Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001)

I was in 2^nd grade when I first saw Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I watched it once with a friend, and after that day, we watched it once a week for the rest of the year. I loved Nausicaa. I still love it. And I love Miyazaki’s other films – Howl’s Moving Castle, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, Castle in the Sky, and My Neighbor Totoro. I also love Spirited Away.

There’s something about Miyazaki’s animation that is amazing. He captures image, character, and message perfectly. First off, the animation is beautiful – the emotions on the characters’ faces (and the way they open their mouths really wide when they laugh), the colors, the style of drawing. Whatever the subject or tone, the artistry of Miyazaki’s work suggests an underlying joy. It’s more than just pretty images, although some Miyazaki scenes are stunning in their visual detail. His animation lends the cartoon scenes and characters a sense of reality. Watch Nausicaa some time. I love taking in every detail of the toxic jungle. Miyazaki includes every leaf and water drop, and doesn’t miss a thing. The pictures on the screen seem so alive. I think some of this comes from its being hand-drawn. It’s lot of fun to watch.

Another very real part of Miyazaki’s films is the emotion. In a lot of films, especially cartoons, it’s hard to believe in the way the characters are feeling. But in movies like Spirited Away, the emotions are clear. Miyazaki captures them in facial expressions and in actions, but also through the careful use of music. The soundtrack adds a lot to the excitement or emotion-filled moments. One of the most vivid places where the music comes alive in Nausicaa is where Nausicaa comes racing out of the jungle chased by a toxic insect. The music soared and became more urgent, and my heart raced with excitement. In My Neighbor Totoro, the plip plip sounds of water dropping after the rainstorm at the bus stop adds an amazing awareness of the passage of time while Satsuki waits for the bus.

With a Miyazaki film, though, you get entertainment and more; you walk away from them with something other than just a good time. I particularly like the messages implicit in his movies, especially his attitude about the environment, a subject that is important to me. As you watch Spirited Away, think about what’s going on beyond plot and character. Think about what Miyazaki might be saying about growing up, about greed, about family. It seems like there is always a good message portrayed through all his movies.

Whenever Spirited Away is mentioned, whatever group of people I’m around, people say, “Oh, I watched that movie when I was eight and I got so scared!” They don’t realize that that’s the beauty of it. You can’t be scared of something you don’t think is real, like those obviously fake, rubber monsters in an old horror movie. But when Chihiro’s parents turn around to face her and they are pigs, it’s pretty terrifying. At least, to an eight-year-old. More terrifying is after that, when Chihiro runs through the city full of the unknown and she can’t find her parents because they aren’t there. The thought of being abandoned and alone without guidance is the scariest. And Chihiro’s terror is probably the most real moment in Spirited Away.

I hope that moment is still terrifying, even if you’re not eight years old. That would mean that Miyazaki has succeeded, both in entertaining you and in making you feel something important about growing up.

Kaia Findlay
Miyazaki Devotee

David Lynch's Eraserhead (1976)

David Lynch finds horror in unlikely places. We were going to write about his being a difficult-to-categorize director, but then it occurred to us – he directs horror films. But not the kind you’re used to, not slasher pics like Friday the 13th or monster movies like The Host or fantasy horror like The Howling or psycho scary films like The Grudge or The Cell. No, we’d put Lynch in more of the existential horror mode.

Take a movie like Blue Velvet for example. In the opening scene, the camera moves in slowly on an idyllic suburban setting: cute little house, white picket fence, green lawn. The camera keeps getting closer and closer, moving down to ground level, then into the grass, then into the dirt. Where we find creepy crawly things. And a severed ear.

Yeccchh. The scene works as a good metaphor for Lynch’s early work, that beneath the seemingly benign or pleasant exterior there is a seedy, seething corrupt creepiness, that we find this creepiness more horrifying because it exists not just next to but inextricable from the ordinary. We see it in the overdone, psychotic makeup that Diane Lane wears in Wild at Heart. We see it in Dennis Hopper sucking pure oxygen in order to amp himself up to do something evil in Blue Velvet. We see it in the endless revelations of unexpected corruption in the TV-show Twin Peaks. And we see it the whole vision that is Eraserhead.

Lynch has been asked, many times, what Eraserhead is about, or what inspired it, or just “what the heck?” His answers are frequently elliptical or philosophical or oblique, never straightforward or concrete. Eraserhead is like one of those pointillist paintings, where you have to step back from it a bit to get a clear picture of what it represents. In this movie you’ll see a young man and his wife. They have a baby. What could be more ordinary than that? The stress of their relationship drives the woman away, leaving the man to take care of their baby. Okay, that’s basic conflict and good substance for a film. But if you’ve never seen Eraserhead, then what you’re imagining right now as you try to picture the film is nothing like what you’re going to see. That’s why critics tend toward the word “surreal.”

But it’s more than that. It’s horror. Lynch’s movie makes visual the terror we suppress not just in difficult situations like the one in the film, but in every moment of our daily lives. He suggests that we live in a nightmarish world, and the normalcy is just the clown make-up we plaster over it to feel safe.

As Lynch got older (he made Eraserhead, his first feature-length film, when he was 31), he moved away from the rawness and near avant-garde feel of this film. Now his movies feel more packaged, more polished. In some ways that has only enhanced his message, although movies like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire are far more than just existential horror films. He’s pushed his work into other genres, like the thriller, and turned up the psychological volume a bit, bringing his films closer to a world we recognize and acknowledging his audience’s lust for conventional entertainment forms.

As you watch Eraserhead, enjoy its weirdness, its vision of psychic turmoil, and rest easy in the knowledge that some day, when you’re at a party, and someone asks “what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?”, you’ll have a ready answer. And on that other day, when life is beginning to grind you down, and your perfect life is bending under the strain of finals, or your job, or bills, or those goons who’ve threatened to break your knee caps, you’ll have an apt visual image for the pressure you feel – it’s like someone’s putting your head into a pencil sharpener.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

L. Q. Jones' A Boy and His Dog (1975)

Despite a certain amount of sex and violence, L. Q. Jones’ A Boy and His Dog is more like Road Warrior lite than a direct American counterpart to George Miller’s brutal Australian post-apocalyptic warning, which may be why the latter is better known (although one might also cite the nascent superstardom of Road Warrior’s Mel Gibson). In both movies, civilization is but a vestige of its former self and so humans are reduced to scavenging, scrabbling to eke out a minimal existence in a desert-like wasteland. Where Miller’s Road Warrior focused on the centrality of gasoline, the absence of which reduces most humans to sub-human sadists, A Boy and His Dog takes a more whimsical, general view – the movie explores more the question of daily survival than the threat humans pose each other when the social fabric has been shredded. Vic (Don Johnson) wants only food and the occasional female companionship to maintain his sense of quality existence.

In fact, if there’s a theme to A Boy and His Dog, it’s companionship. Jones juxtaposes two modern and common kinds, emphasizing them by their near-necessity in the post-civilized world: the companionship we feel with our pets (here represented by dogs who can telepathically communicate with their human counterparts) and the companionship we seek through mating (that’s right, sex and propagation of the species). In the end, A Boy and His Dog actually argues that one kind of companionship outweighs the other, but before we get to that, let’s consider the subtext. The script, from an original story by the fabulous science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, tells us that, when the world is destroyed, our greatest fear will be loneliness, a much gentler moral than those suggested by the nuclear-winter-and-cannibals hopelessness of John Hillcoat’s The Road (from Cormac McCarthy’s novel), the steroidal butchering motorcycle gangs of Miller’s The Road Warrior, the viral holocaust of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, or the genocidal irony of Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (from Pierre Boulle’s novel).

Is Jones that naïve or have our tastes merely conflated the allegorical nature of the post-apocalyptic story with our lust for horror films? (That’s a real question: discuss it amongst yourselves for a few minutes.)

One answer may come from that fact that this film, at times, has its tongue firmly in its cheek. We’ve included it in our collection of “post-apocalyptic visions,” but another way to look at A Boy and His Dog is as a cinematic shaggy dog story. Not that it’s about Blood, but that it contains a lengthy build-up to a rather sophomoric, somewhat disconcerting gag. We won’t give it away, but it may leave you wondering whether you were really meant to take the rest of the film seriously after all.

We hope you do. Ellison/Jones see their future world divided into a pair of communities not unlike those we found in the Boulle/Schaffner Planet of the Apes film – one group on the surface of the planet adapting to hardships in a remade world and one group beneath the surface, desperately trying to retain the vestiges of a passing civilization. One asks oneself, which is the more viable approach? Which the more desirable? And isn’t it better to avoid the whole choice in the first place and try to keep the world we have intact?

And if we can’t, will mere companionship make the new world palatable? (Consider what drives Viggo Mortensen on in The Road.) So now you get to choose: the dog or the human? Which will it be? Maybe you can discuss it with the person who came to the film with you while you have a bite to eat.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

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

Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth (1985)

One of the subsets of post-apocalyptic storytelling is the “last man on earth” tale. Richard Harland Smith, critic for Video Watchdog magazine, explored the sub-genre in the insert for The Quiet Earth’s DVD release, writing:

“All last-man-on-earth movies lie. That’s how they rope you in, with their secret promise of a world with nobody in it except a sole protagonist through whom we hope to enjoy the vicarious thrill of being the only one left. Last-man-on-earth movies are our favorite worst case scenario, allowing us to fantasize about where we might live, how we might dress, and the ways in which we might spend our days if suddenly – by dint of atomic blast or nuclear fallout or bacilli spread – we found ourselves unfettered by economics or status and no one was looking. Would we seize a mansion or a penthouse, or possibly camp at the top of the Empire State Building? Would we drive a Rolls or a Porsche or one of those Caterpillar 797 off-highway trucks? Would we elect ourselves General or King or God, go paramilitary, or run through the empty streets au naturale? Would we teach ourselves to garden, take time to read the Greeks, or just go around smashing things? Unlike life as we know it, the possibilities of being the last survivor seem endless. Alas, the dynamics of the three-act screenplay require that last-man movies renege on the promise of their premise and trundle in a second party, then a third party (or more) to up the dramatic ante; before you know it, monologue becomes dialogue and there goes the neighborhood. Last-man scenarios are most satisfying in their first act, when it’s just our protagonist knocking around society’s hollow shell, going into buildings, taking stuff, and setting himself up with a lifestyle he could never have afforded before things went pear-shaped.

“Last-man movies are the flip side of the disaster flick, a sci-fi sidebar that mulls over the fate of the human race via cautionary tales of destruction from space (When Worlds Collide, Armaggedon) or nuclear folly (Testament, The Day After) More intimate and more selfish, last-man movies comprise a respectable title list of their own, reaching back to the silent era. In the Fox Film Corporation’s The Last Man on Earth (1924), a pandemic wipes out all adult men save one Ozark rube, who is promptly cashiered by the reigning gynocracy. A decade later, the more sober-sided Deluge (1933) destroyed the world in Act I, paired the last man Sidney Blackmer with the last woman Peggy Shannon in Act II, then trucked in Blackmer’s wife and children as a third act complication, prompting Shannon’s altruistic suicide to preserve the sanctity of the family (at the sacrifice of 33% of the earth’s adult population). In the three-handers The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) and The Last Woman on Earth (1960), garrulous ménages a trios ponder the point of living after “The Big One.” In contrast, Sydney Salkow’s Italian-made The Last Man on Earth (1964) and The Omega Man (1971), both sourced from Richard Matheson’s classic science fiction novel I am Legend, are nightmarish nesting fantasies in which a sole survivor of the human race must barricade himself against an un-neighborly mutant horde whose incessant catcalling night after night requires him to keep his turntable volume on high. …

“Hitting American cinemas late in 1985, Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth (based on the novel by Craig Harrison) dialed back the post-apoc weirdness to rethink The End of the World As We Know It without blasted cityscapes, monkey-man mutations and discotheque fashions. The film’s first act is a one-man-show for Bruno Lawrence, cast against type as Zac Hobson, an Auckland egghead in the employ of “Project Flashlight,” an American-financed experiment to create an energy grid allowing war planes to circle the globe indefinitely without the need to refuel. Something has gone terribly awry, however, causing the human race to go missing at 6:12 one July morning. … The Quiet Earth eases speculative science to the background in favor of nailing the very human behavior that in its own way has brought on the end of days.”

Richard Harland Smith
Video Watchdog magazine

Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001)

Nominated for eight Academy Awards, and winner of four Oscars including Best Picture, A Beautiful Mind is one of the foremost dramas of this millennium. The creation of director Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind debuted to widespread serious approval due to the depth of its screenplay (by Akiva Goldsman from a book by Sylvia Nasar), the brilliant performances of Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, and the in-depth portrayal of a victim of mental illness.

Russell Crowe's follow-up performance to blockbuster hits such as, LA Confidential and Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind is an astonishing trip into one man's delusional reality. As a mathematical genius, John Nash (Russell Crowe) enjoys the early achievement of a promising profession in academia. Able to solve mathematical theories that stump many of the greatest minds of his time, Nash’s true problem arises because of his mental illness. The reality in which he lives does not exist, and it threatens to tear apart his marriage, his career, and the very life which he holds dear. Crowe's one-of-a-kind depiction of the schizophrenic Nash and the beautiful Jennifer Connelly's performance as the woman who loves him are both complex, bolstered by an onscreen chemistry between Crowe and Connelly. Crowe especially is adept at revealing the many onion-like layers that Nash creates for all aspects of his life.

The cast and crew of A Beautiful Mind allow us to see a whole new world through the eyes of suffering genius. And Ron Howard has crafted an absorbing film which effectively blends the lines between the world in John Nash's mind and the real world, A Beautiful Mind eloquently depicts one man's struggle against enormous odds. As Nash's paranoia and figments of imagination join together to conceal the genius of Nash’s beautiful mind, the power of the human spirit rallies to great heights in this inspiring film, arguably one of the best films of the decade.

Billy Lutz
SPA Film Club

A Beautiful Mind falls into the honorable category of “biopic,” a film that tells the life story of a real person, emphasizing the facts. That’s not to say that biopic film-makers don’t bend a few realities in the name of dramatic narrative, but this is as close as Hollywood gets to non-fiction without being a documentary. Biopics earn respect in the industry, too. They challenge actors and give film-goers access to historical figures without turning the experience into lecture. Think of the recent or great biopics you might have seen: Gandhi (starring Ben Kingsley), X (Denzel Washington as Malcolm X), Ali (Will Smith), Frida (Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo), Ray (Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles), Beyond the Sea (Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin), Walk the Line (Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash), The Queen (Helen Mirren), Milk (Sean Penn) or Invictus (Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela). Many of these have been nominated for Academy Awards and often the actor won or was nominated as well. But how respectful are these sorts of films of the history they represent?

Tonight’s film takes us through the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a mathematical genius who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia. When the film came out, an argument ensued over screenwriter Goldsman’s somewhat cavalier use of his source material. Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the book, claimed Goldsman left out important parts of Nash’s life and fictionalized others. This is always the tension with major film biopics – the desire to both entertain and inform, to make a good story out of real life. Typically, we find that Hollywood will bend truth in order to provide entertainment, and so as we watch A Beautiful Mind, it’s important to keep in mind that the reality may not be exactly as it appears on the screen. Perhaps A Beautiful Mind, about a mathematician who has delusions, is our own delusion – we think we see John Forbes Nash, but we really just see Russell Crowe as a character that reflects a few of the moments of his life.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Chang Cheh’s One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

Editor's note: Once the Shaw Brothers and Chang Cheh introduced us to the one-armed swordsman hero in the late 1960s, a trend was born. One-armed heroes cropped up all over the martial arts film world, teaming up with each other, fighting each other, going it alone. Some of the more popular one-armed titles were even remade or rebooted within the mere space of a decade. The following essay refers to one of the one-armed swordsman works, but not the one we ended up watching. We apologize for any confusion.

“So the other day I was walking through the country side minding my own business when some dude (I later found out he was an emperor) comes out of nowhere and lops my arm off. WHAT THE HELL, MAN?!?!?

“At this point I’m pissed. Who goes around chopping people’s arms off at their leisure? I really couldn’t do anything at the time so I just ran away. I wasn’t going to beat some dude in a fight with just one arm. So, you know, I bided my time making money as a mystical one-armed waiter until I could gain enough money to teach this guy some manners about cutting people’s limbs off. Little did I know he has like a million followers who would throw down their lives for him.

“And throw down their lives they did. Jeez, I must have murdered at least 100 people on my way to this emperor dude. When I finally got to him I had to use three swords—YES THREE SWORDS—to end his sorry life; it was super raw. An arm for a … life. That’s how the saying goes right? Actually including all of his followers it was more like an arm for 101 lives. Either way, I taught him a lesson about walking around cutting limbs off. He will be able to use it plenty of times in the after life at the bottom of some hell pit."

One-Armed Swordsman has to be one of the best kung fu movies of all time. It’s a story, like most kung-fu movies, of revenge. If you like Quentin Tarentino this is where he stole a lot of his stuff from. Cheap dialogue, ridiculous plot, awesome action: that’s what kung-fu is all about. If you don’t like this awesome form of entertainment, that’s fine (but you are insane) – even so I would give this movie a try because it is one of the pinnacles of the genre.

Just the scene where the one-armed swordsman is trying to get to the emperor and cutting down a bunch of people to get there is supermegaawesome. And then after that it shows all of the dead that he left in his wake from an overhead camera shot which just blows me away. If you are looking for lots of passion and emotion, One-Armed Swordsman won’t have any of it. In fact it may even remove some emotion from your body and make you a harder, tougher person. If the goal of the movie industry is to entertain, this movie does the job quite well.

So what kind of actor could be a big enough badass to star in such an awesome kung fu movie? Move over Bruce Lee and enter Jimmy Wang Yu. This guy was not only insanely awesome on screen (often playing one armed characters for some reason) but he was even cooler off screen. He got in plenty of bar brawls and had a love affair with a famous actress whose husband ended up hanging himself rather than go through a divorce. Most people think of Bruce Lee as the first well known kung-fu hero but Jimmy Wang Yu was well known before Bruce Lee (One-Armed Swordsman made one million dollars at the box office). He paved the way for Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. For the longest time I thought he only had one arm in real life because all of the movies (3) I had seen with him he only had one arm. But he has the normal amount of limbs which raises the question why does he play so many one-armed characters? Maybe you can find out!

When you get home after watching this move you should tie your arm behind your back and try some kung-fu tricks. I bet it’s far harder than it looked on screen. That’s probably why Jimmy was one-armed in so many movies. He just wanted to prove to the world that disabled people could do just as much killing as any normal person. What a valiant statement, Mr. Yu. In fact, more directors should make disabled people action movies. Ray would have been so much better if Ray Charles went on a murder rampage.

Alec Nordin
Film Club co-President

Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

Tonight’s film is our third and final Woody Allen movie this year. Allen has directed 40 feature films since 1966. That’s almost one a year. Clearly the Wood-man has something, some talent, respected enough to maintain his work year after year. What is it? What brings loyal fans back to a Woody Allen film time after time?

Part of it is an affinity for Allen’s humor; his New York self-deprecating neurotic voice comes out of his early career as a stand-up comedian, capable of riffing on anything and turning it into something funny or thought-provoking. In many ways, Allen’s career (and one might argue that he has had a number of mini-careers) reminds us of the great work of someone like Chaplin. It has an arc, and it is driven not by plots or genres or technology, but by genius. That’s a big word, so perhaps we mean it in the more Renaissance sense: the unique spirit of an individual. Woody Allen films are, above all else, Woody Allen films.

Even those that do not star Woody Allen, in fact. Bullets Over Broadway is the first since (after 23 previous films in which he did star). But the humor, the pacing, the feel is all Allen. Does John Cusack play a “Woody Allen” character? We’ll leave that up to you to decide.

Another defining element of the Allen film is its emphasis on community. No matter what style of film he’s working with, every film features an ensemble cast, which if you don’t remember the term, refers to a large group of people, no one of whom stands out as protagonist. The group is the protagonist. In addition, most of his movies have moments which remind one of being at a sort of cocktail party. Yes, we know you don’t go to cocktail parties (does anyone, anymore?), but that’s the feel. It’s the moment when people seem to gather and just have a relatively intellectual conversation that doesn’t go in any particular narrative direction. It’s very naturalistic, so much so that one can be a little surprised when a screenwriting credit turns up at the end of the film. You mean it wasn’t all ad-libbed?

Allen’s ability to capture this kind of moment, to explore it, to use it to build theme, to find what it is that makes people human is probably, for your humble narrator, the most specific reason why he returns to Woody Allen films regularly. William Saroyan has a novel (1943) called The Human Comedy, and I’ve always felt that would be a good title for Allen’s collected works because he’s so deft at capturing upper-middle class East Coast people in their environment and so often his exploration leads to wry observations about the human condition.

Finally, Allen films rarely pass without what I’d call an indelible moment, something unforgettable that people talk about and remember over the years. In Sleeper it might be the orgasmatron or the orb, two objects that satirize 1970s self-absorption. In Annie Hall it’s probably the lobster scene, which emphasizes Alvy’s less-than-heroic nature (he’s scared of the lobsters he’s trying to cook for Annie) and makes us aware of just how formulaic romantic involvement can become, of the hyper-defined roles that we play, male and female, in relationships. Tonight, in Bullets Over Broadway, see if you don’t walk out repeating Dianne Wiest’s famous line from the film. Ask yourself: What makes such a simple line so memorable? And what does it tell us about her character? And what is the broader target of Allen’s humor at that moment?

What we might like most about Allen’s films is that after they’re over there is always something to talk about over a soda. He has invited us into the conversations of his movies so often that it’s clear we, his audience, are also part of the films’ communities. So the next time an Allen film comes out (there’s one due out in a few months called You Will Meet a Dark Stranger), you can be sure – you’re invited back.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

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

Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977)

In 1977 Woody Allen directed Annie Hall, winning four Academy Awards and over thousands of fans across the world. Annie Hall is a romantic comedy involving Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). Allen, who both acts and directs, produced many successful films prior to Annie Hall yet the 1977 romantic comedy is arguably his best. Allen followed this success with Manhattan (1979) and other films such as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Allen’s success continued into the 21st century with his film Match Point’s nomination for an Academy Award (Best Original Screenplay).

One thing that makes Allen unique is that he is one of a small group of famous directors, such as Roman Polanski, Zach Braff, Quentin Tarantino, and Alfred Hitchcock, who have also acted in their own films.

Directors who appear in their own films will forever be related back to Sir Alfred Hitchcock from the United Kingdom, who made a cameo appearance in most of his films. For example, in his classic horror film The Birds, Hitchcock leaves a building with his two white terriers on leashes as the female lead enters. In Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train he is seen trying to carry a large bass fiddle onto a train car, the shape of which mirrors his own heavy set body.

Likewise, other directors have had small roles in their own films. Tarantino casts himself as minor roles throughout his films, including Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds. In Inglourious Basterds Tarantino plays a German soldier who awaits his scalping as well as an American soldier.

It is much more rare for a director to star in his or her own movie. Zach Braff actually starred as the lead male actor for his movie, Garden State, but that’s just one movie. Allen has directed almost 40 full-length feature films and starred in almost all of them. (Film Club will show the best Woody Allen film without Woody Allen in it, Bullets Over Broadway, next month.) While one can point to great actor-directors like Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Kenneth Branagh, none of them had near the body of work that Allen does.

So Allen’s starring as the lead male role, alongside three decades of famous actresses, including Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Helena Bonham Carter, and most recently Scarlett Johansson, makes him unique. And fortunately Allen has proved himself as a more-than-capable actor; his performance in Annie Hall is spectacular. He even received a nomination for an Academy Award for his performance.

Conor Dowdle
SPA Film Club

Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998)

When most people talk about films and time loops, they refer to time loops as “a la Groundhog Day.” In Groundhog Day and many other films like it, time loops are a way for normal people to try everything again. Ultimately, time loops are seen as a sort of bad karma. But in tonight’s film, Run Lola Run, time loops are a chance for Lola (played by Franka Potente) to try things again in an attempt to save her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreau).

In Run Lola Run, both written and directed by Tom Tykwer, it appears that nobody is aware that they are in a time loop at all, unlike Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day who is completely aware of his repeating, so much so that he manipulates his experience to set up certain events, learn to play piano, and win the heart of a woman he’s smitten with. The plot of Run Lola Run rotates around Lola’s need for a large sum of money to save her Manni’s life. He owes a lot of money to a crime boss who will kill him if he doesn’t deliver. Lola chooses to try to steal money from the bank where her father works, then deliver the money to Manni, who’s trying to get the money himself by robbing a grocery story. Tykwer repeats the sequence three times. Each time Lola goes to the bank, she learns the same things. If she were aware that she had tried this before, she would have not gone back each time. However, notice that in the first sequence, Manni shows Lola how to load a gun. In the second sequence, she knows how to use a gun already.

So, a major theme in this film is the concept of chaos. The chaos theory states that small things that people do can (and often do) result in major changes. Notice that the only real difference between the three sequences is how Lola responds to the man on the stairwell during the animation sequence. Each response causes a slight change in timing, and therefore a totally different outcome. Also, each time Lola passes people on the street, a different future is shown for those people, though there are seemingly no differences within the context of the film.

One final theme in the film is futility. Lola seems to make quite a few decisions in each loop that result in the outcome. But did she ever decide how the sequence would end? Was there any great planning on her part? Or is fate simply in the hands of the man with the dog? Is Lola simply running around like a ball on a track, encountering whatever obstacles she will? Nobody, perhaps not even Tykwer himself, can know.

Noah Shavit-Lonstein
SPA Film Club

Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973)

Woody Allen is kind of a funny guy. The critics think so. With five films on the AFI 100 years…100 Laughs list, he is the most represented director. The viewers think so, too. He has a rating of 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is only brought down by the poorly conceived films he acted in. And we think so. Sleeper, a comedy from 1973, is one of his funnier movies.

Allen stars as Miles Monroe, a health food-selling Brooklynite who undergoes nonconsensual cryogenic freezing. When he is defrosted 200 years later by scientists who hope that he can help overthrow the evil dictator in charge (a scene which Mike Myers and Austin Powers took more than a few cues from), the world is a very different place. This setting change from the tangible, real modern world to a completely goofy figment of Allen’s imagination allows for as many creative additions as he wants. The people of the 22nd century are all slightly robotic and vapid, and when the government police show up to arrest the scientists who have thawed Miles, he panics, scatters, and ends up posing as a robot in the house of Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton), a poet in her own time. Cue a disastrous dinner party, slapstick jokes, and a new head for Miles the robot. Since robot Miles does not want to lose his human head, he kidnaps Luna. More hilarity ensues as they run from the police. Eventually, Miles is captured and brainwashed. Then rescued. Then involved in a plot to kill the evil dictator. (But struggles against adversity really aren’t the point in Sleeper.)

Funny writing, clever dialogue, and smart jokes characterize many Woody Allen movies. He is a cerebral writer and director, and it comes out in his humor much of the time. Sleeper represents a break from the later, more traditional Woody Allen mode. There are far more physical, Buster Keaton- and Charlie Chaplin-esque jokes, such as Allen’s robot impression, and the debacle that occurs in the fix-it shop. Physical humor turns out to be something that Woody Allen does very well. He has plenty of ironic and satirical humor, as always, but also includes props like the ‘Orgasmatron’(you’re not going to find an explanation here) and ‘the orb,’ a device that, when held, gives its user a sense of euphoria.

Sleeper also pays homage to scenes from other movies throughout. When Miles is attempting to get back to sanity, he flashes into a scene from “A Streetcar Named Desire,” playing Blanche DuBois, and Luna is forced to step into the role of Stanley Kowalski (by doing a ludicrous Marlon Brando impression) to steer him back to the real world. Also, Allen mimics the famous Marx Brothers scene involving a full-length mirror.

If you’re more familiar with Allen from his later more intellectual style in films like Hannah and Her Sisters, Annie Hall, or Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the comedic romp in Sleeper may catch you by surprise. Not that the movie isn’t intellectual, but it also includes and relies on humor that fans of the Three Stooges might enjoy. Yes, there’s a bit with a banana peel. A very big banana peel. If you’re a snob, you may have trouble enjoying it, but if you’re out to enjoy laughs any way they come, Sleeper is an easy one to sit down to.

Sam Rock
SPA Film Club

Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996)

You're half way through Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Many of you are reading the play for class. Some of you are performing the stage play later this week, a production we are all going to go see. These three experiences – Hamlet the text, Hamlet the theatrical production, and Hamlet the film – give us a perfect opportunity to examine the different natures of artistic form. So let’s do it.

For those of you reading the play, notice how the text makes itself available to all possible interpretations simultaneously. Hamlet can be a brooding adolescent, a middle-aged mama’s boy, or a heart-broken young man all at once. You can take a line like “the universe is out of joint; oh, cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” and see that as a metaphor for the shift from a theocentric world view to a more humanist one. Or you may chalk it up to a certain petulance on our hero’s part. Each choice means that you read the lines that follow and seen subsequent scenes in different ways, but you can hold all the possibilities in your mind and be participating in a variety of parallel explorations of meaning.

Certainly in your mind’s eye, you’re probably “seeing” the text’s characters and setting in a consistent way. Good readers, studies tell us, do this visualization. But it’s a free flowing experience, capable of shifting as the text shapes your experience from scene to scene. With Shakespeare, specifically, a highly visual writer, we are encouraged to visit this theater of the mind. Take Ophelia’s revelation to her father, Polonius, of her encounter with Hamlet in Act 2, scene 1:

As I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled,
Ungartered, and down-gyved to his ankle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors – he comes before me. (2.1.87-94)

You don’t need to have seen that to “see” it. So the text is a space of unlimited possibilities and dimensions, allowing us, as readers, to assemble our own coherent worlds and meanings.

On stage, Hamlet takes place in an imagined space. The action, for example, occurs in the castle of Elsinore. Look at the stage this weekend when your classmates are performing. What visual elements evoke Shakespeare’s setting? How do you place it in time? Where is it? What does the set suggest about the action and psychology of the characters? Choices have been made – how do they shape a single vision of the play? Whatever your answers to these sorts of questions, your responses will rely on imagination. You’re not really looking at Elsinore’s walls. You’re probably looking at painted Styrofoam, and the palace, with its bedrooms, antechambers, throne room, battlements, hallways, and library (however Mr. Severson or Mr. Dutton choose to represent these) will all be compressed into a space roughly 35’ x 16’. That you believe in the setting is a form of willing suspension of disbelief, but more importantly this imaginative interaction allows the play’s language (e.g. “Two nights together had these gentlemen, / Marcellus and Bernardo, on their watch, / In the dead waste and middle of the night, / Been thus encountered: a figure like your father, … / Appears before them.”) and its events (i.e. ghosts) to have meaning on two levels, one literal and one figurative. In short, theatrical drama takes place both on stage and in our minds.

Filmic Shakespeare takes place in a realistic space. That is, when Branagh wants you to see Elsinore, he gives us the stunning establishing shot of Blenheim Castle and then we cut away to an interior with black and white tiled floors, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and a crowd of courtiers, as well as other equally well-appointed rooms. In the place of imagination, we have the acceptance of vicarious experience. The emphasis of movies is on feeling the realness of a story, no matter how fantastical. As you watch the remaining portion of Branagh’s Hamlet, consider how this realness affects your perception of story, character, and ideas in ways that would be different if you were reading the text or watching the play on stage. One example: Branagh depicts, via flashback cutaway, an actual sexual relationship taking place between Ophelia and Hamlet, while Ophelia discusses Hamlet with her dad, Polonius. These flashbacks aren’t possible on stage and don’t appear in the text; they are a filmic trait. And their presence creates a specific reality out of something that in the text is ambiguous and on stage is created, if at all, subtextually.

In the end, seeing is believing. We simply want to stress that what you see – words, staging, or celluloid – makes all the difference.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996)

Whether you find the prospect of an evening of Shakespeare on film daunting or exciting, you’re in for a treat with Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. First, Branagh loves Hollywood. He likes movie stars, fabulous sets, intense drama, stunning costumes, and the broad sweep of life one can capture on 70mm film. His Hamlet is the Gone With the Wind of Shakespeare films.

So here, we want to talk about what happens when Shakespeare goes Hollywood. (Next week, we’ll look at more at the nature of Shakespeare on film.) Branagh knows as well as anyone that a movie needs to entertain. But we’re talking Hamlet here, perhaps the greatest work by the greatest writer in the English language. If you asked any group of, say, 50 people if they’d rather go see Hamlet or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, chances are good Megan Fox would beat out the Bard. So Branagh pulls out all the stops – resplendent costumes in red and gold and black, the opulent backdrop of Blenheim Castle, and notable A-list actors taking on even the small roles. Branagh reminds us that this play, while a tragedy, is great fun. It’s got ghosts, and murder, and thwarted love, and political intrigue, and sword fights, and poison, and grave humor, and Kate Winslet’s face pushed up against a two-way mirror.

Usually, to get all this and pages of awesome language in, directors need to cut the words down. Branagh himself is one of the more aggressive Shakespeare text cutters when he’s filming. His production of Love’s Labor’s Lost (2000) reportedly removed 75% of Shakespeare’s lines (replacing some of them with music by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern). He did much the same with As You Like It (2006), set in Japan. But with Hamlet, you get a “complete” text, all the lines associated with the play. (We’re being a bit coy about that because there are different versions of Hamlet, and a definitive text is a bit of a misnomer.)

One justification for cutting the language is that Shakespeare wrote for a stage that had little in the way of decoration. His characters tend to paint pictures with their words (think of Macbeth’s “is this a dagger I see before me” speech, how clear the images are even though they reside primarily in Macbeth’s imagination). As you watch this first part of Hamlet, listen for the kinds of speeches that other directors would have cut because they could show what was being described.

One thing to ask yourself is whether all of Branagh’s scenery ends up being redundant? When the soldiers explain about the ghost they’ve seen walking the battlements, and Branagh gives you his version of the ghost, do the images simply reiterate the lines? We tend to think that Branagh deftly avoids this trap, and we’ll leave it up to you to consider how the language complements or competes with the filming.

Hollywood also likes stars. When we go to a film like Mission: Impossible to watch a character name Ethan Hunt, we’re never able to disassociate ourselves from the fact that it’s Tom Cruise who plays him. Branagh trusts Shakespeare’s characters to hold their own even when they’re played by famous faces like Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, and Jack Lemmon. (It doesn’t always work; and yes, we’re looking at you Alicia Silverstone.) Part of this acceptance of star power as a force behind the Shakespearean actor is that Branagh considers himself sort of a movie star. He frequently succeeds in his roles as Benedict, Henry V, and Hamlet in making you forget you’re watching a Shakespearean actor and not just another Hollywood leading man. His shaping of the lines is so effortless, it’s easy to watch him act.

In fact, not since Lawrence Olivier has one man handled both the directing and primary acting of so many quality Shakespearean films. We hope that while you watch the first part of Hamlet tonight, that you’ll enjoy it as much as a movie as an addition to the ranks of great Hamlet productions.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen (1991)

Delicatessen, a zany little film directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet that’s startling and clever, blew me away with its sheer originality and liveliness. This 1991 film encourages the viewer to connect with the characters on a complex level, developing both disdain and fondness for the decisions that each of them makes. The film begins in a rural apartment building in a post-apocalyptic France. A shortage of food forcing grain to be used as currency has forced out the older social structure as the struggle to regain balance and unity between the characters takes priority.

It sounds dark and dramatic, but directors Jeunet and Caro demonstrate an impressively confident feel of comic timing. Thriving on quirks, the film’s most distinctive aspect is its careful use of musical sequences, accented by uncomfortable uneasiness and using quick cuts reveal rhythms and even melodies played out in a light-hearted natured. For example, they set up goony little nonsense symphonies, such as everybody in the building simultaneously bowing cellos, Dominique Pinon painting the roof while springing off his tied braces, two brothers testing their animal noise toys, all in choreographed symphony to Jean-Claude Dreyfus and Karin Viard’s love-making. Or like Dominique Pinon and Karin Viard’s little dance while bouncing on a bed to test loose springs, the two of them keeping time to a song playing on the TV.

Jeunet and Caro’s keen sense of black humor is ever-present, particularly in Sylvie Laguna’s bizarre attempts to commit suicide with Rube Goldberg-type setups such as connecting her doorbell to a sewing machine that sews through a piece of cloth that will pull a lamp into the bath (which fails when the power goes off). Particularly, her climactic attempt to use a combination of pills, gas, shotgun, Molotov cocktail and hanging, which all farcically fail at once, portrays this serious subject in a lighter less emotionally draining way for the viewer. At the foundations of the film is the romance between monkey-faced Dominique Pinon and innocently lovely Marie-Louise Dougnac, which plays with a genuine sweetness in the middle of the film’s off-kilter tone.

The characters of Louison (Dominique Pinon) and Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard) caught my attention in particular because of their idiosyncrasies and the relationships they take on with other characters they run into. Louison (Dominique Pinon) answers an ad to work as a handyman doing odd jobs for a butcher. Unbeknownst to Louison, the butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) has hatched a plot to turn the unsuspecting worker into the next choice cut for the tenants in his dilapidated building. The real story comes when Louison, who is not without skills and charm, becomes a gear in the clockwork of the butcher’s gruesome scheming. He soon falls in love with Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac) as the story deepens as she is the painfully shy daughter of the Butcher.

Incredibly inventive, both in storytelling and set and character designs, Delicatessen uses its quirky tone to combine a surprisingly visual film with the bleakest of social satires. Literally one of the many movies that must be watched to truly understand its genius, Delicatessen marks another collaboration of genius directing team Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and is one of the sharpest of all futuristic foreign films.

Billy Lutz
Film Club Co-President