Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973)

Woody Allen is kind of a funny guy. The critics think so. With five films on the AFI 100 years…100 Laughs list, he is the most represented director. The viewers think so, too. He has a rating of 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is only brought down by the poorly conceived films he acted in. And we think so. Sleeper, a comedy from 1973, is one of his funnier movies.

Allen stars as Miles Monroe, a health food-selling Brooklynite who undergoes nonconsensual cryogenic freezing. When he is defrosted 200 years later by scientists who hope that he can help overthrow the evil dictator in charge (a scene which Mike Myers and Austin Powers took more than a few cues from), the world is a very different place. This setting change from the tangible, real modern world to a completely goofy figment of Allen’s imagination allows for as many creative additions as he wants. The people of the 22nd century are all slightly robotic and vapid, and when the government police show up to arrest the scientists who have thawed Miles, he panics, scatters, and ends up posing as a robot in the house of Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton), a poet in her own time. Cue a disastrous dinner party, slapstick jokes, and a new head for Miles the robot. Since robot Miles does not want to lose his human head, he kidnaps Luna. More hilarity ensues as they run from the police. Eventually, Miles is captured and brainwashed. Then rescued. Then involved in a plot to kill the evil dictator. (But struggles against adversity really aren’t the point in Sleeper.)

Funny writing, clever dialogue, and smart jokes characterize many Woody Allen movies. He is a cerebral writer and director, and it comes out in his humor much of the time. Sleeper represents a break from the later, more traditional Woody Allen mode. There are far more physical, Buster Keaton- and Charlie Chaplin-esque jokes, such as Allen’s robot impression, and the debacle that occurs in the fix-it shop. Physical humor turns out to be something that Woody Allen does very well. He has plenty of ironic and satirical humor, as always, but also includes props like the ‘Orgasmatron’(you’re not going to find an explanation here) and ‘the orb,’ a device that, when held, gives its user a sense of euphoria.

Sleeper also pays homage to scenes from other movies throughout. When Miles is attempting to get back to sanity, he flashes into a scene from “A Streetcar Named Desire,” playing Blanche DuBois, and Luna is forced to step into the role of Stanley Kowalski (by doing a ludicrous Marlon Brando impression) to steer him back to the real world. Also, Allen mimics the famous Marx Brothers scene involving a full-length mirror.

If you’re more familiar with Allen from his later more intellectual style in films like Hannah and Her Sisters, Annie Hall, or Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the comedic romp in Sleeper may catch you by surprise. Not that the movie isn’t intellectual, but it also includes and relies on humor that fans of the Three Stooges might enjoy. Yes, there’s a bit with a banana peel. A very big banana peel. If you’re a snob, you may have trouble enjoying it, but if you’re out to enjoy laughs any way they come, Sleeper is an easy one to sit down to.

Sam Rock
SPA Film Club

Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996)

You're half way through Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Many of you are reading the play for class. Some of you are performing the stage play later this week, a production we are all going to go see. These three experiences – Hamlet the text, Hamlet the theatrical production, and Hamlet the film – give us a perfect opportunity to examine the different natures of artistic form. So let’s do it.

For those of you reading the play, notice how the text makes itself available to all possible interpretations simultaneously. Hamlet can be a brooding adolescent, a middle-aged mama’s boy, or a heart-broken young man all at once. You can take a line like “the universe is out of joint; oh, cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” and see that as a metaphor for the shift from a theocentric world view to a more humanist one. Or you may chalk it up to a certain petulance on our hero’s part. Each choice means that you read the lines that follow and seen subsequent scenes in different ways, but you can hold all the possibilities in your mind and be participating in a variety of parallel explorations of meaning.

Certainly in your mind’s eye, you’re probably “seeing” the text’s characters and setting in a consistent way. Good readers, studies tell us, do this visualization. But it’s a free flowing experience, capable of shifting as the text shapes your experience from scene to scene. With Shakespeare, specifically, a highly visual writer, we are encouraged to visit this theater of the mind. Take Ophelia’s revelation to her father, Polonius, of her encounter with Hamlet in Act 2, scene 1:

As I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled,
Ungartered, and down-gyved to his ankle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors – he comes before me. (2.1.87-94)

You don’t need to have seen that to “see” it. So the text is a space of unlimited possibilities and dimensions, allowing us, as readers, to assemble our own coherent worlds and meanings.

On stage, Hamlet takes place in an imagined space. The action, for example, occurs in the castle of Elsinore. Look at the stage this weekend when your classmates are performing. What visual elements evoke Shakespeare’s setting? How do you place it in time? Where is it? What does the set suggest about the action and psychology of the characters? Choices have been made – how do they shape a single vision of the play? Whatever your answers to these sorts of questions, your responses will rely on imagination. You’re not really looking at Elsinore’s walls. You’re probably looking at painted Styrofoam, and the palace, with its bedrooms, antechambers, throne room, battlements, hallways, and library (however Mr. Severson or Mr. Dutton choose to represent these) will all be compressed into a space roughly 35’ x 16’. That you believe in the setting is a form of willing suspension of disbelief, but more importantly this imaginative interaction allows the play’s language (e.g. “Two nights together had these gentlemen, / Marcellus and Bernardo, on their watch, / In the dead waste and middle of the night, / Been thus encountered: a figure like your father, … / Appears before them.”) and its events (i.e. ghosts) to have meaning on two levels, one literal and one figurative. In short, theatrical drama takes place both on stage and in our minds.

