Thursday Movie Picks - A Disappearance

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them - we won't disappear on you!

Fear not, my friends! I haven't disappeared, I'm just CRAZY busy and tried to do this on my lunch break at work but that didn't work because I haven't really had a lunch break all week. Anyway, this week's theme is disappearances, which can be traumatic - for the disappeared as well as the ones they left behind.

The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2016) A Puritan family is exiled from their village after their views are deemed too extreme (which, since we're talking about Puritans, must have been pretty damn extreme!). They settle on the edge of a wood and before long, when teenage Thomasin (a star-is-born performance from Anya Taylor-Joy) is playing peek-a-boo with her baby brother, the baby disappears. As it turns out, he was stolen by a witch who lives in the wood, and the young twins insist that the family goat, Black Phillip, is talking to them. One of the best films of last year, The Witch (or, if you prefer, The VVitch) is supremely chilly, a tense, beautifully shot freakout that never feels anything less than completely authentic, and features outstanding performances from Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson as the heads of the household.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) On Valentine's Day in the year 1900, three schoolgirls and their teacher disappeared during an outing at Hanging Rock in Victoria, Australia. This didn't actually happen, but after watching Peter Weir's gorgeous masterpiece, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was based on a true story. The film knows that not knowing what happened is scarier than giving a definitive answer, and it accumulates a lot of power in its depiction of the disappearance and its aftermath.

L'Avventura (Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1960) A woman disappears during a Mediterranean boating trip, and her fiancée and best friend become attracted to each other during the course of the investigation into her disappearance. Because of the ennui of the Italian socialite set. Or the landscape. Or something. I don't know. I just don't like this movie. No one is likable and the pace is too slow. I'm sure it all MEANS SOMETHING, but I could care less about these poor sad beautiful rich people.

Thursday Movie Picks - Fish Out of Water Movies

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. All you have to do to get in on the action is pick three films that relate to the week's theme and write a little bit about them!

This week on Thursday Movie Picks: Fish Out of Water movies. Which is VERY convenient for me, since I just watched one for another project! So why don't we start with that one...

Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) Harrison Ford received his only Oscar nomination (CAN YOU BELIEVE?!?) for playing Philadelphia cop John Brook, forced to hide out in Amish country after he gets shot trying to protect a young Amish boy who witnessed a murder. Weir and cinematographer John Seale cast quite a spell here, making Amish country feel like a lovely place to live, even if they don't have electricity and believe themselves to be superior to everyone else. The scene where the whole community comes together to raise a barn for a newlywed couple is just magnificent in every way. That the film is so good with the quiet drama that comes in Amish country makes its facility with the thriller elements that dominate the first and last twenty minutes even more impactful. PLUS: early screen appearances from Danny Glover, Viggo Mortensen, and MISS Patti LuPone herself!

...but most good Fish Out of Water tales are comic as opposed to dramatic, so....

My Cousin Vinny (Jonathan Lynn, 1992) MARISA TOMEI FOREVER, BITCHES! Look, My Cousin Vinny isn't some masterpiece of cinema or anything, but it's still funny as all get-out thanks to director Lynn's knack for staging (he also directed the comic masterpiece Clue) and the inspired comic stylings of the Oscar-winning Tomei as Mona Lisa Vito, stealing the film right out from under the nose of Joe Pesci (who is no slouch in the comedy department here). A rogue's gallery of great actors in key supporting roles take the rote city-slickers-in-the-sticks courtroom drama of the script and make it indelible with go-for-broke line readings that just kill. You're probably reciting some of them right now.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, 2006) One of the best movie-going experiences of my life was seeing Sacha Baron Cohen's masterpiece mockumentary with my sister in a packed theater two weeks after it opened. Some films are just meant to be seen with the largest, most diverse crowd possible, and Borat is the king of those. That one viewing has colored all subsequent viewings of this for me. If you were somehow living under a rock in 2006, here's the deal: Baron Cohen went undercover in disguise as Borat, a reporter from Kazakhstan purportedly making a documentary about America, on a road trip from coast to coast, meeting with different people, attending various events, and getting an unwitting picture of America and Americans at their best and worst (but mostly worst). To say the film's timing was perfect would be an understatement: we NEEDED to laugh at ourselves in 2006, and boy did Borat ever deliver that in spades. Since most everything in the film was real (all the non-celebrities, and even most of the celebrities, had no idea it was Baron Cohen under that mop and ridiculous mustache and crazy accent), Borat almost is an actual documentary about the state of American social mores in the mid-00s. Baron Cohen's unbelievably committed, completely fearless performance is a hilarious master class in improv, but the film is so much more than that. This is social satire at its most brazen and biting, a ruthless takedown of American imperialism and exceptionalism that will probably never stop being relevant and ahead of its time.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot - Witness

