Blog from the Booth

Monday, February 23, 2015

REARVIEW: THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION

When it was released, no one really cared about everyone's favourite movie. The Shawshank Redemption was a box office flop. In 1994, top movies included Dumb and Dumber, Ace Venture: Pet Detective, and The Mask. Maybe if Jim Carrey had starred as Andy Dufresne – breaking out of prison by turning into a human tornado, leaving a cartoon silhouette in the brick, or proclaiming "Get busy living or get busy dying" through his ass – Shawshank would have been a smash hit. It was only when it wound up on VHS and on TV that Frank Darabont's movie based on Stephen King's story became what's now considered a classic.

It's hard to say why movies don't stick right away. Pulp Fiction was one of the other huge films of 1994, as violent as it was cool, and one of the few movies of the American indie renaissance that made good on its author's early promise. For all its affectations, though, Tarantino's sophomore film made for one of the most narratively innovative experiences most mainstream audiences had by then encountered. But of course the biggest film of that year was the time-trotting, saccharine Forrest Gump, as famous for its camera tricks as it was for its folksy wisdom. Narratively interesting and with triumph of the human heart written all over it, it is a wonder why Shawshank wasn't better received.

Browsing the popular movies of the year, it occurs to me that, while all very fine flicks in and of themselves (isn't Bill Pullman pissing himself in True Lies one of the all-time classic movie moments?) the biggies are generically clear. You've got uncomplicated action, uncomplicated comedy, all streamlined for their audiences. But Shawshank stands out for it's mix of depressing and uplifting. While it's no Hunger, it is primarily about incarceration, and as much as it is about the success of the human spirit, it's also about the destruction of said will to live. It's a nice buddy story, but it also has its share of beatings, and rape, and suicide.

The movie's fidelity to Stephen King's original story might have a lot to do with its slow motion success. We could sit here until the killer clowns come home arguing about King's literary merit, but the fact is that the guy's probably one of the most stalwart post-war storytellers in North America. He's got an undeniable knack for the yarn. As a horror writer, he's most distinguished for placing his characters in a pot of water and bringing it to a slow boil. In his less talked about monster-less writing, King cooks the water the same. In "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," incarceration, false or otherwise, is the creeping ghoul. Without the danger being clear and present in the adaptation (Clear and Present Danger did better than Shawshank in 1994, too), I can't help but wonder if the movie was as immediately compelling for audience being offered more defined, blatant – which is not to say not good – fare.

King's novella reads like a corked, classic narrative. The movie has this classic feeling, too. Which might go a ways to explain why The Shawshank Redemption found its audience on home video. Even watching it for the first time, you can't help but feel like you've seen it before, like it's been around forever. It's just my opinion, but the top movies I've mentioned feel so tightly tethered to 1994, whereas Shawshank lives freely on that beach in Zihuatanejo.

- Andrew

Monday, February 9, 2015

GMC: DECEPTIVE POSTER EDITION

Get busy livin', or get busy watchin’ movies. That's god-damn right. For the second time in my life, I am guilty of committing a crime.* Parole violation.* Of course, I doubt they'll toss up any roadblocks for that. Not for an old movie club host like me...

I find I'm so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across town. I hope to see my friends and watch a movie with them. I hope the Cinema is as full as it has been in my dreams. I hope.

Whoa. I got a little Morgan Freeman there for a minute. You’ll have to forgive me. The Guelph Movie Club selection for February is The Shawshank Redemption. We hope you’ll join us on the 26th at 8:45 p.m.

Sure, you could see Shawkshank 106 times on television between now and then. But, great movies are better on the big screen, with friends. So forget the crappy TV edit. See it with us.

If you don’t know, we, the people, choose the movies we show at Movie Club. That's kinda awesome. You know what else are awesome? Bill Murray movies, that's what. So, we’re making March all about Bill Murray. Help us decide which of his films we see by voting in the poll below.

Which Movie Starring Brian Doyle Murray's Brother Bill Do You Want to Watch In March?

I think a lot about making Guelph Movie Club something people love. So, if you’ve got a suggestion for a movie, or something else we can do to make it great, you can email (williamson[dot]d[at]gmail[dot]com] or tweet [@dcwllms] me any time.

Until then, see you at the movies.

- Danny W.

*Not really
*Very not really

Sunday, February 8, 2015

SELMA: THERE IS ONLY AN AMERICAN PROBLEM

On March 7, 1965 ABC news interrupted its Sunday movie, Judgement at Nuremberg, to show footage of peaceful American citizens being gassed, chased down, and beaten by newly deputized white male citizens of Dallas County. Incidentally juxtaposed with what were still fresh, but by then also historic, crimes against humanity (the film included real footage from inside the concentration camps), the rightness and wrongness of the reach for and denial of civil rights in America must have appeared all the more stark to TV viewers. Present ambivalence must have seemed all the more repugnant in the sudden context of the results of past ambivalence. Here was history, the type of thing they make movies about years later, happening in real time.

Of course, violence was to be expected when civil rights activists from Selma, Alabama attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named for a US Senator and popular Grand Dragon of the KKK) en route to Montgomery. It was tragic that it had to happen, but, through the lens of history, necessary that it be witnessed by a nation that had seen and supported changes in the laws, but were mostly (whether willfully or not) ignorant of how little impact those improvements had made. When the footage of the unprovoked brutality was supplemented with news of the murder of a white Unitarian minister, James Reeb, the nation's hackles were suitably raised. The stain of ancestral, systemic racism will probably never been full scrubbed out, but the greater moral transgressions in Selma and all over the country seemed, at least for a time, to trump - or, sadly, amplify - personal prejudice. "There is no Negro problem," President Johnson was compelled to declare. "There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem."

Selma zeros in on this national tipping point, focusing on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s role in both boots-on-the-ground assistance in Alabama's micro struggles while orchestrating that strife in a way that could be understood and diagnosed, in a macro way, as what Johnson would afterwards call an American Problem. The film doesn't delve into so much as portray this important place, this important period, and these important people of history. Most historical films - especially portrayals of American history, it seems - tend to supercharge their stories with the bombast and certainty of hindsight, will limn every action with the confirmed importance of its outcome. But there's a realist, history-not-yet-written tone to Selma that makes it feel unique. It's not a depiction of an historical event so much as it is a depiction of an event becoming history.

David Oyelowo's Dr. King feels especially human, frangible and fallible - a hero in his own time, living at once in history but also in the everyday minutiae that gets sloughed off with time. His countenance is not constantly sturdy - the way real characters often are in histories where we know the end - but instead is open to the nuances of doubt and worry as he tries to both assist the personal goals in Selma and urge forward the national ones.

Because not many films have resulted from this decade of change in American history (I'll bet more movies have been made about the 30 seconds of gunplay at the OK Coral), it's difficult not to compare Ava DuVernay's Selma with Spike Lee's Malcolm X. Both films tell their story under the contemporary pall of ongoing struggle. Malcolm X opens with footage of Rodney King being furiously beaten by the LAPD. It's a troubling context to begin in, morally as well as narratively. Beginning with that violence tethers the progress made by Malcolm X and other civil rights pioneers to ongoing setbacks. Effectively, a story of steps taken forwards opens with steps taken back. Selma of course arrives after half a year of confounding and heartbreaking fruition, with our cozy culture gobsmacked by the fact that what so many thought was a self-evident truth that Black Lives Matter needs to be pointed out and fought for still. In Selma, the past and present similarities don't need to be stressed. The near-mirror image of the Bloody Sunday clashes in Selma and those in Ferguson are not a choice of the filmmakers, but a troubling byproduct of how little has changed. The tone of Selma is never triumphant. The film knows that it's the story of battle won, and a war ongoing. Things are changing, but nothing has changed.

Maybe the most troubling anecdotal parallel between that battle of 1965 and the one we're in now, forty years later, is that when ABC delayed Dancing with the Stars to cover the not guilty verdict in the death of Michael Brown it did so not with the certainty that this was a story that demanded we drop whatever we were doing and pay attention, but with an apology and an assurance that the show about washed-up celebrities dancing would start shortly. What's that if not an American Problem?

- Andrew

Monday, January 26, 2015

REARVIEW: GREMLINS

The only thing I really recalled about Gremlins before watching it as an adult was big-eared, big-eyed little fluffy Gizmo -- or Giz -- behind the wheel of a hot pink toy sports car. Directed by Joe Dante, written by Chris Columbus, and produced by Stephen Spielberg, Gremlins came out in 1984. I was a year old. The sequel, The New Batch, wouldn't come out until 1990. Who knows when or how I saw the movie, but I grew up in a culture where Gremlins was more a product than a movie. There were gas station cups with a cutesy Gizmo on them, dolls, t-shirts, actual Gizmo's in actual pink sports cars. Thanks to cultural osmosis, I knew about the characters and premise, but the violence and gore of the original movie (the tipping point that resulted in the PG-13 rating, by the way) had been rendered out.

The first half of Gremlins is perfect for a product line. The inventor father who underhandedly picks up the trilling mogwai from a Chinese curio shop goes as far as to remark that every kid in America will want one. And most kids wound up getting one. The cuddly mogwai toy was as ubiquitous in the 80s as plush ETs and Ewoks. The idea that this creature represented something that, if handled incorrectly, would turn into a monster ready to kill you, did not survive into franchising. This commercial for Gremlins breakfast cereal doesn't even make a joke about food's connection to the disastrous transformation. In some ways, Gremlins didn't heed its own warning. The glut of products that spawned from this weird little movie are maybe the real monsters. The movie itself might even agree with me there.

As with a surprising amount of Stephen Spielberg's projects in the 80s, there's a little brook of antiquated Orientalism running through Gremlins. The sentiment reaches near racism in the voice of the drunk veteran next door neighbour who bemoans America's obsession with foreign products. "You gotta watch out for them foreigners because they plant gremlins in their machinery... They put them in cars, they put them in your TV. They them in stereos and those little radios you stick in your ears. They even put them in watches! They have teeny gremlins for our watches!" Ostensibly, the mogwai is just such a foreign product. As the cute mogwai transforms, turning into rampaging, mindless gremlins that tear apart a nice little American town, it's hard not to see Gremlins as pretty xenophobic.

But after the day's been saved -- the town's been destroyed, but probably nothing that can't be cleaned up in time for Kingston Hills to becomes Hill Valley (both movies take place on the same Universal Studios backlot -- the wizened grandpa from the curio shop returns to take back Gizmo and scold the Peltzer family. "You do with mogwai what your society has done with all of nature's gifts. You do not understand. You are not ready." He's especially upset that the white Americans have taught the mogwai to watch television, a concern that's reiterated and emphasized in the 1990 sequel. The foreign gremlins wreck mindless havoc, but in an American way. They gobble junk food, they guzzle booze, they smoke, and they fire off guns. Until they're all destroyed -- while watching a Disney movie -- they're living the unchecked American dream.

Is Gremlins saying that culture, like the mogwai, is something that one needs to be delicate with or else destroy/be destroyed by? And is the way that American cultural excess has spread throughout the world indicative that we've been irresponsible? Or is it about how America is being destroyed by foreign influence? Or is it just a kids movie?

Really, who cares when Gizmo's that cute?

- Andrew

Monday, January 12, 2015

STILL ALICE

Advance Tickets to the Thurs Jan 22, 6:45pm screening of Still Alice are now available for sale in the bookstore.

All Tickets are $15.00 for this Sneak Preview, with proceeds going to the Guelph office of the Waterloo Wellington Alzheimer Society.

The Greenroom will be open for dinner (Reservations recommended - 519.821..3311 x155) with advance seating privileges available, But the special Dinner & and Movie pricing WILL NOT APPLY for this FUNDRAISING SCREENING.

KNOWING THE END

I've been up there in the projection booth for a few showings of Foxcatcher, was in the audience for one. When I'm in the booth, it's not uncommon that I'll be doing work, my back to the screen, oftentimes the soundtrack dialed low. I always know when Fotcatcher is getting close to the end when I feel the booth shake. Every time the film reaches its climax, the whole theatre jumps, rattling the room.

Based on the real-life relationship between a pair of wrestling brothers and a wealthy eccentric, the ending of Foxcatcher is no secret. Most press about the movie mentions the cold facts of the film's ending. But I won't say a word because I've been shushed, had the air in front of my mouth swatted at if even I begin to speak about something that is public and historic knowledge. A few times I've received the scold, "No spoilers."

Gillian Flynn's novel Gone Girl, about the disappearance of a wife and the suspicion of her husband, was ravenously read in 2012. Its twist is Hitchcockian. Exposed to open air for 3 years, I should be able to talk openly about the winding road the story takes, but I wouldn't dare. There's not a tall enough tree in Guelph to string me up from if I dared reveal even an iota of the plot. David Fincher's film of Flynn's adaptation of her own book was widely anticipated and widely seen. This long after The Empire Strikes Back, everyone knew Darth Vader was Luke's father.

I didn't read Flynn's novel, but word of the story made it to me before seeing the adaptation. Even knowing the story, none of the suspense was lost when I saw Gone Girl. Fincher manages a sort of memory wipe, a hermetic experience that's indicative of a sturdy movie. If a good movie can suspend our disbelief, it can likewise suspend our intelligence.

I understand the spoiler embargo. Knowing no backstory makes for a special experience of discovery with film or literature or television. But I'm not fond of the opinion that the culture of No Spoilers creates. It turns art, or entertainment, or however you want to classify the books, movies, or TV you're gobbling, into mere plots, a moving point form list of things that happen. It treats the destination as more important than the journey, if you will.

Maybe one the most famous No Spoilers campaign came from the aforementioned Alfred Hitchcock for the release of Psycho. From the outset, Hitchcock went so far as to buy up as many copies of Robert Bloch's original novel as he could, trying to scorch that earth. Upon the film's release, viewers were urged not share the reveals -- SPOILERS: Marion Crane dies halfway through the movie, Norman Bates is Mother -- but of course I saw the film 35 years after the twists were public knowledge and the effect wasn't diminished. Because Hitchcock's classic is greater than its secrets. It envelops us in such a way that our innocence is somewhat restored.

And take Sunset Boulevard, which opens with struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis floating dead in a pool. From the the getgo, we know how the movie will end. Narrating, Gillis tells us outright that he will die. He shows us the bobbing proof. Does this spoiler corrupt the experience? No. We hang on not to find out how the film ends, but to understand why it ends. I went into Foxcatcher knowing what would happen, and still I jumped, signalling to the projectionist that night that the film was about to end again.

- Andrew

GMC: HOLIDAY LEFTOVERS EDITION

Like a good Christmas dinner, Guelph Movie Club is serving up our most delicious leftovers. Every month, when we choose a movie, there are always four losers, four movies that didn’t make the cut. Some of those movies – well – they lose a lot. That doesn’t seem right to us. So, we’re rolling out our most-loved, most-failed movie: Gremlins.

On Thursday January 29th at 9:00 p.m., join us, won’t you? If you do, just remember the following rules about your fellow movie clubbers:

1. Keep them out of the light
2. Don't give them any water, not even to drink
3. The most important rule, the rule you can never forget, no matter how much they cry, no matter how much they beg, never feed them after midnight

Oh, and another thing if you’re new around these parts: we need your help. You see, the way we pick the movies ‘round these parts is real democratic like. We’re sticking with the theme of “also rans”. Cast your vote to help us choose which Oscar loser we watch in February.

Which Oscar-Loser Do You Want Watch In February?

Gremlins represents the start of the third year of my hosting Guelph Movie Club. It has been, and remains, a real treat for me to share a movie a month with you for the last two years. I hope you’ll consider helping me spread the word, spread the love, and fill the Cinema to the brim.

'Til then, see you at the movies!

- Danny