HopkinsCinemAddicts

Mon Oncle (1958): Dirty Freedom and Shiny Constraint in a Shifting City Landscape

Jacques Tati's film Mon Oncle opens with credits designed as street signs positioned against a construction site, a crane in front of a white high-rise, a Paris so new it's still being built. The city is in the process of modernization. After the opening credit, the film cuts to the city’s old neighborhood consisting of crumbling stone buildings and narrow pathways, juxtaposing the new Paris with the old one. A few street dogs appear in the scene. The camera follows the movement of the dogs traveling from the old neighborhood to the new suburb until they stop in front of a villa of pure shapes and clean lines locked behind an iron gate. One dog crawls into the villa through a hole in the gate while the rest watch a woman, Mme. Arpel, carry it into the house with one hand, almost dropping it to the ground, visibly disgusted by its dirt.

Dog. Flickr, by gildas_f (2009).

The iron gate both physically and metaphorically separates house and inhabitants from the lower end. Outside the villa, the dogs run around freely and enjoy a diversified city landscape, whether impoverished or vibrant. As they reach the street corner, they stop to rummage through the trashcans. The camera, mimicking the frankness of such curiosity, shows a close-up shot of the Arpels’ dog getting a taste of an open can, unveiling the unfiltered delight of the primal instinct. This is something it cannot enjoy in the villa where the whooshing of the vacuum is as offbeat as the fish fountain in the garden. In fact, when Mon Oncle Monsieur Hulot first appears in the film, he wanders the flea market, with the head of a dead fish popping out of his tote. A dog of a food stall bares his teeth to the fish head, as if protesting against the controlling Arpels for their treatment of its peer. And it is in this space outside the villa can we see such lively interaction, which extends beyond human beings and involves the interplay between the living and the inanimate.

Hulot is like the dogs, from his estrangement from his sister Mme. Arpel and her husband to his love of the dirty freedom. He picks up his nine-year-old nephew, Gérard, from school and takes him back to the villa. Yet, halfway through the S-shaped path in the garden, he stops, watches Gérard get into the house, turns around, and leaves. When Mme. Arpel asks, “Are you not coming in?” Hulot doesn’t even bother answering. He simply waves his umbrella in the air gesturing an obvious no, not interested in this seemingly shiny lifestyle. Nor is he interested in the office work. When his brother-in-law tries to get him a job, in an effort to get him out of town and away from Gérard who adores him and is influenced by his nonconforming ways, he botches the job interview, removing his ill-fitting shoes to empty out the sand. He continues to bumble around when M. Arpel offers him a position in his own factory. Meanwhile, Mme. Arpel decides what the disordered and disruptive Hulot needs is a mate.

Replica of Villa Arpel at the Cent Quatre in Paris. Flickr, by Clem (2010).

Perhaps the most hilarious scene occurs when her matchmaking at the villa goes awry, leading to the eventual clash between the two battling forces: dirty freedom versus shiny constraint. Already disconcerted by the M. Arpel’s sudden job offering, Hulot is introduced to a neighbor by Mme. Arpel who hands him a modern gadget, a white stick designed to hold the drinks. “Stick this in the ground. Very practical,” said Mme. Arpel. However, it doesn’t stand, so Hulot has to push it into the sand farther from them while coughing from the smoke that the neighbor blows. It is then the accident occurs: the water stops flowing from the fish fountain and starts coming out from the hole created by the stick. Finally, the very product designed for this high-end life threatens its meticulously maintained orderliness. But the neighbor is still unaware of the scene and goes on rambling on how exceptional M. Arpel and Mme. Arpel are. Only Pichard, who works for M. Arpel, offers to fix the leak while the others move along the inconveniently paved pathway with their supplies, still engaging in ineffective exchange. Fortunately, Pichard, now covered in dirt, appears from the crack, successfully fixing the fountain. But when Mme. Arpel turns on the water, the fish fountain splashes mud all over the place until the water gradually becomes clean again. Hulot, also soaked and dirty, has already gone to the top of the house, and with the help of Gérard, Hulot drops more dirt to the ground, a more outright encroachment on the villa’s constrained orderliness. The villa is now taken over by rawness in a literal sense, ultimately celebrating the triumph of genuineness over affectation in the anxiety of transformation and modernization.

The Contaminated Host -- Boon Joon-ho's The Host

When we think about a parasite, we treat it as a harmful organism. But what about the host?

The definition of the host is “an animal or plant on which a parasite or commensal organism lives.” The film The Host (2006, dir. Boon Joon-ho) tells the story of the protagonist Park Gang-du and his family fighting with a monster in the Han River. The monster was created by the toxic chemicals that an American military pathologist commanded his Korean assistant to dump, and the film discusses the culpability of the host, which allows the parasite to thrive.

The protagonist Park Gang-du’s daughter, Hyun-seo, was captured by the monster as he accidentally saved another girl instead of his daughter when fighting with the monster. Then, Gang-du and his family, along with the families of other victims, gather in a basketball court, which the government uses as a refuge for the victims’ families. Each family forms a small circle and sits on the floor, crying and grieving for their lost ones. Behind them is a giant wall of portraits of the victims, but the nonstop camera flashes keep interrupting the last moment between the deceased and their families. While Gang-du and his family grieve in the court, an officer in a high-saturated, yellow full-protected suit with a disinfectant face mask enters the room. The officer’s suit is extremely noticeable under the blue tone and the ragged shirts among the victims’ families, and his power is immediately established as he is the only one standing, physically above everyone else in the frame. However, his appearance doesn’t get anyone’s attention until he slips and falls on the floor. It is also worth noting that the officer’s protective suit suggests the potential virus that the monster might spread, but the government only protects the officer instead of the people in the room. Within a few seconds, the film diminishes the power of this government representative, showing his incompetence during a catastrophe.

Then, the officer asks everyone to report if they were near Han River during the attack, threatening that their families will be affected if they return home. Albeit all of them are the victims’ families, whom the government should protect and comfort, they follow the instructions without hesitation. The room is completely silent, with only the officer speaking, presenting this world of silent people under the absolute control of the government instead of receiving any help. Then, Gang-du’s brother, Hae-il, an unemployed college graduate who is a former political activist, stands up and questions the officer to explain the attack, which is the first and only opposing voice in the room. When Hae-il speakers to the officer, the camera captures the entire wall of the pictures of the victims right behind him and on his shoulder and head level in a long shot; the camera crops the people sitting on the floor with only their heads in the frame, below Hae-il’s knee level. This shot forms a great metaphor that only the deceased people have Hae-il’s back, supporting the only one who speaks a different voice with the government, and the rest of the people just accept their deprived right to know. The blocked information is further revealed when the officer tries to respond to Hae-il by turning on the news on the TV, but none of the TV channels is broadcasting the monster, as if not announcing the monster to the public will erase its existence. Before more people start questioning the situation, a team of officers in identical protective suits rush into the room, spraying disinfecting chemicals without providing any face covering to the victims’ families, treating them like they are also lifeless. The fog formed by the chemicals both blocks the people’s sight and obscures their knowledge of the situation, further revealing the irresponsible and dehumanizing nature of the South Korean government in the film. As the host of this land, Korea shows no mercy to its people and provides this perfect condition to be occupied and controlled by an external parasite.

Soon, Gang-du is under extreme monitoring once he admits that he was in contact with the monster. Gang-du is surrounded by numerous doctors that investigate potential viruses in his body. The camera captures two doctors putting their masks and protective glasses on and turning on the screens to show Gang-du’s brain in a hurry when they see an American researcher walk in, pretending to work for the country's security only in front of the foreign force. The American researcher starts by comforting Gang-du with a different attitude from the Korean representatives, presenting an illusion of the arrival of a savior. But the camera captures their close-ups from a low angle, planting the pressure silently with the cinematography. And their intention is soon revealed when the American researcher tells the translator that there is no virus behind Gang-du’s back. However, Gang-du overhears and understands when the American researcher says “no virus” in his sentence, confirming the dehumanizing and compulsive actions by both the parasite and the host. What is more ironic is that Gang-du, an uneducated man, understands these English words because around 30% of the Korean language is originated from English, and the foreign parasite has been deep in the host’s culture. This scene juxtaposes the host and parasite relationship between the Korean and American governments, which the host is being cheated by the peaceful illusion that the parasite brings without understanding its actual intention. The combination of an ignorant host and an intruding parasite becomes the actual monster that harms Gang-du and other innocent people on the land.

Albeit the film starts with the monster killing and intruding on the country, it explicitly criticizes how the American force takes control over the South Korean government in Korea. When the parasite is the active disrupting force, the host is never inculpable of its blind, incompetent, and indifferent nature. In the end, Gang-du uses his foot to turn off the TV which broadcasts the confession and explanation of both the Korean and American governments on the nonexisting virus. Instead of listening to the fabricated news from the host and parasite, Gang-du grabs his gun, stares into the dark, and protects his uncontaminated mind and body to host his life.

 

 

 

Sundown: Reflections (The End)

Before I knew it, the last day of filming had arrived. At times it felt like we were so far away from the finish line, but in just seven days, there we were. On this last day, most of our scenes were going to be shot outside, so we prepped equipment and blocked with actors for a few hours while waiting for the lighting conditions to change. There were just two actors left to wrap on before the shoot was over, so I could spend more time with each of them during our rehearsals, honing the performances I wanted from each of them. Our last shot of the night—and thus, the final shot of our production—was a labor of love from everyone. We spent the last few hours figuring out how to light and shoot the main character riding his bike outside after dark. One tungsten light, a makeshift camera car rig, and a lot of failed runs later, we finally arrived at (a very sleepy) “that’s a wrap!” It was also my AC, Isabel’s, birthday, so we went inside and had surprise cupcakes while everyone packed up to go home for the last time. I was excited to wrap up production and close out this chapter of Sundown. However, the end of production also meant the end of crew bonding, countless inside jokes, shared midnight delirium and getting the chance to create.

 

Aug. 27 - Car rig for a mobile shot

 

As wild, spontaneous, and downright exhausting as this experience was, I’m grateful for all that I was able to gain from the highs and lows of these past six months. By no means was this a perfect project, nor is Sundown a perfect story. Regardless, the experience I gained through all the writing, revising, scheduling, shooting, and reflecting upon Sundown was invaluable. With each mistake came a lesson learned for the future, and with each success came more motivation to keep pushing forward. My final thoughts regarding my experiences are as follows:

Director-Actor Relationships

I have never worked with non-student actors, especially across a longer production time across multiple locations. Sundown included a college professor, my cousin, a novice actor, and three experienced actors. Regardless of experience level, spending ample time connecting with my cast was key to establishing a mutual creative understanding of the project and each other. Working with a skill-diverse cast of six in these circumstances pushed me beyond my comfort zone in ways that I’m extremely grateful for. My actors, complete strangers, were willing to believe in me, and I had to do the same for everything to work.

 

Sneak peek :)

 

Technical Approaches

The choice to film just three months after getting the grant is one that I don’t regret, but my approaches to the process left much to be desired. Throughout the problems that arose—last-minute scheduling changes, casting stress, uncertainty—a common theme was role delegation. I’ve learned to better trust others on my crew with creative responsibilities regarding Sundown. It’s hard to relinquish full control of something that feels so precious, even though it's for the betterment of the project and myself. I partly missed out on the joys of having a talented, knowledgeable crew by not leveraging their expertise in places I should have. One such misgiving is not working with my camera crew to review dailies and having a set process of looking over the footage we shot, leading to increased feelings of anxiety during editing. No production is without its hiccups (or disasters); still, many of my anxieties (and much of my exhaustion) during production could have been mitigated by trusting myself to trust others.

 

Aug. 27 - Mini crew photo!

 

Sundown & Me

Approaching this project, I thought back to my time on Return 0;, another Studio North grant project I had the pleasure of working on as a rising sophomore. Reflecting on my time on that set, I felt so beyond my depth; everyone else seemed so knowledgeable while I was only starting my college film journey. Flash forward to one year later, and I’m exactly where I thought I was so far away from. This accomplishment didn’t negate the very inevitable imposter syndrome that arose multiple times throughout the process, which I recently spent the past ten weeks reflecting upon in my blog posts. If I didn’t constantly question my work, if I didn’t try to always improve upon myself, then I wouldn’t be an artist. Surviving the creative process and pushing through challenges led to me learning these hard truths. I want to continue creating work that feels personal to me, but work that also scares the living daylight out of me to create, just like Sundown. I want to pursue new projects that challenge my skills and urge me to improve and be greater in every way. I want to and will continue creating, succeeding, and failing. I’ve learned that I need to be less afraid of failing and failing wonderfully, failing and knowing that I’ll always try again. In the end, I’m glad I took a huge chance on myself with Sundown, my silly little short film.

Another sneak peek :)

Currently, we’re three months removed from filming and moving into the early stages of post-production. All that’s left is for me to say: thank you. Thank you to my wonderful cast and crew, my chosen family, for sticking with me throughout everything. To my professors and advisors, who gave me invaluable advice during each stage of production. To Studio North for giving me the creative means to embark on this journey in the first place. The next few months promise long hours spent editing and promoting the film. It also promises me moments spent reminiscing about our shoot through notes, names, places, and objects scattered about my digital and physical spaces; reminders of all the memories made. While the sun is beginning to set on this project, I’m eager to give rise to a new creative endeavor, the dawn of a new era. 

The Child in Cell - Lee Hwan-kyung's Miracle in Cell No.7

What would a prison be like if there are children in the cell?

The film Miracle in Cell No.7 (2013, dir. Lee Hwan-kyung) tells the story of Yong-gu and his six-year-old daughter Ye-sung’s experience in a prison cell with other criminals. Yong-gu is mentally disabled with only the intelligence of a six-year-old, and he is falsely accused of rape and murder of the police commissioner’s daughter. Although Yong-gu is charged with death penalty, he treats the desperate cell as a friendly environment as he used to do and saves the prison gang leader Yang-ho’s life when the prisoners in another cell attack Yang-ho. As a return, Yang-ho and other cellmates plan to sneak Yong-gu’s daughter into the cell for their reunion.

The first shot when Ye-sung arrives at the cell is the prisoners ripping off the tape of a large snack box. The aerial shot of the box fills the entire frame, and when it first opens, only her cloth is visible. When the camera pushes backwards, Ye-sung’s entire body is revealed. She lies as an infant, tightly confined in the box, and then sits up as a newborn. Ye-sung’s arrival is portrayed as the unboxing of a gift delivered in the cell, and Ye-sung indeed functions as a gift which brings the prisoners a new life in the cold, hopeless, and entrapped cell. When Yang-ho sees Ye-sung, he mispronounces her name as “Ye-su,” which means “Jesus” in Korean. This subtle line plants the idea that Ye-sung is the savior of the cell, gathering the prisoners and awakening their kindness beneath the crime. Then, Ye-sung sees her dad, but she is still in the box, like how Yong-gu is trapped in the cell. Yong-gu crawls to Ye-sung like a toddler, hugging her and taking her out of the box. Although both are confined in a small space, the camera follows his movement, presenting love’s power to break the claustrophobia in jail. It is also worth noting that the rest of the box is filled with bread and milk boxes, suggesting that Ye-sung uses the space they use to deliver food. Giving up the space for food to sneak Ye-sung in for a brief reunion with Yong-gu, the cell shows the first miracle that love and friendship outweigh the luxurious snacks for the prisoners, whom got caught in the jail because they broke the law for their self-interests.

Inspired by Ye-sung’s drawing of a hot air balloon, the prisoners decided to help Yong-gu escape the cell the day before his execution to avoid his death penalty, which is the day of the prison’s Christmas concert. Ye-sung performs with other kids, and each of them holds hands with a prisoner. Although the kids are surrounded by prisoners, there is no handcuff on the prisoners nor weapon on the prison guards. All we can see is the happiness on everyone’s face. The prisoners are in orange uniforms, the kids are wearing red ties, and the shot is layered with a warm filter, maximizing the feeling of warmth in the cold jail. Yong-gu’s cellmates clear a way for them to get into the hot air balloon among all other prisoners and release the rope to let it fly. All prisoners, including those that are their opponents, assist Yong-gu and Ye-sung to be the only people on the hot air balloon selflessly. None of them tries to take advantage of this possibility to escape, and all of them fight with the guards to ensure Yong-gu can leave. And when they are fighting, Ye-sung says that “everyone is dancing,” still perceiving the dangerous world in the most innocent way that only children have, further proving that the kindness in a child’s mind is what touches all the criminals. However, the fairy tale ends when the wire gate traps the rope. Unlike Yong-gu’s desperate cellmates, he appreciates the view with Ye-sung on the hot air balloon. The kids’ mindset filters the negative ideas, viewing this as a peaceful moment of reunion. The dreadful, dirty, hopeless prison traps the adults physically and mentally, but it can't trap the love of a father and a daughter and their purist love of the world. When the extreme long shot of Yong-gu and Ye-sung appreciating the sunset in the hot air balloon cuts to Ye-sung’s drawing of a hot air balloon above a castle in the cell, juxtaposes the world in and out of the cell. The warm and saturated colors of her painting cover the cold and plain wall, hiding the brutal reality with innocence and imagination. They failed to make Yong-gu escape from the cell, and Yong-gu's death penalty comes the next day, but he accepts his death peacefully.

Some critics view the plot of escaping the jail with a hot air balloon as highly inauthentic and overdramatic, but if we view this from a six-year-old kid’s perspective, it is just a beautiful resolution of a story. In a corrupted world that charges innocent people, a little fairy tale is the only comfort for other people in the dark. In the end, Ye-sung and Yong-gu’s cellmates, now living an ordinary life after their prison terms 20 years after Yong-gu's death, prove Yong-gu’s innocence at the court. There was no miracle when a six-year-old and a room of prisoners were trying to save Yong-gu’s life, and Yong-gu's death after Chrismas eve is irreversible. However, it is a miracle that Yong-gu and Ye-sung filled the cramped cell with love, support, and justice.

Sundown: Evening (Day Five)

After the roughest day in production, we had another break day. As always, I reflected on what happened the previous day and found silver linings. The day wasn’t all bad; the morning scene was successful, which featured Johns Hopkins’ own Dr. Jamie Young as our “psychiatrist” character. Furthermore, I was determined not to let one bad day of shooting ruin my energy for the rest of the shoot. I was especially excited for our final days as we planned to shoot all the scenes that were part of the original shorter script. The scenes that started it all.

The break was primarily used to take photos of my actors for “family photo” production design in the final location of the shoot, the main character’s childhood home. Here, I also got to talk more with my main actors and understand how they truly felt about the project—they were having a good time! Taking a relaxed moment to connect with my actors was vital for me and them to understand each other better, director to actor, and person to person. After the break day and a few conversations with my cast and crew, my attitude toward the remaining portion of the shoot improved. In my reflections, I understood (and continue to understand) that my mistakes and regrets about the film were lessons to learn from going forward.

Our final location was held at my paternal grandmother’s Baltimore apartment. She graciously let us invade her space for nearly twelve hours at a time, four days straight. The first day was focused on shooting the very first scene in the film, the opening conversation between the main character and his mother. Watching everything come together—the production design, the performance—I felt that my original artistic vision was genuinely coming to fruition. Later that night, we wrapped on one of my main actors. Directing him (and others) was a great push outside my comfort zone in working with non-student actors and adapting to various acting experience levels. Most importantly, my experience taught me many lessons in how to do what a good director does best: know what they want and how to get it.

Aug. 24 - “Young Mikey” and his mother

We began our fifth shooting day a bit later to get closer to the time of day we needed. We primarily focused on external shots that day, prompting us to move quickly with the ever-changing light. This day brought an obvious issue to my attention; the period my entire film centers around (sunset, or more aptly, sundown) lasts for a very short time. There was confusion on my part about what the lighting conditions would be at certain times and how long those conditions would last. As a result, we had to postpone filming one scene for over an hour since the reflection of the light outside at the story-accurate time of day was too strong. My Script Supervisor, Devin Andrada, was not happy with me regarding the continuity; but again, these are lessons learned for the future. Despite the issues, this shot was where my crew (specifically my camera and lighting team!) got to show off their skills with the setup and execution. Also, while waiting to shoot this scene, we got the quintessential sundown shot (not really, it was pre-sundown, early evening, but close enough).

Aug. 25 - Crew setting up for the window shot

The most exciting part of the day was starting work with my “Creature” actor for our one-shot scene. Here, the main character’s mother gets caught by the Creature, which we wanted to be able to execute creatively through a one-shot. Going through the prep for this was a challenge: clearing space for movement, blocking, framing, sound, and more. However, with each dry run and each take, the work began to pay off. We did about four or five runs of this scene, each with unique elements that could work well in the final film. This was our last shot of the night, which ended with us squealing over a take that worked, a shared success amongst the entire crew. More than any day before, I felt what I had been working to feel throughout the previous shoot days: a genuine sense of accomplishment that was validated by others’ enthusiasm.

Aug. 26 - Checking the front door, featuring my Sound Mixer, NIls

This sense of accomplishment carried me into the second-to-last day of production. The entire day was dedicated to the scene where the main character first encounters the Creature. The scene that started it all. We were staring down the barrel of an 8-hour day without much time for breaks; if we weren’t shooting, we were rehearsing, setting up for the next shot, or breaking down the previous one. I expected to be more stressed this day than on any of the others. I had anticipated it for so long. However, I felt more level-headed that day than I had felt on all the other days. I loved moving from shot to shot, setup to setup, as seamlessly as we did. The day ended with another one-shot where the main character meets the Creature for the first time. After 8 hours of work, the most significant part of our film was complete. I returned home well past midnight but felt more accomplished than ever. After three months of intense preparation and six days of shooting later, 80% of my short film was under my belt.

By this time, there was just one day left in our schedule. Approaching the end of production after an entire summer’s worth of work and anticipation was a bittersweet denouement. While I was eager to stop harboring self-doubts, finally get some rest, and generally move on, I also knew I would miss this experience for everything that it was. Sundown was coming to an end, and it was almost time for us to say goodbye.

Sundown: Morning (Day One)

When I awoke on the first morning of production, time felt unreal. It was a Friday, but it felt like a Monday. Day One. The beginning of what I had worked so hard to pull together over the past three months. I stayed up late to ensure everything was in order—printing scripts, shooting schedules, call sheets, everything. Soon, it was time for action.

Aug. 19: Late-night printing scripts. V4 with edits.

On day one, our call time was 9:00am at the Film Centre. Once I arrived, I met with my other leading actor (the adult version of my first actor), convened with my crew, and set prep into motion. Watching everything come together—camera setup, production design, hair and makeup, last-minute rehearsals—I was moving through my disbelief that something I had worked on tirelessly was coming to life. Meeting my actors was the biggest example of this; I loved finally connecting with my cast in person, going over lines, and feeling the energy they would bring their characters. I was not as nervous as I thought I would be stepping into the director role. I had my worries, sure, but I felt a natural ease in addressing everyone on set and commanding attention (in a non-intimidating way), mainly because I was given space to do so by my cast and crew. They trusted me, which was all I could ask for.

Back to reality—we needed to shoot! We began the day about 30 minutes behind schedule after arriving a bit late, so we worked quickly to set up a “therapist office” in the faculty and staff kitchen area. Once it was “all systems go,” pressing the record button, once to roll, once more to cut, was a transition past the point of no return—the first take, evidence that the film now existed in some way. Of course, I was then super particular about redoing the shot multiple times to make it “perfect” (whatever that meant). Already behind schedule, I was encouraged by my crew (particularly my Assistant Director, Mia DeAngelo) to move on, so we did. This scene, which exists about halfway through the film, had many elements: dialogue, multiple angles of said dialogue, lighting challenges, and more. It was the perfect way to test set dynamics and my directing style for the rest of the production.

Aug. 19: Our first scene in the “therapist office.”

After filming this scene, we had a much-needed lunch break while moving locations to shoot the last scene of the day and the movie’s final scene. This scene posed some challenges, considering how crucial it was to look and feel right. Even after messing around with lighting setup, character action, and camera framing, I’m not sure that the scene ended up where it needed to be. The instance of this feeling was, I soon learned, the first of many. Nonetheless, we wrapped in the early evening, saying goodbye to our supporting actress and moving equipment to our following shooting location before dispersing to our homes for the evening. The first night back set a dangerous precedent for production: wake up around 8am, go to set for no less than 8 hours, come home to work on production documents, and attempt sleep at 2am. This was my night, every night, without fail.

On day two, we were at my Assistant Camera’s house to shoot with my main actor at his “adult apartment.” We got to have fun shooting “nighttime” scenes in broad daylight, dirtying up a bedroom, and hiding our sound mixer in the shower for a bathroom scene. I originally planned to be in the space for two days, but I figured we could achieve everything in one very long day. However, we ran over schedule. I had to decide whether to keep people past wrap time for an hour or more or make sacrifices. Ultimately, I cut a relatively insignificant scene from the film, allowing us to finish on time.

Aug. 20: Day two, location two; bathroom of “adult apartment.”

With the extra day in our schedule, I held a production meeting with my crew to discuss plans for one of the most crucial scenes in the film: the climax, Scene 20. How painfully ironic that the climax of my film was the height of my experience on set-- for all the wrong reasons. First and foremost, this was the busiest day on set. Nearly all my cast and crew were present, totaling about 21 people on set throughout the day reporting to me. Second, this scene essentially functions as a set piece, requiring a lot of blocking and equipment prep beforehand. Even after 2 hours of rehearsal and my crew put in their best efforts to creatively light and shoot the scene, I came away from it feeling utterly defeated. I felt a painful shame as most of my cast and crew watched me fail to extract the performance I wanted. The imposter syndrome I had worked hard to stave off in the middle of the summer rushed back in the worst way.

Aug. 21: A camera/dolly blocking diagram for Scene 20.

Half of the film had been shot at this point, and I was disappointed with the most significant part of it. This was the culmination of my biggest failure in approaching Sundown: inadequate preparation. Even then, I’m not convinced that the failure wasn’t due in part to an unclear story, reflecting deeper insecurities about my project. Returning home, I felt a greater shame as I returned to my destructive routine of finalizing production documents the night before we shot. I spiraled into an identity crisis, ending my night seriously reevaluating my future in the film industry. This was my lowest point during production. However, I had no choice but to continue. As long as my cast and crew still trusted me to direct, I knew I had the support I needed to see the project through thick and thin. It was all I needed.

The Mountain in the Sea: Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave (2022)

Numerous flashlights shine in different directions from the bottom of a dark mountain. The film cuts to an aerial wide shot of an old man’s dead body. He lies upside down on a giant rock, like a floating dead fish in the ocean. None of his belongings are around him; even though he only takes a small portion of the frame, his red hiking outfit makes him eye-catching among the police officers and forensics in uniforms. This unnatural death in the mountain opens Park Chan-wook’s film, Decision to Leave (2022).

The dead man is the main character Seo-rae’s husband, and detective Hae-jun is investigating the case. As a young Chinese woman who moved to Korea because of the murder of her mother, Seo-rae becomes the primary suspect, and she is the murderer of her husband indeed. When Hae-jun questions her in the interrogation room, the camera catches them from the side. Their bodies and reflections in the mirror equally split the screen, and their heights match almost perfectly. Albeit it is the first encounter between a detective and a suspect, a man and a woman, their power dynamic is stable and balanced. The focus is on both of their bodies, blurring their reflections in the mirror. Then, Seo-rae quotes the Chinese philosopher Confucius’s saying that “the benevolent likes the mountain, and the wise likes the water.” When she adds, “I’m not the benevolent. I like the sea,” the focus is on Seo-rae’s body and Hae-jun’s reflection in the mirror, forming a perfect symmetrical mix of their identities. The cinematography projects the duality of both Seo-rae and Hae-jun. Seo-rae is an attractive and vulnerable widow, but she also displays her dangerousness and brutality to Hae-jun to seduce him. Hae-jun, who is supposed to be a logical detective, agrees with Seo-rae’s reasoning about mountain and sea, suggesting his hidden desire of risk is projected by Seo-rae, building an invisible connection with her. Then, the camera racks focus on Seo-rae’s reflection in the mirror and Hae-jun’s body in reality. The change in focus seems like separating them, but indeed suggesting their hidden link is like how the water reflects the mountain and projects a distorted image. In the confined interrogation room, their dualities are like twins, echoing their similarities and building this fated but unjustified love. Seo-rae displays the dangerous part that Hae-jun is hiding as a detective, and Hae-jun shows the security that Seo-rae needs in her heart.

The mountain is never about benevolent to Seo-rae. After Hae-jun knows that Seo-rae killed her husband from the mountain and poisoned her mother, Seo-rae asks Hae-jun to spray her mother’s bone ashes from the mountain. At the mountain cliff, Seo-rae wears a headlamp and adjusts the light to directly target Hae-jun, just like how the detectives are using the flashlights to locate Seo-rae’s husband’s dead body at the beginning. In the dark, Seo-rae’s headlamp is the only light source on the screen, examining the surroundings and Hae-jun, like the predator locating its prey. Then, Seo-rae turns the light to the cliff, directing Hae-jun to walk to the cliff's edge to spray her mother’s bone ash. The scene is silent except for Seo-rae’s footsteps and Hae-jun’s accelerating breaths. A hand-held camera approaches Hae-jun from the back, shaking, tilting, speeding up, and cuts to a shot facing Hae-jun with the sound of two bodies crashing together. The cinematography suggests Seo-rae can push Hae-jun off the cliff, but it turns out to be a back hug. Hae-jun’s reaction of closing his eyes, pausing, and breathing heavily shows Seo-rae’s shift from evil to love surprises him, as well. The mountain of death becomes where Seo-rae’s mother’s body returns, and Seo-rae’s love settles.

But Hae-jun can’t cover Seo-rae’s crime, and as she can’t give him up, she commits suicide. She stands in a sand hole with only her head above the ground, drinking a bottle of alcohol. Behind her is a pile of sand, forming the shape of a mountain. The camera pulls back, revealing the ebb that fills up the hole with the sand that buries her. We can only hear the wave hitting the sand, meshing the sea and the mountain, gradually wiping away the trace of her existence.

A mountain is formed by sand and rock, while the sea gathers water and takes away remnants of sand and rock from the mountain. Seo-rae has been trying to deny the remnant of kindness in her, convincing herself that all she needs is the wisdom of the water instead of the mountain. However, at the end, she uses the sand to make herself a part of the mountain buried by the sea, accepting the benevolent part of her wins her wisdom because of love. Juxtaposed through film, mountain and sea are reconciled in Seo-rae’s act. She makes herself part of both, a mountain buried in the sea, accepting their inseparable nature, the co-existence of love and death, a balance of wisdom and benevolence.

 

Humans are Grey: Park Hoon-jung's New World

Imagine yourself being the closest person to one of the potential successors of the chairman in the largest prorate crime syndicate. When the chairman accidentally dies, your superior fully trusts you to oversee the gang when he is absent for other businesses; however, the policeman threatens you to share internal information about the gangsters. Whose side would you choose?

But what if you are actually an undercover policeman?

The film New World (2013, dir. Park Hoon-jung) presents this dilemma of loyalty that the protagonist, Lee Ja-sung, faces in the eighth year of his undercover in the Goldmoon International crime syndicate. Ja-sung thrives in the gang and expects the police chief Kang to end his mission, but Kang rejects and threatens him with his pregnant wife and his true identity, leading to Ja-sung’s betrayal – killing Kang and becoming the new chairman of the crime syndicate. While the film is not about the battle between justice and crime, but the discovery of loyalty in the grey area that is shifting between black and white.

Ja-sung’s loyalty to his job as an undercover is unquestionable before his betrayal. Killing people for Jung and conducting crimes are both physically and mentally challenging. He has to risk his life every day dealing with the gangsters, doing things that violate all his moral standards as a policeman. More importantly, he has to hide his identity from everyone he knows in the crime syndicate. Although Ja-sung makes such sacrifices, Kang uses Ja-sung’s wife and plants other undercovers in Goldmoon to watch Ja-sung's every action. Not to mention that whenever the police department gains information from him during his go-game lessons, they only ask him questions without sharing any plans from the police side. This forms a great metaphor that Ja-sung seems to be one of the players in this game; however, he is nothing but an insignificant chessman in the battle between the black and white. Ja-sung is isolated from both sides of his world to complete his mission as an undercover, which requires tremendous faith to sustain a torn life like this for eight years. Albeit it is understandable from the police’s perspective to secure their plan, they forget that before Ja-sung becomes a policeman or a gangster, he is a human who needs emotional support instead of a negligible chessman doomed to be either black or white. The audience would not blame Ja-sung for betraying the law because it is the police department that ignores and exploits his loyalty first.

Ja-sung’s loyalty to his superior, Jung Chung, is more complicated. Getting Jung’s trust is the most important part of his mission, so he has to act his loyalty from the moment he meets Jung deliberately. Whenever they meet Jung’s opponent in Goldmoon, Lee Joong-gu, Ja-sung never bows as other members do to show his disrespect. It seems like an insignificant action, but it requires a strong determination that Ja-sung will never be against Jung’s side in the gang because he is purposefully building a boundary and provoking Jung’s opponent. But not every action can be faked. When Joong-gu tries to scare Jung by almost hitting Jung with a car, Ja-sung stands in front of Jung to protect him without hesitation. Within the second that a car is rushing towards you, it is not the brain that evaluates the situation and makes an action, but your instinct instead, and nobody’s subconscious is born protecting others first. As time passes, his acted loyalty becomes a reality.

But why? Why would an undercover, who is supposed to hate all the dirt and crime, have such a strong attachment to a gangster? The reason might be indeed simple – loyalty is two-sided. Unlike Kang’s constant suspicion, Jung always calls Ja-sung “brother,” and he never uses violence nor threatens Ja-sung. They build a bromance over the eight years of fighting against the brutality in the criminal world with each other. Living in a grey area with dividing sides, Ja-sung feels warmth, connection, and company in this dark environment with Jung. And when the world of justice treats him as an opponent, he is being pushed closer to the black side.

It might also be how everyone in Goldmoon prioritizes their internal bonds taught Ja-sung what loyalty is and made him become part of them. When Kang tries to bribe Jung to leak evidence to arrest his opponent Joong-gu, Jung immediately rejects and despises this external source’s intervention. There is no actual benefit to Jung by not accepting Kang’s offer, but it is against what he values the most – the brotherhood code. It is more ironic that what Kang uses to trade with Jung is a list of undercovers that will doubtlessly be killed by Jung once revealed.

As we are all human beings instead of chessmen that could be either black or white, we constantly shift in the spectrum of different shades of grey. After Jung’s death, he kills everyone who used to stand in Jung’s way to continue the code of brotherhood and takes Jung's position. Although he betrayed Jung as an undercover in the past and betrays his job as a policeman, he finishes his journey of discovering his need for emotional connections as a human and starts to be loyal to himself.

Sundown: August Whirlwinds

Once the first week of August hit, I was on 100. The work necessary to push us to the next stage included finalizing the cast, holding rehearsals, gathering production design materials, confirming locations, scheduling equipment rentals, and much, much more. Days felt like months leading up to the first day of production, given how much needed to be accomplished in the final days before we shot.

In the second week of August, I went shopping with my Production Designer, Elaine Lu Qu. In prepping for our trip, we went through each scene of the film and pulled out necessary props, costume pieces, and other set dressing elements. We went to Savers (thrift store), Walmart, and Home Depot for items like picture frames for family photos, sticker paper for custom prescription pills, and a wooden dowel for a melee weapon (that we never ended up using). Outside of our shopping trip, I worked on sourcing a prop gun for my Adult Mikey character. Luckily, Brian Song referred me to a local prop armament store that was extremely helpful in delivering a safe, affordable handgun on time.

Aug. 11 - PD shopping at Savers with Elaine, looking for books to fill a therapist's office.

The last five days were the most crucial in pulling everything together. Once I moved back to the city on the 14th, nearly everything that was not Sundown-related was evicted from my consciousness. In between unpacking and various store runs, nearly every moment of that week was spent prepping like mad. The first night in my apartment was spent rushing back from Target to direct a two-hour Zoom rehearsal with nearly all my actors, one of the last before we moved to shoot starting the 19th. We went over some near-final script changes, mainly just small edits to the dialogue, including changes to phrasing and clarifying how lines should be delivered.

In this rehearsal and in prior ones, seeing and hearing the story that I wrote come to life through early performances were surrealistic moments. I always emphasize how Sundown is not just “my” film— it carries with it the creative input of nearly everyone in my cast and on my crew. Watching my actors perform my story, turning it into our story, was when this sentiment felt real. Despite how exhausted I was on a personal and creative level, I always felt a budding sense of accomplishment after each rehearsal. That night, I prepared for what I knew would be another long day of preparation.

The next day, I went to my grandmother’s apartment with my mother and my brother to prep and dress the space before we shot there later the next week. Her space is small, so I wanted to be sure things were set up before I invited my cast and crew in for four days. More importantly, prep involved us getting rid of a China closet that was partially blocking the hallway I wanted to film in. Prepping her space was an all-day affair, but the next day promised some respite.

Aug. 15 - Goodbye China closet, you won't be missed.

Later that week, I went with my Key Hair and Makeup Artist, Abby Cloud, to go cosmetics shopping at CVS. I had sent out a survey to my cast, and most of my actors had their own makeup, but we bought more just in case. In the last few days before the shoot, I returned home to bring a wagon full of props and craft service snacks to my apartment. At that point, my bedroom became a storage closet for my film instead of being a functional living space, but I convinced myself that I didn’t mind.

Aug. 17 - Abby Cloud with me at CVS looking for foundation for our actors.

At this point, all our prep led to the final day before we shot, the end of the beginning. That morning, I met with Adam Rodgers to get some last-minute notes on my script (per a suggestion from Studio North). I was so, so very anxious going into our meeting. All of me felt terrible for burdening Adam last minute with a request for notes, but the meeting went better than I thought it would. With that done, I went later in the day to hold an officially unofficial prep day. I had also originally planned to spread equipment pick-up and prep over two days, but due to actor availability, I had to condense the two into one day. Luckily, my camera and lighting crew were flexible enough to be able to accommodate the change. Isabel, Christian, Elaine, and Chime accompanied me throughout the day while we picked up equipment, tested everything out, and visited all our filming locations for the week. Trusting in their expertise, we ended the day by leaving my grandmother’s house (which felt like two of my worlds colliding in ways I never thought they would).

Aug. 18 - Isabel testing out a fisheye lens (Hi Chime!); sad we never used it.

With cast, crew, locations, equipment, craft services, and more all set, there was one thing left to get in order: me. During the final week before filming, I had a one-track mind, a singular train of thought that never stopped to consider proper mental and physical health. While preparations were productive, they also came with mountains of stress. At this time, I realized I still didn’t know how to delegate tasks, especially those that seemed too cumbersome or burdening properly. I also tend to do most things myself out of fear of pushing my disorganization onto others, which led to me taking on many producer-specific roles. Sourcing snacks for craft services, making the shot list and shooting schedule, and creating call sheets every day was all too much, which I learned by the end of the shoot. I ended the last prep day with a mix of anxiety, excitement, sleep deprivation, and the hopes that everything for Sundown would go according to plan come sunrise.

The Price of Money: Boon Joon-ho's Barking Dogs Never Bite

A quote says, “there are some things that money can’t buy, like manners, morals, and integrity.” But will the opposite work? Can we “buy” money by giving up morals?

Boon Joon-ho’s film Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) explores this possibility by telling the story of an aspiring college professor, Ko Yun-ju, who struggles with his career and life. The film’s first shot is Yun-ju appreciating the nature view that his cheap apartment faces. He is unemployed because he despises the behavior of bribing the dean with $100,000 to get the professor’s position. Nevertheless, as a man with ambition and is desperate to prove himself in the society, this shortcut is undoubtedly appealing. When Yun-ju is torn between borrowing money to bribe the dean and keeping his meritoriousness, the barking dog that disturbs him whenever he thinks about his career path becomes the only issue he can control himself. Hence, he kills the dog – which does no harm but bark – to demonstrate that there is something in his life that he can make an immediate decision about and take action to achieve his goal. This is the first time Yun-ju gives up his morals to escape his incapability to fight the corrupted world. Yun-ju carries the vicious cycle of determining others’ life and death, just as what he experienced in the society.

Yun-ju eventually bribes the dean and gets his dream job. He gives up his morals and obtains the position. The film ends with him fading into darkness when his student covers the view of nature outside the window with the curtains before class. The nature outside becomes a luxury that Yun-ju can’t afford anymore as he used to have every day. Yun-ju shows that you can buy money with morals, but your freedom is an additional inevitable price. It is also ironic that the position Yun-ju commits in this dirty transaction is a college professor, who is supposed to represent and enforce social order and justice.

However, if we consider Yun-ju’s life from a realistic perspective, he has a job that can make more money to provide a higher living standard for his family. He won’t be ordered by his wife anymore but have her respect instead. More importantly, his social status as a college professor will also satisfy society’s expectations on males and solve his anxiety as a home husband. Isn’t this a win?

The film also presents the tradeoff between human’s desire for money and morality with other characters. Hyun-nam, the bookkeeper and custodian of the apartment that Yun-ju lives in, experiences the opposite situation. Although she has a stable job, she is unsatisfied with her life as she dreams about getting famous by being on television. Therefore, the story of the missing dogs excites her with the possibility of being a hero in the neighborhood. Hyun-nam’s dissatisfaction with her ordinary career leads to her desire for surprise and freedom in life. She represents the impossibility of people buying emotional achievements with money and shows the jejune lifestyle that people without money dream of. Eventually, she loses her job as she is not focusing on her work. When Yun-ju loses joy after he sacrifices his freedom for the job, Hyun-nam can go hiking with her friend, which she dreamed about when she was working. But again, if we take a step back, Hyun-nam’s freedom is only temporary. She cannot sustain her life without a job and has to give her freedom back in exchange for the money.

The homeless, who eats the dogs in the neighborhood, is another character Boon shows the conflicting costs and benefits of life. For the homeless, ethics is a luxury idea to consider. All that matters is being able to survive. By eating the dogs and secretly living in the apartment’s basement, which the vast majority find immoral, the homeless can have a great meal with meat and a safe place to live. Food and housing are the top priorities that people would buy when they have money. But when money is a scarcity, freedom, danger, and dignity are nothing but his only asset to trade for a higher quality of life. Although he ends up being caught, he explicitly says he is excited about his life in jail as he won’t worry about food and house anymore. The homeless carries the fundamental concern about which way to trade money and freedom is more beneficial and pushes the audience to think if keeping a moral standard is indeed helpful in a desperate life.

Boon made the film when he was 30, and this is his first feature film. The conflicting and torn perspective towards using unjustified ways to achieve one’s goals is also a display of Boon’s struggle with exploring justice in the world at that age. Boon shows compassion when criticizing the characters’ decisions, leaving it to us to judge if they have made a better deal between money and freedom.

When the world is dark, should we light up a fire, or should we just close our eyes and sink into part of the darkness? And when the immoral darkness is monetarily beneficial, should we accept it? Are we making the social codes and moral standards the lights or another unseen trap in the darkness?

Sundown: Quiet Before the Storm (July)

Nowhere to go but up.

Coming off the tails of June, I dove into the rest of the necessary preparation work for Sundown. I knew I had to be efficient and purposeful with how I spent the remaining days of my summer before we shot, and time was fading fast. Much of what was left to do should have been started, if not completed, the month prior. This included— but was in no way limited to— creating a shot list, another round of script revisions, figuring out funding, holding preliminary conversations with my camera and lighting team, and above all else, casting.

In keeping with the theme of “things-that-should-have-been-done-in-June-but-weren’t,” I worked with John and Aarushi to set up casting through Backstage as quickly as we could. For Sundown (V3), I was able to get the number of characters reduced from 11 characters to 6, which I still thought was a bit much for the caliber of my production. Furthermore, with the story I wanted to tell, I had no idea how difficult (or easy?) it would be to find a talented, available, predominantly Black cast for an unpaid student short film in just a month. There was only one way to know, and we moved to find our answer when we launched on July 6.

July 2022 - A snippet of the Backstage casting page.

We actually received our first submission for one of our leads, “Adult Mikey,” the same day we launched our listing. It took me a few days to figure out how Backstage’s notification system worked, so I ultimately didn’t see it until a few days later. But still, so exciting! This eased my doubts about the feasibility of the task of casting I laid out for myself However, my enthusiasm was undercut by the issue of needing the applicants to fit the creative and logistical needs of Sundown. Over the next four or five weeks that the casting page would be open, we sifted through 18 total applications, of which we casted 3 out of our 6 roles. In late July, we posted an open call to our Instagram which procured our fourth role of the “Therapist.” We held 6 callback virtual auditions throughout the month, making sure to ask questions about experience, logistics, and other pertinent information necessary should they be on set. The other two cast members came from personal connections: one family member of mine, and a Hopkins professor (reveal to come in a future entry!).

July 2022 - Redacted audition notes about a few of the actors that came through Backstage.

Casting non-Hopkins students, and really, casting anyone in the far periphery of my immediate circle was a huge source of anxiety for me. Learning how to communicate with working actors, moving through the audition process, ultimately rejecting applicants— it was a daunting prospect for someone who is very sensitive about nearly every one of my interpersonal interactions. Am I making this actor uncomfortable? Am I being too incessant with my emails and messages? Does my actor secretly hate me? These were feelings that would ebb and flow over the next few weeks and into August as I prepared to execute the role and responsibilities of a director. Regardless, I trusted in the process (and myself) and moved forward. By early August, we had cast (and confirmed availability) with all six of our actors.

The next pertinent thing to accomplish was establishing a plan of action for camera and lighting. I only worked on the script revisions for the next version (V4) later in the month, but I wanted to create a storyboard for parts of the story that I knew would stay the same. I met twice with my Director of Photography, Sophia Lin, and my 1st Assistant Camera, Isabel Salas, trudging through the script for hours to draft a storyboard. It was important that I rope them in for this process since I wanted their vision and creative expertise to inform the visual language of the film. Collectively, we came up with a few ideas for shots that I was very excited to execute in the coming weeks. I sent the storyboard to my grip and electric team (Chime Nwogu and Christian Reidy, respectively) to get them thinking about any equipment necessary to pull off certain shots. Towards the end of the month, I implemented the last round of script revisions to create a near-final version of the script, which included some much-needed edits. After talking with my camera and lighting crew, initiating casting, and generally spending more time on the project as compared to June, I felt much better about the possibility of Sundown.

July 2022 - Working on script revisions and the storyboard while on a plane back home from Indiana.

There was still one last thing to do: figure out crowdfunding. The issue of creating a “compelling, well-written, unbelievably beautiful promo video” still stood. Looking at the time and resources I had, I made the decision to postpone the fundraising launch until post-production. This meant that I needed to secure more private funding, which I was thankfully able to do without much issue. With the main elements of pre-production set into motion, we were on our way to be prepared for our August 19 start date.

July ended on a much better note than June as my confidence in the project—and myself— had been somewhat restored. Despite being constantly ping-ponged between work and my internship, I wanted to put my all into Sundown for the rest of the time I had left. This month presented personal and technical challenges as I explored uncharted territories with casting, budgeting, and general preparation for a short film. I knew that I was in for more challenges and surprises (both pleasant and less-than-so) in the weeks to come. Nonetheless, I had full faith in my cast and crew and we moved forward into August with a plan of action and the will to make it happen.

What Does the Helper Need? Park Chan-Wook’s Lady Vengeance

Why do we help others?

To feel happy? To feel needed? To fulfill a certain responsibility? To ease guilt? Or out of self-interest?

These are questions explored in Park Chan-Wook’s 2005 Lady Vengeance.

The main character, Geum-ja has been imprisoned for 13 years after a wrongful conviction for the murder of a 6 year-old-boy. In fact, she was manipulated into a confession by the villainous Mr. Baek, who kidnapped and threatened her infant daughter. Baek has kidnapped many children from many families for ransom, and Geum-ja helped him kidnapping the boy so that Baek would help her and her daughter without knowing that Baek will ultimately murder the boy.

The direct translation of the title is actually “The Kind-hearted Geum-ja,” and indeed Geum-ja acts like an angel in prison and helps almost everyone selflessly. But Geum-ja kindness is not without reason. Everyone she helps is essential to her revenge, and her kindness in prison is what convinced other prisoners to help her.

In fact, Geum-ja doesn’t hide her dark side. Once she is released, she even purposefully reveals herself as evil. Korean has a tradition of giving the released prisoner a piece of tofu as a symbol of starting a new life that is pure and innocent as the color of the tofu. However, Geum-ja throws away the tofu in front of a group of people when she is released, ignoring, and even confronting this suggestion of guiltlessness. She also starts putting on blood-red eye shadow and wearing all-black outfits. Most importantly, the angel who used to smile at all criminals never smiles again once she gets out of prison. She is desperate to show everyone, and herself, that all her kindness is out of purpose, and now it is her time to achieve that only goal. Geum-ja completely wipes away her innocence and even loathes her past kindness. Because only doing so can this young and attractive woman be determined to fight a murderer. Geum-ja must hide any compassion she has to convince herself that she is stronger and more brutal than Baek to conduct her revenge. As human beings are conflicting figures, the best way to disguise our intentions is to present the opposite side, just as the revenge-motivated angel in prison and the desperate evil outside that Geum-ja shows.

Her conflicting mentality is also shown by how she separates herself from the rest of the people involved in her plan. She makes her revenge like a ritual event where she is the goddess who controls everything without being an actual part of it. Geum-ja gathers all the families of Baek’s victims and asks them to kill Baek together. In contrast, she doesn’t even touch Baek during the entire murder process. More dramatically, Geum-ja provides identical raincoats for all the victims’ families to prevent getting blood on their bodies. With all the families sitting together in the raincoats, it looks like a uniform that unifies them and creates the bond of their shared crime. She then takes a group picture with all the families in the raincoat, with blood on their bodies, and brings everyone to a celebration with her hand-made black cake to keep enforcing the bond between the families. Again, she doesn’t eat that cake, but makes herself a white one in the same shape of the tofu and throws her face into the cake at the end. As if immersing herself in that cake can wash her soul and cleans her guilt, and she can cover her darkness displaying outside. It is Geum-ja’s revenge, but she makes it seem like she is helping the families to avenge instead of for her personal hatred. Through this, Geum-ja can get herself out of the cycle of revenge and eliminate her guilt.

Geum-ja is not the only one who “fakes” kindness. The priest, who encourages Geum-ja the entire time she is in prison and gives the tofu to Geum-ja, is indeed following Baek’s order to keep an eye on Geum-ja in case she avenges. Typically, we judge the priest’s betrayal behavior immediately as he pretends to be a “good person.” But here, the priest is doing the same thing as Geum-ja, the protagonist whom we are directed to support, and it becomes a moral dilemma that we can’t tell who is doing the “right thing” or if there really is anyone who is doing the right thing.

To me, the film is definitely not portraying Geum-ja as an innocent figure, nor making anyone in her an absolute demon. Geum-ja conducted the kidnap in exchange of receiving help from Baek when she was pregnant, and she also murdered someone to help a prisoner whom she knows that she will need her help to revenge. She selfishly helps people but kills Baek morally. The conflicting behaviors we see from her are just an unspoken consensus that people all act for self-benefits, whether we are being conscious about it or not. This invisible cost-benefit analysis leads to whether we display ourselves as a kind-hearted evil or a brutal victim.

If there is no pure angel nor ultimate devil, what does the helper actually want?

To feel the kindness in their heart, or plan to receive help in the future?

 

Sundown: Late May and the Chronicles of June

Pre-production for Sundown began in late May, a few weeks after the Spring semester ended. Looking ahead towards the summer, I had an internship, a part-time job, and a production for a short film lined up, so I knew I had to be efficient with my time. Before I left campus for the summer, I was able to get a head start on location scouting, visiting my then-Script Supervisor, Isabel Salas’ apartment. I learned a few things about location scouting, such as needing to note the location and quantity of outlets and windows, among other things. Isabel graciously allowed me to use their apartment during production, which was one of three locations successfully secured.

Once I got back home, I moved to build a concrete schedule for the entire summer. I held my first production meeting with my producer, John D’cruz on May 25. That same day, I got a fun little curveball thrown my way when my previous Assistant Camera emailed me notifying me that she would be transferring to Columbia in the Fall (now Harvard). Isabel then became my AC and everything was fine again. Before the month ended, I wanted a clear plan on how the rest of the summer was supposed to go. We began with creating a timeline that marked a plan for script revisions, crowdfunding, marketing, location scouting, casting, and ultimately, shooting.

However, plans are made to be changed, right?

Sticking to the plan was going well, that is, until we hit June. Before things went south, I was able to scratch a few things off the list, like sending in my second revision to Studio North, having pared the script down to a more manageable 13 pages. The much-needed Sundown (V3) finally existed and ultimately became the script I worked from for the rest of summer. That same day, I visited my grandmother’s apartment in Baltimore to location scout. Thankfully, she agreed to us using her apartment, so that was two out of three locations secured. I figured the rest of the locations could be created within the walls of the Film Centre (I was right, and this is what we did).

June 2022 - Location scouting, specifically, my main character's childhood home. The china closet needed to go (and it did!)

But back to plans changing and June being problematic. June was slated to be the heaviest month in terms of pre-production. The first task was to draft a script for and shoot the promotional video for the Seed and Spark crowdfunding platform. All I needed to do was create a compelling, well-written, unbelievably beautiful promo video and convince everyone I knew to donate to our project. Easy, right? Well, it could have been, but I became so paralyzed by my fear of failure that I fell down the rabbit hole of self-sabotage. The plan I had for my promo video quickly fell to bits.

Ideally, I would have cast a friend, shot footage that emulated the story, recorded a talking-head video talking about the film, edited it together, and moved on. However, being away from Baltimore (and everyone else I knew also being away from Baltimore) made it harder for my idea to become reality. Or, should I say, I thought it would make it harder. After watching so many other Seed & Spark videos, I convinced myself that there was no way I could create anything good in time and failed to do what was necessary to create a quality video.

May 2022 - Me attempting to shoot footage for the promo video. Not what I had in mind, and it was ultimately scrapped.

Issues with the video provoked more doubts about my project in general. Even writing the script for the video, I ran into challenges discussed elements of the story I still wasn’t sure of. I usually avoid moving forward on projects when all the details crystal clear; I couldn’t afford to do that with Sundown. The timeline I created forced me to keep moving—for better or for worse. This is when my self-doubt and inevitable burnout started to peak. Working 6/7 days per week and planning Sundown at the same time was emotionally draining. I asked myself “is this really going to happen?” nearly every day. My early summer burnout, mixed with a fear of failure and a splash of inexperience created a perfect self-sabotage cocktail. There’s a universe that exists where June 2022 was super productive and fulfilling for me. This isn’t that universe.

Pulling myself back to reality, I knew Sundown had to happen. Yes, because I made a commitment to Studio North, but mostly because I made a commitment to myself. I learned that had to lean on my crew members for external support since my well of internal motivation was running dry. John became my right-hand man and my biggest source of support in the early stages of the project. Aarushi Krishnan joined us as a co-producer early in the month, which I was extremely grateful for.

June 2022 - Aarushi joins 'Sundown' and I had more shoulders to cry on :)

June wasn’t a complete bust. We did set up the Seed & Spark project page without the video, highlighting the story, the crew, and some incentives for donation. June 6, we posted our first post to the Sundown Instagram, created by Nikki Ucheya, which received such positive feedback.

May/June 2022 - Our first marketing meeting and our first Instagram post. I was so overwhelmed with love.

June forced me to confront my deep-set insecurities about Sundown and about my abilities as a filmmaker in general. I am endlessly thankful for everyone I worked with in the early stages of Sundown. I (and my project) survived June, but the month was a lesson in knowing when to reach out for support. The month ended with us moving closer to casting, final script revisions, and of course, shooting. July threatened its own challenges, but after hitting the rock bottom in June, I had nowhere to go but up.

Can we manipulate who we actually hate, and who we truly love?

Oldboy (2003), is a South Korean neo-noir film directed by Park Chan-wook. The film starts with the main character, Oh Dae-su, being kidnapped on his daughter’s birthday and locked in a sealed hotel room for 15 years. It is undoubtedly that the story develops with Oh’s avenge of the person who kidnapped him, but the film is indeed more about love.  

While the film is shot from Oh’s perspective, I would like to interpret the love and hatred of the antagonist, Lee woo-jin’s view. Lee fell in love with his sister, and Oh accidentally saw their incest in their high school. After Oh told the story to his friends, rumors spread out in their neighborhood and eventually led to Lee’s sister’s suicide. As bystanders, we recognize his sister’s death as the tragedy of the judgment from society towards incest. However, for Lee, Oh is the only specific person he could possibly blame, especially deep inside his mind, he knows that his cowardess and weakness to protect the forbidden love is another determinant of his sister’s suicide. Lee’s sister’s photos are all over Lee’s wall in his penthouse, but outside his house, he almost never committed his love for her to anyone. Lee’s sister is his most valuable treasure but his deepest secret. The beginning of Lee’s hatred of Oh is the only solution that Lee could think of to make justice for his existence after his sister’s death. Lee can’t manipulate the world to accept their love, but at least he can manipulate Oh.

Therefore, Lee uses hypnosis to set Oh to fall in love with his daughter, Mi-do, after he is set free from the cell. For Lee, letting Oh experience incest is the best way to revenge and torture him. Nevertheless, at the climax of the film, when Lee reveals that Mi-do is Oh’s daughter, Lee doesn’t gain the excitement he has been expecting for 15 years. To prevent Lee from telling Mi-do the truth, Oh knees down and licks Lee’s shoes, begging him like a dog. Eventually, Oh uses the scissors to cut his tongue, using this extreme way to punish himself for saying Lee’s incest, even though it was supposed to be the moment that Oh avenges Lee for the 15 years of torture he had been through. Both of them know that Lee has complete control over Oh, but Oh’s desperate reaction to keep the secret convinces Lee of his love for Mi-do and also arouses Lee’s compunction for letting his sister suicided. His hatred becomes the respect he has for the man who is now experiencing the same torn for loving his blood family, and Oh’s valor to protect Mi-do is what Lee wished he could have had. While in terms of the mise-en-scene, the intense violence and distorting bloodiness in this sequence were disturbing to watch at first, while it also functions as a way to contradict the dirty world and pure love. No matter how much blood they get, there is a place in their heart that needs to be kept absolutely clean.

The love between the immediate blood family in the film is controversial, and we never know if the love between Oh and Mi-do is because of manipulation or not. But if we think about this, the concept of “incest” is also the product of social restraint, a cage that human beings build for ourselves. And when this uncontrollable feeling appears as how it is, shall we embrace it, forget it, or destroy it? Should we manipulate our minds and fight against the world to protect the purity of our love, like how Oh chooses to get hypnotized again and forget that Mi-do is his daughter? Or should we give up on our lives like Lee and his sister and try reaching another world where there are no interruptions from outside?

Instead of searching for the answer to who we love, it might be easier to just accept the feelings we have and do our best to protect this uncontrollable feeling that almost every human being has.

Sundown: A New Dawn (Beginnings)

Where do I begin talking about this project? Almost a year after its conception, I sit here reflecting on the journey of bringing my “coming of age thriller,” Sundown, to life. I’ll begin at the very beginning, eleven months ago when I wrote the pitch for my script.

 

October 2021 - Early October, when all 'Sundown' meant was the time of day. Little did I know what a turbulent semester this would be, so this is a moment of blissful ignorance, enjoying Hoptoberfest.

 

Fall 2021, the start of my sophomore year, I took Introduction to Screenwriting where I spent most of the term revising a script I grew to dislike by the end of the course. However, our final assignment was to write a new three-to-five-page script. In thinking about what to write, I searched for themes that attracted me. I thought back to a few months prior when I created a pitch for a five-page, no-dialogue film for Studio North’s production committee. In October, the committee was preparing to choose a short film to produce that semester, and I had yet to think of anything to pitch.

Around that time, my Intro class read the first few pages of Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and I then decided to watch the full movie on Halloween. I resonated with the underlying theme of childhood trauma executed with a predominantly Black cast. Additionally, I thought about what kind of story works well with highly visual, extremely short formats. I needed a compelling exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution— all within five pages. With these elements put together, I settled on a thriller about a kid from Baltimore who experiences childhood trauma after he disobeys his mother one night. Intro Sundown.

 

October 2021 - Initial (and very messy) notes about the story in preparation for Studio North's production committee pitch session. Note the 4:21am edit time.

Writing the origin of the trauma and attempting to inject a semblance of Peele-esque cultural significance into my story, I thought about the phenomenon of “sundown towns” in America. The title alludes to the existence of towns and neighborhoods in the United States that implemented de facto segregation, using signage to usher people of color out of the town after sunset. While the story grew to abandon the idea of racial-based trauma, I enjoyed using “sundown” as a foundation to explore a story about a Black teenager who endures a unique trauma after staying out past sunset. This is where my main character, Mikey, comes in, and where the story of Sundown falls into place.

October-December 2021 - Cover slide for my 'Sundown' pitch deck. Excerpt from an early draft of 'Sundown.' So many lines to be cut in future revisions.

Though the production committee did not vote for my pitch, I decided to revisit Sundown for my final Intro assignment. I had only created a pitch for the committee, so I moved to write my first draft of Sundown in December. While writing the first draft, I had the idea to incorporate a time jump at the end. After Mikey disobeys his mother and gets caught by a “creature” after sundown, we see him ten years later, severely impacted by his childhood trauma. Though this pushed me slightly over the page limit, I was adamant that the reader (and eventually, the audience) should see the lasting impacts of Mikey’s childhood trauma on his mental health. Feeling confident in this addition, and tired after a long week of finals, I submitted Sundown the night of December 21.

December 2021 - The night I submitted 'Sundown' for my Intro to Screenwriting course; I made a last-minute solo trip to the last night of Christmas Village downtown. My COVID-conscious gloved hand holding a bratwurst. So cold, but so worth it.

After a tumultuous semester, I felt like Sundown was the victory I desperately needed, especially after weeks of working on other writing I had little passion for. In a way, I felt that the turmoil of my personal life catalyzed my decision to write about such a dark premise. I struggled with excess demands of my time, a less-than-comfortable living space, and the regular stress and sadness that comes with being a college student trying to do it all. Thankfully, I was able to channel my feelings into something productive: a story that I wanted to take further than a final assignment in an introductory screenwriting class. 

Our professor, Titus Burrell, encouraged all the Intro students to submit their pieces to the Baltimore Screenwriter’s Competition for the 2022 cycle. I knew I didn’t want to submit my main Intro piece, which I had grown to dislike for various reasons. After a bit of thought, and some (read: a lot of) external pressure from an impending January 21 deadline, I made yet another revision of Sundown, bumping it out from six pages to fifteen pages. With high hope (but low expectations), I submitted Sundown on the final day of the competition, emailing the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts at 8:00am and running downtown to drop off my script at 3:00pm since it was too late for snail mail. It would be another four months before I heard anything from the competition (spoiler: I only made it to the second round, which I am still proud of nonetheless!).

January 2022 - Flyer for the Baltimore Screenwriter's competition.

January 2022 - Results from the Screenwriter's Competition. Baby steps (or something like that)!

In the meantime, another opportunity presented itself: the Studio North 2022-2023 grant cycle. The Studio North grant was something I learned about as a freshman, and I always had prospects of applying to it—during my junior year. I had a lot of trepidation about applying to the grant this year, mainly due to my (perceived) lack of experience and absence of an idea to produce. At this point in time, it’s early April, and I had not thought about Sundown in months during the new semester. Contemplating the possibility of applying for the Studio North grant, I eventually found my way back to Sundown and ultimately wrote another revision for the application. Despite my many anxieties, I took a leap of faith and applied to the grant cycle in early May (after much encouragement from Film and Media friends and faculty). In the face of all my self-doubt, I was one of two students to win this year’s production grant— news I celebrated through more end-of-semester stress and a nagging cold.

May 2022 - The Studio North premiere for the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 grant cycle films (left to right: Abena Ababio, Ruby Baden, Mary Yan, Ellie Rha, and Brian Song), the day before I pitched 'Sundown,' and two days before I was awarded one of two grants for the 2022-2023 cycle.

This news was as much to my excitement as it was to my chagrin: now, I had to somehow produce a short film. My self-doubts began to creep back in as I looked towards the next year with less-than-positive prospects. However, by this time, I had received coverage notes from the Screenwriter’s Competition, along with pitch notes from the Studio North executive board. Both sets of comments sent me well on my way to beginning a third revision, which I aimed to complete in early June, giving myself approximately one month. Looking at the summer ahead of me, I began to set things in motion to fundraise, cast, and ultimately film Sundown at the end of the summer. With a fast-approaching production timeline and a lot of work to do, I knew I would be dedicated to Sundown as if it were a full-time job. I had much to think about, such as where and how I’ll cast, logistics, budget, art direction, and much, much more. More than anything, I knew I had to trust myself if any of this was going to work, which was the hardest part. Taking yet another leap of faith, I took the first step towards a summer of preparation for my first short film. 

May 2022 - Back home, on a long walk I used to think through my plan for the rest of the summer. I couldn't possibly anticipate the kind of summer I was about to have, but I had my moment of peace before the craziness began.

Free Indirect Discourse as Artistic Marxism in Pasolini's The Hawks and the Sparrows

In his 1966 film  The Hawks and the Sparrows, Pier Paolo Pasolini shows viewers a “narrative poem” concerning religion, Marxism and the various social strata present in Italy, here specifically in the outskirts of Rome. As in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini, 1964), Pasolini utilizes religious imagery among other “stylemes” and “im-signs” in order to expound on the hypocrisy of capitalism and the shortcomings of religious as well as Marxist ideologies as they pertain to the “real world”. In the film’s second-act digression, a “left-wing intellectual” crow tells Totò and his son Ninetto a story about Franciscan friars tasked with teaching God’s message of love to the hawks and the sparrows. The story is a parable for the futility of religious dogma, as it is in the hawks’ nature to eat the sparrows, regardless of abstract concepts of love. The hawks respond, “we are all God, then”; the sparrows question the value of the friars’ message, as it does not solve their problems of hunger. These themes are repeated later in the film, when Totò and Ninetto travel to different homes in the countryside, further illustrating the presence of an inescapable social hierarchy for which the film proposes the solution of Marxist ideology—a solution that ultimately fails when applied to the characters’ social reality.

In his essay “The Cinema of Poetry”, Pasolini emphasizes the importance of what he terms “free indirect discourse” in poeticizing the medium of film. However, The Hawks and the Sparrows presents distinct points of view through interactions between characters, namely Totò and his son with the people they encounter along their journey. At first, this seems to present a lack of continuity in Pasolini’s argument—a flaw which is definitely present in his essay. But Pasolini’s use of people and animals to embody abstract ideologies turns these characters into semiotic markers rather than concrete personalities. 

This technique is augmented by the presence of the parable in the film, in which Totò and Ninetto also play the 13th-century friars who must spread the gospel to the birds. The crow’s role of ideological lecturer attributes these social lessons to the natural order of the world, and the film’s surrealist imagery and noticeable camera movement (e.g. jump cuts, montage sequences, etc.) fulfill Pasolini’s requirements for “poetic cinema”. 

The film concludes with a callback to the film’s first scene, in which Totò explains to Ninetto the influence of the moon on the tides: “It draws all the garbage to the shore.” Continuing their journey, Totò, Ninetto and the crow come upon a woman named Luna, the Italian for “moon”. Both men feign stomachaches and take turns “swimming” through a cornfield to reach Luna; they each have sex with Luna in the corn. Afterwards, finding the crow pedantic and boring, the two men kill and eat it, leaving its steaming remains on the side of the road and walking onward. This scene is the final, definitive instance of nature winning out over pure ideology: the humans are higher on the food chain than the crow, so they kill him, and the mission of the friars is once again a failure, now with humans proven to be no better than the animals the friars sought to lecture. The previous montage of footage from Italian Communist leader Palmiro Tagliotti’s funeral, the intellectual with whom the crow’s ideology is explicitly aligned, foreshadows this end for the crow. 

The Servant's Cold Comic Irony

Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963) delves into class conflict with piercingly economical incisions. The most salacious elements of the story are shown from blocked vantage points; we hear the boring edges of conversations about potentially interesting things. The narrative unfolds along prescribed lines: Tony, a young member of the declining British upper crust, seeks to employ a manservant for his new home. Hugo Barrett is well-trained and seems to know his place. Tony impresses his girlfriend, Susan, with vague plans to “clear the jungle” and build a number of cities in Brazil to “fill with people from Asia Minor.” 

Harold Pinter’s script thus matter-of-factly reveals a system of poorly-conceived imperialist idealists nominally clinging to relevance, blissfully and pathetically unaware of the surrounding world’s changing conditions. Tony’s new house, supposedly a mere waystation between adolescence and foreign conquest, becomes with Barrett’s help a last stop on a road toward decadent irrelevance, a tastefully decorated funhouse-brothel-crypt. Pinter and Losey’s application of social conventions to a story about their breakdown emphasizes the irony of such conventions’ strict usage in a society that has largely outgrown the need for them. 

The film’s recurring song, “All Gone,” scores scenes of love and betrayal with mocking detachment: the soul-bearing drama of the lyrics, “can’t love without you, must love without you,” as characters struggle to express themselves beyond allusions to unsavory topics, underscores their repression to an almost comedic level. When Tony visits a beatnik bar, his incongruence with the environment is emphasized by the juxtaposition of Tony’s stiffness with the twangy guitar music. 

Similarly, a scene in which Tony and Susan visit a noble older couple’s manor (unclear whether they are Susan’s parents, Tony’s parents, some other distant relation, or just members of the couple’s milieu) starkly contrasts imposing mise-en-scene with tedious dialogue to point out the ridiculousness of the ruling class. Lady Mounset works at an embroidery hoop while Lord Mounset sips a highball, the two-shot buttressed by neo classical nude statues and spindly, baroque furniture. The high-culture aesthetics of ancient civilizations loom over the elderly couple while simultaneously being relegated to the background, a visual reminder of the imperial powers after which the British Empire models itself. The couple’s leisurely pastimes denote the privilege as well as the frivolity of their class position. Another discussion of Tony’s business prospects in Brazil leads to a disagreement about the meaning of the word “poncho”: Susan defines it as the article of clothing that “drapes down in the front and behind,” while Lady Mounset maintains that it is “what the cowboys are called” in “The Argentine.” Again, the wealthy display their ignorance in matters that extend beyond the drawing-room even as that parlor visually represents the seat of western imperial power. The ease with which Barrett monopolizes Tony’s home and assumes control over his life further exemplifies the paradoxical nature of the class structure in situations that would be comical if not for the overwhelmingly pathetic downfall of Tony; when he writhes on the floor in an alcoholic stupor, we can’t help but pity him.

The LA Times called The Servant “the coldest film ever made.” To me, this description is made accurate by the ice inherent in the film’s hints of warmth, by the penetrating winter snow that is almost always visible through the townhouse windows. Warmth emanates from the hearth, lit by a resentful servant in a display of false domesticity; it emanates from glasses of brown liquor and cigarette smoke, vices that pair with and substitute for “intimate” trysts coldly arranged by that same servant. The fickle warmth of the relationship between Barrett and Tony is tinged with cold, boyish competition petrified by stifling class designations. Susan and Tony fail to express their emotions while standing in a snowy field that accentuates their repression. The Servant coldly depicts a social structure in which authentic warmth is made impossible by outdated conventions. The imperial fantasy of developing the global south is an unreachable mirage in the declining era of the empire.

Anatomy of a Hustler: Capitalist Madness in Uncut Gems and American Psycho

“You wanna win by one point or fuckin’ 30 points, KG?” asks Adam Sandler as Howard, jeweler and gambling addict. The line cues in a feverish marimba on top of an ominous synth.

KG is Celtics star Kevin Garnett, playing himself. This moment comes after KG pays Howard $165,000 in cash for an uncut opal. With this cash, Howard is finally in a position to pay off his extensive debts — but there’s still 30 minutes left in the two-hour film.

Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2019 crime thriller Uncut Gems is a grueling experience for its characters and viewers alike. The film barrels forward, accumulating tension without stopping to catch its breath — akin to a roller coaster with a perpetual, rapid incline. The disorienting tone and pacing help immerse us in Howard’s world, and his singular obsession with money, as it drives him to ruin.

Howard, like many tragic figures, has his fair share of hubris. Rather than a prophecy deciding his fate, however, Uncut Gems demonstrates how American capitalism creates the ideal conditions for Howard’s particular brand of go-getter. A similar societal critique is advanced in Mary Harron’s turn-of-the-century cult classic American Psycho, though in the context of corporate finance. Taking distinct stylistic and tonal approaches, the two films portray capitalist logic as a narrative force of compulsive escalation.

Both Uncut Gems and American Psycho omit the starting and turning points of their protagonists’ unraveling, resulting in an unsettling narrative inertia. This choice allows the films to level their critiques beyond their protagonists at the environments that shape them.

Uncut Gems is set into motion with the delivery of an Ethiopian opal that Howard, deep in debt, plans to sell. KG, however, insists on borrowing the opal for good luck at his NBA game. From there, the film follows Howard, growing increasingly desperate, as he scrambles to get the opal back while evading loan sharks.

After Howard finally does sell the opal, our relief quickly evaporates when he decides to gamble the money. “This is how I win,” he explains, delivering a kind of manifesto as the marimba track intensifies. Both lucidity and madness might be read into his gaze, which is partly shielded behind black shades.

Howard does win, in a sense: His bet wins him over $1 million. And then a loan shark shoots him in the head. The final shot zooms into his serene, lifeless face; Howard is finally at rest. His death curbs the inertia of his gambling addiction, which incidentally ends on a high.