Filmic Shakespeare takes place in a realistic space. That is, when Branagh wants you to see Elsinore, he gives us the stunning establishing shot of Blenheim Castle and then we cut away to an interior with black and white tiled floors, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and a crowd of courtiers, as well as other equally well-appointed rooms. In the place of imagination, we have the acceptance of vicarious experience. The emphasis of movies is on feeling the realness of a story, no matter how fantastical. As you watch the remaining portion of Branagh’s Hamlet, consider how this realness affects your perception of story, character, and ideas in ways that would be different if you were reading the text or watching the play on stage. One example: Branagh depicts, via flashback cutaway, an actual sexual relationship taking place between Ophelia and Hamlet, while Ophelia discusses Hamlet with her dad, Polonius. These flashbacks aren’t possible on stage and don’t appear in the text; they are a filmic trait. And their presence creates a specific reality out of something that in the text is ambiguous and on stage is created, if at all, subtextually.

In the end, seeing is believing. We simply want to stress that what you see – words, staging, or celluloid – makes all the difference.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996)

Whether you find the prospect of an evening of Shakespeare on film daunting or exciting, you’re in for a treat with Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. First, Branagh loves Hollywood. He likes movie stars, fabulous sets, intense drama, stunning costumes, and the broad sweep of life one can capture on 70mm film. His Hamlet is the Gone With the Wind of Shakespeare films.

So here, we want to talk about what happens when Shakespeare goes Hollywood. (Next week, we’ll look at more at the nature of Shakespeare on film.) Branagh knows as well as anyone that a movie needs to entertain. But we’re talking Hamlet here, perhaps the greatest work by the greatest writer in the English language. If you asked any group of, say, 50 people if they’d rather go see Hamlet or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, chances are good Megan Fox would beat out the Bard. So Branagh pulls out all the stops – resplendent costumes in red and gold and black, the opulent backdrop of Blenheim Castle, and notable A-list actors taking on even the small roles. Branagh reminds us that this play, while a tragedy, is great fun. It’s got ghosts, and murder, and thwarted love, and political intrigue, and sword fights, and poison, and grave humor, and Kate Winslet’s face pushed up against a two-way mirror.

Usually, to get all this and pages of awesome language in, directors need to cut the words down. Branagh himself is one of the more aggressive Shakespeare text cutters when he’s filming. His production of Love’s Labor’s Lost (2000) reportedly removed 75% of Shakespeare’s lines (replacing some of them with music by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern). He did much the same with As You Like It (2006), set in Japan. But with Hamlet, you get a “complete” text, all the lines associated with the play. (We’re being a bit coy about that because there are different versions of Hamlet, and a definitive text is a bit of a misnomer.)

One justification for cutting the language is that Shakespeare wrote for a stage that had little in the way of decoration. His characters tend to paint pictures with their words (think of Macbeth’s “is this a dagger I see before me” speech, how clear the images are even though they reside primarily in Macbeth’s imagination). As you watch this first part of Hamlet, listen for the kinds of speeches that other directors would have cut because they could show what was being described.

One thing to ask yourself is whether all of Branagh’s scenery ends up being redundant? When the soldiers explain about the ghost they’ve seen walking the battlements, and Branagh gives you his version of the ghost, do the images simply reiterate the lines? We tend to think that Branagh deftly avoids this trap, and we’ll leave it up to you to consider how the language complements or competes with the filming.

Hollywood also likes stars. When we go to a film like Mission: Impossible to watch a character name Ethan Hunt, we’re never able to disassociate ourselves from the fact that it’s Tom Cruise who plays him. Branagh trusts Shakespeare’s characters to hold their own even when they’re played by famous faces like Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, and Jack Lemmon. (It doesn’t always work; and yes, we’re looking at you Alicia Silverstone.) Part of this acceptance of star power as a force behind the Shakespearean actor is that Branagh considers himself sort of a movie star. He frequently succeeds in his roles as Benedict, Henry V, and Hamlet in making you forget you’re watching a Shakespearean actor and not just another Hollywood leading man. His shaping of the lines is so effortless, it’s easy to watch him act.

In fact, not since Lawrence Olivier has one man handled both the directing and primary acting of so many quality Shakespearean films. We hope that while you watch the first part of Hamlet tonight, that you’ll enjoy it as much as a movie as an addition to the ranks of great Hamlet productions.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen (1991)

Delicatessen, a zany little film directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet that’s startling and clever, blew me away with its sheer originality and liveliness. This 1991 film encourages the viewer to connect with the characters on a complex level, developing both disdain and fondness for the decisions that each of them makes. The film begins in a rural apartment building in a post-apocalyptic France. A shortage of food forcing grain to be used as currency has forced out the older social structure as the struggle to regain balance and unity between the characters takes priority.

It sounds dark and dramatic, but directors Jeunet and Caro demonstrate an impressively confident feel of comic timing. Thriving on quirks, the film’s most distinctive aspect is its careful use of musical sequences, accented by uncomfortable uneasiness and using quick cuts reveal rhythms and even melodies played out in a light-hearted natured. For example, they set up goony little nonsense symphonies, such as everybody in the building simultaneously bowing cellos, Dominique Pinon painting the roof while springing off his tied braces, two brothers testing their animal noise toys, all in choreographed symphony to Jean-Claude Dreyfus and Karin Viard’s love-making. Or like Dominique Pinon and Karin Viard’s little dance while bouncing on a bed to test loose springs, the two of them keeping time to a song playing on the TV.

Jeunet and Caro’s keen sense of black humor is ever-present, particularly in Sylvie Laguna’s bizarre attempts to commit suicide with Rube Goldberg-type setups such as connecting her doorbell to a sewing machine that sews through a piece of cloth that will pull a lamp into the bath (which fails when the power goes off). Particularly, her climactic attempt to use a combination of pills, gas, shotgun, Molotov cocktail and hanging, which all farcically fail at once, portrays this serious subject in a lighter less emotionally draining way for the viewer. At the foundations of the film is the romance between monkey-faced Dominique Pinon and innocently lovely Marie-Louise Dougnac, which plays with a genuine sweetness in the middle of the film’s off-kilter tone.

The characters of Louison (Dominique Pinon) and Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard) caught my attention in particular because of their idiosyncrasies and the relationships they take on with other characters they run into. Louison (Dominique Pinon) answers an ad to work as a handyman doing odd jobs for a butcher. Unbeknownst to Louison, the butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) has hatched a plot to turn the unsuspecting worker into the next choice cut for the tenants in his dilapidated building. The real story comes when Louison, who is not without skills and charm, becomes a gear in the clockwork of the butcher’s gruesome scheming. He soon falls in love with Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac) as the story deepens as she is the painfully shy daughter of the Butcher.

Incredibly inventive, both in storytelling and set and character designs, Delicatessen uses its quirky tone to combine a surprisingly visual film with the bleakest of social satires. Literally one of the many movies that must be watched to truly understand its genius, Delicatessen marks another collaboration of genius directing team Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and is one of the sharpest of all futuristic foreign films.

Billy Lutz
Film Club Co-President

Buster Keaton’s The General (1926)

Editor's note: The following conversation was overheard outside of a dim classroom in the hallowed halls of St. Paul Film Academy, where some ongoing discussion of movie lore continues without concern for time or grades.

Alec: Buster Keaton, or Busta Keaton as he is known amongst the more urban crowds …

Findlay: Wait, wait. No one called him that. What urban crowds? Are you suggesting inner city folks are abandoning the clubs and stuff for standing-room-only celebrations of Buster Keaton? The guy who made his first movie in 1917? How would anybody know him?

Alex: Hey, he made himself famous through the silent comedy genre.

Findlay: Dude! You make it sound like he chose that type of film out of variety pack. ‘Hmmmm. Should I go with Low-Budget Zombie or Post-Apocalyptic Drama? Nah, I’ll make Silent Comedy.’ Keaton started in silent films because that’s all there was! What else have you got?

Alec: His main competitors were Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin. He’s not as famous as the other two …

Findlay: … except amongst the urban crowds.

Alec: Uh, yeah. But his works are equally entertaining. He got his start in the entertainment business through vaudeville. By the time he started working on movies he was already well known. You can see his vaudevillian beginnings in his movies.

Findlay: So what can we expect from tonight’s movie, arguably Keaton’s best work, The General?

Alec: Well, I haven’t seen The General.

Findlay: Dude, again! You’re the host!

Alec: But I have seen One Week. I really enjoyed the basic “Romeo and Juliet” plotline. The movie required minimal thinking and maximum laughing. These old school comedies have this exceedingly simple plot and humor but they are somehow able to entertain.

Findlay: Sounds like my English classes. But why is that funny?

Alec: Well, watching silent comedy, sometimes I think “that guy just fell down in some kind of fast motion, why is this funny?” and then he falls down again and I start laughing again. They have this ridiculous quality and although they are simple they are easily able to entertain me.

Findlay: Well, you know what they say about simple pleasures.

Alec: Not really. I know as a member of film club I am supposed to be someone who enjoys intensely thematic and philosophical movies. I can enjoy that kind of movie if they are well done but I also enjoy the simplicity of one man beating the other with a cane and knocking him down.

Findlay: I am totally hiding my Three Stooges collection from you.

Alec: I guess you could call these silent comedies the junk food of the movie world but that really would not be doing them justice. Although they may not require thought or thematic conclusions they are good movies (which cannot be said for most comedies these days).

Findlay: You’re so right. But if silent comedy is “junk food,” what the heck are Adam Sandler comedies? The paste you eat when you’re in kindergarten? I think we should look at silent film in general as a completely different form. The problem is we don’t have a lot of understanding left of the conventions of silent film, the way we do with superhero movies or romantic comedies. How do we watch these movies if their real qualities are on display but we don’t know how to see them?

Alec: Well, at the most basic, they have historical value as far as film goes. But they are also at the beginning of the film comedy genre, the “city on the hill” of film comedies. You can even see traces of these movies in pop culture today whether it be mimicking them or mocking them. In fact the common comedy technique known as slapstick found somewhat of a start here. Your favorite comedies of today would be far different without this awesome genre as a launching pad.

Findlay: Whoa! You’re getting all intensely thematic and philosophical.

Alec: I’m a true fan. Especially of Keaton. I truly enjoy his movies and those who do not give him a chance because he is from the black and white silent genre are insane. Any movie has the potential to be entertaining (yes even Jim Carry movies). People should not avoid silent or black and white films because they think of them as “boring.” People have complained to me that film club is “showing too many old movies this year.” Watching these older films will allow you to appreciate and understand new movies.

Findlay: You said it, Busta!

Alec Nordin (Film Club Co-President) and R. Findlay (Film Club Adviser)

Jamie Uys’s The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)

Jamie Uys’s The Gods Must Be Crazy opens in anthropological documentary format, with a voice-over narrating the commonalities of daily life in the Kalahari desert. But it is important to remember you are watching a work of fiction. And a sly one at that.

In many ways, we can see The Gods Must Be Crazy as an allegory, a figurative form of storytelling in which we look past the literal to the figurative. Critics complain that even when the film was made in 1980, innocent groups of Bushmen no longer existed, as the modern world had encroached on and changed their nomadic, hunter/gatherer society in significant ways, but they’re missing the point, possibly because of the faux-documentary style of the beginning. The point is to establish a group of characters whose existence is defined by complete innocence – they have no sense of evil, no superfluous elements in their lives, nothing that seems without purpose, no conflict. It is an Edenic existence, and therefore resistant to literal readings.

Uys clearly wants to contrast this innocence with the “civilized” world, and he does so for satiric purposes. Keep your eyes open for deadpan sarcastic contrasts between the language describing what you see and what is actually going on.

