Beasts of the Southern Wild

In Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild a nine-year-old girl, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), struggles to survive in an apocalyptic Delta flood-zone, while her only parent, her father Wink (Dwight Henry), comes and goes and finally dies, and the thawing arctic ice unleashes a rampaging herd of prehistoric giant boars, called aurochs.
     As her name suggests, Hushpuppy is what she has been constantly told to do, hush up. She's a spontaneous animal energy, on the domestic end of the spectrum opposite to the aurochs. Her father's name points to his intermittent sobriety, vision, understanding, connection to his responsibilities.  

The film is a vision of the beginning and the end of life. The denizens of “The Bathtub” have only brief security against the floods, imperiled by the levees built to protect the mainland. "Bathtub" connotes cleanliness, the purity of the pre-civilized, and the assumption of contained, controlled water -- which the residents find they don't really have. 
      As this represents the beginning of life, the wild community is an informal society, sharing what little they have, until the more advanced -- our -- society tears them away, offering Wink medicine and putting Hushpuppy into an incongruous blue dress. The Bathtub adults are always asking what the stray Hushpuppy needs. In their unstructured world, “The Bathtub has more holidays than the whole rest of the world.”  On the other hand, all animal life here is “meat,” without distinction between human and  beast. As Hushpuppy observes in the outside world's hospital, “When an animal gets sick here, they plug it into the wall.” In the flood, “For the animals that didn't have a dad to put them in a boat, the end of the world already happened.” Though the Bathtub denizens disdain of the niceties of civilization, their own hopeless ignorance, squalor, and self-destruction preclude our sentimentalizing The Noble Savage.
      As the film is told from the nine-year-old girl's perspective, the world is full of mystery and magic -- and naivety. She is struggling to make sense of the universe, so her statements have more sweep than reality: “I see that I am a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes it right.... The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece... the entire universe will get busted.” She understands her father’s death before she accepts it: “Everybody loses the thing that made them. It's even how it's supposed to be in nature. The brave men stay and watch it happen, they don't run.” When Hushpuppy sends the dead Wink off on the floating pyre he wanted, she recasts the imagery that earlier she flung in a fit of anger: “I hope you die and after you die I'll go to your grave and eat birthday cake all by myself.” That's when she sets the fire that destroys her house. Ultimately the unreliable father believes he has prepared his daughter to survive on her own. That would make his death her rebirth. But he is simply reiterating his delusion when -- after the floods have destroyed all their sustaining flora and fauna -- he declares "I'm in control." Similarly, he tried to stop the heavy rains by drunkenly firing his rifle at the sky.  

Hushpuppy's voice-over begins with her -- bathetic -- sense of portentous pulse: “All the time, everywhere, everything's hearts are beating and squirting, and talking to each other the ways I can't understand. Most of the time they probably be saying: I'm hungry, or I gotta poop.” As she listens to a bird’s heartbeat, she adds “But sometimes they be talkin' in codes.” Like the other meat, humans. Wink says her mother left them because when she first saw Hushpuppy the mother’s heart beat so strongly she thought she’d explode. When he describes her mother as so hot she would set pots of water boiling by walking past them, he inadvertently prompts Hushpuppy to set her destructive oven blaze. Poetry comes natural to this elemental people. 
      We're encouraged to believe Hushpuppy may recover her mother when a Charon figure rows her across a  Styx to a brothel where all the children are embraced and fed by the prostitutes, who themselves crave a maternal order. This sentiment is undercut by the score, where Fats Waller sings "If this isn't love, it will have to do, until the real thing comes along."
       Auguring the end, a fire destroys the home Hushpuppy’s mother left her. Rains flood the entire community, forcing evacuation. But Hushpuppy has learned her father’s resolve:”They think we're all gonna drown down here. But we ain't going nowhere.” The aurochs -- an emblem of wild brutish male power -- run riot until Hushpuppy faces them down. “Strong animals know when your hearts are weak” -- and hers isn’t. In this fantasy Hushpuppy grows from frisky kid to force of nature. The young female perspective draws on the archetype of woman as source of creation. The teacher makes woman also the source of culture.  

As she hides in a cardboard box from the rampaging fire and her angry father, Hushpuppy draws a caveman image of herself on the wall, her intimation of immortality: “When daddy kill me I won't be forgotten. I'm recording my story for the scientists in the future. In a million years, when kids go to school, they gonna know: Once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in The Bathtub.” But in the film’s last shot, the survivor Hushpuppy walks in the distance with her friends as the waters cover the path in front of her. Like a swampy island in a flood the child disappears into the adult, innocence into experience.

