Indiana University Cinema… A Place For Film™

TRON: Legacy — Disney’s Last “Cool” Blockbuster

Posted on by David Carter

Still from TRON: Legacy
Still from TRON: Legacy

Hard to believe there was a point in the 21st century when you could say Disney wasn’t completely risk-averse or desperate enough for something to connect that they’d take a shot on giving a person or team enough creative slack to impose a hefty amount of character and vision onto a film. Well, it’s been such a long time since both the Marvel and Lucasfilm Ltd. buyouts of the 2010s that you’d be forgiven for forgetting when Disney didn’t have over a quarter of domestic box office shares at cinemas and could rest on their laurels (and giant mountains of cash) and churn out whatever their market research and algorithms would guarantee a hit amongst the general public.

No, in the ’00s and pre-Avengers 2010s, Disney wasn’t on the most solid footing zeitgeist- and box office-wise. They weren’t struggling per se. They had massive hits with their Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and had steady earning and critical acclaim with their acquisition of Pixar, not to mention mid-level hits amongst a younger, more female-focused crowd with things like Confessions of a Shopaholic, Hannah Montana: The Movie and Tangled. Disney was more in want of films that would net them that all-powerful “white male. 18 to 35” demographic that was (and largely still is) the lifeblood of blockbuster box office. The buyouts of Lucasfilm Ltd., Marvel, and later Fox would solve this problem for them for the foreseeable future. Why breed  your own hype and golden goose when you can just buy it? (more…)

Exploring Friendship, Sexuality, and High School Popularity in Jennifer’s Body

Posted on by A Place For Film

Still from Jennifer's Body
Still from Jennifer’s Body

Several factors contributed to the box office underperformance of the Karyn Kusama-directed film Jennifer’s Body in 2009 — chief among them was the marketing, which relied heavily on selling the movie as a slasher with Megan Fox as the eye candy for a primarily male audience. Although the focal point of the film is the titular character and the havoc she wreaks upon the small, fictional town of Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota, the film is mainly from the perspective of Jennifer’s best friend, Needy (Amanda Seyfried), who was rarely featured as prominently in promotional materials. Reviews at the time gleefully ripped apart the film for having a simplistic plot and for being such a divergence from the career-high that was screenwriter Diablo Cody’s prior film, Juno. Rediscovered years later though as an underappreciated, feminist-bent horror film with social commentary on fame, it became a cult classic. It drew such a resurgence in interest that its ten-year anniversary produced a bevy of articles and interviews from the cast and crew reflecting on the making of the film. Due to this renewed visibility, the narrative around the film was refocused on the real central themes: the complexities of female friendship and female sexuality. (more…)

Crossing Thresholds in Lamb

Posted on by Laura Ivins

Maria gives Ada the lamb a kiss on the cheek while Ada wears a flower crown
Maria and Ada in Lamb

Contains some light spoilers, though I try not to give too much away.

At first glance, Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson, 2021) is a film about grief so powerful it conjures the past into the present.

Sheep farmers Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) sit at their kitchen table, and Ingvar remarks, “They’re saying time travel is possible now.” They chat about the practicalities for a moment, with Ingvar continuing, “Not that I’m in a hurry to see the future.” He’s satisfied with his present. The camera cuts to Maria, and a pregnant pause hangs in the air before she mentions the possibility of going back in time. We can see they both have the same thought — the same painful memory — on their minds, some time to which Maria would like to return. (more…)

A Look at This Spring’s International Art House Series

Posted on by A Place For Film

Poster for spring 2022's International Art House Series

 

Guest post by Dr. Alicia Kozma, Director of IU Cinema.

In 1956, film scholar John Twomey surveyed his contemporary film exhibition landscape and noticed a change was taking place: small, independently run theaters across the country were turning away from the usual mainstream film fare, focusing instead on what he termed “films of quality.”[1] These films, Twomey recounts, were primarily “films from other countries, reissues of old-time Hollywood ‘classics,’ documentaries, and independently made films with offbeat themes.”[2] When I first read Twomey’s assessment, these films were immediately recognizable to me: “These are art house films, John!” I replied to the nonresponsive page. But historical hindsight is 20/20, and it is understandable that Twomey was searching for the term to describe the trend he was seeing. Even today, defining an “art house film” is notoriously difficult. The designation cannot claim a hard and fast identity and is often applied to any film that screens in an art house theater, regardless of if the film “fits” Twomey — or anyone else’s — definition of an art house film. Art house films often find themselves subject to the oft-quoted litmus test coined by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in his famous determination of what constitutes obscene art: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.[3] But that instability is precisely what makes art films so invaluable and interesting. Art house films can be challenging, uncomfortable, dense, and difficult. They can also be high-gloss crowd pleasers, fun, inspiring, and raucous. What matters is that an art house film makes you feel, makes it impossible to turn away, and leaves you talking about — and even puzzling through — what you just saw long after the screening ends. The films in this semester’s International Art House Series will do exactly that. (more…)

Physical Media Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny: Blu-ray Reviews for December 2021

Posted on by David Carter

Selections from this month's Blu-rays
Photo by Amanda Hutchins

Full transparency: all Blu-rays reviewed were provided by Criterion, Kino Lorber, and 88 Films US.

Happy holidays, everyone! ‘Tis the season for merriment, goodwill to your fellow man, and watching people beat the living hell out of each other, or at least it is on “Physical Media Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny.” There’s something in the air within the world of physical distribution. It seems that the time has come for balletic martial arts and high-octane action films to get their time to shine. On this month’s episode, we have three labels and all of them have brought some of the greatest films featuring fast and furious fists and a symphony of squibs. (more…)

Historical Loss in Bill Morrison’s The Great Flood

Posted on by Laura Ivins

silhouette of a sharecropper tilling the land with a wide sky behind him
Black sharecropper in The Great Flood

In one of her essays, film historian Jane Gaines opens with a contemplation about absence in the historical archive. She’s writing about racialized spectatorship. Documents may be lost or never have existed, and the cultural experiences of both Black and White audiences attending race films in some ways defy documentation in their ephemerality. How can we create historical narratives when such chasms of absence plague our understanding?

The found footage documentary The Great Flood (Bill Morrison, 2014) tackles absence in an interesting way by highlighting the process of loss that occurs in the historical archive. The film is comprised of archival footage from the 1920s-1960s. The only “narration” are brief title cards organizing the footage into themes — “Swollen Tributaries” or “Evacuation” — and the only sound is the musical score composed by Bill Frisell. The footage is most certainly intentionally arranged, guiding us to particular associations between natural disaster and social impact, but the historical portrait is obviously not comprehensive. (more…)

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