The movie really gets going when the two civilizations collide, and the collision comes in the form of a Coke bottle. Again, in an allegorical way, the bottle represents not only the “civilized” world from which it comes, but the evil that results from that object’s incursion into the Bushmen’s society. It could also represent the absurdity of consumerism. Or it could be technological advancement; the scene in which the Bushmen find inventive uses for the bottle is incredible. Or it could represent the apocalypse (we just had to throw that in). As we recognize the many different interpretations one can take of this Coke bottle, it becomes obvious that Uys is using it more symbolically than literally.

So there’s lots to think about here, but that’s just one aspect of this remarkable little film. We hope you’ll enjoy its gentle comedy, while not missing its biting satire. And that you’ll take pleasure in its style, which shifts throughout the film. Uys used actual Bushmen, including Namibian farmer N!xau (as Xi) who had not acted before his involvement in this film. (The exclamation point in his name represents the clicking sound the Bushmen use in their language – listen for it in the movie.) It’s often hard because of the documentary style, the realism of the mise en scene, the dubbing of certain characters, and the rawness of the filming and editing to see what’s going on as a carefully crafted film experience.

As America moved away from the realism of 1970s’ films and into a period of film-making evidenced by highly polished techniques and looks, The Gods Must Be Crazy, a South African film, provided a refreshing, unassuming, and charming alternative when it was released in America in 1984. (It ranked 29^th in domestic gross at 30 million dollars; Beverly Hills Cop was the top.) Perhaps movie-goers were drawn in by the film’s thought-provoking commentary on the craziness of modern society. Or perhaps they just enjoyed its off-beat humor. Whatever made it one of the top 30 films of that year, it retains those qualities today and is still an example of Must-See World Cinema.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E (2008)

This year’s main theme is “post-apocalyptic visions,” films reflecting the human struggle that results from a past cataclysmic event, be it nuclear war or world pandemic or vanished resources. In deciding what films we would show this year, a lot came up that we would consider “apocalyptic,” those films that depict the cataclysm itself – the zombie attack, the tidal wave, the outbreak. And we rejected them, looking for films that had a little more to say about our world, even as they were depicting it in ruins.

We ask you to consider, briefly, the difference between the two types of movies. The Apocalyptic film is essentially a heroic tale – people faced with suddenly oppressive odds. Maybe they win, maybe they don’t, but the emphasis is on an ultimate struggle, a cosmic cage-match with the future going to the winner. The Post-Apocalyptic film, on the other hand, suggests that Man lost. While the heroes in Post-Apocalyptic films still struggle, still exhibit classic heroic traits, these films are more about social commentary. Take Road Warrior, George Miller’s bleak vision of a world in which civilization has collapsed and roving bands of violent thugs fight over scarce gasoline resources. Miller doesn’t even hint at what brought humanity to this point; instead, his film coldly suggests that faced with the crisis people reverted to selfishness, brutality, and sadism. Apocalyptic films tend to show people at their best; Post-Apocalyptic films tend to indicate that even if good people still struggle on, they tend to so against people at their worst.

What we find most compelling about these post-apocalyptic movies, like Franklin Schaffner’s original Planet of the Apes, Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen, L. Q. Jones’ A Boy and His Dog, and Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth, is their exploration of a world past the brink. These, like so many others in the genre, seem rooted in a fatal logic: we can’t remain civil toward one another if our basic comforts are removed. We might understand if the suddenly missing ingredient is, like, water. But it’s scarier to think that we might come to the same violent primitivism by the mere absence of something really mundane, like digital communication or something. The movies we’re showing this year that explore this speculative future provide a wide variety of possible cataclysms, but they’re almost uniformly pessimistic.

Even WALL-E, tonight’s first film in our “post-apocalyptic visions” series, despite being a light comedy for young people, relies on a darker criticism of human nature, positing that humanity has brought itself to a conclusion through its own devices, specifically the relentless pursuit of convenience and instant gratification. Think about that the next time you drive to Taco Bell so you can have dinner in your car. You will enjoy our intrepid little hero, a sentient garbage can, but it’s interesting that the hero in this film is not human; he’s cleaning up after them. Nor do the humans regain any sort of nobility. For them, it turns out, it’s essentially over. And now we can turn our attention to the far more efficient, and in the end human, robots that have inherited the earth. (Or if you’re watching Cameron’s apocalyptic Terminator films, it’s anti-human terror.) WALL-E, like so many other Post-Apocalyptic films, is a requiem. We’ll leave it up to you to decide if it truly is our future to end, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a whimper after the bang.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985)

As we die-hard Monty Python fans know, Terry Gilliam, the illustrator for the movies and the TV series, is not only the American Python but also a native Minnesotan. Like Bob Dylan and other famous sons, however, we’ve seen little of him for a very long time. Provincial sour grapes aside, Gilliam’s fantastical cartoons for Monty Python offer a telling preview into the visual and narrative extremes of the movie Brazil.

Brazil’s convoluted plot, made more so by a disastrous studio recut, sends a pathetic everyman named Sam Lowry (played by Jonathan Pryce) into the classic and absurdly comic bureaucratic hell. While one recut tacks an abrupt happy ending onto the film (and cuts out numerous scenes in the middle), Gilliam’s director’s cut extends the absurdity in Freudian directions that explore Sam’s love interest in a final dream sequence. Although numerous recuts make plot summary more difficult, the basic plot outline is so convoluted it hardly matters. These recuts of the film, including a UK television version, the studio version, and Gilliam’s ultimate director’s cut (which Film Club is showing tonight), suggest even those responsible for the film don’t quite know what’s supposed to be happening. If you want a carefully crafted plot, you might want to look elsewhere. Enjoy Brazil for the splendid visual chaos, the satire of consumer culture, and it’s newly relevant look at terrorism and torture.

