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Still Alice Kristen Stewart and Julianne Moore article story large

Earnestness: Glatzer & Westmoreland’s Still Alice

March 9, 2015 / Noah Fusco / 0 Comments

Pauline Kael wrote, after seeing Shoeshine (1946): “I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, ‘Well I don’t see what was so special about that movie.’ I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?”

A similar experience for me happened when watching Still Alice; a heartwrenching existential play written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Continue reading

March 1, 2015 / Talia Amorosano / 0 Comments

Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God

March 1, 2015 / Austin Stearns / 1 Comment

“After the Spaniards had conquered and sacked the Inca realm, the sorely oppressed Indians invented the legend of a golden kingdom El Dorado. Its alleged location was in the impenetrable bogs of the Amazon tributaries. Near the end of the year 1560, a large expedition of Spanish adventurers under the leadership of Gonzalo Pizarro set off from the Peruvian sierras. The only document to survive from this lost expedition is the diary of the monk Gaspar de Carvajal.”

This is the text preceding Werner Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre, The Wrath of God and, though Herzog claims historians repeatedly ask him where he found these documents, it doesn’t claim to be anything more than a fabrication–which it is. How could it be anything else? Certainly Don Lope de Aguirre, Gonzalo Pizzaro, and Gaspar de Carvajal were real people, but the story itself, its cinematic presentation, chronicles a megalomaniacal odyssey through the gates of hell. The Spanish conquistadors, spurred onward by their hubris and insatiable desire, rush through the dense Amazonian tributaries toward El Dorado as quickly as the current will carry them. There’s no need to be coy, Aguirre is one of the best films ever made, and its most impressive quality might be the way it perfectly balances fantasy and reality, resulting in a film that feels both grounded yet dreamlike and larger than life.

The actual origin of this story was a small coincidence. “I spent some time at a friend’s house,” Herzog recollects. “And he was on the phone all the time when I arrived and he had a huge library and I went through his books and I grabbed one book by coincidence about adventures and discoveries and opened it and there was half a page on a man called Don Lope de Aguirre.” Herzog then rushed home and wrote the screenplay in roughly two and half days, finishing the story as he traveled to Vienna with his soccer team. One might expect Herzog’s first draft to reflect the finished film’s meticulous visual complexities, carefully planned out in advance–but that’s the beautiful irony residing in Herzog’s vision. Herzog’s screenplay was nothing more than prose, lacking a script of any type, designed to specifically avoid the type of dramatic and visual contrivance that characterizes most films of this scope. In order to make the film he wanted, Herzog needed to lead his cast and crew deep into the jungle and try to find a movie in there through improvisation, allowing his cast to take a journey identical to that of their characters. “The story takes place in the Peruvian jungle,” he would later say, “you have to go there, there’s no alternative.” He needed to embody the deranged character that captured his imagination, leading his crew into the jungle without any assurances of what he might find. He needed to become Don Lope de Aguirre, in pursuit of an El Dorado all his own.

Principle photography for Aguirre, shot on location nearby Machu Picchu, was as chaotic and dangerous a production as any in film history. In fact, Herzog and his crew would never even have reached the difficult shoot had they not been bumped off their original flight to Brazil, a plane that ended up crashing in the jungle and killing 94 people. This would be only their first brush with death.

Of course, merely the fact of shooting on location in the jungle was dangerous enough, especially given how limited their resources were. Herzog needed to make a massive period-adventure film with an absurdly small budget of around $360,000. “Sometimes,” begins Herzog as he recalls their financial difficulties, “I had to sell my boots or my wrist watch just to get breakfast.” Financial shortcomings like this were common during the five week shoot (Herzog didn’t even own the 35 mm camera used to shoot the film–he stole it), all five of them made yet more difficult by the dense terrain, which was filled with disease-carrying insects. There was also the occasional run-in with the local wildlife, as Herzog specifically mentions in a reflection on the film: “I grabbed a tree and it was full of fire ants, and chopped it with my machete but it didn’t chop the whole tree, it was too thick. And hundreds of fire ants rained down on me, and I got bitten about 150 times and developed a very bad fever. So it was the daily sort-of stuff you got through, that’s okay.”

The most horrifying creature in the jungle, however, was Klaus Kinski, the man playing Herzog’s titular lead. Herzog’s struggle to control Kinski has become something of a legend in cinematic history (Herzog claims they hated each other so much during the shoot, that they both independently plotted the other’s murder). Christian Bale’s rant on the set of Terminator Salvation (2009)–setting today’s standard for prima donna behavior on set–doesn’t even come close to the tumultuous presence of Klaus Kinski. He was literally dangerous. “One night, the extras were a little bit noisy,” said Herzog, in regards to one of Kinski’s more violent outbursts, “they drank a little bit and played cards, and Kinski couldn’t take it. So he screamed and yelled, grabbed his Winchester rifle, I mean a real Winchester, and fired three bullets through the walls of their hut, and there were 45 of them crammed together. That he didn’t kill anyone of them is a miracle.” Kinski did, however, blow off one of their fingers. Herzog confiscated Kinski’s rifle and, later on during the shoot, after Kinski threatened to walk out on the film (which was a very real threat since Kinski had already established a reputation for violating his contracts without a second thought), Herzog himself threatened to shoot Kinski if he bailed. Kinski stayed.

Much like the characters in the film, the cast and crew of Aguirre faced many perils during their expedition to “find” a movie in the rainforest. So what did Herzog’s camera find in the jungle? Was it worth it? Herzog has always maintained that the struggles in making Aguirre were insignificant in comparison to the final product, but I find this stance slightly problematic. Aguirre, as a film, was certainly worth enduring an incredibly difficult production–it’s one of the best films ever made, and I would allow myself to be eaten alive by fire ants in joyous zeal if it meant I got to make a film like this. My problem is that Herzog’s struggles in making Aguirre aren’t insignificant in comparison to final film, they are crucial, they are required: They are the final film.

This concept, the philosophy dictating Herzog’s decisions as director, has often been linked to an anecdote relayed by famed film critic André Bazin in “Cinema and Exploration” (1967), where he attempts to describe a specific type of cinematic realism. Michel Ichat’s Victoire sur l’Annapurna (1953), a documentary chronicling a team of French mountain climbers as they ascended to the 8,091 meter peak of Annapurna I, is incomplete, says Bazin, because an avalanche “snatched the camera out of the hands of [Maurice] Herzog” (162). Bazin’s description is visual and establishes the image of a camera buried in snow, unable to accomplish photographic registration as its lens is obscured. In this moment, the distance between the camera and its object is compressed until it vanishes entirely: the real has entered into the film frame. The existential force of the avalanche is reinforced by its unrepresentability, and Maurice Herzog’s experience encompasses the sublime. It’s in this brush with death, with the uncontained power of the natural world, where Bazin’s understanding of the indexical image and the origin of Werner Herzog’s filmmaking philosophy reside.

Scholars have long suspected that Bazin’s story is what inspired Werner Stipetić to change his name to Werner Herzog, but whether or not this is true, this anecdote captures the soul of Herzog’s filmmaking aesthetic. For Herzog, conquering a mountain is synonymous with filming it, and the world yields meaningful images because it’s deadly, because it’s powerful and uncontrollable, often beyond our understanding. Herzog is after a certain type of authenticity that can only be produced by these encounters at the edges of the world, where death beats its wings loudly and can be dodged only through demanding physical investment. That is the magic of Aguirre: there is no magic, there are no tricks. The images, and the experiences they capture, are real. Film and reality become permeable, and in Aguirre it is a two way street between them.

In a scene quite reminiscent of the one Bazin describes, Herzog loads his actors onto several rafts and joins them onboard, filming as they travel downriver and traverse rapids. As the murky water begins to foam, picking up speed, and the actors cling dearly to the raft’s center for life (except, of course, Kinski, who instead approaches the edge), Herzog instructs cinematographer Thomas Mauch to bring the camera closer to the water and let it splash up onto the lens, allowing the furious river to invade the frame just like the avalanche from Bazin’s story. The camera almost seems to merge with the scene it’s trying to capture, and this particular use of the water droplet motif reappears all throughout Herzog’s career, from Fitzcarraldo (1982), to his hilarious collaboration with Zak Penn, Incident at Loch Ness (2004), and even Rescue Dawn (2006).

The sublime, intangible power of nature in this imagery invokes a quote from Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration of 1999: “there is such a thing as a poetic, ecstatic truth.” When the real world enters the film frame it corrodes the relation between film and reality, the gap between sign and referent disintegrates and we’re left with images that are, ultimately, as intangible and incomprehensible as nature itself. Herzog’s films are lyrical, brewing with poetic moments that are, at their core, inexplicable and beyond signification. At the same time, the pure physicality of Herzog’s filmmaking process imbues his work with a distinct corporeality that seems to be soaked up into the image and provide these poetic inserts with the gravitas of “truth” or “authenticity.”

In Aguirre, this type of authenticity is everywhere and it works perfectly. It feels like Herzog and his crew were actually there in 1561 with a camera. During the credit sequence, the entire cast is shown descending a precarious stone path etched into the side of a mountain. When the characters burn down an Amazonian village, Herzog actually burned down an abandoned village. And when Herzog wanted a strikingly poetic set-piece for the last act of the film, he actually built a full-sized caravel, constructed as a shipwreck, which he impaled atop a tree. It’s not solely the facts that the film is shot on location and that the actors are getting down and dirty in the muck that imbues the images with a corporeal aura, but also the physical investment of the director, who marches through the jungle, sells his possessions, contracts diseases, battles fire ants, and makes this ascent himself. The extraordinary degree of effort required to perform this feat of filmmaking is what gives it such poetic power.

And incredibly, despite the sublime aggression of the Amazonian nature, Kinski’s performance dominates the film. He embodies the megalomaniacal spirit of Don Lope de Aguirre perfectly. The physicality of Kinski’s performance perfectly compliments the corporeal presence of nature. Both the way he stalks around like a crab or spider and the latent fury of his countenance are unforgettable. For a time, Herzog had intended Aguirre to have a hunchback, but he dropped the idea in favor of employing an outfit that incorporates an abundance of straps along the back, as if to suggest that Aguirre needed to be physically held together (this touch makes Aguirre feel remarkably Shakespearean; he’s particularly reminiscent of Richard III). In the face of all of nature’s power, Aguirre is a man of insane, insatiable ambition–and this ambition has devoured the other aspects of his personality, the disposition of his mind epitomized by the film’s final moments. I always feel that it is Aguirre, rather than the endless river he’s riding, that represents the wrath of god.

Werner Herzog’s filmography is eclectic and filled with numerous films I’d dub masterpieces, but Aguirre, The Wrath of God is maybe his best work. It is one of but a handful of films–a group including films like Citizen Kane (1941), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Apocalypse Now (1979), There Will Be Blood (2007), Andrei Rublev (1966), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Taxi Driver (1976), Marketa Lazarova (1967), The Vanishing (1988), and Persona (1966)–that strikes me as being, somehow, better than perfect. The filmmakers seem to be exploring territory they might not fully understand, but they are overwhelmed by the desire to tell this story nonetheless. The film thus takes on a life and personality of its own.

I can explain what happens in Aguirre, but I cannot necessarily say what the film is about. There’s no way to pin this film down. The film has absorbed the sublime, intangible nature of the world it inhabits, of the river and avalanche. Aguirre is like a vision in a dream, and it does not provide us with answers, but questions. Who are we right now? Where do we come from? What is our place in this world? How do we behave in the face of danger? We will never find definitive answers, but I believe viewers will find Aguirre insightful forever.

February 26, 2015 / Matt Atwood / 6 Comments

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Organic World Building Done Right

February 25, 2015 / Jeremy Barnes / 2 Comments

When I reflect on what’s missing from a lot of games these days, my first thought is “a cure for my crippling loneliness.” My second thought? A sense of discovery and mystery, of finding and uncovering of my own accord pieces of a game’s lore and world. I like going into a world that feels real, one that feels like it wasn’t created with my satisfaction in mind, but rather could have organically existed without my participation. A game shouldn’t have to spell everything out for me, because its job shouldn’t be to please the player. Not all games have to be fun. Games can be more than just things to do in order to pass the time; they can be challenging, emotionally engaging, thought provoking, and even sad. Not every game needs to make me excited, it just needs to succeed in its own right in whatever it sets out to do. Help from the game or being given a sense of power is nice sometimes, but I usually don’t want a game to hold my hand. Why do some games assume I wouldn’t be able to find my own face without a big glowing waypoint?

Two recent games come to mind that have really left a lasting impact on me because of their worlds and infrastructure: Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (developed by Monolith Productions) and Dark Souls (developed by From Software). I’m not trying to make the claim that these two are the only recent games to have intrigued me lately or that other games are complete failures, but rather that these are merely two examples of the kind of successful world building that I’m talking about. These two games have their own ecosystems of sorts and allow the player to (for the most part) uncover their respective worlds’ mysteries on his or her own.

Shadow of Mordor takes place in Tolkien’s Middle Earth and follows Talion, a ranger from Gondor who seeks revenge upon Sauron’s henchmen for the death of his wife and son. The actual narrative of the story mode is pretty dry and really doesn’t feel all that original. Too often Shadow of Mordor seems like it’s trying to compete with the rest of the Lord of the Rings mythos by imitating other works within the Lord of the Rings universe, namely the Peter Jackson films. Its “me too” attitude makes it look like a little kid trying to wear his dad’s suit; it’s kind of cute at first, but when it tries to drive to work and do your taxes, the act starts to feel a little forced. Its many attempts at shoe-horning Gollum into the plot come off as contrived and Celebrimbor’s endless movie quotes can get a bit tiring, making the story missions in general feel a bit lacking.

However, the game more than makes up for these shortcomings with its Nemesis system, which produces an ever-changing hierarchy of Uruk warchiefs and commanders. The game tracks the rank and combat strength of each of Sauron’s Uruk captains and allows the player to aid, defeat, or enslave any of these captains in their struggles for power. When the player is defeated by one of these captains, that captain will then increase in strength and taunt the player for his failure if he or she chooses to go back for a second attempt at his life. The game will also track the deaths of your friends, allowing you to take vengeance upon the Uruk captain that killed your poor buddy. Lastly, Uruks shift their power positions even without the input of the player, making this system of power feel real and organic. This system is introduced to the player through the main storyline, but for the most part Talion’s interactions with the Uruk captains and bodyguards are not necessary for the completion of the game–which is odd because this aspect is by far the most interesting part of the game.

This ever-shifting ecosystem of war and succession is smart and refreshing and breathes life into an otherwise dull romp through Middle Earth. The game’s world and lore also come out far more clearly in the numerous collectibles that the player can optionally pick up all over the game map. Each collectible is embedded with some sort of memory or engraving, allowing a glimpse into the mind of the individual who owned said collectible. For example, Torvin the dwarf hunter is relatively uninteresting and one-sided in the main story; however, through a few pieces of collectible intel we learn about his relationship with his brother and the reasons for his passion to hunt the Legendary Graug. These pieces of intelligence and history provide context to the action and give the player a glimpse of the micro-level workings of Mordor, something that enhances the overall experience of the game world.

Even though Shadow of Mordor succeeds in terms of its Nemesis system and enlightening collectibles, in some places it still feels like it’s trying to hold the player’s hand. Once the player gets to an area’s watchtower, every collectible and objective is revealed on the game’s map, eliminating the player’s need to seek out secrets for himself. Instead of letting the player seduce and woo the game into revealing its secrets, Shadow of Mordor just drops its pants and flaunts its goods at the drop of a hat. While some may ask why I’m not more critical of its transparency, it’s because I’m just happy that Shadow of Mordor came to the party with pants on at all (I’m looking at you, Pokémon games; I can indeed chew my own food, contrary to how you treat me).

Unlike Shadow of Mordor, Dark Souls is engrossing and intelligent the whole way through. Along with its predecessor, Demon’s Souls, and its sequel, Dark Souls II, Dark Souls has entered the gaming canon as one of the most punishing and cutthroat games in recent years. Compared to some other modern games that treat the player like an idiot and the player’s character like a demigod, the world of Dark Souls seems intent on kicking the player’s undead keister back to 1988. Granted, it ‘s hard, but Dark Souls is perhaps characterized too often solely in terms of its difficulty; there are far more interesting things to say about the game than “it’s harder than grandma’s month old fruitcake.” For one, Dark Souls gives the player a great deal of control over almost every aspect of the game, including the unfolding of the plot. The player controls a chosen undead in his mission to traverse Lordran and defeat the hollowed husk of Lord Gwyn, the world’s previous ‘caretaker,’ if you will. If that sounds vague, that’s because it is vague; the story of Dark Souls isn’t expressly given to the player aside from a few scarce cutscenes. All other bits of story have to be gleaned from NPC’s, from item descriptions, or from observation of the world’s topography and architecture. The item descriptions in particular give poignant clues to the nature of some of the game’s bosses and lore, while NPC’s breathe life into the world and hint at a vastness to the lands of Dark Souls.

Not only does Dark Souls leave its story ambiguous, but it leaves its gameplay elements and explorable world a mystery as well. Once you leave the Undead Asylum and its tutorial scenarios behind, the world of Dark Souls is left up to the player to explore (and probably perish in). Failure and character death are staples of gameplay, but they’re not meant to be deterrents; rather, they’re motivational learning experiences–and death in this game acts as a teaching tool. Dark Souls is meant to be taken meticulously and patiently. Rashness and high stakes are often met with death and loss of time and resources. Combat is like a morbid kind of dance where if you miss a step someone stabs you and steals your wallet (after which you get up, dust yourself off, and go back to get your wallet, but this time you’ve brought Mr. Zweihander and he’s out for blood). In addition to the regular combat, boss fights are an interesting endeavor as well. Bosses are scary and do big-boy damage, but their patterns can often be learned and exploited, and often times the most apparently formidable bosses have the biggest, albeit generally secret or hard to find, weaknesses (in the case of the Stray Demon, you can get him stuck on a pillar, rendering him harmless and easily killable).

The combat system has a lot in common with the missions and objective structure of the game. Which is to say that there really is no overtly easy or straightforward way of moving through the game, but the clever player can find shiny new items and areas and will make it much farther than the impatient player. Though there are mandatory objectives that must be completed in order to finish the game, many can be done in interchangeable order and others can be skipped or ignored. Entire sections of the game can go unnoticed by the player, like the Painted World of Ariamis or Ash Lake, the latter being arguably the most visually striking and beautiful section of the game; it’s reached by exploring a hollowed out tree located in the corner of one of Dark Soul’s main story areas. The Painted World also raises numerous questions about its origins and purpose: Who made it? Why does this place exist? These questions, among others, are never really answered, and I’m okay with that. I want to be able to wonder and make up my own conclusions. I don’t want to be spoon-fed every little bit of information and lore.

I don’t want this piece to be one of those “all modern video games are dumb and for babies” posts, because frankly those kinds of opinions are often uninformed and stuck in the past. Not all games have to be mysterious, complex, or highly intelligent, but I greatly appreciate those that make me forget that I’m playing in a constructed world. Sometimes I just want to get lost somewhere else and experience something new and exciting for myself, as I expect do many other players of video games do. Shadow of Mordor and Dark Souls are both excellent games, and should be celebrated for their success, because for someone who feels a bit jaded these are sometimes a breath of fresh air. In a real world filled with monotony and busy work, games like these let me stretch my imagination a little bit.

