Just in case any of you were interested, I thought I’d post a link to the film I did for last year’s coursework. I ended up doing it on my dog going through the 5 stages of grief.
And they said never to work with children and animals….
I’m well aware that this is far from perfect, but I was pretty much a one man band in constructing this thing and I’m fairly happy with it considering it was the first short film I’ve done.
Anyway here is the link on vimeo. I hope you enjoy it!
I have finally completed my first draft of my research project so I had a little celebratory movie day yesterday where I pooled Netflix for something I hadn’t watched yet. I ended up watching Girl, Interrupted and I pretty much fell in love with it. There was just something wonderful about it that captured my attention from the minute it started.
There’s a bond between all of those women in the hospital, something sort of reminiscent to Chicago – it’s the sort of feeling where friendships are formed out of necessity, but though both environments mirror each other as prisons, there is a definite sense that these girls in the ward do in fact care for each other, unlike Chicago’s harsh confessionary feel. After all the protagonist Susanna does humbly say “they were not perfect, but they were my friends,” and we get a touching scene of Susanna and Lisa singing “Downtown” to Polly when she was upset.
I had a lot of thoughts about this film actually. And no, it wasn’t just me fan-girling over Misha Collins entrance as Tony (although I did do a literal shriek) but just as a side note I thought it was interesting how his character vaguely echoes Jared Leto’s Toby – the names are uncannily similar as well as looking similar onscreen: dark hair, stubble/beard, dark shirts. Tony sadly didn’t get much screen time, only to try and persuade Susanna to stay with him (like Toby does) and not truly understanding or even comprehending her illness (again! a mirror to Toby). I can only think that was used to make us think about Jared Leto’s character during that scene, though I think he’d run away to Canada at that point.
I loved Susanna, because in some ways I can relate to her. In fact I think a lot of people can… I think it’s pretty clear that she was a bit disenchanted with high-school and before her stay in the hospital she was only vaguely aware of what to do next in her life – she’s missing any sort of direction which isn’t following what her parents would like of her. Susanna wants to be a writer, and turns down the opportunity to go to college and at every stage when she expresses her wishes the people around her question it a little bit. Even later on towards the film, when she tells her doctor her desire to write she finds she’s back on medication again the next day. It made me think of something that was said during a Psych class, where an offender pretended he was crazy to avoid going to prison and he did it so well that they didn’t let him out… in fact they interpreted everything he did as abnormal behaviour. It does feel like Susanna almost has a ‘choice’ to be crazy – or the doctors imply that she does as a ‘borderline’, … “whatever that means.” That’s not to say of course that the film handles mental illness insensitively, just that in accordance of Winona’s character not fully understanding her own illness it allows us the audience to follow her into the hospital as if it were ourselves in her shoes perhaps.
I totally blanked 