Cinematic Concerns

I go back to the question, of why one makes movies. Of course, the more pertinent question, as far as this blog is concerned, is why would I want to make movies? You have to understand, that this is an embarrassing question for me to ask, for I have not really made one.

Then along came this movie. Agora tells the story of Hypatia, a dedicated female philosopher in Roman-ruled Egypt, at a time when the Christian uprising is beginning to take the world by storm. It is a decidedly non-Hollywood story, one that infuses tension in its drama, which is centered around the conflict between science and reason against the unquestioning faiths that organised religion demands. One that is set at a time in history and an event that you would be hard-pressed to find any individual of the masses to be interested in, purely in itself.

No, they might have come to the movie because of Rachel Weisz, or because the trailer looked epic. But none of those reasons are the reasons one should watch the movie – not sufficient, anyway.

This is directed by Alejandro Amenábar, a filmmaker I was interested in, even though, oddly enough as I just realised, I have only seen one of his films. But I've heard of his movies; his debut film Tesis being a film that surprised people so much it won Best Film at the Spanish Oscars (his first film!!), then Abre Los Ojos which Cameron Crowe later loved so much that he adapted it less successfully into Vanilla Sky and even used Penelopé Cruz in the exact same role. Then of course Amenábar went a bit Hollywood by working with Nicole Kidman in The Others. Last before this, he directed Javier Bardem in The Sea Inside, which won the Oscar but which I found hard to love. Generally he comes across as a bit of a Chris Nolan without the budget and the explosions – i.e. equally serious and intellectual. He usually composes the score for his own films (though not this time).

But this project interested me for the curiously obscure subject matter. Who is Hypatia? You can wikipedia her. But here I was really interested because she is played by Rachel Weisz. Of course she is played by Rachel Weisz – who else can do intelligent and seductive at the same time? (I'd like to see Eva Green try.) But then there's the rest of the cast.

Max Minghella, who unfortunately lost his father during the shooting of this movie (that famous Oscar-winning director of slow-moving epic dramas, Anthony Minghella). I've always held high hopes for him because of his pedigree, but I've never really seen him shine. This movie changes things; his character arc is well-handled, and Minghella is alternately lovelorn, confused and torn, and equally determined when he joins the Christians in tearing down the Library of Alexandria as when he later tries to save Hypatia from the Christian mob. (Makeup note: the beard helps.)

Then the others. Oscar Isaac, whom you just saw play King John in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, playing the third wheel in the love triangle in this story. Rupert Evans, whom I saw once in a bravely revealing performance in the BBC series "Sons & Lovers" (those who recognise DH Lawrence will now go 'ahh') and whom some of you might remember from Hellboy.

Ashraf Barhom, an actor I was utterly impressed with due to his role as the dedicated and sincere Saudi officer, Col. Ghazi in Peter Berg's The Kingdom, and who then totally blew my mind with the way he played the completely mental Falangist soldier in Lebanon; here, he exudes the sort of unsophisticated but unyielding Christian zealotry that one dislikes and pities at the same time.

Homayoun Ershadi, whom I still remember as the high-principled father in Marc Forster's The Kite Runner, here playing a dedicated servant of Hypatia, who gently holds her thoughts for her so that she may pick up her strands of thought and come to the conclusions she comes to.

And what conclusions they are!

You remember that scene in Iron Man 2, when Tony Stark figures out what his father's blueprint is trying to tell him, that moment of eureka when he thought of the atom-within-atom structure? It's probably complete hogwash and can never be true scientifically. In Agora, however, Hypatia's struggles were to understand the nature of the planets and where the Earth fits in among them. Here, more than a thousand years before Copernicus, before Kepler, before Newton, she (in this movie at least) figured it out. This is a bona fide moment of eureka.

Those of you who have studied the Cosmology portion of Physics may already know what her conclusions will be before the halfway point of the movie. And yet – and here is the crux I'm trying to get to, as a way to get to the answer of the question I posed in the beginning of this post – what totally grabs me here is how she figured the damn theory out.

Simply through the power of the mind. Using no tools but what primitive models she could make (or at least, her slaves could make). It's a kind of effort any painter or screenwriter can attest to: the struggle to come up with creative solutions to problems that have no points of references, nothing to hold on to, nothing one could see that could provide a solution, as if one is floating in blank space. What I'm trying to say is, the movie (tries to) put you in the same mindset as these people, a thousand and five hundred years ago, who do not have the certainty provided by the ziggurat of knowledge that has accumulated over millennia of human civilisation as we have in the 21st century, so that your only way to figure out scientific theories, is purely by using the mind to think: what can 100% be eliminated, what is considered 100% true, and how to deal with what is in-between that.

As such, even though I knew the mathematical solution she was trying to get to, since it is so easy for a 20th-century-born man such as I am, I totally shared in her discovery, each inching step towards that goal of cranking open just one more secret of the heavens.

But, the movie also makes the point that all these knowledge were lost. (Again, all these discoveries were suggested by the film; I do not know whether she did indeed come to these very modern conclusions. These writings are an emotion reaction that assumes what was presented in the movie to be true – this being a discussion of the movie.) The loss, the waste! Her knowledge did not have any time nor space to spread. It was knowledge that would be lost for a thousand years, only to be rediscovered by those aforementioned names, who now enter our history books as the people who discover those different things that led us to our modern, proven heliocentric model of the Solar System.

You see many other very unusual things. You see a woman tutoring young men. You see how a student who proposes to her (an unusual occurrence) is rejected (in a most unusual manner). You see Christians committing actions which would be considered most un-Christian by today's believers of that faith, one that bears not an iota of resemblance to the English and Chinese churches attended by myself and my other Christian friends here in Malaysia. I should remind the reader/viewer, that this is set at a time when Islam has yet to exist, though the scenes of violence already suggest the sort of you-kill-me-I-kill-you religious politics that stains the Middle East till this day.

The movie isn't perfect, though I have to say the grandeur of ancient Alexandria (when the Lighthouse was still standing) is jaw-droppingly impressive. The birds-eye-view scenes of the city never looked false for a moment, and the scenes of the crowds, whether they were of people shopping at the market or people rioting and rampaging, looked fairly realistic. The budget is large at $75 million but it could easily have cost twice as much for a Hollywood production - and of course, no Hollywood producer in his or her sane mind may ever want to touch something as sacrilegiously intellectual as this.

What didn't hit the grade for my Hollywood-pampered tastes were the less than polished editing, and the slightly intrusive score, which was over-reliant on wailing vocals. (Surprisingly, from Dario Marianelli.) The acting also felt uneven at times, seeming rather theatrical and postured, and this even among the more experienced cast members.

This is nitpicking. Ultimately I felt that I have seen an example of the sort of movie that would pleasure me a lot to make, and all of it here: a movie about ideas, a movie set in historical times with its intentionally non-contemporary context, a movie that dares to be different from Hollywood but no less the ambition ... a movie starring Rachel Weisz.

And I despair. I despair at the thought that I have no one to share this movie with. Most people I know, from friends to acquaintances, would simply laugh at such a movie, dismiss it as either "too deep" or "who wants to watch stupid crap like this". Or they may try to watch it, and not get it. And I mean, literally, no one, not a single person I can think of, could ever appreciate the movie the way I appreciate it.

How much more alone can a person feel? Alexander the Great knows of similar pain.

Seriously, what is it about Malay movies that makes me regret spending the RM11 on it as I am sitting through the opening credits, i.e. before the movie even starts?

It might be the trailers that come before it, with every single Malay movie trailer reminding you that the Malaysian film industry is essentially purgatory (or neraka). Then the production company logo, which is usually presented very loudly and classlessly. Then the opening credits themselves, with their synth-heavy music (or occasionally, melodramatic piano music ... wait, that's boring HK/Taiwanese movies, actually).

I posed a personal question earlier –

Noting the popularity of local movies like ICE KACANG PUPPY LOVE and TIGER WOOHOO, should I just do that and give the people what they want rather than the stories I want to make that probably only a minority of people want to see?

I say now, there is nothing like watching a local movie to remind me that the answer to that is no, because my motive is not to make movies, but to make movies that affect the audience in the way I want them to be affected.

And something that I am slowly coming to terms is that: it is possible that I will, thus, never make a movie. Ever. But that's ... not worth talking about now.

Going back to Belukar for a while ... It's not actually terrible. It's just terribly boring. The movie failed to hold my attention for huge swathes of its runtime. But, for once, it's not for lack of trying. The refreshing thing about this particular Malay movie is that for once, the film isn't technically shit. The acting is halfway decent. Daphne Iking was surprisingly good (I say surprisingly because the only acting I've seen her done is in 15Malaysia: Gerhana), in that she seems to be in character without overplaying it (as is the norm in Malay acting performances). Bront Palarae is alright, and I think he can only ever play the male lead if he keeps his beard. There are some annoying acting among the secondary characters but we'll let that slide for now.

As far as cinematography goes, once or twice I saw some attempt to be a bit stylish. For example, placing the breathing handheld camera outside looking in at a coffee shop conversation, with the gate at the foreground and occasionally obscuring the characters; it's a bit pointless, but it's okay, not bothersome pretentious. The editing is alright given the story, which is huge step up from other productions; the thing I give it high marks for is consistency. The movie also makes use of flashbacks, and unlike another fuckwit of a local movie, Killer Clown, the filmmakers of Belukar know how to transition into and out of a flashback. (To reiterate: you DON'T just cut to a flashback scene.) There are a couple of visual effects shots I could see; the one involving fire is of course not gonna be great (fire is actually one of the harder vfx shots to achieve convincingly); the one involving a car accident is not half bad.

The music and songs can be a bit annoying, but that's because I (along with Hollywood) have grown past the need to have music playing loudly to tell me how to emote or what to feel in a scene. To be fair, all other filmmakers in the world still do it. Bollywood especially, and HK and Taiwanese films (again) to my great annoyance.

Given that for all these aspects of film, I have basically given Belukar ticks on boxes labeled Moderate, why didn't I enjoy it then?

The story. First the positives: at least it wasn't head-shatteringly dumb or illogical. Contrived, yes. But the logic ... can be accepted, with a bit of a stretch. And it should get points for being even slightly ambitious with the plot structure – the movie begins with the end – and without screwing it up. (Nothing as wow-inducing as what Mission: Impossible III did. But it'll be totally unfair to compare against JJ Abrams lah.)

But at the end of the day it features two not very interesting lead characters and a whole bunch of secondary characters who are either terribly annoying or who barely registered my attention. The plot has intrigue and not much suspense. It's just not very exciting.

And there it is. Story. It's simply not good enough to have an okay story. You need to bring your A-game on this department. Story needs to be attention-grabbing. Characters need to tug at the audiences' heartstrings – and then yank them hard.

And if I had come up with this film, while for almost everyone else, they probably should be reasonably happy (though I don't know at this point how well it'll do in the box office), I would've been suicidally unhappy and inconsolably depressed about it for a long time (well, at least after the euphoria of having completed a film is over).

[Oh, fine, if you want a rating, I'll give it 4.5/10. Mind you, Sepet was a 6/10 and Sayang You Can Dance was a 0.5/10; for those Senario movies and similarly braindead comedies as well as pointless horror movies that served only to parasitically suck the money out of the populace and from more culturally useful ventures, and that has progressively dumbed down the majority population and caused a disastrous plunge in the collective IQ of the nation, they deserve no more than 0/10.]