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Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Michael Fassbender as Jung in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method

Something Sigmund Freud says in A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s stupendous film on the birth of psychoanalysis, caused us to sit up straight in the slouch chair. He tells Sabina Spielrein, the patient, then lover, then student of his estranged disciple Carl Jung: “We’re Jews, and Jews we will always be.” Jung, whom she was still fascinated with, is an Aryan who is interested in mysticism and talks about helping people “become what they were born to be.” Jews, Freud reminds Spielrein, have seen what people really are.

The fates of the protagonists, summarized dispassionately at the film’s end, attest to the truth of Freud’s statement.

(In our own heads Freud is telling us, “We are nerds. They tolerate us now because we are clever, but someday the Sardaukar will come after us.”)

Cronenberg’s deceptively pretty movie based on the play by Christopher Hampton is itself a form of psychoanalysis: it dredges up the dark impulses under the bright surfaces. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung consults his intellectual father figure, the Austrian Sigmund Freud, who sees their relationship in Oedipal terms naturally: the son attempting to kill the father.

Jung has a beautiful house paid for by his rich wife; he sails in the tranquil blue lake in a boat paid for by his rich wife. But his great love and intellectual match may be Spielrein, who enters the movie kicking and screaming literally. He cures her of her symptoms, and then gets her off by spanking her.

Keira Knightley as the hysteric Sabina Spielrein

The alien in Alien. Hmmm. Michael Fassbender is starring in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, which is “set in the universe of Alien.” Freud believed there are no accidents…

As the hysteric Keira Knightley contorts her face and extends her already prodigious jaw so far she looks like the alien mother getting ready to bite off someone’s head. Her acting is almost risible because her costars don’t seem to be acting at all (Vincent Cassel expresses volumes by raising one corner of his mouth very slightly). However, the director has stated in interviews that this is exactly how the historical Sabina behaved. However one regards Knightley’s performance it is certainly brave.

Fassbender caps his amazing year by playing Jung as a very proper man consumed by terrible agonies. (His visions will result in the theory of the collective unconscious.) Mortensen’s Freud is playful, paranoid, magisterial, a man who sees complexes everywhere. His expression on the ocean liner as his disciple goes off to first class says everything we need to know about the outsider who is suddenly reminded of his true status. Don’t get too comfortable.

Sigmund Freud’s couch by Annie Leibovitz

Fincher and Reznor (and Zeppelin)!

What are the chances of Peter Jackson using Misty Mountain Hop or Battle of Evermore in The Hobbit?

Our friend has a serious beef with the way Steven Zaillian’s screenplay has futzed with the source material. We’re delighted that the movie does not sound like the book. (Granted it may be a victim of inept translation.)

You picked the winner of the Weekly LitWit Challenge 8.3: Cruel Rejections. It’s VenusdeSupsup! Congratulations, Venus—it appears you voted for yourself more than twice; fortunately other readers agreed. You may claim your Carson McCullers hardcover any day starting Thursday, 2 February 2012, at the Customer Service counter of National Bookstore at Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati.

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The book being The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, the movie being the adaptation of the same by David Fincher. Explain your answer in 500 words or less. Oh and try not to write like Stieg Larsson; make your prose compelling.

The winner will receive the bestselling Scandinavian thriller The Boy In The Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

and a copy of the official Fincher movie poster (see above). Consider it a limited edition: You won’t be seeing this poster displayed in cinemas due to the racy artwork.

Three runners-up will each get a poster, courtesy of Jay and Columbia Pictures. David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo opens in Metro Manila theatres today.

We’re accepting submissions until Tuesday, 7 February 2012 at 12 noon.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

Contraband, a remake of the Icelandic film Reykjavik-Rotterdam, directed by Baltasar Kormakur (who starred in the original) and starring Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster, Giovanni Ribisi, Diego Luna, Kate Beckinsale.

A smuggler turned legit businessman (Wahlberg, mwah) is forced to do another run after his idiot brother-in-law (the guy who played Banshee in X-Men: First Class) gets into trouble with a nasty gangster. The gangster is played by Giovanni Ribisi (Where have you been?) who makes up for his relative puniness by being insane-scary. Diego Luna as a Panamanian gangster also gets to do insane-scary, but Ben Foster who could out-insane-scary them all has to play subdued-complex (We prefer scary mode). Kate Beckinsale is in two movies this week: you can see her killing werewolves in the latest Underground Underworld, or worrying about her husband in Contraband, and in both films she wears the same expression (Buti lang maganda siya). As always Mark Wahlberg is the calm center of the storm, the guy who makes the improbable believable.

