HopkinsCinemAddicts

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Who Framed Mark Zuckerberg?

A ‘framing narrative’ is basically a storyline wrapped around another storyline. It’s super popular in literature – Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness, Ethan Frome – and also noticeably present in all sorts of famous movies, from Titanic to The Social Network. Using The Social Network (directed by David Fincher, written by Aaron Sorkin), I’d like to talk through what (I think) a framing narrative can add to a movie.

First of all, a framing narrative adds complexity… but not the good kind of complexity. When you frame your main plot with another plot, you clutter the script with all sorts of extra details, locations, time periods, and possibly even characters. At least in regard to mass appeal, simplicity seems to be a filmmakers best friend, so this is a bit of a drawback. In a worst case scenario, the framing narrative can subtract from the actual point of the film. In The Social Network, the framing narrative definitely adds a fair amount of complexity. The main story – Mark Zuckerberg’s journey from undergraduate to CEO – is presented to the audience through the lens of a deposition. In the hands of a less competent director and a way less competent screenwriter, the greater narrative of Zuckerberg’s lawsuits could easily confuse the focus of the film with extraneous legal nonsense.

But moving past the extra weight, there’s also a lot of potential benefits. For one thing, a framing narrative can add context and justify exposition. A really easy question to throw at a movie is: Why are we watching this? A framing narrative can answer that question. In The Social Network, the question is already answered with exformation – everyone in the audience has heard of Mark Zuckerberg, and we’re watching the movie to learn about his experiences founding Facebook. But the framing narrative adds an in-universe explanation as well. We’re watching to find out how Mark got to this deposition, and find out why he’s being sued by three of his fellow Harvard students (one of which is his former best friend). Another plus that goes somewhat hand-in-hand with the context of a framing narrative is that exposition can become far more natural. If the movie is built around someone telling the audience a story, then tools like voiceover and backstory don’t seem so jarring because, well, that’s just how people tell stories.

A framing narrative can also add tension to a movie. Since framing situations often take place in the future relative to the main events of the story, the framing narrative can create useful dramatic irony. If your movie opens with a spy dangling over a pit of lava and that spy turns to the camera and says, “You’re probably wondering how I got here,” then the explanation becomes exciting. In the main narrative, watching that spy do something as simple as getting out of bed is transformed into a captivating mystery because we know the stakes of his inevitable predicament. The Social Network utilizes this exact arrangement to keep the movie engaging. Watching Mark’s friend group work on their little social networking site is 10x more captivating when you know that they all end up at each other’s throats by the end of the film.

Finally, a framing narrative can target the audience’s psychology. People are hardwired to listen to someone tell them a story (see: books), and movies tend to lack that specific subconscious signal. Watching short intercut video clips obviously makes sense to people, but it doesn’t resonate in quite the same instinctual way in which a directly told story does. Adding a story teller into a movie can patch that hole.

Ditch That Witch

Here’s a paradox, sort of:

Movies are a ‘visual medium.’ The Blair Witch Project is a movie. The central (most effective, most memorable) element of The Blair Witch Project is the Blair Witch. The Blair Witch never appears on screen.

Then where is the Blair Witch? You don’t hear it, touch it, taste it (thank god), or smell it. At best, you see where it’s been and what it’s done—or maybe not even that. You don’t really know for sure if it exists, although you’re given pretty good reason to believe that something awful and unexplainable lives in those woods.

So the Blair Witch doesn’t exist, but it also definitely does exist. It’s in the title, and the first section of the movie is just talking heads explaining the witch’s lore. It’s also in your head throughout the entire duration of the film (and, in my case, for several years afterwards).

The Blair Witch Project is an excellent example of a movie that scares you by not showing you something. This is a pretty widely talked about concept in horror across all mediums; you’ve probably heard the phrases ‘fear of the unknown’ or ‘the scariest monster is the one you don’t see’. Stephen King talks about this in Danse Macabre: “Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. 'A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible', the audience thinks, 'but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.’ ”

How does this work in The Blair Witch Project and why is it effective? I believe there are three key ingredients to a terrifying offscreen monster:

1. Your imagination is pre-loaded. – As I mentioned earlier, the first section of the movie is devoted to telling you all about the Blair Witch. This is incredibly important to the movie because it primes the audience’s imaginations. If the Blair Witch was given no more background than “Hey there’s a witch out in the woods,” then the audience would either not think too much about what the witch looks like or, worse yet, use their currently existing archetype of witches to picture it. The general concept of a witch in American lore is really not that scary (no thanks to The Wizard of Oz). A witch is usually a green older woman with a pointy nose and a pointy hat and a big cauldron (if you need evidence of this, google ‘witch’). The movie doesn’t want this kind of witch; it wants a creature so horrible and unimaginable that it can’t even be visualized on screen. In order to get the audience to create such a monster with their own imaginations, the movie plants seeds—little details, rumors, and legends at the beginning of the movie are kept just vague enough to allow the viewer to envision something far worse than any special effects could render.
2. You know it’s out there. – While trying to seem clever at the beginning of this post, I said The Blair Witch Project was like a paradox when really it isn’t. As with most all horror movies, what you see is what scares you—the only notable difference is that this movie’s visuals scare you through implication, specifically the implication that there’s something horrible in the woods. The Blair Witch is effective because it’s constantly reaffirming the idea that’s just around the corner, that it’s hiding in those bushes, that it’s right behind you. When our three protagonists wake up in the forest after a night of strange and unexplainable noises outside their tent, they find that something/someone has placed little wooden symbols all around the camp. The witch was right there in their camp while they were sleeping. This point is crucial, as it differentiates the witch from a character like Godot—the audience needs to know that the witch is a physical presence and a threat, not some far away concept.
3. You almost see it – The trick to the ‘unknown’ being so horrible is that you’re always almost on the brink of knowing it. Heather, the main character and director of the eponymous Blair Witch Project, screams something like ‘OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT??’ when sprinting through the woods at night and catching a glimpse of something that was probably the witch. We don’t see what she sees, but we come so close that it’s agonizing. Sitting on the cusp of a horrifying revelation is sort of like a meta version of peeking around a corner. The tension of almost realizing our fears, of wanting to see it but also desperately not wanting to, elevates the terror of the monster to explosive levels.

The Blair Witch Project created its monster with a tiny budget and a whole lot of well executed creativity, and the end result was a solid proof of concept that the most chilling tool in a filmmaker’s kit can be simple exclusion.

When Life is Truly Stranger than Fiction (Yaejin)

Recall a favorite novel, its plot and characters. It could be a page-turning thriller about a tenacious detective hunting down killers. Ann Penelope has just been murdered, and the culprit leaves a taunting note. The details are a bit gruesome, but it is only fiction, so what's the harm? Now, imagine turning on the television and watching the news cover the murder of an Ann Penelope. Your reality plays as the fiction in your hands unravels. This is the sort of premise that Stranger than Fiction, starring Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson, adopts.

Harold Crick is an IRS auditor with a knack for numbers. His life is very much a daily routine kept by his trusty watch. Karen Eiffel is a successful author unable to finish her latest novel because she does not know how her protagonist should die. You see, her novels address the certainty of death, so her main characters always suffer a very poetic death. What she does not know yet is that her protagonist, Harold, is very much alive. He can even hear her narration of his life.

Harold distinguishes the narrator's voice from a schizophrenia diagnosis by noting how well the narrator knows him. Although the narrator speaks with a British accent, she and Harold share an emotional and intellectual connection. As any artist, she thoroughly knows and understands her character. When Harold first meets his love interest, the narrator is able to describe his thoughts perfectly, albeit through more flowery language. She knows how many teeth Harold has and how many times he brushes each one because she created him.  The plot she writes into Harold's life leads to uncontrollable curveballs that he must navigate. Since she created him, she feels the need to end him appropriately, so his death suits the character she has written. 

This is how Harold overhears the ominous words "little did he know" that make him very much aware of his imminent death. As Eiffel experiments with several dramatic ends, Harold races to find her before she kills his character. While hearing his life read back to him, he begins to create a different path for himself as he breaks his routine. Despite regulations against fraternizing with an auditee, he wants Ana Pascal, a tax-evading baker, and pursues her with bags of flour. He starts learning the guitar, a childhood dream. 

As we, the audience, watch Harold, we cannot help but root for him. As an IRS auditor, he is no hero to the American population but watching a man fumble after his crush is endearing and relatable. Like many with an office job, Harold comes in the morning, works at his cubicle, and leaves at closing time. His daily schedule is comparable to many Americans as he represents the everyman. We cheer him on as he goes after what he wants, independent of Eiffel and her intentions for his character. 

One day, after finding the perfect death, Eiffel types about a ringing phone, her own phone rings. Startled because no one ever calls her, she curiously types that the phone rings again. Her phone rings a second time. Just to be sure, she types for the third time, her finger hovering over the period key. Once she presses it, her phone rings and she picks it up. It is Harold, her main character, on the other end. 

Spoiler Alert

After meeting Harold, Eiffel thinks about the eight characters she killed in her previous books. As the creator of the world in her novels, she is responsible for the deaths of her characters. Harold has already changed his path by contacting her and being aware of his impending death. After reading Eiffel's manuscript, Harold tells her to finish the book, satisfied with its ending. By knowing when and how he will die, he creates his own ending when he accepts his death. Deciding between her masterpiece and Harold's life, Eiffel cannot help but want to save the character who has slipped past her grasp. 

Ultimately, she chooses a less satisfying end and severely injures Harold instead. As the audience, we are relieved to know Harold and Ana can start another chapter together. Rather hypocritically, we also feel disappointed by the lackluster ending. Since the genius of Eiffel's ending is hyped throughout the movie, the new ending reflects the book's dissatisfying end. By the end of the film, Eiffel is very much part of the audience, watching Harold live his life. Since she cannot have it all, the audience cannot either. Despite having broken bones everywhere, Harold is overjoyed to wake up in a hospital, alive. Eiffel finds peace with her "okay" novel; it is not the masterpiece she wanted, but she is okay with that. This change from her perfectionist mentality is just as wonderful as Harold's newfound appreciation for life. Stranger than Fiction itself ends on an encouraging note, asking its audience to consider what its characters experienced. 

How I, Tonya is Based on a True Story (Cristina)

The 2017 Tonya Harding biopic, I, Tonya, opens with a title card proclaiming that the film is "Based on the irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly." From the very first seconds, the film refuses to claim it's "Based on a True Story." It's based on interviews that, the audience is told upfront, can barely be trusted because they contradict each other. The film's opening shots establish a recreation of these interviews with Tonya and Jeff, as well as Tonya's mother, Tonya's coach, Jeff's friend Shawn Eckhardt, and reporter Martin Maddox, which will serve as a framing device to walk us through Tonya's life story. 

While some films have an unreliable narrator, this film has six. 

From the very beginning, the audience is aware that everybody involved has a motive, a reason for telling their side of the story and an image of themselves they want to convey. Before we even see Tonya, we see the other interviews as the characters talk about their own reputation or Tonya's. Jeff Gillooly laments his infamy and ill-advised mustache. Tonya's mother defends herself against Tonya's assertion that she was a bad mother. Tonya's coach claims that Tonya is like America, either loved or hated. When we finally meet Tonya in the film, she rephrases the interviewer's unheard first question, "What's people's impression of me?" To which Tonya responds, "That I'm a real person."

The film seems extensively interested in how it's easy to forget that Tonya Harding is a real person when seeing her in the center of one of the most dramatic incidents in sports history. The assault on Tonya's skating rival Nancy Kerrigan, supposedly arranged by Tonya and/or Jeff, is a story still wildly disputed today.

Consistently throughout the film, the uncertainty of the narrative and the unreliability of its narrators are established in unique visual ways. A scene where Tonya chases Jeff through their home with a shotgun is broken by Tonya in the scene turning to the camera to announce, "I never did this." Some moments have Tonya's and Jeff's interviews in split-screen as they recount the same conversation, word for word, but with wildly varied intonations. A training montage of Tonya's preparation for her second attempt in the Olympics begins with her running through the woods with a bag of dog food on her back while Tonya explains while she runs, "This is how Rocky trained to fight the Russians." And as if knowing the audience would find this hard to believe, the film pans to Tonya's coach during each strange training ritual, saying, "She actually did this... and this... and this."

The audience is never allowed to forget how subjective these moments are, how hard it is to prove what is real and what is not when the people claiming to be telling the truth have such a high stake in how the story is received.

Just as often as the film continues to cast uncertainty over what is being shown, it also offers exact recreations of some of Tonya's competitions, her wedding, and actual news footage covering the assault on Nancy. Most impressive is the competition where Tonya lands the first triple axel in US women's skating history. Over the credits at the end of the film, the actual video of Tonya's performance plays, and everything from her costume to her hair to the awed and relieved expression on her face the moment after she landed the jump had been perfectly rerendered by the film. In these few scenes, the audience is grounded back in reality, in facts that can be proven and moments that were documented.

(Tonya Harding training after Nancy Kerrigan's injury at Clackamas Town Center, 1994)

Despite being based on a true story, I, Tonya never claims to have the full truth. The first half of the film shows Tonya fighting to earn her place in the skating world which is so concerned with physical presentation and reputation. The second half offers the audience the opportunity to question everything they think they know about the Incident: Tonya's reputation, Nancy's reputation, and the way those reputations were created. As Jeff himself says, "Everyone remembers the incident differently and that's a fact." The film seems satisfied with its own lack of answers, content to introduce the audience to the real person, Tonya Harding, who factually will forever be the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition. You can create your own opinion on the rest.

The Haunting Of Hill House and Non-Linear Narratives on Screen (Cristina)

Now that we're deep in the month of October and fully in the Halloween season, I find myself returning to my favorite ghostly pieces of media. Among them is the 2018 Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Hill House, an adaptation of the Shirley Jackson novel, which follows the five Crain siblings (Steve, Shirly, Theo, Luke, and Nell) through two different timelines: the summer their mother died when they were children and the days surrounding Nell's suicide in the present. The show hops nonchronologically between these two timelines, showing various events at Hill House, the haunted mansion where they lived as children, and [narrating] the prelude and aftermath of Nell's death.

Most impressive is how the show visually transitions over the timelines, tying each sequence together through some physical, sonic, or thematic connection. In one scene, young Theo pushes through a door and reveals adult Theo opening a fridge in Shirley's kitchen. As a child, Luke hears the ghostly sounds of dogs barking outside his window in Hill House and in the present-day Luke listens to another group of dogs while sitting in a park. Shirley, the mortician, prepares Nell's body for her wake before the scene transitions to Nell's wedding where Shirley helps her apply her makeup.

Aside from being visually compelling and creating a flow to each hour-long episode, the inescapable connection between the past and the present is one of the show's driving themes. In the first episode, Steve explains his understanding of the supernatural: "A ghost can be a lot of things. A memory, a daydream, a secret. Grief, anger, guilt. But, in my experience, most times they're just what we want to see." 

For the Crain family, ghosts are memories. They are haunted (sometimes literally) by their pasts, which we fade in and out of. For example, Shirley in the present day is haunted by a male ghost, sitting and raising a glass to her. Deep into the season, it's revealed that Shirley met the man at a conference and had an affair with him. Her guilt literally haunts her with his image. 

Furthermore, while telling the story non-linearly, the first five episodes are organized around the five siblings from oldest to youngest. Each sibling is given an episode documenting their chilling experiences in Hill House and their reactions to Nell's death. Dividing the story like this not only allows for some spectacular character development, but it also raises the question of perspective. Our understanding of each scene changes depending on whose story we're following and what context we're allowed.

In episode one, Steve's episode, Steve returns to his apartment to find a sick-looking Luke presumably robbing Steve for drug money. However, when we reach episode four, from Luke's perspective, we see the scene again with the understanding that Luke is trying to procure some money to help his friend from rehab get off the streets. In one haunting scene from Steve's point of view, he hides in his room with his father while something turns the doorknob on the other side. The scene takes on a new context, when in episode nine we follow their mother Liv and discover that she is on the other side of the door, crazed after the house has been slowly eating away at her sanity.

Each moment and each line is meticulous, carefully building mystery and intrigue, but ultimately fitting together neatly when the audience is able to reflect on the full timeline, slotting each scene into its perfect place with new understanding. 

In the final episode, the remaining Crain siblings return to Hill House and see Nell as a ghost, who says, "Everything's been out of order. Time, I mean. I thought for so long that time was like a line, that our moments were laid out like dominoes, and that they fell, one into another... But I was wrong. It's not like that at all. Our moments fall around us like rain. Or snow. Or confetti." And ultimately this is how we see the Crains and their story, like confetti, flowing in and around their lives through time, through sounds and motions and ideas, each memory slowly settling around us.

The Good Place and Redefining the Sitcom (Cristina)

Despite critical acclaim and decent ratings, this past Thursday marked the final season premiere of NBC's The Good Place. Where many sitcoms of similar success find themselves running for upwards of six seasons, ending the series after just four was the choice of the creator Michael Schur to preserve the show's narrative integrity, continuing its tradition of subversive television storytelling.

The Good Place stars Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop, an Arizona deadbeat who dies and finds herself in an afterlife neighborhood in the titular Good Place, a non-denominational heaven. The only problem: she has ended up in the Good Place by accident, mistaken for a different Eleanor Shellstrop who dedicated her life to helping others. Slowly her presence and less-than-savory personality begin to have dire physical consequences on the environment around her.

While slightly more fantastical, the show situates itself like most modern network sitcoms, centering around a group of diverse personality types in a unifying location. Where Friends has Central Perk and the apartments, The Office has the office, Parks and Rec has the parks department, The Good Place has the neighborhood. As its first season starts up, the groundwork established, the episodes remain mostly episodic, following Eleanor and her allies as they help her avoid detection and teach her to fit in by becoming a better person.

However, a mere seven episodes in, the show begins making bold narrative choices. Season 1 Episode 7, "The Eternal Shriek", follows another antic filled day. This time Eleanor and her friends must murder the pseudo-robot neighborhood guide, Janet, in order to keep Eleanor from being discovered. Just when they escape the day unscathed, seeing her friends wracked with guilt for their actions and stress over maintaining their lies, Eleanor announces to the entire neighborhood that her placement in the Good Place was a mistake.

This pivotal turning point completely changes the structure of the show from an episodic comedy to a plot-driven adventure. For the back half of the season, every episode pushes the plot forward as stakes increase. It becomes necessary for the audience to watch every episode in order to understand what's going on. 

Situational comedies have a long and noble history on broadcast television. A hallmark of the genre is repetition, the necessity to return all characters and relationships to their starting point at the end of every episode, no matter what has been accomplished by the plot, to preserve established dynamics and tensions. For example, a 'will-they-won't-they' dynamic holds two characters with romantic potential right at the edge of a relationship for as long as possible to continue to use the tension of the situation. Missing an episode or tuning in to a later season should have little effect on the audience's ability to enjoy the show.

The Good Place rejects the sitcom's repetitive nature. The characters begin to change drastically, most notably Eleanor who genuinely becomes a better person as the show progresses and whose actions as a good person disrupt any possibility that the situation can exist in perpetuity. Where the conceit of the show depends on Eleanor's selfish actions jeopardizing her position in the Good Place, her learned honesty and selfless actions disrupt the status quo of the show's world.  

The season one finale ushers in a plot twist of monumental proportions, redefining the entire season and establishing that the content of the show will never be the same. The Good Place is self-aware of its changing nature as it moves from a mere subversion of the genre into a meta-commentary. The final scenes see our main characters have their memories wiped, literally reverted to their states at the beginning of season one because their character development was a threat to the sustained existence of their neighborhood. 

Season two and three become even more plot-heavy and dedicated to worldbuilding, the midpoint of season two seeing the characters abandon the neighborhood altogether and go on a sprawling adventure through all corners of the afterlife and then the real world. And every time the characters grow, internally and in their relationships with each other, some magical force will inevitably revert them back to their 'default' state, until they inevitably grow into their better selves. 

As we approach the finale, it's impossible to say where the story and characters will end up. By deliberately choosing its end, I have no doubt The Good Place's conclusion will be as narratively satisfying as the previous three seasons. 

 

See You In 27 Years: A Look at Andy Muschietti's It Duology (Cristina)

I continue to find myself unbelievably fond of Andy Muschietti's It Chapter One. While on the surface It is a horror movie about an evil clown named Pennywise, when you dig deeper it's an earnest character-driven ensemble film. The movie does a meticulous job balancing all seven members of the Losers' Club, a plucky band of outcasts being tormented by the clown, as unique characters with strong voices, separating them at times to develop their individual journeys and bringing them together to bounce off each other. Whether it's Richie making a terrible joke, Beverly saying something courageous, or Stan dryly rolling his eyes, the characters' have great consistency in their interactions with each other, a playful banter that easily escalates to genuine tension between their distinctive personality types as the stakes increase. 

