Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999)

Office Space, based on the short “Milton” cartoons Mike Judge created in 1991 and added to for Saturday Night Live in 1993-94, is an excellent comedy that not only shows the necessity of relaxation but also emphasizes the stress that many American workers go through every day. The traffic jam in which Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), the film’s protagonist, finds himself trapped at the beginning of the movie is the perfect jumpstart into the utter stressfulness of a work day, which Judge satirizes brilliantly, crafting highly memorable scenes of both comedy and romance. Fans refer to Office Space as a cult film, but this movie ranks as one of the best comedies of all time.

The cast is an amazing group of people perfectly fitted for their roles. Milton (played by Stephen Root) and Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole) are particularly funny and without them the movie could never have achieved such a high level of hilarity. Judge, who wrote the script as well as directed, has a great ear for the mundane language of the workspace. Listen especially to Lumbergh’s ability to bore people into getting what he wants or Milton’s squirrelyness and timid chattering that accompany his boss’s reduction of his workspace. Judge also captures the Darwinian ruthlessness of office politics and the inanity with which they are carried out. In the end, the red Swingline stapler is not only Milton’s last representation of office autonomy, it becomes a symbol for an insane world in which we define our sense of self through our ability to control our own office supplies.

Lumbergh and Milton stand out, but Judge makes all the characters here stand out; many of them would be exceptionally unfunny had it not been for both his comedic genius supported by the actors’ impeccable portrayals.

Office Space is probably Mike Judge’s best-known work, but he also created the animated television shows “Beavis and Butthead,” (1993) and “King of the Hill” (1997). In the film he plays the character Stan, the manager of the restaurant Chotchkie’s were Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), Peter’s prospective girlfriend, works. The “Not Enough Flare” scene in which he tells Joanna that she does not have enough flare only adds to the utter stressfulness of daily life portrayed throughout the movie.

Judge’s ability to take something seemingly boring and almost angering and turn it into a scene where laughing is inevitable is amazing. Sometimes his humor can seem over the top, irritating those with a negative disposition to begin with, but with the right attitude you can walk away from the movie feeling as though it was greatly worth the time.

The movie overall did not gross much in the box office, barely making it over the production cost of around 10 million dollars; however it sold a very large amount of videos and DVDs and has built a large fan base. Negative initial reviews stunted this movie’s ability to make money but eventually a larger number of people saw the movie and were able to fully comprehend its brilliance.

So when going into the movie remember one thing, always, always put a cover sheet on your TPS reports.

Calvin O'Keefe
Film Club

The Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984)

What is it about Joel and Ethan Coen, the Coen brothers, that makes them such an engaging duo of filmmakers. The brothers, who grew up here in St. Louis Park, MN, have directed countless features like Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and most recently No Country for Old Men. They do comedies, thrillers, period pieces, and other strange adventures, in a genre that could only be called ‘A Coen Brothers Film.’ And auteur theory may be the only way to describe them, as there are elements that run through everyone of their movies, beginning with their first here—Blood Simple.

Blood Simple, the first winner of the Sundance Film Festival in 1984, shows the Coens doing what they do best. The film has a simple setup that only results in more and more complications. Julian (Dan Hedeya) knows his wife Abby (Frances McDormand) is cheating on him with Ray (John Getz), so he hires a private detective named Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill them. There’s money, there’s murder, and a lot that can go wrong, does in fact go wrong.

I remember when No Country got its first look by the American critics who were saying that this was radically different from anything the brothers have ever attempted. True—it’s very different from their comedies, but Blood Simple deals with much of the same material. The opening of the film, in which Visser talks about the problem of fate, is directly referenced with Tommy Lee Jones in No Country.

What Blood Simple does best is never let details go. As each step of the plot advances, another complicated issue arises. Double crosses become triple crosses. Innocents become murderers without pulling a trigger. Nothing is simple in the world of the Coens.

Yet it has a dark sense of humor to it, making the strangest of jokes out of the weirdest of situations. A man may be dying, but the Coens are there to point out the absurdity, and even if you don’t laugh, there’s at least a twisted smile on your face. The choice of music always adds another ironic touch, especially as the film ends.

Is this film what we could call a neo-noir? Well that definition has always been hard to say. There is a private cynical detective, but he’s not the protagonist. There’s a woman, but she isn’t a femme fatale. The film is dark, but definitely not shot like the old ‘40s movies. Neo-noir is a genre that I believe we want to exist, but doesn’t. Just as the term ‘noir’ never existed in the minds of Billy Wilder, Raoul Walsh, or Carol Reed, neo-noir probably is a genre that only exists in terms of our desires to see homage to the past. And it is certainly true that the Coens are taking from Double Indemnity, but they owe as much to cheesy B-movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

So maybe, we should just call Blood Simple a Coen Brothers film. It’s sadistically funny, darkly serious, and always engaging, just like any film by the Minnesota duo should be.

Peter Labuza
Film Club President Emeritus

Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984)

“The life of a repo man is always intense.” “The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.” “No one is innocent.” These, and other lessons, can be learned from the mid-‘80s film Repo Man, written and directed by Alex Cox.

Repo Man follows the path of a disaffected young punk named Otto (Emilio Estevez), whose odyssey is a result of his disillusionment with his friends, his parents, and his life. His girlfriend dumps him for his friend who recently got out of prison. His parents send the money in his college fund to a televangelist. And he loses his mindless job in a grocery store. Otto is an individual with no direction until he meets Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) and learns what the life of a repo man offers. Otto does not find direction immediately, but after a while on the staff he finds what he wants do with his life and what is really important to him.

But Repo Man is no typical coming-of-age or message movie. It’s a howling satirical attack on the substancelessness of American culture. Instead of being about typical American existence, which is about buying and getting items, Repo Man is about repo men, whose only function in society is taking things away from people. Cox increases the irony when he calls attention to American consumerism by highlighting the absence of glaring product labels. In Repo Man, for example, there are no corporate labels on food, or anything else. Beer is “Beer,” Corn Flakes are “Corn Flakes,” Canned Beans are “Canned Beans,” etc. The products may be generic, but it reminds us that we are surrounded by advertisement. This simplicity clashes with the American identity that is the consumer.

The life of a repo man is simple as well. As the quote “repo man’s got all night” shows, all that a repo man does is pick up cars. Again, Cox is tweaking our sense of irony, making heroes (or at least protagonists) out of a profession that is more likely to be reviled by anyone who takes the time to think about it. The entire movie could be defined as similarly counter-culture, from the ‘80s punk soundtrack to the anti-consumerist actions of the repo men to the focus on people who repossess vehicles. And we haven’t even mentioned the UFOs and deadly top-secret (possibly alien) substance in the back of that Chevy Malibu.

The surrealism of Repo Man is what makes it so funny. Through another character’s eyes, Otto’s world could be a horror film. However, we watch as Otto encounters goofy people, gets into goofy situations, and says goofy things. What happens to Otto is so strange and unrealistic that it is funny, especially the nature of what happens to him.

Sam Rock
Film Club

Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (1950)

Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, in their book Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, call Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A., which stands for “dead on arrival,” an “unusually cynical film.” That’s quite an eye-opening statement considering that one of the defining characteristics of classic film noir is its cynicism. That’s like saying SPA is an unusually educational place to go to school. It seems to us that when you tell stories about characters who are either obsessed or, more likely, alienated and thrown into a fatalistic, irrational world where the primary protagonist is not so much another person as the malevolent force of a corrupt society, and they end up dead, then cynicism is a natural result.

D.O.A. has a great plot. It’s about a certified public accountant named Frank Bigelow who goes on vacation to San Francisco. Feeling sick, he consults a doctor and learns that he has been poisoned (radiation!) and has only a day or two to live. He begins to search for his killers.

So here we have another film noir protagonist who will be destroyed by forces outside his control, joining doomed men such as Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity, Frank Chambers (John Garfield) in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) in Asphalt Jungle, and Jeff (Robert Mitchum) in Out of the Past. Each reaches a point in the story when he accepts what will happen, embraces the inevitably of his destruction. Silver and Ward suggest “this resignation to being annihilated by a relentless, deterministic abstraction, is the only, bitter solace that the noir vision permits.” If that’s not cynical, then we don’t know what is.

But here’s the point. Cynicism is not a pleasant or respected outlook on life. It involves pessimism, disdain, disparagement, distrust, contempt, and a whole host of other rather ugly words that fly in the face of what we believe to be the American spirit. Yet film noir was and is again a relatively popular genre. (Heck, D.O.A. itself was remade in 1988 starring film’s paragon of pert perkiness, Meg Ryan.) So what’s our obsession with film noir?

Perhaps it is because Americans see themselves as an optimistic, Fate beating, can-do people that we are fascinated by the seamy underbelly of it all, like children, grossed-out but drawn to and fascinated enough to gather around and poke at fresh roadkill. Maybe film noir is another form of thriller, where the audience can sit for a couple hours, watch a life transformed by horror, feel the frisson of “there but for the grace of god…” and then walk blithely out of the theater, into the sun and home to dinner.

Film noir says we are all corrupt in some way, all vulnerable to Fate, all out of sync with society, all at sea in an existential world, all involved with people whose motives we don’t really understand and really shouldn’t trust. Do we believe it? Maybe the only thing that protects us from such a reality, and the cynicism that would result, is that we don’t, that we trust in good, in hope, in honesty, and the benevolence of our fellow men. Maybe, if we believe that hard enough, it’ll be true. And maybe Frank Bigelow will find his killer, convince him to reveal some unexpected antidote, and survive his personal nightmare. Check yourself; see how many times you think such a thing will happen as you watch D.O.A. Then you’ll know if you’re a cynic.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Francis Veber’s La Chèvre (1981)

Americans don’t think about foreign films very much. Or perhaps they don’t think very much of foreign films. Yes, we give an Academy Award for best foreign language film, and you can pay $8.50 to see a few at the Lagoon. But in general going to the movies and spending a couple hours reading subtitles ranks up there with throwing a party and inviting friends to work on your math homework with you. But after you’ve seen a lot of movies, and we have, watching only movies made in Hollywood is like getting a box of assorted chocolates – coconut cream, butter rum, maple cream, peanut cluster, dark chocolate truffle, strawberry cream – and only eating the caramels. (And our momma always said: life was like a box of chocolates…).

Most of the negative perception about foreign films is pure horse-pucky and unsubstantiated prejudice. Are foreign films too long? What’s too long? Forrest Gump is 142 minutes. Spider-man 3 is 139 minutes. Troy is 163 ... oh, wait … 201 minutes in the director’s cut. And really, length is a matter of perception. Bad movies seem slow; great movies seem brief. One supposes that if you have to work at a film, like maybe reading subtitles, it might seem longer, but foreign language films compensate in a number of ways.

One important one is narrative variety. We love film because we love stories. The movie theater is just a modern version of the campfire we sat around after the hunt thousands of years ago. One of the frustrating things about Hollywood is how frequently it seems to repackage the same story over and over. A French or Chinese or Spanish or Korean – wow, seen a Korean film lately?! – is going to tell a somewhat different story, with different textures, different pacing, different approaches to narrative.

Would an American film-maker have ended Pan’s Labyrinth, the way Guillermo Del Toro did? (Well, maybe Martin Scorsese.)

Would an American film-maker have rounded off The Lives of Others with multiple dénouments, giving the audience a deeper sense of perspective the way von Donnersmarck did? Nah. Roll the credits.

Would an American film-maker have lingered on the dead face of a usurping emperor, allowing you to realize fully the consequences of his death, the way Feng Xiaogang did in The Banquet. Probably not. Heck, even Zeffirelli didn’t linger long on Mel Gibson’s dead mug in Hamlet. Bring in Fortinbras, and let’s get this thing over with! This is not to say that foreign films are slow (and most of those that are make you love their pace). Most are not. Tonight we’re showing Francis Veber’s La Chevre, a light comedy about two bumbling detectives on a missing persons case, which clocks in at a brisk 91 minutes.

Finally, one of the biggest jokes about the reticence to see foreign film is the hypocrisy. Right now some of the most interesting film-makers in the US making Hollywood films are foreign born: the aforementioned Del Toro (Hellboy), Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain), Alfonso Cuaron (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), Richard Rodriguez (Sin City), Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted), John Woo (Face/Off), etc. According to the Christian Science Monitor, Hollywood frequently turns to foreign talent in order to “bring a fresh eye to shop-worn formula pictures.” So, we ask, why wait for that talent to come here. Why not see it in the original, not only for its “fresh eye” but for its approach to non-shop-worn narratives.

Francis Veber is just such a talent. He’s been writing top-drawer French comedies since 1972 (many of which, including La Cage Aux Folles, have been made in to American films) and directing them since 1976, including The Dinner Game, The Closet and, recently, The Valet. So sit back, and read, and enjoy. Think of it as a rare raspberry cream in a box of otherwise dull caramels.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

We’ve said before that critics claim that film noir is not a genre, but a style – that you can have a noir-ist western or a noir-ist science fiction film or a noir-ist crime drama, but that a film is rarely just a film noir. Tonight’s movie is a good example of this. John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle makes most critics’ top 10 film noir lists because it has so many of the conventions we’ve come to associate with the style – a dark, urban filmscape, a corrupt, amoral world, a deep feeling of paranoia and alienation, a pervasive sense of guilt and despair. You can see this (or feel it because it is as much a mood as a visual style) from the very beginning of the film.

Foster Hirsch writes in his book, Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen, that “The Asphalt Jungle begins with shots of empty New York streets, with scattered newspapers blown about by the wind the only signs of movement in the early morning gloom. The film’s kaleidoscope of the city at dawn is beautiful but threatening, as if New York is ready to explode; the city’s awesome canyons seem indifferent to human concerns.” Well, you might ask, does a city in any movie ever care about the humans that live in it?

Sure. Watch Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, where all the buildings seem friendly, built to happily serve and contain the needs and desires of the protagonist. (The irony in Truman is that they are built to make Truman happy, but that’s another story.) Or check out Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where the city in which Sam Lowry lives and works seems to take a malicious glee in making his life difficult. It may not be friendly, but it has personality. The point is that film-makers endow settings with character just as much as they do the people in a movie. And in film noir the depiction of the city sets a definite mood.

So, The Asphalt Jungle is noirist, but a noirist what? The genre here is heist. If you’ve seen Spike Lee’s Inside Man or The Thomas Crown Affair or The Italian Job or Ocean’s Eleven, you’ve seen a heist film. Essentially, the plot revolves around the elaborate plan and execution of a robbery. We would further separate the heist film from the con film in that the robbery involves defeating a challenging technical anti-theft apparatus, like a impenetrable bank vault with a flawless time-lock or an alarm system with random roving electric eyes, whereas a con film focuses on an elaborate deception that results in people willingly parting with something valuable (think The Sting or The Grifters).

In The Asphalt Jungle, a group of criminals led by a “mastermind” plan a jewelry heist. One of the conventions of a heist film is that the robbery itself comprises a significant part of the movie – here it is 11 minutes long. Another important convention is the complication. Few heists go according to plan, and often participants plan to double-cross one another or something causes the plan to unravel. This is one of the joys of the genre – what does the unraveling reveal in terms of character? What storytelling trick will surprise us with unexpected exposition or resolution? What suspense will result from improvising on a meticulously pre-conceived plan?

Heist movies also offer one of film’s most delicious ironies – a plot that often makes you root for the criminal element of society. This is especially hard in a noir film where people aren’t especially likable, but it is an interesting element in human nature that we tend to root for humans to succeed at difficult tasks, even if the task in question is a robbery. Why do you suppose that is? Anyway, we hope you enjoy tonight’s film noir heist film as both a remarkable example of a genre and a style

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984)

What makes Rob Reiner’s 1984 masterpiece This is Spinal Tap so funny? Is it the clever, hilarious and quote-worthy dialogue? Or is it the way the movie is done? This is Spinal Tap opened up a whole different genre of film – “the mockumentary” a film shot in the style and using the conventions of documentary filmmaking but focusing on a fictional, and often satirical, subject. Spinal Tap not only is a great movie, but paved the way for other great movies using the same type of filmmaking. Christopher Guest, who is one of the leading “rockers” in Spinal Tap, was heavily influenced by Reiner’s unique style of filmmaking and went on to direct other mockumentaries such as Waiting for Guffman (1997), Best in Show (2000), and A Mighty Wind (2003).

Reiner’s film, the first for Reiner as a director, also influenced other mockumentaries such as: Bob Roberts (1992), Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), and Borat (2006), as well as other musical mockumetaries like Fear of a Black Hat (1994), about hip-hop, and Dill Scallion (1999), about country music. Reiner has found himself in as one of the most successful directors of our time.

One reason that I think Spinal Tap is so funny, is because it is almost real. They tried to do everything in their power to make the audience believe that this was an actual documentary on aging rockers trying to squeeze a few bucks out of a tour. The three main characters of the movie, David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) all learned how to play their own instruments and learned how to talk in a believable British accent. Reiner takes us into the minds of these “rock stars” and shows us the in-fighting and the steady decline of the rock band as it hits rock bottom.

Because most of the film was adlibbed, it created the impression that it was a real documentary and that the actors in the film weren’t really “acting” but saying what they tought stupid, drugged out, washed up British rock stars would say. After the film came out other rockers said that almost everything in Spinal Tap had happened to them. For example, rockers like Robert Plant and Ozzy Osborne said that they too had been lost in the hallways looking for the stage door. In fact, the film has a number of not-so-veiled references to the real histories of such bands as The Beatles, The Who, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and a variety of others.

All the music in Spinal Tap was created by the members of the “band” and Reiner. Spinal Tap even has their own page on iTunes where you can buy their music. If you go to Amazon’s music page, you can actually buy albums by this “fake” band. This ambiguity – real or not? – has confused audiences from the beginning. When the movie was originally released in 1984 the screen audience didn’t think it was very funny because they were confused whether this was an actual documentary or not.

Spinal Tap was the first of its kind, making it ultimately a cult film. Pop culture was ever-altered by its release. It not only opened doors for future filmmakers, but altered filmmaking itself. Spinal Tap shows us that directors don’t need multimillion dollar budgets to make a great movie, but just clever dialogue and an open mind to filmmaking.

Tim Blodgett
Film Club

Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957)

Let’s do something really wacky this time. Let’s consider how Macbeth transcends the era in which Shakespeare wrote it – Jacobean England circa 1605 – and comments presciently on our own day and age. English teachers are always telling us that Shakespeare speaks to every age; it’s why we continue to find him in the modern classroom. Yeah? So what, really, does a guy who communes with witches, hears fatal prophecies, stabs a king to death, sees ghosts, falls for the idea that a child delivered by Caesarian section is “not of woman born,” and gets his head hacked off have to do with us?

First, let’s consider Macbeth’s relation to its own time. Although set in Medieval Scotland, the play’s Renaissance audience could see a direct parallel between the play’s situation and their own. Critic Terence Hawkes points out that “on 5 November 1605 a search by security forces, instituted at the personal behest of King James, discovered beneath the Houses of Parliament a secret cache containing enough gunpowder, fuses, and other implements to blow the king, his ministers, and the lawful government of the entire state sky-high” (Hawkes 2). This “Gunpowder Plot,” prepared by Guy Fawkes, a member of a group of English Catholics bent on assassinating King James, failed. Fawkes’ notoriety survived him though as the English celebrate the failure annually on Guy Fawkes Night.

This plot to kill a king, though, would have been foremost in the minds of Shakespeare’s audience. It would have seemed that Macbeth himself was, in part, a literary version of Guy Fawkes, although more successful. The play’s depiction of Lady Macbeth slipping into insanity, Macbeth receding into moral emptiness, and the natural world going crazy, all as a result of the regicide, confirms the Renaissance view of the king as rightfully placed and cosmically protected and explains the heavenly reason for Fawkes failure.

Now if Fawkes’s name rings a bell that’s because it has been in vogue lately. Ever since Alan Moore’s graphic novel, V for Vendetta, was made into a movie, people on this side of the Atlantic have been reintroduced to Fawkes, except the movie casts him as a hero, a vigilante who tears down a corrupt and oppressive government. (And if you want to see this transformation taken to an absurd extent, look at how the character and the slogan associated with him – “Remember, remember, the 5^th of November – have become affixed to libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.)

The V character wears a Fawkes mask, his anonymity making him more of a symbol against tyrannical governance than an outraged citizen. So where does this take our connection to Macbeth? In a world where the anti-government, proto-terrorist vigilante is celebrated because he succeeds in blowing up Parliament, succeeds in bringing down the “king,” where does that leave Macbeth? Is he not a sort of hero? Well, no.

There is nothing in Macbeth that indicates that Duncan is corrupt (although there is little to suggest that he is not, too). Macbeth’s own inclination prior to the murder is not to do the deed. He feels, as host to the King, responsible for him. And afterwards he suffers from intense guilt. Everything about the play says his action is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Still, our society is distrustful of political power at this moment. It would be easy to digress and consider Macbeth as a version of Moore’s V, a man not driven solely by ambition or by a shrewish wife or by his own fevered visions, but by the desire to cast aside the powers-that-be and take control of his own life. If that’s not what Ron Paul wants, it’s certainly what his supporters want. Forty-five years ago, we may have been able to make a similar comparison to Lee Harvey Oswald. The point is that Shakespeare gives us room to consider all his characters in a modern context. You just have to connect some dots.

“Hey, hey, hey,” you’re yelling. “Aren’t we watching an Akira Kurosawa film? A JAPANESE film? About a guy not even named Macbeth?” Well, yes. But it’s the same story, and we encourage you to consider just what might have compelled Mr. Kurosawa, in 1957, to make a Japanese version of an early 17^th-century English play. Perhaps because where, or when, it takes place does not matter. What matters is the universality of the human condition it depicts. Enjoy Throne of Blood.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000)

Memento, the product of brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s collaboration, follows an anterograde amnesia patient searching for his wife’s murderer. Director Christopher Nolan adapted his brother’s short story and later came up with the unique idea to tell the story backwards. The structure of the film alternates between black and white segments and color segments. The black and white segments fit together in chronological order, depicting a phone call between the protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), and an anonymous man. The color segments are played in reverse order starting with the end of the chronological events and represent the time in between Leonard’s memory lapses. The innovative structure of the film creates a tense and mysterious drama that makes the audience share the protagonist’s experience because, like Leonard, we don’t know what happened before the scene we’re watching.

Memento falls into our Film Noir series, but as a modern film made in 2000, critics would categorize it as “neo-noir.” While Memento may lack a number of the stylistic traits associated with classic film noir, it exactly embodies many of the noirist motifs. One might compare Memento to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Somewhere in the Night (1946), about an amnesiac ex-marine, in which “memory and identity is an absolute metaphor for the inability of the noir hero to distinguish between benign and malign as he moves through the noir underworld,” critics Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward write. The same is true of Leonard.

The neo-noir tones of Leonard’s identity crisis and memory loss and the cruel subjectivity of the characters of Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) emerge very subtly. The subtlety of Natalie and Teddy make the depressive emotions of the neo-noir genre even more pervasive as their ambiguous motives lurk just beneath the surface of their everyday demeanors, just waiting to take advantage of the confused Leonard. This sense of paranoia is further enhanced by casting Guy Pearce, a relative unknown, to play Leonard. Alec Baldwin and Brad Pitt were originally considered for Leonard’s role and but both were unable to accept, allowing the film to take on a more down to earth feeling without the attending “star power.”

Finally, what makes the film so sharp in all of its facets is the intense passion and attention to detail of all of the actors and directors involved. Guy Pearce personally called the director looking for the part and was on set every day of the incredible 25-day shooting schedule. Besides the tremendous work effort necessary to shoot a movie in 25 days, the director’s attention to detail to create Leonard’s condition, anterograde amnesia – the experience of memory loss of events that follow an injury, as opposed to retrograde amnesia where the victim experiences a loss of memory of events prior to injury – as realistic as possible that it garnered praise from Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch saying Memento is "the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in the popular media."

Director Nolan emphasizes this realism by avoiding conventional Hollywood touches. In a fight scene where Leonard attacks Jimmy, Guy Pearce insisted on a realistic fight. While on the phone in the black and white scenes Pearce was allowed to improvise his narrative. We hope you enjoy Memento, both as a thought-provoking addition to the noir genre and as a unique film in its own right.

Daniel Preus
Film Club Co-President

Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep (1946)

One of the most intriguing aspects of film noir is its use of a strong narrator. Voice-overs and first-person, or restricted, narration are used with both style and consistency in the genre, so much so that we tend to associate those characteristics with film noir and to describe other movies that use the technique as “noirist.” (There is even one film, Lady in the Lake, filmed entirely from the main character’s point of view; that is, all the camera shots are all restricted to what he sees, as if the camera were his head, and the only time you see the character himself is when he’s looking in a mirror.)

Let’s hit the quote machine: “What is significant about The Big Sleep in terms of narration is that is strictly adheres to restricted narration – that is, the camera is always tied to Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart’s character), so the spectator finds out what happens in the narrative when Marlowe does. For example, while waiting outside Geiger’s house, Marlowe sees a car pull up outside. He hides in his car so as not to be seen. Interestingly, the camera remains outside the car and shows a figure get of the other car and enter Geiger’s house. Yet, the figure remains in shadow. So, even though the camera does not directly imitate Marlowe’s point of view as he hides in the car, it does not privilege the spectator either” (Buckland, Film Studies, 43-44).

So what does this limited perspective do for our understanding of this film and of the film noir genre? Well, for The Big Sleep, we get a simple connection. Based on a Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep is a detective story, a genre that likes to unravel mysteries one clue at a time. Limiting our experience to what Marlowe learns as he learns it both maintains the suspense and allows us to enjoy the step-by-step solving of an intricate puzzle.

Beyond this, we may conclude that film noir employs this technique consistently because it tends to depict an urban world in which a single character struggles (usually unsuccessfully) against the forces of corruption, temptation, and chaos. A first-person narration enhances this focus. In addition, film noir frequently delves into the psychological effects or torment of its characters, and this is more cathartic for the audience if we are closer to the character.

This is not to say that film noir avoids third-person or omniscient narration. Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, regarded as the final film noir of its period, employs third-person very effectively, from its opening scene where we watch someone put a bomb in the rear of a car, then follow the car as it works its way slowly through a Mexican border town, then shift to follow the two protagonists as they take an evening stroll. The third-person here allows us to meet characters (exposition) and regard the situation (with its rampant hypocrisy and corruption) objectively and a kind of distanced horror.

But The Big Sleep loves its protagonists. And with Bogart we’re unlikely to get a character who suffers because of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. He may be cynical (world-wise). He may be imperfect (human). He may struggle with a world going to hell. But Bogart usually, as you’ll see here, remains above the morass. The film’s restricted narration makes us his sidekick. It’s a great place to be.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1992)

What’s that stuff that goes in when you’ve got nothing left to say? You know, those couple extra sentences that push your paper just into the range of acceptable length, the triple playback of that spectacular inferno that our hero has barely removed himself from, and in the nick of time too. Such redundancy could possibly be termed as supplementary; it serves only to reiterate a point. Or perhaps it serves only as fluff.

One would think that plot that revolves around a pair of missing shoes would need a whole lot of fluff – say eighty minutes worth. It seems too simple to carry through and too minor to offer any significance, but the Iranian Children of Heaven’s director and screenwriter Majid Majidi exposes an entire existence that emerges from this seemingly innocuous story-line, and not once does it feel as though the plot is stretched too thin. He takes a precedent evocative of a Pixar short and weaves it into a strangely believable story about how things should be. A child’s naïve conceptions about what it takes to be happy – a piece of candy, soap bubbles, a pair of brand new, pink leather shoes – are infinitely more satisfying that the complex goals an older individual sets for his self. Yes, I’ll be the first to admit that Children of Heaven is a movie that is foremost about the replacement of a young girl’s shoes, but it presents so much more than that. Maybe sometimes you have to believe that something can be simple and meaningful.

That simplicity is something that doesn’t quite work in Hollywood anymore. It’s odd that great special effects, carefully orchestrated action scenes, and convincing stuntmen are what it takes to make a movie “realistic.” I know that I’m guilty of the attraction. Watching Amir Farrokh Hashemian’s (Ali) face, however, as he tells his sister the bad news, seeing the tears spill over onto their cheeks, that is about as sincere as it gets. It’s somewhat disappointing that we have to turn to foreign films for a “real” experience, but completely understandable. I, for one, cringe when I imagine a younger Dakota Fanning standing in Bahare Seddiqi’s (Zahra) place.

Frankly, I’d be surprised if the foreignness of the film wasn’t half the draw. It’s so rare to see something different, so completely alien that we hesitate to make connections. It’s a strange structure of familiarity and disconnect that Majidi has wrought for a non-Iranian audience. We’re not strangers to keeping secrets to avert ourselves from a parent’s rightful anger, so Ali’s shame resonates with us. At the same time, the very relationship between the children and their elders is so different from what we identify with. Watch Ali’s hesitance in pressing his teacher for the chance to race; if he wasn’t desperate, you can tell he would not dare to make those demands. But even though we don’t go for the “speak only when spoken to” rules of old, it is so easy to slip into Ali’s mind frame and congratulate him on a conquest that does not exist in our culture (to the same degree, at least).

Actually, the thing that gets to me about foreign films is that the cultural connotations and innuendos all go over a stranger’s proverbial head. In Children of Heaven you get so completely inside Ali’s head that you understand his motives and the context of his struggles without ever being condescended with an explanation. The story and the message are always very clear: hey, the first time I saw it was without subtitles.

So watch closely because everything you need to know is right on the screen.

Arshia Sandozi
Guest commentator

John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992)

Neo-noir, modern films (since 1981) that use the techniques of film noir, can be defined very simply, by analogy. Let’s say you’re working on a piece of art. You throw some mud at a fan, splattering brown gobs all over your walls. You rev the fan (it’s industrial sized) to 30,000 rpm and empty a can of blue paint mixed with honey in front of it. Instantly, everything in the room is mottled with the sticky blue substance punctuated by your brown blobs. Now comes the beauty part: you release 100,000 ants into the room, install a video camera and leave, locking the door. Inside, your three-dimensional Jackson Pollack-esque installation seems to move, to creep, to change second by second, as the ants crawl all over, seeking honey. You call your work “Living in a Factory” and ask the government for a grant to do more. Critics come. They dub your style: Bio-Modernism. You are famous.

When you were doing it, though, you didn’t know it was Bio-Modernism. You thought you were just flinging mud and paint and honey at the walls and freeing the denizens of your friends’ ant farms. But now you’re famous and critics are defining you, your work, and other artists whose work is like yours. There’s the guy, for instance, who built a replica of the interior of a store, all the shelves painted the same color red, filled it with white dishes, and let a bull go inside, smashing stuff. He calls it, unoriginally, “Bull in a China Shop.” Bio-Modernism is all the rage.

Time passes. Bio-Modernism and its unveiled comment on the conflict between the human and natural worlds (with the added ironic comment that this contretemps will be viewed on video) cease to interest the art-lover. Something called Primitive Formalism takes its place, only to be replaced later by Ironic Realism, then Chewed Art.

Then, one day, someone rediscovers your work, its use of constructed living spaces, and fundamental art media, and animals. Using your theories, the ones you didn’t know you had until some critics pointed it out for you, they adapt Bio-Modernism to their own narratives. They keep the randomness, the blobs, the animals, but they apply these traits, intentionally, as embellishments to their own commentary on a world they see freeing itself from the laws of gravity and bioethics. One artist suspends three elephants from the top of the dome in the capitol building in St. Paul, Minnesota, while three Tibetan monks circle below them, chanting for peace. The work is called “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The critics, ever the reductionists, are more impressed with the new artists use of the earlier theory than the new ideas it enhances. They dub the new stuff Neo-Bio-Modernism.

Et voilà! Now you understand how we get to Neo-noir film. Essentially, it’s films like John Dahl’s Red Rock West, which features an intinerant oil worker (Nicolas Cage), out of work, sucked into a corrupt little Wyoming town and an even dirtier relationship between a husband (J. T. Walsh) who’s trying to kill his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle) and the wife who’s not all that she appears. So why isn’t this just film noir, like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past or Touch of Evil is film noir?

Because those films weren’t part of a genre; they included a mood, a mood that reflected the dissatisfaction, alienation, psychological disorientation, and moral relativism that pervaded American during and after World War II. That mood seemed to dissipate after 1959 (although in some ways it was replaced by much darker things). You can’t come back in 1981 (Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat), and just make a film noir. Your awareness of it as a style, the different time in which you make your film, the evolved culture that the film reflects, all mean that you can imitate or adapt the style, but you are creating something new: Neo-noir. At minimum you are making an homage to an older film style, sure. But more significantly you’re making a film that both comments on its own time by associating it with the past and comments on the style itself.

Watching Dahl’s Red Rock West, you’ll recognize a lot of elements from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity or John Farrow’s His Kind of Woman. A femme fatale. A man whose moral compass is just a bit bent by difficult circumstances. Light streaming through slats. A lot of action at night. A sense of corruption. An urban-ness despite the rural setting. But this is still a very modern film. There is something new about it, something that separates it clearly from the original film noir movies. You have to figure out what it is.

Or, to paraphrase a man named Morbius: I can only show you the door marked “Neo”: you have to walk through it.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959)

Before we begin looking at a specific aspect of this film, notice that like our last film, Double Indemnity (1944), Some Like It Hot (1959) is directed by Billy Wilder. Now, the two films are vastly different – one’s a dark, cynical noirist drama, one’s a comedy; one’s a product of the war years, one’s from the boom era after the war; one tweaks our moral sense although good triumphs over evil in the end, one seems to conform to our moral sense although the end is humorously ambiguous – but it is worth asking yourself, what qualities does the director bring to both movies?

Billy Wilder is one of America’s greatest directors (he would win a Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writer/ Screenplay award for The Apartment in 1960). What, as you reflect on two of his better films, are his identifying traits? What makes him a good director? What kind of story does he like to tell? How does he tell it differently than another director might? Let us know what you come up with.

That said (or asked), let’s take a moment to look at what’s at the heart of this comedy – cross-dressing. Drag. Guys dressed up as women. In this case, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, on the run from the mob after witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, dressed up as 1920s flappers in order to pass themselves off as musicians in an all-girl band. Quick, make a list of the films in which this gimmick provides the centerpiece of the plot. Okay. Pencils down. How many of you had: Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Big Mama’s House, White Chicks, Nuns on the Run, I Was a Male War Bride? (Give yourself extra credit if you got more.) The question here is: why is this so funny?

First, a simple answer: Guys look hilarious when they’re dressed up as women. If you look closely, you’ll realize it’s never the point to make them completely feminine. Often the opposite is true. They stumble around on high heels. They walk like men. They struggle keeping their voices from being “manly.” They’re forced to adjust their bras, and girdles, and hosiery at inopportune times. Quickly we’ve descended into the comic irony – by watching men dressed as women we’re celebrating how NOT-women they are.

Which leads us to an even bigger irony. The men-in-drag technique is a particularly enjoyable form of dramatic irony. We know those guys are men, but many of the onscreen characters don’t. Consequently we hear the men’s lines two ways – the way the other characters do (a “female voice”) and the way we know it really is (the “male voice”). In Some Like It Hot, both Lemmon and Curtis try to find ways to insinuate themselves with Marilyn Monroe. So we combine this dual voicing with a lot of sexual innuendo, both ironic and otherwise, and the result is pretty comic.

One of the more interesting paradoxes of men in drag is whether it reinforces typical gender roles (men should be men, and if they try not to be they look silly and are funny) or blows them up (cross-dressing men appeals to some inner sense of desire we have, and we only drape it in comic styling to shield ourselves from our non-conformist ideas). You work it out. In the meantime, enjoy Some Like It Hot, one of Hollywood’s classic comedies.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944)

So, what the heck is feelm no-wahr, anyway? Tonight’s screening of Double Indemnity inaugurates our year long introduction to both classic and neo- noir. We’ll be showing seven films, and you get to decide what the heck noir really is. Until then, here’s a brief discussion of the matter.

First, the term film noir is French for “black film,” which is kind of ironic because in many ways film noir is a unique American style. Second, film noir isn’t really a genre of film, like westerns or romantic comedies or action flicks; rather, it’s a mood, a style, applied to a variety of film types. But even this is a bit misleading because it suggests that the classic films we now describe as examples of noir, films like The Maltese Falcon, Shadow of a Doubt, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Gun Crazy, Out of the Past, The Big Clock, The Set-Up, D.O.A., Asphalt Jungle, and Touch of Evil, were made by people who knew they were making noirist films. And they didn’t. The term itself didn’t even come around until 1946, and while some critics date the advent of the style from the end of WWII, others see it beginning as early as 1927.

Instead, these filmmakers simply captured a mood, a feeling that was in the air. It’s an urban feeling, a paranoid feeling, a feeling that everything has gone to hell, no one’s on the level, and everyone is guilty. It’s a world of moral ambiguity, and according to film archivist Hayden Guest, the hero, if one exists, “is not necessarily grounded in any sense of right or wrong.”

There’s also a look to film noir, and you’ll see it in Double Indemnity. Darkness, filtered light sliding through blinds, creating odd angles of light and dark across rooms and characters, trenchcoats, cigarettes, rain slickened streets. Really, though, the best way to get to know and to enjoy this particular style of film is to watch some. When we get to neo-noir, noirist films made after 1979, we’ll see the style make a serious comeback until we can almost find elements in every movie currently coming out of Hollywood, if not other countries. (The current cinema of South Korea, stuff like Oldboy and Shiri, is seriously noirist.)

In the meantime, you’re sitting in front of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (from a novel by edgy crime writer James M. Cain and a screenplay by hardboiled fiction writer Raymond Chandler) with Fred MacMurray and Barabara Stanwyck. Stanwyck is the classic femme fatale (“dangerous woman”), another frequent convention of noir. Watch her twist MacMurray’s character around, until he has agreed to help her murder her husband.

In the end, and we won’t give it away here, MacMurray’s character Walter Neff, is a great example of crime writer James Ellroy’s definition of film noir: “A righteous, generically American film movement that went from 1945 to 1958, and exposited one great theme and that theme is: you’re f---ed.”

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser