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

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

Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948)

Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Biciclette), directed by Vittorio De Sica, takes place in Italy after the second world war where it is really hard to make a good living. The movie is about a man named Antonio in trouble financially who finds a job putting up posters around the city, but in order to do this he must have a bike, and in order to get a bike he will have to sell his few possessions. On his first day on the job his brand new bike gets stolen. And the rest of the film is about how, because the police do not help him, this man and his son try to bring justice and find the bicycle thief themselves. Now Antonio is on a desperate quest to find a bike so he can keep his family from starving.

The film is famous for having used individuals with no experience in the acting industry for the job. In fact the leading role (Lamberto Maggiorani as Antonio) is played by a factory worker. These factors – a story about poor, working class people, using untrained actors, and shooting on location rather than a set, along with frequent used of deep-focus photography, long shots, and lengthy takes – define a film movement known as neo-realism. De Sica is one of the most famous of the Italian neo-realist directors. Roberto Rossellini is another.

Many critics have considered Bicycle Thieves to be one of the best neorealist films ever made. Upon its release it received numerous awards including an honorary Academy Award for the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States during 1949. (The Academy did not begin giving out an award for “best foreign language film” until 1956. Prior to that, they gave only special or honorary awards.)

But the film is not important because it is neo-realist; it’s important because it tells, beautifully, a story in a way that marked a change in film-making style. As you watch De Sica’s film, consider what movies you may have seen that approach film-making the same way he does. Many people, for example, have seen similarities between Bicycle Thieves and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), and others have pointed to the neo-realist influence on American films of the 1970s. More recent films have nodded to De Sica as homage: Tim Burton’s Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, for example, follows the pre-pubescent Pee Wee Herman as he tries to retrieve his stolen bicycle.

Beyond acknowledging the influence Bicycle Thieves has had on films that followed, we encourage you to think about how it stands on its own. In 2005, the British Film Institute created a list of the “50 films you should see by the age of 14.” Bicycle Thieves is in the top 10, along with films like The Wizard of Oz, The 400 Blows, Spirited Away, and Toy Story. Why? What makes this movie one that everyone should see before they get out of high school? And there you have it: something to discuss over a soda at a local restaurant after the movie. Just make sure you locked up your bike. You wouldn’t want it to get stolen.

Nick Volpi and R. Findlay
Film Club

Franklin Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968)

None of us at Film Club would argue that Franklin Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes is the best movie of the late 1960s or even one of the best. There are too many remarkable films from the period between 1967 and 1970: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, In the Heat of the Night, M*A*S*H, Patton. We could go on. So it’s easy to dismiss Planet of the Apes as simple sci-fi, post-apocalyptic cheese with Charlton Heston chewing scenery, not unlike Richard Fleischer’s topical sci-fi of the year before, Fantastic Voyage. But upon a bit deeper reflection, while it may not be the best, it might be the most reflective film of its time.

The late ‘60s were a period of upheaval in American life – politically, generationally, racially, culturally. The politics of the time were dominated, of course, by the Viet Nam war. Planet divides its ape community into three parts – chimpanzees (a sort of youthful simian middle-class), orangutans (the elder, wise men and law-makers), and gorillas (the warriors). Each of these also presents an allegorical version of contemporary American society: the idealistic students, the government, and the military. So it’s more than a moment of narrative tension when Schaffner stages chimpanzees protesting, with radical Berkeley-esque fervor and signage, decisions by the orangutan rulers. If you see the reference, then the film becomes part of the anti-war conversation.

We can make a similar connection if we think about what the movie has to say about the rise of youth culture. The two principles in the film, Cornelius (played by Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter), not only present youth as heroic (in the face of intransigent and entrenched policy-making and brutal militarism) but also represent it as far more reasonable than their other ape counterparts. Their idealism, their questioning, their anti-authoritarianism all come at moments when it is just to be so.

Like the drama over Viet Nam, the U.S. also was in the heat of the civil rights movement. Ask yourself, as you watch, what Schaffner is suggesting about race and where he makes specific reference to contemporary social attitudes. Are the apes and humans, two different species, just a stand-in for the different races? Does the film support or caution the viewer about America’s growing black militancy?

Schaffner also uses his film to mine a growing mistrust of religious fundamentalism. It’s evident in the scriptural foundation of the ape community’s laws, and their hypocrisy about challenges to that scripture. It’s also evident in the clear Darwinian attitude about evolution and social advancement. Ask yourself how religion is specifically depicted? What happens to its icons? The more we dig into this film, the less it seems like science fiction. After all, what technological “what if” is really in question here? Yes, our hero, Taylor (Charlton Heston), is an astronaut who pilots a space ship through time and to an unknown place, but the film really has nothing to do with this exploration or its vision of man’s exploratory future. The film focuses first and foremost on the clash of cultures – both ape/human and within the ape society – after Taylor crash lands on the planet.

And none of this is to forget the film’s iconic moment of irony, a statement itself that is more about culture than science or technology or space ships. So, when Heston utters his famous line at the end of the film, can we still hear it now, 32 years later, for the warning it was to the community watching in the seats? Questions worth asking. It’s always impressive to us that films from this period, even the cheesy ones, seem so much more socially relevant than those we get today.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Sam Mendes' American Beauty (1999)

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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

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941)

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

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

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

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

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

Alec Nordin
SPA Film Club

Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995)

The Usual Suspects (1995) stands out as an incredible film for so many reasons, but these reasons all revolve around the many talented actors assembled – Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollack, Chazz Palminteri, Gabriel Byrne, Benicio Del Toro, and especially Kevin Spacey as “the Gimp,” Roger “Verbal” Kint. As is so often true with character-based films, quality acting creates lasting memories.

Spacey goes all out here. He aggressively prepared for his Kint role, filing his shoes down to create the kind of wear they would get if he actually had a limp and gluing his fingers together to simulate the effects of a disability. And this kind of attention to detail paid off. Even though he’d been acting in movies for almost a decade when he took the role in The Usual Suspects, his turn as Kint solidified our appreciation of his talent and opened more leading roles up to him in films like American Beauty, K-Pax, Shipping News, and Beyond the Sea.

The Usual Suspects also benefits from great writing. Christopher McQuarrie’s script, highlighted by Spacey’s voice-over narration and the witty dialogue between Palminteri’s Kujan and Spacey’s Kint, reflects and enhances the masterful balance and layering of the film.

Beyond the writing, Bryan Singer’s ability to create a masterpiece out of “the concept of a movie poster of five guys in a lineup” never ceases to amaze. This movie is one of those that gets better on repeat viewings, even if you know the film’s surprise ending. The movie accomplishes the feat of bringing together so many different stories, people and effects and flows them concisely together through entertaining twists and turns that so much detail, so many tiny clues and hints to the film’s subtext, evades the viewer’s eye that only multiple viewings can detect.

Singer’s genius lies in his ability to not only do the best job directing possible (and by the end of the film you’ll notice that he’s not only an expert at visual misdirection, but also a master at wrapping you up in the story), but to have the flexibility to allow actors to build complex, entertaining characters, like Benicio Del Toro’s quick, unintelligible Fenster. These things combined – the breathtaking tension of the film, the smooth, cool hilariousness of characters like Fenster, McManus and the assortment of ‘usual suspects’ – pushes the movie beyond a sharp mystery to a truly unique work of art.

And this is a mystery: The American Film Institute has listed The Usual Suspects as one of the top ten mysteries. What mystery does this film address, what questions does it ask? Here’s a challenge, what questions did the movie ask of you and what fears do the possible answers give you?

Daniel Preus
Film Club Co-President

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

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006)

Normally, we talk about the evening’s screening in this space. But because SPA’s German class is going to have a few words tonight about topics related to Herr von Donnersmarck’s film, we thought we’d take a moment to discuss this evening’s animated offering: Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein’s “Balance.”

We choose animated shorts for a number of reasons. One is to offer an entertaining intro to the scheduled movie while providing students a few extra minutes to get to the movie before it starts. We also try to find short pieces that are, in some way, related to the feature film. And so we introduce Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), about an East German secret service agent who becomes intrigued by the lives of a couple he is assigned to observe, with a stop-action puppet animation about five men on a platform in space trying to maintain their balance when one of them pulls a heavy box onto the platform.

What’s the connection, other than the fact that both works are German? You might want to consider the effect that an oppressive system has on the individual as one theme. In “Balance,” the five men have organized themselves into a highly efficient society. (The fact that it is the product of oppression is suggested by the numbers each man wears on the back of his coat and by the pervasive grayness of the film’s palette.) Yet the arrival of the box, a red box that plays faint music, disrupts not only the balance of the platform but the balance of their culture. They go from working together to working against one another.

Das Leben der Anderen, which takes place before the fall of the Berlin Wall, also reflects a society that is, in one sense, highly ordered. A powerful government. An efficient information collection system. People who know their roles. Yet it is all disrupted by a single human emotion. In “Balance,” that emotion is greed; in Das Leben der Anderen it is, perhaps, love. Now that’s an interesting concept – the emotions that make us most human are also the things that will disrupt our attempts to form efficient systems. When the system being disrupted is an oppressive one – and one doesn’t get much more oppressive than the Cold War visions reflected in these two films – we seem to be celebrating the triumph the human spirit. We suspect, however, that even a benignly efficient system is vulnerable, a message that Gene Roddenberry drove home repeatedly every time Captain James T. Kirk dismantled a utopian society in the old Star Trek series.

But gosh, you’re saying, this is just an animated short. In fact it’s just a short piece meant to illustrate a particularly intense irony. After all, the balance depicted at the end of the film is radically different from that suggested at the beginning. How do we end up thinking about all this deep Cold War and culture stuff? Easy. “Balance” is designed to encourage us to think below its surface story. It has no dialogue, so we must interpret its action without intervention from onscreen explanations. It takes place in a hypothetical universe where the rules are metaphorical – to survive, the men must maintain the balance of their platform (one could even read that as an environmental message, no?). And the Lauensteins load the brief minutes of their piece with key visual images. The box, for example, is red, while everything else is gray. Does the red suggest anger? Is it anger that destroys their world? Does the red suggest life, passion, love? The viewer must interpret, or translate, the images. And in doing so, we construct a meaning.

“Balance” is a beautiful film, perfectly balanced in its storytelling and imagery. We hope it encourages you to think a bit, and that you’ll draw some connections between its story and the feature film. And we ask the same of every animated short we show, even if it’s “Iddy Biddy Beat Boy” or “Officer Pooch.”

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

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Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Imagine, if you will, a giant boat. This boat is three stories tall, over three hundred feet long, and weighs 340 tons. It’s luxurious and a sight for almost everyone to see. Now imagine that same boat being pulled up a giant mountain, with no machinery whatsoever. Welcome to the world of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

Herzog’s Fritzcarraldo is one of those films like Apocalypse Now that works on two levels. On the first, it is a brilliant insight into the dreams of one man. On the second, it is a marvel to see how far a director will go to accomplish his vision. The film is a realist vision of an eccentric Irishman trying to accomplish the impossible. But beyond the film, director Werner Herzog demanded more out of his crew than any other director before him, pushing his crew to insanity, and thus making the film even better. The two stories go hand in hand: the film influenced the production, and visa versa.

The film begins with madness and continues throughout. We see a small boat with a dead motor, slowly pushing its way to an opera house in the middle of a small town on the Amazon River. The man on the boat is Brian Sweeny Fitzgerald (based on a real man), or as the natives call him, Fitzcarraldo (played by Klaus Kinski). Fitzcarraldo has one vision: build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon and have the great Italian singer Enrico Caruso star there opening night. But the only problem is that he cannot get to the place where the Opera shall be built. But Fitzcarraldo has a brilliant idea: carry his boat over a mountain from a river close to where the opera must be built and into another river.

The madness of such an idea makes for a brilliant film but something more amazing happened. Director Werner Herzog actually carried that boat over the mountain. The images of the boat climbing the mountain are both absurd and glorious. It’s almost impossible to understand what could drive a man to do that. But if it had been a plastic boat or special effects, this film would have no power. The spectacle is in the reality. Not only did Herzog carry this boat, but he did it in the heart of the Amazon with a crew of natives who spoke neither a word of English nor German (and were unfairly never paid).

Werner Herzog has been one of those directors whose ambitious expectations have become legend. Aguirre: The Wrath of God, telling the story of one man’s mad quest for El Dorado, also featured the story of man versus nature and was also shot in the middle of the jungle, miles away from civilization. Nosferatu, a remake of F.W. Murnau’s silent classic, explored the madness of the main character and was shot using Murnau’s original locations. This is ambition bordering on insanity, and Herzog has always explored madness whether as a director, a documentary filmmaker (Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzly Man), or an actor in a documentary (Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe).

And the only actor who could complement Herzog was Klaus Kinski. Klaus and Werner went together like two best friends with PMS; put them together and they could either create magic or kill each other. (On the set of Aguirre, it is rumored Herzog pulled a gun on Kinski in order to make him finish a scene.) In Fitzcarraldo, Kinski pulled his soul and heart into the film. You can feel his pain at every mistake and his amazing joy at the successes. Originally, Jason Robards was cast (and Rolling Stone’s singer Mick Jagger as his captain). But Robards would have simply been playing a madman; Kinski is a madman. Kinski and Herzog made five films together, and despite the hatethat frequently erupted between the two, they formed a deep respect (as seen in Herzog’s My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski).

Fitzcarraldo is a film that can only be appreciated when seen. It’s such a strong and ambitious experience that it’s almost impossible to deny its power. Whether you enjoy this film or not, you must respect the power of Herzog and Kinski.

Peter Labuza
Film Club Co-President

Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954)

To understand where we are now, we must understand our past. Every month, Hollywood releases some large action film with big actors and fight scenes. But how did today’s action film begin? The answer lies not in America, but in Japan.

Akira Kurosawa’s three-and-a-half hour sweeping epic Seven Samurai remains the epitome, and the beginning, of today’s adventure and action films. It takes a simple story, combines it with compelling characters, throws in some heart pounding action scenes, and a pinch of romance. But unlike the action films of today, all these parts work as a whole, and were made for the glory, not the money.

The story follows seven samurai who decide to defend a helpless village from a group of bandits who are planning to raid their crops during the harvest. The samurai will be fed small bowls of rice and given little to no payment, with the chance of success at a minimum. Why bother then? Maybe it’s for the samurai code and honor. Maybe for the adventure. Each comes for his own reason.

At three-and-a-half hours, Seven Samurai IS a daunting task for many to watch. The original American release had fifty minutes cut. But there is a reason for its length: to build real characters. Each samurai is given his own story without feeling unnecessary. We see the relationship between the samurai and the villagers grow. We see the crops grow. So when we get to the big raid of the village, we actually care for the characters and can actually mourn their deaths. It’s an ambitious task to say the least.

Kurosawa seems to meander toward two main characters. Takashi Shimura, also greatly known for his role in Ikuru, plays Kashimi, the eldest and leader of the samurai. He is not the strongest or best swordsman, and spends much of his time shaking his head, planning out the attack, and mapping out the story for us. Shimura simply plays this straight, not trying to overact. He is a knowledge bowl of mystery, a quiet man with a great aura, and works perfectly as our guide throughout this adventure.

Our comic relief and slight underdog is Kikuchyo played by the phenomenal Toshiro Mifune. Kikuchyo is only posing as a samurai, while actually a farmer’s son. He is bold, impulsive, clumsy, and a showoff. He carries a sword longer than others, thinking that can prove his worth. But in a film that’s 207 minutes long that, we start seeing him less as comic relief but as a full-fledged character that we will cheer for.

As Kurosawa would influence generations of filmmakers, Seven Samurai has many influences. Marxist ideas and Russian literature flow through the story. The action scenes feel inspired from Americans DW Griffith and John Ford. The characters, as fleshed as they may be, can be attributed a lot of Western cinema. Japanese critics attacked Kurosawa for being too Western sometimes, but he was simply doing what he must do – breaking out of the norm. His Japanese auteur counterpart, Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story), whose films were slow meditations on human nature, has no place in Kurosawa’s epics.

As much as Seven Samurai influenced today’s modern action films, it also created the remake. The Magnificent Seven, a western set in Mexico, is one of the first remakes ever made. Many of Kurosawa’s films would be slightly remade for American audiences, including Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars and The Hidden Fortress as Star Wars. Influences are simply not just in remakes but also in story arch, character types, and climaxes.

Seven Samurai is the king of action and adventure films. It’s brilliant in character, production design, and story. Although it is a daunting task to watch the entire film, the breadth of the film allows audience’s to appreciate its brilliance. To understand where we are going, we must know where we came from. One of the most influential films of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is a true masterpiece.

Peter Labuza
Film Club

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is an important movie, one that penetrates to the heart of racial unrest in our country. Despite its intense conflicts, there are no villains in the film. Everyone’s point of view is clear and supportable. This is how life is. And when it comes to solving the conflict we are often faced with contradictory options, unsatisfactory compromises, and potential chaos. Or, as Spike Lee demonstrates so clearly, choices that are as widely divergent as the perspectives of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

We offer the following discussion questions from William V. Constanzo's Reading the Movies for your consideration as we take this week and this movie to think about the legacy of Dr. King and America’s ongoing struggle to find racial harmony and respect within a diverse community. Enjoy Lee’s film; it’s one of the best.

- Film Club and Intercultural Club

1. Do the Right Thing presents more characters than do most films. How does Spike Lee keep them all alive? How does he create a sense of community among them? To what extent is the block itself a character in the film?

2. Is the central issue between Sal and the community or does it involve other people, other groups?

3. Who are the victims of the violence in this film? Where do you think the blame lies? Does the film suggest solutions?

4. What is the function of the disc jockey, Mister Senor Love Daddy? Of Da Mayor? Of Mother Sister?

5. Spike Lee has been commended for his ability to keep up the momentum through the entire film. Do you agree? What helps to maintain the pace?

6. What motivates Mookie to throw the trash can through the window of Sal’s Pizzeria? At the end of the movie, does Mookie “do the right thing”? Explain.

7. Many of the characters in the film seem inarticulate. Smiley stutters. Radio Raheem speaks chiefly through his radio. Mookie accuses Tina of choking her speech with obscenities. How does this film dramatize the frustrations of expressing deeply felt emotions and beliefs?

8. What parallels can be drawn between the film and historical or current events?

9. Several conflicts are presented in the film: between Sal and Buggin’ Out, between the police and the community, between the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. and those of Malcolm X. Do you think the director takes sides? How can you tell?

10. What do you think has been learned by the end of the film? Who has learned the most?

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

"Bonnie and Clyde is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful. If it does not seem that those words should be strung together, perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life."

-Roger Ebert

Bonnie and Clyde is just one of those movies that comes along and shakes things up. Although it first premiered as a B-rated movie and was only shown in a few drive-in and alternative theaters, the movie rose above the concerns associated with it and quickly rose to immense status and critical acclaim, grossing over 50 million dollars.

It easily could have been a sappy, forgettable love story about a misunderstood couple who try desperately to rebel against a society that ultimately will put them down for good. But while Bonnie and Clyde does portray love, its portrayal is brutally honest, and the relationship between Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow is juxtaposed with scenes of melancholy, doubt, humor, and appalling violence. Two young lovers who brutally riddle people with bullets and rob banks may seem like quite a bizarre happening, but the combination of two such opposite concepts is really quite honest commentary on the many contradictory layers of American society.

Peter Politis
Film Club

One of the great things about a film series is that one gets the chance to compare multiple works by film-makers. In Bonnie and Clyde, we have the opportunity to consider the growing talent of Robert Towne. Towne is not acknowledged in the film credits, but it is widely known that he contributed to the final script. In February, the Academy Film Series will screen Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), perhaps Towne’s most famous (and credited) script. When you watch it, reflect on Bonnie and Clyde and ask yourself whether you can hear any similarities in the writing.

What does that mean? We tend to focus on the surface of the dialogue when we first think about screenwriting, but a little deeper we find an opportunity to consider naturalistic speech vs prosaic speech, the meaninglessness of speech that supports action vs the glory of language that transcends action, or the role of language in shaping and defining human experience. Listen to Towne. What does his writing tell us about the characters? About the time the movie was written? About the movie’s tone? What philosophy does it suggest?

You probably know Towne even if you’re not the kind of person who can rattle off how many Academy Award nominations every movie in 1974 garnered. Towne wrote Brian DePalma’s Mission: Impossible and John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II. The world is full of connections. Try to make some; go to Towne.

Randall Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke (1967)

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new hero arrived in American cinema: the anti-authority hero. Cool Hand Luke was one of the first films to portray this new type of hero, as portrayed by Paul Newman in one of his greatest screen roles.

Newman plays Lucas Jackson. We see right as the film begins how "Luke" represents anti-authority. He's drunk and cutting the tops off parking meters. We can't tell if he's doing it for the money or because he's angry, just that he's doing it because he can.

Luke is shipped off to a Southern prison camp, which is one of the film's major highlights. In the camp, a world of its own, secluded from society or real world existence (or just from any David Lynch film), prisoners must conform to the rules of the strict captain (played by Strother Martin). One of the many things that have come into pop culture from this film is the chain gang working o the roadside asking the prison guards' permission for trivial tasks like "wiping the forehead, boss" or "taking the shirt off, boss."

When Luke first enters, you can already tell he can't conform to this way of life. It isn't him. It's against everything he stands for. At first Luke is mistreated by the other prisoners, led by their somewhat leader Dragline (George Kennedy in an Oscar-winning role). But the thing is Luke doesn't mind. He keeps on living how he lives, and he eventually wins them over. (He gets the nickname "Cool Hand Luke" after winning a huge poker hand with absolutely nothing.)

But Luke also becomes an inspiration to the others on the chain gang. In one particular scene, Luke rallies his fellow prisoners to quickly finish a tar road in order to have a break. It's this sort of power, to rally others into defiance, which establishes Luke as this anti-authoritarian hero.

Yet Luke doesn't just get everyone to go along with him and have a happy ending. The captain and the bosses can't let their power be undermined. The guards realize that if the prisoners aren't suffering, they no longer have power over them. But the one who Luke runs into trouble with is boss Godfrey. Godfrey, hidden in the shadows or wearing dark sunglasses, represents the silent power that has tried to destroy these anti-heroes.

The guards finally make sure to stop anything Luke might or might not do after the death of his mother. Luke is put in "the box" until after his mother's funeral. One of the guards argues with Luke: "Just doin' my job. You gotta appreciate that." Luke's response -- "Aw, callin' it your job don't make it right, boss." -- underscores one of the film's themes, that law and authority does not always mean the same thing as justice. For a country still coping with the aftermath of watching mounted police attack civil rights marchers in 1965 (and just three years away from the horrifying killing of four Kent State students by the Ohio National Guard), Cool Hand Luke captures the human side of a very disturbing direction in national politics.

But the film is not a one-sided polemic. We feel bad that Luke is being punished for something he hasn't done. Yet we can sympathize with the guard who has no choice but to follow orders. Even the film's most famous line, "What we got here is ... a failure to communicate" (inspiring generations of bad Strother Martin impersonations), speaks to a larger social, generational, and political concern the United States found itself facing.

Cool Hand Luke remains one of the greatest films ever made about non-conformity. It's supremely acted, brilliantly written, includes plenty of wit and humor, and remains one of the first films of the time to create this memorable character type.

Peter Labuza
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

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

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Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

In the mid-1950s, rebellious youth were running rampant on the screen. Brando had terrorized small-town America with his motorcycle gang in The Wild One (1954). Sidney Poitier had played one of the troubled city high school students in The Blackboard Jungle (1955). Such was the climate when Nicholas Ray cast James Dean in the title role of Rebel Without a Cause. Ray took his title from a book published by Robert Lindner in 1944, the story of an imprisoned juvenile delinquent who could give no reasons for his crimes. As a sociologist, Lindner had studied the postwar generation of youth – often violent and inarticulate – which he believed was rebelling against conformity. Ray was intrigued by Lindner’s views; he talked to law officers and young offenders, then wrote a short synopsis for the film. He created the roles of Jim and Judy with Romeo and Juliet in mind because he considered Shakespeare’s play “the best play about juvenile delinquents.” … For [Ray] the central focus was “the problem of the individual’s desire to preserve himself in the face of overwhelming demands for social conformism.”

If Nicolas Ray became a kind of cult hero among film critics and directors, James Dean (1931–55) became an even greater idol among young viewers. When Dean was killed in an auto accident at the age of twenty-four, he left a legacy of only three feature films. For two of his performances, both directed by Elia Kazan (East of Eden, 1955; Giant 1956), he had won Academy Awards for best actor. … Francois Truffaut described Dean’s acting as “more animal than human,” noting how “he acts beyond what he is saying; he plays alongside the scene.” Yet off the set, Dean could be articulate about his philosophy of performance: “In the short span of his lifetime an actor must learn all there is to know, experience all there is to experience, or approach that state as closely as possible.”

From the first shot of the film, Dean’s talent is at work. While the credits roll, we see him playing on the sidewalk with a windup toy monkey. It is a whimsical moment – the youth is a bit tipsy – but it reveals the sensitive child within. On the soundtrack, a discordant jazz piece mingles with the strident scream of sirens. Amid the sounds of discord is a cry for help. In the police station, Jim mimics the sirens. His tie and jacket barely cover his emotional dishevelment.

Later in the film we are introduced to the [characters’] families, and we see their large suburban homes. In the planetarium, the context becomes cosmic. “The problems of man seem trivial indeed,” intones the professor of astronomy, while a cataclysmic ending of the earth is enacted on the dome overhead – a movie within a movie. … Back on earth, the issues acquire Freudian overtones. Jim’s father, wearing an apron, appears weak and foolish; he fails to be the male authority his son is yearning for.

These teenagers adrift are left to work out their inner tumult in knife fights, gangs, and chickie fights. They rebel with reasons, but without a cause.

William Constanzo
Reading the Movies (p.105-108)

Francis Ford Coppolla's The Outsiders (1983)

Your Humble Commentator is not a fan of teen street gang films. There was always something hokey about the East Side Kids, and he could never take the Jets and the Sharks seriously, no matter how many immortal dance moves they put on each other. And don’t even get him started about Grease. The problem is that Hollywood has never really been sure what to make of youth gangs – the alienation, the anti-social behavior, the “otherness,” the outsidership, rather startling considering two of Hollywood’s finest moments involve the embracing of film noir and neo-noir, genres that trade in all of those attributes. When it comes to young people, however, Hollywood has always had a hard time being cynical enough to make an honest film. Real teens don’t even get on the Hollywood radar until 1955 (see Rebel Without a Cause next month).

The Outsiders (1983) should have solved all that. It certainly has the pedigree. First, its source is S. E. Hinton’s 1967 young adult novel of the same name, which, according to Great American Writers: Twentieth Century, “is recognized as the beginning of realistic young-adult fiction ... [I]ts characters cope with violence, alcoholism, and drug addiction.” Hinton’s book, and the characters it presents, is the antithesis of the John Hughes vision of the wrong side of the tracks. Johnny would kick John Bender’s butt. Whereas Hughes sees poor and blue-collar adolescents as types who wear their social class like an outfit selected at Ragstock, Hinton’s characters, on the other hand, feel the consequences of their social position and lack of resources, bitterly, sometimes fatally.

Second, the film finds itself in the capable hands of Francis Ford Coppola, whose Godfather films, The Conversation (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979) make him arguably the best director of the previous decade. (The decades to follow are another, unfortunate story. Captain Eo, anyone?) Look for Coppola’s trademark realistic mise en scene and focus on the interweaving character’s stories. This film looks right.

Third, The Outsiders marks one of the early steps in the careers of an astounding number of young male actors: Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio, Leif Garrett, and future B-movie stud C. Thomas Howell. It’s refreshing to see so many soon-to-be-famous names acting before their real name superceded their character, and that fact lends another layer of realism to the film.

So, you be the judge. Does The Outsiders result in a successful depiction not only of the dark side of adolescence, but of the twisted sanity of gang membership as antidote? Does Hinton’s realism, added to Coppola’s realistic vision, supported by young, raw actors’ realistic portrayals, make a “real” film experience? Is it, in the end, a good movie?

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser