HIDE

DVD viewing
 

 
While standing in a lobby waiting to see Pulp Fiction back in 1994, a friend’s husband said to me, “You actually liked Reservoir Dogs? I’ve never known a girl who liked a Quentin Tarantino film. They usually find them too gruesome.” I simply smiled and said, “I’m not like most girls.” This has been reiterated again and again in my lifetime; my friend Meredith calls my interests “boy movies”. And that’s true, I guess, if I must put labels on films. I’m rarely interested in sweet fairy tales with girls swooning over guys and men modeled after Prince Charming (with the exception of maybe Hugh Jackman in Kate and Leopold). I prefer the messy realities of life. The relationships that are doomed from the start. The Greeks termed it “tragedy”, but modern-day stories of this type are filled with just as much romance and emotion as chick flicks, only mixed in with violence and suffering. It’s simply presented with hard edges and gut punches and moments that rip the heart out. And I love these stories. I will generally wade through all the gunplay and gore and profanity just to see a story told well and told realistically. Rage and angst and despair are much more interesting emotions to me than happily-ever-after. I’m fascinated by the depths of the human soul, and I find the journey riveting and provocative. And my most recent excursion into this realm provided much to ponder.
 
The recent DVD release of Hide came to my attention through its lead actor, Christian Kane, though it was released independently last year. It is the story of Billy and Betty, sociopathic lovers in the vein of True Romance and Bonnie and Clyde, who struggle to rediscover their relationship after a seven-year prison separation as a result of a killing spree. The film begins with the fallout of the initial crime spree — a scene quite reminiscent to me of Pulp Fiction‘s opening diner scene between Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer — and then it switches to the reunion of Billy and Betty and their attempts to track down stolen cash that was hidden during the initial takedown. The film is, in essence, a road trip in which Betty attempts to restore their past glory as lovers and partners while Billy wrestles with a desire for redemption and penance that came upon him during the prison stint. He is in every way torn and broken, and yet Billy is also a man in love. His struggle is just as much against his lover as it is against his own self. As the story progresses we see just how Billy became the man he was and the man he is at present, and we come to understand the vast chasm that has developed in his psyche. The character of Billy is fully evolved, with all credit to Christian Kane for what I consider the best performance of his career. There is a depth to the character that would not exist in the hands of some actors, and, by his own admission, Kane chose to own every aspect of Billy and tap into some dark personal traits in order to portray him fully. Rachel Miner, as Betty, is equally astounding, allowing herself to disappear before our eyes so that all we see throughout the film is a fearless, volatile and deeply dissonant woman in search of something to ground her. Without these two performances, alongside the stunning landscape of Argentina, Hide would not carry as much depth as it does.
 
Were this the expanse of the movie, Hide would be nearly perfect. Instead, there is a subplot that plays like a horror film and there is a final scene that is so mind-bending I had to watch three times and still did not understand. The pieces just don’t fall into place as they should. I’m guessing this is a writer’s issue, for the actors truly embraced all that was asked of them and the director shot the film with languid beauty. Which makes the unraveling of the story so disappointing. I found myself a little dumbfounded when I stopped the disc, then decided that I needn’t tax my brain about the story’s details. Instead, I’m embracing the characters and the themes of forgiveness, redemption, and good-versus-inherent-evil. And for those elements I thoroughly enjoyed the film and will watch it again and again through the years. It’s not for the faint of heart or mind, and it’s not even for those who simply enjoy violent films. Instead, Hide is a character study packaged with psychological brokenness and tumultuous relationships. My kind of movie, no doubt, but not something I would recommend to just anyone.
 
film image via Starz Channel

THE TIPPING POINT: HOW LITTLE THINGS CAN MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE by Malcolm Gladwell

Genre: Nonfiction ISBN: 0316316962 Acquired: Bookcrossing.com Reading Began: May 3, 2008 Completed: July 15, 2008 Overall Rating: Seven out of ten

You might think that the two months it took me to read The Tipping Point means I struggled with the writing or the content or the length or something similar. In fact, the delay had nothing to do with the book and everything to do with myself and life’s circumstances. The Tipping Point is a very good book, fully engaging and quite provocative. I truly enjoyed it and am excited to read the other Gladwell title that sits on my shelf. What began as such an intriguing premise evolved into an even more compelling argument with each and every anecdote and case study. From Paul Revere to Blue’s Clues to the teenage smoking epidemic, Gladwell makes a strong case for the power of influential people and word of mouth, and on several points I actually found myself rethinking long-held beliefs simply on the basis of his supposition. True, this is not light reading, but it’s worth the time and open mind one should bring to it. Passages of Note The Law of the Few, p. 53 Was he actually interesting? Who knows? The point is that Lois found him interesting, because, in some way, she finds everyone interesting. Weisberg, one of her friends told me, “always says — ‘Oh, I’ve met the most wonderful person. You are going to love her,’ and she is as enthused about this person as she was about the first person she has met and you know what, she’s usually right.” Another of her friends told me that, “Lois sees things in you that you don’t even see in yourself,” which is another way of saying the same thing, that by some marvelous quirk of nature, Lois and the other people like her have some instinct that helps them relate to the people they meet. When Weisberg looks out at the world or when Roger Horchow sits next to you on an airplane, they don’t see the same world that the rest of us see. They see possibility, and while most of us are busily choosing whom we would like to know, and rejecting the people who don’t look right or who live out near the airport, or whom we haven’t seen in sixty-five years, Lois and Roger like them all. ************************* The Stickiness Factor, p. 102 If you take these two studies together — the toys study and the editing study — you reach quite a radical conclusion about children and television. Kids don’t watch when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused. If you are in the business of educational television, this is a critical difference. It means if you want to know whether — and what — kids are learning from a TV show, all you have to do is to notice what they are watching. And if you want to know what kids aren’t learning, all you have to do is notice what they aren’t watching. Preschoolers are so sophisticated in their viewing behavior that you can determine the stickiness of children’s programming by simple observation. ************************* The Stickiness Factor, p. 126 “If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don’t understand—things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it’s a search for understanding and predictability,” says Daniel Anderson, who worked with Nickelodeon in designing Blue’s Clues. “For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, they not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth. And Blue’s Clues doubles that feeling, because they also feel like they are participating in something. They feel like they are helping Steve.” Of course, kids don’t always like repetition. Whatever they are watching has to be complex enough to allow, upon repeated exposure, for deeper and deeper levels of comprehension. At the same time, it can’t be so complex that the first time around it baffles the children and turns them off. ************************* The Power of Context (Part One), p. 163 Character, then, isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment. I have a lot of fun at dinner parties. As a result, I throw a lot of dinner parties and my friends see me there and think that I’m fun. But if I couldn’t have lots of dinner parties, if my friends instead tended to see me in lots of different situations over which I had little or no control — like, say, faced with four hostile youths in a filthy, broken-down subway — they probably wouldn’t think of me as fun anymore. *************************