So ends a nuanced depiction of gambling addiction — not as a failure of personal responsibility, but as a powerful capitalist impetus. The incentive to “win” cannot be chalked up to pure greed: Howard’s obsession with chasing wealth far surpasses any desire for its rewards, and the camera takes no aesthetic pleasure in material glamor. As misguided as Howard may be, his glorification of wealth for wealth’s sake is a condemnation of the system that incentivizes it.

American Psycho’s serial murdering protagonist, meanwhile, is indisputably evil, but this characterization similarly serves a critique of his milieu. It owes its success to a stark tonal difference from Uncut Gems’ grittiness; eschewing subtlety, American Psycho hyperbolizes the archetypal Wall Street investor with the self-serious, image-conscious Patrick Bateman, who finds an outlet for his neuroses in brutal homicide.

In the iconic opening scene, Bateman briefly introduces himself before diving into a catalog of his morning routine. This voiceover accompanies a visual representation of his systematic inventory-taking, featuring close-ups on sculpted body parts and luxurious toiletries and long shots of his apartment in the vein of an interior design magazine. Bateman presents himself as a commodity, a sum of desirable objects. This eerie scene establishes Bateman’s storefront-esque sense of self, deliberately constructed so he may relate to coworkers at a reasonable distance.

Much as we meet Howard already in debt, American Psycho foregrounds Bateman’s psychopathy, later revealing that he’s killed before. In contrast with Howard’s nosedive into mania, however, is Bateman’s increasing detachment from the world around him. Diametrically opposed to Uncut Gems’ frenzy, the corporate environment serves as a backdrop for mundane conversations between coworkers. Petty status competitions have higher stakes than the work itself, which is essentially absent from the narrative. Physical violence is at least generative for Bateman, a reprieve from the stifling nothingness of corporate existence.

The escalating tension between Bateman’s personal and professional selves drives the film toward an uncertain climax; as his body count grows, so does the challenge of compartmentalizing his two lives. After a very public murder spree, Bateman calls his lawyer with a tearful confession, presumably ending his double life — but when Bateman confronts the lawyer at a company event, he’s met with a blank stare.

The lawyer’s unresponsiveness marks a striking role reversal for Bateman, whose uncharacteristically sincere expression fills the frame. Faced with this dead end, Bateman joins a table with the same coworkers as usual, though he sits tentatively. Their conversation is aimless; they talk at each other without really listening.

As one makes a passing comment — some guys are just born cool, I guess — a wide shot captures the table’s response: While the others stare off into various distances, Bateman looks at him and snorts, then points and laughs. It’s a bizarre shot with a slightly high angle, a stylistic break that goes out of its way to show the coworkers as an egalitarian group. The interaction also departs from the norm: Bateman, attentive to his surroundings, disrupts their aloof dynamic with a genuine reaction.

For the first time, Bateman seems to comprehend the people around him and his position among them. Their usual pretentiousness, something he’s always participated in, now strikes him as ridiculous. The others point this out; when they finally recognize something “off” about Bateman, it’s when he’s at his most human. In the end, nothing fundamentally changes, save for Bateman having a realization: He and his coworkers are unknowable to each other.

Bateman’s “true self” is made irrelevant, supplanted by his corporate self. Like Howard, Bateman “wins” in that he constructs a persuasive corporate identity, but he finds himself trapped in it.

Uncut Gems and American Psycho ask us to consider the nature of such wins. Both protagonists remain unsatisfied despite capitalist success; the thrilling momentum of these narratives, as it turns out, precludes real change and growth. We might start to wonder if madness, given its economic incentives, should come as any surprise.

Opening Night Re-examines and Refracts the "Aging Actress" Trope

“I’ll do just about anything to make my character more authentic. I always have.” 

John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977) is about a woman whose life is dedicated to performance. Myrtle Gordon subsumes herself in her acting roles. She has no children; her romantic relationships are with her co-star and her director; she has no age to which she will admit, lest her aging jeopardize her career. In her latest play, she stars as Virginia, an aging actress. After a car accident takes place outside the theater after a performance and a young fan is killed, Myrtle begins to hallucinate the young girl as she herself descends further into alcoholism and unreality. Myrtle speaks, like Gena Rowlands’ characters in Cassavetes’ films often do and are, like a mad person who believes she is the only sane one in the room. 

She may be the only sane one in a room of occultists preparing for a seance led by the playwright’s psychic, but her proclamations of self-knowledge are as forthcoming and easy to comprehend as they are tragically revealing of Myrtle’s own blind spots. In sacrificing herself for roles - not sleeping enough, drinking, smoking, all to “get into character” - she indulges in the hedonistic pleasures afforded her by the vocation of inhabiting another person. In pursuit of a character’s authenticity, Myrtle has lost herself; she is unable to see the young woman she once was in Virginia, the “second woman.” Because she inhabits every character so fully, Myrtle’s loss of self impedes her acting. Thus, the straightforward trope of the aging actress is reflected back upon itself, exposing the discrepancies between the artistic rendering and the reality. 

Myrtle moves between stage sets and real-life locales constantly, and themes established in the outside world recur in the narrative of the play. In Virginia’s apartment, two enormous black-and-white photographs of an old woman in a headscarf adorn the walls. Her face is etched with wrinkles, the quintessential babushka; the domineering presence of the photographs beats the play’s audience over the head with its theme of aging womanhood while serving as a clear juxtaposition with Myrtle/Virginia, whose “old” age is less obvious, more well-preserved than “decrepit.” We see the fine lines on Myrtle’s face only when she winces as she knocks back a drink in a close-up, a donning of armor before facing the audience. 

Myrtle is not as old as Virginia, and she identifies this to Sarah Goode, the playwright (played by 1930s movie star Joan Blondell, whose own career imbues the casting with the connotation of the washed-up starlet archetype) as a major sticking point in her artistic process. “You have me up there having hot flashes - I don’t have hot flashes!” Myrtle refers to herself as her character, indicating her increasing difficulty with separating the two, and implicitly accuses Sarah of humiliating her by writing such an old woman for her to play. Myrtle’s worries seem vain and ridiculous, like those of so many vain, ridiculous actresses who care more about how they appear than how accurately they portray the character: a variation on Norma Desmond, the butt of the joke. It’s a culturally accepted phenomenon, and it largely lets Hollywood off the hook for the superficial standards of practice that drive women to such hysterics. Myrtle explains it all: if she plays this role convincingly, her fate is sealed as an old actress relegated to old-woman roles. No matter how good this play might be, no matter how complex and rich of a character Virginia is, she is not an ingenue in the traditional sense and Myrtle will never be such an ingenue again. 

The paradoxical lucidity with which Myrtle analyzes her relationship to Nancy, the young fan killed in an accident outside the theater, further distinguishes her from the crazy actress trope while confirming that she is sort of textbook “crazy,” hallucinating the dead girl as a paragon of desirable youth who says things like, “I like to fuck. I like when men look at me.” Unable to let go of this version of herself who probably never was - first eighteen, then seventeen, impossibly young and beautiful and scarily willing to be used by men in ways that many aspiring actresses rationalize to themselves again and again - Myrtle conjures her and tortures herself with the phantom. When Nancy confronts Myrtle, it is the confirmation of Myrtle’s worst fears about her aging self through the eyes of the younger woman she “killed,” perhaps so no one would rise up, All About Eve -style, in her place? 

In the manner of an experimental character study, Opening Night atomizes and comments on the wider tendency of the actress to make everything about herself, the solipsism required by the profession that dramatizes every aspect of life, encouraged and pilloried by the people who want her to perform, who write plays and direct her in them. The car accident has a lingering effect on Myrtle because it is an awful thing that she witnessed and subsequently internalized, but also because the people in the car with her (her husband, Manny, the play’s director; and her co-star and stage husband, played by Cassavetes) tell the chauffeur to keep driving.

Re-Evaluating Cruising: Indictment or Incitement of Anti-Gay Violence?

Cruising (dir. William Friedkin, 1980) is a controversial film. It earns this label more through audience and critical reactions than through its content. Content-wise, it’s a bit muddled, which of course facilitates reactionary interpretations. Its depictions of gay-bashing and homophobia are as pulpily violent as its wordless scenes of semi-nude male bodies writhing in underground bars are pulpily seductive, and the picture it paints of gay life in early 1980’s New York is grim and seedy and dangerous. Released at a time when representations of homosexuality in the mainstream media were sparse and often negative, it inevitably generated backlash from gay rights groups who viewed the film as yet another exploitative depiction of a “lifestyle” in which sex is inextricably tied to violence and homoerotic urges are a mark of shame and depravity.

Given its polemical history, I was surprised to see Cruising in the Criterion Channel’s collection of “taboo-breaking” queer cinema for Pride Month. I guess it fits the description: a lot is shown that is considered “taboo” by contemporary cultural standards, although whether the taboos are broken or enforced by the film is a slippery question the answer to which changes based on the viewing context. Friedkin himself remarked that the movie was “never” an “anti-gay screed,” but rather a glimpse into the specific S&M subculture of the gay experience based on a real-life serial murder case from the era. And from a modern-day viewpoint, seeing the film within the context of all the other cinematic depictions of queer life that came after, the culture it depicts seems less monolithic. 

 

 

 

The question of interpretation is complicated by the role of the police. Although the film is far from “copaganda” - the police fail to apprehend the killer, the killer is a police officer (in a last-minute reveal that sacrifices clear character motivation for shock value) - it positions the authorities as our window into the “regular” world. The opening scene, in which a beat cop delivers a Travis Bickle-style speech to his partner about cleaning up the filth from the streets, could go either way depending on whether or not you viewed Taxi Driver as a satire. 

Al Pacino’s George Burns, an undercover officer looking to make detective, bridges the divide between the film’s two worlds; the “everyman,” in an acceptable heterosexual pairing, ostensibly more interested in doing his job than in “working over” potential suspects. The audience is made to identify with Burns, and the casting of a likeable star who served a similar narrative purpose in one of the era’s biggest successes, The Godfather, facilitates this kinship between viewer and protagonist. 

However, Cruising’s subject matter is even more “taboo” than the Italian mafia, and the content dictates an inevitable lack of subtlety that can be ascribed more to a dearth of gay media representation than to the representation in this specific film. Club scenes, post-coital scenes, and murder scenes are often unaccompanied by score, and Friedkin allows action to unfold in long, silent takes that feel more voyeuristic than judgemental. The classical theme that plays when Burns is in bed with his girlfriend connotes propriety as well as stodginess.

The killer’s act of corrective penetration - stabbing to death the man he has just sexually dominated - is his indictment of his own behavior as well as his victim’s, a manifestation of self-hatred. Or it could be, anyway. Unlike in Psycho or Dressed to Kill, there is no psychologist to sweep in at the end and explain the murderer’s perverse motivations. As oversimplified and unsatisfying as the psychological explanation often is, the lack of such a convenient wrap-up leaves us with no prescribed point of view with which to agree or contend. But is it fair to expect a clear moral answer from a film simply because it deals with “controversial” subject matter? Does the filmmaker have a “responsibility” to lead the audience down the “right” path in their thinking? At a time when gay life was not in the public eye as it is today, media depictions such as Cruising were many people’s first and only foray into that world, and although it focuses on a small subculture, Burns ultimately does not restrict his violence to members of that subculture when he murders his neighbor, a gay man who does not participate in the “scene.” The film’s final twist is sticky because it traces this violence back to the authorities while acknowledging that elements of that same violence (the police costumes, the power dynamics) are also present in the subculture the authorities aim to attack. The film falls short of breaking the taboos it exposes, instead grimly reinforcing them.

Very Important Persons: Period Satire in The Death of Stalin and The Favourite

In the typical fashion of political satire, monarchies and oligarchies serve as wells of comedy in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite (2018) and Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin (2017). Its subjects, however, are out of power; The Favourite depicts the court of Queen Anne of Great Britain in the early 18th century, and The Death of Stalin, while recent history, depicts the ruling committee of a now-dissolved nation. From score to costuming to set design, these films embrace period drama conventions and root themselves in history. This genre-melding provides a viewpoint of the human condition that neither contemporary satire nor straightforward historical accounts can access on their own.

Set in the Soviet Union in 1953, The Death of Stalin portrays the central committee’s response to their leader’s demise and their ensuing power struggle, which ends in one member’s execution and Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power. The committee members are simultaneously old friends and bitter rivals, at times timid and other times ruthless. Comic actors play many of its essential roles, most notably Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev and Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov, Stalin’s gullible successor. This casting reflects the film’s irreverent approach to depicting historical figures, as it imagines comedic situations and banter within the context of high-stakes political turmoil.

As the audience witnesses mythic figures portrayed as fallible humans, the characters themselves experience the same with Stalin’s passing. The committee finds their leader’s dead body on the floor of his office, collapsed in a puddle of urine. They perform grief, and it’s not clear who the exaggeration is meant to convince — it could be Stalin, the other ministers, even themselves. The film finds humor in this grief; Malenkov proclaims that Stalin is irreplaceable, for example, before pointing out that he’s the successor. “Calamity, calamity,” Khrushchev laments as he casually takes off his coat. As the characters state their distress, the camera remains impersonally distant rather than capturing their faces in close-up as one might expect.

There’s also the running joke of the urine puddle: After his proclamation of grief, Malenkov steps on the wet spot and asks, “Is this?” as the camera tilts down to the puddle. The others make the same mistake and then warn the others, who shuffle around the spot. Each time, the grief is quickly interrupted and abandoned. These trivial asides often occur in long shots where Stalin’s horizontal body remains in frame, rendering him an afterthought, which further minimizes the gravity of death as an individual — what his death means commands much attention. The men then hoist the body off the ground together, shuffling and giving each other commands as though they were transporting furniture.

The levity of this scene seems dissonant with the historical significance of Stalin’s death; the committee’s reactions ask us to consider the difference between what Stalin represented versus Stalin as an individual. His physical body becomes an inconvenience in this scene, and as the ministers deal with the material reality of his death rather than its abstract meaning, the film convinces us of their status as human beings rather than historical concepts.

The Favourite takes a similarly candid approach in representing Queen Anne, its highest-ranking character. I say highest ranking because Anne, while the most powerful character in name, is vulnerable to other characters’ emotional power over her. The film sees Anne most often in a passive role, reacting to her surrounding circumstances. The central conflict occurs between Anne’s trusted confidant and lover Sarah Churchill and her cousin Abigail, whose arrival changes the court’s status quo. While Sarah’s influence over Anne allows her to influence her decision-making, Abigail develops a friendship with Anne that challenges Sarah’s political and emotional power over her.

The value of winning Anne’s favor means that the smallest actions, like a certain intonation or glance, can have significant consequences for the characters’ relationships. Anne’s power — or rather, her title — actually makes her more susceptible to manipulation. She expects to be catered to and cared for, surrendering agency as an exercise of privilege.

Early in the film, Abigail pours Anne hot chocolate, but Sarah stops her, telling Anne it’s unhealthy. Anne protests; the camera captures Abigail, confused, facing the other two on the couch as they argue. She stands with the cup in a low-angle shot, as though from Anne’s vantage point. Though low-angle shots often assign the subject power, this one seems unique. This angle exemplifies the bizarre power dynamic in Anne’s close relationships, as Anne requires her subordinates to dote on her. Sarah, for instance, regulates Anne’s diet to a comical extent; although she allows Anne to drink the hot chocolate, Anne lets the cup sit untouched, signaling her faith in Sarah’s judgment.

The absurdity of this exchange also results from its contrast with Sarah and Anne’s preceding political discussion. As we watch Abigail pour the hot chocolate, the other two talk offscreen about Anne’s raising property taxes to fund the war against France, at Sarah’s insistence. “Are the people really angry about the land tax?” Anne asks. These far-reaching policy decisions take place in the background, speaking to Anne’s limited regard for her actual governing power. Severely detached from the nation she rules, she treats politics as she does interpersonal relationships. Her fickleness and naivety speak to the isolating effect that power can have on a human being, warping their perspective.

As a result, the competition for Anne’s affection is also a competition for power. Her lopsided priorities fuel much of the film’s humor, producing situational irony as the characters assign grave importance to trivial interactions. In this way, The Favourite achieves a similar tone as The Death of Stalin, balancing humor and darkness, but by depicting exaggerated reverence rather than irreverence.

Essential for both The Death of Stalin and The Favourite and distinguishing them from standard cinematic accounts of history is their focus on interpersonal pettiness, which not only brings abstract historical figures to life but makes their humanity plainly visible. The films derive humor from how their neuroses and social blunders fuel political conflict. These foibles aren’t just entertaining, though; they have major consequences for society at large. The contrast between characters’ earthly concerns and their lofty titles and responsibility allows both films to tread a fine line between comedy and darkness. With their faults amplified by considerable power, the ruling class drags subordinates and the public into their internal conflicts, a dynamic neither film allows us to forget.

Saboteur: A Harbinger of Blacklist Paranoia

Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942) predates the first official Hollywood blacklist by five years, but its themes of scapegoating, patriotism and paranoia reflect such a period of upheaval in which the seemingly trustworthy are found suspect, and vice versa, as “true Americans'' seek out disloyal enemies on home soil. Barry Kane, a California factory worker, becomes a fugitive from the law after authorities wrongfully peg him as the saboteur who set fire to an aircraft factory. The classic Hitchcock premise - a man falsely accused of a crime, pulled into a world of subterfuge and corruption that goes to the top, accompanied (often unwillingly) by a skeptical but ultimately acquiescent femme noir - takes on a topical meaning: the sabotage of which Barry has been accused is a crime against the war effort, against his fellow workers, against America itself.

Barry first takes off to find Frank Fry, a mysterious factory worker (played by Norman Lloyd, whose friendship with Elia Kazan notably ended after Kazan named him among other actors for the HUAC in 1952) who handed Barry a fire extinguisher containing gasoline when the blaze broke out. Evading the police after they come to question him at the home of his deceased friend, Mason, Barry follows an address he noted from a dropped envelope of Fry’s to an opulent ranch in High Desert. Charles Tobin, the ranch’s owner, lovingly plays with his infant granddaughter as he informs Barry that the police are on their way to arrest him in place of the real saboteur, Fry, a minion of Tobin’s. 

As Tobin has him arrested, Barry laments that “just because you have a big ranch with a pool, everyone will believe what you say.” Tobin agrees, smugly asking, “who are they going to believe? I am an upstanding member of this community.” The recognition of Tobin as such, while an innocent with lower socioeconomic standing is made to take the blame, suggests that the unfair conditions of this world are not unique to Barry’s situation.

When Barry takes refuge in a blind man’s home, he identifies himself as “Barry Mason.” This adoption of the dead worker and friend’s name signifies the working-class solidarity that makes men like Mason and Barry himself expendable in the eyes of the sabotage’s wealthy mastermind. The blind man’s niece, Patricia, is intent on turning Barry in as soon as she sees his handcuffs, claiming it is her “duty as an American” to do so. She remarks that Barry fits the character of a saboteur in a way that Tobin does not, again causing Barry to cite Tobin’s wealth as the source of this misconception. Kane’s primary helpers in his escape are a blind man and a caravan of circus freaks, people marginalized by society in the same way he is as a criminal. 

Saboteur ends with Barry chasing Fry to the top of the Statue of Liberty, where Fry falls to his death: the villain meets his demise, with a poetic nod to the national ideal of “liberty and justice for all.” But Tobin, the financier behind the sabotage, remains unpunished and free to live at his family ranch, suggesting that the trappings of wealth and good social standing are enough to grant one impunity even in a country based on values of justice and equality. Coincidentally, the screenplay was written by Dorothy Parker and Peter Viertel, both of whom were also named on the Hollywood blacklist. I watched this movie with my dad, who dismissed the dialogue as "weird" the way that dialogue in old movies just is weird to modern audiences. I think some of that comes from the need at that time for coded language to get around censors, as well as subversive subtext that exists in any film about a man wrongfully accused of a crime - a criticism of the government, of class, of the system writ large. 

Lost In America Embalms the New Hollywood Road Movie with 80s Cynicism

Lost In America (dir. Albert Brooks, 1985) tells the story of a married professional couple who “drop out” of society to roam the United States in an RV à la Easy Rider. The irony is inherent to the concept, but the narrative unfolds it to its full potential by prodding its characters incrementally toward their inevitable failure. Unlike its self serious predecessor’s approach of tragic irony, Lost In America handles the futility of the American dream with the deranged comedic detachment of resignation to the (admittedly comfortable, albeit monotonous) status quo in an arch eulogy for the New Hollywood road movie.

David and Linda Howard are quintessential yuppies. Their identity is defined by this era-specific term that denotes upward social and financial mobility. David quits his advertising job not on principle, but out of frustration after being denied a promotion. They liquefy all of their assets into a comfortable “nest egg” to live on for their remaining years: not exactly “free-spirited.” And their first stop is Las Vegas, the American mecca of consumerist debauchery. Again, every additional element heightens the film’s satirical premise.

In Vegas, soft-spoken Linda reveals herself to be a compulsive gambler and loses the entire nest egg in the middle of the night. David’s comically disgraceful attempt to convince the casino owner to refund the Howards their money, complete with a desperate advertising pitch featuring Santa Claus, establishes that his professional skills are unhelpful outside of an office and cannot help him in the “real world.” Linda, too, proves unadaptable to these non-yuppie environs through her inability to control herself at the blackjack table, thereby threatening a marriage built on stasis and responsibility and financial comfort.

Beside the Hoover Dam, the couple argue over the plot of Easy Rider. We never see the national landmark in all its glory; instead, we linger on the side of the road as the Howards bicker about whether Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper “dropped out with nothing” or “sold a ton of cocaine” at the beginning of the movie (they did the latter, a point which further tarnishes the ideological purity of both pairs’ endeavors).

Both David and Linda view the lifestyle depicted in that movie as exemplary in some way, even though the film itself is arguably about the disappointing “reality” of such a lifestyle. David and Linda bond with a police officer over their love of the film and he tears up their ticket as a result. That an officer of the law could adore a film with staunchly anti-establishment leanings indicates a misunderstanding and re-appropriation of an American cultural touchstone made possible by the superficial concerns of the “yuppie” era.

Linda and David’s decision to go to New York and “eat shit” for David to retain his old job, followed by a montage of the increasingly exhausted travelers driving across the country set to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” satirizes the couple’s renewed faith in the stifling yuppie lifestyle as euphorically positive, highlighting the romanticized nature of that vision with the use of the iconic song over less-optimistic footage of the RV merging with choked-up city traffic - a less visceral but more insidious final image than the explosion at the end of Easy Rider.

Resolutions for the Unresolvable Girl in "Promising Young Woman" and "Little Women"

While the recent PG-rated adaptation of Little Women and the provocative social thriller Promising Young Woman couldn’t differ more in tone and aesthetic, they are products of the same moment in a post-#MeToo Hollywood. The two films reflect a tentative optimism about the state of women in film, as well as an interest in reevaluating past portrayals of women.

Shaped by this climate, Little Women and Promising Young Woman tread familiar ground with fresh perspectives. Though they might hope to celebrate women’s victories, both retain some level of skepticism about the future. For one, they acknowledge that having a voice is not enough; these films not only star women but grapple with the extent they can control their own narratives.

Director Emerald Fennell answered the call for subversive female protagonists with Promising Young Woman, which deals with a familiar narrative — the rape-revenge plot — but only partially delivers on the revenge element.

The film stars Carey Mulligan as Cassie, a med-school dropout who spends her weekends entrapping predatory men. Her main target is Al Monroe, who assaulted her late best friend, Nina. In the final 20 minutes, Cassie tracks down Al at his bachelor party and corners him with a scalpel — but in a prolonged, stomach-turning twist, the groom suffocates Cassie to death with a pillow. For those who hoped for a victory over the patriarchy, this scene is a punch to the gut.

On top of thwarting expectations, this moment is captured with brutal honesty. No visual euphemisms shield us from the horror of Cassie’s death, and the pace slows to a near stop as the camera pulls back to document the event. We witness her struggle in real-time as the camera steadily pushes back in, only to take up Al as its subject. Cassie’s limbs are still twitching as she’s edged out of frame.

Then, the tone shifts drastically: a college buddy discovers the scene the next morning and, moments later, reassures Al of his innocence. Cassie is an afterthought as Al’s buddy pulls him into a hug and kisses his head. The exchange is light, verging on comical. The tonal dissonance reaches a climax as the two men burn her body in the woods, set to “Something Wonderful” from The King and I. Al’s friend comforts him as they stare into the fire. “This is a man who tries,” the song promises us.

The tragedy of this sequence of events isn’t just that Cassie fails; it’s also that Cassie is literally and figuratively silenced, and that the film then moves on. She spends the film trying to get justice for another dead woman, only to meet the same fate. The absent Nina lost control of the narrative a long time ago; following Cassie’s abrupt removal from her own story, the ease with which Al assumes center stage rubs salt in the wound. He progresses toward his own happy ending — his wedding day — and gets yet another second chance.

At this point, we viewers might feel that the karmic laws that govern storytelling have been violated; though this injustice is realistic, it’s still narratively unsatisfying. The film seems to sense our disappointment in its final moments and says, “Fine, my treat.”

At the outdoor wedding reception, Cassie’s scheduled texts come through, and they seem to address us directly:

You didn’t think this was the end, did you?

It is now.

Enjoy the wedding!

We — along with the texts’ recipient, Cassie’s ex-boyfriend — realize Cassie has planned for this outcome, having dispersed the necessary evidence ahead of her death. Cue upbeat ‘80s ballad “Angel in the Morning.” Sirens announce the arrival of the ultimate Deus ex Machina; the police escort the bad guy out of frame. Then, the final texts:

Love,

Cassie & Nina

;)

Fennell shared in an interview that she planned to end the film with Cassie’s body burning, but financiers pushed her in another direction. Without this final scene, we could say with certainty that Cassie’s revenge is a futile exercise. But as it stands, Promising Young Woman ends on her last text — a winky-face emoticon! Did she win after all? Is this catharsis?

I’d argue no: The film withholds catharsis. No one mourns Cassie; the final scenes don’t allow space for it. Cassie must posthumously force herself back into the spotlight. If this is victory, it’s the Pyrrhic kind. Yet Cassie engineers this scenario with precision. When forced to compromise, she ultimately decides that regaining control of her and Nina’s narrative is worth it.

I recognized a similar kind of compromise in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s text reckons with her choice to marry off Jo March; without diverting from this ending, the film plants seeds of doubt that undermine its legitimacy.

After Jo says a final goodbye to Professor Bhaer, she turns around to find her family and friends smiling at her expectantly. “You love him,” Amy tells her — not a question, but a statement. “No, I don’t,” Jo replies. It doesn’t matter; no one believes her. Her sisters plan a carriage ride to intercept Bhaer. The music swells gleefully, and the following scenes in the carriage and at the train station are bathed in warm yellow light, preparing us for romance. If we detect artifice here, we might be able to ignore it.

Then the music abruptly dies as the film cuts to the coolly lit publishing office. Jo and the publisher are discussing the ending of her novel, “Little Women”; Jo’s current ending is unacceptable because the main character does not marry. The prior scenes hint at artifice, but this one confirms it by revealing a divergence between Gerwig’s Jo March and Jo’s fictional counterpart. Jo points out that her protagonist voices her refusal to marry throughout the book — as she does in the film — and defends her choice.

“The right ending is the one that sells,” the publisher says. Jo ultimately concedes, but she wants the copyright.

La Fiancée Hésitante, Auguste Toulmouche

When the soaring music starts up again and Jo and Bhaer kiss passionately in the rain, the image of Gerwig’s Jo begrudgingly accommodating her publisher is still fresh. These two versions of Jo become difficult to reconcile. The excessive romance of this reunion seems less substantial when compared to Jo’s mercenary pragmatism. In this light, Jo’s family’s insistence that she marry Bhaer is less endearing. The film still adapts its source material’s ending, but it understands Jo March’s marriage as a compromise — both on Jo’s part and Alcott’s.

In the final scene, Jo watches the printing and assembling of her book with a nebulous expression. Her smile is slight, fading before returning. A disembodied arm hands her a completed copy. She’s proud, but that emotion is complicated by uncertainty. While the copyright might belong to her, this story is not purely her own.

Despite its effusive joy, Gerwig’s Little Women cannot give its protagonist a true happy ending. Jo’s womanhood precludes her from an uncompromised triumph. Beholden to patriarchy, Jo has limited control over her own narrative, but she can control which sacrifice she makes.

Keeping Jo March in mind helped me disentangle the messiness of Promising Young Woman — like Jo, Cassie struggles against the confines of her circumstances, evading a neat resolution. The reunion with Bhaer evoked a similar sense of unreality to Al’s arrest, which strikes me as too good to be true. The romantic happy ending is so convenient and cinematic that it casts doubt on itself, and I couldn’t help but feel the same way about the last-minute karma of Al leaving his wedding in cuffs.

Cassie’s posthumous texts are certain of this scene’s finality, definitely claiming that the end “is now,” though Al’s fate will be left up to the justice system. It seems that Cassie declares an ending to her own narrative, regardless of Al’s fate.

My first reaction to the film closing on Cassie’s winky-face was disbelief. I felt it was unearned. What is there to wink about? Upon reflection, the wink seems cued into the sick joke of the situation. As minor characters discover the trail of evidence leading back to her corpse to the tune of an 80’s power ballad, Cassie makes herself heard the only way it seems to work. “I told you so,” the wink says. “I told you I would.”

Cruella: A Traditional Fairytale with an Updated Aesthetic

This weekend, I went to the movies for the first time since the start of the pandemic. When we’re both home from school, my friend Ryan and I like to go to the worst movie we can find that still promises some entertainment value. We haven’t always struck the right balance - Tom Hooper’s Cats (2019) in particular felt like a waste of $13.50 - but the theatrical experience can usually make a mediocre film into a somewhat captivating spectacle. We saw Cruella, the origin story of the titular Disney villain first seen in 101 Dalmatians. Amateur reviews on Twitter advertised a bonkers explanation for Cruella’s hatred of spotted dogs, the kind of plot twist you can tell got greenlit in the middle of a pandemic when everyone was losing their minds a little bit.

Cruella places its heroine at the center of the London fashion scene amid near-constant British invasion-era needledrops, painting the classic villain as an avant-garde designer who stages guerilla runway shows and sabotages her stodgy competition, the House of Baroness. The rivalry between the two designers, Cruella and the Baroness, somewhat acts as a microcosm for the film’s blending of gritty, counterculture coolness with elements of the classic fairytale. I couldn’t stop thinking of comparable works, possible pitches: “Vivienne Westwood meets Mary Poppins;” “The Devil Wears Prada meets Cinderella”. Maybe this is because I think of Disney less as a treasure trove of quality children’s entertainment and more as a soulless conglomerate gobbling up all the surrounding talent and putting them to work spinning gold out of idle Disney IP. 

It’s not just a Disney thing, though: Todd Phillips’s Joker essentially mix-’n’-matched thematic and plot elements from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy while applying them to the well-known narrative of the evil comic book character. Cruella, teasingly dubbed “the Girl Joker,” borrows less directly from seminal works, but both films seem to me like things people wanted to make anyway and then were paid a lot more money to write as vehicles for already-established characters owned by studios. The trend of small, up-and-coming, “serious” directors being tapped to helm big-budget Marvel movies in the past few years (e.g. Taika Waititi, Ryan Coogler, Rian Johnson, Chloe Zhao) suggests an attempt by the genre to rebrand as genuine “art” rather than action fodder, an ideological counter to the studios’ impetus to churn out as many sequels and reboots as possible. At first glance, Cruella reads as an audacious cash-grab by an industry bereft of new ideas; its merits as a film don’t necessarily absolve it of that judgement, but rather raise questions about the interactions between creativity and money in a “fallen” Hollywood. 

It makes me a little mad that they used an Iggy Pop song in a Disney movie. It feels like yet another example of mainstream media de-fanging subversive work by adopting its aesthetic without analyzing its deeper meaning. “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog” makes an inane level of sense in a movie about a woman obsessed with crafting a dalmatian fur coat. It’s clever in a not-clever way that pisses me off and makes me feel like I’m being annoying for getting pissed off. But who was that for? Am I just supposed to recognize the androgynous High Street vintage store proprietor; Cruella’s Frank-n-Furter costuming and makeup as she assumes control of her own “Frankenstein place,” Hell Hall; the music of The Beatles and The Clash (different, sure, but both famous and British) as half-defined markers of a bygone era, stripped of any real cultural significance, but easily recognizable shorthand for a “vibe” that doesn’t need to adhere to historical accuracy?

Yes! Yes. Time and again, Cruella anesthetizes the cultural subversion and political turmoil its allusions suggest by reverting to fairytale conventions. Any issue of class brought to bear by Cruella’s status as an orphaned pickpocket is quelled by the ultimate revelation that she is the Baroness’s daughter. Both Cruella and the Baroness are referred to as “psycho,” but their poor mental health is simply a facet of the characters’ villainousness. The cast’s algorithmic diversity suggests a post-racial landscape, and readings of unconventional characters like Artie and Cruella as “queer” are purely subtextual. Thus, Cruella utilizes its historical and cultural milieu for aesthetic purposes while such allusions appear to “heighten” the text.

Nurikabe: The End of a Very Long Beginning

This is the end to a very long beginning. Looking back at the past three years, I don’t think there was a day I didn’t spend thinking about this project in one way or another. And as we move into production, I feel like it would be good to reflect a bit on some of the things we learned from the experience.

 

1. Motivation is not discipline: At the beginning of any creative endeavor you probably feel very motivated. After all, it takes enthusiasm and creative energy to come up with an idea for a project. And maybe that motivation will carry you through developing that idea into a workable outline. But eventually that motivation fades. It doesn’t fade forever, of course, resurfacing anytime. But it will inevitably fade. And the idea you’ve been excitedly working on? Well, the excitement is gone and the work remains. It is at times like this that discipline comes in handy. Motivation and the energy that comes with it is fickle and unreliable. Discipline is not. It’s an “either you do it or you don’t” mentality. So even when things were hard, frustrating, intimidating or felt impossible, we both knew that nothing was going to happen unless we made it so. 

 

2. Unique doesn’t always mean original: In our research, we read through many volumes of folklore and fairytales. And though no two stories were the same, some were more similar than others. In Japanese folklore many stories can be summed up as such: A spirit causes trouble, so a monk prays a lot and the spirit goes away. In Latin American folklore, we found quite a few stories that bore a striking resemblance to Cinderella. The Japanese character Momotarō is similar to Tom Thumb and Thumbelina, all of whom in their respective stories are children born in odd ways to childless parents. Since our project’s focus is adaptation and folklore, we knew our film wouldn’t be something entirely new. But in our research, we realized that the most interesting thing about adaptation is not how similar things are. It is the differences between each story that make them interesting. For something to be interesting and unique, it doesn’t have to be completely original, it just has to take the material in a new direction. 

 

3. It’s all on you until it isn’t: As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, this is our first large scale collaborative project. We are used to relying on ourselves for everything, from the first draft of the script to the final cut of the film. The weird thing about this project is it felt very much like everything we’d done before until it wasn’t. We had to create the story, write the script. It was up to us to find a cast and crew. As stated before, we understood from the beginning that nothing would move forward on the project unless we made it happen. But now it feels like something is about to change. Now, we have to pass our vision on to our cast and crew, relying on them to make this thing a reality. And while it does relieve some pressure on us, it can be scary to hand off almost three years of work to others and trust them to make it good. We have to stay on top of things, making sure everything is in control and moving along nicely. But we also have to let go a bit, letting everyone do their work. Ultimately, we can’t do this by ourselves, as film by its very nature is collaborative.

 

4. Caution and anxiety are two different things: We have taken a lot of care in planning for production. Making sure everything is ready, our contingencies and backup plans, that is the result of caution. Caution is good in pre-production as it makes you take a step back, consider possible obstacles or issues. Anxiety, on the other hand, has no place in filmmaking. It makes you doubt everything, throwing you into a swirling storm of what-if’s. It’s a paralyzing force that narrows your focus to only the problems without considering any solutions. If left unchecked, that anxiety turns to self-doubt, which affects the entire production. Because if you don’t believe in the project (or yourself), why should anyone else? In my experience, the best remedy to anxieties (other than good preplanning and backup plans) is a simple question: “And?” It switches the focus from the problem back to the solution. Worried about what happens if something goes wrong? And? If it happens, you’re going to have to deal with it anyway, so it doesn’t help to get worried about it. It’s an attitude that’s gotten us through many stressful periods in all sorts of environments. No matter what happens, at the end of the day you’ll likely get through it unscathed. It may not be fun, and it may not be perfect. But it will be done. 

 

5. Never forget why you love it: A little while ago, I saw someone give a talk about being successful. They said that you shouldn’t do what you love because one day you’ll be working hard and realize you aren’t enjoying it. They argued it was better to figure out what you’re good at and learn to be passionate about it. Personally, I find that a rather depressing way to live. For all I know, I only have one shot at life. Seems like a waste to give up on pursuing my passion without at least trying to follow it first. And yes, there have been times on this project where everything feels wrong. Times where it feels like it’s too much to handle, where frustration and challenge overwhelm any positivity. But in those times, it’s good to remember why you started. Because if those young Nishimoto brothers, who were so fascinated with the behind the scenes features on DVDs, could see what we are doing here today… their excitement would be enough to power us through this project ten times over. 

 

That flame of childhood excitement, it is still burning inside us. Sure, it might not be as easily accessible as it was back then. But it’s light has been with us every step of the way on this project, and it will continue to light our way ahead.

^{Photos By Amy Nishimoto}

We have been Thomas and Curtis Nishimoto. We’re making something that, for lack of a better term, is really cool. And we cannot wait to show you. - TC

 

Nurikabe: Working With Others

It may be the last week of classes, but there’s still so much work to do! We spent the last week meeting with our production heads, trying to get everything in order for the shoot in June. There’s equipment to gather, costumes to make, shots to list, and schedules to make. We have more than a month to do it all, but that time is certainly going to fly by faster than we anticipate!

Thankfully, we’ve surrounded ourselves with talented people, who all seem to be just as enthusiastic about this project as we are. And that’s really exciting! It’s nice to have help, to know that we don’t need to figure everything out on our own. 

However, it is a little weird. Our style has always been ragtag and chaotic. Pretty much all of our previous films were shot in the span of a day or two, with limited equipment, and a nonexistent budget. We’re used to doing all the jobs ourselves, from lightning to camera to sound. There was no need to communicate our vision with others because we were responsible for everything from the get-go. 

^{Photo by Amy Nishimoto}

So it’s a little disorienting to be working with a bigger crew. It’s required us to put more thought into what exactly we want the finished product to look like. We’ve had to work on effectively communicating those thoughts to other members of our team. Planning has never really been our strong suit. Our previous works have been much more improvised. The process of making them was something along the lines of “this is what we have on hand. How can we make this fit into what we want?” For this film, it’s more like: “Here’s what we want. What do we need in order to get it?” We can’t show up on set, place down a camera, and hope for the best. 

Well, we can, but we probably shouldn’t. 

So there are some challenges to working with more people. However, there are also numerous advantages. As said previously, we’re used to doing everything ourselves. Having an actual crew helps lighten that burden, distributing responsibilities among multiple people. 

Additionally, each crewmember brings a new perspective to the set. This film has been stewing in our minds for years, so we’re a bit locked into a certain conception of it. Our crew is not so limited in their thinking, which allows them to suggest changes and ideas we’d never considered. Their input will hopefully make our film better than anything we could have made on our own. 

At the end of the day, it all comes down to trust. We trust in our crew's abilities, confident that they are the best people for the job. In turn, our crew trusts in us. They trust that we have a clear vision of what we want and a plan to enact that vision. Our job is to make sure that they can do their job. Once we do that, all that’s left is to place down a camera and hope for the best. - TC

 

Nurikabe: Keeping It All Organized

We rush ever faster towards production! The anxiety is creeping in a bit as we get closer to shooting, because there’s still a lot that needs to get done, and we have eight short weeks to get it all figured out.

In good news, we’ve almost got all our crew together. We have our cinematographer and production designer locked in, as well as a few production assistants. Additionally, we’ve applied for a shooting permit to film on the C&O canal, so once we have that, our location will be secured! 

I think the one thing that I appreciate now is all the time and effort it takes to plan a production like this. We’re filming at only one location, with a minimal cast and crew, making a twelve minute short. Our film is nowhere near the scale of a full feature, and it’s taken us months just to get everything in order! It has certainly been an educational experience, so we thought we’d share some of the lessons we learned from pre-production.

 

Lesson one: Time management is your friend. As it is with any large undertaking, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the things you need to get done. Sitting down and making a schedule can help make it all a bit less daunting. Make a list of everything you need to complete before you can move into production. Do you need actors? Crew? A location? Figure out the steps you need to take, and then set deadlines for each. Having a set due date for each task makes them less conceptual (“I need to cast sometime in the winter”) and more concrete (“I’ll post a casting call on November 10th”). 

 

Lesson two: Prudence and accountability. You have your deadlines, now stick to them! It is incredibly easy to procrastinate, especially when it comes to making big decisions. Putting things off will cause trouble for you down the line, so respond to those emails, check your to do list. Ask someone you know to hold you accountable. Having a friend that won’t let you get away with slacking off can ensure that you stay on task. 

Lesson three: You don’t know what you don’t know. There’s always something you miss, a question that you don’t know to ask. And there are so many questions you need to answer. How are people getting to set? What equipment do you need? How long is each scene going to take? And so on and so forth. Find the answers, make sure they’re thorough, and don’t assume anything. Things rarely work themselves out. You’re the one that has to make things happen. 

 

Lesson four: Resilience and Forgiveness. Making a movie is hard. Really, really hard. And even with all your planning, things won’t go according to script. So you need to be resilient. Take a deep breath and find a solution. Make peace with the fact that things aren’t always gonna go your way. You’ll miss an email. You’ll realize that you need something that you don’t have. Something will go wrong that is beyond your control. Mistakes will be made and accidents will happen. When these things occur (and they will) you need to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep moving forward. Because you still have a movie to make. 

 

And the only thing that can ever stop it from being made is you. - TC

 

Sleeping with a Friend: Sex, Friendship, and Love in "When Harry Met Sally" and "Sleeping with Other People"

Spoilers for When Harry Met Sally and Sleeping with Other People.

When Harry Met Sally (1989), a now–classic film, has plenty of references to other classic love stories, from discussions of Casablanca (1942) to the Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald oldies on the soundtrack. Interspersed throughout are talking heads of elderly couples sharing their love stories, marking the pivotal points of Harry and Sally’s story. At first, the pair is positioned as complete opposites — Sally the high–maintenance optimist to Harry’s smarmy cynic — yet as their friendship develops, their vulnerabilities and compatibility gradually come to the fore, and the two prove endearing and funny in equal measure.

But first, some false starts. The film begins somewhat stereotypically, trapping Harry and Sally in a car driving from Chicago to New York. Their initial antagonism and the question they debate — Can men and women really be friends? — are just red herrings, however, that mock the forced antagonism of other rom–coms. The road trip that might have taken ninety minutes in another film is over within fifteen, and Harry and Sally separate with no expectation of meeting ever again.

Nevertheless, this is a rom–com and they are reunited twice more — during a flight five years later, picking up their disagreement right where they left off, and then a third time five more years later, after both have just exited serious relationships. This time, they go to lunch, unpacking their respective breakups and finally agreeing to be friends. Although both are getting over their exes and have no intention of dating, the film hints at what’s to come — the beginning of their friendship mimics Harry’s dating pattern that he described earlier, getting a “safe lunch” together before going to dinner, as the film’s theme, “It Had to Be You,” plays unobtrusively.

© Sam Valadi / CC BY 2.0

What follows is a montage, both morose and comedic, of the pair moving on from their breakups and wandering New York City together, while a phone call between them is heard in voiceover. The sequence ends with a split screen as they watch Casablanca on the same channel from their respective apartments. Although the contrast between Sally’s cheery bedroom and Harry’s dreary one reflect their differing personalities, the scene emphasizes their compatibility and connectedness. The couple spends much of the film seated across from one another at various outings, filmed in shot–reverse shot, but here they are side–by–side.

Although their determination to remain platonic complicates their eventual romantic feelings and delays their happy ending by a few months, Harry and Sally’s compatibility is underscored by their friendship. They are brutally honest and courageously vulnerable with one another, sharing details of their romantic trials and sex lives, including the iconic scene in which Sally fakes an orgasm in a diner to prove to Harry how easy it is. The film’s ultimate message has nothing to do with whether men and women can be just friends, instead demonstrating that the best relationships begin with friendship.

Sleeping with Other People (2015) has a very similar premise and structure, to the point that writer–director Leslye Headland described it as “‘When Harry Met Sally’ for assholes.”¹ In it, Jake and Lainey, who lost their virginity to each other in college, reunite twelve years later after each has gone through a bad breakup. Both are serial cheaters who sabotage all of their relationships — Jake because he is cynical about love and too immature to just break up with his girlfriends; Lainey because she keeps going back to her neglectful recurring fling, Matt. Although it also asks whether men and women can be friends, the film is similarly disinterested in answering that question, but for different reasons.

Jake and Lainey admit to their mutual attraction very early on in the movie, but agree not to act on it, determined not to sabotage their nascent friendship. This accord is followed by a montage of the pair growing closer that mirrors that of When Harry Met Sally, including the split screen at the conversation’s end, the voiceover updated from a phone call to a text exchange. Yet while Lainey is shown getting over Matt, Jake continues his womanizing ways and the split screen of the last shot expands to fill the whole screen to show his departing one–night stand, out of frame while he spoke to Lainey.

Although Jake and Lainey have similar issues with commitment and even, it’s suggested, sex addiction, only Lainey is shown actually overcoming her problems, finally standing up for herself against Matt and applying to med school, a long–delayed ambition. Jake, by contrast, remains the same for much of the montage and the film, rarely opening up to Lainey, only to suddenly realize that he’s in love with her. Lainey reciprocates, but neither acts on their feelings — she’s moving to Michigan for med school and he’s afraid to ruin their friendship.

© Sofiamoreiralima / CC-BY-SA-4.0

Jake’s static character development is epitomized by the scene where he teaches Lainey how to masturbate, using a plastic bottle to demonstrate. Instead of mutually learning about relationships from each other, as Harry and Sally do, Jake instructs Lainey about relations with men and herself, placing himself in a position of mastery. He does not change so much as realize that Lainey is “the one,” a concept whose existence he spent his entire adulthood denying.

This is the one of the main differences between the two films. When Harry Met Sally is dominated by its leads and the growth they experience together. Rare is the scene that isn’t an intimate or important moment for the two, as they come to terms with their flaws and their love. Significantly, Harry and Sally watch their best friends Jess and Marie fall in love, an undeniable reminder to snatch up a compatible partner when you find them. In comparison, Sleeping with Other People distracts from its main romance with other flings and its secondary characters tell Jake and Lainey what their flaws are, instead of showing them. The movie is a little grittier, a little meaner — in its portrayal of its characters, the framing of New York’s streets, even in its EDM soundtrack and movie references (The Graduate (1967) and Misery (1990)). Although both films share a similar message — the importance of friendship as a foundation for love — and feature a happy ending, the former is a cleaner depiction, emotionally and filmically, while the latter isn’t afraid to show life’s messiness, even if it confuses the narrative.

¹ Nick Allen. “Sleeping with Other People.” Review, September 11, 2015. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sleeping-with-other-people-2015

A History on the River - Finding Our Location

Updates: these past few weeks we’ve been trying to secure the proper permission to film on location. It’s still a developing situation, but projections look good. It also gives us a chance to talk about location scouting for our film.

As we have written in previous posts, our film is a modern fairytale structured around elements and themes of folktale. But for our setting, we didn’t look to books for inspiration. Instead, we turned to our own childhoods.

We grew up in rural central Maryland, where Virginia and West Virginia meet. Our summers were spent outside in the woods, on hiking trails, and around campfires. And at the center of all of those memories is the Potomac River. 

We Nishimoto Brothers owe a lot to the Potomac. We would often hike or bike down the canal paths. Every Christmas, we would hike up to Jefferson Rock and watch the cars drive on the opposite bank. Our first job was creating promotional videos for River and Trail, a local rafting company. 

So, we figured the Potomac and the surrounding area would be a good location. More specifically, we came up with the idea of having our characters hike down the C&O Canal. If you’ve hiked down the canal, every now and then you’ll come across locks. Some of them are better preserved than others, but they are very interesting features on the trail. Accompanying some of these locks are lockhouses, lodging for caretakers of the lock back when the canal was operating. These houses are quite old, dating back to the 19th century. They are quaint, historic, and a little creepy. That makes them the perfect place for some mysterious happenings.

In preparation for production, we visited the lockhouse we were interested in last summer. It’s about a quarter mile hike from the nearest parking lot, making it a very isolated location. The first thing that struck me about the house is its simplicity. It’s very unassuming, a simple white house. It’s the kind of building that you won’t know what’s inside until you go in. 

Stepping inside, you feel like you have gone back in time. All the furniture is wood and the walls are adorned with black and white photographs of past inhabitants and the canal when it was in use. A steep narrow stairway leads up to two bedrooms separated by a thin wall. The house sleeps eight people, which seems like a large number for such a small building. With the shutters closed, the house is extremely dark. From a filmmaking standpoint, this is good. It will let us control the light better. 

^{Photo by Curtis Nishimoto}

The only major drawback to the house (other than its remoteness) is that there is no electricity. This is good for if you’re trying to live like it’s 1873, but rather inconvenient when you’re trying to shoot a film. We spent the night in the house, the summer heat painfully reminding us of the lack of air conditioning. I (Curtis) can’t be sure I slept at all that night, it was so hot. Nevertheless, we made it to dawn. And as we walked down the trail, the warm morning breeze in our faces, our heads were filled with questions on how we would pull off a film production in the house.

Almost a year later and we’re a few months away from the shoot. Challenges aside, we know that the lockhouse is a perfect location for our film, so we’ll take it, heat, bugs, and all. - TC

^{Photo By Curtis Nishimoto}

Nurikabe: Dealing with the Anxieties of Film Production

There’s this joke which posits that babies actually have the ability to teleport, and that’s how they manage to disappear even though you only looked away for a second. It’s only when they get older and realize that teleportation is impossible that they lose this ability. It’s starting to feel like people that make movies are the same way; they only are able to do it because they don’t realize it’s impossible yet.

That’s a very convoluted way of saying it’s been quite a week. We’re now starting to lock in our cast and crew. Or at least we’re trying to. Thing is, up to this point, the ball has been in our court. We’ve needed to come up with the idea, write the script, choose a shooting date, et cetera, et cetera. But now, we need a crew. The only thing we can do about that is spread the word and hope that people respond. And the waiting is the hardest part. 

Maybe it’s just that we’ve entered the part of the semester where all the big things are coming due. Things are getting stressful, and this project is no exception. There’s a bit in Wallace and Gromit where Gromit is riding a toy train, frantically laying down pieces of track as the locomotive barrels forward. That’s what this feels like. We’re barreling towards a destination and we need to get all the tracks laid in order to get there. And right now, we’re waiting for others to hand us the next piece of track. 

Right now, we’re at a tipping point. We have our cast assembled. We have dates picked out and reserved at the location. We just need hands to fill our crew. And it’s a bit scary. Because the last few years of our lives have been this film, this story. But now, we’re asking others “Is this something you want to be a part of?” As artists and creators, our work is an extension of ourselves. Part of our identities are put on the page, in the film. And it’s a difficult thing, to put yourself out there, to be vulnerable. Because when we ask “Is this something that interests you,” we’re also asking “are we someone who interests you?” Are our ideas worth your time? Are we worth your attention? Do you believe in this project, and by extension, do you believe in us? 

And it’s unclear what the answer to those questions are. We haven’t gotten as many responses as we’d like, although we hold out hope that we’ll get more. That’s the important thing, that we don’t lose hope. At the end of the day, all we need is a story, some actors, and a camera. At the base level, that’s all a film needs. And as long as we believe in our story, that it’s one worth telling, we’ll find a way to tell it. 

One way or another, we’ll make it to the end of the trail. 

-TC

Nurikabe: Updates and The Writing Process

Updates: I wish we had some tangible updates to share with you, but unfortunately, it’s all just emailing people. This week, we’re finalizing our cast and putting our crew together. We’re creeping ever closer to production, which is very exciting! 

Alright, we’ve covered the research process. Now, we get to my (Thomas’s) favorite part: writing! I think I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller. As a kid, I was reading all the time or making up my own stories. And while I don’t read as much as I used to, the second part is still going strong. But I never really got into screenwriting until my freshman year, when Studio North started their underclassmen writers room. For some reason, I always had this notion that I needed to fulfill certain requirements in order to be a writer. “I don’t really read much, so I can’t be a writer” and similar thoughts always held me back. And then I joined this writers room and was basically told “alright, you’ve got a week to write this episode. Go.” And that’s when I realized that there was only one real requirement of being a writer: you write. So I did, and I haven’t stopped since.

Process. Every writer has one, and I’m no exception. Everything I’ve ever written has started as a blank Google document. At the top, I put a general summary of what I want to do. For this project, that was some sort of modern fairytale. Next, I make a list of characters. Character is everything for me. Before I can start writing a story, I need to know who that story is happening to. I write out a short bio for each character, outlining their strengths, weaknesses, fears, and desires. And slowly, each one takes shape. 

I knew that there would be three characters, as that number often shows up in fairytales. They would be college-bound seniors, a state of being that was fresh in my mind. And they would all be anxious about something. Because fairytales often serve as ways to teach children, to help them confront and make sense of the world. Certainly, that transition to college, to adulthood is a time of learning. And as I thought about what anxieties that brought with it, my characters presented themselves.

Three friends, Amanda, Jenny, and Grant, each with their own unique hurdles. Grant is a homebody, lacking the drive and confidence to take hold of his life’s direction. Jenny is insecure, fearing that her decision to attend a community college makes her inferior to her peers. And Amanda doesn’t want things to change. She’s not ready to let go of the life she knows just yet. Now I just needed to figure out a plot that would force them to confront these fears. 

I can’t tell you too many details (can’t spoil the film before we’ve made it!) but I will talk about its creation in general. Once I have my characters down, I write down the typical story outline (hook, inciting incident, first act turning point, midpoint, second act turning point, climax) and write a sentence for each. It’s not much, but it gives me enough structure to start filling in the details. Sometimes I’ll write a treatment, but usually I just jump right into the script. I’m a slow writer. I can’t “just put something down on the page.” It can be painful, because often I’ll know what I want to do, just not how to do it. I tend to pace around my room, saying different lines until I find the right one. I usually make a vibes playlist, a collection of songs and scores that I think capture the feeling of the film, and play it in the background. I’m also directing and editing the film in my head. It’s not written explicitly on the page, but I’m thinking about how each scene is shot, how the lines are being delivered, and where the cuts are. Sometimes, it feels like I’m watching the movie in my head and just writing down what I see on screen. 

 

In short, writing can be overwhelming and exhausting. Every sentence feels like an hour, each page an eternity. But at some point, the script gets finished. Then I send it to some friends, get feedback, and start all over again. All this effort for about twelve pages. Will it all have been worth it? Will that work even show through in the finished product? Only time will tell I suppose.

^{Photo by Curtis Nishimoto}

Revisiting "The Social Network"

Spoilers for The Social Network

Over ten years after being lauded one of the best films of its decade, David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network, with its sleek directing and punchy dialogue courtesy of Aaron Sorkin, still proves an engrossing watch. The Shakespearean-esque drama flashes between the founding of Facebook by Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg and two lawsuits that occurred a few years later, which respectively accused Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for Facebook, and of pushing his co–founder Eduardo Saverin out of the company.

© Charis Tsevis / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The film’s Mark Zuckerberg is socially awkward but egotistical (never a good combination). The screenplay describes him as “a sweet looking 19 year old whose lack of any physically intimidating attributes masks a very complicated and dark anger.” He wants to be the smartest and coolest in any room, wants to be liked and admired by everyone, but in lieu of affection, he’ll accept their jealousy, to the point of presuming it in everyone he meets. Erica, Mark’s fictional girlfriend, puts it best when she says:

“You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you’re gonna go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”

When Erica tells Mark that she just wants to be friends, he tellingly responds, “I don’t want friends.” His inability to connect to others is self–inflicted and he can’t stand it either when those close to him have other friends. In one scene, he approaches Erica while she’s out with friends, invading her night with them and trying to get her alone. Later, when Eduardo reveals that his emotionally manipulative and abusive girlfriend Christy frightens him, Mark unfeelingly replies, “Still, it’s nice you have a girlfriend.”

These slightly sympathetic, painful moments of failed connection are both undermined and underscored by Mark’s ruthlessness. He constantly drags down his friends to his level in an attempt to put himself on top. The film implies that he spread a story that Eduardo committed animal cruelty to discredit him and called the police on his business partner Sean Parker after Sean partied with underage college students. After Erica unceremoniously dumps him, he creates Facemash, a website where undergrads can rate female students’ appearances, judging one girl against another like “barn animals.”

Altogether, the film presents Mark as pitiful but reprehensible. Yet its execution is muddled by its admiration of Zuckerberg’s ingenuity, or rather the ingenuity of his creation. One has to wonder how many men have come out of The Social Network wanting to emulate, not condemn, its main character. Nevertheless, it stands to question if Mark even is the genius of the movie. The idea for Facebook originates after a conversation with Harvard seniors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, the plaintiffs in the other lawsuit against Mark. It is Eduardo who provides the initial funding for the site, his roommate Dustin Moscovitz who inspires the famous relationship status feature, and Sean Parker who attracts investors for it. Even Facemash, the closest he gets to a truly original invention, is inspired by a roommate’s idea and a creation of pure cruelty and childishness that depends upon an algorithm created by Eduardo to work perfectly. Mark may be intelligent but he’s also as unoriginal as he is impulsively cruel.

Mark’s real skill seems to lie in his ability to use and discard the people whose ideas and money he is deploying. Of the entire cast, Erica is the only character who cuts Mark loose before he can do the same to her. She exists as both a voice of reason and a white whale for Mark, framed as the reason he works so relentlessly on Facebook. Like most of the female characters in the film, all of whom are supporting characters, she is subjected to casual sexism by Mark and other men. Most women in the movie are glorified window dressing, background props objectified by the frat guys and venture capitalists around them as an implicit condemnation of these male characters and the toxic culture of the spaces Mark inhabits throughout the film.

Yet the movie is guilty of the same mistreatment and objectification as these men, and not once are any of these women or their experiences with misogyny treated with true gravity. The nearest we get is a seconds–long close–up of Erica in tears after being taunted by some male students for her bra size, which Mark has mocked online.

For all of its slick, masterful packaging, The Social Network’s condemnation of Mark is obscured when it fawns over his intelligence and revels in the toxicity of his ambition. It also stands to mention that the real–life Mark Zuckerberg began dating his wife, Priscilla Chan, around the time of the events depicted — ironic considering Erica’s centrality in Facebook’s creation and the treatment of women throughout the movie.

Mark Zuckerberg at South by Southwest in 2008. © Jason McElweenie / CC-BY-2.0

The film’s last scene further muddies the waters. After a grueling day of depositions retreading his vicious ousting of Eduardo from Facebook — at one point, Eduardo bitterly spits, “I was your only friend,” while Mark glares back, silent — Marylin, Mark’s lawyer, tells him, “You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.” Here the film, via Marylin, invites us to sympathize with Mark and his conflicted, boyishly vulnerable expression, despite the reprehensibility we have seen on display, despite the confirmation yet again of how self–inflicted his anguish is.

Yet sympathy does not seem to equal redemption. Or perhaps we’re meant to pity him instead. Left alone, Mark pulls up Erica’s Facebook page and sends her a friend request. In a chilling last shot, the screen fades to black as the Beatles’ “Baby You’re a Rich Man” plays and Mark refreshes over and over, hoping that Erica will accept his overture. Having watched Mark get in his own way every time he neared something resembling human connection for two hours, having watched him refuse what he needs in favor of what he wants, we know better.

Nurikabe - Films and Folklore

Not too many exciting updates for this post. We’re in the middle of sending and receiving emails for cast, crew, and location. We can’t wait to tell you all about those, but we want everything to be in place first. 

So instead, let’s talk about where our story left off. We had just decided on a topic: folklore and adaptation. That’s a very specific and not at all nebulous topic to research, right? Where do you even start for something like that?

Well, the answer was to talk to our faculty mentor. See, every recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship must find a faculty mentor, someone who can help guide the student through their research. And for a film project, it seemed pretty clear to us who our mentor should be: Professor Matthew Porterfield. 

Not only does he teach production in Johns Hopkins’ wonderful Film and Media Studies program, Matt Porterfield is an accomplished independent director! Some of his notable features include Putty Hill and Sollers Point, not to mention that he’s directed numerous short films. Experience with making movies in Baltimore and on a small budget? Sounds like our guy. 

Fortunately, he agreed to work with us and help make our film happen! His first job: to help us find materials to research. In the summer after our freshman year, he graciously provided us a list of movies and books for us to read, watch, and ponder about. Some of the books were simply collections of folktales from various cultures, such as Japanese, Native American, and Appalachian. Some, like The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim, were about fairy tales themselves.  And yet others discussed film, such as Andre Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time. Some of these books were harder to work through than others, but they helped us think about the function of story and film and put us in the correct mindset to begin working on our own artistic creation. 

I found the films to be more interesting and memorable. Whether that’s due to my tragically short attention span or general disposition to the medium, I do not know. But I will say, there’s nothing that ignites the imagination more than being handed a list of films that you’ve never heard of before. I’d like to share with you the highlights.

 

Arabian Nights, Volumes 1, 2 & 3. I think these were my favorite of the bunch, despite them being somewhat difficult to follow. Inspired by the original Arabian Nights, these films feature a myriad of tales centered in modern day Portugal. I couldn’t summarize them all, as that would take too long, but one included the ghost of a cow testifying at a trial! So that’s cool.

 

Kuroneko. Gotta love Japanese ghost stories. Set in historical Japan, this film follows two spirits as they take vengeance on a group samurai. It’s not all that scary, but it’s got a beautifully eerie atmosphere to it. Plus I’m a sucker for anything having to do with ancient Japan. 

 

A Ghost Story. Of all of the films we watched, I think that this is the one that I need to watch again. Because to be completely honest, I didn’t get it the first time (I mean, a seven minute single take of a woman eating a pie, what’s up with that?). But upon reflection, I think it’s a beautiful film about love, loss, and life. It’s simple, creative, and unique, and I’d be lucky to create something as thought provoking. 

 

I think that’s it for now. We’ve included a picture of the complete reading list, in case anyone’s interested in replicating our research experience (be warned Norte, The End of History is over 4 hours long!) Till next time! - TC

Nurikabe - The Story So Far

It all started with a question: “what do you want to do?”. That’s what Dr. Natalie Strobach, the Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Research, asked me two years ago in our first meeting. I was confused; I had applied for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program with an idea for a documentary about the Maryland Wind Festival. Wasn’t that what I was going to do? She informed me that I wasn’t obligated to follow through with that project. The application determines if you’re selected for the program, but it doesn’t dictate what you do with the grant. “But surely I am making a documentary of some sort,” I thought. After all, it is a research grant. As it turns out, I had a very limited understanding of what research could be. As I walked out of that meeting, head swimming with thought, I was no closer to an answer. What do I want to do?

 

Spoiler alert: I figured it out. As it turns out, research as a film major is a little different than STEM research. Like STEM researchers, we research a topic and publish a work surrounding that topic. However, we aren’t writing essays or publishing to journals. We (as you can probably guess) are using our research to make a short film. Publishing our research means submitting to film festivals. This opens up our project to be about anything we want, as long as it’s approved. So, with that in mind, I considered what I wanted out of film, why I wanted to make them so badly. And after a lot of thought, I came to the conclusion that I’m here to tell a story. So I decided to focus the project on storytelling, specifically myths, fairytales, and folklore. It also gave me an opportunity to connect with my heritage. Despite being half Japanese, I didn’t grow up knowing much of Japanese culture. I don’t even speak the language. But as a child I did read stories and fairytales, either translated into English or illustrated in books. I thought that this was a good opportunity to dig a little deeper in those stories. - C

^{Photo by Thomas Nishimoto}

I was always an unofficial part of my brother’s project. I kept up with his progress, helped him brainstorm ideas, and it was a given that when it came time to film, I would be on set. I officially joined in the end of my freshman year, when I received a Wilson Fellowship of my own. In my first meeting with Dr. Strobach I was given a choice: pursue my own project or join my brother’s. I thought about it and came to the conclusion that when I graduate, that I want to have something to show for it. By combining our grants, my brother and I would have twice the budget than we would’ve had individually. But more importantly, working together meant twice the creativity, twice the potential. - T

^{Photo by Curtis Nishimoto}

We are Curtis and Thomas Nishimoto. For the past two and a half years, we have been working to create a short film based on our research. And as we approach the start of production, we’d like to show you where we are, how we got here, and where we’re hoping to go on this project. - TC

Duplicity and Darkness: Human Nature, According to Fargo

Spoilers for season 1 of Fargo.

“This is a true story.” The first episode of Fargo begins with these words, superimposed over a sweeping landscape whose few signs of civilization — a thin road, a telephone line — are overwhelmed by the wintry wilderness and shrouded by the night. The lights of some unknown city glimmer just over the horizon, barely visible. As the words fade — “true” the last one to disappear — and the haunting orchestration swells, a single car appears, dwarfed by the nature around it but inexorably driving towards its goal. Its headlights might seem like the light at the end of the tunnel, but its driver is far from a civilized presence here to illuminate the night.

This is our villain, Lorne Malvo, a coldblooded contract killer who leaves chaos in his wake wherever he goes. Malvo is no man, but an apex predator, a wolf, a comparison he himself enjoys making. He’s skilled at putting on a charming face when he wants to, whether playing a harmless pastor, a caddish dentist, or a quippy wanderer. Yet, the wolf lingers beneath, unsettling all who glimpse his true nature. Like the series itself, which is in fact completely fictional, this dissonance between exterior presentation and interior reality creates a sense of narrative distrust and suspense. Fargo itself is predatory in the way it preys on audiences’ fascination with truth. Nothing is what it seems, which makes Malvo and the show alike all the more dangerous and unpredictable.

Malvo’s duplicity and underlying malevolence are mirrored by the setting of Fargo. Most of the season takes place in the Minnesota cities of Bemidji and Duluth, whose wholesome, friendly Midwestern façade and pristine, snow–covered landscapes are undermined by the dysfunction which lies beneath. Fargo’s “antihero,” hapless insurance salesman Lester Nygaard, is similarly deceptive. A broken washing machine’s brutal thumping is our first sight and sound of the Nygaard household, before the camera tilts up from the basement to Lester and his wife Pearl in the kitchen, and it immediately foregrounds the dysfunction of their marriage and Lester’s capacity for malevolence — hidden underneath the floorboards, but violently pulsing, ready to explode.

Fargo presents a rather bleak outlook on human nature and fate. Frequent establishing shots of the Minnesotan wilderness signal that this is the animal kingdom, for all that its characters live in towns and work 9–to–5s. The camera often crouches animalistically behind objects, whether they be snowdrifts or steering wheels, giving the impression of a stalking predator or cowering prey. In the world of the show, doing good is often a pointless quest in futility and one chance encounter can loose the raw, animal savagery lurking beneath a veneer of civilized humanity. Lester and Malvo meet entirely by chance in the hospital and by the end of the pilot, Malvo’s sinister encouragement has driven Lester to kill his nagging, domineering wife, bashing her head in with a hammer after a fight. And so begins Lester’s move up the food chain. He is now both predator and prey, and struggles with this dual existence for the rest of the season.

At times, Lester is cold and calculating, tampering with crime scenes, evading the police, and eventually pinning Pearl’s murder on his brother. But he sometimes reverts to a bumbling coward who can never quite shake off the suspicions of Deputy Molly Solverson, the hero to Lester’s antihero and Malvo’s villain. Throughout the season, Lester wears a bright orange puffy coat, the lurid color resembling that worn by hunters to avoid shooting each other. It simultaneously marks him as both hunter and hunted, a predator and a sitting duck, with no hope of blending in with the stark, muted color palette.

By the season finale, Lester has seemingly transformed from failed salesman to successful alpha male. Following a one–year time skip in episode 8, he’s remarried to the adoring Linda, started his own insurance shop with a slick, masculine façade, and wears sharp blazers and dark–colored turtlenecks. But his past is inescapable and Malvo soon returns to Bemidji to murder Lester, setting in motion a sequence of events that ends in both their deaths. After Lester injures him with a bear trap, Malvo crawls away to his rented cabin to recover and is shot dead by a former police officer, Gus Grimly, who has been lying in wait there. Gus had previously tried to have Malvo arrested, only to have Malvo threaten his daughter Greta. His triumph over Malvo is a triumph of family man over callous killer, of law and order over a vicious predator. Yet Malvo dies as he lived, sowing mistrust and suspense. Neither his severely injured leg nor Gus’s initial hail of bullets are enough to do him in and it takes two bullets to the face to exterminate his threat once and for all.

Malvo’s death also unearths the truth of Pearl’s murder, sending Lester on the run. He dies two weeks later, after running onto the thin ice of a lake in Glacier National Park. In contrast to Minnesota’s flat open landscapes, Montana’s mountainous wilderness is claustrophobic, closing in on him. In truth, he has been on thin ice this whole season and his fall — shortsighted, self–inflicted, and accidental — is a thematically appropriate conclusion to his story. The natural swallows the human, in a trope oft–employed by the Coen brothers (creators of the 1996 movie the series is based on), warning the audience that compromising morality is a slippery slope.

Fargo’s ruthless message about the fragility of humanity is strengthened rather than softened by its seemingly paradoxical happy ending. In a nod to the original film, the show’s last shot frames a pregnant police chief, this time Molly Solverson, her husband Gus (the officer who defeated Malvo), and Gus’s daughter Greta. The only family to survive the season with every member alive, the camera lingers on them curled up together on the couch, watching TV — a happy family, a slice of Americana, a reassurance that at least some good guys have a happily ever after.

An Unconventional Cut

Showing up to fourth grade picture day after a botched haircut and hearing, “What happened to your head?” from a classmate haunts me to this day, and likely will forever.  Even so, that experience pales in comparison to that of a man with no social experience and scissors for hands, thrust into a too small town of gossiping housewives and their unconcerned husbands.  Such is the fate of Edward Scissorhands.

Created in a lab, with his progenitor now deceased, Edward spends countless months alone in a gothic castle which looms over the nameless suburb.  As with many aspects of the film’s presentation, the contrast is stark and definite but not heavy handed. Completely unaware of the world outside of the castle and its beautiful gardens, tended to by Edward’s own blades, a hapless door-to-door saleswoman, Peg Boggs, stumbles in and brings him into town. 

The things which typify a suburban environment, such as pastel homes with near identical floor plans and freshly trimmed lawns, are so utterly homogenous that they only serve to unsettle.  The set design and cast of intrusive neighbors highlight societal norms which are often taken for granted, and become oppressive in their conformity.

Edward is clearly an outsider, and the nosy townsfolk take note before he can get settled.  Beyond the obvious, his face is pocked with scars from self-inflicted wounds.  In his first attempt to dress in civilian clothes, he tears them to shreds and slices clean through a pair of suspenders.  Edward is effectively an infant when it comes to etiquette and social matters, rarely speaking and often misunderstanding what is said to him.  He doesn’t even respond when referred to as Ed, likely because he fails to recognize it as a shortened version of his own name. 

In a town where your business is everyone’s business, Edward’s quirks quickly turn him into a novelty item.  He is constantly paraded around town, encouraged to give eccentric haircuts and coerced into handling the neighborhood’s gardening duties.  That is until the differences become too stark and the sheen begins to come off.  Outliers are only used as showpieces, not to be truly accepted into society.

The film doesn’t stop its critique at a community level, but brings it to a personal, familial level.  Seated around the Boggs’ family’s dinner table, Mr. Boggs poses an ethical question to Edward, concerning what he should do if he stumbled upon an unmarked briefcase full of money.  With childlike charm, Edward claims he would like to give it to his friends, but Mr. Boggs, is quick to remark that the proper thing to do is to take it straight to the authorities.  Kim, the family’s daughter and Edward’s crush, speaks up for Edward.  It is one of the many instances in which we see the personal good compared to the common good, and individual desires set against public expectations.

There are further questions prompted concerning spirituality, as well as the contrast between the organic and the artificial.  Edward is a manmade construct, and despite his stunted social nature, he possesses all interior aspects of a human.  He clearly feels love, sorrow, and shame, yet the religious zealot in town curses him and calls for a return from whence he came.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to say what defines a human, but it is a question which the film doesn’t hesitate to bring up.

Despite its weighty nature, the film does not take itself too seriously and is full of enchanting moments.  In a tender encounter between Edward and Kim, she tells him, “Hold me,” to which he replies, “I can’t.”  It is a dismal scene which highlights Edward’s own defects, but in a self-aware, lighthearted manner.  It is moments such as these, in which abnormality and empathy are married, that the film works best – and there are plenty.

As always, Tim Burton beautifully places the mad, strange, and misunderstood at the forefront of the story, doing so in his signature style, which despite its bright colors and eccentric costumes retains a peculiar authenticity.  Edward Scissorhands is far from your traditional heartwarming Christmas story, but it is an endearing tale which will resonate with the insecurities in all of us.

Portraits of Nora Ephron and Joan Didion

The documentary, Everything is Copy, chronicles Nora Ephron’s life, focusing on her importance as an essayist and screenwriter, as well as the relationships that shaped her. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold similarly dives into the writer’s personal and professional life. Both of these documentaries focus on loss and question what it means to know another person, providing perspectives characterized both by intimacy and distance. 

