on the 5th day of Christmas

on the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

five broken things

well, not really, but our attempt to watch Jean Renoir's The River was foiled last night by a recalcitrant disc and my yin tells me i'm free to use creative license on this one. at this point i'm unable to tell what i think of the film as a whole, except that there's this delightful voyeuristic game being played with the cinematography. it seems to intentionally keep the spectator further away from the Indian subjects than from their colonizers, and i'm especially intrigued by Melanie, whose mixed ethnicity serves as a metaphor for underlying cultural tensions:

Melanie and her father...
i've always been a sucker for a miscegenation backstory

it also has a shot of what is, without a doubt, the greatest tree in the world:

like a giant globe growing out of the earth

appropriately enough, i had been reading about Renoir earlier in the day in my on-going attempt to regain momentum on my thesis. here's what André Bazin had to say on the man:

"But simply being realistic is not enough to make a film good. There is no point in rendering something realistically unless it is to make it more meaningful in an abstract sense. In this paradox lies the paradox of the movies. In this paradox too lies the genius of Renoir, without doubt the greatest of all French directors."

who am i to argue with Bazin?

the argument is beside the point.

the point is that after the deceptively pleasant lull of jute plantations and the colonial Ganges, i insisted on something with tensions more obvious, Stanley Kubrick's 1950's noir classic The Killing:

clown with tommy gun - yikes!

all i know is that Quentin Tarantino should be court-ordered to pay royalties to Kubrick's estate because The Killing lays out as impressive caper-gone-wrong scenario as i've ever seen. the film keeps the spectator hoping against hope until the final moments, and features one of the most unlikeable femme fatales in cinema; a woman who is attractive, but whose beauty is insufficient to overcome her loathsome nature:

parts of her performance reminded me of Nancy

thus concluded the fifth day of Christmas.