Tag: michigan theatre

REVIEW: You Will Die At 20

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

Recently I’ve been thinking more about mortality; I guess I’m not old, but everything these days feels like a crossroads. They are each so definite, a fixed point in time that demands a decision, either by me or whatever fate or force controls me. For Muzamil, all other paths have been eliminated; it’s just a short, straight path to a certain end. It feels like there are a million hidden stops along the way; they come out of nowhere, they hinder, they allow you to pass. I don’t know what that is, but in the context of You Will Die at 20, I guess it’s the townspeople, everyone preventing Muzamil from living without severe restrictions on where he goes, what he does.

Having only a little time on Earth is supposed to increase the value of life. Knowing that it will end, likely before we want it to (or more precisely, before we’re adequately prepared for it to), should free us from monotony, allow us to respect each day as something special. But thinking about the ending inserts countless checkpoints, countless worries: are you eating healthy, exercising, getting your teeth cleaned regularly, had your flu shot, checking that your car mirrors are positioned correctly, getting your oil changed often, making enough money, making enough money to retire before you die, making enough money in case of an emergency? The stops expand a life, drawing out its borders infinitely. Now it’s too long, too much. Sakina numbers the days in chalk on the walls of a sunlight-slashed room, waiting for her child to die. The main difference in opposing views of mortality is the degree to which one accepts their end, no matter how untimely. There is mourning, and there is apathy. With each there is some ratio of fear to happy passiveness, the very worst kind of Punnett square. There’s not necessarily one option that’s the best, or least likely to ruin the psyche, but when something forces you into extremes, like a sheikh prophesizing your early demise, it can seriously alter your mental state for a startling amount of time.

 

The village, much like its residents, is almost totally austere: rather neutral tones but harsh surfaces, little life able to grow, stark. The amount of calm, steadiness, in the characters and their surroundings was unsettling, but of course that’s where the movie’s power is.Where there are richer colors, the contrast with their surroundings hurts to look at, makes you feel like crying no matter the subject of the scene. Excitement was always paired with doom, at some point down the line; there was always worry behind the beautiful points.

Most of the movie covers Muzamil’s 19th year, his last-ditch efforts at individualism, or just proving he’s alive. Early-onset death throes, the last dregs. If we lived more like that, tried to feel more, all of the time, would we be better or worse? As people, friends. Citizens, leaders. I’ll invite you to watch this movie and try to think about that. You can access it for free until March 17th.

You can find both in-person and at-home showtimes for the Michigan and State theaters here.

REVIEW: Beautiful Boy.

niezi Leave a comment
Beautiful Boy is like an idea of a great film, a summation of perfect things – virtuous moral, talented cast, a story with a capacity for emotion as deep as the ocean. It’s posed as an indie centrepiece in the film industry, especially anticipated with leads Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell. But Beautiful Boy, as a sum, is not as magnificent as its separate parts, playing everything a little too safely to hurt, a little too cleanly to feel. The gorgeous visuals and honest dialogue is lost to a sterile mood, a story that’s been overly delineated into clean lines.

As far as addiction memoirs go, this film is on the tamer side, almost feeling inhibited. Some of Beautiful Boy’s appeal is, however, its muted tones, the cyclic styles that the film runs in during its one hundred and thirty-nine-minute duration. It’s almost tiresome, the anticipation of everything falling apart, the highs and lows amid a sunny L.A. backdrop or the dark corner of a bathroom stall. The feeling of an emotional disconnect, the weight of a cyclonic helplessness seeps onto the screen as we follow Nic’s father, David, and his attempts to understand the rise and falls in his son’s addiction and recovery. Just like how David had told a young Nic in the airport in one scene – “Do you know how much I love you? If you could take all the words in the language, it still wouldn’t describe how much I love you. I love you more than everything” – Nic is his sun, as if he were heliotropic, moving in the same motions day and night.

