HopkinsCinemAddicts

Production Blog #6

All Over But the Crying

Artistic projects are never finished; they are abandoned.  Well, I’ve finally abandoned my short film after a long, exhaustive editing process.  I’m writing this as my film is burning to a DVD and I feel a bit like a parent on their child’s first day of school, fighting the instinct to grab it back before it get into the world, saying “Maybe he’ll be ready next year”. 

Upon completing a project, any humble artist will look back on a project and reflect on what could have been improved upon or altered meaningfully.  Now, I will never call myself an artist, but as a college film student, I do look back reflect on all the stupid, stupid, stupid things I did.  Someone once said that we are in the business of creating greater and greater failures.  Well this is definitely my greatest failure yet, and I think it’s a good idea to review some of bigger lessons I learned the hard way. 

Being a director and a director of photography at the same time is like being on a date with two women simultaneously, and neither date is going well.  I am, in fact, exactly one person and, probably because I am a man, I multitask poorly.  Whenever I am setting up a shot and getting the composition exactly right, I’m losing time with my actors, making sure they can connnect to the choices their characters are making and understand their actions.  When I'm working with my actors, I can't be communicating what I need to the crew.  It’s exhausting and unfair to both the cast, and crew, and to me.  If possible, this will be the last film where I occupy both roles.

There is no "make my film look better" button.  On set, it’s easy to get into the “Oh, I’ll fix it in post” mindset.  And a lot of times, you can, especially if you oversee, or in my case, perform, both shooting and editing.  If you have a cohesive idea of what you want, you can usually get close to that.  For example, some of the stuff I shot at night is supposed to take place in the day.  Even being inside, during the day, sunlight bounces around and makes the image bluer than if you shot just with artificial light.  You can add this blue in color correction to make shots look like they took place during the day.  Unless you totally forgot about the giant window in your shot and that shows that it’s clearly night outside. Oops.  This being said, sometimes what you shot is just crap.

Checking your equipment periodically is always a good idea.  I recorded roughly 180 different tracks to use for post-dubbing purposes.  Basically recording sounds to get exactly what I want and syncing it up to the video and no one knows the sounds were recorded seperately.  Unfortunately, I never checked the audio files outside the recorder so, while they sounded fine on the recorder, they were incredibly quiet when I imported them into my Final Cut Project.  So the majority of what I spent a solid six hours recording was essentially useless.  The price for stupidity is always high. 

Don’t edit films to your favorite music.  It’s common for me to listen to a song and thing Oh man; I want to use that in a movie.  You might think it’s a great idea, that it fits the film perfectly, and that’s awesome, but I’m telling you it’s a bad idea.  It’s a bad idea because you will never, ever want to listen to that song ever again after you’ve cut a film to it.  It’s one thing to listen to a song on a loop; it’s another to listen to the same seven-second section a dozen times while cutting it into a scene.  So long “Jesus Flag American Fish” by Cuckoo Chaos; it’s been nice knowing you.

So now the film is as finished as it will ever be.  I didn’t prepare any real cathartic final statement to wrap all this madness up, but I’ll give it a shot.

Filmmaking is arduous, thankless, deprecating and filled with frustration, heartache, and disappointment.  It’s also inspiring, enlightening, elevating, and filled with laughter, excitement, passion, and love.  If you look at the first list and get excited, you’re a masochist.  If you look at the second list and get excited, you’re an idealist.  If you look at both lists and can’t wait to get started, you might just be a filmmaker. 

Go make movies.

Cheers,

John

 

Clever Kids: The Depiction of Precocious Children in David Slade's Hard Candy.

As a child I got a thrill out of watching movies that featured kids outsmarting adults. I could never forget the ingenuity of Macaulay Culkin’s character in Home Alone (1990) or how his spectacularly booby trapped house and quick thinking foiled the plans of two hardened (albeit dimwitted) criminals taking advantage of the Christmas season. I also loved watching Lindsay Lohan take on a dual role as twin sisters swapping lives and sabotaging their parents’ affairs in The Parent Trap to the point where I had to watch the movie almost every weekend.

With the exception of films like Home Alone and The Parent Trap—family friendly movies whose plot focuses on crafty children—most films give children a secondary role. Sometimes children bridge the emotional gap between two prospective lovers in romantic films; other times children are seen but not actually heard, serving no greater purpose than to be part of a family unit. For this reason, even now as an adult, I am still drawn to films that show children asserting their authority or even films that capture the brilliance and a child’s awareness of the world. A film that truly alters the balance of authority between child and adult is David Slade’s Hard Candy (2005).

Hard Candy, a film about a 14-year-old vigilante who confronts and psychologically tortures an unsuspecting man, whom she believes to be a pedophile, demonstrates a non-adult character taking charge and behaving in an atypically mature manner. The film plays on the audience’s preconceived notions about children being helpless without supervision. When I first watched the movie (having been completely clueless about Hard Candy’s premise), I assumed I was going to be sitting through a film about some unfortunate girl enduring a traumatic experience at the disposal of the villainous pedophile Jeff. The opening scene plays up the young girl Hayley’s supposed naiveté in order to make her control and maturity more effective later in the film.

The façade of Hayley Stark’s innocence begins with a close up of an inappropriate chat dialog between a 39-year-old photographer Jeff aka “lensman319” and Hayley. Neither character is seen but the nature of the conversation is cause for concern. Hayley’s suggestively promiscuous yet childish screen name, “thonggrrl14” coupled with her flirtatious comments make her seem like the stereotypical teenage girl who carelessly draws attention to her age while trusting a complete stranger with her inner thoughts and personal information. While reading  lensman319’s texts insisting that he and Hayley “finally hook up” and Hayley’s suggestion that he “film [her] with [his] vidoecamera” before “doing it,” I could not stop myself from wondering if she either had ever seen Primetime or was just plain stupid. Needless to say, after seeing Hayley’s character for the first time, I was thoroughly convinced that she would fall into the trap of

In the subsequent scene, the first meeting of Hayley and Jeff, Hayley is the epitome of puerility, and Jeff the calculating and personable pedophile.  If I wasn’t already disturbed by this little girl so eager to get in a stranger’s car and drive to the man’s house alone, the intimacy established with back-to-back close-ups of Hayley’s and Jeff’s faces made me extremely uncomfortable.  The first shot of Hayley is a close-up in which she turns around; her soft features, round face, round eyes as wide as a baby’s, and slightly confused expression as she asks, “Jeff?” give evidence to her apparent youth and naiveté. A close up of Jeff follows; his smiling face and open demeanor are inviting to Hayley even as he inspires suspicion in the viewer. Even though Jeff is rather attractive –with his stylish hair, chiseled face, and boyish charm— his predatory looks, the way he undresses Hayley with his eyes, and his wolfish grin make him seem like a lecherous old creep.

