HopkinsCinemAddicts

It's Tough Out There for a Broad (Madison)

Well, folks, this is it. As I am posting this, the final week of classes is winding to a close; exams are being prepped for, parties are being thrown, summer plans solidified. Spring Fair has come and gone; the library is packed with students in the throes of an end-of-semester panic; your timelines are undoubtedly inundated with invitations to oddly-themed a cappella concerts. This spring--the last of my undergraduate career--has been marked by a series of bittersweet benchmarks I can’t help but notice as they pass (far too quickly) by.

 

 

Oh, I found myself thinking the other afternoon, I just skipped the last lecture of the last science course I ever plan on taking (Sorry, Professor Rawlins). And after wrapping up a class on American Women Poets, I was struck by the realization that I might never again have cause to be in room 138 in Gilman hall (and that, drafty as it is, I’ll miss it). I learned, just today, the trick to getting free drinks from the vending machines in Hodson, only to remember that I won’t have time to test out the method.

I am forced, in confronting these Lasts (and the capital L feels proper, here), to turn, also, ahead: if these are the things that I am leaving, what am I heading toward? On the one hand, the answer to this question is simple: I’ll be making my way to grad school in Iowa City (home to an amazing bookstore, plenty of cornfields, and a natural history museum which features a replica of a 10-foot-tall prehistoric sloth). Still, on the other, I have no idea what the next few years will look like.

 

For the first time, I’ll be paying for my own insurance. For the first time, I’ll be more than a two-hour drive away from my mother’s house. For the first time, I’ll be living in a place that is very unlike my hometown (a bit of relevant trivia: the population of Philadelphia is 1.3 million; in Baltimore, it is 623,000; and in Iowa City, the population hovers around a miniscule 73,000).

As I often do when I am forced to forge into unknown territory, I turned to television for answers (answers, of course, that come with a heaping side of escapist fantasy). There are plenty of movies and shows, these days, that explore what it means to be a young woman trying to figure out just what the hell is going on in the world (however you might feel about Lena Dunham, her Girls did pave the way for the moment we find ourselves in now, in which a plethora of lovably-struggling femme millennials fill our screens).

 

I’ve sampled many of them: 2 Broke Girls is a bust for me, feeling somehow stale and forced; New Girl is charming, silly, and consistently entertaining, even if its glory days are somewhat behind it; Jane the Virgin has its appeal, even if it borrows a bit too much from the telenovela to help me navigate my own, admittedly more mundane, life. On the silver screen, Frances Ha (Baumbach, 2012), Tiny Furniture (another Dunham offering, this one from 2010), and Adventureland (Mottola, 2009) are worth a watch (Legally Blonde, too, qualifies as a post-college film, in my view!)*

Still, among all these offerings, one show has become my far-and-away favorite, the one I watch over and over again, the one that makes me feel entertained, reassured, and vaguely aroused (a joke), and the one I binged (again) in preparation to leave the Johns Hopkins nest: Broad City.

 

The Comedy Central hit began as a web series in 2009, when Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, the show's creators, stars, and writers, met in New York City while taking classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade; it made its way (with the help of one Amy Poehler) onto television in 2014. It has run for three seasons, with a fourth and fifth upcoming (not soon enough, of course; season 4 isn’t scheduled to run until this August--I am in agony).

In part, my love of the show comes from my identification with Abbi Jacobson. Both she and her character (also named Abbi) grew up on the Philadelphia Main Line, ten minutes away from my childhood home. She went to the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) for her undergraduate degree, which, as most of you know, is only a very short bus ride away from the Homewood campus. She’s not good at public speaking and hopes that her career as an artist will “blow up any day now!” In my preemptively-nostalgic, pre-graduation phase, this is enough to make us soul sisters. Watching her navigate what everyone tells me is the hellscape of your young twenties gives me particular comfort, as if I’d sent a body double ahead of me to test the waters; she seems like she’s doing well--maybe I can, too. 

 

Of course, the appeal of Broad City is much deeper than hometown pride. The show is hilarious; in one episode, Ilana becomes latched onto a garbage truck after trying to wear an industrial chain as a belt; in another, the duo is kicked off of a plane when their MacGyver’d tampon is confused for a bomb. It’s also oddly sweet; it’s clear that Ilana would do anything for her best friend Abbi, including grilling potential one-night-stands about their sexual health, mothering her after the removal of her wisdom teeth, and spending hours tracking down a stolen cell phone.

 

And for all its fluffiness, the show is smart, too, with a feminist sensibility that is always present but never pedantic: the leads are two Jewish women who share a friendship that would make even the best bromance movies jealous, and who talk frankly and frequently about their active sex lives—and not in an I-had-another-steamy-affair way, in an I-just-peed-out-a-condom/I'm-looking-at-my-labia-in-a-Topshop-dressing-room/a-guy-asked-me-to-peg-him kind of way.

It matters to me, too, that Ilana is bisexual, and shows no signs of being killed off. Her liaisons with women are never fetishized, or even addressed as unusual. There is no moment of coming out, no older, predatory lesbian seducing her, and no sense that her friendship with a straight girl is strange or suspect (admittedly, one of the quirks of the pair’s friendship is Ilana’s oft professed love for Abbi—this, though, feels more like a running gag than a comment on the impossibility of friendship between queer and straight women). It is the kind of representation one seldom gets, as a bisexual woman. To see oneself rendered likably and fully on screen, not tokenized or tortured, is an opportunity that is hard to come by; even as Broad City makes me laugh, it gives me the chance to feel real, to take a delight in my queerness that can be otherwise difficult to maintain in the current political climate both at home and abroad. 

Beyond all this, Broad City has a surrealist bent that allows it to stand out amongst other shows of its ilk. The use of non-diegetic sound, fantasy sequences, and absurdist humor make each episode a surprising one: you’re never sure when a giant Bingo Bronson (a stuffed blue cartoon toy) might make an appearance, or when a piece of particularly shocking news will be accompanied by the sounds of a bomb detonating (complete with aftershock and ringing in the ears). It is equally likely that the girls will find themselves at a swanky rooftop cocktail party as in a subway car filled with Hasidic Jewish men or human fecal matter.

 

There is something about this show that defies description; it's difficult to explain why it feels like the suitable topic for my final CinemAddicts post. After all, what can I tell you I’ve learned from watching Broad City? I’m still scared to leave my friends and Baltimore behind; I’m not any closer to understanding how to do my taxes; and it’s true, it isn’t my dream to work as a cleaner in a fitness center or as a temp at a failing startup, so there isn’t much in the way of inspiration to be found in that arena. I suppose, though, I have learned some things: how to sneak an offending BM out of a toilet and into a trash shoot if the power is out and the man I’m crushing on is stopping by for a visit; that “for every ten pounds a man loses, he gains a visual inch”; a recipe for a s’more made with marijuana.

 

I can see, as I’m writing it, how insufficient this list may seem. What I did not include on it, for fear of being sentimental, but what I hope I've made clear throughout this post, is this: Broad City allows me to imagine myself, one, or two, or five years down the line, living a wonderful life. Ok, Abbi and Ilana are messy; ok, they don’t have dream jobs; ok, they live with crummy roommates. But their friendship—the most convincing and compelling female friendship on TV today, in my opinion—is not only enough to sustain the show, but to sustain them through all of the absurd drama of their not-yet-figured-out lives.

So, I’ll finish this Last—my last post on this blog—with a question. Do we have any readers in Iowa City? I’m looking for an Ilana to my Abbi. After all, I hear it’s tough out there for a broad.

 
*I’d like to recognize that this list is hugely incomplete, and (for the most part) only presents a selection of white, straight, middle-to-upper class stories. If you have any recommendations that escape these pitfalls, I’d love to tune in!

My first time with "The Bachelor" (Madison)

April is the month for trickery; national poetry month; and, according to Eliot, the cruelest month. It has always seemed a mistake, then, that Valentine’s Day doesn’t fall during these first few weeks of spring; April feels designed for love and love’s vicissitudes. Sudden storms thunder in the morning, then peter out in time for the birds to chitter at the receding sun by dinnertime. Heavy coats are tucked into storage, then brought back out again as a wintry afternoon inserts itself in a week of 60-degree weather. Cherry trees blossom so suddenly that, in a blink, whole streets are covered in a flowery snow.  

And now that I’m in my twenties, I’m even more aware of spring’s potential for romance. My happily-coupled friends spend evenings discussing their post-graduation plans to buy houses and host engagement parties. Even the advertisers on my podcasts seem in the mood for love; a chipper woman from Match.com implores me to try the site that “leads to the most second dates!”

