Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

If you’re a modern film-goer, a disturbing moment comes a short way into Blake Edwards’s iconic 1960s romance, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Audrey Hepburn’s character, Holly Golightly, comes home to her apartment late having forgotten her key and awakens her building superintendent, Mr. Yunioshi played by Mickey Rooney, who chastises her:

“Missee Go-right-ree, Missee Go-right-ree,” he yells. “I protesssst. … You disturbuh me.”

That’s right. Mr. Yunioshi is Japanese, and he speaks with a heavy accent. As played by Rooney, he’s a buffoon. And to top it off, the film-makers have chosen to provide Rooney with huge buck-teeth and kooky large glasses that look like they’re increasing his near-sightedness rather than correcting it. There’s really only one phrase to describe it: racist stereotype.

Critics have another word for it – yellowface, or the portrayal of an Asian character by a white actor. Admittedly, Mr. Yunioshi occupies a very small space in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but he’s like the tip of an ugly iceberg. Pre-Civil Rights American film is full of this sort of thing. In 1956, for example, John Wayne played Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. Peter Lorre, a Jewish actor, played the title character in eight “Mr. Moto” films in the late 1930s. In Disney’s The Aristocats (1970), Paul Winchell voiced a feline character named “Chinese Cat,” whose only contribution to the catchy tune “Everybody Wants to Be a Cat” is lines like “Shanghai Hong Kong Egg Foo Yung. Fortune cookie always wrong.” This is accompanied by his hitting the cymbal on his head until his eyes cross and playing his piano with his chopsticks. Hi-larious.

We no longer accept Caucasian actors in blackface, why would we not comprehend that those in “yellowface” as just as offensive? Perhaps we dismiss these sorts of images as the products of a less enlightened time, but we shouldn’t. A more difficult question is how should a more “enlightened” audience react?

We realize that this is an odd question to find in a “why we picked this film” essay. It would seem more of a reason not to pick this film. But Edwards’s movie is a classic. It should be watched. And its weaknesses as well as its strengths should be recognized, discussed, and accounted for. We might dismiss Rooney’s portrayal simply by saying “that was considered funny at that time,” but really a statement like that requires unpacking. Funny for whom? At whose expense? How does a culture make such an assumption? What is the result of a mocking, derogatory portrayal for the American community at large? Why did yellowface continue to be acceptable long after whites in blackface (or as Native Americans) became unacceptable?

You think it didn’t? Have you seen Balls of Fury (2007)? What is Christopher Walken (as Feng) doing?

Sadly, racial stereotypes like Mr. Yunioshi persist, in many forms and in diverse media. It’s up to us to recognize offensive images when they occur, begin the conversation that explores our relationship to them, and take steps to ensure that such derogatory ethnic humor never goes unremarked again.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Guillermo Del Toro was born on October 9, 1964 and raised a devout Roman Catholic. Del Toro started making movies when he was eight years old. When he was 21, he created and produced his first short film by the name of Doña Lupe. Afterward, he dedicated his life to learning about and designing special effects and costuming for eight years. When he was done with this, Del Toro helped to co-found the Mexican Film Festival and he started his own production company, the Tequila Gang.

His movies draw on a wide variety of genres and topics, ranging from being something like the fantasy movies that he is well known for, such as El Labertino del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), to the movies that are based on comic books, such as Hellboy and Blade II.

Guillermo Del Toro is best known in recent years in the United States for his work on Pan’s Labyrinth, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the 2006 Academy Awards (losing to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others). Pan’s Labyrinth received this kind of attention due to the amazing cinematography, costume designs, and imaginative story telling that Del Toro made as the movie’s director and producer. It’s hard to imagine viewers not thinking of the image of the faun, or of “the Pale Man” who holds his eyes in the palms of his hands, when they remember Pan’s Labyrinth. But every image in the film is a stunning visual treat, like a Tim Burton movie but with gravitas.

Del Toro’s love of costume design and special effects is also apparent in some of the earlier movies in his career, such as Hellboy (2004). While much of the imagery comes from Mike Mignola’s original comic book, Del Toro gave Hellboy a darker edge to its surrealistic fantasy, a trait shared by Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s clear that Del Toro is fascinated by fantasy, comfortable with disturbing but beautiful visions. What’s interesting is that he can find these common elements in both action-oriented super-hero stories and thought-provoking historical fantasies.

Perhaps because of his distinctive vision, since the creation and release of Pan’s Labyrinth Guillermo Del Toro has received many offers to work costuming or directing a variety of films but has turned many of them down. The ones that he turned down ranged from the serious, such as One Missed Call, to family movies like The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and even some in between, like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and I am Legend. The reason that he turned all of these offers down was so that he could focus on writing and directing his newest release, Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), a film that has been almost as financially successful as the original Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth combined. (He has agreed to direct the upcoming film version of Tolkein’s The Hobbit.) As disturbing as Del Toro’s visions may be, they definitely are finding their audience.

Jackson Smith
Film Club Co-President

Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995)

The Usual Suspects (1995) stands out as an incredible film for so many reasons, but these reasons all revolve around the many talented actors assembled – Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollack, Chazz Palminteri, Gabriel Byrne, Benicio Del Toro, and especially Kevin Spacey as “the Gimp,” Roger “Verbal” Kint. As is so often true with character-based films, quality acting creates lasting memories.