Amidst our current national discussion of torture and its consequences, watching Terry Gilliam’s absurdist dystopia Brazil may feel more chilling than absurd. It envisions a totalitarian state that clearly aims for the brutal efficiencies of Orwell’s 1984. In that grey, bleak novel, the omnipotent Big Brother seeks to extinguish all hope and all love from the world through a culture of paralyzing fear and mind numbing disinformation.

In Gilliam’s version, a similarly grey ideal gets sidetracked by gross incompetence. In this world, terrorism is mostly a common sense response to repeated bureaucratic ineptitude best shown by Robert DeNiro’s maniacal heating/air conditioning repairman who rebels against the system by doing unauthorized and (gasp!) undocumented repairs on HVAC systems. Similarly, Sam Lowry’s love interest in the film, the beautiful terrorist Jill Layton (Kim Greist), ultimately seeks to destroy the central authority through bombings after trying and failing to help her neighbor with government bureaucracy. Most chillingly, however, fellow former Python Michael Palin plays the chief torturer for the regime with a disturbing ability to compartmentalize. Moving from dingy office to domed torture chamber, Palin’s character looks like a slightly deranged dentist who cheerfully follows orders to apply his own “enhanced interrogation techniques” on whoever appears at his office door.

Despite its occasional bleakness, Gilliam’s movie (in whatever version) gleefully satirized plastic surgery, mindless office work, and technology in ways both more relevant and more comic than they were before.

John Wensman
Guest Film Club Commentator
SPA English Dept.

Kevin Spacey’s Beyond the Sea (2004)

Your Humble Commentator found himself, in the mid-1980s, at a party in Dinkytown, arguing with some guy about who was the greatest actor in Hollywood: Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Tootsie, Rainman) or Robert De Niro (The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, King of Comedy). Today, we think we’re blessed with an even wider array of choices – Kevin Spacey (whose film Beyond the Sea we’re screening tonight), Daniel Day-Lewis, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, and Don Cheadle all come to mind. In fact, we selected American Beauty, The Usual Suspects, and Beyond the Sea for inclusion in this year’s film series because of what Spacey in particular had made of them.

But is he the greatest? First, this begs the question of the criteria one uses to determine such irrelevancies. Allow us to suggest the following (and we’ll limit ourselves to male actors this time):

Losing oneself in a character – One of the most impressive aspects of watching a great actor is the amazement at seeing him or her completely morph from one role to the next, a “how’d he do that” moment. In 1985, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis made two movies, Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette and James Ivory's Room With a View. In one he played a gay punk London tough, in the other a pretentious uptight Edwardian aristocrat. And you could not tell it was the same actor. Wow.

Consistent greatness over time – this is hard. A lot of actors start well and then flame out or coast on their success (one might put Dustin Hoffman in this category). Others start out as two-dimensional and don’t mature into richer, more nuanced characters until later (Bill Murray comes to mind). Consistent greatness is a true achievement. Here Sean Penn is a great example, from his breakout role in Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to the complex characterization in Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking (1995) to his most recent tour de force in the biopic Gus Van Sant's Milk (2008). There may be occasional duds, but he’s still got it.

Not falling into type – This is a killer if you’re going to be considered great – you can’t be the same person every time (Tom Cruise, we’re looking at you). You can’t make every character into you; you have to make yourself into the character. And you have to take risks with your audience’s and fans’ expectations. Is there a more experimental actor in Hollywood than Johnny Depp? You might think that his consistent choice of idiosyncratic literary characters – Hunter S. Thompson, Willy Wonka, Jack Sparrow, Ichabod Crane, Don Juan, James Barrie, The Mad Hatter – amounts to self-typing, but he’s too adventurous to let any one of those resemble another. Nor does a concern about his star status seem to affect his choices. In 2010: Tonto?

Making a lot out of a little – We love it when an actor doesn’t have a starring or major role and still makes a quality impression. We would go see any movie with Don Cheadle even if he was only on screen for a matter of minutes; he brings so many smaller characters to life: overconfident ex-con Maurice Miller in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998), naively hopeful Buck Swope in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997), unintelligible Basher Tarr in Soderbergh's remake of Oceans 11 (2001), and corrupt Haitian official Henri Moore in Brett Ratner's otherwise forgettable heist film After the Sunset (2004).

So, given these criteria, how does Kevin Spacey stack up? Well, we’re going to leave that up to you. Suffice it to say, Spacey has assembled a body of work with which one can begin to make these sort of distinctions. He began his career with small but notable turns in films like Working Girl, Henry and June, and Glengarry Glen Ross. If you take Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995) as his first great film and run your finger down the list to what you consider his most recent superior work, do you cross into a second decade? Has he begun to coast? What about variety of roles? Are his characters distinct from one another? Does he take risks?

It’s hard to judge an actor on the basis of just three films, which is what Film Club limited itself to in selecting the stand-out works of Kevin Spacey, but we’re pretty impressed with the three we chose. And we leave it up to you, as you watch Spacey morph into 1950s and ‘60s singer and teen idol Bobby Darin in this musical biopic, to place Spacey in that pantheon of current great male actors. One more question: Does Spacey’s decision to use his own singing voice, as Joaquin Phoenix did in James Mangold's Walk the Line, move him up or down your list?

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet (2006)

What hath Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon wrought? Nothing less than the American breakthrough of a whole genre of films at precisely the time that genre left its adolescence and reached full artistic maturity.

Time was you had to stay until very late at night to watch Chinese films (“Kung Fu Theater!”), raw stories of Shaolin temples destroyed by gangs of martial arts proficient and nunchakus-wielding or qiang-thrusting or sai-throwing gangs. Your hero often survived, but just barely, the only remaining member of his school, and it’s rare but efficient fighting method. Survived to recover and take on, usually single-handed the entire martial arts army of his school’s enemy. It was a sort of quest, a test of honor. This is the wuxia story.

You know wuxia. Perhaps you’ve seen Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, or Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair. If so, you’re already a Hong Kong martial arts film devotee. But if not, then Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the Zhang Yimou films that succeeded it – Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Curse of the Golden Flower – are all examples that have noticeable American releases. The form even has reached the parody level, as all genres do when their conventions become recognizable by a general populace: Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle. (Maybe a good choice for Film Club next year?)

Tonight’s film, The Banquet or, as it’s being renamed in America, The Legend of the Black Scorpion, has all the earmarks of traditional wuxia – a superior martial arts skill, a magical force such as the ability to move swiftly up walls, over water or through trees, the ability to control a variety of objects as precise weapons, and highly defined sense of honor even when faced with villains.

But The Banquet has one other interesting characteristic; it also falls into that oddball genre of “Shakespeare adaptation,” uniting it with such disparate films as Ten Things I Hate About You, She’s the Man, Forbidden Planet, and West Side Story. The Banquet is a retelling of Hamlet, a young Emperor’s son is studying far from home (not at Wittenberg) but at a school for artists. When the Emperor is murdered, his brother ascends to the throne and sends troops to murder the prince. He survives and returns to the palace. In this story it is not his mother who has married the new Emperor as it is in Hamlet, but his former girlfriend. Trouble ensues.

Beautiful trouble. The Banquet may be one of the most beautiful films you ever see. It’s the kind of movie you walk out of actually wondering who the cinematographer is and whether you can buy a poster to hang on your dining room wall to make the room look better. Top quality Asian movies have looked great for years – think about Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, or Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou, or Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host – and Feng Xiaogang’s film is no exception.

So, beauty. Shakespeare. Wuxia. This film has it all. Enjoy The Banquet. It’s a feast for your eyes.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Sam Mendes' American Beauty (1999)

Program currently a.w.o.l. Please check back later.

François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959)

Rather than discourse on tonight’s specific film, Francois Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), we’d like to reflect, for a minute, on foreign film in general and its marginalized place in American movie culture. Even designating a film as “foreign” makes us a trifle uncomfortable, like when we find an eyeball floating in our chicken-noodle soup and the waiter reminds us that in some cultures such things are considered a delicacy. As long as we resort to terminology like “foreign,” those films so designated will always remain alien, outside of our experience, and the sort of thing one only finds at Landmark theaters. Yet foreign films offer something intensely valuable in the film-going experience: difference.

Cultures can become inoculated by their own narratives, and in American film, where bottom-line economics plays such a big role in how stories get told, more often than not financial success is found in the reuse of formulae. What’s that movie where a cop, who’s kinda sexist or racist or xenophobic or something, and his partner are sitting in a restaurant and the partner is musing about how close he is to retirement and then a bad guy busts in and kills the partner and the cop vows revenge but his vengeance is hampered because he’s soon saddled with a woman or a foreigner or an alien for a new partner? Oh, yeah, it’s like twenty movies. And don’t even get us started on sequels.

Foreign films, because they come from cultures with different formulae, tell stories with different textures. They tell stories that draw on different myths. They tell stories that rely on different imagery. They tell stories that reflect different values. They tell stories that don’t conform to our fetishistic expectation that all films should be roughly two hours long (unless it has lots and lots of special effects).

When we become inured to our own formulae, films lose their power except as spectacle, which may account for the rise is graphic horror films, special effects-laden but story-poor super-hero flicks, and the blunt, sketch-driven, irony-heavy comedy of the likes of Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler. We can become jaded by our own art. It’s not healthy. We need our palette cleansed from time to time.

Watching only Hollywood-produced and American independent films is like only eating pizza for dinner. Dining out once in a while at an Indian restaurant (Planet Bollywood!) or ordering out for Chinese or sampling the yak kothe and momo at Everest on Grand will make you appreciate your pizza more. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. You like a variety of foods, right? Why not film?

We won’t generalize about the cultural traits of foreign films from specific countries, not even to ask if all French romantic comedies are required to have love triangles. Suffice it to say that these foreign traits reenergize our expectations for all the movies we see. To experience difference is to be transported some distance, no matter how small, from the familiar, and to look back at it is to see it from a new perspective.

We believe that American film-goers like this re-awakening. Look at the success of Slumdog Millionaire, from one point of view a traditional rags-to-riches story, but from another a completely fresh take on how one tells the rags-to-riches story. What may happen next is that the unfamiliar traits we associate with this film will find themselves imitated by and evolving in American film. Thus, foreign films of note can make American film fresh.

This happens all the time. Not too long ago The Matrix (1999) used martial arts style action, drawing on the influences of hundreds of Hong Kong films from the 1980s and ‘90s. A year later Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) became a huge success in America and now it’s nearly impossible to see an action film that doesn’t have some martial influenced fighting in it.

Tonight we see Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a film that was itself in 1959 ground-breaking film-making and which influenced an entire generation of film-makers. We don’t need to get all historical to appreciate it though. All we need is to enjoy its difference, and cleanse our palette for our weekend excursion to The Watchmen.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Terence Young's Wait Until Dark (1967)

We haven’t shown a lot of suspense thrillers during the last five years of Film Club screenings. Part of the reason is that Film Club exists to present great movies you haven’t had the opportunity to see previously. But people tend to be skeptical or reticent or just plain foot-draggy about committing to something they’re unfamiliar with. This explains why Hollywood spends so much money on promotion (sometimes a third of the entire production budget); they want to acquaint you with the product so you won’t be intimidated by it even if that means spending millions on product tie-ins at McDonald’s. Hey, if you’ve played with the toy, the movie must be great.

Film Club doesn’t have millions of dollars. We barely get Blue Sheet announcements done on time. The consequence of that is that we end up asking you to come to see movies on faith rather than a (false) sense that you know what you’re going to be seeing. And often you don’t (although if you’re reading this, you did – thank you.) We’ve learned that some genres are easier sells than others – romance, action, animation, anything with Johnny Depp. Others are more difficult, and one of those is the suspense thriller.

When we elect to show a suspense thriller that’s older, two issues pop up. First, there’s the unfamiliarity with an “older” film. If you’ll allow us a soap box moment, let us just say that it’s sad how controlled Americans are by PR, advertising, and the productization of important things like art, politics, and even religion. Everything is packaged for us. Open the New York Times Book Review and 15 books will be reviewed, the same 15 books you’ll find reviewed in other literary journals, the same 15 books you’ll see ads for in literary media. Some of those books are very good, but 25 years ago some of the books reviewed and celebrated during any given week were also good, but have been forgotten. Why? Not because they turned out later not to be good, but because the marketing machine has moved on. Old doesn’t sell; new sells. And now you buy Twilight and Jim Butcher novels instead of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice novels. Those are old. No one is talking about them. And even if you did pick the old ones they might not feel the same as the newer ones.

That’s the second problem with the suspense thriller genre, the genre itself has evolved and when we look back we don’t see stories told in a familiar (there’s that word again) way, the way we’re used to. Watch Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) some time. See if you don’t laugh when Bela Lugosi slinks out of the shadows and raises his hands up, claw-like, like he’s about to play an awesome chord on an invisible piano. You can almost hear a million parodies getting ready to say “bluh, buh-luh, buh-luh; I vant to drink your bluhd!” Were people really scared by that in 1931? They certainly aren’t now.

Now we want realism. And we want blood (just like Dracula). And we want dismemberment. It shocks us to think that in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the film that started the modern slasher genre, the hockey-masked Michael Myers terrorizes and murders all those high school kids, and there isn’t a drop of blood in the movie. Carpenter was going for psychological horror.

The same is true of Henri-Georges Cluzot’s Diabolique (1955), a terrific French film about a boarding school head-mistress who murders her adulterous husband and hides his body in the murky school swimming pool, only to find it missing when the pool is drained the following spring. Psychological horror.

And the same is true of Wait Until Dark (1967), tonight’s film about a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) terrorized by three thugs who think a doll stuffed with heroin is hidden in her apartment. Although it’s directed by Terrence Young (who previously directed three of the first four James Bond films), this is Hitchcockian suspense. Does that genre still thrill? Are we still fitted with the buttons it pushes?

In the week leading up to this screening, every adult who noted that we’re showing Wait Until Dark has stopped to comment on what a great film it is, especially one scene in particular. The students we’ve chatted with, who don’t know it, are skeptical. Maybe they’re a little afraid. Because, really, the unknown is often scary. We’re more comfortable with the familiar. Maybe we should take more risks. After all, it’s only a movie.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941)

Released in 1941, Citizen Kane has a reputation as the best movie of all time. It follows the life of a man by the name of Charles Foster Kane beginning with his death, then flashing back, in a series of newsreels and interviews, to the earlier events of his life. Born in poverty Kane climbs both the economic and social ladder only to reach the top lonely and sad. The story is loosely based on the lives of William Randolph Hearst and the director of the movie, Orson Welles. Hearst was not pleased with the film. In fact, Hearst did not allow the mention of the movie in any of his papers, and he offered $800,000 for the destruction of the film and the negative. Some say that he was not dismayed by his portrayal as much as the portrayal of Marion Davies, an actress with whom Hearst had an affair and whose career he tried to promote, widely seen as represented by the character Susan Alexander in the film.

The movie gained its reputation as the best movie ever for its intense psychological thrill ride. People just enjoy watching a man as his life falls apart around him. Citizen Kane sits at the top of respected movie charts such as the American Film Institute and the British Film Institute. It got positive reviews when it debuted although it had a relatively low turn out at the box office. It was not until the 1950s that Citizen Kane came back into the spotlight.

The other reason Citizen Kane tends to appear at the top of “best” film lists, is because of Orson Welles who directed, wrote, produced, and starred in Citizen Kane at the age of 26. (Some of his other works are The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, Macbeth, Othello, Touch of Evil, and Chimes at Midnight.) In retrospect, Welles is thought of as something of a genius, mostly for both for his visionary filmmaking techniques and for his writing or adaptation of scripts. Citizen Kane won the Oscar for best screenplay in 1941. However, his movies failed to earn money at the box office, and as a result the studios did not respect his artistic vision. They cut large parts from his films, which angered Welles, and he eventually left Hollywood. It was not until after his death in 1985 that he and his films were really recognized.

Not everyone thinks Citizen Kane is the greatest film of all time. Ray Carney, a well know film theorist, believes that the film lacks emotional depth and is full of empty metaphors, calling it “an all-American triumph of style over substance... indistinguishable from the opera production within it: attempting to conceal the banality of its performances by wrapping them in a thousand layers of acoustic and visual processing” (Wikipedia).

Perhaps it is a testament to a works innovation when one can find extreme disagreement of opinion. Is Citizen Kane as good as some critics argue? Is it really saddled by banal performances, on a par with the likes of Babes on Broadway or Men of Boys Town (oops, did we just pick two films with Mickey Rooney?), also released in 1941? Really, only you can decide whether the film is a masterpiece or a complete failure. You can’t argue with authority if you haven’t seen it, which is why the SPA Film Club is proud to show Citizen Kane.

Alec Nordin
SPA Film Club

A Night of Short Films

Welcome to the SPA Film Club’s Night of Short Films! Tonight we present a variety of brief works, some animated, some live-action, some traditional narrative, some avant garde, but all great examples of the kind of film-making we don’t usually see. Really, working in the short form is harder than making full-length films, the same way that writing a short story can be harder than a full novel. There’s no room for wasted frames; every shot has to work toward a sense of completeness whether the film is 15 minutes long or five. So enjoy these, and if you’re considering making a film for the SPA Student Movie contest, don’t be afraid to grab a few good ideas.

1. “King of the Rocket Men” – serial chapter (12:00) – Not really a short film, but a great example of how to put together a narrative on a low budget. What is that helmet made of?

2. “Mr. Resistor” – Mark Gustafson (8:00)
In this stop-action animation, a little guy made of spare parts, wires, and some wild hair looks for an elusive boon – a pair of golden arms.

3. “The Morning Guy” – Mark W. Gray (4:50)
Do you have a clock/radio that wakes you in the morning? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be married to one? Sometimes a cool film idea comes from a very wacky premise.

4. “Eramos Pocos” (“One Too Many”) – Borja Corbeaga (15:15)
When a man’s wife leaves him, he turns to his mother-in-law to help care for him and his son’s domestic needs. A lot of short films use the ironic “punch line” approach to narrative structure; this one does that really well.

5. “More” – Mark Osborne (5:50)
We tend to take animation more lightly then live-action film, but “More” reminds us that even claymation can have a lot to say about the forces that control our lives: hope, capitalism, sacrifice.

6. “Eye Like a Strange Balloon” – Guy Maddin (5:11)
Not every film you make has to be a traditional narrative. Maddin’s is unabashedly surreal (think Luis Bunuel), with elements of German expressionism and that avant garde thing where you mess around with the physical celluloid itself. Follow the plot. If you can. (Yeah, yeah; plot is irrelevant here.)

7. “Our Time is Up” – Rob Pearlstein (12:00)
This is a straight up character study arranged around a simple structure: establish a character, throw a huge complication in his life, and watch what happens.

8. “The Ninja Pays Half My Rent” – Steven Tsuchida (5:00)
Guy needs a new room-mate. It’s a Ninja! ‘Nuff said.

9. “West Bank Story” – Ari Sandel (18:30)
Modern media is all about the mash-up. This film takes Romeo and Juliet adaptation West Side Story, turns its tragedy into parody, and resets it in the middle of the middle-eastern conflict. Full of wonderful visual puns: check out the allusion to a famous musical film about a third of the way into the film.

10. “Bride of Resistor” – Mark Gustafson (6:04)
Mr. Resistor is back! And this time he’s looking for love. It’s fitting that in this stop-motion animation sequel made up of found objects, our hero learns that love is often found in unusual places.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Richard Thorpe's Jailhouse Rock (1957)

A lot of performers have made the jump from music to film, and done it well. Check out Beyonce in Cadillac Records or Queen Latifah in Hairspray and The Secret Life of Bees. Certainly, being in the entertainment industry prepares you for more than one genre, and Hollywood has a long history of capturing charismatic talents and presenting them on the big screen. But we wonder if Hollywood still thinks of these performers as exploitable celebrity – hey, this guy’s popular; let’s put him in a movie and rake in the dough from his fans – rather than exploitable talent.

Take Elvis Presley. From 1956 to 1969, Elvis made 31 movies, and it may have been "Saturday Night Live" that used to have a joke about them. In a skit, Elvis is portrayed as showing up a little dazed to a film shoot. A director runs in and tells him he’s going to be playing Sam or Dave or Jim, or some other innocuous name, and that he’s going to be in a particular situation. Like:

“Elvis, in this movie you’re Sam and you’re in the biggest car race of your life.” And the Elvis character would sing “Gonna win that race!”

Or, “Elvis, in this scene you’re Dave, and you’re a sea captain trying to save your ship from sinking,” and “Elvis” would sing “Gonna save that ship!”

Or, “Elvis, in this scene you’re Jim, and you’re making out with the Larimer County beauty queen at the State Fair,” and “Elvis” would sing “Gonna kiss that girl.” Etc.

The point was that from a popular perspective, Elvis’s movies were cookie-cutter formula flicks with generic scripts designed to place a visually (if increasingly pudgy) Elvis on screen for his legions of fans and collect their ticket money without much regard to the quality of the films. Just stick him in front of the camera, get him to sing, and people will pay. And that’s certainly true of forgettable movies like Clambake, Spinout, and Harum Scarum.

The irony to all of this is that, in the beginning, Elvis really wanted to be a great actor. His early roles, in films like King Creole and Loving You and Jailhouse Rock, are dark and James Dean-esque, and, dare we say it, require actual acting. As early as 1961 Elvis was explaining to anyone who would listen that he wanted his acting to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, the movie studio failed to hear those pleas because it was easier, and cheaper, to throw together lame scripts, go through the motions, and still make money. They considered him more of a B-movie actor and by the mid-1960s he was saddled with regrettable claptrap like Tickle Me.

Here, in Jailhouse Rock, though, we have the early Elvis, a good script, some good actors, and some very memorable songs. It’s no surprise that people still remember this movie after they see it. The images from it have been reused and imitated for decades (see the final scene of the original Blues Brothers), and one can only think wistfully at what might have been if Elvis’s film producer, Hal Wallis, and his manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, had respected Elvis’s wish to become a serious actor. Perhaps Elvis wouldn’t be consigned now to be remembered as an actor by comedy sketches and a critic’s statement that “No major star suffered though more bad movies than Elvis Presley” (Wikipedia).

Fortunately Jailhouse Rock isn’t one of them.

R. Findlay
SPA Film Club Adviser