TriStar Pictures/Courtesy

The last time we saw Neill Blomkamp, he was fresh off the success of “District 9,” the 2009 summer sleeper hit that combined slick visuals and action with biting social commentary. Four years ago seems like an awfully long time.

“Elysium” is a good movie the same way “Twilight” is a classic novel — which is to say it’s not.

Set in 2154, the future of humanity is grim. Well, grim is relative; if you’re one of the unlucky proles stuck on Earth, then you live in a desertlike world that looks like a mixture of East Jerusalem and set pieces from “Mad Max.” If you’re of the wealthy upper crust, then you live on Elysium — a biosphere qua space station whose immigration czar and defense secretary is played by an unusually dull Jodie Foster.

There is no subtlety in either “Elysium” — the fictional space palace nor the film writ large. In the movie, “undocumented ships” routinely try to break through the atmosphere and drop off their cargo. I say “cargo” here because there are no actual people in Elysium or on Earth. Instead, we have sacks of flesh that traverse the screen, brandishing tricked-out weapons and spaceships that compete for our attention with the oh-so-awful plot.

Our story begins before 2154, when a young Max (Matt Damon) and Frey (Alice Braga) hold hands and attend Catholic school in the ruins of Los Angeles. Max promises to take Frey to Elysium one day, and the rest of the movie is spent unpacking the consequences of this promise. Reinserted decades later, Max is a reformed car thief looking to move up at his assembly-line job, and Frey is a nurse. Max is in an accident and needs to go to Elysium for a cure, and Frey gets roped in with the allure of healing her daughter, who is sick with leukemia.

Yes there are all the annoyingly obvious class-war, Occupy-style plot devices. And yes, it is possible that you went into the wrong theater and have sat down and begun watching the most recent Michael Bay “Transformers” installment. But at its core, and despite its best efforts to distract from those tangential details with poor plotting and marvelous special effects, Elysium is really just another distinctly Hollywood take on post-apocalyptic Earth.

For instance, on Elysium, there are MRI-like beds that you can climb onto that will heal all of your ailments in about 30 seconds. To use them, you’ll need a handy-dandy citizenship stamp, which people who have never been to Elysium apparently know how to forge on Earth, but never mind that minor detail. What’s really irritating here is that somehow, a planet that was able to cure all diseases with a futuristic Sealy also let itself slide into ruinous inequality and war. OK.

I’d ordinarily let a small thing like that slip by (it’s sci-fi, duh), except the movie is filled with them. The upper classes on Elysium interchangeably speak French and English, as if the former is uniquely a language of sophistication and the Spanish-English spoken down below is the real language of the people. Moving past the medical technology issues, it also appears that reducing entire languages to crude cultural stereotypes (French fancy, Spanish gritty, English common, etc.) is a sufficient way to illustrate differences between the lives lived below and up top.

And so on.

“Elysium” was made for $100 million, money surely thrown at Blomkamp after the success of “District 9,” which made him the toast of the film world. And although I’m not pleased to say this, “Elysium” is hardly a follow-up worth watching for a filmmaker with the potential of Blomkamp.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org.

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Graham Haught/Staff

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, an annual event seeking to promote “awareness, appreciation and pride in the diversity of the Jewish people,” kicked off this past week with a variety of showings across the Bay, including the July 27 screening of Alex Karpovsky’s “Red Flag” at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival would also like you to know that Karpovsky, who appears regularly in Lena Dunham’s HBO hit “Girls,” has been called “the next generation’s Woody Allen.” In fact, I read the phrase “Woody Allen of your generation” (or some variation on that) no less than a dozen times in the literature promoting the screening, in a New Yorker piece from March and in a number of articles from across the Web.

I also heard it when the announcer introduced the screening and the lights dimmed — and yet again immediately after that when Karpovsky was probed on “Red Flag” (which by the way, is not directed by Woody Allen), his work with HBO and other sorts of questions on what it’s like to be young, Jewish and making movies. Then, the movie began.

“Red Flag” is a mumblecore film true to its genre: It was made for almost no money, it’s interspersed with uncomfortable snatches of dialogue and it’s moved along at a glacial pace by an anonymous cast of actors (most of whom you’ll never see in another movie). Playing himself, Karpovsky is a down-on-his-luck filmmaker who’s kicked out by his live-in girlfriend, forced to hit the road alone promoting his new film about birds.

After a one-night stand and some awkward camera angles, Karpovsky sojourns on through the South and eventually recruits an old friend to join him. This friend, Henry (Onur Tukel), writes kid lit about death (it’s quirky — don’t worry about it) and ends up bringing River — the woman with whom Karpovsky had slept just a couple nights before, played by Jennifer Prediger — along on the road trip. As the trip goes on, shenanigans ensue, and the movie’s dark humor foreshadows the ending relatively early on.

“Red Flag” is not a bad movie, but it isn’t exceptional, either. It’s just embarrassingly decent. Karpovsky’s film deals with self-obsession and how the characters who are overly connected with themselves (which is all of them, save for Karpovsky’s ex) are ironically unable to see past their own egos, character flaws and so on. The Woody Allen comparison here is particularly apt.

