Screening Notes

Screening notes will be here!
Children of Men!

The moment for me was any and all scenes involving Jasper, because I love Michael Caine, mostly because I would listen to that dude read the phone book.  I would also listen to H. Jon Benjamin and Alan Rickman read the phonebook.

But yeah, when they all finally get to Jasper's house and it's sort of like the scene with Moore with all the newspapers all over the place, but only instead its an off newspaper here and there and then a bunch of pictures.  And books too.  Jasper's pad is really laid bad, lots of stimulation and yet it seems very calm and safe.  Theo soaks his feet and eats some noodles, then he plays with a dog.  It would be an awesome, chill life to live, the house is in the middle of the forest too.  

And he's got chess on the table.  You can learn a lot about a person by what kind of things sit on their coffee table.  He’s so caring and casual too.  Him reminding Theo to tell Syd that he’s a fascist pig not once but twice, was great and perfectly casual.  Then he offers the Rebel Scum biscuits and deliciousness. 

Then he gets show and I want to cry horribly.  And they keep shooting him!  Jasper stays a real rebel to the end and keeps asking the guy to pull his finger.  No fun in revolution I guess. 

Seriously, that sucked.  Jasper was cool, man.  He listened to crazy music and took care of his less mobile partner.  He had the right idea.  He was kicking back, surrounded by green forest – his house almost looked like a greenhouse – and then these rebel dicks smash their way in, wake everybody up and drive everyone away.  It’s so tragic, perhaps more tragic than the rest of the movie combined.  It’s tragic how people can walk into paradise and fuck it all up.

I mean, I don’t do drugs, so I wouldn’t be down for that part of it, but feet soaking is AWESOME.

Hugo!
What a film!  First of all, I'd like to thank Instructor Glenn for screening this film in light of what we have learned in the class.  I don't think I would be able to have the appreciation that I do for the piece without that precedence being set.

Now, onto the actual film.
I really loved when Georges was on the set of his films.   He said something along the lines of "this is where dreams are made" or something like that, which is exactly what I expected to hear out of this film.  I expected it because this film is a labor of love for film.  This film was made by people who love film.  It told me what kind of film I just watched and allowed me to reflect on it more fondly.  I like art more when it's done by people who truly love what they do.  It's the difference between seeing an athlete that's there for money because they have natural ability and people who worked hard to get to where they are because they love nothing but what they do.  The autonomaton in the film has more soul then a lot of Hollywood films.

I also liked whenever Hugo was people watching.  It reminded me of some of the Lumiere brother's films  where it was just people walking out of factories or trains coming at you or things like that.  Relatively ordinary events that happen everyday but yet Hugo can still find beauty in it.  He can still let it capture his attention.  It was nice to have in the film, because otherwise we would have gotten the impression that you had to have all this magic and wonder in order to feel anything about film at all.

I also liked when the Inspector finally let Hugo go and got the attention of that flower girl he fancied.  It seemed to me like a symbolic gesture of one finally letting for of their own bitterness and to just be happy with one's life.  And cinema, in this case.  It's about getting over this mental block people have that magic can't happen on screen anymore, not being so jaded and accepting that this movie is still good independent of it being in 3-D.


A Single Man!

I really started thinking of it when George was giving his early lecture on minorities.  When I think of minorities, oddly enough, I think of white people.  Now while this movie didn’t have anything to do with race, it did make me notice that a lot of this movie was white.  All kinds of white.

-White flowers
-White shirts
-White clocks
-White walls
-White lamps
-White underwear
-White cigs
-White sheets
-White shower curtains
-White sand
-White waves
-White snow

All of these elements struck me throughout the film, and got me thinking about why certain things were white.  I wanted to think they were all objects of pleasure, like the cigs (for some), flowers and underwear, but it doesn’t really work with walls and lamps and bandaids.

Then I thought more about the flashbacks, where he’s with Jim in the snow after the car crash.  It’s all so white, and while it is very sad, there’s a certain bliss to George’s appearance that we don’t see much more of for the rest of the film. 

I’m thinking that the white represents a “heavenly ideal”.  As in when we think of heaven, it’s this idealized white place of purity and goodness.  I think we only really see George at this happiest when things are white, when he’s laying next to Jim in the snow or running across the sand and into the ocean with Kenny.

And now I’m just noticing how stark black the gun is.  It looks blackest at the end.  The white owl is when he has clarity.  He locks the black gun of death away, only to have Jim return in black, placing a similar kiss at his death.

The Prestige!
I feel like such a bad blogger.  I look at everyone else's screening notes and they have all these bell and whistles and this showmanship to them.  And here I am just tip-tapping out text.

Anyway, I love this film!  I hate magicians, typically, but I love what they represent for theatre and performance.  The illusion, the willful suspension of disbelief on the audience's part, the devotion to one's craft.  It's beautiful.  Poetic even.  And can be seen in just a few other fields.

Watching the film, it really illustrated to me the similarities between magic and professional wrestling.  The audience is in on it, they know that what they're seeing before them is an illusion, but every once in awhile, some angle or performance comes along that inspires wonder and sometimes even doubt.

I just love it thematically.  I love that we have a working class magician who knows what they do best, (being a twin, playing to his strengths) over coming a rich obsessive.  In wrestling, as a performance art, you can sometimes see the same thing.  A person with every advantage physically or athletically that can never inspire wonder or true emotion in an audience like the dirt covered independent wrestler can.
Also, can we watch The Wrestler in this class?  No?  Alright.

This can be extended into our forms of artistic expression, like, say, making films!

As far as I can tell, this movie was relatively low budget.  And while it wont pull the numbers of drek like Transformers, it will be better objectively to most people with less money spent on it.  For many of us, it's the films that don't beat us about the head with special effects that insight real wonder in our hearts, because when you have giant robots punching each other it reads like a big pink neon sign saying THIS IS FAKE AND IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN EVER.

But alternatively, I am more than willing to believe in a world where David Bowie plays Nikola Tesla.

I want to explore the similarities with magic and pro wrestling and somehow work film into that now.  What does the obsession of film bring people to?  What's the trick?

Melancholia!
Someone should really warn me if I'm going to see Kirsten Dunst naked.  Like, I know this is the only movie she was ever good in or whatever, but I just would like to know.  It's like the only thing I'm superficial about.

Anyway.
One point of interest was how surreal it all looked.  Dunst looks like a zombie (more so than she usually does OKAY I'LL STOP IT THAT'S THE LAST JOKE) and the birds (bats?) falling around her look really fake.  But I guess that is ideal so I'm not so worried about them taking a realistic stance on planets colliding, because I had no idea what this movie was about when I started watching it.

The smoke coming out of Dunst's fingertips reminded me of one of the first scenes in a show called Serial Experiments Lain.  I know nobody has seen it in this class, probably, but it was another very surreal show involving a girl who appeared depressed dealing with something inevitable that was also way bigger than her.  With Lain, it was this internet type place called The Wired and how it was seeping into the real world and she was God and stuff, but but I feel like it works.

Taking a limo down a winding dirty road is funny, and having to retread old ground like that is also pretty obvious.  I'm glad the rest of the movie has scenes like this, that roll in repetitiveness.  Very appropriate for depression and other such disorders.  And then everyone else taking the wheel to see if they could do better!  I have a good feeling about my abilities to give some ideological explanations of this, especially since this is a pretty auteur film and doesn't give everything in plain terms, allowing multiple explanations.

Since this was just a general kind of thing, I'll leave it at that.  If I did every scene, I'd be here for like 6 hours.  I also probably shouldn't have watched this a day after dealing with a major personal episode.  Good thing I had a psych appointment right after!
The Hurt Locker!
Moment One: The Death Of Thompson
This is one of the more memorable scenes as it is also one of the earliest.  It came at the hands of an Improvised Explosion Device (IED) and is a more typical Hollywood death scene.  It's an early scene, so these characters aren't exactly vital to us as people yet, but they need to set the precedent of death and establish that this is what they and by proxy, we, have to deal with.
So Thompson's death is made to feel almost unrealistic.  Everything related to the death happens in slow motion, making it seem separated in time and more dream like than anything else.
I also thought the set choice was aesthetically fitting.  He was out in the middle of a sandy area, (the soldiers themselves even remarked on the complete lack of grass, i.e., life) and damage is first shown on a rusty vehicle, which doesn't exactly scream life either.

Moment Two: Meet the PMCs!
A fire fight erupts and the camera goes crazy with the zooming in on people.  It's chaotic on purpose because war is more or less a concentrated chaos at times.  It creates confusion, which is appropriate because the soldiers barely know who they're shooting at.  Then another man dies, after a quick close up to his throat where the bullet enters, then it cuts away as quickly as the soldiers stop thinking about him, giving a simple notice that a man has died and moving on.

Moment Three: The Death Of Cambridge
This was during the second IED related incident.  This scene is slow, but then fast at once because of the unexpected explosion.  It totally destroys the body it seems and it's a bit chaotic afterwards.  In fact, it even zooms out into the jeep, almost like we're in the jeep with the soldiers and seeing what they see, which is a man who they're looking at, alive, and then suddenly a puff of smoke and then no man.  Even the camera appears to be in shock, because we don't leave the jeep for a bit.

Over these three scenes, we see death in different ways thanks to the different aesthetic choices.  We see how we think of death, how we see death, and what death actually is.

Viaggio in Italia!
Denotation: So there's this part in the film among all the smoking and sight seeing where Sir Alex and Madame Catherine are having their big blow up argument.  What struck me most was the placement of the performers, standing or sitting on opposite sides of each other and moving to different sides of the screen as the argument changed focus.  The face of Alex was occasionally covered in smoke, and he left the scene without her looking at him.
Connotation: I think the scene was shot like in order to illustrate how they were both right and wrong.  By that, I mean at any given time, one of them was on the right half of the screen, and it would shift like that, one would be right for a time, and the other one would be left, as in not-right, as in wrong.
I think the smoke is also a useful device in showing just how smoky and unclear their reasons for the quarrel really was, as it is clear neither wants to really get divorced by the end of the film.  This smokey quality is only heightened by the movie being in black and white, and sort of making things blend in with each other.  This is like how real arguments can be, when the idea of what is right is blurred.
Myth: The myth produced here is that married couples have a tendency to fight over something in an irrational and rash fashion.  Asking for a divorce because you think somebody is annoying is outrageous, especially considering the circumstances of them just spending a little too much time with each other.  In the heat of an argument we don't really want to have, we sometimes say things that we don't mean and don't want to happen.  It also submits an idea that in marriage, no sole person is always right or wrong.

And now for something completely different: Screening Notes for Psycho!
-The shower scene is still, far and away, one of the most intense pieces of film ever to be put out.  It's an Only In Cinema sort of thing, because we begin with this very voyeuristic beat of watching this girl shower.  Then shadows, and then a bunch of stabbing.  And she stabs this woman for what seems like hours.  Film is the only place you can show somebody being stabbed while not having them actually get stabbed, and it's the only place you can put that classic music over it.

-I love the scene after they catch the guy.  You don't really see a whole movie and mystery being wrapped up so matter-of-factly like it was no big deal.  IN FRONT OF the woman that lost her sister to those murders.  Film can convey that emotion, or lack there of in this case.

-Cinema can characterize in animate objects.  I talk about it a lot with the Silent Hill video games: I love when the location is a character of it's own.  I would have liked to see more shots of the house and the swamp, but the bits that we did get were very cinematic in making this feel like more than just a story about a few people getting stabbed.  It felt like something was inherently evil about the world around them.

Grapes of Wrath: Screening Notes!

Still gotta figure out how to fix this silly blog thing.

The way film characterizes things and people is unlike what any other medium can provide.  That is chiefly do to the presence of sight and sound.  Photography, there is no sound, and books don't have anything but the author's word for it.

A great example of this can be seen in any scene involving large machinery.  The tractors are characterized as these ominous harbingers of despair, here to knock over your home and take away everything you ever had.  The tractors were overlayed with other tractor footage, eliciting a feeling of desperation and fear. 

The next scene with a tractor is the man’s flash back of his house being knocked down, where they close up in on the tractor as it crashes through the man’s fence like a monster before knocking over their flimsy house.  Film can also turn away just as it happens, in the way you would when you say “I can’t watch” when something particularly inhumane is about to happen. 

The scene is also a flashback that transitions back to the real world, giving a feel of the supernatural, even though this is a film that is too early to have crazy special effects.

Cars are also vessels of escape.  It appears that way due to the way they're filmed.  The tractors are always rolling towards you, and cars, with the exception of a few scenes, are usually riding away from the camera.

Midnight In Paris

I viewed the film Midnight In Paris with the mindset of thinking about the things that only film can provide us.

-Films can roll through the items in a room or scene in en route to showing what the main character is looking at.  It can show all the things in the room, in this case the party goers, food and furniture.  Pictures and paintings can only cover a single scene at a single moment in time, but film can cover all that’s happening in the room, in moving time even, documenting change as it happens. 

-Film can show past events and people living and happening in front of us in the present.  This film features many characters that have been long since dead that are “existing” within the “real world” that Owen Wilson’s character lives in.  photographs and paintings can depict characters or locations that either have never existed in our world or no longer exist in our world, but film can present them in juxtaposition with characters perceived to be living in our own time, and present them as living breathing people and environments.  Which is actually pretty cool when you think about it, because you can do whatever you want then and have Abe Lincoln fight Hitler or something.

Masculin, Feminin

Notes from my handy-dandy notebook!  This will be on how the film breaks conventional rules.

-The camera doesn't cut to each character as they speak.  There is no shot/reverse shot, the camera merely stayed on one of the characters while they spoke to another off screen character.

-Some of the editing doesn't appear to make continuity clear, and rather just make it confusing.  The shots also don't appear to have any relevance to the narrative.

-There are rarely establishing shots, in favor of slides presenting the scene number as well as a few printed words.  Usually we are thrown into a setting just before a scene begins.

-Music isn't used to evoke reactions of the audience, but apparently just to fill dead air, as the music track stops when dialogue or other sounds interrupt it.

-Parallel editing is used, but isn't entirely clear that it is being used during the movie theatre seen.

That's about it!  Otherwise, it was quite the trip!