Spacey goes all out here. He aggressively prepared for his Kint role, filing his shoes down to create the kind of wear they would get if he actually had a limp and gluing his fingers together to simulate the effects of a disability. And this kind of attention to detail paid off. Even though he’d been acting in movies for almost a decade when he took the role in The Usual Suspects, his turn as Kint solidified our appreciation of his talent and opened more leading roles up to him in films like American Beauty, K-Pax, Shipping News, and Beyond the Sea.

The Usual Suspects also benefits from great writing. Christopher McQuarrie’s script, highlighted by Spacey’s voice-over narration and the witty dialogue between Palminteri’s Kujan and Spacey’s Kint, reflects and enhances the masterful balance and layering of the film.

Beyond the writing, Bryan Singer’s ability to create a masterpiece out of “the concept of a movie poster of five guys in a lineup” never ceases to amaze. This movie is one of those that gets better on repeat viewings, even if you know the film’s surprise ending. The movie accomplishes the feat of bringing together so many different stories, people and effects and flows them concisely together through entertaining twists and turns that so much detail, so many tiny clues and hints to the film’s subtext, evades the viewer’s eye that only multiple viewings can detect.

Singer’s genius lies in his ability to not only do the best job directing possible (and by the end of the film you’ll notice that he’s not only an expert at visual misdirection, but also a master at wrapping you up in the story), but to have the flexibility to allow actors to build complex, entertaining characters, like Benicio Del Toro’s quick, unintelligible Fenster. These things combined – the breathtaking tension of the film, the smooth, cool hilariousness of characters like Fenster, McManus and the assortment of ‘usual suspects’ – pushes the movie beyond a sharp mystery to a truly unique work of art.

And this is a mystery: The American Film Institute has listed The Usual Suspects as one of the top ten mysteries. What mystery does this film address, what questions does it ask? Here’s a challenge, what questions did the movie ask of you and what fears do the possible answers give you?

Daniel Preus
Film Club Co-President

F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)

How do we watch a silent movie like F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)? Really, most film-goers feel the same way about silent film that we feel about rotary phones and typewriters – why would we even spend time on something so technologically out of date? Well, we’re not dealing with a tool here (you don’t use a movie), we’re looking at an art form. One of the problems with film lately is that the technology of it, special effects if you will, seems to have overwhelmed our appreciation of that.

So say this to yourself, out loud (or you can silently mouth it for less ironic effect): silent film is not an antiquated, obsolete method of movie-making. It is a specific form of expression, different from what we are currently used to. Few musicians currently write and perform music using the instrumentation of the western European medieval period (the lute! the sackbut! the hautbois! the vielle!), but that doesn’t mean that the music of that period has no value or that it cannot be appreciated. In fact, it’s pretty cool. And so is silent film.

Here are some things to love about silent film. First, its black and whiteness. Nosferatu is a horror movie, and horror movies are better in black and white. Yes, we know blood looks cooler if it’s actually red, but horror movies are more effective if they don’t show the blood. The original Halloween (1978), for example, avoids any blood, and it’s a slasher movie, but it is scarier than most of the horror that follows it in the genre because so much of takes place in your mind. Psychological horror is freakier than gross-out horror. Black and white further engages the psychological effect of a film because it recedes from the verisimilitude of color, it’s unreal. And horror is all about otherness. What’s more, if you do have blood, isn’t it creepier if it’s black? Tim Burton thought so in Batman Returns (1992).

Second, silent movies are silent. Film-makers struggled for 30 years to sync up sound with image, a technological difficulty that took ingenuity to overcome and didn’t happen until 1925. But in the meantime, the silent approach developed into a laudable form. Watch Singin’ in the Rain (1952) sometime. Underneath its musical plot, it recaps the transition from silent to sound and acknowledges that many great silent actors could not make that transition because their voices weren’t auralgenic.

But look at that phrase: “great silent actors.” What does that mean? It means that actors of the silent era created indelible characters, memorable, expressive, larger-than-life actors like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Ramon Novarro, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, and on and on. And a lot of them did this with their faces; if you can’t speak out loud, emotion must be communicated through face and physical expression. Watch for this in Nosferatu, how the actors capture love, horror, fear, sadness – the basic human emotions – effortlessly with their faces. Now, this is a bit more expressionistic, or exaggerated for emotional effect, than we’re used to, and that can seem weird. But as we get used to it we realize we’re seeing human emotion more clearly as an element of narrative than we do in modern film.

Finally, one of the modern film-making’s most bothersome elements, to this writer anyway, is the soundtrack, so manipulative, so distracting, so much like a band-aid slapped over a film’s weaknesses or a chaperone that interferes with our engagement with a hot date. In true silent film, film without the ongoing organ accompaniment that would have been improvised and played by an organist, live during the movie, we connect directly with these emotions. All modern DVDs of silent film include musical accompaniment, mostly because contemporary film fans cannot fathom the total absence of sound. We’ll leave the recorded organ accompaniment turned on during tonight’s screening, but imagine if it was just you, and the vampire, alone in a castle room so dark there’s no color, and no one can hear you scream. Because there is no sound.

Happy Halloween!

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)

For years and years, the image of Frankenstein as a square-headed, stiff-limbed, heavy-lidded, electrocuted monster has been the prevailing image for Halloween costumes and decorations. Almost solely because of the 1931 film Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as the monster, the first image that tends to come to mind when someone mentions Frankenstein tends to be this goofy-looking creature, which is interesting because Frankenstein is the scientist, not the creation.

That’s the power Whale’s film has had over our impression of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, written in 1818. The book and the movie may share a name, but further than that, few similarities are to be found between them. Shelley’s version is a Romantic novel that raises questions about the meaning of life, how we can maintain our humanity after the groundbreaking discoveries of the Industrial Revolution, and our responsibilities for the world we create, while Whale’s film is an early horror movie that plays on our fears of the unknown, unchecked science, and human hubris with shock value and a brain-dead monster. In the novel, it is important that the monster has human, if not super-human, characteristics because Shelley sought to explore questions of Man’s place in the universe. In the movie, the (un)jolly green giant bears no similarity to a real man; it is a despicable monster, a sub-human, that needs to be destroyed.

The reason that the movie took such a different direction than the novel is that contemplation and discussion about whether or not scientific advancements will benefit mankind doesn’t sell. Horror movies with a clear villain (the mad scientist), a dumb assistant (the hunchback), and a disgusting monster does, especially in a time, the onset of the Depression, when film was growing as a source of entertainment. People simply found it more fun to see a movie, with exciting costumes and special effects, and no thinking involved.

Certainly, Shelley’s novel has, and probably would have without Whale’s film, stood the test of time. Since the original movie, Frankenstein has been both seriously remade and parodied over and over again, whether in films like Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 feature, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Mel Brooks’ 1974 parody, Young Frankenstein, or Frank Henelotter’s 1990 black comedy, Frankenhooker, or Tim Burton’s 1984 short, Frankenweenie (the movie that got Burton fired from Disney, which we’re showing this evening), suggesting the staying power of Shelley’s vision.

But it is Whale’s movie that inaugurated the visual interpretations of Shelley’s book, and subsequent film versions, many closer to the novel’s intent and depictions, have not displaced Whale’s imagery from the popular consciousness. Little kids think the creature is named Frankenstein, has bolts in his neck, wears really big shoes, and that you could balance a stack of books easily on his head because it is flat. And every mad scientist who, upon viewing the result of his work, cried out to the heavens “IT’S ALIVE!” owes a debt to Whale’s lasting and iconic vision.

Sam Rock
Film Club

Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954)

How do we account for the continued popularity of Audrey Hepburn? Ask your parents or grandparents about her and they’ll mention Roman Holiday, Funny Face, My Fair Lady, Charade, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and almost no one has anything critical to say about her. She’s beautiful. She’s fabulous. She’s Audrey.

Is it too simple just to say that she was a movie star, in that old time way that movie stars used to be larger than life, more glamorous than any star seems to achieve these days, and so she sticks in our collective consciousness? As do Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liz Taylor, Charlton Heston.

What it boils down to for Heburn is class. Hepburn had class – style, couture, grace, savoir faire. Watch her in Sabrina. Even when she’s playing the chauffeur’s daughter, before she’s gone to Europe and hobnobbed with culture, she has that class. The only thing different about her when she comes back is she has fashion – gorgeous dresses designed by Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head.

(You know Edith Head. She’s the fashion designer Brad Bird caricatured as Edna Mode or “E” in The Incredibles, the designer of their costumes. The real Head, a legend, designed costumes for over 400 movies, from 1927 until 1980. We don’t know if any of them had capes.)

We don’t really need to belabor the point here. To watch Hepburn in Sabrina is to see, to understand star power, to know what was so compelling about her. The other stars in the film – and they were big (Humphrey Bogart and William Holden) – seem to pale when she’s around.

Perhaps a more interesting line of inquisition is why so few Hollywood actors today can achieve this? Certainly part of it is the studio system which no longer exists. The studios controlled, rigidly, the public personae of their stars, and they were able to amplify and shape them into the gods and goddesses we remember. Today things are different; the central publicity machines are missing and the Internet is here, where anyone with a digital camera can catch you nude, overweight, and having a bad hair day on a beach, then post the pictures on their blog for everyone to see. We live in an age in which the sheer volume of personal, and often unflattering data, destroys any possibility of one’s mythologization.

Russell Crowe. Didn’t he hit some guy with a telephone? Julia Roberts is one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood. Fans are equally aware of her movies and her tempestuous love life.

Myth cannot exist in a world of trivial minutiae that diminishes star status. This is true not only of movie stars but presidents (a 2005 book about Abraham Lincoln claimed he might have been homosexual – the claim is disputed by most historians – and recent revelations about John F. Kennedy’s indiscretions in the White House have done a bit to tarnish his Camelot image), civil rights leaders (historians have argued that some of Martin Luther King’s academic papers and speeches contained plagiarism), and sports heroes (steroids, anyone?).

If anything, watching Audrey Hepburn now allows us to return to a time when we were allowed to have movie stars, and they could exist in a bubble unpunctured by too much information. Could Audrey Hepburn, the glamorous, the embodiment of class, exist as a star today? We think not. That’s why we can revel in and honor her as the star of movies like Sabrina.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999)

Office Space, based on the short “Milton” cartoons Mike Judge created in 1991 and added to for Saturday Night Live in 1993-94, is an excellent comedy that not only shows the necessity of relaxation but also emphasizes the stress that many American workers go through every day. The traffic jam in which Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), the film’s protagonist, finds himself trapped at the beginning of the movie is the perfect jumpstart into the utter stressfulness of a work day, which Judge satirizes brilliantly, crafting highly memorable scenes of both comedy and romance. Fans refer to Office Space as a cult film, but this movie ranks as one of the best comedies of all time.