Everything Is Copy is notable in how it works to explore Ephron’s life in spite of her not being alive at the time of filming. She died of leukemia in 2012, and her son, Jacob Bernstein, began working on the documentary in the years immediately afterward, ultimately releasing it in 2016. The film first opens solely with the sound of Ephron speaking, and a few seconds later, her image appears. This shift from the audio to video immediately emphasizes how film brings her to life. She looks not at the camera but at Charlie Rose, who is off-screen, as she recounts a story that results in laughter from the audience. This beginning doesn’t need context; her presence and humor are enough to establish her personality.

The subsequent ten minutes exhibit a combination of photographs, archival footage, and past and more recent interviews, exposing how film can break up time as well as extend it. In just a few minutes, we witness not just who Ephron was, but specifically the history that shaped her and her legacy into the future. The segment of her and Charlie Rose, for example, is followed by an oscillation between her present and the past. It cuts between home videos of her at nine years old, and an interview where she discusses her mother’s mantra that Bernstein chose as the title, “everything is copy.” The juxtaposition of the visuals of her as a child and her adult voice demonstrates the formative nature of this idea and how it has persisted throughout her life. Our understanding of her is immediate and personal. The film then moves from the past to the actual present, with a cut from her using a typewriter to one of Bernstein’s laptop. This technological gap marks the passage of time, while also illustrating Ephron’s impact on her son, who details how he too is a writer. Photographs of her punctuate throughout; although she is often joyous, these still images seemed to contain her and suggest that, without her alive, our understanding of her is ultimately limited.  

The documentary also points to the boundary between public and private identities, and explores the extent that such a boundary existed for Ephron. Bernstein interviews a large range of people, including David Remnick, Meryl Streep, Rob Reiner, Amy Pascal, Meg Ryan, and Rosie O’Donnell. Her demeanor in interviews with hosts like Charlie Rose matches the descriptions of those who personally knew her. Several speak of her in a way that suggests a closeness; there’s often a succession of them individually describing the same thing about her, adding to a cohesion in her portrayal. Yet many lament not knowing that she had been diagnosed with cancer. The documentary creates a parallel between the viewer and her friends; the film increasingly immerses us in her life, allowing us to get closer to her, and then it forces us to revisit the secrecy of her illness again at the end. Ephron is simultaneously knowable and elusive.

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, like Everything is Copy, was directed by someone close to her, specifically her nephew, Griffin Dunne. The film's visual depiction of Didion’s loss of her husband, John Dunne, suggests its incomprehensibility for her. When Didion begins describing the night he died, we see part of their apartment in daylight, where no one is present. The tension from this absence is exacerbated by an off-center camera. As she progresses in recounting what happened, we get increasingly closer-up shots of a table, and then the piano on the side. Her words, “I remember the sense of the weight as he fell,” coincide with a cuts to a shot of trees outside, now at night and at a distance from what is presumably Didion’s window. The film conveys the emotion of this grief not through Didion’s words but in what is on screen. Another example of a key visual decision is when Dunne’s brother discusses how he and Didion went into John’s office after his death. As he talks about himself, the closet is in color, but as he talks about her, it shifts to black and white, signifying the impact of Dunne's death on her.

The documentary’s portrayal of Quintana, Didion’s daughter, is also of note. At one point, there is a shift in topics from Quintana to Didion’s journalism and political work, which centered on the El Salvadoran Civil War, as well as Dick Cheney. The documentary then returns to the topic of Quintana, and Didion discusses how her daughter had told her she was “remote” as a mother. This structure, where her political work gains prominence and is sandwiched by Quintana, seems to implicate it as creating a division between the two of them. Regarding the comment that she was “remote,” Didion insists: “I didn’t see it as possible because her father and I so clearly needed her.” There is an evident dissonance between their perspectives of her role as a mother, and there is no way for it to be reconciled.  

Next, a sequence of photographs of the three of them shifts from black and white to color; the passage in time is marked by this shift, as well as through John’s balding, and Quintana’s growth from a child to an adult. There’s a noticeable lack in what we know about Quintana from the film; photographs of her seem empty, as we don’t truly get a sense of their relationship. Soon afterward, there’s a description of how Quintana enters a coma and ultimately dies, with coincides with a photo of her smiling. Interestingly, after her death, a shot of hand-written notes from Quintana as a child is the only kind of personal evidence, other than photographs, that we get of her.

It may not be that Didion and Quintana had a uniquely distant relationship, but instead that the film specifically decided not to give the viewer a privileged perspective of them. What gets left out of such a documentary, though, is as interesting as what is put in.

Redemption or Damnation in Bruges

Martin McDonagh’s first feature film, In Bruges, strikes a fine balance of morbidity and comedy. A creeping introduction acquaints the viewer with the town’s looming medieval structures, gothic figures, and moonlit canals. Characters often claim that “it is like a fairytale,” and they are not at all wrong. However, while Bruges makes for a fantastic setting, the film’s reason for taking place here is far from pleasant.

Two Irish hitmen have hunkered down in a local inn to keep a low profile after a job gone wrong. They await further instructions from their short-tempered boss, Harry. The first hitman, Ray, is a brash young man, juxtaposed against his more cultured and experienced colleague, Ken. While Ken is dead set on exploring the town’s cultural offerings, Ray is determined to do anything but; his head sits deep in the folds of his coat, arms crossed and fingers fidgeting, constantly looking for an excuse to be anything but sober. Ray’s first job had been a few days earlier and the way it plays out makes his demeanor understandable.

Having been sent to kill a priest, Ray sits in the confessional, outwardly proclaims his motives, and emerges with gun in hand. He then riddles the father’s body with a barrage of bullets. As the man collapses a young boy is revealed behind him, caught by a stray bullet. Scrawls on a bloodstained note reveal the boys sins, carefully prepared for confession: “1) Being moody / 2) Being bad at maths / 3) Being sad.” As with many scenarios in the film, McDonagh does well to deliver a distillation of humanity, complete with all of its absurdity and sorrow. There is an evocation of the near incomprehensible feeling which is the coupling of the comic and the hollow.

The separation of youth and age is clear throughout the film, beginning with the stark contrast in both demeanor and appearance of the two hitmen. The botched murder of the priest takes this idea a step further. Initially, it was simply the intentional killing of a man who had already selected his lot in life, with little room for progression. For the boy with a bullet in his head, the stakes are much different. A previously unknown but hopeful future has been erased, with no prospect for redemption.

It is in Bruges that Ray, must reconcile with his actions. It is a town whose storied past harkens back to the Crusades, with its monuments and culture suggesting the Christian ideals of righteousness, judgment, and repentance. As such, what could be a beautiful getaway for Ray becomes a place of harrowing reflection; the film becomes a search for a remedy for Ray’s guilt and a desire to understand what awaits beyond physical death. Ray must know, will this crushing guilt die along with him in this life?

Stepping back, it is clear from the first moment that these men are foreigners, unfamiliar with Belgian customs and conventions. It is also evident that Bruges is a place of sinners. We come across a corpulent American family and a snobbish Canadian couple, possibly representations of the cardinal sins of gluttony and wrath, respectively. Ken and Ray also stumble upon the shooting of a film, where they meet a racist dwarf from the States and a seemingly demure but potent local who sells drugs to the production crew. They are here shooting a dream sequence, lending an illusory sense of self-awareness to the film. Over time, we understand Bruges to be the den of imported miscreants, arrived to reconcile their vices.

Notably, not a single Belgian native dies during the entire film despite plenty of near death experiences. Instead, it is only the foreigners who come face to face with their mortality. As such, McDonagh is possibly framing the residents of Bruges as those who permanently reside in purgatory, pushing sinners towards their impending judgment. This is supported by the film’s final scene in which a mortally wounded Ray is ushered through a procession on the set of the film, surrounded by grotesque masked figures, along with the locals who he has met during his time in Belgium. It is a sequence eerily familiar to Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, “The Last Judgment,” which Ray and Ken mull over.

It is a wonderful tale of repentance and judgment, balanced against tight, oftentimes lighthearted, dialogue. We come to understand Bruges as Ray’s purgatory, a temporary stop on the path to eventual judgment, consistently marked by suffering and uncertainty.

Domestic Captivity in Selick's Coraline

From Coraline’s first moment, Henry Selick has the viewer uneasily engaged. Eerie bells jingle and voices hum as a small doll, with black buttons for eyes, effortlessly floats in through a window, sheltered from the night’s star-spotted skies. Spiderlike, metallic hands are there to greet it; hands which gently place it onto a table alongside myriad sewing tools and cutting instruments. Rarely is a simple toy handled with such care. We come to see that the doll’s handler is not mending, but rather undertaking a complete reconstruction, as mechanical hands clinically guide scissors through the doll’s spine. Eventually, the doll is reborn, now with freckles, blue hair, and a yellow raincoat, but still black buttons in the place of eyes.

We are then whisked away to the Pink Palace Apartments, a gloomy yet ornate home, bordered by towering mountains on each side. It is here where we meet the true Coraline. Upon seeing her, it is clear – the reconstructed doll is a skillfully crafted depiction of her. However, where the hands of unknown owner so tenderly tended to Coraline in miniature, her true parents continuously neglect and chastise her. Coraline wants nothing more than a romp in the mud or an afternoon in the garden, but her parents are too occupied with work to entertain a word she says.

Understanding her role as a nuisance to her parents, Coraline occupies herself by exploring the surrounding area. She first stumbles upon Wyborne, or “Wybie,” and his black cat, as he terrifies Coraline by nearly running her over on his bike. Wybie is the young grandson of the Pink Palace’s landlady and the first of the film’s many absurd, dual-natured characters. Despite coming off as a spooky daredevil, Wybie is quickly shown to be little more than a wallowing kid, lamenting his name and equating it to “Why born?”. This is the first moment in which the film expresses an interest in the reason for existence.

Shortly after their meeting, Wybie returns to the Pink Palace to give Coraline a gift – something he found at his grandmother’s place. It is the doll from the opening sequence. Coraline then explores the interior of her home; it is sprawling and angular, but with grey walls and few decorations. Put plainly, it is wholly and deliberately unremarkable. That is, until the discovery of a miniature door of knee height, which is only opened by using a black, button-shaped key. Upon opening it, Coraline is utterly disappointed to find a brick wall on the other side.

That night, with the doll carefully placed next to her bed, Coraline is awakened by mice beckoning her to follow. She jumps out of bed and heeds their call, winding up at the foot of the miniature door. Now it is open, leading to a winding, ethereal tunnel. She traverses the tunnel and emerges in the very same place she left, but here things aren’t quite the same. It is a world of similar proportion but with contradictions at every turn. There is now a welcoming warmth and cheer to the home, with the previously dull hues being replaced with warm tones of red and orange. In the kitchen her mother awaits, but this mother has fairer skin, beautiful make-up, and buttons for eyes. The yarn of contradictions is seemingly endless and only unraveled further as Coraline continues to visit this wondrous land, where everything initially appears just as she would like it to.

Returning to reality, Coraline meets another of her neighbors, Mr. Bobinsky. He is a man with straw-thin legs and a hulking chest, whose body accurately reflects his eclectic personality. Bobinsky claims to own a circus of jumping “mushka,” or mice, which has Coraline enraptured. Then, she is introduced to a pair of one-time burlesque stars, Mrs. Spink and Mrs. Forcible, who occupy the basement. The two have an undoubtable affinity for the past, speaking of their glory days in the industry, offering Coraline bowls of old taffy, and displaying their packs of dogs – some still living while others line the walls, taxidermized.

Each of these interactions comes across with an intentional absurdity, as none of the characters address Coraline properly, instead calling her Caroline; the opposite is true on the other side of the door. Bobinsky’s physiognomy is inherently contradictory, and his tales of mice delusional, yet he treats Coraline kindly and thrills her with a display of insane acrobatics. Spink and Forcible seem to be at odds in every way; one is top heavy while the other is bottom heavy, one is blind while the other is not, and the two can never seem to agree, yet they both share an interest in Coraline. The one trait common across all of these characters is that they own a pet.

Coraline continuously returns to the other world, but with repeated visits she realizes that something is awry. Her other mother wants her to stay forever, and all it will take is the sewing of buttons into her eyes. We soon come to understand that the hands, which so carefully crafted Coraline’s replica, did so in an effort to enslave her. It was the doll which opened the portal to this odd world, and it is a menacing creature known as the Beldam which seeks to trap her here forever; to have someone to love without end, in a place which feels desirable to its captor, but is little more than an elaborate prison.

At this point, the film’s narrative begins to accelerate and the content begins to pierce further, beyond the eerie introductions and juxtapositions of its first act. The layers of domestic captivity are expertly laid in front of the viewer. First there is the plaything, or doll, then there are living creatures. From cats, dogs, and mice we can then progress to humans children. Selick encourages us to ask, what is the role of these beings and have humans consigned such creatures to live unfulfilling lives of captivity for their own selfish desires? The same can then be applied to children more generally, harkening back to Wyborne’s name and the question of why are they born? Existence is a harrowing enough process as is, which is only made more complex when we begin to understand existence as the means of pacifying the greed of others. Coraline displays that getting what you wish for is not all that it is made out to be, while asking incisive questions about the human’s role in nature, as well as the relationship between parent and child.

Challenging conceptions of human's relationship to nature

The two documentaries, Jane and David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, appear to have differing explicit intentions. The first is a biological documentary about Jane Goodall, the primatologist renowned for her chimpanzee research. It provides a portrait of her work in the Gombe National Park of Tanzania, and how it personally shaped her life. On the other hand, the latter is more of a nature documentary rather than a biological one; it is a plea for humans to correct the devastation we have caused on the environment. Although the extent of the damage is anchored by Attenborough’s memories of his travels, the film doesn’t seek to give us a better understanding of the historian as the prior does for Goodall. What does emerge from both films, though, is the idea that humans have strayed in thinking that we are above nature, rather than a part of it. In particular, notions of a dichotomy between human and animal, as well as of rightful human dominance, are palpably flawed. 

Jane, despite the fact that Goodall’s work was key chimpanzee research, is noticeably detached from the science of it all.  Most of the film is footage of Jane’s explorations, narrated by her present self. What is crucial is how director Brett Morgen creates parallels between the chimpanzees and Jane, highlighting their similarities and her unique, emotional approach to studying them. The film, for example, often juxtaposes the behavior of the chimps with that of Goodall. We see a young Goodall sitting in trees that the chimps occupy, washing her hair in the same river that they traverse. She tends to them like they tend to one another, and treats them like humans, naming them — David Graybeard and Flo are some examples —  rather than numbering them. 

The film also deliberately pairs the developments in Jane’s relationship to the chimps with developments in her personal life. She sets up a feeding system that allows her to observe them more closely and excitedly learn about their habits’, aggressions, and mating styles. In the scenes subsequently afterward, we then learn how she shared this admiration of the chimps with the photographer, Hugo van Lawick, her eventual husband. Close-up shots of Jane’s face — smiling, sticking her tongue out —  contrast from footage of her in the beginning, that is  impersonal. As we achieve a better understanding of the chimps, we also achieve a better understanding of her.

The parallels between Jane and the chimps are especially prominent when Flo gives birth to an infant, whom Jane names Flint. Shortly afterward, Jane has her own child, and directly emphasizes the importance of seeing the relationship between Flo and Flint for her own relationship with her son. Jane mostly guides the narration, but occasionally the direction of the interviewer helps solidify the parallels. When asked what she admires about Flo, Jane says “she was playful, but being supportive.... That was the key, and of course that’s what my mother was”. Jane has such a personal bond with the chimps and learns so much from them. The film pushes us to empathize with both Jane and the chimps, and to consider our role in the world in light of this.

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, addresses the consequences of human behavior on the environment. Attenborough’s life is used mainly to contextualise the rapidity with which humans have had a devastating impact on the environment. 

The film grounds itself in three important statistics: world population, carbon in atmosphere, and the percentage of remaining wilderness. As Attenborough runs through the past 93 years of his life, these numbers evolve and serve as evidence of the perilous state of the planet. At the beginning of the film, we learn that in 1937, the year Attenborough was born, the population was 2.3 billion, the carbon 280 parts per million, and the remaining wilderness 66%. In 2020, the word population has tripled, the carbon has doubled, and the remaining wilderness has been cut in half. This is a warning sign to the viewers. 

The film juxtaposes a past beauty and immensity of the environment with the destructive behavior of humans. Bird’s eye shots of the Borneo rainforest, for example, expose an intense lushness and vibrancy that is now threatened. As viewers, we bear witness to tall, strong trees that are cut down, pulled down to the ground; it is unnatural that humans do so. Similarly, the film presents the ocean, its wonders in the colors and diversity of its organisms, as threatened by the constraining influence of humans. 

The first part of the film is an indictment of human behavior; in the second, Attenborough offers solutions to the crisis, that include a higher standard of living to stabilize population growth, plant-based diets and no fish zones. The last shots of the film, though, are most powerful. Attenborough exits the abandoned building in Chernobyl that the film began with, and enters surroundings full of trees, where nature is regenerating because of the absence of humans. Attenborough says: “The wild has reclaimed the space,” a reassuring statement about what the future can hold.

In Jane, Goodall emphasizes the need for conservation at the very end, and its importance has become clear through seeing her own relationship with her environment. In David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, the beauty of the world is undeniable, as well as a type of human arrogance and neglect. Both compel the reexamination of our place in nature.

The Deconstruction of the Horror Film

With October upon us, there is undoubtedly a seasonal resurgence of interest in one of cinema’s longest standing, most beloved genres: Horror. Despite its origins in the early 20^th century, the genre has seen little progression, especially in recent decades. Contemporary horror films continue to be stuffed with the same characters, creeps, and story conventions. Jocks, beauties, stoners, and goody two-shoes types who make troublingly poor decisions dominate the screen, often being felled by the same foes, from undying zombies to sweet talking vampires. The Cabin in the Woods directly acknowledges this stagnation and the industry’s continued fan-service and uses them as ammunition, aiming for the satirical deconstruction of this treasured genre, while still providing the scream inducing slaughter of innocents and gothic morbidity that we have come to know and love.

After an introductory montage of ancient murals depicting blood sacrifice, we abruptly find ourselves in a high-tech, labyrinth-like underground facility where we witness the conversation of two middle-aged men dressed professionally. They begin with a discussion of fertility and the risk of jinxing things by preemptively baby-proofing a home; it is an interesting topic that aligns with the film’s interest in fate, free will, and the supernatural, though unfortunately, the subject is never again touched upon. The men then shift to business. The nature of their work isn’t immediately clear, but as they weave through the massive complex, allusions to other countries undergoing similar endeavors are made, and we begin to understand that this is a high stakes, experimental operation.

Cut to the home of Dana, a college student preparing for a weekend trip with friends. Here we are introduced to our cast of all too common characters, as they prepare to embark on their weekend vacation. Apart from Dana, there is Curt, the handsome football player, and his beautiful girlfriend Jules. Rounding out the group are Marty, the rambling pothead, and Holden, a transfer student who plays football with Curt. Events then proceed as any fan of the genre would expect. The gang has an off-putting exchange with a freakish old man at a seemingly abandoned gas station who speaks bluntly, warning them not to proceed. We soon learn that this man is an integral part of the aforementioned experiment, serving as “the harbinger” of the group’s impending doom; this is one of the first of many instances in which a discussion concerning freewill is prompted. Is their doom imminent or is there potential for redemption? Was turning around and going home ever an option? At the same time, this interaction serves as a critique into the plotlines of typical horror films, in which foolish characters blatantly step into deathtraps despite glaring “STOP” signs.

Upon arrival at the cabin we begin to understand the film’s signature feature and main plot conceit; just as we were seconds ago, the aforementioned suits are watching the gang approach the old cabin. They sit in a control room chock-full of screens, buttons, and levers. It is from here that these men orchestrate the eventual, elaborate murder of the youthful pack. Deaths that we later learn are to fulfill a blood sacrifice to the “old gods” who will annihilate humanity if not properly appeased. The group proceeds into the cabin and begins to settle in, all the while our perspective alternates between viewing the events from the control room or directly from the cabin itself. The men in the control room manipulate the environment by locking doors, blasting pheromones into the home, and awakening a bloodthirsty undead family from the grave. It is an affectionate, but unrelenting ridicule of the heavy-handed writing which often results in blatant idiocy and inevitable death for many of the genre’s characters.

It is here that we begin to understand the film’s criticism of the genre, which is at once incisive and reflective. Those in the control room may represent the genre’s filmmakers and producers who all too often use every tool at their disposal to create pulpy, haunting pictures which are all too predictable. Further, viewers can be compared to the “old gods” who only seek gory, raunchy entertainment; the “old god’s” satisfaction determines the fate of the men in the control room, prompting thoughtful questions into the relationship between creator and audience.

The Cabin in the Woods does well in displaying all of the puzzle pieces which normally constitute a horror film, and while much is revealed in tearing apart this puzzle, the pieces are never put back together. We are left with only a sardonic critique in the form of a film whose entertainment value relies as heavily on the tropes and clichés it mocks, as anything else. As the world crumbles to pieces at the hands of omnipotent gods and the screen fades to black, a thoughtful viewer cannot help but say that it is marred by some sense of incompletion. So many complex issues and powerful metaphors are brought to the surface but never expanded upon, that one cannot help but feel teased. Further, while the film expertly and uniquely unravels and exposes the genre’s conventions, it still wholly relies on them in delivering its entertainment and lacks meaningful closure. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be anything more, and without a little bit of what may be considered mindless entertainment to pacify the masses, the world may very well fall apart.

Confinement and Control: Being John Malkovich

Human existence is at once exhilarating, exhausting, and perplexing, and so it is common to wonder, and even believe, that life may be simpler and more clear if it were lived through the eyes of someone else. But those thoughts are merely wishful, and instead we are resigned to writing, acting, dreaming, and sharing stories in an effort to understand the perspectives of others – to obtain and experience something beyond ourselves.

Being John Malkovich takes this simple truth of existence and upends it, creating an eerie universe in which, for only a few minutes, you can embody and become one with someone else. In this world you do not become just anyone, but instead the enigmatic star John Malkovich. While it may sound like Mr. Malkovich is the primary actor and protagonist, he instead exists as a vessel through which a remarkably witty story, packed with hard-hitting questions concerning human interiority is delivered.

Set in the final decade of the 20^th century, we find ourselves in the near-vacant cellar of a New York City apartment. It is a dark, brooding scene in which we are greeted by the stiff facade of a wooden doll, masterfully contorted into a desperate and disturbed dance. However it is the puppeteer wielding the strings from above who we soon understand to be tormented. Craig Schwartz claims his sole purpose is as a performer – transcending himself and creating a new reality, one in which he is the sole master; but Craig has no audience, and what is a performer without an audience? He continues to be confined to his own mind, serving only himself.

Soon Craig is out on the city’s streets acting out a passionate puppet show in which forbidden lovers lust after one another. Here we see the development of his first audience; a young girl looks on as the puppets gyrate. Her father takes notice and pays Craig accordingly, with a fist to the face. A peculiar scene, whose absurdity leans towards comic. It is also the first of many scenes in which profound questions are posed in distinctive ways. We begin to question the roles and relationships of artist and audience; Craig’s suggestive show may have found a welcoming audience in a packed theater under the right circumstance, but instead a little girl stumbling by took a naïve interest in something unfit for her eyes. Where can such a show take place, who can see it, and what obligation does the artist have to adjust their work for a given, or even unknown, audience?

While Craig searches to escape from his own confinement via the contortion of inanimate objects, his wife Lotte searches for similar solace in her control over living beings. She tenderly cares for and supports Craig with a maternal instinct, just as she cares for the creatures that line the walls of her pet store. In their apartment, the couple are accompanied by an iguana, birds, a dog, and a chimpanzee. Through her care of these creatures, Lotte gains a sense of importance and meaning that cannot be attained internally. She treats each of these animals as well as she does Craig, if not better, clearly mapping out the differences, or lack thereof, between humans and other animals; the film too makes references to the chimpanzee’s consciousness, his lingering childhood trauma, and his visits to a shrink. It is at once lighthearted and thought-provoking.

Craig eventually takes on a temporary job as a filer, thanks to his rapid fingers. In the office he meets Maxine, a coy beauty who ceaselessly toys with him. It is here that Craig discovers the portal to Malkovich, which he then promptly shares with Maxine. Maxine, in conniving fashion, determines that the two must partner together and charge $200 per 15-minute trip into the mind of Malkovich; after all, who doesn’t want to experience the world through a different lens? We are again prompted by further questions of artist and audience: Malkovich as the unknowing artist, providing a show for all of those who pay to accompany him. Here the show provides great meaning to the audience, a miraculous glimpse into a consciousness beyond the one they have always known. Isn’t that the very essence which art attempts to capture?

In a similar sense, this expansion beyond the self is exactly what each character strives for. They each have a distinct way to achieve contentment, coming through varying methods of control over something or someone else. Simply put, a way to escape the confinement of their individual mode of perception. While Craig directs dolls and Lotte influences animals, Maxine finds meaning through the manipulation of other people and their emotions. Each character is looking for control and influence that reverberates outside of themselves.

Malkovich is no different on a surface level. He is an actor, exerting control over roles that are outside of himself, and prompting emotions and reactions from those around him. While Craig does so with no audience, no respect, and no understanding of himself beyond validation from others, Malkovich does so with total self-awareness. He is confident in who he is and has a complete understanding of his place in society. He knows himself to be John Malkovich. A man with an audience, a name, and plenty of respect.

However Malkovich’s sense of security becomes lost when Craig enters the portal, and with his own puppeteering skills is able to exercise complete control over Malkovich, eventually gaining the ability to inhabit him indefinitely. It is here that the aforementioned questions of audience and actor take on a twisted meaning. Craig, the possessor, becomes the actor, while Malkovich, the possessed, becomes the audience, bound to watch events play out on his very own stage.

Eventually Craig is forced to exit Malkovich’s shell. Upon doing so he cannot cope with his own existence and believes he must again embody Malkovich to be loved, so he rushes back to the portal at once. However a convoluted chain of events has turned Malkovich’s portal into a tunnel leading to the mind of a young girl. Here Craig finds himself imprisoned for eternity with no agency. Worse, this young girl is being raised by Lotte and Maxine, the two women that Craig once pined after. It is fantastical and maddening, as Craig finds himself the audience of his own tragedy; condemned to witness a happy existence in which he has no place.

Everyone seeks freedom from the infinite confinement of their own consciousness, and Being John Malkovich makes the case that art, as well as the relationship between art and artist, allows us this escape even if only for a moment. To do so, there must be an acceptance of the self and of our own consciousness as the one true mode of perception. Transcendence beyond the individual can be feigned for a moment to provide joy and relief, just as a 90-minute film serves as a valuable distraction from the pains of life, but dragging that brief moment into an indefinite reality can be destructive, as it is for Craig.  

Lady Bird's Coming-of-Age Journey

“I wish I could live through something,” states the protagonist of Lady Bird at the beginning of the film. As the titular heroine, Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, rides in the car with her mother, Marion, she expresses this desire to attach a grand meaning to her life. This meaning, we quickly learn, does not exist for her in Sacramento, her hometown. “I hate California. I want to go to the east coast,” she says, and a close-up shot of her looking out the car window emphasizes how she yearns to be across the country, far from the colleges that she and her mother have just taken a road trip to tour. The flat, dull and unchanging landscape that the car moves through helps frame her desire for escape. 

This desire of Lady Bird’s launches the first conflict in the film: an argument between her and her mother, who sees it as an example of her daughter’s selfishness and lack of gratitude. The addition of this conflict in the scene is subtly matched by Marion’s turning of the car; their previously straight path and corresponding fluidity have been disrupted. They begin talking over one another, and their eyes fail to meet for the rest of the scene, as the camera alternates between individual close-ups of each of them. These elements serve to establish their opposing points of view; in this conversation, they are not truly listening, but simply speaking, reacting, and revealing their frustrations with the other. To free herself from this fight, Lady Bird jumps out of the moving car — an action that both comically and strikingly encapsulates her feelings of confinement. Marion screams, and the film quickly cuts to a close-up of a hot pink cast on her arm, with the words “fuck you mom” written on top. The cast matches her dyed pink hair, and both serve as markers of her individuality throughout the film.

These initial few minutes set up a focus on mother-daughter conflict and an adolescent’s struggle for what they want, which is a central theme of the film. In the first part, we continue to see that Lady Bird feels her life is lacking in several ways, some small and others large. For example, she and her best friend, Julie, walk through a wealthy neighborhood after school, with quick cuts of them longingly looking at the grand, beautiful homes. Then she wants her mother to buy her a magazine, so she can read it in bed as “rich people do”, rather than having to borrow it from the library. It is this dissatisfaction with her environment, and her to desire to leave California, that most prominently ties her to her mother. The film uses their perceptions of Sacramento, and their movements through it, to distance them at the beginning and connect them at the end. 

Early on in the film, Marion drives home from work, and there are several small, simple but beautiful cuts of Sacramento on her ride home. Shots of Marion are interspersed, and John Hartford’s “This Eve of Parting” plays. Marion is constantly grounded in reality, and an abrupt cut from the song to a slamming of her car door, reminds us of this at the end of the sequence. Before that, though, there appears to be her peaceful, almost romantic admiration of setting. 

Lady Bird, on the other hand, is focused on escape. She constantly rejects Sacramento, an act which Marion ostensibly takes to be a rejection of everything she has tried to give her. These opposing perspectives of their home, and what Lady Bird’s place in the world can be, push them apart. However, the end of the film brings them back together by recalling Marion’s drive in a couple of ways. When Lady Bird receives her acceptance letter for a school in New York, “The Eve of Parting” plays again. Marion, angry that Lady Bird had secretly applied to east schools, has ceased speaking to her at this point. But the song functions as a poignant reminder of their bond, and how Marion has to come to terms with Lady Bird’s departure. At the very end, after Lady Bird has arrived in New York, she calls her parents. As she speaks, the film cuts to shots of the same drive in Sacramento, and then it alternates between Marion and Lady Bird each driving alone in the car. As Lady Bird looks out of her window, there is a clear appreciation of and comfort in Sacramento that she never held before. Here, there is finally a resolution where we become aware of Lady Bird’s growth and her connection with her mother.

What is also interesting to me about Lady Bird is how much of her identity is ill-defined. She isn’t particularly interested in or good at one thing, but she hopes to be, which makes her a more ordinary yet more dimensional character than typical coming-of-age protagonists. For example, it’s her senior year and she sits in the office of a nun at her Catholic school, where she says it’s her tradition to run for student government, but she knows she won’t win. Similarly, she says she’d like to join the math olympiad team, to which the nun says: “But math isn’t something you’re terribly strong in.” The nun also pushes her to audition for the theater group’s fall musical, which Lady Bird didn’t even know existed until now. She gets a minor role in the musical, but complains: “The part I got was basically not getting in.” Then she abandons the group in the spring, refusing to audition for the play. 

What we never doubt that she genuinely cares about, though, is the abstract idea of freedom and what her future could entail. Her desire for going to New York isn’t rooted in something specific, but just in her belief that it has “culture”. Lady Bird stands in contrast to Julie and Jenna, the “popular girl” that she befriends, who are both content to stay in Sacramento. She also doesn’t have proof that she deserves what she aspires to have, and is reminded of this at different instances, like when her counselor initially laughs at the idea of her applying to east coast schools. Lady Bird simply wants, and she shows us that that’s reason enough.

Beyond Comedy: Napoleon Dynamite

A lanky, curly headed boy stands in front of a modest one-story home. The goof wears a horse graphic t-shirt tucked into denim jeans with no belt and peers through clear-lensed aviator glasses, eyes half closed, mouth wide open. He boards the school bus and saunters to the very last row, towering over the other students, all of whom are significantly younger. A fellow student asks, “What are you going to do today Napoleon?” to which he snaps “Whatever I feel like I want to do. Gosh!” A sharp retort that is both comic in its delivery and charged with underlying anxiety. It is evident from merely a few seconds on the bus that the titular character of Jared Hess’ 2004 high school comedy, Napoleon Dynamite, is troubled. It serves as the first of many clever, oftentimes ridiculous, scenarios in which the qualms of an outcast riddled with angst, uncertain of his identity as a high school student, and his place in the world at large are carefully explored.

Each element of the film plays into an uncomfortable and unpredictable mood, while servicing the aesthetic of a rural town stuck twenty years in the past. We follow Napoleon through a day at Preston High School. Bullies shove him into lockers, he delivers a current events report on the Loch Ness monster, he plays tether ball alone, and he calls his adult brother Kip to ask for Chapstick. A day which is at once absurd and banal, yet riveting; while no particular event directly progresses the plot, we slowly become acquainted with the questions and inner machinations of Napoleon’s mind. The sense of everything being oddly ordinary yet intriguing, as well as the slow-burn character development through unremarkable events is not unique to the opening scene, and only ramps up throughout the remainder of the film.

In terms of execution, a synth-heavy original soundtrack, along with the inclusion of some classic ‘80s tunes, pair perfectly with the plot, setting, and costume design. Further, keen attention to audio aids in placing the viewer; flies audibly buzz past and cows bellow in the background.

Jon Heder’s role as Napoleon is undeniably brilliant, but he is surrounded by other notable performers. Each delivers keen facial expressions and perfectly timed delivery; in my mind, there is no role which could have been cast or performed any better. Beyond that, there is a patience to every encounter which results in expert pacing. No moment feels rushed and pauses between dialogue are often drawn out, further lending to a curated sense of uncertainty and immaturity. Each interaction holds meaning, revealing new aspects of characters’ desires and insecurities. These are conveyed with a familiar clumsiness which hearkens to the often repressed memories of youth’s struggles.

It is in this essence of adolescence, so expertly captured, in which the film begins to transcend its perceived place as a quirky, but superficial high school comedy. Every character, from Napoleon’s dare-devil grandmother to his friend Deb, reveals complex and base desires. There is nobody with more wisdom than anyone else; each character is portrayed as impulsive and elementary. Each character also grapples with questions of identity: who do they believe they are and who do they want to be? Napoleon’s grandmother goes for trips to the sand dunes with a secret boyfriend, while Uncle Rico can’t stop thinking about 1982 and what could have been. These troubles, often typical of high school, seep into the lives of every character.

This idea of an uncertain identity is infinitely relatable, seeing as such questions can never be definitively answered. Everybody is portrayed with the same confusion and infantile nature as a high school student; there is little discernible difference in maturity and authority between your eldest and youngest, most significant and most minor characters. They are all flawed and insecure.

The film’s complexity does not end with this universal infantilization. Hess also grapples with complex issues of class, custom, and gender in unique and interesting ways. Pedro, Napoleon’s new classmate and friend from México, is derided by the school’s principal for failing to understand his instructions. Further into the film Pedro is again brutally chastised for bashing a piñata in the likeness of another student, something he claims is customary in his native country; an intentionally ridiculous and comic scene, but even so it is a moment which highlights cultural differences and the principal’s blatant ignorance. Later, Napoleon’s sleazy uncle preys on his nephew’s high school classmates and attempts to sell them breast enhancement supplements, alienating young women and exposing Napoleon to further disdain. These only serve as a few examples of the more profound questions and issues which cleverly find their way into the film.

A deceptively deep film which at once brims with excitement and dread. It did not have me laughing out loud, but instead smiling throughout. Each moment is not demarcated by exciting action, place, or dialogue, yet there is a charm and a familiarity to its composition which requires nothing of the sort. And while any realistic depiction of high school, and life for that matter, is full of plenty of sorrow, Napoleon Dynamite finishes in a moment of triumph, with each character feeling secure in their identity, at least for a moment. Pedro has won the class election, Napoleon has danced his heart out to tremendous applause, Kip has a girlfriend, and Napoleon finally has a partner to play tether ball with.

Note-able Design: Episodes 1 and 2 Update

Hi there again, friends!

With the semester very close to being over, I'm happy to say that the episodes are also on their way to being ready to showcase. Since I could not record narration for that part of the podcast at the Film Center, my supervisor Kyle Stine and I have been recording Skype calls to get that part of it. I must admit that part of the reason why I chose doing a podcast instead of a film production was that so that I could get over the fear of hearing my own voice. And, I think that this whole process has gotten me ever so slightly more used to it, though not completely of course. 

The screening has also been delayed to later this week.  It's pretty cool how they made little profile pages for each project, makes me kind of nostalgic to see my fellow film peeps again. This has been an interesting journey, and I'll be very happy to share with you all the podcast once things have been thoroughly finalized! 

 

Groovy

The Evil Dead doesn’t have much of a plot. Compared to something really plot-heavy like Moneyball or The Avengers (the latter being absolutely stuffed wall-to-wall with twists and betrayals and drama), The Evil Dead doesn’t really seem like it has much going on.

What happens during the movie’s hour-and-a-half runtime?

Five college students travel to a cabin out in the woods. They intend to stay there while on vacation. They discover a cursed book, accidentally recite an incantation, and summon a few demonic spirits. These spirits attack them, posses them. They fight back. Most of them die. The End.

That’s really it. Of course, there’s some other stuff scattered around the film. At one point, they try to start a car so that they can drive back to town, but that doesn’t work out. A few of the characters are dating, so there’s a little drama there. But the vast majority of the movie is just violence and gore and tension as these twenty-somethings fight a losing battle against a number of hateful demons. If you don’t believe me, here’s a chunk of the movie’s plot summary from Wikipedia: “Shelly becomes a Deadite (possessed) and scratches Scott's face. Scott throws her into the fireplace, briefly burning Shelly's face. As she attacks him again, Scott bisects part of her wrist with a knife and then she bites off her own mangled hand. Scott stabs her in the back with a Sumerian dagger, apparently killing her. When she reanimates, Scott dismembers her with an axe and buries the remains. […] When Ash checks on Linda, he is horrified to find that she has become possessed. She attacks him, but he stabs her with a Sumerian dagger. Unwilling to dismember her, he buries her instead. She revives and attacks him, forcing him to decapitate her with a shovel.” I think you get the point.

So if this movie isn’t plot-drive… What is it? It certainly isn’t character-driven. While the protagonist Ash Williams is an icon of the horror genre, that has less to do with his portrayal in this movie and more to do with the subsequent films. Besides Ash, most of the characters are shallow and built on clichés. They also all want the same basic thing: they just want to survive. There aren’t any tangled motivations, alliances, or crisscrossing desires. Everything about the characters points outward. So, again, what is this movie doing?

The Evil Dead is often categorized into the genre ‘splatter’, which hints to one of the movie’s main draws: it constantly tries to shock and horrify you with outrageous amounts of blood and gore. Limbs are torn off, skin melts away, and faces decompose into leather. The visual spectacle of it all is likely why you and most Evil Dead fans paid for a ticket (or pulled it up on Netflix). The over-the-top, macabre, visceral explorations of the human anatomy ignite a simultaneous guttural revulsion and fascination within the viewer. And it’s all done with practical effects, so the ungodly sights occurring in that isolated cabin are strangely mesmerizing (although I did a fair amount of looking away).

It’s also just cool. Similar to the cult classic The Thing, the special effects used in The Evil Dead are both impressive and hokey. They bring out your inner sci-fi/horror film nerd.

The Evil Dead’s lack of plot makes it a good example of a movie that wasn’t really anything until it was committed to film. While the ‘book of the dead’ is a cool aspect of the fiction and some of the more memorable scares were certainly conceived with the script, this movie is memorable for what director Sam Raimi was able to with his camera and some fake body parts.

None of this is an insult to The Evil Dead, which I think is a great movie. I just want to use it to point out how far interesting, creative visuals can take a movie. In the case of Sam Raimi’s breakout hit, direction took it from 0 to 100.

Note-able Design: The Way From Here

Hi friends,

I'll be honest, not much has been happening save for some frustrating editing complications. It really is a process to figure out the real meat of the conversations I've had, but it's also been really nice re-listening to them. Made me a bit nostalgic, actually. I think that in the end I'll have two really neat episodes to show clips of in the virtual screening happening at the end of the month.

Speaking of, I wonder how that will all play out. Of course there's going to be some marginal dip in quality since it'll be online and my fellow colleagues' (or at least the majority of them) have some sort of visual component to their projects, but hopefully it won't be too difficult to have them show their projects and give them the spotlight they rightfully deserve. I do feel kind of gypped that we won't have an in-person screening, because the one last year was really great in my opinion. I really liked how in that event last year the seniors that presented talked a bit about their piece at the end of it, and in a sense I'm glad that the department is doing that by having us record videos about that. Sort of stupidly I also like how the film events that I've been to in the past had my FMS logo on it, because even though I am not the most active person in the FMS community as a whole, I feel that I've contributed something since they still use that.  

Tomorrow I'll have a meeting with my capstone advisor to catch him up on the project and how things are going in general, so that's nice too. He told me that the episodes have to be done by mid-May, which is actually really nice because I somehow had the idea that I had to have them ready by the end of classes, which is the end of this week. It's a relief that I have a lot of time to work on them for sure. 

Anyhow, I'll keep you guys posted on how the meeting goes tomorrow, I suppose. For now I don't have any groundbreaking updates or anything. Just wanted to voice my thoughts on some end of the school year matters, especially since this semester has proven to be an abnormal one in more than a couple of ways. Thanks for listening to me ramble on a bit. 

A Story Retold: Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars

    The classic Akira Kurosawa 1961 film Yojimbo, and its spaghetti western remake, Sergio Leone’s 1964 A Fistful of Dollars, tell an almost Shakespearean story of a wandering stranger who comes into a town riddled with violence. The stranger uses wit and martial skill to trick the town’s competing gangs into destroying each other. The two films follow the same basic plot structure but use different tones and filmic techniques to tell the story. Yojimbo has many comedic elements, with witty dialogue and interesting characters in the town, which make up for the relatively few and simple sets. A Fistful of Dollars retells the story, but makes the film more about the action, with more violence, vivid color, complicated sets, and fewer character development scenes.

    Yojimbo was made in black and white, set in a simple Japanese town while samurai were still powerful, but guns were being introduced. A Fistful of Dollars is set in a Mexican town just south of the US border; the gangs in the town have more developed compounds and attempt to operate without the knowledge of the army. The sets of the films are very different, much of the dialogue in Yojimbo, following the ronin Sanjuro, takes place in the bar or on the street, while A Fistful of Dollars has more scenes outside of town and in the vast compound the Rojo gang has. The Rojo gang is made up of three brothers and their followers, they have a walled compound, with large storage rooms, and a courtyard for feasts. The story follows the Rojo’s more than their counterpart in Yojimbo, Ushitora’s gang. Yojimbo’s sets are very simple, with a few small houses and the large open street having most of the action. The Rojo’s rival gang, the Baxters, did not receive much development, while Ushitora’s rival Sebei is made to seem like more of a player in the game. Of the two films, Yojimbo gives off the sense that the town is full of real characters, from the merchants to the low-lives. A Fistful of Dollars has fewer character outside of the gangs, and almost no extras, making the town seem dead, but this strategy allows for the filmmakers to focus on developing the Rojo’s and the Man With No Name’s relationship with them.

    In both films, a rivalry is set up between the protagonist and the other most competent man in town. Unosuke in Yojimbo, and Ramon Rojo in A Fistful of Dollars. Both Unosuke and Ramon are distinguished from their brothers and the rest of the town by their skills as marksman. Unosuke is in possession of a handgun, a rare and deadly weapon that often spells death for samurai. The pistol defines Unosuke as a killer, he goes on to prove his vicious nature throughout the film, before dying to Sanjuro’s sword. Unosuke’s need for violence, even in his dying moments as he says: “without my pistol… I feel sort of naked. I can’t go to the other world without it.” Somehow, when Sanjuro hands him the pistol, Unosuke is unable to shoot, perhaps revealing that violence is not really the answer. Ramon Rojo, from A Fistful of Dollars, is also out for blood, murdering a Mexican Army squad for gold and framing the Americans. This scene was surprising because there was no basis for it in Yojimbo, showing that the western uses action to drive the plot.

    Ramon is given more external motivation than Unosuke, by trimming down some of the content in Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars has fully removed the Sake brewer and the Silk merchant’s characters. The Sake brewer, siding with Ushitora, was given the woman Nui (Marisol in A Fistful of Dollars) to secure his loyalty. Without an intermediate character like the Sake brewer, Ramon himself covets Marisol and stole her from her family. When the Man With No Name rescues Marisol, there is a personal vendetta between them, and makes their showdown much more emotionally charged. Ramon is a master marksman, and the only character shown using a rifle. The sword versus pistol in Yojimbo hits much harder than the pistol versus rifle concept in Fistful of Dollars, but the final fight scene is executed extremely well, with the Man With No Name goading Ramon into using up all his ammo before proving himself to be the better gunslinger.

    The two bartender characters contrast well considering the different approach both films take to violence. Gonji, the elderly bartender is sick of seeing violence in the town, he is distrustful of Sanjuro, who he fears will incite further killing. His temperament reflects the moral stance the film takes: violence and gambling are wrong, and evil men will be punished. A Fistful of Dollars does not talk about morality much at all, the Man With No Name simply finds a situation to take advantage of, without a clear motive. The bartender her befriends, Silvanito, is against his involvement with he town affairs but celebrates as the gang members are killed and tricked. He is not as averse to violence, and watches as Ramon kill the Mexican soldiers. Silvanito does not serve as a moral compass like his counterpart Gonji; both help the protagonists, but take different views to their actions.  

    In conclusion, the plot of Yojimbo is trimmed down slightly in A Fistful of Dollars, but the two films approach the story differently, with Yojimbo functioning like a play, with snappy dialogue and reduced fight scenes, while A Fistful of Dollars capitalized on action, and only developed the most important characters. The focus on action is engaging and visually pleasing, as well as effective at creating tension during the shootout scenes, which any good western should strive for. In Yojimbo, the focus on writing and dialogue gives both a levity and intelligence to the film, while limiting the exploration of the set. Both films follow the plotline well and have excellent final fights.

Voice-Over Troubled Waters

I’ve watched a fair amount of amateur film criticism on YouTube, and by far the most frequent complaint I’ve heard about modern movies is that there’s too much voice-over.

There’s lots of people out there who really don’t like voice-over, and they especially don’t like it when films starts with voice-over, which is unfortunate because films really like to start with voice-over.

My guess as to why opening narration is so popular is because it’s an extremely quick and easy way to explain things to the audience. Let’s say your film is set in the future—how do you communicate this to the audience? You could build up a whole futuristic cityscape with flying cars and holograms like at the beginning of Blade Runner, you could show your main character using some sort of futuristic technology, you could follow two characters as they discuss what it’s like to live in the future, or… you could start your film over black with the main character’s voice-over saying, “The year is 2049.” Boom. Mission accomplished in three seconds.

But the benefits of narrated exposition are also the exact reasons why people hate it so much. They say that voice-over is lazy and unsatisfying. Movies are (obviously) very visual and communicate tone, emotion, story, character, setting, etc. through imagery—bad voice-over completely fails to take advantage of that. It’s almost anti-cinematic.

But voice-over remains popular, which isn’t a bad thing because voice-over isn’t inherently lazy or unsatisfying. To clarify: it's bad voice-over that sucks.

Good voice-over can be anything for a movie. Marriage Story has good voice-over. It even opens with it.

The first seven minutes of Marriage Story introduce us to the two main characters, Nicole and Charlie, through two separate monologues. Charlie first delivers a monologue where he talks about Nicole, and then Nicole delivers a monologue where she talks about Charlie. But it isn’t like these speeches formally introduce the two protagonists to the audience; they simply list very personal and specific observations like “She makes people feel comfortable about even embarrassing things” and “He is very self-sufficient – he can darn a sock and cook himself dinner and iron a shirt.” These lines are delivered over visual representations of these observations.

Why is this good voice-over? For one thing, it isn’t trying to force feed the audience. Instead of dumping backstory, this sequence slowly and sweetly eases you into the personalities of two characters who you’ll be spending the next couple hours with. It’s effective because it draws the viewer in instead of pushing them away. Bad voice-over is an easy gripe because it’s very noticeable. When a main character opens the movie with bland world building, it feels like the screenwriter is just lecturing the audience. Boring. Marriage Story instead delivers something that feels organic. The details shared aren’t economical, and they don’t merely pave a roadway for the plot. This voice-over takes its time in giving you an almost romantic sense of Nicole and Charlie. It feels as though the voice-over is adding something to the beginning of the film that a more straight forward scene could not.

Marriage Story’s voice-over is also effective because it doesn’t forget about visuals. By pairing each line with the mentioned character acting it out (“He’s very competitive” played over Charlie raging at a game of Monopoly), the audience subtly gets the feeling that they're experiencing memories. Every snapshot is short and pointed, and it matches perfectly and sometimes humorously with its respective narration. It’s as though the viewer is looking back on a long and lovely relationship with each of the two protagonists. The result is that Charlie and Nicole both feel familiar before their first full scene.

But the best part of Marriage Story’s short voice-over portion is that it’s charming. The music, the laughs, and the slight sentimentality all come together in a really lovely way. While certain specific functions and characteristics of film tropes like voice-over do tend to indicate whether or not it’s being used well, the main qualifier always boils down to this: Did you enjoy it? Everything else comes second.