You only ever see your own life fully. We are ignorant of any moment, large or small, that occurs beyond our limited eyesight. It is a breadth of ignorance too enormous to ever be acknowledged. There are billions of human lives, living and dying, and we can only feel one. Yet, inevitably, those other lives will push and pull on our own. Collisions between lives, then, are unexpected. You will never know who is significant until your self-centered perspective, so carefully cultivated, is in shambles all around you. In the film Parasite, the Kim family hope to use that same egocentric, obliviousness to trick the rich Park family and climb up the economic ladder. But they are, after all, subject to that same blindness. The collision between the two families, then, is a fascinating one, even more so because of the director and writer of the film, Bong Joon-Ho (Snowpiercer). Parasite is currently showing at the State Theatre. Tickets can be bought online or at the box office ($8.50 with a student ID).
Category: Lifting Voices
PREVIEW: Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a movie first released in 2001 about the life of a German emigrant living in a trailer in Kansas. She is the victim of a botched sex-change operation, and the movie follows her, as an “internationally ignored” rock singer, as she searches for stardom, and maybe even love.
The movie originated as a Broadway musical, and was eventually translated into film. John Cameron Mitchell starred in and wrote the musical, and he also stars in and directed the movie as well. I have always had this musical on my bucket list, especially after Darren Criss became the star. And if I can’t see the musical, the movie is the next best option!
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is playing at the State Theater on Friday (Nov. 8) and Saturday (Nov. 9) at 10 pm.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p9mPhGo1j0
Friday tickets: https://secure.michtheater.org/websales/pages/TicketSearchCriteria.aspx?evtinfo=647021~c76be4f4-22b5-4bed-a89c-7def863b8c53&
Saturday Tickets: https://secure.michtheater.org/websales/pages/TicketSearchCriteria.aspx?evtinfo=647022~c76be4f4-22b5-4bed-a89c-7def863b8c53&
Just a side note: This movie is rated R for sexual content and language.
REVIEW: International Studies Horror Film Fest
Another year of the annual International Studies Horror Film Fest has come and gone, and with it went my hope that they would show actual horror movies.
Don’t get me wrong; the selections were wonderfully artistic and variable in tone and theme and texture. All three featured original plots and unsettling undertones. They each force a bit of creepiness into one’s idea of the world, while remaining quite beautiful. However, I would have appreciated at least one fully, overtly gruesome movie in the program. The gore was almost nonexistent in all of the films, limited to a few scenes of graphicness apiece. I found myself groaning over the romantic subplots and long periods of calm while trying to focus on the main stories and character dynamics. On Halloween, I need fear to rule. This can be done in complex, story-rich, writerly ways; the artistry of a film need not be sacrificed. Thus, even if the fest’s planners intended to get together a group of intellectually stimulating movies, they could have done so while giving the audience a little more of a scare.
Face was basically CSI or Criminal Minds in all it accomplished horror-wise. The whole movie seems cast in shadows, plagued by an uninspired soundtrack and TV-drama style acting. But the pace of the film was perfect, a slow reveal of a shocking truth whose slime does something venomous to the psyche of the audience.
The Lure was an entire musical, and certainly the only movie of its kind, however impossible to define that may be. The heavy glamour of the strip club pairs so well with the mythology surrounding mermaids, and the girls’ dead stares were a perfect balance for all the life in their musical numbers. The unwholesomeness of the young girls participating in this business combines with the sexual power of mermaids in lore to create an uneasy feeling for the audience, similar to the trickery sailors face in all the stories. But even with the violence and the complex uneasiness, this movie is far closer to a comedy than a horror film.
Dogtooth seemed like something I should have enjoyed, given that its creator is the same man behind The Lobster (a movie which, after watching, made me feel so unmoored that I literally held onto street signs as I walked to the bus stop, certain I’d blow away with the wind). It bears obvious similarities in how the cast is directed to act (basically emotionless, flat) and the minimalism of the indoor environments. But it falls short of creating the same level of effect for me that Lanthimos had in his later film. I think he realizes later in his career that there is a limit to the lack of expression he can write into his actors and the barrenness of the landscape before it becomes too offputting for the audience to focus on the story. In short, I got bored, and the beauty of the expertly done lighting and the carefully constructed garden space did little to change that. Some emotional music would have gone a long way.
Truly, these movies have tons of artistic value to consider and appreciate. In another sort of film festival, they would be great additions (and indeed, they have been inputs of such festivals as Cannes and Sundance), but I still hold that they are unwise selections for a true horror fest. I hope that next year, they have more time in the gallery to show an extra movie that a Halloween lover would appreciate.
REVIEW: Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
Before seeing the documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, I was familiar with some of Miles Davis’s most iconic music (like his album Kind of Blue), but I didn’t know very much about him outside of these recordings. That said, this film, which shares its name with Davis’s 1957 compilation album and is directed by Stanley Nelson, offers a deeper look into the many years of his career, as well into him as a person.
The film went through his life in chronological order, and since he was born in 1926, there is not a lot in the way of video of the early years of his career. However, the documentary deftly handled this, and still managed to be quite engaging. As black-and-white archival images panned across the screen (a classic move from a PBS documentary), Miles Davis’s own words (many of which were from his autobiography, Miles: The Autobiography) were read by actor Carl Lumbly. The film additionally features interviews with scholars and some of Davis’s closest colleagues.
While Miles Davis is certainly one of the giants of jazz, the documentary also does a remarkable job of showing the complexity and flaws behinds the star. He was not a warm personality. Despite his capacity for beautiful music, he was an abusive husband, which is revealed in the film during interviews with his late first wife, Francis Davis (who is featured on the cover of Miles’s album Someday My Prince Will Come). In one perhaps telling (and mildly humorous) anecdote, a colleague recalls asking Miles how he was going to drive his family in his Ferrari. Reportedly, he responded that his kids could call a taxi. He struggled for years with alcohol and cocaine, and the film does not sugarcoat this.
In fact, it was in part due to his struggles with addiction that Miles did not pick up the trumpet for over five years. Between 1975 and 1980, his career was virtually on hold, and many doubted that he would ever return to music. However, he made an incredible comeback, and in my opinion, this was one of the most compelling storylines of the documentary. Not only did he return to the stage, but rather than pushing back on the changing tastes in music, Miles embraced it and adapted, pushing the conventional boundaries of genre.
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool is now showing at the Michigan Theater. If you are interested in learning more about the jazz legend, I strongly recommend it!
PREVIEW: International Studies Horror Film Fest
Halloween, though it has already been upon us for months, is now extremely upon us. Somehow the most important holiday in the universe does not warrant a day off of school (meanwhile, some still legitimately celebrate Columbus Day), so we must do all we can to work around our schedules to properly honor this spiritual time.
Thank the Unholy Lord of the Dead that the International Studies program is continuing horror film fest. In its seventh year, the free program will include three foreign films (subtitled in English) for all to be terrified by. Come by the Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery (first floor) between classes, or if you’re especially dedicated, skip them all and stay for the whole time. And I better see you all in costume, or else.
The movie schedule is as follows:
10:00–11:30 a.m. — Face (2004, Korean)
11:30 a.m.–1:00 p.m. — The Lure (2005, Polish)
1:15–3:00 p.m. — Dogtooth (2000, Greek)
https://events.umich.edu/event/68410
REVIEW: Sankai Juku, Meguri: Teeming Sea, Tranquil Land
After experiencing the Japanese dance form of butoh through Sankai Juku’s meditative performance, I felt both emotionally disturbed yet liberated. The continuous 90-minute ‘dance’ performance, composed of seven distinct acts, is supposedly choreographed to emanate the circularity within processes and systems such as the earth’s transformation and its movement through the four seasons. The eight performers are powdered a stark white from head to toe, donning bald heads, asymmetrical earrings, and mostly white, sarong-like costumes on their lower halves. They move in correspondence to emotionally dynamic music and express a “dialogue with gravity” through both graceful and grotesque movements marked by spinning, jumping, and eerie bodily gesturing. It is personally difficult for me to describe Sankai Juku through a traditional ‘dance’ perspective; I fail to see it confined to any form of dance theatre that I have experienced before. Sankai Juku as a whole feels more akin to a poetically disturbing expression of the human experience, while their interpretation of meguri translates as a storytelling experience that is facilitated by the mostly monochrome stage lighting that changed with each act.
I thought Ushio Amagatsu’s portrayal of the grotesque within the context of meguri communicated to the audience particularly well; Act V, titled Forest of Fossils, left me especially disturbed with my thoughts asunder. It was during this section that I finally reached some sort of understanding of the performers’ wide, gaping, mouths and permanently perturbed eyes – to me, they communicated agony in discovery and marked the climax of the program. During Act V, only three performers are present on a stage set aglow with greenish light; the music is both tensely trembling and pulsating with the sounds of rocks grinding, which calls to mind the natural shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates. Paralleling the earth’s provocations are the performers, who appear the most agitated that they have been, with one performer gesturing the most frantically and in the most ‘agony’ – at one point, that performer drags his limbs across the powdery ground in a tight spiral to form two symmetrical circles, then subsequently emotes in pure tension and agony around the formation of those two circles. The remaining two performers respond in an unsettling symmetry, and their generally upwards arm movements seem to be grasping at some unattainable substance or idea. The desperation and agony contained within this grotesque imagery, combined with the increasingly jarring music, left me feeling deeply unsettled and in rumination of Amagutsu’s artistic intent behind that section.
As much as I enjoyed the dichotomy between the grotesqueness of Amagutsu’s work and the beauty in the circularity and meguri it conveyed, I think the most uniquely beautiful aspect of Sankai Juku is how the performance manages to maintain universality in evoking the most visceral of emotions from its audience. My disturbed reaction to and interpretation of agony from Act V, Forest of Fossils, differs from the next audience member, yet the emotional impact of this does not seem to suffer in the face of Sankai Juku’s widely interpretable themes derived from the human experience.
