HopkinsCinemAddicts

Get Your S*** Together, Girls

    A lot of people have been talking about her, the girl with the fat arm tattoo.  But Lena Dunham is more than just a person who should always wear sleeves; she is a very endearing woman with a pretty awful vision of the lives of young women in New York.  Her new HBO series Girls is neither terrible nor excellent, and really neither good nor bad.  Three episodes have aired so far, and while plot points have emerged, nothing has really happened.  Even with the issues of financial instability, job hunts, abortion, dead-end relationships and the occasional horrifying sexual partner pervading each episode, I as a viewer have not really been fazed by any of it because the eponymous girls haven't been fazed either.

    All these "not really" qualifiers point to the show's great weakness: all four girls seem to be stagnating in a muddy puddle of drab furniture, unflattering clothes and profoundly unsatisfying professional, romantic and sexual lives.  These girls are languishing in apartments they deem too impermanent and transitional to decorate; they are entertaining the whims and inappropriate behavior of their first bosses to much too great an extent; they are pseudo-pursuing or passively staying in relationships that do worse than just fail to satisfy them--they further diminish what little joie de vivre these particular girls can occasionally muster.  Yet they seem to believe they are self-possessed, independent, worthwhile young women who have inexplicably been thrown into situations they can only sigh and shrug their way through.  They do not pursue opportunities, they let themselves be led. They never demand anything, never even show an interest in making their desires known.  They graduated from college, hopped in their car and followed the traffic towards the road to adulthood; but then their tire blew out.  No one can figure out how to use the jack, none of their contemporaries is stopping to help and none of the girls had the foresight, the capital or even just the autonomy to become a member of AAA.

    These girls fail to entertain me because they themselves do not actually do anything (entertaining or otherwise)--things happen to them and they barely react, they merely acquiesce.  There is no private torture of the dependent, the confused, the hopeless; there is no public outrage of the oppressed, the overzealous, the aggressive; there is only the blank-faced displeasure of the unmotivated, the uninterested, the utterly passionless.

    It infuriates me to hear female critics call this show an affront to womankind, because I believe we should not allow these girls to represent womankind.  They certainly do not represent the kind of women who deserve immense respect and appreciation.  If you allow yourself to be sexually subjugated time and time again and continue to pursue your subjugator, that is entirely your fault.  Men, particularly awful men, do not have absolute power over how women are treated; women have to command respect and never stop.  The onus is on the woman to demand proper treatment, and every time the choice is hers to discard, punish or educate the wrongdoer who treats her poorly.  We are not natural victims, and we should put no faith in women who act as if they are.  We don't go back to some jerk's apartment day after day, playing into his perverse desires and indulging in the wrongheaded but popular notion that all men are terrible.  There are countless situations in which being a woman works against you, but this is not one of them.

    On another character's note, you don't stay with the effete and overly wholesome boyfriend you can no longer stand and with whom you have terrible sex just because you have been together for four years.  To revisit the driving metaphor: you actually have to try to free your wheel from a rut, you can't just sit in your car with your head in your hands and wait out the rest of your life.  So, as I said, Girls, get your s*** together. There are plenty of women who have.

 

Many thanks to Lucy Bucknell for the above image and for the chance to write this blog.

I'm Famous

So the biggest thing that's happened to me since we last spoke is this:

I'm on the cover of this week's JHU Gazette!  They did a piece on four of the senior Woodrow Wilson Fellows and subsequently took a photo of me staring down the camera while holding a camera in front of a computer and subsequently chose that image to grace the cover of their publication (we could get into how I then used a computer to take a picture of myself holding up a picture of myself but that would be EXTRA dumb).  Because the main point of all of this is that--I won't mince words--I am now a celebrity. Nowhere on campus  can I escape my own self-serious visage.  Not to brag, but a student in one of my classes said to me "hey, I read that article about you in the JHU Gazette."

Besides throwing wood into the fire of my burgeoning celebrity, the article also served to substantiate this whole filmmaking process It publically and officially announced the premiere (May 12th, 7th P.M, my loyal readers).  Right now the film is just an unexported (and half unedited) file on Final Cut Pro, but no matter what happens it will always have been a thing that was going to happen.  And there's something cool about that.

Substantiation is something I want desperately.  I really want to show the film to people.  Not (just) because I'm desperate for people's approval, but because I'm growing increasingly interested in film as event.  With this movie I feel like I didn't just bring to my fruition my artistic vision. I also captured moment in time.  Most of my friends are in this movie in one way or another, many as heightened versions of themselves.  Years from now we'll always be able to look back on the film and remember.  Remember what it was like to be young, to be dumb, to have our futures ahead of us.  

So I don't see it as just a movie screening, but also a community event.  Even if it happens to be a tiny community.  Maybe as I continue to work on movies my community will get larger.  But that paradoxical feeling of both insularity and extreme inclusiveness is not something I want to lose, at least not yet.  Because sometimes the love machine malfunctions a bit.  It's easy to lose love for yourself at times, even your art.  But when you've packed your film with a bunch of little buddies eagerly awaiting your finished project, it's hard not to crack a smile and keep plugging away.  

So maybe that's why I go through all this trouble.  To build communities.  Or maybe it's just to get my big 'ol mug on the cover of as many magazines as possible.  Either way is a model of nobility.

 

 

Superhumanity: The Human Characters of The Avengers

WARNING: SPOILERS

 

                After 4 years of setup, The Avengers has finally become a reality. Thankfully, it has lived up to its expectations, as it had the potential to be one of the biggest disappointments in cinema history. However, while it is filled with big explosions and thrilling action, it succeeds not through its thrills, but through the humanity of its characters.

                Superheroes represent the pinnacle of humankind. They are able to do things that people can only dream of doing, and they operate in a world of black and white. We love to go to the theatre or read comic books in order to imagine how awesome it would be to fight off evil invading aliens or a maniacal super villain. The Avengers gives us this escape, but each of the main characters is also a deeply flawed person in addition to an epic superhero.

                The majority of the film focuses on the team having troubles coming together in order to face their common foe. Each of their personalities forces them away from each other. Tony Stark overcompensates for his ego and drives everyone around him away with his pompousness, Bruce Banner struggles with his severe anger problems, and Steve Rogers is dealing with being a man who has lost touch with the modern world. Each of these problems is extended into the fantastical realm, such as Bruce Banner turning into a giant rage monster when he gets angry or Steve Rogers having been frozen in ice for several years, but they all resonate clearly with the audience. We like these people because we can relate to their problems, not because they can jump over buildings.

                The one member of the team that stands outside this pattern, and as such is a less effective character, is Thor. While he has to deal with the fact that the villain is his brother, he speaks in Elizabethan era English and feels less human than the rest. He is a god and as such exists on a different level than the other characters. In the end, he ends up getting less screen time as he is simply less interesting than the other characters.

                The humanity of the characters is truly brought to the forefront when, in classic Joss Whedon fashion, the most human of the characters is killed off. This death does not happen to one of the superheroic members of the team, but instead to Agent Colson, their completely human friend. He dies trying to protect Thor from his brother, but in the end proves mostly ineffective. His death provides a truly emotional moment for the audience. For those who have been watching these films since Iron Man, Colson has been a constant presence who helped to bring these characters together. However, even for those who have only seen The Avengers his earlier scene in which he starts to gush to Captain America about how he has collected all of his trading cards endears him to the audience. He represents us as we get excited about these characters. He looks up to them just as we do. His death allows the Avengers to move past their own personal issue and unite in their common grief.

                All of these human emotions pay off in the very last scene of the film. After the credits are done rolling, we are treated to a two minute long scene of these superheroes, still in costume, eating shawarma in a grungy New York restaurant. This moment is the most human moment in the film. No one does anything fantastic. No one says anything to each other. They simply sit there and eat, allowing themselves to relax after the stressful day they have had. This relaxation is a sentiment that everyone can relate to. Sometimes we just need to sit back and eat some food. It’s a refreshing thought to know that superheroes need to eat too. 

 

Steven Soderbergh's CONTAGION: The Disease Thriller as Genre Movie

Contagion, the latest film from chameleonic director Steven Soderbergh, is many things: a so-called hyperlink movie (in its use of globally-interwoven plotlines and a vast ensemble cast à la Traffic), a post-Katrina indictment of bureaucratic ineptitude in dealing with disasters, a chronicle of Internet-fueled mass hysteria, and a chronicle of various disparate individuals struggling to make sense of their lives in the wake of a calamitous event. The calamitous event is a disturbingly fast-moving pandemic of international proportions -- dubbed the MEV-1 virus -- and the massive cast consists of afflicted patients, public health officials, and medical scientists working on a cure. As such, the film fits neatly into the genre of “medical thrillers” or “disease epics,” and it is this status as a genre movie that I want to explore here.

Though perhaps not as well-recognized as its cousins the mystery thriller or the disaster movie, the disease movie is a genre governed as much as any by conventions and codes. Contagion fuses these generic conventions with a subtler auteurist side, producing a strange little thriller that, all along its way, flirts with formula while suggesting a darker, odder, more human reality buried behind the sad eyes of the actors. I want to go through a few of the thematic elements of the genre, one by one, to reveal the myriad ways in which Soderbergh brings them to cinematic life. Here are a few:

Patient zero. The disease thriller is almost always what I would call a genealogical movie. It is concerned with tracing the origins and lifespan of a character, its morality, its habits. What makes these movies so unique is that the crucial character is the disease itself. We see the symptoms it causes, but what we are most concerned about is where it came from, and -- almost always -- what human flaw led to its devastating spread. This is where the archetype of the “patient zero” comes in --  the first human to get the disease, and -- for better or worse -- the one to blame for the millions of deaths that follow. My first exposure to the concept of “patient zero” was, quite tellingly, through a prime example of disease-movie filmmaking: the AIDS epic And the Band Played On, which, like Contagion, simultaneously traces the devastating effect of the disease on individuals and the ambitious and somewhat self-serving attempts of the medical establishment to identify and cure it. In that film -- which is admittedly imbued with a much more historical, humanistic spirit than Contagion -- the figure who acts as the patient zero for North America is Gaëtan Dugas, an extremely promiscuous French-Canadian flight attendant who travels the world, blithely spreading HIV through sordid sexual encounters. We are meant to judge him, to shake our heads at his unthinking vanity, to reframe AIDS not as the product of indifferent viral mutations, but rather as an extension of human hubris -- something we did to ourselves. That And the Band Played On is also deeply sympathetic to sufferers of AIDS is one of that film’s contradictions. Our sympathy for suffering is unbounded, provided we always have someone, somewhere, to blame. In Contagion, the patient zero figure is incarnated by Gwyneth Paltrow, playing a rich, adulterous wife who comes into contact with some dubious pig blood on a business trip to Hong Kong. Though she is never reduced to Fu Manchu levels of villainy, we in the audience come to resent her for her happy ignorance in spreading the disease. In this respect, Contagion perfectly incarnates the genre trope: it moves along as a detective story, with a morally flawed human being as the single perpetrator.

Panic. In the wake of the early outbreak of the disease, mass panic spreads. As in other disease movies, we witness the agitation of the hoi polloi as they feverishly squirrel away supplies and chase after dubious cures. In Contagion, though, this panic is mediated by, well, the media -- in particular Internet media such as blogs that disseminate (often dubious) information at lightning speeds.

Spread of the disease. The MEV-1 disease is quite nearly personified in this film; mutating to exploit our biological weaknesses, it careens through entire societies, reproducing and spreading like a morally-coded miasma. The spread of the disease is presented as an abstract force, a gravitational momentum quite poorly resisted by the human impulse towards control. In particular, it spreads through social contact -- interpersonal gestures like handshakes or touching of the face that the movie goes to great pains to stigmatize -- and as such the film is a thoroughly modern excavation of social networks. The disease spreads, but only because it is able to colonize the ways in which we are all already connected.

Spread of information. Acting as a foil to the spread of the disease, there is an ethically-righteous spread of accurate information about the disease, running from the very first clinicians on the front lines all the way to the highest levels of the military and the public health establishment. Like the disease, this information-pattern -- this web of medical knowledge that provides the only hope of a cure -- spreads via our social networks, jumping from one person to another. The disease is only controllable once this information is disseminated widely enough to counterbalance the parallel spread of the disease itself. When information fails to spread adequately, as in the case of bureaucratic/homophobic hurdles hindering awareness of AIDS, or in the case of misguided cures transmitted through the blogosphere, the disease spreads faster. In effect, these thrillers thematize the idea of a signal-to-noise ratio. The signal is comprised of medical benevolence, well-reasoned caution, scientific elan, and the will of common people to take care of each other. The noise is comprised of panic, greed, mob mentality, denial, and human miscalculation.

Dignity in death. For disease thrillers to truly instill fear in the viewer, someone important has to die. But there is little pathos in watching a craven wretch, coughing and bleeding and vomiting, keel over in the middle of a street. These films need a martyr, a person to die with dignity and grace, with full lucid awareness of their victimhood, and yet without an embrace of that victimhood. In Contagion (spoiler alert), that role is played by Kate Winslet, a saintly Epidemics Intelligence Agent, who, like a diligent detective, burrows towards the disease until she gets burnt by it. She is one of the few wholly innocent victims in a film that favors moral ambiguity and stigmatizes human social behavior as not just lowly and incompetent, but as an actual physical vector for the spread of the disease. Her last dying gesture -- stranded in a gymnasium with hundreds of other moribund souls, she tries and fails to pass a blanket to another patient -- is the ultimate stroke of pathos that seals our fear of the disease.

Ignorance. Yet another parallel spread is the spread of misinformation. Here, that is incarnated by Jude Law, playing a polemical blogger who claims -- mendaciously -- to have found his own cure for the disease, just so he can raise the price for a cabal of pharmaceutical investors. For a while, his scheme threatens to derail the countervailing efforts of doctors and scientists to control the disease.

The cure. This is the Holy Grail of disaster thrillers, the equivalent of a secret talisman to be found by an action hero, or the final clue to a murder mystery to be solved by a detective. It is the object of risk-taking, sacrifice, compromise, ambition, and holy recklessness. In Contagion, the cure is found by two scientists -- played by Elliott Gould and Jennifer Ehle -- who endanger their own health and the health of others in order to run dangerous experiments towards finding a vaccine. Their rashness is motivated more by personal self-interest -- the hope for a Nobel prize, say -- than by a desire to help the suffering millions, but the fact that their efforts are rewarded shows that the film is on their side. As in many disaster thrillers, doctors have to act like action heroes in order to have any hope of success.

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Photo courtesy of Jesus Perez, and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

The Superhero and the Super Hero: The Development and Legacy

*I thought for my last blog I would do something a bit more fun. It’s a little different but I hope you all still enjoy it. *

As a little kid I would always dress up for Halloween. My dad would pick me up and throw me into the air and I could pretend I was flying. I would spend hours in the backyard fighting invisible enemies, kicking and punching the air, pretending like bad guys were at my mercy. I was the protector of justice, the keeper of all that was good. Superheroes, to me, were the combination of all positive qualities people all mushed together and multiplied a hundredfold. Their moral aptitude, courageous spirit, and unbelievable strength kept me entertained under the blankets with a flashlight reading comic books for hours after bedtime.

