The Blog of Jason "Jayce" Olshefsky

I headed over to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to catch the films screened there. Starting out was a short film called Living Organics which was a series of animated, abstract vignettes depicting how modern culture works to remove humanity from the living world it is part of. It was fitting introductory piece to Hausu (House).

There really is no way to explain what happens in the movie. It’s rooted in a nightmare horror scenario where members of a party disappear one at a time. Its execution … well, that’s another story. My friend Albert commented afterward that it was very dreamlike — so perfectly so, in some ways, that we were having a hard time remembering the events that transpired. It’s supremely bizarre narrative. I guess it makes a little more sense from a Japanese perspective, as there are some cultural references — but even then, it’s dominated so much by this dreamy nightmare motif that it’s really hard to explain.

I left the show a little early to get to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) for a screening of The Yes Men Fix the World. I had been aware of some of the … umm … pranks? stunts? performance-art pieces? … created by The Yes Men for some time. I had recorded a segment on Democracy Now! back when I had satellite where they had convinced BBC News that they represented Dow Chemical and wanted to help fix the ongoing disaster created by their then-recently-purchased subsidiary, Union Carbide in Bhopal, India in 1984. The movie goes behind the scenes of how they got on the air and announced that in honor of the 20th anniversary of the disaster, Dow was committing billions of dollars (US$12 billion, if I remember correctly [and indeed, upon reviewing my copy of the interview on Democracy Now!, it was]) to help the people and clean up the site. By the end of the day, the hoax was revealed, and the largest complaint was not that Dow didn’t step forward and do what was right and just (i.e. commit resources and fix things) but that the hoax cost Dow shareholders US$2 billion.

And that’s essentially what The Yes Men are continually asking: why can’t we make a world where corporations do the right thing? Their method of asking that question is to enter situations where they present themselves as members of corporations and announce that they are going to do the right thing.

I spent most of the movie saddened that these pranks never seem to have any effect: corporations continue to do the wrong thing, claiming that the increased profits are worth more than any real benefit.

But then I realized that no one person (or even large a group) can instantly make change. Rather, it is through the constant pressure of good that makes the world better. So when I left, I got on my tall bike (which, believe it or not, I made just over 5 years ago) and realized that we all need to make the world a better place. Even little things matter because all there is is little things.

Ali, Amber, and I went to The Cinema Theatre (957 South Clinton Ave.) to see Star Trek. As you might expect, it’s a decent movie and an innovative way to kick-start the franchise once again. Ali and I enjoyed it and I think Amber did too although she had some complaints. Anyway, they left and I stayed for the second feature: a movie I’d heard nothing about called The Brothers Bloom.

Apparently it came-and-went from The Little (240 East Ave.) and possibly corporate screens as well, all with little fanfare. Reviews have been lukewarm at best. My mood was to give it a try at the beginning, and my alternative was to meet Ali out at Lux Lounge (666 South Ave.): a not unattractive option.

Well, I figured I’d hang through the “early days” introduction: two brothers, Stephen and Bloom, had been in-and-out of foster families for quite some time when they stumbled into the notion of playing cons. I didn’t know if I was in for a kids movie but I figured I’d linger to the credits. Once the relationship was established, the film heads for 25 years in the future when the brothers are adults, and still con-men.

Ok, so it’s hooked me for 10 minutes.

Bloom doesn’t want to stick with the game after their last job, but his brother ropes him in it for one more: woo a naive heiress — Penelope — living alone in her parents’ estate. She’s a handful, though, as she has a surprisingly fierce appetite for adventure (especially considering her apparently self-imposed exile) and she’s extremely smart in a myriad of practical and philosophical fields.

Anyway, the movie runs along in a whimsical fairy-tale style. The simple surface conceals a more interesting philosophical bent: is it valuable to plan ahead? As such, the story — largely led by the plan crafted by Stephen — leads Bloom and Penelope on what should be a romantic and bond-forming adventure. But it’s only in the fringe deviations from said plan that those things actually occur. I’ve found it’s pretty much the same in life: it’s no the planned trip to Chimney Bluffs State Park (7700 Garner Rd., Wolcott) that I remember as much as it is when Lucy ran her hysterical orbits through the muddy waters along the trail. It’s the unplanned moments that make things worthwhile.

So … why plan?

And I think that’s what The Brothers Bloom is getting at. To speak in music reviewer parlance, it’s sort of Hudson Hawk meets Adaptation. meets The Adventures of Baron Munchausen: the lighthearted comedy and uneven production of the first, with the film-as-life-as-film metaphor of the second, and the attention to detail and understanding of fantasy of the third. It’s not the best movie ever, but definitely worth a visit … hang in there the few times it really lags, and just have a good time with it.

I went to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) with my friend Christina to see Huozhe (To Live). She had seen it before (at least the latter 75%) and liked a lot.

It was one of the most beautiful, serene movies I’ve ever seen. It’s about a family that stays together through record-setting turmoil. Or it’s about redemption. Or it’s about life being change. Or it’s a critique of communism. Or it’s about luck. Or it’s about beauty all the time. Or any combination or all of those things.

