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.
Alex Brannan, contributor | Take Out (2004)
In light of Anora winning the Academy Award for Best Picture earlier this year, Shih-Ching Tsou’s solo directorial debut (Left-Handed Girl) recently premiering in Critics’ Week at Cannes, and the Cinema showcasing indie auteurs this summer, I sought out Baker and Tsou’s Take Out (2004).
Take Out centers on Ming Ding (Charles Jang), an undocumented immigrant living in New York City who is hard-pressed to repay a steep debt. The film opens with a scene that could come out of a gangster movie. Two heavies bust into an apartment cramped with tenants. They violently throw open doors and strip sheets off beds looking for Ming. Ming is informed he has one day to pay back his debt to a local loan shark. In truth, the film couldn’t be farther from the gritty crime drama this opening scene suggests. Take Out is a character drama shot and structured in the vein of neorealism. As we follow Ming through his workday — working a delivery job that we are acutely aware will not earn him enough to cover his debt — the film reveals more about the financial struggle of him and his family. The big city swallows him whole without a second thought, abandoning him to his own devices and shattering the illusion of the American Dream in the process. The camera, meanwhile, is deployed in a handheld vérité style that is queasily cramped within tight apartment walkups and the bustling kitchen of the restaurant at which Ming works. Shots hover awkwardly close to other characters, as if the viewer is simply another worker shouldering their way past people to get to the fryer.
Between the bike courier job and the character’s strapped-for-cash conflict, the obvious point of comparison would be Bicycle Thieves (the economy of bike stealing is even a point of conversation in Take Out). The filmmakers are clearly inspired by the Italian neorealist movement, which took as its cinematic focus a systematically battered working class. In both films, the bicycle itself is a useful metaphor for this economic disenfranchisement. In Bicycle Thieves (1948), Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) must already have the money to afford a bike before he can gain employment to earn a living for his family. In Take Out, the lower class steals bikes from struggling restaurants just to sell the bikes back to those restaurants, knowing that the small business owners can’t afford to buy a new bike at retail. This vicious cycle forces people to labor while actively keeping them from prospering. Stranded at the bottom of an elevated metropolis built on and for commerce and capital, the characters in Take Out survive in spite of a geography of oppression.
Jesse Pasternack, contributor | The Killer (1989)
The Killer is a perfect example of one of my favorite types of films that comes in a great director’s career. My current language for it is a little clunky but, for now, I like to call it a “solidified” film. That is something which builds upon the promise shown in their earlier “breakout” film and it comes before a “magnum opus” in which their art hits a peak. This film, in which writer-director John Woo expanded the scale of his action sequences and deepened his exploration of male friendship, is a perfect example of it.
This movie is about a hitman in Hong Kong named Ah Jong (Chow Yun-fat). He accidentally blinds a sweet singer named Jennie (Sallie Yeh) and, guilt-ridden, accepts one last job to pay for a surgery which will restore her sight. Meanwhile, Detective Li Ying (Danny Lee) goes about trying to find and arrest Ah Jong, only to realize that they have more in common than he originally thought.
Woo had earlier shown an eye for good composition in gunfire-heavy action sequences in A Better Tomorrow (1986), but what he does here in this film is even better. It’s not just that there are more gunfights, but that they have a higher technical value. They’re better staged, shot, and edited than in his earlier work. Certain moments, like a rack focus when Ah Jong pulls off his first onscreen hit or a mirrored surface revealing a hidden gunman, have an immediacy which is very memorable. It all builds to a sequence set in a church that takes everything which had made Woo’s first gunfight in A Better Tomorrow so good and amplifies it to become unforgettable.
But this film is not just a collection of brilliant gunfights. It is also a surprisingly tender portrait of male friendships. Woo mines good pathos from Ah Jong’s ally Fung Sei (Chu Kong) trying to navigate his personal loyalty to Ah Jong and his professional relationship with the Triad for which he works. More prominently, he depicts the rise of Detective Ying’s friendship with Ah Jong as they realize they have common goals and respect for each other. It’s a fantastic portrayal of the bonds between men and what leads them to kill and die for each other. Their relationship has even greater emotional power than the ones shown in Woo’s previous films, and suggested that he was moving in the right path on his artistic journey.
The Killer is an iconic film in its writer-director’s body of work. It cemented Woo’s status as Hong Kong’s poet laureate of incredible action sequences as well as the passion and pain of male relationships. In addition, it solidified his career as an exciting one which would lead to even more brilliant films.
Chris Forrester, contributor | Strike! (1998)
I was lucky enough to catch a 35mm screening of an unsung gem of the spate of ’80s/’90s prep school dramedies that produced the much-much-much-more widely recognized Rushmore (Anderson, 1998) and Dead Poets Society (Weir, 1989): Sarah Kernochan’s All I Wanna Do (1998, originally The Hairy Bird and later Strike!), a perfect concoction of charm and emotion starring Girls alum Gabby Hoffmann as Odie, the fish-out-of-water new girl at a New England boarding school she’s been transferred to after her parents discover her plans to have sex with her boyfriend, Dennis. Odie quickly acclimates to the school’s strict rules — enforced by an uptight hall monitor who offers an early antagonist — and social climate, befriending a group of savvy visionaries who aspire to more than their classmates and know how to defy the law of the land without getting caught. Among them is an exuberantly charming Kirsten Dunst, who comes to spearhead a grand scheme for justice when the students learn that the school will soon merge with a nearby boys’ school.
As screenwriter, Kernochan is electrically witty, remarkably efficient, and always charming about it. The briskly paced unspooling of events wastes nary a chance at a joke nor a minute too many of exposition, and achieves a great satisfaction in that purposefulness with a bevy of satisfying payoffs. And as director, she brings out a lovely bunch of performances from her cast — both the aforementioned and a large ensemble of supporting parts that includes Lynn Redgrave as the headmistress and Hayden Christensen as a drooling school dance handjob recipient — that imbue the dramedy with a real warmth.
The film came and went on release and remains its filmmaker’s sole narrative feature in large part thanks to the misdeeds of one Harvey Weinstein, who damned it to box office dismissal with a series of mandated edits and a name change (Strike! is almost laughably ill-fitting of the tone and premise) predicated on the assumption that men wouldn’t be interested and women wouldn’t see it on their own because their boyfriends would pick the movie (one imagines, too, that some of his objection was a lashing at the film’s crowd-pleasingly feminist bent). It exists in less truncated form in Canada, where it was a success at the box office (go figure) and has begun amassing appreciation through repertory screenings. I was fortunate enough to see the Canadian release version and my instant fanaticism for its utter delights would have me much more insistent that everyone seek it out ASAP were it not for producer Ira Deutchman’s allegedly-near-fruition attempts to release a restored version of the original cut in theaters. If you — or we all! — are fortunate enough to catch a non-Weinsteined presentation, RUN!
Note: the trailer is for the American version, sadly!
Noni Ford, contributor | Loving Vincent (2017)
Along with thousands of people, I went to the Immersive Van Gogh experience and was quite blown away with Vincent Van Gogh’s comprehensive works. The exhibit led me to buy two prints of his paintings and in general piqued my interest more in the artist. Prior to the exhibit, I had seen famous Van Gogh paintings in different art museums but he was never an artist that I had felt any compulsion to find out more about or to explore further. Perhaps because he’s considered such a great artist in the Post-Impressionist movement now and his work is so popular and oft reproduced is the reason I had so little reaction to his work previously. The visibility of it made me seek out other works in the museums and galleries I found myself in, where there were less crowds.
As previously stated, though, my conception of him changed after seeing his work in a 360-degree projection room. This change was what likely led me to 2017’s Loving Vincent, a rare film where each frame is hand-painted in the style of the great Van Gogh as DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman direct and deconstruct the multiple perspectives on the final days of the artist’s life. I knew about Van Gogh’s suicide and the depression he experienced throughout his life so I thought the story would be quite clear. Except it wasn’t. Within the social orbit he inhabited there were many reactions, understandings, and theories on what precipitated his death. We follow Armand Roulin in this story as he attempts to find someone to deliver the very last letter Vincent Van Gogh sent to his brother, a task given to him by his father who is a postmaster general and someone who has additionally established a friendly and caring rapport with the deceased. Roulin is young, but not in that he is idealistic; instead he seems to see the world in unsubtle, binary frameworks. He believes Van Gogh was someone obviously sick and that since he has died, time and attention shouldn’t be spent on delivering this letter. And while he seems to regard Van Gogh’s suicide apathetically, he becomes intrigued once it’s indicated that there’s an air of mystery around his actions and his fateful decisions.
As Roulin travels to Paris and then Auvers-sur-Oise to gain more insight and piece more of the story together, he transitions from simply a letter carrier to a staunch defender of Van Gogh’s character. Beautifully illustrated by a team of 125 artists across the world, and with many notable actors lending their voices to this piece (Douglas Booth, Saoirse Ronan, Chris O’Dowd, etc.), the story captures some of the impact that Vincent Van Gogh’s story and work has on people still and the trajectories of lives he changed during his 37 years on Earth.
Ben van Welzen, contributor | A Snake of June (2002)
After bursting onto the scene with his cult-classic, heavy-metal, body-horror extravaganza Tetsuo: The Iron Man, director Shinya Tsukamoto caught his stride and went on a 15-year streak of delivering visually stunning, atmospheric, genre film masterpieces with a distinct directorial voice. This month, I watched one of the last in this incredible run of movies: A Snake of June. Significantly moodier than his other work, this erotic thriller tells the story of Rinko (Asuka Kurosawa), a careerwoman who works for a self-help call service and punctuates her otherwise drab life with private moments of sexual exploration. That is, until an anonymous man whom she’s helped through her work begins to stalk her and photograph her in these private moments, later blackmailing her into expressing her secret desires in public. In its short runtime, the film rides this premise into the bleak avenues of desire, obsession, self-expression, and mortality, becoming increasingly surreal as it progresses.
The most immediately striking quality of the film is its color palette; in a bold move, Tsukamoto tinted the entire film in a monochrome blue in post-production. With this oppressive coloring, the city streets bear down on the characters and the viewer, locking us into the rainy streets and claustrophobic offices and trapping us alongside Rinko. Beyond just the blue hue, Tsukamoto’s direction and cinematography is simply stunning (it should be noted that Tsukamoto somehow managed to write, direct, produce, shoot, edit, and act in all of the films from the aforementioned 15-year streak). Without the frenetic editing of his films like Bullet Ballet and Tetsuo, Tsukamoto lingers on his stunning setups, letting us soak in the dense atmosphere of sensual anxiety he meticulously crafts.
Nevertheless, A Snake of June is not just a pretty film to look at, but rather it uses these images to examine the role of the spectator and the violent act of looking. It seems that everyone in the film is staring at Rinko, whether it be her stalker, her husband, or even the camera (and thus us). Tsukamoto asks the question if being seen is an imprisonment or a liberation, if the pleasure of looking inherently humiliates the subject or if a self-awakening requires an onlooker. As the narrative devolves into the usual Tsukamoto-style surrealism, all we can do is look, and all the character’s repressions must be revealed. It’s hard to sink into Tsukamoto’s thick atmosphere, but when we do, and when we look too hard, we can’t help uncover the secrets buried deep in our desire.
Michaela Owens, Editor | Manhunter (1986)
Michael Mann is a filmmaker I’ve never really clicked with, maybe because I always expect his films to be action-packed and then I’m confronted with contemplative scenes of men looking out of windows as they question their way of life, long (maybe too long?) runtimes, and an almost languid pace between the exciting setpieces. There’s a tension between the quiet and the loud that I find… I guess you could say frustrating, even though I’m sure that’s part of what a Mann Fan™ enjoys about him.
All that being said, I keep trying to give the filmmaker a chance, as I did this month with Manhunter, Mann’s adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon and the first film to bring the character of Hannibal Lektor (played superbly by Brian Cox here) to the screen. Truthfully, I was already in the bag for this movie solely because it stars William Petersen, who will forever be Gil Grissom to me after many loyal years of watching CSI and who is, in technical terms, a complete and total babe as Manhunter‘s brooding, traumatized criminal profiler Will Graham. Petersen isn’t the only eye candy here, though, thanks to Dante Spinotti’s stellar cinematography that utilizes colors so beautifully that almost every frame made me swoon in some way.
While the story offers no real surprises — as soon as you see Dennis Farina’s agent lure a weary Graham back to the FBI because he’s the only one who can track down a new serial killer nicknamed the Tooth Fairy, you know where things are going — the pleasure of the film is seeing these familiar beats delivered so confidently and brilliantly, underlined by a real sense of unease as you fall deeper into the nightmare Graham tried so hard to escape. I still can’t say I get Michael Mann, but this was definitely a step in the right direction.