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Author Archives: Reid Mukai
The Next Few Days at Neuro ICU
Though I had moments of deep sleep at Harborview’s neuro ICU, more often than not brief lapses into sleep were interrupted by nurses and/or assistants dropping in to administer meds, take vitals, draw blood, or change my sleep position to prevent pressure sores. Of all the various scheduled procedures the position changes were the most disruptive.
In my weakened state at the time changing positions, such as being tilted left or right, would be enough to drastically alter my blood pressure, sometimes causing dizziness. It would also cause coughing fits due to the movement loosening mucus built up around my trach tube. Because of the difficulty coughing and swallowing, I needed the assistance of a suction tube to be able to breathe.
When I was able to sleep deeply enough to dream, I dreamt of walking and exploring familiar environments from the past (usually schools and workplaces). Such dreams continue to be the most common type to this day and probably stem from an innate need to explore. I’m always walking alone and never encounter others in the various environments. Sometimes I find useful items like a flashlight which I need to use, for the buildings I explore are often dark (though for some reason I never feel afraid or anxious, just curious). After a few months of using a wheelchair I’d occasionally realize within the dream that I shouldn’t be able to walk and would wake up immediately after having that thought.
Because of the lack of deep sleep during the night in addition to the regular doses of meds, I was often tired throughout the following day. Even communication was tiring despite it usually being one-way and requiring simple yes/no answers. Listening comprehension was itself a struggle at the time, which was why I opted to listen to music rather than podcasts.
For communicating more detailed information, Danielle had to review with me a system taught by a speech therapist at the trauma ICU (which I had no memory of). It was a simple but tedious way to spell out words using a laminated grid with color-coded quadrants containing a set of letters in alphabetical order.
To communicate a specific word I would indicate the color of the quadrant with the first letter of the word by silently saying the name of the color (hoping the listener can read lips) while focusing my eyes on the quadrant linked to the color. Once the correct quadrant was understood I would mouth the name of the letter and if the listener didn’t understand they would have to ask yes or no for each letter in the section. When the correct letter was found they would write it down and move to the next until the word was deduced.
Fortunately this system didn’t need to be used very often at neuro ICU, mostly when Danielle or my mom wanted to help me select media to keep myself distracted while bedridden and unable to talk. Finding something I wanted to watch was often difficult because what I had in mind was something escapist yet relevant, abstract but not overly convoluted and with a message of hope. The films that helped me most to get through those times were Strawberry Mansion, Linoleum, and The Fall. In addition I had time to rewatch dystopian fare I’ve always enjoyed such as Children of Men and Max Headroom.
Danielle and my mom spent much of the time monitoring my health and getting help from nurses as needed, providing water and the suction tube when needed, working on medical, insurance, and financial matters, and offering words of support which I could acknowledge but not reciprocate. I imagined it might have been almost as traumatic watching me go through various ordeals as experiencing them first-hand. Later in the week it was determined I was ready to sit in a wheelchair, which initially wasn’t pleasant but at least it gave me something to do.
Saturday Matinee: Metropia
MOVIE REVIEW: TRIBECA: Metropia – Swedish Animated Dystopic Film’s Look is Stunning!
By Sheldon Wiebe
Source: Eclipse Magazine
Metropia is a stranger film than the average dystopia. With a visual design that would be appropriate for 1984 and its depiction of a Europe connected by a vast subway complex called The Metro and a plot that includes a biological mind control device disseminated by shampoo, Metropia is definitely a unique experience.
Roger [voiced by Vincent Gallo] is a drone who works at Supercall, the mother of all telemarketing/tech help companies. He lives in a shabby apartment with his exotic looking girlfriend, Anna [Sofia Hein], and rides a bike to work because he doesn’t trust the Metro. The Sweden in which he lives is a grey, grey place – as is all of Europe, we learn over the course of the film. He is as normal/unremarkable as a person can get. His biggest fantasy is to meet the model for the shampoo that, unbeknownst to him, has left his thoughts open to the ominous Trexx corporation.
Being as normal as he is, Roger is startled to realize that he’s hearing voices – or rather a voice – in his head. Freaked, he manages to finish his shift and get home. The next morning, he has to take The Metro to work – someone has trashed his bike. In the station, he spies the woman from the shampoo. He follows her. She is Nina [Juliette Lewis] and she not only confronts him, she seems to know about the voice in head! She also seems to know what to do about that.
Metropia is a great looking film. The animation – like some absurd CG hybrid of Terry Gilliam’s more fluid cutout work and Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation – is extremely well done and carries the story as well as setting a very specific mood. Director/co-writer [with Stig Larsson and Frederik Edin] Tarik Saleh keeps things to a very deliberate pace for most of the film, with only a few moments of accelerated action.
