The Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933)

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Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain (1952)

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Bob Clark's A Christmas Story (1983)

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Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude (1971)

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Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938)

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Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974)

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Francis Veber's The Valet (2006)

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

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Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones' Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

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Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934)

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Édouard Molinaro's La Cage aux Folles (1978)

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Stanley Donen's Bedazzled (1967)

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Blake Edwards' The Pink Panther (1963)

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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

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

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

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

Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993)

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