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.