2001-03-12 - Afternoon
OK ... movies. I saw three this past weekend--one documentary and two old science-fiction films (one of the museums in Balboa Park is hosting a sf film festival throughout March and April). Let�s just get right to them, shall we?
Sound and Fury (2000)
Documentary about the controvery over cochlear implants--the surgical procedure that allows some (though not all) deaf people to hear. The film follows a very large, very LOUD (even the sign language is LOUD) family on Long Island with both deaf and hearing members. One brother and his wife, who can hear, are planning implant surgery for their deaf infant son, while another brother, who is deaf--as are his wife and all their children--is flipping out because his 4-year-old daughter wants to get the implant so she can fit in with her hearing friends.
Arguments ensue--lots of them. There�s a lot of shouting (and highly animated signing) in this film--over dinner tables, at family barbecues, in doctor�s offices, etc. What struck me is that while everyone is speaking and/or signing, no one is communicating. Everyone has his or her value judgment and is hell-bent on imposing it on everyone else. The deaf people who oppose cochlear implants see them as a threat to capital-D Deaf culture; I�m somewhat sympathetic to that view, although watching this film I can�t help feeling that this is yet another example of tribalism and victim politics run amok. As for the hearing people (particularly the family matriarch, who is a loudmouth hag of the first order), they�re so obsessed with the idea of deafness as something that needs fixing, and with the supposed stigma of being deaf in a hearing world, that they fail to understand that bolting a big-ass MICROPHONE to a child�s skull is going to give the kid a stigma too. A cochlear implant doesn�t make it so you�re no longer deaf, any more than giving me a wheelchair makes me ambulatory. The only person in the film acting like an adult is the 4-year-old, who considers everyone�s opinion and then decides she doesn�t want the implant after all. I wanted to pimp-slap every other "adult" in the film at least once.
Still, it�s a balanced treatment of the issue and it�s worth seeing if the controversy interests you. In the end, the baby gets the implant and the all-deaf family moves to a town in Maryland where there�s a large deaf population and even the hearing clerks at the supermarket know how to sign. Which is the better way of coping? We�ll have to wait till the kids are old enough to go on Oprah.
Metropolis (1927)
One of the great silent films, marred here by an annoying John Cage-esque musical score. I�ve seen this film several times, and each time I�m drawn to how many of the images here have been recycled/ripped off in countless science-fiction movies since. The robot here could be C-3PO�s great grandmother. The cityscapes foreshadow those in the 1990s Batman movies. And the evil Master of Metropolis is a dead ringer for Peter Cushing. Still relevant even today--if you don�t think we North Americans live in our own glitzy metropolis that�s kept functioning by people living in squalid conditions, then you probably think those clothes you bought at Old Navy were made by elves in a hollow tree.
Things to Come (1936)
A visually stunning film, even if the future here resembles an Ayn Rand wet dream with men dressed in scary, overstarched Heidi outfits. World War II starts in 1940 and lasts 30 years; chemical and biological warfare leaves civilization in ruins until the "Airmen" arrive in their fancy flying machines, which look like Siamese Spruce Gooses. Under their benevolent regime of Reason and Science (basically Stalinism minus the purges and forced-labor camps) they bring about a world without war or traffic accidents. Preachy as hell, but fun to look at. Watch for Ralph Richardson, who plays the petty dictator of postwar London (or postwar Piccadilly Circus, as that�s the only part of London we actually ever see) as a cross between Benito Mussolini and Edina from AbFab.
Before these last two movies they also showed 1930s Flash Gordon serials. It�s odd in this post-Schwarzenegger age to see how flabby the macho action heroes were back then. I kept trying to picture Buster Crabbe--who�s about as doughy as my dad--as the Jean-Claude Van Damme of his time and it just made my brain hurt and I had to go home and lie down.
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