Orphan Black

February 23, 2015 / AVeryStrangeHoard / 0 Comments

It’s not easy to be a feminist and watch TV. I don’t deny there are shows that are making strides in their representation of women and non-normative people, such as Orange is the New Black, Parks and Recreation, Bob’s Burgers, etc. But despite these shows, television seems stuck in a rut. Though there is a lot available, shows stay rigidly within their genre and tend to market towards one single demographic. Cop shows work one way, sitcoms another, teen dramas are different from soap operas, and soap operas are different from prime time. So although the shows employ many different lenses, they remain clustered around a few primary ideas, showing but not embracing diversity in characters or life narratives. Watching through a feminist lens traps you in wanting to praise and encourage a show for the progress it does make but feeling disappointed by the conservative structures that TV can’t seem to let go of.

Orphan Black is a show that begins to deconstruct these ideas. For those of you who have not watched it, let me give you a synopsis (unless you want to watch it right now. Don’t worry, I’ll wait). Sarah Manning (played by Tatiana Maslany) is the first and primary character; the audience mostly follows her through the narrative, though in the later episodes this changes. Sarah was raised in the foster system, had an unplanned pregnancy, and ran away leaving her child in the care of her foster mother. The show begins with her return to NYC where her foster mother and daughter live, as well as her foster brother Felix (Jordan Gavaris). Sarah quickly learns that she is a clone, meaning that her DNA was either copied or constructed and that her body is technically owned by the Dyad group. She meets many of her “sisters” (as they call themselves) and joins them in trying to discover their origins. They attempt to sustain their lives while managing the unusual details of their existence and fighting for their autonomy against institutional and scientific control.

Through its story, Orphan Black establishes connections between the personal and the political that most TV shows don’t even attempt–and it does this while managing to maintain a multilayered narrative. Diverse characterizations for women–who are the majority of the cast–and men are central to the show. Unfortunately, Orphan Black is largely lacking in representations of people of color. The fact that a large chuck of the characters are all played by Tatiana Maslany because they’re clones is a contributing factor, but it by no means excuses the show for its white-dominated cast. This was a choice the show’s producers made, so though I praise the leaps that it is making I cannot say it does not have flaws, and I am not defending this significant gap in its representation of the human experience.

That said, Orphan Black creates a diverse representation of the female experience, including sexuality, career, class, religion, ideology, and motherhood status. Through learning about Sarah, her family and the clones–mainly Allison, Cosima, Helena, and Rachel–the audience is shown many different ways in which women live. Allison lives in the suburbs with her husband and two children. Cosima is a queer-identified student studying evolutionary biology. And Helena was raised in a convent and then brainwashed to kill people (pretty unusual, really). The audience is also shown the complex relationships between all of these women, and in particular the generational relationships of Sarah, her foster mother, and her daughter. The connections between women, such as those of motherhood or sisterhood (both biological and emotional), are major themes explored in the show. Strong bonds between women are not the subject of most TV shows at the moment, and it’s incredible to see these realistic and relatable female characters explore their relationships to each other, themselves, and the world. In addition, the show includes interesting male characters. In fact, the male characters are integral to the plot and are characterized just as the female characters are, as having different and complex identities. The show focuses on its female character while consistently bringing in male narratives and identities to complete the complex views of gender that appear in the show.

This diverse picture of identities is continued with the inclusion of queer-identified characters like Felix, Cosima, Delphine (a fellow scientist of Cosima), and Tony. I use the term queer to mean non-normative: anything that is against the traditional structures of society. Felix is Sarah’s gay foster brother who, while male identified, is welcomed into female spaces. He is not only openly gay with an actively queer social life but is defended as Sarah’s brother. His identity is not only outside heteronormative bounds, but his connection to Sarah is non-normative as well, as they are not blood relations.

The relationship between Cosima and Delphine (Evelyne Brochu) is also an amazing accomplishment of the show. After thinking about Cosima kissing her in the episode “Entangled Banks,” Delphine admits “Oh, like… I have never thought about bisexuality. I mean, for myself, you know? But, as a scientist, I know that sexuality, is a… is a… is a spectrum. But you know, social biases they, codified attraction. It’s contrary to the biological facts… you know.” This discussion of sexuality acknowledges both the social meanings and scientific ideas of sexual identity. The development of Cosima and Delphine’s relationship explores questions of identity, how identity changes, and what loving someone means. Tony, while only briefly in the show so far, queers the idea of female experience even more by being a transgender clone. His presence highlights that a female body does not always mean female person. Despite having identical DNA with his clone sisters, Tony identifies as a man and pushes against the gender binary and its limited view of sex.

Not only does the show incorporate all these identities as experiences of life, but it also connects them to political, social, scientific and other external institutions. Through the focus on reproduction and women’s bodies, the show explores how people and bodies are used in science, religion, and politics. The clones are inherently drawn into this tug of war because their bodies are the property of science. This also politicizes the lives of these women’s families. Their status as ‘object,’ not ‘person,’ raises questions about how women’s bodies in particular are commodified, often through their reproduction.

The questions of religion, science, and politics, however, do not end there. The show explores the relationships between these political institutions: where their goals overlap, when they’re in contest, how they view each other, and how their ideologies construct worldviews. This complex look at social institutions in connection with the individual is what makes Orphan Black such a smart and multi-layered show. Orphan Black is not trying to show the audience a single way to live, but is instead asking us to examine how the world around us works and what our place is in it. It shows life not as a contained event, but as connected to and influenced by larger external forces. This is exciting to me, that a popular television show would express such a complex world view.

Orphan Black is by no means the only example of television with diverse identities or political implications. Nor is it perfect, with every identity accounted for, and all voices heard. However, it is a show that attempts to establish the connections between personal and political lives. Its characters show a range of life experiences and identities and build relationships outside of a heteronormative structure. The show stands out against the Normative and promotes a more complex understanding of an individual’s relationship to society. In short, I think it’s worth a watch.

For more Orphan Black information, click here!

The Filmmaker as God: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

February 23, 2015 / Noah Fusco / 1 Comment

Who is the star of Birdman? I ask genuinely, as director Alejandro González Iñárritu, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (fresh off an Oscar win for Gravity), and star Michael Keaton, seem perfectly content to live harmoniously in this wonder of a film, while also threatening to overwhelm each other to stand as the true star. It’s a film about egos though, so I suppose this is only fitting.

Ms. Marvel & The Power of Tropes

February 20, 2015 / Zil Schroeder / 0 Comments

Bursting on the scene with the exuberance of youth comes the new Ms. Marvel, superhero extraordinaire. Premiering from Marvel comics in February of 2014 the story starts with sixteen-year-old Muslim Kamala Khan living in a New Jersey where spandex heroes are commonplace celebrities. She spends most of her time writing stories about them. Or hanging out with her friends at the 7/11 EXPY. After sneaking out for a night on the town, Kamala acquires shape-shifting and healing abilities. Now instead of only having to balance her identity as an American teenager with her Pakistani background and her faith, Kamala also has to balance it with new superhero responsibilities. Naming herself in honor of her favorite superhero, the blonde Captain Marvel who can lift cars over her head, Kamala decides to actively help her community, in the same way that the heroes she admired from behind her computer screen do.

Though not the first Muslim superhero in the Marvel universe, Kamala Khan is the first to have her own title. The talented writer G. Willow Wilson, artist Adrian Alphona, and editor Sana Amanat–who comes from a similar background as Kamala–work on the book. This helps create the realistic grounding for what is a fun fantastical premise. With her abilities, Kamala could chose to look like anything, which makes it that much more important that she choses to still look like herself.

When people recommend the new Ms. Marvel they talk about how original the title is. The story of a sheltered Pakistani American superhero with something to prove certainly isn’t one we get everyday. The discussions within the book about trolling, internet fan culture, and what it means to be Muslim in America are all more clearly relevant to the modern age than many other contemporary superhero stories.

However, the ways in which the work really shines are in the combinations of the old world of comic books with these newer socially relevant view-points. Kamala Khan, in fact, has more in common with what came before than is usually admitted. That’s because we genuinely love and want to celebrate this book, and so tend to stress its originality. But the use of familiar tropes should not by itself be seen as automatically problematic. It’s problematic only when these tropes aren’t given the breathing room they need for creativity to shine through. When a hero has to be a certain way because of old genre conventions, a story can end up strangled by its own pathos. And that’s not the case here.

With great power comes great responsibility is the Spider-Man mantra every moviegoer learns. Kamala comes up with her own: good isn’t a thing you are, it’s a thing you do. Her powers are played as a typical coming of age narrative. She’s sixteen and her body starts doing strange things beyond her control. She’s insecure about her looks, only to find herself suddenly able to shape shift. Her parental guardians love her but can’t possibly understand what she’s going through. Spider-Man. The story we’re deja-vu-ing on is Spider-Man.

But Spider-Man gets dated. We’ve seen so many variations of his story where only slight details are changed. At this point, superhero stories with a white dude dealing with his emotions on an explosive metaphoric level are boring. Though there’s some interest in seeing how storytellers pick at these narratives for new material, goodness, by this point it’s a little like beating a dead horse. Story elements start to lose their punch. In the 1960s the idea of a father disapproving of his daughter dating a nerd seemed more reasonable. In the most recent Spider-Man movie, the writers had to incorporate the idea of mental instability to initially explain Captain Stacy’s dislike of Peter Parker. Now Marvel studios has been given the opportunity to reincorporate the character into the cinematic Marvelverse and we’re going to see him struggle for the third time in thirteen years. Even the casual fan has to sigh at the state of the story.