The film isn’t dramatized in the sort of voyeuristic pull that watching a disaster unfold has like in some other drug films. There is a layer of abstraction that comes from Beautiful Boy being primarily focused on David and his otherwise idle life, with shots of rolling green lawns and kids’ swim meets. It’s the kind of complacency that drove Nic to crystal meth, an all-American boy with a suburban emptiness, a lethal boredom, a hole to fill. This mood is perfect in Beautiful Boy.

But for the moments where Beautiful Boy is supposed to emerge from its staid nature with the capability for heartache it has, it feels like a tick box on pain. Timothée Chalamet plays Nic with sensitivity that’s powerful, simultaneously a crude driving force and an acute fragility in each scene, with Steve Carell alongside, growing into his role the longer the film plays on, becoming more and more certain as David with each iteration of Nic’s relapse and recovery. Yet as a whole, Beautiful Boy feels not quite there. Despite a few significant scenes, there isn’t enough for it to rise from the consistent white noise of gloom that drowns the film.

Maybe this is its intention. The film has some rough edges carefully stripped away from the original written memoir, turning it into something more refined and clean and easy to digest. If it wanted to be more accessible, more focused on the particular struggle of loving someone already long gone, more soft-spoken and hopeful, then Beautiful Boy has accomplished that. Otherwise, it feels as if there is a loss of depth, a film that only treads in the shallows, waterlogged, when it was given an ocean.

Check out Beautiful Boy at Michigan Theater.

REVIEW: Dont Look Back

Laura Dzubay Leave a comment

Bob Dylan is celebrated far and wide for his sense of enigma. It draws many fans to him like a magnet — the fact that he rarely, if ever, reveals details of his personal life, the impenetrable nature of his ever-changing persona. In fact, I actually went to see him in concert this October, and I was surprised by the fact that he didn’t say a single word outside of the songs that he played. This mystery is a trait that he carries even to this day, and it can be traced all the way back to the very beginnings of his fame in the 1960s.

Dont Look Back, a 1967 documentary focusing on his 1965 tour of London, England, brings its audience closer to Dylan — the “real” Dylan, if there is such a thing — than any of them are otherwise likely to get. This Dylan is striking, more than anything, because he wavers so much between different facades. At times he is visionary, playing guitar and singing straight from his heart, or talking honestly with people who see life differently from him; at other times he is downright arrogant, interrupting people often and discounting their opinions in favor of his own. Sometimes he is quiet and attentive, carefully listening while fellow musicians like Donovan and Joan Baez play music for him in hotel rooms; sometimes he is loud and angry almost to the point of not making sense, like when he demands to know who in his hotel is guilty of throwing glass into the street. He’s humble and down-to-earth, but also remarkably full of himself (“I know I’m big noise,” he taunts to a man he has accused of being guilty of the glass-throwing). Sometimes he’s very serious, and sometimes he grins and makes jokes — and what’s more, he’ll often switch between many of these attitudes within the span of a single minute.

Of course, many of these less endorsable sides of Dylan — that he is argumentative, acerbic, full of himself, etc. — are traits that a great deal of his fans will easily dismiss. They’ll say, “That’s just the way he is,” or, “That’s what makes him so great — he’s not afraid to tell people how it is!” Luckily, the film itself takes no sides; with no retrospective voiceover or imbalance regarding what footage it decides to show us, it is indiscriminate. It leaves its audience to make their own decisions.

The crowning achievement of Dont Look Back, then, is that it’s honest. It gives fans an inner look at everything they love about Dylan — the ways in which he can be at once relatable and completely, untouchably elevated — while refusing to shy away from the paradoxes of his character that at times can undercut this. I’ll admit feeling a personal pang of anger during a moment in the movie when Dylan tells a reporter something on the lines of, “I know more about you and your profession, just now from meeting you, than you will ever know about me.” But I also laughed anytime Dylan told a joke, and watched breathlessly during recordings of his live performances of songs like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Talkin’ World War III Blues”.

Dont Look Back was filmed at the height of Dylan’s fame and at the cusp of some of his most major creative breakthroughs (a.k.a., his 1967 triple-album win with Bringing it All Back Home, Blonde on Blonde, and Highway 61 Revisited). It situates us directly in Dylan’s touring life, to the point that we feel like we’re actually sitting where the camera operator is sitting, three or four feet away from him. It is arguably the closest any film has ever or can ever really come to penetrating the eternal mystery and captivating persona of Bob Dylan, for better or for worse.

PREVIEW: Dont Look Back

Laura Dzubay Leave a comment

When I first got to Ann Arbor, I was amazed how many Bob Dylan fans I seemed to run into. It’s not surprising, considering how enduring his work is and how popular he remains to this day. I even remember my History of the Sixties class talking about his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Naturally, there are a ton of movies and documentaries focusing on aspects of Dylan’s life. My favorite so far has definitely been the extensive documentary No Direction Home (after the line in his famous “Like a Rolling Stone”). But Dont Look Back, with appearances of people like Joan Baez and Donovan and a 100% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is definitely at the top of the list of necessary Dylan-related films. It covers Dylan’s 1965 concert tour in England, on the cusp of many of the creative breakthroughs that would eventually confirm his place in history as a legend.

That’s why I’m very excited to see Dont Look Back tonight at The Michigan Theatre, as part of the theatre’s 1967 Film Series. I’ve never seen it before, and I can’t wait to see what it’s like. The film will show at 9:30, and student tickets are $8 each.

REVIEW: The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Michigan Theatre.

niezi 1 Comment

2016, freshman year: I, fresh-faced and a virgin to the world of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, emerged from Michigan Theatre as a slightly less virginal, still very impressionable, but a bit more cultured freshman. One year ago, I had the expectation that I was going to see a film with a great story line and amazing musical numbers.

If watching a calm, visually pleasant movie in an idle theatre is your kind of night, maybe a kind of film that’s musically show-stopping and rendered so beautifully that it’ll likely make you shed a tear or two – then I hear Once is a pretty good pick.

Because going to Rocky Horror is much less about seeing a magnificent film then it is going to experience a magnificent movement – a cult classic in all its chaotic vibrancy. This was immediately evident even in the line-up outside of Michigan Theatre as show time approached, with countless people floating by in a variety of costumes: pink wigs, fishnet tights, gold spandex.

2017, I’ve matured; I’m seasoned, having taken The Rocky Oath and done The Time-Warp before.

Introducing the show.

This year, I went into Rocky Horror not to watch a movie. Instead, I went for the callbacks, the sing-alongs, the endless amount cheering through the night. Perhaps it’s unusual within the realm of theatre-going, but audience interaction with the film is a significant part of the experience. With a repertoire of callbacks timed in sync with the movie script, (someone memorably shouting “Hey, what do you like to eat for breakfast?” just as an on-screen character replied “Come,” for example), each time the experience is new, different depending on the audience itself.

There are more corporal traditions, however, such as standing up and dancing to The Time Warp, snapping rubber gloves as Frank N. Furter does in the laboratory, yelling “Asshole” and “Slut” every time Brad and Janet are uttered. The clever, sometimes absurd traditions are my absolute favourite part of Rocky Horror, bringing a local culture into the theatre.

The lips.

With a shadow cast this year, another dimension was added to the film. A cast interpreted the plot playing on screen, acting out the script along with the movie. Sometimes the attention shifted off-screen entirely, the crowd cheering as the cast did something particularly funny or racy – even more so than what was happening on film. Something like this bridges the gap between film and audience even more. And unlike a lot of successful movies, Rocky Horror isn’t held in a pristine prestige; it’s steeped in and shaped by the layperson.

A generally good time, and an interesting cultural phenomenon, The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Michigan Theatre isn’t something to be missed. It only gets better year after year of attending, and I’m looking forward to the next Halloween weekend!