The cuts between Hayley and Jeff ‘s close-ups reveal the difference in their height since Hayley’s head is almost always tilted up and Jeff’s is always at a downward slant.  A long shot of Jeff’s tall figure is a startling contrast to Hayley’s petite frame and size.  This difference in stature symbolizes Jeff’s authority and draws more attention to Hayley’s childishness. Just as Jeff typically dominates the frame in his non-close-ups, he seems to be entirely in control of the situation. As is typical of his type, he engages Hayley in conversation making sure to only speak about topics that interest her, boy-bands and teen novels—things that would be trivial to any grown man. For a brief moment a flier with the face of a smiling girl and the word MISSING come into focus, standing out on the wall just opposite of where Hayley and Jeff decide to sit. The appearance of the missing girl’s photo led me to believe that a similar fate would befall Hayley. Everything suggested Hayley’s eventual demise, and I had no way of knowing how wrong I was until everything takes a strange turn at Jeff’s home.  

After Hayley manages to get Jeff drunk in his own home, her demeanor becomes sadistic. With Hayley’s childishness sentiment exchanged for a cold mask of indifference and sadism, Jeff becomes the target of the viewer’s sympathy.  While the close-ups are still a factor in this scene, Hayley’s eyes are no longer round and her mouth becomes a thin disapproving line, proof that she was putting on a face the entire time in the café. Having tied Jeff up in a chair she insults him for believing she would be dumb enough to “chase him to the next drink.” When Hayley says, "Just because a girl can pretend to be a woman doesn't mean she's ready to be a woman," she let's both Jeff and the viewer know that her logic is sound and she's aware of how things should be. Her verbiage becomes more complex and less moronic as she explains her true intention to discover what secrets Jeff may be hiding in his home.

 Hayley proves her intelligence as she admits to intentionally behaving like a trusting young girl, who would foolishly believe that “anyone could know so much about her.” The balance of power has clearly changed. The few long shots, show Jeff—his height stolen by the low position of the chair—now appearing shorter than Hayley who stands confidently before him with her hands on her hips.  This reversal of stature is also apparent in the close-ups with  a discombobulated Jeff, staring up at Hayley with a confused expression and Hayley looking down at Jeff.  Jeff’s growing uncertainty and anxiety comes out in his voice as he asks Hayley, “What are you going to do to me?” Overwhelmed by the drastic change in events, I couldn’t help but see the irony in Hayley’s response, “Anything I want!” With Hayley’s dubious nature revealed, and the ambiguity of Jeff’s involvement with the missing girl, Jeff becomes the prey and Hayley the predator. 

 

Killing in the Name of Boyle

Recently I came across a thought-provoking quote taken from an old interview given by director Danny Boyle (a particular favorite of mine).  In this quote Boyle mentions that he, along with fellow directors Martin Scorsese and John Woo, initially intended to become a priest (a Protestant minister in Woo's case) before directing his career path towards film-making.  Boyle goes on to relate the two seemingly disparate professions by claiming that they both involve heavy drama and the duty of lecturing to an audience.  Honestly, Boyle's comfortable comparison of film-making to preaching didn't immediately resonate with me as a viewer who typically likes to let sleeping dogs lie when it comes to religious symbolism in film.  However, the more familiar I've become with the works of the (almost) priests-cum-directors (having only just seen John Woo's The Killer and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver this year), the more willing I am to explore the remarkably dark violence in their films under the cast of a new, "divine" light.

My experimental attempt to find religion leads me to a reexamination of the first movie from Danny Boyle that I expressly remember falling in love with: 28 Days Later (2002).  Although marketed to the mass public as another gory, zombie apocalypse flick, 28 Days Later instantly impressed me as a film that transcends its narrow genre.  Revisiting this film now allows me to apply my new-found knowledge of director Boyle's strong Irish Catholic background and devotion, and as a result, give a credible explanation of how this zombie film touches upon quality subject matter.  For example, an important distinction can easily be made between 28 Days Later and all other zombie apocalypses filmed to date by explaining that 28 Days Later focuses almost exclusively on the "apocalypse" angle of the genre.  In other words, while most zombie movies prominently feature the mindless flesh-eaters as they munch their way through the remainder of the human population, Boyle's 28 Days Later is a marked departure in its unique emphasis of a post-apocalyptic absence of life, whether it be human, animal, or the animated undead.

 Pushing the suspicious lack of abundant zombie predators and human fodder in 28 Days Later further into the realm of religious allegory, one can even speculate that this movie serves as an updated representation of the Old Testament flood, which supposedly cleansed the world of nearly all its inhabitants.  In the film, a "flood" of disease wipes our modern world clean of civilization, leaving death (constituted by the occasional appearances of the roaming undead) and an all-consuming emptiness, as conveyed to the viewer in the striking opening scenes.  From a high-angle/heavenly standpoint, the viewer experiences a series of extreme long shots that altogether show the progression of a lone survivor (played by Irish actor Cillian Murphy) as he slowly makes his way through the abandoned streets of London.  Instead of being submerged in floodwater, the city is smothered by a blanket of deafening silence that is maintained throughout the duration of these poignant long shots/takes.

