Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Cinderella (2014): CALL discussion notes


The plot. We all know the story. Rebellious servant girl, suffering under capitalist oppression, marries handsome, wealthy and noble foot fetishist. 
The importance. All us girls grew up with this story. It invested us in dreaming of becoming a princess. Then came that damn feminism that rejected that illusion/aspiration and overthrew the assumption that a woman’s salvation and self-realization depended on her landing a man. Her sole-mate.
So Kenneth Branagh retells Cinderella for the current-wave feminist age. Can such an archetypal pre-feminist fable speak to our time and does any magic survive? Does the story still work?

How do the following details address the problem of recasting the old story for the new age:
1. The infant Ella’s gift of imagination, e.g., seeing a cloud as a horse. 
2. The “evil stepmother” and the motivation Branagh gives her both in the early scene of her overhearing Ella with her father and later, when she tells Ella her own life — as a fairy tale.
3. Ella’s renaming as Cinderella.
4. The black court officer’s help.
5. Ella introducing herself to the prince as Cinderella.
6. Ella proposing to him.
7. Ella forgiving the stepmother.
8. Reviving the Freudian song, “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes.”
9. The stepmother’s smashing of Ella’s hidden glass slipper.
10. The extraordinarily, congenitally kind Ella showing courage.
11. The film’s faith in magic.
12. Changing the cartoon’s grandmotherly fairy godmother to an edgy fashionista.
13. Ella’s conversation with the king.
14. The king’s deathbed reference to Ella as the girl who’s always losing her shoes.
15. The stepmother’s connivance (aka blackmail) with the court official.
16. The prince’s characterization. 

Consider the following elements:
1. Why does the house have a chandelier with glass swans on it?
2. What is the thematic point of Ella’s gift request for her father? Is it magical?
3. How are elements of animation woven into the live-action reworking of the Disney original? e.g., the transformation scenes (to and fro), Gus-Gus and the other mice, the satanic cat Lucifer, the bluebirds, etc. 
4. With blank slates (aka unknown actors) as Ella and the prince, how does the casting of familiar actors draw on their personae from earlier work? E.g., Helena Bonham Carter as the fairy godmother, Derek Jacobi as the old ruler, Rob Brydon as the court painter, Cate Blanchett as stepmummy. Hint: Blanchett recently played Blanche du Bois on Broadway, then a variation on that character in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.   
5. What does the clothing signify? Why does the fairy godmother change Ella’s mother’s dress from pink to blue? Why does the stepmother begin in widow black, laced with gold, and end in bright green? (There is always design in the design.)
6. What is the function of the stag?
7. What’s the effect of the fairy godmother delivering the film’s voice-over narration?
8. Ella stays in her family’s house and servitude out of faithfulness to her parents.
 9. The stepmother begins her life story with "Once upon a time." How does this, together with the survival of animation in a live action film, suggest we live in fictions?
     
Consider the significance of the following lines:
1. Bibbity bobbity boo.
2. Have courage and be kind.
3. Go Goosey.
4. Animals talk to us, if only we could understand them. 
5. I can’t drive. I’m a goose.
6. I’m not a footman. I’m a lizard. Enjoy it while you can.
7. Just because it’s done doesn’t mean it’s what should be done.
8. When there is kindness there is goodness. When there is goodness there is magic.
9. You needn’t call me [stepmother]. Madame will do.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

White God: CALL discussion notes


White God — director Kornel Mundruczo (Hungary)

The state here bans free running dogs and taxes mongrels. So 13-year-old Lili (Zsofia Psotta) is heartbroken when her (separated but briefly custodian) father expels her best friend, her dog Hagen (Luke and Body). Bolstered by her faith in love, she sets out to find him and he tries to find her. The film follows Hagen’s adventures in the nightmarish city, his encounters with cruel humans and with other wild dogs. (Lassie Come Home this ain’t. Till the end, maybe.) Hagen leads the wild dog pack in an attack against the city that abused them (Budapest).

Questions to consider

  1. What’s the point of the film’s flashback structure? The body of the film works around to the opening scene. Why start with that shot? What does Lili's coming down a bridge mean?
  2. Why does the film’s first shot open silent?
  3. Why Lili’s and Hagen’s opening tug of war?
  4. What do their names suggest?
  5. Why is Lili characterized as moving from disobedient and sullen through criminal to ... what?
  6. Why is her father a slaughterhouse meat inspector? What’s the point of his having been a professor? 
  7. Define the trajectory of Lili’s relationship with her dad.
  8. How does the father’s ID lanyard read in context?
  9. How does the film relate to the opening quote from Rilke: “Everything terrible is something that needs our love.” Is it?
  10. What’s the point of the TV clip of the Tom and Jerry cartoon Cat Concerto?
  11. Why does Hagen move from family, to banishment, then slavery, then a brutal collective and finally….?
  12. How does the intercutting of specific scenes of Lili and of Hagen establish parallels or contrasts? e.g., her rehearsal with his training to fight; his fight with her club party and bust; her concert with his jailbreak; etc.
  13. How are the dogs characterized? Why? Are the dogs just dogs?
  14. Why the literally dog’s eye view? Why the opening and closing high angle shots (i.e., bird's or god's eye view)?
  15. Do you think there might be a political reading of this film? Religious? Ecological?
  16. What does the closing fade to black mean?
  17. What does the flame-thrower signify?
  18. Did you notice the restaurant owner’s Ben Laden poster?
  19. Why is it titled White God?
  20. Is there some point in the director specifically playing the Afghan who sells Hagen to the brute? What’s the effect of knowing that?
  21. Where are the humans herd-like? Where/why so authoritarian?
  22. How is Budapest depicted?
  23. Where would you place this on the spectrum from animal cartoon to traditional Aesopian fable? Or does its realism put it off that scale completely?
  24. What may be specifically Hungarian about this film (language and music apart)?
  25. How do you read the last shot?  In relation to the first? Does the word “submission” spring to mind? Might the fact “Islam” means “submission” be at all pertinent?
  26. Is that last shot a happy ending or a brief lull? Have Lili and Hagen recovered their lost closeness? 
  27. What do the school band and music signify? 
  28. Why the references to Wagner’s Tannhuauser? Does it go beyond the theme of the redemptive power of love and God’s forgiveness?


Consider the implication of these lines:

  1. “So you’ve tripped up the ladder.”
  2. “That’s fit to consume.”
  3. “No kiss?”
  4. “Your dog is not a Hungarian dog.”
  5. “You’re going to fuckin work for me.”
  6. “You’ve grown up.” [Translation: I’ve lost one I loved.]
  7. “The dogs are not acting like dogs but like a well organized army.”
  8. “They’re not after the meat.”
  9. “Give them a little more time.”

Monday, March 23, 2015

'71: CALL discussion notes

                     ’71   — director Yann Demange
Background. “The Troubles”: Northern Ireland was split between the mainly Catholic Republican faction that wanted independence from Britain and the mainly Protestant Loyalist opposition. In 1971 the British forces suffered their first fatalities and the rebel IRA was about to make its mark with Bloody Sunday.
The film: After a riot in 1971 Belfast a young British soldier, Gary Hook, is separated from his unit, due to his tactically idealistic (i.e., well-meaning idiot) commanding officer’s incompetence. He spends the night threading the IRA’s hostile streets, unable to distinguish enemy from ally (Both sides wear green). In addition to fleeing the violent IRA Provos, after encountering an undercover British paramilitary force he has to evade them, too. Hook lucks into a precocious 9-year-old urchin (a Loyalist whose father was killed by the IRA) who shows him through secret passages. A pub bomb takes the kid’s arms and wounds Hook, who’s saved by a Catholic medic and his daughter.

Consider these questions:
  1. Aristotle distinguished between “history” — the particulars that happened on one specific occasion — and the superior “fiction” — universal patterns that recur time and again. What qualifies this film for “fiction”? That is, rather than being just about there and then, what makes it about here and now?
  2. How is the song, Elmore James’s “The Sky is Crying,” relevant? The last shot?
  3. What’s the thematic effect of the pacing and the handheld camera?
  4. Why does Hook suffer a graduation of violence, from training to physical assault, to a bombing, to an administrative abuse?
  5. How do the opening scenes encapsulate the film’s themes? 
  6. How are the opposing sides in this war characterized?
  7. Why do both sides wear green? (Remember, you’re analyzing a film.)
  8. Why is the raw recruit hero named Hook?
  9. What is the point of rebel teenager Sean, as young and naive as Hook, assigned to kill him? How is Sean characterized? How does he compare to the 9-year-old and to Hook’s kid brother? What’s the point in this pattern?
  10. What’s the relation between the two daughters, the medic’s and the homeowner’s (where Hook takes brief refuge)?
  11. What’s the significance of Hook’s last actions? How does the film’s end relate to its opening?
  12. What’s the point of the film’s colour scheme?
  13. What thematic function is served by all the children? 
  14. Why make the film now? (i)From the Irish/British perspective? (ii) From us outsiders’?
  15. How is the film “disarming”?
  16. Why does Hook have so little speech?
  17. The military court concludes “It was a confused situation.” Was it? Who/what confused it?
  18. Is there any optimism in this work?
  19. Why the allusion to David Bowie?
  20. How is our response to Hook’s incompetent commander inflected by our sense of his vulpine superior?
  21. Why is there no priest in the film?
  22. Compare the three boys. Compare the two daughters.

Discuss the significance of these quotes:
  1. “I’m not going out of the country. So you should feel good about that.”
  2. “How was college?”
  3. To commanding officers you’re “just a piece of meat.”
  4. “Rich cunts telling stupid cunts to shoot the poor cunts.”
  5. “You don’t know? I’ve fuckin heard it all now.”
  6. “It’s all under control.”
  7. “The army looks after its own.”

Postscript: Unrelated to the film, if you’re curious about Belfast’s condition today check Patrick Keefe’s “Where the Bodies are Buried,” New Yorker, March 16/15, pp. 42-61. 

Why is that “unrelated to the film”?

Thursday, March 12, 2015

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

What was originally a malapropism ends the film and summarizes its theme: “There is no present like time.”
Our one great present is time, the time we have, life. In their various solitudes and couplings and triangles all the characters here resolve to make the most of their remaining time. Living fully in the present drinks life to the lees (Tennyson).
All the first film’s senior citizens are back, with a couple of new ones to shake things up: David Strathairn for Maggie Smith and Richard Gere for hotel manager Sonny’s mother. The main plot involves Sonny trying to attract US investment to add another hotel to his “chain” (making it two links) that caters to elderly have-nots trying to finish their days in style.
        The film’s formal structure is built around Sonny’s marriage. His commercial union threatens to make his romantic one secondary — but he recovers his balance and orchestrates both at the end.
One recurring issue is wouldbe lovers’ fear. The Judi Dench and Bill Nighy characters are almost stymied by his shyness. His potential as a lover is like his public speaking—he can’t do it without an outside feed, which she manages to exploit. Ronald Pickup and his partner have to overcome her fear of monogamy. Penelope Wilton pretends to a romance she doesn’t yet have — to give her the confidence to initiate another one. But she’s afraid to approach her Ex without the pretence of one. Celie Imre’s character is the most courageous, switching between two elderly Indian men before settling on the more attractive — but lower class — driver. Nor is fear the preserve of the old. Sonny almost runs his engagement aground with his jealousy of a successful friend.
The spectacular wedding at the end not only seals both the romantic and business plots. It infuses the film with a spectacular celebration of life, colour and energy. The dance combines traditional and contemporary movements. All the fogeys join in. They’ll get the most of their present, time. That point is poignantly emphasized by a late scene which flirts with a principal’s death but pulls back. For now.
Come to think of it, isn’t that what a sequel essentially is? A second gift of the time that seemed to have been irredeemably spent in the first film. As characters can have as many beginnings as their time allows, a film can have as many sequels … as their audience attends

Monday, March 9, 2015

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

This film reminds us that there is a counter-culture in Iran. They too have sex, drugs, rock’n’roll (both American and Iranian) and even breasts.
The film had an American production team, American producers, was shot in California but has an Iranian director, cast and dialogue. So it is an Iranian film however outsourced. The setting is a bleak, isolated city dominated by a monster power plant and oil well pumps. It evokes the climax of Welles’s Touch of Evil.
Director Ana Lily Amirpour presents the underbelly of Iranian society. There’s the wealthy spoiled playgirl who takes ecstasy from handy gardener Arash but won’t kiss him. The decadent  macho pimp turns Arash’s old dad into an addict, then claims Arash’s sportscar in payment. He exploits his whore Atti. Finally, the titular vampire seems out to avenge injustices done women when she fangs the pimp and old man but spares the little boy and Atti, finally driving off with beau Arash.
    Where the traditional vampire is driven by sustaining thirst this one also robs and plunders, showing a certain readiness for life in our world. Arash’s piercing of her ears for his gift of stolen earrings is both a deflowering and a reversal of her bloodletting. Her discriminate killing keeps her from being labelled a terrorist. She’s closer to a supernatural force enforcing the prophet’s forgotten respect for woman. She wears the hood.
Of course the film has a political undercurrent. It’s impossible to ignore its putative setting: a bleak Iran with a huge gap between the oligarchs and the despairing population. The only national energy is its echo of Western rock, not the oil that’s characterized as robotic pumps. This film’s world has no hope or beauty — except for the hard-working and devoted son Arash and the vampire he loves.
     Of course their escape is futile. Wherever they go they‘ll be doomed to their past. We’re not told but of course we know she’ll outlive him. By centuries.
In the only explicit political reference, a Reagan mask bobs up at the drug party. As president Reagan arranged to sell Iran arms — despite the embargo for having held American diplomats hostage (for that story don’t see Argo) — he’s an emblem of the daylight lifelessness for which the Iranian regime still stands. He’s America’s dark side in contrast to the bright side of the counterculture. 
     This is a refreshing B film with strong visual style and a healthy dose of sickly atmosphere. Perhaps if Secretary of State Kerry fails to negotiate a gussied up surrender to Iran, his deputy Dennis Rodman might swing something with this set.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Winter Sleep

Nuri Ceylan’s Winter Sleep explores the need to find values one can live by in the contemporary world free of religious trappings. (That’s how the drunken teacher Levent puts it: in raki veritas.) Set and filmed in rural Turkey it represents the elemental pivot point between Islam and the West.
The film is essentially the anatomy of Aydin, a secular intellectual/artist/businessman, who pretends to conscience and morality as he judges (and oppresses) others but falls well short on both counts himself, frozen by his arrogance. The film opens on an arid landscape, under infernal billowing white smoke. It ends on the hero’s estate covered in snow and ice.
After 25 years acting on stage and screen (but never in soaps!) Aydin has retreated to run a petty empire in the countryside. He owns a small hotel which he keeps “natural,” preferring muddy roads over gravel. He inherited local property so is very wealthy, a condition he also defends as “natural.” He writes a weekly column in a small local paper, but won’t venture into a major publication. The fish feels larger in the small pond. He’s so proudly isolated he has never been to the nearby village. He gets a vicarious thrill out of his adventurous tenants, like the motorcyclist and the young Japanese hikers. When Aydin gets an email from a local teacher he summons his wife and neighbour to hear her adulation, under the pretence of asking their advice on responding to her request for financial help.
Ceylan makes Aydin admirable and sympathetic at the outset, then gradually exposes him. His vanity in reading that email is our first clue to his failings, as well as his alienation from his wife Nihal. At first a beautiful enigmatic phantom in the home, she emerges as a repressed, frozen-out young woman who has finally found self-realization in running a charity project, raising funds to improve the village’s schools for the poor. 
Aydin spoils that by intruding upon her group’s climactic meeting, then by insisting upon taking over her bookkeeping on the project. He says he suspects the others of fraud and wants to preserve their family name. That, we later learn, he has already compromised when he turned earthquake victims away from his hotel in order to accommodate the paying members of relief agencies. His association, not Nihal’s inexperience, would poison her project. Aydin is at his ugliest when he smiles condescendingly throughout Nihal’s weeping complaint at his destructive treatment.
As coldly detached as Aydin now is from his wife, after years of conflict, he also tries to remove himself from what’s happening around him. He doesn’t listen to messages. When a second-generation tenant falls into rental arrears, Aydin tells the younger brother Hamdi not to bother him anymore. He claims his assistant Hidayet and his lawyers do everything on their own. Aydin feels no responsibility for the cruelty a wild horse suffers when caught for him. 
He wants a horse in order to live up to the image on the hotel’s website. As he quotes Omar Sharif’s advice: “Acting is honesty.” To Aydin no other honesty is required but a persuasive act. Despite his commitment to Turkish theatre, his walls are adorned with theatre posters from the west, Shakespeare and Caligula. His hotel is named Othello. The cosmopolitan pretence rings as hollow as his moralizing.
Aydin frees the horse when he leaves Nihal and sets out for Istanbul. He is jolted into self-awareness when he instead goes for a drunken evening and morning hunt with neighbour Suavi and schoolteacher Levent. Levent’s babble confronts Aydin with his earthquake shame. The combination of brandy and guilt give the controlled and controlling Aydin his first breakdown. He vomits. 
The next morning he shoots a rabbit and finds it, still quivering with last life. That breaks down the detachment he has maintained between himself and the abuses of nature he has ordered, whether toward animals or his tenants. He returns to beg Nihal to forgive and to stay with him. When he admits he knows she doesn’t love him anymore but doesn’t want to be away from her, he lets her define their relationship. In submitting to her he shows he has grown from his catharsis. He awakens from his winter sleep.
At the end Aydin finally starts writing his long-researched history of Turkish theatre. At least beginning that book means he is finally putting out something significant, instead of just absorbing the energies of others and writing a pettily controversial column. In morality as in writing (as the travel writer observed), “The hard part is beginning.” In his argument with his sister Necla Aydin stresses the need to do something, not just think about it, assuming his local superiority over her inactivity.
In a breakfast conversation Necla proposes to confront evil by submitting to it. She postulates that instead of resisting evil, thus further provoking its agent, by submitting to it one can perhaps arouse the malfeasant’s conscience. She even considers asking her drunken ex-husband to forgive her for divorcing him, in hopes that might convert him to sobriety. “Islam,” of course, means “submission,” though that usually refers to Mohammad not to evil. 
In addition to his secularity, the other Islamic cornerstones that Aydin violates are brotherhood and charity. Neighbour Suavi is literally what Aydin is metaphorically: a lonely isolate, who after his wife’s death closed off several rooms and retreated to his living room stove. But Suavi has warm relationships with others, like the teacher, and he has actively joined Nihal’s project. 
Aydin’s callous treatment of his suffering tenants and the earthquake incident prove his total lack of charity. When he gives Nihal a large donation it’s to try to buy off her anger at his intrusion. Of course, he tells Suavi and Levent about his “anonymous” gift to bolster his image. His “charity” is disqualified by his self-interest.
When Nihal gives that money to the unfortunate tenants she seems to counteract her husband, turning his conscience money to effective use. That family is a microcosm of current Islam. The younger brother Hamdi is the local imam, who gives sermons and struggles on a small salary to support his jobless older brother Ishmael, his sister-in-law and nephew, and their aging, ailing and ungrateful mother. Yet Aydin writes a column criticizing the imam for not setting a proper example in maintaining his yard. Despite their long tenancy, Aydin has allowed the family to be dunned by a collection agency, the police, and confiscators of their TV and other goods. Ishmael was humiliated by an assault in front of his family. 
Hamdi is a good man, who serves the community with Koranic wisdom. But he proves powerless trying to mediate between the wealthy landlord and the violent rebel. Hamdi reluctantly accepts the money from Nihal, but Ishmael proves self-destructive in his sense of violated honor. Ishmael went to jail for -- in a perversion of Islamic respect for women -- stabbing a brute who stole his wife’s underwear and then teased him. Now, as he recounts his various shame by Aydin, he rejects the money that would restore his family’s honour and throws it in the fire instead. That bears out Aydin’s warning that Nahil is naive in her sense of people’s character. 
“Ishmael,” of course, was Hagar’s son, the original Moslem banished from Abraham’s family. The original Moslem here becomes the first radical. When he slaps his son Ilyas for smashing Aydin’s van window with a rock, then breaks his own window with his hand, Ishmael tries the Old Testament “eye for an eye” justice. 
The Grade V boy Ilyas is an intensely resentful figure who stones the landlord’s van, then falls into a faint and a fever when his imam uncle tries to get him to apologize to Aydin and kiss his imperious hand. If Ishmael’s burning of the money evokes the self-destruction of the Islamic militant, son Ilyas represents the outer-directed destruction to come. When Ilyas broke the window and fled, he fell into a stream. Hidayet drives him home so he wouldn’t get sick. But the boy gets pneumonia when the imam brings him to apologize to Aydin. The incident causes what Hidayet tried to prevent. 
     This three-hour-plus film has such long, meaty discussions that a single viewing can’t be expected to apprehend its multiple themes and nuances. But this should encourage you to undertake this challenging experience.