The cast is an amazing group of people perfectly fitted for their roles. Milton (played by Stephen Root) and Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole) are particularly funny and without them the movie could never have achieved such a high level of hilarity. Judge, who wrote the script as well as directed, has a great ear for the mundane language of the workspace. Listen especially to Lumbergh’s ability to bore people into getting what he wants or Milton’s squirrelyness and timid chattering that accompany his boss’s reduction of his workspace. Judge also captures the Darwinian ruthlessness of office politics and the inanity with which they are carried out. In the end, the red Swingline stapler is not only Milton’s last representation of office autonomy, it becomes a symbol for an insane world in which we define our sense of self through our ability to control our own office supplies.

Lumbergh and Milton stand out, but Judge makes all the characters here stand out; many of them would be exceptionally unfunny had it not been for both his comedic genius supported by the actors’ impeccable portrayals.

Office Space is probably Mike Judge’s best-known work, but he also created the animated television shows “Beavis and Butthead,” (1993) and “King of the Hill” (1997). In the film he plays the character Stan, the manager of the restaurant Chotchkie’s were Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), Peter’s prospective girlfriend, works. The “Not Enough Flare” scene in which he tells Joanna that she does not have enough flare only adds to the utter stressfulness of daily life portrayed throughout the movie.

Judge’s ability to take something seemingly boring and almost angering and turn it into a scene where laughing is inevitable is amazing. Sometimes his humor can seem over the top, irritating those with a negative disposition to begin with, but with the right attitude you can walk away from the movie feeling as though it was greatly worth the time.

The movie overall did not gross much in the box office, barely making it over the production cost of around 10 million dollars; however it sold a very large amount of videos and DVDs and has built a large fan base. Negative initial reviews stunted this movie’s ability to make money but eventually a larger number of people saw the movie and were able to fully comprehend its brilliance.

So when going into the movie remember one thing, always, always put a cover sheet on your TPS reports.

Calvin O'Keefe
Film Club

The Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984)

What is it about Joel and Ethan Coen, the Coen brothers, that makes them such an engaging duo of filmmakers. The brothers, who grew up here in St. Louis Park, MN, have directed countless features like Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and most recently No Country for Old Men. They do comedies, thrillers, period pieces, and other strange adventures, in a genre that could only be called ‘A Coen Brothers Film.’ And auteur theory may be the only way to describe them, as there are elements that run through everyone of their movies, beginning with their first here—Blood Simple.

Blood Simple, the first winner of the Sundance Film Festival in 1984, shows the Coens doing what they do best. The film has a simple setup that only results in more and more complications. Julian (Dan Hedeya) knows his wife Abby (Frances McDormand) is cheating on him with Ray (John Getz), so he hires a private detective named Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill them. There’s money, there’s murder, and a lot that can go wrong, does in fact go wrong.

I remember when No Country got its first look by the American critics who were saying that this was radically different from anything the brothers have ever attempted. True—it’s very different from their comedies, but Blood Simple deals with much of the same material. The opening of the film, in which Visser talks about the problem of fate, is directly referenced with Tommy Lee Jones in No Country.

What Blood Simple does best is never let details go. As each step of the plot advances, another complicated issue arises. Double crosses become triple crosses. Innocents become murderers without pulling a trigger. Nothing is simple in the world of the Coens.

Yet it has a dark sense of humor to it, making the strangest of jokes out of the weirdest of situations. A man may be dying, but the Coens are there to point out the absurdity, and even if you don’t laugh, there’s at least a twisted smile on your face. The choice of music always adds another ironic touch, especially as the film ends.

Is this film what we could call a neo-noir? Well that definition has always been hard to say. There is a private cynical detective, but he’s not the protagonist. There’s a woman, but she isn’t a femme fatale. The film is dark, but definitely not shot like the old ‘40s movies. Neo-noir is a genre that I believe we want to exist, but doesn’t. Just as the term ‘noir’ never existed in the minds of Billy Wilder, Raoul Walsh, or Carol Reed, neo-noir probably is a genre that only exists in terms of our desires to see homage to the past. And it is certainly true that the Coens are taking from Double Indemnity, but they owe as much to cheesy B-movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

So maybe, we should just call Blood Simple a Coen Brothers film. It’s sadistically funny, darkly serious, and always engaging, just like any film by the Minnesota duo should be.

Peter Labuza
Film Club President Emeritus

Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984)

“The life of a repo man is always intense.” “The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.” “No one is innocent.” These, and other lessons, can be learned from the mid-‘80s film Repo Man, written and directed by Alex Cox.

Repo Man follows the path of a disaffected young punk named Otto (Emilio Estevez), whose odyssey is a result of his disillusionment with his friends, his parents, and his life. His girlfriend dumps him for his friend who recently got out of prison. His parents send the money in his college fund to a televangelist. And he loses his mindless job in a grocery store. Otto is an individual with no direction until he meets Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) and learns what the life of a repo man offers. Otto does not find direction immediately, but after a while on the staff he finds what he wants do with his life and what is really important to him.

But Repo Man is no typical coming-of-age or message movie. It’s a howling satirical attack on the substancelessness of American culture. Instead of being about typical American existence, which is about buying and getting items, Repo Man is about repo men, whose only function in society is taking things away from people. Cox increases the irony when he calls attention to American consumerism by highlighting the absence of glaring product labels. In Repo Man, for example, there are no corporate labels on food, or anything else. Beer is “Beer,” Corn Flakes are “Corn Flakes,” Canned Beans are “Canned Beans,” etc. The products may be generic, but it reminds us that we are surrounded by advertisement. This simplicity clashes with the American identity that is the consumer.