But where Karpovsky departs from Allen is where the film struggles. In “Annie Hall,” Allen focuses inwardly and travels throughout his life to understand the troubles underscoring his relationship with the titular character. Deconstructing his entire biography, Allen leaves no stone unturned, and the audience is clued into how the male Jewish mind works — not dissimilar to Philip Roth’s 1969 novel, “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

In “Red Flag,” there is no deconstruction. We instead are witnessing the answer less the question: All of these self-involved powderkegs crowded into a sedan left with nothing but each other to talk to and about. Perhaps limited by the genre (mumblecore kind of mandates minimalist dialogue and production), there is no curious introspection, and there are no forced moments of realization.

Maybe that’s the point: Karpovsky (the character) is self-absorbed to the point that he lacks the capacity to see what about himself repels other people. And that’s not a bad point, especially because for someone with (in the words of a Very Serious Magazine like The New Yorker) the “promise of becoming his generation’s Woody Allen,” his generation is frequently knocked for its self-absorption and inability to pay attention to what’s going on.

Whatever the case, it doesn’t really matter, because people who lack the capacity to look within themselves — at least in this case — make for boring cinema. Regardless of whether those people are any generation’s Woody Allen.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org.

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Micah Fry/Staff

Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director of “Drive” and “Valhalla Rising,” has produced his most complex and fascinating work yet in his new release “Only God Forgives,” in theaters Aug. 2.

Starring Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas and Thai newcomers Vithaya Pansringarm and Yayaying Rhatha Phongam, the drama is a gory noir unlike any in recent memory, channeling predecessors as diverse as Gaspar Noe (“Enter the Void,” 2009), David Cronenberg (“A History of Violence,” 2005) and Richard Kern (“The Evil Cameraman,” 1990). Perhaps the best film to be released thus far this year, the characters and story of “Only God Forgives” are as maddening to process as they are captivating to watch unfold.

The film follows Julian (Gosling), the American owner of a Bangkok boxing club used as a drug distribution center, as he is pushed by his mother Crystal (Thomas) to avenge the death of his brother at the hands of the mysterious vigilante policeman “Chang” (Pansringam).

Describing Thomas’ character as a mix of “Lady Macbeth and Donatella Versace,” Refn says that because “we are so used to seeing crime and violence as being the work of male characters,” it made it all the more appealing to use a female villain that would “embody absolute evil.”

Complementing Thomas’ overbearing-mother personality, Gosling’s Norman Bates stand-in is a mute, spastically violent creation constantly wrestling with the bizarre, semierotic relationship with his mother. At one point in the movie, Julian brings his favorite prostitute, Mai (Phongam) to dinner with his mother as his date, to which she responds in a predictably profane and explosive fashion.

While the story and narrative arc may be a little more abstract than what fans of “Drive” might expect, the cinematography, soundtrack and use of color are the best of any movie released this year. Through the use of a variety of tracking shots, thoughtful camera angles and a diverse array of graphic metaphors, there is not a single frame in this movie that feels out of place; the visual style is an inventive blend that recalls classics like Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” or even Ridley Scott’s 1980s sci-fi epic, “Blade Runner.”

Consider the opening scenes.

The lighting is dark, with the exception of fluorescent lights illuminating the two padded teenagers beating on one another in the middle. The camera looks at the fight from above and pans out to show the backdrop of the gym — a menacing rose-tinted dragon glaring at the audience that also later serves as the backdrop for the final fight between Chang and Julian.

A powerful metaphor for the distant, ominous god figure that Julian continually wants to fight (perhaps the Laius to Crystal’s Jocasta?), the dragon stares down the fighters as if to let them all know that they are beneath the dragon-god, far below anything they ever hope to defeat. This, among some other subtle cues, lends the whole film a kind of doomed, star-crossed-lovers vibe that swaps Romeo and Juliet for Julian and his mother.

The movie’s whole format is something like this. A complicated amalgam of classical tragic themes and a protagonist lusting for higher truths while on a revenge mission, the movie has, to repeat the overused phrase, polarized audiences.

Received controversially from the beginning, “Only God Forgives” caused many at its Cannes debut to walk out of theater while the film simultaneously earns a five-star review in The Guardian. For a movie as successfully strange and emotionally overpowering as this one, the mixed reviews are unsurprising.

David Fincher’s “Fight Club,” a similarly wild and great movie, also received varied reactions upon its 1999 release. One New Yorker critic described “Fight Club” as being overwhelmed by Fincher’s “sadomasochistic kicks,” and another from The Los Angeles Times characterized the movie as having a “crack-brained” premise. Copy and paste a few words here, insert some manufactured outrage there, and what we have is a half-baked argument that the ultraviolence of “Only God Forgives” overshadows any philosophical or formal excellence the movie has.

Simply put, such reductive thinking ignores the usefulness in this violence as a medium on its own. The body horror involved in “Only God Forgives” is a self-acknowledged nod to Kern — in sync with the Cronenberg-esque themes of violence as a tool of illumination and introspection.

There is no doubt: “Only God Forgives” is an uncomfortable movie to watch. However, it is a deeply rewarding one whose mind-bending nature will leave the viewer with much to ponder, and yes, squirm over.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org.

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20th Century Fox/Courtesy

While many are distrustful of tech giants like Google and Facebook because of their part in the recent NSA surveillance scandal, it would probably pass you by completely were you to shell out cash for “The Internship,” the new buddy comedy reuniting “Wedding Crashers” stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn.

Perhaps most charitably described as a two-hour Google promo punctuated by poorly constructed jokes and Owen Wilson being lovable, “The Internship” is a “turns out old dogs can learn new tricks” comedy co-written by Vaughn and director Shawn Levy. Both are Hollywood veterans; Vaughn appeared in “Anchorman,” “Dodgeball” and “Wedding Crashers,” and Levy directed the Tina Fey-Steve Carrell vehicle “Date Night” as well as the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots-inspired “Real Steel.”

Baiting the audience with its goofy premise and a sneak peek inside the vaunted Google campus in Mountain View, it would not be a stretch to say that the key reasons the film was made were the obvious on-screen chemistry between Wilson and Vaughn from “Wedding Crashers” and Google’s blessing to shoot on-site free of charge. Puffed with cliches like a sexual coming-of-age scene in a strip club and the usual Owen Wilson forbidden romance (did I mention Wilson and Vaughn co-starred in “Wedding Crashers”?), “The Internship” is an extremely decent bad movie.

Nick (Wilson) and Billy (Vaughn) are watch salesmen at the top of their game — until the game, of course, collapses as a result of people using smartphones instead of watches, resulting in their company going out of business. Nick takes up work at the mattress store run by his sister’s creepy boyfriend (one of the movie’s few bright spots, played marvelously by Will Ferrell) and Billy gets in a shouting match with his longtime girlfriend about his unfulfilled potential and missed mortgage payments. Somehow, Billy scores an interview for himself and Nick at Google, where they stumble their way into the company’s summer internship program.

Once at Google, Billy and Nick team up with cosplay-obsessed (Google it) Neha, “repressed, self-punishing Asian” stereotype Yo-Yo, smartphone-glued smart-ass Stuart and obnoxiously dorky Google intern team leader Lyle — not to mention their primary antagonist, a one-dimensional British jerk named Graham. By the end of the movie, you will hate all of these people.

Put through a number of challenges — like developing an app and playing a game of Quidditch — the interns are judged on their performance in these events as well as their “Googliness.” We’ll get to “Googliness” in a minute, but here is where we depart from the realm of analyzing the one-dimensional plot and begin to assess the absurdity of the movie writ large, particularly as it relates to being an advertisement for Google, Inc.

The successful integration of art and corporatism has a rich history. Nike in particular is quite good at this. The Spike Lee-Air Jordan commercials with Michael Jordan and Lee’s infamous “Mars Blackmon” come to mind. I still wake up at odd hours of the night shouting Blackmon’s catchphrase, “It’s gotta be the shoes!”

Nike’s collaboration with indie pop group LCD Soundsystem yielded “45:33,” an outstanding EP consisting of one 45-minute long track marketed as the perfect jogging music. While LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy later conceded the marketing was 100 percent bullshit, this album and Lee’s collaboration with Nike are representative of an artistic drive that sought to exploit the partnering brand as supplementary to their artistic vision. Not vice versa.

In “The Internship,” we get, as Julian Assange described it, the full “banality” of Google’s mantra, “Don’t be evil.” Throughout the movie, the actors practically scream the company’s PR talking points. One earnest Google employee shouts that “diversity is in (Google’s) DNA!” At another moment, one of Google’s notorious driverless cars rolls by our stunned protagonists, forcing Billy to comment to Nick that “It’s only scary because it’s new.”

There is a reason, as the Los Angeles Times reported, that Google let the filmmakers use its campus free of charge (save for veto power over any material that Google found objectionable). The message “It’s only scary because it’s new,” is perhaps better suited to Google’s own interest than to an already overcliched comedy script. And no corporate trope is better suited to a movie this bad than the cliche’s cliche: “Googliness.”

“Googliness,” as we are to understand it, is the essence of Google — the secret sauce that makes these lovable computer science dorks the new masters of the future. According to Google’s own website, “Other companies screen for intelligence and experience in potential recruits. But Google also looks for ‘Googliness’ — a mashup of passion and drive that’s hard to define but easy to spot.”

Unsurprisingly, the movie is hard put to describe Googliness; while I have not rewatched the film for fear of inducing a severe migraine, I do not recall any description of the term that did not use shots of Owen Wilson’s face or stupid metaphors. Is Googliness in the DNA-bound diversity that we heard of earlier? Is it in the pluck, tenacity and crooked nose of Owen Wilson? Possibly. Likely? Nah.