An artists rendition of many classic superheroes and villans.

Some had superpowers, burdened by the responsibility of being great. For example in the 2004 animated feature film The Incredibles, directed by Brad Bird, each character has a certain superpower. Mr. Incredible has the gift of super strength, lifting cars and bench-pressing trains. His son, on the other hand, has the gift super speed; the ability to run so fast he doesn't break the surface of the water as he jets across. Superpowers aren’t necessary, however. Take, for example, the 2005 live action film, Batman Begins directed by Christopher Nolan. Nolan portrays the superhero as realistically as possible; the character of Bruce Wayne, a billionaire industrialist, having no outstanding powers other than his fervent determination and sharp intelligence. Whether a serious dramatic portrayal or an animated spoof, a Superhero represents the archetypal being; a societal desire to strive for the unreachable: peak physicality and mental prowess, highest regard for values and morals, and immortality in the face of uncertainty and fear, all attributes transcending the limits of human ability.

Adversity, a common theme throughout superhero cinema, is mainly used as a catalyst for greatness; pressure on a character to have them rise to the occasion. In Batman Begins, for example, Bruce Wayne witnesses his parents murder and struggles internally with vengeance against the perpetrator. “My anger outweighs my grief” he states as he plans to kill his parents murderer, clear that he is not fighting against injustice but for retribution. His struggle with this uniquely human characteristic creates him as a distinct mortal character, a trait that causes him to be relatable and dimensional. On the other hand, The Incredibles, an homage to classic superhero cinema, instead shows adversity through the downfall of the great superhero time or "The Golden Days". Like pressure on a coal to make a diamond, adversity on the hero forces them to develop, in this case, by forcing them to settle down and create a family, the greatest strength that one has throughout life.

Strength, for the hero, comes both physically and mentally. Mr. Incredible and his family have certain powers that transcend human capabilities while Bruce Wayne, although having no natural extraordinary ability, continually trains to be in peak physical shape. Mentally, each superhero must be sharp and able to use the surroundings to their advantage. For what Batman, a human and mortal, lacks in superpowers he more than makes up for in intelligence. He knows he can only become so physically adept and must use his brain (and endless money) to design equipment to transform himself into a superhuman.

Being mentally adept is only half the battle, however. Each must also street savvy and resourceful. The downfall for most super villains is their inability to think outside their " Master-plan". Syndrome, the main nemesis in The Incredibles, did not account for the fact that the robot he built could learn so well that he would become unable to control it. The Incredible family, however, uses their combined strength as well as their surroundings (ex. flinging the manhole cover at the root robot to disable it) to their advantage. Bruce Wayne, after learning of his mentor’s plans to destroy Gotham City (his hometown) uses his environment to destroy the training facility and keep the plan from being executed.

 

"No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again.” - Mr. Incredible

This classic superhero code is to protect and aid those in need.  "I seek the means to fight injustice, to turn fear onto those who prey on the fearful", Bruce Wayne states proving that stalwart morals and a powerfully strong code of values is paramount. Even 15 years after society shunned them, Mr. Incredible and his super pal “Fro-Zone” still perform weekly super deeds such as saving innocent civilians from burning buildings. The morals do not only extend superficially as well, the topic of lethal force inherently opposed. Batman's one principle throughout Batman Begins is a strong conviction against lethal violence. The Incredibles show this mercy too when Mr. Incredible refuses to kill Mirage, Syndromes assistant. Heroes cannot only use brute force to defeat their enemies or they themselves would be as problematic as the enemies.

All too often fear equals mortality.  For superheroes, however, they must be impervious to fear and thus invulnerable. "No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again,” Mr. Incredible explains. Every time the hero gets hit, they get right back up, always choosing to face fear head on. Much of what we fear comes from our own mortality. Why does a gun command so much fear? We all fear death. Humans are mortal. Superheroes, on the other hand, and their continued timeless existence, even through the greatest of adversity, teach us that we don't need to be afraid. Bruce's father explains the truth, "You know why they attacked you, don't you? They were afraid of you...All creatures feel fear.” The entire point of superheroes is to instill a passion to do what's right and to support the belief that anything is possible. The ability to overcome fear and do what is right is pivotal. Mr. Incredible feared losing his family, in the end. Batman, himself, creates his entire persona out of his greatest fear, the bat. Without fear, Batman is immortal." As a man, I'm flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol...As a symbol I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting"

Superheroes are ideals, artwork carved from fantasy; an idolization of the unattainable. Their purpose though is not to create faux heroes in real life but instead instill the belief that anything is possible if you always fight for good. They are role models that always have (and always will have), in the face of fear and adversity, conquered their foes. Everyone faces struggles and difficult times. It is how you react to those struggles into that adversity that makes you a hero. "Not every superhero needs powers you know.”

 

Much thanks to Creative Commons and the public domain images used. Creative Commons in no way endoreses any opinions expressed in this blog. Any opinions, views, or ideas are soley of the poster.

Call Me Crazy

    Since I saw it last June, I have considered and reconsidered Carey Mulligan’s performance in the stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 film Through a Glass Darkly (which, I admit, I still have not seen).  I think about this performance on a weekly basis, at least.  She portrayed a woman railing unsuccessfully against family disconnect and symptoms of schizophrenia and manic depression.  She did it so beautifully and completely that I wonder why most cinematic representations of crumbling sanity can leave so much insight and nuance to be desired—but some, of course, do not.  While I could attribute Mulligan’s superiority to her ingenuity, or to the particular intimacy and immediacy afforded by the stage, having her tear-stained face eight feet in front of mine boosted the efficacy of her portrayal only so much.  The real force of her performance lay in the dichotomy of terror and secrecy: alone onstage, Mulligan’s Karin revealed sheer horror at the prospect of succumbing to insanity; surrounded by her husband, brother and father, she desperately tried to foster a sense of lighthearted family fun while trying to hide the mounting mental illness that all three men already suspect she has.  She was dealing with one of the most terrifying fates I can imagine, and she was dealing with it in secret while trying to maintain her family.  Along with the prowess of the performance, this particular pickle calls to mind two of my favorite psychologically tortured heroes in film: the somber, suffering Curtis in Take Shelter and the eponymous misfit martyr in Donnie Darko.

    In the best movie of last year, Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter, Michael Shannon just nails it.  (It is such an unbelievable, potent, poignant film and was so inexcusably overlooked by critics and moviegoers alike that I have trouble approaching it objectively, or at least analytically, while maintaining my self-appointed post as the film’s liaison to the world.)  Shannon’s Curtis, a quiet blue-collar man, suffers from vivid nightmares of natural disasters and manmade violence that signal the end of the world.  He becomes obsessed with fear, both of the potential apocalypse and of his genetic predisposition for schizophrenia; but which fear is greater?  Would he rather his visions of the violent end of the world were true, or his self-diagnosis of mental illness was? Unwilling to rule out either theory, Curtis keeps his visions to himself for a time and even sacrifices his job and his family's savings to build a storm shelter in the backyard.  After an especially extreme night terror, he is forced to explain his psyche to his wife (Jessica Chastain), who proves to be a more devoted and supportive companion than he or I expected. Once she knows his secret, however, the film takes a turn: Curtis is no longer alone in his fears, no longer hiding his visions and all their implications, no longer protecting his family from himself; and while his fears have not abated much by the time he agrees to seek treatment at a mental hospital, he has a rational, determined partner with whom to share the awful burden of potential insanity.  In the end, there is no clear answer and certainly no happy one--do we pray for his sanity, and therefore the end of the world, or do we preserve Earth and sacrifice Curtis to an institution?

    Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko hinges on a similarly secret terror, but in a considerably different context: within a financially secure family, a presumably paranoid schizophrenic teenager alternately rejects and obeys Frank, the "imaginary" man in the rabbit suit who appears to him with projections for the end of the world. Donnie escapes death, floods his school, defaces its mascot statue, finds a girlfriend, burns down the house of the local inspirational speaker/closeted child pornographer, grasps the "philosophy of time travel," shoots his girlfriend's accidental killer and dies all in the span of the 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds Frank said it would take for the world to end (action-packed, no?).  He mentions Frank and the pending apocalypse to his psychiatrist (Katharine Ross) only when hypnotized, and he merely hints at his visions to his girlfriend (Jena Malone).  His family knows he is on medication, and from his psychiatrist his parents learn he is showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia; but he never tells them anything himself.  Even when his young sister catches him having an acrimonious conversation with the invisible Frank in the bathroom, he responds, "I'm just taking my pills, Sam."  He keeps his secret because he believes he is losing his mind at the same time as he believes he and everyone else has only four weeks to live.  For Donnie, what would be the point of sharing his troubles?  If he is insane, he wants no one to know the extent of it.  If the world must end, why worry everyone? He remains almost entirely isolated from the people he knows and the society they comprise, and this emotional solitude leads him to believe there is some credible truth to the apocalyptic visions that seem to spring from madness.  Though his greatest fear is dying alone, it is his choice to live alone that eventually does him in.

Many thanks to Creative Commons and Flickr member Roger Mommaerts for the above image.

The Trials and Tribulations of Being a Son on FX's Justified

The father-son relationship is, in some ways, the most important male relationship in existence. While it is ostensibly a nurturing bond, it is also inherently competitive. Fathers want to raise their sons to follow in their footsteps, but in doing so they make themselves obsolete. This past season of Justified mines this relationship in order to take its characters in new directions which are familiar, but also novel.

                This theme seems in retrospect to be an obvious one for the show to tackle, as Raylan Givens, the main character of the show, has had extremely troubled relations with his criminal father in the past. It was obvious that some form of conflict would eventually pop up between them. However, instead of taking the obvious path of bringing them together in a head on conflict, the show ended up taking the theme in a much more subtle route. Raylan and Arlo, his father, are almost never on screen together for the entire season until the very end. Instead, the theme of father and son is explored through the villain before being cast upon the more obvious subjects.

                Robert Quarles, the villain of the season, does not, upon first glance, seem to have anything to do with the theme of fathers and sons. As a fast talking drug lord come down from Detroit to tame the wilds of the Kentucky oxy trade, he seemed to embody the expansionist, a theme which is common in many Westerns. However, as the season goes on, the viewer learns that every action that he performs comes from his relationship with his father figures. He attempts to make his adopted father proud by earning money and influence through the drug trade, while at the same time reenacting the terrible things that his biological father did to him on gay men that he kidnaps and tortures throughout the season. Quarles never outgrows the shadow of either of his fathers, and ends up crashing and burning because of it. Even as he is being chased by the Marshall service through the hills of Kentucky, his first priority is to call the head of the Detroit mob, his adopted father, and say that he wants to come home.

                This theme is greatly enhanced through the performance of Neil McDonough. He plays Quarles as a cheerful smiling villain who is as funny as he is scary. He cracks jokes as he kills people, and is always polite. However, as the season goes on, it becomes more apparent that McDonough plays the character as an overgrown child. He constantly tries to show off his sleeve holster like a child with a new toy, and he struggles to be seen as better than his “father’s” biological son. All of this is done with the emotional openness of a child showing the stunted development of this man.

This issue of father and son drives Raylan as well. Timothy Oliphant plays Raylan as a very emotionally closed character as opposed to Quarles’s childlike openness. He constantly denies that he has any issues with his father, and does everything he can to ignore the issue at hand. However, Raylan’s drive to show his father that they have nothing in common is the baseline for everything that he does.

All of the troubles he has with his father come to a head in the season finale in which we are treated to a scene in which Arlo attempts to tell Raylan that he is proud of him. The scene is touching, especially owing to Timothy Oliphant’s performance as Raylan tries to pretend that he doesn’t care, but cannot stop himself from feeling glad that his father is finally acknowledging him. This only serves to set the viewer up for the crushing final moments of the season in which Raylan realizes that Arlo has killed a friend of his, thinking it was Raylan, in order to protect his adopted “son.” This realization that he has truly lost his father breaks Raylan in a way that the viewer has never seen. He isn’t angry or vengeful. He just seems defeated. His father has a new son, and he has been left with no one.

                Justified has always been about fathers and sons, even from the very beginning, but never before has it been such a central element to the plot. By exploring this tenuous male relationship, the show is able to explore the depths of its characters and bring them to their knees. It can be said that those who know us best can hurt us most, and that statement is never truer than in this past season.

Much thanks to Creative Commons and the public domain images used. Creative Commons in no way endoreses any opinions expressed in this blog. Any opinions, views, or ideas are soley of the poster.

 

 

Mistakes and Okay, Successes

    I've made a lot of mistakes.  I've adjusted camera settings incorrectly (in multiple ways), leaving me with some interior shots that are far grainier than they need to be.  (Making a film has made me want to murder grain.)  I've tried to "shoot around" equipment that is in the shot rather than just clear it, meaning there are a number of unusable takes due to visible equipment.  I've forgotten the camera battery at a location that is 45 minutes away, necessitating an hour and a half round trip before we even started shooting.  I've had shoots involving over 10 extras that were poorly organized and thus sort of a nightmare, exacerbated by having to pause two or three times in the middle of shooting to charge the battery because I hadn't bothered to buy an extra and also forgot to charge it during the break in shooting that I designed specifically for completing such tasks as charging the battery.  I've neglected to hire people as crew that would have been able to help immensely with things like lighting up a room and making sure the shoots are run efficiently and reminding me to charge the battery.  I just simply haven't spent enough of my budget.  I've neglected until this late in the process (only one weekend left of shooting) to really learn how my actors work and design a system to draw out their best performances.  

    In truth, there are at least as many (if not more) parts of the process that I consider to be great successes and feel very proud about. I want to segue into the corny "yet this is has still been the best experience of my life" part because in most ways it has.  So far the hardest balance to find has been between a healthy obsession with the movie and beating myself up so much over my mistakes that I feel immobilized.   Because ultimately film-directing is a very emotional game.  You have to find a way to stay excited about the project without overlooking all the tiny flaws that might ultimately condemn it to mediocrity.  My two maxims right now are that I should use every day of filming to learn something new and that I should treat every scene as its own short film.  The former is an attempt to find some psychic rest about the mistakes that continually eat at me.  I guess I shouldn't ever forget (with the risk of sounding mock-humble) that this is, after all, my first film.  Maybe Scorsese doesn't learn something every day on his sets, but something tells me he wouldn't have reached his level of success if he didn't have that attitude at one point in his life.  And in regard to the latter maxim, it is crucial to remember that no matter what mistakes you've already made, filmmaking is constantly offering you chances at rebirth.  It's not quite like writing fiction where until it's published you can always go back and change things, but at least you can always go out there and shoot a knock-out scene no matter to what stupid depths you've found yourself descending earlier in the day.  

     That's why if you're looking for me on campus, you should know I'll be the guy wearing the custom-made t-shirt that reads "Filmmaking: The Ultimate RollerCoaster" with a graphic that includes the rails of a roller coaster subtly morphing into reels of film.  Trust me, these shirts are gonna get huge, fast.  You'll be purchasing and wearing one before you can even say "That's the dumbest t-shirt idea I've ever heard."  

P.S  Hope you enjoyed the movie stills included throughout the post!  Did I seamlessly integrate them into the tight logical progression of the post?  No, no I didn't.  But did I include them?  Well, yeah.

Drab Men and Knotty Abstractions: The New TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY

We never get a head-on look at the main Russian antagonists in Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the latest adaptation of John le Carré's classic Cold War spy thriller of the same name. Instead, the Soviet agents insistently lurk just at the edges of the frame, visible -- if ever -- only as hollow silhouettes or passing shadows. Just as it is for the British intelligence agents who form the film's main corps of protagonists, we know these faraway schemers only by the ambiguous ripples they cast on the west side of the Iron Curtain. Nor can we or the main characters claim the easy privilege of vilifying these antagonists, for the film is imbued with the frightening suspicion that there is a moral equivalency -- or at least a behavioral symmetry -- uniting both sides of the Cold War. Each side uses the same cold-blooded methods (torture, extrajudicial surveillance, murder, sexual manipulation) and in any case, the spy class as depicted here are not capitalists or proletarians but rather civil servants whose motivations are personal and professional, not ideological. So if there are no Bondian action showdowns with Soviet megalomaniacs, no affirmations of the inherent goodness of free-market capitalism or the inherent corruption of communism, what then is at stake in this film -- morally, narratively, psychologically? What compels us -- and the characters -- to keep moving forward towards the resolution of the film's central mystery? And what do we hope to achieve when we get there?

Perhaps it's best to begin by tracing the contours of that central mystery, the ostensible destination of the film's journey through the psychological back-alleys of British intelligence, code-named "The Circus." Basically -- and I'm leaving out a lot of rich backstory here -- the film's plot is a classic whodunit: one of four top Circus officials is suspected of being a long-time Soviet mole, and it's up to semi-retired spymaster and recurrent le Carré character George Smiley to ferret him out. Smiley is an uncharismatic, perspicacious, largely silent man whose distinguishing features are his drabness and his misguided love for his cheating wife; in essence, he is the anti-Bond, and he is played with laconic self-effacement by Gary Oldman, replacing Alec Guiness, who played Smiley in a 1979 miniseries adaptation of the novel. Smiley's talent -- what elevates him from a meek nobody to a national-security genius -- is his ability to grasp the psychological realities hidden behind the espionage world's curtain of abstraction. Because that's what this film is about fundamentally: abstractions, and the ability to stictch them together into something meaningful. Smiley has no visible enemies, no tangible objects to find or identify, no murder mystery to solve. All he has, like the audience, is a series of facts put out before him, and his enterprise -- like that of the viewer -- is to rearrange the puzzle pieces into an image that makes sense.

On that level, what's at stake for Smiley is what's at stake for the audience: the chance to build a system of information that hopefully is the correct one out of many wrong ones. We witness a world bathed in hypnotic dread -- beneath the browns and grays of ‘70s London, beneath the drab machinations of drab men in a drab bureaucracy, we know that most un-drab things are afoot: national security, the fate of the free world, etc. But he film hardly ever speaks the name of these graver issues; instead, it is left to us to pick up the intimations behind the surface movements. If the film works at all -- and it does, excellently! -- it is because we are engaged in the same process as Smiley: making sense of a confused information-pattern, seeing events as proxies or stand-ins for other events. So this is a taciturn, chilly film, but it is also absorbingly rich, because for every gesture shown on the screen, there are a thousand unseen ones whose invisibility only serves to increase their portentousness. The fragmented structure of the movie -- with events depicted non-linearly or in flashbacks -- is the perfect mirror for the fragmented information-structure presented to Smiley. More than spies, we all become mathematicians.

Admittedly, Smiley is engaged in more than a dispassionate hunt for cold facts; even if he isn't deeply invested in the moral outcome of the Cold War, he cares about the sanctity of the organization he's worked for all his life. Ousted from the service in the wake of a botched mission in Budapest (a disaster caused by the mole and shown inexorably unfolding in the film's prologue) he is bereft of his vocation, bereft of the one thing he's good at. Finding the mole is his way back to power; it's a way of restoring the honor of his generation by applying his mind to the facts before him. That's all that he can achieve by finding the Soviet infiltrator, and that's all that we can hope for as viewers: a de-scrambled puzzle that we can all live with, that makes us all feel like we're where we belong...

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Photo courtesy of David Sickmiller, and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

And My Nominees for Best Sound Editing Are…

    Jorma Taccone's MacGruber:  This movie is grossly underappreciated in so many categories of filmmaking, but maybe most of all for its soundtrack.  As MacGruber (a mulleted Will Forte) loads his beloved Benji-box portable car radio into his red Miata, he changes the station from Rock 98.1 to Soft 87.3.  A most halting transition ensues, switching from "Heavy Soul" by The Black Keys (film and television's premiere band for he's-just-too-damn-cool songs) to the desperate vocal straining of Toto's satisfyingly atrocious "Rosanna" and then to the exclamatory saxophone riff in Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street."  This trifecta runs the risk of making the audience laugh too loudly to hear anything for the next thirty seconds of the film.  Sound Editor: Sean Garnhart

    Greg Mottola's Superbad:  If you ever DJ'd a party with your iPod in high school, this film will put your fancy feet playlist to irreparable shame.  Never has a party seemed more appealing than when my personal favorite, "I'm Your Boogie Man" by KC & The Sunshine Band, comes on and every kid on the living room (dance)floor begins to get real funky.  Only slightly less appealing is the one-man party that usurps it, thrown by Officer Slater (Bill Hader) after he and his partner evacuate the living room in response to a noise complaint.  "Don't trust the police/ No justice no peace/ They got me/ Face down in the middle of the street," The Coup raps as Slater pops and locks to the anti-cop anthem "Pork and Beef."  Sound Editor: George Anderson

    Sam Mendes's American Beauty:  Composer Thomas Newman is a genius.  The man can do no wrong in my book.  (His association with Jarhead gives it so much credibility that I often forget the trailer was actually better than the film.)  His soundtrack for American Beauty rivals the eerie softness of David Shire's for The Conversation and the pretty self-referentiality of Cliff Martinez's for Drive, but his surpasses both of these because it is ultimately so heartbreaking, just like the film it supports.  For other sonic standouts from Thomas Newman, see: Road to Perdition, Finding Nemo, Erin Brockovich, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (a risky move, setting more scenes of a prison to more Thomas Newman compositions only five years after Shawshank's release--but director Frank Darabont's formula certainly works).  Sound Editor: Scott Martin Gershin

    David LaChapelle's Rize:  West coast "indie rap" phenom Flii Stylz recorded some of the most rousing and threatening hip hop ever rapped for this gorgeous documentary.  With track titles like "Break It On Down (Battlezone)," "Beaztly" and "Ready to Brawl" accompanying the film's furious and beautiful non-choreographed dances, how could you not want this soundtrack?  Every time I listen to "Get Krumped"--which is often--I replay the entire dance "battle" between Tight Eyez, Lil C and Dragon in my head and wish that a) teaching myself to krump had worked, and b) I could marry Tight Eyez.  Sound Editor: Christopher S. Aud

    Community, "Epidemiology" (Season 2, Episode 6): This episode continues a groundbreaking trend pioneered by Shaun of the Dead: zombie fights accompanied by bad 70's pop that is all the more hilarious because it is diegetic, accidentally lending goofy dance beats to scenes of violent commotion. What I wouldn't give to act out my own heroic scene of pugilism with classmates who've contracted an aggressive strain of Rabies from the toxic Army surplus taco meat served at the college Halloween party, provided I get to listen to "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" while I fight.  That's the power of ABBA.  Sound Editor: Ryan Young

    Very Honorable Mention for The O.C., "The Perfect Couple" (Season 1, Episode 10):  If I had had a makeout soundtrack as sultry yet lighthearted as this in high school... forget it, I still wouldn't have found a boyfriend.  This, my favorite episode of one of my favorite shows, is bookended by scenes of pretty adorable romance, beginning with Aqualung's "Strange & Beautiful" and ending triumphantly with "Breathe" by Leaves.  My affair with this episode started at 9 PM on Wednesday, November 12th 2003 and has been going strong ever since.  Sound Editor: Jeremy J. Gordon

 

Many thanks to Creative Commons for the above image.

Adventures of the Young Director

The young, cocky film director steps upon his first film set.

He looks unerringly director-like, in oversized red-and-white beanie, black windbreaker, and slightly off-kilter haircut peeking under aforementioned oversized beanie.

He doesn’t need a shot list because he’s sure he’ll construct the movie in his mind, on the go.

He’ll hold the camera in his very own hands, sensitive yet sturdy as a stone, perfectly divining the sensuous contours of his own constructed filmic reality. 

After sixteen hours of filming like thus the young humbled director plans to plan out as much in advance as possible for this week’s shooting.  I missed some stuff.  Not crucial stuff.  A boom mic here, not enough light there. But you feel it.  Every mistake.  Every little instance that so easily could have been better.

But in total I am thrilled. With the risk (or certainty) of sounding silly, I have taken to directing like a duck to water.  I have never felt more focused and vital than I have while being in charge of a film set consisting of upwards of twenty people.  Additionally, some of my hypotheses are working out.  Casting people experienced with comedy in various small roles has led to a number of (in my opinion) hilarious moments that I couldn’t have anticipated while writing the script.

The key is to learn from erroneous methods and not convince yourself to keep them just to avoid cognitive dissonance.  A film moves and progresses in a narrative entirely separate from the constructed narrative from the film itself.

A film, quite simply, is a journey. That’s the stupidest sentence I’ve ever written.

But seriously.  I’m only like a third of the way through but I think it might not just be advantageous to continue learning throughout the process, it’s necessary.  Well, as necessary as things can be these days.  What you should take away is this:  next shoot I’ll be using a (tentative) shot list. 

P.S

Look at this desperate facebook page I made to extras for my film.  Also, though, it worked!  Seems like I’ll be writing at least fifteen personalized songs.  Sweet!

Extras for Westbaum in High School