COMEDY: FROM THE GUYS WHO BROUGHT YOU EVERYTHING UP TIL NOW

The past season of Inside Amy Schumer felt built for shares and retweets and pins and whatever other way media caroms in the echo chamber that is the Internet. From a Friday Night Lights parody that hung a lantern on rape culture to an episode-long 12 Angry Men-style drama about whether or not Amy Schumer is hot enough to be on TV, the comedian and her staff seemed to be going out of their way to both address and subvert all the issues everyone with a Twitter account was either needlessly or – more importantly – justifiably having kittens over. If the comedy wasn't so good, if it wasn't so spot-on and hilarious, it might have seemed pedantic.

Trainwreck made for a sort of exclamation mark following Inside Amy Schumer's much lauded third season. The announcement of the film, though, the year before contextualized Schumer's relevance with the fact that star-maker Judd Apatow would be directing the film written by and starring Schumer. By the time the film was released, Apatow's involvement felt inconsequential, eclipsed by Schumer's acumen and momentum. Yet, the ad campaigns for Trainwreck were lagging behind. The poster doesn't use Schumer's name but includes the banner:

Chatelaine tracked the trend of burying the female leads in these comedies, instead using the cadre of male funny-makers as the bait. To slip into the minds of the studios, this move is probably for the purposes of delineation. A woman featured prominently on a movie poster – I'm imagining their line of thinking here – runs the risk of suggesting that that movie's a "chick flick" and scaring off dudes. Distracted by the prominence of male producers – The Guy or The Guys – dudes might be tricked into see a good, funny movie about a woman starring a woman.

Bridesmaids stands as an odd touchstone, where it dawned on culture that women could be funny. But there's a catch there. It wasn't that women as leads hadn't been feasible up until then. Broad venues just weren't being made available. The people ponying up the dough didn't trust that the ticket-buying public would watch a movie where a woman shit in a sink or in the middle of the road for comedic effect. But it turned out that people with money did like seeing that, and since Bridesmaids there's been an increasing trust from the studios in the bankability of women.

Certain miserable, wrongheaded bags of shit might see the increasing prominence of women as leads in popular culture as some insidious feminist coup. Certainly this most recent season of Inside Amy Schumer was pointed and scathing enough to make it seem like the show had an agenda, and if it did, it hit all its marks, generating tons of worthwhile conversation. But Trainwreck has little to none of Schumer's directed issue tackling. The Amy character – the titular trainwreck – is similar to many of characters that appear on the TV show, but the movie itself doesn't deviate that wildly from a strong, conventional comedy. Yes, the typical gender rolls are flipped, but that switch isn't played as revolutionary. For all the social progress Schumer has recently made with her show, the sheer regularness of Trainwreck – and I should stress that I'm not slagging the movie; it's a deft hoot – is in itself a triumph. Trainwreck isn't out to change the world, but with the movie Schumer occupies a strong and effortless place in pop culture. Needing to hitch what she's doing to The Guy or The Guys by now seems like a vestigial move.

- Andrew

REVIEW: FORT TILDEN

Dramatically, hipster millennials – or caricatures of millennials, or caricatures of hipsters, because to imply that a portrayal of an age or cultural group is absolute is to cruise for a bruise – offer a unique challenge. Desire is the engine of traditional drama. A character wants something, reaches for it, and something or someone stands in their way. Conflict ensues, story is created. But what happens to drama when that desire is muddy or inarticulate? Millennials or hipsters, in the most egregious examples, suffer from a conflicting blend of apathy and hyperbole. If desire is absent or disingenuous, from where does the drama come?

Fort Tilden is seemingly simple. Harper and Allie meet a couple of guys at a party they're barely tolerating. Harper is a trust fund "artist" and Allie has plans to join the Peace Corps. They attach themselves to these guys' beach plans the next day with the promise of bringing along molly – aka MDMA. If we're charting the drama, their "want" is to go to Fort Tilden to meet these guys. The only thing standing in their way is their inability to function at the most basic level, to navigate from point A to point B. There are points where Harper and Allie start to feel like Vladimir and Estragon running late to meet Godot.

Harper and Allie are both light and scathing examples of a certain type of "kids these days," operating solely for the cachet of an experience rather than the substance. Sticking these two clueless, quixotic characters into a simple want/conflict trajectory makes for a surprisingly fun urban epic. It's hipster portrayal lands somewhere between the goofiness of Portlandia and the dark bleakness of The Comedy. In a way, the lack of drama becomes a generator of drama; the lack of any real conflict becomes true conflict.

- Andrew

GMC: HARRISON FORD IS A ROBOT EDITION

Welcome back to another year of Guelph Movie Club, kids. It’s our monthly celebration of movies we love, movies we have to see again on the big screen. Our first show of the year screens at The Bookshelf Cinema October 1st at 9:00 p.m. I know what you’re thinking, but that’s barely October, so we’re counting it as our September show.

Just like the first days of school, let’s start off with some show and tell.

Item 1: Harrison Ford. Is he a man? Is he a replicant? Who knows?

Item 2: Blade Runner. Is it The Bookshelf Cinema Essential Cinema? Is it a Guelph Movie Club selection? Who knows?

Well, at least for Item 2, I do. It’s both.

Yes, this month, we’ll watch Blade Runner: The Final Cut as the Guelph Movie Club selection for September. But, it’s also serving double duty as the Essential Cinema selection. Movies are neat like that, aren’t they? On one hand, it’s a classic piece of cinema directed Ridley Scott based on the equally classic story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. It’s been critically acclaimed, dissected, and endlessly analyzed. It’s clearly worthy of a spot on the Essential Cinema list.

But, it’s also clearly a movie we love. Google “Blade Runner fan theories” if you don’t believe me. Seriously, I know someone who owns all 200 versions of the movie (OK, there’s four or something, but don’t quote me on that). So yeah, it’s also clearly our kind of movie. Be sure to check it out on October 1st at 9:00 p.m.

If you’re new to Guelph Movie Club, here’s how it works. At each of our screenings, we ask for suggestions. We turn those suggestions into polls. Those polls decide what goes up on the screen each month. Here's our spooky poll for Halloween. We'll announce the results at the screening of Blade Runner.

Which film are you publicly willing to wet your pants on account of?

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Friday the 13th

Child's Play

Scream

Hellraiser

Create a poll like this

We had to hear it from your own lips.

Create a poll like this

 
















Till then, see you at the movies.

Danny

"THE WOLFPACK" AND ENTERTAINMENT AS EXPERIENCE

Finding the city of New York a vulgar place, Oscar Angulo kept his six sons and one daughter locked in their cramped Lower East Side apartment, ostensibly to protect them. They'd get out once or twice a year, but were otherwise sequestered, being schooled by their mother, Susan – a Midwestern hippy who met Oscar while visiting Machu Picchu – and by the over 5, 000 movies their father brought home to them.

The strict isolation and contradictory education of the Angulo kids is the subject of Crystal Moselle's documentary, The Wolfpack. Noticing the group of boys roaming through her neighbourhood, all dressed like Tarantino-ish hitmen, she approached them and eventually established a rapport over a shared love of cinema. A short while before their meeting, one of the brothers had managed to escape from the apartment, though did so dressed in a homemade Michael Meyers mask, which lead to a quick arrest. But that one instance of escape was enough, and the Angulo kids were now free to come and go as they pleased. Warming to Moselle, they brought her to their apartment and shared with her their huge homemade movie archive. In all those years trapped at home, they'd passed their time remaking their favourite features, transcribing the scripts, fashioning the costumes from old yoga mats, acting out and filming the scenes. For the documentarian, it was a windfall; for the Angulo boys, the chance encounter seems like not just a means of sharing their story, but of screening their body of work.

As a documentary in a post-Capturing the Friedmans world, The Wolfpack might be frustratingly respectful for some viewers. Moselle and her camera are visitors, not investigators or interrogators. The viscera of the Angulos' upbringing is hinted at, but never exposed; the psychology of their mother and father glimpsed, but not caught; the logic of a man chronically weary of a poisonous culture while also allowing in such a wealth of that culture's entertainment remains confounding. The boys themselves, and their relationship to one another and to cinema, stays the focus.

It's apropos that Quentin Tarantino is the filmmaker most looked up to and most emulated by the Angulo boys. Tarantino made and still makes movies that are primarily about movies. The movies the boys themselves make are – based on what's seen in the documentary – direct copies of their favourites. Replication is their stated directive. But how different is their Be Kind Rewind-style emulation from, say, Tarantino's thorough boosting of the 1987 Hong Kong crime flick City on Fire in his first feature, Reservoir Dogs? (A handy comparison of which can be found HERE.) Seeing the Angulo boys sitting cross-legged in front of the undulating light of their TV, it's easy to picture a young Tarantino in a similar pose of reception and devotion. The point to make is that what Tarantino, considered an auteur, brings to his art is his unique experience with other art. As young creators, are the Angulos, in their own unique circumstances, milling with less grist than any other artists who lock themselves up and wolf movies?

Nearly every reviewer of the doc notes how well adjusted the Angulo pack are, all things considered. These are not feral children, or Kaspar Hausers, but seemingly socialized kids; they're smart and charming and, when together, exude a great deal of swagger and confidence. They're also profoundly productive. With little detail of their actual upbringing, it's hard to make too many assumptions about the conditions of their rearing. But as much as the surface details are exceptional, there's something to their forced, entertainment-rich seclusion that feels familiar, comparable to a larger cultural movement towards reclusion, towards experiencing the world primarily through media and entertainment. By trying to protect his kids from a destructive American experience, Oscar inadvertently created the perfect condition for another one.

Culturalization is lately seeming as, if not more, important as socialization. Heaven help you if you're at a dinner party and you haven't seen The Wire, or if you work in an office and you've never seen The Office. Staying indoors and consuming entertainment is establishing itself as the norm. At the end of The Wolfpack, I couldn't help but wonder what, if any, deficit the Angulos, as both creators and people, really will suffer as they carry on into a world where everyone else seems to be staying home.

- Andrew

REARVIEW: MAD MAX

New watchers coming to the Mad Max series based on the new installment, Fury Road, might have a hard time including the original in their idea of what "Mad Max" is. The sere, ravaged world of the 2015 film – as well as its frantic, frenetic tone – feels like a far cry from the more tame-seeming, pre-apocalyptic 1979 setting. Mad Max takes place on the edge of the dystopian cliff, is the beginning of the end that most people associate with the franchise.

Much like the newer iteration, Mad Max is first and foremost car chase porn. It's set against a future oil crisis, where cars become somewhat fetishized on account of their dwindling feasibility, an idea sparked by the 1973 crisis. Discussing that trigger for the film, screenwriter James McCausland said,

Yet there were further signs of the desperate measures individuals would take to ensure mobility. A couple of oil strikes that hit many pumps revealed the ferocity with which Australians would defend their right to fill a tank. Long queues formed at the stations with petrol—and anyone who tried to sneak ahead in the queue met raw violence... George and I wrote the [Mad Max] script based on the thesis that people would do almost anything to keep vehicles moving and the assumption that nations would not consider the huge costs of providing infrastructure for alternative energy until it was too late.

In an undefined future, gangs chip away at the lingering structure of law and order, the Main Force Patrol. With a threatened citizenship unwilling to stand up against the marauders, the courts useless as a result, and the MFP being specifically targeted, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson's second role) emerges as the last one to fight for order in a civilization tipping towards chaos. When his wife and child become disastrously involved, Rockatanksy becomes the titular "mad" one.

When Max goes over the brink, he seems to drag the world along with him. The changes in the landscape and the fuller collapse of civilization featured in the subsequent movies do feel connected to the change in Max, the wilderness of the post-apocalypse a manifestation of the wilderness of his grief.

The world of Mad Max in most watchers minds will probably be the wild desert world of the sequels and the new installment. As a stand-alone, Mad Max exists as a triumph of DIY international cinema that came at the end of the decade in which the big studio "blockbuster" was invented. Made for pennies by mostly novices, Mad Max went on to gross 100 million – making it the most profitable movie ever, as far as cash spent vs cash earned goes, until The Blair Witch Project came along. Most indie movies of the time – especially internationally – leaned more towards the artistic, but Mad Max was then and still is a rare example of indie action. Part of its charm is the gritty aplomb unique to amateurs, but its deft stunts and action mixed with a quiet worry for the future keep people coming back.

- Andrew

REVIEW: WELCOME TO ME

Welcome to Me is not a documentary about Borderline Personality Disorder or mental illness in general.  Yes, it does feature a woman, Kristen Wiig as Alice Kleig, with diagnosed BPD who elects of stop her medication in and around the time she wins 80ish million dollars in the lottery. With her windfall she buys time on an infomercial channel and creates a TV show, in the image of Oprah, that is entirely about her, conforming to the untethered whims of her personality. But Welcome to Me is absolutely not a documentary.

As a sort of comedy, Welcome to Me is a rarity. Most movies that either deal with or feature mental illness skew towards the dramatic. Culturally, disorders are still much misunderstood and sometimes derided, and so the handling of mental illness is often reverent and dramatized and to find humour in a reality that can so often be destructive for the sufferer and those close to them runs the risk of being tacky and disrespectful. No doubt there will be some concern over whether or not Welcome to Me is mocking afflictions, especially considering Wiig's particular, slanted sensibility.

But these are Welcome to Me's concerns as well. Yes, it's funny and odd that Alice rides out on a swan boat and eats a meat cake and has actors re-enact traumatic scenes from her life – it's right up the alley of found footage/cable access humour – but the rightness and wrongness of being audience to this process that resembles a type of catharsis is never settled on. The TV crew have doubts about enabling someone clearly having a tough time and the slowly-building audience find the show funny until it's not funny. Whatever doubts the viewer might have about whether or not Alice's unstymied BPD is being played for laughs get echoed throughout Welcome to Me.

But are we allowed to find Alice Kleig funny? A question persists: where does a disorder begin and the person end? To reduce someone to only as a sufferer is to treat them as the sum of their imbalances. The film allows Alice to be an unlikable, difficult person, a challenge to her friends and family, while at the same time revealing an essential oddness and warmth about her. In this way, Welcome to Me, as a comedy, manages to be a more effective look at a person living with mental illness. Dramatic portrayals tend to dwell on struggle, in the process blotting out a great deal of the person struggling, becoming more about the disorder than the person. The title itself nods to the fact that this is a movie about Alice Kleig, who has BPD, and not one about BPD, which has Alice Kleig.

- Andrew

REARVIEW: BACK TO THE FUTURE II

Is Back to the Future II the perfect sequel? Quite possibly.

Before all you rabid fans of The Exorcist 2, Psycho 2, Jaws 2, Teen Wolf Too, Baby Geniuses 2, Speed 2, Weekend at Bernie's 2, and The Empire Strikes Back totally Biff-out on me, let's consider what makes a great sequel. It's a dicey errand, as the line between a great number two and a crumby one is thin and hardly straight. 

We should set our terms first. What are counting as sequels? I'm hesitant to include the likes of Indiana Jones or James Bond, as these are more serials than sequels, hewing more closely to the early days of cinema and the old days of literature where a common hero threads through various adventures. And do we include fare like Star Wars – also a throw back to Flash Gordon-like serials – which is ostensibly a full, unfolding narrative series? Dictionary-wise, yes, these do fall under the definition of sequel, but let's culturally qualify a bit. 

The kind of sequel we're talking about is generally compelled by commerce more than storytelling. Once a movie has proven to be bankable, people who are in the business of making money will want another one. But it's not as evil as it sounds. Lazy, maybe, but not evil. Hollywood wouldn't make sequels if we didn't go to them. So, in some ways, the kind of sequel we're talking about is for fans of the first movie who want more from a story that doesn't have a lot more to give.

Bruce Willis' John McClean, for instance, is just your every day half-saucy/half-crusty NYPD officer who is just trying to mind his own business when international incidents keep getting foisted on him over and over again. We, the audience, take for granted that the same or similar things happen to a character who doesn't go looking for trouble. And we don't care, so long as it's entertaining.

I'm not saying this is an essentially a bad thing. Yes, it's frustrating when every movie that comes out is a retrofit of a previous one, but there is a sort legitimate glee to rehashing the same experience over and over again, a reality that became clear to me the other weekend as I watched my four-year-old nephew go up and over the same bouncy slide incessantly. When we like an experience, it's understandable that we'd want to have it again.

"There's something very familiar about all this."

And so this is the challenge set to a sequel that isn't part of a greater mythology or serial: it has to be different from, but also sort of the same as, its predecessor. Is Back to the Future II a great movie? Not necessarily. But we don't usually hold sequels up to the same standards as the originals. The first in a series comes out of nowhere, is a discovery, whereas sequels are familiar, and we want them that way. And this sequel gives us what we want in spades. Not only does the movie use all the characters from the first movie (sort of sans Crispin Glover and with a swapped Jennifer), but it features different versions of them throughout time. (So many Biffs!) Too, it mimics a few of the famous scenes from the first movie, though with the added spin of these new old events taking place in a futuristic 2015. And, as a good sequel should, it doesn't ignore its own cultural echolalia. As an old Biff says while watching the redux of the Biff and Marty chase from the original, '"There's something very familiar about all this."

But what makes Back to the Future II the perfect sequel is the fact that it doesn't only nod to the first movie, but actually takes place within it. Thanks to the logic of its own universe, it's able to literally do what all sequels strive to do figuratively. 

I realize that there are plenty of number twos out there are better movies than the second Back to the Future – I'm looking at you, fans of The Boondock Saints 2 – but no other follow-up manages to tick as many sequential needs as this one does.

- Andrew