Based on the book written in 1999, The Perks of Being a Wallflower provides a unique insight into the world of a teenager outsider. It accurately depicts the lonesome and invisible presence one obtains in high school, particularly as a freshman.
This part made me LOL
The 2012 film centers around Charlie played by Logan Lerman (who we all melted over after Percy Jackson and the Olympians), a teen with prior struggles with mental health issues. Like many, Charlie viewed high school as a fresh start. In his first week he was faced with the fact that being an outsider will never get easier; shifting his views on starting over. He is welcomed into a new group by two upperclassmen, Sam and Patrick, who welcome him with open arms into their own group of outcasts. Charlie is more unstable and unsure of himself than the average entering freshman following the suicide of his best friend. The death messed him up, and it marked him by association. Maybe Patrick and Sam recognize his outsider status in themselves; in no time, the three are inseparable. The film takes place in a hazy sort of late ’80s, early ’90s time frame; no cellphones, and mix tapes are a crucial medium for expressing teen angst, which adds to its feeling of universality among teen audiences. The movie is both written and directed by the book’s author, Stephen Chbosky, who has also done work on movies like Rent and musical Dear Evan Hansen. His work has been teen-experience centric and he tends to nail the feeling of fleeting youthful joy, as well as the ugly parts that come with growing up. The film is very moving and inspiring, though the plot can sometimes get a bit cluttered due to the extensive human complexities that the story in the novel touches upon.
Rumored that Ezra Miller stole Tim Curry’s cheekbones
Music by David Bowie, Cocteau Twins, New Order, and the melancholy “Asleep” by The Smiths illustrate a nostalgia that perhaps the viewer never experienced. Referencing to high school dramatics and dreams that feel inherently moody yet hopeful is not a feeling that can easily be replicated. While I question a few of Chbosky’s directing cues, the music was spot on. Each song was pointative and had the angst and light sadness that came with being hormonal as well as the explosively energetic Teenage Riot anarchist soul that lived in all of us. The songs don’t just give us a beautiful, somber tone, but also an insight to Charlie’s taste and feelings, as though he handpicked the songs himself. While the film may take a few years to watch without cringing at my own bleeding angsty heart, the soundtrack I will definitely be revisiting for my own nostalgia.
Rest in Piss 2020!
I loved this class! Beyond obviously wishing we could have the class in person, the structure and constant assigning of different films has definitely made this semester much more enjoyable! Upon deciding to take this class again, I was mainly excited to learn more about film and expand my movie repertoire, but interestingly enough this semester I feel like I’m really starting to find a voice in these blogs. While I should have started them earlier, given how much they inspired my thought processes once I did them, I feel very proud of the writings I’ve produced in this class. I don’t feel as though I’m simply in homework anymore, but rather that my opinions and reviews are grounded in experience and knowledge, which feels really empowering at this point in college. It’s rare to find a professor that inspires passion for things like you do, and it’s incredibly fun! Thank you for the great semester, you set the bar very high for professor’s teaching on online and inspire us to make quality work despite the circumstances.
In Christopher Kenneally’s Side by Side, narrator and interviewer Keanu Reeves brings together directors such as David Lynch, Martin Scorscese and scores of cinematographers and editors to discuss the past and future of film with the question of the century – “Is film dead?” The 21st century has been embodied by exponential growth in technology, and has since changed the markets of art forms like film forever. The basis of how movies were presented, taught to be shot, and consumed had completely been uprooted with the invention of the digital camera. The stories of many directors experience in trying to either hold on to traditional techniques or explore the new help understand how big this change was for the industry founded on tangible film. Christopher Nolan gives a great explanation as to how film evolved from its photochemical stages to eventually a CCD chip. As a loyalist film user, he warns against moving too far too fast into digital, and how it can detract from the history and legacy of film. Not only did the digital camera push the boundaries of filming as an artistry that can be manipulated, but it also offered security for the very existence of the film.
Over 40,000 reels and negative were lost, thanks New Jersey
In 1937, a vault fire at Fox’s studio ignited over 57 truckloads of nitrate film, resulting in the loss of the majority of silent films released by Fox before 1932. This wasn’t just a loss of movies, but entire careers, livelihoods, and history erased. As a tool of capturing history and culture, the expansion of its technologies should be prioritized as to keep the art form alive and adaptable to the changing world.
Imagine seeing Star Wars and assuming it was all real!
The second film for this week gave visual evidence to the evolving industry of special effects in film, through the mastermind of George Lucas. The department of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) is a branch of Lucasfilms that is dedicated to making the effects and movie magic that his imaginative mind is known for. Created in 1975 to make the sound effects for Star Wars, a culture bomb about to explode, Lucas really had no basis behind what he was experimenting with as “SFX” was yet to go to the extent of being able to film spaceships…IN SPACE. “Magic” was exactly the word for it- effects have always been a part of film that reaches beyond the possible and makes imagination a reality on screen. A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès was one of the first attempts at creating special effects to replicate going to space, in the year 1902, that had the audiences in a complete frenzy. The film has since been considered one of the 100 best films of the 20th century by the Village Voice, as the influence it had on cinema was unparalleled and would eventually contribute to the revisiting of simulating outer space in film. With his small-scale recreations and obscure sound collections, Lucas and his team changed film forever and have since worked on nearly 300 films spanning over 35 years.
Of all these discussions of the advancement of film, I found the concept of ownership we talked about in class to be the most backwards moving function of the industry as of yet. While it makes a great deal of sense to pool resources, especially when those resources are of the multi-million dollar stature, the gradual condensing of studios and copyrights is bringing us back to the golden age of Hollywood when five studios made everything everyonewatched. Clearly the magnitude of a corporation in 1928 is almost comical next to the size of the companies now, but the principle of one city in California controlling the image of America for thousands of people still hold true in the way we consume media from these sources. Clearly an enormous loss of culture such as the vault fire that erased Theda Bara’s career wouldn’t happen again here, but rather the loss of individual thought may be the concern of we who live and experience the media from these fews sources. It impossible for a profit-driven business not to have an agenda, and the artistic license of everyone who participates is affected. Like in the vault fire, it’s not just films that are of concern, but the livelihoods of those who make them and we who consume them. It may not be wise to put all your eggs in one basket, but it sure helps the monopolies that will continue to pac-man eat small companies and absorb their creations.
Sofia Coppola was born into film royalty in 1971, and consequently was thrust into the arms of Micheal Corleone and starred in her first Academy Award winning picture The Godfather in 1972 at the tender age of one. She was surrounded by beauty and film from birth. With her family tree breeding talent such as Nick Cage and Jason Schwartzmann and the ever-present, figurative shoes of her father, Francis Ford Coppola, to fill. She was always artistically inclined, having started a girlish clothing brand that embodied youthful feminine fashion in the 90s that is now exclusively sold in Japan. Her first experiences with the film industry were not exactly positive, having been bullied out of a film career after returning to film The Godfather III as (my namesake) Mary Corleone. However, storytelling would prove to be her true medium. Her first short film Lick the Star was released in 1998. Fourteen minutes long, on 65mm black and white film, her perspective was distinctly feminine. It followed a clique of four teenage girls and their navigations of life, and the “traumas of adolescence” that Coppola captures with such quiet intention. Coppola was a beginning to form a lens, even while only being perceived in her father’s shadow. The next year, her debut feature film The Virgin Suicides premiered at Sundance film festival. Continuing her exploration of adolescence, Coppola attempts to go against traditionally formalist and dominant Hollywood cinema styles, therefore categorizing The Virgin Suicides as counter-cinema. Adding to the list of cult cinema under Kirsten Dunst’s belt, the film opposes mainstream cinema by going in an alternative route with the characters and story-line.
The Virgin Suicides (1999)
The plot is fairly abstract; or rather, there really isn’t a set plot. The film is about feelings, emotions, and the repression of human, or particularly adolescent girls, suffering. The male perception in the film (AKA the neighborhood boys) idolize the girls, and the girls become objects of fantasy, angelic and mysterious. Mary G. Hurd speculates on Coppola’s attraction to Eugenides’ story in Women Directors and Their Films, and the attraction seems to be due to the sense of alienation between the audience and the story. When the girls commit suicide, the boys are “frozen in time with their adolescent perceptions of the girls” (Hurd, 132) Coppola characterized a feeling of isolation and identity, adding complexities to her character’s lives. Her way of portraying characters as inside their heads, especially in the concept of girlhood, creates loneliness that she wants us to feel in her films. She also does this exceptionally in her other films Lost in Translation and Somewhere. Coppola thrives with material involving sexuality, repression, resentment, and being in a state of limbo, so to speak.
After gaining some reputation as a well-rounded director after her release of comedy-drama Lost in Translation, Sofia’s feminine, blasé historical brain-child Marie Antoinette was released in 2006. Reviews were ultimately very polarized: Todd Kennedy described the critiques of Coppola as a constant battle of aesthetic over substance. “In spite of a body of work that stands as a direct assault on Hollywood’s status quo, the source of the attack, for those who wish to attack her, is routinely focused on a perceived lack of depth,” (Kennedy, 41). Critics scathed over her artistic liberties and post-punk soundtrack, which were simply written off as “historical inaccuracies.”
.Marie Antoinette (2006)
The vapidness and opulence may have been too much for viewers that wanted a historical drama and could be misconstrued as a weakness of plot, but rather, it cleverly entreats the viewer into how mundane Antoinette’s life may have been, especially as Dauphine. Coppola succeeded in making Antoinette more human – more understandable. The decadence of aesthetics is almost overpowering, the film is overflowing with romantic mise en scéne. Supported by modern touches like The Cure and Dunst’s dazzling close-ups, there’s a measure of heart to the performance which will have you rooting for her rather than baying for blood. The sense of childlike amusement is reinforced by the backdrop of excess and glamour, Coppola’s forte, and the film feels suitably feminine, yet strong. Coppola’s leisurely, feminine shots countered greatly from the points of Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory that a film cannot transform patriarchy and be visually pleasurable. Coppola does not sacrifice her or her character’s femininity for the acceptance of even feminist theorist, but rather let’s her characters live in it’s shameless bliss. I distinctly remember a shot when I first saw the film around ten or twelve years old , as Coppola was a pop culture icon for my older sister at the time, and it had always stuck with me. When the Dauphine goes on an emotion-fuelled shopping spree to “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow, trying on distinctively 18th century kitten heels when the camera pans to a pair of blue converse. I had only noticed after seeing the scene a few times, and eventually I came to believe they were in the scene as a surreal symbol for her innocence and being a teenager, something that is often overlooked in the scope of history’s remembrance of Marie Antoinette.
Sofia was never given the benefit of the doubt as up and coming director, but rather always seen in comparison to the suspected intellectual nepotism she had grown up with. Her father’s great works, her cousins’ acting careers – all independent identities as males in the industry- had weight on her career. However the genius of her auteur is more conspicuous than critics would have assumed of her, as she was destined to act beyond the male-dominated film traditions and raise many criticisms in the process. Famously quoted for saying “That’s the way I work: I try to imagine what I would like to see.” Coppola was making what she knew, from the perspective of a female that often found herself in a room full of male perspectives. She made her name known with her glorious aesthetics, distinctly feminine perspective, and emotionally restrictive pacing.
Coppola and Elle Fanning on set for The Beguiled (2017)
The Beguiled was viewed under close scrutiny as a remake of the Clint Eastwood film (in which he headlines over the seven female co-stars), but it would prove to be significant for all female filmmakers. Sofia became the second woman in eighty years to win Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. Critics of her films always reference perceived weaknesses such as “self-indulgent” and “fraught over aesthetics”, which almost brings one to ask, when do we consider these “weaknesses” signs of the auteur? It’s almost as if critics such as Dana Stevens from Slate, who had coined Coppola a “The Veruca Salt of American Filmmaking” are merely more willing to accept that her imagination pays all creative respects to her father before herself. If that be the case, will feminine voices only be seen in comparison to the accomplishments of men in an industry built by men? Sofia Coppola makes it quite clear, to audiences as well as to young women entering the film industry, that her femininity is at no compromise to how others perceive her auteurship.
Hurd, Mary G. “Newcomers.” Women Directors and Their Films. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group Inc., 2007. 130-133. Print.
Kennedy, Todd. “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur.” Film Criticism, vol. 35, no. 1, 2010, pp. 37–59.
Edward Zwick’s 1989 classic film follows the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first African American regiments to fight for the Union cause. It triumphed on Academy Awards night in 1990 by marching to glory with three Oscars – for Best Supporting Actor for Denzel Washington as Trip, Best Cinematography for Freddie Francis and Best Sound to James Horner. Produced within the enormous canon of Hollywood Civil War films, Glory is an epic tale of brotherhood and overcoming adversity. Most of these narratives conveniently follow one social issue at a time, or downplay the issue of slavery in order to appeal to the largest possible audience. Glory, however, never lets the viewer forget the reality of the war as an enormous social matter about race.
The ideology of civil war movies rarely brings light to those whose rights were being disputed, and Hollywood had since made a great deal of money reenacting these historical events with little attention to detail or authenticity. The name “Glory,” which is a touch sanctimonious, proves to have been chosen in an ironic vein, much of the narrative depicting the inherently cruel and demeaning acts committed against the characters who, among their first acts as free men, volunteered to pay for their freedom with their lives, declaring an allegiance to a country that did not claim them beyond their physical value.
Zwick devotes the first half of the two hour endeavor to the regiment’s training in a camp in Massachusetts where the irate Shaw finds he must combat racism that delays uniforms, rifles and even shoes for his black soldiers. We as viewers begin to become familiar with a group of them; while the real 54th regiment had no recorded stories of soldiers or personal details recreated in the film, Zwick characterized four attitudes towards the civil war within American black men in the characters he illustrates in the regiment. A great moment in the film, which is praised for its historical accuracy, is when Colonel Shaw decides to stand alongside his men who protested being underpaid by the government. Broderick plays a reserved man of few words but meaningful actions, and many times the soldiers do not know what to make of him. In this scene however, he is with his regiment completely and we can see their strength as a team.
The solidarity of this group is part of what makes the film so personable and able to convey the emotions of men in battle together. Their journey through perdition is fraught with hardship, at the end of the day overcoming their struggles, Shaw, Forbes, and their men all stand together as brothers in arms. The bond they forge in basic training carries on through the narrative, only strengthening in the chaos of combat. There are moments when they have their differences of opinion but unite in the face of disrespect directed towards the 54th, Shaw and Forbes never allowing it to stand. There is an undeniable respect between these men, and the solidarity between them makes this movie worth your full attention.
Get Out, Jordan Peele’s debut feature as writer and director, is chillingly entertaining, even when it makes your gut wrench. It is liberally inspired, using elements of Rosemary’s Baby and Invasion of the Body Snatchers before ultimately revealing itself to be the most self-aware racial revenge fantasy since Django Unchained. I did see Get Out opening night along with the entire high school population in New Orleans, because like me, they had all heard that this movie was going to be different. Our ideologies were challenged right off the bat, and we wanted it even more. I can only say that I feel as though I’ve grown up with Jordan Peele, as did a lot of people my age, and that set a precedent to be open to this film. It’s not everyday the comedy writer you watched as a kid that you got your sense of humor from starts making incredible horror movies and directing the new wave of The Twilight Zone (which isn’t streaming on anything sadly :/).
Get Out is specific and pointed about white privilege and power and the inequities it creates, not just on a broad societal level, but in situations as small as social gatherings and casual conversations. There’s a lot of comedic potential in the ideas Peele plays with in the film, in the possibility that any given racially tinged awkwardness between strangers might just be insensitivity, or might mask something much darker and more savage. Peele used that silence, moments of tension, to encapsulate a feeling of unsafeness and danger that I personally have never experienced as a white individual.
The ideological aspect of the film is incredible in that it’s almost never mentioned outright by the white offenders, but completely understood by the black protagonist who would navigate through forms of racial insensivity daily. The beliefs and ideas of the family he enters, while obviously much more extreme than originally revealed, create a sense of danger and distrust from the very beginning. Peele’s ability to interpret those experiences of fear as a black individual into film while using referential horror movie elements is chilling, and definitely brings to light a neglected facet to psychological horror. For Peele’s protagonist, a talented black photographer named Chris Washington (played by Daniel Kaluuya, already a face of neo-psycho-horror in Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits”), being able to tell the difference is literally a life-or-death ordeal.
This film is one of a kind. I think it goes to say something when a film that is so new and challenging of the norm is finally able to break through because its artistic merits can carry it beyond the ideologies that audiences have for decades. In addition to delivering the thrills and chills of an effective horror movie, Peele addresses racial tensions head-on and gives an amazing platform for a film founded on the experiences of black people, who have long been exploited yet disregarded by the film industry. I think had this film not been so impeccably timed and directed by such a seasoned writer like Peele, perhaps the world wouldn’t have taken as much heed. Furthermore, he broke the ever-present glass ceiling by proving that movies (especially horrors) with black leads can be successful at the box office.
The Thin Blue Line directed by Errol Morris challenged the conventions of documentary and how it could be used to construct a narrative. It’s no surprise that the film that comes up third when you google “best documentary films of all time” would be something memorable, but I had been completely unprepared for the immense amount of content I had seen inspired by this very film. Your former student had told me this film was the first of it’s kind, and immediately I was hooked. I’ve seen this format for true crime documentary since I began watching movies because I’ve always found the topic interesting, and allow me to say that Netflix has EXHAUSTED this structure that Morris popularized. There’s a reason for that, it’s very comprehensible and makes a story surrounding something as indecipherable as the justice system appealing and understandable to viewer’s that would not normally be interested or aware of. I found it refreshing, as the original work, that it had no frivolities or unnecessary dramatic-filler scenes that I would so often see in American Crime Story, Wicked Attractions or had to listen to on Dateline. No, Morris’ film is extremely simple; no introduction or name titles, simple lighting and interviewee narration, and an unconventional but objective staged reenactment scene. Each of these elements were executed with purpose and distinction to impact the narrative, with a beautiful score to listen to.
Morris began working on the film when he became interested in Dr. “Death” Grigson in Texas, a psychiatrist known for testifying with 100% positivity of a defendant’s recidivism, and would soon find this to not even be the biggest moral perplexity within the case once he began interviewing the defendants. With the intention of documentaries to be presenting the most unbiased, objective perspective of a chosen setting, it was almost impossible for a narrative to not form after the contradictions of truths and testimonies collected by Morris. The editing Morris utilized has since been reappropriated for countless, if not thousands of crime documentaries and dramatizations that recount crimes as stories. His choice to film each individual in their respective environment, spanning from multiple law offices to prisons, reflected the complexities of the justice system and also consolidated each individual’s contribution to the case and storyline. The style of shooting was simplistic, yet intentional, as the content provided by Adams and Harris was detailed enough to carry the story,but the visuals were where Errol Morris truly took artistic reigns. Immediately, the differences in presentation between the two accused defendants is distinct.
Randall Adams wears a white jumpsuit that illuminates the dark prison background he sits in, while David Harris comfortably blends in to the dark red back lighting in his orange jumpsuit. The dramatizations between their recountances is seamless, the high key lighting carries through both scenes and heightens the feeling of fiction that may begin to arise with Morris’ subtle artistic liberties.
The placement of events entirely shapes the perception the viewers have of the interviews and reveals to the viewer many facts that shape the story-line, and thus function as narrative elements within the film. When David Harris tells the story of his child brothers’ death in the last twenty minutes, when all evidence has been layed out and contradicted, the mood of the film shifts largely and suddenly we see Harris in a “right in front of you the whole time” light. The Philip Glass soundtrack is haunting and emotion-stirring as it underscores the interviews, and an excellent use of a composer that inspired a lot of appreciation on my part. These emotional leniencies, while not exactly “verité”, were essential to portray in a story where the contradictions become so clear, and when the subject of recounting and memory are so important to the foundation of the case itself. This ultimately makes for an extremely understandable story, and one that could have easily not been brought to anyone’s attention had Morris not taken those liberties to recount the innocence of Randall Adams.
Introduction to Film Studies 