By Govindini Murty. The final film in the Harry Potter series is a pleasant surprise. Directed by David Yates, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II offers a satisfying conclusion to the eight-film Harry Potter saga, finally allowing some light into the dark and providing a rousing depiction of the forces of good fighting back against the forces of evil. Deathly Hallows Part II moves along at a brisk pace, keeping things to a lean 2 hours and five minutes. The film provides a number of well-crafted action and suspense sequences, while not short-changing key emotional moments in which the characters reveal themselves in manners that are both dramatic and affecting.
This is all welcome because the prior installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I, had been a rather melancholy affair. In Part I, the evil reign of the villainous Lord Voldemort had extended itself over all of England – with the forces of good apparently unable to fight back. Albus Dumbledore, the kindly and wise Headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had been killed by the treacherous Professor Severus Snape. Teen wizard Harry Potter and his best friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley had dropped out of Hogwarts in order to hide from Voldermort’s forces while hunting down the “horcruxes” or splintered pieces of Voldemort’s soul that Voldemort had hidden away in order to evade death. Voldemort himself was on his way to possessing the “Deathly Hallows” – a set of three magical objects consisting of the all-powerful elder wand, the cloak of invisibility, and the stone of resurrection – that would make him immortal and invincible. The film’s bleak coloration, air of inescapable doom, and depiction of Voldemort as an all-powerful Hitlerian figure who installs a racist, Nazi-style regime that massacres non-magical human beings (known as “Muggles”), had made for rather depressing viewing.
Fortunately, in Part II things start to turn around as Harry Potter and his allies finally rally and fight back against Voldemort. A series of long-laid plans start to come to fruition, and we finally see revealed the full details of Harry Potter’s destiny. After a number of sequences that include a dramatic infiltration of a goblin bank, an escape on a white dragon, and the hunting and destruction of more horcruxes, the action culminates in the Battle of Hogwarts. A fantastic array of good witches and wizards, plucky Hogwarts faculty and students, animated stone statues, magical shields, swords, and spells are used to defend Hogwarts against Voldemort’s supernatural army of evil witches, wizards, ghouls, giant ogres, enchanted snakes, and shape-shifters. This could all make for rather busy and frenetic action, but director David Yates has managed to weave all these disparate characters and thematic strands into sequences that are coherent and compelling.
In doing so, this last Harry Potter film illustrates what may be the key achievement of the entire series, which is to create a complex fantasy world that fuses mythological and cultural symbols from a number of traditions, while still maintaining a forward-moving momentum and narrative clarity.
My Libertas co-editor Jason Apuzzo commented recently on the information-dense, “palimpsestic” quality of Michael Bay’s Transformers films, and I have to say that that quality very much characterizes the Harry Potter films, as well. In fact, it may be the defining characteristic of the major fantasy/sci-fi film series of the modern era. This trend most notably began with George Lucas’ mythologically-rich Star Wars films, continued through the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films, and is now fanning out into innumerable other fantasy and sci-fi novels and movies. Continue reading LFM Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II & The Western Cultural Tradition
By Govindini Murty. Housewife shows are apparently bigger business than ever before, with one ‘housewife’ formerly of Bravo’s Real Housewives of New York City even recently signing a major merchandising deal for $100 million. I commented on this trend a year ago and said that it represented a move toward traditionalism – posing a wry counterpoint to the apparent ‘progressiveness’ of modern popular culture. After all, the ‘housewife’ shows glamorize women who seem to do nothing but shop, gossip, have lunch, dress up and attend parties – and who have only acquired their lifestyles by marrying wealthy men. These tendencies reached their zenith in the deliciously campy and over-the-top recent episodes of The Real Housewives of NYC‘s lavish trip to Morocco (read hilarious recaps here, here and here), an obvious homage to the notorious trip to the Middle East from last year’s Sex and the City 2 – a film that earned over $288 million at the worldwide box office.
When these housewives have careers, they often appear to be pursued for vanity reasons, rather than for serious purposes of building long-term professional achievements or for supporting their families. And yet, in the very fact that these housewife shows are highly popular on TV (and seem to be the major money-makers for the cable network Bravo, which has launched six of the Real Housewives shows), they appear to be one of the few ways in which shows featuring a majority of women characters can even get on the airwaves.
