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Fresh Off the Boat

April 13, 2015 / Tyler Clauson-Wolf / 4 Comments

Fresh Off The Boat is one of the newest ABC sitcoms. It comes to the network from Nahnatchka Khan, who based the show off of chef Eddie Huang’s memoir of the same name. Though the title suggests a family of immigrants just arriving to the United States, the show follows the lives of the Chinese Huang family after their move from Chinatown in Washington D.C. to Orlando in the mid-1990’s. It centers on their struggle to assimilate to a new culture, while also having much more similar sitcom tropes such as difficulties fitting in at school, challenges running a successful business, and issues surrounding parenting.

Though the show revolves around hip-hop fanatic, 11 year old Eddie (Hudson Yang)–who, despite being young, has a sharp wit to him–the episodes all have the theme of assimilation central to their plots in one way or another. Eddie, for instance, is trying to fit in with the kids around him in school. His mother (Constance Wu) is trying to fit into the new white culture that she has found herself surrounded by. And the father (Randall Park) is trying to discover the correct way for his restaurant to fit into the community and garner patrons. Despite the obvious racial conflicts in the show, this is a series based much more on exposing the ridiculousness of people who believe stereotypes rather than on making fun of immigrant culture.

While the show has deep-rooted racial dynamics, it also plays on much more typical situational comedy tropes. In addition to standing out at school because he is Chinese, Eddie goes through the typical adolescent struggles of trying to make friends or being cool (through the music he listens to or, in one instance, by getting his hands on a porno). Similarly, his mother has trouble adjusting to her new white housewife neighbors and eerily calm grocery store, but also has to go through the trouble of finding a job and figuring out how to raise her children when they resist a lot of what she wants from them. Eddie’s father, meanwhile, wants the best for the family, but is also constantly dealing with issues in his restaurant. Most of the comedy around him is more about professional failure and the difficulties of being a restaurant owner and a passive dad, which has little to do with his race. His involvement with American culture is exemplified by his attempts to get his western themed restaurant off the ground by appealing to customers’ whiteness.

The strongest part of the show is the character dynamics. The Huang family has three young children, with Eddie the most prominently featured character. Eddie is sort of wise beyond his years–a trait emphasized stylistically through regular voiceovers from his adult self–and has a smart aura about him. He is a really likeable character because he is trying to make friends and do all the things he wants to as a young child but this causes conflicts with his parents, namely his mother. The clashing of cultures between his Chinese parents and his assimilation into American culture is the perfect platform for the majority of the comedy of the show. While he also faces the familiar trouble of finding friends and fitting in at a new school, a lot of the comedy geared towards an older audience arises from his overbearing mother and goofy father. His father is constantly trying to find ways to successfully run his western-themed steakhouse and can be seen as somewhat of a weaker character with his reluctance to confront his employees and children. He typically plays second fiddle to his opinionated wife when it comes to making decisions. The mother, on the other hand, demands attention in a way that puts her in awkward situations that draw much of the laughter. The youngest brothers are mostly just there for comic relief from the rest of the show, which sometimes deals with the tougher issues. The final member of the family is the grandmother, who rarely speaks and has a somewhat indeterminate role on the show.

The show is chalk-full of 90’s references. Part of the excitement of watching it is in the nostalgic feeling one can get. The music on the show is almost all old-school rap, as that is all Eddie listens to. Eddie is also a basketball fan and sports a Shaquille O’Neal Orlando Magic jersey in one of the first episodes, circa the mid-90’s. The focus on adolescent boys also enables lots of references to things like Hi-C Ecto Coolers, Lunchables, VHS tapes, and Ella Macpherson to be prevalent. Despite middle-school-age boys’ issues being one of the main plot drivers on the show, the frequent references to things of the past means this show is aimed more at an older audience who grew up in this time than contemporary viewers who are the same age as Eddie.

The problems around parenting, the efforts of the characters to fit into the white American culture, and the constant 90’s references suggests that the ideal viewer for the show is very particular. Given the issues being brought up on the show, it would appear to appeal to either parents, immigrants or ethnic minorities, or young adults who grew up when the show was taking place. That being said, I think part of the idea behind the show is also to expose the dominant white culture in the American society to the things people go through when they are not a part of this group. Thus it could be useful for just about every American to give it a watch for more than just a laugh. Though the writers do a really good job balancing comedy, moral lessons, and racial issues in each episode, the declining viewership of the show since its premier indicates audiences have not taken to this idea, despite the high praise the show has received from critics.

Fresh Off The Boat is a groundbreaking show simply based on the fact that it centers on Chinese-Americans, a group that has rarely been seen in sitcoms. Its brilliance goes much deeper than this though. It is a refreshing comedy with a unique take on racial issues that seeks to undermine a lot of the Asian stereotypes in this country. In this way, it is a little ahead of its time and, as with a lot of more clever, critically acclaimed sitcoms, it is not a ratings smash, since it is trying to do more than just be silly or show slapstick humor. Fresh Off The Boat is a really strong show that consists of excellent writing and acting. It is hard to have the star of a primetime sitcom on network television be a young child, but Hudson Yang is more than up to the task of leading this show in his hilarious and deep portrayal of Eddie Huang. Hopefully the viewership can climb in the second half of the first season because it would be great to see this show picked up for future episodes as it tells a very compelling story surrounding an Asian-American family and the issues they face everyday.

April 13, 2015 / Talia Amorosano / 0 Comments

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There’s something fascinating about decay. Maybe it’s the way man-made things look as they revert back to their natural states, maybe it’s the idea of the slow but inevitable aging process which is often augmented by neglect, maybe it’s just the thought that everything meets the same end but gets there in different ways. Regardless, there is something aesthetically beautiful about things that are not typically considered aesthetically beautiful. Like when a person is conventionally unattractive, but just has ‘something’ about him, there is a raw character about these objects that would not be visible under a fresh coat of paint.

I chose to use a macro lens while taking these pictures, because (besides the fact that I had just gotten the new lens and was really excited to use it) I wanted to capture these subjects the way someone would capture a conventionally beautiful thing, like a dewdrop on a piece of grass, or a flower petal. I wanted to highlight their tiniest intricacies: a piece of chipped paint, a crack in a piece of wood, a rusty nail.

Throughout the process I noticed that decay caused some subjects to take on the properties of their surroundings, and made others stand out. However, all the subjects that I photographed seemed aesthetically far from how they were originally intended to look. And while all these photographs depict nonliving things, I hope that I was able to capture the nuanced individual lives that time and neglect had given them.

A Problem In Video Game Scholarship

April 12, 2015 / Jeremy Barnes / 0 Comments

I’ve said it a million times and I’ll probably say it a million more: Video games as a medium are constantly being dumped on. Too many people write them off as children’s toys, unworthy of serious attention and potential for analysis. That’s part of the reason why I’m writing my senior thesis on the modern military shooter genre. I want video games to be taken as seriously as any piece of literature or any film could be. In my thesis, I’m looking specifically at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Spec Ops: The Line and analyzing their uses of violence and how they justify themselves. What’s sad is that it seems like a lot of other critics and scholars aren’t willing to put similar time and effort into seriously analyzing the works about which they’re writing.

Often critics will overly simplify and generalize their discussions about games. Many readings of modern military shooters approach games of this genre merely as extensions of the US military complex, ignoring other narrative or ludic nuances embedded in them. The evidence they provide is also unfairly selective, with examples having clearly been cherry-picked to support an argument, thus preventing the game from being read fairly and accurately. One of the reasons that many critics accept this practice may be because the definition of a ‘war shooter’ is rarely clearly articulated; as a result, many shooters with a similar setting are assumed to have similar tendencies. For example America’s Army and Call of Duty are completely different entities, despite the fact that they both portray modern military conflicts. Even within a single game or series, further distinctions have to be made, like differences in different modes within a single title (e.g. singleplayer, multiplayer, or cooperative modes) or differences between the many devices on which games can be played.

Additionally many researchers may not have the necessary skillsets or knowledge base to analyze games, but attempt to do so anyway with their own training and knowledge from various different fields, such as psychoanalysis and sociology. These lenses and fields of inquiry can certainly be applied to video games research and analysis, but a problem arises when those employing those lenses do not understand video games or engage seriously with the works in question, and rely on the methodologies of other fields entirely. Their results thus end up full of holes resulting from incomplete analysis, erroneous claims, and overgeneralizations.

In his article “Playing War” Ian Graham Ronald Shaw argues that “Video games are political spaces fizzing with military agendas… [they] allow millions of users from around the world to transition into a space of pasteurized terror. They are virtual worlds built with the ideological scaffolding of the military entertainment complex that splay the lines between civilian and soldier across a cultural mosaic of consent, participation, and less frequently resistance…. From drones hovering in Pakistan to drones hovering in Modern Warfare 2, the way that war is known is increasingly playful…. Tucked away under televisions in millions of homes, they are banal technologies that distribute carefully crafted military aesthetics.”

Shaw’s argument is that what he calls “war games” serve to support the American military entertainment complex and make war into something playful, in contrast to what war actually is. His conclusion sounds entirely feasible, but his argument is based on erroneous and overly presumptuous research and evidence. While Shaw never explicitly states his playtime or experience with the games in question, it is very apparent that Shaw is extremely unfamiliar and inexperienced with Modern Warfare 2. He claims that “spatial simplification extends beyond a ‘mystical other’ (in games such as Prince of Persia) into a ‘violent other’ (in games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) through the representation of Middle Eastern cities suffused with conflict.” Höglund argues that in order to keep “the flames of the ‘war on terror’ burning, the military entertainment complex depicts Middle Eastern cities as in a state perpetual war.” This assertion is false, as there are no “Middle Eastern cities suffused with conflict” depicted in the game’s campaign. There are sections of the game that take place in Afghanistan, but these missions take place in a decrepit airplane boneyard and in a secret American base. Even if Shaw’s point about location is taken to be true, the player never interacts with any Middle Eastern characters (neither friend nor foe) throughout the entirety of the story. The main antagonists are Russian soldiers, South American militia members, and American soldiers. Perhaps Shaw here is basing his analysis on the multiplayer action of the game, but he never makes this claim explicit. Furthermore, his reference to drone strikes establishes that his analysis is concerned with the campaign mode of the game, so it should be assumed that he would continue that analysis throughout his piece. Even in the brief few sections that he deals with Modern Warfare 2, he fails to provide convincing and accurate proof for his arguments.

David Leonard uses his article “Unsettling the Military Entertainment Complex: Video Games and a Pedagogy of Peace” to argue a similar point to Shaw’s: he makes the case that video games and other forms of popular media should be engaged with and questioned. In regard to the case of war shooters and military games, he believes that video games should be critically analyzed because of their importance to how the United States handles and portrays its participation in physical war. However, like Shaw, Leonard’s analysis is also flawed. He often makes statements that grossly overgeneralize the war shooter genre, likely resulting from a loose understanding and lack of direct engagement with military shooters. Leonard makes the claim that games promote “military solutions and the unilateral acceptance of the War on Terror as justification for all military endeavors,” and that “War video games are no longer purely about training soldiers already enlisted; rather, they are about recruitment and developing future soldiers, while simultaneously generating support among civilian populations for increasing use American military power. Americans of all ages are thus able to participate collectively in the War on Terror and in Operation Iraqi Freedom, just as if they were members of the military.”

Leonard mainly uses America’s Army and Operation Desert Storm to illustrate his points, while briefly mentioning games like Call of Duty and Kuma\War. However, his use of America’s Army and Operation Desert Storm as representations for the entire military shooter sub-genre misrepresents other military shooters. America’s Army in particular is a multiplayer-only experience that is often used as a recruitment tool by the United States military and is funded directly by the government, making this game a direct extension of the United States government. Other members of the military shooter subgenre, like entries in the Call of Duty or Battlefield series, have single-player, multiplayer, and cooperative modes and are products of private corporations and publishers rather than a government. Furthermore, according to “Reality and Terror, the First-Person Shooter in Current Day Settings,” there were over 160 first-person shooters released between 1993 and 2009, 95 of which could be considered military in nature as the these games pit the player against political enemies, rogue governments, and terrorists.” Using two examples to represent a further 93 would lead one to make fallacious claims. Unfortunately, Leonard is not the only video game critic to make claims like these.

According to Johannes Breuer, Ruth Festl, and Thorsten Quandt in their study “Digital war: An Empirical Analysis of Narrative Elements in Military First-person Shooters,” “most existing content analyses of digital games simply look at the first few minutes of gameplay or specific in-game sequences of twenty to sixty minutes. Such time-based sampling is likely to cause bias and does not represent the game in its entireity.” While this certainly does not apply to all analysis done, it does pose a problem to video game criticism when laziness and shoddy research is an accepted scholarly practice.

So what do we do about it? Keep writing about video games. Not as sexist and gun-toting pieces of garbage unworthy of analysis, but as serious pieces of artistic expression. While it is true that there are a lot of bad video games, it shouldn’t soil the integrity of the entire art form. To me, it seems like a lot of critics treat video games like toys or like some passing fad, not as a potential artform worthy of analysis. I’m certainly not trying to claim that all video games are art and worthy of supreme praise, but just that a video game shouldn’t be dismissed because of its medium.

Abel Morales Anna Morales and Andrew Walsh

A City of Desolation: J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year

April 10, 2015 / Noah Fusco / 1 Comment

A Most Violent Year is an exercise in that 1970s New Hollywood style that has become so common in recent films that it may as well now be a considered a contemporary genre of its own. Dark lighting, steady shots, gritty urban realism, a political atmosphere, and a cynical and stark worldview are all attributes of The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, and Serpico, amongst others, and A Most Violent Year utilizes all of them, which weighs on the film heavily.

A Most Violent Year is about the young owner of a growing oil company, Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), whose trucks are being hijacked, men beaten, and oil stolen just as he is trying to close a deal on a riverfront property. He’s losing money; his drivers are getting nervous; he’s showing vulnerability. Adding to that, the DA’s office is bringing up charges against him for possible illegal activities. The year of the title is 1981, which was one of the most violent in New York City’s history. Throughout the film, radios in the background quietly play news stories about murders, shootings, and other commonplace violence.

The entire tradition of 1970s American cinema is a heavy weight to carry, and one cannot help while watching AMVY to recall those older films–and any film that has The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon on its shoulders has a lot of heavy lifting to do. Interestingly enough, the film does an excellent job of establishing the story quickly and leanly; the film, however, feels insubstantial at first. Much of the dialogue is comprised of short, usually cryptic, phrases that feel like they contain truths about business and the Real-World, but the ultimate value of these phrases do not amount to the iconic power of “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” or “Attica!” Though the film is finely shot, and many of the compositions are outright beautiful, this cinematographic gleam results in the film feeling like an exercise in style over substance.

Thankfully, the great casts that populate the films of the 70s are reflected here with Oscar Isaac and his supporting players. Isaac, who demonstrated himself as one of this generation’s finest, most subtle actors in Inside Llewyn Davis, proves himself once more with AMVY, channeling young Al Pacino with a restraint that proves to only be a façade for a furious rage. Yet Isaac’s Abel Morales is not Pacino’s cruel, ruthless Michael Corleone. He wants to do things as right as he can, as honestly as possible. That we can recognize this in Isaac is what distinguishes his portrayal as a great performance in its own right, and not just another imitation.

As AMVY moves into its second act, it takes on a greater sense of urgency and originality. Narrative pace quickens, and by the halfway point J.C. Chandor, the ambitious director and writer of this film, begins to truly captivate with flawless sequences.

Later in the film, Abel is driving when he gets a call on his radio that one of the trucks has been hijacked. He is in the vicinity, and goes after it. The chase sequence is perhaps one of the most clichéd in all of cinema, and might be considered cheap thrills. Yet, Chandor has the audacity to put such a scene in the middle of this otherwise highbrow drama. It works. Chandor even reinvigorates this tired trope of chase scenes by having Abel follow the truck into a tunnel, where the rear lights become the only source of light in an otherwise black tunnel, and even they become muddled and distorted by sand and dust picked up by the cars. Before I mentioned that the film is beautiful and finely shot, but new, incredible images like this are what elevate the film.

Jessica Chastain as Anna Morales, Abel’s wife, also reinvents an old trope of 1970s cinema: that of the gangster’s wife. Using Diane Keaton as Kay in the Godfather films as a counterpoint, Kay rarely gets to display much agency in her position as Michael’s wife. Anna, however, does. Early in the film after a man is found on the property grounds of the Morales’s home, Anna gets a gun to protect herself and her children with, saying to her husband, “I told you. I wasn’t gonna continue to stand around and let these people come and get me and my children. Unlike you, who seems to be completely comfortable just standing around like some fucking pussy, I decided to do something about it.” Women were not granted this power forty years ago. They are rarely granted this power now. Late in the film, Anna reveals that she’s been skimming money from the company, to which Abel explosively reacts, “You stole from me.” Yet, ultimately, he takes the money. Anna wins.

A Most Violent Year moves towards its climax with a very firm awareness of things drawing to a close. But with each move towards a culmination, anxieties such as Anna’s true involvement in Abel’s affairs are dredged up. The film ends uneasily. It may not be a profound, eternal masterpiece, but it merits the title of a great movie because of the ideas it brings up, the expert level of craftsmanship at hand, and mostly the quiet changes it makes to the 1970s New Hollywood mode of filmmaking. Abel has prided himself on being honest, but as the film comes to a close, after several moral failings, the business goes on, and the images of blood and corruption stain New York City like the blackest of oil on snow.

April 5, 2015 / James George / 0 Comments

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It is rare that I make a complete collage when I spend a night or afternoon in my basement—my makeshift studio—attempting to do so. I usually end up flipping through dozens of magazines, ripping out images that catch my eye and storing them for later use. However, when I do have an idea, it usually doesn’t take more than an hour or two to cut everything out and put the pieces together.

I primarily use images from LIFE (late 1960s-90s) and National Geographic (1930s-present) magazines in my collages. I have an enormous stack of images from these magazines that are organized in four categories: figures, frames, backgrounds, and miscellaneous. Figures, the most numerous of the four, are typically the most important. They are often the seed of a collage idea. A good figure simply has to be an image that I can alter in a meaningful and aesthetically pleasing way.

In the collages I compiled for this post, a figure interacts with a frame in an interesting way. One of the questions I explore with these works is: “How do frames change how we perceive an image?” In line with collage’s essential ability to juxtapose images and create new meanings, these collages impart new significance on images and question how our perceptions change based on the way in which we view images.

Remembering the Breakfast Club

April 5, 2015 / Sheopatra Smith / 0 Comments

Let’s do an experiment. Step one; shove five people who appear to have absolutely nothing in common into one room for ninety-seven minutes. We’ll have one jock, one “princess”, one “brain”, one “basket-case” and throw in a “criminal” just for good measure. Step two; watch them argue, dance, and unload their emotional baggage in attempt to relate to each other. Now, what do you get? (Hint: it’s not a reality show). You get one of the most iconic films to ever grace pop culture, the 1985 John Hughes masterpiece, The Breakfast Club.

“In the simplest terms and most convenient definitions”, The Breakfast Club is a movie about five high schoolers that spend a day in detention together. At first they practically despise each other, but as the day unfolds they each let their guards down, revealing how underneath their labels they all face similar issues of neglect, and all would just like to be validated. I guarantee that the actual film is a lot less cliché than its simplistic synopsis makes it out to be. It’s a movie that makes you giggle at the sight of five divergent teens bonding over a joint in the school library. It’s a movie that forces you to side with a delinquent boy when a treacherous school Principle secretly threatens him. It’s a movie that unexpectedly gnaws at your emotions, so much so that you have no choice but to “pull a John Bender,” and raise your fist in alliance as the credits roll. You cannot deny that The Breakfast Club is a classic.

I’m sure an entire room of cinephiles virtually regurgitated at that last line, but I stand by it. Yes, the film has received a less-than-admirable reputation for being “one of those Brat Pack movies,” but it’s much more than that. And although I would never place him in a category of the greatest filmmakers of all time, John Hughes had an indisputable knack for capturing the often overlooked but authentic struggles of being a teen.

The film opens with lyrics from David Bowie’s 1972 song Changes, presented on a black title card while Simple Minds’ famous theme song “Don’t You Forget About Me” plays. The Bowie lyrics on screen read:

And these children that you spit on,
As they try to change their world,
Are immune to your consultations,
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.

The words quickly shatter, breaking away to the obligatory establishing shot of Shermer High School, Illinois. This sudden transition demonstrates Hughes’ talent of balancing sober situations with a comedic flare. Through the Bowie quote (brought to his attention by actress Ally Sheedy) and the Simple Mind song, Hughes highlights the film’s major themes of neglect and validation. In less than thirty seconds the film’s message is artfully divulged: these kids, though forsaken, are aware of the injustice surrounding them. And I for one applaud Hughes for having the courage to take teen problems seriously.

The Breakfast Club’s fresh-faced ensemble cast gives remarkably convincing performances in their extremely relatable roles. One by one they arrive at the school’s parking lot. The first is the stylish, moneyed, popular girl Claire Standish, played by notorious redhead teen queen, Molly Ringwald. Claire, who is comfortably seated in her father’s pricey Mercedes, snobbishly exclaims, “I can’t believe you can’t get me out of this…It’s not like I’m a defective or anything.” What a personality! Next is Brian Johnson, the scrawny school nerd and official “brain” of the bunch, played by the innocent looking Anthony Michael Hall. Brian timidly endures his mother’s difficult demands in the front seat of her car: “Get in there and use the time to your advantage.” “Mom,” he replies, “We’re not supposed to study.” “Well Mister, you figure out a way to study!” How’s that for support?

A budding Emilio Estevez is Andrew Clark, the idolized school wrestler. He sits in his macho father’s truck, wearing his letterman jacket, with his head surprisingly lowered in response to his dad’s reproach: “You wanna blow your ride? No school is gonna give a scholarship to a discipline case!” Talk about “no pressure.” Arriving on foot through the parking lot is the complicated John Bender, magnificently portrayed by a young Judd Nelson. Dressed like the lovechild of a flannel-clothed homeless person and a punk rocker, Bender makes a fearless entrance by apathetically crossing the lot and almost getting hit by a car. Dauntless! The gothic and eerie Alison who is competently played by Ally Sheedy, exits said car. Her relationship to her parents is awkward at best and devastating at worst. As she attempts to bid her parents farewell, they drive off speedily. She is left in the parking lot alone. Cue my heart breaking.

Hughes borrows from Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men by filming the majority of the movie in one room. Yet due to the wise angles, appealing framing, and clever cuts, the film possess the creative range of Hitchcock’s riveting Dial M For Murder, which also had only one set. The five students assemble in the library where they’re each given an assignment to write about “Who you think you are” by Principal Vernon, played by the master of character acting, Paul Gleason. Hughes gives these misfits a common enemy, an adult who represents the establishment that disregards them. The students also benefit from the presence of Carl the janitor (played by John Kapelos), who acts as sort of a guardian angel type: “the eyes and ears of the institution.” Hughes’ creates this disparity between adults to show that much like the teen world, the adult world is full of complexity. And thus boom! One stereotype is already deconstructed.

A noticeable spark is brought to the scenes by all the actors, ensuring there is never a dim or overly clustered moment on screen. The famed “eat my shorts scenem” in which Vernon threatens a belligerent Bender while the other students uncomfortably watch and comically interject, is a good example of the vivaciousness the actors exhibited. Vernon makes an unsuccessful attempt to prop a heavy door open–a door which Bender has unscrewed to keep it shut. Vernon recruits the help of the jock, Andrew, and Bender yells out the amusing lines, “If he gets up, we’ll all get up. It’ll be anarchy.” After the two fail and Bender wittily dissuades the Principal’s actions (“I think violating fire codes and endangering the lives of children will be unwise at this juncture in your career sir”), Vernon is furious because he has been humiliated.

The hilarious atmosphere transforms into a restless one as Vernon brow-beats Bender, “The next screw that falls out is gonna be you.” But the real nerve-racking moment is when Bender indifferently says, “Eat my shorts.” The scene escalates when Vernon increases Bender’s days in detention, as the other kids fearfully try to prod him out of his indifference. Nelson’s eyes, however, do most of the talking. They’re able to reveal a world of feeling, allude to Bender’s troubling past, and help you understand that there is reason behind his brash behavior. The scene ends on a chilling note. Vernon paints a displeasing picture of “John Bender in ten years” and Bender yells an expletive tastefully highlighted by a heavy guitar chord as Vernon leaves. This leaves the viewer feeling uneasy, but is in perfect keeping with the film’s focus on the intensity of teen angst.

Hands down, Bender, the rambunctious stirrer of the pot, is my favorite character. There’s a theory which suggests that in all of Shakespeare’s’ plays, there was always a character that represented the writer himself. I believe this theory holds true for Hughes and the character of Bender. They both share the same name, for one thing. Through him, Hughes’ more skillful and daring ideas are given life; Bender smoothly brings up edgy themes of child abuse and sexual exploration that were hardly ever touched in prior films of the teen genre. “It’s (a bruise) about the size of a cigar” or the scandalous, “Calvin’s in a ball, on the front seat past eleven on a school night?” But what I love about Bender is Nelson’s potent portrayal. Without a doubt, Nelson steals practically every scene of the movie. His acting technique of striking matches, ripping pages out of books, or drawing knives, produces a dynamic and unpredictable energy that is reminiscent of a young Pacino. Nelson gives a completely stellar performance!

This is not to say I did not enjoy the other actors. On the contrary, the most impactful scene of the movie involves all five players. The characters are contemplative and seated on the library floor as they come down from their high. This scene is momentous due to the actors’ heartfelt deliveries, and Hughes’ intimate framing. In a semicircle, the five finally divulge their personal feelings and reasons for being sanctioned. We learn that the wrestling giant has a consciousness after he admits the guilt he felt when bullying a boy weaker than him out of peer pressure. The princess doesn’t have it all; her parents use her merely as a tool against each other. The “basket-case” is simply lonely due to an “unsatisfying home life.” But the greatest shock of all is learning the unsuspecting geek Brian has a devastating suicidal disposition because he fears failing Shop Class.

The cast exquisitely pulls off this steady paced, therapeutic scene with mirthful delivery of lines like “I can tape people’s buns together” to gut wrenching ones like “They found a gun in my locker.” Or Hughes’ most prophetic line, considering his eventual death from a heart attack at age 59: “When you grow up your heart dies.” The scene was incredibly personal thanks to the sensible combination of high-angled shots peering down at the five huddled together and eye level shots of them in the frame. Their formation is forever plastered in my mind like a beloved album cover. Hughes’ sophisticated panning (having the audacity to go behind an actors head), as well as one long unbroken shot as the actors relay their monologues, connects you to the moment. You feel like you’re sitting right next to these characters, as Hughes himself was during filming. In the best way possible, this scene is the most spooky, anti-climactic and yet climactic scene of any movie I’ve seen. It sticks out like a sore thumb.

Unfortunately, The Breakfast Club falls flat regarding the extent of its character development. I understand the goal of the film is to demolish high school tropes, which it does quite well, but the film lacks adequate character resolutions. The ending seems rushed and not completely thought out. Almost all our pivotal characters end up romantically involved by the end of the day, except the geek, of course. Brian ends up in love with the assigned essay, which he completes for the whole group. It is uncertain whether they will all remain friends on Monday at school, but I prefer that uncertainty. Despite this dissatisfying resolve, the final shot of the film ultimately reaffirms my adoration. John Bender walks onto the football field with Claire Standish’s diamond earring (which she gave to him) in his ear. And as “Don’t You Forget About Me” plays in the background, Bender lifts his fist in the air, not because he got the girl, not because all five will be friends for ever, but because just for one day they were all validated. That is a feeling you can never neglect.

Let’s face it, through his films’ relatable characters, use of new wave music, and eye for voguish fashion, John Hughes basically invented teen culture during the 80s. Anytime you hear someone utter, “Eat my shorts” or you give a friend a tote embroidered with the quote “We’re all pretty bizarre” you subconsciously applaud the genius of this 1985 feature. This film helps remind you that some things are popular for good reason. Consequently, 30 years after its release, The Breakfast Club’s sincerity and pertinence justifies its status as the unofficial blueprint of practically every good teen movie ever made.

March 18, 2015 / Matt Atwood / 2 Comments

Painting

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Everyone’s “everyday” consists of a different makeup, a different routine. Places, on the other hand, remain constant. I explore these everyday places in order to ground viewers in an area with which they are familiar, to give them a sense of reality. My images, however, try to capture the surreal in these places of reality. I want to show the parts that are ignored, the areas that seem to be so commonplace that one wouldn’t think anything odd could possibly exist there. When I take photos, I look to deconstruct an everyday area to show its quirks, oddities, and most importantly, the aspects that make it surreal.

Digital photography is my medium. For this project, I limited myself to a single parking garage and explored it as well as the surrounding area. Every photo is taken of, or from, this garage at night. I used a tripod to keep the images clear and crisp to capture the location’s inherent surrealism, letting darker areas become illuminated and bright ones become blown out or flared up.

I want to disorient the observer by giving these photos the constructed quality of a collage. Parts of these photos should not feel like they go together. In creating this aesthetic effect, light plays a major role. Most of the light is artificial with the only natural light coming from the moon.

My biggest influence for this photo series was David Lynch. His films and artwork focuses on aesthetics, texture, and the surreal. While I do not concern myself with texture, I am very interested in the manner in which Lynch produces a sense of the odd in the most mundane locations. Inspired by Lynch, my series attempts to force the viewer to look at the everyday in a new way, with a particular emphasis on color and composition.

There’s No Place Like Home

March 18, 2015 / AVeryStrangeHoard / 0 Comments

Wow. Gone Home shattered all my assumptions about video games. But before I get into that let me offer two disclaimers. One, this is, in fact, the first video game I have every played from start to finish (unless you count a round of Super Mario Kart) and the first video game I have ever owned. Second, I will be talking about my personal life in connection to this game. If that makes your skin itch, I’m sorry.

In the hyper-masculine realm of popular video games, violence is king. Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Diablo, etc. Games are marketed to men and use female characters as pawns to drive the story and to develop the male protagonist’s character. Women in games are not independent or their own characters, but are rather devices marketed to men. This often means that the female character is killed just to give the male character depth or purpose. In addition there is the completely unacceptable sexual violence in Grand Theft Auto where players are REWARDED for raping women, blatantly encouraging rape culture. As someone who has witnessed this problem and who had a mother who purposely kept video games out of the house for this reason, I didn’t realize that there were games out there that were interested in women and their lives. To my surprise, after five minutes of playing Gone Home (developed and published by The Fulbright Company). I was completely hooked on this emotionally complex and intellectually challenging game. It requires players to contemplate women’s lives (their whole lives–not only their connection to men, or their male or masculine personas, but women as they live and struggle in a patriarchal society).

From the start you are playing a young woman: Katie. And you are most interested in the life of your younger sister, Sam. You return home from a semester abroad to your family’s new house (they moved while you were away), and find the house strangely empty. The ‘game’ aspect involves your solving the mystery of where your family is. You walk through your house and learn about your life and the lives of your family members. Understanding the characters and their lives is crucial. There is no enemy. There is no specific goal or quest. Character development drives the game forward. To my amazement, this development is largely focused on Sam’s non-traditional views of gender and her budding relationship with Lonnie, an older girl in her class. As the game is set in 1995, they exchange mix tapes of early female punk rock and write a zine about knocking out the patriarchy. From Sam’s experiences of oppression and prejudice to the fact that THERE ARE TAMPONS IN THE BATHROOM, the game strives to provide a holistic view of a family and specifically a daughter in transition and turmoil.

Even better than that, this game made me feel. I moved from Massachusetts to Virginia after my freshman year in high school. I was suddenly the only openly queer student in a small private christian school. I had two older sisters. I was intensely angry with my parents. Walking through Gone Home felt like walking back into that time in my life. I read notes from Sam to her parents because they weren’t speaking. I heard Sam talk about being bullied in school. I relived how hard it is to be different in a new place with a family you don’t feel connected to. My family was much less religious than Sam’s but I still felt like outsider. This video game made me reflect on that time and forced me to look at it from a different angle. This self-examination was not what I expected to face in any video game. I hadn’t expected that a video game could make me cry with happiness at its conclusion.

The depth given to these characters in the game is astounding. Here is new a way to explore the experiences of a queer identity, to feel how horrible it is to be invisible. The game not only gives historically accurate references to the lesbian community and culture at the time but also has definite connections to present-day queer experiences. The journal entry “A Very Long Phase” talks about the experience of coming out and the powerful impact of each person’s reaction. Sam’s parents simply deny that she is a lesbian (though her identity is never specified, I use lesbian for simplicity) and believe that it is a phase. Unfortunately, this is not unusual even today. Women, especially those who are queer identified, face the challenge of people believing (1) they just don’t know what they’re doing, (2) they’re doing it for male attention, or (3) eventually they’ll get married and everything will be normal (Please, just don’t let women bond with women! If men aren’t involved, IT CAN’T BE REAL). This intersection of sexism and homophobia adds to the struggle of women to be treated with respect, as someone with agency and knowledge.

So I know that this review was more of a love fest than a proper review, but that’s how I feel about Gone Home. This emotional and complex game goes beyond entertainment. It is not a time waste, or useless. Gone Home, if you’re willing, will entertain you and make think about who you are. If you have the time, I absolutely recommend that you play this game. Before I played it I never thought I’d really enjoy video games, or that they were more than a diversion. But after? I think I’m going to search for other games like this. I want more.

March 12, 2015 / Noah S. Thompson / 0 Comments

Frank Miller’s Martha Washington

March 11, 2015 / drabkins / 0 Comments

Writer and artist Frank Miller is a sort of paradoxical figure among comic book readers. On the one hand, he wrote The Dark Knight Returns and Batman Year One. I mean, he basically invented the modern Batman. Those titles, along with his Daredevil run, helped usher in comic books “adult” enough for us to read in classes. But it’s also pretty widely understood that Miller is kind of, vaguely, a fascist. And sort of a racist. And I guess if we’re going to get into it, he’s not particularly fond of gay or disabled people either. It also seems really hard for him to write a female character who isn’t a sex worker and he certainly doesn’t like Muslims. These exaggerated, though not entirely unfounded, accusations make for awkward conversations about the roots of modern comics. Though Miller’s written some of the greats, he’s also written a few of the worst. Miller is thus one of the last people we would expect to write a strong, believable woman of color as a main character or deal with real social issues without being preachy or disrespectful. And this is weird, because he wrote Martha Washington.

Martha Washington first appeared in Give me Liberty, a 1990 4-issue miniseries published by Dark Horse, written by Frank Miller and drawn by Watchmen’s Dave Gibbons. Give me Liberty begins in the not-so-distant future of 1995 with the birth of Martha Washington. The following year Martha’s father is killed in a protest against the economic policies of President Rexell, a thinly veiled caricature of Ronald Reagan. The story follows Martha surviving in the government created slums until her eventual enlistment in the military.

Although the comic focuses on Martha, it is situated in a developing story about the political climate in America. Rexell is replaced with an idealistic liberal president when the white house is blown up by Saudi Arabian terrorists (I mentioned Miller’s feelings on Muslims, right?). The new president decides to deploy forces to save the rain forests (which I guess is what environmentalists cared about before climate change). This is when the story starts getting really weird. The rain forests are being threatened by Fat Boy Burger, a multinational fast food restaurant that wants to cut down the forests so that they can grow cattle on the newly cleared land. The Fat Boy Burger corporation fights with giant piloted robots that look like fat boys holding burgers. They also fight with horrifying chemical weapons.

Something Give me Liberty does particularly well is pairing the surreal with the serious. There’s a beautiful splash page of Martha breaking down into tears and then brushing them aside and gritting her teeth after all of her fellow soldiers are killed with poisonous gas. It’s a pretty grim scene. Later she takes down one of the giant burger robots with a helicopter. The comic jumps back and forth between silly and scary without making either seem forced. There’s an earlier section where Martha is institutionalized at a mental hospital that is secretly doing experiments on children to turn them into psychic supercomputers. Then everyone in the hospital is sent out onto the streets because government funding for the hospital is cut. We have a very real issue, poor funding for mental health facilities, paired with the very fantastic idea of psychic supercomputers. Despite all the talk of Miller’s gritty realism, I think he excels when pursuing this sort of juxtaposition. He brings real issues into a world that is still distinctly a comic book universe. In this way, he touches on important aspects of our culture; but unlike many of the other authors coming up around the same time (I’m looking at you Moore), he doesn’t sacrifice the thing that make silver age comics great: absurdity.

I’ve mentioned that Martha Washington is a strong character and I stand by that. However, before I can recommend this comic, which I strongly do, I should mention that it’s not a perfectly progressive comic. There are a few more gay Nazi’s than I’m comfortable with. Miller is able to get away with so much partly because he makes fun of virtually everyone. Conservative or liberal, Miller guns for them and the only one who really comes out looking good is Martha. The story is beautifully drawn, fun without being stupid, relevant without being preachy; it exemplifies the nuance that characterizes Miller’s early works.

Postscript

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