MYST Post #3: Hick

Hick

Earlier today, I overheard a conversation about the movie Hick. I looked it up and saw that it featured many of my favorite actors - Blake Lively, Rory Caulkin, Chloe Grace Moretz - and the storyline sounded pretty similar to one of my favorite movies, Electrick Children. I decided that I had to watch it. Going into it, I had high expectations. Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed.

One of the first scenes of the movie is of the main character Luli (played by Moretz) at her 13th birthday party, which is hosted by her alcoholic mother in a bar. Nobody there is Luli's age - everyone attending looks to be at least 30. Luli's father gives her a revolver. A few scenes later, Luli is home alone and decides that she can't stand living with her alcoholic parents anymore. She packs a bag of clothes, her gun, her drawing book, and a wad of cash stolen from her mother, and starts hitchhiking her way to Las Vegas. A guy named Eddie (played by Eddie Redmayne) picks her up. Soon after, she gets scared of him and asks him to drop her off. She catches another ride with a young woman named Glenda (Blake Lively), who takes Luli to her house. To the surprise of both Glenda and Luli, Eddie is there, working for Glenda's husband, Lloyd. Eddie then proceeds to kidnap Luli, rape her, and keep her hostage in a motel room. A few days after Luli was taken, she wakes up tied to the bed, with Glenda watching her. Glenda confesses that she used to date Eddie and he did the same thing to her. Glenda is helping untie Luli when Eddie walks in and shoots and kills Glenda. Luli takes the gun and shoots and kills Eddie. The motel owner, Beau, tells Luli that he can make sure she'll never get in trouble for any of that, and that if she needs a new home, his sister in Los Angeles has always wanted a daughter. At the end of the movie, after realizing that she doesn't want to go home to her mother, Luli takes a bus to Los Angeles to live with Beau's sister.

One of the main things I didn't like about the film is that in the beginning, the plot is extremely slow. Then all of a sudden, everything bad that could happen happens, and then the movie ends, and the audience is left shocked and confused. There are many unanswered questions at the end of the movie: what happened to Luli's father? The only information we get is Luli's mother's flippant "your father never returned". What happens after Luli gets on the bus - does she make it to LA? Does Beau's sister welcome her into her home or does she reject her just like Luli's real mother did? Does Luli ever get in any trouble with the police about the murders? There are so many things thrown at you at the end that you barely have time to process what is happening. 

Unfortunately, the plot wasn't the only thing I disliked about the film. For one thing, the casting was terrible. It was hard to take blonde bombshell Blake Lively seriously as a white trash gold digger after she starred as a rich, spoiled, New York teen in teen drama Gossip Girl for six years. I disagree with the way 15-year-old Chloe Moretz was sexualized in this movie. Eddie Redmayne totally flopped in his role of a psycho stalker/kidnapper/rapist. And Alec Baldwin? Where did he even come from? And how many donuts did he have to eat before getting this role?

A fat Alec Baldwin comforting Chloe Moretz after she kills her rapist.

The shots and angles in this movie were extremely boring. Rarely did the camera stray from a medium shot. I can only recall one scene in which a unique angle was used (a dutch/oblique angle when Eddie sees Luli for the first time after she gets out of his car). Being that there was basically just one type of shot, it was hard to decipher scenes and take meaning from them. High angles mean that that person has power - so who is in the position of power here? The object can't be that important if there is no close up on it - right? 

All round, this movie was a flop. So bad, in fact, that when I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes after viewing, I saw that critics gave it 5% and viewers gave it 37%. Basically, the movie is unrealistic and paints a picture of an extreme worst case scenario - it's as if my mother herself directed it as to push the idea of running away and hitchhiking out of my head. I give it one star out of five. 

MYST Post #2: Annie Hall

Annie Hall

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen as Annie and Alvy

Bored on a Sunday afternoon, I was scrolling through Facebook and stumbled upon a post about Annie Hall. Interested, I looked it up on IMDb and decided it was a movie that I just had to see, being a fan of romantic comedies, Diane Keaton, and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris is one of my all time favorite films). 

The movie begins with Alvy (played by Woody Allen) speaking directly into the camera, breaking the fourth wall, talking about how he misses Annie, a woman with whom he was in a relationship for a year. He describes himself and his relationship with Annie, incorporating a few jokes into the monologue and relating them to his life and his time spent with Annie. Right away, I could see that this movie would be unlike any other I had seen - the main character was already narrating the story in first person and present tense. If I had turned the sound on my computer off and just watched the scene, I would have felt that the scene was minimalist and simplistic - just a man in in a suit with in front of a blank wall. But if I had closed my eyes and turned up the volume, I would have felt completely different. Alvy babbles on and on about Annie and about himself. The only breaks he takes while speaking are to clear his throat. The monologue is almost difficult to keep up with (especially considering that at this point, the viewer knows nothing about who Annie is or why he cannot seem to stop talking about her). As I kept watching the movie, it struck me that every scene was like this: seemingly simplistic but in actually fact quite deep. I imagine that if one were to watch the movie only half paying attention, the movie would seem quite mindless and typical of a romcom. But reading deeper into the movie and paying attention to the little things opens up a new side of the movie to the viewer. Every scene has a purpose (and the purpose is not something like "to show their love for each other". Try, "to show the way that Annie has changed throughout the relationship with Alvy, finally looking up from the floor when she sings in front of an audience, and the way Alvy is uncomfortable, proving that he is not ready for changes and is stuck in his old ways").

First scene of Annie Hall

Throughout the rest of the movie, there are little quirks like when Alvy walks into past situations/memories and views them from a third person perspective, or when the subtitles flash up on the screen during a conversation between Alvy and Annie, narrating not what they are saying but what they are thinking. There is also a scene where Alvy goes to Annie's family's house for a meal. In this scene, Allen puts side-by-side shots of his family eating a meal and Annie's family eating a meal, juxtaposing the chaos of his family and the calmness of hers. Through this, we as an audience see why Annie is awkward and almost shy around other people and why Alvy goes a mile a minute; there are actually a few scenes that do this with different scenarios. A lot of romantic comedies are superficial: girl meets boy, girl falls for boy, boy falls for girl, and they live Happily Ever After. But in this movie, the viewer gets a great inside look at what the characters are thinking and past events that shaped them as a person. 

While Annie and Alvy are talking about art, subtitles narrate what they are really thinking.

On the left is Annie and her mother. On the right is Alvy's family.
There is a noticeable difference between both families,
even down to the fact that Alvy's family takes up more space on the screen

The shots in this movie last for a long time. I did a bit of research and the average shot length during a typical 1970s film was between 4 and 7 seconds. The average shot length in this film was 14.7 seconds. This is an interesting juxtaposition against the quick banter between Annie and Alvy that is occurring most of the film - in fact, the majority of this movie is dialogue. There are few scenes in which there is no one talking. The long takes could be a reflection of the way Alvy speaks in long, run-on sentences, barely pausing to take a breath. It could also represent the way Alvy is looking back at the relationship with Annie and makes the reader feel as if they, too, are standing back and viewing a scene from one spot. In many movies, shots that long would not work and the viewer would lose interest. However, because of the interesting, constant dialogue, the viewer doesn't get bored (or at least, I didn't).

Woody Allen included in this film dry humor, unique flashback scenes, a romantic storyline, and dialogue that kept me hooked the whole time. Because of all of those components, I absolutely adored the film. To be honest, I don't think that there was one part of the movie I disliked - right from the beginning I was captivated and I even had to cancel plans with friends because I couldn't bear to put the movie on pause until I got back. I give this film 5 out of 5 stars.

Formal Film Study: Xavier Dolan films dealing with sexual orientation

Having heard about Xavier Dolan's newest film Mommy doing so well at Festival de Cannes this year, I became interested in Dolan's other work (all of which has been shown at Cannes) and what influenced it. I noticed that many of his films deal with sexuality and how sexual orientation affects different people. I decided to watch 3 of his films: J'ai Tué Ma Mère, Heartbeats, and Laurence Anyways. Being that Dolan is from Montreal, Canada, all three of these films are in French.

Xavier Dolan

In today's society, being gay is almost considered "trendy". Gay men are portrayed by the media as being feminine, friendly, sassy types. Dolan has obviously tried (and succeeded) to break that stereotype. In all of these films, the main homosexual character is not the stereotypical gay man that you see every time you turn on your television. The characters Dolan creates are normal, subdued, fairly introverted males with pent up frustration and sometimes aggression. In J'ai Tué Ma Mère, the main character, Hubert Minel, is a quiet homosexual teen who fights with his mother and runs away from home just like every other kid does at some point. Heartbeats constructs a protagonist who is boyish and quite rugged. The leading man in Laurence Anyways transforms himself into a woman, but that doesn't stop him from being strong and assertive. Being that Dolan himself is gay, this is probably a reflection of who he is, especially when you take into account that Dolan not only directs but also stars in Heartbeats and J'ai Tué Ma Mère. He is trying to make the point that just because a man is gay, it does not mean that he has to act like a girl.

Another thing I noticed about Laurence Anyways and J'ai Tué Ma Mère was that both films depicted the strain that "coming out" can put on a parent-child relationship. In fact, J'ai Tué Ma Mère centers around that theme. In both movies, the audience sees that at first, the mother of the main character, does not know how to deal with the news that her son is queer. In Laurence Anyways, the main character's mother says to him, "I don't know what you want me to say. Your father will never accept you" after he tells her of his decision to become a woman. In J'ai Tué Ma Mère, Hubert's mother finds out from Hubert's boyfriend's mother that Hubert is gay; she does not mention to Hubert that she knows until it comes out during an argument, which prompts him to run away. This creates a huge divide between mother and son. However in both films, the relationship is mended and the mother comes to terms with her son's sexuality. Laurence and his mother are having lunch together near the end of the film and she says, "I was never close to you. I never saw you as my son. But I do see you as my daughter." Hubert and his mother reconcile at the end of the movie. This interested me and prompted me to look into Dolan himself. I came to discover that Dolan actually describes J'ai Tué Ma Mère as autobiographical. At first, his mother was shocked and did not know how to deal with it. But then she accepted it and now they are close.

Throughout all three of these movies, there were a lot of direct shots of both faces and objects. It made me think of the way that none of these stories beat around the bush - they are direct and get right to the point. They are also all quite long and tell stories in chronological order - there is no jumping around a timeline, which leads us back to the point that they are all very forthright. Yet another thing that caught my attention was that all the films had at least two scenes with discontinuity editing, each one including the main character. This created a juxtaposition between the two characters in the scene and emphasized the way homosexuals often feel like they are not accepted or are not "a part of it".

Direct shot from Heartbeats

From a scene of discontinuity editing in Laurence Anyways

It's easy to see what the political/cultural stance of these movies are. All three films were made within the last 5 years, but even though they are fairly recent, they are still battling to defeat gay stereotypes and prejudices. Laurence Anyways is set in the late 1980s-early 1990s, depicting scenes of bullying and rejection of transsexuality (seen when Laurence is fired from his job and also when he is beaten up on the street). Those things, however, are still prevalent in today's society, which is one of the messages that the film is putting out there, and trying to bring awareness to. J'ai Tué Ma Mère is set in the time in which it was made (2009), but it too has a scene where the main character is beaten up for being gay. Although homosexuality/transsexuality is becoming more prevalent and more widely accepted in today's society, these films are trying to show that we are not all the way there yet; living as a transsexual or a homosexual is still very hard.

Right after Laurence is beaten up, he begs a stranger for a
quarter so he can call for help and gets ignored.