Considering the number of people who worked on the script [comparatively few for an animated film], the story seems to be pretty skeletal. Everything moves, more or less, in a single direction and [with only a couple of exceptions] at a single pace – and the film doesn’t quite hang together.
The biggest problem has to be that Roger hears that voice in his head, but is still able to do whatever he wants – which makes him unique in a world of people whose lives are seemingly controlled by others. It’s never explained why this should be – and there’s no real reason for Nina to take him bed, either. Roger is such an unremarkable guy that the film might have worked better had she used her sexuality to get him to do what she wanted with just the promise of sex as a motivator. Still, Gallo’s washed out vocal performance as Roger is spot on, as is Lewis’ turn as Nina. If we buy them, then we buy the film – and they work.
Some of the best moments of the film come with the CEO of Trexx, Ivan Bahn [Udo Kier] explains to investors just how the company works – and how the shampoo figures in the company’s bottom line. His demonstration of the effects of the shampoo –on a Texan named Wayne Marshall [Indy Neidell] – is particularly effective.
Metropia may be flawed, but it’s still quite the visual feast, and definitely worth a look.
Watch Metropia on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/5845007
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: Amores Perros
By James Berardinelli
Source: ReelViews
Without a doubt, the majority of the reviews of Amores Perros, the acclaimed debut feature from Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, will, at one time or another, invoke Pulp Fiction. There are undeniable similarities, although most of them are at the surface level. Amores Perros, like Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-nominated opus, deals with men and women who live on the seedy side of life. The plot unravels episodically and in a non-linear fashion, with characters from one segment occasionally appearing in, or passing through, another. However, one of Pulp Fiction‘s trademarks was to glamorize the gangster – to make the traditional “bad guy” seem hip and interesting. This was done through clever dialogue and stylish filmmaking techniques. In Amores Perros, criminals are not romanticized. They are exposed for what they are – human beings whose moral compasses have become twisted. So, although the territory may be familiar to viewers of Pulp Fiction, the vantage point is radically different.
Amores Perros introduces us to a veritable Rogues Gallery of individuals. Of the seven or eight significant characters traversing Iñárritu’s terrain, only one could be considered sympathetic. The others comprise a web of corruption and deceit. There are hit men, murderers, philanderers, thieves, betrayers, and other assorted riff-raff. Tarantino’s anti-heroes are cool and suave, with always the right one-liner to offer. Iñárritu’s are brutal and lacking even a modicum of charisma.
The first two we meet are Octavio (Gael García Bernal) and Susana (Vanessa Bauche). She’s his sister-in-law, but that doesn’t stem his ardor for her, and, because he treats her with a degree of kindness that her brutish husband, Ramiro (Marco Pérez), never shows, she can’t help but be attracted to him. Octavio is determined to make enough money so that he and Susana can run away together (along with her infant son), but, in Mexico City, where poverty abounds, clean money is hard to find. Ramiro’s meager income as a grocery store clerk is supplemented by convenience store hold ups, but that’s not a path Octavio is interested in taking. Instead, he decides to get involved in dog fighting, and he’s fortunate to own a real winner. But, once Ramiro finds out about his little brother’s windfall, he wants a piece of the action, and all of Octavio’s carefully laid plans are put in jeopardy.
Meanwhile, a couple of rungs higher on the social ladder are Daniel (Álvaro Guerrero) and Valeria (Goya Toledo). She’s a world-class model who has hit the big time. Her face and body are plastered all over billboards throughout Mexico City. He’s a magazine publisher who has left his wife and two children to be with her. Together, they make the perfect couple – young, good-looking, and in love – until tragedy strikes. Valeria is seriously injured in a car accident and Daniel must cope with living with a mentally and physically crippled woman whose modeling career is at an end. Suddenly, the rosy life he envisioned reeks of decay.
Finally, there’s Chivo (Emilio Echevarría), a mysterious, wild-looking figure who hovers around the periphery of the other stories until his tale is finally told. Chivo is an ex-guerilla who abandoned his wife and daughter for The Cause. Now, many years later, he lives with regrets. He spies on his adult child from afar, never having the courage to approach her, while he takes odd jobs as a hit man to feed himself and his small menagerie of mangy dogs. But, when Chivo is hired by one brother to kill another over money, he arrives at a few realizations about the importance of family.
The dogs in this film are almost as important as the humans. Canines feature prominently in all three stories. Octavio makes his fortune by fighting dogs. Valerie loves her pooch more than a child (and, one might argue, more than Daniel). And Chivo treats his animals with greater respect than he accords to any human. By elevating dogs to this level of importance, Iñárritu is making a statement about the level to which society has descended. It’s a sad commentary about a culture where individuals care more about dogs than other human beings.
Amores Perros‘ timeline is not linear. It curves back on itself, but not in a manner that is intended to confound the audience. The film begins with an pivotal occurrence that happens half-way through the movie, then proceeds to show events that lead up to that moment, and, later, what happens afterwards. Chivo’s story plays out in the background for most of the film, until, during the final forty-five minutes, it is brought to the fore while the other tales are wrapped up on the periphery. Iñárritu’s approach isn’t unique, but it is unusual, and it’s one of the elements that will keep viewers involved in Amores Perros from beginning to end.
Iñárritu has surrounded himself with a strong cast. Veteran Emilio Echevarría is magnetic as Chivo, with blazing eyes staring out from beneath bushy eyebrows. They are the eyes of a fanatic, but there’s also a sense of almost unspeakable loss in them as they gaze in the direction of his daughter. Álvaro Guerrero brings a youthful energy to the part of Octavio, and Goya Toledo is suitably fragile and spoiled as the model who is used to having the world bow down in front of her. In fact, there isn’t a weak performance to be found throughout the movie; even the trained dogs do solid jobs.
Amores Perros has won an impressive number of awards in film festivals across the globe. Watching the film, it’s not hard to understand why. Iñárritu’s style contains elements of Tarantino, Peckinpah, and others, but, ultimately, the synthesis is all his own. Even though there’s really no one in this film we can like, root for, or sympathize with, the intricacies of the narrative and the its themes are strong enough to ensure that we will not lose interest. Amores Perros is more than just a strong debut; it’s good, gritty filmmaking.
Watch Amores Perros on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12158942?utm_source=MARC&Lid=hhh985
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: Peking Opera Blues
Running Out of Karma: Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues
By Sean Gilman
Source: The End of Cinema
I first saw this eight months ago, on my first night home after the birth of my second kid (I had rented it from Scarecrow Video and needed to watch it before returning it the next day). Needless to say, exhausted and occasionally interrupted, I remembered very little of the experience, other than that I liked the film quite a bit. Happily, a more clear-headed rewatch confirms that initial vague impression: this is a great movie, perhaps the best melding of director Tsui Hark’s twin impulses toward subversion and entertainment I’ve seen yet.
The setup follows two plotlines that will come together and intertwine with a third, each focused on a female protagonist. Brigitte Lin plays the daughter of a local warlord. She dresses like a man (having spent time studying in the West, and also because she’s Brigitte Lin) and is secretly a revolutionary. She and fellow revolutionary Mark Cheng (memorable as Louis Koo’s able assistant in Johnnie To’s Election 2) have to steal some MacGuffins from the general’s safe. Cherie Chung (from The Enigmatic Case) plays a musician who stole a box of jewelry from a soldier (Tung Man, played by Cheung Kwok Keung) in the chaos after the previous general was run out of town. Through a series of complications, the box ends up at a local theatre troupe, where Sally Yeh, daughter of the director (played by film director, actor, clock Wu Ma), wants very much to go on-stage but can’t because women aren’t allowed to perform. Lin and Cheng also find themselves at the troupe, as it’s the favored entertainment for the most powerful people in town, including the local police commander/gangster Liu, who becomes infatuated with the star actor, Fa.
That covers the first 20 minutes or so of the film, what follows is an elegantly structured twisting and deepening of the characters and their relations as the film progresses through a variety of suspense and comic set pieces. Ching Siu-tung choreographs some exceptional action scenes, usually featuring Mark Cheng jumping into or shooting a bunch of bad guys (the sequences at the theatre make ingenious use of the space’s multi-leveled design, with Cheng diving under and jumping over tables and benches, then on the main stage and up to the stage above it before swinging across the rafters and finally onto the rooftops), but there are also cunningly designed short sequences like the one David Bordwell describes early in Planet Hong Kong, where Mark and Cheung and Cherie hide in Sally’s bed from her father. The two father-daughter relationships are especially poignant, with Lin’s eyes exploring every aspect of her self-hatred for destroying the father she loves while opposing everything he stands for politically. It’s most remarkable to see her usually implacable image break down in anguish near the end of the film and even in happiness in a brief middle section where she gets drunk with the other girls. As well Wu Ma brings a note of knowing sadness to the theatre director father, a man who we took as a stock type gains nuance when we realize exactly why he so strictly keeps his daughter away from the stage: because if she catches the eye of the powerful, she’ll be forced to prostitute herself for the sake of the company (as Liu attempts with Fa). Complex as well are the film’s romantic relationships. Not so much the main one between Mark and Brigitte (if that even is a romance given Lin’s ambiguous orientation), but the all but unspoken one between Cheung (whose soldier I don’t think is even named in the screenplay) and Cherie, which exists almost entirely in the subtle looks he gives her of longing and disappointment at her more venal moments. That soldier, in fact, is one of the more fascinating characters in the film: a hapless guy, bullied by his fellows, who joins the revolutionaries by chance, falls in love with a girl and ends up saving the life of the heroine in a spectacular last minute rescue. There are few martial arts films I know of that have so many richly developed characters and relationships. The only one that even comes to mind in Tsui’s own epic Once Upon a Time in China.