But if you’re willing to be receptive to it, you’ll feel some of those ideas.

I headed out to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) for a last-minute addition: The Visitor, a film by Thomas McCarthy who was there to discuss it and answer questions. In short, it’s about a rather emotionally-closed college professor who visits his apartment in Manhattan only to find that there are two illegal immigrants living there. As McCarthy pointed out, it’s not really an illegal immigration “issue film”; I found it to be superbly warm with a bittersweet ending full of hope and possibility.

Overall, it reminded me of a time when I was at Burning Man in 2006 which I wrote about before. I was riding far past the edge of the main city one night, headed toward a light way off in the distance when I suddenly came upon the trash fence (and outer boundary) of the festival. On the one hand, I knew the entire event was bounded, but I had a much deeper and different understanding when I actually touched the gilded cage around me.

Likewise with The Visitor, it points out the same thing about America — in some ways a magical land of freedom, but in others, just a gilded cage no different from anywhere else.

Today I went to The Rochester Optical Factory Outlet (400 Jefferson Rd., in Hen-Jeff Plaza) and picked up my new glasses (with the lowest price in town — and honestly priced to boot). Last month I went to The Ocu Sight Eye Care Center (1580 Elmwood Ave.) for an eye appointment: partly for issues with near-sightedness, and partly to get those eye disease checks that I don’t get without owning glasses. Everyone who has glasses sneers when I say I have better than 20/20 vision, but damn it: I can’t read street signs at night! Accordingly , my prescription was pretty weak, but now I can see far-away things. It may not be perfect (I’m still working on figuring out if it’s honestly wrong or if it’s just confined by the granularity of a weak prescription) but hundreds of yards better than what it was.

So one of the first things I got to do was to go with Ali to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) where we saw JCVD — Jean-Claude Van Damme‘s Tree’s Lounge … er … sort-of. Ali didn’t intend on seeing it, but I suggested we walk from her house to double-up a little physical activity, but she didn’t feel at all like walking back home alone afterward so begrudgingly stayed (and actually thought the film was okay).

I thought the film was very good overall. I remember from film class in college something about film genres taking a turn at some point — when the formula used is somehow tweaked so the film is still recognizable by its pedigree, but is significantly unique as well. In this case, it’s the action genre: where the bad guys establish a sophisticated upper-hand, the good guys are embarrassingly disorganized save for the few heroes, and good wins in the end. Plus there’s a showcase for special effects and a reinforced apathy for the loss of lives of the unknown.

In JCVD, Van Damme plays himself — an action star tired of constantly being personally associated with the attributes of the characters he plays and the films they are in, and pretty much the only guy who could possibly fit the role. He returns to his hometown of Brussels and quickly becomes the central figure in a heist gone awry. From there it’s action-movie anarchy: mobs of people surround the bank to cheer on the most famous Belgian outside Belgium, Van Damme’s role in the heist is not as it first appears, and, of course, he’s not some ass-kicking, bulletproof hero.

In a jarring foil to the climax, Van Damme steps out of his film-self to deliver a monologue directly to the audience. He ends up coming across closer to Jesus Christ than to his own JC moniker (Jean-Claude, that is — far more closely associated with bad acting and terrible movies). Practically a classic Catholic confession, he reveals that he’s conflicted: for after having traveled the world and experienced all the different kinds of people he’s met, he cannot see how each and every one of them shouldn’t be adored for who they are. Yet his films — the entire action genre — broadly categorizes everyone in the world to one-of-two, black-or-white categories.

So in its own way, JCVD is incredibly powerful. For it has forever tainted any future viewing of an action movie for me. It’s really where my own philosophy led anyway, but JCVD accelerated my progression to a fully new mind-space.

Ali and I went to The Little (240 East Ave.) to catch a couple movies. She had read the book and wanted to see the film The Reader, and I’ve been meaning to catch Vals Im Bashir (Waltz With Bashir). They both started about the same time — although the shorter Waltz started 10 minutes earlier, so I got out some 45 minutes earlier. I headed to Spot Coffee (200 East Ave.) but couldn’t figure out how to get on the Internets with their wireless Internet [assuming "Spot on WIFI" was the SSID of their network.]

Anyway, Waltz With Bashir is a rather interesting movie. It’s an animated film about a man who had fought in Israel’s war with Lebanon 20 years ago. He can’t remember anything of his involvement in the war until one of the people he fought with reveals a recurring dream. The man then seeks others who fought in the war by his side to help him get his memories back — particularly about a massacre he has the most trouble remembering.

The scenes of war were particularly surreal. Not because of the unreal aspects of the animation, though, but from the insanity inherent in war itself: particularly those aspects that bridge peaceful life with war life. The soldiers are expected to behave a certain way, but their humanity draws their attention to commonplace things: sounds and silence for example, or the benign apathy of plants to politics, borders, and war.

I look at this whole war thing like I must be crazy. I mean, I can’t see how it makes anything any better. It’s a deliberate act of malice that changes the course of people’s lives, justified in future retrospect that it will have been seen as unavoidable and written in history as a good thing by the victors.

So I see these films that portray war as this absurd exercise and it seems true through the rich approximation of emotions. But then I’ll talk with some guy returning from Iraq and they all say it was such a rewarding experience. On the one hand I feel like my fellow fairly-trade-coffee-chewing aristocracy, proud of our nuanced and clearly superior understanding of war. Yet it’s a much more filtered view than those who are actually at war.

Unassailable logic dictates that to really get an answer, I’d need to go to war myself. But aside from gaining more knowledge about the world, I otherwise find the idea, well, bad.

I think I might just leave this one unknown.

Since Ali had other plans, Christina and I decided to head to City Hall (30 Church St.) for the city’s Standing Tall…Standing Strong Black History Month celebration.  Well, actually we went because we knew there would be a food tasting featuring homemade dishes from City employees.  As in past years, there’s a huge line … and since we got there late, all the [presumably heavenly] macaroni and cheese was gone.  We were both very impressed by the Firehouse Meatballs by Carlos Manns and the Lasagna with Turkey Meat by Jeffrey Medford.  Everything was great, though.  Plus you can’t beat the price.

Unfortunately we had to leave early to get to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see The Thing by 7. We got there a little bit late, but there was a huge line. Christina suggested we just watch it off her housemate’s Netflix box so we did that instead.

She maintains the film as one of her favorites, but I was not particularly impressed. I guess the whole futile, frenetic activity against an unstoppable force was just too much. I mean, what was the point of watching these people run around killing one another and stuff when their plight was beyond hope? Perhaps as a parable: how can you fight an enemy that can look and act exactly like you do? In that sense, I think the original version, The Thing from Another World, made more sense in the context of McCarthyism when your otherwise unsuspecting neighbor could be your sworn enemy.

So Ali and I went with Christina in her recently-formed couplehood with Dominic to see Trouble the Water at the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) As it happened, my Palm Pilot [Palm Pilot Vx from 2001, thanks for asking] decided to wipe its memory earlier that weekend, presumably from my pocket trying to hack into its password protection. While it was in memory therapy on its cradle at my house, I didn’t have access to it or its wealth of information that includes the events from JayceLand. So we went at 7 p.m. which is when I though the movie was to be shown.

Well, as Jim Healy began introducing the film, it became slowly clear that this was not that movie. “What does he mean, ‘characters’?” “I had no idea this was filmed in India.” “I wonder if he means ‘pool’ as some kind of metaphor.” Indeed, we had arrived in time to see The Pool instead.

As it turned out, the movie is very very good. It’s about a couple kids from Goa, India who eek out a living in odd jobs on the street. The elder Venkatesh is fascinated by an unused swimming pool at what appears to be the home of someone unimaginably wealthy. He weasels his way in to helping the owner with his garden. Then he befriends the man’s daughter and the three youngsters spend the pre-monsoon afternoons together. Ever so gradually — with the editorial precision of a surgeon — the film reveals why the pool stays unused.

In retrospect I found it to be a brilliantly paced film. Ali was enchanted by it — much to our surprise, as it could very well have been the kind of Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Celine and Julie Go Boating) experience culminating in a “when are they going to get on the fucking boat?” somewhere around the 3-hour mark. But it was very warmly received … I guess I’ll have to get Ali to write up a summary one way or another.

As Ali wasn’t interested in the plot, I went by myself to The Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Los cronocrímenes (Timecrimes). By this time, I was starting to feel like I was in one of Dayna Papaleo‘s bad weeks: a continuous stream of movies, one after another, that just become a blur.

Anyway, as time-travel stories go, this one was rather unusual in that the ramifications of going back in time are seemingly completely resolved, if at great expense. The protagonist, Hector, starts out the film in an (apparently) satisfactory relationship with his wife at (apparently) a house they just moved into. Hector is perusing the landscape with his binoculars when his wife leaves to run a few errands. In a nearby clearing, he spies a woman undressing so (naturally?) he goes to investigate. Once he finds the girl, he’s attacked by a man with a fully bandaged head. He escapes to the shelter of a facility of some kind, and finds the sole weekend occupant who inexplicably ushers him into a chamber that sends him back an hour-or-so into the past.

He again meets the technician — who’s naturally surprised to meet him for the first time — and the technician explains that he must not do anything until he gets back to the point where he left from earlier … er … later. Hector, however, has other plans: he wants to stop himself from getting attacked. In the process, though, he ends up with quite a head injury and realizes he’s the guy who attacked himself.

Well, things go from bad to worse, to worse again. Just one Hector was clumsy enough, but having three of them exist in the same hour just leads to disaster. He thankfully figures out how to get all the events to play out without need for further trips back in time.

So what’s the point? I’m not sure. Maybe a tale about not being malicious. Maybe it’s just a clever story. And maybe it’s as simple as this: if you’ve got a wife and see a sexy young woman undressing, just stay away.