Ирония Судьбы или с Лёгким Паром (1975)

A successful picture requires a classy female lead and a confident male lead, both worthy of imitation, and a happy ending, which teaches to accentuate the positive, thereby helping moderate the side-effects of self-awareness and foresight, inherently human afflictions. "Ирония Судьбы" goes beyond these requirements. Honed onstage, every line, look, and gesture in the movie have been perfected. The acting retains the intimacy of a theatre production without a trace of theatricality.

Sometimes, in a miscalculated bid to appeal to the masses, actors employ a stereotypical vocabulary of facial expressions and body language. The ensuing delivery is as expressive as mass-produced apartment blocks. By contrast, "Ирония Судьбы" has character innovations that have been edifying generations. British theatre is similarly innovative, and so was American cinema in its Golden Age, except it capitalised on franchises (such as Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, and Fred Astaire), which Soviet cinema rarely did, treating each actor as a character actor.

"Ирония Судьбы" is not a comedy. It has a genre to the extent that a life (when crafted carefully) does. In life, comic situations do not befall stand-up comedians. They befall those who seek novelty, which conflates genres.

Both protagonists, Надя (Barbara Brylska) and Женя (Андрей Мягков), fall in love with each other's character, not personality, which, at least by the age of thirty, is largely derivative of character. In cinema, practical considerations dictate that a woman's character be reflected in her looks, unsurpassed for Barbara Brylska.

The picture is about seizing the moment, about friendship, about the supremacy of love, and about the clarity of vision. It is easy to overlook a potential infatuation, but not potential love, which promptly casts the couple in a play written just for them. The right lines spring up naturally (and are perceived as right also naturally).

"Three Comrades" by Erich Maria Remarque (1936)

Remarque merely sketches his protagonists. Pat is liked by all, but the reader shall not see why. He must do with the author’s assertion that she is. Bobby is shallow and nice—a valid character, but an imperfect narrator. The novel’s true characters are times, not individuals.

War steals and deceives. It breeds fatalism. Individuals refuse to attempt to change their circumstances, and the lack of change discourages them further. Despair settles in.

War untames humans by awakening the thrills of risk-taking. Without the rule of law, such behaviour is destructive. With the rule of law, such behaviour may promote entrepreneurship. In either case, the shortage of individuals willing to invest at a normal return leads to extreme inequality and myopic policies.

Narratives must be happy. Good opportunities present themselves rarely, and so it is important to illustrate how to take advantage of them. Catastrophes and failures do not instruct.

Gravity (2013)

Beauty: the belief that the world is a little better than it is.

Memories of the better moments linger longer.

Gravity: the power to cling to the world as it is—in expectation of the memories of beauty.

The sequence in which Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) strips, dozes off briefly, and then glides inside the space station are among the most beautiful visuals in cinema. Her smooth, efficient body contrasts with the prickly, inanimate interior of the station. These two paragons of human-made beauty summarise the accomplishments and the vulnerability of the civilisation.

There is an element of honesty in cinema that is absent from literature. Movies have only two hours to distract and instruct. To succeed, a movie must inspire living, not replace it.

ProArteDanza

(Harbourfront Centre, 5 October 2013)

Mami Hata's movement is her own. Her each step is natural, necessary, and occurs only if every muscle in her body concurs---which happens often and visibly brings her happiness. When she moves, it is for a reason.

Novelty is not an integral part of beauty. Beauty is a fulfilled expectation. Beauty is an evocation of the familiar. Novelty emerges as the artist searches for a more intense, more efficient presentation. Novelty emerges as the artist expresses the private, which is unique, hence novel.

ProArteDanza hold the balanced attitude according to which an individual neither spins in vacuum nor inanimately submits to an external design. What one discovers about oneself depends on who one is with. One travels to discover. What one discovers shapes what one becomes. One's perception of oneself is affected as much by how one has influenced others as by other's influence.

"Sweet Tooth" by Ian McEwan (2012)

Ian McEwan's novel is a permutation of stereotypes about times, places, and people. His tone is that of a tutor delivering a lesson: competent, respectful, detached, pleasant, engaging, and faintly condescending. There is nothing singular about the characters; these are the circumstances that make these characters interesting, not the other way around.

McEwan hides behind the back of a boyish writer, Tom, slouched at the typewriter that impresses the very pages that the reader ends up swooshing on his touchscreen. Lovestruck and hence stuck with his protagonist, Tom relives, fills in, and retouches his own and borrowed memories.

The novel concludes with three non sequiturs, supplied by Tom: (i) English majors are better than mathematicians, (ii) Sussex is better than Cambridge, and (iii) "marry me."

Discovering how to align individual self-interest with the social good and explaining this alignment to voters have been among the most valuable pursuits of the twentieth century.

"On China" by Henry Kissinger (2011)

She is alone, having just returned from a tango class. At 10:22pm, the front door is slammed open. A poorly shaven (by design or inadvertently) man enters. She neither screams nor calls the police. "What a nuisance," she thinks, putting aside the New Yorker. "This foul-smelling savage probably wants me to teach him some salsa. And another one is hovering in the corridor---too shy to enter and supplicate. Well, if I teach the basic steps to the intruder, he might leave promptly and share the knowledge with his friends. Surely he has not forced himself into my apartment to lecture me on his area of expertise. I am in no danger." This seems to have been the Chinese foreign policy until the mid-nineteenth century.

History has favoured military might and economic influence, not poignant poetry, romantic dance routines, and friendly demeanour. Yet it is hard to accuse history of having failed to favour merit; the definition of merit evolves to conform with history's choices. Today, poetry, dance, and friendly demeanour are all integral parts of economic influence.

History matters for the same reasons data matter in science. A successful society encapsulates all relevant history in social norms (e.g., common law), institutions, and a collection of principles (e.g., a constitution). The remaining history are possibility theorems, of interest to experts.

Revolutions change the rules of the game. Entrepreneurship changes the strategies. Economic and political development benefits from the stability of rules and the innovation in strategies. Mao understood the merits of change, but has failed to direct it appropriately. Capitalist economies and democracies deliver change without planning for it.

The belief in the supremacy of ideas is less harmful than the belief in the supremacy of nations. The latter vilifies and sacrifices people. The former challenges ideas and, in the best case, may lead to conversations, not wars.

Peepshow Follies of 1938

(Fais Do-Do, 16 August 2013)

What Marx used to call exploitation, what feminists used to call objectification, what the layman calls a repugnant transaction, and what the philosopher intuits as injustice consists in having little choice but to make a living of a small and common subset of individual characteristics. This subset's commonality leads to vigorous competition, which makes so earned living meagre. This subset's smallness makes so earned living dull.

The way to improve an individual's condition is to expand the choices available to him, instead of circumscribing modes of employment. The involuntary, idle poverty brought about by such circumscription would hurt more than exploitation does.

The mundane serial exposure of common bodies lacks a narrative and aesthetic gratification. It is not art. (There is more art at an afternoon SkyBar, in the fabric flirting with the breeze and the bodies undulating with each step.) This exposure may lead to intellectual gratification, however. There is liberation in acknowledging the mundane as such. There is a promise in bodily small talk, however common.