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Oh say can you see...a musical based on the American Revolution?
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Monkey see, monkey in big doodoo
Thursday, July 28, 2016
"Project Nim" proved to be a fascinating examination of science run amok and the hubris of man's attempt to get animals to conform to our rules and social structure. At least that's the message that the majority of CineVerse members came away with after viewing this 2011 documentary last evening. Among the topics we discussed were the following:
WHAT DID YOU FIND UNEXPECTED, DISTINCTIVE, AND MEMORABLE ABOUT THIS FILM?
• The chimpanzee often appears more intelligent and definitely more sympathetic than any of the humans around him.
• Unlike many other documentary films, this one utilizes reenacted footage with actors, and even a chimp robotic, to depict past events; this is an approach often used by documentarian Errol Morris.
• Arguably, this film is more about Nim’s handlers than Nim himself; and Roger Ebert’s review, he said: “I call Nim ‘he’ rather than ‘it’ because that’s how his humans see him. The movie is more about how we see them.”
• Viewers may go into a film like this with grandiose expectations that this would be a successful linguistic experiment and a scientific miracle – anticipating that the chimpanzee could effectively learn to communicate with humans via sign language or otherwise; actually, these expectations are lowered throughout the film and any hope for a scientific miracle is squelched by tragedy.
• The chimpanzee is often depicted as a child of divorce or a broken home as well as a troubled adolescent trying to cope in a series of dysfunctional families.
• It may make many viewers think twice about how they see animals in zoos or as pets going forward.
WHAT THEMES ARE EXAMINED IN THIS MOVIE?
• Humans or animals, but other animals are not humans and cannot be understood in human terms.
• The hubris of man – trying to get an animal to conform to man’s world.
• The sometimes inhumane consequences of man’s scientific curiosity and ambition.
NIM GETS PASSED AROUND LIKE AN ABANDONED CHILD OF DIVORCE TO A SERIES OF DIFFERENT CAREGIVERS. CAN YOU TRACE THIS PROGRESSION?
• It starts with his “father,” Herb and proceeds to:
• “Mother” (Stephanie) and Nim’s “sister” (Stephanie’s daughter) and reluctant stepfather (Stephanie’s husband)
• Stepmother (Laura)
• New sisters and brother (Herb’s new assistants)
• Head of an orphanage
• Foster father (Bob)
• Somewhat kind warden of a cruel prison (LEMSIP)
• Emancipator (lawyer)
• Adoptive father (ranch owner)
NIM THE CHIMP HAS BEEN COMPARED TO CHARACTERS IN LITERATURE BY DICKENS AND KAFKA; CAN YOU CITE ANY EXAMPLES?
• New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott wrote: “(Nim) resembles the titular hero of a Dickens novel, an orphan buffeted by circumstances whose biography is also a fable of individual virtue and social injustice. A helpless innocent compared with his protectors and tormentors, Nim bounces like a long-armed David Copperfield from one unnatural home to another His tale is Dickensian, but also Kafkaesque, since he is at the mercy of powerful forces beyond his ken or control. Red Peter, the learned ape in Kafka’s devastating “Report to an Academy,” dreams, above all else, of a “way out,” and to watch footage of the young Nim at play and in confinement is to infer that he must have known a similar longing.”
OTHER FILMS THAT REMIND US OF PROJECT NIM
• Koko: A Talking Gorilla
• Au Hasard Balthazar
• Grizzly Man
• Chimpanzee
• Unlocking the Cage
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Rise of the Planet of the Apes
OTHER FILMS BY DIRECTOR JAMES MARSH
• Man on Wire
• Shadow Dancer
• The Theory of Everything
Monkey business
Sunday, July 24, 2016
1957 meets 1986 meets 2016
Thursday, July 21, 2016
The film "Stand by Me" is a trip down memory lane to a simpler time, but this sentimental journey isn't designed to be exclusively enjoyed by men who shed their childhood skins in the late 1950s, which is time period depicted. It has a story and characters that resonated in 1986--the year of the film's release--and that can be appreciated today, too. Here's our CineVerse group's take on this memorable movie and what it has to say to modern audiences:
WHAT DID YOU FIND INTERESTING, DIFFERENT OR UNIQUE ABOUT THIS PICTURE?
• It falls into several categories: it’s a coming-of-age film, a road movie, a buddy picture, an adventure tale, and a nostalgia film.
• It also has the best of all worlds: an absorbing plot, well-developed characters, and quality dialogue and voiceover narration.
• Different from other coming-of-age and road trip stories, however, it occurs over only two days and by foot—not machine or over a vast distance. Additionally, many coming-of-age films feature more female characters; here, the only one of consequence, and in a small part, is Gordie’s mother. By removing any female peers as characters, the filmmakers avoid any sexual complications and let the four boys’ experiences and innocence stand out on their own.
• It’s well cast with talented young teenagers who make us believe what they’re going through.
• It’s told in voiceover flashback by the main character, now an adult writer, which offers perspective and context on what can be learned from childhood experiences.
• There’s a great “tale-within-a-tale” sequence, told around the campfire that provides comic relief in the middle of the film.
• It’s wistful and sentimental, but in a bittersweet way that doesn’t try to glorify/whitewash the late 1950s when the main story occurs: each boy has challenges and problems that they hope to overcome; some do, others don’t.
• It’s based on a novella written by Stephen King, who is more known for his horror tales; this movie showcases King’s talent for writing across genres, as it also demonstrates director Rob Reiner’s skill at crafting movies across genres, too (he’s done comedies, romances, thrillers and fantasies, as well).
• It stands the test of time as an evergreen feature, due in no small part to the fact that it’s a period piece removed from the time the film was released; even though future generations won’t be able to relate to what it was like to be a preteen in the late 1950s, any viewer of any future time period who survived adolescence can appreciate the movie’s themes, conflicts and characters.
• Curiously, this movie is rated R, despite not showing any nudity or graphic violence. Arguably, it deserves no higher than a PG-13 rating so that it can be seen by more teens and preteens for the wisdom it can impart on adolescent viewers.
• It’s a picture that’s not afraid to show preteens smoking, swearing, using homophobic slurs, and talking about sex. Today, smoking in films and homophobic slurs are seriously frowned upon by Hollywood, especially among child characters.
WHAT THEMES ARE EXPLORED IN “STAND BY ME”?
• Living life to the fullest in a very mortal existence; as reviewer Martin Liebman put it: “Theirs is a quest that will reveal what it means to be alive, even as they willfully seek out death.”
• Liebman further suggested: “It's how the characters learn to live not only in the good times but with the bad in life that's the real purpose of the story, and it's that honesty about how life works -- for these characters through the meshing of youth, experience, discovery, and death -- that makes Stand By Me one of the all-time great movies that deals with the realities of the world at large but here discovered through the small-town experience.”
• The loss of childhood innocence as we mature into young adulthood and, later, adulthood.
• The strong bonds of friendship and camaraderie; the film’s title was changed from the novella’s title, “The Body”, to “Stand by Me”, to accent this point.
• Social and familial alienation: These boys each cannot count on the support of parents or siblings; they can only rely on each other.
• The mythic journey of a hero who must travel and undergo different challenges to be able to return home as a new or reborn man. King said he was influenced by Joseph Campbell’s book “A Hero with a Thousand Faces”; Campbell noted that the prevalent template for the mythic quest and the narrative driving the hero’s journey follow the pattern of separation, initiation and return/redemption.
• Like legendary stories from Greek mythology, including “The Odyssey,” our protagonists must travel away from home and confront dangers and threats that will help them develop into fully actualized adult heroes: First, they venture across the dump and its Cerberus-like canine guard; next they must traverse the treacherous train bridge; next, our storyteller shares a myth within a myth around the campfire; then, this lead character encounters a deity or spiritual presence in the form of a deer; next, they must cross a pond filled with monsters (leeches), during which the main hero’s manhood is threatened; eventually, they must confront death (the dead body) and the forces of evil (the gang of older boys); finally, they return home, forever changed by their experiences and destined to live out their fates—some will survive and thrive, others perish or acquiesce.
EVEN NON-HITCHCOCK FILMS CAN HAVE A MACGUFFIN. WHAT IS THE MACGUFFIN IN THIS MOVIE?
• The dead body itself, which drives the action and characters, but which by itself proves to be relatively inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
FILMS AND TV SHOWS THAT STAND BY ME BRING TO MIND
• A Christmas Story
• The Wonder Years
• American Graffiti
• The Goonies
• The Outsiders
• The Sand Lot
OTHER FILMS HELMED BY ROB REINER
• This is Spinal Tap
• The Princess Bride
• When Harry Met Sally
• Misery
• A Few Good Men
• The American President
Stephen King gets sentimental--with a dead body thrown in, of course
Sunday, July 17, 2016
Playing tic-tac-toe with the Master of Suspense
Thursday, July 14, 2016
"Strangers on a Train," from 1951, kicks off Alfred Hitchcock's astounding run of major and minor masterpieces created in the 1950s that stand among the best of his works--including, chronologically, "Dial M For Murder," "Rear Window," "To Catch a Thief," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "The Wrong Man," "Vertigo," and "North by Northwest." We've now advanced to a point in our Hitchcockronology monthly series where the movies viewed and discussed are each worthy of several Wednesday evenings worth of examination; alas, we typically have less than an hour to dissect each. But much was learned during last evening's condensed CineVerse discussion about "Strangers on a Train" that bears repeating. Here are the highlights:
WHAT THEMES ARE EXPLORED IN THIS FILM?
• Innocence and guilt, and the transference of guilt: the main motivation for Guy to foil Bruno by the end of the film is Guy’s guilt stemming from the fact that he has overtly wished for Miriam’s death, which is fulfilled
• Doppelgangers, doubles, pairs and opposites
• Crisscrossing and double crossing
• Good vs. evil, light vs. dark and the shades of gray and ambiguity between them
• Suggested homoeroticism and sexual tension:
• The dark side to wish fulfillment, represented by Bruno
WHAT PATTERNS AND MOTIFS ARE USED BY HITCHCOCK?
• Pattern of doubles: two taxicabs, two sets of train rails that cross twice, Hitchcock’s cameo (carries a double bass), similarity between Miriam and Anne’s sister (played by Hitch’s daughter), both of whom wear glasses; two pairs of feet, double drinks ordered, tennis played between 2 people; two boyfriends for Miriam at the carnival; two respectable fathers; two sets of detectives; two old men at the carousel; two little boys near the fairground; two women at the party
• Geometric shapes used:
o Xs: crossed legs, x-shaped railroad crossing signs shown; cigarette lighter with crossed tennis rackets
o Parallel lines: silk robe with its parallel lines; large gate with parallel bars; rows of parallel heads swiveling left and right watching the tennis match, the police officer’s uniform patch
o Circles: circles on Bruno’s robe; handles shaped into a strangling circle; white globe atop a lamppost; kid’s balloon; the sun that Bruno glances at
o In this way, using these shapes, the film is like a big screen game of tic tac toe: Xs, Os, and gridlines.
• The left side of the screen typically depicts evil characters; the right usually shows good or temporarily dominant characters.
• Interplay of shadow and light used in the cinematography and compositions
• Key scene: where Guy prepares to enter his property, but hears Bruno whisper from across the street: Bruno stands behind a gate that casts symbolic shadows across his face, while Guy stands to his right, outside the gate. When a cop car pulls up, Guy rapidly moves behind the gate next to Bruno, and now they’re both behind bars, insinuating that they’re both guilty and capable of evil.
WHAT’S INTERESTING ABOUT THE FILM’S SEXUAL DYNAMICS AND SUGGESTIONS?
• Bruno is depicted as subtly homosexual in mannerisms, walk, and flirtatious behavior.
• Guy is suggested as possibly intrigued by Bruno’s homosexuality, but rejects it by the end of the film:
o You could argue that Guy is sexually confused and may be a closeted homosexual: this is substantiated in the scene where he has to pass by the guard dog, who licks his hand, as if to suggest that Guy is like Bruno and is one of the family.
• Bruno is disgusted by the heterosexual world: his heterosexual father, Miriam’s repellant flirtatious heterosexual behavior (including her phallic licking of an ice cream cone); and, it could be argued, that he is jealous and resentful of Guy’s success as a heterosexual and had planned to have Guy framed as a premeditated frame up.
• What’s interesting about the casting is that Robert Walker was a straight man in real life who was known for playing likable boy next door types and yet he is cast against type here as gay and villainous, and Farley Granger was a bisexual man in real life being asked to play a straight man here.
• Bruno, unfortunately, continues a classic Hollywood period tradition of often depicting gay characters as deviant, aberrant, perverse, askew and inclined to commit a crime—as evidenced by famous gay/lesbian characters in classic films like Mrs. Danvers in “Rebecca,” Joel Cairo in “The Maltese Falcon,” Waldo in “Laura,” and the gay college roommates in “Rope.”
WHAT’S FASCINATING ABOUT BRUNO AS A HITCHCOCK VILLAIN?
• He’s capable of both great charm and wit as well as great violence and volatility.
• He can murder cruelly without compunction, and in the next scene help an old blind man across the street.
• He’s a creepy, malevolent, nearly omniscient presence who seems to know where Guy is at all times—in some ways, he’s characterized almost like a vampire who is stalking Guy and, near the end, waiting for the sun to go down so he can fulfill his evil plans.
WHAT DID YOU FIND DISTURBING or RISQUE ABOUT THIS FILM?
• Miriam’s trampy behavior for a 1951 film: she’s married to Guy, yet pregnant with another man’s baby and philandering with multiple men—in one scene suggesting a ménage a trois.
• The fact that you identify with Bruno, just like you’re forced to identify with Norman Bates after Marion Crane is killed in Psycho; you secretly want him to retrieve the cigarette lighter and evade a near capture by police.
• Bruno’s strange relationship with his mother, and the mother’s reaction to Bruno.
• The shocking chaos of the carousel out of control scene and its powerfully destructive conclusion: it’s obvious that many kids must have been killed, yet their fates are overlooked in favor of resolving Guy’s guilt problem.
Read more...
Riding off the rails with Hitch
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
"We're all in this (surrealist nightmare) together..."
Thursday, July 7, 2016
Few films are as polarizing and perplexing as "Brazil," Terry Gilliam's foray into dystopian fantasy, which, at very least, stands as a remarkable visual and technical achievement--even if its plot and 142-minute director's cut runtime is incredibly demanding of its audience. It can take several viewings to better comprehend this kaleidescopic mashup of Kafka, Orwell and Python sensibilities melded with Gilliam's twisted vision and eye for oddball esthetics. What follows is a roundup of key points made about this unforgettable flick during our CineVerse discussion last evening:
WHAT DID YOU FIND UNEXPECTED, DIFFERENT, IMPRESSIVE OR EVEN OVERWHELMING ABOUT “BRAZIL”?
• The visuals are incredibly original and impressive in their size and scope, especially considering that all the special effects are done “in the camera” (meaning they weren’t augmented by extra optical work or computer effects, and everything was filmed on actual stage).
• Director Terry Gilliam presents an odd, unsettling and yet humorous take on an alternate universe that isn’t necessarily futuristic or the realm of science-fiction and fantasy (other than the dream sequences); here, he creates a world that appears retro, ugly, and technologically dysfunctional yet is trying to suggest that the powers that be in this world want people to think that it’s advanced and technologically progressive.
o Criterion Collection essayist David Sterritt wrote: “This was filmed in an abandoned Victorian flour mill still containing its obsolete wooden machinery, refinished by the crew to get the ungainly mix of newfangled ugliness and oldfangled inefficiency that characterizes the picture’s look.”
o Film reviewer Glenn Erickson suggested: “Terry Gilliam wisely constructs his bureaucratic Dystopia from the remnants of the past, which immediately puts the look of Brazil ahead of 90% of its peers. Movies as diverse as Things to Come and Fahrenheit 451 imagine future styles that soon become obsolete. Avoiding that trap, Gilliam's retro-mechanical automatic typewriters and Fresnel-enhanced data monitors already look like outmoded junk, suggesting Orwell's crumbling infrastructure while at the same time resembling nothing familiar to us now.”
• The movie seems prescient in its depiction of constant terror attacks, consumer preoccupation with plastic surgery and body image, the way society is over-dependent on technology, and the abusive crass capitalism by which corporate America exploits our consumer tendencies (turning every day into Christmas Shopping Day).
• “Brazil” also curiously and crazily blends political and sociocultural commentary, whimsical comedy, fantasy and surrealism, bleak, dystopian pessimism, and romance, creating a tonally diverse picture that isn’t as dour and doom-laden as obvious influences like Kafka’s “The Trial” and Orwell’s “1984.”
• The film’s title is obscure; we never hear the word “Brazil” mentioned in the movie, and it’s not clear if the characters inhabit the country of Brazil. The only frame of reference is the 1939 song, sung by Ary Barroso, used throughout the picture. Sterritt posits that “Brazil figures here the way Chinatown does in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film: it’s a shadowy somewhere else that haunts the imagination without intruding much on the characters’ world.”
WHAT THEMES IS “BRAZIL” ATTEMPTING TO MINE?
• Government bureaucracy run amok: Brazil is run by a totalitarian regime, minus any Big Brother figure, that, despites its intentions to create order and control, leads to disorder, terrible mistakes, inefficiencies, and oppression.
• The pitfalls of advanced technology: Brazil depicts a netherworld where technology makes our lives worse and our jobs harder, with the design of that technology proving to be irrational, inefficient and user-unfriendly.
• Social isolation and alienation, which are repercussions of a bureaucratically oppressive government and poorly engineered technology.
• Terrorism and its random, destructive threat; actually, Sterritt ponders that “it’s possible there are no terrorists, just a lot of lethal accidents caused by bungling authorities.
• The possibility that technology and bad government can lead us backwards instead of forwards, creating a regressive instead of futuristic look; consider this reading of “Brazil” from Criterion Collection essayist Jack Mathews: “There isn’t a futuristic moment or element in Brazil. The story is Orwellian, in the sense that it is set in a totalitarian state where individuality is smothered by enforced conformity. But where George Orwell, writing in 1948, was envisioning a future ruled by fascism and technology, Gilliam was satirizing the bureaucratic, largely dysfunctional industrial world that had been driving him crazy all his life.”
OTHER MOVIES OR WORKS OF LITERATURE THAT REMIND US OF “BRAZIL”
• Dystopian cautionary tales like “1984,” “The Trial”
• The story and character of Robin Hood, who miraculously arrives to save the day for the underprivileged; here, Robert DeNiro’s Tuttle stands in for Robin Hood, solving problems quickly.
• Sci-fi features like “Metropolis,” “Things to Come,” “THX 1138” and “Logan’s Run”
• Political satire movies like “Dr. Strangelove”
• “Battleship Potemkin” (in how this film mimics its famous Odessa steps sequence)
• Films influenced by “Brazil”, including “Dark City,” “Kafka,” “Batman” (1989), “The City of Lost Children”, and “Children of Men”
OTHER FILMS DIRECTED BY TERRY GILLIAM
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (co-director)
• Jabberwocky
• Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which, together with Brazil, formed Gilliam’s “Dreams” trilogy of fantasy films
• Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
• The Fisher King
• Twelve Monkeys
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
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