Meanwhile, Murphy's lone survivor doesn't amble aimlessly around town for too long before eventually assuming a greater responsibility outside of his own survival.  This responsibility is comparable to that which was bestowed upon Noah by his Holy Father.  Just as Noah was charged with choosing who would survive with him in the Ark, so too does Murphy's character decide who will live alongside him and who will fall prey to the zombie's lethal bite.  More specifically, Murphy's character unleashes a hungry zombie within the bowels of a military compound (functions as the Ark, or the last standing refuge of humanity during the scourge) in order to kill the corrupt men hiding there.  Fast-paced cuts and dim lighting make it practically impossible to distinguish between the wild zombie and Murphy's rampaging young man as they jointly indulge in an unchecked killing spree throughout the compound.  Both the zombie and the young man appear to equally represent executing agents of the cleansing "flood"/disease through their gratuitously bloody slaying of the wicked soldiers.

Interestingly enough, the gruesome crusade of Boyle's blood-splattered Noah is closely matched in terms of its violent display of righteous fury by the actions of Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.  Underneath the surface view of Bickle being nothing more significant than a paranoid vigilante, exists the possibility of Bickle being another divine crusader charged with carrying out tough justice against the "scum" of New York City.  One can potentially suggest that Bickle embodies a New Testament Christ-like figure in his attempted life sacrifice to free the prostitute Iris from her pimp and from her sins.  Evil and sin are once again fought with grotesque violence implemented by a lone purveyor of "divine" justice.  Of course, this "divinity" is ultimately administered by the omnipotent director--especially often by fire and brimstone-minded Catholics like Boyle and Scorsese--as he channels it through the dramatic scenarios he imagines and directs.

Production Journal #5

Editing 

I always give myself at least a week between filming and editing.  When you’re shooting film, this buffer is built in to your schedule because you need to wait for your film to be processed and digitized at a lab, but when you’re shooting digital, there’s nothing to stop you from immediately hopping into the editing booth.  So even though the film just sits on my hard drive for a week, I let it sit.  There are two reasons for this.  The first reason, this is the one I tell everybody, is because it’s virtually impossible to look at what you’ve shot objectively when you shot it hours earlier.  You need a breath of fresh air before you come back and look at what you’ve got.  My second, and more palpable reason for waiting a week, is that I’m scared shitless that I’ve screwed everything up.  

Editing is a strange, purgatorial experience.  When you’re writing, the possibilities are endless, and working on set everything is organic and kinetic and has life, but when you’re editing, to a certain extent it feels like the film is already made and you’re just pulling it apart and piecing it together.  This is, of course, not true.  And while it may give you vertigo to go from sitting in a tub filled with fake blood to sitting in a small dark room with large computer monitor, you need to be equally creative at doing both.

The first thing you need to do when editing digitally is transcode your video.  While this might seem unnecessary, as the Canon 7D and Mark IV, both save the to .mov files, which is an incredibly common file type that can be read by Final Cut Pro, it is actually a crucial step.  All .mov files are not created equal.  Video files need to be read by something called a codec that decodes encrypted digital information, in this case it turns the digital information into video and audio.  There are dozens of different codecs for .mov files, and while the one used for the Canon camera files can be read easily by virtually every media player, it’s a disaster to edit with.  So you have to transcode.

Transcoding takes a very long time, it works at a ratio of about 1:1, as in it takes a second to transcode every second of video.  While you can batch files together and let this run overnight, I like to stay in the room while my files transcode, not only because I enjoy the sense of progress, but also because if one file has a problem, the entire process stops nothing gets transcoded until you fix it.  So the first four or five hours of my “editing” process were spent reading a book looking up ever so often to make sure things haven’t gone awry.  Nothing went wrong. 

My fears during the filming have been realized and I’m finding myself unable to wake from the nightmare that is sync sound.  To put it plainly, I’m finally being forced to reconcile all the mistakes I made while I was bumbling around, not knowing what the hell I was doing.  For example, I completely forgot to tell the PAs to call out the scene and take number before slating, so I now have a huge collection of audio files, and I have no idea what video files they match.  Oops. 

Some of the recordings are so low that they’re unusable, but others seem okay.  For now I’ve decided to not worry about it.  I organized all my clips by scene, which makes the whole editing process just so much more enjoyable, as you don’t have to constantly hunt for clips.  I’ve been going through and picking my favorite takes, and crudely editing them together, just so I have everything in the right order.  Once I’ve got my favorite takes in the right order, then I go back and snip them to the proper size and make everything fit.

So what else do I have look forward to besides long hours in a tiny editing suite?  Post dubbing and foley.  Once I’ve done the best I can with the unholy mess of audio that I collected during filming, I have to go back and add additional sound effects and music.  This additional audio is often the difference between you having a very pretty home movie, and something you can ostensibly call a film.  But more on that next time.

Cheers, 

John

Photo Credits

1. Flikr - SirronWong

2. Flikr - Average Jane

Production Journal #4

Shooting

There is nothing more exhausting, frustrating, backbreaking, and incredibly rewarding than directing a film.  At the independent level, filmmaking is all about long periods of frustration punctuated by moments of artistic and emotional euphoria.  It took me three incredibly long days, but the film is in the proverbial can.  I would reccomend giving yourself as many days to shoot as possible, but when your cast and crew can only come together for three days, you shoot your film in three days. 

For this film, I experimented with not rehearsing anything ahead of time with my actors.  We had a little dinner party to get to know each other, so everyone would be comfortable enough to get on set and start playing off each other, but that was it.  I wanted to throw them into the space and let them settle into the material in front of the camera.  Not giving your actors a lot of time to rehearse can get them to do some really interesting, creative things, but it can also make them second guess themselves.  Two of my actors, in particular, had a problem breaking character and asking to start the scene over again.  Unfortunately, what actors often think isn’t working really is, and many times they end up ruining perfectly good takes. 

Shooting with a DSLR camera made me bold and I thought I could put the camera anywhere.  While this is msy be true, on the first day of filming I soon discovered that I, unlike my small camera, cannot fit everywhere.  A lot of this shoot was comprised of me contorting myself into various tiny nooks, car trunks, closets, and bathtubs.  My style of directing is not sitting in a chair, drinking a latté, and issuing orders; you can’t do that on a small shoot, especially when you aren’t paying anyone.  Also, how are you going to get an actor to trust you if there is always a camera between you?  But even if I could sit back and watch, I’d still choose to wrap myself up in a giant garbage bag and contort myself in a tub for a shot.   

While directing is a lot of work, I had an amazing crew and I am indebted to Abby, Andrea, Alec, Avidan, Emily, Janice, Michael, and Will, who all were essential to making the film work.  Crewing on a shoot like mine, everyone does everything.  Sometimes you run sound for a shot, sometimes you slate, sometimes you need to clean a couple gallons of fake blood out of a tub.  There is very little glamor on my sets.  The key is to believe in the end result so much that you don’t care. 

Working long days with subject material that is somewhat dark, it’s important to keep the mood on set lively.  I do this two ways, one by giving my actors and crew enough room to be creative and offer suggestions and ad-lib.  Some of the best shots in this film were the direct result of suggestions that weren’t mine.  As I wrote my script with my actors in lines, I encouraged changing things up and cutting lines that didn’t work.  I don’t have an attachment to the script, so much as I have a commitment to making the final film as good as it possibly can be.  The second way to keep people happy on set: buy them food.  After four hours of filming, they joy you get when two crewmembers arrive with Subway is unparalleled. 

This film marks the first sync sound film I’ve ever made, so I currently have a lot of video and audio files sitting on my computer that I’m nervous to look at.  I have a lot of syncing, post-dubbing, and editing ahead of me.  But, for now I’m taking a few well-deserved days off before I go through the hellish experience of post production.  More on that next time. 

Cheers,

John

Photo Credits

1. Production Still 

2. From personal collection of photos of me in trash bags

3. Flikr - Like_the_Grand_Canyon

The Tramp's Last Social Commentary

 

Two of the most well known silent film stars had deeper messages for their audiences beyond their humor and physical comedy. While Keaton was the king of the outcasts, Chaplin was the champion of the workingman. Buster Keaton was much quieter about broad political concerns. He tended to focus on the struggles of the individual. In the films that I have reviewed previously, Buster focuses on family dysfunctional relationships.  Although, he does depict himself as unemployed in his short film, The Goat.  His follies are often a result of missing the social cues.  In the Goat, there is a scene with a breadline.  Buster goes to the bread window cutting the long line of fellow jobless.  Upon learning of his mistake, he heads to the back of the line or so he thinks.  He gets behind some mannequins placed near the line.  By the time he figures out the stationary line he’s standing in is merely an illusion the bread window closes.  The breadline depicts desperate times. And the dummies are a depiction of the dehumanization of the impoverished. The line is really just an example of those who understand the system, which eludes Buster.

Chaplin on the other hand was particularly supportive of the plight of the working class, and uses his films to impart his criticism of post war and newly industrialized society. Utilizing his character “The Tramp” Chaplin would vocalize his distaste in the treatment of the lower class though his physical comedy. As one of Chaplin’s first non-silent films, Modern Times depicting the hardships experienced by the impoverished was an important message to be communicated by Chaplin.  In the film’s opening scene, sheep are squeezed together as they travel along a chute. Then, there is bird’s eye shot of men emerging from a subway, crowded together on a sidewalk rushing to their jobs in a factory.  This quick intellectual montage creates a feeling of hopelessness as the faceless crowd of workers shuffle into the factory. One cannot help but notice the comparison Chaplin has made between the sheep headed to a distasteful destiny and the workers heading to mindless, meaningless monotony. Furthermore, the only consistent sounds in the film come from the machines in the factory, while the characters are silent. Chaplin is further asserting that machines rule modern society and there is no longer a place for the individual.

In Modern Times, Chaplin is a worker on the conveyer line with two other men.  His job is to tighten the bolts on a plate before it gets to the others who have other simple tasks.  Of course as precursor to other future conveyer scenes such as Lucille Ball’s famous chocolate factory foible, this scene pans over to “The Tramp” out of sync with the others and the rhythm of conveyer belt.  He encroaches on the other workers who never seem to move from their spots. At one point later in the film, he lands on the belt and goes through and around giant gears before the belt is reversed.  Of course, there is more going on than just the work delay in section five where the Tramp is stationed.  We see the boss who unlike his workers is reading a paper and working on a jigsaw puzzle, which symbolizes more of a puzzle as to why he seems to be out of touch with anything other than production matters.  Certainly, management is not interested in the worker only the whirl of mechanical production. In a Wizard of Oz like fashion, the boss is able to see and be seen by the workers in order to speed up production at his whim.  In attempt to give his workers more time on the line, he is shown a mechanical feeding machine that can make mealtime more efficient.  Of course, the Tramp extracted from his job on the assembly line is the test candidate.  A close up of the Tramp strapped into the machine provides hilarity when it malfunctions shoving bolt into his mouth instead of pastries, and finally hits in the face with a cream pie.  The boss deems the prototype a failure-“It’s no good-it isn’t practical” as shown by the title card. After a mental breakdown and a stay at a mental hospital, the Tramp returns to the factory which has shut down; so although he is cured, he is now unemployed.  There is footage of crowded streets crammed with others who are jobless, yet another intellectual montage depicting desperate times.  Grim, gray masses move without direction.

After his dismal portrayal of factory life and workers, Chaplin shows us how he prefers life in prison to being unemployed and starving in the streets.  Chaplin makes a bold socialist statement by having the Tramp “mistakenly” lead a workers protest. After picking up a red flag that falls from a construction vehicle, he gets caught in a worker demonstration and mistaken for its leader by the police.  Once in jail, he discovers a prison is a place where he is happy and comfortable.  Although he has a few comical altercations with fellow prisoners, he stops an escape attempt and wins the favor of the guards. Unfortunately he is not able to stay in prison forever.  He repeatedly tries to break the law to get back in prison to get back to the better life.  As a perk for heroism, he is given a letter by the warden attesting to his superior character.  Chaplin is suggesting that perhaps the prison offenses are unjust.  Just in Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables, the poor suffer wrongs and are incarcerated because they are poor.  Perhaps, Modern Times is the Chaplin American film version of the Hugo story as there are many similarities.