Superman has similar difficulties connecting to an audience in the modern age. The multitude of his powers combined with his strong moral compass makes him a difficult egg to crack for DC Comics. The most recent solution that I’ve enjoyed has again taken him to this place of immaturity. The Spider-Man coming of age narrative is used as a young Clark Kent discovers and struggles to control his new powers in Smallville. Clark Kent sees a pretty lady and his heat vision starts to act up! However, the show begins to struggle as the cast grows older because they are trapped within the confines of this already established narrative. Clark has to become Superman. No matter how a character might grow over the course of a television decade their eventual place in the universe has a set path a writing team doesn’t have the power to change. This transforms characters like Lex Luthor, or hey inevitable Green Goblin Harry Osborn, from tragedies to foregone conclusions.

Ms. Marvel is a good story because it uses cliché superhero origins not as a crutch but as a spinal column on which to attach the meat of characterization. Kamala is carefully created to be relatable without having to veer into bland, to be admirable without being inhuman (though she is in fact an Inhuman). She is new and her supporting characters could be almost anything. Even so, the patterns they present are familiar to our brains. One character is the locked-out-of-the-loop best friend. Another is the beleaguered secret keeper. Kamala is going to struggle with her identity, her place in the world, and her new responsibilities. Presumably she may lose things she cares about and make mistakes. But the fun is not knowing what those mistakes are going to be.

So yeah. Go read it. I dare you.

February 17, 2015 / Noah S. Thompson / 0 Comments

Jane the Virgin is far from a Beginner

February 16, 2015 / Tyler Clauson-Wolf / 0 Comments

Just based on the title alone, Jane The Virgin is an attention grabber of a show. This CW comedy-drama focuses on Jane Villanueva, a virgin (surprise, surprise), who finds herself at the center of numerous crazy developments that complicate her life and the lives of those around her at every turn. It was developed for an American audience by Jennie Snyder Urman and is loosely based on a Venezuelan telenovela called Juana La Virgen. The show itself is a pseudo-telenovela and pays a lot of tribute to the genre: its characters are predominantly Latino, dialogue is occasionally in Spanish, and a fictional telenovela regularly plays on the characters’ TV screens.

Jane (Gina Rodriguez) is young Latina woman going to school and waitressing in Miami, where she still lives at home with her flirtatious mother (Andrea Navedo) and devoutly religious ‘Abuelita’ (Ivonne Coll). In the series premiere, Jane finds herself artificially inseminated because of a mix-up at the gynecologist. This plays into the religious undertones of the show as Jane becomes pregnant despite still being a virgin (her purity is something her grandmother preached to her to protect when she was younger). The mis-applied sperm, it turns out, belongs to a man named Rafael (Justin Baldoni), who not only runs the hotel Jane works at but also happens to have been her first kiss five years earlier.

For Jane’s detective-boyfriend Michael (Brett Dier), learning that his virgin girlfriend has become pregnant inevitably puts some serious strain on their relationship. By the end of the premiere, the two decide to take their relationship to the next level by becoming engaged to be married. The symbolism is apparent in the final shot, where Michael knocks a white flower–symbol of Jane’s virginity–out of her hair and they embrace. This foreshadows what is in the imminent future for Jane, although when this moment of deflowering will come is a big mystery.

As with a typical telenovela and soap opera, if you thought this show couldn’t get any more complicated, you would be very wrong. Just to give you a taste of all the storylines in this show, here are some of the things that a viewer will have to follow. Rafael’s sperm (frozen before a bout of cancer left him infertile) had originally been intended for his devious and scheming wife Petra (Yael Grobglas) as a way to salvage their marriage. Despite this ploy, Petra is sleeping with Rafael’s best friend Zaz, who Michael just happens to be spying on because he is the last link to a missing drug dealer. Jane’s absentee father also happens to be the star of her favorite telenovela, but her mother can’t bring herself to tell this to Jane. Oh and the gynecologist who caused this mix-up? None other than Rafael’s sister Luisa, of course.

The white flower is a recurring symbol

This complex web of interconnecting stories is both a flaw and one of the appeals of Jane The Virgin. On the one hand, it keeps the speed of the show very fast-paced and there is never a dull scene. The music also plays into this process: a frequent use of background music conveys the sense that a scene is about to reach its climax (pun intended) and then snowball into the next big moment. This gives the show a rhythm that it complicates with every scene. On the other hand, the complex plot leads to there being anywhere from seven to fifteen legitimate and important story lines going on at all times. This can make the show seem scattered and hard to follow on occassion.

The writers do a really good job combating this complex narrative by having every event and person related to one another. Every single scene has larger implications and there is no wasted time in each episode. The writers also utilize a narrator to make sure the audience is keeping up with all the characters and their stories. He has a very jokey and omnipotent voice. He is in on all the jokes and aspects of the show that the audience can see but the characters cannot. Relatively frequent flashbacks also help tie the story together to explain both character motives and relationships between different people. Despite the high amount of turning wheels on the show, the writers are able to tie it all back together, providing a satisfying assurance to viewers that any confusing event will be explained in due time if they continue watching.

The directors of the episodes have a tendency to hint at a lot of things in the future. There is an incredible amount of foreshadowing, and part of the fun as a viewer is to catch the symbolism in what seem like otherwise mundane details. This gives the viewer a privileged view that is way above the characters themselves and can thus draw viewers back to see if their predictions turned out to be correct or if they misinterpreted the hidden message in a scene. The main example of this is the sort of ‘will they, won’t they’ feeling surrounding Jane and Rafael. They have a classic rich vs. poor, Romeo and Juliet dynamic between them. This becomes confounded by the fact that Jane and Michael really do care about each other as well, so it will be interesting to see how this unfolds on the screen.

For all the narrative trickery and complexity, however, it is the characters who are the real driving force behind the show. At first glance, they all may seem very one-dimensional. Their basic personalities, for instance, are established very quickly from the moment they are first on screen, and it seems at first that they are all extremely easy to figure out. However, as the show progresses, all of the characters are shown to have much more going on. And in due time they become much more multifaceted. This is a really crucial part of the show because it complicates a lot of the decisions that characters have to make, since all of them are dealing with internal struggles.

Though the writing helps, the depth and attraction of all the characters is mainly due to the performances of the actors. Rodriguez is really the backbone of the whole cast. She plays all her characters’ emotions to the fullest and is asked to do so across a large spectrum in every episode. She shines brightest in the tougher, dramatic scenes but is still able to hold her own with the comedic scenes. She was deservedly recognized for her abilities when she won the Golden Globe for best actress in a TV comedy this year.

Navedo, who plays her mother, heavily supports Rodriguez’s rollercoaster of highs and lows. Early on, she is presented as a ditzy, young, carefree mother going from man to man. But she is capable of much deeper scenes when she is put in a position to showcase her nurturing side and take care of Jane. The same could be said for Baldoni, who is able to portray the difficulty and complications within his character with just his face and posture when necessary. Additionally Grobglas does a fantastic job keeping the audience guessing as to her motives and what side she is really on, utilizing very emotional performances that can turn on a dime through expert use of a very sly grin. Some of the supporting roles are more caricatures, with the overbearing grandmother, backstabbing best friend, and clueless/self-indulged television star, but they all do a great job holding up the rest of the show and bringing it together.

Andrea Navadeo (left) as Jane’s mother and Ivonne Coll (right) as her abuelita

For what it’s worth, the show is also pretty progressive. The large majority of the central roles are Latino characters, which is somewhat revolutionary for U.S. television today. This is important for the show, because it is an ode to telenovelas and it is showing that Latino actors and characters can lead, carry, and tell a very compelling story to an American audience that is typically drawn to predominantly white shows like Everybody Loves Raymond, The Middle, and Modern Family. However it is interesting to note that while a lot of the characters have accents or Latino names, they are not actually all Latino, and the exact ethnicity of any person on the show cannot be determined. Rodriguez, Navedo, and Coll are all of Puerto Rican descent in real life but the show is situated in Miami, a very Cuban city. Surprisingly enough, given their accents, at times, and appearance, Baldoni and Grobglas are not Latino in the least. Baldoni’s parents were of Jewish and Italian descent, while Groblas grew up in Israel and her parents are from France and Austria (though her ethnicity on the show is even harder to tell than the others). This is a testament to their acting abilities; however, it also brings into question why actual Latino actors were not used for more of the roles, as they are an underrepresented acting group in network television.

Additionally the show deals with a lot of heavier issues in society. Examples of this is whether or not Jane should get an abortion and the decision over when to lose her virginity, in addition to a lesbian relationship with one of the recurring characters. These are topics that other shows might shy away from for fear of controversy and Jane The Virgin should be commended for tackling them head-on.

Ultimately, Jane The Virgin is a delightfully charming show that still possesses the ability to put amazing emotional scenes at its core. This charm makes sense given that it is on a network station and marketed towards a younger audience than more conventional network shows. It is quite action-packed and complex to say the least, yet because of the foreshadowing and narrator, a viewer could miss an episode or two and still have a strong grasp of the majority of what was going on. The whole show also has a very fantastical feel, which a viewer needs to accept given some of the ridiculous things that happen. This magical feel is conveyed through the intertwining stories being told, the music and narrator, and the utilization of very vibrant colors.

It is hard to categorize this show into one genre as it has elements of comedy, romance, drama, and even mystery. It may sound like a lot to comprehend in one show, but Jane The Virgin is quite brilliantly constructed to have everything eventually tie together. This is not a laugh-out-loud show per say, as the humor typical arises from situations of classic misunderstandings that drive the plot forward. The jokes have a playful feel to them, toeing a line between childish and mature so both adolescents and young adults can find it enjoyable. This has been highly recognized among a large variety of people as the show was nominated for a Golden Globe for best TV comedy series this year, despite its airing on a relatively smaller network. Jane The Virgin is a show with such an incredible amount going on that it can be intimidating, but it does a really good job balancing the funny with the heart wrenching, the absurd with the relatable, and even addressing contemporary issues.

Postscript