Written as part of the series hosted by Nathaniel R. over at The Film Experience, where I occasionally contribute.

Peter Weir's Witness is one of those films whose reputation precedes it. The movie was a HUGE hit upon its release in 1985, and also received the Oscar seal of approval, with eight nominations including Best Picture, Director, and Actor (for Harrison Ford) and winning two including Best Original Screenplay. Everyone I know who was an adult when it was released LOVES Witness - especially, perhaps, my mother, who has had a crush on Harrison Ford ever since Star Wars. So, you could say I went into this viewing with high expectations.
 

But then, the expectations game is funny. Because Witness is most often described as a thriller, and somehow I got it in my head that Witness is about what happens when Ford's Detective John Book investigates a killing in the Amish community, NOT what happens when a young Amish boy is the sole witness to a murder in a train station and Book must protect him while kind-of undercover in the Amish community. The film is really only a thriller for both its opening and closing 20 minutes. The rest of it, though, is really a quiet drama introducing people to Amish culture in the broadest of subtle strokes. I don't know how much my expectations got in the way of my enjoyment of the film (and to be clear, I did like it), but up until the last act I kept wondering if this was one of those "you really had to be there" hits that spoke to something ineffable in the culture at the time of its release.

Thankfully, Weir was working with the genius John Seale (arguably robbed of an Oscar this past year for his beautiful work on Mad Max: Fury Road), who is just a fucking painter with light. It's here where the film most earns its iconic status, for me. In its best moments, Witness is some straight-up Terence Malick magic hour Days of Heaven shit.

Here's the weird thing. While watching Witness for the first time, I thought there were not a whole lot of images I would choose as my best shot. And then when I went through it again to grab some screenshots, I capped AT LEAST a dozen shots that stood out to me for various reasons, like this one, which I HAD to capture in motion as the light goes down:

FUCKING. GORGEOUS.

And then there's the scene in the garage, my second favorite scene in the movie almost solely because of how stunningly it's lit (and also because it's the most purely charming Harrison Ford has ever been):

Best Shot Runner-Up

My favorite scene, though is the barn raising, which I could just watch on a loop forever and ever until I die and be purely satisfied. It is so good that for those eight minutes, I was ready to give up all of my stuff for the simple life of the Amish.

Look at them all, all over that scaffolding like monkeys on a tree in the jungle, each tirelessly working away, singular yet also part of a whole, separate but connected. It's an extremely pleasing sight to behold. I don't know what the Amish community thinks about Witness (if they even think about it all), but this scene alone is enough to put them in a very positive light, a close, tight-knit community of people who focus on life's simplest pleasures, who live off the land and have no need for modern conveniences - because maybe we really don't need them when we work hard and have each other.

But anyway, to the business at hand: Selecting the film's best shot. The more I thought about this, the more it was really no contest. For all of the beautiful shots in the film, there was one where all of the film's craft elements came together for me in a magical way:

This comes right before that lamp shot up above, just as Kelly McGillis's Rachel learns that John Book is going to leave, to "go back to his world, where he belongs" in the words of her father-in-law, Eli. Eli tells her that they both know it's where he belongs, but this shot puts where Rachel herself belongs into question. She may be boxed in to the hand-built Amish house in which she stands, but her shirt color ties her to the outside world, where John is. The shot is just as beautifully lit as every other shot in the film, but it's just packed with meaning in a way that stood out to me.