Chaplin continues to highlight the dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots.  As Gamine and Chaplin pass a department store, the night watchman is being carried to an ambulance with a broken leg.  Gamine encourages Chaplin to apply for the position.  With his letter, he is given the job.  Once all the employees have left, he brings Gamine into the store where they have the good life.   The Tramp and his love interest Gamine dress in furs and live the good life in a department store after hours.  The good times are coming to an end. In his rounds, he encounters burglars who are his former steel workers who have hit the store in hard times-“We ain’t burglars, we’re hungry”.  Rather than call the authorities as The Tramp can relate to their predicament, the group begins opening champagne. After drinking in the department store café with his friends in solidarity, he passes out.  Discovered among the fabrics, he loses his job and is thrown in jail.  Released, he finds Gamine has waited for him. Gamine has managed to build a shack so they can try to live the life they envisioned.  It looks like their luck has improved when the factory has reopened.  Their fortune is short lived when the workers go back on strike the same day the Tramp has been hired, and again the Tramp is jailed.  Again released, Gamine is transformed.  Gamine has landed a cabaret job and also gets Chaplin hired a singing waiter.  Within this turn of events is rare scene of Chaplin singing.  This film had been planned to be the first talkie, but he abandoned that idea as it was feared that a departure from the silent genre would ruin his film career.  As ever, the love birds luck disappears with an arrest warrant for vagrancy for Gamine.  The film concludes with their escape from the police and with the Tramp and Gamine free from society’s restraints to walk hand in hand into the sunset hoping still for a better life.

It was in this film, Modern Times, that Chaplin made his last appearance as the “little tramp”.  Chaplin was viewed as someone with very strong views on economic and social problems of this era.  He was well read on the subjects. He created his own economic theory, and used this film to turn his concerns into comedy. For many reasons, this is a film that is worth watching as entertainment and as a historical societal commentary.

Of Worms, Typos, and other Totems of Love in SECRETARY

Lee Holloway likes dull work.

“I want to be bored,” she insists, instantly intriguing prospective boss Mr. E. Edward Grey on the interview for the first job of her life. The mysteriously docile creature activates his fantasies of a kind of woman who would jump into a dumpster for him, whom he could care for and dominate. But more on that later. Based on a short story from Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior collection, Steven Shainberg’s high concept tale of office romance seems to exist liminally between genres in the American tradition of David Lynch and the Coen brothers. The film investigates the erotic in mundane, unexpected objects such as the typewriter, red pen and yes, typographical errors – it’s La Pianiste with slapstick! Indeed, the comedic forces behind this sincerely kinky film is what marks the difference between provocation and sensationalism.

Assuming the titular position is a youthful Maggie Gyllenhaal, who manages to rise above the stunted social intelligence of the character to give a spirited performance. Recently released from a mental institution after slitting her wrist with a kitchen knife (accidentally on purpose), Lee returns to the tedium of her home in suburbia welcomed by her overzealous mother, alcoholic father and complacent newlywed sister who lives in the pool house. To feel something in a life that is otherwise numb, Lee quickly retrieves her old jewelry box of horrors from under the mattress; digging the foot of a plaster ballerina into her thigh, the ritual is at once medieval, teenage and fetishistic. 

But Shainberg is not interested in erotic rituals on the basis of exposure – nudity is minimal in good taste. In early scenes, a milky bathtub and backyard pool hide Lee's scarred body for dramatic purposes but also emphasize her childish sexuality. Enabling her with hot chocolate and the like is Mr. Grey, portrayed by James Spader. The actor's presence almost surely sets up the expectation of eccentricity. This is confirmed as much in the introduction: the strange and ascetic arrangement of darts and red pens on his desk is juxtaposed with the ridiculous, elaborate orchid garden in the middle of his office. Here one finds an overt metaphor for Lee and Mr. Grey, both fragile and in need of attendance. (In another metaphorical aside, Mr. Grey can be seen setting mouse traps in the office only to free the captured mice.)

Though released in 2002, the film's retro props and kitsch decor diligently mystifies its tone and time period. Certainly the film's preference for the 60s pop art aesthetic and 70s wall treatments gives it a humorously insular look. Using color, Shainberg also distinguishes the two worlds Lee comes to inhabit. Her home is decidedly girly, from the pink bicycle lock on the cabinet of knives to the glittery door sign to her room, and Lee's hue is decidedly purple, which as a liminal color carries the right odd and juvenile connotations. It is also the color of a bruise, a motif for Lee's interiority and foreshadowing of her physical relationship with Mr. Grey. When she's at the office, however, she enters a more comforting, natural world. In this re-imagined garden of Eden she is discovering her femaleness as if she were the first woman and Mr. Grey the first man. The film's imagery of water, an agent of cleansing, also conveys Lee's emergence out of that stifled domesticity into a more self-possessed personhood.

The pivotal moment in which Secretary admittedly loses its innocence arrives fifty minutes into the film. Mr. Grey, having had enough of Lee's typos (no spellcheck on a typewriter after all), takes matters into his own hands. In some ways, the initiation into spanking is the first love scene of the film. Lee experiences a moment of tactile intimacy with Mr. Grey and feels paradoxically liberated. Soon she revels in submission and in having every last detail of her life controlled by him. “Just a scoop of potatoes, four peas, and all the ice cream you want,” the latter dictates over the phone at dinner time. The declaration "I'm your secretary" even becomes most celebratory in her fantasies. Lee actually endeavors to be spanked, and when she mails Mr. Grey a dead worm in provocation, it is so thrilling and aggressive an action that Mr. Grey would have to retaliate. 

Since the film takes Lee's perspective, to some extent Mr. Grey is morally illegible. By all accounts, E. Edward Grey is not sure how to be nice. Peeks into his solitary existence outside the office demonstrate how he treats his life with absolute efficiency. Resting his head on own his shoulder in one scene, he invokes sympathy for the lonely devil. Nevertheless, his wish to be closer to Lee and compulsive self-discipline eventually forces a disassociation with himself and in an act of monumental denial, he cruelly reenacts the scene of the first interview to fire Lee.

