Alejandro Amenábar's Open Your Eyes (1997)

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Blake Edwards' The Pink Panther (1963)

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Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998)

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Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006)

There haven’t been all that many successful movies made about magicians. Not white-bearded wizards or spellcasting warlocks, mind you – I’m talking about realistic illusionists. The movies are there, don’t get me wrong, but if you compare the number of movies strictly about magicians with just about any other subject matter, you’ll find the department in question … lacking.

It’s not difficult to see why making a decent movie about magicians is near impossible. The ONE thing that magicians have going for them is their ability to seemingly defy natural law right in front of an audience’s eyes. That’s just what they do. Unfortunately, a filmmaker would be hard-pressed to evoke a similar sense of awe and amazement in a movie about magicians because today’s society doesn’t trust what they see on a screen anymore. Since the dawn of modern special effects, we’ve had to abandon any notion that something amazing in a movie actually happened. Any trick that a magician could perform could be so easily replicated with special effects, it wouldn’t be worth an audience’s attention.

Keeping this in mind, you can tell why Christopher Nolan (Memento, Dark Knight trilogy) was the perfect man for the job of making an amazing movie about magic. When The Prestige was released in 2006, it had to compete with the precedent set by Neil Burger’s The Illusionist which had hit theaters just two months prior. Burger gave moviegoers a dramatic love story – sure, he used a conjurer as the vehicle by which he could tell it, but it was centrally a love story. Burger recognized that creating a good tale strictly about magic was doomed to fail and created an entirely different set of tensions within the plot. I actually really enjoyed The Illusionist, but in my mind it was nothing compared to The Prestige.

And that’s because Nolan figures out how to make a successful movie about magicians. Instead of trying to make a movie about magic tricks, he makes his own magic trick. The Prestige itself is one big artifice. I think that’s part of what makes it such an enjoyable movie. Probably the most significant lines from the movie are spoken by the magicians’ stage engineer, Cutter:

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge.’ The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird, or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course … it probably isn't. The second act is called ‘The Turn.’ The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret … but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call ‘The Prestige.’"

I won’t ruin the plot by explaining exactly how the movie fits perfectly into Cutter’s explanation of what makes a great trick, but I promise that it does. Nolan doesn’t try to amaze us with tricks performed by the magicians (although I loved the way he showed how some of their tricks were performed); instead he amazes us with the trick of his own while actually managing to focus entirely on the lives of two magicians throughout the story. By doing this, Nolan is finally able to evoke that sense of open-jawed bewilderment in his audience that no other movie about magic could ever accomplish. He brings the awe of watching a magic trick in person to the big screen, which is why I call The Prestige one of his greatest works.

Christian Koch
Film Club Co-President

Mel Brooks' The Producers (1967)

It's time for another "Film Club Dialogue," tonight featuring Miriam Tibbets, Film Club's own Anarchist and Film Club's adviser, Mr. Findlay. Tonight's topic: cult films.

Miriam: Why are cult movies considered “cult”?

Findlay: Um, because they band together and practice strange rituals at midnight?

M: Maybe, but Wikipedia says it’s because of their dedicated fanbase, an elaborate subculture that engages in repeated viewings, quotes dialogue, and participates in some form audience participation.

F: Like when people throw rice and toilet paper and shout rude things at the screen during The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

M: That too.

F: So it’s the audience that acts like a cult, not the movie. But what does this have to do with tonight’s movie The Producers by Mel Brooks?

M: How could The Producers not be cult film? Any film whose plot includes a washed-up Broadway producer (played by Zero Mostel) and a nebbishy accountant (played by Gene Wilder) creating a musical called “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” deserves the esteemed title of “cult.”

F: So, does the audience participate? I’m not sure I want to see a bunch of high school students singing and dancing along to “Springtime for Hitler” or dressing up as Nazis. Even if it is a comedy.

M: The Producers made my father sing out “Springtime for Hitler” at the very mention of this movie.

F: No doubt your father sings along with a lot of movies. Has he seen Mulan?

M: Maybe; we’re getting off topic. Cult films also have a status that places them outside the mainstream. They’re movies that are overlooked by most people, even as they become hugely popular with a small “in-group.” They also tend to have story elements that challenge mainstream values.

F: Ah, like the movies of John Waters, most of which we can’t show at Movie Night. But wasn’t The Producers fairly popular?

M: Yes, it was. Many critics, who usually disregard movies that later achieve cult status, celebrated Mel Brook’s comedy. But it does approach a serious topic with a kind of humor that a lot of people might find offensive.

F: Like making a musical about Hitler.

M: To quote the movie, “Not many know it, but the Fuhrer was a terrific dancer.”

F: Now that’s funny.

M: I’m a huge fan of satire and black comedy, the sort of elements one often finds in a cult movie.

F: Sure. That reminds me of one of my favorite cult films, Eating Raoul. It’s about a dinner party, and I’ll let you guess who’s for dinner.

M: Ewww.

[Pause]

F: I think there's another really important aspect of the cult film definition we haven't talked about.

M: What's that?

F: "Camp." Typically this refers to the mocking of conventional values. More specifically, camp art attacks "straight" values with a homoerotic subtext.

M: Are we still talking about The Producers?

F: Well, yes. But a more familiar example might be the 1960s Batman movie which we showed last year.That depiction of the Batman character is frequently described as "campy" because its presentation of a male superhero who speaks in decisive exclamation points in such an over-the-top comic manner calls into question the conventional attitudes about manliness. Just look at his tights, his eyebrows painted onto his cowl, Robin's cute little slippers.

M: Right. And The Producers has the same kind of subtext. The flamboyant effeminacy of the character, L. S. D., and the whole "Springtime for Hitler" show, in fact.

F: Exactly. That's campy. And that's a key component of a lot of cult films. For an odd comedy about a couple of guys trying to make a terrible Broadway musical, The Producers has enjoyed a pretty long life. It got made into an actual Broadway musical in 2001, and then that got made into a new film musical in 2005.

M: Raising another question: Why do people insist on remaking movies already held in high regard?

F: Maybe film-makers in the 21^st century have run out of ideas. Or they just know it’s easy to make money when you give the film-goer something familiar.

M: Well, enjoy this original version of the movie. And join the cult, too, for heaven’s sake! We sacrifice goats to Mel Gibson at sunset.

Miriam Tibbets (Film Club Anarchist) and R. Findlay (Film Club Adviser)

Mel Stuart's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Film Club’s theme for Movie Night this year is “originals.” That is, movies that were later remade into versions that, for younger viewers, have become more familiar then first. For example, raise your hand if you’ve seen both Peter Jackson's King Kong AND the original King Kong from 1933 or the Coen Brothers' Academy Award-winning True Grit AND the original True Grit from 1969 (with John Wayne). We were pretty intrigued by the idea of seeing these classics. What major differences would emerge? Would technology, or culture, or narrative be the most re-worked element? What made the original so entertaining or flawed that film-makers were compelled to make another one? And the more we talked about it, the more I got the sense that we were chalking this cannibalization of movie stories up to a typical Hollywood maneuver, one usually have to do with economics.

But it’s not. Telling stories, repeating them, adapting them, changing them, blending them with other stories – this is what we humans do, and we’ve done it for millennia. For example, Shakespeare’s plays are reworked versions of older stories. All three of the major Greek tragedians tell versions of the Orestes and Electra myth within a few decades of each other. More recently, Rick Riordan has been updating Greek myths for new readers. We love familiar stories, and we love to hear them with new twists. And sometimes because we love them, we want a small piece that makes us uncomfortable to be changed, so we can go on loving them.

In a trivial example of this, in 2005, HarperCollins, the publisher of the children's classic Goodnight Moon, decided to remove, from a picture that had long adorned the back of the book, the cigarette from illustrator Clement Hurd's fingers, using the magic of PhotoShop. "It [was] potentially a harmful message to very young kids," publisher Kate Jackson told the New York Times at the time. A significant outcry against changing what amounted to a historical document forced HarperCollins to reconsider.

So it may or may not surprise you to find out that there are two versions, an original and a revised, of Roald Dahl’s children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, from which tonight’s movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, comes. The change is a small one, but it’s significant. And it has to do with the Oompa-Loompas, those endearing little people who live and work in Willy Wonka’s famous chocolate factory. Dahl published his book, originally, in 1964. The introduction and description of the Oompa-Loompas goes like this:

Children and parents alike rushed down to the edge of the river to get a close look.
“Aren’t they fantastic!”
"No higher than my knee!"
“Their skin is almost black.” 

At this point there is some incredulity about their size. Mike Teavee doesn’t believe any real person could be so small. And Mr. Wonka points out that the Oompa-Loompas are, in fact, pygmies (as in Faith Jacques original illustrations):

Pygmies they are! Imported direct form Africa! They belong to a tribe of tiny miniature pygmies known as the Oompa-Loompas. I discovered them myself. I brought them over from Africa myself -- the whole tribe of them, three thousand in all. I found them in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before. They were living in tree-houses. They had to live in tree houses, otherwise, being so small, they would have been gobbled up by every animal in the jungle. And when I found them, they were practically starving to death. ... Poor little Oompa-Loompas!

When Mel Stuart began work on the film version that you’re watching tonight, there was some concern about controversial issues. If you read the passages that follow the original description of the pygmies, you’ll notice right away the stereotypes that have become associated with racist or imperialist imagery: A culture of struggling little natives rescued by a benevolent (white) European, easily adapted to entertainment (“They love singing and dancing. They are always making up songs”), still retaining elements of its "primitivism" ("they still wear the same kind of clothes they wore in the jungle  ... the women wear leaves, and the children wear nothing at all"), and who seem to have no problem with their indenture in a factory.

The studio wanted to ensure that the film was enjoyed by all and, as you will notice, they eliminated the pygmy look and replaced it with the now-distinctive orange and green Oompa-Loompa. Dahl followed suit in a revision of the book in 1974. The passages quoted above were replaced. Instead of Africa, the Oompa-Loompas now came from “Loompaland,” the existence of which is denied by Mrs. Salt. Mr. Wonka begs to differ and retorts:

What a terrible country it is! Nothing but thick jungles infested by the most dangerous beasts in the entire world – hornswogglers and snozzwangers and those terrible wicked whangdoodles. A whangdoodle would eat ten Oompa-Loompas for breakfast and come galloping back for a second helping. When I went out there I found the little Oompa-Loompas living in tree-houses.

The fantasy tone of the revised version echoes the fantasy of a magic chocolate factory, and few people challenged the changes. As revised fantasy Loompalanders, we’re less likely to criticize this depiction, which is retained in the revision, and echoed in Quentin Blake's 1998 illustrations for the book (right). Dahl explained the change this way:

"I created a group of little fantasy creatures ... I saw them as charming creatures, whereas the white kids in the books were ... most unpleasant. It didn't occur to me that my depiction of the Oompa-Loompas was racist, but it did occur to the NAACP and others ... After listening to the criticisms, I found myself sympathizing with them, which is why I revised the book."

This is not to say that Dahl is a racist, or that remakes and revisions exist to correct errors or weaknesses of the past. Dahl came from a time and a place still recovering from an intensely imperial (and imperialistic) past.

And that’s an interesting thing about originals – the window they open to earlier cultures. We get to look at a familiar story, but reflect on the unique way in which the story is told. You’re watching a movie tonight, one with orange Oompa-Loompas and a Willy Wonka definitely not played by Johnny Depp but by Gene Wilder. What elements of 1960s culture do you see built into the story? What elements stay the same? Whatever you notice, you’ll enjoy the riotous, sarcastic, deadpan entertainment of this version of Dahl’s story.

R. Findlay
Film Club adviser

Allan Arkush's Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979)

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Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

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Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning (1990)

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Robert Kenner's Food, Inc. (2008)

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George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973)

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Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002)

In honor of the Lunar New Year, we leave our teenage angst perspective for one with a different color, a foreign taste. Enter our Eastern friends with Chinese kung fu. When exploring the realm of martial arts, the first noticeable trait that the eye catches is no doubt how ridiculous these actors look flying in the air with their unrealistic swordsmanship. In fact, Hero is an entire spectacle of ridiculous notions. From a warrior warding off thousands of arrows with nothing but her sleeves to a battle taking place solely on water, Hero upholds the standard that has somehow become essential to any kung fu movie.

I used to hate that about my favorite Asian films. As a child, my movie was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I worshipped every scene and every score of music as if I was its creator. Frankly I still do, and I cringe whenever I hear someone talking about it as if it was just another movie. It lures me in with an intense and emotional pull that I cannot describe other than nostalgia. But one day (the first and last), I decided to share this personal treasure of mine with a friend who had never seen the film. The only reaction from her was laughter. For how could anyone take a movie like this seriously, where people are ricocheting off roofs and balancing on bamboo trees?!

I used to think that this ridiculous aspect took away from the important themes and lessons that one can find in a martial arts film. But honestly, the immense fakeness is necessary. It is a mirror of ourselves as people, who do ridiculously evil things to each other all of the time as nations, as races, and as opposites (who are not as opposite as we think).

If you are new to the martial arts scene, I suggest Hero as the perfect starting point because it exquisitely incorporates the inescapable sense of hysterics with the realization of deep morals. This may seem like an odd pairing to put together in a movie, but is perfectly balanced with an immense and indescribable beauty that renowned director Zhang Yimou has once again created. It may then be surprising to learn that the most beautiful movie I have ever laid eyes on is about nothing but war. Let me explain.

Hero takes place during a time in China’s history when the warring states were still struggling for control over one another. Though it is a period film, the movie’s underlying messages transcend any time or culture barriers because it is about war, an ugly complex that humanity fails to avoid again and again. War is the dirty little secret behind civilization and remains an inescapable truth throughout world history. And because death is a part of life, it is also beautiful in its twistingly human way. Hero magnifies that beauty and morphs the crude nature of humanity into a simple lesson of morals. Movie reviewer Roger Ebert states that it is violent only incidentally. But perhaps the movie suggests that violence itself is incidental in the grander scheme of understanding ourselves.

Peace and honor are hard words to take seriously in our time and society. Laughable even. Possibly the root to why kung fu movies seem so ridiculous. But for me at least, this movie brought back the inspiration that is hidden in these concepts. If anything, watch Hero to fall back in love with the romanticism behind honoring one’s country or with the primitive instinct to put your love over yourself. Watch the movie for the colors, the cinematography, the music, everything that is so brilliantly put together in order to give us a sense of who we are and how we can learn to do the right thing.

Gina Nguyen
Guest Commentator

Michael Verhoeven's The Nasty Girl (1990)

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Leslie Martinson's Batman (1966)

Tonight we're showing Batman, the movie. But it's probably not what you think. When we think about Batman movies these days, we make a variety of assumptions without knowing it -- what kind of costume he wears, the reality of the world he exists in and the darkness of that world, a certain bleak aesthetic that goes hand in hand with the mythology. This current impression exists because the popular culture vision of Batman changed, drastically, in 1986. That was the year that Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” (originally published in three volumes) came out. Prior to that, Batman was firmly in comic book mode – he fought outlandish costumed villains or two-bit criminals, worked in a absolutely moral, though slightly ironic, universe (good, evil, little in between), and faced the frequent simplicity and looniness of comic narrative with a persistent straight face. It was the stuff of juvenile fantasy. Yes, the 1970s saw the rise of more realistic art in comic books. Neal Adams, and a handful of other illustrators, located DC and Marvel heroes in a much more detailed, recognizable world and added powerful detail to their illustrations. But the two-dimensional simplicity of the stories for the most part stayed intact.

Then Frank Miller gave us the “Dark Knight.” If you haven’t read that story, it’s set in the near future. Batman is 55, battle-scarred, thought by many to be dead. Punks, disorder, corruption rule the city (and make you wonder if Batman ever had any effect on Gotham’s crime rate). The comic’s real villain is moral decay, and Batman’s role is decidedly ambiguous. He even fights Superman, who comes off as a government stooge. The villains are not just evil, but dangerous. So Miller shifted the emphasis from fantasy (superheroes fight and beat the metaphorical representatives of social disorder) to post-modernist social commentary (superhero fights monsters in stories that reveal our own cultural id).

To completely understand the effect of DKR, you only have to look at the Batman stories of the next few years. In 1988, DC released two comics, “The Killing Joke” in which the Joker shoots and paralyzes Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, and “A Death in the Family,” in which the Joker beats the second Robin, Jason Todd, to death with a crowbar. The Dark Knight effect, then, was to move Batman into a darker universe, an ugly world, both in atmosphere and in antagonist, that is not easily conquered.

And in 1989, Tim Burton released the first of his Batman movies, starring Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Burton fully embraced the dark and gothic aspect of the character lurking within the more recent, malevolent, storylines. Making effective use of the ominous, looming architecture of production designer Anton Furst, Burton created a cast of grotesques, who got even more grotesque in Batman Returns (1992), sinking the viewer into a disturbing slough of psychosis and the dark, seamy side of life. Think: Burton’s Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) whose vinyl outfit screams dominatrix, while the outfit’s ever-present stitching suggests metaphorically the scars on her soul.

Burton was followed by Schumacher (Batman Forever with Val Kilmer and Batman and Robin with George Clooney) and then Nolan (the current Batman trilogy with Christian Bale). But whether gothic grotesque or Freudian chic or pessimistic realism, all these Batmen are dark, violent, oppressive, and tortured.

And all of them are 180 degrees and worlds away from Leslie Martinson’s 1966 offering, a movie made using the cast and concepts of the concurrent Batman TV show. What you’re seeing tonight is not only not recognizable in the current Batman scheme, it’s hard to figure out where it came from; it’s that alien. But the word we attach to it is “camp.” First of all, it treats the comic book origins of Batman as just that – comic. Second, it presents Batman in an ironic mode of deadpan self-mockery. It’s like the movie is one giant in-joke. Nobody actually acts like this, the movie suggests, but we’re going to pretend that it’s all perfectly normal. The more outrageous the character, situation, language, the more normal we’re going to pretend it is. Doesn’t everyone scale the sides of buildings with a thin rope when they could take an elevator? Doesn’t everyone have a spray can of Shark Repellent Bat Spray in the bathroom cupboard? Doesn’t every country have a navy surplus submarine fitted with duck-foot-like stabilizers and a periscope in a penguin head? Of course these things exist! And Batman (Adam West) and Robin (Burt Ward) think nothing of their oddity, even as they speak in sentences that end exclusively in exclamation points.

One thing I really like about this movie is how the production designers (Serge Krizman and Jack Martin Smith) went back to the original comic books’ 4-color printing process: yellow, magenta, cyan (blue), and black. Batman’s costume is gray. This cape is blue, as is Bruce Wayne’s hair. All the colors in a comic book are based on what variations, with tinting and combinations of tints, can be made with those four colors, a palette of 64 colors to be exact. And the movie stays pretty true to that palette in invoking the original comic look.

Look also for the cinematographer’s (Howard Schwartz) frequent use of the “dutch angle,” where the camera is tilted so that world on screen looks tilted too. Batman uses this technique when depicting the villains, whose world is, metaphorically, crooked.

So there’s a ton of fun to be had watching this very comic-book version of the movie. And it’s a perfect antidote to the more recent seven dark and depressing versions of the character we’ve had since 1989. In fact, you might think a bit about how these different versions of Batman reflect, a lot, the cultures in which they’re created. And then ask yourself: in which “world” do you most want to live?

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser