The Visitor

The Visitor is a small indie film that adeptly examines the theme suggested by its spare title from a couple of different levels. There is the college professor who has given up on living, he's merely visiting his life. And then there's the refugees in the U.S.A., hoping for a chance at a better life, but relegated to a surreal limbo-like existence, outside of the official bureaucracy.

Richard Jenkins stars as the barely alive college professor - inspired casting given his experience as the spiritual dad in the classic tv series, Six Feet Under. What kind of actor, by the way, takes a role in a series where his character is killed off in the first scene? Okay, granted, his ghostly presence made regular on-screen returns, but still.

Unknown to the professor, a refugee couple have rented out his Manhattan apartment (we never find out why exactly he maintains an apartment in NYC which he rarely visits - something to do with his late wife, we presume). The professor shows up for a conference. Surprise! Surprise! But he lets the couple stay. Tarek is from Syria - a musician specializing in African drum - a form of music that captivates the professor and gradually re-invigorates the professor's life - that and a visit from the Tarek's mother.

To its credit, the movie does not engage in any heavy-handed proselytism of the evils of the refugee process. It simply presents the refugees as people - and lets the circumstance and treatment speak for itself. "Everything changed after 9-11," one character remarks. Perhaps, but there has to be a better way to address the plight of these human beings.

Doubt

The film, Doubt, based on the play of the same name written by John Patrick Shanley, tackles a controversial topic by shrouding it in layers of uncertainty and, of course, doubt. The storyline contrasts the dagger of suspicion against the presumption of innocence. Yet, by choosing such a button-pushing subject, the purported sexual abuse of an altar boy by a Catholic priest, the author casts illumination on his theme, while simultaneously introducing complexities that deflect from the central issue. Questions of race and motherhood, spreading an implication that the boy - and thereby accusing all such victims - brought the abuse upon himself.

"It's his character," the mother defends and lashes out in the same breath, "just leave it alone, let him graduate in six months."

This melodrama - unbelievable and socially unacceptable, yet tugging at threads of race and impoverished hope - highlights another problem with this story. It is a not a piece of fiction for fans of subtle intricate plots - no, the archetypes are front and center, the contrasts obvious, the dialogue rising to a crescendo at the end of every scene. The cold wind blows through doors and windows left ajar, a disapproving god chilling the hearts of his wayward servants, lost and full of doubt.

On the positive side, this filmic adaptation of the original play is visually stunning, making the most of the change in medium. And the acting is stellar - Meryl Streep inhabits the role of the morally superior nun with headstrong certainty (at least until the final scene), while Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays the priest with a believable combination of sanctimony and not-quite-innocent vulnerability.

Burn after Reading

Finally, an intelligent comedy that engenders some real laughs. Burn after Reading is a dark, sarcastic take on the internal workings of the CIA. Created from the warped minds of the Coen brothers, the film alternates between absurdist reality and out-of-control hilarity. Imagine the movie Get Smart if the Coen brothers had been given control. J.K. Simmons is perfectly cast as the incredulous upper management type (e.g. the Chief), while John Malkovitch rages as the intellectually pompous (and alcoholic) ex-agent whose firing triggers the ridiculously simple plot. The only false step is provided by Brad Pitt whose over-the-top portrayal of a semi-moronic fitness instructor reminded me too much of his tick-ridden psych inmate from the classic Twelve Monkees.

The death of the novel

Just as Nietzsche declared that God is dead, and Fukuyama proclaimed the End of History, the death of fiction (at least in form of the written word) is upon us. The short story is long gone, poetry rendered irrelevant without a backing beat, and now the novel as a piece of art is relegated to the trash heap of history - though, since history is done, the meaning of this is unclear.

We're talking about the literary novel, of course, a form of long-winded expression that is capable of describing a moment in human civilization, of circling and enveloping and describing in detail the arc of a people, from birth to death, from passionate love to saturated hate, from selfless sacrifice to narcissistic obsession, from the dregs of slavery to the glory of freedom, from the horrors of war to the whispered soliloquy of peace.

This means that the literary novelist is an obsolete figure. Lament the disappearance of Dickens, Dostoevsky, of Camus and Tolstoy, even Twain and Hemmingway. We will never see their like again.

Yet the panderings to the mass-market, the populist fare that somehow captivates the

appetite of the multitudes with its nutrition-free offerings, survive and prosper.