The film somewhat loses its footing after Lee's dismissal. She meets other sadists and explores the caricatured world of suburban sadomasochism only to discover that it's not the lifestyle but Mr. Grey she really covets – not that the film gives any other potential suitors a chance. Subsequently this candied implication of true love meanders into a runaway-bride parody. Rejecting the normal romantic option in her old classmate, Jeremy, a largely thankless foil for Mr. Grey, Lee returns to the office for one last test. At this point, Shainberg involves the zany inhabitants of their small town in the relationship, as they come in one by one to talk Lee out of her unmoving stance at Mr. Grey's desk. If the viewer feels marooned by this turn of events perhaps it is because Shainberg chose to dignify Lee and Mr. Grey by caricaturing everyone else in the film. They're there as comic relief and to maintain communication between the two, as it is her public declaration of love in the newspapers that convinces him of her determination. Finally, he revives her and carries her to his orchid lair (and really, there isn't a better way to put it), where he attends to her exposed figure with tender, religious devotion. The odd couple ostensibly lives happily ever after and in the last confrontation of the film, Lee looks into the lens to address the viewer as a self-realized woman.

Beat Halloween: Sidney Peterson's The Cage and The Potted Psalm

I believe there are two sorts of moods conjured up at Halloween, and they are both tied to anxiety. The first involves lust for gore, fright, heart palpitations and being generally unnerved. Films in this vein do not necessarily have to reach the gruesome, cathartic extremes of Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Hooper) or Silence of the Lambs (1991, Demme), although they may. What matters is not so much the content, but that the filmic form of that content effectively manipulates emotions. The mood (primal insecurity, agitation, pure fear) need not be connected to cannibalism. The same primitive human angst can be exploited through a variety of genres, including the slasher, psychological thriller, horror and even war films. What they share are momentary or prolonged emotionally manipulative sequences. I’m thinking of the gripping feeling Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock) evokes as Scottie, in an awkward sweaty panic, follows Madeline up the campanile at San Juan Bautista. Or, channeled through more grotesque visual language, the shots of Leatherface’s kitchen littered with animal skeletons, feathers and detritus; the icebox containing the body of his teenage victim in Massacre.

The second type of mood connected to Halloween is slightly more cerebral. The main driving question for this mood is not “What is the capacity for others to wreck violence against me?” but rather, “How far do I have to venture to detect the truly bizarre and unfamiliar within the familiar?” Anxiety is still a factor here, for we have to make the conscious decision to set aside normalcy, congruence and linear thought. If the slasher film relies on visceral responses and our most primal human fears, then surrealist and experimental films challenge our intellectual pursuit of narrative progression, reason, meaning and causality. Sometimes none of these exist, and sometimes they exist only to very small degrees. So experimental films are unnerving, not because they threaten our corporeal security, but because they problematize the conventional ways in which we think about the world.

Of the two Halloween “moods,” I believe the second is more difficult to achieve. Or at the very least, the industry has invested less time and fewer resources into its development. Hollywood is quite good at exploiting our instinctual, animal-like need for security. It is slightly less adept at illuminating the absurd. So, while films that agitate, terrorize or unnerve are not the exclusive purview of mainstream media, movies that venture —even briefly— into the surreal and avant-garde are generally treated as art cinema. Nevertheless, I would argue that these sorts of films are essential viewing at Halloween! Gore alone is insufficient. We also need a dose of the slightly strange — not supernatural, and not wholly divested from the objects and spaces of everyday life, but the distorted anatomy, jarring stop-action, and the playful conglomeration of store windows, shabby things for sale, reflected pedestrians and bifurcated vehicles. I’m advocating that all of you sit down and watch two shorts: The Cage (1947) and The Potted Psalm (1946), both by filmmaker and beat poet Sidney Peterson.

I first came across Peterson in Art Cinema, which classifies his work as surrealist. The point of that movement, according to Young and Duncan, was to "reestablish links with the 'primal mind.'"¹ I would argue there is no more appropriate time than All Hallows Eve to reaffirm such a connection.

The Cage and The Potted Psalm function as a nice pair, diverging subtly in the mood, but also complementing each other. Viewed together, they provide excursions (amusingly absurd in The Cage and somewhat more ominous, though still not ghoulishly so, in Psalm) into the unfamiliar side of seemingly normal people, interactions and material things. In The Cage, Peterson establishes a surprisingly coherent visual language reminiscent of the Soviets' Kino Eye. He warps and distorts images, spins the lens across axes of symmetry, collapses space and captures pedestrians navigating San Francisco backwards. Surveillance is a motif that permeates both shorts. In Cage it is articulated explicitly: an escaped eyeball rolls, maneuvers, appears and disappears along the California streets and around an amusement park, spawning a protracted chase. What we perceive as a narrative progression perhaps makes The Cage more digestible than Psalm, but the internal logic of Cage is also undercut by the existence of the protagonist's alternate personas, and the wrought-iron spiraling bird cage that encloses his head.

Peterson also seems to communicate a fascination with the threshold between life and death. Resurrection is suggested almost continuously throughout the film. For instance, early on, cooked ducks in Chinatown windows are juxtaposed with live pigeons. The film also constructs an indeterminate space which could arguably function as a world for the living or the dead. Cars and people move in reverse, as though sleepers moving through a dream. The carnival space becomes doubly unnerving as its visitors and rides predominately move in reverse. The physics of rotating rides and bullet-like cars tunneling through space seem simultaneously graceful and precarious, and the odd forward running march of the group chasing the detached eye connotes them as social misfits. To us, they look both militaristic and hilarious.

As weird as things get, they never stray too far from an inner documentary basis. True, a man may lose an eye, butter his bread with fresh oil paints, and inhabit different bodies, one of which buries itself in the sand. But at its core, the short investigates the possibilities of the absurd built into the textures of everyday life. A female thief who steals a bundle of onions strikes us as odd as the male companion threatening to shoot the stray eyeball with a rifle (and later a dart). The two become nearly interchangeable. They both characterize what we possibly fear most about ourselves: that we are driven not by rational thought, but by instinctual, even animalistic inclinations.