Contraband is low-key and efficient, with some gripping moments and an interesting blues-rock soundtrack. We learned a whole lot about how to smuggle contraband by getting a job on an ocean liner. You don’t suppose the Costa accident in Tuscany…

Haywire, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Gina Carano, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor in a bad haircut, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Bill Paxton.

A high-powered action flick in which a private contractor doing black ops for some shadowy government agency exacts revenge on the people who framed her. Essentially it’s about an attractive woman (Gina Carano of American Gladiators) beating the crap out of hot guys. No suspension of disbelief required: she looks like she could break them in half. Entertaining, yes, but why all the A-listers in a movie that, with the exception of Carano, could’ve starred practically anyone?

J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Dustin Lance Black, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench.

Clint Eastwood is a very cool cat. Early on he was the silent gunslinger in spaghetti westerns, then he was the vigilante urging punks to make his day. But since Unforgiven he has been engaged in taking American myths apart, and now he takes on J. Edgar Hoover.

Why should we even watch a movie about J. Edgar Hoover, an odious man who ruined many lives? Clint Eastwood, working with Dustin Lance Black who wrote Milk and an in-form Leonardo DiCaprio, digs up the villain and unearths a human being. He doesn’t make us like the man, but he lets us see how he could’ve turned out that way: a man so intent on policing his country from enemies real and imaginary, he polices himself into a lifetime of denial and unhappiness. (We love the Psycho reference.)

The movie is particularly good at portraying the relationship between Hoover and his protege Clyde Tolson (the beautiful Armie Hammer doing discreet-campy). J. Edgar is very matter-of-fact about its protagonist’s gayness, and it does not take the easy route of blaming his actions on his being in the closet. The action shifts seamlessly between decades and manages to encompass half a century of American history.

Screenwriter Black allows Hoover to spin his own myth, complete with Hollywood public relations campaigns, and then calls him out on his lies. If you want to see a complex think movie, this is the one; for escapism you have the options above.

When we get back from Oz we’ll see My Cactus Heart.

Chinese New Year toy from our buffet dinner at Escolta

Either our famous person radar has gotten an upgrade, or everyone just stays at the Manila Peninsula. Tonight at 1840 we walk into the Pen after sitting in traffic for 45 minutes, and standing by the elevators outside Salon de Ning in a Panama hat, T-shirt, shorts is Edward Norton. He is scrolling through an iPad and asking questions of a bellhop, who goes to fetch something.

We’re early for our dinner reservation at Escolta, so we calculate the probability that we will run into him again standing alone by an elevator and figure it is almost zero. So we stop and address him. “Hello. Big fan. Are you lost? May I help you?”

Note how we leave doubt as to who is the fan of whom hahaha. Yeah, never address famous people as exalted beings, treat them like stray cats.

He says, “No, I was just asking for a keycard. But thank you!”

He is tall and thin and covered in blonde fuzz. He sounds the way he does in movies, and he looks like a Yale graduate student who’s going off to join the Peace Corps in a banana republic.

We’re not in the habit of taking celebrity photos, and anyway we don’t want to get politely turned down by another cast member of The Bourne Legacy only to find photos of him online posing with half the population of Metro Manila.

(Noel: When Renner said, ‘I don’t want to cause a stir’ you should’ve said, ‘I understand, Mr DiCaprio.’)

Later we report the Norton sighting to Noel who says, “Wow, inggit! He was my supercrush once. If he doesn’t watch it he’ll end up looking like the thin guy from Scooby-Doo.”

“That’s it!! He looks like Shaggy of Scooby-Doo!” But in a good way, of course.

Now. This moment. Go.

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2.3. The film takes place in “A place that calls itself Rome”—actually Belgrade, Serbia, whose recent history gives the material a fresh charge. Coriolanus is especially relevant in a year when ordinary people in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere rose up and toppled entrenched strongmen.

2.3.1. Writing 400 years ago, Shakespeare has something new to say about the world we live in. No one explains human beings better.

2.3.2. Compare this to another recent film, George Clooney’s much-praised political drama The Ides of March (the title a reference to Shakespeare). Though finely-crafted and well-acted, The Ides of March is a conventional drama about an idealist who loses his illusions. It is not nearly as complex as the evening news on TV. We know whom to root for, whom to dislike.

2.3.3. Coriolanus is so badass, we don’t know whether to worship him or revile him.

Read our review, Coriolanus: The People vs The Badass, on Interaksyon.com.