Perspectives from a Professor
From the time I was a little girl, I loved the natural world and the world constructed of words. Stories have always made my world go around, and as I got older, the world inside my head became just as real (more so sometimes) than the world around me.
No matter how much I enjoy Melissa McCarthy, Elizabeth Moss, Tiffany Haddish, and the incomparable Margo Martindale, this movie is a mess.
Except for the soundtrack. I did appreciate that.
I love to support women directors, and Andrea Berloff also adapted the screenplay from a comic book series, but story is the problem here.
Elizabeth Moss, Tiffany Haddish, and Melissa McCarthy
It’s always gratifying when my former students find professional success in careers they love. I can’t take any significant credit for that, but playing a supporting role in the initial stages seems a little like “paying it forward” out of appreciation for how my teachers nurtured (and nudged) me along.
By this time, I have taught thousands of students, and some of them I remember with surprising clarity.
I remember quite a few conversations with Tripper Clancy during his college days. When I saw Tripper for breakfast in LA a couple of weeks ago, billboards and bus signs and all kinds of other promotional materials for Stuber were all over town. Now, the film is playing at multiplexes everywhere.
Seems like a good time to get some behind-the-scenes information.
Continue reading “STUBER”
If you haven’t seen Joe Talbot’s brilliant directorial debut (based on a story by Talbot and Jimmie Fails that is based partly on events from Fails’s own life), you still have a few days to see The Last Black Man in San Francisco in Winston-Salem, Chapel Hill, Durham, Charlotte, Asheville, or Fayetteville.
One of the reasons I urge you to see the film at the cinema if possible is because it is visually stunning, and Talbot makes an unconventional choice in terms of framing that reinforces the sense of San Francisco as a vertical city, one that forecloses options for Jimmie Fails (playing a version of himself with the same name).
In the early days of the movies, most films where shot with an aspect ratio (width to height) of 1.33 to 1 — written 1.33:1 — later adjusted to 1.37:1, which is similar to the original 4:3 aspect ratio of the television screen.
There are a variety of aspect ratios used in film and television, but most widescreen films in the US are photographed at 1.85:1, which is roughly analogous to 16:9, the HD widescreen TV aspect ratio you’ve grown accustomed to today.
All of this is to say that the squarish frame of The Last Black Man in San Francisco is shocking at first, a bit disorienting.
But, this is the perfect visual and emotional frame for this film.
As Jimmie tries to reclaim his stately familial homeplace in a city where gentrification has foreclosed his options, the sides of the visual frame viewers have become accustomed seem to close in on him.
When we think about the weight of elements within the frame, this is called mise en scène, a French term that comes from the world of theatre and refers to the arrangement of scenery and props on the stage. In cinema, the term has a more expansive meaning and includes lighting as well as material objects — anything that gives weight to the space within the frame.
Mise en scène and framing contribute to whether or not we think of a scene as having an open form (suggesting that the virtual world continues beyond the frame and evoking a sense of freedom) or a closed form (conveying a sense of claustrophobia and reinforcing themes of entrapment).
Sometimes the contrast in tone and theme can be contained in the same film to mark important transitions. One example of this I use in class is The Shawshank Redemption (1994), which many of my students have seen.
For most of the film, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) and Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman) are in prison. The colors are cool — gray, cold blues, black — the lighting moody, and the sets enclosed to emphasize their incarceration.
Contrast this with the final scene when both men are free. Wide open spaces prevail, and the blue tones here are warmed by sunshine and suggest tranquility rather than emotional detachment.
I admire many things about The Last Black Man in San Francisco, but I am particularly taken with how the aspect ratio of the film is a unifying principle for other aesthetic elements and narrative themes.
See this one sooner rather than later…
Right now, I am in the chair at the hair salon I visit every five weeks. This means that I have downloaded the WordPress app, figured out how to link to the On Media blog, and am writing my first post on the fly from my phone.
Probably half of you are thinking, “So what?” But, a quarter of you are amazed I took this initiative, and another quarter of you think it is cool.
That’s it for the new trick portion of this post; now it is time for a couple of big ideas.
If you know me well, no doubt you have heard me say, “I would love to live on a farm if I didn’t have to do any of the work.”
At least, I would love to live there on weekends and/or holidays.
The idea of watching a film about a nature cinematographer (also a creative force behind the documentary) and his foodie spouse leaving a cramped apartment in Santa Monica to take over a farm an hour north of LA is intrinsically appealing to me.
But, you don’t need to have a predilection for rural settings or non-fiction film to appreciate this doc because The Biggest Little Farm is outstanding by any measure.
On June 21, 2019, 34 teams drew genre assignments then had 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit short films to compete for awards from the local 48 Hour Film Project. The competition began on the Summer Solstice, but more daylight doesn’t translate into more time when the clock is ticking!
You can see the award-winning films at Greensboro’s Carolina Theatre on Saturday, July 13 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 for the “Best Of” screening event, an evening that promises to be fun — for those who submitted films and the rest of us who get to watch them.
Each team had to include the character Nathan or Nancy Thomas (a writer), to include a specific prop (a wallet) in the story, and to incorporate an assigned line (“Aren’t you precious?”) into the script. According to the official rules, films must run between 4 and 7 minutes.
A panel of three judges evaluated the submitted films on artistic merit, technical merit, and adherence to the assignment. As one of the judges, I have seen all of the completed films. It is always intriguing to see what teams come up motivated by their love for movies.
I find the enthusiasm of participating teams inspiring.
But now, with so many viewing options available on a variety of platforms, networks are looking for creative ways to compete for eyeballs, and fresh offerings have become a key part of the strategy.
CBS All Access’s first original streaming series The Good Fight is a spin-off from (and sequel to) the popular drama The Good Wife (CBS 2009-16), and luckily for those of us unable to access CBS All Access because of market restrictions, CBS is airing the first season of the series on Sunday nights this summer.
Five episodes in, I’m enjoying the show.
Yesterday I saw Yesterday.
It is perfectly charming and avoids a lot of pitfalls that stories based on metaphysical “magic” usually fall into, narrative traps that distance me from the narrative.
The actors are engaging, the filmmaking accomplished, and the message inspires and rings true in a way our fame- and privilege-obsessed culture needs to embrace if we hope to thrive or, possibly, to survive.
Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) has given up his teaching job to focus on his music with the encouragement of his friend/manager Ellie Appleton (Lily James). It is clear to viewers that she loves him, but he has never moved her from the friend column into the love column, probably because he does not feel “together” enough or worthy enough to be loved.
It is only after Jack is on the cusp of worldwide fame and unbelievable that he discovers what it is he really wants: a simple life filled with love and music with friends and family and built around an alignment with purpose on an intimate scale that appears enormously appealing in this movie.
Yesterday is an unconventional teacher movie that almost oozes sweetness and hope, two things I hold in high regard. And, yet…
I came to Deadwood late but since discovering the depth and unexpected beauty of the series have done my best to make up for lost time.
One of the joys of binge watching is sharing the experience — either in the same space or through conversation during and after. I watched the first half of the Netflix series Dead to Me with someone, then we compared notes a few days later after completing the episodes separately.
Our shared verdict? The series needed one more episode to wrap things up instead of setting up a second season. The series shares some similarities to Big Little Lies, another show that should have remained a limited series instead of trying to capitalize on its successes by expanding the narrative in ways almost sure to diminish it.