The Peking Opera setting provides Tsui a world full of potential meaning, and he plays it up beautifully. The gender reversals required of the all-male stage echo the real-life reversals of Lin’s character, as she not only dresses like a man but takes on the traditional hero role (note that it’s the women who rescue the men time and again). When the other two women make it on stage, they become women impersonating men impersonating women, just as they more or less unwillingly take on the roles of revolutionaries. Eventually, the politics that undergirds the plot comes to be seen as a form of performance, with one general shuffling on stage as the other exits, the rebels scheme amounting to a lifting of a curtain (exposing certain warlords as conspiring with foreigners) all while the real power lurks behind the scenes, in the form of the black clad local police force. That the local commander is both bluntly evil and homosexual (as well as the ultra-effeminate depictions of the male actors) might be a cause for concern were it not for the sincere warmth with which Tsui depicts the homoerotic relations between the three women (Sally in particular seems infatuated with Brigitte). Instead, what we see is sexuality, with politics, as another kind of performance that serves to either mask our baser urges (the violence of the commander, the greed of Cherie) and/or complicate our nobler ones (the father-daughter relations, the multiple instances of self-sacrifice throughout the film, as each hero in turn faces death to save the others).
The result is a film not too far in spirit from the anarchic nihilism of Tsui’s earliest films, the burn-it-all youth drama Dangerous Encounters – First Kind or the cannibal comedy We’re Going to Eat You. But instead of merely exposing the world, politics, and human relations as a sham, Tsui instead finds a humane warmth at our core, while simultaneously celebrating the artistry of that disguising performance itself: Mark’s ultra-cool secret agent and Lin’s resolute stoicism, as well as the athleticism of the opera performers. The film opens with a series of close up shots of Peking Opera costumes and props and actors, scored to a traditional sounding song with a modern synthesizer beat. And it ends with a close-up from that same series of a performer in full make-up, laughing maniacally at us, or maybe with us.
Ruminations on Trauma
Once again focusing attention on my immediate situation, I self-assessed how I felt. The adjective I kept coming back to was “traumatized”. At first it didn’t seem quite right because I associated trauma with survivors of violent assault. Upon further thought, I understood how it results from any violent event and could be physical as well as psychological.
Though I have no accessible memory of the crash that caused my injury, it’s possible a buried subconscious memory exists. At times I couldn’t stop recreating scenarios of what probably happened mixed with fantasies of what could have happened (either dying or escaping unscathed). In any case, the injury resulting from the crash including aspects of hospitalization, was itself a source of trauma.
Unless one has experienced it, it’s difficult to imagine the horror of waking up in a newly immobilized body especially if one was relatively healthy immediately prior to the injury. It instantly shatters any illusions one might have had of a just universe or merciful higher power. But the evidence was always there, from psychopathic war criminals and health insurance CEOs living in luxury to innocent children killed and maimed in indiscriminate bombings and countless sick and injured living curtailed lives of misery due to denied claims and inaccessible treatments.
Initially it’s like a waking nightmare that never ends. One wouldn’t wish such an affliction on one’s worst enemy, much less easily accept that it’s actually happening to oneself. Even typing this now, nearly a year after the crash, waking life still sometimes feels like a bad dream.
As the reality of the situation sets in it begins to feel more like a fracture or demarcation point between two very different lives and lifestyles. Though fundamentally one remains the same person, the extremity of the physical change makes changes in personality, priorities, interests, beliefs, self/public image, and relationships, inevitable and how could it not?
Although in my case I experienced no physical deformation and associated acute pain, it was nevertheless traumatic to so suddenly lose such a large part of oneself. Especially early on, it was odd to feel so disconnected from one’s body despite appearing healthy on the outside (aside from breathing tube, nose tube, catheter, IV line, etc).
In a sense, my injury was analogous to accelerated aging. Rather than a gradual loss of certain functions and abilities over time, it’s a rapid loss of many functions and abilities instantly. At the same time, quadriplegia evokes the experience of infancy such as the many times when one is more of a spectator rather than participant and having to rely on others to attend to basic needs. Quadriplegia is not as restricting as Locked-in Syndrome, in which the only body part capable of movement are the eyes, but it is still a significant reduction of freedom and a loss of one’s primary means of interacting with the world.
From one’s new perspective, life pre-injury was one of relative comfort, ease and happiness (even if it didn’t always seem like it at the time). Life post-injury may have moments of comfort, ease and happiness, but much shorter, fewer and farther between, making them all the more precious. On particularly challenging days, sleep also offers a welcome respite as it did that night.
After the Crash 