Every month, A Place for Film brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked one film that they saw this month that they couldn’t wait to share with others. Keep reading to find out what discoveries these cinephiles have made, as well as some of the old friends they’ve revisited.
Jesse Pasternack, contributor | Little Women (2019)
Little Women, acclaimed writer/director Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel, is one of the most beautiful films of 2019. Gerwig and her collaborators use a lush and lively technical style to expertly explore themes of memory and love. They make this an adaptation that will stay in your memory for quite some time.
Little Women tells the story of the four March sisters — Jo, Amy, Meg, and Beth. Spurred to return home to Massachusetts by Beth’s illness, Jo, a professional writer, thinks back to her childhood. She recalls her youth in Civil War-era Massachusetts as well as the events that have most strongly influenced her and her family.
The cinematography in this film is wonderfully beautiful. Gerwig and Director of Photography Yorick Le Saux make the vast majority of their shots, especially the long ones, feel like living paintings. They distinguish the flashback sequences from the “present” day ones by bathing them in warm amber light that displays how people can view their memories as being rosier than their current lives. The visual decadence and intelligence that Gerwig and Le Saux bring to every frame makes it a joy to watch.
Almost everything that I love about this film’s technical style can be found in two scenes. In the first one, set in the past, Jo thinks that Beth has died. She frantically runs downstairs, with quick cuts to various close-ups creating anxiety over what has happened to Beth, only to see in a medium close-up that Beth is sitting next to their mother Marmee. The scene is bathed in the warm amber light of the flashback sequences. The second scene, however, features a single shot of Jo slowly walking down the stairs until she stops near the table. A single cut to the same medium close-up from the last scene reveals Marmee sitting next to Beth’s empty chair. The scene features the paler blue colors that dominate the visual palette of the present-day ones. Both scenes brilliantly display cinema’s potential for using a wide variety of technical elements — including but not limited to editing, lighting, framing — to portray the emotions felt by a lead character.
I know this is a very specific take on a highly successful film that stars such well-known actors as Saoirse Ronan and Laura Dern. But it is a testament to Gerwig and her team that I enjoyed how they told the story of Little Women as much as I did about the story itself. They have created images that will move people as much as the words of the original novel did.
Jack Miller, contributor | Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Though I am someone who embraces the wide world of cinema in its many diverse incarnations, for a few years now I have felt that the western represents a kind of high-water mark in film history. As the great critic Blake Lucas put it, the western at its peak “is a genre without equal – as an artistic form, as entertainment that any audience can warm up to, as sophisticated reflection of history reimagined as myth.” That being said, my intense interest in the genre has been largely focused around the classical American western of the postwar years (roughly 1946-1962), an astonishingly fertile creative period which reaches a kind of apotheosis of expression during the ‘50s, the decade during which western specialists John Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher were turning in their finest, most mature work. Admittedly, I’ve been less interested in the later “Spaghetti” westerns from Italy and Spain, and this is partially due to my reaction to Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) after seeing it a couple of years ago. At the time, I felt like Leone had replaced the genre’s central concern – a dual emphasis on redemption and renewal – with qualities that I found much less interesting: utter cynicism and comic violence. It didn’t help that Leone’s formalism had also, in my eyes, replaced the clean, classical style of old with a kind of grotesque, cartoonish aesthetic.
Now that I’ve finally seen Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West this month, I can see how very wrong I was to write this filmmaker off for so long. The film possesses, above all, a deep and abiding respect for the Hollywood westerns of yore. Leone shot it in Monument Valley, the site where John Ford made his masterpieces My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Searchers (1956), and he seems to deal with this land as a kind of mythic space made sacred by the movies; as Dave Kehr put it, “it’s a film that seems to spring entirely from other films… as if Leone had been able to inhabit this landscape that never existed, as if for him the movie West were a place as real as Athens or Rome.” And yet, one could never mistake it for a classical work – it is an aggressively postmodern film which eschews classical virtues altogether to arrive at something that feels entirely new and somewhat scary. Leone seems to have synthesized the forms, shapes and iconography of western films from the past, only to dispense with their stylistic vision and language. It represents a kind of commentary on his part, a film that has more to say about cinema as expression than it does about the world we inhabit. I can’t wait to revisit this film many times over the course of my life, hoping to understand it a little better each time I return to it.
Laura Ivins, contributor | Blue My Mind (2017)
Going into Blue My Mind (dir. Lisa Brühlmann), I was expecting a gruesome horror film about the female siren. What I remember about the marketing was an emphasis on body horror, something similar to Agnieszka Smoczynska’s 2015 mermaid film, The Lure. But Blue My Mind isn’t really like The Lure. It’s more like Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (2003), but with a supernatural element woven in.
Blue My Mind follows Mia (Luna Wedler), a teen girl alienated from her parents, seeking friendship with the enigmatic “cool girl,” undergoing confusing body transformations, and experimenting with self-destructive and risky behavior. The film combines conventions of the “girl monster” genre (tying her transformation to sexuality and/or menstruation, for example) with the coming-of-age drama (navigating self-harm, rebelling against the mother, trying on different sexual personas), and the weight of the film is more on the drama. Unlike the classical girl monster film, where the girl violently externalizes her transformation by preying on her peers, the monstrosity in Blue My Mind comes from Mia’s deeply distressed reactions to her body and her attempts to hide it. The friendship between the girls is also surprisingly touching.
Michaela Owens, Editor | John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch (2019)
Okay, this may be cheating a bit since this is technically a TV special, but Netflix has this listed as a movie, so I’m running with it. As someone who is obsessed with John Mulaney — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rewatched his stand-up specials and various interviews — I was more than ready for the arrival of his latest project, despite it being billed as a children’s special. (Fun fact about me: I have never liked kids. Even when I was one.) The fantastic thing about this piece, though, is that adults can definitely still enjoy all of the surreal, cerebral, silly, and, most importantly, relatable moments that Mulaney and his incredible group of child performers have to offer.
While I’m not a big fan of the one-on-one discussions with the Sack Lunch Bunch that are peppered throughout, the guest stars are aces, the music (written by Mulaney, Marika Sawyer, and Eli Bolin) is wonderfully catchy, the production values are superb, and the comedy keeps me grinning from ear to ear. Really, what other special gives you a song about the magic of buttered noodles, a chess match between Mulaney and a kid set to the score of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, David Byrne dressed as Elsa from Frozen, and Jake Gyllenhaal descending into madness as the fictional entertainer Mr. Music?