I’ve written previously about the highly un-progressive nature of Hollywood casting. Despite the fact that women make up over 50% of the population (and according to the MPAA’s 2010 box office report, purchase 50% of the movie tickets), according to SAG statistics they’re only cast in one out of three lead roles in film and TV, and only earn two-thirds of the pay of male actors. Watch most network TV shows, TV ads, or movies in theaters and you will see two or three men cast for every woman. It’s completely deplorable.
From TV housewife to ambitious businesswoman.
This disparity poses a telling contrast to the era of classic Hollywood, when it seemed that leading women got as many roles as the leading men -and were often the most highly-paid performers at their studios. When Greta Garbo made films with Clark Gable at MGM, she got top billing. When Marlene Dietrich was at the height of her fame in the ’30s at Paramount, she was the highest-paid performer at the studio. Mary Pickford was so powerful in the 1910s and ’20s that she co-founded and ran her own movie studio, United Artists, after being the top-paid performer at Paramount. Even Shirley Temple was the top money-earner at Twentieth-Century Fox in the depths of the Depression, single-handedly keeping the studio afloat and earning the paychecks to match. Is there any female actress today with the clout to co-found a movie studio? No. Is there any female actress today who earns more than the top male stars at any studio? No. Is there any top female actress who will get top billing over a top male star? No. And yet in reality TV – which may more accurately reflect the tastes of average Americans, due to the fluid, highly-adaptable nature of the programming – women get the majority of the roles and significantly out-earn male reality TV stars. Continue reading Bravo’s Billion-Dollar Housewife?
By Govindini Murty. As the Japanese reel from the triple blow of a massive earthquake, a terrible tsunami, and now a nuclear crisis, I wanted to ask Libertas readers to do anything they can to support Japanese relief efforts by donating here to the Red Cross.
Japan has one of the world’s great cultures – and more important than that, they are our friends and allies and they deserve our support. Jason and I had the opportunity to visit Japan some years ago, and we came away with a tremendous respect for the beauty and sophistication of Japanese culture – and for the courtesy, intelligence, and resiliency of the Japanese people. Whether we were walking down the Ginza in Tokyo, or hiking through the Japanese Alps, or visiting temples in Kyoto and Nara, we were touched on every occasion by the hospitality of the Japanese people – and by their extraordinary commitment to the aesthetic sense.
One of Utamaro's "Beauties."
I remember on one occasion walking down the Ginza with Jason, taking in its modernist labyrinth of shiny skyscrapers and flashing electric signs. (Jason and I kept commenting to each other that we felt like we were in a scene from Blade Runner.) We stopped in one store that had a mysterious, old-fashioned air to it that set it apart from the rest of the hypermodern street. The store turned out to sell incense and other supplies for Buddhist temples. When we showed an interest in their wares, the owners kindly invited us to come upstairs and have a tour of their private museum. The most magical, hidden world was unveiled before our eyes. We were taken into a room paneled in black lacquer, and around its walls was arranged the most exquisite collection of golden, miniature Buddhist shrines. In the middle of the room was the most remarkable sight of all: a tea pavilion completely covered in gold leaf, a copy of the famous golden tea pavilion built for the medieval warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
On another occasion, family friends invited us to dinner at the fabled Ichiriki teahouse in the Gion district of Kyoto. Several of Kyoto’s most famous and charming geisha entertained us with traditional Japanese songs, music, and dance. (Geisha are now important cultural ambassadors for the Japanese arts.) When our hosts heard that we were interested in Japanese history, they asked the mistress of Ichiriki to bring out some of the teahouse’s famous samurai artifacts. She brought out an ancient samurai helmet (we have some amusing photos of Jason and his father trying it on) and told us fascinating stories from the teahouse’s three hundred-year history – including those recounting Ichiriki’s role in one of Japan’s most famous samurai stories, Chushingura – The Tale of the 47 Loyal Ronin.
On yet another occasion, we had the opportunity to visit Nara, the ancient capital of Japan during the 8th century A.D.. An elderly volunteer docent spent several hours showing us around the temples and monuments of Nara, of which the most extraordinary is the Great Buddha of Todai-ji. We were touched by the tremendous pride this gentleman took in his heritage, and by the care and patience he took to explain it to us. I remember one particularly graceful wooden pagoda that this gentleman pointed out to us – the pagoda of Yakushi-ji – that had survived intact for over a millennia. Gazing up at it beatifically, he described its elegant lines and symmetry to us as “frozen music.”
The love that the Japanese people have for their cultural heritage and the ties that they feel to their beautiful land are sources of strength that will help them to recover from this latest disaster. But for all of their elegance and reserve, the Japanese are a sensitive people who, already shaken by a troubled economy and by domestic political crises in recent years, have been truly rocked by this latest tragedy. Japan needs all the friendship and support we can give it right now. Continue reading A Celebration of Japanese Culture in the Midst of Its Current Crisis
By Govindini Murty. In honor of Fashion Month, I thought it would be fun to introduce Libertas readers to one of my favorite fashion/street-photography sites, The Sartorialist. Founded in 2005 by Scott Schuman, The Sartorialist is one of the most visually-inspiring sites out there. Schuman has been doing an exceptional job recently covering the New York, London, Milan, and Paris fashion shows. I’ve included a favorite look he captured from the Gucci show here, and other striking shows he’s covered include the Marc Jacobs show and the Altuzarra show in New York. Back in January Schuman also covered the men’s collections in Florence (where Luca Rubinacci epitomized the Italian style) and Milan, where the most elegant presentation was the Bottega Veneta show.
Of course, Schuman covers a lot more than runway shows – his main talent is as a street-style photographer – but we’ll get to that in a moment.
The 2011 Gucci Fall/Winter collection, shot by Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist.
Jason and I often speak about the importance of feeding the visual sense. As filmmakers and creative people, it’s extremely important to think about the image as much as about words, dialogue, and ideological meaning. That is why we here at Libertas make the effort to provide you with a site that is as appealing to look at as it is thought-provoking to read.
I found out about The Sartorialist about a year and a half ago from an article in British Vogue. Scott Schuman started the site in 2005 by posting photos he had taken of the quirky and chic people he encountered on the streets of Manhattan. The Sartorialist attracted more and more admirers, including many fashion industry professionals who turned to the site to see what was happening on the street-level in fashion. Within just a few years Schuman has become a fashion force to be reckoned with. The Sartorialist now receives more than two million unique visitors a month and Schuman’s photos are on the inspiration boards of major fashion houses around the world. Schuman has also been named one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 Design Influencers and he has been profiled in numerous fashion magazines and newspapers (read an LA Times profile here and an article in The London Times). In 2009 Schuman also published a terrific book of his street-style photography. Continue reading The Sartorialist: Feeding the Visual Sense
By Govindini Murty. The King’s Speech is that surprising thing – a film that glorifies the British monarchy while at the same time espousing American-style democratic principles. A warm-hearted, sumptuously-mounted film directed by Tom Hooper, The King’s Speech is the sort of feel-good drama that is likely to please Academy voters on Oscar night tonight and earn it a number of top prizes. In particular Colin Firth, who gives a fine, career-defining performance as King George VI, looks likely to take home the Best Actor honor.
The King’s Speech tells the story of King George VI of Great Britain (the father of the current Queen Elizabeth II) and his struggles to overcome a speech impediment in the years leading up to his ascension as King. What gives this struggle its greater relevance is that George VI is part of a generation of royals in the 1920’s and ’30s who must learn to communicate in the new mass media of radio and film at the very time that dangerous totalitarian demagogues were using those mediums to threaten Western civilization. (The film highlights the double-edged implications of these new mass media when it describes, for example, the wireless radio as “a Pandora’s box.”) Oddly enough, it will be constitutional monarchs like George VI who, lacking any real political power, will instead function as the symbolic representatives of the people (an echo of the Hobbesian idea that the king is created by the covenant of the people), to articulate to them their nation’s support for freedom and democracy against tyrants like Stalin and Hitler who were working to wipe those freedoms out. As George VI says in the film as he readies to speak at the outbreak of war in 1939: “The nation believes that when I speak, I speak for them.”
The King’s Speech opens in 1925 with Prince Albert, the Duke of York (the future George VI), preparing to give a speech at the close of the British Empire Exhibition games. The Duke struggles tortuously through his speech, barely able to get even one sentence out. His wife Elizabeth, the Duchess of York (played with warmth and wit by one of my favorite actresses, Helena Bonham-Carter) looks on with pained love and dismay. As the story unfolds, Elizabeth brings speech doctors to Albert, but none of them work out and the Duke gives up the effort out of frustration. Compounding the problem, Albert’s father, the aging King George V (played by Michael Gambon), is dismissive of Albert’s struggle to speak and has repeatedly thrown him into public situations where he is forced to give speeches before large crowds. Albert’s older brother, Edward, the Prince of Wales (played by the nervy, angular Guy Pearce), is verbally articulate, but is a playboy who would rather romance married women than attend to his duties as the future king. Edward routinely mocks Albert’s speech impediment, only making his brother’s torment worse.
Colin Firth & Helena Bonham-Carter in "The King's Speech."
Out of desperation, Elizabeth goes to an unorthodox speech therapist, Lionel Logue, played with intelligence and impishness by Geoffrey Rush. Logue is a far cry from the genteel, expensive doctors the Duke and Duchess have been used to. His office is in a ramshackle old building in an unfashionable part of London, and he lacks even a doctor’s degree. However, Logue has the warmth and humanity – and the unorthodox teaching methods – to break through Albert’s icy shell of pride, pain, and frustration. Elizabeth persuades Albert to see Logue, and in a series of encounters – including their first one in which Logue democratically insists to Albert that they call each other by their first names, and that in his consulting room “we’re equals” – Logue works on Albert step by step to speak more clearly.
Logue may lack a serious medical pedigree (something that later leads to meddling officials trying to remove him from the King’s service), but he’s learned his skills as a speech therapist by helping shell-shocked World War I veterans – and he has the sensitivity to realize that the Duke’s problems are ultimately not physical, but emotional in nature, originating in the strictures placed on Albert early in his childhood by a cruel nurse and distant, uncomprehending parents. Thankfully, The King’s Speech is free of the usual cliched “training montage” that ends with a triumphal breakthrough for the protagonist. Rather, the Albert’s progress is shown to be slow and tortuous, requiring years of continual effort and few easy answers. This wouldn’t seem to matter so much, because Albert is after all the second son of the King, but his father King George V’s death in 1936 and his elder brother Edward’s sudden abdication as King in December of that year (in order to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson) suddenly thrusts Albert into the spotlight as the next monarch of Great Britain.
A voice of freedom in a dark time.
This is where The King’s Speech started to engage my interest in any serious manner. Truth be told, The King’s Speech is engaging and competent up to that point, but I’m used to well-made British period films – the British excel at them – and this one had somewhat dampened my enthusiasm early on by playing a number of scenes for easy laughs. As a potential Best Picture Oscar winner, I was hoping for more from the film than sit-com level jokes and a series of unnecessary scenes in which Albert is persuaded by Logue to swear with four letter words in order to “free himself” emotionally – scenes that historians have charged have no basis in fact and that are merely the latest example of our ’60s-inspired culture’s equation of the overthrow of civil norms with the acquisition of antinomian virtue.
However, as the clouds of war gather on the European continent and Albert prepares to become King George VI, the film draws into sharper focus the King’s need to speak clearly by contrasting it to the alarming rise of Hitler in Europe. This theme had been set up earlier in the film when the elder King George V lectured his son about the importance of speaking well over the new mass medium of radio because of the rise of Bolshevism in Russia and Fascism on the continent. As George V says to Albert: “Who’s going to stand between us, the jackboots, and the proletarian abyss?” If the King can’t articulate his role to the public, and serve the public by explaining to the world the need for their nation’s defense, he may soon find himself gone the way of his cousins the Russian czar and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany – and worse yet, see his nation taken over by totalitarian tyranny.
There is one scene that communicates this idea especially well. Albert has just been crowned George VI in Westminster Abbey in May of 1937 and is watching the newsreels after the ceremony with his family. As the film switches to a newsreel of Hitler giving a speech in Germany, the projectionist moves to turn it off, but the king insists that it be kept on so he can watch it. He and the royal family watch in dismay as Hitler harangues a massive crowd in fluent, inflammatory rhetoric that is met with enthusiastic cheers. The newsreel ends, and the young Princess Elizabeth asks the king what Hitler was saying. The king replies: “I don’t know, but he seems to be saying it rather well.”
Geoffrey Rush in "The King's Speech."
The implication is clear: Hitler, the evil tyrant who will soon plunge the world into war, is verbally adept and is able to use modern methods of mass communication – microphones to address huge rallies, radio and film reels to broadcast his words to the world – to persuade the German public to follow him down a nihilistic path of death and destruction. The only people who can challenge him will be the democratically-elected leaders of the world – and such symbolic figures as the royal families of Europe – who, although they hold no real power, must be able to speak persuasively to the public in order to remind them of their own humanistic traditions and inspire the public to defend freedom and life.
The King’s Speech dramatizes the need to take verbal adeptness seriously, to cultivate intelligent, well-spoken, principled leaders who can use modern means of communication to articulate crucial humanistic principles and fight back against the rise of totalitarianism and nihilism around the world. The end of the film states that thanks to his wartime speeches, George VI became to the British people “a symbol of national resistance.” In an era when American films feature heroes with supernatural powers who behave like kings and place themselves above the rest of humanity, how ironic that the Europeans – in this case the British – should make a film about a king who behaves like a human being and believes in liberty. Despite its occasional obvious moments, The King’s Speech is a fine, humanistic film that movingly supports the democratic principles that we here at Libertas hold dear.
[Editor’s Note: thus far The King’s Speech has won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (David Seidler).]
[UPDATE: Over the course of the evening, The King’s Speech won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director (Tom Hooper), Best Actor (Colin Firth) and Best Original Screenplay (David Seidler)].
By Govindini Murty. Today we commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Iran democracy protests. I’ll be commenting at greater length later on some of the fine recent films by Iranian filmmakers that have explored Iran’s current social and political issues. For now, though, I wanted to show you two interesting short films on Iran.
The first film, titled Iran: A Nation of Bloggers, is a fast-paced, informative two minute short about how Iranians have embraced blogging in order to express themselves freely to the rest of the world. It was directed by Aaron Chiesa as a project for the Vancouver Film School. (I have fond memories of Vancouver Film School from my early days as an actress when I was living in Vancouver, as I acted in some of the school’s short films.) The short features striking animation reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (in fact, I think a couple of shots were used from Persepolis) – and a catchy, exotic, pop-music sound track. You can watch Iran: ANation of Bloggers above.
The second film is Exile Paranoia, a ten minute short by Iranian filmmaker Nassrin Nasser. The film explores in a haunting, meditative manner Nasser’s own feelings of alienation and confusion as she seeks to get a visa/passport to leave Iran and come to the West. Exile Paranoia moves at a dreamlike pace that is the opposite of Iran: A Nation of Bloggers, but I like the contrast. And while Iran: A Nation of Bloggers features black and white animation done in the radical-chic, populist style that dates back to Soviet constructivist art (and that was most recently seen in Obama’s “Hope” poster), Exile Paranoia is a softer, more intimate film that explores one woman’s emotions in a poetic, understated style. I like the subtle use of color in Exile Paranoia – from white to cream to green to blue – and the dream-like, computer-composited shots of night-time Tehran. I also find it interesting to see a brief glimpse of life from the viewpoint of an Iranian woman filmmaker. Whether I would agree with her feelings about the West or not (the one Western male in the film is portrayed as a cold jerk, but maybe that’s just what this filmmaker has experienced), it’s still interesting to see life from her viewpoint.
Fortunately, in Part II things start to turn around as Harry Potter and his allies finally rally and fight back against Voldemort. A series of long-laid plans start to come to fruition, and we finally see revealed the full details of Harry Potter’s destiny. After a number of sequences that include a dramatic infiltration of a goblin bank, an escape on a white dragon, and the hunting and destruction of more horcruxes, the action culminates in the Battle of Hogwarts. A fantastic array of good witches and wizards, plucky Hogwarts faculty and students, animated stone statues, magical shields, swords, and spells are used to defend Hogwarts against Voldemort’s supernatural army of evil witches, wizards, ghouls, giant ogres, enchanted snakes, and shape-shifters. This could all make for rather busy and frenetic action, but director David Yates has managed to weave all these disparate characters and thematic strands into sequences that are coherent and compelling.