What’s more likely is that Googliness, in addition to the dork-as-crusader myth that’s at the heart of Silicon Valley, is just that — a myth. Were it not that the cult of tech has already invaded Hollywood (consider 2010’s fantastic “The Social Network” and every Pixar movie ever) this myth’s insidious presence might appear out of place. But, as we are reminded, the reality is that the dorks have invaded Hollywood, and now they’re collaborating on terrible comedy films.

If “The Internship” is an omen of a trend in filmmaking, expect to be disappointed. Crappy movies that misuse Google, Facebook or any anchors of Silicon Valley culture are just crappy movies, no matter how much “Googliness” they possess.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org.

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Editor’s note: Noah Kulwin is a member of J Street U at UC Berkeley.

As word broke yesterday that ASUC President Connor Landgraf would not veto SB 160,  the divestment bill targeting companies involved in Israeli human rights violations, which passed in the ASUC last week, I was not sure how to respond.

On the one hand, it means divestment passed – an end with which I am not pleased. At last Wednesday’s senate meeting, I spoke against the divestment bill and criticized how it did not consider the inextricable link between Jewish and Palestinian self-determination. Nor did the bill propose a strategy of political engagement with which to advance American diplomatic leadership in the region.

But on the other hand, I am sort of relieved. There will be no more all-night Senate meetings, no more claims of pro-Israel lobbies buying off ASUC senators and, thankfully, an end to the repeated claims of many of my peers in Berkeley’s Jewish community that this bill’s very nature “silences” the Jewish community on campus.

Berkeley’s Jewish students are blessed with tremendous resources, including many that came to bear fully in opposition to divestment.  Whether it was coming together in our multi-million dollar Hillel building to voice our complaints, or strategize with professional support staff and Jewish ASUC Senators to provide a legislative alternative to divestment – Jewish students have had ample space in which to voice their frustrations and feel supported.

I don’t doubt that some Jewish students do indeed feel marginalized. I do, however, wonder if they are aware of how much damage these accusations of “marginalization” do to our community when we frame our own claims as mutually exclusive to those of Palestinian students and their allies.

Is a senate chamber divided between “students of color” and “Jewish students” the kind of portrait of campus engagement that we want to symbolize our community? Is it possible that the privilege of the established Jewish community at Berkeley has blinded them to these harmful dynamics?

This self-awareness is absent from the discussion in the recent Daily Cal op-ed written by ASUC leaders Natalie Gavello and Oren Friedman. According to their version of events, divestment supporters “had the opportunity to take a progressive and innovative approach to this issue but instead renewed feelings of alienation and discomfort reminiscent of 2010.”

Let me backtrack– I applaud Gavello and Friedman’s support for a two-state solution in their piece, and attempt not to “detract from the Palestinian suffering.” Sadly, the authors still have a long way to go.

First, I don’t know what an “innovative approach” to this issue looks like, or why the authors felt they should be involved in how to handle divestment. Most vocal leaders of the Jewish community have unfortunately never before indicated that they care to make change on this issue (except when they are trying to defeat divestment). This has become evident as almost none of these leaders, including Friedman and Gavello, returned to advocate for SB 158, the pro-Israel bill they were championing the week before.

Moreover, if Israel love-a-thons like “Israel, Peace and Diversity Week” with a giant, spinning Star of David in the middle of Sproul Plaza are the best our community has to offer in terms of “innovative” campus engagement with this issue, then no wonder many don’t consider us partners for change.

Friedman and Gavello are correct that divestment “renewed feelings of alienation and discomfort” – the problem is that it goes both ways. For every Jewish student complaining of their “marginalization” on this campus, there is a pro-divestment student with a similar claim that divestment supporters are being painted unfairly as anti-Semitic and that members of our community are trying to whitewash their oppression.

This also perpetuates alienation within the Jewish community. It is a sad day when my fellow opponents to divestment attempt to create this illusion that the Jewish community is united on this issue by smearing Jews who support divestment as somehow less relevant and, implicitly, less legitimately Jewish.

I remember when I, sitting in the “Jewish” section during the senate meeting, heard my peers snicker when Palestinian students told stories of their families’ suffering. And while I too am frustrated by cheers of a Palestine from the “river to the sea,” I was also stunned hearing some in the Jewish community condemn a peaceful student protest in solidarity with Palestinian hunger strikers as a “hate rally.”

I have heard many in the Jewish community cite what Israeli politician Natan Sharansky calls “the three D’s” that distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism: demonization, delegitimization, and double standards. It is with a deep sense of irony that I realize one could apply those same criteria to my community’s behavior this week.

Palestinian students and divestment supporters are “demonized,” slurred as bad people, for pursuing non-violent political actions in our student government. And they also are “delegitimized,” as many in the Jewish community simply dismiss the real tragedies of occupation as being mistruths or mischaracterizations. And Jewish students treat divestment supporters with a “double standard,” content with the other side feeling silenced or marginalized if it in any way threatens our own comfort on campus.

If the Berkeley Jewish student community wants to be fair-minded and inclusive, I fully support that goal and will work aggressively toward that end. That being said, as long as venomous discourse and acts of exclusion typify how we, as a community, respond to acts like divestment – nothing will change, nothing will get better.

Celebrated American Rabbi Joachim Prinz, speaking right before Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the famous 1963 March on Washington, urged that “America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent.”

If Jewish students seek to build bridges with minority communities on this campus, it begins with a refusal to be “silent” and remain “onlookers” of the struggles communities of color face on this campus and in our country. It will not come if our loudest voice is the one that complains about being “silenced.”

Image source: kateausburn via Creative Commons.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @noahkulwin.

The post Some thoughts on divestment and the Berkeley Jewish community appeared first on The Daily Californian.

News broke last week that in response to the United States’ ban on 18 Russian officials from entering the country, the Russian government announced a ban on 18 Americans from entering Russia.

The grounds?

The Russian government reportedly stated that these Americans were responsible for the “legalization of torture” during the Bush years, and chief among the bureaucratic offenders is Berkeley law professor John Yoo.

Independent of the tit-for-tat quality of the Russians’ announcement, there is good reason to express concern over Professor Yoo’s role in expanding the role of torture after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And from the perspective of Berkeley students, it is tough to consider he is allowed to draw salary from the University of California given his integral role in shaping American policy around indefinite detention and “enhanced interrogation” (read: torture), and the circumstances under which he adopted such views.

While I firmly believe John Yoo has the right to speak his mind and advance the ideas in which he believes (as he is wont to do under our campus’ firm principles protecting academic freedom), he should not dishonestly vacillate between positions as we elect different presidents into office.

And funnily enough, it’s a Berkeley professor who makes this case best.

In February 2009, campus economics professor Brad DeLong called for John Yoo to be fired. In a blog update illustratively titled “I Never Thought I Would … Be The Kind of Crank Who Wrote Letters to the Chancellor Trying to Get My Colleagues Fired,’ Delong posts a copy of a letter he wrote to UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau demanding the dismissal of Professor Yoo.

In the letter, he paraphrases rather accurately how Professor Yoo advocated in a 2003 document referred to as the “Torture Memo” that “President Bush’s commander-in-chief power is without limit save for impeachment itself” and that it “is unlawful for any member of the United States armed forces to disobey a presidential order to torture prisoners.”

However, it was only three years earlier in essay entitled “The Imperial Presidency Abroad” that Professor Yoo asserted “President Clinton’s commander-in-chief power is crabbed and restricted.” And that Clinton was “accelerat[ing] disturbing trends in foreign policy that undermine democratic accountability and respect for the rule of law.”

If Professor Yoo believed that “democratic accountability” was necessary in 2000, what made him completely flip to arguing that the commander-in-chief’s power was “without limit?” Having never substantively addressed this reversal, one must conclude (as Professor DeLong did) that if Professor Yoo “could write ‘The Imperial President Abroad’ in 2000 and the “Torture Memo” in 2003 … he does not believe what he writes–at least not for any meaning of believe’ that any of us would recognize.”

And it is this damning cynicism pervading Professor Yoo’s time both working in government and at Berkeley that eats away at the integrity of whatever academic endeavor he pursues.

In journalism, The Washington Post’s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin is guilty of the same sin. Writing shortly before Election Day extremely bullish articles on Mitt Romney’s chances of winning the presidency, she lamented after his loss that “the [Romney] communications team was the worst of any presidential campaign I have ever seen … It was hostile, indifferent and unhelpful to media.”

It should be noted that Ben Smith observed in October of 2011 that she scored “a rare interview with the candidate [Romney] after a recent foreign affairs speech,” whose staff she described as “‘the most professional of the presidential campaign staffs, because they are the most experienced.’” One could reasonably suggest that she changed her mind over the course of the next year, but I invite the reader to read any number of salivatory posts discussing the Romney campaign that she wrote up until she trashed him after Election Day.

Rubin’s rank dishonesty is right up there with Professor Yoo–the professions of journalism and academia respectively entail a certain of amount of respect and protection. But both that honor and shielding end up severely tested should the occupants of these jobs fail the obligations of sincere thought demanded.

Russia was politically posturing when it banned Professor Yoo from crossing its borders. And as inscrutable as Professor Yoo’s motives were in changing his opinion, the fact he does not provide sufficient justification for neither his amended thoughts or the political influence they earned him is reason alone to release him from Berkeley’s employ.

The university is a special place; in this space we are able to bring new ideas to the table and debate them fairly. But part of the contract upon entering here is that one argues her ideas with some measure of conviction. Professor Yoo, in his shameful and calculated “transformation,” has violated that contract.

Make no mistake I – unlike Professor DeLong – am not questioning Professor Yoo’s right to teach here. Nonetheless, it seems clear that censuring him and setting a precedent of serious consequences for this sort of un-academic behavior is called for.

At the very least, it would be the first step in fully grasping his deeply problematic actions and starting a campus conversation about responsible academic and intellectual behavior in a democratic society.

Image source: Miller_Center via Creative Commons.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @noahkulwin.

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ERBP/Courtesy

Early twentieth century Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov once observed that “everybody who cares for his art seeks the essence of his own technique.”

Director Shane Carruth’s sophomore effort, the new film “Upstream Color,” strikes directly at this exploration; it is a sprawling, emotionally wrought movie whose abstract plot seems less like a cohesive center and more like a vessel through which Carruth is able to employ his considerable talents to investigate themes of loss, love, moving on from tragedy and how they all fit together.

The movie’s opening scenes reveal little: a confusing jumble involving a thief, some neighborhood kids, their bicycles and a worm with psychotropic properties. The thief drugs a woman, she then loses her memory and has some part of her transferred into a pig during a surgical procedure.

Carruth is no stranger to this convoluted genre of sci-fi. His last film, the surprise indie hit “Primer,” won the 2004 Sundance Grand Jury Prize on a reported $7,000 budget. While “Primer” is a sharply made time-travel bender whose highly technical dialogue and confusing plot were part of the movie’s mystique, Carruth departs from “Primer” in a number of key ways while from time to time re-applying much of what we saw in “Primer” in “Upstream Color.”

Diverging from the morality play that was at the very core of “Primer,” “Upstream Color” has not so much a confusing plot as one that is foggy on the details. Carruth — a micro-manager of the highest order who was in charge of the movie’s direction, production, score and script — has stated that he relishes this opacity; in an interview with the sci-fi blog io9 he says the film “definitely … requires more attention.”

Clearly drawing from the work of director Terrence Malick, Carruth uses “Tree of Life”-inspired montages of worms, pigs and azure orchids to elicit a message that is difficult to ascertain. Carruth has characterized this as the “worm-pig-orchid life cycle” and goes on to suggest that it is meant to prod the audience into asking deeper questions about everyday existence.

Carruth’s technical mastery is unquestionable. His minimalist score (which is available to stream on SoundCloud, free of charge) is woven into the plot and the movie’s soft beige-brown-grey color palette enables seamless visual continuity from frame to frame.

In one scene where the two main characters lie in bed with arms and legs wrapped around one another, there is a stunning optical metaphor between their limbs and the mysterious worms we see throughout the movie. There is no way to watch “Upstream Color” and be unimpressed with the precision of Carruth’s execution.

Aside from its visual splendor though, the metaphysical discussion the movie prompts in its skillful albeit bare-bones script is harder to process. These themes of emotional connection manifest themselves directly on screen as human lives are linked with motifs of worms, pigs, orchids and audio samples. If these connections seem bizarre and difficult to conceive, that is precisely the point.

Perhaps what Carruth has sought to do in “Upstream Color” is less a self-contained cinematic journey in which there’s a clear beginning, middle and end, and more of a hazy adventure in which he is able to showcase both his abilities and general curiosity about the philosophy of existence.

And it is also his earnestness, a lack of pretense that is evident in the low-key (and in the case of “Primer,” low-budget) nature of both his movies, that keeps his work enjoyable while also mentally exhausting; watching his films is the cinematic equivalent of a triathlon. And it is in this workout that Carruth “seeks the essence of his own technique.”

Whether it is the restrained, techy nature of “Primer or the rambling epic of ”Upstream Color,” Carruth succeeds at, well, something. Watching him fumble around with all these big questions or further refine his own mechanical skills is not easy to put together. In fact at times, a few disjointed moments can make it hard to keep focused.

But nonetheless, Carruth’s beautiful, pensive trek through actuality is worth sticking around for. And one can only hope that the enigma of “Upstream Color” is a sign of more great work to come

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org.

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What has made the Internet such a fun place for me in the last week or two? I discovered BroBible.com – the only website that will satisfy your Greek fix (not the Athenian kind) with its shamelessly misogynistic and unsophisticated worldview.

With headline gems like “The Smartest Party Schools in the Country,” “10 Ways to Write the Perfect Fraternity Email” and a penchant for slut-shaming (in their “Facebook Follies” section – because alliteration? – the article “Um, I Don’t Think This Ex-Girlfriend Knows What ‘Breaking Up’ Means” sticks out), BroBible.com has given me every reason I ever needed to hate Greek life conveniently located in one URL.

And BroBible is hardly the only place we see peddling this middlebrow humor as a way to “brocially network” or understand how to develop a meaningful, long-lasting “bromance.” With the advent of the “funny-yet-burning-my-eyeballs-ouch” genre of films like “I Love You, Man” or “40 Year-Old Virgin,” the idea of unseen and comically unsophisticated (read: fart jokes galore) relationships between heterosexual (and usually white) males has taken on a new life.

BroBible is a crude excess of this hype, capitalizing on the “bro” craze while getting as campus-centric as possible because the business end of the website realized early on that only manchildren living in decrepit fraternity houses could ever derive serious enjoyment from it. As Gawker noted upon the site’s launch in late 2008, the “bro” trend “is sort of endearing for a bit, but the minute it becomes so hyper-commodified … like so many other trends” it ends up being “epically embarrassing.”