Carnage

Yasmina Reza wrote the source play and (with the director) co-wrote the screenplay, but Carnage (nee God of Carnage) is a pure Polanski film. Its theme is the one that has defined Roman Polanski’s work from Knife in the Water, Cul de sac and The Fearless Vampire Killers on: the savagery that underlies our thin veneer of civilization -- and constantly threatens to erupt. As the lawyer (!) admits, “I believe in the god of carnage. The god whose rule’s been unchallenged since time immemorial.”

Before the drama begins, 11-year-old Zachary Cowan has hit classmate Ethan Longstreet in the face with a stick, ruining at least one tooth. But haven't we developed beyond the "tooth for a tooth"? Not here. Or there. Their parents have met to discuss the issue. Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly) Longstreet are liberals. She writes about ethnological art history and argues for human rights and justice, so she knows from savagery. He sells kitchen equipment so he knows domestica and cleanliness. Zachary’s parents are conservatives, Nancy (Kate Winslet) an investment broker and Alan (Christoph Waltz) a lawyer, here constantly taking cell phone calls to contain a scandal about the dangerous side effects of one of his client company’s pharmaceuticals. 

As the film opens the Cowans are leaving the Longstreets but are then drawn back in. They will continue to leave and return for the duration, establishing the inescapability of the root issue. You can move in and out of  social roles but the primeval grip will pull you back. The couples’ initial agreement disintegrates as their discussion extends. Then each marriage reveals its tensions. 

By film end each character has been exposed, each pretense to civilization destroyed. The good citizen Penelope turns aggressive, first verbally against the aggressive boy’s parents, then physically against her husband. Foster plays her as an arid, pinched attacker. Nancy is cooler but she (properly) resents her husband’s work obsession and under the strain (and perhaps Penelope’s proud fruit cobbler) vomits. Thus defiling Penelope’s rare Kokoschka catalogue dispels the notion that even classic Expressionist art can sublimate our radical wildness. 

The lawyer embodies the abuse of the law, as he immorally defends his dangerous client and blithely accepts that his son “is a savage.” He admits he has no trouble following his own baser impulses. The kitchenware salesman is the most sympathetic of the four, the character least invested in the pretensions of civilization. But in his ostensible cleanliness he abandons his daughter’s hamster to the Brooklyn jungle. His tendency to compromise only infuriates his supposedly justice-centered wife. Both marriages shivered, the characters realign themselves along gender lines, the cigar-smoking men against the cell-phone hating women. This realignment is another form of regression, preferring a martial sexual identity over their marital oaths.  

Zachary’s violence is revealed to have had an external cause. Ethan refused to let him into his gang and called him a snitch. On Broadway, James (aka Tony) Gandolfini had a spark to his memory of once having led a gang himself; that's missing in Reilly's line.  The whole drama is a kind of snitch, because it blows the whistle on our pretence to have outgrown savagery. By film end each parent has exceeded their children’s verbal violence and emotional abuse. The boys’ gang, of course, is a miniature of social organization, but it embodies the exclusion of some Other rather than some positive community. 

      In addition to this essential Polanski theme the director places his personal stamp on the film in two ways. First, he makes a cameo appearance as the frightened neighbor who opens the door to check on the hallway furore. This signature device cites the exemplar of transfer-of-guilt dramas, Alfred Hitchcock. As well, Polanski's cameo appearance represents a significant reduction from his earlier adoption of featured roles in his films. He appears just long enough to remind us he's in hiding.

Moreover, he significantly casts his son Elvis Polanski as Zachary, the lad whose impulsive violence triggers the action. In this casting the father visits his notoriety upon his son. Polanski adds to the play a frame behind the opening titles and closing credits where in long shot we see first the initial tussle and finally -- the boys’ natural reconciliation. The latter touch speaks volumes. It suggests that children left to themselves will work out their own differences. If their parents get involved their greater power will only worsen the situation, making it more dangerous. By further implication, Polanski suggests that kids get over their traumas, especially if left to their own desires and codes of conduct. Given that Polanski is still on the run for having skipped out on his trial for allegedly seducing a minor -- who, not incidentally, has publically forgiven him -- his adaptation of this play becomes especially personal. Polanski's closing note confirms the lasting power of men and their signature gadgets: the lawyer's drowned and dried cell phone rings again. You have heard the sound of one axe grinding.   

Robot and Frank -- CALL Discussion Group

Robot and Frank

directed by Jake Schreier

     In Cold Spring, “in the very near future,” Frank (Frank Langella) is a retired cat burglar. One of his few contacts with the outside world is a lonely librarian Jennifer (Susan Sarandon). His grown children are worried about his lost memory and his inability to look after himself. Rather than put him in a home, a “memory center,” his son Hunter (James Marsden) buys him a robot companion (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) programmed to care for him. This despite daughter Madison’s (Liv Tyler) confusion between disliking robots and her political opposition to enslaving them. First the man has to subvert the disciplinarian robot’s fixation with good health. Then the man and machine end up planning a heist together. Ostensibly for Jennifer, they steal the library’s rare Gustave Dore edition of Don Quixote. Their partnership is briefly interrupted when the do-gooder Madison insists on moving in, turns off the robot, and tries to serve its functions. She restores Frank’s Captain Crunch. Finally Frank persuades her to turn it back on. The team steals the posh jewelry from Jake (Jeremy Strong), who has bought the library to replace books with the new technology, “to re-imagine the library experience” and make it “retro-cool” with “augmented reality stuff.” The police computer identifies Frank as a main suspect, in view of his previous jail terms, but Frank evades their investigation and search for the loot. He saves himself by taking the robot’s advice and erasing its memory. The film ends with Frank in a home, enjoying a family picnic and saddened that he doesn’t have a personal robot as other inmates do.   

Questions

1. How is Don Quixote a central key to this film? Mr Darcy?
2. What genres does this film play with? The buddy heist? Sci-Fi? The odd couple?
3. Isn’t this also a great love story? A man forgets his wife but discovers he’s still drawn to her anyway. There’s a tragedy in the forgetting and another tragedy in the restirring of ardor. 
4. How does the opening scene -- where Frank burglarizes a home and safe that he didn’t realize were his own -- parallel and validate his climactic revelation about his wife?
5. What are the implications of the hero’s criminal past and its revivifying resurrection? “It would be a crime not do it.” How is this related to Madison’s ambivalence/confusion about robots and third-world poverty?
6. Over the end credits there is documentary footage of assisted-living robots already developed in our ”real” world. How does that affect our reading of the film?
7. What is the point of the central family’s names? Their surname is Weld. And “Cold Spring”? 
8. What current social or cultural trends does the film reflect upon or satirize?
9. “The very near future” is established by minor extrapolations from our present technology, e.g., see-thru cell phones, voice-announced phone calls, wall-TV phones,    the library robot, slightly grotesque hair and dress styles. Hunter’s Audi has a (robot-like?) remote opener/closer. Perhaps the most dramatic new technology is the single-passenger car we see early in Frank’s walk. What might it symbolize?
10. Why did Harry’s restaurant change into the Blush beauty bar? What’s the point of Frank stealing cat soaps?
11. The new library is doing away with books because it will be “about community.” Really?
12. What’s the irony in the man who has lost his memory erasing his machine friend and servant’s?

How do these dialogue lines open up the film?

1 --Hello, Frank. It is a pleasure to meet you. 

   --How do you know? 

2. Connection lost.
3.Did you steal a fizzy bath bomb, you son of a bitch?
4.I’m not familiar with that title.
5.We’re gonna clean up.... I want to go out clean.
6.Take what’s most valuable by the ounce.
7.You’re so square you’re practically avant-garde.
8.They’re selling the feel of security.

The Queen of Versailles -- CALL DIscussion Group

The Queen of Versailles

Director Lauren Greenfield

     This documentary follows David Siegel, the powerful 74-year-old owner of the Westgate Resorts time-share company, as he and his beauty queen wife Jacqueline, 43, build the largest single family private home in America. I won’t go into the stats because real estate porn should be indulged in private. But their current 26,000-square foot mansion -- which will ultimately become Jacquie’s “my private island” -- is a bit cramped. The new building project was supposed to be the film’s focus. But in 2008 the US and global economies are shaken by the  Lehman bankruptcy, the subprime mortgage collapse and the fragility of debt-riddled countries, companies and families. Forced to downscale, the ostentatious Siegels abandon their unfinished dream home, putting it on the market for a mere $75 million (The banks want them to ask 15). Will the financial challenge affect this happy average American family?   

First, the sermon. In two parts.

(i)The popular misconception is that a documentary is factual, unlike the “fiction” or unreality of the non-documentary. In fact, a documentary is as much its director’s fabrication as a fictional feature is. The director may use found rather than staged material, but sometimes even stages scenes with the real-life characters. (e.g., Siegel charges that the director staged the stretch limo-to-McDonalds visit.) The director still chooses the subject and is constantly making choices in what and how to shoot, how to edit, and what “story” or themes to pull out of all that raw material. The documentary can be as personal (read “subjective,” “creative,” “biased”) as any fictional work. Did you really think Michael Moore is an objective, disinterested chronicler of his time? Conclusion: a documentary can be analyzed with the same strategies and rigour as a fiction film for the director’s meaning. Cherchez the themes.

(ii) Remember Aristotle’s distinction between History and Poetry. By poetry he meant what we call Fiction, not just rhythms about Man’s first disobedience and to justify God’s ways to man or rhymes about that epic hero from Nantucket. History, Aristotle wrote, retails just what happened once. Fiction (his “poetry”) is about what happens all the time, eternal patterns of life. He therefore ranked Fiction above History. The latter may record merely the result of the interplay of accidents at the time; it has no significance beyond itself. But we turn to fiction for the essential models of life. All fiction implicitly begins with “Once upon a time.” That’s the lie on which the truth of fiction is based. It really didn’t happen...once. It recurs, even/especially if it never happened exactly in the way the story is told. Romeo and Juliet would be true even if there never had been Montagues and Capulets. The best documentary will therefore transcend the limiting particulars of history to convey the larger truths of a fiction.

Now, to the questions.

1. So, okay, is The Queen of Versailles history or fiction? If the latter, what truths beyond this particular case are told? What do either David or Jacqueline mean, or signify? Their house? Their saga? How is this film about us, about mankind, our culture?
2. Every new work of art enters the field of possible connection to every other work of art  --  past, current, future (See Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”). The scene in the Siegel’s storage building evokes Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s classic study of an arrogant, ambitious, cold empire builder, itself a fictionalized version of William Randolph Hearst. Welles’s working title was The American. How is the Siegel film illuminated or inflected by connection to Welles’s?
3.   The camera prowls through the Siegels’ real world. But once a real object appears in a story, on screen, in a work of art whatever the genre along the Reality-Fantasy spectrum, it ceases to be just itself and has the possibility of being read as a symbol. What symbols crop up here? e.g., the wastepaper baskets full of Barbie dolls; the wall to wall dog shit; the Risk and Monopoly games David gets for the last Christmas and the kids’ “In a Pickle”; his Life Fitness treadmill? What about the motif of putting out the lights, from the domestic to “the brightest sign on The Strip”? The Filipino nanny’s Plymouth sweatshirt? The Jesus Calling book on the desk when a staff member phones clients trying to raise money?
4. So, too, language doesn’t just happen here accidentally. It also has the potential to resonate. For example, in this context, what does “time share” come to mean? At the end David is trying to “buy time.” What other metaphors emerge from this true-life situation? The company’s dupes called “mooches”? “There she is,” Jacquie says, returning to the old, small house of her childhood, but also echoing the Miss America Show climax? In what ways is Jacquie still an Engineer? And what about the real estate agent pronouncing the palace “Ver-size”?
5. Where do you see Director Greenfield inflecting the material through her choices in editing? e.g., cut from David saying Jacquie is “a good mother” to the nanny bathing two kids. Cut from the poor black couple tempted to buy a time share to Jacquie’s incredible shoe collection. Or the cut from “You have to decide what you want to be when you grow up” to a darting snake? In camera placement? e.g., the interplay between closeups and long shots, like Jacquie and the director dwarfed by the dream house skeleton. 
6. Do the opening -- David in his gilded throne -- and closing -- the Disney fireworks outside the abandoned, junked dream home -- shots suggest anything? Are they related?
7. Where is the “vicious circle”? How does David’s parents’ fate, being lured into blowing their wad in Vegas, reflect on his tale?
8. Who is the film’s villain? Who are the “pushers”?
9. What, finally, is Greenfield’s attitude toward the Siegels? How do the minor characters -- e.g., the nanny, Jacquie’s high school best friend Tina, their bankrupted driver, the adult son -- serve to reveal this? Does her -- or our -- attitude towards them change?
10. Why did the director omit the 2008 court order that Siegel pay an ex-employee $610,000 for battery? The plaintiff claimed she declined his offer of $1million to have sex with him.
11. How/why does the director keep us aware of the process of filmmaking?
12. What significance emerges from these lines:
1. “Mommy, what are all those people doing on our plane?”
2. “What’s the name of my driver?”
3. “I’d rather not say, because it may not necessarily have been legal.”
4. “I didn’t know we even had a lizard.”
5. “This is the staircase I’d use if I were visiting the children.”
6. “the largest time share company in the world”
7. “There’s no place like home.”
8. “Trust me.”
9. “My husband deserves the new house.”
10. They didn’t set out to build America’s largest home. “It just happened.”
11. “Because I could.”
12. “Make sure they buy something.”
13. The driver observes, “It’s feast or famine.”
14. “They might have to go to college now.”
15. “No-one is without guilt.”

Now, back to the sermon. An epilogue. Or two.

(i)Unlike a fiction, the characters in a documentary -- if they’re lucky -- live on. In this case David Siegel sued the director and the film’s distributor for defamation, for claiming his company was not paying its bills. He insists he is financially secure, his company booms again and he is resuming construction of his ‘umble abode. Jackie talks of doing a reality TV show. Not because she needs the money, presumably.

(ii) From BloombergBusinessweek, Siegel explains how he got Bush elected:

“Whenever I saw a negative article about [Al] Gore, I put it in with the paychecks of my 8,000 employees. I had my managers do a survey on every employee. If they liked Bush, we made them register to vote. But not if they liked Gore. The week before [the election] we made 80,000 phone calls through my call center—they were robo-calls. On Election Day, we made sure everyone who was voting for Bush got to the polls. I didn’t know he would win by 527 votes. Afterward, we did a survey among the employees to find out who voted who wouldn’t have otherwise. One thousand of them said so.”

The Master -- CALL Discussion Group

The Master 

written, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

In the interests of completeness and laziness, today’s plot synopsis comes from cletrab-1 on IMDB:

Alcoholic Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is a World War II veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and struggling to adjust to a post-war society. He finds a job as a photographer at a local department store taking family portraits, but is eventually fired for assaulting a customer after drunkenly harassing him. Freddie then finds work on a cabbage farm, but one of his home-made alcoholic beverages poisons an elderly coworker due to its questionable contents. Freddie is chased off the farm by his employers and becomes a drifter.

One night, Freddie, while intoxicated, boards the yacht of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the leader of a philosophical movement known as The Cause. Despite Freddie's intrusion, Dodd allows Freddie to stay because he enjoys his drinks (revealed to be made with paint thinner), even going so far as to extend an invitation to Freddie to attend the marriage of Dodd's daughter (Ambyr Childers). Dodd exposes Freddie to the exercise known as Processing, during which Freddie is subjected to heavy psychological questioning with the intent of conquering any past traumas Freddie may have. It is revealed that his father has died, his mother is institutionalized, he may have had an incestuous relationship with his aunt, and he abandoned the love of his life, a young girl named Doris (Madisen Beaty) who wrote to him while he was at war. Freddie takes a liking to The Cause, and Dodd sees something exceptional in Freddie. Together they begin to travel along the East Coast spreading the teachings of The Cause. However, Freddie's violent and erratic behavior has not improved, nor has his alcoholism. At a dinner party in New York, a man questions Dodd's methods and statements, and Freddie responds by assaulting him later in the night.

Other members of The Cause begin to worry about Freddie's behavior, despite Dodd's insisting that Freddie is an important part of the movement. While visiting in Philadelphia, Dodd's wife Peggy (Amy Adams) tells Freddie that he must quit drinking if he wishes to stay, to which he agrees. However, he has no true intention of keeping his promise. Freddie criticizes Dodd's son Val (Jesse Plemons) for disregarding his father's teachings, but he responds by informing Freddie that his father is a fraud and all of his teachings are being improvised. Dodd is arrested for practicing medicine without proper qualifications, and Freddie is also arrested for assaulting police officers. When he is imprisoned, he responds by destroying parts of his jail cell and smashing his head on the top bunk bed. Dodd attempts to calm him down from the neighboring cell but Freddie erupts in a tirade, questions everything that Dodd has taught him and accuses him of being a fake. The two men trade insults until Dodd turns his back. They eventually reconcile upon their release, but members of The Cause have become more suspicious and fearful of Freddie, believing him to be insane or an undercover agent.

Freddie returns to the exercises performed by The Cause, but becomes increasingly angry and frustrated with his lack of results and repetition of the exercises. Eventually he passes the tests, with Dodd hugging him in approval. They travel to Phoenix, Arizona, to release Dodd's latest work, which he was initially hesitant to publish. When Dodd's publisher criticizes the quality of the book and its teachings to Freddie, Freddie drags him outside and assaults him. Helen Sullivan (Laura Dern), a key member of The Cause, upon reading the book, questions Dodd for contradicting previously-established practices in the new book, and Dodd loses his temper publicly. During another exercise in which Freddie is supposed to ride a motorcycle at high speed through the desert towards an object in the distance, he instead abandons Dodd, rides the motorcycle out of the desert, and decides to leave The Cause. He attempts to rekindle his relationship with Doris, but learns from her mother that seven years have passed since he last saw her and that she is now happily married with children and is living in Alabama. Freddie leaves disappointed, but seems pleased that Doris has made a happy life for herself.

While sleeping in a movie theater, Freddie has a "vision" of Dodd, who calls him by telephone, having mysteriously located him. Dodd informs Freddie that he is now residing in England and that Freddie must travel and join him as soon as possible. Taking the dream literally, he travels across the Atlantic to reunite with Dodd. Upon Freddie's arrival at Dodd's school, Peggy concludes that Freddie has no intention of improving his life and should not be involved in The Cause at all. Dodd finally realizes that his wife is correct, and that Freddie must venture out to the world and take his own path. He gives Freddie an ultimatum: Stay with The Cause and devote himself to it for the rest of his life, or leave and never come back. Freddie decides to leave. After leaving, he meets a woman at a pub and has sex with her, while reciting the questions Dodd had first posed to him during their first session at sea. The film ends with the image of Freddie on the beach, lying in the sand, next to the sand sculpture of a woman he had earlier defiled.

Questions:

1. Disregarding the analogy of L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology, what would you say is the subject of this film?
2. What do Lancaster Dodd and Freddie Quell have in common? How do they differ? How do these points define the film’s themes? e.g., Does Freddie’s hooch parallel Lancaster’s Cause? Consider especially Lancaster’s “You seem so familiar to me,” their scene in adjacent cells and their last, weeping scene together.
3. Our first view of Freddie is a thin strip of face, nose up, between a barrier and his helmet. He closes his eyes. Our first view of Lancaster is a long shot of him dancing at his boar party. So?
4. What does Peggy, Lancaster’s wife, signify?
5. Of what is Freddie’s drinking materials, from fuel oil to Lysol, a metaphor? The sand woman?
6. What’s the point of the frame shots, as the film opens on roiling waters and ends with the beach sand woman? 
7. What other props, actions or scenes blossom into metaphor?
8. What is the effect of the film starting with and following Freddie instead of Lancaster? Imagine the difference if we’d first met and followed Lancaster. Or Peggy.
9. What is the point of Joaquin Phoenix’s often incomprehensible muttering?
10. How do you read the names “Dodd” and “Quell”?
11. What significance grows out of the fragmentary narrative in the first part of the film? That is, the scenes don’t flow together but seem jagged, abrupt, incoherent.
12. How does the film reflect on the cultural effects of commercial film, especially in its lurid recovery of 1950s Hollywood melodrama? Also, note the characters named Margaret O’Brien and Doris Day and Freddie’s “vision” of Lancaster’s call during a cartoon of Casper the Friendly Ghost. Who is the friendly ghost?
13. What themes emerge from the sex scenes?
14. What’s the point of Freddie’s method to get rid of crabs? (Reminder: shave one testicle so they’ll all collect on the other. Then set fire to that testicle and stab each crab to death. Note, this is a theoretical question. Don’t try it at home.)
15. How does the Ella song, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” inflect the meaning of the department store scene? And Lancaster’s “Slow Boat to China”? And the closing song from the beach shot through the credits, “Changing Partners”? Freddie’s motorcycle ride is attended by “No other love can warm my heart, now that I’ve known the comfort of your arms.”
16. How do you connect the two photo shoot scenes, Freddie in the store and Freddie shooting Lancaster?
17. What’s the point of Frank, the laborer Freddie poisons, reminding him of his father?
18. How do the screensful of flowers work here, in connection to the Arizona desert and beach scenes?
19. Describe the arc of Freddie’s faith.
20. What is the effect of the tendency towards prolonged closeups?
21. What does this film say about today?
22. What themes does the film share with Anderson’s earlier works: Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood? Given that his earlier heroes smoked Camels, why does Lancaster smoke Kools?

How do the following quotes open into the film’s larger meanings:

1. The war is over. Peace is here. You men are blessed with the rejuvenating powers of youth.
2. --You look like you've traveled here. -- How else do you get someplace?
3. I believe, in your profession it's called -- 'Nostalgia'.
4. I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist and a theoretical philosopher. But above all, I am a man, a hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you. 
5. I can leave any time I want but I choose not to. I choose to stay here.
6. He took the drink himself. I didn’t do anything.
7. We fought against the day and we won.
8. You are not an animal. Man is not ruled by his emotions....man’s inherent state of Perfect.
9. Take control of your life.
10. If you figure out a way to live without a master, any master, be sure to let the rest of us know, for you would be the first in the history of the world.
11. In the Casper cartoon: “X marks the spot where the sunken treasure is.”
12. Who got to you?
13. Couldn’t be better.
14. You can’t take this life straight, can you?
15. I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China, all to myself, alone.

Moneyball -- CALL Discussion Group

 Moneyball (2011)

                    Director: Bennett Miller (Capote)

Billy Beane was a high school baseball hot shot (“a can’t-miss prospect”), who turned down a Stanford University full scholarship because he believed the pro scouts’ hype and was drawn to the big-bucks contract. When his career in the majors fizzled, he became a scout, but had the savvy to work his way up to manage the Oakland Athletics. But that small-market team couldn’t compete with the large-market baseball teams who can buy away the best players. Now GM Beane (now Brad Pitt) has the major leagues’ lowest budget for player salaries. In 2002 at $40 million it’s one third of the Yankees’. He loses three stars to the Yankees and Red Sox. 

Then a Yale Economics grad, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), proposes an unconventional approach to evaluating players. Sabermetrics pioneer Bill James (an ex-security guard) contended that the humble guy who can get on base is more important than the glamorous hitter. With Brand’s statistical technique Beane collects undervalued players who end up making a winning team, despite the skepticism of coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and scout Grady Fuson (Ken Medlock). Beane resuscitates the dead career of Red Sox catcher Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt). He fires Fuson but keeps the coach, who refuses to follow his orders. Beane trades away the coach’s stars and in effect takes over the coaching himself behind the scenes. The media credit Howe with the team’s surprising success. The A’s win an American League record 20 games in a row. In that 20th win, the A’s blow an 11-0 lead, to be tied at the top of the ninth. In the bottom of the ninth, Howe accepts Beane’s philosophy and sends in Hatteberg as lead-off batter, hoping just to get him on base. Instead Hatteberg hits the winning homer. Nevertheless, as in the previous year the A’s are eliminated in the first playoff round. The Boston Red Sox offer Beane $12.5 million,to make him the highest paid GM in sports history. 

Of course, Beane has a happily resettled ex-wife Sharon (Robin Wright) and a beloved 12-year-old daughter (Kerris Dorsey). To stay close to the latter -- and not wanting to repeat his earlier bad decision made for money -- Beane declines the Boston offer, stays with the A’s and reverts to losing. Beane’s and Brand’s computer-based statistical analysis revolutionizes “America’s national pastime.” The other teams beat Beane with his strategy. The Red Sox -- without Beane -- win the title two years later.

Questions

1. “[Baseball] is a metaphor?” (Brand). Do you believe that? For what?
2.  What does the title suggest? What’s Moneyball vs Baseball?
3. The Oakland A’s never did win a title under Beane’s system, have not even made the playoffs since 2006 and remain losers even now. Why is this relevant/irrelevant to the film?
4. What does this film say about Now?
5. If this were entirely fiction, why would Billy Beane be the perfect name for the hero? (Hint: a “beanball” is a pitch directed at the batter’s head, in order to make him lose his (i) composure, (ii) consciousness, or (iii) head.)  Note: Factual/historic names do not always serve metaphoric function. In a classic miscasting, the historic Ned Buntline wrote pulp myths about the wild west and Bowie Kuhn was the baseball commissioner. There should have been a trade.
6. A film may have multiple/alternative auteurs. Director Bennett Miller directed the Truman Capote biopic (also starring Hoffman). One of the screenplay writers is Aaron Sorkin, who created The West Wing TV series and scripted Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)and The Social Network (2010). How is each artist reflected in this film? 
7. As it happens, Steven Soderbergh (remember Contagion?) was slated to direct this film but the studio axed him because he wanted to add interviews with ex-players for “documentary enhancement.” Any thoughts? 
8. What’s the point of Beane’s orality (compulsive spitting, eating, chawing, etc.)
9. How does Beane’s relationship with his 12-year-old daughter, reflect on the main themes? What does her song say, in each of its two scenes?
10. The film’s first scene shows Beane in the wake of the elimination loss to New York. The last has his daughter’s recorded song. What’s the connection/point?
11. What’s the thematic point of Beane’s refusal to watch his team’s games?
12. How does Bill James’s sabermetrics apply beyond baseball?
13. Like the Vietnam War-era Rocky, in this Underdog sport film the Underdog doesn’t win. He barely manages to survive. So?

What can you make of the following dialogue:

1. “It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball?” (Beane, converted to computer stats) He adds: “It doesn’t mean anything.”
2. “It’s an unfair game.”
3. “Who’s Fabbio?” (a scout asks)
4. “This guy walks into a room, his dick’s been there for six minutes.”
5. “There’s an epidemic failure in the game to understand what’s really happening.” (Brand)
6. “This is all about your shit, isn’t it?” (scout Grady Fuson gets himself fired)
7. “We’re all told at some time that we’re too old to play the children’s game.” (How does this statement’s meaning change the second time we hear it?)
8. “I’d have drafted you in the ninth round. No signing bonus.” (Brand to Beane, winning the job)
9. “We’re organ donors for the rich.” (Beane)
10. “I don’t know why I lied just then.” (Brand)
11. “People are overlooked for a variety of reasons.”
12. “If this guy’s such a good hitter, why can’t he hit good?” (Beane)
13. “Ugly girlfriend means no confidence.” (The actor/scout’s original ad lib was “Ugly girlfriend means bad eyesight.”)
14. “Adapt or die.” (Billy)
15. “There’s an element of randomness in [the A’s] success.” (Commentator)
16. “There’s no explanation for what’s going on right now.” (ditto)
17. “Nobody reinvents this game.”
18. The daughter’s song:  “I’m just a little bit, caught in the middle... Life is a maze.... I’ve got to let it go. Just enjoy the show... It’s a lot, to be what I’m not.... You’re just a loser, You’re just a loser. Just enjoy the show.”

Farewell, My Queen: CALL Discussion Group

Farewell, My Queen (orig. Les adieux a la Reine)

Co-written, directed by Benoit Jacquot

It’s largely sunny on July 14-17 in 1789 at Versailles (pronounced ver-sigh) and the peasants are revolting. They’re also angry and defiant. The complacent Louis XVI (Xavier Beauvois) and his Austrian skirt Marie Antoinette (Diane Kruger) plan a quick trip to evade the kerfuffle. But here the historic sweep of the French Revolution is consigned to the background. We see almost none of it. The film centers on the servants’ and courtiers’ intrigues, assuming the viewpoint of Sidonie Laborde (Lea Seydoux). She’s Marie’s devoted lectrice, a lady-in-waiting hired to read to the bored queen. Sidonie’s devotion to the queen borders on passionate ardor. The queen confides her passion -- unrequited -- for the Duchess Gabrielle de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen), a historic figure who was rumored to be Marie’s lover as well as her best friend. The Duchess ranks No. 3 -- of course Marie is No. 1 -- on the revolutionaries’ Top 286 guillotine hit list. Climactically, the queen orders Sidonie to act as bait. She risks her life by switching identities with Gabrielle, to enable her mistress’s love to escape.

Questions

1. Historic fictions are less about the time in which they are set than about the time  when the work is made. After all, why tell that story now? The best turn out to reflect upon the time they are received. So this film is not really about the French Revolution.    That’s why it doesn’t tell you anything you probably don’t already know about it. How is it about now? Does the absence of guillotine shots preclude reference to the trickle down theory?
2. What is the significance about its focus on the servant courtiers rather than the royals?
3. How does the English translation of the title affect our reading of the film? Clue: the English is singular, the French plural; the queen becomes my. 
4. What is the significance of the design of the interior sets?
5. What larger themes are involved in Sidonie’s relationship with Marie and how it plays out?
6. How do the Downstairs scenes reflect on the Upstairs ones? Note that Sidonie doesn’t even get the pile of gold coins the queen pays for her embroidered dahlia. In this power structure does service/servility pay? 
7. What is the point of the tapestry and embroidery scenes? Any connection to “The people are a fabric that is highly combustible?” 
8. What are the implications of the heroine being the queen’s “reader”?
9. What does the film say about culture? About power?
10. How do you read the mosquitos (les moustiques)? The rats? Sidonie’s golden clock?
11. Jacquot depicts an underclass that scuttles for information, though it’s usually just gossip and rumour. Sidonie is especially dedicated to collecting info -- to the point of giving Paolo a quickie, almost, and cultivating the pathetic old archivist -- yet she’s scolded by an equal for being entirely secretive. What’s the point here? 
12. What is the significance of Sidonie’s opening and later fall? 
13. What is the director’s view of the famously scandalous queen (notorious for her alleged “Let them eat cake”)? Of Louis XVI?
14. Why does the film suggest (and only suggest) a possible lesbian relationship between Marie and the Duchess, or in Sidonie? Is Sidonie’s view of the nude, sleeping Duchess pertinent?
15. In the first scene Marie compliments Sidonie’s “pudgy” beauty. How does this connect to her last-scene deception? 
16. How does fashion form a theme here? Note, only Marie and Gabrielle change their dresses, except for the climactic escape scene. 
17. What’s the point of those scenes where there is no music and we hear outdoor sounds -- e.g., cats, crows, crickets?
18. How do you read Sidonie’s conduct in the escaping coach (head into the wind, waving at the peasants)?
19. What current themes does this film share with The Queen of Versailles?
20. Read the last shot. As the coach tears offscreen, the empty night road remains and we hear Sidonie voiceover: “I obeyed my queen. Soon I will be far from Versailles. I will be no-one.” 
21. La bord means the border, edge, hem. How does that reflect on Sidonie Laborde’s meaning?
22. How do these lines open out:

i.“What will happen to us?”

ii“Your love of the queen makes you blind to her caprice.”
          iii “The more he cheats, the more she eats.”
           iv“We’re human beings just like her” spoken by the thieving lady-in-waiting.
            v  Marie: “I will go disguised as the queen of France."
           vi“They hide everything from me.”
          vii “Envy is the most common feeling in the world.”
        viii Louis: “How can anyone want power?... a curse hidden with an ermine cloak.”
          ix Sidonie: “Words are all I possess.”