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 finally got to watch ‘Teenage‘ which I had been dying to see for a couple of months now so deciding to randomly check the website again today I was delighted to find it’s now available on Netflix! I already knew what the soundtrack was like when I ravenously clicked on everything on the main site all that time ago, but getting to hear it combined with the silent footage was a joy. Bradford Cox is a genius, the whole thing flowed beautifully.
I enjoyed the scrapbook-esque quality of the film with the main black and white footage woven cleverly with voiceovers, diarising the history of German, British and US culture and how they saw ‘the youth’ before anyone had really come up with the concept or even the word ‘teenager’. (Incidentally it wasn’t until 1945 until the name was first used in America – can you believe that??) There is a continuous upbeat rebellious vibe which I feel is balanced out by the more subdued reminders of real events – the great depression, the world wars, all which let you empathise with the people you see on screen. It does give a poignant sense of survival but I think that the seriousness was important – it showed young people to be continually resilient in times of great struggle in a positive light, giving insight to exactly how they saw themselves and not being sorry for it.
It’s a seriously good documentary and it feels timeless to watch given the fast paced multitude of eye-candy available – seriously one second you’re looking at big cheesy smiles and swing dancing, the next it’s cut to sparks spraying out as girls learn mechanics for the war effort. It’s lovely, would definitely recommend watching it as it depicts a perspective that still seems to be very relevant now even though times have evolved and moved on so much.
Second day into the second week back at school and already I am exhausted. After psych class me and a friend went to get coffee and tried not to stress out too much. Really, my film coursework should be fun; with halloween around the corner I decided to do my research project on 70’s-80’s golden age slasher movies. I’ll be looking into final girl theory and feminism, buuuuut I only have 24 days to find my sources and gather together an annotated catalogue. Eeek. Carol J Clover where are you when I need you???
The stuff I’ve found so far had been really cool though, for example I never knew that Italian Giallo or ‘yellow’ films and German Krimi genre all contributed to setting the conventions of a typical slasher – as well as of course the mighty Hollywood era shaking things up with Hitchcock and films like ‘Carrie‘ which literally changed the face of horror forever. (*whispers* but I still prefer to new one. shhh.) Sadly I can’t really include this in my presentation, but I figure the history is still good to know! Shall persevere whilst my t.v screen gets internally splattered with corn syrup and risk accidentally waking my sister up with the piercing shrieks of good ol’ Jamie Lee.
I totally blanked 