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anhed-nia · 4 years

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BLOGTOBER 10/17/2020: SPOOKIES

What do we watch, when we watch movies? This question was sparked by my SOV experience with the very different, and differently interesting BLOODY MUSCLE BODYBUILDER FROM HELL and HORROR HOUSE ON HIGHWAY 5. Within the Shot On Video category, one can find inventive homemade features that are driven entirely by blood, sweat, and the creators' feeling of personal satisfaction. The results are sometimes fascinating, in their total alienation from the conventions and techniques of mainstream filmmaking, and after all, one rarely sees anything whose primary motivation is passion, here in the late stages of capitalism. But, all this talk about what goes on behind the camera points to a discrepancy in how we consume different kinds of production. The typical mode of consumption is internal to the movie: What happens in it? Do you relate to the characters? Are you able to suspend your disbelief, to experience the story on a vicarious level? One hardly needs to come up with examples of films that invite this style of viewing. Alternatively, we can experience the movie as a record of a time and place in which real people defied conventions and sometimes broke laws in order to produce a work of art. SOV production is usually viewed through this lens, where the primary interest is not the illusory content, but the filmmakers' sheer determination to create. We find some overlap in movies like EVIL DEAD, which simultaneously presents a terrifying narrative, and evidence of what a truly driven team can create without the aid of a studio, or any real money to speak of. See also, Larry Cohen's New York City-based horror films, in which a compelling drama with great acting can exist side by side with phony but beautiful effects, and exciting stories of stolen footage that would be dangerous or impossible to attempt today. I'm thinking about these different modes of consumption now because I just watched SPOOKIES, a legitimately cursed-seeming film whose harrowing production history has superseded whatever people think about what it shows on the screen. The lovingly composed blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome includes a feature-length documentary that attempts to explain the making of the film--which is accompanied by its own feature length commentary track by documentarists Michael Gingold and Glen Baisley. The very existence of this artifact suggests a lot about the nature of this movie, in and of itself. The truth behind its existence is as funny as it is tragic.

I'm not going to do a whole breakdown of the tortured origins of SPOOKIES, which is much better told by the aforementioned documentary. To summarize: Once upon a time in the mid 1980s, filmmakers Brendan Faulkner, Thomas Doran and Frank Farel conspired to make a fun, flamboyant rubber monsterpiece called TWISTED SOULS. It was wild, ridiculous, and transparently fake-looking, but it was loved by its hard-working creators; as a viewer, that soulful sense of joy can rescue many a "bad" movie from its various foibles. Then, inevitably, sleazoid producer Michael Lee stepped in--a man who thought you could cut random frames out of the middle of scenes to improve a movie's pace--and ruined it with extreme prejudice. Carefully crafted special effects sequences were cut, relatively functional scenes were re-edited into oblivion, and the seeds of hatred were sown between the filmmakers and the producer. Ultimately, everyone who once cared for TWISTED SOULS was forced to abandon ship, and first time director Eugenie Joseph stepped in to help mutilate the picture beyond all recognition. Thus SPOOKIES was born, a mangled, unloved mutation that would curse many of its original parents to unemployability. For the audience, it is intriguingly insane, often insulting, and hard to tear your eyes off of--but in spite of whatever actually wound up on the screen, it's impossible to forget its horrifying origin story as it unspools.

As far as what's on the screen goes: A group of "friends", including a middle-aged businessman and his wife, a vinyl-clad punk rock bully and his moll, two new wave-y in-betweeners, and...a guy with a hand puppet are somehow all leaving the same party, and all ready to break into a vacant funeral home for their afterparty. Well, this happens after a 13 year old runaway inexplicably wanders in to a "birthday party" in there, that looks like it was thrown for him by Pennywise, and he has the nerve to act surprised when he is attacked by a severed head and a piratey-looking cat-man who straight up purrs and meows throughout the picture. Anyway, separately of that, which is unrelated to anything, the island of misfit friends finds a nearly unrecognizable "ouija board" in the old dark house. Actually this thing is kind of fun-looking, having been made by one of the fun-havers on the production before the day that fun died, and I wonder if anyone has considered trying to make a real board game out of it...but I digress. Naturally, the board unleashes evil forces, including a zombie uprising in the cemetery outside, a plague of Ghoulie-like ankle-biters, an evil asian spider-lady (accompanied by kyoto flutes), muck-men that fart prodigiously until they melt in a puddle of wine (?), and uh...I know I'm forgetting stuff. One of the reasons I'm forgetting is because of this whole side story about a tuxedo-wearing vampire in the basement (or somewhere?) who has entrapped a beautiful young bride by cursing her with immortality. That part is a little confusing, not only because it doesn't intersect with the rest of the movie, but because sometimes it seems contemporary--as the bride struggles to survive the zombie plague--and sometimes it seems like a flashback, as our heroes find what looks like the mummified corpse of the dracula guy, complete with his signet ring. So, I don't know what to tell you really. Those are just some of the things that happen in the movie.

Some people like this a lot, and have supported its ascendance to cult status, which is a huge relief when you know what everyone went through to make this movie, only to have it ripped away from them and used against them. I found SPOOKIES a little hard to take, for all the reasons that the cast and crew express in the documentary. It holds a certain amount of visual fascination, whatever you think of it; something of its original creativity remains evident in the movie's colorful, exaggerated look, and its steady parade of unconvincing but inventive creature effects. But then, you have to deal with the farting muck-men. What was once a scene of terror starring REGULAR muck-men, that sounded incredibly laborious to pull off, became a scene of confusing "comedy" when producer Michael Lee insisted that the creatures be accompanied by a barrage of scatalogical noises. Apparently this was Lee's dream come true, as a guy who insisted everyone pull his finger all the time, and who once tried to call the movie "BOWEL ERUPTOR". But, of all the deformations SPOOKIES endured, the fart sounds dealt a mortal injury to the filmmakers' feelings, and even without knowing that, it's hard to enjoy yourself while that's happening.

Actually, all the farts forced me to ask myself: Is this...a comedy? Like for real, as its main thing? As the movie slogged on, I had to decide that it wasn't, but I was distracted by the notion for around 40 minutes. I was only released from this nagging suspicion when the bride makes her long marathon run through throngs of slavering zombies who swarm her, grope her, and tear off her clothes, before she narrowly escapes to an even worse fate. The lengthy scene is strangely gripping, and sleazy for a movie that sometimes feels like low rent children's entertainment. Part of the sequence’s success lies in its simplicity; it is unburdened by the convoluted complications of the rest of the movie, whose esoteric parts never fall together, so it seems to take on a sustained, intensifying focus. The action itself is unnerving, as the delicate and frankly gorgeous Maria Pechuka is molested and stripped nearly-bare by her undead bachelors, running from one drooling mob to another as the horde nearly engulfs her time and again. Actually, it feels a lot like a certain genre of SOV production in which, for the right price, any old creepy nerd can pay a small crew-for-hire to tape a version of his private fantasy, whether it's women being consumed by slime, or women being consumed by quicksand, or...generally, women being consumed by something. I wish I could describe this form of production in more specific or official terms, because I genuinely think it's wonderful that people do this. Anyway, Pechuka's interminable zombie run feels a little like that, and a little like a grim italian gutmuncher, and a little like an actual nightmare. Perhaps it only stands out against its dubious surroundings, but I kind of love it--and I'm happy to love it, because apparently the late Ms. Pechuka truly loved making SPOOKIES, and wanted other people to love it, too.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable place where I land with this movie. On the one hand...I think it's bad. It's so incoherent, and so insists on its impoverished form of comedy, that it's hard to be as charmed by it as I am by plenty of FX-heavy, no-budget oddities. Perhaps the lingering odor of misery drowns out the sweet joy that the crew once felt in the early days of creation--which is still evident, somehow, in its zany special effects, created by the likes of Gabe Bartalos and other folks whose work you definitely already know and love. But I feel ambivalent, about all of this. On the one hand, I can be a snob, and shit on people for failing to make a movie that meets conventional standards of success. On the other hand, I can be a DIFFERENT kind of snob--a more voyeuristic or even sadistic one--and celebrate the painful failures that produced a movie that is most interesting for its tormented history and its amusing ineptitude. I'm not really sure where I would prefer to settle with SPOOKIES, and movies like it. (As if anything is really "like" SPOOKIES) With all that said, I was left with one soothing thought by castmember Anthony Valbiro in the documentary. At some point, he tells us how ROSEMARY'S BABY is his personal cinematic comfort food; he can put it on at night, after an exhausting day, and drift to sleep, enveloped in its warm, glowing aura. He then says that he hopes there are people out there for whom his movie serves that same purpose, that some of us can have our "milk and cookies moment" with SPOOKIES. Honestly, I choke up just thinking about that.

#blogtober #2020 #spookies #horror #supernatural #vampire #zombie #creature feature #old dark house #cursed film #thomas doran #frank farel #eugenie joseph #michael lee #vipco #twisted souls #brendan faulkner #maria pechuka

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itsbeaconhillsbaby · 3 years

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CHERRY: a review that no-one wanted but I had feelings 💕✨

I tried to be really calm in this review and not get too ✨ passionate ✨ Not that it matters, but I have a film degree and hope I managed to bring forth some insight into elements of the film but also I know nothing lol please enjoy my 1k ramble xo

Rating: 8.5 / 10

My whole experience to this film prior to it’s release was a rollercoaster. There was the initial excitement of such a challenging and demanding role for Tom, which was always going to be something I was going to be eager for – but I must admit, reading the critics reviews of the film mixed with Tom speaking so highly of it and interviews alike caused me a lot of confliction and my excitement turned to nerves knowing how much the cast and crew alike felt personally connected to this film.

Needless to say, I was completely unprepared for the film that followed.

Cherry is a visual experience. Whilst initially curious to see how the chapters of Cherry’s life would work on screen, wondering if they would they feel either disconnected or disjointed from one another, I was so surprised at how seamlessly they managed to merge into each other. Personally, it was never too much of one thing and not enough of another – each chapter illustrated the trauma constantly added to Cherry’s life and I understood why they were highlighted in the ways that they were.

Whilst I agree not all the stylistic elements were necessarily needed, I didn’t think it damaged the film in any way having them in there. I just don’t think it impacted or heightened it in anyway either. The use of the 4th wall and its constant breakage as a form of narration, I thought, was used brilliantly – it made sense, it added further life and character from Cherry that dispersed him from being this idea of ‘could be anyone’ and made him more of an individualised character which I think is important in a film which is trying to express the idea that Cherry could be anybody, as it still gives you someone to hold onto throughout.

Also, I have to talk about the use of the cinematography within this film. Newton Thomas Sigel does an absolutely incredible job with how this film looks, especially considering there are six different cinematic styles to get right. From the quieter shots that really struck me, such as the church shot – to a lot of the bigger landscaped scenes, I really found myself being mesmerised by the camera work and generalised look of the film in itself, from lighting, filtration, angles, lenses – it was beautifully done, and excelled in its own storytelling.

What I will say, is without Tom and Ciara I don’t think I personally could’ve rated this film the score that it’s been given. I firmly believe they carry a lot of the weight, and of course sell it too.

I have seen many critic responses, some even highlighting that they simply couldn’t see past the ‘Peter Parker’ image – my response to that would be if you’re looking for Spiderman then all you will see is Spiderman. Not because of Tom’s performance, but because that is what you want to see. I think Cherry is miles away from Peter Parker, and whilst even I was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to shake that image, what he manages to do in this film is frankly, for me, indicative of what kind of potential he truly can reach regarding his versatility in further roles. You can see the levels in which Tom pushes this character to his very limits – shedding skin in every chapter to eventually reveal such raw brokenness. There were moments that truly took my breath away, and I can understand why there would be some Oscar buzz surrounding this particular performance and I can only hope that he gets further roles that allow him to play such conflicting, raw and real characters in the future.

Ciara is also an absolute force to be reckoned with in this film. There was one thing pulling her back from truly reaching the peak of her character, which I did see a couple of glimpses of, specifically when her character turns to addiction herself. However, the underdevelopment of Emily and her storyline as a standalone aspect to this film stopped her fullest potential being reached, which is frustrating in a film that is supposed to have a focus on addiction and how life consuming it can be for anyone in any circumstance. There were too many times where Emily became an extension of Cherry instead of her own person, which fell flat for me – especially in a script written by women. But by all means, Ciara’s performance was brilliant and I truly felt the pain for the character when it was given – I just wish I could’ve seen more of her. The chemistry between Cherry and Emily, ergo Tom and Ciara were also 10/10 – a little more push and pull here and there would’ve been preferable (but this is definitely more of a director’s element than on Tom and Ciara themselves, with the material in front of them – I genuinely think that they did a phenomenal job) but altogether, some extraordinary performances, perhaps some of my favourite in cinema.

I could speak so much more on this film (and probably will) and would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on it. Also, I did not read the book prior to watching the film – but I would like to say that I’ve heard a lot of people saying they have issues with the adaptation, but please remember that adaptation is always difficult to get right. Unless it is a biopic or biographical film, which I always think should be as accurate as possible. I’m always intrigued to see what resonates with screenwriters and what aspects of the novel they want to take inspiration from the most.

Please remember that filmmaking is art. And art is entirely subjective ❤️

#tom holland #ciara bravo #cherry #film review #russo brothers #mcu actors #apple tv #please someone talk to me about this film #I’ve seen so many of my film bros hating on it and I really want to understand why they despise it #because I REALLY didn’t get that vibe #do I think it’s just because it’s partially Tom Holland and they don’t like that...maybe #which is shit #his performance really wowed me #we won't talk about the ageing ending n moustache choice or the accent breakage bc I refuse to see it hunnies

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sebkijk · 3 years

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Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021) - Movie Review | SebKijk

This movie review was originally published on: https://sebkijk.nl.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is finally here. I can joyfully say that this movie has been well worth the wait. This movie is truly amazing. Not only is this my favorite DC Comics movie since The Dark Knight, but it is also one of my favorite superhero movies of all time. I’m just going to say it. Zack Snyder’s Justice League is also one of my favorite movies of all time. It is currently my number one movie of 2021. I have to limit my enthusiasm so I don’t just type in capital letters full of joy, but nonetheless, I’m going to fervently tell you why this movie is simply epic. My thanks to Warner Home Video and Day One MPM for their cooperation and screener copy of the film.

Synopsis Zack Snyder’s Justice League

In Zack Snyder’s Justice League, we see how Bruce Wayne is determined to make sure that Superman’s ultimate self-sacrifice was not futile. That’s why he teams up with Diana Prince. Together they try to form a team of meta-humans that can protect the world from an upcoming threat of catastrophic proportions. The task proves tougher than imagined for Bruce, as each member must deal with their own demons before they can form an unparalleled team of heroes together. United, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash may not be up to the task of saving the planet from the cruel plans of Steppenwolf, DeSaad and Darkseid.

Snyder’s Vision

I want to take a moment to talk about the making of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. This film is the director’s cut of the 2017 American superhero film Justice League. It’s directed by Zack Snyder – duh! The film reflects the original and true vision of director Zack Snyder. Zack Snyder outlined his visionary foundation for the DC Extended Universe with his films Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice(2016). Snyder’s original plan was to create a five-film arc. The films Man of Steel and BvS were to be succeeded by a Justice League trilogy. Snyder’s original vision was to show the dark and epic mythological side of superheroes.

This did not please everyone – including myself. I am not exactly a fan of Man of Steel, but I could appreciate BvS. However, I have only seen the theatrical version of this movie and not the Ultimate Cut. This ultimate version is also, according to many, the better version. After seeing Zack Snyder’s Justice League, I have also been itching to see this Ultimate Cut. Batman v Superman was mainly poorly received due to its dark tone, slow pace and lack of humor. Distributor Warner Bros. reconsidered changing the tone of the upcoming DCEU films, including the Justice League film which at the time was a month away from shooting.

Reshoots & other Difficulties

The shooting of Justice League began in April 2016 and concluded in December of that year. Months later, multiple versions of Snyder’s Justice League were shown to Warner Bros. executives. These executives considered these versions to be unwatchable. For this reason, Warner Bros. hired director Joss Whedon. Whedon had worked on superhero movies before. For example, he is the director of the Marvel Studios films The Avengers (2012) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). He was hired to rewrite the script and help with extensive reshoots. CEO Kevin Tsujihara determined that Justice league should not exceed two hours in length, and Warner Bros. also decided not to push the release date. This made it more difficult for the filmmakers to finish the film properly. Zack Snyder was expected to film the scenes that Whedon rewrote.

They worked together until Zack Snyder’s daughter Autumn killed herself in 2017. Zack Snyder continued working on Justice League for two more months to distract himself, but finally stepped down in May. His wife – and producer of the film – Deborah Snyderalso left the project. Whedon took full control of the production, although Snyder retained directorial control. It is estimated that Whedon’s version used about 10% of the footage Snyder shot. Composer Tom Holkenborg was also replaced by Danny Elfmanmidway through post-production. The scenes Whedon wrote or reshot for the theatrical release had a different tone and more humor. In addition, the level of violence was reduced in Snyder’s darker direction.

#ReleasetheSnyderCut

More than 90 minutes of Snyder’s footage was removed, but the result still remained the basis of the story. Although the initial cut was poorly received by test audiences, the early screening of Whedon’s cut scored as high as the first Wonder Woman film. For this reason, Warner Bros. decided to go ahead with it. Justice League was released in theaters in November 2017. Many critics and fans were disappointed. The film was described as one in which the work of two different directors – with competing visions – totally failed to come together. Warner Bros. lost about $60 million with this film, according to Deadline Hollywood. Fans rebelled against this version of the Justice League film and created an online petition to see Zack Snyder’s vision of the film.

The movement to see the Snyder Cut continued to grow tremendously on social media under the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut. On May 20, 2020, Zack Snyder announced that his version of Justice League would be released on HBO Max in 2021. Fans around the world reacted to this news with enormous happiness. Additional scenes were shot in October 2020 that featured cast members such as Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill and Ray Fisher. In January 2021, it was announced that Snyder’s version of the film was completely finished. So this film has a long history, but how glad I am that this film still came out.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is DC’s Crowing Achievement

Zack Snyder’s Justice League feels like an epic comic book movie adaptation that evokes profound emotions. The film may be longer than 4 hours, but the strong quality makes it feel even too short. Snyder put his full vision and passion into his version of Justice League. The film is full of scenes that you’ll have not seen before. These are not only incredible action or mythological scenes, but also storylines where more empathy is generated for the characters. All the main and supporting characters are more strongly underpinned with backstories and motives in this film. Even a weak villain like Steppenwolf is much better fleshed out in Zack Snyder’s version of Justice League. As a viewer, I almost couldn’t believe it, but Steppenwolf genuinely came across as a danger to the heroes. In the 2017 Justice League film he looks and acts like a joke.

The villain’s design may be slightly over-the-top, but in terms of visual effects and CGI, it is certainly as good as the Marvel villain Thanos. Zack Snyder’s Justice League feels like DC’s epic. This is their answer to franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universeand The Lord of the Rings. Zack Snyder’s Justice League is grandiose, spectacular and exceptionally deep. For example, the character elaborations are so good that as a viewer you start to care about fairly weird DC characters like Cyborg and Aquaman. Your empathy is not only created by the strongly written story and great acting. The camera work and editing also provide many symbolic shots that develop the characters.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the Better Version

Take for example shots where Cyborg is looking out of a broken window. This symbolizes the fact that this is a broken character with a damaged view of the world. Each superhero gets a chance to steal the show, in that each character is much more fun and better than the characters in Whedon’s version. The Snyder Cut is simply a dream come true. Not only for Snyder, but also for the fans. For those who weren’t already aware; in my opinion, Zack Snyder’s version of Justice League is way better than the 2017 version. The film may be very long (and, according to some, slow), but this does not take away from the fact that the added material has a purpose. It doesn’t just consist of extra fan-service scenes.

These new additions serve a purpose and do not feel like a weakening of the material. On the contrary – it strengthens the entire film and its supporting characters. In Joss Whedon’s version, the superheroes only come together because it’s a superhero movie. In Zack Snyder’s version, the choices and motives are so much better substantiated. As a viewer, you believe that these characters must come together to stop the enemies. This is due to the sincerity of the new scenes. You get to see how these characters must learn to appreciate and understand each other. You get to see how they must learn to function as one team. According to some critics, the story still does not feel earned. The reasoning behind these criticisms rests mainly on the idea that all the characters should have been worked out in solo films first.

Unnecessary Criticism and Minor Flaws

While I can appreciate the idea of previous solo films, I personally think this is bad criticism. It is not based on what the end product is, but on what the end product should have been according to the reviewer. In my opinion, this is not how (film) criticism should work, even though I sometimes understand the urge to review like this. Of course, every reviewer is free to write however they want. The problem is that these critics allow their written opinion to be presented as the truth, when in fact it is their personal opinion. Still, I must say that I (also) have some minor problems with Zack Snyder’s Justice League. For example, there is an overuse of slow-motion scenes in the first and last hour of the film. This can get quite irritating at certain points, but that’s a personal taste issue.

In addition, the CGI and special effects don’t look quite finished at some points. For me, these are the only two minor points that I would like to criticize. Other than that, I for one thoroughly enjoyed Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Also, the work of composer JunkieXL is simply brilliant. It brings together musical themes from different films and characters perfectly. The acting by the entire cast is top notch. In this movie I particularly enjoyed Ray Fisher, Ezra Miller and Ben Affleck. The powers of the superheroes are also used to their full creative potential. This makes for spectacular scenes full of action and suspense. After watching Zack Snyder’s Justice League, I have a huge desire to re-watch Man of Steel and BvS. It has also created desire where I hope Zack Snyder gets to continue and finish his vision for this franchise.

Conclusion

Normally I write an extensive conclusion, but I only want to say two things briefly now. My thanks to Zack Snyder. Not only for creating a top-notch movie, but also for continuing your original vision. And also I hope Zack Snyder can make his two other Justice League movies. In short – #RestoreTheSnyderVerse.

★★★★★

#zack snyder #justice league #snyderverse #deborah snyder #snyder cut #zack snyders justice league #justice league 2021 #sebkijk

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gayleisabao · 4 years

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Nanay Lilia: The Star That Remains In The Dark

Admit it or not, with the world we revolve around in today, being remembered is one of the things that we give importance to as humans before we face the end, the afterlife, or death. We do our best to leave a mark on this world no matter how big or small it is, as long as at least one person still thinks of us while we’re inside the casket or crossing the path to where our spirit is destined to be. Yes, we may not all be focusing on the idea of making our names be remembered as centuries and generations pass by, but the thought of being known for what you were or what you did here on earth for the entirety of your life, comes with a grudge that most of us blindly take care of.

This is something that I see as a concept that is widely common for people who are part of the creative industry, especially for the branch of film. There’s this sense of making a legacy out of your career and from the many stories that have been revived by the talents of writers and directors, to the characters and figures portrayed by the actors, everyone has a role in treasuring what once was and is to be. In fact, the process of it can be reflected in how we look up at the horizon each night.

We often have those moments where we gaze through our windows and look for the sight of the moon, surrounded by the ocean of stars that bring light to the beauty of the night sky. For me, this is how I look at films, or at least perceive how each one is made and brought to life through the eyes and the minds of producers and directors. With how big the industry has become so far, so much talent and creativity revolves around it that recognition is something that is commonly looked out for by the people who are behind each piece. Recognition that serves as validity that a talent or creator has made it in the industry, especially with film.

In the topic of recognition, I would like to talk about a film that we have watched for our film class this past week which is Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay, which is directed by none other than Antoinette Jadaone. It is a mockumentary revolving the everyday life of the very iconic Lilia Cuntapay, which some or most may not know her by name, but can definitely recognize her just by seeing her unique appearance. She is commonly known for her roles in Filipino horror movies wherein she portrays characters like a witch, an aswang, or other paranormal beings written and told by filmmakers and writers alike. And personally, when I first learned about her, I also didn’t know her by name, I only grew up watching her on horror films that my family used to watch and remembered how terrified I was of old ladies with long hair because of her. She was what I envisioned a witch would look like in real life, the perfect imagery of a person that holds so many grim and mysteries. And for Peque Gallaga, a well-known film director who was asked about Lilia Cantupay in an interview, this is also what he thought of as he first saw and met Cantupay during the set of his film Shake, Rattle, and Roll II back in the 90’s.

With that in mind, now getting a chance to watch a film about Lilia Cuntapay again, at first I had my expectations that it could be a horror film or maybe a look as to how actresses like her work in the film industry especially with specifications and characteristics that her roles are limited to. But as the film opens up to people getting questioned if they are familiar with Lilia Cuntapay, including clips of people from the industry getting interviewed about the actress, I immediately assumed that it was a documentary film given that I watched it without knowing anything about the film's background. The setup and the way the story was being portrayed in the first few minutes of the film is similar as to how we usually get to see documentaries, it consists of multiple parts where we get to know more about the subject in a collection of different views of people involved with the main character. That’s why as the scene of Lilia rolled in, where she is in the middle of a pulpit in a mock award show surrounded by valuables that were curated from her past films, I readily got curious as to how the film was going to progress.

The way the film was captured by director Antoinette Jadaone really shows the rawness of how Lilia’s life was behind scenes. It’s not what most people would normally imagine the life of someone who is very iconic in the industry would be, because we see that despite her landing big time jobs in the past and how she is a veteran in her genre, the longevity of her fame doesn’t guarantee the convenience of her everyday life. As it continues to progress, we slowly see that even though she has been included in a lot of big time selling horror films, she doesn’t get recognized as much as she is supposed to. Here the film slowly hints that it is a mockumentary that depicts the inner struggle that actors and actresses face in their field caused by “typecasting”. Wherein despite how good you are in your craft, if you’re associated or tagged to specific types of roles, there is still a high chance that producers and directors can decline you. They can still have the ability to change the way they treat you as a human being from your fame, unlike the treatment that most normally get when they’re seen by their fans or supporters.

Going back to the way as to how I see the film industry and while progressing through the story of Lilia’s character, I realized that we were made to believe that this is what her life actually is, and somehow that idea contributes largely to how we feel as we watch the film.There are scenes where we laugh out of the comedic elements that give light to her positivity despite her struggles and sacrifices for her passion, and then later on we feel pity for her because we see that in her old age and the treatment given to her, it's not fair. A roller coaster of emotions that slowly streams us to the flow of the film's message and prepares us for the mind-boggling ending. That’s something that I truly admired the film for, its consistent patterns of making its audiences feel the same way Lilia feels in the film. That feeling of somehow we could all relate to her as she works her best but ends up not being credited for the contribution she brings just because she’s not as known as the others in the industry.

To be honest, each scene for me was well thought out, given that the progression of the film leads up to an ending that still reaches the goal that was set in the beginning of the film, but it's modified into something that turns out to be more valuable than what we were made to believe was the most of what is offered in the plot of the story. It truly gave light to the potential of actors and also directors out there that are being overshadowed by those that are more popularized. It’s the genuinity of the film that really gets me giddy about it, it's not sugar coated like other works wherein there are unrealistic elements that mislead us to thinking that it's possibly impossible to happen to ordinary people like us. It’s relatable in a sense where we actually get morals and motivation out of it, that’s why I see the storytelling of it to be a perfect example of what I imagine the film industry to be as I have mentioned earlier. It’s the night sky where there’s a moon that is in the middle of an ocean of stars that are sometimes covered by clouds causing their light to not be seen, but despite this and without them, the universe would be in complete darkness without these stars. That’s why whether they are seen or not, recognized or ignored, their value to the industry remains the same and that’s what keeps them going to shine their light.

Overall, I would definitely say that Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay is definitely a must watch. It gives light to Lilia Cuntapay as an actress, she gives light despite the void that she is in when is not recognized for her contribution, and despite her being stuck in that darkness, she still shines through. The way she guides you to the storytelling of the film will lead you to interact and solve the questions that puzzle you in the beginning, very effective storytelling and gives us a clearer view of how the film industry and the entertainment industry as a whole is in reality that will build your appreciation and respect for filmmakers and actors out there.

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noconcernofyours · 4 years

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Pinning Down My Kind of Movie

Warning: Wanky, self-indulgent ramblings about Hollywood auteurs to follow

A couple of days ago, I sat down with my housemate to watch Miami Vice (2006) directed by Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral) and starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. Since we moved into our place, my housemate has gradually been exposed to my taste in movies, and the other day, sat in front of a strung-out Colin Farrell ordering mojitos to ‘Numb/Encore’ during an undercover sting, he finally confronted me with a crisis-inducing statement: “You know, I can’t figure out what your kind of movie is.”

If I am to be totally honest, it doesn’t take much to send me into an existential tailspin, but this observation got me thinking enough to want to sit down and write about it, so here we are. My name’s Daniel and I love movies! When I was a teenager, I was certain I wanted to be a film critic, so I started writing in earnest. The problem was I wasn’t that well rounded as a viewer. I confined myself to the world of comic book movies and Disney animation. I turned my nose up at pretty much everything else before realising that I didn’t actually know much or have much to offer about film. Instead, I turned to music criticism because that’s where my knowledge base is.

That being said, I still loved movies, and as the years have gone on, I have been rapidly expanding my film knowledge and broadened my horizons extensively. I got called a “film buff” for the first time recently, which really shocked me. I still don’t feel well-watched enough, or knowledgeable enough to fit a moniker like that. Maybe it’s imposter syndrome, but I really feel like I have a way to go yet.

My Letterboxd bio includes the phrase “admirer of film nerds”, and I think that admiration informs the entire way I look at the world of film. I read a lot of reviews and listen to a lot of podcasts by smart, unpretentious film obsessives like David Sims, Griffin Newman, Katey Rich, Karen Han and Bilge Ebiri, but that same admiration also informs the kind of films I enjoy the most. In confronting the statement from my housemate, I realised that while there are some genres I gravitate to more than others, my taste in movies is largely defined by the extent to which I can pick up on a single authorial voice driving the film. A director, writer, actor, composer or cinematographer who has a real, obsessive love for their craft whose influence and personality can be felt in every layer of a film’s construction. Franchises are a different beast, but it’s usually the entries in a franchise that feel like passion projects for individual filmmakers that I love the most, which is why Iron Man 3 is by far my favourite Marvel movie.

Over the last few months I’ve started building a fairly extensive Blu-Ray collection. I love physical media because I like to have a tangible representation of the art I love, but it also allows me to physically organise my thoughts about film rather than moving things around on a spreadsheet or in my head. It has also had an effect on how I watch films. Spending money on a film makes me feel more obligated to watch it through to the end in one sitting, to not be on my phone at the same time and to pay closer attention. It’s also made my approach to picking the films I watch more considered. I’ve been hunting down the films I haven’t seen by directors I love, fuelled by newfound completionism, and I’ve been subconsciously prioritising this kind of auteur-driven mindset in a way that has revealed, over time, who my favourite filmmakers are.

So, with that in mind, let’s transform this meandering, self-indulgent think piece into a meandering, self-indulgent listicle. Here are the filmmakers that have changed the way I watch movies:

Christopher Nolan

I know this is a bit of a film bro cliché, but I promise I’m not one of those film school douchebags who’s convinced they’re going to be the next great big budget auteur. Like a lot of other people my age, I discovered Christopher Nolan through the batman movies. I was taken to see The Dark Knight by my parents when I was 10 years old, not having seen Batman Begins, and it blew my mind. For years after that, I was one of those arseholes who had a terrible Joker impression that I whipped out at parties, until I became aware of the cliché and never did it again.

In the years since I’ve watched all of his other movies and gained a new love of Interstellar and The Prestige – movies that taught me a lot about the authorial voice and interweaving a central theme into every element of a film. I also learned that just because I find it annoying when the same tropes turn up in every Quentin Tarantino movie, recurring tropes throughout a filmmaker’s catalogue aren’t universally a bad thing.

The Coen Brothers

Representation is important. The tough thing about watching films from an auteur-driven perspective is that so many of the most important filmmakers in Hollywood are approaching their films from a white, Christian, male perspective. Scorsese is a particularly difficult director for me to appreciate because so many of his films are overtly informed by his Christianity. My Jewish identity is the most significant aspect of my identity, so naturally I’m always looking for films made from a Jewish perspective, overt or otherwise.

Whilst the Coen brothers don’t always make movies about explicitly Jewish characters or subject matters, their Jewishness always comes out in their writing, particularly in the totally undidactic way they approach the subject of faith in almost every film they’ve made. Their approach to God, fate, spirituality and religion is never one of moralising certainty, but rather a questioning one, which is a fundamental aspect of Jewish existence. I feel represented on multiple levels in the films of the Coen brothers, particularly in Inside Llewyn Davis which is my favourite film of the last decade, in ways that other directors could never manage. For the same reasons I will forever be excited about the potential of the Safdie brothers.

Stephen Spielberg

Whilst the Jewishness of Stephen Spielberg is a major attraction for me (Catch Me If You Can, his moody Christmas movie, comes across as weirdly Jewish to me), the thing that has solidified the guy as one of my favourite filmmakers is his approach to telling true stories. Unlike the Coen brothers, it’s Spielberg’s self-assuredness and didacticism that fuels my love of his work. His spate of recent, politically switched-on, historical dramas (Lincoln, Bridge of Spies and The Post) are all incredible achievements in effectively giving quiet dramas about people talking in rooms the tension and stakes of great action movies.

It’s the obvious thing to say at this point that Spielberg is one of the few genuine masters of the cinematic language, but while most will point to his massive, populist movies of the 80s and 90s as the definitive examples of that, I would point to his spottier late career with its moralising and earnestness as where his most exhilarating work lies.

Michael Mann

I like that Michael Mann is uncompromising. He makes films which, based on premise and star power, should be commercial knockouts, but they almost never are. He has an incredibly clear sense of self, and like Nolan has a lot of frequently recurring tropes in his films. Michael Mann makes films about Men Making Tough Choices™. He builds detailed, intensely researched worlds and he loves crime!

There’s something special when a filmmaker can tread the same ground over and over again and never convey the same central message twice. Nearly all of Mann’s movies are gritty, neo-noir thrillers with an obsessive attention to detail, but all of them deal with a totally distinct existential question which runs through every element of the film, from meta casting to set design, to music, to Mann’s pioneering use of digital photography. I’m just obsessed!

Stephen Soderbergh

Soderbergh is a hill that I’m going to be climbing for quite some time, I think. This is a guy who is relentlessly prolific, taking on a ridiculous number of roles on set himself, and working so fast that he often churns out multiple films in a year. With limited funds and a determination to watch movies legally, my progress through Soderbergh’s filmography has been slow, but I’ve loved every one I’ve watched so far.

As much as I love the guy’s mastery of the heist movie, and the way he slips those story telling devices into a lot of his non-heist stories, I think what really gets me about Soderbergh is the way his filmmaking style always seems to feel tooled towards portraying his characters with as much empathy as possible. Often his films are about people working or learning to empower themselves and coming to terms with their own identities. Anyway, go watch Out of Sight! It’s a damn masterpiece!

Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow’s career is full of insane ups and downs, but as far as I’m concerned, despite the difficulties she’s had getting her movies made and seen, she has three unqualified masterworks: Point Break, Strange Days and The Hurt Locker. On this list of directors, Bigelow has perhaps the most stylistically varied body of work, but her best work, much like that of other directors that I find myself drawn to, is largely concerned with obsession. Her characters are deeply flawed, but unwaveringly driven. What I love is that despite her drastic genre change from pulpy action thriller to hyper-realistic docudrama, she’s managed to hold on to that fascination with obsession, and an acute, outsider’s understanding of masculinity and its fragility.

Kathryn Bigelow has had to adapt to keep working, but because of that, she’s managed to develop a voice and a personality that is versatile enough to withstand her career shifts, but strong enough that it hasn’t been chipped away at by the difficulties she’s faced as a woman in Hollywood.

So, what was the point of all this?

Honestly, there wasn’t one. This was a piece of self-indulgence that allowed me to navigate an idea over which I was obsessing for a little while. That being said, I think if I had read something along these lines a few years ago, I would have delved into the world of director-focused movie watching far sooner. It’s hard to quickly and easily define the role of a director in contemporary film, particularly due to the ever growing influence of studios, but in the world in which the above filmmakers operate, the director has final say over all the creative decisions involved in putting together a movie. For me, the most exciting films are the ones that clearly and effectively communicate a single creative voice. Sue me, I love auteurs.

#miami vice #auteurs #christopher nolan #the prestige #the coen brothers #inside llewyn davis #stephen spielberg #the post #michael mann #collateral #steven soderbergh #out of sight #kathryn bigelow #the hurt locker #filmmakers #Jewish film #wanky bullshit

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chiseler · 5 years

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The Madness of Ken Russell

Critical thinking in Britain has always taken the view that Ken Russell was a wild, ill-disciplined talent who ultimately went artistically mad: this was also the view in the film industry. The only major disagreement was about when he went from being merely excessive to being balls-out crazy: different parties chose different tipping points.

(WAIT! WHO CARES ABOUT CRITICS?)

(Bear with me: in Russell’s case, the critical consensus serves as a valuable reverse barometer.)

Russell, a suburban boy, former merchant seaman and Catholic convert, made a few brilliant short films with his wife and fellow genius, costume designer Shirley Russell, before landing a job at the BBC’s flagship arts program, Monitor. His stint here taught him to fight, and placed him under the stern patronage of producer Huw Weldon, probably the only authority figure he ever respected. Many good fights were enjoyed. When Russell joined the program, there was an absolute ban on dramatization and re-enactment: the most he was allowed was to show a composer’s hands at the piano. By the time he finished up on the show, he’d managed to twist it out of shape to the point where he’d been allowed to make complete dramatic works in the guise of documentary. These TV plays are highly cinematic, kinetic and bold: like Kubrick, Russell had a love of both stark symmetry and dynamic movement. Control and its opposite.

Russell found actors he liked, including Oliver Reed, with whom he enjoyed a strange kinship: both were heavy drinkers, both affected a casual attitude to their work, though Russell was never ashamed to call himself an artist. Ollie became the John Wayne to Russell’s Ford (in a roiling, nightmare vision of classical cinema).

The point when Russell moved out of TV is the first moment his detractors choose to mark his decline into self-indulgent craziness. He made a modest, eccentric comedy, French Dressing (with mounds of inflatable girls piled up like Holocaust victims) and a wild, idiosyncratic spy movie, The Billion Dollar Brain, a Russophile anti-Bond movie full of flip humor and Eisenstein homages. Critics saw these films as work-for-hire, as perhaps they were, and largely discount them. They are quite brilliant.

Women in Love is counted by others as the last pre-madness film, and its relative sanity can be attributed to the control exerted by its writer-producer Larry Kramer. Russell’s excesses are held in check, it is argued, and the tension between its creators was productive. It’s a very good film, but I find it too sedate in places, though the vivid color and Shirley Russell’s bold designs, and some scenes of genuine wildness and invention stave off actual boredom.

The Music Lovers, his dream project, expanding the TV composer film to the big screen and color, is where a real case for craziness begins to be made: the choice to explore Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality now seems mature rather than lurid, but Ken is undeniably pushing the biopic into unfamiliar terrain: fantasies of decapitation by cannon-shot, a filthy madhouse, a demented honeymoon on a train rocking like the Starship Enterprise, complete with crotch shots. Maybe even worse, from the critics’ viewpoint, Russell, who had directed one TV commercial before walking away from that business in disgust, co-opted the visual language of the shampoo commercial to depict the images conjured by the composer’s music. Russell was in love with romanticism but saw through it too. Ironically, the filmmaker constantly castigated for unsubtlety injected an irony into the film that critics missed, taking the soppiness at face value and not seeing how the concealed satire blended perfectly with the overt caricature and phantasmagoric visions.

Still, the subject was respectable, but with The Devils, Russell managed a film maudit that took decades to be reappraised, and earned him criticism of a uniquely vociferous sort, admittedly in keeping with the hysteria of the film itself. An account – or channelling – of a 16th Century witchcraft trial in France, the movie didn’t so much push as cremate the envelope as far as sex, violence and blasphemy were concerned: Russell, who had converted to Catholicism in his youth, lost his faith while making this one, converting to an animist worship of the Lake District, a religion of his own devising. Well, he did have a substantial ego.

Russell was upsetting: apart from the torture, abuse and madness, the film threw in discordant tonal shifts, creative anachronisms and deployed all of his cinematic influences, which prominently featured Orson Welles, Fellini, Fritz Lang’s German silents, and the musicals of Busby Berkeley, which supplied the top-shots used to depict the rape of Christ on the cross, a scene cut by the censor and lovingly preserved by the director for a future restoration, still explicitly forbidden by the film’s backers, Warner Brothers.

Asides from his crisis of faith and crises in his marriage and his dealings with the studio, Russell was also knocking back the wine. “Better before lunch,” was his prop man’s characterization of the director. Production designer Derek Jarman recounted Russell asking him, “What can I do that’ll really offend the British public?” “Well you could kill a lot of people,” mused Jarman, “but if you really want to upset them you could kill some animals.” A plan was then devised to have King Louis with a musket blowing the heads off the peacocks on his lawn: the birds were to be fitted with explosives at the neck, like Snake Plissken, but Russell backed away from this extreme, even by his standards, approach, and instead had the target practice performed with a man dressed as a blackbird, and the King saying “Bye-bye, blackbird,” and Peter Maxwell-Davies’ remarkable score quoting the popular twenties song, and that infuriated the critics just as much as actual bird-blasting would have.

Less amusingly, Russell was also guilty of unsafe practices involving the naked girls and rowdy extras: the stories here get really dark. As does the film: a demented masterpiece that shows Russell for once engaging with the political: a film about corruption that uses physical disintegration alongside social and spiritual rot.

Just to confuse us even more, Russell made The Boy Friend the same year, an epic music and a miniature at the same time, allowing him to recreate Busby Berkeley’s pixilated fantasias in a seedy English theater. It’s light and charming, but Russell’s version of these qualities was not recognized by the critics, and it’s true that his wit is clodhopping, his whimsy grotesque, everything is overplayed, in your face: but you have to climb aboard the film, get into its spirit, and then it really is a very lovely reversal of the usual nightmare.

The seventies brought more composer films, Mahler and Lisztomania, and also the rock opera Tommy, which earned Russell slightly better reviews as his boisterousness was judged more in keeping with the material (critics, it seemed, could not stand the idea of a filmmaker responding to classical music for its passion and energy, its rock ‘n’ roll qualities, rather than for its assumed civilising effect). Russell got away with showing Ann-Margret humping her cushions while slathered in feculent chocolate sauce, shot Tina Turner with a 6mm lens to uglify her as she thrashed around a steel sarcophagus studded with hypos, and put Elton John on ten-foot platform shoes.

Lisztomania is another movie that’s seen as marking the decline into lunacy: its producer, David Puttnam, hugely impressed by Russell’s flare and his ability to shoot Mahler after half the budget fell through, felt that ultimately the relentless negative press knocked his enfant terrible off-balance. Instead of rolling over in submission, Russell perversely doubled down on the excess and became a parody of himself. And he had already been a parody to begin with (but a parody without an original, unless we take him as a combined burlesque of all his cinematic influences). I’ve always adored Lisztomania, which knows it’s going too far, knows its japes and conceits are ludicrous and indefensible, knows it can’t get away with Roger Daltrey as Liszt and Ringo Starr as the Pope. And just. Doesn’t. Care.

Valentino, which marked the end of the Russell marriage (there would be a bunch more), was dismissed by Russell as the fag-end of his first British period, “everything about it was bored and boring, including me,” but it’s actually rather good. Nureyev as Valentino (well, he was used to being called Rudolph), Russell as Rex Ingram wielding a megaphone the size of a cannon. The twenties, as lived by Rambova, Dorothy Arzner, Fatty Arbuckle, or as dreamt by Mad Ken.

Russell had made his career in Britain at a time when the industry was in collapse: he largely missed the explosion of energy that marked Swinging London, the British new wave, and the only kitchen sink he liked was the one he was always throwing in. Now, the domestic business seemed to have expired of ennui, senile dementia and blood poisoning, but Hollywood beckoned. Russell was bottom of a long list of directors who all turned down Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States, a late-mid-life crisis film about sensory deprivation tanks and psychedelics which takes John C. Lilley and fuses him with Dr. Jekyll. Russell took it on despite being forbidden from changing a line of dialogue, but got his revenge by having his actors speak fast -- like Jimmy Cagney fast, not so much throwing away their lines as firing them like tennis balls. And by having them eat at the same time. And by expanding the hallucination sequences until they took over the movie, so that they were all anyone talked about. Druggie audiences would hang out into the lobby, Russell gleefully reported, posting a sentry in the auditorium who would yell “Hallucination!” whenever one was starting, and everyone would rush back in to get a hit of audiovisual delirium.

A bit like Women in Love, Altered States benefited from the creative clash between director and writer (who took his name off the script in protest at Russell’s backhanded fidelity), but the reaction among respectable types was mainly a theatrical eye-roll: the maniac was up to his old tricks. Crimes of Passion, starring Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins, was next, with she as a Belle de Jour career girl by day, working girl by night, he as an insane sex-obsessed preacher, some forgettable soap opera type as leading man, the whole thing soaked in neon colors and spliced full of Bearsley and Hokusai, whom the American censor duly deleted in horror. “They cut out anything to do with art,” observed the filmmaker.

And that was it for America, save occasional pieces for HBO, progressively more televisual, the locked-off symmetrical winning out over the kinetic. Russell returned to the UK to make theatrical features, and again you heard the cry off “Whatever happened? He used to be good!” Gothic dealt with Byron and the Shelleys and the birth of Frankenstein, and was fruity, literate, dirty good fun. The Rainbow was a return to Women in Love territory, on a lower budget and with less energy and star wattage: Russell declared it his best film since that imagined zenith, and a few critics wanly agreed. The Lair of the White Worm was another journey beyond the pale, thrusting some of the same actors into a ludicrous vampire and snake goddess phallic farrago with Hugh Grant and a kilted Peter Capaldi attempting to snakecharm with bagpipes. A vampirized policeman gets his head impaled on a deco sundial. Marvelous. And the sequence was rounded out with Salome’s Last Dance, which stages Oscar Wilde’s biblical wet dream in a Victorian brothel, an inspired no-budget solution and a film which, unlike Altered States, really respects its words, lingering over them, rolling them salaciously over its tongue. Add in also Ken’s episode of Aria, in which he stages Nessun Dorma as an accident victim’s operating room hallucination, with porn mag model Linzi Drew, a new Russell favorite, in the lead.

Time was running out, the budgets shrinking like a Fu Manchu death chamber, the ceiling pressing down and clearly constraining what Russell could achieve, despite his continuing ambition. Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the BBC scored huge ratings, and he was never asked back. Commercial television’s top arts programme, The South Bank Show, run by Russell’s old screenwriter from Women in Love, Melvyn Bragg, kept him going with more-or-less annual commissions: he’d come full circle, or did when he moved back to home movies, shot in his garden or in his favorite Soho pub, which he hoped to “flog on the internet.” The symmetry of the career, its ourobousness, is more pleasing to contemplate than it must have been to live, though the last marriage lasted and was happy, and the ever-moving critical pendulum had reached the place where people were starting to say that The Devils and some of the other seventies work was really good, actually.

I can admire everything up until the final home movies, and maybe I’ll come round to them: Russell was right to admire all his earlier films. He spent decades more or less brushing off French Dressing, then saw it on TV and thought, “This is a masterpiece!” which it is. But only a minor one compared to what was those around it. Seaside-postcard humor, musical comedy performances, pop art imagery, Wagnerian and Stravinskian soundtracks, a defiant rejection of subtlety. “I don’t believe there’s any value in understatement […] This is the age of kicking people in the balls and telling them something and getting a reaction […] Picasso was not restrained, Mahler was not restrained!’” His detractors thought he should be, possibly in a straitjacket and with megadoses of Thorazine, but Russell was a volcanic eruption in cinematic form, a purple-faced tyrant of the Stroheim school, a demonic force driven to possess reels of celluloid and make them glow in the dark with a sugar rush radiation that has yet to decay. He was too big, too vulgar, too beautiful, too nasty and too beautiful for a national cinema mired in lethargic literary-theatrical respectability. “The visual arts have never had a foothold in England,” he sneered.

Ken!

Life is not a Ken Loach movie. It is a Ken Russell movie.

by David Cairns

#David Cairns #The Chiseler #Ken Russell

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keets-writing-corner · 5 years

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Intro to Music

Music and how its used in storytelling.

Vocabulary:

- Theme/leitmotif= reoccurring melody or instrument that becomes associated with something

- Soundtrack = musical score behind a visual story

- Track = a singular song from the score

- Score = all of the music written for the story

- OST = Original SoundTrack

Stories mentioned with potential for spoiler: How to Train Your Dragon (1+2), Big Hero 6, Your Lie in April, Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Alright everyone buckle down. Even though this is just another intro, it’s about one of my passions so I’ve got a lot to say. People often forget about or even flat out ignore music in movies, but music contributes a lot more to movies than people care to think about.

Sure, maybe there’s that one occasion where you noticed a nice melody within a movie or show or videogame. But what about the whole soundtrack? Have you ever considered what it does in a story? How it contributes? Why is it there? How does it show different and often hidden aspects of the story? How does it affect our own view of the story?

To be clear here, I am not talking about the sung portions of musicals, nor will I be referencing the sung portion if I DO happen to talk about musicals soundtrack (nothing against musicals, but I do have a little beef with songs with lyrics in them because for some reason people only seem to think music is valid when they have lyrics, and so when I try to talk about soundtracks everyone immediately jumps to musicals because “Honestly, what other kind of movie music is worth listening to?”). No no, I’m talking about the full blown instrumental, orchestral Original SoundTrack (OST).

(Disclaimer: I do not dislike lyrical music, nor do I think people who like it have bad taste in music. There is genuinely good lyrical music, and I do enjoy listening and singing to them too. I just get frustrated because that seems to be the only kind of music that a lot of people care about, and will immediately dismiss orchestral and instrumental music as boring even though it’s not. Sure, some of the older sonatas and symphonies miiiiight be a… hmmm acquired taste. But to say that all instrumental music is boring is a straight up narrow-minded and ignorant view of what music is truly capable of. Jazz alone has many many songs that has no singers and is all instrumental for example)

With that out of the way, let me give how I view OSTs and their role in storytelling. Comparing a book to a movie, there’s a lot of information that’s cut out right? Literally all the narration. As such, movies are left with only visuals to convey their point. Or are they? What is usually in narration? Well, by using the right language, narration’s job is to convey atmosphere and ambiance. There’s a difference between “It was a dark and stormy night” and “The rain pitter-pattered lullingly against the window”. Both are about storms at night, but one is ominous, while the other suggests a relaxed and sleepy atmosphere. Narration is also responsible for the emotions. Sure, the characters are responsible to portraying emotions to some degree, but that only goes part of the way. It’s one thing to see a character’s emotion, and another to feel it yourself. That’s what music does in soundtracks. Music creates ambiance. It tells you what sort of place you’re at when you’re watching. Playing exciting music suggests a moment of high energy that will build up to something (either a plot point (or an introduction if it’s at the beginning)), or maybe the music is slow and somber which means someone is dealing with something emotionally. Or maybe the music is eerie which suggests that something bad is about to happen. Emotions as well. Sometimes characters are too busy doing something to portray their inner emotions, music’s job is to tell you what they’re feeling, and if done successfully, will make you feel that too.

Now, I’m getting a little ahead of myself, let’s talk about one of the biggest musical icons in music history. I promise you, even if you don’t recognize his name, you absolutely recognize, know and even love his music (If you’re a music nerd like me, you probably already know who I’m going to be talking about). I’m talking about John Williams of course. For those who did a flat “Who?”, let me ask if you’ve heard the Star Wars theme? Superman theme? E.T. theme? Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, Jaws- the list is very long, impressive and recognizable. John Williams is the guy who created all that music. It’s important to note, that Harry Potter had a total of four composers, but movies 1-3 were all John Williams. So that iconic Hedwig’s theme is one hundred percent Williams (If you want to learn more about the music of Harry Potter, there is a very good catalogue/analysis (sort of)).

If you visit the page, you’ll notice that there’s a massive list recording each of the Leitmotifs/themes that Harry Potter has. Which is a perfect segway into my next subject of soundtrack and how music contributes to the story! Leitmotifs! Leitmotifs can also be called ‘Themes’ (which is what I’ll be calling it because it’s shorter and easier to write than leitmotif). Theme has lots of different meanings and definitions, for OSTs, it’s usually a set of notes, or a particular melody that can be heard in relationship to something else in a way that the audience associates said melody with the thing. Themes can be tied to anything: emotions, objects, a character, two characters together, an idea, a group, literally anything. Depending on what they’re tied with, they accomplish different things.

It’s important to note that Williams loves using leitmotifs way more than the average composer but even so, some composers don’t use themes at all (it’s a matter of personal preference and also director’s vision), which is a shame if you ask me because from what I’ve seen of my own observations, themes and leitmotifs are one of the most effective ways of playing with and manipulating audiences emotions effectively. By conditioning an audience to a theme, whenever they hear a theme, they will think of whatever it is that theme is associated with, even if the scene itself doesn’t have said representation in it. Imagine having a character with a theme die in the story, then when they die, their theme disappears until maybe later in the story when the main character thinks about them, and their theme is played. You can bet that this will cause crying.

Now because I am a huge music nerd, I could go on and on and on with examples (and honestly, I will cover more of these in another post), what they mean, how they’re used etc etc, so for the sake of not letting this post get out of hand (which, it already is going to be super long), I’ll show an example of how one particular leitmotif is used.

[leitmotif]

This is what I like to call the How to Train Your Dragon’s friendship theme. It’s played many different times throughout the movie. Note, this isn’t the only theme that plays when the two are onscreen together, the two explore many things together, but when it appears, it’s usually when the two are establishing some sort of meaningful relationship or interaction. For example:

[Hiccup’s POV Toothless’ POV]

The first time they meet and decide not to kill each other

[forbidden friendship]

The entire song called Forbidden Friendship is about them establishing trust and might as well be called “Variations on the friendship theme”.

[Playful]

Then they start getting playful with each other

[To the Rescue]

Then Toothless protects Hiccup for the first time

[Drowning]

Then there’s that time when Toothless fell in the water and Hiccup started drowning trying to save his friend, and his dad went down there and saved Hiccup, then had a moment of “Gee, this is my son’s friend” and saves toothless as well.

[hiccup is safe OST]

Then there’s that moment when it’s revealed that toothless saved Hiccup

[Helping Hiccup]

At the end of the movie, there’s that scene where Toothless is helping Hiccup walk. The friendship theme is absolutely EVERYWHERE! It’s one of the iconic How to Train Your Dragon themes! When people hear it, in the context of the movie, it’s almost immediately associated with their friendship. It’s just a fun, light hearted melody, that is both playful and gentle. So… Great! Now we can find all the moments in the movie when the filmmakers wanted us to be thinking about this friendship! Now what? Well, do you remember that scene in the second movie when Draggo turns Toothless against Hiccup and tries to kill him? Guess what plays there?

[Shattered Friendship]

Ouch. Talk about completely shattering a friendship. The theme is only played again after Hiccup manages to break Toothless out of the hypnosis and the two team up to take down Drago, and the theme is taken over by the new theme introduced in the second movie that is symbolic of their loyalty to one another.

I would dive more into this, but I do need to cover the OSTs that don’t use leitmotifs at all, and the hybrid OSTs before the day ends so! (Fret not friends! I intend on doing an intense analysis of How to Train Your Dragon’s music and themes in the future, so if this small taste of what that movie has to offer and my thoughts on it wasn’t enough, do not worry!) (also themes aren’t always melodies, sometimes characters are represented through a specific instrument)

So, as I said, I think that OSTs that use leitmotifs are usually stronger narratively, and have an extra/easier tool for manipulating our emotions. That isn’t to say however that OSTs without any themes at all are bad. There are many OSTs without themes, that have some of my favorite songs in them. Let’s look at another animated movie, Big Hero 6. Now, I haven’t listened to too many of Henry Jackman’s stuff, but from the few things I have listened to, I haven’t seen too many themes if any at all, but he knows how to write music to carry scenes. Case in point, the scene when Hiro rides Baymax for the first time, the scene where Hiro lets his grief get the better of him and transforms Baymax into a killer robot, and the scene when Baymax shows Hiro Tadashi recordings.

Personally, I think all OSTs should theoretically be able to carry a scene, but I can respect when OSTs are just there to accentuate the story, more than carry the scene, but I digress. In the scenes mentioned in Big Hero 6, with the exception of the last one, they’re all mostly scenes without dialogue. Which means, any emotion that creators want the audience to feel have to be portrayed visually, and musically. With the flying scene, the music’s job was to capture the thrill and the wonder of flying. With the killer robot scene (starts at 2:50), the music’s job was much more complex. The music’s job for that scene was many things: first and foremost, it had to encompass Hiro’s rage and his grief. It had to capture how truly broken he was, how far he had fallen. It had to capture Yokai’s fear at suddenly being the target of what was essentially this war machine. It had to capture the horror that Hiro’s friends felt when they saw this out of control robot trying to kill someone, and their fear when they realized they needed to stop him. Lastly, it needed to capture the possible torment Baymax might’ve felt had he emotions (being programmed to cure and being forced to kill). The score at this point absolutely hammers that all on the head. It’s absolutely devastating. As far as the third scene goes, I’ll cover that more when I do my analysis of Big Hero 6 and its representation of grief.

While I do think that OSTs that don’t have themes have a harder time making great standout music, that doesn’t mean that they can’t have them at all. But, this leads me to my next category on here, hybrid OSTs.

You can view these any way you like. T.V. shows have an interesting variant on hybrid OSTs, in that usually they don’t have OSTs for the entire season, rather they have a handful of tracks that they’ll reuse and recycle at different points in time in an episode. In this way, these tracks are played so repeatedly that they end up feeling like a leitmotif because they’ll usually be played in similar situations (e.g. “we’re now at school” “this is a fun time” “this is sad” etc). Sometimes, shows will have notable themes, other times they don’t, but even if they don’t, they still feel like themes. Just to go back to Henry Jackman real quick, the other works I’ve heard of him include Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in which he creates a singular leitmotif, but uses it in very powerful ways.

[scream]

The scream. There are many variations on it throughout the movie, and it’s almost always used to announce or suggest the presence of the titular Winter Soldier (for time’s sake, I do have another leitmotif I’d like to talk about now while we’re on hybrids, so I’ll be moving on from the scream, but do know that the scream is another music-themed post that I intend on doing in the future).

So let’s take a look at advantages and disadvantages of leitmotifs and no leitmotifs. On the one hand, themes can be used in very flexible and powerful ways to tell/move the story, and emotions, on the other hand, having too many themes can get confusing to keep track of. On the flip side, all of the storytelling advantages that themes have, OSTs without themes don’t have. They don’t have that character theme to pull up in a scene when they are being referenced for extra kicks and feels, but they don’t have the confusion that OSTs with too many themes have. Is there a way to solve this? Yes, this is what hybrids do. On the one hand, they don’t have a lot of themes. They mostly function like themeless OSTs do. But for the few themes they do employ them, because they are few and far between, they are instantly more recognizable and even hold more weight to them. Take the Winter Soldier’s theme for example. I would argue that that’s the only theme in that movie and yet its impact is incredible. The scream itself is chilling to hear, usually, it starts playing every time the Winter Soldier gets screen time. Then it starts playing when other characters start thinking about him. The second that scream is heard, you know that stuff is about to go down.

So now that I’ve introduced themes vs no themes, let’s dabble a little into how to “read” OSTs. This is also very large and extensive, so yeah, probably going to be a bigger post that goes further in depth about this later. A lot of it is cut and dry. Sounds sad? Probably something sad is happening or being felt. Sounds excited? Probably something energetic is happening. Sounds angry? Maybe it’s a fight. But of course, it goes a lot deeper than that if you hear tracks in the context of the other tracks. Also, it helps if you’re someone who also studies music (like me :D)

I have a friend who knows I love soundtracks, and she would frequently play OSTs of movies and shows I’ve never seen, and ask me what I thought was going on (she watches a lot of animé so the following story uses OST from an animé that I’ve never watched). One day, my friend pulls out this song:

[Song]

She asked me to tell her what I thought was going on. First things first: this song is playful, piano is often played in contemplative situations, and there is a call-response happening between the piano and the violin. To me it sounded like two characters who were supposed to become really close friends were meeting for the first time and getting to know each other. Also, given the dancing feel of the entire song, I would throw in two extra cents on the bet that the scene also had things swirling around these two in the wind (ya know, as animé does). Then, my friend pulled out this:

[Song 2]

I turned to her and asked her, “You gotta tell me, which of the two friends die?” Pianos are also used for somber and melancholic ambiance. The piano is being played gently and wistfully, and the violin partner is missing. The way it leans into certain chords and hesitates on others tells me a lot. Music is essentially another language, you need to listen to the pauses, to the way the notes are being played. The piano is gentle which signals a need for care, which implies affection. Hesitation implies fear of being hurt, in this case, remembering the absence of the other friend. Hesitation also had a hint of waiting for something, waiting for the violin to come in with their part. But they don’t. They can’t. They’re not there anymore. So the piano falls into the melody and the chord, trying to reclaim the song they were playing as a way of holding onto it even though it sounds a little emptier and incomplete. All of this points to grief, which of course points to a death. The pure tenderness of this version of the song sounds to me like someone trying to deal with a fresh loss. When you lose someone, all you want to do is to be with them again, but of course you can’t, so you settle for trying to reclaim their essence, and that’s exactly what this song is. Of course, without having heard the first song, I never would have been able to go so deep into this analysis.

But it goes further. While I was working on a personal project, I was using these two songs for my tracks because of the whole “loss” aspect that they have, and I discovered, they are the exact same song. The entire song is one giant leitmotif. For your listening ease and purposes, I’ve put edited some parts in which they play the same thing (Well, technically, they’re playing the same thing the whole time, but I only edited a few spots where they were compatible enough to play together, and/or for comparison).

[Comparison cuts]

The second song isn’t just trying to reclaim their friend’s essence, it’s trying to play their “friendship song” and being unable to for obvious reasons. Hearing them side by side and/or on top of each other, also shows stylistic differences that clearly exemplify what emotions you should be feeling. In the duet version, the violin leads up to the melody and shines right before entering. The solo piano version tries to imitate their lost friend, but they hesitate. They keep going because they must. Unlike the duet version where the violin flares excitedly before falling into the melody, the solo version hesitates, it seems for a moment like they aren’t going to play anymore. I can even imagine their lip or hand tremble with grief as the chord is held before they reluctantly go on.

Is your heart hurting even though you didn’t even see the story?

Oh look, my Intro to Music got way too long. What a surprise.

Who could have seen this coming?

Music is important, and carries a lot more weight in stories than people tend to realize. Whether it’s carrying the mood, or foreshadowing a future plot point, it’s going to be there to mess with you, your emotions and your perceptions of the story. Keep your ears open, and maybe you’ll notice the music in your favorite shows or movie more now. Maybe it’ll be fun to ask what it says about the story, and maybe, it’ll help you see something you’ve never noticed before.

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thenatureofnarrative · 3 years

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Best Films of 2020

The basis of my annual list is simple, these are the films that were, for me, mesmerizing and memorable. These were the cinematic experiences that either provoked a depth of emotion and/or provided a whole lot to talk about. These are the films that I could not forget and I cannot wait to see again.

After you read this year’s list, you can also find last year’s list here, and if you’d like to watch an epic conversation about the best films of the year I encourage you (or dare you) to watch this video. You can also follow me and my reviews on Letterboxd.

1. Time

Time is a documentary that doesn’t feel like a documentary, but rather sets itself apart as a transcendent piece of visual poetry about the perseverance and devotion of family in the face of injustice. This film is so many different things, and yet is one cohesive lyrical experience. This is a story about love and commitment. This is a story about parenthood and motherhood. This is a story about the forgotten and the voiceless, those discounted and discarded by an oppressive and racist system of incarceration. And this is a story about repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. Time is an 80-minute cinematic experience that beautifully and seamlessly ties all these threads together, through the singular voice and expressions of wife and mother, Fox Rich. I’m telling you, you’ve never seen or heard a film like this before. The way it’s shot, the way it sounds, the way it’s cut together, and the way it lets us linger and just sit with this woman and her family as they wait, but most importantly, as they persevere and fight for the release of their husband and father. Time is a masterpiece, and I can’t wait to watch it again and share it with others. On Amazon Prime.

2. First Cow

First Cow, Kelly Reichardt's masterpiece, was the most unexpected cinematic experience of the year for me, and I'm not even quite sure why. Maybe it was because I had heard such strange things about this film? Maybe it was because I've never actually seen any of Reichardt's previous films (though I am well aware of them)? And maybe it was because I genuinely didn't know what it was about? Whatever the reason(s) may be, I was truly captivated by the charming sincerity of this simple historical tale. In the first half-hour, the cinematography and production design was giving me made-for-TV-Canadian-heritage-moment vibes; and I don't mean that as an insult. I didn't know what to make of this film at first. It was like - - The Oregon Trail: The Movie - - which made me feel nostalgic and all the more intrigued. But this is Kelly Reichardt's genius: an unexpected, perfectly paced and plotted tale. I mean, sincerely, this film is the perfect example of how a story should unfold, of how the pieces of a narrative should be laid, and how the rug can get pulled out from under you at the end. Even though I didn't feel particularly emotional while watching the film, it was the ending - - Good Lord - - that ending! I mean, I was putty in Reichardt's hands. She got me. She totally got me, and I loved it! How foolish of me to think the final act would become something else, how susceptible and satisfied I was when, in the end, the story was pure and true. And that's all I'm going to say about it, because you need to see this film. On Crave-HBO and Rental Services.

3. Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee’s latest offering of cinematic greatness is less a work of protest and more a re-education. With Da 5 Bloods, history is given a voice, those oppressed and ignored now share the stage and their stories. At this point in his illustrious career it’s almost hard to believe that Spike Lee can still surprise us, but with Da 5 Bloods he masterfully and brilliantly blends together multiple cinematic styles and genres; and deserves an Oscar for it. Through the reunion of four Vietnam vets, who return to Ho Chi Minh in search of the lost remains of their fallen squad leader, an unbelievably heartfelt, exciting, and at times, shocking, story is told. A story that defies convention and summation; a film that genuinely has to be seen to be believed. For its entire two and a half hour runtime, we are never bored, always engaged. Some might accuse this film of trying to be too many things, but two transcendent performances keep us anchored through it all. Unnervingly, Chadwick Boseman plays a small role as the departed squad leader, appearing in flashbacks and as an apparition to one man. This one man is, Paul, played by Delroy Lindo, who portrays this grief-stricken and traumatized protagonist with staggering strength; and deserves an Oscar for it (though some suspect his departed co-star might win posthumously for another film). Nevertheless, Da 5 Bloods is a memorable and meaningful work of art and an essential education. On Netflix.

4. Judas and the Black Messiah

While watching Judas and the Black Messiah, I couldn’t help but draw lines of comparison between it and The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020). Both films are award-worthy pieces of penmanship. Both films are brimming with award-worthy performances. The distinction is, however, that TTOTC7 is a terrific piece of entertainment, while JATBM is an important work of history. Director Shaka King has carefully crafted, not only a captivating piece of cinema, but a necessary education about the historical efforts of the Black Panthers and the cyclical-social struggle of standing against injustice while resisting the influences of political coercion and moral corruption. And while Daniel Kaluuya, as a true thespian, gives a commanding and courageous performance, I believe the work of both, LaKeith Stanfield and Dominique Fishback, deserve more attention and award consideration. Their performances brought a depth of soul and struggle that was especially agonizing to watch during the film’s conclusion because not a single person in this story is a caricature. These are real people with real motivations living out the truest of conflicts: the preservation of power vs. justice for the oppressed. On Rental Services.

5. The Trial of the Chicago 7

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a terrific piece of entertainment. This true story, adapted and directed by Aaron Sorkin, is expertly written and structured, condensing a complicated six-month trial into a brisk and captivating two hours. For some, the story’s brevity is a cause for concern, but for me, in terms of cinema, I could not escape the momentum all three acts uniquely displayed, effectively intercutting several testimonies so that we would feel the chaos and uncertainty of the proceedings. Across the board the cast is incredible, but I believe it’s John Carroll Lynch, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II who are most worthy of award recognition. And yet, we cannot ignore the necessity of a fully-embodied antagonist, performed perfectly here by the great Frank Langella. The truth is, TTOTC7, doesn’t work without Langella’s performance. In the hands of another actor, Judge Hoffman could have come off as cartoonish, because his behaviour and actions seem so unrealistic and unbelievable, but thankfully, due to Langella’s craft and care, we do believe it, and it makes us angry for all the right reasons. Nevertheless, in the end, TTOTC7, isn’t a perfect film, but it is a great one. On Netflix.

6. Possessor

You probably shouldn’t watch this film. Fair warning. It is extremely graphic and violent, and yet, profound in its artistry and themes. The visuals are both simple and mysterious; clever and confounding. Possessor is a story that forces you to confront the frailty of the human condition, both physically and psychologically, and consider how easily influenced our sense of being and identity can be. While watching this film I couldn’t help but think how aptly equipped filmmaker, Brandon Cronenberg, would be to direct the next Christopher Nolan screenplay. Their themes and skills would be a perfect match. Young Cronenberg (son of David Cronenberg) is a remarkable director and provides us with some of the year’s best cinematography; along with another terrific performance from my favourite “young” actor, Christopher Abbott. On Crave-HBO and Rental Services.

7. Soul

Pixar’s Soul is a masterful, moving, and unpredictable work of art. This may not be a film for the youngest ones, but it is for the young at heart, or more specifically, those whose hearts are in a middling crisis of some sort. On the macro-level, there is absolutely nothing generic about this film. Whether in a spiritual plane or a material one, everything on screen is detailed and nuanced. From the philosophical and ontological, to the cultural and vocational, every audience member is invited to experience a universal narrative through a very specific lens; and there is tremendous power in that. Even though, in the Pixar family, Soul might be a stylistic cousin of Coco or Inside Out, and explore a narrative arc similar to Woody’s experience in the Toy Story films, it still sets itself apart as a work of Ecclesiastes. This is the sort of artistic confrontation one needs when dreams and passions are no longer sufficient, and one’s calling is no longer a pursuit of something unattained but a present embrace of an already unfolding narrative. Soul is a profound and beautiful work of art. On Disney+ and Rental Services.

8. The Climb

The Climb was one of the biggest surprises of the year for me, and the funniest film of 2020. Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin have crafted a hilarious and wildly entertaining portrayal of friendship; fiercely loyal, desperately-co-dependent, backstabbing friendship. And while the story may not explore any great psychological depths, no scene in this brisk roller coaster is wasted. Every sequence is an elaborately choreographed vignette, a clever and creative single-take or “oner.” And even though the visual craftsmanship might strike some as excessive, I found it elevated the excitement and unpredictable nature of the story. From opening sequence to touching conclusion, The Climb, is a surprising and side-splitting comedy about enduring friendship, a story of despicable people doing despicable things in hilarious ways. On Rental Services.

9. Horse Girl

Horse Girl is a surprising film, with a truly stunning and subversive narrative. Alison Brie has always been a strong performer, but her performance in this film is award-worthy, and has sadly been overlooked this year. In the first half-hour we are charmed by Horse Girl. For those of us who love Duplass productions, or quirky films about lonely people, we are easily won over at first, but then this story takes a serious turn and we realize we’re watching a shockingly poignant portrayal of mental illness. Nothing is taken for granted or included without careful consideration in this story. Everything, every scene and every interaction, draws us in and allows us to experience the symptoms and disillusionment of a loved one losing their grip on reality. It’s heart-breaking. It’s harrowing. It’s tenderly rendered. My only wish while watching was for a more intricate or visually complex composition. Nevertheless, Jeff Baena’s Horse Girl is still a terrific achievement and one worth typing into the search bar. On Netflix.

10. The Father

The Father is a stunning achievement in directing and editing, especially when you consider it as a first-time feature, from an artist adapting their own stage play. This is a heartbreaking, harrowing, deeply empathetic portrayal of dementia and mental illness, as we experience it through eyes and mind of the afflicted. In a single apartment, every doorway and room is a different memory or time in one's life, and even though our protagonist appears to be in a familiar space, they cannot grab hold of the present. It’s almost scary how realistic Anthony Hopkins’ performance is. Both he and Olivia Coleman are fully embodied, and it’s devastating to watch. This film is a remarkable achievement. On Rental Services.

Honourable Mentions (alphabetically):

The Devil All the Time: A masterclass in southern gothic storytelling; it’s bleak, dark and disturbing, and deeply compelling. On Netflix.

Extraction: A truly impeccable piece of action cinema, with just enough heart and soul to keep the story grounded. On Netflix.

Mank: A black and white talky-bio-pic about a Hollywood socialist who’s dependent upon millionaires that manipulate their audiences with familial metaphors and manufactured newsreels. Watch with subtitles. On Netflix.

Minari: A simple and sobering tale about familial struggle and heartache, with a striking deftness to each and every character, across the generations, from children to parents and grandparent. On Rental Services.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always: Every year there is one film, one story, that is so honest, vulnerable and raw, that it’s hard to watch and yet undeniably essential and important. This is that film. On Crave-HBO and Rental Services.

Nomadland: With more focus than a Terrence Malick film, and less obligation than a documentary, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland is a beautiful and innocent observation of our unknown neighbours. On Disney+.

One Night in Miami: The best ensemble of the year, with carefully crafted, fully embodied, sincere and nuanced performances from every cast member. On Amazon Prime.

Promising Young Woman: A unique and unpredictable thrill. Emerald Fennell’s award-worthy screenplay walks a tight-rope between black-comedy and revenge-thriller. On Rental Services.

Red, White and Blue: Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of five films is a marvel, but Red, White and Blue is the cornerstone at the center of it all. On Amazon Prime.

Sound of Metal: A deeply affecting story about recovery, discovery and the stages of grief - - all explored through the experiences of our deaf protagonist. I wept through this one. On Rental Services.

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hayaomiyazaki · 7 years

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i saw call me by your name and then i came out to my parents

last night at nyff, i saw call me by your name (and enjoyed a brief post-screening q&a with the director and leads). i have studied film theory for six years at nyu, and i’ve seen so many films…so many queer films…so many feminist films…just so much, and i’ve been so grateful to have been exposed to so much immersive, reflective, creative cinema over the years. there are no “best films of all time” — only films that have helped develop mainstream form and style, and films that we each love personally. the latter is all that matters, to you, to filmmakers, to cinematic history. please trust me. here’s some notes on things people seem rather curious about (with minor spoilers for those who haven’t read the novel, though i genuinely believe knowing what happens in the film takes away nothing from the experience whatsoever, because it’s not a plot-based narrative, but an exercise in pacing):

the peach scene is not grotesque as the media is leading you to believe; it is brief, and it is essential. it represents the exploration, awakening, and ennui of elio’s life, and affords a huge amount of vulnerability to the following interaction between the two men. it’s not scandalous or explicit or silly or gratuitous. it’s not “a big deal.”

they kiss. no, they kiss. i’ve found that it is a default for straight or straight-leaning actors to kiss a very particular way: closed-mouth, hard, foreheads pressing together as their faces gravitate towards the floor. it’s rough and inexperienced, and, sure, this can be passionate. but in this film, they kiss. they kiss with their mouths open, and slowly, and they touch each other’s hair and faces, and their chins press together because they’re looking up, up at the stars or the hot air above them; “gasping for air” is what we often read in fiction, when two characters are kissing. those gasps — that air — it isn’t between them from below; it’s above. they look up and into each other’s eyes and it feels like gentle want, not like they’re rushing to make use of stolen time.

armie hammer has mentioned many times in talks that the film is simply about love, that there’s no harshness about coming out, that there’s no phobic sources forcing them apart, etc. understand that this is not necessarily true. yes, the film is wholly about love, but the root of their “lost love” narrative is a subtle religious-based shame, almost exclusively on the part of oliver, a proud jewish man. he is sure, as much as he loves elio and will never forget their time together, that it simply isn’t realistic for them to be together (specifically mentioning his father would have him “carted off to a correctional facility”), and does default to a heterosexual marriage at the film’s end. at the same time, they function completely in secret (or, attempt to do so) during their weeks together. this is important to recognise, even within the spacio-temporal context of the film.

timothée chalamet’s voice is a lot deeper than you’d imagine it would be.

you will hate your life after seeing this film. i’m sure you have it wonderfully, loving friends and family, sure, sure, but do you have a villa in northern italy, a cook that makes apricot juice good enough for the gods, two pools, parents who read you fairytales in german as you lay across their laps on a wet summer’s evening, a rustic turquoise bike that maintains its perfect state no matter how many times you carelessly throw it against the dirt road, a closet of endless cable knit and cotton button-downs, fresh peaches for days, fluency in three languages, and armie hammer in short-shorts? call me by your name is not set in italy — it is set in utter queer paradise, and it will make you sick.

michael. fucking. stuhlbarg.

the film is 90% symbolism. fountains. statues. bikes. hankies. mattresses. paper. shirts. bare feet. water. juice. peaches. so many peaches. the score replaces the first-person narrative of the novel, and you’ll never forgive sufjan for how it all makes you feel.

i called my mother this morning and said, “i want to talk,” and she was worried, “oh no, what’s happened? oh, you’re calling to tell me you won’t graduate, is that it?” and i laughed, because what a silly assumption, but also so spot-on, and i sighed because we’re not very close and this is feels like the interaction close family should have, and i said, “i just want you to know that i didn’t lie to you because i’m scared of what you’ll think, because i’m not,” which is true, because my parents are wonderfully accepting, and i would know, as my sister is in a committed lesbian relationship, and she said, “oh my goodness, what’s happened? are you okay?” and i said, “mom, i’m fine. last month when you visited, you shocked me by asking me a question at dinner so nonchalantly, i wasn’t prepared, but i should say i’m glad it was so nonchalant because it means we really are making some progress in society…” and she cut me off, saying, “sarah, what is the matter?” and i said, “nothing. i just wanted to tell you that last month, you asked me ‘if i was dating girls’ and i lied and said no, but i had a girlfriend over the summer, and she just moved to london, and it’s over, but it’s true, and you would have liked her, mom, she was very sweet, and she was much prettier than me, you would have been proud, but, anyways, that’s happened and now you know,” and my mom laughed and started, "she's not the first...no, of course she isn't..." and then got very stern and said, “you mean she was in town at the same time as me and you didn’t introduce me?” and i laughed and then she asked me about the lgbtq acronym and told me labels don’t matter, and i told her not to be surprised when there’s another lucky lady in the future, and she said, “yes, any lady would be lucky to have you,” and i agreed, because she would want me to, and i said, “i saw this film last night,” and she said, “you’re sick and off from work but you felt fine to see a movie?” and i said, “no, that’s just it. i saw this film and it made me so ill…i didn’t go to work, and then i called you and told you all this,” and she said, “well, i’ll have to see it, then, and i’ll have to tell your sister about it if it’s gay,” and i laughed, because she assumes all gay people like all gay films, and then she went on to tell me that she wanted to watch the danish girl because she wants to know more about the trans experience, and i tried to interrupt and say, “well, perhaps don’t start there,” but she said, “no, i didn’t, because i got it confused with this movie carol,” and then she told me how she watched carol waiting for one of them to be trans — “probably cate blanchett because she can play anything!” she said — but then fell asleep because it was kind of boring, and then she said, “but i’ll try again,” and then there was some gentle jesting about grandkids and who knows what else, and that was it. it was the easiest thing in the world. and i don’t feel relieved…i just feel some equilibrium in the universe has finally been achieved.

anyways, what was the point of this post again? ah, call me by your name. yes… yes. it’s one of my favourite films i’ve ever seen. it’s made me supremely poorly: my head aches and my chest hurts and my feet are heavy and my eyes are welling up during every downbeat, and i can’t focus on anything, which is probably why this whole post is such gobbledygook. that is to say: i’m very grateful.

#i don't usually post real personal stuff. sry bout this #also sry bout the length #call me by your name #guadagnino #p

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bnrobertson1 · 5 years

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“It made our trials seem smaller” BRMR #15: The Straight Story

You can’t throw an internet rock without hitting an article about the greatness of 1999 film. And with good reason. Between the emergence of new talent (Spike Jonze) to the ascension of some of our most lauded artists (P. T. Anderson, David O. Russell), the year was filled with great filmmakers making great fiction. And that statement wouldn’t even reflect my personal favorite film of the year, American Movie. Those who whined there was nothing good at the multiplexes- and there’s always more-than-enough of those bags o’ fun around- look like unimaginative Philistines in retrospect.

And then there was The Straight Story.

Until very recently (August 2019ish?), I could have sworn to you I had never even heard of the existence of this movie. Which… well, whatever, hundreds of thousands titles wear that definition comfortably. But none of them were directed by Mr. Eraserhead himself, David Lynch, as The Straight Story was*.

[Like 99% of the internet, I’m a big David Lynch fan. One that wrote extensively about him a decade ago, and whose interest has only intensified and enriched in the days since. I would argue there are few artists are responsible for American art’s evolution as Mr. Lynch, but that is a for another piece. Just know I like David Lynch for most of the same reasons others do.]

Between the masterpieces about the female orgasm, the genre-smashing television series, and the reclamation-in-the-name-of-cool of PBR, few artists define “weird” as acutely as David Lynch. His name is so closely associated with the grotesque yet alluring that it has literally become a synonym for it. And while I’m not watching-blu-rays-backwards obsessive about the director, I am a big enough fan to at least know his strange-stuffed filmography by heart.

Or so I thought until I read about the existence of The Straight Story, barely mentioned as a lesser-film in one of the bigger 1999 retrospectives. Even though it was made in between Lost Highway* and the aforementioned Mulholland Drive, The Straight Story does not fit into the “David Lynch is the weirdest dude on the planet” narrative. At all. Whatsoever. And that’s the exact reason self-described film-geeks like your’s truly don’t know it- and the exact reason why we should.

*My pick for the film that best captures Lynch’s philosophical dance with the bizarre

The Straight Story features very few Lynchian qualities. There is virtually no violence, no perverse close-ups of bloody, loose limbs, and no suddenly naked, screaming femme fatales. It doesn’t even feature a curse word. It’s literally G-rated, which is the first thing that makes you think this must be some other David Lynch. This must be a case where you’re mixing up one Paul Anderson with Paul Anderson.

Alas, nope. It’s the same David Lynch. So, prelude over, how is Chief Cole’s G-rated foray into sentimental Americana for mass-consumption?

As profoundly gorgeous as any film in recent memory.

How, exactly, did this happen? How did Lovecraft’s metaphorical son produce one of the most genuinely warm and moving films I’ve ever seen? By staying true to himself, of course. While The Straight Story’s story, a based-on-truth tale of an aging man driving a riding lawn mower to visit his ailing brother, is about as far as narratively possible from the intentionally convoluted works with which Lynch is most oft identified, watching the film it becomes obvious that it is still the same director. The lushness of detail where art, and life, really come to life is unmistakably DL. No, there is no 60s icon sucking on a mysterious gas; there is, however, a deer-loving woman who constantly finds herself hitting them with her car on her way to work. While there are no focused-upon phones or boxes that represent chaos, there are a pair of hot pink gloves at a greasy spoon prominently displayed at a turning point. Instead of beer being discussed, a “grabber” is. There is no starlet’s naked body filling its frames with detached beauty, just the grace of some of the best crop-porn the Midwest has ever produced. The lead performance* doesn’t give pause because of its nuanced complexity- it gives pause because of its deeply-rooted earnestness. While it is purposefully lacking in the detached irony of many of Lynch’s most celebrated works, it more than compensates with knotless empathy of rare fidelity.

*Richard Farnsworth, who was nominated for Best Actor, would lose to Kevin Spacey and his performance in American Beauty, a candidate to take Film that Has Aged Worst in the Last 20 Yearsaway from Revenge of the Nerds

To close, I wanted to discuss a question that has been mentally looming since my misty eyes found the “Eject” button as the end credits rolled: would I have liked this film nearly as much as I did were it not directed by The One David Lynch, aka MR. BELOVED* AMERICAN AUTEUR? The short answer is “no,” but not for the reasons you might presume. At 36, I’m confidence enough in my tastes to like a piece of art that is not made by some universally-lauded artiste. I think I would have liked The Straight Story quite a bit for its meditative and kind qualities. For the way it looks at the goodness of the human race, and life itself. For its frame-worthy cinematography and great leading performance. For the way it methodically builds to its ending, one of the most soulful I can remember seeing on celluloid. Ironically, I could see me thinking some of the stranger details, such as some of the turns of phrase or the entirety of Sissy Spacek’s character, coming across like a film school imitation of the Lynchian aesthetic, implying some sort of warped commentary about the America we see versus what it really is (whatever the hell that may mean). But it wasn’t some star-gazing film student who made this film- it is the OG himself, the one with the filmography of dark, beautiful delights. And it is the images of darkness that Lynch has conjured that makes the light he brings simultaneously stunning and moving (somehow). Lynch typically rhapsodizes about America and the nature of existence in his films- The Straight Story is no different with a point no less substantial, except instead of commanding the alienating to make his point, he utilizes the inviting. The really odd thing is that this sweetly-natured side of Lynch has never really been hidden. It has been in the interviews** he gives, the passion he talks about transcendental meditation, even the character he plays from Twin Peaks. Sure, they’re weird, but they have a genuine, boyish enthusiasm for life that is impressionable in the best ways imaginable. Art is not in a vacuum and it’s impossible to act like it is and that should also apply to evaluation. What The Straight Story lacks in its creator’s typical irony and complexity it more than makes up for with a surprising light of endless warmth and beauty*. Break out your grabber and pick up a copy. Not only is it itself a masterpiece, it makes all of its master’s works shine even brighter. Grade: A+***

*For the minute, at least

**You’ve never seen a man say GEE GOLLY! and similar 50s sentiments so genuinely and lively.

***My inspiration for this piece was born out of a quote from the film. While discussing his estranged brother with a hospitable stranger, Alvin talks about how the two of them would stare at the stars together in the cold and comfort one another. “It made our trials seem smaller.” I couldn’t figure out a way to weave this into this piece, but I feel an obligation to point out my awe of that sentence’s structure and sentiment. About as beautiful as it gets. Maybe I can sneak it in the title somehow…

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nathanneedsausername · 5 years

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2018 Film Retrospective

This is my retrospective of all the movies I saw in 2018. This is based on UK release dates so films such as The Favourite, Vice or Eighth Grade will not appear on this list despite technically being 2018 movies as I have not yet been able to see these yet. There are also many movies that I have missed in 2018.

I will still be updating this list throughout 2019 here: https://letterboxd.com/nathan_r_l/list/2018-from-best-to-worst-3/

If you want to see where these movies fall on this list as I see them.

So, anyway here from the worst of the year to my personal favourite are all the films I saw in 2018:

37. The Queen and I (Dan Zeff):

I only saw this film a few days ago as of writing so it may seem a little harsh to call it the worst of the year as it hasn’t had any time to grow on me yet. Although I don’t see this getting any better with age. Sky intended this new David Walliams’s TV movie as a sort of Christmas present, but this must be one of the very few films I have ever seen that has actually made me angry. Nothing more than royalist propaganda that manages to completely miss the potential of the concept as well as missing the point of the sequence from Les Miserable that it decides to “pay homage too”.

36. Death on the Tyne (Ed Bye):

Not much to say here. Really it isn’t a surprise that UKTV made a bad comedy.

35. Fahrenheit 451 (Ramin Bahrani):

I promise that I saw more than just TV movies this year, it just so happens that most of them were really bad. All of the changes that were added to the story were stupid and when they actually tell the story it is painfully boring.

34. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J. A. Bayona):

Let’s be real, despite ranging in quality none of the Jurassic Park sequels have warranted their own existence. That being said Fallen Kingdom might be worth watching just to see how hilariously bad these films can get. Despite having the same director as The Orphanage and A Monster Calls no amount of good tracking shots can fix a script that is this ridiculous. The script comes across like two different ideas for new Jurassic Park movies were awkwardly stitched together when the best treatment for both would have been not to make either of them. Through in an incredibly stupid and unneeded twist and the most underwhelming Jeff Goldblum cameo in cinema history.

33. Grandpa’s Great Escape (Elliot Hegarty):

Oh, look another bad TV movie. Davis Walliams consistently finds himself attached to these boring BBC productions never quite capture the heart and care of his writing. Walliams is a good children’s author, but the small screen adaptations of his work always feel rushed and unfocused.

32. Venom (Ruben Fleischer):

The biggest disappointment of 2018. Venom is corny, bland and forgettable. According to IMDB, Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer is behind this mess but judging by Tom Hardy’s performance and the incomprehensible CGI finale no-one directed this.

31. Solo: A Star Wars Story (Ron Howard):

A soulless, lifeless film that stinks of studio interference. All of the cast feel as if they are just playing the type of character they are expected to (especially Phoebe Waller-Bridge as L3-37). There are moments in this film where it feels like there is supposed to be a joke that has awkwardly been edited or written out after Lord and Miller left the project, these moments haunt the film and make me feel like this could have been great, but alas.

30. Death Wish (Eli Roth):

At this point it might be time to consider that Eli Roth might be making bad movies on purpose. I went into Death Wish expecting something needlessly graphic and entertainingly violent and stupid but that’s not what this is. For the most part the gun violence in this film is pretty tame and the dialogue is far to generic and boring to be funny. There is one scene in a garage that showcases what usually makes Roth’s films memorable, but it comes too late to bring this movie into guilty pleasure territory. I do believe that Roth is a good filmmaker but the more he releases these mindless, generic thrillers the harder it is to defend him.

29. The Meg (Jon Turteltaub):

Half of this movie is a self-aware special effects movie that is genuinely entertaining. The other half is a boring and cliché. It should be good but never quite manages to keep up any momentum that it builds.

28. Tomb Raider (Roar Uthaug):

Technically better than the 2001 Lara Croft film although I know which one I would rather watch. Some interesting set pieces and homages to the newer tomb Raider games mixed with bland dialogue and an uninteresting plot.

27. Deadpool 2 (David Leitch):

Not as funny as the first movie but has better action. Deadpool 2 is mixed bag, the satire falls short when the movie insists on upping the stakes and having its audience feel emotionally connected to the story. David Leitch is a good action director and I look forward to seeing what he does next, but I can’t say that I’m all to exited about the next instalments in the Deadpool franchise.

26. Tag (Jeff Tomsic):

I don’t think that this film deserves the hate it seems to have gotten. Tag is a pretty funny movie with memorable characters and good camera work. It’s a little corny and the ending gets way to soppy but it’s a good film to watch with a group of friends if not just for some good Hannibal Buress quotes.

25. Click & Collect (Ben Palmer):

Hey, a TV movie that didn’t suck! Airing on BBC 1 on Christmas Eve this is an example of cringe comedy done well, the plot doesn’t always make sense but that doesn’t stop the comedy from really working.

24. Outlaw King (David Mackenzie):

A pretty good historical drama about Robert the Bruce. That’s all this is really a serviceable movie about an interesting topic. Not bad by any means all though a little forgettable, the performances and fight choreography are great but the writing lacks any real direction.

23. Aquaman (James Wan):

A list of other movies scenes from Aquaman made me think of:

Ratatouille

Splash

Raiders of the Lost Arc

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Black Panther

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace

Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

How to Train Your Dragon 2

Wonder Woman

Full review coming next

22. Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed):

Not as funny or engaging as 2015’s Ant-Man. This is a decent blockbuster with some good special effects and funny moments. A lower tier Marvel film for sure that gets completely overshadowed by the other two movies that the studio brought out in 2018 but still a fun watch.

21. Ocean’s Eight (Gary Ross):

About as good as Ocean’s 13. All of the hallmarks of the Ocean’s trilogy are present. The last 15 minuets begin to over explain what we have already seen and the name of the movie spoils and reveal at the end of the movie. A well-directed heist movie none-the-less that should be enjoyable for any Ocean’s fan

20. Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg):

This movie is at its best when it is at its most Spielberg. There is a really great car chase and a plot that revolves around kids standing against authority. It goes on for way to long and some of the references are on the nose. It certainly needs to be cut down but it’s a movie worth seeing if you know your pop-culture.

19. Searching (Aneesh Chaganty):

By far the best example of found-footage to be released in years. Having the entire film appear from the perspective of computer screens and phone calls makes the experience feel far more real and personal as if you are right there figuring out the mystery with the character. The story itself separated from its gimmick has been seen before and the twist is a bit of a reach but with its unique style it feels completely fresh. If you hated Unfriended there is a high chance that you will love this.

18. My Dinner with Hervé (Sacha Gervasi):

A HBO movie featuring a fantastic performance from Peter Dinklage. The life story of French actor Hervé Villechaize is told through a crazy interview based on the one that the actor had with the director in the early 90’s. It’s a small film but one that has been made with a lot of passion from its director and star. Absolutely look this one out if you can.

17. Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson):

Wes Anderson is responsible for some of my favourite films of all time. While his latest may not be his best work to date it is a beautiful and insanely well-crafted film full of life and wonder. Anderson has a particular style and this movie sums up exactly what makes that style work so well with every shot working perfectly.

16. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (David Slade):

It’s hard to tell at this point whether or not this will start a new craze for choose your own adventure movies the way that Avatar started a craze for 3D. Honestly I don’t think Charlie Brooker has left anywhere to really be explored with the this concept as he dives head first into a meta-narrative all about free-will. Certainly, an ambitious endeavour for the crew of Black Mirror that has taken over the cinematic discussion for a little while. I saw this with a group of friends trying to uncover as much of the story as we could in one sitting and I highly recommend that experience if you haven’t seen/played this yet.

15. Black Panther (Ryan Coogler):

A Marvel movie that appears to have nudged its way into Oscar conversations, regardless of whether or not I think that it deserves that acclaim this is a great film. Black Panther has some of the smartest writing of any MCU movie and one of the best villains to ever appear in a superhero movie. This is a film that will be talked about for years because of what it means for representation, it also helps that it is a really good movie.

14. Game Night (John Francis, Jonathan M. Goldstein):

The biggest surprise of the year is that the two guys behind 2015’s awful Vacation reboot managed to make one of the funniest and well-made comedies of 2018. The camerawork in this film is brilliant, one long take in particular has to be one of my favourite scenes of the year. The plot takes some logical jumps but who cares when the film is this good.

13. A Quiet Place (John Kransinski):

Sure, it doesn’t all make sense when you analyse it but watching A Quiet Place on the big screen is one of the tensest experiences I have ever had. When the credits rolled after the first time I saw this film I noticed that for the past 90 minuets, that’s the sign of some effective tension.

12. First Man (Damien Chazelle):

Chazelle has proven himself to be one of the best directors working today. While I may not love his latest as much as his previous work on La La Land and Whiplash it has to be said that First Man is a solid base hit for a great filmmaker. The third act of this film features some of the best special effects of the year mixed with one of the most emotional sequences of the year. Gosling and Foy are both brilliant and both deserve nominations as does Chazelle.

11. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh):

Slightly twisted and very enjoyable Three Billboards is a strange film. McDonagh is able to find humour in the darkest of places but never undermines the serious nature of the subject matter.

10. Incredibles 2 (Brad Bird):

Going into the top 10 it feels important to restate that these rankings are based purely on my own personal opinions on each film. Incredibles 2 is objectively not as good as the 2004 original, but it doesn’t have to be, this is a very fun movie featuring some great animation, fantastically directed action sequences that only Brad Bird could pull off and do I even have to mention the Jack-Jack scenes? Brad Bird is one of the greatest filmmakers to ever work in animation and this feels like his victory lap, not his best film but absolutely one that showcases just how great he is.

9. The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro):

Best picture winner, The Shape of Water deserves all the acclaim that it has gotten. This “adult fairy-tale” features a wonderful score, fantastic performances, beautiful set-design and characteristically excellent direction from one of the world’s greatest directors! Everyone has already lumped praise on this film and so I am not left with too much else to say other than see this film.

8. The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling (Judd Apatow):

I hear that 2018 was a great year for documentaries, I wouldn't know because I only saw this one but if Three Identical Strangers and Won’t you be my Neighbour are better than this then I need to see them. Judd Apatow looks into the life of his friend and fellow comedian Garry Shandling only 2 years after his tragic death. His approach leaves no stone unturned as he dives head first into the late comedian’s mind using his own diaries and interviews with his closest friends and collaborators. As a stand-up comedy fan it is absolutely fascinating to get a look the real life of an often misunderstood legend like Shandling for it to be as neatly put together and wonderfully entertaining as this is a welcome bonus.

7. Avengers: Infinity War (Joe Russo, Anthony Russo):

For the technical achievement alone Infinity War deserves a place in my top 10. The Russo brothers managed to pull off a stunt that just a year ago I was ready to call impossible, bringing together 10 years worth of character arcs and plot points while still making an enjoyable film. Even though it has been 9 months I still don’t know what to say about this film and my lack of words may be the best compliment I can give it.

6. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie):

If you asked me in June I would have said that the Mission: Impossible franchise had peaked with Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol in 2014, I also would have been dead wrong. Fallout is not just the best film in the franchise but an absolute high point in action cinema. Seeing this on the big screen was one of the most visceral and intense movie going experiences I have ever had, every stunt is a nail-biter and the whole time I was on the edge of my seat.

5. Thoroughbreds (Cory Finley):

This is the movie that I saw alone and have yet to properly have a conversation with someone about. This film slipped under almost everyone’s radar and then disappeared. I am telling you now find this movie it is a fantastic, quaint little film with the power to make you uncomfortable and make you laugh at the same time. Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor Joy are both brilliant and the ending has one of my best moments of the year with a single long shot and the power of suggestion. If you missed it, which you probably did, go look it out.

4. BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee):

Loud, funny, unapologetic, stylish and controversial. Those are the five words that describe all of Spike Lee’s best movies and BlacKkKlansman is no exception. With multiple Oscar worthy performances, a great score and a screenplay that shows Spike at his angriest and smartest in a long time, this film will get under some peoples skin, as great cinema should.

3. I, Toyna (Craig Gillespie):

Every now and then a movie comes along that perfectly sums up why I love this art form, I Tonya is one of those movies. Deeply impactfull on an emotional level while remaining hyper stylised, Gillespie manages to make the audience feel sympathy for characters that would be the villains in any other story by taking you on an emotional roller coaster through the life of Tonya Harding that leaves the viewer feeling just as broken as the titular character by the conclusion.

This film is so good I watched it twice in two days.

2. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig):

I fell hard for this film. Greta Gerwig’s painfully honest look at growing up feels like watching a selection of incredibly well shot home movies from a real person. The real achievement of Gerwig’s directorial debut is how it manages to feel relatable even if you aren’t in the same situation as the protagonist. When the credits role it’s hard to feel slightly disappointed that you can’t keep watching what is going to happen to this character next and when the only criticism you have is that you didn't want it to end, the film must have been pretty good.

1. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman):

I’m just as surprised as you are.

Somehow and for whatever reason this is the movie that resonated with me the most in 2018, this is the film I see myself going back to the most. Sometimes the best film is the most entertaining one, this film had me hooked instantly and kept me in a near trance-like state during its run-time. In don’t have anything to profound to say about this film it’s just really a great film that everyone can enjoy. If this is still playing near you and you haven’t seen it yet, go check it out you won’t be disappointed.

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joshhutchsource · 7 years

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Josh Hutcherson AMA Transcript

This is the transcript from Josh’s AMA on Reddit on February 16th, 2017. All spelling and grammar errors are as written by the original people This is very long, so the majority is under a read more.

Q: Do you miss working with the Hunger Games cast?

Josh: yes... they were the best! family forever. i miss them all dearly... however we still hang now and then and keep in touch.

Q: Hi! What's your favorite television show to watch?

Josh: the Bob Ross painting show... i can benge for hours

Q: Hey Mr. Hutcherson, is there any actor (that you have not yet worked with) that you wish to work with someday?

Josh: so many.... joaquin phoenix is up there for sure.

Q: Hi Josh, You got second class treatment from Rosemary Telesco and continued with Katniss Everdeen. Does it hurt your feelings?

Josh: hahaha.... life imitates art…

Q: What do you define as your first "big break" into acting and that business?

Josh: For me my first ever job was personally my big break.. I was 9 and I held a goat in the backgroud for a bible study video in ohio.... everyone starts somewhere…

Q: How do you go about choosing a script that you want to work on, both for this project and other professional work?

Josh: I want originality. Characters that are bold and have clear voices. i also want to push the boundaries of what reality is.

Q: Hey Josh! What is the craziest encounter you've had with a fan?

Josh: i had two girls and their mom show up at my door a few years ago during christmas with my family..... that was..... awkward. Im not answering the door next time. Haha

Q: do you think 2017 is going to be a good year?

Josh: hard to believe it can be... however I feel like so many people are getting involved that werent before... this is a moment when people feel energized.

Q: If you had not been an actor, what profession would you have done?

Josh: i like building stuff... and i like photography... maybe building stuff and taking pictures of it... if thats a job

Q: Because Im sure you get the same questions over and over - what's your favorite day of the week, and why?

Josh: Thursday... not becuase im here... but because i like how the word looks. and wednesday is finally over.

Q: JOSH is there anything you couldn't live without?

Josh: my freedom of speech and gluten

Q: your favorite song at this moment?

Josh: Lazarus by David Bowie

Q: Why were you such a little bitch in the hunger games ?

Josh: i prefer other words... however this little bitch survived. so... yeah.

Q: Which country do you think is the safest in a zombie apocalypse?

Josh: Iceland... no doubt. Zombies hate Byjork

Q: What's your idea of a successful person. What would make someone successful in your eyes?

Josh: A person who is comfortable in their skin... I'm defintely not. I have gotten better as time goes on but someone who is and who is genuine is successful for me.

Q: Do you have any advice for someone dealing with depression?

Josh: I'm not certified to answer this sort of thing. However I go back to perception. As well as really find what you care about and express it. film, music, walking... whatever it is that you can connect with is what i try to lose myself in.

Q: i feel like, in my mind, i always associate you with the jungle. Why is that?

Josh: that really makes me smile. I love the jungle and i feel a part of it often. thank you.

Q: hi josh, I'm not very good at english so I can't write a good question but do you like mango?

Josh: yes... im human. never trust someone who doesnt

Q: What do you think about Darren Aeronosfsky as a director?

Josh: I think hes great... requiem is on point!!

Q: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Josh: here in this ama.

probably isolated somehwere thinking of ideas of things to make movies about. I dont know!!!! cant think that far ahead honestly.

Q: in ten words can you describe your experience directing "Ape"?

Josh: BEst experience of my life creatively hello cars cat apples

Q: What's your favorite food?

Josh: Skyline Chili... Only available in the greater Cincy area…

Q: You still here? And if so, what do you think of the Oscar contenders this year?

Josh: Moonlight!!! That movie was incredible. I also really loved LA LA Land. those two really stood out for me. so many great performances though. Denzel was on point!

Q: Donald Trump or President Snow ?

Josh: I mean... one in the same right?

Q: How are Driver and Manchi?

Josh: they are the loves of my life.... I worship them. I believe they are quite happy. they get plenty of love and attention!

Q: ‼️‼️‼️ BERNIE SANDERS !!!! ❗️❗️❗️❗️

now that i got your attention,

Do you watch TV SHOWS ? If yes which one

You are such an inspiration to me. After almost 10 years as a fan, im really proud of you and everything you've achieved! I cant wait to watch ALL your upcomings projects and you are such an AMAZING human being Joshua. Thank you for everything. Seeing you in Paris in 2015 was the best moment of my life, i hope i will see you again and talk with you. Please don't forget your fans, we love you so much. (We missed you so much) Will you ever come back in France? :)

Josh: THANK YOU!! that made my day=] I love france and would love to come back!

I do watch some tv... not so so much. I really love GIRLS. that show is so perfect in so many ways. Ive never seen a show that feels more flawed and honest like that one. Best characters ever.

Q: Really wanna know if you'll keep supporting Bernie although the election is over?

Josh: ABSOLUTELY. we must. things are crazy now but we need to vote in local elections and keep our voices loud. I miss the days when Bernie was a real option…

Q: Hey Josh! Congrats on your director debut of "Ape." Were there things you did differently as an actor because you were also the director? How did it change your perspective?

Josh: it was hard... I liked it a lot but it was tough because i couldnt watch the monitors obviously so i had to make notes in my mind while acting in the scene... i realy liked this experience though and i have somehow even more respect for directors than before.

Q: Do you believe in a real life happy ending? If yes, what would you tell someone who kind of lost hope?

Josh: I think a happy ending is possible. I really believe its all about perception. If you can learn to manage that then you can find ways to be happy all the time

Q: HEY JOSH! I'm so glad you have finally done an AMA!

What advice would you give you're teenage self when entering the theatre/acting community?

Josh: thick skin. actors are the most insecure and insane types of people... with that you need to have thick skin to deflect the dissapointment and let downs and judgements.

Q: Do you want to repeat the experience as a director??

Josh: No doubt. I loved it. its extremely addictive and Im feining fo some mo.

Q: Hi Josh ! How are you ? Will there be a French subtitled version for Ape ? I'm a French fan :) Thank you !

Josh: oui... i think.

Q: Yooo RV was a dumpster fire of a movie...that being said, how awesome was it to work with Robin Williams??

Josh: hahahahah! Robin is a saint... biggest heart in the world and never a dull moment. he was the best.

Q: What kind of movies would you like to direct in the future?

Josh: I like stuff that bends reality and questions the human condition... bending the rules. I love films like being john malkovich and eternal sunshine of a spotless mind

Q: Hey Josh! What's your all time favorite movie or a movie you think everyone needs to see?

Josh: Two for the Road. 60's film that was way ahead of its time and has inspried so many modern love stories. its great!

Q: Hello, Josh! As an aspiring filmmaker, I know how tedious making any sort of film can be. What gets you motivated to create? Also, what’s your favorite snack? Cause, duh, snacks are some of the best motivators.

Josh: Honestly I think i get inspired when i see a dope movie... like when i saw moonlight i just wanted to go out and create something personal and important.

Also sitting in a restaurant looking around and making up stories about the people...

Snack..... kale. Fuk off kale!! frosted flakes

Q: JOSH. Huge fan, you're awesome, yadda yadda ;)

You're such a strong ally to the LGBT community. How did you get involved with your organization, Straight But Not Narrow? What is your advice to the community in the wake of certain political events?

Josh: We started SBNN becuase it felt like there was a lack of outreach to bridge communities together... especially in schools where bullying is brutal. I think now more than ever showing your support to your neighbors is paramount in surviving whats going on.

We are all here and human

Q: What was it like working with Mark Ruffalo?

Josh: Hes the best guy in the world. I love that human!

Q: Josh! Favorite 80's movie?

Josh: Lost Boys

Q: Do you have any directorial advice?

Josh: prepare!! Its so important to know what you want to make so when youre there on set you have it all set up.

The script is the absolute base for everything. understad it inside and out.

Q: Hi Josh!

You and I went to the same school, and you even lived in the same neighborhood as some of my close friends. We’ve never met because you always looked like you wanted privacy and I wanted to respect that, plus I’m a shy person who wouldn’t have known what to say. I’ve always wondered if you felt like you sort of missed out on your high-school experience, and if that impacted you on a social and mental level.

I’m trying to pursue my dream of becoming a published author, but sometimes I just feel like it’s never going to happen and that I’ll never be successful in the only thing that I’m passionate about. What advice would you give to someone who’s been told over and over again to give up their dream and focus on a more practical plan for their life?

Thanks for doing this AMA! It’s really awesome seeing someone from Union doing what they love!

Josh: I think that going for something different in life is for sure the most important thing to do... FUCK THE HATERS!

Only you can stop yourself from going for it.

that should be on an inspirational cat poster...

Q: How would you beat up Donald trump?

Josh: With knowledge.... it seems to be his biggest weakness…

Q: Would you rather be attacked by 50 duck sized horses or 1 horse sized duck?

Josh: One horse sized duck.... no question... Ive seen some big ass ducks…

Q: What are the kind of things you learned while working your blockbuster role in "The Hunger Games Trilogy"?

Josh: TEAMWORK. we had massive crews and it is not possible without all that.

Q: Josh Do you have any Tips for a Happy life?

Josh: Inner happiness... you wont find it in anything else in the world. thats the only way to get by and be happy

Q: what is the number one thing on your bucket list?

Josh: go to patagonia…

Q: Was this role challenging for you to play and how do you think you did?

Josh: It definitely was challenging... its a deep and dark place to go to and I like tapping into that side of myself... I think I did alright... Im my hardest critic

Q: It's so easy to hack me because all of my passwords are your name, what do you think about that?

Josh: Its kinda dope,... maybe try changing it for a bit?

Q: What is your favorite horror movie?

Josh: I really like It Follows... and classics like the shining of course... some chronenburg stuff too... butchered that spelling

Q: Is it harder to be an actor or a director?

Have you thought about being in another large franchise such as the hunger games?

Josh: Hmmm. I would say that directing definitely requires a shit ton more focus and work!!! Id say thats more challenging for sure

Q: Are you looking forward to doing the full length APE?

Josh: YES!!! The plan is to fastrack this into production after the short comes out. the feature is even deeper and darker... gonna be weird…

Q: If Peeta tried to fight you, could real life you take him down?

Josh: fuck yeah!!! well... maybe not. I have a ferocious side that I can tap into.

Q: Hi Josh (my brothers name too) What is the most Hollywood thing you have done/seen so far?

Josh: dont ever come to hollywood for a vacation... its tacky and nothing like they make it seem. Hah.

Q: There's definitely a theme of dealing with mental health issues in your film. Is this something you've dealt with personally?

Josh: There have been moments where I've questioned my mental state... haven't gone too far down that road but I think it's beyond interesting to try to empathize and deal with people who are dealing with those.

Q: hey josh! the other night i was really high and felt like i was you. did you feel it too?

Josh: Wait... was that monday?? I felt something then…

Q: Hi,

What is your dream role, if you could have any in the world, and what is your dream directorial role (genre, plot, cast to direct)? If you had to pick one of these, dream role or dream directing opportunity, which would you prefer to do?

Now this is the obligatory thank-you part that I could not pass up the opportunity to post, considering how much your LGBT+ work has meant to me:

I figured this would be a good opportunity to send some well-deserved thanks your way and hope you see it…! This idea of wanting to thank you started in a letter I started writing a good few years ago now… which I still happen to have in my bedside table, because it never got sent. (I don’t think I ever figured out where to send fan-mail to you, which didn’t help my cause.)

I don’t remember, when I was younger, knowing of any out actors. I’m 20 now, but up until my mid-teens, there was a big blank space around the ideas of ‘LGBT+’ and ‘the world’ being connected for me. I’ve known I was gay since I was 11, but the experience was very isolating, not knowing any gay people in real life. I had no foundation to go on, no experience in this, and obviously felt as though I couldn’t talk with anyone about it, even though I remember very few support-type services.

I remember seeing you in Zathura (my Dad loves Jumanji, so it was bound to happen) and ever since then, I think I’ve just sort of stuck with you. I must have seen that movie when I was about 12/13, and I think that’s when I started to hear what it was you were saying, because I noticed it was relevant to me. I followed what you were saying, and as I got older and more aware of myself and the world, it really started to have an impact on me. I felt as though that was my connection, as though that was my way of learning partly about who I was.

Even though you weren’t gay, the fact that you were only a few years older than me and were into the things and the field I also enjoyed really helped me relate to you. Because I related to you and because you actually meant something to me, the message you seemed so passionate about really resonated with me and it gave me a sort of courage and hope I don’t think someone older (or just generally someone whom I didn’t look up to) would have been able to instil. For the first time, someone I liked and someone I respected was talking about this thing I wasn’t able to share with anyone else. And they were a proper force in the ‘wider world.’

I never really struggle with ‘being gay,’ but I struggled with what other people might have thought, and again your dialogue helped with that. It was just so amazing to see someone whom I respected acting in a way that showed me he would treat me and people like me just as he would any other person. Even though it wasn’t a two way conversation between us, I felt that because you were a person with such a big stature who was brave enough to say this in public, that surely you knew people like me were out there and you were at least partially talking to us.

In the big scheme of things, I didn’t have it as hard as some others do, and I never want to take that for granted. My parents are relatively liberal and Australia is an OK climate to LGBT+ in. But I still found that it was hard to relate who I was with something bigger, and it was scary thinking about whether I would have to start a journey of discovery (not just self-discovery, but a discovery of ‘everything LGBT+’ I suppose you could say) on my own. Simply said, you helped me bridge the gap that I think sometimes people forget exists, even for young LGBT+ people in “supportive” environments. Just because they’re supportive doesn’t mean they’re informative or comfortable.

Nowadays, I’m so happy when I see younger celebrities come out, because I know how much that visibility and that platform means to young LGBT+ kids who simply want to see someone like them on television or in the media. Ellen Page, Charlie Carver, Tom Daley, Troye Sivan, Gus Kenworthy, etc, are all fantastic people that I just know will help make all the difference in someone’s life, as you did in mine.

So, all in all, I just wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done and continue to do for me and everyone else like me! I think it’s fair to say you’re not just an ally, but a friend too. I hope one day I get to shake your hand and thank you in-person for what you’ve done.

(...well this is the most personal thing I've ever written on this website.)

Josh: Of course! I think its beyond important to give people their voice and fair shot at what they want from life. GET OUT OF THE WAY HATERS!

Only light can drive out dark.

#Josh Hutcherson #interview #Reddit #Reddit AMA

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jehanimation · 7 years

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Celebrating the undersung heroism of The Peanuts Movie

In December 2015, a movie reboot of one of history’s most beloved entertainment brands was released in cinemas, and it took the world by storm. That movie was not The Peanuts Movie.

Not that I’m setting myself up as an exception to that. Like pretty much everyone else, I spent the tail-end of 2015 thoroughly immersing myself in all things Star Wars: The Force Awakens, drinking deeply of the hype before seeing it as many times as I could - five in total - before it left theatres. In the midst of all that Jedi madness, I ended up totally forgetting to see The Peanuts Movie, Blue Sky Studios’ well-reviewed adaptation of Charles M. Schulz’s classic newspaper strip, which I’d been meaning to catch over the festive period. But then, it’s not as though the schedulers made it easy for me; in the US, there had been a buffer zone of a month between the launches of the two films, but here in the UK, Peanuts came out a week after Star Wars; even for this animation enthusiast, when it came to a choice between seeing the new Star Wars again or literally any other film, there was really no contest at all.

A year later, belatedly catching up with the movie I missed at the height of my rekindled Star Wars mania proved an eye-opening experience, and places Blue Sky’s film in an interesting context. With a $246.2 million worldwide gross, The Peanuts Movie did well enough to qualify as a hit, but it remains the studio’s lowest earner to date; in retrospect, it seems likely that going head-to-head with Star Wars and the James Bond movie Spectre didn’t exactly maximise its chances of blockbuster receipts. Yet in an odd way, modest, unnoticed success feels like a fitting outcome for The Peanuts Movie, a film that acts as a perfectly-formed celebration of underappreciated decency in a world of bombast and bluster. Charlie Brown, pop culture’s ultimate underdog, was never fated to emerge victorious in a commercial battle against Han Solo and James Bond, but his movie contains a grounded level of heartfelt sympathy for the small-scale struggles of unassumingly ordinary folk that higher-concept properties don’t have the time to express. The Peanuts Movie is a humbly heroic film about a quietly laudable person, made with understated bravery by underrated artists; I hope sincerely that more people will discover it like I did for years to come, and recognise just how much of what it says, does and represents is worth celebrating.

CELEBRATING... BLUE SKY STUDIOS

Before giving praise to The Peanuts Movie itself, it’d be remiss of me not to throw at least a few kind words in the direction of Blue Sky Studios - a group of filmmakers who I’m inclined to like, somewhat despite themselves, and who don’t always get very kind things written about them. After all, the 20th Century Fox subsidiary have been in the CGI feature animation mix since 2002, meaning they have a more established pedigree than most studios, and their long-running Ice Age franchise is a legitimately important, formative success story within the modern era of American animation. Under the creative leadership of Chris Wedge, they’ve managed to carve and hold a niche for themselves in a competitive ecosystem, hewing close to the Shrek-inspired DreamWorks model of fast-talking, kinetic comedy, but with a physical slapstick edge that marked their work out as distinct, at least initially. Sure, the subsequent rise of Illumination Entertainment and their ubiquitous Minions has stolen that thunder a little, but it’s important to remember that Ice Age’s bedraggled sabretooth squirrel Scrat was the CGI era’s original silent comedy superstar, and to recognise Blue Sky’s vital role in pioneering that stylistic connection between the animation techniques of the 21st century and the knockabout nonverbal physicality of formative 20th century cartooning, several years before anyone else thought to do so.

For all their years of experience, though, there’s a prevailing sense that Blue Sky have made a habit of punching below their weight, and that they haven’t - Scrat aside - established the kind of memorable legacy you’d expect from a veteran studio with 15 years of movies under their belt. Like Illumination - the studio subsequently founded by former Blue Sky bigwig Chris Meledandri - they remain very much defined by the influence of their debut movie, but Blue Sky have unarguably been a lot less successful in escaping the shadow of Ice Age than Illumination have in pulling away from the orbit of the Despicable Me/Minions franchise. Outside of the Ice Age series, Blue Sky’s filmography is largely composed of forgettable one-offs (Robots, Epic), the second-tier Rio franchise (which, colour palette aside, feels pretty stylistically indistinct from Ice Age), and a pair of adaptations (Horton Hears a Who!, The Peanuts Movie) that, in many ways, feel like uncharacteristic outliers rather than thoroughbred Blue Sky movies. Their Ice Age flagship, meanwhile, appears to be leaking and listing considerably, with a successful first instalment followed by three sequels (The Meltdown, Dawn of the Dinosaurs and Continental Drift) that garnered successively poorer reviews while cleaning up at the international box office, before last year’s fifth instalment (Collision Course) was essentially shunned by critics and audiences alike. Eleven movies in, Blue Sky are yet to produce their first cast-iron classic, which is unfortunate but not unforgivable; much more troubling is how difficult the studio seems to find it to even scrape a mediocre passing grade half the time.

Nevertheless, while Blue Sky’s output doesn’t bear comparison to a Disney, a Pixar or even a DreamWorks, there’s something about them that I find easy to root for, even if I’m only really a fan of a small percentage of their movies. Even their most middling works have a certain sense of honest effort and ambition about them, even if it didn’t come off: for example, Robots and Epic - both directed by founder Chris Wedge - feel like the work of a team trying to push their movies away from cosy comedy in the direction of larger-scale adventure storytelling, while the Rio movies, for all their generic antics and pratfalls, do at least benefit from the undoubted passion that director Carlos Saldanha tried to bring to his animated realisation of his hometown of Rio de Janeiro. I’ll also continue to celebrate the original Ice Age movie as a charismatic, well-realised children’s road movie, weakened somewhat by its instinct to pull its emotional punches, but gently likeable nevertheless; sure, the series is looking a little worse for wear these days, but at least part of the somewhat misguided instinct to keep churning them out seems to stem from a genuine fondness for the characters. Heck, I’m even inclined to look favourably on Chris Wedge’s ill-fated decision to dabble in live-action with the recent fantasy flop Monster Trucks; after all, the jump from directing animation to live-action is a tricky manoeuvre that even Pixar veterans like Andrew Stanton (John Carter) and Brad Bird (Tomorrowland) have struggled to execute smoothly, and the fact he attempted it at all feels indicative of his studio’s instinct to try their best to expand their horizons, even if their reach sometimes exceeds their grasp.

Besides, it’s not as though their efforts so far have gone totally unrewarded. The third and fourth Ice Age movies scored record-breaking box office results outside the US, while there have also been a handful of notable successes in critical terms - most prominently, Horton Hears a Who! and The Peanuts Movie, the two adaptations of classic American children’s literature directed for the studio by Steve Martino. I suppose you can put a negative spin on the fact that Blue Sky’s two best-reviewed movies were the ones based on iconic source material - as I’ve noted, the films do feel a little bit like stylistic outliers, rather than organic expressions of the studio’s strengths - but let’s not kid ourselves that working from a beloved source text isn’t a double-edged sword. Blue Sky’s rivals at Illumination proved that much in their botching of Dr Seuss’ The Lorax, as have Sony Pictures Animation with their repeated crimes against the Smurfs, and these kinds of examples provide a better context to appreciate Blue Sky’s sensitive, respectful treatments of Seuss and Charles Schulz as the laudable achievements they are. If anything, it may actually be MORE impressive that a studio that’s often had difficulty finding a strong voice with their own material have been able to twice go toe-to-toe with genuine giants of American culture and emerge not only without embarrassing themselves, but arguably having added something to the legacies of the respective properties.

CELEBRATING... GENUINE INNOVATION IN CG ANIMATION

Of course, adding something to a familiar mix is part and parcel of the adaptation process, but the challenge for any studio is to make sure that anything they add works to enrich the material they’re working with, rather than diluting it. In the case of The Peanuts Movie - a lavish computer-generated 3D film based on a newspaper strip with a famously sketchy, spartan aesthetic - it was clear from the outset that the risk of over-egging the pudding was going to be high, and that getting the look right would require a creative, bespoke approach. Still, it’s hard to overstate just how bracingly, strikingly fresh the finalised aesthetic of The Peanuts Movie feels, to the degree where it represents more than just a new paradigm for Schulz’s characters, but instead feels like a genuinely exciting step forward for the medium of CG animation in general.

Now, I’m certainly not one of those old-school puritans who’ll claim that 2D cel animation is somehow a better, purer medium than modern CGI, but I do share the common concern that mainstream animated features have become a little bit aesthetically samey since computers took over as the primary tools. There’s been a tendency to follow a sort of informal Pixar-esque playbook when it comes to stylisation and movement, and it’s only been relatively recently that studios like Disney, Illumination and Sony have tried to bring back some of that old-school 2D squash-and-stretch, giving them more scope to diversify. No doubt, we’re starting to see a spirit of visual experimentation return to the medium - the recent stylisation of movies like Minions, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Hotel Transylvania and Storks are testament to that - but even so, it feels like there’s a limit to how far studios are willing to push things on a feature film. Sure, Disney and Pixar will do gorgeous, eye-popping visual style experiments in short movies like Paperman, Inner Workings and Piper, but when it comes to the big movies, a more conservative house style invariably reasserts itself.

With the exception of a greater-than-average emphasis on physicality, Blue Sky’s typical playbook hasn’t really differed that much from their peers, which is partly why their approach to adapting Seuss and Schulz - two artists with immutable, iconic art styles of their own - have stood out so much. Their visual work on Horton Hears a Who! was groundbreaking in its own way - it was, after all, the first CG adaptation of Dr Seuss, and the result captured the eccentric impossibilities and flourishes of the source material much better than Illumination managed four years with The Lorax - yet The Peanuts Movie presented a whole new level of challenge. Where Seuss’s worlds exploded off the page with colour and life and elastic movement, Schulz’s were the very model of scribbled understatement, often eschewing backgrounds completely to preserve an expressive but essentially sparse minimalism. Seuss’s characters invited 3D interpretation with their expressive curves and body language; the Peanuts cast, by contrast, make no three-dimensional sense at all, existing only as a limited series of anatomically inconsistent stock poses and impressionist linework that breaks down the moment volume is added. It’s not that Charlie Brown, Snoopy and co are totally resistant to animation - after all, the Peanuts legacy of animated specials and movies is almost as treasured as the comic strip itself - but it’s still worth noting that the Bill Melendez/Lee Mendelson-produced cartoons succeeded mostly by committing fully to the static, spare, rigidly two-dimensional look of Schulz’s comic art, a far cry from the hyper-malleable Chuck Jones/Friz Freleng-produced style of the most famous Seuss adaptations.

Perhaps realising that Schulz cannot be made to adapt to 3D, Blue Sky went the opposite route: making 3D adapt to Schulz. The results are honestly startling to behold - a richly colourful, textured, fluidly dynamic world, populated by low-framerate characters who pop and spasm and glide along 2D planes, creating a visual experience that’s halfway between stop-motion and Paper Mario. It’s an experiment in style that breaks all the established rules and feels quite unlike anything that’s been done in CGI animation on this scale - with the possible exception of The Lego Movie - and it absolutely 100% works in a way that no other visual approach could have done for this particular property. Each moment somehow manages to ride the line of contradiction between comforting familiarity and virtuoso innovation; I’m still scratching my head, for example, about how Blue Sky managed to so perfectly translate Linus’s hair - a series of wavy lines that make no anatomical sense - into meticulously rendered 3D, or how the extended Red Baron fantasy sequences are able to keep Snoopy snapping between jerky staccato keyframes while the world around him spins and revolves with complete fluidity. Snoopy “speaks”, as ever, with nonverbal vocalisations provided by the late Bill Melendez, director of so many classic Peanuts animations; the use of his archived performance in this way is a sweet tribute to the man, but one that hardly seems necessary when the entire movie is essentially a $100 million love letter to his signature style.

I do wonder how Melendez would’ve reacted to seeing his work aggrandised in such a lavish fashion, because it’s not as though those films were designed to be historic touchstones; indeed, much of the stripped-back nature of those early Peanuts animations owed as much to budgetary constraints and tight production cycles as they did to stylistic bravery. Melendez’s visuals emerged as they did out of necessity; it’s an odd quirk of fate that his success ended up making it necessary for Blue Sky to take such bold steps to match up with his template so many decades later. Sure, you can argue that The Peanuts Movie is technically experimental because it had to be, but that doesn’t diminish the impressiveness of the final result at all, particularly given how much easier it would have been to make the film look so much worse than this. It’d be nice to see future generations of CG animators pick up the gauntlet that films like this and The Lego Movie have thrown down by daring to be adventurous with the medium and pushing the boundaries of what a 3D movie can look and move like. After all, trailblazing is a defining component of Peanuts’ DNA; if Blue Sky’s movie can be seen as a groundbreaking achievement in years to come, then they’ll really have honoured Schulz and Melendez in the best way possible.

CELEBRATING... THE COURAGE TO BE SMALL

In scaling up the visual palette of the Peanuts universe, Blue Sky overcame a key hurdle in making the dormant series feel worthy of a first full cinematic outing in 35 years, but this wasn’t the only scale-related challenge the makers of The Peanuts Movie faced. There’s always been a perception that transferring a property to the big screen requires a story to match the size of the canvas; in the animation industry, that’s probably more true now than it’s ever been. Looking back at the classic animated movies made prior to around the 1980s and 1990s, it’s striking how many of them are content to tell episodic, rambling shaggy dog stories that prioritise colourful antics and larger-than-life personalities over ambitious narrative, but since then it feels like conventions have shifted. Most of today’s crop of successful animations favour three-act structures, high-stakes adventure stories and screen-filling spectacle - all of which presents an obvious problem for a movie based on a newspaper strip about a mopey prepubescent underachiever and his daydreaming dog.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Charlie and Snoopy have had to manage a transition to feature-length narrative, but it was always unlikely that Blue Sky would follow too closely in the footsteps of the four previous theatrical efforts that debuted between 1969 and 1980. All four are characterised by the kind of meandering, episodic structure that was popular in the day, which made it easier to assemble scripts from Schulz-devised gag sequences in an essentially modular fashion; the latter three (Snoopy, Come Home from 1972, Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown from 1977 and Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!!) from 1980) also made their own lives easier by incorporating road trips or journeys into their storylines, which gave audiences the opportunity to see the Peanuts gang in different settings. The first movie, 1969’s A Boy Named Charlie Brown, also features a road trip aspect to its plotline, but in most respects offers the most typical and undiluted Peanuts experience of the four original films; perhaps as a result, it also feels quite aggressively padded, while its limited cast (lacking later additions like Peppermint Patty and Marcie) and intimately dour focus made it a sometimes claustrophobic cinematic experience.

Given The Peanuts Movie’s intention to reintroduce the franchise to modern audiences who may not necessarily be familiar with the original strip’s melancholic sensibilities, the temptation was always going to be to balloon the property outwards into something broad, overinflated and grand in a way that Schulz never was; it’s to be applauded, then, that The Peanuts Movie ends up as that rare CGI animation that tells a small-scale story in a focused manner over 90 minutes, resisting the urge to dilute the purity of its core character-driven comedy material with any of the family adventure elements modern audiences are used to. Even more so than previous feature-length Peanuts movies, this isn’t a film with any kind of high-concept premise; rather than sending Charlie Brown out on any kind of physical quest, The Peanuts Movie is content to offer a simple character portrait, showing us various sides of our protagonist’s personality as he strives to better himself in order to impress his unrequited love, the ever-elusive Little Red-Haired Girl. The resulting film is certainly episodic - each attempt to impress his object of affection sends Charlie Brown into new little mini-storylines that bring different classic characters to the foreground and evoke the stop-start format of Schulz’s strip, even though the content and style feel fresh - but all of the disparate episodes feel unified by the kind of coherent forward momentum and progressive character growth that Bill Melendez’s older movies never really reached for.

Indeed, it’s probably most telling that the film’s sole major concession to conventional cinematic scale - its extended fantasy side-story featuring Snoopy engaging in aerial battles in his imaginary World War I Flying Ace alter-ego - is probably its weakest element. These high-flying action sequences are intelligently conceived, injecting some real visual splendour and scope without intruding on the intimacy of the main story, but they feel overextended and only infrequently connected to the rest of the film in any meaningful way. This would be less of a problem if the Snoopy-centric narrative had effective emotional hooks of its own, but sadly there’s really not much there beyond the Boys’ Own parody trappings; any real investment in Snoopy’s dreamed pursuit of his poodle love interest Fifi is undermined by her very un-Schulz-like drippy damselness, and it becomes hard to avoid feeling that you’re watching an extended distraction from the parts of the movie you’re actually interested in. Of course, it’s arguable that an overindulgent fondness for Snoopy-related flights of fancy drawing attention away from the more grounded, meaningful exploits of Charlie Brown and friends is actually a fair reflection of the Peanuts franchise in its latter years, showing that Blue Sky were faithful to Schulz to a fault, but I wouldn’t like to focus too much on a minor misstep in a film that’s intelligent and committed about its approach to small-canvas storytelling in a way you don’t often see from mainstream animated films on the big screen.

CELEBRATING... LETTING THE ULTIMATE UNDERDOG HAVE HIS DAY

All of these achievements would count for very little, though, if Blue Sky’s movie wasn’t able to adequately capture the intellect and essence of Schulz’s work, a task that seems simultaneously simple and impossible. For such a sprawling franchise, Peanuts has proven remarkably resilient to tampering, meddling or ruination, with each incarnation - whether in print or in animation - remaining stylistically and tonally consistent, thanks to the strict control Schulz and his fastidious estate have kept over the creative direction of the series. On the one hand, this is a blessing of sorts for future stewards of the franchise, as it gives them a clear playbook to work from when producing new material; on the other hand, the unyielding strictness of that formula hints heavily at a certain brittleness to the Peanuts template, suggesting to would-be reinventors that it would take only a small misapplication of ambition to irrevocably damage the essential Schulz-ness of the property and see the result crumble to dust. This has certainly proven the case with Schulz’s contemporary Dr Seuss, one of few American children’s literature writers with a comparable standing to the Peanuts creator, and an artist whose literate, lyrical and contemplative work has proven eminently easy to ruin by misguided adapters who tried and failed to put their own spin on his classic material.

There’s no guesswork involved in saying these concerns were of paramount importance to the Schulz estate when prepping The Peanuts Movie - director Steve Martino was selected specifically on the strength of his faithful adaptation of Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!, and the film’s screenplay was co-written by Schulz’s son Craig and grandson Bryan - but even taking a cautious approach, there are challenges to adapting Schulz for mainstream feature animation that surpass even those posed by Seuss’ politically-charged poetry. For all his vaulting thematic ambition, Seuss routinely founded his work on a bedrock of visual whimsy and adventurous, primary-colours mayhem, acting as a spoonful of sugar for the intellectual medicine he administered. Schulz, on the other hand, preferred to serve up his sobering, melancholic life lessons neat and unadulterated, with the static suburban backdrops and simply-rendered characters providing a fairly direct vessel for the strip’s cerebral, poignant or downbeat musings. The cartoonist’s willingness to honestly embrace life’s cruel indignities, the callousness of human nature and the feeling of unfulfilment that defines so much of regular existence is perhaps the defining element of his work and the foundational principle that couldn’t be removed without denying Charlie Brown his soul - but it’s also something that might have felt incompatible with the needs and expectations of a big studio movie in the modern era, particularly without being able to use the surface-level aesthetic pleasure that a Seuss adaptation provides as a crutch.

I’ve already addressed the impressive way The Peanuts Movie was able to make up the deficit on visual splendour and split the difference in terms of the story’s sense of scale, but the most laudable aspect of the film is the sure-footed navigation of the tonal tightrope it had to tread, deftly balancing the demands of the material against the needs of a modern audience, which are honestly just as important. Schulz may have been a visionary, but his work didn’t exist in a vacuum; the sometime brutal nature of his emotional outlook was at least in part a reaction to the somewhat sanitised children’s media landscape that existed around him at the time, and his work acted as an antidote that was perhaps more necessary then than it is now. That’s not to say the medicinal qualities of Schulz’s psychological insights don’t still have validity, but to put it bluntly I don’t think children lack reminders in today’s social landscape that the world can be a dark, daunting and depressing place, and it feels like Martino and his team realised that when trying to find the centre of their script. Thus, The Peanuts Movie takes the sharp and sometimes bitter flavour of classic Schulz and filters it, finding notes of sweetness implicit in the Peanuts recipe and making them more explicit, creating a gentler blend that goes down smoother while still feeling like it’s drawn from the original source.

The core of this delicate work of adaptation is the film’s Charlie Brown version 2.0 - still fundamentally the same unlucky totem of self-doubt and doomed ambition he’s always been, but with the permeating air of accepted defeat diminished somewhat. This Charlie Brown (voiced by Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp) shares the shortcomings of his predecessors, but wears them better, stands a little taller and feels less vulnerable to the slings and arrows that life - and ill-wishers like Lucy Van Pelt - throw at him. Certainly, he still thinks of himself as an “insecure, wishy-washy failure”, but his determination to become more than that shines through, with even his trademark “good grief” sometimes accompanied by a wry smile that demonstrates a level of perspective that previous incarnations of the character didn’t possess. Blue Sky’s Charlie Brown is, in short, a tryer - a facet of the character that always existed, but was never really foregrounded in quite the way The Peanuts Movie does. In the words of Martino:

“Here’s where I lean thematically. I want to go through this journey. … Charlie Brown is that guy who, in the face of repeated failure, picks himself back up and tries again. That’s no small task. I have kids who aspire to be something big and great. … a star football player or on Broadway. I think what Charlie Brown is - what I hope to show in this film - is the everyday qualities of perseverance… to pick yourself back up with a positive attitude - that’s every bit as heroic … as having a star on the Walk of Fame or being a star on Broadway. That’s the story’s core.”

It’s possible to argue that leavening the sometimes crippling depression in Charlie Brown’s soul robs him of some of his uniqueness, but it’s also not as though it’s a complete departure from Schulz’s presentation of him, either. Writer Christopher Caldwell, in a famous 2000 essay on the complex cultural legacy of the Peanuts strip, aptly described its star as a character who remains “optimistic enough to think he can earn a sense of self-worth”, rather than rolling over and accepting the status that his endless failures would seem to bestow upon him. Even at his most downbeat and “Charlie-Browniest”, he’s always been a tryer, someone with enough drive to stand up and be counted that he keeps coming back to manage and lead his hopeless baseball team to defeat year after year; someone with the determination to try fruitlessly again and again to get his kite in the air and out of the trees; someone with enough lingering misplaced faith in Lucy’s human decency to keep believing that this time she’ll let him kick that football, no matter how logical the argument for giving up might be.

Indeed, Charlie Brown’s dogged determination to make contact with that damn ball was enough to thaw the heart of Schulz himself, his creator and most committed tormentor - having once claimed that allowing his put-upon protagonist to ever kick the ball would be a “terrible disservice to him”, the act of signing off his final ever Peanuts strip prompted a change of heart and a tearful confession:

“All of a sudden I thought, 'You know, that poor, poor kid, he never even got to kick the football. What a dirty trick - he never had a chance to kick the football.”

If that comment - made in December 1999, barely two months before his death - represented Schulz’s sincere desire for clemency for the character he had doomed to a 50-year losing streak, then The Peanuts Movie can be considered the fulfilment of a dying wish. No, Charlie Brown still doesn’t get to kick the football, but he receives something a lot more meaningful - a long-awaited conversation with the Little Red-Haired Girl, realised on screen as a fully verbalised character for the first time, who provides Charlie Brown with a gentle but quietly overwhelming affirmation of his value and qualities as a human being. In dramatic terms, it’s a small-scale end to a low-key story; in emotional terms, it’s an moment of enormous catharsis, particularly in the context of the franchise as a whole. It’s in this moment that Martino’s film shows its thematic hand - the celebration of tryers the world over, a statement that you don’t need to accomplish epic feats to be a good person, that persevering, giving your all and maintaining your morality and compassion in the face of setbacks is its own kind of heroism. The impact feels even greater on a character level, though; after decades of Sisyphean struggle and disappointment, the ending of The Peanuts Movie is an act of beatific mercy for Charlie Brown, placing a warm arm around the shoulders of one of American culture’s most undeservedly downtrodden characters and telling him he is worth far more than the sum of his failures, that his essential goodness and honesty did not go unnoticed, and that he is deserving of admiration - not for being a sporting champion or winning a prize, but for having the strength to hold on to the best parts of himself even when the entire world seems to reject everything he is.

Maybe that isn’t how your grandfather’s Peanuts worked, and maybe it isn’t how Bryan Schulz’s grandfather’s Peanuts worked either, but it would take a hard-hearted, inflexible critic to claim that any of The Peanuts Movie’s adjustments to the classic formula are damaging to the soul of the property, particularly when the intent behind the changes feels so pure. The flaws and foibles of the characters are preserved intact, as is the punishingly fickle nature of the world’s morality; however, in tipping the bittersweet balance away from bitterness towards sweetness, Martino’s movie escapes the accusation of mere imitation and emerges as a genuine work of multifaceted adaptation, simultaneously acting as a tribute, a response to and a modernisation of Charles Schulz’s canon. The Peanuts Movie is clearly designed to work as an audience’s first exposure to Peanuts, but it works equally well if treated as an ultimate conclusion, providing an emotional closure to the epic Charlie Brown morality play that Schulz himself never provided, but that feels consistent with the core of the lessons he always tried to teach.

In reality, it’s unlikely Peanuts will ever be truly over - indeed, a new French-animated TV series based on the comics aired just last year - but there’s still something warmly comforting about drawing a rough-edged line under The Peanuts Movie, letting Charlie Brown live on in a moment of understated triumph 65 years in the making, remembered not for his failings but by his embodiment of the undersung heroism of simply getting back up and trying again. It’s not easy to make a meaningful contribution to the legacy of a character and property that’s already achieved legendary status on a global scale, but with The Peanuts Movie, the perennially undervalued Blue Sky gave good ol’ Charlie Brown a send-off that a spiritually-minded humanist like Charles Schulz would have been proud of - and in my book, that makes them heroes, too.

#peanuts #peanutsmovie #charles schulz #charles m. schulz #charlie brown #peppermint patty #lucy van pelt #linus van pelt #snoopy #woodstock #blue sky #blue sky studios #animation #film analysis #movies #movie critique #long post

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chicagoindiecritics · 4 years

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New from Jeff York on The Establishing Shot: JEFF YORK’S PICKS FOR THE 10 BEST FILMS OF 2019

The latter half of this year was so chock full of excellent films, I knew I’d have a difficult time narrowing my best of the year to a mere ten choices. Among the movies I loved that just missed the top were FORD V. FERRARI, THE TWO POPES, GWEN, DOLEMITE IS MY NAME, THE FURNACE, OPHELIA, TOY STORY 4, HAIL SATAN, THE REPORT, and LITTLE WOMEN. If I did a top 20, they’d be on it.

So, what did make my top 10? Here are my picks for the best films this year:

1.) PARASITE Directed by Bong Joon Ho Written by Bong Joon Ho and Jin Won Han It’s great to see this Korean movie getting all the accolades it’s racking up. Rare is a foreign film that gets so much buzz. PARASITE is practically a shoo-in for Best Foreign Film and might just give plenty of American films this year a run for their money as Best Picture at the Oscars. (I’m talking to you, Quentin and Marty!) Bong’s masterpiece works best if you know little going into the cineplex to see it. I’ll simply say that the plot concerns a Korean family of four conning their way into working for a rich family of four and the film’s title comes from how both groups feed off the hospitality of each other. This dark comedy skewers caste systems and economic injustice, yet remains a fiendishly witty entertainment with some of the best camerawork, production design, and ensemble acting of the last decade. I’ve seen it three times and want to see it again. It’s that incredible.

2.) PAIN AND GLORY Written and directed by Pedro Almodovar Pedro Almodovar has been making classic films about the human condition for over four decades, and PAIN AND GLORY represents all that has gone before while hinting at a mellower filmmaker looking to the future. Almodovar has always been emotional and big, with colorful sets, twisty plots, and outrageous characters. Much of that is still here, but it’s a mellower work. The aging movie director at the center of the story (Antonio Banderas, never better), representing Almodovar undoubtedly, feels less anger about the past and more hope for the future. It’s a moving meditation on aging, one that made me tear up in sadness, but also in joy.

3.) BOOKSMART Directed by Olivia Wilde Written by Emily Halperin, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel, and Katie Silberman For me, the biggest surprise of the year was BOOKSMART, an incredible coming-of-age film that eschews several teen movie clichés in favor of smarter truths and more genuine laughs. Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are two seniors about to graduate who’ve been responsible, stay-in-their-lane types the whole time. On graduation eve, they decide to act out of character and attend a raucous party. Of course, craziness follows them throughout the evening, but while the set-pieces are hilarious, it’s the bonding between the girls that sticks with you. And how nice to see a teen comedy where the female leads didn’t need boyfriends or get punished severely for their mishaps. They’re too smart to let that happen, and so is this movie.

4.) MARRIAGE STORY Written and directed by Noah Baumbach If anything, Baumbach’s stunning character study should’ve been entitled DIVORCE STORY. That’s the crux of the film as two good people find that they’re no longer good together and must start anew. Charlie (Adam Driver, incredible) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson, almost as good) are an experimental theater director and his star. How fitting that the arcs that each will go through in this drama will require constant improvisation. The New Yorker Charlie, used to being in control, must learn to let others run the show. Nicole relishes being out from under her ex, but he’ll always be in her life nonetheless as the father of her son. Even with vicious divorce lawyers doing their best to make things ugly, the film manages to stay positive, finding sympathy for both parties and hoping they each find a better path.

5.) KNIVES OUT Written and directed by Rian Johnson Rian Johnson is a filmmaker who likes to usurp genre and formula. He set his detective noir BRICK in a high school and twisted the STAR WARS formula into the unpredictable THE LAST JEDI. In KNIVES OUT, Johnson riffs on Agatha Christie’s style of drawing-room whodunnits, all-star casts, and an eccentric detective solving the puzzle. It’s a clever mystery, but also a hilarious satire of one. Daniel Craig was loose as a goose playing southerner PI Benoit Blanc while big names played the vicious offspring of their rich, dead patriarch (Christopher Plummer, unmatched in playing salty, yet sophisticated seniors.) It’s no small feat making a movie like this work and Johnson’s crowd-pleaser may have just been the most satisfying studio film of the year.

6.) PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE French filmmaker Celine Sciamma’s love story is as much about art as it is about a painter and subject becoming lovers. Marianne (Noemi Merlant) is tasked with painting the mercurial Heloise (Adele Haenel) for her wedding portrait in an arranged marriage. Their wariness of each other turns into bonding over art, free-thinking, and zigging when the world would have you zag. It also portrays the difficulty of truly seeing what’s standing in front of you, whether it’s a subject to paint or a person to understand. Sciammna takes her time, letting the pot slowly boil, but when it does, look out! She also does amazingly clever things with the camera, escalating its movement as the women become more and more passionate together.

7.) 1917 Directed by Sam Mendes Written by Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns War films are inherently dramatic with the stakes being life and death. This film dials up that trope by having two men tasked with having to save thousands. British forces during WWI get intel that warns them of a regimen about to walk into a German trap. Two young lance corporals (George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) are given the horrible task of running on foot across enemy lines to get the new orders to the 1600 troops. The race begins, with the camera accompanying them every step of the journey, shot to be perceived as one, uninterrupted shot. (All the more to make it seem scarily real, natch.) It’s a nail-biter, to say the least, as we are right next to them through bushes, streams and cannon fire. War is hell, sure, as this film proves, but it can also make for one incredibly exhilarating and unique experience in the cinema.

8.) THE FAREWELL Written and directed by Lulu Wang In a year of so many superb films put forth by female directors, Wang’s autobiographical one is a clear standout. In her story, a Chinese-American family learns their grandmother only has a short time left to live. They decide not to tell her the bad news. Instead, they concoct a fake family wedding to gather everyone together for one big celebration – – before she dies. What could go wrong? Their well-intentioned scheme generates daft shenanigans, some of the funniest farce on film this year. As the family can barely keep track of their lies, and blunder through awful toasts at the wedding, Grandmother starts to put two and two together. Few films can juxtapose laughs against tears so successfully, but Wang’s did, and her triumph ended up being the feel-good film of 2019.

9.) I LOST MY BODY Directed by Jeremy Clapin Written by Jeremy Clapin and Guillaume Laurant How’s this for a weird animated movie pitch? A disembodied hand searches for its former owner, and in turn, discovers the complicated and tragic life of the man it was attached to. Indeed, that’s the premise of this adult-themed gem from French filmmaker Clapin. The stark illustration style, the haunting music, the expressive voices of Dev Patel and Ala Shawkat for the American translation – it all made for an eerie ride through a TWILIGHT ZONE-ish tale of painful memories. Available right now on Netflix, it’s absurdist, violent, scary, romantic, and never less than mesmerizing.

10.) AD ASTRA What is it with space exploration and family issues? GRAVITY and INTERSTELLAR both had astronaut protagonists tortured by losing family members. So does AD ASTRA as its astronaut (Brad Pitt) is sent out to retrieve a renegade father (Tommy Lee Jones) gone AWOL on the outskirts of the galaxy. As he journeys, Pitt’s military man discovers a great deal about the dad he never knew and gains insights into his own failures back on Earth. Most surprisingly, he learns how readily duty can get compromised by politics and corruption, even NASA. It’s a haunting tale, writ large on the big screen where the scale was ginormous, as were the regrets of the main character.

If you want to read the original reviews of my selections, just look for them here in the archives of The Establishing Shot, or at Creative Screenwriting magazine online where I’m the film critic.

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jillmckenzie1 · 6 years

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Twelve Notes – Local Movie Reviewer Explores the New Remake “A Star is Born”

One of the old Hollywood legends is about the genesis of 1937’s A Star Is Born. Allegedly, it was not-so-secretly about the relationship between Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay. While Fay was a success on Broadway, his film career fizzled. Stanwyck became a massive film star, and Fay worked out his resentment of her through alcoholism and physical abuse. For a while, that was the template for these remakes, that of the meteoric rise of the ingènue and the corresponding fall of the has-been.

That tells us that, at the end of the day, there aren’t that many stories. In Christopher Booker’s book The Seven Basic Plots, he posits that there are — you guessed it — seven kinds of stories that we tell. They are:

Overcoming the Monster

Rags to Riches

The Quest

Voyage and Return

Comedy

Tragedy

Rebirth

The important aspect isn’t what the story is, but how the story is told. The filter provided by the artist gives us perspective, and that perspective makes the story unique – or not.

For example, Hollywood has provided a whopping five iterations of the same story, one of the vast pitfalls of fame. The first was What Price Hollywood? released way back in 1932. 1937 brought us the Fredric March-starring remake entitled A Star Is Born. Folks liked that title because it came back around in 1954 with the doomed Judy Garland. In 1976, it turned out folks really liked that title, and this time Barbra Streisand was the headliner.

Unsurprisingly, another remake struggled to get off the ground. For a minute there, it looked like Clint Eastwood was going to direct Beyoncé, but like pitiless Roman emperors, the Hollywood gods gave a thumbs down, consigning it to development hell. Then Bradley Cooper came along. He had a take on the material that was timely. More importantly, he had Lady Gaga. The end result is the 2018 version of A Star Is Born, which is both a machine engineered to win awards and a genuinely good film.

We’re introduced to rocker Jackson Mane (Bradley Cooper) performing at a sold-out concert. The crowd loves him, loves his barroom-rock and country ballads. How much does he actually love it? We get the sense that his passion for music is fading, as evidenced by the bottle of booze he slams down in his limo after the show. This is not the first time he’s self-medicated with hooch. It won’t be the last.

Clearly, Jackson needs…something. At a drag bar, he finds what he’s looking for. Ally (Lady Gaga) works by day as a server in a hoity-toity restaurant. On Friday nights, the queens at the drag bar generously let her take the stage. She’s a hell of a singer. The regulars love her. Her father Lorenzo (Andrew Dice Clay) thinks she could be huge but thinks the size of her nose will hold her back.*

Jackson stumbles into the bar, orders the first of what one presumes to be several drinks, and waits for something to happen. Ally emerges onto the stage and proceeds to absolutely decimate the crowd with her version of La Vie En Rose. Watch Cooper play this scene because as the song goes on, we see his facial expressions shift from admiration to shock at the scope of her talent to infatuation.

They fall in love, but their romance is nurtured by their mutual respect for their talent. He encourages her to write her own songs. He tells her, “Music is essentially twelve notes between any octave. Twelve notes and the octave repeats. It’s the same story told over and over. All any artist can offer the world is how they see those twelve notes.” As Ally begins to rocket into the heavens, Jackson starts to fall.

As someone with more talent than he’s sometimes given credit for, Bradley Cooper knows a thing or two about the machinery of stardom. Consider that, for a while there, he was viewed as the freakishly good-looking guy from The Hangover. He paid attention to the craft of filmmaking in acting showcases directed by Clint Eastwood and David O. Russell, and as the voice of the trash-talking Rocket Raccoon in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Cooper applied that knowledge here with his directorial debut. As debuts go, it’s pretty damned good. It’s common that, when actors step up to the director’s chair, they have a knack of coaxing out strong performances. Cooper is no different, and his film is overstuffed with outstanding acting. He also knows that one of the main reasons folks are showing up for this film is the music. Wisely, he always takes a moment to let us appreciate the songs, ones that we hear more than once in different contexts. Is his direction perfect? Not always, and I wasn’t crazy about the frequent occurrence of shakycam shots and an overreliance on close-ups. The first hour is the most energetic; there’s a good amount of bloat in the second act. Still, he’s offering strong and steady filmmaking that must be applauded.

This project was a labor of love for Cooper, and he worked on the script alongside Will Fetters and Eric Roth. They get an awful lot right, with an ear for natural dialogue that’s never too clever for its own good. I also appreciated how this iteration of the old tale sidesteps the resentment aspect and portrays alcoholism as a genuine disease that requires treatment. Yet the script has a couple issues as well. It seems to agree with Jackson’s take that pop music is totally disposable. A little bit more of an issue is that Ally is written somewhat inconsistently. She tells Jackson early on she won’t tolerate his drinking, then she constantly tolerates it. It doesn’t feel like her character is struggling. Instead, it feels like the script isn’t clearly showing us her struggle.

If you’re seeing this movie, and you should, it should be seen on the biggest and loudest screen possible to luxuriate in the performances. As Jackson’s older brother, Sam Elliott shows up to offer a masterclass in film acting. Most of us think of Elliott as the impressively mustachioed cowpoke in Tombstone, but here he’s mournful, restrained, and astonishing. Also, in words I thought I’d never write, Andrew Dice Clay is sweet and charming as Ally’s goofball father.

Reportedly, Lady Gaga encouraged Cooper to sing all of their numbers live. Wise Lady! Her suggestion brings an energy to the music that would have been lacking if they’d lip-synced. As the self-destructive Jackson, Cooper gives a controlled performance. He’s showing us character beats during each song, and watch how during each musical number, he quietly gets just a little sloppier, mirroring his character’s mental state.

Big surprise that Lady Gaga is the star of the show. If there’s one thing she isn’t lacking, it’s self-confidence. Initially, the idea of Gaga playing a woman who needs The Right Man to encourage her to share her talent with the world was laughable. She pulls it off, and as Ally, she’s absolutely fearless. Initially, she’s a little shy, unsure about her talent but quite sure that her chance has passed her by. We see her first number with Jackson in front of a massive crowd and her reaction of Holy s–t, I can’t believe this is happening. Gaga is a force of nature who confidently shows us the evolution of her character. The woman in the last five minutes of the film is a very different person than the woman we first meet. That’s how you portray a three-dimensional character.

We’ve seen this movie before, but you know what? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. A Star Is Born is okay with being a 21st-century melodrama. It’s perfectly comfortable cranking up its emotions and firing them directly into your face. That comfort with genuine emotion is important, especially now. It’s the kind of thing we should be thankful for. I certainly am.

*Seriously, the size of Gaga’s nose is a recurring plot point. I found this very weird.

from Blog https://ondenver.com/twelve-notes-local-movie-reviewer-explores-the-new-remake-a-star-is-born/

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