For the terminally single, the season of the birds and the bees can start to lose its luster quickly. A truly cynical girl might, on a warm, weekday evening, even find herself turning to the truly absurd for comfort: the latest season of The Bachelor. This show is bafflingly popular among my female friends, especially the younger ones, but I myself had never seen it until I began writing this blog post.

It is hard to escape the cultural zeitgeist that is The Bachelor, it’s true; I’ve watched a close cousin of the show, I Wanna Marry Harry, which saw twenty-odd American women competing for the heart of a Prince Harry look-alike (the fact that their suitor was not actual royalty was hidden from them until the final episode), and have partaken in the parody series Burning Love. Lately, as a salvo to the show itself, I started watching Unreal, a Lifetime series (I know, but stay with me) about the dramatic lives of the producers of a Bachelor-type program.  

It feels difficult to write anything truly novel about this sort of show; everyone knows that the world of reality TV is highly contrived, oversexed, and nakedly misogynistic (or, at the very least, post-feminist, relying as it does on a divorce of individual narrative from social context). There are hundreds of blogs poking fun at the poor suckers who really think they can find true love on cable. But as I watched my first episode of The Bachelor (Nick flew one of his darlings to Finland, first class), I didn’t want to laugh. Scoff, sure—the bachelor’s self-assured smile, his stilted conversations (one romantic dinner was filled with chatter about whether or not an iron or a steamer is better for getting wrinkles out of clothes), and the very fact of his having dated up to 29 women at a single time, made the whole premise difficult to take seriously.

But I didn’t find the episode hilarious. The women all seemed so sincere, so ready to love a near stranger; an invisible hand behind the camera was clearly prompting them to confess deep feelings to their suitor, and several tearfully admitted to having fallen in love with the scruffy-but-personable Nick. Watching them I felt, uncomfortably, that I understood where they were coming from. After all, I’m trying to date, and have an intimate knowledge of how truly terrible it is (a memorable one-liner from the Tinder-sphere: “You want to be my cardio this evening? It’s cutting season.”) If you’re going to couple-up in the modern age, why not get a few months’ vacation in a mansion as well?

And, though the environment is obviously staged for the screen, the fairy-tale effect is never quite punctured; despite myself, the sweeping orchestral score and the lights of cabin windows glittering on a fjord made me quickly invested in the (thin) narrative (the Southern belle has never had an orgasm, and can’t figure out how to tell her beau). It is easy to believe that the pair are sharing an intimate exchange over dinner when one is distracted by candlelight, by the stylish fair-isle sweaters, and impeccable makeup.

This is partly what drove me to watch Unreal; one always suspects that the contestants’ every move is choreographed to maximize interest, that the editing is, at best, misleading and at worst malicious, and that the results are predetermined, and watching these suspicions unfold in a Lifetime drama is undoubtedly satisfying. One gets to feel not only that they were too clever to have been duped by reality TV, but also that they are no longer complicit in reality TV’s bullying and, therefore, can indulge in the drama without doing harm to any real people.

And it’s true, Unreal is as dramatic as any afternoon soap; 6 episodes in and the main character has already been blackmailed, her boss has nearly died of a heart attack, a contestant was outed on national TV, and a girl has jumped off of the roof. Watching the self-serving behind-the-scenes world of reality TV production is entertaining, if slightly nausea-inducing. But, still, it can’t quite compare to what I felt watching the real deal.  

Even with the glitz and the glamour attendant to The Bachelor, there is something searingly genuine about it. If the impulse to display one’s love life to an audience of millions is foreign to me, if the contestants seem chillingly like American standards of beauty personified, if the much-discussed “Fantasy Suite” smacks a bit of coercive sex, the overwhelming desire to be close to another person (any person, even a person who wears too many turtlenecks and makes you wait in the cold while he sips whiskey with the host) is so… normal. It is so much like the April afternoons I spend here, in Baltimore, downloading a dating app for the fourth time (even though I swore after I deleted it last time that I was done for good), that I couldn’t bring myself to laugh at the people on my screen. In this season of love, I’m not that unlike them. The Bachelor might have won itself another fan.

My first, and favorite, female superhero (Madison)

The superhero is having a moment. Some readers of this blog might say that this particular moment is lasting a little too long; one can’t throw a stone without hitting a spandex suited savior these days, on both the big screen and the small (e.g. The Avengers, Supergirl, Batman vs. Superman, Daredevil, to name just a few). The genre is well on its way to feeling stale, and has long been plagued by (rightful) accusations of sexism (where, where, where is our Black Widow movie?!) and racism (the whitewashing of Asian characters has been particularly relevant of late, with Doctor Strange and Ghost in the Shell emerging on the scene). And one has to wonder; does Hollywood have anything new to offer us?

Yet, for all of this, we keep tuning in (the season 1 finale of Supergirl garnered 6.1 million viewers; The Avengers grossed $1.52 billion at the box office). I’ll admit, I love a good superhero flick; if I’m cynical of Hollywood’s heroes, I’m also under their sway (I was one of the 6.1 million watching Supergirl).

So, when I found myself without anything to watch, I turned to what might be one of the foundations of today’s obsession, and the first superhero I remember from my childhood; Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy is different than the heroes we see on screen today; indeed, some might not call her a superhero at all (where is her costume? Where are the spaceships, the ray guns?) But when I was a kid, she was TV’s woman of steel. I was born too late for Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, and the more fully rendered heroines of recent media—Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones, Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch—were a long time coming. Buffy (whose show ran from 1997-2003) was part of the cultural landscape I grew up in, and made a space for complex female heroes like Jessica Jones to fill in the years following.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I was both too young and too cowardly to really follow the show when it was playing (I was only two when it premiered; I was frightened by an episode of Hey Arnold that featured a cartoon vampire). But Buffy was a presence in my life; my best friend in middle and high school watched it obsessively, and I recall many a sleepover spent with my head under the covers, cowering from the demons on screen. And when, a week ago, I asked a friend what series I should start watching she said, without hesitating, “Buffy. You’re a feminist; it’s basically required.”

Even beginning my viewing as a woman in 2017 who has watched (dare I say endured) a surfeit of superheroes, I’m captivated by Buffy Summers. In a week I’ve seen 26 episodes, much to the detriment of my sleep schedule. I have been thinking about what makes Buffy such a cultural cornerstone. It’s not the special effects (the 90’s era CGI is quaint at best, painful at worst, making the monsters less threatening than they might be), nor, admittedly, the show’s sense of pace; the episodes often introduce seemingly apocalyptic obstacles, worry over them for thirty-five minutes, then wrap them up with two minutes of hand-to-hand combat, sending their heroes back into the halls of Sunnydale High to reflect on their latest sweethearts or homework assignments. A sense of suspense is often noticeably lacking (particularly when one doesn’t have to wait a week between episodes, a fault of my own consumption rather than of Joss Whedon’s direction).

Yet there is something compelling about the fast-talking, stake yielding Buffy (played with panache by Sarah Michelle Gellar) that is worth watching, even if one has wearied of world-savers. Part of the appeal is that the stakes (hah) feel real, here, in a way that they don’t in the sanitized world of Disney’s Marvel universe or the CW’s National City. The violence, while often aimed at monsters we know to be less-than-human, is almost always shown rather than implied. The heroine even, at times, takes a perverse pleasure in causing pain (Season 2, Episode 11 sees Buffy giving a vamp a protracted beating after having walked in on her mother making out with a slimy new boyfriend; she enthusiastically slices into a 7-foot-tall praying mantis long after it is dead Season 1, Episode 4).

When a villain is killed, they are not whisked off-screen; they are stabbed to death in front of us. It’s true that they dissolve into ash, bloodless, but the camera takes a fierce joy in the moment a ghoul is staked. Each fight scene is the delaying of that gratifying moment when our heroine snaps some sign post in half and plunges it into her enemy’s chest.

The self-conscious sexualization of the protagonist also makes this series an interesting watch. Buffy has undoubtedly become a feminist icon—and Whedon intended her to be, wanting to subvert the trope of the blonde slasher-film victim—but she is also a conventionally attractive (slim, white) woman performing roundhouse kicks in high heeled boots and mini-skirts. That is, she performs normative femininity while embodying a masculinized form of power (namely, physical strength and a preternatural ability to kick ass); this is no witch, that icon of feminine power, nor is her gift one of shapeshifting or laser vision. What she does is go blow for blow in fist fights with the undead. It’s an emphatically physical power, perhaps more masculinized even than Superman’s—after all, Buffy isn’t immune to bullets, and she can’t fly. She’s super merely by merit of her grit and her ability to square up. And she does it all with a fresh coat of lip gloss to boot.

If Buffy smacks of a man’s fantasy girl it’s because, in a sense, she is. Her creator, Joss Whedon, is quoted by Patricia Pender in her book I’m Buffy and You’re History as saying, “I definitely think a woman kicking ass is extraordinarily sexy, always… if I wasn’t compelled on a very base level by that archetype I wouldn’t have created that character.” And it can’t be ignored that some of the combat has erotic undertones; Buffy is repeatedly choked, tied up, threatened with sharp teeth against her exposed, lily-white neck.

This is one of the more uncomfortable parts of watching the slayer: after all, she’s just a girl. More of a girl, even, than our modern Supergirl (today’s Kara Zor-El comes with an office job and well-furnished loft). Buffy is sixteen at the series’ beginning, a sophomore in high school. The pleasure viewers take in watching her lithe fighter’s form is complicated by the fact of her youth; and when she starts dating a 250-year-old vampire, we naturally feel a little strange about it.

Yet her girlishness is also part of the series’ appeal; Buffy’s charm lies how relatable the eponymous lead is. She isn’t the sunny, saccharine Supergirl, nor is she the brooding, tortured Batman; she’s more or less an average sixteen-year-old. She is unaccountably moody sometimes; she gets jealous when her best friend starts hanging out with someone new; she bickers with her mother. For the first time, with the advent of the Slayer, a typical teenage girl is cast as super. It is enough for Buffy to be just who she is, and occasionally kill a vamp or two. The series developed a cult following, and retains its place in the cultural lexicon, because it allows teenage girls to see themselves on screen and in power.

And I know I’m only scratching the surface; soon, I’m told, there will be lesbian witches, advice on leaving an abusive relationship, and a guide through the grieving process. But halfway through season 2, I’m already sold. If the superhero is having a moment, let it linger. And if you’re disenchanted by the current offerings, I suggest taking a look behind you; Buffy won’t disappoint.

Let the Games Begin! (Madison)

I spent the last several weeks of the summer in a small town in upstate New York called Lake Placid. Those of you who are familiar with the place know that it is hard to be there without being keenly aware of the specter of Olympic competition; the village hosted the winter games in both 1932 and 1980 (hockey fans will remember the "Miracle on Ice" from the 1980 games, where the underdog American team beat the Soviet Union in a surprising upset.) I have seen the silver cauldron where the Olympic torch burned; jogged on the clay colored track at its feet; walked long stretches of the old bobsledding run; and blanched at the top of the ski jumps that sit five minutes outside of town, and which are still used as a training facility for some of the world's best athletes today. I've done all of this not because I am a naturally athletic person, or even because I am a passionate follower of sport—in fact, the opposite is true—but rather because it is hard not to be excited by the relics of some of the greatest games on Earth. 

This year, though, I was not only thinking about the ghosts of those former, frigid Olympics; I was also, as I'm sure almost everyone was, tuning in to the summer games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The night of the opening ceremonies, I sat on the couch for nearly four hours (my computer struggling to connect to the slow, log-jammed wifi) as athletes from 206 countries--including two of our very own Blue Jays, Pilar Shimizu representing Guam and Ana Bogdanovski representing Macedonia--filed through the Maracaña Stadium to wild applause. During the course of the games, I was able to watch bits and pieces of my favorite events; swimming, diving, gymnastics, and volleyball, among others. 

It's hard to imagine a scenario more perfectly suited for the screen than the Olympic games. They have it all: high-budget camera equipment, beautiful scenery, unfathomably fit athletes, an audience of millions, and the weight of God and country to back it all up. The stakes at the games are undeniably high; taking home a medal is a matter of national pride, and losing can mean the frustration of a lifetime's worth of training. It surprised me, then, that there wasn't a glut of movies about the games. I did pick a few, though they do not by any means constitute a complete list, or even a well-rounded one (if anyone knows of a good place to watch non-Anglo Olympic films, let me know!) I started with Chariots of Fire (1981) dir. Hugh Hudson, moved on to the less critically acclaimed Stick It (2006) dir. Jessica Bendinger, followed by the charming Eddie the Eagle (2016) dir. Dexter Fletcher, and ended with the recently released Race (2016) dir. Stephen Hopkins. 

In watching these films I was interested in a few key elements: how does the gaze of the camera approach the body of the athlete, considering the games as the ultimate expression of physical perfection? How do these films handle the role of the press in Olympic competition, considering the experience of competing in the games as the experience of being watched by an audience of judges, peers, and fans? How much does the interior life of the athlete inform their sport, and how much does their national background, considering the games as being played on behalf of both the individual and their country? How have the games changed since the first modern Olympics in 1896, considering the current games as the seat of the latest in sports technology? Really, what I am asking is: how can these movies explain why we care so much about the Olympic games? Because this is somehow the greatest mystery of all, to me; what is it about this quadrennial competition that make sporting seem so noble, so much more than, well, games?

 A lot of these questions have to do with how the movies are shot. The three biopics, Chariots of Fire, Eddie the Eagle, and Race, featured male athletes (Harry Abrahams and Eric Liddell, Eddie Edwards, and Jesse Owens respectively); that is, they featured the type of body that is less often exploited onscreen than that of the female athlete (as Stick It seemed to corroborate.) I noticed, though, particularly in Hopkins' Race, a close attention to the athlete's body: in one scene, Jesse Owens (played by Stephan James) stands shirtless in the locker room, hips wrapped in a low slung white towel, as the camera leers at him from amongst a team of jeering football players; in another, as he stares down the track before his race begins, there is a slow pan up his legs before he bends to the start and fully enters the frame; often, the camera looks up at him as if perched on the ground, so that his proportions are exaggerated and he seems taller, stronger; and throughout, James glimmers with sweat, indelicate and emphatically physical. While it would be a bit of a reach to call this gaze sexual, it still seems a notable exception from most feature length films, which allow the body of their leading men to be quietly beautiful; here, the strength and grace of the male form at its physical prime is on full display.

One wonders if this close gaze is somehow permissible because the man in question is black (i.e. a more acceptable target for objectification and physical scrutiny), though to avoid being too contentious, I won't say much more about that. I will note, however, that compared to Race, the treatment of the body in Chariots of Fire seems almost chaste (though it would be unfair of me not to admit that this does seem to be in keeping with the historical period of the film, which is set in the 1920s.) The British team runs in a plain white (dare I say virginal?) costume of tee shirts and long shorts, sometimes even in suspenders, and rarely without a shirt on. Eric Liddell, the most moral character in the film, wears his brown overcoat over his running clothes until the very moment he has to kneel at the start.

Eddie the Eagle, the only film on my list that is about the winter Olympic games, treats its affable main character as something of a much-loved younger brother. Eddie (played by Taron Egerton) has an unassuming shape, with a slightly softened waist; he wears Fair Isle sweaters and neoprene ski suits, and carries a tin lunchbox. Indeed, the film uses the exposed male figure principally as a vessel for comedy; in one scene, Eddie finds himself in a sauna with the Norwegian ski jumping team, all of whom are nude. Egerton’s eyes shift nervously behind his fogging glasses as he sits swaddled in a white towel, trying to make polite conversation with men whose athletic prowess allows them an arrogance, here demonstrated by their proud nudity. Indeed, Eddie Edwards is so naïve as to be nearly asexual, standing in stark contrast to his troubled coach Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman), who compares ski jumping to climaxing during sex (again, Eddie is unsure of how to react—the film seems to celebrate Edwards in spite of his body, not because of it.)

Stick It, a young adult comedy about a juvenile-delinquent-turned-elite-gymnast, is much less hesitant to flaunt the bodies of its athletic stars; the film is a bouquet of bright, sugary color, with a heaping serving of tan, toned muscle to boot. Most of the scenes take place in the gym, where a cast of young (mostly blonde) women flip around in skin-tight leotards or sports bras. The main character, Haley, enters in a baggy tee shirt and shorts to signal an attitude of non-conformity and defiance, but as the film progresses begins tying her shirts in knots to expose her stomach, and in the end, wears a bright orange leotard with a flame streaking up the side, exiting the gym in a close-fitting white tracksuit. The exposure of these women's bodies cannot be said to be merely the appreciation of peerless athletic physique; pieces of dialogue draw attention to the gymnast's body in a sexual light, as when Haley's sidekick says of another gymnast, "You don't think she's hot? I think she's hot... she has an apple butt"; or when Haley remarks, looking at a girl kissing her boyfriend, that the only thing that girl has that the gymnasts don't is "boobs." 

 

Setting aside concerns of the sexualization of female athletes, I will say that the film rejoices in the highly visual, artistic nature of gymnastics, with a series of kaleidoscopic overlays of the athletes performing their routines, all in different colored leotards. The movie takes an evident delight in the sport, spending minute-long stretches on the women’s routines in almost every scene; here, the body becomes as important as the plot, making the movie a whirlwind of kinetic energy.

