Years of Poems and Spirits

Watched the movie “Michael Clayton” tonight. Really enjoyed it: a simple story tightly developed into a brilliant thriller; Excellent casting, scripts and acting.

In terms of acting, we thought Tom Wilkinson’s stands out. I never saw his performance before but a five-minute dialogue between him and Clooney reminded me of Ian Holm in Joe Gould’s Secret. Very typical English stage acting IMHO.

Clooney wasn’t bad either. I liked the movie partly becuase I liked where Clooney is going: he is not afraid of taking on serious topics–topics that demand the “silent majority” to do some collective soul-searching. He is the “righteous guy” from the left and he is happy to throw in his fame and fortune at it too.

Is this Clooney’s new niche? I also liked Syriana. If that movie was a little too dark to be popular, Michael Clayton’s triumphant ending can certainly make a difference here (but I would act differently if I were him. $10 million is enough to buy a life, let alone truth).

One thing I noticed was that the villain in the movie is played by the only female character–is this Clooney’s view on gender equality?

Incredibly, I just read this story on WP: “A former Qwest … executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in [the evasdropping program].” Nacchio’s case was a high-profile one. It was all over the news when it came out. Now this new twist? Only WP put it on its web front page. No others mentioned it ever. Looks like NSA got everything covered now that Nacchio is allowed to leak the story.

Song is leaving for Beijing again. We thought it would be nice to spend a day in the city instead of being stuck on the east side.

Dinner at Waterfront Seafood Grill: Great sound view, spectacular sunset, pricy menu (the burning-through-your-wallet kind), excellent Lamb Rack.

Seafair Torchlight Parade: The lamest street fair I’ve ever witnessed. Where the New Orleanians turn funeral parade into a festival, the Seattlites turn a festival into a funeral parade. There was even a large contingent of Fa Lun Gong band: a wierd sight that left me … 哭笑不得 (or “not sure to frawn upon or to laugh at”).

The Simpsons Movie: for an long time fun, the movie is hardly any more entertaining. But it didn’t ruin the brand either. The really fun part was the experience of watching it: as different people picking on different jokes, it reminded me watching an episode with a group of guys in a bar. There is “solitary” movie and “social” movie. The Simpsons certainly belongs to the latter.

Saw The Last King of Scotland last night. Here is what I thought: it is a good, serious movie. Yet its artistic richness cannot overcome the story’s hollowness.

The movies uses a fictional character to paint a picture of Idi Amin who, perhaps more than anyone else, defines the term “African dictator”. Although the movie raises several good points, such as the peril of blind liberal allegiance with the downtrodden, or how terrible Ami was as a ruler (especially for the younger generation who have never heard of him before), I was struck by how Euro-centric the movie is–”not there is anything wrong with it”, but that is what I mean “hollow”.

The whole story was told by the young doctor from Scotland, who escaped from a bourgeois future to seek excitement and adventure. He was soon secuded by power, statue and charisma and became a unwilling servant of Idi Amin. It is really odd to look at Idi Amin this way because he meant so much more to his people, his neighbors and to history than he could ever have been to a lone Westerner.

In the movie, Amin, played by Whitaker, invoked his tribe, his agenda against colonialism, Libya and the PLO during conversations. Those names, each saturated with historical significance, matters a lot to everyone else except the young Scot who was engaged in a passionate affair with one of Amin’s wives. Therefore, the enormity of Amin’s crimes came to the young Scot’s–and us viewers’–consciousness only through the terrors he cast upon the two adulterers. I thought this arrangement errorneously aggrandized western individualism (I doubt even Satre would object to an Ugandan dictator torturing a green-eyed hunk for screwing his wife behind his back. If so, then what Amin did wrong?) but trivialized the suffering of the victims–after all, hundreds of kids starved to death before they are old enough to play Paolo and Francesca!

Another issue I have with this movie, and the portrait of African politics in the West in general, is that the picture is too simplistic: it is either “he’s his people’s savior” or “he will turn the country into his personal checkings account”–as if there is no shade of grey in between. After all, nationalism was invented in the West, when Amin keeps saying, “my country”, what exactly does he mean? Does he equates a head of state to a chief of a tribe? If so, where is the evidence? If not, where are the nuances? It is always the subtlety that tells a more complete story. Unfortunately, all the subtlety The Last King of Scotland has is the flirtacious eye contacts between the young Scot and his black beauty. What a waste of time!