Starring: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens, Rachel Korine, and Gucci Mane
Cinematography by: Benoît Debie
Editing by: Douglas Crise
Spring Break is kicking around in its death throes, and what a sad thing that is. I know I’ve certainly procrastinated, and for the good health of anybody, I hope you all did too! I also know that I’m not the only one who looked forward to and saw the new movie Spring Breakers. Now, if my opinion is worth 800 words (and who’s isn’t) then maybe I can save someone $10 and 94 minutes. This review has spoilers, you’ve been warned!
Walking out of Harmony Korine’s newest and most prodigal Spring Breakers, I wasn’t sure if my senses were kaput, or if what I’d seen was too garish to sense at all. The film prides itself on Korine’s exactness and style, but as a foremost provocateur, his cinematic patchwork never realizes the ambition of his ideas. It’s true that the film reaches for something and for that it deserves a little credit, but Korine’s vision is almost as unwatchable is it is hard to swallow (and unfortunately there’s none of that either).
I get it; you’re hankering for a really prime movie, but
there’s nothing playing at thecineplex you want to see. Or The Video Station is closed. Or you’re
procrastinating, and really shouldn’t leave home. (Insert excuse here.)
As it happens, there are some pretty spiffy movies on Hulu.com that their programmers, for whatever
reason, have overlooked putting behind their pay wall.
This is just a jaw-dropping film. Jean-Pierre
Melville gives the full, unspeakably bleak picture of what working in the WWII
French Resistance was like: the constant fear of being caught, the horrible
assignments of killing your own countrymen (even if they are traitors), the
coming to terms with how you’ll face your own death. There’s no sentimentality
here.
Because Charles de Gaulle was unpopular at the time of the
film’s release, it was panned in France and wasn’t released in America until
its restoration in 2006.
Plus! It stars Jean-Pierre Cassel, Vincent Cassel’s dad.
You’re not going to watch this, are you? I could say that
John Ford has a cameo as one of the Klansmen, that it was the first film to be
shown at the White House—see? Your eyes are already glazing over. Fine. If you
won’t eat the perfectly wholesome Cheerios, here’s something a little more
Count Chocula-ish:
This was one of my two favorite monster movies growing up
(the other, of course, being King Kong
Escapes, where Kong battles a mecha-Kong). The alien costumes are just
super-cool 60s, and the sexy alien played by Kumi Mizuno lingered long in my
memory.
For some reason, the beam effects are really well
done—they’re a radioactive blue, and the force fields the flying saucers
project around Godzilla and Rodan are 3-dimensional, shaded bubbles. Good job,
Toho Studios!
I know. Calm down. This is really a TV anime series. But it
beats the crap out of most movies with first-rate storytelling, character
development, and pacing. I was ready to drop out after the first three episodes
(“Jesus, is this story going anywhere?”), but my patience was well-rewarded.
Last Exile is set in a retro Steampunk future, on a colony
world named Prester. Nations fight each other with flying battleship fleets...eh, I'm not doing a good job explaining this. Just go watch a few episodes. It’s Japanese, it’s a bit weird, but it’s also amazing
storytelling, and unlike anything you’d ever see on American TV.
Christ, do you know how rare this movie is? After reading
about it and seeing snippets on YouTube, I tried to snag a copy at the Video
Station (no go). Even Netflix claimed it didn’t have a copy. (Really, Netflix?) To find it for
free, on Hulu, is truly proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Brick is a smart, well-written film
that breathes new life into the hard-boiled detective genre. Upon its release in
2005, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's acting career was losing steam, and Rian Johnson was an
aging USC graduate who had been laboring to get his script made for seven
years. Thanks to Brick, they're both A-listers, now.
*If you have fast internet. But c'mon, this the second decade of the 21st century! Even the cool new Pope has fast internet.
Walt Disney’s educational I’m No Fool series (made from 1955 to 1957) are the first projected films I can remember. In
second grade, Mrs. Galloway, who was probably at or exceeding retirement age,
gathered us around the out-of-tune upright piano and taught us to belt out rousing renditions of My Country ‘tis
of Thee and America the Beautiful.
When she tired of that (or perhaps wanted a nap behind her desk) she’d haul out the battered Korean War-era 16mm projector and spool up one of these gems:
The theme song (“Oh, I’m no fool, nosiree…”) still leaps to
mind from time to time.
I wonder if schools show these anymore. Or do they merely
encourage the children (like a Roadrunner cartoon) to stick their fingers into
light sockets, ride their bikes off cliffs, etc.?
It also occurs to me that the series is pretty death-heavy ("But fools find out / when it's too late / that they don't live so long."). How much does a second-grader really think about what the termination of existence means? On the other hand, that's what makes this series so awesome!
The series ran thusly:
I'm No Fool With A Bicycle (10/06/55)
I'm No Fool With Fire (12/01/55)
I'm No Fool As A Pedestrian (10/08/56)
I'm No Fool with Water (11/15/56)
I'm No Fool Having Fun (12/15/56)
I'm No Fool in a Car (1957)
I'm No Fool in an Emergency (1957)
I'm No Fool in Unsafe Places (1957)
I'm No Fool in Unsafe Places II (1957)
I'm No Fool on Wheels (1957)
I'm No Fool with Safety at School (1957)
I'm No Fool with Electricity (1957)
P.S. -- Mrs. Galloway, if you're reading this, I'm sorry for being such a little asshole in class. They didn't have good ADHD meds back then.
I was at Powell’s City of Books the other night, browsing
through the film section, and I picked up a book of Robert Rodriguez
interviews. Rodriguez talks about visiting Skywalker Ranch in the late 90s and
puttering around with one of Lucas’ bleeding-edge HD cameras for the first time
(George Lucas mostly filmed The Phantom
Menace on 35mm, but as a test shot two scenes in HD).
Rodriguez was already a fan of video cameras, at least to
practice with. Beginning filmmakers were better off learning their craft on
video, he advised. It was cheaper, easier to use, and easier to edit. He shot El Mariachi on 16mm, then shot
throughout the 90s and early 00s on 35mm. Clearly impressed by the HD
technology, he shot Spy Kids II and Once Upon a Time in Mexico in digital.
He never went back to film.
It’s clear in interviews from the 90s and early 00s
that not only was HD a better experience for him as a filmmaker, film itself
was kind of a drag. You were never sure, he says, what the film would look like
when it got back from the lab. It was always different, never exactly what he
intended the shot to look like. Only with the advent of HD cameras could he
look in the monitor and feel confident that what he was seeing was what he was
recording. And he could make changes on the fly given this feedback, something
else film denies the filmmaker.
He recounts how he would shoot scenes in 35mm and then with
a digital camera, and compare them side-by-side. To his surprise, sometimes the
filmed image was underwhelming to his taste. He’d take the clips on the road
with him when he gave talks, and show them to the audience. People were often
incredulous: what do you mean, 35mm is
worse? We were told it’s always better!
Rodriguez was also very much a practical effects guy early
in his career. By necessity in El
Mariachi, and by choice in later films because he felt he had control
of practical effects. By Spy Kids,
all special effects on film were getting him down. He talks about having to
scan film frames, digitally remove grain, composite the digital effects,
digitally add the film grain back, and then print the result back onto film. By
Spy Kids II, he was done with that.
He was shooting in digital, doing the lion’s share of effects digitally in post-production. It was cheaper, faster, and he felt he had more control and
creativity.
* * * * *
It’s a bit scary how clearly Rodriguez saw the future. In
the 90s he was just a young upstart, flinging rocks at the establishment. Nonlinear editing? Replacing 35mm cameras
with digital cameras? Who is this guy? This is how we do things Uptown, kid.
It's been good enough for 80 years, and it ain't gonna change.
Until it did. So fast that we’re still a bit dizzy.
The lever of change, of course, was money. The studios
didn’t care about enhanced creativity, or greater filmmaking freedom. In
digital production and post-production they saw the opportunity to save a LOT
of money. And when the technology finally matured for digital projection, they
salivated at all the money they could save not having to strike and distribute
35mm prints. All the extra control they gained over theaters was just gravy. No
longer would physical prints go floating around, outside of their direct
control. They’d know who was projecting a movie, when and where, every time.
And without a password, that video file was dead to a theater.
It’s hard to argue with Rodriguez’s line of reasoning, creatively
speaking. Filmmakers who want to shoot on film in the future are certainly
welcome to, but they’ll have a tough battle convincing miserly studios to open
up their pockets a little more. And when theaters get digital projectors, they’ll
probably junk their 35mm projectors. In five years, who will have the equipment
to project on 35mm?
For a little extra profit, the medium of film has been cast aside. I feel good about HD as a filmmaker, but I feel queasy about it as a filmgoer. It's now easier to make my sandwich, but sometimes it doesn't taste as good as it used to.
When I was an adolescent, I had a conflicted relationship with a friend. At one point, she aimed hard at my stomach with her fist. The impact was abrupt and surprising. That's kind of what watching "The House That I Live In" is like...but in a good way, the way that a great documentary can hit you hard when you don't expect it.
I have read the statistics for years now about the failed War on Drugs, prison-industrial complex, inflexible mandatory sentencing guidelines, and destructive impact of the justice system on African-American communities and lives. Judges and prison administrators are fed up. Addicts are incarcerated and remain mired in addiction. Families are destroyed. Still, at the end of the 2012 Sundance-winning documentary, "The House That I Live In," directed by Eugene Jarecki, I sat in stunned silence with a million thoughts racing in my head about the connected dots. This rarely happens to me and even less often about familiar topics.
"The House That I Live In," which the International Film Series is screening Tuesday, March 5th at 7 and 9pm, pulls together numerous different pieces of American dysfunction and inequality to present a devastating indictment of how our country deals with race and class. It sucks in the viewer with a personal story, that of how the War on Drugs has affected the family of the director's childhood housekeeper. It interweaves this narrative with interviews with people involved in the system (judges, prison officials, prison guards, etc.), historical information about the War on Drugs, interviews with a senator who helped create the situation, and other broader information.
The cherry on top of the sundae is an interview with David Simon, creator of the HBO five-season bravura meditation of the corrosive War on Drugs, "The Wire." As a journalist in Baltimore, Simon had
first-hand exposure to the Baltimore inner city and the impact of drugs on African-American communities. So, the man has cred and isn't just a Hollywood talking head. And any man who conceived of each season of his show as a novel with a meaty and important overarching theme and can write a scene where the principals communicate exclusively with various manifestations of a curse word is alright with me. Ok, sue me--I'm a fan, maybe even a rabid fan.
I thought Simon was going to offer some choice words about drugs and African-American communities. Instead, he delivers an analysis near the end of the film of how America has treated and conceives of its underclass that put the previous material of the film into a context that totally blew my mind and brought up questions for which I have no answers.
In the waning of the empire, there are no endless opportunities and brighter days for everyone, much less our poor and working class. In an era of budget-cutting and austerity, educational institutions, never stellar in poorer communities,cannot provide the way out. Hell, we are even cutting back food subsidies to poor mothers and their infants and toddlers. And there are politicians who are cheering on these measures. Simple reality in this country keeps falling into a bad case of surrealism. It stands to reason that films that put the pieces together, rather than plunge me into escapism, blow my mind.
I know this probably reads more like a lefty screed and less like cinematic analysis. But when it comes down it, I believe that cinema is at its best when it opens my mind and makes me wonder about the world. Sometimes, this takes the form of a fictional aesthetically beautiful fantasy, like "Holy Motors" where I found myself contemplating reinvention and the protean nature of identity and performance. Other times, it is a documentary that slaps me across the face, holds me rapt with its varied way of presenting vivid and important information, and haunts me with its ideas.
The end result is this is a film that I want everyone I know to see. It's important, provocative in the best sense of the word, and worth the time. Hopefully, you can come up with better solutions to the issues that it brings up than I have.
If there's only one film that you see at the IFS this semester (and given the quality of the offerings, that would be a shame), show up for this film and invite your friends to come with you.
I’m thrilled to finally, this weekend (starting tonight, all of you fans) see Miguel Gomes new film Tabu. Perhaps a less-known fact is that the film borrows its namesake and stylings from the era of F.W. Murnau. Murnau’s 1931 classic, Tabu, is a silent, sweeping love story in two parts. In glorious black and white, Tabu and Tabu make known a growing and exciting trend in movies today.
Tabu 1931
Tabu 2012
When the Academy recognized The Artistin 2012, a newfound appreciation wheedled movie-goers everywhere. Credit where it’s due, The Artist is a great film. There’s a legitimate fascination in the excited faces and over-the-top attitude an old film projects. When can something be classified, though, as an old film? The 1960’s? The 1970’s? 2000? In the now, when everything moves faster than the speed of a projector claw, objective age isn’t always “old” in appeal; rather, appealingly “old”. On a budget of $15 million, The Artist made back more than $130 million. Murnau’s film was considered a financial disaster, even though (not adjusted for inflation) its $150,000 budget made back more than $400,000. In spite of not finding adjusted figures, I can guess that the film, ambitious and public, made less dent than The Artist. Not speaking for the business of it, but it appears that the homage to “old” is more embedded. It’s an interesting matter that the old, foreign to us Gen Y’s, is popular. It’s not surprising, however, to expect an interest in something that isn’t the dipping standard. The innovation here is born of time, and innovation so-called can’t be old without being new as well.
I don’t think it’s the goal of today’s filmmakers to recreate the classics, but to reshape it for the era. The result, again, of time is that cinema can be given different meaning. Art, in this way, has always been inelastic because we can forever interpret anew. Homage is complicated because of this. It might be hilarious to exaggerate the sexist nuclear family of the 1950’s in Parents, but doing so lends itself to new social ideas; whereas made in the 1950’s, those themes are reflective and perhaps subconscious. I hear so often that preserving history reminds us of mistakes and milestones, and that without it we might forget that we ever didn’t have television. But technology moves so fast that remembering a day when mobile phones just made phone calls is a stretch. Satisfaction is usurped by the edge of new, but that isn’t all true if film can fetishize old-fashioned, and people enjoy it more than ever. It’s a good thing, though, that in our bustling present we can love ancestral filmmakers through our contemporaries.
It’s fine to call this trend a break in the figurative sense, but in a literal way the old-fashioned diversifies modern cinema. For those who might otherwise write it off, Tabu may offer an ironically new perspective. Perhaps they still do write it off, but Academy-ratio, scratchy 35mm goodness teases the eye. Less of that headache anamorphic and more of that timeless appeal.
I hope to see as many familiar faces at one screening or another. So don’t miss out on Miguel Gomes' Tabu, playing at 7:00pm & 9:30pm Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And of course, check out the trailer:
For those also interested, Guy Maddin has made an incredible impact in the last two decades with his meticulous body of work. His films are more representative of experiment, replication in study of the golden age, but interesting nonetheless! Check it out, especially The Saddest Music in the World.
