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.

Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998)

Rushmore is the story of a boy in high school who is struggling to find his place in life. Although that sounds cliché, the movie certainly is not. Wes Anderson, who directed and co-wrote Rushmore with Owen Wilson, tells the story of Max Fischer, played by Jason Schwartzman. Although seemingly a bright person, Max Fischer’s grades are just not up to par. Because of his love for extracurricular activities such as language clubs, the school newspaper, and yearbook, he has found little time for his school work. He is placed on sudden death academic probation and must get his grades up to snuff or lose his scholarship to Rushmore High School.

Max has a very eccentric personality, which brings him to compete head to head with Herman Blume (Bill Murray) for the affections of Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), a first grade teacher at the school. Herman Blume, a rich man of similar eccentricity, has been seeing Rosemary, and Max becomes especially angry when Rosemary tries to turn him down. Max becomes a scheming, wicked character with revenge on his mind, and the side of him that is shown earlier by his chronic lying habits is brought out into the open. Rushmore is a great film about an outsider with everyone out to stifle his creativity, but also about an adolescent coming to terms with his place in the world.

Charlie Driscoll
Film Club

Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971)

The first time I saw Harold & Maude was a film editing class. My teacher told me that this film represents everything you need to know about life, death, and everything in between. >

At first glance, Harold & Maude's premise sounds more disturbing than enjoyable. Harold, played by Bud Cort (The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou), is a young teenager obsessed with death. He commits fake suicides that look surprisingly real. When asked by a psychiatrist about how many he's committed he replies "A rough estimate? I'd say about fifteen." He also attends funerals where he has no business being and drives a hearse. We never really are given any straight answer about why Harold finds himself intrigued with death, but we can guess. He lives alone with his commanding mother, who shoves off his suicides with little care.

But when he meets Maude, played by Ruth Gordon (Rosemary's Baby), at a funeral, he and the audience learn the real celebration of life. Maude, a woman who’s "seventy-nine years young," lives each day to the fullest. She has no respect for any authority as she has almost in a way given up on life. In one scene, she completely abuses a cop in a hilarious way.

It's these ideas of life and death and how similar they end up being. By the end of the film, we have celebrated death, celebrated life, and once again celebrated death.

Many people list Harold & Maude as a classic 70s film. With its hip and spunky characters, great music, and 70s look, the film kind of sits as one of those classic 70s cult films that are hard to ignore. Others compare it to Wes Anderson films (He has called it his favorite film before) as it easily compares to the feel, both narratively and visually, of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore.

In the end Harold & Maude is just a wonderful story about issues teenagers face. Do we want to choose life? Or does our interest in death create a more compelling situation? The questions are up to you to answer.

Peter Labuza
Film Club

An Evening with Coleman Miller

USO JUSTO
An Artist's Statement

Throughout my filmmaking career I have made a conscious effort to remind the audience they are watching a film. Uso Justo came about from an almost ridiculous idea I had to make a “foreign film”. After viewing an old 1950’s Mexican dramatic film I realized there was gold in this footage that had to be mined. I started with virtually no story and simply wrote new subtitles for my own entertainment. My only objectives were to make it smart, incongruous and funny.

It was while working on a separate project, 27 Short Videos About Film, that Uso Justo began to develop. I was constructing a series of short chapters all interrelated by the filmmaker’s quirky takes on working in video and film and how the two affected each other. After editing some of the Mexican narrative scenes into this longer piece I realized that Uso Justo began to standalone. It was stronger and more to the point of what was on my mind at the time - which was showing a film that is keenly aware of itself. I wanted to make people laugh at the same time they were getting thrown concepts from left of center. For instance, the film dicks telling two characters early on in the film, “Well you better start telling a story quick or we’ll be back.” This is a direct result of my desire to develop my narrative storytelling after years of purely visual filmmaking. I enjoyed revealing the film's intents and processes, and therefore my own, to the audience.

Later in Uso Justo, the doctor takes the nurse into an experimental film world – this section is a good example of many of the films I produced while working as a film printer in San Francisco in the 1990’s. Many of the elements used in that particular section are taken directly from some of those films, in particular Step Off A Ten Foot Platform With Your Clothes On (1990). At that time I was turning film around on itself in a purely visual way – showing the sprocketholes, edge numbers, dirt and frame lines, etc. Attempting to reveal the film through narrative dialogue, for me, is a natural progression. Also, using my own work within my work is self referential, and a parody of myself and others in the experimental genre.

I was deeply inspired by Bruce Conner and in particular his short film Take the 5:10 To Dreamland. His use of found footage from various educational films along with his editing style of using black in between these seemingly unrelated shots was deeply inspiring to me. At the time I was shooting a lot on super 8 and blowing it up to 16mm. I was using sound in a very contrapuntal way. Examples are the sounds of children playing over shots of a car driving too fast down the road and cricket sounds over the shot of an empty rocking chair rocking.

I have found that I use whatever tools are given me. While working as a printer in a film lab in San Francisco I was able to use equipment most filmmakers didn’t even know existed. Use of a continuous contact printer, which I used every day (and on weekends I was given carte blanche to use them as I saw fit.) was particularly inspiring. The film lab turned into a ten-year experimentation fest. I was able to invent many new printing techniques, which I continue to build on today. By manipulating found footage I was able to create a body of work which turned the medium of film back around on itself.

Since leaving the lab I have had to find new tools. Fortunately, I have found these tools are everywhere. I love finding ways to use ‘non-film’ tools to make film. While working as a temp I used a microfiche printer to make animation pieces. Xerox machines, I found, could print directly onto film for beautiful results. Currently, my tools lie in the digital realm, but I still think of non-traditional methods to produce films by manipulating these tools. History is not forgotten, though, as found footage, sprocketholes, edge #’s, and framelines continually appear and reveal themselves freely in my work to this day. In this way my art thrives on the unexpected. The joy in the discovery for me is as important as the finished product.

Coleman Miller
Film-maker. Director. Writer. Producer. Editor.

Hettie Macdonald's Beautiful Thing (1996)

Program unavailable at this time.

Cédric Klapisch's L'Auberge Espagnole (2002)

Program unavailable at this time.

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

Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World (2001)

Program unavailable at this time.

John Hughes' The Breakfast Club (1985)

Although none of us attended high school in the 1980s, the teen classic, The Breakfast Club (1985) written and directed by John Hughes, shows us what the experience could have been like in a Chicago high school. Hughes, famous for Sixteen Candles (1984) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), sticks to his familiar themes of stereotypical high school life, leading his characters on a path of self-discovery. Written in only two days, the 4th and 5th of July, 1982, Hughes' story is simple and his morals blatant, but his characters' classic dialogue, as well as his feel-good theme, make The Breakfast Club a timeless treasure.

Film Club

George Roy Hill's The Sting (1973)

Screened with:
Tex Avery's "Red Hot Riding Hood" (1943)

Your Humble Commentator would like to talk about cartoons. Over the last few weeks, we here at the BCFS have been celebrating the classic cartoon as much as classic films. Back in the day, every movie was preceded by a short cartoon. The older Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Superman, Tom and Jerry, and Betty Boop cartoons (to name a few) that we’re so used to seeing on TV were originally made for the big screen. And on the big screen the gags are funnier, the painstaking hand animation more impressive, the original scores more thrilling.

Perhaps we don’t ask ourselves often enough: what makes a great cartoon? The techniques used to create the cartoons we’ve shown here at Blake are mostly gone now, replaced by computer animation, or slowed to fewer frames per second, or filled with stock animation, or saddled with limp anonymous music. We’re not knocking Japanese animation (in fact, we’re big Miyazaki fans) or the recent boomlet in nouveau animation like “Batman: The Animated Series,” “South Park,” “Duckman,” and all those “Ren & Stimpy” or Japanimation knock-offs on the Cartoon Channel. But what you’ve been watching at the BCFS are examples from the golden age, started by Winsor McCay and his “Gertie the Dinosaur” and perfected into the demanding, distilled six-minute format by masters like Ub Iwerks (Mickey Mouse), Otto Messmer (Felix the Cat), Dave Fleischer (Popeye and Superman), Chuck Jones (WB), Bob Clampett (WB), Friz Freleng (WB and Pink Panther), and Tex Avery (MGM).