Stick It gives its audience something else that the two more critically acclaimed films (Chariots and Race) don’t; we are invited to watch a woman in the process of becoming an athlete good enough to qualify for the Olympics. That is, we see her fall, and fall hard. We see wipe outs, bruises, and ice baths, while in the other two films, training is covered in a brief montage, with an upbeat soundtrack playing in the background. Stick It does what even the real Olympics can't quite manage; it depicts the painful, difficult process, not just the fantastic, medal-worthy results. 

With so much attention being paid to Haley’s journey towards the games, it might not be surprising that Stick It places a greater emphasis on the individual than on their home country, which cannot be so easily said of Chariots of Fire and Race. Although the place of the individual is paramount to all three stories, for the men, concerns of country seem equally urgent. Their games are used, respectively, to symbolize European values being upheld in the face modernization and professionalization of sport, and to protest the racial hatred propagated by Hitler’s regime; the male athletes in these films feel a pressure to prove something about their particular in-groups, be they national, ethnic, racial, or religious. To win a race is to justify the existence of whole populations, who are either persecuted (as in the case of Owens, and the Jewish racer Abrahams) or perceive themselves as dying out (as in the case of the conservative Liddell, and the deans of Cambridge University.)

In Chariots of Fire, a priest says to the runner Eric Liddell, trying to convince him to train for the Paris Olympics, “What we need now is a muscular Christian to make people sit up and take notice”; the head of the British Olympic Committee remarks that the games gather delegates “from every civilized nation on the face of the Earth.” The implication is clear: the ability to send athletes to the Olympics signifies a certain amount of class, wealth, and prestige; the ability to best those other countries in sport signifies the supremacy of one’s cultural and national values. This can be seen in Race, too, when an American builder petitions the United States Olympic Committee to allow athletes to participate in the Berlin games on the basis that, “the American people need champions to remind them what they’re capable of.”

Sport becomes a vessel for cultural dominance as well as cultural exchange. This becomes all the more clear as technology begins to play an important role in the games; the teams with the equipment, the professional coaches, the time and resources to devote to training full-time, have the advantage on the field, as well as a stage to promote themselves to millions of viewers. While watching the Rio games I was struck, particularly during the synchronized diving, by how many times and at how many angles one saw the dive; once in real-time, then again from the side, from a bird’s eye view, in slow motion, and once from a camera placed at the bottom of the pool. This seemed especially striking in comparison to the sports technology depicted in several of these films; Eric Liddell and Jesse Owens run on dirt tracks, where they use small silver trowels to dig out footholds for themselves. Jesse Owens’ family listens to his race on the radio; Liddell and his teammate Abrahams research other athletes by studying grainy, black and white photographs of them clipped out of newspapers; even in the 1988 games depicted in Eddie the Eagle, the crowds are smaller and the race footage blurrier, and Eddie’s jumps are recorded in a ledger with a ball point pen.

Race had the difficult task of depicting the first Olympics to be televised; the ’36 games, held in Berlin, were filmed by German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who pioneered many techniques in sports cinematography. On screen, Riefenstahl (played by Carice van Houten) remarks to a controlling Goebbels that “[These may be your games] but this is my film. Without it, your games will be forgotten in a year.” This line, perhaps more than any other, feels as if it is cutting to the heart of why we care so much about the Olympics; here, there is a film being made, carefully crafted and rehearsed (Riefenstahl has Owens return to the track to recreate his record-breaking long jump so she can catch it from several angles; she zooms in on his competitor, Luz, shaking Jesse’s hand in an act of political defiance), but with the reassuring guarantee of reality behind it, the human narrative that we find so compelling.

Although what we see of the Olympics is just as crafted as any film—and just as full of product placement—there is also the undeniable body in front of us, the real person who is accomplishing something that is, for most of us, unattainable. The experience is something close to uncanny; it seems both as if anything could happen, and as if the results could never have turned out differently once they are revealed. There is real risk, with all the editing, polish, and beauty of the television and films that we see day to day, and it’s all happening in real time.

With the 2016 summer games long over, and another two years to go until we can watch the winter Olympics in PyeongChang, I will have to content myself with the occasional inspirational sports film or biopic to get me through; still, I plan on going back to Lake Placid soon to get my fix. Even when the torch goes out and the cameras leave, something miraculous lingers on those old Olympic sites. I can’t quite help but get sucked in, every time.

Reproductive Rights, Camera, Action: Abortion on the Big Screen (Madison)

Some of you may know that the Supreme Court will be hearing a landmark abortion case, Whole Women’s Health vs. Hellerstedt, this March, one that will consider the constitutionality of a Texas law imposing restrictions on abortions in that state.  I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to do a little research on this case, and lend your voice to the conversation. My own interest in it inspired me to write a post on movies featuring abortion; today’s list includes Juno (2007) dir. Jason Reitman, Vera Drake (2004) dir. Mike Leigh, Citizen Ruth (1996) dir. Alexander Payne, and Obvious Child (2014) dir. Gillian Robespierre.

It is not my intention to get too political on this site—after all, this is a film blog, and I’m here to talk to you about movies. Still, with this legal action pending, my mind has been very much on women: their bodies, their rights, and the way conversations about what they should or should not do are framed. Films provide a helpful and often critical lens with which to view our society; this, of course, includes the political issues that so sharply divide us.  

It occurred to me, watching these films, that there are two ways to make a movie about abortion: you can either make the audience cry, or make them laugh. Most of the films I watched in preparation for this post chose the latter. I wondered, why is it that these directors chose comedy to speak on such a serious topic? And what is different, cinematically, between a somber abortion film and a comedic one?

It might seem silly to even write the words “funny abortion film”; still, I can’t deny that I laughed out loud at these movies. In Obvious Child, Donna Stern, the main character, opens the movie with a joke about her panties “[looking] like they army crawled through cream cheese” by the end of the day; the punk-y receptionist at the Women Now clinic in Juno says “[these condoms] make my boyfriend’s junk smell like pie” with a deadpan sincerity; Ruth, in the eponymous Citizen Ruth, shrieks at a smiling nurse at an emergency pregnancy center “Are you people fucking deaf?! I want an abortion!”

These moments of humor are often, somewhat necessarily, uncomfortable—or at least, they deal with the realities of womanhood in a way that most movies shy away from; they are surprising simply by virtue of being presumed inappropriate. It is the candidness of these moments that makes them so funny. The women in these films speak with an almost alarming frankness that occasionally verges on un-likeableness (particularly in Citizen Ruth); it seems to me that, in this way, the women very much are the movie. That is to say, no film can successfully deal with abortion without being honest, and that honesty is almost always coming directly from the mouth of the woman whose body forms the contested political ground.

 

 

To briefly say more about the body: I noticed that the camera and its gaze had a complicated relationship with the female form in these films. In some, the women are put on display: Donna in Obvious Child dances in her underwear; in Citizen Ruth, Ruth bends over the sink as the camera pans over her bottom, landing on the thong peeking over the edge of her sweatpants. Of course, this gaze is fairly neatly subverted shortly after we are treated to it: we see the underwear Donna danced in crumpled up on a pillow, dirty now; the same night Ruth bends over the sink, she huffs spray paint and faces the audience with her mouth and chin covered in black pigment. The convention of objectifying the female form (through partial nudity, the segmenting of the body into sexualized parts, the slow pan that mimics the erotic gaze) is used, certainly, but also mocked and worked through; these films are fluent, it seems, in the cinematic technique of blockbusters, but repurpose them to tell women’s stories in a funny and revolutionary way.

On the other hand, films like Vera Drake don’t use or subvert the (normative, sexualizing) gaze of the camera at all; indeed, the main character in that film bustles around in housedresses, or else swathed in her green coat. It is made clear to us that power, for Vera Drake, does not come from anything close to nudity: in fact, one of the lowest points in the film takes place when Vera is symbolically disrobed, and asked to remove her wedding ring upon entering her jail cell. Perhaps this is one of the differences between a comedy about abortion and a drama about abortion: sex, in the former, is still on the table. The woman’s body, while the site of struggle and stress, is also a place for pleasure and levity.

It is interesting to note that the leading women in these films don’t look the way we necessarily expect our movie stars to look. One is a homeless woman, often shown onscreen with paint on her face, dazed and red nosed from getting high; another is a well worn, middle-aged, working class woman; one is unabashedly Jewish (and no, her main concern is not getting a nose job); and one, of course, is pregnant, with her belly button popping out and a 64 oz. blue slushie in her hand.

 

 

It would be unwise to ignore that these women are not necessarily part of the demographic that is deemed normatively attractive. This is not to insult the actresses, who are all beautiful; rather, I want to make the point that these movies, which aim to tell female stories, cast a wider variety of women than we see in most box office films. This is a space where the woman’s body cannot merely be a sex object; it has to be made real, seen, understood as vital to the plot, which often means it must be flawed, or at least rendered convincingly, with all its attending oddness.

I would also like to point out that these films create a unique opportunity to depict communities of women. I will take a moment here to say that the movies I watched for today are flawed in that they only represent the white, straight, cisgendered female experience; I was disappointed to see that there were so few women of color cast (indeed, I can only recall two: one, who goes unnamed in Vera Drake and appears only briefly, later referred to as a racial slur; the second, Su-Chin in Juno, is onscreen for all of thirty seconds and gives the impression of being rather stupid.) Still—and this is not to push away concerns of whitewashing, merely to say that there is a positive among the negative—the films did bring women together in convincing, moving ways.

 

 

Be it Donna climbing into her mother’s bed in tears to hear about the illegal abortion she had in the 60s; or Vanessa holding Juno’s stomach in the midst of a Midwestern mall; or Vera comforting a panicked young woman by telling her that she will be “right as rain”, it is clear that the women in these movies care for one another in an important, even radical way. They are not depicted as rivals, as is more typical in film, but as companions. The love they have for one another seems to be uniquely feminine, not by nature of their biological characteristics, but because of the deep sympathy and compassion they have for one another as people trying to make it in a world that can be at best androcentric, and at worst nakedly oppressive.

Truthfully, it is a little misleading to group these movies together and try to speak about all of them at once; even amongst the comedies there is a wide variation in style and message. This could be due to the directors; men directed three of the four films I watched for today (I’ll refrain from commenting further, and allow you to conduct your own analysis of this bit of trivia.) The fourth film, Obvious Child, directed by Gillian Robespierre, is the one that seems to me the most blatantly political of the comedies. It manages to be funny, but also informative; Donna asks if the procedure will hurt, if her friend regrets getting an abortion, how much it will cost, etc. The goal of that film, it seemed to me, was to allow abortion to appear in mainstream conversation, rather than be relegated to women’s bedrooms to be spoken of in shamed whispers.

 

 

The other comedies didn’t necessarily share that sentiment: in fact, Citizen Ruth casts an equally scathing gaze on both pro-life and pro-choice parties. Both become caricatures fighting what they call a “war”, which includes acts of elaborate costume and deception, armies of followers standing on opposite sides of a barbed wire fence, and expensive (dare I say military grade?) private transportation (see Jessica Weiss’ helicopter, Blaine Gibbons’ private jet.) That film concludes with Ruth escaping a women’s clinic through its bathroom window, walking right through a crowd that has gathered outside, ostensibly to speak with her. None of them see her, even as they shout her name and wave signs; both groups are rendered utterly ridiculous.

Juno, too, is funny without taking a firm political position. On the one hand, the women’s clinic Juno visits is a dark, dirty place with lazy employees, and Juno seems to find abortion immoral; on the other, she is able to speak freely and openly with her friends and parents about her reproductive health and planning, and the decision to have the baby then give it up for adoption is her own.

I will note one last, important detail before I conclude this post (I’m afraid I’ve gone on a bit long already); one of the greatest differences, in my opinion, between a funny abortion flick and a sad one is its relationship to place and setting. Vera Drake is shot almost entirely indoors: in bedrooms, hospital rooms, jail cells. The farthest outside we go is the tenement block. Films like Juno, Citizen Ruth, and Obvious Child, on the other hand, chose not to maintain that internal focus and brought the viewers out to face the landscape: Juno bikes under blue sky and flowering cherry trees; Donna walks through the bustle of New York city; Ruth drives down a snowy, unvariegated Midwestern plain.

 

 

The movies that refused to be sad were the movies that allowed their women out of doors and into the real world, that confronted the tradition of domesticity and broke their characters out of it. This isn’t to suggest that the women’s relationship to the outside world is uncomplicated, by any means; I merely want to bring attention to the physical space these women are allowed to inhabit.

I will leave my considerations there, for now. It is hard for me to conclude this post; to do so seems to suggest that I have said everything I wanted to say about abortion, and about the way it is pictorialized, which is not the case. Still, I can only hope that this post has encouraged at least some of you to find more: more films, more articles, more passion (and, probably, more arguments.) Abortion is something that, however uncomfortable, however political and divisive, needs to be spoken of, particularly in the weeks ahead. I hope you take a look at some of these movies; and then, I hope you take a look past them, and into the lives of real women. I think it will be an eye opening experience. 

Short, Sad, and to the Point (Madison)

With February fast approaching, it seems appropriate to write a post about that problematic behemoth of the film industry, the Oscars. I admit to being fairly new to the scene: typically, my interactions with the Academy begin and end with me Googling red carpet looks the day after the awards ceremony. This year, though, I wanted to be a little more in touch. Still, I wasn’t quite ready to dive in to all the complicated (and frankly upsetting) politics of the bigger categories like Best Film or Best Actor. I decided to start small; or rather, short. For this post I watched the 2016 nominees for Best Live Action Short Film, an emotionally taxing set of five films with casts and crews from all over the world.

 

 

The list includes Ave Maria (Palestine, France, and Germany), directed by Basil Khalil, Shok (Friend) (UK and Kosovo), directed by Jamie Donoughue, Alles Wird Gut (Everything Will Be Okay) (Germany and Austria), directed by Patrick Vollrath, Stutterer (UK), directed by Benjamin Cleary, and Day One (USA), directed by Henry Hughes. Although these films offer much-needed international perspectives, you will notice that all of the directors are men; even in less popular categories like the Short Film, the tendency of the film industry (and particularly the Academy) to prioritize primarily male voices, stories, and perspectives is readily apparent, and should be considered critically. Still, putting aside questions of identity politics (however necessary they may be), I will begin by heartily recommending that you watch these films, difficult as they are to sit through without shedding a few tears.

 

 

I have never been one to watch short films; they often don’t play in most theaters, and they can feel somehow inaccessible, made solely for the film fanatic who is particularly literate in the finer points of film technique. After all, these short movies just don’t have the space to tell long stories; out of a sort of necessity, their strength often comes from careful attention to design and cinematography. These films, though, proved me wrong. It’s true that I thought each was well shot (Shok giving its viewers a careful contrast between the beauty of the Kosovar countryside and the ugliness of state-perpetrated violence and poverty; Alles Wird Gut moving the audience skillfully from the bright lights of a fair to the cool, colorless space of an airport), each also told an essential human story with impressive precision.

Because of the brevity of these films—the longest clocked in at half an hour—every line of dialogue, every shot, had to be meaningful. There could be no wasted action. Thus, these films packed every minute with an emotional force that I don’t often see in feature length movies.

 

 

Each of the nominated films open on a scene that gives us a sense that something important is at stake, at risk, or in danger of being lost: within the first few minutes of Ave Maria we hear (but do not see) the sounds of a car crash; the camera moves outside, where we get a close-up of the head of the Virgin Marie statue, knocked off in the crash, oozing what looks like blood onto the sandy earth. Stutterer opens on the main character, Greenwood, trying to overcome his debilitating speech impediment to call the telephone company; the woman on the other end repeats, “Hello? Is anyone there?” as we watch his mouth working frantically to produce sound. The use of close-up in both cases feels particularly powerful; the emotional crux of the piece literally fills the screen (in the former, the darkly silly and accidental meeting between people of differing faiths is pictorialized in the wounded statue; in the latter, a man’s struggle to connect despite his stutter is made visual with a prolonged gaze at Greenwood’s lips.)

 

The other three films also open on a weighted scene: a speeding car almost runs over a child’s bicycle lying in the road (Shok), a man paces in front of a gated house, buzzing the doorbell over and over (Alles Wird Gut), a woman tries to operate a makeshift showerhead and a man barges in on her (Day One.) The viewer is thrown immediately into the action, waiting for what will happen next and knowing that it must happen soon. Each film becomes something of a masterpiece in tension; even those without scores, like Alles Wird Gut, evoke mood very effectively through the use of diegetic sound (especially those sounds of modernity: the whine of a motorcycle, the whoosh of a highway, the ding of a cellphone, all of which create a feeling of manic speed or stress.)

 

 

Though the films vary in lightness (ranging from an unflinching reflection on the Kosovo War to a sweet piece about a young man’s first date with his online girlfriend), none of them lack for emotional honesty. Above all, they are believable: in Stutterer, Greenwood sends flirtatious messages over Facebook (“6 months? Have I really been enduring you for that long?”); in Ave Maria, Moshe’s wife and her mother-in-law bicker constantly throughout their fifteen minute ordeal. These conversations feel like the ones we have with our own friends and families every day; thus, even as the characters’ worlds are different from our own, they never venture into the realm of film set. Because we are allowed to see these quotidian, or even goofy moments—Lea, in Alles Wird Gut, sticks her tongue out in her passport photo; in Shok, Petrit begs his mom to let his friend sleep over—we are willing to follow these characters into whatever dark places the filmmakers take them. And, almost without exception, we are taken somewhere dark.

 

 

Even in Ave Maria, a comedy set in the West Bank, there is the sense of a lingering threat despite the light, humorous tone; the Israeli family, when presented with a vehicle by the silent nuns, worries about passing the checkpoint in a car that looks “too Arab,” saying that the guards “would shoot [us] on sight.” In the end, the family transforms the “Arab” car into a Christian one, roping a neon cross on top and blaring hymns from the windows, and the threat of violence disappears in the sheer silliness of the image.

The other films, for the most part, offer no such relief. More often than not, things seem to go from bad to worse; children get shot, mothers die in childbirth, a father clings, sobbing, to his young daughter as the police try to rip his hands away. As a fellow theatergoer said, “My takeaway is that everything is definitely not going to be okay.”

Still, this level of emotional drama may be somewhat par for the course for short films like these. Shorts require far less funding than feature length films (although most of the budgets were not yet available online, Stutterer’s listed budget is a meager $7,200; a small sum, compared to movies like Brooklyn, which has a budget of roughly $10 million); this means that the filmmaker has a bit more creative freedom to do as he (or she, in other cases) pleases. With longer films, it’s hard to sustain the intense misery present in these shorter pieces: for one thing, two hours is a long time for a filmmaker to stay on one painful note; for another, the audience simply wouldn’t stand for it. With films as short as these, however, there is enough stamina to maintain a somber attitude, and less of a need for a film to be friendly to a broad audience.

Because each of these films is truly the vision of its director, they are quite different from one another. Still, if there is anything that ties these many films together, it is their searing humanity. If the material is at times familiar (the two boys in Stok make perhaps an overly likely pair, with the one being too big for his britches, and the other playing the innocent who dies in the end to teach the former a lesson; in Day One, divorcee Feda begins by proclaiming that she never wanted children, but emerges from the movie singing to a stranger’s baby with a rapturous look on her face), it is never unconvincing. Because of the elevated stakes, the fast pacing, and frankly wonderful performances (I found the child actors particularly impressive), I could forgive the things I could not understand about each film. Even those pieces that left us with an unresolved ending, as Alles Wird Gut did, felt persuasive; in fact, the fractured, brief nature of these stories mimicked life almost more effectively than a longer movie could. The form felt true to the disordered pace of life in the ‘real world’, where stories don’t always arc perfectly, and there often isn’t a discrete ending.

 

 

As I have learned from the above films, sometimes it is better to be brief, so I’ll leave you with this: the short film, though it may seem intimidating at first, is a medium well worth exploring, and the nominated films this year are especially impactful. To quote the Bard, “though [they] be but little, [they are] fierce.” You can watch the 2016 Live Action Oscar Shorts in theaters now (if you’re in Baltimore, the Charles has been showing them nightly!), or wait until February 23^rd, when they will be available online. Be sure to bring some tissues with you when you go.

On Loving Flowers, and Saying Odd Things (Madison)

As some of you may know, April is National Poetry Month (and according to T.S Eliot, the cruelest month, but that's besides the point.) In honor of the occasion, I thought I would dedicate this blog post to a few films that deal with poetry and great poets, ranging from a broadly appealing romance about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, to an examination of an old South Korean grandmother suffering from dementia. With this post, I am trying to understand how we (the 'we' represented by a filmmaker creating movies for an audience) understand poetry, what examining poetry allows a filmmaker to do, and how this literary art translates onto the big screen. 

On the list for today are Poetry (2010), directed by Lee Chang-dong; Slam (1998), directed by Marc Levin; Howl (2010), directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffry Friedman; and Bright Star (2009), directed by Jane Campion. I've tried to compile a diverse group of films; films that look at the same subject in different ways, and that might enrich my own conception of poetry and what it should do. 

I think all of these films, different as they are, are asking the same question: what is poetry? They ask it in a few ways: some, like Poetry or Bright Star, have protagonists who want to learn how to write it; Howl shows us the 1957 obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who published Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl) where witnesses are asked to define literature and literary merit; Slam considers whether poetry can act as a form of non-violent protest, or as a means of rehabilitation. There is something opaque about poetry, something that keeps an audience removed; a film must necessarily overcome that barrier between content and viewer if it is to be well received, and one way of doing so is to try to answer that one fundamental question: what is poetry?

The answer, though, is never simple. In Poetry, Mija’s daughter defines a poet as “[someone] who loves flowers and always says odd things”; another woman says, “If you have feeling, you can write poetry.” In Bright Star, John Keats, trying to teach his next door neighbor how to read and write verse, explains, “Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.” In some films, poetry is defined by its inability to be explained; an astute witness in Howl explains to the prosecutor, “Sir, you can’t transpose poetry into prose—that’s why it’s poetry.”

Even as our protagonists read it, write it, recite it to us, they are unable to pin it down. We are, instead, ushered into a sort of understanding through the use of unconventional film techniques. Howl is half animated: as James Franco reads Ginsberg’s famous piece in voiceover, we are shown cartoon scenes of “angel headed hipsters” crawling through the streets, jumping off buildings, copulating. The film switches from black and white shots of Ginsberg reading his poem in 1955, to colored scenes of an interview Ginsberg is giving, and the obscenity trial in 1957, then to these odd, bright hued cartoons playing over frenzied jazz music. It is something of a jarring switch: the literal man to the drawing, the clean lines of a black and white café to the uncanny CGI version of a world ruled by a bullheaded monster, Moloch. It doesn’t make sense; but then, that departure from literal sense is an attempt to capture what poetry is, what it means.

Even when the rupturing of reality is not quite so extreme, it is there: in Slam, in between narrative scenes, blurry, overlapped clips play, depicting things we have already seen in the film—a man getting shot, Ray running from the cops—blurring into the future, with Ray in cuffs, and into scenes that have no temporal signature at all: frames of graffiti, sad-eyed boys, crowded sidewalks. Poetry, too, makes some unusual choices. There is no soundtrack except for birdsong; we see frames filled only with glimmering water; we spend stretches of time watching an apple turning in the sunlight or an apricot fallen to the ground; in the last scene, we hear a girl who we saw in the opening drowned in the river recite a poem, we see her face the camera with a half smile before the screen goes dark; we do not know what happens to the protagonist, Mija—she leaves the film before the last five minutes, and we are never given closure. These are odd decisions, things that feel unusual, but that also fit into the landscape of the film, make sense in the artistic context.

These breaks with expectation are the filmmakers’ way of explaining to a viewer what poetry is; if it cannot be stated verbally, if Mija’s teacher cannot explain when one will find poetic inspiration, if Keats cannot tell Fanny Brawne how to become a poet (“if poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it had better not come at all”, he says during their first lesson), then it can be communicated visually. The business of poetry is breaking expectation, making the familiar seem unfamiliar—how better to do that than to disrupt the narrative flow of a film, to use the camera as a poet uses words, featuring images that might otherwise go unseen, forcing the viewer to look, to be confused, to feel something that cannot be identified even as it is familiar.

This focus that poetry allows is a wonderful tool to look at people on the margins of society; people who, like Allen Ginsberg, are gay, like Ray Joshua are black, are prisoners, like Mija are old, suffer from Alzheimer’s, like John Keats are poor, or dealing with depression. This vehicle allows us to look closely at people who might otherwise be ignored. Arm them with images, with a pen, and they speak: poetry becomes a very real force for social change as it allows the stories of marginalized writers to be shared. Poetry is a place, a cultural location that exists through change; unlike many other traditional social spaces, poetry is meant to evolve, to be altered, to tell many stories and take on many forms. It is the ideal vehicle for the ignored, as it is so amenable to change, so easy to take with you. As Ray says when offered a place in a prison gang, “No. All I need is some paper and a pen, then I can figure this out.”

Poetry also allows us to look at subjects that are otherwise uncomfortable, or ignored; sex, in particular, is addressed in surprising ways in these films about poetry. In Slam we see a woman receiving oral sex; in Poetry we watch an old woman have sex with a stroke victim; in Howl we are faced with a forest of (it makes me cringe to write this) playful penises waving in a cartoon wind. All of this is out of the ordinary: women are seldom the recipients of sexual pleasure in film; old people are portrayed as asexual; male genitalia are hidden at all costs. But in these films, the directors use poetry as a vehicle to confront these things, to look unflinchingly, even goofily, at those parts of our sexuality that make us so uncomfortable.

Mental illness too, is examined: we are familiar with the artist as a depressed figure, yet are often more comfortable ignoring mental health problems. These movies shine a spotlight on the depressed, the people who “have been half in love with easeful Death” like Keats, been forced into insane asylums and given shock therapy, like Ginsberg’s friend Solomon, have started forgetting nouns, who have become overwhelmed and confused like Mija. When looking at the biographies of poets, the presence of mental illness cannot be ignored; when looking at poets through the unflinching lens of art, mental illness cannot be left unaddressed or unexploited. 

Poetry, then, can do a lot for the marginalized, the outsiders; it may be confusing, may even seem inaccessible, but film allows us to understand visually what we might not be able to on the page. Film, too, allows us to hear poetry rather than read it; we are immersed in it, experience it unfiltered by sight, by the blankness of page margins. As we hear it we cannot look away, we can only let it wash over us. The act of hearing a poem is immersive and complete, allows us to experience a poem in a different way than we do when we see it on the page. Poetry, then, shares a special relationship with film: as it is interpreted visually, it is also delivered orally, presenting the viewer unique access to pieces that may seem alien in a book.

I’m afraid I’ve run out of space, so I will conclude with this: I have heard, as I think most people have, that poetry is dead or dying at best, that maybe a long time ago people got fired up about sonnets, but you'd be lucky if you met someone today who even knew what the word 'sonnet' meant. It was in the hope that what I've heard is wrong that I pursued films about poetry, and why I wrote about them today: poetry, if it can be a part of films like this, reaching audiences who most comfortably navigate culture through screen, is still very much alive and kicking. As poetry is adapted to film it maintains a place in our cultural landscape, and evolves to target an audience who, though they may no longer have Shakespeare or Keats or Ginsberg, have, as all humans do, a basic need for creative expression. 

 

 

Bon Appetit! Food in Film (Madison)

Growing up, I lived ten minutes away from my Pop-pop, an Italian chef who built his career in Philadelphia, working in restaurants and hospital kitchens. He wore newsboy caps and had a hatred of undercooked pasta, microwave dinners, sauce from a jar… and, well, anything he hadn’t made himself. Every Sunday, my mother, father, brother, and I would go to Pop-pop’s house for dinner; or, at least, what we called dinner, although it usually started around 3 in the afternoon. I can still remember the way his house always smelled of cooking oil, bacon fat, tomato sauce: his beige carpet had turned black after years of spills and the footsteps of dinner guests and family.

I shudder to think what Pop-pop would have said had he seen me eating lukewarm ravioli out of a can as I watched the films I want to discuss today. I’ve chosen five films that place a focus on food and cooking, ranging from light-hearted comedies to magical realist dramas, to answer the questions that brought me to this project: why do people want to watch movies about food? Why do people make them? What is so attractive about watching someone prepare a meal that you will never taste, and what is it that makes film an effective instrument with which to examine food?

The following are the films I salivated through in preparation for this post: Like Water for Chocolate (1992), directed by Alfonso Arau; Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), directed by Ang Lee; Julie and Julia (2009), directed by Nora Ephron; Romantics Anonymous (2010), directed by Jean-Pierre Améris; and The Lunchbox (2013), directed by Ritesh Batra. Each of these films is in a different language, and each (with the partial exception of Julie and Julia and Romantics Anonymous, which are both concerned with French cuisine, though the former has as much to do with American cooks as it does French) are concerned with different styles of food and take place in different cultural contexts. By discussing an international sampling of films (although it is by no means exhaustive) I am hoping to demonstrate the universality of what food signifies; although the meals and the tables at which they are eaten may change, people from all over the world want to watch films about food for similar reasons.

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So, let’s start where most great meals do: in the kitchen. A great deal of the appeal of these films is watching chefs at work: in Julie and Julia, a film about a woman making every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking,we see raspberry jam being folded into white cream, red beef patted down in paper towels and seared in an orange frying pan, a chicken perfectly browned and emerging from the oven; here we are reminded of how beautiful food is, the truly engaging and surprising ways in which food resembles art, resembles painting, how delicately and artfully each ingredient is paired to another, and the visual play between parts of a meal. 

In The Lunchbox—a film set in Mumbai about a man who accidentally receives another man’s lunch, and strikes up a relationship with his wife, Ila—we hear the sizzle of dough fried in oil, the clicking of a stove as it’s being turned on; we are invited aurally into a woman’s kitchen, hearing sounds that are familiar even to those of us who don’t cook (who, like me, don't even have an oven). Our senses are engaged in more than just a visual way; we hear the food as music and we think of how it would smell, the frying oil, the gas from the stove, the aromatic sauces and spices. We recall how food engages the entire body as we see Ila slowly stuffing peppers with rice, when we watch her eat with her hands or dip her palm into a sauce to test it. Sound serves to more fully immerse us in the musical, corporeal pursuit of cooking, reminds us that a film about food is more than a picture on a screen, it should be an experience that stimulates all of our senses. 

 

In Eat Drink Man Woman—a film set in Taipei, about an aging master chef living with his three adult daughters, all of whom are struggling to figure out what they want—we watch Mr. Chu carve warriors onto the skin of a watermelon, or break a fish’s neck and debone it so carefully that a perfect skeleton emerges, and we see the care it takes to prepare food, the precision that great cooking requires. There is something oddly life-affirming about watching a man slice tofu into millimeter thin strips, or chop a root vegetable into perfectly even segments; the kitchen is a place of control, detail, exactitude. It is beautiful to see a person work so carefully at a pursuit that is entirely nutritive, that will be shared with others, and that, although it will be eaten and digested and entirely gone soon, for the moment deserves complete attention.

 

In Romantics Anonymous Anglique, a woman with crippling social anxiety, spreads melted chocolate across a cool metal counter, and her colleague whittles a perfect Eiffel Tower out of a block of chocolate, and we understand more than just texture (another means of engaging the viewer’s bodies with a filmic experience), we understand how cooking is therapeutic, how precision in the kitchen is more than just carefulness: to Anglique, who is typically a nervous wreck, the care and exactness of her profession allow her to heal, to exert power and demonstrate competency. Cooking is more than just ‘feeding work’, more than supplying fuel for a body; its intentional nature also does the ‘emotion work’ of improving the chef’s internal condition.

In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita, a young woman from a conservative Mexian family, in love with her sister’s husband, kneels on the floor she grinds corn for a tortilla, and we see her bare shoulders, a flash of her breast, the sweat on her neck: the film is deeply erotic, and we see how cooking becomes a means for Tita to express her sensuality in a socially acceptable way. Although she lacks power and agency in her life, controlled as she is by her mother, when she cooks she is free to use her body, to be passionate; she engages with her body erotically, and cooking becomes a way to end not only literal, but also sexual hunger.

 

In all five films, among these other images and sounds, there is the perpetual billowing of steam from pots, an ethereal presence in the kitchen that reminds the viewer how ascendant the process of making a meal is. Steam is the closest any visual can get to the otherworldly: it is a literal, visual means of communicating the mystical, of indicating that something if not divine, then at least fantastic is happening.

 

And food does allow fantastic things to happen: in The Lunchbox, two strangers pass notes along with bowls of paneer and rice, and start to fall in love; as the man eats Ila’s food, his life and hers become more aligned. She swats a fly away from her face at the same moment he swats one from his; as he reads her description of a fan slowing down and stopping, the fan whirring above his head slows and stops.

  

 

Even in Julie and Julia, a fairly down-to-earth film, two women who are separated by a span of sixty years are brought together by Julie Powell’s project to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes: in the film, scenes of Julie’s modern life are woven in between scenes of Julia’s in late 1950s Paris (in one scene, a room Julie is looking at in a museum literally becomes a scene from Julia’s life, as the camera zooms in and the light changes, and Julia Child bustles into the kitchen with her husband), and Julie constantly talks about feeling Julia’s presence in the kitchen as she cooks. Although this is not precisely ghostly, there is something magical about one woman being so connected to another (who she will never meet) through her recipes.

 

Another important and related thread connecting these films is the idea that cooking is a way for women to claim power, to reassert control over their lives and become meaningful, contented people: and, although there is a part of me that wishes cooking was not the only way women in these films could prove themselves (after all, who isn’t tired of the phrase “get back in the kitchen!”), there is something empowering about them. Although cooking is seen as a feminine pursuit domestically, the professional world of food is still male-dominated: seeing women enter that space is actually quite radical and feminist.

 

Still, it should be noted that even when women aren’t entering cooking in a professional sphere, food allows them to connect to others, to express things that they are forbidden to in regular life: through the lunches Ila prepares in The Lunchbox, she connects to a man who appreciates her, and eventually gains such a feeling of self-worth that she leaves her unfaithful husband (and not for another man, but for herself!—she remains single at the end of the film); in Like Water for Chocolate Tita pours her emotions into her food, causing those who eat it to weep if she is sad, to kiss if she is feeling sexy, to throw up if she is angry: she becomes powerful in a very literal way.

 

Food, too, creates a network between women: Julie learns to cook from Julia Child, Tita learns from her nanny Nacha and cooks with her friend Chencha, Ila borrows ingredients and gets advice from her “Auntie” in the upstairs apartment: cooking connects people, connects women, in a way that empowers them, draws them together and gives them strength.

 

Food is such a meaningful part of our lives, whether our parents made us dinner, or our babysitters, or our Pop-pops did, whether we eat out every night or make mac and cheese in a microwave. It is important both as something we experience every day out of necessity, and as something we use to mark special occasions, to pass on cultural values, and to bridge distances (both personal and temporal) that might otherwise be insurmountable. Food is a lens through which to view female agency, sexual politics, romantic and filial love, and internationalism; and, most basically, it’s fun. People (or, most people I know) enjoy eating, especially when the food is good, just as people (at least, all the best people) enjoy good films. So, I invite you all to make yourself some popcorn (with extra butter!), and dig in to all of the movies in this post; I promise you, you’re in for a real treat.  

The Wonderful Worlds of Wes Anderson (Madison)

The first film I ever fell in love with was Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom. I was sixteen the summer it premiered, and watched it in a small-town movie theater in upstate New York with my cousin. The theater had been built in 1926 and hadn't grown much since then; it was small, with a screen the size of two king-sized sheets and seats upholstered in red velvet. The movie was shown on 35mm film. This was the best possible place to be introduced to a director, producer, and screenwriter with as many small quirks and fascinations as Wes Anderson.

 

Those who are familiar with Anderson's work will understand my feeling that his films are as exquisitely crafted and delicious as the confections he features in his 2014 film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. They are sweet, beautiful, and complicated; such that you enjoy them the first time you see them and then crave them again and again. 

 

In preparing for this post, I've tried to watch all of the feature length films Anderson has written and directed (with the exception of Bottle Rocket, his first film from 1996.) The list is as follows: Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Moonrise Kingdom (2012), and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Although ranking these offerings seems as unfair as trying to pick favorites among a group of best friends, I want, here, to rate Wes Anderson's films from “Must Be Watched” to “See it if You’re a Fan.”

But before I do, let’s take a moment to talk about what makes Anderson’s films so incredible and distinctive.  Although Wes Anderson often works with collaborators and cowriters, he has written, directed, and produced every single work I’ve included in this post; the final product, then, always has a couple of features that smack of Wes (warning, spoilers ahead!)

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Anderson enjoys examining transient spaces: in particular, he seems to have a fascination with trains and hotels. In Fantastic Mr. Fox, Ash and Kristofferson bond over a toy train; in The Darjeeling Limited, Jack Whitman often wears a Hotel Chevalier robe when he’s aboard the train (a two-for-one!); in The Royal Tenenbaums, Royal Tenenbaum lives in a hotel for several years and eventually becomes its elevator attendant; Bill Murray’s character in Rushmore is similarly exiled to a hotel when his marriage dissolves.

 

Settings such as these are metaphorically fraught: does the train break down? Does the hotel make it through the war intact? Can this man pay for his room, and will someone help him if he can’t? The answers to these questions have as much to do with the internal state of a character as with any literal corresponding event.

 

When you put broken people in settings that aren’t quite anywhere, you put them in a space to move, either towards resolution or destruction. These settings, then, not only reflect the unresolved nature of Anderson’s characters (who are often sad, lonely adults striving for connection, be it with family or lovers), but also push them to extremes. Darjeeling Limited, for example, goes one step beyond trying to reunite three estranged brothers; Wes Anderson does not ask, what would happen if they met up for lunch? He asks, what would happen if they all lived in one small room on a train, in a country where they did not speak the language, for several weeks? Spaces like this, trains and hotel rooms, accelerate the plot, in that they naturally lead to something else: no character that lives in a hotel simply stays there and enjoys their visit; no train embarks without a destination. These spaces are close and temporary, a powder keg that the unstable character wanders into holding a lit match.  

In the vein of explosions, I’d like to point out another facet of Anderson’s brilliance as a storyteller: Anderson, for all of the beauty and levity his work presents, never lets the viewer forget what is at stake, what is at risk, and what is in danger of being lost. His films often feature an animal companion; typically, these animals don’t live to see the second half of the film.

 

Remember Snoopy, the khaki scouts’ dog, shot through the neck in Moonrise Kingdom; Deputy Kovac’s beloved Persian cat thrown out a window in The Grand Budapest Hotel; poor Buckley in The Royal Tenenbaums, struck dead by an intoxicated Eli Cash. And if Wes chooses not to sacrifice an animal on screen, he populates his stories with dead mothers and husbands (as in Rushmore), or kills off a character (such as Ned Plimpton in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou or the cider obsessed rat in Fantastic Mr. Fox.)

Although what we are seeing on screen may be bright, filled with primary colors and quirky furniture sets, there is a darkness lurking very near to the surface. The viewer is not spared the gory realities, particularly in Anderson’s latest work: we see Snoopy bloodied on an arrow in Moonrise Kingdom, and in The Grand Budapest Hotel are treated to a view of a woman’s severed head. These gruesome moments remind us that in these films everything is at stake. The chance to reunite with a family member, to preserve a dying world of elegance, or to be with the person you love is not only that; it is a chance to live, and to make living worth something. Above all, these films are about lost people trying to come together and connect; the fear of death and of dying alone or forgotten drives these characters forward and towards each other. Forging and testing relationships, then, does have life and death consequences.

Anderson often makes the decision to emphasize the physicality of his characters, for similar reasons. When we see Peter’s long pale legs sticking out of his boxers in Darjeeling, or a flash of Laura Bishop’s breasts as she washes her hair in Moonrise Kingdom we are reminded that these characters are vulnerable and mortal.

 

Of course, Anderson does not rely solely on nudity to help the viewer see a character as a body: the subdued performances of many of his characters (the straight faced Suzy Bishop, for example) and the minimal style of dialogue focuses our attention on the actors as people with bodies; we see their clothes, their hair, their heavy eye makeup as clues to their interiors. Everything that we see tells us about the character. Wes Anderson is nothing if not an expert at visual storytelling.

This brings me to what most people associate with Mr. Anderson’s films: bright, beautiful colors and exquisite set design. He fills his worlds with fantastic, quirky objects (the mounted head of a javelina, a pair of antique binoculars, a pendant with two blue keys printed on it) so that his stories become rich visual experiences. He plays with balance, using close up camera shots to establish symmetry; but then, you notice, the character he has focused on has one black eye, and the balance that was so carefully established is violated. Anderson gives us a tight shot of a girl’s face as she reads a book aloud, and then zooms out until the scene is a diorama with improbable paper dolls in place of the actors. One never quite knows what to expect when watching Anderson’s films; one only knows that it will be beautiful and unusual, and that one will want their wedding to look exactly like it. 

 

Another vital part of this visual experience is the quiet focus on scene and setting; each film is set in a different world, and Anderson makes sure to show to viewer every inch of it. We see the pink mountains of Zubrowka, the expansive forests of New Penzance, the multi-storied Tenenbaum house on Archer Avenue; the setting is so vital to the film that it comes close to being a character itself. These places are so believable, while at the same time being ever so slightly off, that one feels as if the worlds of Anderson’s films are just like ours, except that there, the whimsical and improbable can and will happen. The faux historical aspects of these places help us believe in the worlds just as we suspend our disbelief over what happens in them.

I will quickly mention (as I am running out of room) the meta-fictive aspect of many of Anderson’s films: often there is a narrator, a play within the film, or a sectioning of the film into parts or chapters. We are reminded, in watching them, of our favorite books, the ones we read over and over as children until the pages were stained with thumbprints and the corners had been torn.

 

As I’ve reached my 1500 word limit, I must present to you my ranking of Anderson’s films, and leave the discussion of music in his film for another time. Here it is, then, a list of Anderson’s films in order from “Must Be Watched” to “See it if You’re a Fan”:

1. The Royal Tenenbaums

2. Moonrise Kingdom

3. The Grand Budapest Hotel

4. Fantastic Mr. Fox

5. The Darjeeling Limited

6. Rushmore

7. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

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“For my dearest darling, treasured, cherished [Wes], whom I worship. With respect, adoration, admiration, kisses, gratitude, best wishes, and love from [M] to [W].”

Zero’s letter, slightly changed, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)