If The Cage strikes contemporary viewers as "playful," then The Potted Psalm is notably less tame. Clownish makeup, graveyards populated by tropical flora instead of the typical hemlocks, and distorted women all render gothic horror motifs slightly exotic. Whole sequences seem devoted to the "body mischievous," a theme communicated through elongated limbs, goiter-like necks and mannerist torsos. Things get stranger as the film progresses: most notably, women submerged and abandoned imply the aftermath of violence, but not the violent acts themselves. Yet, even in Psalm, Peterson exercises great restraint. He does not manipulate viewers, or at least he does so subtly, so that we feel we have come to all the conclusions on our own. At the film's closure, a woman runs a considerable length, shot at variable distances. She stumbles, yet persists, and this time the hilarity of the small steps and brisk cadence that characterized the chase in The Cage is replaced with a sense of urgency. The force that pursues her is imperceptible; the lack of dialogue or even other humanity is acutely felt. And whenever she is captured in a frame with another human form, it is only herself, superimposed and dissolving briefly on an overexposed horizon.

 

1. Young, Paul. Art Cinema. Ed. Paul Duncan. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2009. Print.

When TV Gets Spooky

TV shows and their Halloween episodes—it's a hallmark of the season, so long as the show isn't taking a hiatus that week to accommodate children being led door-to-door. One would think sci-fi and fantasy shows, shows that already delve into the edges of belief, would have a particularly easy time with these sorts of episode.

Well, yes and no. It's a gimmick, and when your show already has vampires, or takes place on another planet, how are you going to fit in children and masks and make it interesting?

A variety of ways, it turns out. I'm just going to run through a few of my favorites here.

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Probably the most straightforward example of this trope that I'm going to discuss is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Here we've got quite a few episodes that could qualify as implicitly Halloween-themed, but the two obvious ones are “Halloween” and “Fear, Itself.”

The twist in these episodes is that, in a world of demons and vampires, the baddies stay in on Halloween. Performing evil deeds when everyone around you is dressed up all scary in order to score candy? It's cheap. And so, Halloween is meant to be a calm and relaxing night—except, of course, unless you're Buffy or one of the gang.

While not exactly scary, “Halloween” is definitely an entertaining episode with several character twists—Xander as the capable soldier, Buffy as the maiden in distress, Willow as a sexy ghost. Whatever costumes the characters put on, they become. While the plot could be more gripping, the episode is very much worth it just for the clothing and the symbolism inherent in every character change.

Then we have “Fear, Itself.” As one might guess from the title, the fear factor for this episode is greatly improved. Here, we have a college haunted house that actually appears to be haunted. The gang is split up, characters are abandoned or attacked, and a demon has been summoned. With traumatized co-eds hiding amidst the cobwebs, and characters all alone in the darkness, the episode becomes a chillingly effective success.

I'll let you, reader, find out what happens to the demon. Let's just say he goes out with a bang.

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Our next show is Castle. (While it's a bit of a stretch to describe this show as fantastical, these episodes either refer to Nathan Fillion's stint on the cult sci-fi hit Firefly or toy with the supernatural. They're also really fun.) Take season two's “Vampire Weekend,” otherwise known as vampires, goths, and ghouls, oh my! (Okay, maybe not ghouls.) This episode begins with Castle dressed as Mal, captain of the spaceship Firefly.

“Didn't you wear that, like, five years ago?” his daughter asks him.

“So?” he replies.

“So, don't you think you should move on?”

“I like it!”

The episode continues in standard fashion: a body has been found in a graveyard, a stake driven through the victim's heart. Castle and Beckett find themselves in a subculture of black clothing and synthetic fangs, and the possibility of real vampires excites Castle in a delightfully childlike manner.

Eventually, they solve the crime, and there is no immortal life involved. The journey there, however, is endlessly entertaining. Also, for those among us with an appreciation for the more Gothic side of the clothing spectrum, highly aesthetically pleasing.

More recently is the episode “Demons,” wherein Castle and Beckett investigate a murder in what appears to be a real-life haunted house, home to several murders. There are no Firefly references in this episode, but the was-or-wasn't-it-a-ghost tension works, and the banter is top-notch. Is it the best episode of Castle ever? Probably not. But it's certainly worth the price of the candy corn you'll snack on while watching.

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Perhaps my favorite example of this trope, though also the least straightforward, is the Farscape episode “Kansas.”

John Crichton is an astronaut, trapped for 3 years in a distant part of the galaxy, who finally makes it home to Earth. Problem: he makes it back several years too early, in 1986. Problem: his friends are aliens, very non-human looking aliens, though mainly with two arms and legs. Sometimes with bonus tentacles or blue skin, but still, the general shape is the same.

Solution? Visit during Halloween. Also, focus your plot on John Crichton's attempts to fix the timeline and John's familial relationships. Just make sure to have several sugar-related jokes, and have a cop investigate our jolly group for their suspiciously realistic masks and limited English skills.

Truth be told, this episode is fantastic. By far the best I've discussed here.

John's homecoming to Earth does not disappoint, and the difficult relations between John's parents (with one another, with a teenage John, and with our adult John) pull at the heartstrings. Even Chiana's short fling with a teenage John does not disappoint, or disturb too badly. Perhaps the one downside is that this episode comes late in the show and is thus the culmination of a lot of emotional drama. After all, who would want to start watching The X-Files on the day Mulder learns the Truth?

In other words, Spoilerphobes beware. Everyone else? Please choose this scare.

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Obviously this list is by no means exhaustive. While not strictly supernatural, Psych's “This Episode Sucks” is as silly as it sounds, and when Dead Like Me features children and costumes, it's a bit funny, a bit sad, and a bit horrifying.

These are some of my favorites, though, and if you're as in love with TV and Halloween as I am, they are sure to make for one awesome weekend.

10 Horror Films You Probably Aren’t, But Should Be Watching

10 great, original horror films for those of you who are tired of remakes, reboots, rip offs, and other disappointments.    

Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006, Dir. Scott Glosserman) What may at first seem like a run of the mill mockumentary is actually a very smart, very funny little film that follows a team of graduate students as they document Leslie Vernon’s quest to become the next horror icon.  Wonderfully subversive, well acted, and with a fun little cameo from Robert Englund, this film isn’t really scary, but well worth watching.

Black Christmas (1974, Dir. Bob Clark) While true horror fans know this film well, it seems to have slipped through the cracks of the slasher cannon.  Before Bob Clark directed the holiday classic A Christmas Story, he painted the holiday black in this tale of a sorority house terrorized by a mysterious caller who begins murder the sorority sisters.  Combining American conventions with Italian giallo sensibility, Black Christmas is the sadistic older brother to the slasher Godfather Halloween.

High Tension (2003, Dir. Alexandre Aja) Two friends, Alexa and Marie, travel to Alexa’s country home for a vacation that turns into a nightmare when a mysterious man shows up, bent on killing everyone.  Few films are as simplistic as High Tension.  The film guns it right out of the gate and never lets up.  It’s ending may seem a little slapped together, but if you’re in the mood for 90 minutes of blood soaked tension, Aja’s French thriller will do the trick.

Inside (2007, Dir. Alexandre Bustillo) This French shocker is for everyone who thinks that American horror films have become just a little too safe and predictable.  On the eve of giving birth to her first child, a woman is visited in the middle of the night by a woman intent on taking her unborn child.  Visceral, unforgiving, and downright surreally violent, Bustillo’s breakthrough film is everything horror should be, if you can stomach it. 

May (2002, Dir. Lucky McKee) This unsettling little indie film tells the story of May, a young woman finding it increasingly impossible to interact with those around her, who decides to create her own perfect friend out of the best parts of people.  Angela Bettis gives an amazingly creepy, and surprisingly empathetic performance as the title character.

Pieces (1982, Dir. Juan Piquer Simón)  Falling into the category of "so bad it's good" films, Pieces follows a chainsaw wielding killer as he saws his way through a college campus, steal body parts along the way.  This film is the Citizen Kane of tasteless, talentless slashers.  Watch it with friends.

Pontypool (2008, Dir. Bruce McDonald) Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess, this uncommonly intelligent zombie flick changes up the formula by having the infection spread, not through blood, but through language.  Strong performances all around help flesh out this great premise and turn an interesting film into a great one.

Thirst (2010, Chan-wook Park) The director of Old Boy tries his hand at the vampire genre in this tale of a priest turned vampire.  The amazing performances of Kang-ho Song and Ok-bin Kim elevate this twisted, bloody love story into something really worth seeing.

Torso (1973, Dir. Sergio Martino) This Italian giallo slasher follows a mysterious killer with a knack for strangling American exchange students.  While the first 45 minutes are almost incomprehensible pedestrian it all comes together and the film’s final act builds more tension than most horror films can dream of creating. 

Trick ‘r Treat (2007, Dir. Michael Dougherty) This horror anthology is probably the best Halloween film since John Carpenter changed the way we think about Halloween in ‘78.  Dylan Baker, Anna Paquin, and Brian Cox all give great performances in this celebration of the holiday.  The film also introduces Sam, the Spirit of Halloween, one of the best horror villains in a long time. 

Happy Halloween.  Go watch something scary.

 

 

Zombies: Our Greatest Fears Come to Life

Zombies. The undead. The walking dead. The living challenged. Whatever you want to call them, they’re everywhere. Zombie films have been around since the beginning of cinema and are now more popular then ever. What is it about the undead that continues to fascinate and terrify audiences? Zombies are the physical representation of what we fear most: Death and the unknown. Not only do they embody the fear of what happens after death, even further than that, zombies reflect the greatest fears of each era.

 

White Zombie (1932) is given credit for being the first feature length zombie flick

 

 

The film centers around a maleficent master of voodoo in Haiti who turns a young woman trapped in a bizarre love triangle, into a member of living dead. America was experiencing an influx in immigration. The idea of strange, new people infiltrating in the country brought animosity and fear to America. White Zombie plays on that fear as an innocent American girl is put into an unbreakable trance by voodoo. The zombie in this film is your typical slow moving, non contagious zombie.

The King of Zombies (1941) is a film about a couple who crash lands at the doorstep of a Nazi Doctor who has harnessed the power of voodoo to raise the dead for his own diabolical purposes.  The America public was well aware of Germany’s cruelty and inhumane treatment of Jews during the Second World War.   Hitler was thought to have a fascination with the occult. Hitler used science in terrifying ways, such as using fertilizer products to make nerve gas.  Zombies could be produced in a terrifying rate using this mad scientist’s formula.

 

 

      Night of the Living Dead (1968) is the most famous zombie film ever produced.

This is the first time zombies are seen as hunters that could leave their environment to seek out food sources, albeit slow moving predators.  It was believe the zombies were caused by radiation given off by an exploding space probe. In the heart of the cold war, radiation given off by an atomic bomb was a very real fear for many people.  Even the Congress and Senate had a secret fallout shelter nestled in West Virginia to escape radiation from an atomic device.

 

In 2002, films like 28 Days Later and Resident Evil gave rise to the zombie apocalypse. The faster moving zombies physically represent the quickened spread of the flesh eating undead. In other words, with these guys after you, you’re screwed. These films displayed the public’s fear in gene alteration and the idea of super-viruses that could spread with such speed that escape was virtually impossible.

 

Zombies are the loss of a person’s uniqueness and humanity.  Zombies feed on other humans turning their victims into someone devoid not only of life, but individual essence.  Cannibalism is just one of the frightening elements.  In each period of time, these films capitalized on the fear that was known, but unknown so seemingly plausible.  As knowledge and experience change so evolves the zombie, the embodiment of the new fear.

 

Sources:

Film posters for ''White Zombie'' ''King of the Zombies'' and Night of the Living Dead all used in accordance to Wikimedia Commons