But the success of the pop-literati is not the full story. Somehow the examination of the large issues

in life, be they philosophical, political, economic, scientific or ethical, have been relegated to the non-fiction aisles (nonwithstanding the James Frey pseudo-controversy). Fiction, as they teach us, is all about personal stories - alive with peculiar detail of the lives of these fabricated characters - in order that we can identify, so that we can delve with vicarious pleasure into these

fictional realms. As a result, however, the fiction lacks the social context to deal with, in a meaningful manner,

the issues of the day.

Of course, my musings are not original. Ironically they were repeated recently in a Globe and Mail article describing the Infinite Summer blog, created by a group of people who've dedicated their summer to reading the novel 'Infinite Jest' by David Foster Wallace. This book is revered by some as a modern classic, a thousand page plus tome (with copious footnoted asides) that rivals the masterworks mentioned above.

Perhaps this was the last NOVEL ever written. Certainly, it was the last novel by this author - he committed suicide while attempting to write a followup.

I suppose I should read it then. If only I had an infinite summer.

Crime and Punishment?

What deters a would-be criminal? One's own conscience, for a start. Obviously, that's not always enough. The fear of getting caught, of getting arrested, of disappointing the people who love you, of being ostracized by society at large.

In order to deter crime effectively, punishment needs to be "sure, swift and severe". Cesare Beccaria codified this philosophy in the 18th century. Yet even he realized that the "severe" component of this trilogy had the weakest impact. Punishment needs to be severe enough to loom in the mind (i.e. not just a slap on the wrist), but any increase in severity will have no measurable impact on future deterrence.

Of course, the justice system in our modern society continues to put emphasis on the severity of its punishments, increasing the length of prison sentences, despite the ineffectiveness of this course of action. In fact, it is counter-productive. Prisons are over-crowded, judges become reluctant to hand out effective sentences to "first-time offenders". Punishment is no longer "sure", in fact it is very avoidable if one has a good lawyer. Add to that the typical delays of the court system, and the swiftness of punishment becomes a joke.

A recent New Yorker article (Don't Shoot, June 22, 2009) describes a program designed to curb gang violence and public drug sales by focusing police actions. Rather than the typical maneuver of arresting one or two people (who are sure to be released in a day or two), the police will adopt a policy of zero-tolerance. The police will target all dealers, all gang members, and arrest everyone complicit. This will happen every time a crime is committed. There will be no letting up. The vital component of this program is convincing the gangs that the police will seriously apply its provisions - that punishment will be swift and inescapable. And it works despite the fact the severity of this punishment is unchanged.

Quantum of Solace

After an auspicious rebirth of James Bond in 2006's Casino Royale,  featuring a buff and tough Daniel Craig in the iconic role, the follow-up film Quantum of Solace unfortunately returns to a more familiar Bondian formula.  Though Craig still channels a down and dirty Bond - emerging from various dire scrapes with more cuts and bruises than Demi Moore's ex in a Quentin Tarantino flick - with a soiled yet functional tuxedo, the movie is little more than a sequence of grandiose chase scenes.  And the over-the-top villain is back, an environmentalist anti-hero subtly named Mr. Green (making me think that the movie would culminate in the library with a candlestick). 

Ostensibly, the plot features Bond out to avenge the girlfriend killed in the previous movie, yet the scenes move forward without reason - save for some tenuous thread that links to the mysterious secret society cum evil corporation that seems to be taking over everything.  Of course, Bond manages to seduce one beautiful girl despite his grief.

Dame Judi Dench performs credibly in the role of the boss lady Q, but even that is not enough to rescue this loudly violent piece of popcorn.

Sub-Prime Stagecoach

This article on the Wells Fargo bank, the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, and the ugly pervasiveness of racial discrimination read like an expose written decades ago.  Like in the 1950's, before the Civil Rights movement, before Kennedy, before a man walked on the moon. 

Yet the vehicle of prejudice was distinctly modern.  Wells Fargo loan officials are accused of systematically pushing mortgage loan applicants who were black into the sub-prime category, even if they qualified for less costly loans.  

Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

This, of course, made blacks much more vulnerable to mortgage default after the crash of home values.

The bank proffered bonuses in front of the loan officers for selling these sub-prime mortgages.   It is little wonder that they steered people into them - they even targeted the Baltimore area black churches for more customers of these poison pies.

Perhaps some of these loan officers were not outright racists.  Perhaps some of them thought they were just following a win-win policy, making their bonuses and giving people their mortgages.  

Perhaps the bank management didn't intend to setup a racist practice when they instituted the bonus policy.

Perhaps some of these people even voted for Obama.