Sita Sings the Blues

SITA SINGS THE BLUES opens with the best credits sequence I’ve ever seen. It begins gently enough, but it soon explodes into a vibrant and exciting combination of music and animation. If the film could have found a way to maintain that level of energy throughout its run time, it could well have become one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

While SITA SINGS THE BLUES unspools to become, over the next hour and a half, a fine, imaginative, wonderful movie, it doesn’t stay on track to earn “best ever” status. But hey, whom are we kidding? Most of the movies we sit through are achingly average, so why pick nits over whether a refreshingly innovative, original, and beautiful film ascends to the pantheon of “best ever”? It’s enough that this film takes material with which most of us are unfamiliar, adapts it in a way both entertaining and illuminating, and even manages to reacquaint our culture with the artistry of a performer long-passed.

SITA SINGS THE BLUES retells The Ramayana, a Hindu myth in which the noble Rama and his beloved Sita deal with exile, war, jealousy, and the vicious power of rumor. It tells it in wonderful 2-D animation, with different styles reflecting different storytellers, stories, or stories-within-stories. And it does it to the music of one Annette Hanshaw, a popular jazz singer of the ‘20s and ‘30s, in an innovative twist on the time honored practice of making that which was old new again.

Unfortunately, filmmaker Nina Paley failed to clear the rights to Ms. Hanshaw’s music prior to putting four years into creating this wonder on her home computer. Consequently, you can’t find SITA SINGS THE BLUES on Netflix or at your local art house movie theater. You can, however, find it for free download or stream at http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/, a site created by Paley to distribute her film via a creative commons license. I’m no lawyer, but I’m going to assume it’s legal. So I encourage you to check this movie out. If you like it, flip Ms. Paley a couple of bucks through the link on her site. I, for one, would love to see what she comes up with next.

Synecdoche, New York

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK made me want to jump off a cliff. A 50-footer, with a sheer face standing against the swell of a royal blue sea. It made me want to stand on the precipice, feeling the sun on my face and the wind on my body. It made me want to leap forward, chest out, arms back, and feet together, and fall a perfect arc through the air before clasping my hands above my head, tucking my chin into my chest, and entering the ocean like a knife into butter. It made me want to relish the sharp contrast of warm air to cold water, revel in the sharp forces of momentum and buoyancy when I arch my back to change my body’s direction and stroke the two short meters back to the surface. It made me want to live, to revel in being alive, to bask in the joy of simple existence. And it did it because SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK doesn’t understand what it means to be alive. Not at all.

This film is so consumed with death, so focused on the existential dilemma, that it forgets what makes life valuable in the first place. Its protagonist ignores his family in favor of obituaries, which he reads not as celebrations of lives but as harbingers of doom. When his family chooses to ignore him, he wallows in self-pity. He feels stunted and frustrated with his career putting on the theatrical Standards for the people of Schenectady. When given the freedom create his own original work, he puts on nothing for nobody, wallowing in his sense of importance but refusing ever to actually put his work out there to succeed or fail. He wants, he wants, he wants, but he gives so very little. He doesn’t get it: he never does. And the film wants us to take this journey with him, wants us to find meaning in his lack of such, wants us to feel the existential dilemma for ourselves.

But there is no dilemma. We live. We die. We like to tell ourselves that there’s more to come but, in our heart of hearts, we doubt it. We do some good, we do some bad. And we have a choice. We can run away from life in contemplation of death, or futility, or the inevitability of physical and mental decline. Or we can embrace life, embrace everything about it, do the good we can and avoid the evil we can. We can laugh and cry and love and hurt and run and fall. We can succeed spectacularly and we can fail miserably and, occasionally, we can touch a higher plane that we think does not exist but, in our heart of hearts, we know really does. And we’re gonna die. You’re gonna die and I’m gonna die. Even the Sun is gonna die, a blink of an eye on the galactic timeline. But while we’re here, while we have minds to think and bodies to feel, we can revel in the joy of existence.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK doesn’t even know that joy exists, so I’ve got no time for it. I’ve got living to do.