The immortal Mr. Jones once said that the way to tell a good cartoon is to turn the sound off. If, he said, you can still tell what’s going on and what the characters are feeling, then it is well made. (This works. Try turning the sound off on an old “Scooby-Doo” episode. If every episode weren’t exactly the same, it would be impossible to tell what was happening or why.) Jones was a master of the silent test, and even incorporated it into some of his gags, like when Daffy and Bugs are trapped under a glass bowl in “Beanstalk Bunny” and Daffy mimes a fit until Bugs produces a glass cutter.

It also works for Tex Avery’s “Red Hot Riding Hood,” this week’s cartoon, with its iconic tribute to the comic “take.” While you may not have seen this cartoon before, you know all its moves – the inflated, bugged-out eyes, the red carpet tongue, the steam out the ears, the wooden mallet to the head. If you remember, Chuck Russell pays homage to all these moves in his comic book-into-movie version of The Mask, starring Jim Carrey. But we are proud to bring you Avery’s original, which so many cartoons and cartoonists have stolen from for so many years.

And oh yeah, we’re showing The Sting, winner of the 1973 Academy Award for Best Picture. The Sting has the distinction of being the first film Your Humble Commentator saw more than once during the opening run. This was four years before Star Wars made the first question when you got out of a movie not “what did you think?” but “how many times have you seen it?” The Sting was worth repeated viewings, and we sincerely hope you enjoy it, as much as we’ve enjoyed presenting the entire film series to you. Be seeing you! (YHC salutes audience by laying a finger to the side of his nose and doing that Henry Gondorff/Johnny Hooker thing, then walks off into the sunset. Somewhere a limousine is waiting, but that’s another classic movie …)

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954)

Screened with:
Chuck Jones' "Feed the Kitty" (1952)
Mark Har's "My New Life" (2003)

Consider the thriller. The world can be a terrifying place, yet most of us feel an inexplicable and irresistible pull to sit in a dark movie theater and watch a film that terrifies us. Whether it’s watching Mike Myers (not that Mike Myers) stalk a nubile Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween or gelatinous acid ooze from an alien’s interior mouth just before it attacks in the Alien films or a shadowy government conspiracy threaten heroic FBI agents in "The X-Files," we love to be scared.

In those examples the protagonists face overt, vicious monsters. (Yes, Your Humble Commentator just compared secretive, unaccountable government cabals to serial killers and blood thirsty aliens.) Alfred Hitchcock, on the other hand, dealt in a more subtle form of suspense, the thrill of watching ordinary people mistakenly get caught up in a life-threatening situation. In Rear Window (1954), Jimmy Stewart is “Jeff” Jeffries, an action photographer cooped up in his apartment with a broken leg. When he’s not fending off the marital advances of his girlfriend Lisa (played by Grace Kelly), he spends his time staring out his back window at the residents of the various apartments across the courtyard. And in one of the apartments, a man’s wife suddenly disappears. Jeff suspects foul play. Or is it all a product of his over-active imagination?

Say what you will about the suspense in this film, there’s a lot going on in addition to a few cheap thrills. Hitchcock, for instance, seductively doles out the minor melodramas of Jeff’s neighbors in a way that turns us into voyeurs as much as it does Jeff. It is just like Hitch to suggest impishly that the act of going to a movie is a form of voyeurism, especially if that film includes any form of intimacy. Think about that the next time you laugh when Peter Seller’s character Chance in Being There says “I like to watch.” Don’t we all?

Another form of fear we indulge in for entertainment is the urban legend. And while that may evoke images of sitting around the campfire, telling the one about the escaped one-armed psychopath and the hook hanging off the car door handle or the one about your friend who knows someone who went to a bar, passed out and woke up without a liver, local filmmaker Mark Har has put a little urban legend up on the big screen with his short "My New Life." Coincidentally, Har’s 15-minute film, which was shot in the Twin Cities area, has the feel of an episode of … "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" or perhaps "Tales from the Crypt." In the end, we here at Blake Classic Films are happy to give you the opportunity to gratify that funny little penchant you have for artificially encouraged fear. No doubt it’s a welcome relief from the real life fear of taking your AP exams.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser