Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude (1971)

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John Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

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John G. Avildsen's The Karate Kid (1984)

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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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George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973)

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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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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

Jerome Robbins’ and Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961)

We could write on so many aspects of Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s West Side Story – the ground-breaking choreography, the cutting edge music, the maturity of former child-actress Natalie Wood, the weirdness of Richard Beymer’s post-Story film career, the imminent fading of the musical as a viable Hollywood genre – but really Your Humble Commentator isn’t fully qualified to take on those topics in this short space. So, today, we want to talk about the Shakespearean adaptation film. Film Club has made it a habit to screen one of these each year, including recently Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Macbeth) and Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet, (Hamlet).

Robbins and Wise’s West Side Story is, of course, Romeo and Juliet set in a modern, or 1960s, New York. But a more specific question is: is it Shakespeare? A purist will tell you that what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare is language; it’s not his play if they don’t say “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun,” and transform the ether into living space with his awe-inspiring imagery and syntax.

The story, on the other hand, is not original even to Shakespeare. Many versions came before he wrote the play in the mid-1590s, including a major poem by Arthur Brooke, “Romeus and Juliet,” published in 1562, on which much of the play is based. So why don’t we say that West Side Story is really a version of “Romeus and Juliet”? The easy answer is because Shakespeare made Romeo and Juliet famous, and no one today has heard of Arthur Brooke. A more complicated answer is that Shakespeare’s work stands so tall that his versions of stories (and all but two of his plays are based on external sources) blot out their antecedents and affect our impressions of every version that follows, even without his words.

A brief aside: Your Humble Commentator once attended the Centenary Shakespeare-on-Film Conference which took place in 1999. A centenary conference celebrates, obviously, the 100-year anniversary of something, so that suggests that the first Shakespeare to be committed to film occurred in 1899. The film, specifically, was a one-minute short, a scene from King John. But think about that: the first Shakespeare film had none of his language (because films were silent) and only one excerpted scene from the play (one minute instead of two and a half hours of narrative). In addition, the film was made more as a novel advertisement for a stage production going on at the time than intended as a stand-alone albeit brief feature. That said, the world’s foremost authorities of the field known as “Shakespeare on Film” gathered together and celebrated this anniversary despite the original film’s rather tenuous ties to Shakespeare’s work.

That’s how it goes. Even without Shakespeare’s language, we consider adaptative versions of his plays still akin to Shakespeare’s work. Whether you watch Ten Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew) or She’s the Man (Twelfth Night) or Forbidden Planet (The Tempest), you are going to enter into a conversation that is as much about Shakespeare as it is about the film you’re watching. Take She’s the Man. Twelfth Night is a rather complex comedy, both subtle and direct in its characterizations and plotting in ways that can be made to please on many levels. She’s the Man, its adaptation set in a modern boys school where Amanda Bynes is “passing” in order to hold her twin brother’s place at the school, play soccer and, eventually, get close to a boy she likes, is a farce, a physical and unsubtle form of comedy. Without Twelfth Night, She’s the Man draws commentary as a product of the teen sex comedy genre and is either remarkable or not as a result of its generic choices. With its connection to Twelfth Night, Bynes’ character, Viola, must contend with all the Violas of history, and Andy Fickman’s film enters into a conversation that necessarily includes 400 years of Shakespearean precedent.

So as you watch West Side Story, you are also watching Romeo and Juliet; the parallels and deviations are part of this larger conversation. What does it mean that we’re telling a version of the same story 400 years later? How are Tony and Romeo related? Or Maria and Juliet? Does the musical genre suggest, metaphorically, that Shakespeare’s language, when brought into the modern age, becomes song – structured, lyrical thought? What other ways does the conversation between the two works leave you understanding both better, more deeply?

Or ignore Shakespeare. West Side Story is one of the great films of the 20^th century, and a great story, something that both screenwriter Ernest Lehman and Shakespeare recognized as they adapted it for their respective mediums.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008)

I love being Scandinavian, especially when it comes to taking pride in my homeland. As a Swede, my people have conquered Europe and the North Atlantic as Vikings, made world-famous Swedish meatballs, and, pertaining to your cinematic experience tonight, produced one of the greatest kickassery vampire films ever.

Låt Den Rätte Komma In (Let the Right One In), originally a novel, follows the struggle of a bullied twelve-year-old named Oskar (an extremely common Swedish name, think “John”). When Oskar comes home every day from school, he fantasizes about exacting revenge. One day, Oskar meets a pale (hint hint) girl about his age in appearance named Eli who is living with the man next door. Soon, the two pursue a close relationship.

Eli, who turns out to be a vampire and significantly older than twelve, proves to be in power fast. If you take only one thing away from this movie, remember that girls can wear the pants too. Think of Eli as a feminist superhero as you might Uma Thurman in Kill Bill or Eihi Shiina in Audition, except slightly less realistic considering Eli commits murder after murder in order to survive off of the blood of her victims.

Tonight’s vampire in Let the Right One In holds many similarities to the ever so popular sparkly Twilight vampires, such as pale skin and the need for blood. Not only that, both Edward Cullen and Eli are mysterious, nice to look at, and stereotypically convince the opposite sex that they can never be together, which of course is completely untrue. Then why does Let the Right One In appeal to more than teenage girls? It doesn’t really matter what the story is about in my opinion, but rather how it is told. The romance in Let the Right One In is progressive, whereas the vampire in Twilight immediately decides he must be with the prettiest, dullest girl in school. Another appeal is the action in this film which may or may not make you terrified of little Scandinavian girls (watch out – you do live in the Midwest).

One of the most beautiful characteristics of this film is director Tomas Alfredson’s choice to focus on the relationship between Oskar and Eli rather than make it painfully violent like many American-made horror movies. Honestly, have you ever cared about any of the characters in a movie like Saw? Of course not, you don’t even know who those people are! The only thing you learn about them is their resistance to pain and how bad the actors portraying them are.

If you’re going to enjoy this movie as much as I do, let’s get some things straight: Do not watch the remake of this movie. Hopefully, you haven’t seen it, and if you are lucky, you never will see it. Let Me In, a 2010 American remake of the film you’re seeing tonight, did exactly what I hate about American horror movies. Director Matt Reeves took out the intimate components of human expression and threw in bad horror, along with introducing actors who got their roles because of their looks and not their talent. Stay true to the beauty of an original!

Finally, as you watch Let the Right One In, remember that good things are still coming out of Sweden besides music piracy websites and intense rave music. Just because we don’t participate in World Wars doesn’t mean we are not talented! För Sverige!

Njut!

August King
Film Club

Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum (1979)

Everybody who sees Volker Schlondorff’s film Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) should have an opinion on whether it should be shown at school. You might be glad that Film Club has the freedom to show risqué movies, or you might be shocked that they would, or you may even be upset that the school supports to its showing. Even if the fact that SPA is showing The Tin Drum doesn’t shock you, the movie very well might. It’s groundbreaking, dark and somewhat comedic, and very surrealist. It is also graphically suggestive. (Unless that’s an oxymoron. Hey, it’s surrealism.)

The film’s sexuality earned it enormous controversy when it came out in 1979, and controversy over controversy, on into the 1990s. The state of Ontario banned it as child pornography. Later on, an activist group in Oklahoma County asked their library system to remove their copy of the movie. When they refused, the group showed a single scene from the movie to a judge. Through a snowball effect, he not only blocked the movie from the library, but deemed showing it illegal. Tapes of the movie were confiscated, and police demanded the names of people renting the movie from Blockbuster outlets so those films could be confiscated as well.

Thankfully, the American Civil Liberties Union heard about the case. They filed suit, saying that the seizure of videos violated first, fourth, and fourteenth amendment rights. In the end, the film was re-legalized.

Among film critics, the film is considered a classic. It received the top prize at the famed Cannes Film Festival – the Palme d’Or, a mark of distinction for films as unusual as The Tin Drum. It also won an Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Film), an award rarely given to a film as dark or strange as The Tin Drum.

In fact, there are rarely films as dark or strange as The Tin Drum. It’s cited as a landmark of the terrifying type of movie that takes you way out of your comfort zone in the name of art. Premiere Magazine calls this type of film a “Dangerous Movie” – a movie which “puts square in your face all of the things Hollywood usually presumes you go to the movies to get away from.” Their examples of “dangerous movies” include Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic Weekend. It’s great that we live in a nation with not just the artistic freedom to make bizarre and shocking movies, but one with people willing to see them.

Noah Shavit-Lonstein
Film Club

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

Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984)

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

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

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

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

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

Sam Rock
Film Club

Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1992)

What’s that stuff that goes in when you’ve got nothing left to say? You know, those couple extra sentences that push your paper just into the range of acceptable length, the triple playback of that spectacular inferno that our hero has barely removed himself from, and in the nick of time too. Such redundancy could possibly be termed as supplementary; it serves only to reiterate a point. Or perhaps it serves only as fluff.

One would think that plot that revolves around a pair of missing shoes would need a whole lot of fluff – say eighty minutes worth. It seems too simple to carry through and too minor to offer any significance, but the Iranian Children of Heaven’s director and screenwriter Majid Majidi exposes an entire existence that emerges from this seemingly innocuous story-line, and not once does it feel as though the plot is stretched too thin. He takes a precedent evocative of a Pixar short and weaves it into a strangely believable story about how things should be. A child’s naïve conceptions about what it takes to be happy – a piece of candy, soap bubbles, a pair of brand new, pink leather shoes – are infinitely more satisfying that the complex goals an older individual sets for his self. Yes, I’ll be the first to admit that Children of Heaven is a movie that is foremost about the replacement of a young girl’s shoes, but it presents so much more than that. Maybe sometimes you have to believe that something can be simple and meaningful.

That simplicity is something that doesn’t quite work in Hollywood anymore. It’s odd that great special effects, carefully orchestrated action scenes, and convincing stuntmen are what it takes to make a movie “realistic.” I know that I’m guilty of the attraction. Watching Amir Farrokh Hashemian’s (Ali) face, however, as he tells his sister the bad news, seeing the tears spill over onto their cheeks, that is about as sincere as it gets. It’s somewhat disappointing that we have to turn to foreign films for a “real” experience, but completely understandable. I, for one, cringe when I imagine a younger Dakota Fanning standing in Bahare Seddiqi’s (Zahra) place.

Frankly, I’d be surprised if the foreignness of the film wasn’t half the draw. It’s so rare to see something different, so completely alien that we hesitate to make connections. It’s a strange structure of familiarity and disconnect that Majidi has wrought for a non-Iranian audience. We’re not strangers to keeping secrets to avert ourselves from a parent’s rightful anger, so Ali’s shame resonates with us. At the same time, the very relationship between the children and their elders is so different from what we identify with. Watch Ali’s hesitance in pressing his teacher for the chance to race; if he wasn’t desperate, you can tell he would not dare to make those demands. But even though we don’t go for the “speak only when spoken to” rules of old, it is so easy to slip into Ali’s mind frame and congratulate him on a conquest that does not exist in our culture (to the same degree, at least).

Actually, the thing that gets to me about foreign films is that the cultural connotations and innuendos all go over a stranger’s proverbial head. In Children of Heaven you get so completely inside Ali’s head that you understand his motives and the context of his struggles without ever being condescended with an explanation. The story and the message are always very clear: hey, the first time I saw it was without subtitles.

So watch closely because everything you need to know is right on the screen.

Arshia Sandozi
Guest commentator

Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1989)

Set in the late eighties in a stereotypical high school in Ohio, Heathers follows the story of Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder), a student who identifies herself with the notorious clique called The Heathers. The Heathers pride themselves on being the four prettiest and most popular girls in school; they are also the most powerful, a characteristic they maintain often through the humiliation of others. Veronica, however, wishes to detach herself from this exclusive clique and, in doing so, soon finds herself caught up in a dangerous relationship with loner Jason Dean (Christian Slater) that leads to a series of murders.

With its dark comedic humor, Heathers asks us to re-evaluate our attitudes about individualism, conformity, and the high school social structure as metaphor for all society. It is a satire, and satire, as it often does, forces us to look at something from two points of view – first as an object of satire and ridicule and second as a reflection of a real-world institution that we cannot treat the way the satire does. When Stephen Colbert tells the president, sitting not 10 feet from him at the 2006 Washington Correspondents Dinner, that having a 32 percent approval rating means that 68 percent of the people approve of the job he’s not doing, we scowl or laugh – nervously – because the powerful is being held up to ridicule. But we also reflect on what approval ratings and the office of the presidency mean. Heathers forces us to look at adolescent cliques the same way. Do we laugh at the demise of the popular “bitches” who make everyone’s life hell? In doing so, are we just as shallow as they are because we fail to see them as complete human beings? Does Heathers want us to laugh?

In addition, Heathers directs us to confront our fetishistic obsession with death. Held up for inspection and ridicule are our generation’s many odd responses to shocking and untimely death – from hypocritical eulogizing to group trauma therapy to the uncomfortable idea that we often pay more attention to an individual who has died than we do to the same person while alive.

Heathers is a film that bears watching repeatedly. The first time through is comic absurdity, but its messages, which become clearer with each viewing, are iconic, transcending its time period and the subject matter, and rendering Heathers a true classic.

Sonya Aziz-Zaman and R. Findlay
Film Club

Fernando Meirelles’s Cidade de Deus (2002)

2002’s Cidade de Deus (City of God) follows the adolescent years of a boy named Buscapé growing up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The housing project in which he lives, Cidade de Deus is known for being one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro.

The time frame of the film ranges from the 1960’s to the early 1980’s and shows the progression of the increasing violence of the neighborhood throughout these years. As young Buscapé is born into this neighborhood, he is forced to deal with the many challenges Cidade de Deus has exposed him to including severe gang violence, poverty, and drugs. However, Buscapé’s talent and passion for photography provides him with a chance to detach himself from a destructive future he sees many of the adolescence around him living out.

Sonya Aziz-Zaman
Film Club Co-President

Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967)

Program unavailable at this time.

Lasse Hallström's My Life as a Dog (1985)

Program unavailable at this time.