At its core, it's a coming of age film, following the kids as they confront the evils of the world around them for the first time, only able to find understand and gain the ability to fight back against their circumstances when united. And while their circumstances include a killer clown, they also encompass each characters' individual struggle: Bill's grief at the loss of his brother, Eddie's disillusionment with his mother's overparenting, Mike's forced adjustment to independence and maturity as an orphan. It's only by coming together and fighting the clown that each character is able to accept their situation and grow.

It Chapter Two picks up 27 years later as the characters reunite after Pennywise returns to torment their hometown again. Because of some evil magic, all the characters who left town have no memory of their childhood there at all and only when returning home do they start to remember, both the evils they encountered and their friendship. It becomes essential for each character to uncover parts of their past in order to actually kill Pennywise, once again pairing the clown's attacks with the kids' personal and familial struggles in a series of flashbacks. The narrative becomes a tale of confronting repressed trauma and only being able to overcome that trauma by confronting it head-on. 

The film's narrative is aided by the performances, each adult actor remarkably capturing every slight mannerism from the children's performances. Visually the characters haven't changed at all, unable to while they were unable to overcome the trauma they've repressed.

All that keeps Chapter Two from being as successful at its narrative as its predecessor is the very effectiveness of the first movie. Both the original Stephen King novel and the 1990 miniseries cut between two timelines instead of separating them, pairing the adults return and reunion with the memories they slowly regain of their original fight with Pennywise. The driving force of the adult Losers becomes their ability to uncover what happened that summer and how they were able to fight the clown so they can defeat it again. By separating the children's timeline into its own contained narrative, removing its episodic nature for a more streamlined plot, the audience isn't held in suspense in the adults' timeline, but is rather waiting for the adults to catch up to what the audience already knows. 

While the underlying messages of the narrative are still preserved, the 170-minute runtime of the second film only exacerbates the lack of suspense. The movie is carried along by the charisma of the characters, the intrigue of seeing them as adults, and a promise of finality for their struggles, both internal and against the clown. 

Ultimately Muschietti's adaptation shows true understanding of the point of King's novel and an ability to convert deep thematic narratives to screen. There's something powerful about the narrative that I can't escape, the way the characters find solace in each other and strength in themselves when united. Despite the struggle of pacing in the second film and the campiness of the horror, I continue to recommend it and can't wait to see it again.

What is HOUSE (and house music)? (Vanessa)

This web series would not be possible without my parents, who have always raised me and my siblings to love and respect music both as solace and as art.

My dad is a Navy man, which resulted in me living in eight states and attending a combined total of seven elementary, middle, and high schools before I attended college. The things that were stable in my childhood as a result: family road trips and discussions about music, a deep love for my parents and siblings, and a fascination with how people interact with the world around them.

HOUSE, in particular, comes from the stories of my dad. My parents attended undergrad and met at the University of Illinois at Chicago during the late 80s and early 90s. The Chicago house music scene has its roots in the early and mid-80s as radio personalities and club DJs mixed elements of disco, electro-pop, synthesizers and drum machines (such as the Roland TR-808, the Korg Poly-61 synthesizer, and the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer) and eventually hip-hop to create new sounds that were danceable and innovative. Thus, came the emergence of house music. By the time my parents would arrive in Chicago, house music had expanded to an international audience, included several sub-genres, and became a unique community with a plethora of stories about who exactly made up various house music scenes.

Never one to shy from a good story, my dad would both play house music and tell me stories of what it was like to witness the house scene as a young person living in Chicago during the late-80s. And from that, the inspiration for HOUSE was born as I wondered “what must it have been like to be immersed in something that sounds so vibrant?” and “what must have it felt like to create something like house music?”

If you are a beginner to the world of house music or even to the realm of film production (especially documentary film production), there are three things that I think are important to know for a better grasp on both of these worlds: (1) house music and film production are all about community and being supported by a community, (2) house music and film production are all about passion (for others, music, movies, art, etc.), and (3) house music and film production are all about expression.

Film and house music are both blends of other mediums from which a certain “language” has emerged. At least in my experience, the language of video media (film especially) and of house music is reliant on emotion and experience. With this in mind, I like to think that a documentary web-series about house music, and documentary storytelling of all kinds, is some sort of weird blend of the subjective and objective. You capture someone’s truth while acknowledging that yes, “truth” itself is sometimes informed by emotion, experience, and expression. What is a good story, really, aside from someone communicating what it means to embody an identity, be part of a community, or simply exist as someone experiencing the strangeness that is life?

HOUSE at its simplest, is a story of community and connection within the house music fan bases in Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore, told through the voices of fans and creators alike. It goes through all three cities and features interviews with those who consider themselves “house heads” or part of the house music community. HOUSE explores how a genre of music can be a sound and a feeling.

Just as importantly, HOUSE’s production is also a story of community and connection between people who love storytelling. Those people have ranged from my dad and my professors who have supported me and helped me create this project (shout outs especially to Meredith Ward, Matt Porterfield, and Lawrence Jackson!!!) to my friends and fellow students who have been a part of the production team, individuals who have been interviewed (and people who have offered tremendous amounts of help in pursuing people to interview), and everyone else who got roped into this ride. One of my friends (another film major) and I constantly joke about how any sort of film/tv/web-series/visual media effort is really just a massive group project. BECAUSE IT IS! And hopefully, to anyone reading this, you’ll get to see that through this blog!

Picture from Chosen Few Picnic and Festival, July 2018 (where we shot part of the Chicago episode!)

Next time: “Casting" a Documentary, Producing and Logistics, and Directing

Until then, some house music:

In The Beginning (There Was Jack)

Move Your Body

Hot Stuff (Ralphi Rosario And Erick Ibiza 2018 Rework)

 

Magnolia and Short Cuts: Interwoven Connections Between Families and Strangers (Mireille)

Paul Thomas Anderson has on occasion made clear that Robert Altman has served as an inspiration for his films. Thus, it is not surprising that Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) and Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) both treat the theme of interwoven connections between families and strangers. Anderson progressively, albeit chaotically, brings together every last minute detail of the characters and their back stories which then slowly merge together, unbeknownst to the characters or the audience, to culminate in a point of origin: the relationship and domination of two prominent paternal figures. Short Cuts begins in a manner similar to Magnolia, where chaotic and sporadic camera cuts between the various scenarios that Altman addresses during the course of the film. As in Magnolia, it is not immediately clear how the characters are interrelated, but different from Magnolia, Altman makes subtle, but mundane, intrusions that make the interconnections clear.  

In Magnolia, Anderson utilizes quick successions of intensely packed movement shots as he introduces each of the subjects of the film, creating an almost “jumpy” feel. This intermittent “peeking” into the lives of the individual characters not only leaves the audience unsettled, but echoes the unstable lives of the characters. For example one of the main personas Jimmy is a game show host who cheats on his wife, but it is also suggested that he probably molested his daughter and is dying of cancer; as well as related to past and present child contestants from that game show that appear in the film who have been traumatized by the game show experience. In addition to this, the audience is introduced to Earl who is the producer of Jimmy’s now failing game show and is also consumed by the regret of having abandoned his wife and child as well as his son who uses motivational speaking techniques to peddle sex to a gullible audience. Anderson counterpoints these saccadic excursions with hard zooms; on Jimmy that highlights him as an “important” figure; on an image of Exodus 8:2 on a poster that is in the background of Jimmy’s game show that references and foreshadows an apocalyptic raining down of frogs, as well as on an almost illegible text underneath a painting in one of the character’s house that reads “But it did happen.” All of these elements serve to remind the audience that “every detail counts” to reach a certain point.

Altman’s approach in Short Cuts is more of a subtle knife. Altman highlights the experience of “suburban” mundane living. All of the action takes place in the same neighborhood whose residents are interrelated only by chance. He does not create subjects that are overtly conflicted, but rather only hints at their instability. For example one of the characters Gene, a policeman, makes up unbelievable stories to hide his affairs, whereas another character Lois works from home as a “sex phone operator” while she carries out her domestic duties, and a baker becomes violent because his custom cake has not been paid for. As in Magnolia, the audience is placed on shaky ground, but this time it is the result of anchoring the action in the mundane existence while “peeking” in on the aberrant behavior of some of the characters.

Both Altman and Anderson choose to end their films with a cataclysmic event. However, Anderson’s film creates resolution. The interrelationships between seemingly disparate characters are brought to light, conflicts are resolved sometimes by unrelated people, and the biblical plague that has been foreshadowed throughout the film ensues. Though Short Cuts culminates with an earthquake, which can be considered cataclysmic, it does not have the supernatural and apocalyptic feel of Magnolia’s ending. Furthermore, the ending neither serves to unify the characters nor provides the sense of completion or coming “full circle” that Magnolia does. Instead, Altman chooses to “explain” away any after effects of the earthquake in the context of a nightly news report playing on a television that has been present since the beginning of the film, thus underscoring that all coincidences and aberrations can be put under the umbrella of “everyday” living. In the end, Anderson takes an absurdist direction to unify all of his components and brings the film to a point of resolution through an apocalypse. Conversely, Altman departs from the seemingly mundane human experience, slowly moves in an absurdist direction, and finally leaves the audience in limbo without any real resolution with respect to the relationships between the characters.

Altman and Anderson both explore the possibility that in the end we are all interconnected. Anderson leaves us with the feeling that our interconnectedness may be real, or may be imagined. In fact, Anderson’s filming style and choice of repeated soundtrack (one example being the song One is the Loneliest Number covered by Aimee Mann) leaves the audience with a bizarre hallucinatory feel in which we are uncertain if the interconnectedness is created within each person (“One” is a pseudonym for heroin as drug use persists throughout the film) or is a manifestation of human collective. Altman, on the other hand, suggests that hidden within our very mundane existences lies a web of interconnections of which we may not even be aware; and that our unwillingness to be privy to it may eventually lead to cataclysmic effects on our psyche and our actions. 

Through the Looking Glass: The Art Behind Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror (Mireille)

There is no absolute standard that qualifies a film as an “art film”. As such a film can be considered art when it is the result of the careful construction of frames rendering it artful, but it is also art when the film is simply the expression of what the filmmaker beholds with his inner eye as an artist. One film that is widely considered an art film is Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975). The film recounts a young man’s life not only as a function of what happens to him and who he meets, but also through his emotions. The art behind the film, as the name implies, is the manner in which the film has been made, which is by investigating the inner workings of a human mind as a literal reflection. In other words, the viewer only catches glimpses of the main character of the film, but comes to know him only as a reflection of his life. Despite the absence of the physical presence of the character, Tarkovsky’s style of crafting each frame ensures that the presence of the character is always felt and the viewer does not have the feeling of missing something.

Although the plot and even the central idea behind the film are not entirely clear, a mixture of narration and camera movement in each scene conveys the story to the viewer. Tarkovsky interviews the character about his memories and shoots these scenes in black and white, while filming what the character in the film is currently seeing and experiencing in color. This combination of duality of filming and listening to the voices of the main character as well as narration creates the story for the viewer. In the same way that the viewer catches only physical glimpses of the main character’s persona, the viewer learns about the main character’s mind in bits and pieces. As a result, the viewer gradually comes to the conclusion that the main character is dying and that The Mirror is both a metaphorical and literal reflection on life.

Tarkovsky’s incorporation of camera movement also serves to include the viewer in the frames of the film. This use of movement provides a certain personality and “sense of being” to the camera. In other words, the camera is not just a stationary object that observes the actions of the actors and movement in the scene, but rather the camera itself has a personality and plays a role in each frame. In addition to the movement of the camera, a significant amount of Tarkovsky’s shots are also exceptionally long takes. The use of long takes keeps the viewer’s attention engaged and gives the viewer the feeling that s/he is present in the scene, which adds to the feeling of inclusion. This feeling of presence also translates into a sense of omniscience, almost as if the scene were just another part of the viewer’s everyday life. In addition, the almost slow motion like feel in some of these long takes further allows the viewer to take a step back from the motion of the film and really focus on the elements and people in the scene.

Finally, Tarkovsky also uses repetition to great effect.  Several times throughout the film, Tarkovsky repeats certain scenes, which creates a haunting sense of déjà vu that influences the composition of the film as a whole. For example, Tarkovsky repeats a particular black and white scene in which the viewer sees trees and bushes blown about in a strong wind, and then as the camera pans over to a stone table several objects begin to fall over ostensibly also because of the wind. The repetition of the scene allows the viewer to slowly grasp that the scene is a metaphor for the slow death and chaotic existence of the main character.

The Mirror is not a linear film, the meaning or intention of which is grasped as a function of the unfolding of events. In fact, at first glance, The Mirror may even seem out of order and “random”.  However, therein lays the art. The Mirror is a view into the interior world of Tarkovsky’s subconscious. It is an exploration of life and death through filters and metaphor. The very fact that the viewer witnesses the world that Tarkovsky wants to reveal through Tarkovsky rather than through a physical main character that leads us through the story lays bare Tarkovsky’s most intimate musings and recollections. True art does precisely that. It provides a view into the artist’s beliefs, fears, and longings in a manner that many times is difficult to glean immediately, but rather requires travelling through the labyrinth of the artist’s mind and exiting maybe a bit confused, but with enough bits and pieces to leave us wondering for a long while.

 

Violent Expectations in No Country for Old Men (Gabe)

[SPOILER ALERT]

No Country for Old Men is a unique and bizarrely effective way to battle a bad mood. Early morning contemplation of extreme violence is not how I usually begin my days, but in the course of watching the film I was thoroughly struck by the way it handled and commented upon patterns of human brutality. The film alternates between a stark and unflinching display of the scope of human violence while also rebelling against the viewers’ expectations for what we will and will not see. For example, when one of the main characters, Llewelyn, is gunned down the viewer isn’t shown his final fight or how he is slain. Instead, our last view of him alive, is when he chats with the women tanning by the pool. Decades of action films have conditioned viewers to expect a proverbial blaze of glory as the hero attempts to shoot his way out against impossible odds. Instead, we are shown the surviving gunmen escaping as the lawman Ed arrives. Llewelyn is just dead. There is no attempt to glorify his demise, he has just been erased. This flies in the face of the cannon of American westerns and crime films which generally fully depicting the final moments of a hero’s journey. An additional effect this created is that Llewelyn is utterly removed from his pedestal as a protagonist and is instead left among the ranks of all the other dead characters. He becomes just another nearly anonymous body, despite the fact that we’ve spent most of the film following his story. Through this choice, the film makes a statement about the real consequences of violence for everyone involved.

Often when watching a film, I get so swept up in what’s taking place that I never consider how a character got to where they are now or how the events depicted fit into their lives as a whole, but the film’s touch on father-son relationships was a gently grounding companion theme to the rest of the film’s brutality. Beginning and ending the film with these quiet stories gave the plot a tangible sense of humanity even while exploring the crushing violence the characters each encounter. Of course, a character’s entire life is too much to convey within a film (Boyhood excluded), but this film achieved a similar effect simply through these opening and closing monologues. I then found myself considering why all these characters, pushed to their absolute extremes by the forces around them, were behaving the ways that they were. Perhaps, as an aspiring actor, analyzing and imagining a character’s childhood and adolescence is more interesting to me than for most other viewers, but considering that each of these characters had a father and family brought me further into the world of the film. I found myself yearning to understand them and what drove them to behave the ways they were. I wanted to thumb through their photo albums and peruse their childhood homes. I don’t remember the last time I felt that way about any character in a film. Imagining the characters’ childhoods while watching their shocking exploits was a surprisingly harmonious and contemplative experience and not what I had expected.

The Third Eye View of Avant-Garde Cinema (Mireille)

For a while now, and especially this summer, I have noticed a marked paucity of more conceptually and cinematographically intricate films. Though a smattering of movies released within the last couple of years managed to break the “typical” mold of strict continuity and predictable plots frequently evident in the traditional blockbuster, all too often new releases and their audiences are satisfied with repetitive content that is frequently vapid. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that production is most often guided by market consumption, mass appeal and economics, but I still wish that some of the more artistic and experimental films would gain more attention and possibly spark a greater interest and openness in the general population. The reason for this is that avant-garde films provide heaps of fodder for contemplation. It’s true that experimental films may sometimes defy logic in their approach to storylines or seem a little over-the-top when it comes to the cinematography, but they almost always stay with you for hours or maybe days, leaving you to contemplate for a long while on the visual experience you have just had.

Two short films that are wonderful little introductions to the world of experimental and surrealistic film are Bruce Baillie’s film Here I Am (1962) and Ben Rivers’ Ah, Liberty (2008). Both weave together the interplay between innocence, environment and identity through the eyes of children. Although each film approaches this theme with very different narratives and subject matter, in both the eerie feel and otherworldly mood is sublimely conveyed through shot composition, framing and use of sound.

Baillie’s Here I Am opens with a series of unsteady hand held shots of the tree line and horizon in a non-descript neighborhood. The presence of a distorting fog as well as the contrast between the crispness and dullness of the elements in the frame create a heightened sense of tension and anxiety. Baillie also uses a high frequency ring in this opening sequence that only adds to a growing sensation of foreboding and insecurity. In fact, you start to feel that you are entering a world that represents a separate reality. Equally discomfiting is that Baillie has yet to introduce any human element – until suddenly the camera becomes extremely personal. It literally comes face to face with a little girl on a swing. The camera allows the audience to experience the movement of the child on the swing, lulling it into a sense of peacefulness. Without warning the movement becomes extremely disorienting, and the audience catches glimpses of the child grimacing. At this point the sound has also transitioned from the eerie high frequency pitch sound to completely diegetic sound that pulls the audience into the scene. And then, Baillie forcibly shifts the audience from the emotionally laden moment by cutting to a static shot of the little girl continuing to swing. This time, however, the camera is removed from her immediate personal space. The swing and the little girl are confined to the left hand third of the frame. This change in shot removes the immediacy of the little girl as well as the detail and the emotion present in her face and replaces it with a view of her as simply another element in the frame. Now, the audience must passively accept what is happening in the environment, at once taking in the whole, but also acknowledging the restriction and oppression of the child. Welcome - you have now entered the world of avant-garde film where intensity is not merely a visceral sensation, but one in which you are transported by the camera to look at the world in a different way. The camera now functions as a “third eye” that allows you to see into the psychological makeup of the different “personas” it thrusts in front of you.  

Although Ben Rivers’ Ah, Liberty also begins with a series of shots that display only natural elements and no human subjects, Rivers shoots his beginning sequence with a static camera. His focus is on the intensity and grandeur of the natural world. Rivers chooses simply to capture any motion within the frame, while leaving the camera itself as a still component of the shot. As the film progresses, Rivers begin to incorporate the human subject, and like in Baillie’s film, these are children. However, Rivers chooses to depict children in action, rather than focusing only on facial expressions. Nonetheless, Rivers does incorporate the use of visages. In his film the children put on elaborate masks, which allow them to metamorphose into components of incredibly ornate and complex frames. By the end of the film, the children’s identities have been effaced. They simply become objects among other objects within the shots. In other words, the children have been transformed from protagonists to small informalities present in the vast landscape that Rivers depicts throughout the film. In this way, Rivers has used the camera to erase the individuality of his subjects. Rivers wants the audience to witness the nearly silent swallowing of the insignificance of the individual against the larger world.

Through their films both Baillie and Rivers attempt to convey their intent of effacing the individual. However, whereas Baillie’s cinematographic techniques pull and push us through the convulsive psyche of an innocent child by using camera movement and artificial sound, Rivers silently allows us to bear witness to the enormity of the world where the child is but one small element. Baillie erases identity by physically moving the focus away from his subject; Rivers confounds his subjects within a landscape. In very different ways, both have successfully downplayed the importance of individual identity. Both have left you questioning what your place in the world might be. So, maybe next time you have to watch some experimental work, remember that what might at first glance seem like randomly assorted artistic shots, may actually be beckoning to look at things through a new third eye.

 

The Annoying "What Ifs" (Jaeyoung)

 During the course of my film-watching career, I have been cursed with a special strain of skepticism. It began in elementary school, when I was watching the “Pirate’s Life for Me” scene in Peter Pan. In this scene, various pirates were throwing knives at a door, very nearly missing the unaware Mr. Smee who was coming out from it. I must have had a strong realist mentality when I watched this, because I asked myself, “How in the world did he survive that? What would happen if a knife didn’t miss his head?” This drove me to distraction, and I was annoyed every time the characters narrowly escaped death. (Ironically, I didn’t question the fact that children could fly, that another world exists, etc.)

 This fixation carried over to other movies I watched, especially action films. Every time the protagonist dodges a bullet or narrowly misses a large boulder, I would contemplate the sheer luck the character must have had, and consider what would happen if the protagonist actually died midway through the movie. I understood that this was the wrong way to watch movies (in the battle against realism and story, story should always take precedence), but this was the film-watching equivalent of biting one’s nails; I couldn’t help it.

 The Other Guys helped me to wrap my mind around this issue. In the beginning of the film, Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson play police heroes, parodying the hyper-masculine and ridiculous action plotline akin to the Fast and Furious series. As they chase a group of criminals to the top of the building, they find that the criminals have already escaped to the ground. Driven by misguided confidence, they decide to jump off the building and, in deadpan humor, fall to their death. This was the rare moment when the thought, “There is no way they can survive that” is immediately followed by “Oh, they did not survive that.” The protagonists’ protective cloak was pulled from right under them, and they died in the most humorous way possible. When I saw that this trope could be played with, I stopped caring as much.

 The worry resurrected again when I watched Mad Max: Fury Road. Max and Furiosa are fighting over the control of the oil rig, and Furiosa triggers the gun against Max’s head. Luckily for Max, the gun was void of bullets. I couldn’t help asking, what would have happened if there were bullets in that gun? Of course, this would break the narrative in a couple ways (abandoning Max’s journey of redeeming himself, eliminating the challenge for Furiosa to trust a stranger, etc.). But I think this hypothetical asks the interesting question of whether Furiosa and her cadre of female ex-slaves could fend for themselves without the help of a male figure. Usually hypotheticals lead to some silly conclusions, but this helped me come to the thought that there should be (at least one) big-budget action film that doesn’t depend on the help of a male counterpart (yes, Spy might count, but perhaps one that isn’t also comedy).

 But after much thought, I re-realized that dabbling too deep into the “what ifs” takes away from the movie itself. The focus should (obviously) be on the story. The 2002 Chinese film Hero makes a point of this, as the majority of the film is visual interpretation of the story Nameless tells to the Chinese Emperor. Some parts of the story are fabricated, some parts are truthful, but all parts explode with human expression and explode human limitations. The swords and men of an entire army are slashed and destroyed by a couple passionately in love; swordsmen fly when stakes are high; thousands of scrolls in a library are completely unfolded by a single stroke of the sword. Each fight aches with the conflict between obligation to one’s country and the loyalty to one’s friends and lovers. By foregoing realism, Nameless is able to tell a story that strikes a human chord in a novel way. The film is also layered by the story that happens in the present time, or the conversation that occurs between the Emperor and Nameless. Even this is a retelling, or reinterpretation, as the filmmakers were developed their own vision of a historical assassination attempt. The characters’ fate, therefore, is not determined by chaos of the natural world, but by the stories that are told and passed down. To address my weird fixation, a character’s luck is just another way of filmmakers saying, “your time has not yet come.”

Use Your Imagination: Violations in Amélie (Tori)

When discussing films with my peers, a critique I have heard more than once is that someone did not like a film because it wasn’t realistic.  In fact, this is a critique I’ve heard about other art forms, too, such as novels, plays, and musicals.  This sort of criticism has always seemed problematic to me.  Why is it assumed that art forms are meant to be realistic?  Why do we care if art is true-to-life?  The 2001 French film Amélie, also known as Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, is decidedly unrealistic and thus provides the perfect case study when exploring these questions.

The audience is made acutely aware, from the very first few minutes of the film, that Amélie knows it is a film and does not pretend otherwise.  It sits itself very firmly on the avant garde end of the spectrum.  This is a sort of film of consciousness.  It is emphatically a story, and it is emphatically artistic.  At the very beginning of the film, the narrator explains that at a young age, “Deprived of playmates, slung between a neurotic and an iceberg, Amélie retreats into her imagination.” Amélie’s vivid imagination is crucial to her survival amidst a difficult home life.  It is only fitting that the audience is given a glimpse into that imaginary world, as well.  The result is a multitude of cinematic violations in which common conventions are routinely broken.  These violations are made in order to convey this deeply subjective, creative, dream-like experience of the world.    

One of the most commonly used cinematic violations in Amélie is a violation of a dramatic convention: the breaking of the fourth wall.  Characters in the film, particularly Amélie herself, are constantly looking directly at the camera in a sort of wink to the audience.  The film is seemingly trying to say that it knows the audience is there, and it is not going to pretend as if it doesn’t know it is being watched.  A perfect example of this comes near the beginning of the film, as the narrator explains: “In 48 hours, [Amélie’s] life will change forever.”  While this is being said, Amélie, knowingly, looks right at the camera.

Another example of this occurs at the very beginning of the film and poses some questions about the function of these cinematic violations within this particular film.  As the audience is first being introduced to the world of imagination Amélie has created for herself, the narrator explains: “In this world…the neighbor’s comatose wife has chosen to get all her life’s sleep in one go.”  Then, this woman, at first lying motionless in bed, sits up and says straight to the camera: “After this, I can stay awake day and night.”  Amélie’s imagination is the only way she is able to make sense of the complicated and confusing world she experiences.  This method of dealing with the world will continue throughout Amélie’s childhood and into adulthood.

There are countless other departures from cinematic conventions throughout this film that support this idea of the necessity of imagination in a world that can be so difficult to comprehend.  A violation of consensus reality is made when Amélie falls in love with a man named Nino, and we are given a shot of in which her heart can be seen beneath her clothing.  It beats visibly, and it glows.  When Amélie is upset, she watches TV and views her own funeral, with a huge crowd in attendance mourning her loss.  When Amélie undergoes a moment of realization, the screen becomes lighter and lighter until her image fades away; she is both literally and figuratively enlightened.  Additionally, practically every scene in this film is given a sort of green tint to it; thus imagination is quite literally depicted onscreen.

“If Amélie chooses to live in a dream and remain an introverted young woman, she has an absolute right to mess up her life!”  Though Amélie does, eventually, act on her feelings and begin a relationship with Nino, she does not ever leave the dream world she has inhabited her entire life that is visibly shown through these cinematic violations.  In the final scene, she and Nino ride happily along the streets of Paris.  There is still a greenish tint to the screen.  The scene is sped up, the camera shakes, the image is blurry, and Nino and Amélie even make faces directly at the camera.  Even after acting directly on her feelings and beginning a relationship with the man she loves, Amélie unapologetically remains a dreamer.

Amélie is undoubtedly unrealistic, like many other forms of art, but it is enjoyable not in spite of its unrealistic nature but because of it.  So I think the question isn’t whether a film is realistic or not, but why a film is realistic or not.  Does it make sense for a film to be unrealistic?  What is its purpose?  Is the film’s purpose to be realistic?  I believe Amélie’s purpose is to be an embodiment of imagination so the audience can truly understand what it is like to live in a dream-world.  So, yes, Amélie is unrealistic, and that’s exactly why I liked it.

Trains, and Where They Take Us (Jaeyoung)

 

  [SPOILERS AHEAD]

 As someone who lives somewhat far from campus, I am no stranger to long hours on public transportation. The trip between Baltimore and Massachusetts takes ten hours by bus, which is quite tedious. But it also gives me a lot of time to reflect (and nap). And every now and again, my brain asks me this question (probably primed by the fact that I’m on a moving bus): “Where am I going in life?”

 And I would respond, “I don’t know, what does that question even mean? Next question.”

 However, in the Korean films, Train to Busan and Snowpiercer, the idea of direction is crucial. Given that these films involve a train and a destination, it is not surprising that they both approach this theme. But Train to Busan is pretty blunt with this, as we already know from the title that the protagonists are trying to reach Busan… by train. Now the question this film poses is how this journey shapes the characters: their emotional direction. And if I could be perfectly honest, I don't think that's very interesting of a question.

 To be fair, I should note that Train to Busan is a zombie film; therefore, it is somewhat confined by and borrows from other movies of that genre. The behavior of the zombies is strikingly similar to that of World War Z (fast and maniacal), and it delves into the same ethical dilemma explored by The Walking Dead (who do we let survive, and who is part of our people?). But to its credit, it does break from other zombie films in that it invokes a lot of class-conflict overtones.

 Perhaps the most pertinent example of this comes from the interactions between Seok-woo, a young hedge fund manager, and Sang-hwa, a gruff but charismatic every-man. Their first encounter isn’t pleasant; as Sang-hwa is being chased by zombies, Seok-woo initially decides to sacrifice him for the safety of everyone else. There is a shot where Seok-woo looks like a heartless corporate monster. And then he has a change of heart and lets him in, only for Sang-hwa to scold, “All of you people are the same.”

 But this is exactly the trap Train to Busan falls into: generic characterization. Seok-woo is the yuppie with the heart of gold. His daughter is the innocent “eyes” through which we see a cruel world. Sang-hwa is the masculine comic relief. The list goes on, with a Romeo and Juliet-esque young couple, an unfeeling, dogmatic middle-aged man who serves as the antagonist, and many more in this cornucopia of archetypes.

 And the development of these characters builds like this; Seok-woo, who is only slightly caring in the beginning of the movie, becomes very caring by the end. The young couple, who were flirting in the beginning, die and become zombies together. The antagonist, who is mean in the beginning, becomes even meaner by the climax. Therefore, the direction of this film follows the same predictable manner the title does (and in the way most blockbuster films do). It has a Newtonian storyline, where the force manifests as zombies while objects manifest as the characters.

 In Snowpiercer, we are also led to believe that the story will follow a unidirectional story. In this film, humanity is contained in a single train that is protecting it from an icy post-apocalyptic world. The train is divided into two main parts: the upper class and the “scum” in the tail cars. The story follows Curtis Everett, who leads the tail-car-people in a revolutionary struggle to the front engine. The plot is simple enough.

 But the plot isn’t everything; as Curtis and his crew advance, each compartment is carefully observed; from the vanity of the garden to the debauchery of the dance club, every aspect of human livelihood is carefully recorded. In addition, every loss of life is significant, as Curtis places the burden on himself. Each step becomes harder and weirder as the crew encounters a crueler and wilder world.

 It is evident, then, that director Bong Joon-ho doesn’t just settle for character development. Instead, he allows their environment to change too, creating a dynamic relationship between the train and the revolutionaries.

 And, it turns out, the Snowpiercer is not unidirectional. When Curtis finally reaches the Front Engine, Minister Wilford, the creator and caretaker of the engine, subverts both Curtis’ and audience’s expectation by ceding power to him. Curtis realizes that even if he were in power, nothing about the violent system would change; order and balance is far stronger than any human emotion. And as the perpetual motion engine continues to revolve, the film reveals that Curtis hasn’t reached the finish line. He has only made a full circle, ending up in essentially the same place.

 However, Snowpiercer presents yet another direction with Namgoong Minsu (a security expert) and his daughter, Yona are presented. Namgoong continually reminds Yona to be aware of the outside world, what lies outside the window. While everyone else is focused on what’s happening inside the train, Namgoong has the acuity to see that the world is becoming habitable. Since the train completely derails by the end, destroying the microcosm everyone has been so obsessed about, Namgoong’s prescience prevails. If anybody “wins” in this movie, it is those who (literally) think outside the box. Perhaps this could be a lesson for other filmmakers.

 Now let me ask myself the question I posed in the beginning of this entry: “Where am I going in life?”

 My current answer: “Forward, and then some.”

Whom Do You Trust? (Tori)

(WARNING: SPOILERS)

Whom do you trust?  Do you trust your friends?  Your family?  Classmates?  Professors?  Politicians?  How about the films you watch?  Do you think you can trust them?

The films Rashomon, The Usual Suspects, and Atonement each deal with this question of trust between the audience and the film in their own, unique way.  However, all three coincide in the way they force the realization that the audience is all too willing to trust what it sees.  Why is it that the camera is able to so easily convince us that we are witnessing the truth?

The great Akira Kurosawa's renowned 1950 film Rashomon provides the perfect jumping off point to delve into this question, as the film's impact is truly remarkable.  For example, it coined the term "the rashomon effect," which is a psychological concept used to describe the phenomenon when one occurrence is perceived in distinct ways by different witnesses.  The film follows three men: a woodcutter, a priest, and a commoner, as they discuss the case of a murdered samurai; the two men assert that they have never heard "such a strange story."  The woodcutter claims to have found the body of the murdered man, and the priest claims to have seen the samurai earlier walking with his wife in the woods.  Thus, the two were brought into court to testify.  There, they witness the testimonies of the particulars surrounding the murder, first from a "notorious bandit," Tajomaru, then from the wife of the samurai, and then from the samurai himself, speaking through a medium.  Each character introduces his or her story, and then the camera cuts to what initially seems like a flashback, but actually proves to just be a visual aid to the story they tell, accompanied by a voiceover narration of their testimony.  Eventually, the voiceover stops, and the audience becomes fully immersed in the world of their story.  As each testimony begins and ends, you find yourself believing whichever version of the story you are watching and hearing, yet they cannot all be true.  After the third testimony, the woodcutter reveals that his initial account of the discovery of the body was a lie; he claims that he actually saw the murder take place, as well, but pretended he did not in order to stay out of the situation.  An objective truth is never revealed; the audience remains lost at the end, unsure of which story is true, or if any of the stories are true.  Overall, this film provides the perfect introduction to understanding the power of the narrator, as the film suggests that stories depend wholly on the person telling them.  Thus, it is the narrator who has the ultimate power to determine the truth of the film for the audience.

The 1995 film The Usual Suspects, directed by Bryan Singer, plays brilliantly with this fact—that the narrator has an extraordinary power over the audience.  This film has a non-linear chronology, jumping around in time as the events of a bloody raid on a boat come to light.  This raid was carried out by five criminals, led by a former police officer named Dean Keaton, under the orders of a man named Keyser Söze, a criminal mastermind who is unknown to all.  The facts of the crime, and everything leading up to it, are all revealed to us in the present by one of these five criminals, Verbal Kint, one of the two survivors of the horrific battle.  The story is told to us through flashbacks and voiceover as we once again become fully immersed in the narrative.  It is difficult to describe in words exactly how brilliant the structure of this story is; the audience is constantly thrown back and forth in time, trying to piece together the different parts of the story being told.  After Kint concludes his story, his interrogator shocks him by proposing that Keaton himself was the mysterious Keyser Söze.  Kint is incredulous; he feels betrayed and pleads that Keaton was his friend.  As the story concludes, Kint leaves, and we feel sure it will not be long before he is killed by Söze for the part he played in the story and the information he knows.  Yet, it is moments after he leaves that his interrogator, sitting in his office thinking over the story he just heard, suddenly drops his mug of coffee.  The entire story comes flying across the screen in a matter of seconds through bits and pieces of the facts given by Kint, along with random words written on posters in the interrogation room that popped up in Kint’s story, and finally, a sketch done of Keyser Söze from the last remaining survivor of the boat raid that clearly resembles…Kint himself.  Kint, our narrator, has been lying to us the entire time.  Kint is Keyser Söze.  Singer, in the last couple minutes of the film, completely uproots everything you have come to take for granted throughout the film.  Just like Kurosawa, he asserts the insurmountable power of the narrator.  The entire story, as in almost everything we have seen and heard, has been delivered through Kint.  We somehow forget that Kint is a person with an agenda as we listen to his story.  We believe him to be telling us the objective truth of what happened without a second thought.  In every way, it seems that his story is true.  But each and every narrator has a subjective experience; there is no objective truth, and our forgetting of this crucial fact is catastrophic in the case of this film.

The final film I analyzed was the 2007 film, Atonement, directed by Joe Wright.  This film was based on the 2001 novel of the same name written by Ian McEwan.  This novel is one of the ultimate contemporary novels concerning the use of an unreliable narrator, and I was interested to see how it was dealt with in the film versus in the novel.  The story first follows Briony Tallis, an avid writer, at age 13, as she misinterprets an encounter she witnesses between her sister, Cecilia, and the son of a servant, Robbie Turner.  This misinterpretation spirals out of control as she further and further misconstrues who Robbie is and concludes he must be a sexually crazed criminal, where in reality, he and Cecilia are in love.  When Briony’s cousin Lola is raped, Briony tells the police Robbie committed the crime due to her firm conviction as to who Robbie is.  As she is the only witness, the police arrest Robbie, and he eventually enlists in the war in order to get out of prison.  The story then follows Robbie’s life in the war and finally his reunion with Cecilia.  It is the very end of the story, however, that is truly fascinating.  In the novel, the postscript is entitled “London 1999” and is written in the first person from Briony’s perspective, which is an abrupt change from the third person omniscient narrator to whom we had grown accustomed.  In this postscript, Briony reveals that she is a successful writer and is publishing this story as her final novel, for she is dying.  Thus, this third person omniscient narrator was, in fact, Briony, telling her own story.  But is it the true story?  Briony reveals that, though the characters of Cecilia and Robbie reunite in her story, the two actually both died right before the end of the war.  Thus, the happy ending we received was not true.  It was fiction.  Wright chose to frame this revelation in the film as a TV interview with Briony as she promotes this book.  As we are watching 18-year-old Briony leave Cecilia and Robbie, to whom she attempted to apologize for her wrongdoings, and suddenly the screen goes black.  We hear in a voiceover an older woman’s voice saying: “I’m sorry.  Could we stop for a moment?”  Numerous images of cameras are then shown, showing this woman on them, as we realize that it was this woman who had been telling the story we had been watching, though it seemed like we were watching an objective truth, or a factual telling of past events.  Thus, it is revealed that we were understanding this story through the perspective of an unreliable narrator who is telling a fictionalized version of the events of her past. 

All three of these films intelligently display the immense power of the narrator to truly determine what is real and what is not in a film.  What is more, in my opinion, films are able to even further convince an audience due to the connection between the camera and the story.  We see before our eyes the story that our narrator is telling us.  Thus, that old saying “you have to see it to believe it” comes into full play; we are seeing a story play out right in front of us in a fully believable way.  Yet each of these three films argues that, particularly in the world of film, seeing is not always believing.  Just because we are seeing something doesn’t mean it is the objective truth.  Stories you hear are always coming from somebody else’s subjective perspective.  Thus, it seems that there is no objective truth in the world.

However, these films seem to differ in their ultimate understanding of this fact of the impossibility of objective truth.  The Usual Suspects ends by instilling absolute shock in the viewer; you are left speechless, wondering how you could have possibly been so deceived throughout the film.  You are thus left with a very skeptical outlook on life: absolutely nobody can be trusted, for truly anybody can be deceiving you.  Rashomon seems like it might have a similarly bleak ending, but the final scene takes a surprising optimistic turn.  The priest says, close to the conclusion of the film, “maybe goodness is just make-believe.”  The conflicting stories have him upset and baffled, much like us as viewers, the witnesses are lying and there is no telling what the truth actually is.  He states: “If men don’t trust each other, this earth might as well be hell.”  Yet, upon the discovery of a crying, abandoned infant, the woodcutter decides to take the child and raise him or her with his family.  After seeing this incredible act of humanity and kindness, his bleak outlook on life shifts, and the priest says to the woodcutter: “Thanks to you, I think I can keep my faith in man.”  Thus, Kurosawa’s film suggests that mankind can still be good despite the inescapable culture of lies it has created.  Then, in Atonement, at the very conclusion, Briony Tallis explains why she lied in her novel: “But what sense of hope or satisfaction could the reader derive from an ending like that [in which Robbie and Cecilia both die and are never reunited]?  So in the book, I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life.  I’d like to think this isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness.  I gave them their happiness.”  Thus, lies are not all inherently evil, or done in order to confuse or hurt others.  Briony was an unreliable narrator for the sole purpose of achieving this final act of kindness that became impossible to accomplish in reality. 

So, perhaps there is no such thing as objective truth.  Perhaps we are being constantly deceived by unknown subjective experiences pretending to be utterly real.  But this may not mean that “this earth might as well be hell,” as the priest in Rashomon says.  It seems that there is still goodness to be found in mankind despite the untrustworthy nature of storytelling; furthermore, there is even a sort of kindness or beauty in deception itself.

True or False? Reality and Illusion in Metafiction and Metacinema (Tori)

In the short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" from the compilation Labyrinths by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, we come face to face with the meta.  Here, the meta, or metafiction in this case, is a type of self-conscious writing, or writing fiction about the act of writing fiction itself.  As an English major, I constantly find myself writing "meta" in the margins of the novels I'm annotating; it is far from a rarity in writing, and also in film.

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" tells the story of a world called Tlön, invented by a secret society, complete with invented countries, invented inhabitants, and even an invented language.  The first-person narrator of this story, possibly Borges himself, though it is never revealed, stumbles across a mention of Uqbar, a place in Tlön, in an encyclopedia and finally, after laborious exploration and inquiry, uncovers the history of this world, fully unaware of its inherent falsity.  It might sound ridiculous, but how could he know if this world were real or not?  The most unsettling part of this story is that there is no basis to which the narrator could know of this world's falsity; it seems to be a real world.  As the story progresses, the line between imagination and reality is inextricably blurred; the fantastic world intrudes upon the real world, and there is no going back.  The story ends: "If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.  Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe.  The world will be Tlön."

This story is a fantastic example of metafiction.  It concerns the process of creation, but it truly becomes meta when one considers how this story is actually about itself as a story.  Borges is inventing this entire story, yet there is truth within this imaginary tale concerning how humans interact with reality and with illusion.  In my opinion, the meta is one of the most powerful tools an author can use in his or her writing.  It is impossible to read something meta and not think of its myriad implications within the text and also in regard to your own life.  The meta demands self-reflection, and thus you can learn a lot about yourself and about the world around you through your engagement with it.

I read this story by Borges a few weeks ago in an English class and found it fascinating, and I have been thinking about the meta ever since.  Thus when it came time to watch another film for this blog post, my mind immediately jumped to meta films.  Though there are countless films that interact with the subject, there is one that is widely believed to be the ultimate in "metacinema," as it is called, and after watching it, I found many echoes of the stimulating ideas suggested in Borges' story as well as new ideas about the nature of filmmaking in regard to reality and illusion.  It is safe to say that the 1963 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini entitled 8 1/2 is both one of the strangest and one of the most thought-provoking films I have ever seen.

The story follows film director Guido Anselmi, played by Marcello Mastroianni, who is dissatisfied with the big new science fiction film he is in the process of directing, while simultaneously dealing with a complicated personal life due to his cheating on his wife, Luisa, with another woman, Carla. He is consistently bombarded by his production team, as well as a film critic, with ideas and questions about the film.  Yet, the appeal of this film is not in the specifics about the plot but in both the structure and dialogue that prompt this film to be considered one of the great pieces of metacinema.

The film opens with a man sitting in his car.  He is trying to drive across a bridge, but traffic has come to a standstill.  At first, everything seems normal, but then we notice a man in a neighboring car is staring directly at this first man.  Then, another man looks right at him, and then a woman does the same.  We are next given a wide-angle shot of a bus full of people with their arms dangling out the windows, facing right at this first driver, and everybody in the standstill traffic jam stares at him.  This is a terrifying image; these people are all frozen and look almost like wax figures.  They do nothing except stare.  The scene just gets more strange from here.  First, the man fiddles with his car windows and doors and starts to panic.  It seems as if he is stuck.  Yet, we then see him climbing out of the roof of his car, and then he begins sailing through the air, his coat blowing behind him in the wind like a cape.  He is flying.  The camera then tilts down to the ground; we are now on a beach, and a different man is holding a rope.  It looks as if he is flying a kite, but we soon realize that at the top of this rope is the flying man, who is then pulled down to the ground.  Right before he hits the ground, we cut to a shot of a man in bed with his arm outstretched.  It was all a dream.

Odd scenes such as this one occur throughout 8 1/2.  At first, just as in the opening scene, the line between reality and illusion is pretty clear.  The scene starts off normally, but it then becomes so fantastic that it must be an illusion.  Guido next imagines himself interacting with his parents, both of whom we learn are dead, and then he imagines a scene outdoors with a beautiful woman.  He also has multiple flashbacks to his childhood.  These scenes are all relatively easy to follow; it might not be understood at the very beginning that they aren't really happening, but the audience can catch on relatively quickly.

Yet, as the film progresses, this line between reality and illusion begins to blur more and more until we get to the final scene, in which truth and fiction are completely indistinguishable; it seems to be both real and an illusion at the same time.  The final scene features every character in the film, including Guido's deceased parents, his childhood self, and the beautiful woman we initially thought was only a part of Guido's imagination, as they perform together in a sort of circus act.  As Guido states at the end of the film, "Everything is true."  We can no longer figure out what is imaginary.  The world has become Tlön.

The dialogue in this film presents some confusing and incredible ideas about the nature of truth and falsity in relation to film.  The words "true," "real," "honest," "lie," "clear," and "understand" come up countless times in the dialogue.  The film asserts itself as a piece of metacinema very early on, when the film critic gives Guido feedback on his science fiction film idea, proposing "One wonders what the authors are trying to say.  Are they trying to make us think?  Do they want to scare us?" which are exactly the thoughts we, the audience, are having at that moment in time about 8 1/2.  Moments like this occur throughout the film, as the characters express exactly what we're thinking, thus blurring the line between the world of the film we're watching and our own world.

A key moment in the film occurs when Guido's film and his personal life are shown to be irrevocably connected.  As he attempts to find an actress to play the role of his wife, Luisa, in his science fiction film, the real Luisa storms out of the theater.  Guido follows her, imploring "Did something you saw offend you?  It's just a movie" to which Luisa replies, "Another fiction, another lie.  You put all of us in it, the way it suits you."  These lines are very loaded.  Guido tries to comfort Luisa by assuring her it's just a movie, but it is clearly not just a movie; the movie is their relationship.  Guido puts everybody in his life into the movie; he has cast the people of his world in this film.  Therefore, he functions as a director of the film, but he also functions as a director of his real life.

This film, like metafiction, raises many self-implicating questions.  Throughout the film, we are trying to understand what is going on.  We are making snap judgments about each scene: is this scene real?  Is this another illusion?  Is this real or fake?  But, as reality and illusion become more and more inextricable, we come to realize that these questions are useless.  As with Tlön, the real world and the imaginary world come to a merging point.  Like Guido at the end of the film, we have a realization: "I'm no longer afraid of telling the truth about what I don't know, what I'm looking for, what I haven't found."  We finally have to accept ambiguity, something Guido is forced to avoid by those around him who constantly ask him for clarity.

Fellini provides us mainly with questions rather than answers in 8 1/2, but one thing he does assert is the profound importance and power of the unknown.  Why is it so hard for us to come to terms with ambiguity? Why is it so hard to admit and accept that we don't know?  Why do we care so much about coming to a conclusion about what is real and what isn't when Fellini beautifully shows that illusions can actually be just as real as reality?  Acclaimed author Tim O'Brien writes in his novel The Things They Carried, "I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."  Films are all about story-truth.  Though they are directed and calculated and technically illusions, 8 1/2 proves that the world of cinema, perhaps even more so than the real world, can, in fact, provide us with truth.

Writer's Block in Movies, and Barton Fink as a Meta-Film (Jaeyoung)

 The author Charles Bukowski once wrote, “Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.” Therefore, I will write this blog about screenwriters experiencing writer’s block.

 There are actually many movies that feature this nightmare, including Stranger than Fiction, Ruby Sparks, Secret Window, Limitless, The Shining, Barton Fink, and Adaptation.

 In Limitless and Ruby Sparks, writer’s block is featured early in the plot. Both protagonists of these movies, Eddie Morra and Calvin Weir-Fields, stare at blank pages and become easily distracted, until drugs and romance cure them of their disease.

 Meanwhile, Steven King doesn’t let his characters move on from this debilitating syndrome; the Secret Window and The Shining were both adapted from his novels, and they both feature a struggling writer who slips into a murderous rampage. Perhaps murder is the answer to every writer’s frustration?

 These films portray the frustration of writer’s block creatively and artistically (the tantalizing flashing cursor in Limitless, the anxious blank page atop Calvin’s typewriter in Ruby Sparks, the repeated "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" in The Shining). However, the two films that fully explore the malaise of their respective screenwriters are Barton Fink and Adaptation, and I will view these works as meta-films.

 In the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink, the eponymous screenplay novice struggles to write a B-movie about boxer Wallace Beery. Unlike Limitless, Ruby's Spark, and The Shining, there is considerable emphasis on Barton Fink's environment; Barton's dilapidated hotel room, not him, seems to receive the most focus in the Writer's Block scenes. The slimy, peeling walls, the mysterious beach portrait, the persistent buzzing of mosquitos: it's almost as though the room is preventing him from writing.

 What makes Barton Fink so brilliant is how it meshes fantastical elements to explore Barton's frustration and confusion. It almost seems like the Coen Brothers knew poor Barton's situation intimately well...

 ...and they did! They wrote the Barton Fink when they themselves experienced writer's block with Miller's Crossing screenplay. In fact, there are so many connections between Barton and the Coen Brothers that it is difficult not to view Barton as a projection of the brothers' frustrated selves. Here are a few similarities:

• They wear glasses
• They are Jewish
• They all call New York their home
• They are highly educated
• They struggle with their writing material

 The first three similarities are fairly straightforward, but the fourth and fifth comparisons could use elaboration. Joel Coen went to NYU and Ethan Coen went to Princeton, where he wrote a 41-page essay titled, “Two Views on Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy.” If that title doesn’t scream “educated elite,” I don’t know what would. This characteristic is also found in Barton, when he talks to Charlie, the "common man."

                               CHARLIE

               And I could tell you some stories –

                               BARTON

               Sure you could!  And yet many writers

               do everything in their power to

               insulate themselves from the common

               man – from where they live, from

               where they trade, from where they

               fight and love and converse and –

               and – and... so naturally their work

               suffers, and regresses into empty

               formalism and – well, I'm spouting

               off again, but to put it in your

               language, the theater becomes as

               phony as a three dollar bill.

 

 I'm not sure if the Coen Brothers are pretentious; if they are, I would definitely draw another parallel there.

 I've written that they both struggle with their writing material, but the material they work with are very different; Coen Brothers had been having a difficult time with the highly convoluted plot of Miller’s Crossing, while Barton Fink was tasked to write a bio flick about a boxer. In addition, Barton and the Coen Brothers have different degrees of freedom. The Coen Brothers have almost complete control over their movies (they direct, produce, write, and edit all their major films; they later created their own production company, the Mike Ross Company), but Barton’s screenwriting was heavily scrutinized by Libnick, his boss (must have a lot of action, be fruity, but not too fruity, have the Barton Fink quality, etc.). This is why the brothers have stated that Barton's struggles were not meant to reflect their own experiences with the industry. It is rather their frustration as writers that they channel unto Barton.

 To summarize, the Coen Brothers created a less likable version of themselves and dragged him through hell.

 Charlie Kaufman, on the other hand, does the opposite in Adaptation; he splits himself into the sad, frustrated but sophisticated Charlie Kaufman and the happier, simpler fictional twin brother, Donald Kaufman. In the movie (and in real life, apparently) Charlie struggles to write a film adaptation about the Orchid Thief, partly because it lacks a "filmable" plot, and mostly because he is extremely worried about not doing the book justice. On the contrary, Donald writes cliched psychological thrillers. With Donald's help, the movie about a mopey writer finally develops a faster-paced (and pulpy) plot, as they discover the author of Orchid Thief's secret and fight to survive her murderous rampage.

 What's interesting to note is that Kaufman treats both his characters with sympathy; how Charlie feels, thinks, acts is all laid out for the audience to observe, and Donald's unsophisticated (suggests that Flowers for Algernon is about flowers) and enthusiastic view of life is lovable. As works of meta-cinema, Barton Fink and Adaptation are the antithesis to each other; while the Coen Brothers are the smart-aleck bullies that make their character's life hard, Charlie Kaufman is the parent who asks, "Tell me what what's wrong."

Short, Sad, and to the Point (Madison)

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

To Manifest the Vision (Nicola)

In honor of my last post, I’m going to go a slightly different direction than usual. Instead of examine a specific film, I’m going to go behind the scenes a little bit and discuss my personal experience with the medium.

You see, in addition to other classes, my course load this semester included not one, but two different film production courses, as well as a feature-length screenwriting class. I’ve spent the past few months lugging cameras, tripods, and light kits back and forth between the Digital Media Center and my apartment, sending emails to various TA’s and potential volunteers, and madly typing out words that I could only pray formed a coherent string of thought (or, at the very least, were eligible for some sort of nouveau interpretation). Between contorting myself into awkward positions to get just the right shot, audibly swearing at Premiere Pro, and bribing my four-year-old actress with hot chocolate (and extra whipped cream, of course), there were some fairly undignified moments. For that matter, there may or may not have been an excess of character casualties in my screenplay when I discovered, in the wee hours of the morning, exactly how much time remained before the 10am deadline.

But for all the emailing and flailing, stressing and obsessing, crying and sighing, I’m glad for the experience. Granted, with the power of retrospect, there are certain things I would have done a bit differently, but hindsight is 20/20, right?

The fact of the matter is, up until this semester, the visual medium was something from which I was removed. Yes, I’d taken film analysis courses and written short scripts, but I was still very much within the realm of words. When it came to the hands-on stuff – the actual making of the vision into reality – I remained on the periphery. And I was comfortable there. In fact, growing up in a household filled with incredibly gifted artists, I’d actively avoided the visual route in order to reduce stressful familial competition. I searched for my own realm of expertise – something I could excel at in my own right without being compared to my family members – which is how I came to love writing.

Writing is a powerful medium – it allows authors to insert characters, places, and worlds into other people’s minds without ever having to lift their fingers higher than a few centimeters off the keyboard. For us writers, the ordeal of creation takes place entirely inside our own heads (which isn’t to say it’s not a loud and bloody battle in there; they don’t say ‘kill your darlings’ for nothing), which means we have a certain amount of liberty when it comes to the realities of our world. If we require a dog to perform some miraculous feat of daring, or perhaps desire a slightly-too-convenient beam of moonlight to burst forth from behind the clouds, it's a quick matter of a tickety-tack-tack on our laptop. But writing something into existence and actually finding a way to bring it to life are two entirely different things. Depending on the film’s budget, it might even prove impossible. In my experience writing scripts, I’ve come to the conclusion that dealing with the strict parameters of reality requires writers to truly question their own work. The writer’s world is stripped of its rosy hue and she is confronted with a starker universe – a universe where plot holes and flaws in character logic are unable to hide behind passages of beautiful prose. Coming from a person who is chronically loquacious, I’d say such a limiting experience is a very important experience to have.

I was, I admit, a little overambitious with the amount of film courses I took on this semester, but due to the immersive nature of the experience, I got a chance to sample a broad variety of roles involved in producing a film. I learned so much – so much more than I ever thought I would – and I produced things that I never thought I was capable of. I’d never so much as picked up a T5i before this semester (let alone sat down with editing equipment), and previously, when people started talking about apertures and shutter speed, I would stop whatever I was doing and back away slowly. Yes, they’re student films, and yes, they’re short, and yes, there are a lot of aspects that could use improvement – but they’re mine. I’m coming away from this experience with a heightened knowledge of film and a definitive desire to grab the camera and shoot some more footage.

(Stills from NERVOSA)

 (Stills from Stolen Petals)

Well… maybe after a good long nap.

Before I sign off for good, I’ve assembled a short list of the things I’ve taken away from this experience that you might not find in a textbook.

1. When it comes to finding volunteers, diplomacy is key, but so are complimentary pastries, cookies, and coffee.
2. If you’re filming and you see something that looks cool – shoot it. Even if you don’t use it in your current project, you might glean some inspiration from it or find a place for it in a different piece further down the road. And if you don’t? Well, then you have some cool footage in your library.
3. B-roll footage will save your neck.
4. However long you think it will take to shoot something, multiply it by two.
5. Give yourself parameters. I often find that I’m more creative when my freedom is restricted because it forces me to use my ingenuity.
6. Try to divide your filming days so that you have an opportunity to start editing the first round of footage before going back and filming the next round. This will give you a good idea about whether or not there’s anything you should change or reshoot (note: there always is).
7. When your professor writes “FILM IS CHAOS” on the chalkboard in giant letters, he knows what he is talking about. Things will go wrong. This is okay.
8. Your ego is your enemy. Don’t be scared of criticism – learn from it.
9. Whether or not you're an anxious person, use whatever anxiety you have to your advantage. When you ask someone for feedback on your piece, remain in the room as they watch it. You’ll find that you, yourself, are more aware of certain issues depending on who the audience member is and what your subconscious thinks they will be most attentive to.

And last but not least:

10. Filmmaking is a collaborative experience. The amount of work that goes into producing a film – even a short one – is crazy. To make a film is to make something bigger than yourself – enjoy the experience and make some new friends while you’re at it!

Well, that’s about it for me! Thanks for a great semester!

Shultz Unchained: The Importance of Character Arc (Nicola)

SPOILER ALERT: this will reveal key components of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. If you have yet to see the movie, I highly suggest you stop reading.

I mean it. Stop.

…I bet when you were a kid you flipped to the back of all your picture books too – you ought to be ashamed of yourself. 

This is the face of shame.

I’m a big Quentin Tarantino fan. Even as I write this, I can practically hear my grandmother’s disapproving tsk from all the way across the Atlantic Ocean – but hey, that’s a Tarantino film for you. Tarantino will go where other directors fear to tread, and when he ‘goes there’ he goes there – and he won’t pull his punches either. I’ve always had this feeling that many of Tarantino’s most iconic scenes originated with the sentence, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…?” and then he just goes does it like his big bad self. 

I was re-watching Django Unchained the other day, and in classic Tarantino style, it breaks all the rules. Historical accuracy? Forget it. Political Correctness? Don’t make me laugh. Breathtaking cinematography and total bad-assery? You know it! But while I admire Tarantino’s audacity as a director, he sometimes takes things a bit too far for my taste. In this case, I’m referring to the last twenty minutes or so of Django Unchained.

It’s not the presence of the violence I had an issue with (it is a Tarantino film, after all), but the inanity of it. The whole sequence has no more carnage than the infamous “Crazy 88” fight scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1 yet it seems uninspired in comparison – trite, even. After Shultz (Christopher Waltz) dies and Django (Jamie Foxx) is captured, the movie seems to unravel. But why? Well, that’s because the story line we were actually following has already ended. Yup. You heard me right. You can name the movie after Django, you can give Jamie Foxx all the coolest outfits and the most screen time, and heck – you can even give Christopher Waltz an academy award for Best Supporting Actor, but in the end, it's the endearing dentist-gone-bounty-hunter that claims the role of main character. Don’t believe me? All you have to do is take a look at the traditional aspects of character arc.

The Three (Or Four) Act Structure isn’t cinematic law, but it does compose a large percentage of the storylines we know and love. Whatever you call it – ‘The Hero’s Journey’, ‘The Basic Film Paradigm’, etc. – the essentials are the same: the main character’s ordinary world is established, an inciting incident calls that character to adventure, conflict is encountered, the stakes are raised, and once a crisis decision is made, the climax is reached and some form of resolution occurs. There’s some variation here and there, but in general, this is the natural progression of storytelling.

Now, try to apply this paradigm to Django Unchained operating under the assumption that Django is the main character. Doesn’t really work, does it? As a character, Django remains completely static. Very early on, the film establishes Django’s two goals to be ‘rescue and revenge.’ He is determined to free his wife, Broomhilda, and as far as Django is concerned, nothing save for death is going to get in his way. Django experiences no crisis decision because within the parameters of his established character, Broomhilda is paramount – no sacrifice is too great if it means getting closer to the objective.

Try the same exercise again, but this time with the assumption that King Shultz is the main character. The film establishes his ordinary world as a bounty hunter, and he simply conducts business as unusual until he hears about Django’s search for Broomhilda. With this, he is called to action for, as Shultz puts it, "When a German meets a real-life Siegfried, it's kind of a big deal." Throughout the course of the film, he struggles with moral conundrums as he pursues what he believes to be the right thing. Shultz’s story climaxes with his crisis decision (which, I might add, was a brilliant performance on both the part of Christopher Waltz and Leonardo DeCaprio) to forfeit his life and put an end to the atrocities of Candyland. Once Shultz dies, the central message of the film has been successfully conveyed and all that remains is some gratuitous violence. The subsequent blood bath seemed to prolong the movie unnecessarily.

It would seem that Waltz’s character is so wonderfully developed and well crafted that Django becomes one dimensional in comparison. The thing is, Tarantino is too good of a director and too good of a writer to accidentally switch the protagonists of his main plot and subplot. I’m pretty sure Tarantino knew exactly what he was doing with Django Unchained. He wanted to create a straight-up revenge film, but knew such a premise wouldn’t be rich enough to engage his audience, so he incorporated the character of Shultz to give the story dimension. Consequently, the movie’s conclusion is not so much the resolution of a storyline as it is twenty minutes of pure Tarantino indulgence

But, hey, that’s a Tarantino film for you.

 

What Film Can Do: Storytelling in 'The Fall' (Nicola)

I’m a double major in writing and film. This means that for the most part, you can find me submerged in far too many writing-intensive courses, drowning in a sea of words, half-formed ideas, and coffee – but I digress. My point is, between reading, writing, and watching, stories consume the vast majority of my time. Regardless of the medium, if there’s a story to be had, I’m all over it.

Storytelling is an art form. It’s a transitive experience that takes its recipients from one state of being to another. For me, the best narratives are those that speak on a personal level – stories into which I can insert myself and just escape for a while. Novels, films, personal anecdotes, illustrations, music, and even food – all of these are means of expressing emotion and thus, in my mind, fit the criteria for storytelling. Depending on the intended message, a project might be better suited to one particular medium or another, but film holds a special place in my heart. Film is special. There’s something about it that is so entirely immersive, bringing things to life in a way a single person could never manage on their own. That’s why I want to talk to you about a movie that only came to my attention recently; a movie that wholeheartedly encompasses the essence of film and what it can contribute to a story.

Tarsem Singh’s 2008 film, The Fall – you may or may not have heard of it . I find it extraordinarily vexing that, somehow, this film has slipped under the radar and has not received nearly enough recognition for what it attempts to conquer – itself. The Fall is a film about what it means to be a film (insert dramatic ‘BRWAAAM’ from the Inception soundtrack). Whereas most films want you to forget that you’re watching something on a screen, The Fall seems to actively work against this tradition, wildly pointing to cinematic qualities and how they interact with real life. 

The Fall centers around the relationship between stuntman Roy Walker and a 5-year-old Romanian girl named Alexandria. Both have been hospitalized for fall-related injuries – Alexandria due to an orange grove tumble and Roy for a bridge stunt gone wrong. Roy constructs an epic tale for his hospital companion, hoping to manipulate her into bringing him enough morphine pills to commit suicide. The film weaves between fantasy and reality as Roy’s desperation and depression grow. 

The Fall has received mixed reviews, some praising it for its mesmerizing beauty and others calling it a ridiculously expensive “vanity project” and “visual orgy” that opts for style over substance. But this outlook misses the point of the movie entirely. It takes issue with the absurdity of the fantasy instead of trying to see what Singh is saying through then absurdity. The Fall makes no effort to curb its fictional aspects and purposely blows them out of proportion. How else would you describe a situation in which a masked bandit, a muscular ex-slave, an Italian explosive expert, an Indian, and Charles Darwin must escape from a desert island on the back of an elephant? (no, I’m not joking - this is actually how their story begins). The ludicrous flaunting of make-believe is an homage to the tradition of suspending disbelief. 

As a medium, film lends itself nicely to such a practice. Film structure – at least within the context of continuity editing – manipulates reality to create a cohesive whole. In filming a single scene, a task can span the course of days, weeks, or months, but film makes it look seamless. With editing, two individuals standing fifty feet away from one another can overcome the distance dividing them with a single step. Done properly, the audience won’t even notice the incongruities because we will be so absorbed in the narrative. The Fall purposely promotes the opposite effect, pulling us out of the narrative with wild leaps of imagination in time and space to challenge the our concept of reality.

Because Singh isn’t necessarily concerned with continuity or believability, he unchains himself visually. The Fall was shot over the course of 4 years in 28 countries (Yup. Count ‘em. 28) and used no computer generated effects. This is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen, and I think that this beauty stems from the time Singh takes to capture the quintessential characteristics of each and every location – the soul, if you will. Because there is no CGI, the visuals in The Fall have an undeniable tangibility to them. Rather than spend time on special effects, Singh works to elevate those aspects that make film so unique – the elements of movement, sound, light, and color. Combined, these elements have the ability to make a film a truly immersive experience. If anyone is searching for inspiration in the realm of mise en scéne and cinematography, look no further.

   

Immersion in a film is one thing, but beyond that is the idea of ‘insertion of self.’ I think everyone has that one movie or that one book that speaks to them so profoundly its almost as if it was written for him or her. We find a part of ourselves in these films and consequently insert ourselves into the story itself. The Fall encompasses that exact feeling in the way it gradually incorporates people and items from reality into the fantasy that Roy creates. Though Roy is the one telling the story, all the visual output the audience receives is from little Alexandria. We know this because the descriptions given by Roy and the picture on the screen often differ. For example, Roy speaks of Indian and his squaw but the imagery we see is of a man from India because Alexandira has no concept of a Native American. The story and characters are fluid, fitting Alexandria’s pre-existing schemas and perceptions of the world. The duality between fiction and reality is what makes film so special, and is in part what makes The Fall so special.

Love it or hate it, the artistry of The Fall is undeniable. So whether or not the idea of a movie within a movie intrigues you, the piece is utterly gorgeous and is worth watching if only for the visual experience. I personally love the film, but that’s the thing about stories – they’re subjective. I urge you to watch it and form an opinion of your own.

 

On Post-Production: We'll Tell a New Story (Andrea)

I’m writing this at the very end of the editing process, which has been, in one word: slow.

I am one of those directors who prefers to shoot the film and then not look at it at least for a month or so. Once we wrapped in early February, we didn’t start the edit until later in the month. During that time, our assistant editor Josh synched the sound and audio for us, and put together a rough assembly of a couple of the scenes. We got it back from him in late February, and then began to slowly assemble the film.

This was largely a process that involved our editor, Will, staring at everything and changing things for hours on end, while I looked over his shoulder and offered some advice or voiced my preference for a take or performance, occasionally. We also took a trip down to our sound designer’s recording studio with Zach and recorded his voice-overs. We were often re-writing the script with him in the studio, determining what was easy enough or realistic for him to say.

A sneak-peek: Scene 4.

When we cut the film from start to finish, according to the script, it was thirteen minutes long. And it was a slow thirteen minutes, but we still felt pretty good about it. However, when we showed it to our professor John Mann, he criticized it pretty heavily. It was not a good film. It was long, with too many characters, plots, and confusing scenes. The script, as we had feared, was not working on-screen. However, as he assured us, it was “fixable,” and we could have something good if we worked hard on it.

One scene left relatively untouched. Sans color correction.

Cut to Will and me spending hours and hours in the DMC, editing and desperately trying to save our film. We were pessimistic that it would turn out to be anything worth showing. Our first decision was to create a new cut with the flashbacks in the film reduced to the absolute minimum. At eleven minutes, it still dragged, and we feared that it was no better than before. After showing the film to some friends, we decided it was best to get it down even further.

A beautiful, lost tracking shot.

One afternoon, we reduced the monologues in the chapel scene to silence. Voice-overs, all of the flashbacks (save the fish store), beloved tracking shots, entire character arcs: cut. At around seven and a half minutes, it was the strongest cut that we had. We also made a radical decision: the flashback to the fish store was no longer a flashback, but started the entire film. It was a good choice; the scene was beautiful to open with, and it followed chronologically in Ray’s timeline.

The problem? A majority of our actors and characters ended up on the cutting room floor. Uncle Nick, Uncle Diego, Mariana, Aunt Lis, and Uncle Phil were no longer characters––just featured extras with one line each, at the most. I still haven’t resolved how to tell them that they won’t be the characters they once were, and we feel incredibly guilty about it. However, I long ago resolved that for the sake of the art, we would have to do what was best for the film.

Uncle Nick's monologue: cut.

And here we are, today, April 17: our deadline for picture-locking the film. We’ve gotten it down to around five minutes and thirty seconds, with the help of our professors John Mann, Matt Porterfield, Roberto Busó-García, and many more students and friends. We have cut and recut the film so many times, and the only scene mainly left untouched is the last one, Scene 18. I’ll watch it one more time to make sure it works, but then it’s done; we can’t change anything anymore. And it’s up to everyone else to judge what it is like.

It is not the same film that it was one month ago. It is far from the film that it was when we shot it, unrecognizable from the script that we submitted to Studio North now a year ago. But it has gone from something that scared me to something that I can be proud of, after lots of hours and hard work (and Will’s editing talent, of course).

Next up: we send it to the sound designer, composer and colorist, with less than a month until Studio North’s premiere.

It’s okay to fix it in post,
Andrea

The Wonderful Worlds of Wes Anderson (Madison)

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

 

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

 

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

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

***

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

1. The Royal Tenenbaums

2. Moonrise Kingdom

3. The Grand Budapest Hotel

4. Fantastic Mr. Fox

5. The Darjeeling Limited

6. Rushmore

7. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

***

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

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

 

On the Script: How "Untitled Goldfish Funeral Script" Became "Bernard Died" (Andrea)

I’ve heard it again and again: when you make a film, you have to start with a good script, or else it doesn’t matter how great your director or producer or director of photography or editor is. The film just won’t work.

I know that I want to be involved in filmmaking in some way, but I found out early on at Hopkins that screenwriting wasn’t my strong suit. So when the grants for the new student-run production company Studio North were announced last April, I teamed up with senior Tony Lee––who could write, who was a good friend, and whose work I admired. I told him I would direct a script if he wrote it, and that’s how Bernard Died began.

Tony sent me four short stories he had written, and I picked the one I liked best. It was a 10-page prose piece on a nine-year-old boy named Ray Goby who didn’t want to flush his dead goldfish down the toilet on the day of his grandmother’s funeral. It had multiple flashbacks, dozens of main characters (all family members), and had a unique child’s perspective. Plot aside, the story seemed like a logistical nightmare to produce, but I couldn’t stop visualizing the narrative of a young boy reasoning with death alongside his quirky modern family.

When we started to work on the lovingly titled Untitled Goldfish Funeral Script, I learned that writing an adaptation of a short story is tough. For one, something inherent to prose is the voice, which is difficult to translate visually. We chose to keep Ray’s point-of-view by writing voice-overs, which also solved the problem of the complicated characters and situations. Another difference is the scope. Prose has no limit; scripts, on the other hand, do. Scripts are meant to be produced, to turn into material work. They can’t have that same unrestrained quality of prose––or they can, but with a slim chance of being produced without a lot of money.

We felt so accomplished when we finally finished writing that I thought that once we sent our script to Studio North, pitched it, and got the grant, our screenwriting was over. Far from it. Over the course of the next nine months, we revised countless drafts, even on-set and in post-production. One night in November, Tony, Will (our producer/1st AD), Corey (our DP) and I stayed up late workshopping our script in a true “writer’s room” fashion. We all stood up and screamed at each other at one point, wondering why no one agreed with our ideas. The script went from seventeen pages to ten; from eleven main characters to nine; from dozens of scenes down to just eighteen. It was tough to receive criticism, but that criticism helped turn it into what it is today.

Most of our revisions when we neared production were focused on the logistical aspects of producing the script. When working on a low budget student film, there isn’t money to buy a casket or funeral flowers; no way to pay actors; impossible to fake a school carnival. In a way, the production itself influenced the script, and the limits became its aesthetic. Since we already knew we couldn’t shoot a summer outdoor wedding scene in the middle of January, it was best to change the location and motivation of the scene sooner rather than later. We found ourselves inspired by the props found in thrift stores, the wardrobe that our actors brought to set, the small locations owned by Maryland families, and the personalities and touches that our actors gave their characters.

In the end, what makes all of the revisions and late nights and stress worth it is when this line:

...becomes this opening frame from the film:

Over the next couple of months, I hope to share all of the ups and downs of the little-short-film-that-could, Bernard Died (or, as we still call it, the Untitled Goldfish Funeral Script).

Until next time,
Andrea

Charlie Kaufman and the Artist’s Mind (Josh)

    One of the wonders of cinema is the potential to reach inside the human psyche and explore the nature of the mind itself.  A master of exploring the complexity of the human mind is Charlie Kaufman, an acclaimed screenwriter and director, who has written such films as Spike Jonzes', Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, as well as Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Then in 2008 Charlie Kaufman wrote and directed his ambitious masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York.   Kaufman’s films, like Adaptation and Synecdoche New York, like to explore the internal mechanisms of his protagonist’s thoughts and fears.  His movies use the tools of cinema to replicate the complexity of his character’s ambitions, feelings, and desires.

    Adaptation is a film whose very concept gives the viewer a glimpse into its own creation.   Charlie Kaufman even goes so far as to give his fictional brother Donald, a character in the movie who becomes a writer, screenwriting credit in the film.  The protagonist of Adaptation is Charlie Kaufman who is attempting to adapt the memoir The Orchid Thief into a motion picture.  Throughout the film, Spike Jonze and Kaufman employ techniques to make the viewer aware of the internal struggle of the writer’s mind.  Kaufman speaks in voiceover to himself repeatedly throughout the film, beginning the story questioning whether he is even capable of any original thought whatsoever. The screenplay describes the story structure of the script as it continues.  The visual style alternates between the dreary life inside Kaufman’s apartment and the lush, saturated adventure film that the protagonist ultimately writes.  Kaufman writes in an identical twin character named Donald, the visual representation of the writer’s inner turmoil about the attempt to create unique ideas within a strict set of traditional standards.  Donald’s character represents the desire of any artist to be original and interesting, while at the same time, constantly fighting against the constrictions of what is expected of them by mass tastes.  Donald’s desire is to write a film that is almost completely formula and written in mainstream Hollywood style.  Kaufman illustrates this tension later in the film during a scene set at a screenplay conference taught by Robert McKee, the famous teacher responsible for many storytelling conventions.  Mckee berates Kaufman for having the audacity to believe that nothing happens in the world and a story should reflect that fact.  Unfortunately, the quote is a bit too obscene to print on the blog, but to sum up McKee’s response, he counters by describing the turmoils of people all over the world that happen constantly.  He accuses Kaufman of making nothing worthy of the audience’s time if he believes that nothing really happens in life.  Adaptation describes the thought processes of a creator trying to find the proper balance between his desire for originality and the trappings of appealing to an audience.

    Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche New York functions as a visual representation of a character that desperately wants to find and create the truth about his own humanity,  but is unable to get out of his own head and realize the changes in the world around him. Kaufman begins the film with what appears at first glance like a single ordinary morning, but in the span of minutes, he moves the chronology across several months.  When the protagonist, Caden Cotard lifts up a newspaper, the date reads September.  A moment later, the television references a date in October, and the newspaper references a date in December.  Caden is experiencing life disappear right before his eyes and he, like a viewer not paying close attention to the details, does not notice.  He is a playwright, making art that takes years of work, but that does not seem to offer him fulfillment and in no way impresses his wife.  Caden sees various doctors for an illness that consistently rots his body from the inside.  Kaufman includes new symptoms continually throughout the many years of the chronology of the film.  They often appear ghastly at first, but then they become a normal part of the mise-en-scene.  Caden’s wife leaves him to go on vacation in Berlin, which quickly becomes permanent.  He, of course, does not notice this fact, believing it has been only a few weeks, at most.  After Caden receives a Genius Grant, giving him practically unlimited money to accomplish any goal he so desires, he finally feels ready to construct his masterpiece, constructing a replication of the reality of his world in a massive warehouse in New York.  Kaufman constructs a visual representation of a New York that constantly expands, growing increasingly elaborate and bizarre.  The play has so many layers of reality that Caden gets lost in the world.  Meanwhile, the world outside is becoming a dystopian nightmare, but no one working on the play seems to notice or care.  Kaufman includes these images only in the background of frames, never focusing on any of the turmoil in the world outside of the creation of the play.  The characters are stuck because of the the prisons of their own mind, desperately trying to create something worth remembering, but never getting there.  Human beings, according to Synecdoche New York, try desperately to make their existence matter, but most of them are end up getting trapped in their own heads and fail, always grasping, but never reaching.

    One important note about both these films by Charlie Kaufman, is that the worlds he creates are not miserable.  While he constructs universes that represent our fears and insecurities, he does so in his own darkly comic manner.  His work identifies that life is absurd, and there is always some level of black humor in that fact.  For instance, Synecdoche New York, features a character that spends the majority of her life living inside a house that is constantly on fire.  The fire is a symbol for the lack of control human beings have when approaching death.  Still, the motif is played for the absurdity.  It is meaningful but profoundly funny. Kaufman’s characters represent the inner desires that are nearly universal, but do in a way that is consistently complex, fascinating, unique, and humorous.

The Power of Observation in Rashomon (Elizabeth)

            Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 Rashomon is famous for its revolutionary storytelling technique. Four different people, mostly without any names or backstories, recount a murder four times. Each one’s account differs significantly, from the identity of the killer to the personality and sympathy of each participant. In the end, it is not clear exactly what is true—even the seemingly accurate and impartial account of the woodcutter is hiding his thievery. The film’s format seems to examine the power of the observer and the reliability of what can be seen.

            The first testimonies are all told in a court setting, as the law attempts to find who is guilty of the murder. However, the judge or jury are never seen or heard, even when they ask a question to one of the onscreen characters. Instead, the testifiers speak directly to the audience, with the camera in the position of a court official. It is the viewer of the film who is given the role of authority and power, who is spoken to directly and asked to make a judgment. However, even those scenes where the audience is king are colored by the interpretations of characters. In the court scenes, the other characters can be seen in the background observing from behind, and the audience only gets to experience those scenes from the priest and the woodcutter recounting them to the commoner. As such, the viewer is constantly given third hand accounts of the murder, from known liars, but they are presented just the same as the true events taking place at the temple. The viewer as observer is given the tools to look at each account and make their own conclusions and point out contradictions, as the characters themselves do. However, they are not true observers given a window to the truth, just forced to look through people’s lies.

            The power of observation and sight are present in the accounts themselves. In his own account, the bandit Tajômaru notes that he would not have hurt the samurai or his wife had he not been able to spy her hidden face when the wind blew her veil, but the first glance was enough to fill him with resolve. In the wife’s story, she notes that it was the unforgiving gaze of her husband that made her kill him—she would have accepted violence or death, but having him merely look at her and see her shame was enough to drive her to kill. The woodcutter spied it all from afar, and was the only one to know the whole truth. He was able to use his position of observer to profit, by stealing and selling the wife’s valuable dagger. He would have gotten away freely had he not decided to create his own observer, the commoner, who noticed the contradiction in the tale and called him out on it.

            The viewer is not given a chance to see the murder for themselves—the closest account they get is a first-hand one from the woodcutter, but they go as far as the priest recounting the medium recounting the samurai’s story. Instead, they must make do with the fallible stories of the characters, who all have means and motives to lie. In the same way that we view only what a director shows us, we only get to listen to what the true witnesses choose to tell. The viewer has the power to interpret the stories and find contradictions, but unlike the commoner cannot call the character out on their lies. We cannot see the murder directly, but may observe the film itself and use that for our own judgments. Even then, as we are not true witnesses we cannot change a thing or ever be sure.

It's Good to Be Bad (Ian)

Act I: Stay with me on this one:

Below I've included the link to one of my old curated Letterboxd list titled "10 Absolutely Despicable Characters (That I Still Sort of Love)".  I recommend you start by checking out that first (be sure to hit the "read notes" button at the top of the post), because I think it's an appropriate warm-up to what I'm about to suggest.  Okay, go ahead, read it.  I'll wait.

http://ow.ly/pfRKO

(Note: What is Letterboxd?  An interesting, if underutilized, community for cinephiles--excellent if you're trying to get the hang of programming film series, posting film reviews, or simply want to record the films you've been watching)

All finished reading?  Good, let’s get started.

Here's my proposal, in a nutshell: our knights in shining armors are dead and gone.  Increasingly our so-called "heroes" are only referred to as such because an audience may simply associate the protagonist with the idea of "the hero."  In truth, more often than not independent (and, increasingly, mainstream) film are churning out films that overlap "protagonist" and "antagonist."

“Ian, what you're suggesting is nothing revolutionary,” you might say, “cinema has always utilized the anti-hero."  Good point, but I think American cinema has moved even beyond the anti-hero.  The archetypal anti-hero redeems their flaws by the story's end.  Moreover, we rarely used the anti-hero as protagonist, rather employed them more as a supporting character, a deuteragonist, if you will. (Take Blue Velvet’s Isabella Rossellini, or even Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Zuko.)  The supporting anti-hero exists to temp and test our hero, before the hero restores balance and, ultimately, the anti-hero as well.

What I'm talking about goes one step beyond the anti-hero: we are now facing films where protagonists are flawed characters without redemption.  Last year’s effort from Woody Allen, Blue Jasmine, offers a prime example, and in fact points back to possible origins of this "villain-as-protagonist" trend.  If you haven't seen Jasmine yet, get off your hindquarters and do so.  Blanchett currently holds the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the film, and for good reason.  Blachett is beyond superb as Jasmine, the alcoholic, delusional, nervous-wreck of a former socialite come to rely on her white-trash sister.  In a word, Jasmine is despicable: loveless towards her sister and her nephews, self-absorbed, superficial with her "friends", a compulsive-liar and an alcoholic.  And yet, Allen takes clear steps to make the audience sympathize with Jasmine (I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll try to be light on detail here: her husband screws her up BIG time).  Well, could it be that perhaps Allen wants us to sympathize with Jasmine so that we celebrate her imminent redemption?

Wrong.  Jasmine receives, nor earns, no such second chance.  Well then, you might ask, what was all of this for?  Why didn't the film focus on, say, Jasmine's well-meaning, hard-working sister?