And this “epically embarrassing” trend has manifested itself all over, my favorite iteration being the “I’m Shmacked” YouTube phenomenon.

“I’m Shmacked” is a YouTube channel devoted to documenting and stylishly editing every second of every college campus’ moments of deepest debauchery. Whether it is Deltopia at UC Santa Barbara or the Florida State-Miami football game, I’m Shmacked is there to film in 720p nearly-naked girls and guys chugging $10 per handle vodka as they race on a beer-soaked slip n’ slide while Avicii plays at full blast in the background. A gross caricature of the American college experience rivaled only by the KY wrestling match scene from the movie Old School, “I’m Shmacked” is the id of white men on college campuses come to life.

And what makes all this feel even more bizarre is that the “bro” craze does not have to be this way.

For example, imagine if every February 14, a day of action meant to rally against violence toward women, Berkeley’s own Greek bros descended on Sproul Plaza and demanded action from themselves to be better. Or if they were on campus staffing consent workshops and developing serious dialogues around misogyny and rape culture at Berkeley. Instead, however, we get BroBible and I’m Shmacked.

What really drew me to BroBible this week was not just ASUC escapism, but an email it released of a University of Maryland frat boy explaining to his fraternity’s listserv how to hook up with a Jewish girl. BroBible characterized the email as “phenomenal” and called it “the ultimate guide to conversing with Jewish sorority girls.” It appeared on my Facebook as something to be proud of amongst a large number of my Jewish Facebook friends who are in greek life at campuses across the country.

This sentiment of how to “converse” with a “Jewish sorority” stereotype is repulsive. These fratboys are not lonely introverts looking to develop a deeper meaning with Jewish women; they are looking for tips on how to score in a way that commodifies the very people with whom they are looking to hook up. And as a friend neatly described to me, it is this act of commodification “that entrenches these communities in these stereotypes.”

In another Brobible post detailing one UMD Jewish sorority member’s sarcastic response to the initial email with her own guide on how to hook up with Gentiles (non-Jews), BroBible’s Lance Pauker quips that the woman’s letter “shows that when it really comes down to it, girls are interested in guys and guys are interested in girls. Time and time again, both sides do a really good job of making it as hard as possible to mutually recognize this. But that’s the truth.”

I disagree. It is not irate feminists bent on killing your vibe who are “making it as hard as possible to mutually recognize this,” it is a culture that plays Chris Brown at parties and does not see why it is offensive. It is a culture that is okay with party themes like “Pedophiles and Pigtails” and presumes that because “sororities are cool with it” everything is okay.

In case you have not noticed, everything is not okay.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @noahkulwin.

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In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, disgruntled high school senior Suzy Lee Weiss discusses how the college process is unfair. In the op-ed, Weiss connects how colleges tell applicants to “just be yourself” to how these three words break the backs of all college seniors who do not have “nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms.”

If she were ever to write a book about her college process, she should probably call it “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being.”

In all seriousness, Weiss’ op-ed reflects a dangerous sentiment that many people, especially those from my suburban New Jersey hometown, latch on to in their moments of deepest despair after receiving a college rejection letter. It is the idea that the system is stacked against you because you are not “different” or “exotic” enough to gain admission to an elite college. It is a feeling I know well and one that I am glad to be rid of.

Weiss writes that “as long as you’re using someone else’s misfortunes to try to propel yourself into the Ivy League, you’re golden.” She trudges onward, observing that long ago her “parents gave up on parenting [her].” Ms. Weiss, whose family’s gorgeous house was featured in the pages of the very same Wall Street Journal in November 2011, is simultaneously mocking community service and children from broken homes. Classy.

I appreciate that the college admissions ordeal is an enormous headache and that the phrase “soul-crushing” does not cover the half of it, but I would also put forth that trivializing the legitimate plight of millions of other high schoolers is hardly the way to talk about it.

Furthermore, it is not as if millions of poor African Americans with two moms are lining up to take Ms. Weiss’ spot at Harvard. In fact, a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates “the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university … despite the fact that selective institutions would often cost them less.”

Perhaps the reason people from Ms. Weiss’ background need “killer SAT scores” and “nine extracurriculars” is that there are thousands of far more disadvantaged students lacking the resources to take advantage of their academic promise. There is no shame in losing out on a spot at an elite college because it went to a student with similar qualifications but had a slight edge. It is, however, dishonest and selfish to assert that losing out was in some way in the fault of people who are far more underprivileged.

The op-ed’s muddled morality message would be far less notable were it not for the affirmative action case heard by the Supreme Court recently over Abigail Fisher’s complaint that affirmative action cost her a spot at the University of Texas. Ms. Fisher’s dubious claim of institutional reverse racism collapsed a couple weeks ago, when investigative journalism outfit ProPublica revealed that “race probably had nothing to do with the University of Texas’s decision to deny admission to Abigail Fisher.”

Fisher, in spite of what her lawyers may have argued, did not have the sufficient SAT scores or GPA to gain admission to the University of Texas. Because she did not rank in the top 10 percent of her class, she was competing with students evaluated on “personal achievement” and “grades and test scores.” Her total score, being of lesser value than her peers (who, by the way, were overwhelmingly white), was the basis of her rejection. Not the color of her classmates’ skin.

The list of stories like these goes on. And naked, public exhibitions of privilege in major media outlets are not going away anytime soon. They are as much a staple of our media culture as any reality television show.

I get the problem that Weiss, Fisher and other upset “victims” of the college admissions process are talking about — it is hurtful and frustrating to assume your high school experience and personal development will lead to college acceptances when the reality is different. It sucks, as Weiss put it, to be “lied to.” That salient detail notwithstanding, Weiss’ and Fisher’s belief that their lack of uniqueness or special circumstance are the reasons for their rejection is still off-base.

The real reason for their rejection is that they did not meet the standards for admission. In the case of Fisher, it was so-so academic standing, and in the case of Weiss it was her lack of “killer SAT scores” and “three varsity sports.” If you take issue with the college process by claiming it demands too much of applicants, that is valid. If your complaint, however, stems from a smug, petty conception of inadvertent reverse racism — then you should probably keep your thoughts to yourself.

Image source: Serenejournal via Creative Commons.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @noahkulwin.

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This week was a big one for advocates of marriage equality. On Friday, Ohio senator Rob Portman endorsed same-sex marriage, citing his own son’s coming out as the basis for his change of heart. Then on Monday, former Secretary of State and one-time Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton threw her support behind equal marriage rights in a YouTube video posted by the Human Rights Campaign, one of the country’s most prominent gay rights organizations. These are good things.

But there is an inherent difference between the two – in Clinton’s online interview, she characterizes “gay rights as human rights,” implying that to deny equal treatment and opportunity to all gay Americans would be an explicit violation of Constitutional rights. Senator Portman, bless his heart, does not quite make it so far.

The Ohio Republican, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush, was an avowed opponent of marriage equality until he was for it (as was Secretary Clinton). He also voted to prevent gay couples from adopting children and has been consistent opponent of gay rights throughout his Congressional career. Portman, regardless of what he may believe now, has a lot of ground to make up if he wants to prove he can be a vociferous ally of gay Americans in this country.

And you don’t have to read into his voting record or to which church he belongs in order to see how much further he has to go.

In his revelatory Friday interview with CNN, Portman spoke of how his son’s coming out enabled the senator “to think of this from a new perspective, and that’s of a dad who loves his son a lot and wants him to have the same opportunities that his brother and sister would have.” My takeaway from this segment is that Rob Portman is a good father, but a terrible policy-maker and advocate for civil rights.

Nowhere in Portman’s interview does he come close to suggesting that his rethinking of his position on gay marriage has altered his conception of other human rights issues. In 2011 he voted to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act, a Bush-era relic that permits unwarranted surveillance on American citizens and delayed notification of search-and-seizure operations by authorities. Portman also has a daughter, a fact that apparently changes nothing about his position on abortion and securing federal dollars for Planned Parenthood – the vital women’s health provider that he voted to defund in 2011. Regardless of where he is now on gay marriage, his “new perspective” apparently does not extend so far as to include women’s health and expanded protections for civil liberties.

Make no mistake – Senator Portman’s conversion to the marriage equality cause is a good thing. One could view it as a reaffirmation of the great American tradition “of changing one’s mind.” But if Portman has accomplished anything with his turn of position it is that he has shown how comfortable he is with “government by anecdote.” Unless an issue affects him or his family directly, you are not likely to see him as your advocate. Perhaps this more than anything else explains his unequivocal support for regressive Republican economic policies that seek to, as President Bush put it, “balance the budget on the backs of the poor.”

I would like to think that Rob Portman’s evolution on gay marriage makes him not just a great dad, but also a cogent and thoughtful policy-maker. But until he reworks his logic on the issue to be more than a personal story made political, I doubt any serious progress on other significant issues of civil liberty and social equality.

President Obama last year announced his support for same-sex marriage. In an interview with Robin Roberts of ABC, he spoke of “the pain” that gay Americans feel as being considered “less than full citizens when it comes to their legal rights,” in addition to his own family’s relationship with the issue. While I have deep reservations on other civil rights issues with regard to our President – like the drug war and CIA’s drone program – it is clear his “evolved” view of marriage equality stems from more than just personal interaction.

And, as indicated earlier, Senator Portman’s announcement came within just a few days of Hillary Clinton’s. While Clinton offered us sweeping condemnations of anti-gay bigotry and a vision for equality that includes gay and lesbian Americans’ rights among others, Senator Portman tells us he changed his mind because of his family. And while that may make him “Republican Dad of the Year,” it does not make him any better of an advocate for Americans’ civil liberties.

Image source: See-ming Lee via creative commons.

Contact Noah Kulwin at nkulwin@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @noahkulwin.

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