Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine (1993)

To the Chinese, history is the most important teacher. There is a Chinese saying: 前事不忘后事之师 (qiánshì bú wàng hòushì zhī shī) or “The past not forgotten is a guide for the future.” In order to understand the present and predict the future, one must look to the past. Some of the most well-known Chinese novels, plays, and movies illustrate the importance of history to the Chinese. Farewell, My Concubine is no exception. The film is an exploration of Chinese history and the place of the individual who is caught up in its epic sweep.

2011 marks the completion of the first century of a Chinese republic. The overthrow of the Qing Dynasty was the end of two-thousand years of imperial rule. China was thrown into chaos as warlords and imperialist powers divided it up. Growing up, I always heard stories of my grandfather’s childhood in China, before his migration to Jamaica, West Indies. He was born in the last years of the Guangxu Emperor, and was a young boy when Puyi, himself only three years old, was crowned the Xuantong Emperor. He was to be the last emperor of China. My grandfather’s youth in early republican China was marked by battles between warlords and bandit raids. Indeed, China had been thrown into turmoil. My grandfather chose to emigrate and left his ancestral land for the stability found in the British Empire, of which Jamaica was a colony.

My grandfather’s story is not unusual for those of his generation. Born in the Qing Dynasty, millions of Chinese were thrust into the brutal twentieth century. They suffered through civil and world war, as well as political and social upheaval. This film shows in stark realism and even brutality the revolutionary nature of recent Chinese history.

Throughout the film, we follow two actors, childhood friends, as they are caught-up in the traumatic events of twentieth-century China: the period of the warlords, the rise of the Republic of China, the second Sino-Japanese War, the rise of the Communists and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and finally the tumultuous Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The commitment of the actors to the Beijing Opera, a Chinese art form rooted in traditional Chinese history and culture brings them into conflict with a rapidly changing China. They become confused and disheartened as Chinese history comes crashing into their lives.

Because actors, alongside prostitutes, fell at the bottom of the traditional Chinese social ladder, the film is able to capture Chinese history through the lens of the marginalized. This includes not only actors, but homosexuals as well. There are no proscriptions against homosexuality in Confucian philosophy, and it has a long history in China. As long as a son or daughter married and produced grandchildren, they were fulfilling their filial duty. However, with the rise of Communism in China, with its emphasis on conformity, homosexuality was suspect. This stark treatment of homosexuality and its realistic and horrifying depiction of the Cultural Revolution led to the film being banned in China.

In 1966, Mao Zedong declared the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in an effort to expand his personal power. He came to believe that there must be a perpetual revolution in order to usher in the Communist utopian society. Mao declared the removal of all that was traditional in Chinese society. Writers, artists, filmmakers, teachers, religious leaders, and intellectuals had to conform to strict revolutionary norms. Those who did not demonstrate proper revolutionary enthusiasm were persecuted. Thousands of families were torn apart. Schools closed down. Teachers and parents were turned in by their own students and children. “Struggle sessions” were held in order to accuse and mock counter-revolutionaries. Palaces, temples, libraries and churches were turned into storage places or destroyed. Thousands died at the hands of others, or at their own. The Cultural Revolution was ten years of social turmoil from which China is now only beginning to recover.

Farewell, My Concubine not only explores Chinese history, but also the interplay between art and life. The Beijing opera Farewell, My Concubine is itself quite short; about fifteen minutes. Its protagonist is the concubine of the King of Han, whose kingdom is about to fall. As soldiers surround the city, his favorite concubine offers him wine and asks for his sword so she can dance with it. Fearful of the troops who will soon storm the city, the concubine commits suicide with the king’s sword. Surrounded by animosity, and fearful of being outcast, the concubine dies. In the movie, the play becomes a timeless depiction of fierce loyalty in the face of adversity. Parts of the play echo events in the actors’ lives. Art and real life become intertwined until it becomes hard to discern where one begins and the other ends.

Farewell, My Concubine is ultimately about the decision of ordinary people to survive and adapt or to recoil from the events around them. In the end, the film leaves us with these questions: how do we treat those who differ from us, how do we remain loyal to our friends, what is the relationship between art and life, and how do we shape our own destiny in the midst of history’s grand sweep?

Mr. Aaron Bohr
Guest Commentator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Stephen Frears’s High Fidelity (2000)

One question we encounter frequently with film, because so many movies are derived from books, is 'which is better, the original text or the cinematic version?' In a way, this is an unfair question. After all, each medium stands on its own, so a movie is either worthy or it isn’t regardless of where its script originates. What’s more the question tends to get asked only when the book is of note. Alfred Hitchcock, for example, made a great movie called To Catch a Thief (1955) with a screenplay from a David Dodge book of the same name. As much as we say about Hitchcock’s auteurist and distinctive approach to film-making, the movie followed the text very closely. But no one remarks on that because few have ever heard of the book.

That’s less true of a book and movie like High Fidelity (or for that matter True Grit, a highly acclaimed novel from the 1960s that has now been made into two famous movies, the most recent of which, by the Coen brothers, may win an Oscar). A conversation about High Fidelity frequently includes references to Nick Hornby’s novel. In both works, John Cusack plays a local record shop owner who spends much of his time reviewing the rollercoaster of his romantic relationships. The most charming aspect of Hornby’s book is that Rob specifies his moods and concerns by making lists – lists of albums, lists of his own life events, lists of musicians. At one point, for example, he lists his top five break ups of all time.

But Rob’s lists represent a desperate attempt to put the things that happen to him romantically in some sort of context because he “fails to comprehend the complexities of the female gender [and] surrounds his attempt to understand his current challenging break up through the examination of his past failed romances.” Rob fights off this pattern of self loathing and self deprecation by creating the lists and constantly asking his friends to create lists, like ones of their top 10 artists of all time. When it comes down to it, Rob is a true music lover, and a true romantic. He’s struggling to find out who he is, and ultimately, why did those girls dump him!

In the book, these lists are hilarious little side-bars, which evoke for the reader either mystification (what’s that about???) or sympathetic connection. They’re like organized similes. For director Stephen Frears (The Grifters, The Queen), the challenge is to take something fairly literary but essential (the lists say a ton about Rob’s character), and translate it into a medium that is visual and realistic. Part of the success of the film version is Frears’ choice of John Cusack, an award winning actor, to play Rob.

John Cusack’s Rob is hopelessly lost, forever confused lover boy of the late ‘90s. Cusack is the kind of actor whose sincerity and perpetual youthfulness allow him to pull off the very literary sort of lines that open the film: “What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music? Rob tries to answer the questions we are too scared to ask ourselves! Was she the right one? Or did I just let the right one slip between my fingers? Shit… is there even someone who is the one?” NO body talks like that. But by the end of the speech, we like Rob, partly because we like Cusack.

So where does all this get us? If you haven’t read the book, it won’t matter. The movie is the movie. Cusack is Rob. The writing is engaging and fun. If you have read the book, you have the option on a great conversation. The question is never “which is better?” It’s how do the two works talk to each other? What does Cusack do to your original impression of Rob? What did Frears choose to leave out, and what effect did that have? What insights did the film’s changes (differences from the original text) reveal about what the film-maker thought about the story? Or what impact did experiencing the story in a visual medium rather than a literary one have on you? Those are fun questions. We hope you enjoy High Fidelity and come up with some questions of your own. Or if you haven’t read the book, maybe you’ll check it out so you can.

C. Dowdle and R. Findlay
Film Club

Michel Hazanavicius’s OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006)

Film Club is proud to present tonight’s guest commentator, M. Aimeric Lajuzan, Upper School French teacher. M. Lajuzan graduated from the University of Toulouse, where he studied geography and sociology, and moved to the United States in 2006. This country is lucky to have him. The expertise of the French is well known, for there is nothing that they do not know, and their superiority, both intellectually and culturally, must be acknowledged. For example, the French have been the only people in the world sophisticated enough to recognize the comic genius in the films of Jerry Lewis. For this reason, we have asked M. Lajuzan to opine about tonight’s film.

OSS 117 is the best French parody of a spy movie ever made.

The last years of colonialism were a rough time for the best country in the world. The image of a unified French colonial empire harmoniously working to the beat of La Marseillaise was put to the test as local populations rose up to claim independence. The idea that millions of people around the world wanted to be French was fading and countries around the world emancipated following World War II. This part of History sets the scene for Michel Hazanavicius’s recent film OSS 117: Le Caire, Nid d’Espions, which portrays the adventures of Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (UBDLB), special agent sent on a secret mission to Egypt for the glory of France and its (now completely forgotten) president René Coty.

UBDLB is not Austin Powers (Mike Myers’ character parodying James Bond and the mod England of the ‘60s) nor Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers’ bumbling character from Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther films); he is Sean Connery … but French. He is incredibly self-confident, sexy, and smart; all these things that make us French so popular around the world. When information is faulty (wait! there are Muslims in North Africa?!?), he improvises and gets through problems unharmed. He might offend a person or two or twenty, but it is clear to any Frenchman that those people are just too sensitive. Everyone knows that no other civilization but the French has ever reached perfection, so why would they want to discuss it?

OSS 117 is best watched in French but for some reason there are people who don’t speak this beautiful language and need subtitles. (This is shameful. For centuries English kings spoke French. The founding fathers of the United States spoke French, which served well when they took field trips to France to get assistance in writing their little constitution and Bill of Rights. And you will notice that, in the movie, even the Nazis speak French. Is it too much to expect ordinary film-goers to have some respect and know this language?)

So enjoy this lampooning of French smugness movie in which French culture is captured so accurately and with such reverence. It may be the last time a movie does so.

Monsieur A. Lajuzan
Guest Film Club Commentator
SPA French Dept.

Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942)

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.
Play it once, Sam. For old times' sake.
Round up the usual suspects.
Here's looking at you, kid.

There is perhaps no film that is quoted more often in popular culture than the 1940s drama Casablanca. Beloved by audiences around the world since its release in 1942, Casablanca is widely considered today to be one of the greatest films of all time.

This was not always the case. Upon its initial release, Casablanca was just another romantic drama turned out by Hollywood in its heyday. It received generally good reviews, but no one expected it to become the icon it is today. This change in popularity cannot be contributed to one event or aspect of the movie; it simply continued to capture the hearts of more and more viewers as time went on. Murray Burnett, author of the play from which Casablanca was adapted, calls the story, “true yesterday, true today, true tomorrow.”

Casablanca stars Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid. Directed by Michael Curtiz, the story is set during World War II and focuses on the moral struggles of cynical expatriate Rick Blaine (Bogart), who runs a nightclub in the Moroccan city of Casablanca. At that time, Casablanca was a colony controlled by Vichy France (the French government after France was defeated by Nazi Germany in 1940), and Rick’s Café has become a hotspot for refugees looking for illegal letters of transit to escape to America.

One day an unexpected visitor from Rick’s past re-enters his life, and he is forced to make a decision between “love and virtue.” Rick must choose between being with the woman he loves (Bergman as Ilsa Lund) and assisting her and her husband (Henreid as Victor Laszlo), who is a Czech Resistance leader escaped from a Nazi-controlled concentration camp, out of Casablanca. Ilsa had deserted Rick earlier in the war when the Nazis took over Paris, but seeing him in Casablanca is all it takes for their romance to be sparked once again.

The role of Rick Blaine was a turning point in Bogart’s career. Although by this time he was well-known in Hollywood thanks to roles in films like High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca gave Bogart a chance to break out of his gangster typecast and open the doors to the more romantic roles he would become known for in his later years. Similarly, Casablanca was Bergman’s first big hit after her American debut in the 1939 film Intermezzo.

The supporting characters in Casablanca are just as poignant as the leads - Claude Rains as Captain Louis Renault, Conrad Veidt as Major Heinrich Strasser, Sydney Greenstreet as Signor Ferrari, Peter Lorre as Signor Ugarte, and of course Dooley Wilson as Sam are equally as memorable in their respective roles as Bogart and Bergman are as conflicted lovers Rick and Ilsa.

Casablanca is a tour of humor and heartache, a patriotic film that continues to capture the hearts of its viewers, even seventy years after its initial release. Its iconic nature has awarded it a devoted fan base of viewers who continue to enjoy the tale of Rick and Ilsa’s fated romance – The Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, has screened the film during the week of Harvard University’s final exams since 1957, and the film has spawned numerous parodies, including 2001’s Out Cold and Woody Allen’s 1972 hit Play it Again, Sam.

Casablanca was nominated for eight and won three Academy Awards in 1943, ranked number two on the American Film institute’s list of the 100 best American movies (second only to Citizen Kane), and in 2006, the Writers Guild of America named its screenplay number one in its list of the 101 greatest screenplays of all time. These accolades are nothing, however, in comparison to the place Casablanca has earned in the hearts of millions of fans, who return again and again to experience the romance and suspense, and to hear that famous closing line : Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Maddie Butler
Film Club

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Njut!

August King
Film Club

Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan (2001)

On a Saturday night, it is not unusual to find my family sitting together on a couch watching a movie. No, they usually aren’t in English. They’re in Hindi. No, they’re usually not intense dramas, but they include song and dance. Welcome to the world of Bollywood. My family will start the movie around 8 or 9 o’clock, a decent time (if we were watching something from Hollywood). But remember, this is Bollywood, where it is not unusual to find a movie that is three hours long. Tonight’s movie, Lagaan, is even longer.

In India, going to see a movie is an experience by itself. You buy the tickets ahead of time, because the theater fills up fast for a number of reasons. They don’t just serve popcorn there, but delicious Indian street food. And for those people who don’t have much money, a movie ticket is expensive. So the longer the film the more it seems like one gets one’s money’s worth. In addition, it can get quite hot in some places in India; a longer movie means more time in an air conditioned theater. Consequently, people don’t just treat going to a film as three hours well spent, but they consider it to be a day well spent.

Generally, each movie features five or six songs with choreographed dance. Often times, it is between a boy and a girl. These musical numbers tend to add on 25 or 30 minutes to the length. It is not enough for the girl to act like she’s happy with a boy, but she has to sing and dance to express her feelings.

For American audiences, the biggest challenge from Bollywood is probably the length of the film. Why is it like that? Is it the American film industry that has limited our attention span? Is 90 or 120 minutes really enough for the movie to say something?

Lagaan is trying to say something, but at 225 minutes it has a lot more time to say it. It is a typical sports “underdog” movie, but with so many more elements. Set in the time when the British are governing in India, it has a romantic triangle between a British girl, Indian boy, and Indian girl. All of this is going on, while there is pressure on the villagers to pay three times the tax to the British, or lagaan, if they don’t win a cricket match, a game that they don’t understand. As Bollywood-ish as the movie is, it comments on underlying issues in Indian society. The Caste system is a social hierarchy in India. While not as enforced today, it plays a big role in whether or not they should let an untouchable play cricket with them.

Lagaan can be regarded as a key player for the crossover of Bollywood movies to other parts of the world. The main actor of the movie, Aamir Khan, who has achieved critical success since then in acting and producing, has the kind of appeal that transcends regional tastes. As recognition of its crossover qualities, Lagaan was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar in the 2002 Academy Awards. It didn’t win (the Bosnian film No Man’s Land took the award), but it was still a big step for India. I hope you enjoy tonight’s special Indian treat.

Aditi Kulkarni
Film Club

Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum (1979)

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

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

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

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

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

Noah Shavit-Lonstein
Film Club

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