And here we arrive at my point: we don’t focus on Jasmine’s sister Ginger because that nice, homely sister doesn't interest anyone anymore.  When we go to the movies, or read a book (Gone Girl is an awesome example; we’ll get to that more later), we want blood.  We want carnage.  We want ruin.  We want to follow a character that is so despicable we can triumph at their ultimate defeat and misery.  And yet, maybe there is an element of self-loathing in this ritual; after all, there were moments where we do sympathize with Jasmine.  And thus, her defeat is, in a lesser way, our defeat.  A way to keep our narcissism in check.  Yet, consider: perhaps, this trend isn’t as new as it seems: perhaps movies have always functioned this way.

Act II: “I told you I’d be back.”

Many critics are calling Jasmine a "spiritual successor" to Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, but I say that's being generous to Allen: Blue Jasmine is Streetcar, simply updated to match contemporary vernacular and setting.  What does the update imply?  Well, it means that Blanchett's Jasmine, while a brilliant characterization for sure, simply stands as an updated version of Vivien Leigh's Blanchett Dubois.  Both are despicable; both are sympathetic; and both face horrible ends.

So let's recap: we've moved beyond the hero (who is, with the exception of some superhero movies, very out of place in today's culture), beyond the anti-hero (who is, if anything, today's version of a lightweight-hero), and have adopted the villain as our eyes in a film.  Certainly I can't say this is universally applicable (when can you say that about anything?), but I can say that the trend is undeniably growing:  in the past two years we’ve had Blue Jasmine, Only God Forgives, Behind the Candelabra, Side Effects, Seven Psychopaths, The Master, and most recently David Fincher’s Gone Girl.

In fact, let’s talk about Gone Girl for a moment, as the release of the film inspired me to revisit the topic of villainy as heroism in film.  I think that audiences (not critics, surprisingly) have unfairly reduced the novel as “airport fiction” due to its genre and rampant popularity, but the plain truth is that the work employs eloquent prose, images both ugly and delicately beautiful, and two protagonists with fully fleshed-out psyches.  It’s a peach of a piece.

Because of my love for the novel, I’ll admit I had concerns about a movie adaptation, especially due to the novel’s focus on the internal warfare within each character’s mind, arguably the one human thing film isn’t good at portraying.  Luckily, I can say that the movie nailed it--everyone in my party thought so, and only one other member had read the book (that’s America for you, folks).

Back to my point: Gone Girl’s leading lady, Rosamund Pike’s Amy Dunne, is perhaps the best example of my theory.  Amazing Amy is one vicious sociopath whose actions you don’t just take pleasure in watching, but that you can sympathize with--her motivations grow from a relatable hurt, the feeling of being cheated (again, no spoilers).  Equally, her husband is a shmuck, and the only “redemption” the two receive is mutual life-long entrapment.  Ultimately however, their games of cat-and-mouse prove hypnotic, both to read and to watch, because the chases are sensationalized--the two endanger each other for attention, tell their sides of the story with selfishness and unreliability, and alienate themselves from nearly every other person in their lives, and the entire time they remain muscled and beautiful. Amy and Nick Dunne make rotted ethical cores look attractive because they’re superficially a picture of the ideal all-American couple.

Ultimately then, I assert that audiences increasingly have appetites for villainy on screen, and recent film culture has been happy to satiate us.  Yet on second glance, audiences may have acquired the taste for bad earlier than in the past two decades: indeed, perhaps we’ve loved to live out our guiltiest pleasures and experience our ultimate destructions vicariously on screen all the way back to 1951 with Streetcar, and wait, even farther back to 1941 with the morally bankrupt, and ultimately alienated Charles Foster Kane.

And how does that define us?  As well-dressed savages with delusions of grandeur, bits of sadism, and hints of masochism?

Well, at least we’re well-dressed.

One last note: my key examples of Jasmine and Amy, may lead one to conclude that I have an agenda against women, or that my points only apply to this women.  This is simply untrue; I simply picked them because I thought they’d be fun to dissect (and recall that I also briefly looked at Nick Dunne as subject, as well).  If you’d like an example of male villains that I believe fall into my criteria: No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, Streetcar’s Stanley Kowalski, and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle.)

Inside Llewyn Davis: Shattering Illusions, Dodging Expectations (Ingrid)

(2.5.12. Licensed under Creative Commons at Flickr.)   

    Two Thursdays ago, I was lucky enough to attend a pre-release screening at the Charles Theater of Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers’ latest project. It isn’t scheduled to hit theaters until December 5^th, but when it does, I say it's definitely worth viewing.

    In all honesty though, it’s an achingly unsatisfying film to sit through. At every turn, I found myself trying so hard to empathize with a character that I just simply could not stand. We catch protagonist, folk musician Llewyn Davis (played by Oscar Isaac), at a fragile stage in his life. Still dealing with the suicide of his partner and the consequent slump in his solo music career, Llewyn couch surfs his way around Greenwich Village, disrupting the lives of superficial old friends and reluctant past lovers, as he fumbles to make ends meet. Cynical and jaded, peevish and tired, Llewyn is a character on the cusp of giving up altogether. The signs of it are everywhere: in his lackluster eyes, his slumped shoulders, his deep sighs.

    As unfortunate his situation is though, I found Llewyn extremely unlikable and self-pitying to an unreasonable degree, wallowing in his misfortune and using it as justification for his lack of motivation. Rather than taking charge, Llewyn resigns to external forces. Sheer coincidence dictates the course of his life: when his friend’s cat slips through a crack in the front door, when he lands a much-needed gig with the help of his best friend, Jim, when the doctor accidentally lets it slip that Llewyn has a son in Akron (the result of a cancelled abortion). It seems a window of hope has opened up for Llewyn when he scores a chance to play for Bud Grossman, music big shot and owner of the famous concert venue, Gate of Horn. But even the way by which Llewyn travels to Gate of Horn is entirely subject to fate; he hitchhikes from New York City to Chicago.

    The film follows his venture to Chicago. It is the middle of winter but Llewyn is too strapped for money to buy a coat. Guitar in tow and thumb in air, he finally hails down a car. But the free ride comes with terribly unpleasant company, a drug-addled jazz enthusiast who spends every waking moment insulting Llewyn and his folk music. After an unbearably long and uncomfortable trek, Llewyn reaches the imposing double doors of Gate of Horn. The trip is set up as a perfect plot arc and this moment, the opportunity for him to turn his career around, is the climax. Conventionally, we expect this kind of success or failure situation to transpire emotionally. But when Llewyn plays for Grossman, it ends in the sinking words, “I don’t see a lot of money here.” Llewyn nods, he understands, says okay, end of scene. There is no uproar, no groveling, no last-ditch cry for reconsideration. Llewyn leaves the venue as quietly as he enters it. It leaves us confounded.

    As viewers, we yearn for progression, for resolution, for things we can predict. It’s only human nature. But the film consistently deflects our notion of a happy ending. After hitting a cat with a car, we expect Llewyn to stop and save it. Instead, he watches the injured cat limp into the shadow and then apathetically drives away. After seeing a road sign pointing to Akron, we expect Llewyn to make the turn, search for and eventually reunite with his son. Instead, he bypasses the city without a second thought. Furthermore, the structure of the film is inherently static. It ends in the same scene it begins with: Llewyn alone in an alleyway, having just been beaten up. This is what I mean when I say the film is unsatisfying. Llewyn spends the entire film drifting, making no headway; he shirks all forms of responsibility, leaving doors unopened, loose ends untied. In a way, the film is almost anti-escapist. It’s unmercifully honest. It’s slice of life.

    And the subtle cinematography honors this reality, capturing all the small details: dust particles in the air illuminated by the harsh morning sunlight, chalky embers drooping from a lit cigarette tip. The camera lingers on close-ups for just the right amount of time, catching the most minute of expressions: an extra blink, a fleeting eye-roll, a brief pursing of the lips, a shiver. Inside Llewyn Davis is as raw and authentic as it gets. 

The Collision of Coincidence and Fate (Mina)

        Romantic films generally depict relationships and love in an unrealistic way. The male and female protagonists coincidentally meet each other at the right place at the right time and then they fall in love as if it is their destiny. The couple overcome obstacles and declare their love, and the film ultimately ends with a typical “they lived happily ever after” scene. Isshin Inudo’s 2003 film Josee, The Tiger and The Fish and Marc Webb’s 2009 film (500) Days of Summer also combine themes of coincidence and fate; however they refuse to conform to the convention of romantic genre. They point out how people easily fool themselves to misunderstand coincidence as fate. Mainly through the male protagonist’s perspective, these two films display how romance can fail and how love is reevaluated after the end of a relationship.

        In the opening scenes of (500) Days of Summer an omniscient narrator warns us, “this is a story of boy meets girl. But you should know upfront, this is not a love story”. We are then introduced to the male protagonist, Tom, who looks miserable and devastated due to the breakup with his girlfriend. As a twist on stereotypical gender roles, Tom Hansen is the one who falls in love with Summer Finn at first sight. Tom confesses that he believes in soul mates, yet Summer tells him upfront, that she does not believe in such fantastical concepts. Tom is nonetheless convinced that she is his destiny, and this intense feeling propel him forward and makes him harder to understand why Summer, the girl of his dreams, broke up with him.

        Like most failed relationships, Tom holds onto only the good memories. He recalls, for example, the morning after he spent the night with Summer. The film effectively reflects his happiness through a musical scene. Tom joyfully emerges from his apartment building with the soundtrack “You Make My Dreams” playing in the background. Water jets from the fountain (mirrors his bursting emotions), strangers smile at Tom and shakes hand with him. Tom even dances with the whole crowd of people dressed in blue, a color usually associated with purity and sincerity. For Tom, who grew up believing that he’d never truly be happy until the day he meets the “one”, it seems like the whole universe is encouraging his relationship with Summer.

        Tom gradually learns that he can’t hold onto this fantasy. The complete realization comes when he shows up for a party that Summer is hosting. The plot unfolds in split-screen, contrasting the screen projecting Tom’s hopeful expectations with that of the heartbreaking reality. The gap between the two gradually widens, to the point where Tom hastily leaves the party. He becomes aware of the fact that he and Summer will not reunite. Afterwards, Tom becomes mature and rebuilds himself. Tom stops himself from indulging in self-pity, blaming Summer for failing to be his soul mate and meets another woman. This doesn't necessarily imply that he has given up on true love, he still believes in it. He now knows that any romance can end, no matter how much passionate it was. However, Tom doesn’t hesitate to start a new relationship.

        Josee, The Tiger and The Fish opens with a series of snapshots with a voice-over of the male protagonist Tsuneo. In his retrospective moods, he talks about a trip he went with a girl named Josee. The film then goes back to the time when the two first meet by chance and become close friends. Josee, has been crippled most of her life. She lives with her overprotective grandmother who looks after her but regards her as “damaged goods”. Josee seems to also believe that nothing, not even love, can be done to make her life better. The camera often shows her spending time in a closed closet in close-up shots. A small lamp throws a warm light on her face, emphasizing her content in retreating to her own little world. Yet, confined by the closet walls, and surrounded by stacks of books, she looks lonely at the same time. Tsuneo, a college student in his early twenties, is more like Tom from (500) Days of Summer in terms of inmaturity. Tsuneo is more interested in girls than in his studies. Although Tsuneo has feelings for another girl–Kanae–he met from school, he frequently visits Josee. Tsuneo doesn’t make the final step in starting a romantic relationship with her until Josee’s grandmother passes away. Tsuneo promises to stay with her forever. At least at that time, Tsuneo thinks it’s his responsibility, or fate, to “fix” Josee.

        Although Josee and Tsuneo grow closer, Tsuneo notices that Josee is starting to feel like a burden with the passing of time. He recollects, “There were many reasons why we broke up. But, actually, there was only one. I ran away.” Tsuneo, who has thoughtlessly believed that he can be with Josee forever, runs away and returns to his old girlfriend, Kanae. Despite the sadness, the breakup scene is shot flatly. We see Tsuneo in a long shot, brought to his knees, crying. Cars rapidly pass by him, as if the world doesn’t care about his feeling of loss. Tsuneo faces the harsh reality, his life without Josee and the possibility of never seeing her again. Only after he leaves Jossee behind, Tsuneo fully realizes that his feelings weren’t based on charity, but on true love. Tsuneo has changed; he is is able to differentiate love from lust or charity. He understands true love, and the responsibility that follows it.

      Most of our relationships in the real world do not end up in happy endings such as in Pretty Woman (1990) or Serendipity (2001). We rather find ourselves in (500) Days of Summer and Josee and Josee, The Tiger and The Fish, making the wrong choices or following our instincts and emotions that often results in something we didn't expect.

Defiance - An Adventure in Transmedia (Sophie)

Transmedia, specifically transmedia storytelling is the art of telling a single story or exploring a single world across different media. It is closely associated with the idea of a story world, a more abstract concept referring to a single narrative world that exists across different works of narrative art.

 

In the summer of 2011, Syfy announced an upcoming transmedia collaboration with gaming company Trion Worlds. The result is a two-part project that premiered this year in April with a long-form TV science-fiction political action drama and a corresponding multi-platform MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game).

 

    This is the background of the world they share. In the year 2046, arks carrying survivors of a dying alien solar system carrying an entire ecosystem arrive on Earth, causing war and a complete restructuring of the planet’s surface, society, and biosphere. The show takes place after this, in a town called Defiance, following the myriad political and social struggles resulting from the mix of alien and human cultures and agendas. To some degree, the show relies on tried-and-true plot tropes, such as Romeo and Juliet-style love stories, cultural and spiritual tensions, and classic science fiction elements like alien-on-alien battles, spacecrafts, blue glowy things, and futuristic energy weapons which account for most of Syfy’s budget on the show.

 

    The goal of the project was to extensively link the shared world of the game and the show. They take place in the same area at the same time, and the two branches of the project promise future crossovers, ranging from the ability of the player’s character in the game to appear in the show to large scale players’ actions influencing the show’s narrative future. At the moment, however, the crossover is limited to similar storylines and characters and timed missions in the game that must be completed by the next episode’s airing. The two development teams both made concessions for such a project to become a reality. While, for example, the gaming team thought the alien races known as “Voltan” should bring with them flying car technology, Syfy’s television crew told them that was right-out too expensive.

 

    Meanwhile, Syfy’s conceptual team thought horses or similar pack animals would fit the setting. The logistical team for the video game informed them that pack animals interfere with combat in games like the one they were designing. I admit to having not played the game, but I do have exposure to both television and games of this genre – and the mutual influence is clear.

 

    The TV show brings several well-recognized actors, including Grant Bowler, (known for his previous work in Ugly Betty and True Blood,) and Julie Benz, from (Angel and Dexter). Of course, the television actors served as the live models for their digital doubles in the game. The actors, along with the visual decisions for the various races in the world, had to be decided on several years in advance than they would have been for a typical science fiction show for like this without a collaborating video game team. On the other hand, while video games can relatively easily create very non-human aliens, a TV show has more limitations, meaning Defiance’s aliens look remarkably human. The collaboration has a kind of lowest common denominator effect, where both media have to take into account the limitations of the other.

 

However, transmedia collaboration is not without its strengths. Despite several obvious archetypes and standard genre elements, the extensive world-building is obvious from the very first episode. Because the show is free to tell for of its mythology in the setting of the game, the world feels like it has even more depth. There are two complete languages for the show and game, constructed by David J. Peterson, who also worked on Dothraki, the constructed language from Game of Thrones. Though we don’t see much of some of the alien races, as not all are represented in the main cast, each has distinctive cultural characteristics, evident in their speech patterns, dress, and attitudes, even in minor roles.

 

The races are also original in that the cultures seem to have been built from the ground up, rather than borrowed from Earth cultures and pasted onto alien species, a welcome relief to a veteran viewer of the genre (though some play it a little close at times).

    The show promises a world full of conflict and tensions, some which are more television arc-worthy, others of which could easily permeate throughout the show and game worlds (such as racial tension and environmental dangers). The show has recently been renewed for a second season, hopefully bringing the promised crossovers closer to reality.

Écriture féminine or not really... (Nour)

    Ehky Ya Scheherazade (Youssry Nasrallah, 2009) is an Egyptian feature film which explores problems faced by women in contemporary Egypt. The title of the film makes an explicit reference to One Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherazade tells Shahryar, the king, stories in order to stay alive. Indeed, storytelling is a prominent narrative tool within the film. Even more, the connection to One Thousand and One Nights suggests that the women in the film had to tell their stories in order to stay alive. The film uses the talk show as a vehicle for women to publically discuss their concerns. Hebba—the lead character who is a TV hostess—invites a number of women to her show, all of whom with their particular stories to share. Stories about the search for a husband, women's sexual restraints, and the social traditions which propelled them to seek refuge in marriages they did not really desire, among other concerns.

    A reasonable question to ask at this point is: Does the film belong to women's cinema? Typically women's cinema is concerned with a set of problems and issues which help identify it as such. To this extent, the film is a women's film. It is concerned with problems similar to those picked up by the so called women's cinema. Nonetheless, only one thing is really certain about this film. Ehky Ya Scheherazade (Tell me a Story Scheherazade) has a dominantly female cast. Thus, an alternative way of approaching the connection to One Thousand and One Nights is to think of the film itself as a Scheherazade narrating in order to save the society it depicts from further damage. In this view, women are the boat-rockers. They, perhaps because of their status as shown by the film, are more likely to demand social change.

    Yet, what is the nature of their status?  In this article in Salon, Prof. David Jacobson, a sociologist from the University of South Florida, made a linked women's "sexual" struggles to the more encompassing struggle "over the nature of self." Women, as depicted in the film, seem to undergo a search for selfhood, or feel a need to recreate such self. In this light, the complexity of Ehky Ya Scheherezade is better understood. Through storytelling, these women search for who they are, and who they wish to be. As the narrators of their own stories, they have the freedom to rewrite the parts of their history that they wish to reinvent. The film is a universal journey toward self-discovery and freedom. The film starts inside Hebba's nightmare. She wakes up gasping for breath: "there are no doors" she says. She is trapped because, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that she is not offered the chance to recreate her past through the medium of storytelling. As the one who does not tell her own story until the very last scene in the film, she is given the least creative power. Her story is essentially told by the camera and not herself (the film even closes before Hebba tells her story).

    Hebba is hidden behind a glamorous façade. In a scene where her husband Kareem attempts to scare her away from visiting poor neighborhoods (ironically by citing rape) he is shown painting her lips with a bright red lipstick. He is maintaining the façade with which he is comfortable. Although it is true that Hebba sometimes uses this pretty façade to manipulate others, mostly her husband, it does not seem to be a philosophical choice. In other words, she is not intentionally thinking of her appearance as a means for achieving greater freedom (even if freedom just means achieving the ends she desire). Instead, Hebba is trying to maintain a particular appearance for reasons other than freedom. If I am to describe this appearance, I will say neat, tidy, well-kempt.

    Kareem—her husband—provides further insight. Kareem is a journalist who works in a daily newspaper. He is anticipating a promotion. More importantly, he thinks that the only way he would get the job he wants is by pleasing the "right people." Although Hebba does not seem to realize it, she is a lot like Kareem. They both feel a need to noticeably belong to one group and not the other(s). At a basic level, she maintains an image that separates her from a group(s) of people. The motivation behind this need to belong to one group and not another can only be explained through the benefits associated with belonging to either group. Without attempting to negotiate which groups Hebba aims to belong to, it is clear that such motivation to belong or not belong to any particular group is mediated by a clear recognition of social values and social value systems. Hebba, as is Kareem, does not seem to be able to construct a notion of self away from society, its traditions, norms, etc.              

    Expectedly enough, Hebba likes to be noticed. She dresses to be noticed. Thus far, she could be compared to the film itself. She is dependent on the act of looking—the observation of her audience, her fans, the lustful looks of her husband, and the disdainful looks of the poorer women on the subway. Like Hebba, some of the film's images seem too polished, neat, hyper aestheticized. Yet, in relation to Hebba this hyper aestheticization of the frames gains a greater meaning. In the case of Hebba, one can argue that she is maintaining a façade. In relation to the film, however, maintaining a facade becomes maintaining control over the images on the screen. This film is consciously a controlled environment. This control of the frames draws the viewers' attention to the boundaries within which the women--and men as well--search for their individual selves. Within this boundaries such search is not only acceptable, but also less disturbing to a watching audience.

    The film is a controlled unit where true freedom cannot really be achieved. "Gender war in Egypt: a film about women who fight back" states the film's poster, but what is the nature of this fighting back? Are women really boat-rockers or are they put in situations where even their "fighting back" is pre-mediated by society—controlled by social traditions, structures, norms and orders. Is their mode of resistance real fighting back? If this film is indeed showing a gender war, who has the upper hand ? The struggle seems to encompasses both genders, indeed all human beings in modern societies. The filmmakers chose to create a restricted space in which the stories told by the women do not upset the established order. Rather, these stories and their narrators all fall in place as calculated parts contributing to a greater whole that is restricting to all individuals within it.

   This film depicts a controlled struggle. Ehky Ya Scheherazade is a women's story, but one not told by the voice of women. It is told by the voice of that who/which controls women (and men for this matter). Order is created, maintained by and for the camera—not challenged by it. The camera moves from space to space showing individuals each carrying out his/her designated role. Even those who seem to rebel are playing out a role to which they've been assigned. The relation that this film has to women's cinema is not straight forward. Assuming that the film is a Scheherazade, the audience is the king. The film seems to negotiate the relation between the two. Even if by the end of the film the women do not seem to have fought back, the film (by offering a frustrating narrative) allows for a kind of resistance.  

 

Once Upon a Time: Disney for the Ones Who Grew Up (Sophie)

I am not often a fan of giant media conglomerations, but for ABC's Once Upon a Time, I have to make an exception. The ABC network is owned by the Disney Corporation, and never has this relationship worked out better for the prime time viewer. The show was billed as a fantasy-drama based on classical fairy tales, but it takes much of it's core characters from Disney's animated features and borrows from them to an extent that would be difficult for anyone forced to navigate the "enchanted forest" that is Disney copyright law. The show is by no means made for children, and is often violent and heartbreaking. Still, it is mindful of the themes of the fairy tales (and is some cases Victorian children's stories or other story classics) it is based on. Family, the battle of good verses evil, and true love are not only paramount thematic issues, but actual forces of power, both magically and when enacted through character motivation. By keeping this fairy tale grounding, the show is free to morph the content and characters, enhance the nuance, and add complications, still while maintaining something that feels authentic at least to the versions of these stories we as viewers are most familiar with.

The result to anyone that grew up or raised children in the age of the Disney Renaissance (Late 1980's to 2000) is a show that seems like an updated, more mature version of these now classic animated films. Obviously, some things are different because of format - a television show demands a cast that is more interconnected and recurring than discrete films. It demands a new twist, a mystery or conflict that bridges the various individual stories and drives the characters, and thus the show, forward in a new way. The show accomplishes this in the form of a new curse put forward by the Evil Queen (from Snow White) to transport all the fairy tale characters to our world, oblivious to who they are, forced to live as she dictates: without their "happy endings." As the main narrative unfurls from this plot point, the show also reveals the actions of the past, in the realm of fairy tales. These stories, are focused on individual sets of characters and are paired up with relevant events in the forward flowing plot, so they are told out of order. Slowly, as the show progresses, the past gets woven together and drops hints as to the events of the future.

In this, the show succeeds wonderfully. The balance between hints that pay off and misdirections, for those readers bouncing theories around in their head, is very satisfying. The show never feels like it is fooling with you just for the sake of convolution, nor does it come off as predictable and boring. Similarly, the show doesn't become a detective puzzle that forces the viewer into hunting for clues, for those viewers who are content in letting the mysteries unfold without trying to guess which well known character might show up and what role they might play, or what betrayal or alliance might come to light next. The overall plotting, and the way the various fantasy stories interweave is done elegantly.

Unfortunately, the writing that is so stellar at the drawing board doesn't always translate into the dialogue. Some of the scenes fall into saccharine or maudlin sentiments, often at the same time sounding like generic and stilted dialogue for a scene of tension, revenge, passion, or some other standard story book fare. During scenes that take place in the fairy tale realm, the writers operate under the added complication of trying to use a kind of folktale mode of speaking. Fortunately, as season 2 progresses the kinks seem to be smoothing out.
 
Part of this fault may lie with the actors as well, especially because TV drama is a medium where the writer of each episode varies and the problems in the writing are much more apparent consistently in some characters than others. In television, the actor becomes more of a constant for the character than the writer, and they become vital in bringing the lines to life. In Once Upon a Time, it's the villains (primarily the Evil Queen Regina, played by Lana Parrilla, and Rumpelstiltskin, played by Robert Carlyle) that outshine their cast-mates.

But they have help from a story that does work hard to challenge the classical fairy tale ideas of evil, while maintaining that true good and true evil exist. It isn't moral ambiguity so much as a deep, pervading sense of sympathy. The show does not hesitate in illustrating true evil and then showing its tragic, sympathetic motivation. This is one way that Once Upon a Time updates its source material for an older audience. As adults, the flat evil-for-evil's sake villains that dominate the Disney canon don't pass for believable characters.

Another update of note the show made is to the roles and ideals of gender. Snow White is turned from the 1937 house-wife princess in distress to a survivalist-princess on the lam who rescues her prince as much as he rescues her. But it isn't just about de-feminizing her role. Snow, in her updated fairy-tale life and in her modern world is powerful as a mother, a lover, and a teacher as well as being one of the most capable fighters on the show. The core cast of Once Upon a Time is, in any given arc, at least half female, and though romance (what with the theme of true love) definitely plays a part in the show, it is far from the only driving motivation.

Briefly, no account of the show is complete without a comment on the aesthetic. As costume designer Eduardo Castro said “We didn’t want it to look like a Renaissance Faire, we wanted it to look like an Alexander McQueen show.” The costumes and styles, aside from certainly being grown up, provide insight into character, future plot points, and clues to morality and timeline. Above all else, they are exquisite.

For anyone familiar with Disney's Masterpiece Collection, Once Upon a Time is a wonderful chance to relive and re-meet childhood classics in a new, more age appropriate way. Even for those who haven't, it's a great way to get to know classic characters in an exciting, innovative way.

Time Spirals in Primer (Sam)

Primer (2004), a low-budget indie film written and directed by Shane Carruth about time travel, is legendary for being impossible to understand on your first watch (or your second, or third...). Often times, deliberately obfuscated films can be obnoxious in their mission to confuse the viewer in order to appear clever, but in this case that obfuscation is not only completely earned, it's the entire point.

Most stories that make good use of time travel use a time loop as a plot device. I use the term "time loop" to refer to when time travel causes a closed loop of causality. Everything time travellers do when they go back in time, even if they are actively trying to change the past, simply ends up causing the situation in the future that causes the time traveller to go back in the first place. History cannot be changed; nothing could have turned out differently. Time loops work because they strengthen the sense of inevitability of the ending (which is essential to a satisfying ending). Their usage implies that the universe in which they exist is deterministic. Some films try to ignore the philosophical considerations inherent in the existence of time loops; others embrace it, and are all the stronger.

But Primer does not have time loops, because that's not how time travel works in the story. Instead, it has what I like to call time spirals.

At the beginning of the film we are introduced to four engineering types who make low-end electronic products in their garages for extra money. One innovation in the film is their dialogue: they speak exactly like such people might speak, with no dumbing down of language. A layman listening to them speak (such as myself) only ever half-understands them. This plays a large part in the deliberately murky nature of the film.

Two of these techies, Abe and Aaron, are the protagonists. They discover that they've accidentally created a time machine. The explanation for how the machine works is rather complicated, but I will try to put it as succinctly as possible. The machine is a box. If it's turned on at point A, and turned off at point B, an object that is put inside it at point B can be removed at point A. Thus, the object travels backwards in time. Once Abe and Aaron realize how the machine works, it doesn't take them long to send themselves back in time. This causes a situation where, for a time, there are two Abes or two Aarons walking around. At first, because the two aren't sure what will happen if they create a paradox, they isolate themselves the first time they live through a day, while they wait for the time to shut off the machine (remember, they can only travel back in time once they turn off the machine, at point-in-time B). So there are only two versions of the time traveller during that period of time. They also want to be sure that the simultaneous existence of multiple versions of themselves is temporary.

But they soon accidentally create a paradox and break the causality during the period of time when there are two Abes and two Aarons – and nothing happens. There are no consequences. History can be changed; time loops aren't necessary or inevitable.

This is where the plot thread crosses the line from "difficult to follow" to "impossible to follow on a first viewing" – because both Abe and Aaron begin not only changing causality and causing there to be multiple versions of themselves. And this is why I call this chain of causality a "time spiral" – because characters loop backwards but don't close them. Things never happen exactly like they did the first time. They just keep changing each time through.

And once you have events you've already seen happening differently multiple times, and multiple versions of each character running around, and minimal to no exposition about what's just happened, confusion is inevitable. But that confusion reflects the situation Aaron and Abe are in. The narrative form is perfectly fitted to the other elements of the film (its story, its characters' state of mind, its theme, etc).

This is one of the rare films I've seen where I've enjoyed it even as I lost the plot thread, possibly even because I did. It simply demands multiple viewings to fully understand. And if the film gets better with each viewing, is that necessity such a bad thing?

 

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Sam)

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2008), directed by Scott Derrickson, is an exorcism movie. It begins after the death of the possessed – the titular Emily Rose. Now, I don't have much experience with exorcism movies, but from what I understand, they tend not to do this. Nor does the plot tend to concern a court case which happens after the exorcism. Actually, I'm pretty sure exorcism movies tend to be horror. The Exorcism of Emily Rose, however, is not (though I do think it tries to be one).

Father Richard Moore, the priest who attempted the exorcism (Tom Wilkinson), is accused of negligent homicide; the film's protagonist is his defense attorney Erin Bruner (Laura Linney). Moore doesn't want to defend himself so much as he wants to "tell Emily's story". In this way, we get the story of the exorcism through a series of flashbacks as the story is told in court and to Bruner. So it certainly has things that are supposed to be scary. At 3 AM on successive nights, various characters (Emily, Bruner, and Moore) are visited by an invisible force – a demon which opens and closes doors, knocks over objects, and in Emily's case, invades your body. And Emily's possession and exorcism scenes are unnatural and creepy: her body contorts and convulses, she eats insects, she screams in Latin and German.

But the film just doesn't succeed at being horror. Part of the problem seems to be that it isn't even earnestly trying to be horrifying. After all, most of the time is spent in the courtroom, where Laura Linney has Law & Order-style arguments with the mustachioed prosecutor. Actually, the film really feels like an episode of Law & Order more than anything else. 

And that gets at the second reason I think it fails at horror: the characters feel like they're lifted from an episode of Law & Order. Now, don't get me wrong: I used to love that show. But I don't think anyone has ever claimed it has particularly dynamic characters. My point is, the characters in Emily Rose are flat. Emily herself barely gets any characterization at all, so all the creepiness we get from her exorcism never rises above generic creepiness. Worse, the two protagonists' characterization is clichéd. Bruner is the ambitious, workaholic lawyer with a conscience (cue scenes of her drinking wine alone in her apartment in a city tower while studying case materials) . Moore is the honorable, righteous priest who knows he's right, and wants to go to trial to get the truth out – and besides, taking a plea bargain would be lying. 

Not that you can't have these types of characters, of course. But they aren't very dynamic. Bruner is supposed to develop somewhat as a character as she slowly gets convinced that Moore is right, but that isn't believable or interesting. And if you identify the climax as the moment when the tension peaks, it comes during each side's closing statements, in true Law & Order style. Which, again, could be fine – except for the contents of the speech, which only make a legal point (which is that the jury needn't believe Moore to acquit him – they need only to allow for the possibility that he could be right, and recognize that the scientific explanations and medical diagnosis of Emily Rose aren't fact).

All of these narrative issues stem from the fact that Derrickson doesn't seem interested in drama so much as he's interested in making a point about something. Don't ask me to summarize what that is, though. Something to do with whether demons are real or not. The problem with moving the drama to the courtroom, though, is that it inherently makes the drama come from the question of whether or not the defendant is guilty, while Derrickson is really trying to ask a different question. The end result is the film is disparate, unfocused. It seems to want to abandon being horror at all, but doesn't. It wants to ask philosophical questions about knowledge and belief, but confuses that as well with the courtroom structure.

The courtroom drama aspect is probably doing more harm than good to the narrative structure, in the end. Maybe what this story needs is less Law & Order and more law and order.

Why I Stopped Watching Doctor Who (Sam)

I have a confession to make: I hate Doctor Who as it is being run by Steven Moffat. I have loved it in the past, and because of the nature of the show, I'm sure I will love it again some day. But when Moffat became showrunner, Doctor Who lost not only the heart of what made it an interesting show, it forgot how to simply tell a good story at all.

Let me give some background for the uninformed: Doctor Who is a BBC scifi show with a long history. It's a show about an alien called the Doctor, and a human companion or two, who travel in his ship called the TARDIS, a British police call box which can disappear and reappear at any point in time and space. It first aired in 1963 and ran continuously until 1989. In 2005 it was rebooted. The reason for its longevity is simple: there is a canonical reason to replace the actor who plays the Doctor whenever the current one retires. He dies, then regenerates. He is immortal, ever-changing, ever gaining new energy. And if the show stagnates, it has the potential to regenerate as well.

Ever since its reboot, it has gained an ever-growing, rabid fanbase in the States. I counted myself one of its fans during New Who's first four seasons, while Russel T. Davies was its showrunner. The show was endlessly engaging and dynamic. Time, place, and genre could be different episode to episode. One week it could be a murder mystery, the next, a horror story set on another planet, and the next a historical drama. At the heart of the show's interest was the Doctor, with a little Sherlock Holmes, a little James Bond, and a little of his own idiosyncratic quirks – the most important of those being his love for humans and his abhorrence of violence. One of the main themes of New Who was the idea that the Doctor was a being with the power of a god and who sometimes let that get to his head – and that, in the end, it was always his human companions who kept him in check, who brought him down to earth. Both the Doctor and his companions were always better off with each other. They brought out the best in each other. And when the companions inevitably left him, the Doctor always lost something.

It seems to me that the Doctor's most valuable companion was Russel T. Davies himself, because he certainly lost something after Davies' departure. Unlike previous Doctors, the eleventh Doctor is never challenged. His genius, his ego, and most importantly, his moral superiority, are never questioned – they're taken for granted both by his companions and, by extension, the audience itself. It is telling that, for instance, the eleventh Doctor is far more violent than his predecessors, who were pacifist to a fault. Steven Moffat's run seems to have forgotten the themes of the past show and abandoned them for hero worship. So, pretty much the opposite of what the show was before. 

But I actually think this is a symptom of a larger problem, which is Steven Moffat's and his current writing team's poor understanding of what makes for an interesting story. They rely far too heavily on the Doctor's quirkiness and wittiness. Granted, he is witty, and it's fun to watch him run around the TARDIS and manically explain his solutions to various problems in time and space – so that makes for an effective crutch, at least for a while. But this doesn't make for interesting stories. Nor does throwing together a bunch of random, disconnected, "cool" ideas into one episode. The season 6 finale features a universe where all of time has collapsed into a single moment, so cars fly attached to helium balloons, Winston Churchill is Holy Roman Emperor, and a high-tech lab of sorts called Area 52 is housed inside a pyramid, where everybody wears eye patches. The episode certainly pretends to have a plot, but feels more like an excuse to have all of these things at once because it would be cool. None of it means anything. The emotion is completely unearned and all consequences are completely abstract and impersonal, or rest on clichés. 

After the second season under Moffat's helm, I'd had enough. Doctor Who is currently mid-Season 7, but I haven't seen any of it. 

Nemesis Game (Sam)

Nemesis Game (2003) is a film about riddles. And also, I think it's about philosophy, or metaphysics, or the meaning of life, or something. That is, it tries to use riddles as a metaphor for humanity's persistent questions regarding the "meaning of life" (whatever that means), and then literalizes the metaphor. In other words, it equates the search for answers to riddles and the search for life's various questions. If that sounds like an intriguing premise, that's because it should be. But the film, directed and written by Jesse Warn, doesn't have something interesting to say about such a connection; rather, it incessantly pats itself on the back, as if the entire point of the film is to say, "Hey, isn't this a cool metaphor?"

It certainly seems to try to make something of the metaphor. "It's all a game. Life, everything, one big game," insists Sara Novak, the protagonist. The plot is driven by her playing a certain game – one in which she solves riddles anonymously left to her via grafitti on Toronto subway walls. The rules of this game require her to spray the answers to these riddles in a room in an abandoned building of some kind. Once she has solved enough of these riddles, she is supposed to perceive a "Design". What this Design is is unclear – at some points it seems to be the meaning of life, at others it seems to be a knowledge of one's destiny. I suppose it's both, although it's never quite explained. 

In any case, Nemesis Game certainly spends a lot of time discussing riddles and this Design – in fact, almost all of its time. Considering it's a barely coherent theme, that's impressive. Even worse, it comes at the expense of some essential elements. Half of the dialogue is stilted and overly expositional (though I will say the actors mostly did a good job delivering them). In the first scene, a detective confronts a criminal and explains her life story and her crimes. A few scenes later, when the detective speaks to Sara, who is his daughter, he does the same thing, explaining how her mother died and how he feels about Sara's reaction to her mother's death. In both scenes, each character knows these things; the only reason he has to say them is for the benefit of the audience. Doing so only thwarts the very earnest tone of the scenes.

More importantly, the characters themselves are hardly any more believable. The film introduces us to Sara as a riddle solver, and for most of the film we essentially see her do just and only that: solve riddles. But before a certain plot twist halfway through the film, there are no stakes involved. She's only solving these mysterious anonymous riddles because they're mysterious and anonymous – and apparently she likes solving riddles. There is almost no other relevant information about Sara. The film's premise and the riddles themselves might be able to sustain interest for the first half of the film, but compelling drama it does not make.

The weak characterization extends, of course, to the secondary characters. Essentially, they're all reduced to stereotypes, tropes, or plot devices. For instance, two of Sara's peers at college are creepy to the point where they don't even seem like real people anymore. Their function is to act creepy, so they are. Just as there is no indication that Sara has a life beyond the scenes she appears in, there is even less indication (if that's even possible) that they have one either. 

Still, Nemesis Game has some redeeming qualities. It has a strong premise. It's plotted well, and many of the riddles and plot devices are cleverly constructed. The underlying issue with the script, however, is that it seems to believe that cleverness alone can sustain interest in a film. But if the plot is merely clever – and not an inevitable result of the actions of well-rounded characters – then it cannot do so. The script is salvageable – I just think it needed a few more drafts, and it could have been an excellent film. Sadly, it never got those revisions, and what we're left with is dissatisfying.

Dark City - A Science Fiction Spin on Noir (Sophie)

Dark City is both a science fiction film and a neo-noir. The film, directed and co-written by Alex Proyas, uses its science fictive breaks from reality to create a kind of genre commentary, placing a new spin and plot importance on long standing tropes of the noir tradition. In using a science fiction setting, the film can create a reality in which the metaphorical corruptions and convolutions of the world of the noir become literal. A man waking up with no memory, trying to piece his life together itself becomes a clue in a larger mystery of how this world works. Amnesia is not at all uncommon in noir, but in Dark City, amnesia and confusion of identity become actively malicious, controlled actions of the antagonists, the “Strangers,” who possess godlike powers to stop time and alter reality. Thus, the iconic labyrinthine cities of LA or Chicago give way to a city that is a literal maze that is twisted anew each night and designed purposefully without an exit. One scene, to drive home the metaphor, even depicts such a maze, designed for rats – as the residence of this city serve as subjects of experimentation for these “Strangers.”

The question of fate, of what makes a person who they are, that lurks at the center of many films of the genre is the one that these sinister experimenters are seeking to solve. They seek to understand memory and what drives a person to be the unique agent that they become. To this end, they arrange a classic plot – a betrayed husband, mad with jealousy, turns into a killer of prostitutes. Given the memories of a killer, they wondered, would he continue to kill? But the process fails and the man is left without an identity, framed for crimes he not only did not commit, but most of which never happened in the first place. The detectives who are staged to play their part come onto the scene, walking through dimly lit corridors in an old motel, giving the movie the classic feel – but they too are pawns, and the one detective who has seen the truth is driven mad. By assigning everyone's identities, these puppet masters create a truly noir world of corruption, where there is no secrecy, no innocence, and no place left untouched by a nefarious system. It becomes a world where nothing is as it seems, where no social bond is genuine, and where everything is as tenuous as the will of these unseen powers.

Our protagonist, assuming the assigned name of John Murdoch, is pursued by the Strangers, beings that, they reveal, literally assume the identities of the dead by wearing their skins. John is special – he possesses the same reality warping abilities as the Strangers, and begins to understand the truth – that there is no world beyond the city, that all of their lives are manufactured falsehoods. Much of what he notices fall into the tropes of noir. To convince the detective that the world, rather than he, is insane he says, “Daylight. When was the last time you remember seeing it? I'm not talking about a distant, half-forgotten childhood memory. I mean, like, yesterday. Last week? When? Do you have a single memory? You don't, do you? I don't think the sun even exists in this place.” The Strangers, though they have implanted everyone with the memory of the sun, are hurt by the strong light, and have created a world of perpetual darkness.

The plot is a bit convoluted and at points the artist choices come off as unintentionally comic, but the movie succeeds spectacularly in creating a world and feel with powerful aesthetics and strong philosophical themes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different Strokes: Friendship and Emotion in Action Flicks (Ian H)

        There are times I go to see a film for the craft; the artistry of the director, the once-in-a-lifetime performances, or the technically beautiful design. I must admit though, these are sometimes overshadowed by the times where I get a gallon of over-priced soda and a kiddie-pool sized tub of popcorn and turn my mind off for two hours. In these rare instances and being the manly man that I am, I enjoy the heart pounding, adrenaline pumping, and testosterone filled action films. You know, the ones where the good guy really never gets knocked down and even if he does, he gets up only to beat the bejesus out of someone? A bunch of blockbusters focus on explosions, car chases, and overall excitement while plot takes a back seat (I am talking to you Michael Bay).  That isn’t to say they are not still enjoyable but this intensely Hollywood notion is, thankfully, broken with a few films that are able to intertwine an entertaining storyline broken up with intense action scenes. The most important part of a believable and involving storyline that truly has the audience invested is developed between characters, specifically for our purposes the relationships between the protagonists in two of the best action flicks; Die Hard and Lethal Weapon.

Above: Fiery explosions...the cornerstone of Hollywood action movies

        No one would argue that Lethal Weapon, a film about the pairing of an older “on-the-verge-of-retirement” officer, Murtaugh, and a homicidal, suicidal, plays-by-no-ones-rules cop, Riggs, is a “buddy cop” film. If anything, Lethal Weapon, defines the genre. To say then that the relationship between the two protagonists is anything but critical would be untrue. Throughout the film, the arguable “main” plot revolves around Riggs and Murtaugh being forced to work together to solve a drug smuggling case. The actual case though takes a back seat to the connection the film creates between the two protagonists and thus the affinity we, as the audience, feel toward them. At first glance both are very different people; very different cops. Murtaugh has “been on the force twenty years and not a scratch or a scar” while Riggs is a loose cannon, constantly disregarding rules and putting himself in harms way to get quick results. For example, during his introduction scene, Riggs is held hostage after a failed drug bust and tries distract the perpetrator by pleading to be shot. Each cop though compliments each other in skill and smarts. What Riggs lacks in structure and sensibility, Murtaugh makes up for in sage advice and clever planning. Murtaugh, on the other hand, doesn’t take necessary risks and thus doesn’t see results. 

            Die Hard is not necessarily a “buddy cop” film but to say the relationship between John McClane and Sgt. Al Powell is not touching and important would also be false. Powell, a pudgy desk jockey, is every bit different than the hard-boiled and barrel chested loose-cannon McClane. Throughout the film, their relationship parallels a distinct brotherhood between all cops. Powell immediately recognizes McClane as a brother in blue and thus an unwavering trust is created. The natural affinity they have for each other in the beginning contrasts Murtaugh and Riggs in Lethal Weapon yet both show the common cop mentality throughout.

Above: The same type six shooter as Murtaugh carries.

            The best scenes, interestingly enough, are not the fights or explosions (however much I love them) but the quiet remarks between characters. These are the scenes where the audience becomes most involved and most likely to have a strong reaction. For Lethal Weapon,a vastly important and powerful scene shows Murtaugh and Riggs after a family dinner. Riggs, after some playful banter, indirectly reveals his longing for a family like Murtaugh’s. “I [kill] real good you know…only thing I was good at.” Riggs explains. His skill in this overwhelmingly destructive force cripples Riggs emotionally and he longs for the constructive nature of family. His skill and gall as a cop, however, comes from his lack of dependence on or from others such as a family. A family, or dependence from a partner, might bring Riggs’ skill down since he will not being able to only think of himself anymore. On the other hand, when presented with a surrogate family of Murtaughs, Riggs shows more courage and fervor in protecting them and fighting for vengeance when one gets hurt. Riggs shows his emotional scars however the structure that Murtaugh is able to provide professionally and personally completely changes Riggs’ outlook on life and the beat.

           Die Hard ‘s most involving scenes are also the, by industry standards, “slowest”. Toward the end, McClane is battered, shot, and profusely bleeding. McClane asks Powell why he gave up the patrol for the desk and Powell explains that as a rookie, he accidentally mistook a teenager with a toy as a gunman and shot him. “They can teach you everything…except how to live with a mistake.” Powell explains paralleling McClane’s personal life, whose wife left him after he failed to support her during a large career promotion. McClanes most profoundly emotional moment is when he pleads to Powell to find his wife and tell her he was sorry. The entire plot revolves around McClane trying to single-handedly bring down a hostage situation from inside the building. It is clear from the beginning that he is not doing this for himself; the option to escape being available many times. Instead, McClane is trying to keep his estranged wife safe, his way of showing true devotion to her. These incredible lengths, however, are not nearly as emotional or reaction invoking as the quiet scene where McClane, realizing his slim chance of survival, tries to make final amends to his wife through Powell. “She heard me say, ‘I love you’ a thousand times, she never heard me say ‘I’m Sorry’”.

            Action films are intensely emotional. Most try to pander toward the little pyromaniac kid inside of us showing off intense explosions and shallow characters. A few, however, make us believe in the world on-screen since the emotions captured are so closely relatable to the emotions we feel in life. That, really, is what film is all about: the ablility to take a media that couples a few of our senses and thoroughly tricking us into believing we are actually there. How would you react given that situation? What would you feel? For these two wonderfully emotional and heart pumping action films we see those emotions blatantly in the character development and relationships between the “good guys”.  

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

The Role of the Storyteller in The Princess Bride (Chris D)

Rob Reiner’s 1987 film The Princess Bride has remained a favorite throughout the years. It is a tale of dashing swordfights, monsters, and true love. It is able to place itself head and shoulders above the rest because of its emphasis on the nature of stories and storytelling.

                The film is framed in terms of a story being told from an old man to his grandson. Immediately, the film sets up the idea of passing stories and mythology along to the younger generation. This concept is the basis for the oral tradition that ruled over so many tribes of the past. Before they had a written language, the only way to pass down stories was for the elders to tell them to the younger generations. Though the grandfather is using a book to tell the story, he is still the latest in this long line of storytellers.

                The characters within the story itself are also ruled by the stories they tell. For example, the character of Inigo Montoya lives to get revenge on the man who killed his father.  However, the audience does not see these events. Instead, they hear it told as a story from Inigo himself. By giving the audience the information in this manner, Inigo is created as a man whose whole life is driven by a story. Everything that he does throughout the entire film is preempted by the story that he tells Wesley.

                Wesley also exists through the story of the Dread Pirate Roberts. His reputation is based off of the exploits of the men who came before him. The name is what carries the power, not anything that he has personally done. In this way, he has to become the story instead of being able to tell his own story. Even when he returns and finds his true love, he needs to pass the title on to someone else. He is drawn to continue the story even though his role is over. When he does decide to pass on the role, it is implied that the title will fall on Inigo, a man who is no longer driven by his own story and must now find another.

                These two story driven characters come together for the first time in a wide ranging and extremely cinematic duel. They range all over the terrain, each playing with the other. The nature of the film as a story allows this confrontation to play out in this manner. Real sword fighting is quite brutal, quick, and does not last nearly as long as the fight in the film. However, as both men are living through a story that does not necessarily involve the other, they are able to play and to enjoy what they are doing. Their excitement is shared through the screen by way of the grandfather telling the story of these two men dueling. In addition, this is all being told through the eye of the director and the screenwriter who want to thrill the audience with their story. All this layered storytelling comes together to form a cohesive whole, creating one of the great fairy tales of American cinema.

 

Punches vs. Plot: Storytelling styles of Ong Bak and Ip Man (Chris D)

    In 2003 the film, Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior, was released to great acclaim. At first glance, the film should be resigned to the discount DVD bin. The plot is full of holes and borders on the ridiculous, the dialogue is contrived, and the acting is terrible. However, through the star of the film, Tony Jaa, it rises from being a laughably bad film to being a testament to the perfection of physical capability.

                Tony Jaa’s acting through the film can be described as bad at best.  This is only compounded by the script giving him little to work with and the plot of the film itself being ridiculous. However, the film succeeds on the choreography and execution of its action scenes. Tony Jaa is an exception physical performer, and all of the terrible acting that he does while not punching something goes away once the martial arts scenes begin. Instead, his body is able to tell a compelling story as he fights. For example, in his first real fight scene in the film, he is put up against increasingly difficult opponents in an underground arena. During the first fight, Ting, Jaa’s character, is able to defeat his opponent effortlessly. The only time that his opponent is able to touch him is through cheating.  However, the second fighter presents Ting with slight difficulty. Ting has difficulty hitting the opponent at first because his opponent is so quick. However, the viewer is able to follow Ting as he learns the man’s patterns of movement and is then able to counter them, leading to his victory. The last fighter proves to be an even more difficult match for Ting, as he subverts everything that Ting knows about fighting. Having been trained in a small village, Ting is unaccustomed to dirty fighting as was evidenced earlier in his fight against the first opponent. However, the last fighter does nothing but fight dirty, and thus the viewer watches Ting get hit with chairs, tables, plates, and even a refrigerator. It is only through struggling through the brutal assault that Ting is able to finally win. These series of fights shows Ting as a resilient character that is able to struggle through hardship in order to achieve victory. He learns from his previous mistakes and through this knowledge is able to defeat his opponent. This character building and storytelling is all done without dialogue, leaving the viewer to watch Jaa’s body language. While the script of the film leaves much to be desired, the story of a man persisting through adversity grabs the viewer’s attention.

                The 2008 film, Ip Man, takes a diametrically opposite approach to Ong Bak. In comparison to Ong Bak’s thin plot which only serves to support the martial arts, Ip Man, uses the martial arts to support the plot of the film. The fights still tell a story, but their story only serves to support the characterization and plot that has been established through the dialogue and interactions between characters.

                The titular character of Ip Man never seems terribly challenged in any of the fights through the film. He is established early on as the best martial artist in his village, and nothing in the film seeks to change that. At no point does the viewer feel any threat to Ip Man from any of the opponents he fights. Every blow that an enemy throws is either blocked or dodged. The ease that he wins his battles could easily become boring for the viewer as, without a struggle, there is nothing to invest in. However, the story that accompanies the fights causes the viewer to care about Ip Man as a person and thus care about what winning the fight means. In addition, while Ip Man starts off wealthy and happy, the invasion of the Japanese causes his life to spiral downward. He has to struggle in his daily life to feed his family. Thus the viewer’s thirst for struggle is satiated by the plot itself. Once Ip Man gets into a fight, the viewer has grown so attached to him and watched him struggle so much that when he succeeds with little effort the viewer is thrilled to see him succeed.

                Each fight in Ip Man has a different energy to it according to where it falls in the plot. The first fight in the film is a simple sparring match and thus the fight seems more playful and honorable. This is a very different energy than the final fight against the Japanese general. After watching the Japanese brutalize his friends and family, Ip Man savagely overwhelms his opponent with little mercy. The film uses fight scenes in a very similar way that musicals use songs. When the characters reach an emotional level that cannot be expressed in words, they fight. In this way, the fight scenes serve to reinforce the plot instead of the plot serving as a vehicle for fight scenes.

                The differences between the way fights are used in Ong Bak and the way they are used in Ip Man is reinforced by the fighting styles of the two main characters. Ting uses a very flashy version of Muay Thai which is full of flying elbows and knees. It seems that every other move he is launching himself through the air in order to brutally attack his opponent. This is reinforced by Tony Jaa’s amazing physical condition which allows him to perform stunts that most people require wires to do. This style of martial arts creates large flashy action sequences full of over the top movements.  Ip Man, on the other hand, uses a very reserved form of Wing Chun. He makes small moves and only expends the minimum required energy to block and strike his opponent. The action sequences created by this style are sharper, and serve to fulfill their purpose just like the movements of the hero.

                These two films showcase the two different sides of the martial arts genre. Ong Bak is a film that exists solely for the purpose of celebrating physical achievement. The film allows Tony Jaa to demonstrate his physical capabilities. The viewer is less concerned with the plot, but instead simply wants to see what ridiculous stunt Jaa will be able to pull off next. Ip Man instead creates a world in which fighting is normal, but makes it secondary to the film. Instead, it is the points in between the fight scenes that draw the viewer in with the fights scenes inserted in order to drive home a point. However, with all their differences, the two films still come down to the same basic concept. They focus on a man who must struggle against adversity in order to eventually overcome it. The protagonists are both skilled and flawed in their own ways. In the end, both films celebrate the physical prowess of the human body in a way that only the martial arts film can.

 

Mind Trip: Movies for a New Era (Leela)

“I see dead people.”

Perhaps one of the most famous phrases in movie history, The Sixth Sense is only one of so called mind-game films from the 90s. The mind-game films themselves were part of an assortment of films from the 90s with a complex narrative, films such as Fight Club, Memento, Oldboy, Run Lola Run, and The Truman Show. Mind-game films fall into three categories: (1) films in which a character is being played with, (2) films in with the audience is being played with, and (3) films in which both are the case.  What made these films so fascinating was their experiments with spectator relationships through disorientation or deception, usually with plot twists and trick endings.  

For example, The Sixth Sense. The Sixth Sense falls into the third category.  The final twist at the end is not only hidden from the main character, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, as well as the audience.  How is does director M. Night Shyamalan keep the audience in the dark? The clues are all there.  We never see anyone interact with Malcolm, there are hints of cold air wherever he goes, and a few other small hints.  Yet, Shyamalan misleads the audience through Malcolm’s own self delusions.  As Malcolm explains away the reasons around him, we as viewers are also swept along until the end.  Shyamalan uses mise en scene to emphasize where the audience is looking, drawing attention away from the clues already in scene.  The entire movie is one massive Kansas City Shuffle.

Another example would be Memento. In Memento, the audience is tricked and led, by both the narrative form as well as the narrative.  The story plays out backwards, asking what has happened rather than what will happen.  The form disorients the viewer, forcing them to piece together the story.  It’s an active form of viewership. Often, the audience would have to watch the movie twice or more to understand everything.  As in The Sixth Sense, Memento has a twist at the end. Once known, the whole movie is viewed differently .

Memento is not the only one to play with the narrative form.  Run Lola Run also played with time. The audience explores various alternate possibilities as Lola tries to save her boyfriend. Run Lola Run also intercuts the possible futures of the people Lola runs into as brief snapshots.  Run Lola Run relies on the form for its complex narrative, neither misleading nor using any massive twists.

Why are these movies so popular? One reason stems from the complexity. When creating a film with a complex narrative, plotting the plot becomes even more important.  The connections and choices in these movies are, to put it simply, smart.  The audience is surprised; the formula had been abandoned.  By abandoning the formula, these films are free to play with narrative form and experiment with how the audience reacts.  Not only changing the narrative, but how they tell the narrative.  

These mind-game films go a step further.  Not only is form often complex, but the narrative also. Tricks, traps, deceit, and confusion – theses films delight in disorienting the viewers. Some films used the formulas to lead the audience astray. While others went a different way, the fact remains that these films rejected classical storytelling. The result is magnificent.  So, next Friday night, check out The Others, The Usual Suspects, The Truman Show, Silence of the Lambs, Memento, Primer, Pi, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Machinist, or one of the hundreds of other movies integrating these techniques.

 

It's More Important To Be Good Than New (David)

Dave Dittell is an '06 alum of the Johns Hopkins Film & Media Studies and maintains the blog Alphabet Soup Kitchen, devoted to young writers.

 

There's a saying in Hollywood that nobody wants something new, just a new twist on something old.

For a truly creative person, this is a nightmare.  This seemingly hard-and-fast rule pushes back against pushing boundaries, reins in experimentation, and asks that filmmakers keep themselves from testing the very limits of their abilities.

To this I say: Good.

The nightmare comes not from the actual situation, but from the way it is presented.  It's not about staying with tired, old conventions even when they don't work.  It's about deciding what's more important to you: being good, or being new.

As you may have noticed, Hollywood, with its "something old" attitude, has been doing quite for itself lately.  In fact, storytelling has been around with us for as long as we can remember.  And, throughout all that time, there have always been certain story elements that most appealed to us.  Whether it's a love story, a rivalry, or a betrayal, people relate to stories built on real emotions.

One of the reasons Hollywood has been so succesful this year is because the stories it's presented appeal to that basic love of traditional storytelling.  Films have not only been surpassing expectations and breaking opening weekend box office records, but those films that have captured the public's attention have also been sticking around in theaters longer.  This is what's called "word-of-mouth," and it comes from people liking your film.

To use two recent examples, let's take a look at Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Taken.  Now, if you're the type of person who feels like he has to create something "new" in order to be a valid artist, you're probably already half-way to your gun closet, ready to give it all up.  These seem to be two of the most unoriginal, homogenized pieces of tripe ever put to film.

But people, god damn them, love these films to hell.

While you may hate the watered-down Bad Santa-ish notion of Paul Blart: Mall Cop or the warmed-over Ransom-ness of Taken, the truth is that their unoriginal "flaws" are in concept, not in execution.

These two represent traditional story structures -- one of the underdog facing insurmountable odds, the other of revenge -- with slight tweaks and fancy trappings that make them appear wholly new.  And each one delivers on its promise of gags, action, and tender moments.

They may be unoriginal, but they're certainly well-made.

So there's no wonder that these are two of the most successful films of the year so far, and two of the most successful films to ever come out in the pre-summer months.  These films are made specifically for people to like them.

Fine, you say, but not everybody is solely concerned with box office receipts.  Of course, this is to a certain degree naive, as almost all non-government funders of film production expect to make their money back.  Truly groundbreaking films, which stretch the boundaries of film language, have abysmally low budgets not because they have lesser requirements or because of widespread prejudices against the arts, but because they need to be cheap in order to be profitable.

But let's expand to look at films that, when made, were designed not for the common moviegoer, but for the elite critics.  This year's Oscars telecast highlighted the best of 2008, at least according to the old white men who run Hollywood, and the films they championed, the ones deemed to be the most artistically valid, all had one thing in common:

They were new twists on something old.

The groundbreaking editing in Slumdog Millionaire?  Not to disparage the Oscar-winner Chris Dickens, whose work truly is remarkable, but it's pretty much the same exact editing style also found in Boyle's previous critical darling Trainspotting.

The whole kids in the slums angle?  Ever hear of The Bicycle Thief, or Salaam Bombay, or City of God?

The gritty, realistic look at the world of professional wrestling in The Wrestler?  Is it really anything more than Rocky -- including even the details of the last climactic fight -- with some Super-16 grain on it?

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Reader, Milk,  The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon, Doubt, and WALL-E all have previous films and previous stories coursing through their veins and entwined in their DNA.  There's something very primal about the level of storytelling here -- the basic patterns harken back those many centuries, to when stories were still told in the dark, but over a campfire instead of in a movie theater.

That's not to say that the Oscars are the final determinators of quality.  They're not.  But critical darlings not as clearly rewarded there -- like The Class and Waltz With Bashir -- though more ostensibly "daring" in their filmmaking, ultimately still bear strong resemblances to films of the past, whether it's Dangerous Minds or Waking Life.

Films that don't follow conventional storytelling inherently cannot fulfill or surprise audience expectations; they can only dissapoint.  When you look at, Synechdoche, NY or Watchmen, two films I personally enjoyed very much but which failed to connect with audiences, you can plainly see what made them disappointments.  They're dense, inaccessible, largely incoherent, and just too damn "new."

Ultimately what matters most, however, is not how novel a film is, but how well made it is.  Once a filmmaker picks his style and conventions, he needs to commit to them fully.  The idea of Hollywood as a factory for uninspired filmmaking comes not from the traditional plotting of so many of its features, but from the failure of moviemakers to live up to these standards.  The creative energy used to devise that "new twist," to upset expectations, to create indelible characters to live these time-tested plots is a necessary ingredient, but it doesn't exist for its own sake.  The problem with the "new" stories that get short shrift is that they get the creativity part down but contain none of the emotional elements audiences pay to see.

So the next time you're at square one, trying to decide how to channel your creative energies, don't become discouraged when you find yourself walking down a familiar path.  Put that creativity into a new take on the material or a specific character we've never seen before.  And remember, the execution -- the part that really matters -- is still all up to you.

Top photo by creativedc (Flickr Creative Commons)
Second photo by techbirmingham (Flickr Creative Commons)
Third photo by cliff1066 (Flickr Creative Commons)
Bottom photo by Aaron Geller (Flickr Creative Commons)