Every month, Establishing Shot 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 | Under the Cherry Moon (1986)
Under the Cherry Moon had far from the best reception when it first came out. It underperformed at the box office, won multiple Razzie Awards, and after its premiere the mother of female lead Kristin Scott Thomas (making her debut in films) told her, “Don’t worry, darling. It’ll be better next time.” But when seen today, it’s a charming film with a wonderful soundtrack.
This movie takes place on the French Riviera and is about Christopher (Prince, who also directed it), a piano player who wants to marry a rich woman. He ends up in a love triangle with a wealthy heiress named Mary (Thomas) and his best friend Tricky (Jerome Benton). Christopher wins Mary’s heart, but a tragic ending looms for the couple.
Prince styled this movie as an homage to screwball comedies, and the way he uses their stylistic tropes is delightful. The black-and-white cinematography is beautiful and nicely evocative of the 1930s, as is the high-class production design by the legendary Richard Slybert and the fancy costumes designed by Marie France. It is the type of movie that you could still admire if you put it on mute.
But you should not do that, because the soundtrack for this movie is excellent. It contains many great songs by Prince and The Revolution (who would disband the year this movie was released) that range from his famous hit “Kiss” to less known but still great songs like “Alexa de Paris” and “Love or Money.” The music for this film was so good that when Prince released it as the album Parade, it sold over a million copies.
Under the Cherry Moon will probably always be regarded as a strange footnote in Prince’s long and iconic career. But it deserves a better reputation than that of a weird failure. Its visual beauty and exceptional music are just as much a reflection of Prince’s brilliant creativity as his other, more famous works.
Michaela Owens, Editor | Supernatural (1933)
Fun fact about me: I’m kind of a sucker for any classic Hollywood horror film that features a spiritualist, psychic, or fortune teller. The celestial imagery, the glowing of the crystal ball, the disembodied voices and floating heads, the lingering feeling that there is something out there you can’t fully understand… no other cinematic era captured these things with as much shimmering beauty, eccentric otherworldliness, and charmingly goofy panache as old Hollywood, as exemplified by the pre-Code flick Supernatural.
Boasting a plot that becomes increasingly weird and convoluted (in a good way!), the film begins with a frenzied montage about the arrest and imminent execution of Ruth Rogen, a crazed murderess who strangled three of her lovers and is desperate to get her hands on her last beau, a phony spiritualist named Bavian who turned her into the police. Bavian, meanwhile, is working to convince heartbroken heiress Roma (my birthday twin, Carole Lombard) that her recently deceased brother is trying to reach out to her. When a family friend of Roma’s who is also a scientist creates an experiment that leads to Ruth possessing Roma’s body, it’s safe to say that Bavian has more to worry about than whether or not he can trick his way into Roma’s fortune.
Although a touch clunky in its script, Supernatural excels at vibes with its occasionally eerie direction, lovely cinematography, spooky imagery (Bavian’s fate in particular is gruesomely great), and a terrific performance from Lombard, who is especially mesmerizing when possessed by the terrifying Ruth. Perhaps best of all? Unlike way too many of the other films I watched this month — Poor Things, John Wick: Chapter 4, The Holdovers, Dune Part Two — it clocks in at just over an hour! Truly a blessing.
Chris Forrester, contributor | The End of Evangelion (1997)
As did many others, with its theatrical rerelease this month, I discovered the joys and terrors of the cult anime Neon Genesis Evangelion’s conclusory film, The End of Evangelion (Anno, 1997). For context: the series, which follows child soldiers who pilot enormous cyborg mechs called EVAs to fight similarly enormous monsters of variable but always destructive size, shape, and ability called Angels, ended in 1994 with an experimentally styled pair of episodes that resolved the psychological arc of its tormented protagonist but largely ignored the more bombastic aspects of the premise. Fans were unhappy about the finale, sending — as all overly obsessive fanbases tend to at some point — death threats to the series’ director, who fell into depression, planned to give up animation, and attempted suicide. In 1997, he returned to his now-contentious creation for a film that promised a more satisfying conclusion: The End of Evangelion, an 87-minute tidal wave of disturbing human angst, extreme violence, viscera, and horrifying apocalyptic beauty, formatted as a pair of replacement episodes for the series’s original final two, “Air/Love is Destruction” and “Sincerely Yours/I Need You.”
Watching the original series itself, there is a sense of bifurcated interest that grows through the back (and better) half of its run. What begins as a pleasant but relatively familiar monster-of-the-week saga gently complicated by religious thematics morphs into a sometimes horrifying, often experimental psychodrama about the weight of saving the world on its cast of child soldier mech pilots. Those two arcs have a tendency to feel disparate, and by the end of the series, which swaps out monster mayhem for chaotic introspection, they feel entirely extricated from one another.
It’s sort of a surprise, then, that the much-better-liked End of Evangelion largely preserves the general arc of the series’s original ending (that after stopping the final angel, scientists trigger a Human Instrumentality Project to merge all our souls together and purge us of loneliness), expanding upon it with more mecha action and apocalyptic mayhem so as to hold true to its creators aims while presumably satiating his rabid fans. The result is one of the more harrowing works of genre fiction, and certainly animated genre fiction, out there, in which plot often falls by the wayside in favor of the oversized moods and grave beauties of its unshakable imagery. Indeed, much of what feels memorable about The End of Evangelion isn’t narrative at all but purely visual and thematic — bolstered by the unreal horrors and awesome beauty of its images. Though I started watching the series hoping to catch its film on one of its two days back in cinemas, I ultimately missed the mark… for which I feel almost grateful, because I found its vividly realized images of a loosely cosmic-slash-religious apocalypse jarring enough on a small screen. One for the “five stars, probably won’t watch it again for many years” list.