Kelly McGillis, by the way, is FUCKING FANTASTIC in this. She does so much with just her face and no dialogue at all, conveying so many conflicting feelings that she could not even put into words if she tried.... Rachel has recently lost her husband, and here is this man from the "outside world" coming in and making her feel things she maybe hasn't ever felt before, and at any rate is not ready for. It's completely to McGillis's credit that it feels like Rachel might actually leave the world she has known her whole life for a man she barely knows. For someone I only knew as "the girl" from Top Gun, this performance was a revelation. And to think this was her first major role! People who were there, tell me: Was there REALLY no room for her in that year's Oscar lineup? Or was it one of those cases where no one could decide if she was Lead or Supporting? Or did she somehow not get good reviews?!?

*               *               *

But now that that's all done, can we please talk about the REAL star of this film? Ladies and gentlemen, MISS PATTI LUPONE:

Rocking a mullet like nobody's business.

Okay, okay, she plays Harrison Ford's sister and is only in two scenes, but still. How many women could pull off this look?

NONE. THAT'S how many.

Thursday Movie Picks - Movies Set in a High School

Written as part of the blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. You should join; it's fun and easy! Just pick three movies that fit the week's theme and tell us about them!

Ah, high school: that great cesspool of American teenage life. I actually had a pretty decent high school experience - certainly not the best time of my life (that would be college), but certainly not even close to a bad one. But in the movies, high school is either a magical place you never want to leave or a hellhole you can't get away from fast enough. And nothing in between. I always wondered if people who wrote movies about how amazing high school was were people who peaked in high school or if they were re-writing their teenage years to be better than they actually were.

BUT ANYWAY.... Enough about me. On to my picks for the week! Two 80s classics and two modern almost-classics.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I originally didn't pick Clueless and She's All That for "Teen Comedy" week because I wanted to save them for this. But then I thought of two other films I liked better.

The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985) Easily the greatest movie about high school ever made, and the only movie I can think of that is entirely set inside a high school. This '80s classic should be shown to every incoming high school freshman on their first day, so effectively does it show that no matter what our outwardly defining traits may be, everyone has some deep hurt in their life, and that "each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal." John Hughes's masterpiece speaks to every teen, and to the teen inside all of us. If only all detention was this rewarding (and unsupervised).

Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989) Set in an all-boys prep school in the 1950s, this film's cast is like a who's who of (then) up-and-coming actors: Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, Josh Charles... and of course, Robin Williams as the English teacher we all wish we had (except for the whole defacing a book thing). Williams's Mr. Keating (which also just happened to be the name of my favorite high school English teacher) inspires his students to actually love poetry and live by the principles of the great poets - to really see beauty in the world around them, not just study it as the school's Headmaster would have him do. Of course, this being a prep school in the 50s, the parents don't take too kindly to their sons getting silly ideas in their heads about performing in plays and not respecting their fathers' authority. A beautiful film filled with great performances.

Hamlet 2 (Andrew Fleming, 2008) It's really a pity not many people saw this movie. This story of down-and-out high school drama teacher Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan), who decides to write a musical sequel to Shakespeare's immortal play Hamlet for the annual school show, is the best/worst, funniest/stupidest, most inappropriate high school movie ever made. A spoof of inspiring-teacher dramas, let's-put-on-a-show musicals, and high school movies in general (think of an unholy combination of Dangerous Minds, Step Up, and Waiting for Guffman) Hamlet 2 is completely insane, and that's before Elizabeth Shue shows up playing herself. And WAY before we actually get to the performance of the show itself, which includes such stirring musical numbers as "Raped in the Face" and "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus".

BONUS PICK:

G.B.F. (Darren Stein, 2013) When three popular high school girls running for prom queen realize that the must-have accessory for the school year is the elusive (in their neck of the woods) Gay Best Friend (or GBF), they all latch onto the one gay guy they know, who was recently accidentally outed by his own gay best friend. Suddenly, his life becomes worse and better simultaneously. Because you see, he's really a shy little wallflower, not the outgoing FABULOUS! gay the girls want/expect him to be. Naturally, they help hum out! But do any of these girls actually like him for him? Or do they just like him for what he can do for them? G.B.F. isn't quite the next-gen Mean Girls it's clearly dying to be, but the cast is game (all hail Xosha "fluorescent beige" Roquemore from Precious, who is EVERYTHING), it's pleasant to watch, and it's very funny. And lead Michael J. Willett is, as the kiddies say nowadays, totes adorbs.