Arbitrage

Arbitrage

noun /ˈärbiˌträZH/ 

The simultaneous buying and selling of securities, currency, or commodities in different markets or in derivative forms in order to take advantage of differing prices for the same asset.

Dumb this concept down one or two more shades and I think I'd still be scratching my head. I don't have a head for money or strategy, and the only use I think I'd have with a functioning knowledge of either is to avoid being taken advantage of. White collar crooks have been getting away with the dirt they do for years because, on the whole, that dirt is beyond the ken of most basically functioning people. And it's hard to villainize someone for something you don't have a tight grasp on. In recent years, however, that esoteric dirt has become so egregious and ignoble that us head scratchers are starting to realize we need to smarten up.

In Nicholas Jarecki's first major film, Richard Gere (who, though Buddhist and probably a good dude, I think works best a slime ball) plays a hedge fund manager who has monkeyed with his company's books to cover up a major boner he pulled. Running parallel with his financial skulduggery, Gere flees a car crash that kills his mistress. The crash and Gere's role in it become a sort of tangible example of the financial deceit.

I can't help but think that our notions of right or wrong are mostly empathetic. If we can imagine ourselves doing something or having something done to us, then we can better form an opinion about it. But when crime is committed outside the spheres of our knowledge, reacting becomes difficult. Money and its movements are so ethereal it's hard to grasp the ethics of it. By coupling a financial thriller with a more recognizable one, Jarecki, I think, gets a stranglehold on that ether.

- Andrew

Bookshelf Home

Bookstore Page

Stories We Tell

Stories We Tell is about just that. There are a lot of story levels to this documentary, Sarah Polley's first. (We showed her previous film, Take This Waltz, a few months ago.) Let's do some accounting: there are Sarah's interviews with her siblings, father, and family friends; there is the narration by Sara's father, Michael Polley, from his own memoir; there is archive footage of Sarah's mom, Diane Polley, and Super 8 from the family, all commingled with contemporary footage shot by Polley with actors hired to play her family; finally, there is the story of the compiling of all these stories. Late in the film, Michael Polley points out to Sarah, his interviewer, that the process of her film making is ultimately akin to the story that each participant is telling; what one considers worth telling is just as important as what one leaves out of a story, the details and opinions the teller deems irrelevant. From all her footage and from all her sources, Sarah decides how the story of all these stories will be told.

The secret--the reason for this layer yarn--is not much of a secret at this point, but I won't spoil it. It's enough to say that it's a family secret having to do with Sarah's mother. One interviewee (I won't say who) raises the point that the documentary might be somewhat futile. Diane, the "owner" of the story, doesn't have a voice. In her absence, what authority do the people she left behind (Diane died of cancer in 1990) have to tell her story for her?

Polley doesn't answer this question outright, but certainly addresses the issue in the make-up of the film itself. We are reminded throughout the documentary that we are watching a story that has been compiled and arranged by one person. We see Sarah filming her family during interviews, we see Sarah filming her fake family for the re-creation scenes. We see Sarah in the sound booth directing her father as he reads from his memoir. One of the last scenes is Sarah recording with her father, who, as the film is ending, is presumably reading the end of his memoir. In the middle of one line--his own line, about his life--his director interrupts him, asking for him to try the reading again.

- Andrew

Bookshelf Home

Bookstore Page

Short Childs & Thrills Film Fest: The Lineup!

OK folks, here are some brief descriptions of the films Peter Szabo has selected for the Short Chill and Thrills Film Fest screening Sun Oct 28 at 9:00pm. I'm looking forward to the showing and hope to see you there.

- Peter

Mute

Directed by Zsolt Gyöngyösi
Hungary 2012

While confessing to his priest, a man recalls a life-changing drive with a mute hitchhiker and the dark reflections about his adulterous wife that he revealed to his mysterious passenger. The two confessions--in the church and in the car--connect and lead to a crushing ending. Based on the short story of the same name. 

Maxwell Edison

Directed by Warren Ray
Louisville, Kentucky, USA 2012

Based on the story "The Man Who Loved Flowers," this colourful short follows Maxwell Edison, a man who loves life, flowers, and women, as he prepares for an exciting date with Joan, while avoiding the shadow of the local serial killer. 

Grey Matter

Directed by James B. Cox
Long Beach, California, USA 2012

Based on the short story of the same name, Grey Matter explores the life of Isaac, who must care for his alcoholic father, a war veteran, after his mother abandons them both. Issac finds release from his troubles at home by acting out in school, mainly by telling lies. Unfortunately, these lies have consequences when Issac's father begins a horrific transformation.

Love Never Dies

Directed by Peter Szabo
Guelph, Ontario, Canada 2012

Based on the short story "Nona" by Stephen King, Love Never Dies is a psychological thriller about a drifter who wanders the night, seeking to escape his tormented past. One night he meets the mysterious and seductive Nona, a woman cast from his darkest fantasies, who lures him on a deadly chase to uncover the horrifying truth he so desperately wants to avoid. Inspired by the creepy corners of King’s imagination, Love Never Dies explores the razor-thin line that separates the allure of love from the romance of murder. Love never dies…but sometimes it kills!

See also this contest for the fest:

Human Ambiance

I'm not much of an eater at the movies. I'm there to watch. At my most sensitive, the sound of people eating in front, behind, and to the side of me can be infuriating and completely distracting. I think it might have something to do with the disordered ambiance of a theatre full of munching and crinkling rubbing against the grain of the ordered, intentional experience of the movie itself. But I'd never hiss at someone to quit it with the loud chewing. Food and movies go together like beer and absolutely everything. My tolerance craps out with cellphone glow and unrelated chitchat, but even then it's hard to fault people for being faultful people in what is, essentially, a social setting.

As coddled Westerners, we're becoming cagey, suffering one another--whether foolish or otherwise--less and less. So much of our lives has become about control that we start to unhinge a bit when control over our environment is mostly taken away from us. So we stay home or we wear headphones in public, steering as clear as we can from having to deal with each other. But there's an old fashionedness stained in our cloth. Some part of us still likes cramming together in a dark place to share an experience with strangers, no matter how annoying those strangers are. 

There's just score in Samsara, no dialogue. When I saw the movie the other night, the theater was replete with drink sipping, wrapper crinkling, mindless mastication, but also with whispers back and fourth about what was on the screen, or what what was on the screen reminded someone of; there were disjointed little gasps, tsks, and sighs when someone was moved or disgusted or bummed. There was no end to coughs, and sniffles, and shifting in seats, and the theater door opening and closing without a sense of delicacy. With no plot, no talking, the people in the theater were threatening to overwhelm the movie in the theater. For the first half hour or so, I was losing my mind.

But here's the thing: I mentioned in my previous post that, if it's about anything, Samsara's about us. So it makes a kind of perfect, beautiful, maybe unintentional sense that the people you're watching the movie with are contributing to the thing itself. We experience so much of life completely alone nowadays (yes, I said "nowadays") that I think, even when we're surrounded by each other, we try to ignore that fact.

Think about this: when you're watching TV or movies at home, how often do you laugh out loud? Or gasp? I'm going to guess rarely. It's not a coincidence that we laugh more, laugh louder, when we have others around us doing the same. For reasons beyond my ken, shared experiences are elevated, sensitized experiences--for better or worse. Doing a thing in public is as much about being in public as it is about the thing itself. I remember that when the idea of Letterbox Vs. Widescreen became common knowledge, my dad became incensed that he was losing a few inches of detail on either side of the image. When we watch movies or TV alone, I can't help but think we lose peripheral and important elements of the experience, as annoying as some of those elements might be.

- Andrew

Bookshelf Home

Cinema Page

Samsara

The question I've been getting about Samsara is, "What's it about?" After seeing the film yesterday, the most acute, accurate answer I can come up with goes like this: "It's about us. About how we're the absolute best and the absolute worst. And it's about how beautiful that is." And holy cow is Samsara ever beautiful. Here's a roll call of filming locations: Indonesia, Burma, Mecca, India, the Philippines, Versailles, the Wailing Wall, Tibet, Petra, Namibia, the Himalayas, Epupa Falls, China, Yosemite Valley, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Turkey. The film isn't necessarily capital A About anything, yet is About everything.

Anyone over thirty living in the downtown core of Guelph is probably familiar with the Buddhist concept of samsara. But for those unfamiliar, samsara describes a cycle of birth and rebirth which can only be escaped through enlightenment; and with birth comes, along with the certainly of taxes, death. Not a word is spoken in the film--the images are left to speak for themselves. If there's any narrative here, it's to be found in the juxtaposition of these locations and events. Whether or not the samsara that is this film leads to enlightenment is kind of up to you. The only thing that's certain is that, while you don't have to go home after the movie, you can't stay in the theater.

Coming of age in Guelph in the '90s, filmmaker Ron Fricke's last film, 1992's Baraka, was the film I associated with the Bookshelf Cinema. It always seemed to be coming soon, or playing, or coming back soon. The poster image of a painted child peering out from behind verdant foliage, maybe as amazed by us as we are of her, is the image that encapsulates the Bookshelf for me. Full disclosure: I am employed gainfully by said business. Still and all, while I was having my mind blown and heart stomped by Mr. Fricke's follow-up, I couldn't help but cogitate just slightly on how lucky I and everyone else in that packed little theater were to have a venue to see the spectacular, troubling results of five years of filming. When something so rare is so available, the easiest thing to do is take it for granted. But I'm serious guys: Samsara, in addition to being a humbling mirror held up to our complicated humanity, is a gentle reminder of how lucky we are to have a place like the Bookshelf in our community that lets us hang out with descriptions of ourselves that are kind of disappearing from our lives lately.

- Andrew

Bookshelf Home

Cinema Page

Farewell My Queen

A few weeks ago we were playing the doc The Queen of Versailles and now with Farewell, My Queen filling our screen, I can't help but make comparisons. The Siegels were building the largest house in America, and they dubbed the thing, without a shred of irony, Versailles. Of course the reference points towards the superciliousness of the project, but the Siegels chose this name seemingly without any understanding of how that historical opulence popped.

Farewell, My Queen takes place over three days of Versailles's fall, as observed by young Sidonie, Marie Antoinette's reader. Benoit Jacquot's film is based on the novel by Chantal Thomas, also the author of the study The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette. From all appearances, this films owes much to that earlier book of history. Here's a precis of that text: 

Almost as soon as Marie Antoinette, archduchess of Austria, was brought to France as the bride of Louis XVI in 1771, she was smothered in images. In a monarchy increasingly under assault, the charm and horror of her feminine body and her political power as a foreign intruder turned Marie Antoinette into an alien other. Marie Antoinette's mythification, argues Thomas, must be interpreted as the misogynist demonization of women's power and authority in revolutionary France. In a series of pamphlets written from the 1770s until her death in 1793, Marie Antoinette is portrayed as a spendthrift, a libertine, an orgiastic lesbian, and a poisoner and infant murderess. In her analyses of these pamphlets ... Thomas reconstructs how the mounting hallucinatory and libelous discourse culminated in the inevitable destruction of what had become the counterrevolutionary symbol par excellence.

All of this is present in Farewell, My Queen, but is more implied than belaboured. The young Sidonie is our lens, and her naivete is ours. She is besotted with the queen at a time when that same woman is subject of national rancor. Early on in the film, discussing Marie Antoinette's love of tapestry with another attendant, Sidonie remarks, "That's when she forgets she's queen." The other attendant replies, with a creeping scorn, "I never forget who I am."

As a period piece, Farewell, My Queen spends a lot of time on the literal dirt and indecency of the time. Where most films of this genre revel in the grandeur of what we consider the past, Jacquot's falling Versailles is intimate and frenetic, and Diane Kruger's Marie is human and flawed and as fallible as anyone else in the court. The building revolution lives very much beyond the grounds of Versailles, but the grist of is tangible in the court itself. Farewell, My Queen is all about the intersection of how we view a person and who that person is, in ways both loving and hateful.

- Andrew

Bookshelf Home

Cinema Page

Random Roles

I have a lot of love for the nerdlingers over at the AV Club. They've got the quippy, mordant tone of their father site The Onion, but levelled at popular culture and the maybe-less-popular culture that they're ebullient about. Daily they offer a great pulse-taking of what's new and what's awesome and what's lame, but definitely worth checking out are their running features. Especially edifying are My Year Of Flops, I Watched This On Purpose, and Commentary Tracks Of The Damned. If ever you're feeling like a hopeless lame-o, subsisting solely on the Cheetos and Funyuns of our garbage culture, you can buck up, because you're freaking Fonzie compared to these ostensibly pocket protector-wearing geekazoids.

It's the AV Club's love of and for the ancillary that's laudatory, for culture's a quilt... or a rich tapestry... or something like that. Whatever thing in your linen closet that culture's like, it's animated more by people you've never heard of or rarely hear of than by the people who end up on magazine covers and talk shows. But even if you don't know the names of peripheral proponents of culture, you'll probably recognize them. Random Roles offers a nice cataloging of some of your favorite characters as well as those you didn't realize were your favorites. Recognize these guys?: Stephen Tobolowsky? William Atherton? Wallace Shawn? Jean-Claude Van Damme?

Bookshelf Home

Cinema Page