lizzywatchesamovieaday

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Fruitvale Station

The film for today was Fruitvale Station, written and directed by Ryan Coogler in 2013.  The film follows Oscar Grant, a twenty-two-year-old black man from Oakland California, on the day leading up to him being fatally shot by police coming home from celebrations at approximately 2:15 AM New Year’s 2009.  Unfortunately, I had never heard of Oscar Grant or any of the Bay area riots protesting his death and the lenient sentencing of the shooting officer, Johannes Mehserle (his name was changed for the film) before watching this film.  Growing up as someone with white, suburban privilege, I was not truly made aware of the unjust killing of young black men until it happened in my neighboring town of Sanford, Florida with the seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin.  Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in 2012, so I’m not entirely surprised I hadn’t heard of Oscar Grant before, as I definitely wasn’t taking the time to make myself aware of these injustices until years after Grant was shot.  

              This film is undoubtedly an attempt to bring attention to those wrongfully killed like Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and many more.  More so, it was an attempt to humanize these men.  So often, these men are either turned into villains who had it coming or unwitting symbols of revolutions for racial change.  Coogler definitely succeeded in this film, never hesitating to show the good, bad, and ugly of Oscar Grant’s last day.  The good included loving moments between Oscar and his daughter, girlfriend, mother, and strangers in need of help throughout the events of his day.  The bad included Oscar hiding the loss of his job from his family, and the ugly included a flashback of Oscar’s time in San Quentin State Prison.  Coogler understood that depicting Oscar simply as an angel would not be an honest attempt to humanize the man, nor would it be an accurate depiction of the financial and socioeconomic difficulties faced by poor black youth. I say youth because it is important to remember just how young Oscar Grant really was, twenty-two-years-old, only a few months older than myself as I write this.  

              Another interesting part of the film was Coogler’s decision to include actual footage of the shooting in the opening minutes of the film.  From then on, the audience knows exactly what they’re getting into.  There won’t be any happy ending in this film.  Oscar Grant will die, and that’s something the audience must grapple with for the remainder of the film.  That’s something you must bear in mind as Oscar has his grandmother recommend fish to an uncertain stranger in Trader Joe’s, or as he and his girlfriend, Sophina, bring a cake to his mother’s birthday party on New Year’s Eve.  These things happen to black men on days where it seems nothing could go wrong and on days when it seems nothing else could go wrong.  For Oscar, it was a mix of the two, and the audience must watch him rise and fall throughout the day, all the while knowing he will ultimately fall at the hands of Oakland Police.  

              Overall, I give this film an eight out of ten. You won’t get the beautiful cinematography like yesterday’s film as Coogler kept true to the gritty reality faced by so many in the Bay area, but as far as films that change your perspective on things, this film has it all.  It truly opens privileged eyes to a day in the life of the not-so-privileged Oscar Grant.

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Amelie

The movie for today was the 2001 film, Amélie, by director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet.  Today, there was no checking my phone during the movie or even looking away from the screen for that matter.  Amélie is in French, so staying glued to the subtitles is a must. Yet, the subtitles were not so distracting as to take away from the stunning cinematography of the film.  It was like the entire film was an endless Instagram filter, everything covered in a yellow hue.  This sunny hue definitely added to the overall dreamlike effect of the film as a whole.  Amélie tends to live with her head in the clouds, constantly daydreaming, and this theme was clearly reflected in the aesthetics of the film.  The filmmakers also went as far as to color block Amélie herself.  Amélie’s color seemed to be red.  Everything in her apartment was decorated in various shades of the color.  Red is a color generally associated with passion and love, so I couldn’t help but connect these shades of red to Amélie’s desire to not only inspire love and happiness in others, but also to find it herself with love interest, Nino.  

              The film also featured a narrator for the beginning of the film, someone who connected the dots between seemingly unconnected characters. I know for some viewers, a talking narrator in a film is not something they enjoy.  My mom, for instance, is one of these people.  I, however, have always been a fan of narration through films. It reminds me of a narrator within a novel or short story, showing just how similar and simultaneously different writing and cinema really can be.  The narrator included interesting tidbits of each character’s likes and dislikes, each one as unique as the next, proving that these were indeed actual characters, not ideas of characters.  I think these parts throughout the film really showcased skilled and dedicated writing, not something you see every day in cinema.  It is clear the writers of the film put just as much work in as say, the cinematographers or director.  This doesn’t always happen, but it was something I truly appreciated.  

              To be honest, I found Amélie’s character to be quite stalkerish, but this isn’t something I hold against her character or the film for that matter.  This film clearly wasn’t intended to be realistic, but rather whimsical and, as I stated before, dreamlike, so I do understand Amélie isn’t a depiction of a real person.  Instead, she is a real character within the confines of this other-worldly, dreamlike version of Montmartre, France.  Overall, I give this film a seven out of ten.  It’s singularity and beautiful aesthetics alone encourage me to promote others to see it.  Yet, I did feel the movie dragging on.  For a comedy in its most traditional sense, the screen time of two hours and one minute felt a little long.  The details and pace I had grown to love in the first half dwindled in the second, leaving me slightly disappointed with the acclaimed film overall.  

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Becoming Jane

              Today’s movie is Becoming Jane, made in 2007 by director, Julian Jarrold.  The film stars Anne Hathaway as a young adult Jane Austen and James McAvoy as her early lover, Tom Lefroy.  I’ve been in love with James McAvoy since 2005 when he played the lovable Mr. Tumnus in the film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Anne Hathaway’s role as Andrea Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada is one of the most iconic roles of the early twenty-first century, so you could see how I had high hopes for this film.  Furthermore, as a Literature major I have a distinct tie to the title character, Jane Austen.  Do I love all of her novels? No, I couldn’t make it halfway through Sense and Sensibility (although I did quite enjoy Persuasion).  But that’s not the point.  Jane Austen, along with Shakespeare and Dickens, established her novels as a fundamental part of English Literature as we now know it.  Not only that, but she did so as a woman in a time where there was no such space for a woman’s name alongside a novel (Cue Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own). My point being, a woman from which we owe such a vast amount of our rich literature was surely deserving of a film set to a certain number of feminist standards.  

              To be honest, this film didn’t live up to the standards of which Jane Austen was so deserving.  For a film about a woman and her decision to live independently by the skill of her writing, the film devotes very little time to the great mind of such a woman.  I found myself watching yet another film that did not pass the Bechdel test.  The closest conversation the film had to fulfilling the standards of the Bechdel test occurred when Jane goes to visit Mrs. Radcliffe, a novelist whose career Jane wishes to imitate.  Yet, when Jane asks Mrs. Radcliffe for advice, it is not on how one goes about making a living from writing, but rather, how Mrs. Radcliffe’s husband deals with his wife’s success.  Mrs. Radcliffe does comment on the sexist expectation of the time that wives should never appear smarter than their husbands, but again, the conversation, at its core, is about men and their opinions on women, opinions for which these self-respecting women should care nothing.  The film does touch on the makings of Austen’s most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice, but the surrounding content of the film insinuates that Austen’s success is partly due to her love affair with Lefroy.  While some of her romances might be inspired by past love affairs with men, this insinuation is strikingly sexist and absurd.  Austen purposefully never married, choosing to live independently, so shouldn’t a film dedicated to her then be independent from the male influences of any past lovers?  This film surely wasn’t.  James McAvoy’s character was just as much a lead as was Anne Hathaway’s character, for which the movie was named.  If you want a romance film, write a romance film, but don’t present it as a feminist one in hopes of pandering to an audience looking for a film actually about Jane Austen.  (Just to be clear, romance films can indeed be feminist ones, but this one surely was not.)

              Overall, I give this film a five out of ten because it deviated too far from Jane herself in order to focus on her love life over her career achievements.  Even as far as love stories go, it wasn’t a great one.  I found myself repeatedly checking my phone, a sure sign of a boring movie far past the point of saving even by McAvoy’s stunning charm.  

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The Good Neighbor

              The movie for today was The Good Neighbor, made in 2016 by director, Kasra Farahani. Part of why I love this project is that it is forcing me to watch movies I wouldn’t normally see, this film being one of them.  This film definitely wasn’t a horror movie, but it had thriller elements, centered around two teenage boys messing with an old person, and had a run time of only 137 minutes.  So all in all, not a movie I would regularly choose for myself, and while, I didn’t love it, I certainly can appreciate getting out of my comfort zone more often.

              Something you’ll notice throughout my reviews, is that I rarely enjoy flashbacks for the sole purpose of revealing defining details about characters.  Eight out of ten times, it’s just sub-par writing.  I think good writers should have the ability to reveal these details and traits through present action and a linear narrative.  Sure, flashbacks and jumping narrative lines are fun. Don’t get me wrong.  But if they are the only way to reveal important character details, details that are missing from the present narrative, something’s wrong with your storytelling.  For me, this is what kept happening throughout The Good Neighbor.  I’ll start by saying, I did think it was the correct choice to wait approximately twenty minutes to reveal the current timeline of the movie was actually set within a court trial for the actions of the two main characters, teenagers Ethan and Sean.  I did think it was most important to immediately get the audience invested in the teen boys’ project first and foremost.  What I didn’t appreciate were the flashbacks present within the old man, Harold Grainey’s, storyline.  It’s not even evident until the final ten minutes of the film that these scenes are flashbacks.  The film even goes so far as to have the audience believe the scenes with Grainey’s dead wife are functioning within the same timeline as the scenes dedicated to Ethan and Sean’s pranks.  Grainey’s wife mentions that Grainey needs to fix the door, something that Ethan and Sean utilize as one of their filmed pranks.  To me, this is bad faith narration 101.  You don’t purposefully lead your audience on, only to surprise them at the end with a “Gotcha! Bet you didn’t think that was wrong information we were giving you!”  Good faith narration states that you must alert your audience to a detail that disapproves what they might naturally believe at the earliest convenience, something Farahani did not do in this film.  Furthermore, if Grainey really is an old man depressed to the point of suicide by the death of his wife, wouldn’t he show signs of that before, say, the last ten minutes of the film? If the film had better writers, you bet he would have.  

              I feel like I’m launching a personal attack on this film, but I really do believe the writers and filmmakers didn’t do this film justice.  I think with the correct writers, this film really could have been something.  For thriller and horror movie lovers, the topic was on point (I mean cameras in a house. Paranormal Activity has long established that as a viable topic for the genre), and I found myself continuously impressed with the acting prowess of such young actors as Logan Miller and Kier Gilchrist.  Overall, I give this film a six out of ten, and naively wish for a remake to give this film what it truly deserves.

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Wonder Woman

              The film for today was Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins.  First off, I’d like to thank her and the costume designers for allowing me two and a half hours of Chris Pine in a three-piece suit.  That did my poor soul wonders.  Furthermore, there was a lot of hype behind this movie, and I’ll be the first to say it did not disappoint.  I went into the film with no previous knowledge of Wonder Woman’s character, never having seen Batman vs. Superman as Ben Affleck will never be my Batman.  Yet, breakout star Gal Gadot was beyond captivating, never once letting her audience feel the true distance of the movie’s lengthy screen time.  

              What’s most important to note is how quickly the film passed the Bechdel test, immediately getting into action and dialogue completely devoid of male characters.  Robyn Wright’s character instantly inspired the audience, every one of us hoping to learn how to ride a horse and simultaneously shoot a bow and arrow. Then Diana’s mother told us, and her daughter, the origins of the Amazon women.  As simple as it seems, this woman to woman interaction is incredibly difficult to find within the male-dominated world of film.  Almost as difficult to find as a female director leading a film of this magnitude and monetary worth.  Why is it so hard for us to write female characters talking to other female characters again?? Patty Jenkins certainly made it look effortless.

              Some complaints of the film include the choice to make Diana finally defeat Ares only after her lover, Steve Trevor, dies. I believe the complaint lies in the fact that Diana only reaches her fullest potential after being prompted by her heterosexual love for a man.  Unfortunately, because of the discourse concerning that specific scene, I went into the film already knowing Chris Pine’s character dies (No one warned me about spoilers, and I am bitter.), so I anticipated that scene throughout the film with some dread, hoping it wouldn’t spoil an otherwise wonderful film.  To be honest, I don’t think spoiled it at all. I focused more on Diana’s purity and innate goodness.  For her and the other Amazon women, love is their greatest power.  If this powerful love comes at the expense of a male character (and Chris Pine at that. I have no complaints there.) then so be it. After all, isn’t it spinning male-centric films on their washed-up, sexist heads?  I mean really.  When the roles are reversed, this trope is used all the time.  How many movies have we seen that feature a woman dying and the male character then realizing his full potential? Too many.  To be honest, it was refreshing to see the roles reversed, the tables turned. News flash reverse sexism, like reverse racism, isn’t a thing.  In fact, I think this reversal of an otherwise longstanding sexist tradition was not entirely lost on the film’s writers.  Like I mentioned before, Diana’s search for love and honor is the main takeaway from the scene, but I don’t think the writers and filmmakers wanted you to miss the underlying gender-inverted trope. Hopefully, it served as a wakeup call to a male-dominated industry that women expect, and demand, more of their female characters.

              Overall, I give this film a nine out of ten, and hats off to Gal Gadot, my new #WomanCrushWednesday.

�58�WB

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

This post is a little late as I didn’t get around to watching a movie until late last night, but today’s post is on the newest installment in the Pirates series, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. The film was directed by Joachim Rønning and was advertised as being “inspired” by the series’ original film, The Curse of the Black Pearl, released fourteen years ago in 2003.  While the film did take on several tropes and themes familiar to fans of the original film, I think all those fans can agree that this newest installment was, unfortunately, missing that special something that was so evident in the original film. For instance, the film opened with a younger child version of one of the film’s protagonists, Henry Turner, son to Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan.  Instantly, this hearkened back to The Curse of the Black Pearl ‘s opening scene with a young Elizabeth Swan aboard a British Empire ship.  Yet not only did this scene imbue the audience with nostalgia for the 2003 hit, it also served as a brief refresher, reminding the audience of Will Turner’s curse and captivity to the sea.  Furthermore, it did so in a clever way.  The scene didn’t read as a “previously on...,” but rather as a vital, plot-inducing incident. Having Henry Turner vow to release his father from the sea’s curse not only reminded the audience of this curse but also served as the inciting incident for the film itself.  Overall, I appreciated this ode and recognized its cleverness.  

              Yet the same cannot be said for other rehashed tropes of the franchise.  For instance, what used to be a lovable character, Captain Jack Sparrow, has now turned into a repetitive character willing to crack any joke, even ones the writers should have clearly re-written after the first draft of the script. Yes, we get it.  Johnny Depp plays an excellent drunk comic relief.  But there must be some point at which the writers develop his character.  This was attempted in the flashback scene to Jack Sparrow first becoming Captain of The Black Pearl, but to be honest, I was more impressed with the CGI in that scene than I was with the character development. The use of a flashback to showcase specific details to a character is always risky.  In Jack Sparrow’s case, it didn’t show character development but rather, character regression as the scene only proved that his character used to be more interesting.   Unfortunately, this theme seemed to serve as a haunting metaphor for the franchise as a whole.  

              On a more minor point, I was also bothered by a slight inconsistency present within the antagonist, Captain Salazar’s persona. Salazar refuted the idea of killing men, but rather only killing pirates.  This actually seems to serve as a token of pride for the Captain, proving that he is not the monster he looks to be.  Yet, Salazar then takes down and kills the men of not one, but two British Empire ships within the film.  Obviously the first one serves as an introduction point between Salazar and Henry Turner, further inciting more action.  Yet, Salazar takes down the second ship for seemingly no reason other than to show off the supernatural effects of his ship that acted as a personification of death or the grim reaper. Again, this detail was minor, but seemed lazy on the part of the writers.  

              Overall, I’ll give this film a five out of ten and advise fans of the franchise to view it with caution.  View this film because you love the series, not because you expect to love the film.  

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The Prestige

For my first film in this challenge, I watched The Prestige, made by filmmaker Christopher Nolan in 2006.  To start off, Nolan’s Batman Begins and Dark Knight series are some of my favorite movies, so my bias will definitely show.  I can always count on Nolan to throw a twist in there that I wasn’t expecting, something he definitely did not shy away from in this film as well.  Plus, he brought back Christian Bale and Michael Cain (Bruce Wayne and Alfred), a wonderful pairing of actors if there ever was one. Overall, I had high expectations for this movie, most of which did not disappoint.  

              Yet, there were some key elements missing from Nolan’s film.  In this series, in addition to writing/themes, cinematography, and acting, I intend to focus on gender and racial representations within cinema.  In both categories, the film failed…. miserably. In absolutely no way does The Prestige pass the Bechdel test.  If my count is correct, there were only four named female characters (one of which is a child), and the only case where one talked to the other was when Scarlett Johansson’s character is kicked out of a dinner by Rebecca Hall’s character.  Is the former kicked out over a dispute concerning another male character? You betcha.  Here, the only female to female interaction present within Nolan’s film is entirely dependent on both women’s love for one man.  Yes, it seems even Christopher Nolan is not above such eye-roll inducing tropes.  Furthermore, there was not a single actor of color given a named character, let alone a leading part.  But black people didn’t exist in nineteenth century London, right? Wrong.  If Lin-Manuel Miranda can make George Washington black, Christopher Nolan can remember to cast an actor of color.  

              Yet, if I only let gender and racial representation dictate my opinions on cinema, I would only like about five films total. So now on to the parts of the film I did enjoy, which, you’ll be pleased to know, were numerous.  My main positive take-away from this film was Nolan’s obsession with duality: whether it be Alfred Borden’s twin (#spoiler alert) or the back and forth tit-for-tat relationship between Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman’s respective characters.  I thoroughly appreciated the fact that Nolan repeatedly refused to “take sides” between his two leading parts.  That is, Nolan never indicated which character was “the good” or “the bad.” Instead, he left this difficult choice up to the viewer.  Personally, I sided with Bale’s character because I’ve always preferred Batman to Wolverine.  This existential viewer choice should not be unfamiliar to fans of Nolan’s cinematic portfolio.  Inception, anyone??  If you ask me, Leonardo DiCaprio wasn’t dreaming in that last scene, but ask anyone else and who knows which answer you’ll get.  Deliberately depicting one character as “better” or “worse” than another implies an unequal relationship between director and audience. By refusing to take sides, Nolan levels the playing field between him and us, the audience.  The choice is up to us because the director recognized the audience as equals, not as inferiors in need of moral direction.  

              I don’t have time to get into cinematography or acting in this post because I’ve already exceeded my 500 word (ish) limit, but I will say you won’t be disappointed in either category.  Nolan holds this film up to his usual standards in both regards.  Overall, I’ll give The Prestige an 8/10 rating and endorse it as a definite “must see.” Plus, it’s based on a 1995 novel by Christopher Priest that, if it’s anything like the film, I’m sure would be a thrilling read.