The life of a repo man is simple as well. As the quote “repo man’s got all night” shows, all that a repo man does is pick up cars. Again, Cox is tweaking our sense of irony, making heroes (or at least protagonists) out of a profession that is more likely to be reviled by anyone who takes the time to think about it. The entire movie could be defined as similarly counter-culture, from the ‘80s punk soundtrack to the anti-consumerist actions of the repo men to the focus on people who repossess vehicles. And we haven’t even mentioned the UFOs and deadly top-secret (possibly alien) substance in the back of that Chevy Malibu.

The surrealism of Repo Man is what makes it so funny. Through another character’s eyes, Otto’s world could be a horror film. However, we watch as Otto encounters goofy people, gets into goofy situations, and says goofy things. What happens to Otto is so strange and unrealistic that it is funny, especially the nature of what happens to him.

Sam Rock
Film Club

Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (1950)

Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, in their book Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, call Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A., which stands for “dead on arrival,” an “unusually cynical film.” That’s quite an eye-opening statement considering that one of the defining characteristics of classic film noir is its cynicism. That’s like saying SPA is an unusually educational place to go to school. It seems to us that when you tell stories about characters who are either obsessed or, more likely, alienated and thrown into a fatalistic, irrational world where the primary protagonist is not so much another person as the malevolent force of a corrupt society, and they end up dead, then cynicism is a natural result.

D.O.A. has a great plot. It’s about a certified public accountant named Frank Bigelow who goes on vacation to San Francisco. Feeling sick, he consults a doctor and learns that he has been poisoned (radiation!) and has only a day or two to live. He begins to search for his killers.

So here we have another film noir protagonist who will be destroyed by forces outside his control, joining doomed men such as Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity, Frank Chambers (John Garfield) in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) in Asphalt Jungle, and Jeff (Robert Mitchum) in Out of the Past. Each reaches a point in the story when he accepts what will happen, embraces the inevitably of his destruction. Silver and Ward suggest “this resignation to being annihilated by a relentless, deterministic abstraction, is the only, bitter solace that the noir vision permits.” If that’s not cynical, then we don’t know what is.

But here’s the point. Cynicism is not a pleasant or respected outlook on life. It involves pessimism, disdain, disparagement, distrust, contempt, and a whole host of other rather ugly words that fly in the face of what we believe to be the American spirit. Yet film noir was and is again a relatively popular genre. (Heck, D.O.A. itself was remade in 1988 starring film’s paragon of pert perkiness, Meg Ryan.) So what’s our obsession with film noir?

Perhaps it is because Americans see themselves as an optimistic, Fate beating, can-do people that we are fascinated by the seamy underbelly of it all, like children, grossed-out but drawn to and fascinated enough to gather around and poke at fresh roadkill. Maybe film noir is another form of thriller, where the audience can sit for a couple hours, watch a life transformed by horror, feel the frisson of “there but for the grace of god…” and then walk blithely out of the theater, into the sun and home to dinner.

Film noir says we are all corrupt in some way, all vulnerable to Fate, all out of sync with society, all at sea in an existential world, all involved with people whose motives we don’t really understand and really shouldn’t trust. Do we believe it? Maybe the only thing that protects us from such a reality, and the cynicism that would result, is that we don’t, that we trust in good, in hope, in honesty, and the benevolence of our fellow men. Maybe, if we believe that hard enough, it’ll be true. And maybe Frank Bigelow will find his killer, convince him to reveal some unexpected antidote, and survive his personal nightmare. Check yourself; see how many times you think such a thing will happen as you watch D.O.A. Then you’ll know if you’re a cynic.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Francis Veber’s La Chèvre (1981)

Americans don’t think about foreign films very much. Or perhaps they don’t think very much of foreign films. Yes, we give an Academy Award for best foreign language film, and you can pay $8.50 to see a few at the Lagoon. But in general going to the movies and spending a couple hours reading subtitles ranks up there with throwing a party and inviting friends to work on your math homework with you. But after you’ve seen a lot of movies, and we have, watching only movies made in Hollywood is like getting a box of assorted chocolates – coconut cream, butter rum, maple cream, peanut cluster, dark chocolate truffle, strawberry cream – and only eating the caramels. (And our momma always said: life was like a box of chocolates…).

Most of the negative perception about foreign films is pure horse-pucky and unsubstantiated prejudice. Are foreign films too long? What’s too long? Forrest Gump is 142 minutes. Spider-man 3 is 139 minutes. Troy is 163 ... oh, wait … 201 minutes in the director’s cut. And really, length is a matter of perception. Bad movies seem slow; great movies seem brief. One supposes that if you have to work at a film, like maybe reading subtitles, it might seem longer, but foreign language films compensate in a number of ways.

One important one is narrative variety. We love film because we love stories. The movie theater is just a modern version of the campfire we sat around after the hunt thousands of years ago. One of the frustrating things about Hollywood is how frequently it seems to repackage the same story over and over. A French or Chinese or Spanish or Korean – wow, seen a Korean film lately?! – is going to tell a somewhat different story, with different textures, different pacing, different approaches to narrative.

Would an American film-maker have ended Pan’s Labyrinth, the way Guillermo Del Toro did? (Well, maybe Martin Scorsese.)

Would an American film-maker have rounded off The Lives of Others with multiple dénouments, giving the audience a deeper sense of perspective the way von Donnersmarck did? Nah. Roll the credits.

Would an American film-maker have lingered on the dead face of a usurping emperor, allowing you to realize fully the consequences of his death, the way Feng Xiaogang did in The Banquet. Probably not. Heck, even Zeffirelli didn’t linger long on Mel Gibson’s dead mug in Hamlet. Bring in Fortinbras, and let’s get this thing over with! This is not to say that foreign films are slow (and most of those that are make you love their pace). Most are not. Tonight we’re showing Francis Veber’s La Chevre, a light comedy about two bumbling detectives on a missing persons case, which clocks in at a brisk 91 minutes.

Finally, one of the biggest jokes about the reticence to see foreign film is the hypocrisy. Right now some of the most interesting film-makers in the US making Hollywood films are foreign born: the aforementioned Del Toro (Hellboy), Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain), Alfonso Cuaron (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), Richard Rodriguez (Sin City), Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted), John Woo (Face/Off), etc. According to the Christian Science Monitor, Hollywood frequently turns to foreign talent in order to “bring a fresh eye to shop-worn formula pictures.” So, we ask, why wait for that talent to come here. Why not see it in the original, not only for its “fresh eye” but for its approach to non-shop-worn narratives.

Francis Veber is just such a talent. He’s been writing top-drawer French comedies since 1972 (many of which, including La Cage Aux Folles, have been made in to American films) and directing them since 1976, including The Dinner Game, The Closet and, recently, The Valet. So sit back, and read, and enjoy. Think of it as a rare raspberry cream in a box of otherwise dull caramels.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

We’ve said before that critics claim that film noir is not a genre, but a style – that you can have a noir-ist western or a noir-ist science fiction film or a noir-ist crime drama, but that a film is rarely just a film noir. Tonight’s movie is a good example of this. John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle makes most critics’ top 10 film noir lists because it has so many of the conventions we’ve come to associate with the style – a dark, urban filmscape, a corrupt, amoral world, a deep feeling of paranoia and alienation, a pervasive sense of guilt and despair. You can see this (or feel it because it is as much a mood as a visual style) from the very beginning of the film.

Foster Hirsch writes in his book, Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen, that “The Asphalt Jungle begins with shots of empty New York streets, with scattered newspapers blown about by the wind the only signs of movement in the early morning gloom. The film’s kaleidoscope of the city at dawn is beautiful but threatening, as if New York is ready to explode; the city’s awesome canyons seem indifferent to human concerns.” Well, you might ask, does a city in any movie ever care about the humans that live in it?

Sure. Watch Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, where all the buildings seem friendly, built to happily serve and contain the needs and desires of the protagonist. (The irony in Truman is that they are built to make Truman happy, but that’s another story.) Or check out Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where the city in which Sam Lowry lives and works seems to take a malicious glee in making his life difficult. It may not be friendly, but it has personality. The point is that film-makers endow settings with character just as much as they do the people in a movie. And in film noir the depiction of the city sets a definite mood.

So, The Asphalt Jungle is noirist, but a noirist what? The genre here is heist. If you’ve seen Spike Lee’s Inside Man or The Thomas Crown Affair or The Italian Job or Ocean’s Eleven, you’ve seen a heist film. Essentially, the plot revolves around the elaborate plan and execution of a robbery. We would further separate the heist film from the con film in that the robbery involves defeating a challenging technical anti-theft apparatus, like a impenetrable bank vault with a flawless time-lock or an alarm system with random roving electric eyes, whereas a con film focuses on an elaborate deception that results in people willingly parting with something valuable (think The Sting or The Grifters).

In The Asphalt Jungle, a group of criminals led by a “mastermind” plan a jewelry heist. One of the conventions of a heist film is that the robbery itself comprises a significant part of the movie – here it is 11 minutes long. Another important convention is the complication. Few heists go according to plan, and often participants plan to double-cross one another or something causes the plan to unravel. This is one of the joys of the genre – what does the unraveling reveal in terms of character? What storytelling trick will surprise us with unexpected exposition or resolution? What suspense will result from improvising on a meticulously pre-conceived plan?

Heist movies also offer one of film’s most delicious ironies – a plot that often makes you root for the criminal element of society. This is especially hard in a noir film where people aren’t especially likable, but it is an interesting element in human nature that we tend to root for humans to succeed at difficult tasks, even if the task in question is a robbery. Why do you suppose that is? Anyway, we hope you enjoy tonight’s film noir heist film as both a remarkable example of a genre and a style

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984)

What makes Rob Reiner’s 1984 masterpiece This is Spinal Tap so funny? Is it the clever, hilarious and quote-worthy dialogue? Or is it the way the movie is done? This is Spinal Tap opened up a whole different genre of film – “the mockumentary” a film shot in the style and using the conventions of documentary filmmaking but focusing on a fictional, and often satirical, subject. Spinal Tap not only is a great movie, but paved the way for other great movies using the same type of filmmaking. Christopher Guest, who is one of the leading “rockers” in Spinal Tap, was heavily influenced by Reiner’s unique style of filmmaking and went on to direct other mockumentaries such as Waiting for Guffman (1997), Best in Show (2000), and A Mighty Wind (2003).

Reiner’s film, the first for Reiner as a director, also influenced other mockumentaries such as: Bob Roberts (1992), Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), and Borat (2006), as well as other musical mockumetaries like Fear of a Black Hat (1994), about hip-hop, and Dill Scallion (1999), about country music. Reiner has found himself in as one of the most successful directors of our time.

One reason that I think Spinal Tap is so funny, is because it is almost real. They tried to do everything in their power to make the audience believe that this was an actual documentary on aging rockers trying to squeeze a few bucks out of a tour. The three main characters of the movie, David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) all learned how to play their own instruments and learned how to talk in a believable British accent. Reiner takes us into the minds of these “rock stars” and shows us the in-fighting and the steady decline of the rock band as it hits rock bottom.

Because most of the film was adlibbed, it created the impression that it was a real documentary and that the actors in the film weren’t really “acting” but saying what they tought stupid, drugged out, washed up British rock stars would say. After the film came out other rockers said that almost everything in Spinal Tap had happened to them. For example, rockers like Robert Plant and Ozzy Osborne said that they too had been lost in the hallways looking for the stage door. In fact, the film has a number of not-so-veiled references to the real histories of such bands as The Beatles, The Who, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and a variety of others.

All the music in Spinal Tap was created by the members of the “band” and Reiner. Spinal Tap even has their own page on iTunes where you can buy their music. If you go to Amazon’s music page, you can actually buy albums by this “fake” band. This ambiguity – real or not? – has confused audiences from the beginning. When the movie was originally released in 1984 the screen audience didn’t think it was very funny because they were confused whether this was an actual documentary or not.

Spinal Tap was the first of its kind, making it ultimately a cult film. Pop culture was ever-altered by its release. It not only opened doors for future filmmakers, but altered filmmaking itself. Spinal Tap shows us that directors don’t need multimillion dollar budgets to make a great movie, but just clever dialogue and an open mind to filmmaking.

Tim Blodgett
Film Club

Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957)

Let’s do something really wacky this time. Let’s consider how Macbeth transcends the era in which Shakespeare wrote it – Jacobean England circa 1605 – and comments presciently on our own day and age. English teachers are always telling us that Shakespeare speaks to every age; it’s why we continue to find him in the modern classroom. Yeah? So what, really, does a guy who communes with witches, hears fatal prophecies, stabs a king to death, sees ghosts, falls for the idea that a child delivered by Caesarian section is “not of woman born,” and gets his head hacked off have to do with us?

First, let’s consider Macbeth’s relation to its own time. Although set in Medieval Scotland, the play’s Renaissance audience could see a direct parallel between the play’s situation and their own. Critic Terence Hawkes points out that “on 5 November 1605 a search by security forces, instituted at the personal behest of King James, discovered beneath the Houses of Parliament a secret cache containing enough gunpowder, fuses, and other implements to blow the king, his ministers, and the lawful government of the entire state sky-high” (Hawkes 2). This “Gunpowder Plot,” prepared by Guy Fawkes, a member of a group of English Catholics bent on assassinating King James, failed. Fawkes’ notoriety survived him though as the English celebrate the failure annually on Guy Fawkes Night.

This plot to kill a king, though, would have been foremost in the minds of Shakespeare’s audience. It would have seemed that Macbeth himself was, in part, a literary version of Guy Fawkes, although more successful. The play’s depiction of Lady Macbeth slipping into insanity, Macbeth receding into moral emptiness, and the natural world going crazy, all as a result of the regicide, confirms the Renaissance view of the king as rightfully placed and cosmically protected and explains the heavenly reason for Fawkes failure.

Now if Fawkes’s name rings a bell that’s because it has been in vogue lately. Ever since Alan Moore’s graphic novel, V for Vendetta, was made into a movie, people on this side of the Atlantic have been reintroduced to Fawkes, except the movie casts him as a hero, a vigilante who tears down a corrupt and oppressive government. (And if you want to see this transformation taken to an absurd extent, look at how the character and the slogan associated with him – “Remember, remember, the 5^th of November – have become affixed to libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.)

The V character wears a Fawkes mask, his anonymity making him more of a symbol against tyrannical governance than an outraged citizen. So where does this take our connection to Macbeth? In a world where the anti-government, proto-terrorist vigilante is celebrated because he succeeds in blowing up Parliament, succeeds in bringing down the “king,” where does that leave Macbeth? Is he not a sort of hero? Well, no.

There is nothing in Macbeth that indicates that Duncan is corrupt (although there is little to suggest that he is not, too). Macbeth’s own inclination prior to the murder is not to do the deed. He feels, as host to the King, responsible for him. And afterwards he suffers from intense guilt. Everything about the play says his action is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Still, our society is distrustful of political power at this moment. It would be easy to digress and consider Macbeth as a version of Moore’s V, a man not driven solely by ambition or by a shrewish wife or by his own fevered visions, but by the desire to cast aside the powers-that-be and take control of his own life. If that’s not what Ron Paul wants, it’s certainly what his supporters want. Forty-five years ago, we may have been able to make a similar comparison to Lee Harvey Oswald. The point is that Shakespeare gives us room to consider all his characters in a modern context. You just have to connect some dots.

“Hey, hey, hey,” you’re yelling. “Aren’t we watching an Akira Kurosawa film? A JAPANESE film? About a guy not even named Macbeth?” Well, yes. But it’s the same story, and we encourage you to consider just what might have compelled Mr. Kurosawa, in 1957, to make a Japanese version of an early 17^th-century English play. Perhaps because where, or when, it takes place does not matter. What matters is the universality of the human condition it depicts. Enjoy Throne of Blood.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000)

Memento, the product of brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s collaboration, follows an anterograde amnesia patient searching for his wife’s murderer. Director Christopher Nolan adapted his brother’s short story and later came up with the unique idea to tell the story backwards. The structure of the film alternates between black and white segments and color segments. The black and white segments fit together in chronological order, depicting a phone call between the protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), and an anonymous man. The color segments are played in reverse order starting with the end of the chronological events and represent the time in between Leonard’s memory lapses. The innovative structure of the film creates a tense and mysterious drama that makes the audience share the protagonist’s experience because, like Leonard, we don’t know what happened before the scene we’re watching.

Memento falls into our Film Noir series, but as a modern film made in 2000, critics would categorize it as “neo-noir.” While Memento may lack a number of the stylistic traits associated with classic film noir, it exactly embodies many of the noirist motifs. One might compare Memento to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Somewhere in the Night (1946), about an amnesiac ex-marine, in which “memory and identity is an absolute metaphor for the inability of the noir hero to distinguish between benign and malign as he moves through the noir underworld,” critics Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward write. The same is true of Leonard.

The neo-noir tones of Leonard’s identity crisis and memory loss and the cruel subjectivity of the characters of Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) emerge very subtly. The subtlety of Natalie and Teddy make the depressive emotions of the neo-noir genre even more pervasive as their ambiguous motives lurk just beneath the surface of their everyday demeanors, just waiting to take advantage of the confused Leonard. This sense of paranoia is further enhanced by casting Guy Pearce, a relative unknown, to play Leonard. Alec Baldwin and Brad Pitt were originally considered for Leonard’s role and but both were unable to accept, allowing the film to take on a more down to earth feeling without the attending “star power.”

Finally, what makes the film so sharp in all of its facets is the intense passion and attention to detail of all of the actors and directors involved. Guy Pearce personally called the director looking for the part and was on set every day of the incredible 25-day shooting schedule. Besides the tremendous work effort necessary to shoot a movie in 25 days, the director’s attention to detail to create Leonard’s condition, anterograde amnesia – the experience of memory loss of events that follow an injury, as opposed to retrograde amnesia where the victim experiences a loss of memory of events prior to injury – as realistic as possible that it garnered praise from Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch saying Memento is "the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in the popular media."

Director Nolan emphasizes this realism by avoiding conventional Hollywood touches. In a fight scene where Leonard attacks Jimmy, Guy Pearce insisted on a realistic fight. While on the phone in the black and white scenes Pearce was allowed to improvise his narrative. We hope you enjoy Memento, both as a thought-provoking addition to the noir genre and as a unique film in its own right.

Daniel Preus
Film Club Co-President

Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep (1946)

One of the most intriguing aspects of film noir is its use of a strong narrator. Voice-overs and first-person, or restricted, narration are used with both style and consistency in the genre, so much so that we tend to associate those characteristics with film noir and to describe other movies that use the technique as “noirist.” (There is even one film, Lady in the Lake, filmed entirely from the main character’s point of view; that is, all the camera shots are all restricted to what he sees, as if the camera were his head, and the only time you see the character himself is when he’s looking in a mirror.)

Let’s hit the quote machine: “What is significant about The Big Sleep in terms of narration is that is strictly adheres to restricted narration – that is, the camera is always tied to Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart’s character), so the spectator finds out what happens in the narrative when Marlowe does. For example, while waiting outside Geiger’s house, Marlowe sees a car pull up outside. He hides in his car so as not to be seen. Interestingly, the camera remains outside the car and shows a figure get of the other car and enter Geiger’s house. Yet, the figure remains in shadow. So, even though the camera does not directly imitate Marlowe’s point of view as he hides in the car, it does not privilege the spectator either” (Buckland, Film Studies, 43-44).

So what does this limited perspective do for our understanding of this film and of the film noir genre? Well, for The Big Sleep, we get a simple connection. Based on a Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep is a detective story, a genre that likes to unravel mysteries one clue at a time. Limiting our experience to what Marlowe learns as he learns it both maintains the suspense and allows us to enjoy the step-by-step solving of an intricate puzzle.

Beyond this, we may conclude that film noir employs this technique consistently because it tends to depict an urban world in which a single character struggles (usually unsuccessfully) against the forces of corruption, temptation, and chaos. A first-person narration enhances this focus. In addition, film noir frequently delves into the psychological effects or torment of its characters, and this is more cathartic for the audience if we are closer to the character.

This is not to say that film noir avoids third-person or omniscient narration. Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, regarded as the final film noir of its period, employs third-person very effectively, from its opening scene where we watch someone put a bomb in the rear of a car, then follow the car as it works its way slowly through a Mexican border town, then shift to follow the two protagonists as they take an evening stroll. The third-person here allows us to meet characters (exposition) and regard the situation (with its rampant hypocrisy and corruption) objectively and a kind of distanced horror.

But The Big Sleep loves its protagonists. And with Bogart we’re unlikely to get a character who suffers because of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. He may be cynical (world-wise). He may be imperfect (human). He may struggle with a world going to hell. But Bogart usually, as you’ll see here, remains above the morass. The film’s restricted narration makes us his sidekick. It’s a great place to be.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser