Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (1999)

I was riding down the sunny streets of New York City on a motorcycle. As I sped toward Times Square, the former owner of my new bike’s parents shuttered through my mind: I wondered what their reaction would be when they found out that their son had just been murdered for his Tetsuo brand motorcycle. The thought passed, and I kept riding.

It wasn’t the first homicide I had committed that day. Just minutes earlier, I aimed the barrel of my gun at a propane tank parked at a fueling station and pulled the trigger. I wasn’t able to count the bodies before I could get away from the Five-O on the unidentified man’s Tetsuo bike, the same who lay dead on the pavement in the middle of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

The cops were catching up to me now. Fifty, sixty, seventy the speedometer read. I was the Minnesota cowboy who could not be caught; something in my teetering bulb of dread and dream knew I would never be. And so I killed again

The police were cut off by a walk only street in Greenwich Village. My newly hijacked motorcycle, a Kaneda model, was acquired from an Eastern European gentleman below an underpass off of Highway 78 running alongside the Hudson River. The man’s neck snapped sharply between my fingerless leather gloves. It was the last noise his body would ever make as his legs twitched silently beneath my feet. Sirens blared. This time, I didn’t have enough time to think about his parents.

I raced down the east end of Broadway St, weaving in between a combination of pedestrians, limos, and pigeons. A police officer flew out his windshield into oncoming traffic behind me, sporadically bouncing across the concrete safari of the city for blocks. I knew an acquaintance would be waiting in Brooklyn with a chopper to take us out of the sights and minds of the NYPD, but it would take more than a motorcycle to get there.

I headed for the docks on the Lower East Side, where I might be able to hijack a jet ski to take across East River into the borough to the south. The plot thickened when I tried to pass the SWAT teams on South Essex Street, where spotlights blinded and helicopters deafened. I was about to finally be roped in. The tires of my Kaneda were shot out by a rooftop sniper. For a moment, I flew. The next, I lay dead.

The masochistic nature of my killing spree in Grand Theft Auto IV left me thinking about those motorcycles I rode in my final hour of play. I suspected the names were Japanese, and I knew for a fact that they were fictitious.

Fictitious, but not original. A Google search took me to a character list for an animated film called Akira. Rockstar Games, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, branded their virtual motorcycles under the veil of an Easter egg, the names of Akira’s central characters.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg labeled the film unmarketable in the United States, but Akira managed to achieve cult status after its national 2001 release.

Tetsuo and Kaneda are cyberpunk motorcycle gangsters, members of a society described as “low life and high technology.” Akira has an advantage over live action films in the genre in that the special effects options that went into making a dystopian Tokyo circa 2019 were limitless in its art form.

Akira is much praised as an animated cult movie that managed to influence live-action blockbusters. The Matrix (1999) drew from Akira’s account of a human’s attempt to do right in a corrupt, technology-based society, a remarkable feat for a film without any actors. Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA looked to director Katsuhiro Otomo’s methods of audio engineering when creating the sound effects for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004), compositing the noise produced by a 1929 Harley Davidson with that of a jet engine.

Word of a live-action remake of Akira arises in the media every so often. Warner Brothers Studios bought the rights in 2008, and the various proposed cast lists have been exclusively white A-List: Ryan Gosling and James Franco as the leads, Mila Kunis as femme fatale, Helena Bonham Carter typecast as the villain. No deals between the studio and the actors were ever secured, and production has shut down a total of four times as of January 2012. It’s better that way. The power of Otomo’s storytelling with the animated art form is timeless.

Watch for the respect Kaneda gives his brethren in light of their losses, dissimilar from the respect I failed to give my victims back in my Grand Theft Auto IV days. Hayao Miyazaki fanboys could never stomach the violence you are about to witness.

August King
Film Club Co-President

Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995)

In 1995, when the film Clueless first hit the big screens, I was only one year old. That being said, when I reached the proper age of 12, Clueless seemed to tell me all I needed to know about high-school. My pre-teen friends and I would all gather at slumber parties and pick out Clueless from amongst the 12 video cassettes of Mary-Kate and Ashley fun high-school adventures. After a while, Alicia Silverstone as Cher joined the many other valley-pop girl icons that embraced the MTV scene.

But what made the film Clueless so appealing to a variety of mid-western pre-teen girls in the early 2000s was the idea that Cher was the perfect West Hollywood girl. In a sense, Cher is strong. She is determined and passionate to say the least. She takes care of others and is considerate of the welfare her friends and teachers, to her own benefit in some cases. Either way, to a pre-teen girl Cher kicks high-school in the butt, she is large and in charge, but after a while, as the film unfolds, we see Cher’s perfect high-school world start to unravel.

Watching Clueless again, at the ripe age of eighteen, I am recognize Cher as the outlandish and ... well, clueless ... character that she is, all thanks to writer and director Amy Heckerling. In Mean Girls, writers Tina Fey and Rosalind Wiseman exploit all social groups and stereotypes one might assume true of a common 2004 high school. In essence, Heckerling does the same…she just did it nine years earlier.

In Clueless, Cher encompasses a wide variety of stereotypical women, combining a ‘50s housewife and ‘90s teenage girl. She is a bad driver, conscious of her figure and her fashion – as well as everyone else’s – and suggests that “whenever a boy comes over, you should always have something baking.” But we as an audience feel the exact same way as some of the characters around her; for a good portion of the film we see Cher as a ditzy, blonde, “as if” valley girl whose only direction in life is to the mall. However, what really concerned my slightly feminist mother, who was concerned about my social vulnerability as a twelve-year-old, was the fact in order to be socially successful in high school you always had to be romantically involved with a male counterpart, preferably one of your same popularity or higher. We see Cher thrust this anti-feminist value on her new founded project, Ty.

Cher also embraces the familiar sentiment that she must carry the new, hopeless, and ultimately clueless girl under her wing. This thought falls under the category of “using your popularity as a means for good.” As we saw in Mean Girls where Cady is brought up within the Plastics and in Heathers where “Heather” takes the place of the killed-off Heather Chandler despite her role as a floater. In Clueless, the newest new girl to transform herself is Ty, played by the late Brittany Murphy. Introduced as a “farm girl,” Ty’s popularity suddenly takes shape as Cher shows her the Hollywood ropes. At one point, Ty’s transformation backfires on Cher as Ty for a moment takes away all of Cher’s hard earned attention. “What was happening?” Cher says in a voice-over, “Ty being the most popular girl in school? Was this some sor tof alternate universe? Considering how clueless she was, Ty had the whole damsel in distress thing down.”

What makes this movie so emotionally appealing, to both my pre-teen and adult self, is the fact that Heckerling gives complexity to a character we might normally write off and judge as snobby and annoying. We see the struggles, humorous and heart-wrenching as they may be, unfold throughout this chapter in Cher’s life. Along with Cher and other characters such as Ty, they grow from being clueless teenagers to emotional human beings, just somewhat misunderstood by society.

Liz Rossman
Film Club

Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976)

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Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010)

"Do you think I’ve gone round-the-bend?"
“I’m afraid so. You’re mad, bonkers, off-your head. But I’ll tell you a secret, all the best people are.”

Some of the opening lines of Alice in Wonderland seem to sum up both the film and its creators perfectly. Released in 2010, Alice in Wonderland takes on a new plot thanks to screenwriter Linda Woolverton. But Tim Burton treats the tale as his own. Complete with his whimsical artistic aesthetic, Alice and Wonderland may not be a strong enough film to stand on its own but fits perfectly into Burton’s catalog of films.

The film is set in English Victorian times, with elaborate and fantastic costumes; the “real world” outside of wonderland appears to be a scene out of Brideshead Revisited. Thanks to Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood, the classic tan and pale blue Victorian corsets and petticoats are just as elaborate as the costumes seen in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. In fact, Alice in Wonderland draws on a similar theme – suppressed teenagers within a suppressive aristocratic world – as Marie Antoinette. Uncomfortable with and scornful of anything proper, Alice (played by Mia Waskikowska) wants out of everything relating to arranged marriages and extreme Victorian societal norms. She is an outsider, a Socratic rebel to say the least, always being reminded by others of her place in this world. “I was thinking what it would be like to fly,” Alice says during a posh English party. “Why would you waste your time thinking of impossible things?” exclaims her soon-to-be fiancé.

As we’ve seen in Heathers and Mean Girls, angsty teenage characters are often desperate to escape their own lives. When they finally do, they realize they are just as unhappy as they were before. Alice feels unfulfilled in Wonderland, where her role is set as the slayer of the Jabberwock in order to return peace to Wonderland. Like Veronica, JD, and Cady Heron, it is only at the end of this film that Alice discovers it isn’t where you are that determines whether you’re feeling content and happy despite outside influences and social norms.

Alice in Wonderland finds Burton continuing his exploration of a number of themes and cinematic styles that have become so closely associated with him. The film sheds light on why Burton maybe is one of the great film auteurs of our generation. What Alfred Hitchcock was to the Baby Boomer generation, Burton is to us, the dreamers and people of the XYZ generation. Auteurs like Hitchcock and François Truffaut stuck to what they knew best and rarely ventured outside a film genre. Hitchcock stuck to suspense, thrill, and aloof females. With Burton it’s a somewhat similar story, but instead of suspense there’s animation and this haunting obscure quality to the plot and characters. What Hitchcock achieved with films, such as Vertigo and Psycho, was this amazing feeling of suspense and thrill. With Burton, the audience is thrown into this dream-like world, escaping the somewhat violent and media-frenzy world we experience today. If anything Alice in Wonderland reaffirms Burton's consistent theme of parallel universes. Alice falls down a hole into Wonderland, just as Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas travels through a set of doors in the depth of the words into a universe of Christmas. Or as Victor Van Dort in Corpse Bride travels through this mystical and supernatural portal into the realm of the living dead. Or as Leo Davidson slips through time to a planet of the apes.

What Tim Burton conveys in his films, such as Alice in Wonderland, is an escape from reality into a universe of the wonderful and unthinkable, the impossible even. And sometimes, you need to think a few impossible things. Maybe even before breakfast.

Liz Rossman
British Literature II

Michael Lehmann's Heathers (1989)

Heathers is the first movie that Film Club has shown twice in eight years. Is it the best movie we’ve shown such that it bears repeating? Not necessarily – we think that honor would go to Cidade de Deus (City of God) – but Heathers fits neatly into this year’s theme, The Movies Go to High School, as it did eight years ago, when the theme was Adolescence on Film. And it is an excellent film.

You wouldn’t know it from the box office receipts. Heathers bombed when it opened in 1988, only earning roughly a million dollars (that’s about two million today). Compare that to Mean Girls which earned almost 130 million worldwide in 2004. So what accounts for the continued interest and screenings of Heathers? We would argue that it is a product of its satirical approach to its subject – conformity and cliquishness in the American high school.

If you’re not familiar with the nature of satire, it goes like this. Satire is a literary form that mocks, ridicules, or shames the behaviors – foolish, greedy, misguidedly earnest, or otherwise – of people who have power over us and carries that criticism to the society that allows it as well. English teachers often point to Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which the writer suggested, in the 18th century, that the Irish might solve their economic and domestic difficulties if they simply sold their kids to rich people as food. No, he wasn’t serious; he was mocking people’s insensitivity to the impoverished and the ineffective Irish policies that exacerbated the situation.

Heathers takes on a less national political issue and instead focuses on the politics of social groupings within the high school community. In this way, it is very much like Mean Girls, except that because it was made 16 years earlier, we have to say that  Mean Girls  is a lot like Heathers. Whereas Mean Girls exhibits a relatively tame satire, though, Heathers pulls no punches. The Heathers, a triumvirate of social queen bees, is the equivalent of Girls’ Plastics, but not all of them will survive the movie. Mean Girls jokes about killing off the Plastics; Heathers actually does it. And a couple jocks, to boot. And while  Mean Girls attacks cliquishness per se, Heathers goes after social tyranny, homophobia, and the superficiality of judging people by how they look. So people get murdered, schools get blown up, students promote a national suicide day, and everyone says the F-word a lot. From this we come to understand just how undesirable these behaviors are. Satire, see?

Of course, this makes some viewers uncomfortable. In general, mainstream readers, viewers, and art-goers can be fairly literal minded. Satire, by its nature, is outrageous. If you took Heathers literally, you might conclude that it promotes the murder of adolescent jerks. But we at Film Club believe that you are a discerning and sophisticated movie-goer. We believe you can tell the difference between satire and realism. Just in case, we have a little test for you.

Our cartoon tonight is Chuck Jones’s iconic “Rabbit Seasoning,” in which Daffy Duck tries to distract hunter Elmer Fudd from the fact that it is duck hunting season by convincing him it is rabbit season. Bugs deftly and wittily turns the tables on him at every turn, usually resulting in Daffy getting his bill shot off. If you see this cartoon on TV, it is almost certainly edited; all the seconds of violence (a boom and a cloud of smoke around Daffy’s head, then his bill relocated in a place different from where it should be) gone, and with them the punch-line of most of the jokes. It is UNwatchable. But censors have determined that kids watching the cartoon might misunderstand the violence, that they might determine that it’s “okay” to shoot people. Studies support both sides of the issue – children are affected by constant exposure to violence on TV and in video games; children easily distinguish between “cartoon violence” and the real thing. So there’s your test: which are you?

We feel that both “Rabbit Seasoning” and Heathers ask the audience to think (and both use humor to do so). We’d rather have that than the alternative. So enjoy Heathers, but please don’t kill anyone.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Mark Waters' Mean Girls (2004)

The best villains in film do not believe that they are evil. A movie’s “good” and “bad” sides that create conflict are often relative, a complexity that makes both the characters and the movie more enjoyable. Imagine taking on the role of a villain. You can’t think: “My character knows what he (or she) is doing is bad but does it anyway.” That’s not real. The villainous characters must truly think that their side or course of action is the right way.

In Joss Whedon’s film, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog (2008), for example, the main character (played by Neil Patrick Harris) has a goal; he wants to make it into the Evil League of Evil, and he must commit murder for his application to be successful. But watching him, understanding his motives and his goals and his life, the viewer ends up rooting for him. Really. You root for the villain, instead of the hero, because even when he’s doing bad, he believes it’s for the best. And because in understanding that, you have sympathy for him.

In other films, the ones that take a more two-dimensional approach to heroism, villains still exist, but they are not presented in the in-depth way that Dr. Horrible does. We here at Film Club like complex villains. And we think this accounts for some of the most truly evil, but also most amazing, characters of all time: Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight; Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates from Psycho; Edith Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz; and finally, Rachel McAdams’ Regina George from Mean Girls.

But the beauty of Mean Girls is not just in the way that it avoids the cliché “good girl” vs. “mean girl, or the way that the obvious villain, Regina, is portrayed. It’s the way that the true villain is brought out of hiding. Cady, the main character played by Lindsay Lohan, is a perfectly clean slate, a character who the way evil might develop in all of us. Throughout the film,  Cady may start out pure and honest, but as the film progresses she loses her moral balance and an imperfect sense of the line between right and wrong.

At the beginning of the film, Cady doesn’t even know there is a line. As time goes on, she sees where it is, but afterwards, as mean girl events spiral out of control, her view is distorted. Why does this happen? Because the film’s true villain, Regina, distorts Cady’s perception of the world. That’s how evil she is. And Cady’s naiveté and innocence work against her. Yet at no time does Regina throw back her head and laugh evilly – moo-hoo-ha-ha-ha-haaaa! – because she’s not a caricaturish villain; she’s just a girl in high school who likes to be in charge and get others to do things her way.

Cady’s “fall” in her conflict with Regina, doesn’t make her completely evil either. But no longer is she spotless. And, in fact we can see that very few of the characters in Mean Girls are perfect heroes in the madness of high school. And many have mean streaks. Fortunately, there’s no one like that at SPA. Just keep telling yourself: “It’s only a movie!”

Kaia Findlay
Film Club Publicist

Henry Selick's James and the Giant Peach (1996)

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George Dunning's Yellow Submarine (1968)

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Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946)

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Disney's Fantasia (1940)

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Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

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Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

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Brad Bird's The Iron Giant (1999)

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Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993)

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Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

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