Boyhood

Mason is a boy that everyone knows. Not him personally, but we all know someone in our class who is Mason. Divorced parents, hateful of the trends around him, and a little bit of an outcast. Because his character was so familiar to me, it also made him very relatable. You can't mention Boyhood without mentioning the fact that it was a twelve year project. Watching  the same actors grow over time with their characters gave the film a very realistic feel, almost like a documentary. When I was actually watching Ellar Coltrane, the man playing Mason, grow up it felt like growing up with a childhood friend. The movie ends with Mason being around the same age as me and his ending outlook on life is one that I can understand. He's about to start a new portion of his life and is embracing the idea of living in the moment.
The thing that made this twelve year project work was its seamless editing. The movie never lost it's flow and wove through the lives of the family in a way that made sense. Some stories aren't concluded but that's what makes the movie even more real. Sometimes you just go on without knowing what happens to your old best friend when you graduate or your old step-siblings when your mom pulls you out of the house. I liked the idea that the audience was kind of like a relative of Mason, just dropping in every few years and getting snippets of his life.
The editing was very nonchalant but that sometimes made it hard to reestablish your bearings in the new time. When you begin jumping years ahead, and especially when Mason begins puberty, it could be confusing to understand what year it was and where these people were in their lives. Although the writers did a good job of beginning the new scenes with dialogue that clued you in on what point in their lives we were at. There's one scene where Samantha is talking about having fun senior year and five minutes later, Mason is talking about visiting Samantha in her dorms. It's from this context that the viewer can understand that we're a few years after the scene previous.
This form of editing over a span of years can be seen in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That film was another example of a story moving through several years and relying on other context clues in the film to describe the setting.

MYST: The Double

Being type-casted has got to be one of the worse things that can happen to an actor or actress. If you need a strong, bossy lead female, cast Sandra Bullock. If you need an awkward indie teen, cast Michael Cera. I had thought Jesse Eisenberg had fallen into this unfortunate category as the mumbly, nervous guy, but after seeing him play two roles in one film as his doppelganger in The Double, I was impressed by his ability to do a 180.
He starts the movie as the type-cast I usually I saw of him, so for the first 10 minutes, I questioned abandoning it. We follow him on his course to work, all the while seeing instances of his shy, pushover character. A man approaches Eisenberg's character Simon James on the nearly empty public train and tells him that he's in his seat. A little flustered, Simon looks around nervously before standing up and handing over his seat. As he's exiting the train, he's unable to get out an "Excuse Me" to the men blocking the doorway. When he finally reaches security outside his work, he's unable to get in when his card doesn't work and the guard doesn't recognize him even though he claims to have worked for the company for over 7 years. This film is set in a dingy alternate world and Simon works as some kind of information processor and is the only employee under 50. There's one other girl at the office who isn't and Simon spends a good chunk of his time watching her and trying to say something but never really getting it out. Simon's life is passing by in the most monotonous way possible and after witnessing a man wave to him before jumping to his death, he realizes that being lonely could be a terrible thing. At work, a new employee is introduced, the strikingly similar James Simon. James is everything that Simon is not: he's confident, strong-willed, and kind of rude. When James begins to win the heart of Simon's crush, Simon is faced with the cold fact that he could be so much better than he is.
This film is categorized under Netflix as Film Noir, and although I see elements of it, I wouldn't go as far to say that it really is. The film plays heavily on light and shadows, often keeping the scenes dimly lit. The opening sequence of the film features the light peeping in through the windows of a moving train on Simon's face. This causes his face to flash on and off screen, an eerie effect that was foreshadowing his later encounter with James. The film lacked the fast-paced dialogue that film noir is known for, probably because the leading character was too afraid to speak half the time. That was another common Film Noir trait that the film lacked. Normally the leading male is strong-headed and confident, neither of which Simon portrays. This movie was more of a dark comedy, some parts with enough suspense to make me fear a pop-up was coming and other very satirical and funny.
Although I liked this film, I found parts of it to be very confusing. There are very long sequences without any dialogue and once the doppelganger is introduced, no explanations can get pretty confusing. In scenes where James and Simon were together or fighting, they were often dressed the same too, and it would become hard to tell who was who. Other movies that have done the whole one actor play two parts, like The Parent Trap, did a better job of differentiating the characters by making it clear who was speaking. I give this movie 3/5 flames because it has an interesting plot and overall creative view to the shots, but I found myself able to guess many of the outcomes even through my confusion. I'd still recommend this movie though because it is interesting to see Jesse Eisenberg play such opposing characters.

Short Term 12

Short Term 12 is one of those movies that make you real grateful for the life you have and people in it who love you as much as you love them. That was so cheesy, but after viewing this movie and seeing how some kids my age are treated and what it can do to them psychologically for years to follow, I don't really know what I'm doing complaining about my grades or college apps. The movie is centered around a rehab-like center for kids who were abused or abandoned. The main character Grace, along with her boyfriend Mason, is the head guidance counselor for these kids. Grace has a bit of a troubled past as well and she's managed to keep it down and in the past until a young girl with problems similar to the ones she's trying to hide checks into the facility. This girl, Jayden, is the typical angsty teen that her heavily lined eyes suggest, but the subtle hints she leaves Grace about her troubled home life causes Grace to sit back and examine her own situation that she's tried to push away for years.
This movie had a very realistic feel to it because of the way that it was shot. Often times the camera wouldn't use a stabilizer, so as the viewer, it was easy to put yourself in the view of the camera, looking back and forth between the characters. The opening scene depicted one of the inpatients bursting out the door and making a sprint for the gates of the facility about 100 feet away across a grass lawn. When Grace and Mason bound after him, the camera adopts a hand-held like motion to follow them and capture the chaos of the moment. The camera also works to do the total opposite in moments of intensity. When Jayden confides to Grace about her abusive father through the shark and octopus story, the camera is very still, which paired with the silence of Grace's shock, intensifies the scene by keeping everything still so the audience can absorb what they've just learned. This technique is used again when it's Grace's turn to confide in Jayden.
The camera also takes advantage of close-ups during serious moments of conversations (which this movie is comprised mostly of). These close-ups help to read the emotion on the character's faces better. Some good moments of this is after Marcus recites his rap about his mom to Mason and the camera is right up in Marcus's face. The watering of his eyes and clenching of his jaw right after he finishes and Mason sits speechless helps the viewer understand how much he just opened up through this rap. My favorite close-up has to be when Mason tells Grace "he's done."

Brie Larson did a phenomenal job at this part rolling her eyes back and really showing on her face the grave impact this had on her.
Both of these cinematic elements added to the realness of the movie. The characters were relatable and it was easy to imagine yourself as the one sitting down having a heart-to-heart with them the way Grace or Mason does. Many indie movies adopt this technique to add to the authenticity of their films. The Virgin Suicides is one that pops into my mind for it's similar camera-work. A film that attempted this use of hand-held camera look but failed was the first Hunger Games. The initial fight scene at the Cornucopia was shot to portray chaos but was to bouncy and ended up giving me a headache.
Short Term 12 is a great film. It has a complexity that keeps you interested but isn't so over-the-top that it's unbelievable. It's a serious film that touches on some pretty serious topics, but still manages to throw in moments of humor and playfulness that keep it authentic.

MYST #3- Election

 

 

Gone are the days of Matthew Broderick cutting class to have a joyride around Chicago, now he's all grown up and playing the average middle-class Social Studies teacher at your local high school. Election follows the stories of four different people through the election of the next class president. Tracy Flick (played by a much younger Reece Witherspoon) is the power-house over-achiever that begins the election by running unopposed. Paul Metzler, a popular football player who's IQ wouldn't surpass that of a 6th grader's, is set up by Mr. McAllister (Broderick) to run against, and hopefully beat, Tracy. Why would a teacher intentionally sabotage the victory of one of his students? Probably because she got his friend, and fellow teacher at the high school, fired for sleeping with her. To round out the candidates for the election is sophomore Tammy Metzler, Paul's angsty younger sister whose sexuality scared off her best friend and into the arms of her brother. Tammy's out to take down her brother and his girlfriend (her ex-bestie), Paul's running because it sounds fun, Tracy loves control so why wouldn't she run, and amidst all this is Mr. McAllister who's trying to deal with his child-less, love-less marriage.
   The first hour of the movie is the most interesting editing wise because it is setting up the back stories for all the characters before they come together. Much of the story-telling is done through these long tangents off of the main story before flashing back to present time. The movie begins with Mr. McAllister going through his daily routine of working out and cleaning up at then school, before heading to his classroom to begin the day. On his walk to class, he passes Tracy, already set up and ready for the future voters of America. Up until this point, the camera followed behind Mr. McAllister as he made his way around the school. When he finishes talking with Tracy, instead of following him, the camera stays on Tracy and we hear a voice over of her tell the audience that if you mess with destiny, you suffer. Cut back to Mr. McAllister where he discusses his love of teaching and assisting students over a montage of scenes of him helping crying teens and winning teaching awards. After the montage, we're in Mr. McAllister's classroom getting a lesson on morals and ethics. He asks the class questions and before he can even finish each one, Tracy's hand is first to shoot up into the air. When he finally calls on her, we get a lovely freeze-frame of her face before cutting to the first tangent. For about 7 minutes, you get a back story on what an over-achiever Tracy is and her relationship with a teacher, by the time the camera cuts back to the freeze-frame of Tracy's face, you've forgotten you were even on a tangent. The movie follows this pattern, cutting off to tangents when the other candidates, Paul and Tammy, are introduced. The thing that kept this movie interesting was that you didn't stay with one person for very long. They're all interconnected by this election and although each of the four main characters had problems they were dealing with, often their problems stemmed from one another.
   This movie is one of those coming-of-age films, each character grows, in their own respect, from situations that had held them down early in the film. This can be seen mostly through the growth of Tammy Metzler, the unpopular sophomore who entered the election to sabotage her brother and ex-friend. Tammy is first introduced to us as a burn-out who just lost her only friend, but by the end of the movie, she's got the whole school chanting her name after an empowering campaign speech.
   The editing in this film reminds me of a lot of Tarantino films. Like how Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs cut to different times and places throughout the films, Election does something similar with the tangents it breaks off into. At the very beginning of the film, to show the many achievements of Tracy Flick, the camera flips through the school's yearbook going to different clubs and activities Tracy has participated in. Wes Anderson's film Rushmore uses the exact same sequence to show the accomplishments of another over-achiever Max Fisher. They way that this film flows, seamlessly changing focus of who the main character is as a new character is introduced (following Mr. McAllister then focussing on Tracy when she's introduced), is similar to the flow of the film Slacker. Told through a series of vignettes, Slacker would follow one character for a couple of minutes before another character was introduced, and the focus would shift to that new character's story until another character came along. When Tracy discovers that Paul is running against her and when Tammy discovers her ex-bestie is dating her brother, their eyes narrow and we here this African war music begin to play, suggesting that high school is a cut-throat jungle. Another film to make this comparison is the classic Mean Girls. When Regina George fusses over Aaron right in front of Caty, Caty imagines how this would be settled in the animal world (jumping across the table and attacking her), but in the girl world all fighting was sneaky.
   I'm giving this film 4/5 flames because it's one of the better high school films that I've seen. They characterized the teens in the film well enough that I could actually relate to how they felt and it didn't make high school appear cheesy like in most films.

MYST #2- A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

I thought I was out of my vampire-human-relationship-Twilight phase when I got out of sixth grade, but this movie may have me fantasizing about the life of blood suckers once again. Set in a worn-down Iranian town, the film follows the story of Arash, a hard-working 20-something whose junkie father is more of a burden than anything, and Shirin, our modern-day hero stalking the streets at night and sucking the blood of men who disrespect women.  It is also a love story between the two, but not the same cheesy Bella-Edward love story.

The film is shot completely in black and white allowing the lighting to play a lot with the shadows and adding to the dramatic effect. This use of the shadows emphasized how much thought about composition was put into this movie. Many examples would feature the victim walking down the street at night unaware of Shirin's presence behind them, and when they stopped to look over their shoulder, the camera would always place the subject at the edges of the camera, so when Shirin pops out of the shadows to bite their neck, she is the center attention of the camera. This is a pretty common set up, especially for horror films, to anticipate a pop-up. Another use of composition-foreshadowing occurs as we see a man force a young woman to shoot heroin as his cat watches on. The camera cuts between an extreme close-up of the cat's eye and an extreme close up of the drifting eye of the young woman. We get a scene of the cat's slit-shaped pupil before cutting to a medium shot of the back of Shirin dressed in hooded black cape that mimics the shape of the pupil we saw a second earlier. This placement of Shirin on screen in a similar shape to the pupil of a witness is hinting at the impending death of the man who doped up the young woman. Stanley Kubrick uses the same technique in The Shining when Danny tries to open the twin doors to room 237 and an image of the Grady twins flashes on screen. This split second of the twins foreshadows Danny's own impending horror.

The feelings of our characters on screen weren't always verbalized, but instead shown through the set up of the scene. After a talk by the power plant and Shirin leaves Arash feeling rejected, the camera cuts to a long shot of Arash staring at the ground with his body tensed and Shirin walking away in the other direction just as a dark freight speeds pass him. The way the camera is positioned makes it look as if the freight train hits Arash, mirroring the feeling of rejection.
The thing that I liked most about this film was how much of a bad-ass they portray Shirin to be. The first antagonist presented in the film is a drug dealer shown taking Arash's car after he can't pay for his father's "medicine." Arash makes a snide comment, but other than that, won't stand up for himself. Shirin takes care of the drug dealer at night when she catches him throw out and rob a prostitute. She is the tough independent one of the relationship and setting the film in the Middle East, a place where tough independent are a rarity, makes her femme-power even more exciting to watch. Her ruthless view on the men she kills reminds me of another twisted heroine, Beatrice Kiddo in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. Like Shirin, Beatrice didn't allow her emotions to get between her and what she had set out to do.

A key scene in this movie is Shirin catching a young boy out at night and basically scaring him shit-less but she does it to teach him a lesson. This scene is early in the movie and it helps set out Shirin's agenda so we understand that she's picking out her victims and killing with a purpose. The scene begins with the young boy skateboarding down a beaten side road. Musical hints and flashes of Shirin's cape in the back allow us to understand she's following him and when he too picks up on this, he grabs his skateboard and begins to run. The camera follows as he runs down the street and when he snaps his head back from glancing over his shoulder, Shirin surprises him blocking his path with her body. The scene is very dark, only small amount of key light on one side of the boy's face but paired with a high angle shot of him makes him appear to be small and helpless. Shirin is lit so that you can only make out the edges of her face and eyebrows, enough to tell that she is boring a hole into the boy with her eyes. This along with her black cape gives her an intimidating figureless appearance, like she is still apart of the shadows. Shirin speaks in a low voice and asks the boy if he is a good boy. The camera looks up at her and when she leans down to make eye contact with him, it tilts down so it is level with her head. As she leans in closer to the boy the camera gets closer to her face and the shadows around her features become more exaggerated and frightening. That's when the vampire teeth and demon voice come out. She warns the boy of what she can do to him and that she'll be watching him his whole life, so he'd better be a good boy. With that, she stands up cooly as the boy scrambles away, abandoning his skateboard.
Although this is a love story between Arash and Shirin, the love isn't just the focus of the movie, it also contains themes of vigilante justice and gender roles. I'm giving this indie-horror-love flick a 5 flames out of 5 because it took the classic vampire scenario and did it in a whole new way. Give this one a watch on your next Netflix night in.

Memento

Memento is the reason I have trust issues. In every new scene, the idea we had of a character was being warped from what it was in just a few scenes before. It was like one plot twist after another. The editing of the film is what ensures this. Had the movie been shown chronologically correct, it wouldn't be interesting, just a man hunting down all the John Gs he can find. All the plot twists and character warping come from the film being shown backwards.
I spent a lot of thinking time figuring out how the film was being shown, so I want to get it down in writing. Each new colored scene ends where the scene before began. In other words, each new scene is chronologically one step before the scene it follows. To make things more complicated, mixed into these colored scenes, are black and white sequences of (chronologically) the first scene. If the film was shown in order, this scene would be the first one you see. The black and white sequences are shown normally (not backwards) so that at the end of the movie (or the middle of the story), the B&W and colored scenes meet up. It's all very confusing but I think that it gives the viewer a sense of how the main character feels. Lenard can't make new memories so whenever his train of thought starts over again, he's disoriented and lost. That's how the editing in this film constantly made me feel, I had to quickly pick up on the surroundings and figure out  the plot from there.
It helped that the storyline was just as twisted as the editing. All the lying and deception added to how the backwards editing was able to reveal things layer by layer. This can be seen in how the viewer is supposed to think about Teddy throughout the movie. We begin by seeing his death and all the clues that would point to him as being the killer of Lenard's memory and his wife. This initially puts Teddy as the antagonist, but as the movie goes on it is later revealed Teddy was a police officer, trying to help Lenard feel satisfied by killing the actual murderers and also just using him to kill a drug dealer. Natalie is another character whose image gets shifted as more of what Lenard doesn't remember about her is revealed. At first, she seemed like a friend trying to help Lenard find the killer, but we learn that she too is just taking advantage of Lenard's disability for her own gain.
A part where the editing could've been better was when the story of Dood was being explained. I found that part confusing and and had to do some online digging to figure out how he played in the story.
Another film that relied heavily on the use of editing to reveal the story is Fight Club. Both leads in Memento and Fight Club suffer from a mental disability, but in Fight Club, we don't know this until the end. The movie's editing drops hints throughout the film about the character's mental state and how it changes when he meets Tyler Durden.
The editing of a movie makes it what it is. The way something is cut up and presented to us can totally change how we perceive it.

Formal Film Study: Stanley Kubrick's Top Three

Stanley Kubrick is a name well-known in the movie industry for films that push the envelope and really invite audiences to think about what they're seeing. He's a cult film hero and many of his films remain unmatched in style and editing to films today. I like to think I'm well-rounded when it comes to movie-viewing but a problem I kept running into with Kubrick films was that I've started many, but never finished a single one. Because I'm new to his work, I decided to go for his three most popular films The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I also ordered the lineup I watched the films based on how much I knew about the film before viewing it. I'd gotten through half of The Shining, so I began with that and knew nothing about 2001 so I ended with that one.
Sound: Something Kubrick likes to do is play on your emotions with the choice of background music. Across all three films, there would be instances that could look normal, like a mother and son running in the snow or astronauts posing for a picture on the moon, but the sound playing behind it be so eerie and unsettling that you instantly felt fear for the inevitable agony of the people on screen. The Shining seemed to never have a quiet moment in it and when there was, it was so off-putting that my heart raced a bit from the suspense.  Kubrick was a big fan of the screeching sound, so anytime you were meant to understand that there was upcoming doom, expect a nail on the chalkboard. The sound effects in that film are spot on for getting how you should feel when watching a particular scene. Except one scene when Wendy finds Jack's "novel" and the sound playing in the background along with Wendy's horrified face gets to be a bit comical because of how long it plays out. The music was often times what told the story. According to IMDb, there is 88 out of the 160 minute 2001 where there is no dialogue. During this time, you'd probably be listening to classical music or Stanley Kubrick's breathing (IMDb also said that Kubrick provided the breathing heard in the spacesuits). Kubrick's choice to use classical music primarily over scenes in a spaceship 33 years into the future was to make the scene timeless. He couldn't predict how the technology decades away would look but by adding music over it that has been around for centuries, he gave the scene a bit of irony and further stressed the idea of human evolution present throughout the rest of the film. The first appearance of the black prism is accompanied by a lovely screeching noise that foreshadowed the chaos it'd bring later with the astronauts. I didn't notice the sound as much in Clockwork but I think that's because there was more of a focus on the strange British dialect the characters speak in. Although an important part of the plot is the song Alex sings when he rapes the writer's wife and later accidentally reveals himself to the same writer.

Theme: A message I found throughout these 3 Kubrick films was the power of man to push past his limits and evolve. Alex in Clockwork began the film a scumbag criminal and I don't think he's really cured by the end, but the entire middle of the film centers around him trying to change his ways. Jack's evolution in The Shining is a bit more twisted. His turn from family man to psychopath is attributed to the hotel and it's encouragement to kill his family. The butler continually taunts him, asking him whether he has what it takes to do what the hotel wants. In 2001, man is represented by all of humanity. The movie begins with man in his most primitive state, a simple ape. We then jump to man much further evolved, in space, and creating artificial intelligence.

Camera: Kubrick is a fan of the steady cam, often keeping the camera on one plane and moving it only horizontally or vertically to keep up with the action. Only when there is a sudden change in the action, like two twins who are supposed to be dead walking in on Danny, does the camera break the plane and quickly zoom in to show Danny's puzzled face. This style of camera work reminds me of how Wes Anderson shoots his movies, but Kubrick uses more depth than Anderson. While Anderson's movie will stay primarily in that 2D style of setting up a scene, Kubrick uses a lot of mirrors to make his scenes seem more three-dimensional even if the camera isn't doing much. An angle I saw repeated through his movie was when the camera is set underneath the subject and looking up at it. In these scenes, the subject had his head pressed up against a wall or door and had just made some kind of realization. In The Shining, this angle was used after Jack had officially lost it and was on a manhunt for Wendy. He beats at the freezer door for a bit before the scene cuts to the extreme low angle and Jack realizes that the one he really need to find is Danny. A similar scene occurs in Clockwork when Alex is singing "Singing in the Rain" in the bathroom of the writer he had previously robbed and handicapped. We cut to the low-angle as the writer recognizes the song and voice of the man who had done these horrible things to him and he has a little seizure.

Something Kubrick's films lacked was diversity. All his movies feature an all-white cast except the one black man in The Shining. Perhaps this could be explained by the time period these films were made in (2001- 1968, Clockwork- 1971, Shining- 1980). This was before film makers could use an all white cast without getting backlash from the public for being discriminatory. Other than that, I found Kubrick's films to be extremely captivating and timeless. These films are all older than me, but none of them feel that way. Because Kubrick sets his movies in a distant future or isolates his characters so it's like they're the only ones on Earth, he's able to make his own little world where the stories live on forever.