Butt Boy Films TM

mr. movies

[buttboyfilms-blog]

man if u see this flick and dont fall in love w anna karina buddy idk what to tell ya

so good tho probably seen it like 3x in last month and not even slightly sick of it

[buttboyfilms-blog]

very very proud of this 1

did so good on this mf paper

:P

this is prob my new fav movie of all time

jean luc godard’s vivre sa vie 1963 baby

replacing the likes of -

lotr: return of the king (2006-9) / transformers #1

-district 9 (2009)

-shawshank redemption (10-12)

-eternal sunshine (12-17)

lmao

here is the scene that we were assigned to analyze:::

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlBS3PmPfaI

also some baaaaaad news for all u buttheads out there this is prob my last post 4 like a while im going tree planting next friday til like august

                                    “A picture all unnoticed before”             Enunciatory Struggles and Brechtian Distance in Nana’s Dance

     Nana’s dance to Michel Legrand’s “Swing! Swing! Swing!” displays a crucial moment of self-realization for the female subject of Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa Vie (1962). If only for the duration of the song, she is able to detach from the patriarchal constraints determining her narrative. With unbridled bodily exuberance, Nana’s dance insists on an enduring “specialness” irreducible to the role of selfless prostitute. Analogous to her diegetic counterpart, Anna Karina’s performance seems to refuse the determining power of the camera, denying a full subsumption into Godard’s character. Karina’s dance liberates her from the diegesis, resulting in a disembodied point of view shot, symptomatic of Brechtian verfremdungseffekt. As the jukebox plays, lines drawn between the gendered, transactional relationships of pimp-prostitute and director-actress are blurred to the point of dissolution. While stressing the interconnectedness of filmmaking and prostitution, the scene of Nana’s dance asserts a vision of resilient, volatile female subjectivity, imperishable at the hands of domineering patriarchal forces.      Godard’s third feature film casts his wife, Anna Karina, in the leading role as Nana. Over the course of twelve episodic chapters, spanning approximately eight months, we watch as Nana’s persistent show business dreams lead her from an unfulfilling marriage to an unfulfilling career as a prostitute, and, finally, to her murder.      The dance sequence begins with Nana casually pressing a coin into the jukebox. In her subsequent dance, Nana traverses the length of the pool hall, approaching at first a young, blonde haired man, before sashaying over to Raoul and Luigi, and once more returning to the young man. As the scene fades to black, she twirls around a pillar in front of the jukebox. Throughout the entirety of the dance sequence, Nana’s jubilant body language seems to be at odds with her muted surroundings; her confident, joyous expression impervious to the men’s disinterest. However, in the scene’s final frames, twirling around the pillar, her expression yields to one of dismayed resignation.      Formally, the sequence’s opening frames exercise a tightness of control over the enunciation which Godard is unable to maintain as his wife’s commanding performance takes hold. The camera seems to revere Nana’s image in these frames, defining her strictly in the visual terms of her unmoving body. For the moment, it is in total command of our perception of Nana. It holds at her waist momentarily, letting the record spin, before tilting slowly upwards, savouring each moment of its briefly determining gaze. Godard has said of the film: “I cannot wait for the moment at which Karina has been subsumed to my image of her,” (Silverman 28). In moments such as these, in which the camera exercises determining power over perception of the actress, his vision appears to be fully realized. Nana’s body remains almost perfectly still; it is only the camera which possesses the determining power of movement. The image of a forlorn prostitute presented here is dually reflective of Raoul’s treatment of Nana. It is no coincidence that Nana’s pimp and Godard’s cinematographer share a first name. Both pimp and camera seek to impose reductive identities onto her character, eradicating her subjectivity in favour of their meaning. The attempted elimination of Nana/Karina’s selfhood within the film is an act of collusion between Godard and Raoul, but as Nana casts her eyes mischievously around the pool hall, it is clear that she has other plans.      Although the diegetic reasoning for Nana’s trade is her refusal of a client, her first transgression against the patriarchal domination of her character occurs in this sequence. From the initial tightly determining frames, Nana’s dance goes on to declare a realized female subjectivity, defying her male handlers. She sashays toward Raoul and Luigi momentarily, testing their response. Upon receiving not a glance from either man, she reverses course, now approaching the young man with increasing vitality. Defiance narrows Nana’s face into a mocking pout, and as she pushes forward, the camera is forced to retreat to accommodate her forward motion. She looks past the confines of the frame, disinterested in the determining function it has to offer. Suddenly, she rounds the pool table, forcing the camera to relinquish its tight grasp on her image, now following Nana from the rear at increasing distance. Although she receives minimal attention from the young man, the subordination of the camera to her dance affirms her movement as an agent of self-realization. Rather than the confining function of the camera in the opening frames, Nana’s dance now forces it to hold her at a distance to contain her unpredictable range of motion. Kaja Silverman states that the dance “represents the only diegetic realization of her show-business dreams,” (22). In this outburst of individualized performative energy, Nana defies Raoul’s expectation of prostitutes to renounce their subjectivity, insisting on her undying aspirations to rise above dismal circumstance. Through the singular power of bodily expression, Nana attains a detachment from the patriarchal structures of her narrative, realizing a forgotten, authentic sense of selfhood in the process.       Her moment of greatest self-realization, however, occurs as she approaches her pimp and his associate on the other side of the pool hall. With a final glance toward the young man, she once more pushes up against the retreating camera as she rounds the table back towards the jukebox. Here, however, Nana’s dance seems to force the scene to cut away from this shot. Rather than allowing her to pass the camera by, as before, the scene instead cuts to a shot seeming to be from Nana’s perspective. In this moment, the camera’s gaze appears to have lost all recourse to represent her dance, and, liberated from its determining shackles, Nana seizes control of the enunciation. However, the movement of the camera in this brief shot is slow and stable, in stark contrast to the movement of her dance as previously depicted. What results from this apparent dissonance is a sense of Brechtian verfremdungseffekt, a means by which, in cinema, the director is able to call attention to the fact of the filmmaking process, preventing the audience from losing itself entirely in the illusion of the narrative. The stability of the camera in these frames is irreconcilable with our perception of Nana in the pool hall. In recognizing this momentary discrepancy, we become aware of what appears before us as cinematic illusion, and Godard’s inability to subsume his wife into Nana. At once, Nana has fully realized her diminished selfhood. Her gaze wanders around the corner of the pool hall with a wide-eyed fascination, as if viewing the film’s set for the first time. This shot, as shown through her eyes, is visually distinct from the film as depicted by Godard. Karina’s experience of Nana’s character is profoundly different from Godard’s determining vision of her. In these few seconds, as the camera savours every detail of a chair, a radiator, a window, and finally the two men at the table, the viewer becomes acutely conscious of a sense of detachment from the film’s self-enclosed narrative. As Nana’s implied gaze meets that of Raoul and Luigi, staring out at her with interrupted hostility, Nana is removed from their expectations of her behaviour. In this moment, she is not Nana; not the forlorn prostitute of Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa Vie. Through the power of bodily expression, she has become the film actress of her loftiest aspirations. If only for a brief, jubilant moment, she is Anna Karina.      This brief moment of total liberation for Nana/Karina does not last. The critical distance created by the verfremdungseffekt recedes as the confrontation between Karina’s and Raoul’s eyes extends past the five second mark. As if the unsympathetic gaze of Raoul, coupled with that of the camera, has finally managed to penetrate her dreamlike state of detachment, the scene shifts back to the previous shot, the camera placed now on her other side. Once more, she pushes forward, rounding the corner of the pool table, now moving away from Raoul and Luigi. Mockingly pouting, she sashays towards the jukebox in near perfect synchronization with the music before joyous laughter again overtakes her coy posture. Entirely disregarding the camera, she prances toward the young man, who is still focused on his game of pool. Nana’s dance continues independent of anyone else’s concerns, camera or character. Raoul Cotard’s lens now holds her at a distance, seeming to have momentarily forsaken the impossible task of suppressing her euphoric bodily energy. However, as the scene begins to draw to a close, Nana returns to the camera in front of the jukebox. Twirling around the pillar at the centre of the pool hall, she casts a variety of playfully mocking gestures in the direction of the young man. She spins in and out of frame, the camera remaining still. As the song continues, her jubilant expression subsides to one of genuine dismay. Her twirls slowly become confined to the frame. When the chorus, “Swing! Swing! Swing!” finally begins, interrupting Nana’s wordless flow of bodily expression, she clings to the pillar as this suddenly fleeting moment of self-affirmation. In the sequence’s final frames, Nana appears resigned to dismal circumstance. Casting a final, self-conscious glance toward her preoccupied pimp out of frame, the scene fades to black.      Nana’s dance represents a singular moment of self-affirmation for the female subject of Vivre sa Vie. Although ultimately bound for an abrupt, unromantic ending, this sequence displays Nana as in possession of a subjectivity ineradicable by male determining forces. As the jukebox plays, the charismatic bodily energy of her dance transports her above circumstance. She becomes more than Raoul’s prostitute, and more than a character in Godard’s film. While a scene of unanimously positive energy on the part of Nana, tensions abound within the dance. The roles of prostitute and actress, director and pimp become one and the same as the female subject of the film struggles against the eradication of her subjectivity. The sequence is a moment of unhinged self-reflexivity for both Nana and Godard, their struggle for enunciatory precedence openly comingling with the narrative tension. While Nana’s character ultimately resigns herself to the impossibility of escape, the preceding display of exuberant bodily expression asserts that although her character may be doomed to a dismal fate, her enduring subjectivity could never be erased.

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my essay on sally potter’s bad movie “orlando” vs virginia woolf’s good book “orlando”

im pretty sure my prof like loves this choppy ass borinfg motherfucking movie so i didnt actually say that it sucked

i am spineless

; - )

Borrowing, Transforming and Adapting Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography Eighty-four years after the publication of Virginia Woolf’s enigmatic Orlando: A Biography, Sally Potter’s adaptation sought to readapt the sprawling narrative to suit her own historical moment. Through the lens of Dudley Andrew’s Adaptation, the relationship between Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel and Sally Potter’s 1993 film adaptation can best be understood as a combination of the “fidelity and transformation” and the “borrowing” modes of adaptation (31). Potter’s film succeeds in transforming Woolf’s difficult chronology through the use of specifically cinematic visual cues. Where the film takes liberties is in its borrowing of the gender aspect of Woolf’s text, which it flushes out to paint a more comprehensive picture of transhistorical British misogyny. While Potter’s adaptation occludes certain literary aspects of the novel, it translates the illogical continuities, in time and gender, with cinema-specific narrative devices, rendering it a faithful cinematic adaptation. Sally Potter’s adaptation of Orlando: A Biography succeeds in transmuting the narrative structure of the Woolf’s novel into cinematic form. In Dudley Andrew’s Adaptation, he outlines three modes of considering the relation between film and text in cases of adaptation. He delineates these categories: “borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation,” (Andrew 29). Orlando is able to replicate Woolf’s illogical continuities across gender and time through the use of specifically cinematic means, emblematic of Dudley’s “fidelity of transformation” relation between texts (29). This method of adaptation assumes the task of reproducing “something essential about an original text… conventionally treated in relation to the ‘letter’ and to the ‘spirit’ of a text,” (Andrew 31). Potter’s adaptation, in this respect, is more concerned with fidelity to the letter of Woolf’s novel. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, with Britain under the rule of Queen Elizabeth, the film features a similar, if not exactly transformed chronological trajectory for its protagonist. The transmutability of chronology between literary antecedent and filmic adaptation is described by Andrew: “The skeleton of the original can, more or less thoroughly, become the skeleton of a film,” (32). With a high degree of fidelity, Sally Potter’s film depicts the experiences of Orlando as described in the sprawling narrative of Orlando: A Biography. In both literary source and film adaptation, Orlando traverses from the court of Queen Elizabeth to the deserts of the Ottoman Empire, switching genders while an armed revolution rages before arriving in the British high literary circles of the eighteenth century, finally arriving in the “present day” of novel/film to have her work praised by a publishing firm. In this manner of having her character travel a generally similar chronological trajectory, eschewing the temporal limitations of logical human aging, Potter’s work maintains a degree of fidelity to the “letter” of Woolf’s work. Whereas Woolf’s novel is required to utilize lengthy descriptive sequences to depict the rapid progressions in temporality and scenery, Sally Potter’s film is able to accomplish the same through the use of elaborate costume design. Seymour Chatman distinguishes between two ways time is structured in narrative: “story-time” and “discourse time,” (Chatman 122). Story time refers to the time sequence of plot events, taking place within the self-enclosed narrative. Discourse time, on the other hand, is the time taken to present the narrative, existing outside of the events of the plot (Chatman 122). All prose narratives are subject to a degree of oscillation between these two modes of narrative time structuring. Being an insistently self-reflexive fictional biography, however, the oscillation manifest in Woolf’s novel is immediately conspicuous. Rather than simply stating the facts of description, Woolf’s biographer insists on clarifying the subjective nature of his/her voice. This frequently results in the use of the direct address, as manifest in the passage occurring prior to the description of Orlando’s first seven-day sleep: “The biographer is now faced with a difficulty which it is better perhaps to confess than to gloss over,” (Woolf 49). As a fictional biography, rather than a traditional prose narrative, Orlando: A Biography is often required by form to maintain such visible distinctions between story and discourse time. However, these periodic moments of digression from the biographical record of Orlando’s life serve a greater purpose, fundamental to the large aspect of Woolf’s novel which meditates on literature and narrative. Orlando: A Biography features such narrative ellipses as previously quoted to reflect on how readers perceive truth in literature. Complaining of the protagonist’s visible inactivity during a period of intense poetic energy, the biographer philosophizes: “Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking,” (Woolf 197). This passage illustrates Woolf’s self-reflexive preoccupation in Orlando, reflecting on the manner in which the often uneventful truth of life can be occluded by the means of storytelling. Detailing the process of the purportedly factual telling of Orlando’s story allows Woolf to reflect on her status as an author, illuminating the contradictions between literature, factuality, and subjective truth. In this respect, literature is not merely the medium of Woolf’s original text, but a theme and preoccupation of the novel’s discourse time throughout.   Film, as opposed to prose narrative, does not have the naturalized privilege of alternating between story time and discourse time. While description and other instances of discourse time in literature are able to momentarily divorce themselves from the time-pressure of the plot, narrative film, a necessarily visual medium, is not able to do so without interrupting the flow of the story. As Chatman outlines: “Whereas in novels, movements and hence events are at best constructions imaged by the reader out of words, that is, abstract symbols which are different from them in kind, the movements on the screen are so iconic ... that the illusion of time passage simply cannot be divorced from them,” (130). This distinguishment between mediums is made readily apparent when contrasting Virginia Woolf’s descriptive treatment of her story’s chronology and Sally Potter’s visual treatment. The narrative’s illogical temporal continuity presents unique difficulties for filmic adaptation. Akin to Chatman, Dudley Andrew in turn proclaims the necessarily visual signification of cinema, stating: “Generally film is found to work from perception toward signification, … from the givenness of a world to the meaning of a story cut out of that world,” (32). Insofar as Woolf is able to skirt chronological confusion with her direct pronouncements of alleged biographical difficulties, Potter’s film is forced to grapple with such issues through the use of strictly visual cues. Tasked with transforming the leaps and bounds of Orlando’s story, costume design is essential to Orlando’s cinematic chronology. From the fanned-out, high-collared extravagance of the Elizabethan Age, to the powdered makeup and long wigs of the eighteenth century, to the demure, plaid evening gowns of the Victorians, and, finally, emerging in the 1990’s with a tight braid, high waisted khaki pants and knee-high boots, the transhistorical nature of Tilda Swinton’s Orlando is communicated primarily through the means of Sandy Powell’s historical costuming. Chatman goes on to describe the limitations of film in this regard, stating that “the filmmaker … has to depend on the audience’s agreement to the justice of the visual clues,” (129). Here, Potter shows a slight reluctance to rely solely on the cinema specific means of distinguishing the many temporal settings, opting to employ dividing chapter titles for each temporally divided segment of the film (ex. Death, Love, Poetry), a decidedly novelistic device. Although surrendering some of Woolf’s literary self-reflexivity, Potter’s adaptation is able to transform the sprawling chronological structure of Woolf’s novel into film through the use of visual cues specific to the cinematic medium. Temporal concerns are not the only issue of continuity at stake in a non-literary adaptation of Orlando: A Biography. In a narrative juncture requiring the extreme suspension of disbelief, Woolf outlines Orlando’s abrupt shift from man to woman. The novel’s discourse time promptly states: “He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess — he was a woman,” (Woolf 102). Woolf grants this event no definitive explanation, declaring, “let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can,” (103). Although Woolf’s biographer deigns not to explain the logistics of Orlando’s transition, gender as flimsy construct is a theme frequently alluded to over the course of the novel’s encompassed centuries. Orlando’s initial heteronormative relationship with Sasha fails due to his misunderstanding of her feminine subjectivity, impossible to reconcile with his projected vision of her. From here, Orlando’s relationships take the form of seduction at the hands of a cross-dressing Archduchess, causing him to flee the country, followed by a failed reconciliation with the male Archduke once Orlando has transitioned to female form. Even her loving companionship with Shelmerdine is characterized by a suspicion of the gendered divide between them, as Shelmerdine asks her incredulously, “‘Are you positive you aren’t a man?’” (Woolf 189). This aspect of Woolf’s original text is often touched upon directly within the characters’ dialogue or in the biographer’s discourse, and even more often subtly emphasized in the gender dynamics between sexes. In large part a love letter to Woolf’s secret lesbian companion Vita Sackville-West, Orlando: A Biography emphasizes the arbitrary and restrictive nature of prescriptive gender roles in British society. While gender undoubtedly plays a large part in the social politics and satire of Woolf’s novel, it lies at the heart of Sally Potter’s 1992 cinematic adaptation. It is in this aspect of the antecedent text with which Potter engages in Andrew’s mode of adaptation designated “borrowing,” (30). In this relation between a source text and adaptation, Andrew states: “the audience is expected to enjoy basking in a certain preestablished presence and to call up new or especially powerful aspects of a cherished work,” (Andrew 30). Although Woolf’s novel has gained a high degree of literary prestige for a variety of reasons, its proto feminist, scathing critique of gender roles is what lends the novel its persisting relevance into the twenty first century. Sally Potter’s adaptation forefronts and develops this “especially powerful aspect” of Orlando: A Biography through the use of specifically cinematic means (Andrew 30). In the largely androgynous costumes of the film’s early segments, queer screen legend Quentin Crisp dons a wig and powdered makeup for the part of Queen Elizabeth. Opposite him is Tilda Swinton, cross-dressed as the opposite sex, but clad in similarly androgynous period garb. In this fashion, the film’s commitment to embracing Woolf’s theme of gender mutability is made immediately evident. This is made possible cinematically by the use of visibly known actors, a mechanism unavailable to prose narrative. In addition to this formal interest in gendered performances, Potter’s film adds in a number of references to gender throughout the diegesis. Whereas Woolf’s novel presents no explicit reasoning for Orlando’s transition, merely presenting it as a historical fact, Potter’s adaptation positions the transition immediately after a scene exhibiting Orlando’s unwillingness to conform to the norms of his gender, allowing us to infer causality through the naturalized cinematic function of editing. In the scene of the transition, as well, Potter’s camera grants the viewer a sense of seamlessness in the gender transition which Woolf’s biographer could only assert. While the novel is forced to state: “The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it,” Potter’s film visually displays for us the smooth simplicity of her transition (Woolf 103). After removing her wig to reveal long, feminine red hair, the camera depicts a close up of Orlando’s bathing hands, with her apparently new breasts barely intruding into a corner of the frame, before culminating in the final reveal as Orlando turns to the mirror to see her full, naked female body, declaring to the audience: “Same person. No difference at all. Just a different sex.” While the direct address in Orlando’s summative utterance seeks to mimic the coy, self-reflexive tone of Woolf’s biographer, the rest of the scene depicts a fluid gender transition through strictly visual, cinematic means. The film’s approach to gender manifests otherwise in its repeated use of Jimmy Somerville’s falsetto in soundtracking, another cinema-specific mechanism, and its exhibition of the rampant misogyny of Britain’s high literary circles in Orlando’s eighteenth century period. In its conclusion, Sally Potter’s adaptation makes a final alteration to the source material which profoundly shifts its meaning with regards to gender. Where Woolf’s novel leaves Orlando married with a son, having won the lawsuits to keep her castle in her possession, Potter’s film envisions Orlando in 1992 as a single mother of one daughter, dispossessed of her family’s estate by Britain’s patriarchal laws of inheritance. Through adamant use of cinema’s visual advantages, Sally Potter’s adaptation positions the borrowed theme of gender mutability at the apex of what Woolf’s source work has to offer a modern adaptation. In conclusion, Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography is faithful in its adaptive practice. The film engages in what Dudley Andrew would term a “transforming” of Woolf’s extended chronology, using specifically cinematic means such as costume design to convey temporal difference. Although losing some of Woolf’s self-reflexive wit in the process, it nonetheless effectively conveys the skeletal structure of the novel. In addition to this transformation of narrative structure, Potter’s adaptation makes use of the borrowing technique to develop the aspect of gender mutability present in the source text. Orlando (1992) imaginatively reconstructs aspects of Virginia Woolf’s novel using the cinematic sign system. While maintaining, and abandoning, certain other aspects of the text, it adapts Woolf’s story not only to fit a new medium, but a new era of gendered politics.

[buttboyfilms-blog]

vince staples : a concert review by me in beautiful Montreal QC

oh man oh man saw vince staples for FREE a while ago for my JOB at the TRIBUNE lol

i wrote this review :P wow he’s so good oh my god her linke to trib

http://www.mcgilltribune.com/a-e/vince-staples-astonishes-alongside-goldfish-at-corona-theatre423567/

Vince Staples astonishes alongside goldfish at the Corona Theatre

Dylan Adamson

It hasn’t taken long for Vince Staples to carve out his lane in the west coast gangsta rap scene. After a slew of teenage mixtapes, as well as a few features on early Odd Future releases, Staples broke through to the mainstream hip hop consciousness with his 2014 EP, /Hell Can Wait/. His approach was uncompromisingly hard-nosed; his ear for eerie, driving beats was staggering. When /Summertime ‘06/ dropped in 2015, Staples’ sprawling, 20 track opus left few doubters in the hip hop community. 2016 saw the release of yet another universally lauded EP, /Prima Donna,/ delivered alongside an experimental short film.

To say the least, it’s been a busy three years for the 23 year old artist. His recent work has found him delving into more sonically experimental directions, but his brand has never strayed from his signature unromantic, realistic roots.

On Saturday, March 25th, ahead of his forthcoming /Big Fish Theory/ album release, Staples brought /The Life Aquatic Tour/ before a crowd of understandably stoked Montrealers. With the lavish Corona Theatre filled to sweaty capacity, the rapper could do no wrong as he ran through selections from across his oeuvre. Crowd surfing bodies soared across the swaths of wide-eyed fans; a churning sea of millennial hip hop heads bouncing side to side, feeding off of Staples’ abundant charisma.

Staples’ presence commanded more than enough attention to fill out the space. He stood entirely alone on an empty stage, foregoing audacious rap fashion in favour of a simple black hoodie. Although cool in demeanor, the performance was marked by a thrilling sense of volatility. Slower songs, including /Summertime ‘06/ cuts “Lemme Know” and “Birds & Bees,” were delivered with Staples’ trademark hard-nosed stoicism, his gaze fixed on the back of the room. More familiar cuts, however, burst this tense, restrained atmosphere into furious catharsis. Staples has the ability to leap between registers from verse to verse, rendering his song structures and flow refreshingly unpredictable. Favourites such as “Prima Donna” and “Blue Suede” saw the rapper explode into three dimensions, bouncing across the stage as if in the midst of the mosh pit sprawled out before him.

In keeping with the /Life Aquatic/ theme, Staples’ performance was backed by a tri-panel projection screen showcasing brilliant, atmospheric shots of underwater life, alongside the occasional bubbling skull, as well as a few scenes from the streets of his hometown, Long Beach, California. The supremely tranquil imagery of the sea creatures provided an eerie juxtaposition to Staples’ aggressive, street savvy bars. Huge, luminous goldfish trespassed slowly across the stage, but instead of David Attenborough’s affable narration soundtracking the proceedings, Staples held his mic aloft while legions of hungry fans yelled in chorus, “Bitch you thirsty please grab a Sprite.”  

Perhaps even more preeminent than this visual juxtaposition, the concert was repeatedly permeated by total blackness. Between uproarious bangers and more low key selections, the lone figure on stage was subsumed by darkness, disappearing into the chaos of the evening. Like the titular character of Wes Anderson’s /The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou/, and like the marginalized characters populating many of Staples’ songs, the concert teetered on this exhilarating, terrifying brink of nothingness throughout.

[buttboyfilms-blog]

about to post a lot of crap lol! #blogging

[buttboyfilms-blog]

very very nervous to receive this paper back this upcoming tuesday! def coulda done better by the title but what can u do

it is on nicolas roeg’s Don’t Look Now which is a good ass movie with a crazy ass donad sutherland sex scene lol 

paragraphs done got fucked up too

also i got a job as the arts&entertainment editor at the mcgill tribune for next year! woohoo

Grief and Perceptive Simultaneity in the Opening Scene of Don’t Look Now (1973)

     Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) takes a labyrinthine approach to film editing in its exploration of grief from the clouded, insular perspectives of John and Laura Baxter. This intricate composition is epitomized in the film’s opening sequence, formally setting the tone and introducing major themes that will be developed over the course of the film. The editing style is here characterized by frequent matches on action, image, and sound, which work to frustrate the viewer’s perception of spatial and temporal boundaries. In this fashion, Roeg’s opening sequence constructs a claustrophobic sense of simultaneity, effectively replicating grief’s effect of tunnel vision on the mind.       The film tracks John and Laura’s search for answers in the wake of their daughter Christine’s drowning. The couple moves to Venice for John’s work, where Laura becomes obsessed with a blind elderly woman claiming to be a medium capable of contacting their daughter, while John is plagued by visions of a small figure in a coat resembling Christine’s red jacket. Prior to this, however, Don’t Look Now begins with the scene of Christine’s death, which will form the bulk of this analysis. This sequence flashes between shots of Christine and her brother playing outside and their parents indoors. In the family’s living room, John projects photographs of a church onto a screen between him and his wife, who is reading on the couch. Outside, Christine throws and chases a red ball near a pond while Johnny bikes around the yard. The atmosphere shifts from peaceful to sinister when John notices a figure resembling Christine in several of his photos, and is struck with a premonition of his daughter’s imminent drowning in the pond.      The film opens with a series of idyllic shots showing the children playing outdoors. Here, Roeg exhibits a near Edenic scene. Birds chirp, a white horse whinnies, and the children play innocently as the sun rises over a dewy spring morning. A piano score, played in a deliberate, childlike manner, accompanies the pastoral imagery. Roeg cuts between shots of Johnny and Christine seamlessly, showing Christine playing with an army figurine and red ball while her brother weaves eagerly between trees on his bicycle. Prior to the family’s experience of grief, the Baxter home appears to defined by a feeling of tranquil simplicity.       The sequence’s crucial shift in tone is formally communicated through a combination of music and the use of conspicuous cross cutting techniques between the indoor and outdoor locations. As the cheerful opening score ends, Roeg’s matches on action, image, and sound work to disorient the viewer by blurring the spatial distinctions between the children playing outside and the parents inside. From the first crosscut, accomplished via match on image, the idyllic tone of the opening frames begins to unravel. As Christine is precariously perched atop a makeshift bridge, the camera pans behind her and zooms in on her reflection in the water. Suddenly the location changes, and her red jacket becomes the fireplace in the Baxter’s living room. The visual connection is only partial, as the placements of the coat and fire within the frame differ, but is emphasized by the camera’s zooming out from the fireplace as it had previously zoomed in on Christine’s reflection. At this moment, the reassuring piano score of the opening shots comes to a halt. The couple casually discusses the answer to a question of Christine’s regarding the flatness of frozen ponds. John and Laura appear to enjoy a healthy relationship, although their home bears the markings of a busy, cluttered lifestyle. The setting does not retain the dreamlike idyllicism of the first, but the impending sense of danger is not overtly communicated until the scene cuts back to a shot of Christine outdoors.      In this next transition, the figure John observes in the photograph of the church becomes Christine’s reflection, upside down on the water. Similar to the first crosscut, this shot transition is a match on image. Unlike the first, however, this match introduces a third location, with a more pronounced visual continuity between shots. Thus begins the process of disorientation that will be exacerbated throughout the sequence. Christine, as we have seen her, now exists in three apparently distinct locations simultaneously. She has appeared outdoors, in the photograph of the church, and, being projected onto a screen between John and Laura, inside the living room with her parents. The spatial confusion is here acknowledged not only by John’s furrowed brow, but by a radical shift in music. This match is accompanied by a foreboding, momentary keyboard interlude, played in sharp contrast to the cautious opening score. Christine’s spatial instability is compounded by temporal uncertainties as well. Outdoors, she is shot mostly as a reflection in the water, suggesting that she may already be submerged at this point. Indoors, she exists both in the photographs of the church, which is the location of the rest of the film’s action, as well as in John and Laura’s conversation. Christine’s spatial and temporal ubiquity is further emphasized as the scene progresses, creating a mysterious, disquieting sense of interconnectedness and simultaneity within the scene.      From this point onwards, the transitions between locations occur more frequently. The unremitting matches on image, sound, and action function to radically disorient the viewer with a feverish urgency. As Johnny bikes over a mirror, the film cuts to Christine simultaneously stepping in a puddle, the matching sound mysteriously seeming to cause John to glance up from his work in the living room. John and Christine simultaneously throw objects, the transition matching on this action, and as Christine’s ball lands in the pond, John’s glass of water spills on his projector, creating a similar sound. Nonsensical causal linkages spring from these spatial and temporal uncertainties. Rational boundaries are blurred to the point of indistinguishability, culminating in a tragic final match on image, as the blood/water spilt on the photograph fades into Christine’s body, cradled in John’s arms as they rise from the water.      As the opening scene of Don’t Look Now progresses past the opening frames, simplicity is upended by Nicolas Roeg’s insistent use of matches on sound, image, and action to transition between multiple locations and temporalities. The claustrophobic sense of simultaneity that results forecasts the couple’s insular experience of grief after their daughter’s death. From their convoluted perspectives, which we will inhabit throughout the rest of the film, the spectre of Christine is inescapable. Although they will attempt to move past the tragedy in Venice, their inability to do so will plague the couple through to the end of the film. Formally epitomized in this opening sequence, the couple’s nonlinear experience of time stretches throughout the film. After her death, John sees Christine numerous times in the streets of Venice. He perceives Laura on his funeral barge both after she has travelled to England and before his own funeral. On a formal level, the couple’s sex scene is crosscut with shots of John and Laura redressing afterwards.      Confusion plagues John and Laura after the death of their daughter. Their grieving process, and consequently our experience of the film, is defined by disorientation. John and Laura’s perspectives are shrouded by the omnipresent shadow of Christine’s death. Temporalities and spatial locations intermingle past recognition. Time, as they experience it, is anything but linear. Their grief entangles them in a labyrinthine web of perception, and as they are further subsumed by its perplexing intricacies, the spectre of Christine feels inescapable. The opening scene can thus be understood as a memory, ran through the obscuring filter of grief. Happiness is distant and fleeting, and minute details are tied together, linking events across spatial and temporal boundaries. Christine’s image is ubiquitous and infinite. The struggle for understanding within this opening scene pervades the entirety of Don’t Look Now. Through the lens of the rest of the film, the scene’s descent from the Edenic opening frames to the sinister sense of confusion demonstrates the effects of grief on the couple’s perception. Eschewing clarity for murky perceptive boundaries, Don’t Look Now does not seek to demonstrate how grief looks, but rather how it feels.

[buttboyfilms-blog]

my review of the very good movie called “Get OUt”

wrote a review of the new horror movie that everyone keeps writing thinkpieces about right now! it was so good! check it out buttheads (tm) ! reblog

this is the link to the review in the trib: 

http://www.mcgilltribune.com/a-e/film-review-get-out-637903/

... here’s a pic from the movie...

...and HERE’S the review!

Get Out Busts the Post-Race Myth with Sharp Satire

Jordan Peele, the comedian behind modern day classics such as “Key and Peele – Substitute Teacher” and “Key and Peele – East vs. West Coast Bowls,” caused a moderate stir last year when he announced that his directorial debut, entitled Get Out, would show him experimenting in the horror genre.

Following Peele’s action comedy Keanu (2016), Get Out, released Feb. 24, is one of the most well-crafted, genuinely unsettling, and thought-provoking horror films in the past decade.

The premise is conventional enough, but the film’s horror emerges in the racial tensions underlying everyday interactions. A young black photographer, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), visits his white girlfriend Rose’s (Allison Williams) parents’ country estate for a weekend. Rose’s parents are allegedly unaware of his race, and claim to be an adamantly progressive couple—Rose’s father (Bradley Whitford) repeatedly mentions his undying love for the Obama administration. Awkward moments are obligatory with any meet-the-parents situation, but as Chris makes a series of increasingly alarming discoveries, the family’s casual racism is revealed to be something of a much more sinister variety.

This is not horror in the vein of Paranormal Activity. It doesn’t rely on slow pans, mirror tricks, or other lazy jump scare conventions to build suspense. Rather, Get Out weaves together dark humour, cutting social satire, and an inescapable, bubbling dread to place the viewer directly into the protagonist’s uncomfortable perspective.

The perpetual prospect of sudden violence being inflicted on black bodies is at the heart of Get Out’s horror. The bulk of the movie’s satire, though, is derived from the ways through which racism manifests itself in everyday situations. Right from the opening scene, the audience is thrust into the heightened sense of awareness and danger that persists throughout the film. Get Out opens with a young black man (Atlanta’s LaKeith Stanfield) deciphering MapQuest directions, which have led him to the heart of white suburbia. As a car slowly inches up beside him, he expresses panic, but continues nervously walking. This scene will feel familiar to anyone who’s seen Halloween, or any other slasher film in the past 20 years. With the added racial subtext, it’s all the more unsettling in the post-Trayvon Martin era.

The superficiality of a “post-racial” America—Get Out was written during the Obama years—is highlighted by Peele’s impeccable comedic timing, but also by the two seamless performances from its leading couple. Kaluuya’s Chris is wary, observant, and eventually filled with righteous fury—effectively subverting the slasher film trope of killing the black character first. Opposite him, Allison Williams works wonders as Chris’ socially conscious girlfriend. She criticizes her parents’ microaggressions, and confronts racial profiling when a cop asks for Chris’ identification after they get into a car accident—even though she is the driver. Her progressive, role in their interracial relationship is played to conspicuous perfection, giving just enough clues as to her true motives, but never revealing too much.

Get Out maintains a taut balance of suspense through to its final act, and the carnage that follows is nothing short of cathartic. While conforming to the constraints of the horror genre, Peele seamlessly weaves in his distinct comedic voice. The scares are deployed with careful restraint, adding to the larger commentary rather than distracting from it. Get Out’s mission is not to make your heart pound over its 103 minutes,—although it accomplishes this with ease—but instead shake up your conciousness about racism in America. This is not a film that conceals social allegory beneath layers of metaphor—the source of the horror is crystal clear. Peele’s movie refreshingly succeeds in destabilizing perspective, and shocking viewers into understanding the horrific facade of the myth of “post-race” America.

[buttboyfilms-blog]

uh fuck uhhhhh yeah ?

[buttboyfilms-blog]

thoughts on the BIRDS!

whats new buttheads!

bout to do another post! currently x men: wolverine origins or sum shit is playing in the background. super loud. are these movies well regarded? also just watched the new riverdale but that’s a whole other can of worms.

i am in a really bad class on a really cool subject! it is called “film as a mass medium” but we only talk about adaptation but on like a really boring redundant surface level? so like we read the books then watch the movies or what have you. and then in class it’s just like what DEFINES a nested narrator, medium specificity, and all this lame fucking shit! however, we wrote midterm essays last week and i had fun writing this thing on daphne du maurier’s novelette The Birds (1952) and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 adaptation with Tippi Hedren.

I wrote it very very quickly and was late handing it in so my thoughts are kind of a little bit scattered but i think i wrote some cool things too. also the citations are like most definitely fucked up but.... whatevs. i think i was probably supposed to talk more a/b like what entailed the changes in the narrative in the adaptation with regards to like medium specificity or some shit like that but lol no thank u sir!

the essay q was about like causalities for the phenomenon of the birds and like whether there was 1 and did it matter in the first place

Bombings, Bombshells, and Postwar Disintegrations of Order

Allegories of Chaos in The Birds (1952, 1963)

 World War II represented, in midcentury thought, a break in conventional standards of morality, stability, and order. While no single, cohesive Copernican shift can be perceived amidst the proliferation of postmodern discourse, responses to the rapidly changing world articulated confusion, dread, and excitement for a society in flux (Sim). In both Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 novelette, The Birds, and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film adaptation of the same title, the phenomenon of the bird attacks is given no rational explanation in the narrative, but the ensuing descents into chaos in both works allegorically reflect popular anxieties of the two works’ respective contexts. Du Maurier’s novelette, written a mere seven years after the Allied victory in World War II, offers a figurative reimagining of the 1940 German Blitzkrieg attackson London, focusing on a disintegration of community and psychological stability in rural England. Hitchcock’s film adaptation, on the other hand, produced ten years after du Maurier’s, and operating in an American Hollywood context, is also intentionally ambiguous in terms of a credible diegetic cause for the attacks in Bodega Bay. However, the film’s collapse of small town life, and its attendant conservative values, can be attributed to the arrival of Melanie Daniels, whose character embodies an empowered, urban concept of femininity, a new fixture of the 1960s with the rise of second wave feminism. Du Maurier’s source material and Hitchcock’s film adaptation effectively unsettled viewers at their times of production due to their reflections of relevant anxieties, reaching backwards, forwards, and across oceans for inspiration.

The premise of du Maurier’s novelette, namely, the sudden plagues of violent birds suddenly descending upon England, proceeds in the narrative without being granted a credible cause, although various causes are speculated. At times, Nat declares that the birds must be foreign to the land, descended from “upcountry” (du Maurier 4), claims their violence was incited by “fright” (du Maurier 5), and repeatedly blames the circumstances on weather, while Jim posits that perhaps they were hungry (du Maurier 7), and the national news suggests a vague relationship to the “Arctic airstream,” (du Maurier 9). The townspeople at first doubt the legitimacy of Nat’s story after the first night, laughing at him and planning to shoot the birds away. Daphne du Maurier’s characters in the novelette are fraught with this persistent confusion and misinformation. Nat, in his grave stoicism and “solitary disposition” (du Maurier 1), is viewed by the townspeople he encounters as an alarmist and a drunk (du Maurier 6). As the narrative proceeds to legitimize the phenomenon for the general public, with national news broadcasts declaring emergencies and the deaths of secondary characters, Nat’s wary perspective is likewise given credence. His character becomes the voice of reason, as opposed to an imaginative farmhand. This moment of transition in his character arc, coincidentally occurring once all characters apart from his immediate family have receded from the narrative, marks a shift toward recognition of the birds as analogous to a previous event in recent history, the air raids carried out by the Germans in 1940.

The Blitz, a principal event in the Battle of Britain, wreaked havoc across the nation for a duration between four and thirteen months, depending on the historical source. Concentrated in London, targeting the Royal Air Force base, the violence extended across the nation. The Nazi forces (Luftwaffe) sought to destroy British infrastructure with a particular inclination toward buildings related to the war effort. Although the Luftwaffe was technically indoctrinated against targeting civilians, the large scale bombings made civilian casualties unavoidable. Britain would go on to win a decisive victory, rebuffing the onslaught of German bombings, but the widespread destruction of infrastructure and civilian casualties would leave behind a legacy of psychological trauma (Overy).

Du Maurier’s novelette proceeds quickly towards its premise, revealing little of its characters’ previous. However, a crucial fact is given concerning the protagonist, Nat, and his personal history. This insight serves to explicate Nat’s employment: “(he), because of a wartime disability, had a pension and did not work full time…” (du Maurier 1). Nat’s status as a military veteran is essential to the film’s wartime allegory. Written in 1952, it can be assumed that the story’s protagonist is a veteran of WWII, and, particularly due to his being injured in the conflict, would be a likely victim of lingering psychological effects of the extreme violence, perhaps even Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Overy). While this psychological trauma is never directly addressed in the narrative, Nat’s psychological states are the subject of much narration throughout. His aforementioned preference for solitude, despite being a married man, is a general indicator of instability, as well as the townspeople’s initial hesitance to take his story about the bird attacks at face value, and the children’s laughing at his seemingly bizarre behavior at the bus stop (du Maurier 13).

As previously mentioned, although Nat’s status as an unsociable, disabled war veteran leads the townspeople to initially view his warlike stories about the birds with skepticism, after his tales are legitimized publically, and related metaphorically to the Blitz, his seasoned perspective is privileged as useful to himself and others. His instincts for danger, presumably gained in war, are addressed in description of Nat’s experience the night of the first attacks: “(Nat) leaned closer to the back of his sleeping wife, and stayed wakeful, watchful, aware of misgiving without cause,” (du Maurier 2). Although the reader is privileged much insight into Nat’s heightened sense of awareness for the impending crisis, it is not until the bird attacks are metaphorically linked to the Battle of Britain that Nat becomes the narrative’s lone safeguard against total destruction. He later ponders: “It was … like the air raids in the war. No one down this end of the country knew what the Plymouth folk had seen and suffered. You had to endure something before it touched you,” (du Maurier 7). As the bird attacks increase in severity and scale, Nat’s wealth of wartime knowledge proves progressively more valuable. His history with the Battle is emphasized throughout the narrative, and renders him more equipped to deal with the similar psychological effects caused by the birds’ torments. Akin to Plymouth, devastated repeatedly by the Blitz, the story’s location in Cornwall is a coastal archipelago. Likewise, the effects underwent by Nat, his family, and the other townspeople are comparable to the experiences of Plymouth civilians during the Blitz. The farmer relays that he heard a rumour implicating Russian culprits, “They’re saying in town the Russians have done it. The Russians have poisoned the birds,” (du Maurier 15). While this conjecture is given no credibility, it is reflective of the early Cold War anxieties rising to prominence in the 1950s. Nat understands that isolation from urban centres renders rural communities more vulnerable but also safer in their remoteness. He declares: “...whatever ‘they’ decided to do in London and the big cities would not help the people here, three hundred miles away,” (du Maurier 11). The uncertainty, lack of reliable vital information, disconnect from federal government, paranoia, and incessant posturing of false intelligence underwent by the citizens of Cornwall are all conspicuously reminiscent of the psychological effects of air raids on citizenry during WWII (Overy). Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds gives no narrative explanation for the violent phenomenon of the bird attacks. Instead, the novelette seeks to expose the futility of rationally explaining such senseless violence. The work’s allegorical connection to the Battle of Britain culminates in no triumphant, patriotic resolution for England.  Rather, it uses the imaginative framework of the bird attacks to explore the necessity of remembering the past when confronting the future, particularly in the face of inexplicably collapsed order. Concern for the cause of the phenomenon is thus subordinated to the need for informed pragmatism in mediating consequences, gained by remembrance of history.

Akin to its literary antecedent, Alfred Hitchcock’s film narrative likewise eschews a scientific causal force behind the bird attacks. Rather than the conjectural answers with which the citizens of Cornwall seek to rationalize the arrival of the birds, however, some people of Bodega Bay initially engage in incredulous denial, whereas others simply seek to mitigate without questioning. The denial is exemplified in the confrontation, beginning at 1:16:32, between Melanie Daniels and ornithologist Mrs. Bundy, who refuses to believe that such harmless creatures as birds could be responsible for the apparent violence. She declares, with an air of cold, scientific superiority: “Birds are not aggressive creatures miss, they bring beauty into the world. It is mankind, rather, who insists upon making it difficult for life to exist upon this planet,” (Hitchcock). Aside from this scene, occurring mere minutes before the largest bird attack yet witnessed, the characters of Hitchcock’s adaptation are largely preoccupied with mitigation rather than rationalizing or verifying, and thus the subject is given little direct attention. Another such example, however, in which a character is overtly concerned with causality, gives insight into the film’s larger allegory. The sequence beginning at 1:28:39, with the hysterical mother’s confrontation of Melanie, opens the door to the film’s complex response to modern femininity. The mother rants through tears: “Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you’re the cause of all this, I think you’re evil,” (Hitchcock). There is a degree of credibility to her reading of the coinciding of the bird attacks and Melanie’s arrival in Bodega Bay, although it goes unacknowledged by any other characters.

The arrival of Melanie is tied to the phenomenon of the birds, if only by coincidence, which consequentially links her presence to the disintegration of small town insularity and stability. She repeatedly butts heads with the conservative townspeople of Bodega Bay, most notably in the aforementioned instances, with the elderly, vaguely aristocratic British ornithologist, and the overly concerned, borderline hysterical accusing mother. The conflict of Melanie versus Bodega Bay is heightened to the level of political allegory by the conflation of her character with an urban concept of postmodern, liberated femininity (Burkett) in opposition to the more conservative values of the small town. As she further penetrates into the community (first to drop off lovebirds, next to stay with Annie, then to attend the birthday party, etc.), and her relationship with Mitch develops, the attacks intensify. Although the viewer is given little background information on Melanie’s character, Mitch reveals in the opening scene that she has been in court for counts of vaguely mischievous activity, and later that her wayward behavior in Rome had been the subject of popular gossip. He accuses her, “The truth is you’re running around with a pretty wild crowd...” (Hitchcock). Melanie Daniel’s character is known to the townspeople, including Lydia, as an unruly, even immoral, product of urban living. She stands in for the controversial rise of second wave feminism in the 1960s. The feminist thought of Hitchcock’s time placed revelatory emphasis on women’s sexual liberty and equal treatment in the workplace (Burkett). These radical changes in postmodern concepts of femininity were not met without resistance from conservative voices, and the polarization helped to shape the urban/rural bipartisan divide. Melanie’s own embodiment of the new iteration of feminist thought takes the shape of her own activities in the workplace, and her allegedly nude misbehavior in Rome. The violence that the birds bring to Bodega Bay ensues from the sewing of Melanie, a modern, empowered woman, into a small town, conservative community.

Mitch’s role in this process, however, may not be understated. He trivializes her experience with empowered femininity, chastising her unruly behavior while laughing at her occupational status. From the first scene, he exercises domineering power over Melanie. He tricks her at the pet store, invites her to dinner, asks her to stay the first night and subsequently schemes to get her to attend his sister’s birthday party, despite her insistent protests to return to San Francisco. His sentiment in this evident containment of Melanie’s strong femininity is illuminated in a line from the first scene. After ensnaring an escaped canary in his fedora, an antiquated signifier of dominant masculinity, he mysteriously says: “Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels,” (Hitchcock). In defiance of both the dangers posed by his hometown’s ornithological predators, as well as Melanie’s own wishes, Mitch chooses to not only remain in Bodega Bay himself but to also contain Melanie in the hostile context, and eventually he literally seals her, along with his mother and daughter, in his childhood home. Throughout the film, Mitch Brenner connives to contain Melanie, with her empowered femininity, within a context both physically and figuratively inhospitable to her. She is only allowed to escape once she has been nearly killed by the birds upstairs, in an essentially suicidal decision which reads as an attempted martyrdom for second wave feminists. Surviving the onslaught, the family and Melanie evacuate Bodega Bay, driving through droves of stationary birds towards a distant sun peering through the clouds, evocative of the precarious balance and peace between rural and urban moral divisions, perpetually on the brink of violence.

           In collective social consciousness, the unprecedented violence of World War II heralded a new age of ontological uncertainty. Responses to this historical rupture ranged from a newfound hope in the dismantling of oppressive societal conventions, to a fear for the violent potential of mankind. Produced nine years apart, Daphne du Maurier’s novelette, The Birds and Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation seek to depict a senseless breakdown of natural order, signified by the bird attacks. Whereas du Maurier’s literary antecedent represents the psychological implications of aerial warfare seen previously in the Battle of Britain, Hitchcock’s adaptation posits the disintegration of order as being inextricably tied to the collision of rural conservatism and the urban feminism of the 1960s. In neither film nor novelette is the phenomenon of the attacking birds given credible causal explanation, as both works question the human impulse to rationalize senseless violence.

[buttboyfilms-blog]

trying to read pride and prejudice but cannot stop thinking about how bad i wanna see john wick 2 and then go see logan after

[highlegalize]

[buttboyfilms-blog]

probably too loud for a theatre tho! thank u tumblr

[buttboyfilms-blog]

a essay i did!

this isn’t really that much about movies or any movie specifically i guess but I got high and re-read an essay I wrote last week for a g00d class. one of my profs had everyone in her class analyze this photo (Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still No. 6) without discussing/researching any added context ~~just U and the photograph~~. i wrote my whole thing the morning it was due AND although at the time i was kind of ashamed of it I have since read it approx. 2 more times and have decided that it is really cool. I think I was really self-conscious while writing of having the exact same analysis as every other woke-as-hell male feminist movie fan in my class who has the exact same relevant academic background with these kinds of subjects. i probably did tho

i didn’t do a good job on the title for the paper i handed in but this is the only edit i’ll make (   new 1 also isn’t that gr8 :/   )~~

Renegotiating the Subject/Consumer Dichotomy Via Self-Photography

         In Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still No. 6, Sherman makes evident the mechanism by which she captures her self-portrait, seizing her agency as the combined subject and photographer to force the viewer to confront their viewing impulses when regarding a female subject. The photograph in question features Sherman in a short, blonde wig, sprawled diagonally across a bed. Clad in a black, angular bra, high waisted white undergarments, and an undone white blouse, she gazes outwards toward the top-left corner of the frame. Her legs twist to the right, while her upper torso is contorted in the opposite direction, following her eye line. Her right arm lays limply at her side, loosely gripping a wooden mirror in her hand. Her left is raised to shoulder-level, bent at the elbow with the hand clenched, supporting her face. The photograph is grainy, black and white, and taken from above with Sherman’s chest in the centre of the frame.

         At first glance, the photo feels familiar. Her thick makeup, relaxed, inviting posture atop the messy sheets, and exposed lingerie all lead the viewer to project a kind of passive, available sexuality onto her. Her body, not her face, is at the centre of the photograph, and her chest specifically is highlighted by the sharply angled, dark black bra. Instinctively, the (male) viewer sexualizes and objectifies her. As the passive subject of the photo, we feel free to project what we will onto her image, and place it into our cultural schema as we see fit. Her nearly naked posing at the centre of the frame, in a western context, allows the viewer to confine her to associations with the Renaissance nude portrait, while her anachronistic undergarments gesture us towards the soft-core pornography of the 1940’s and ‘50s. In either case, our perception of Sherman’s image, and subsequent placement of her within our own cultural framework, allows us a sense of entitlement, or ownership of her image. In his discussion of the female nude in western representation, John Berger posits that, for a female subject, nudity “is not… an expression of her own feelings; it is a sign of submission to her owner’s feelings or demands,” (Berger 52). In the same vein, the viewer of Untitled Film Still No. 6 feels entitled to construct a narrative around her (an impulse alluded to in the photograph’s title) and make assumptions about her person and sexuality according to our own desires. As we recognize fragments of her image from our own cultural lexicon, we infer upon her a specific character existing only in our minds.

         Upon further inspection, however, our once comprehensive initial reading is upended by the appearance of the black cord emerging from under her right side, and the attached shutter switch in her left hand. She has made little effort to conceal the mechanism, and while it may not immediately command our attention, it radically alters our perception of the image. In the above reading, we assumed an absence of creative agency on the part of the female subject, instead perceiving her merely as the object of our all-defining gaze. Now, with the added knowledge that the photograph is a self-portrait, we must reassess the impulses which led us to the initial reading. The pose, costume, setting, and every other element visible within the frame must now be viewed as conscious artistic decisions by Sherman, who has assumed the role of both photographer and subject. The image she constructs panders to conventional perception of female subjects as sexualized commodities for the male gaze. In exposing the fabricated nature of this ubiquitous image, Sherman forefronts the vast divide between image, constructed in the mind of the viewer, and identity, inaccessible through photography. Roland Barthes states in Camera Lucida that “photography cannot signify … except by assuming a mask,” (34). In Untitled Film Still No. 6, we are made to watch as Sherman dons her mask, and confront the falsehood of the identities we project on female subjects.

[buttboyfilms-blog]

:D #movies

[ask-deactivated]

20th Century Women (2016, Mike Mills) .

. . #20thcenturywomen

[buttboyfilms-blog]

this one is supposed to be attached to the big long review i just did! Maybe like in the middle of some of the paragraphs or somethign

[buttboyfilms-blog]

20th Century Women! the BEST!

SO GOOD! 1000 stars! ----- more serious tone 2 follow -----

On January 20th, 2017, the day of Donald Trump’s Presidential Inauguration (first time typing that wow!), and the eve of the emphatically responsive Women’s March on Washington, production house A24 quietly made a politically charged announcement. The distributor behind recent indie films including Spring Breakers, Moonlight, The Lobster, and most of the other great films of the last five years, declared that all of the opening weekend earnings of its newest film, 20th Century Women, would be donated directly to Planned Parenthood. At a time when bigotry and misogyny have found new footing in popular discourse, this gesture of compassion to women across America came as a striking reminder of the pragmatic potential of artists for aiding social justice. It is also emblematic of writer-director Mike Mills’ uncompromisingly feminist, remarkably empathetic mission in 20th Century Women.

Mills’ most recent venture, 2012’s Beginners, starred Christopher Plummer as a fictionalized version of his father. It was well-received largely due to the powerful tenderness and warmth Mills imbued on his characters, but suffered occasionally from some overly sentimental indie-romance quirks (see: “Why are you at a party if you’re sad?”). This year’s first classic film, 20th Century Women, takes a similar quasi-autobiographical tact, however it forgoes conspicuous quirk in favour of genuine feeling and laughter. Annette Bening stars as Dorothea, representing Mills’ single mother, who, along with Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and Julie (Elle Fanning), attempts to raise her fifteen year old son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumman, for whose performance a Wikipedia page has definitely been earned) in 1979 Santa Barbara.

The real life inspiration for 20th Century Women is evident in every component of Mills’ film. From the colourful, lush set designs, to the early post-punk soundtrack, to the candid, poignant dialogue, Mills’ deep, personal connection to his subject is readily apparent. He writes his female characters with a deep seated admiration and understanding, which never reads as presumptuous. As women they are flawed, but never condescended to; not fully understood, but admired all the more in their inscrutability.

Of course, none of this is possible without the magnetic performances from across his ensemble cast. This is a film that will you searching everyone involved’s IMDB profile for anything you haven’t already seen (also check out Mike Mills’ 90s punk band, Butter ‘08 on the Beastie Boys’ old Grand Royal label!). Annette Bening exudes a remarkably assured liveliness each time she enters the frame. With a cigarette perpetually perched between two fingers, her superbly expressive face breathes volumes into the pause of her frequent, “Yeah . . . no,” response. Clad in silk floral pajamas, or the bluest bell bottoms you could imagine, her emotionally honest, collective approach to parenting conveys emotional depths far exceeding her role as a mother. Her work is complemented by the inimitable mumble-core alum Greta Gerwig, supporting here as the art school graduated, cervical cancer survivor Abbie, boarding in Dorothea’s home, and Elle Fanning as Julie, the infinitely perplexing and unattainable girl next door, who frequently sleeps in Jamie’s bed.

While these three characters could be read at first glance as essentially the same California woman at different times in her life, as the film progresses, we are privileged deeper insight into their particular anxieties. Particularly revealing is a dinner party scene following a viewing of Jimmy Carter’s “a crisis of confidence” speech. Varying perspectives of radical feminism butt heads over supper, culminating with Abbie confronting each male guest with their reluctance to utter the word “menstruation”, and Julie unflinchingly detailing the painful loss of her virginity.

The sexual focus of second wave feminism in the 1970s is integral to 20th Century Women. We watch as Dorothea, Abbie and Julie grapple with their unique concepts of femininity, each shaped by circumstance, literature, and society. Only a few years removed from puberty, Jamie is given Susan Lydon’s Politics of the Orgasm by Abbie. As he embraces the tenets of radical feminism, he struggles to understand the women in his own life, outside of their relation to him. While both Lucas Jade Zumman and Billy Crudup (as William, an aging California hippie brought in by Dorothea to help raise Jamie) give stirring performances, the spotlight is cast definitively on the three female leads, constructed with careful attention to detail and a surplus of affection.

Mills succeeds in creating a world that feels at once foreign to the viewer and lived-in by his characters. The vividness of his pre-Reagan California is bolstered by his characters’ forays into California’s burgeoning underground music scene. Indeed, as much as 20th Century Women showcases Mills’ reverence for the women of his teenage years, it forefronts the music that made him. After questioning the legitimacy of a fellow skateboarder’s professed sexual exploits, Jaime is told, prior to being punched in the face, that “the Talking Heads are a bunch of fags,” (he later returns home to his mom’s Volkswagen spray painted with the words “ART FAG” and “BLACK FLAG”). In Dorothea’s never ending quest to better understand to her son, she and William try to dance to a few records from his shelf. While they struggle with the appeal of Black Flag’s “Nervous Breakdown”, the Talking Heads’ (or as Dorothea calls them, the “art fags”) “The Big Country” strikes a chord with both of them.

In 20th Century Women’s less than two hour runtime, very little happens. It would be difficult to discern any kind of teleological storyline carrying all the way through, or any easily summarized take-home message. This is strange, because watching 20th Century Women, one feels as if Mills is moving mountains. While this effect could be termed a lack of focus on the part of the filmmaker, I see it rather as an effective subversion of our narrative expectations. Although we’re tempted to look forward to Jamie’s losing his virginity to Julie as a sort of culmination of themes, the script is too insistently thoughtful and empowering of its female characters to allow for this familiar, male-centered coming-of-age tale ending to occur. Mills doesn’t want to sell us a neat, fictional resolution, because his story comes from lived experience.

Mills’ ever-mobile camera rarely strays far from close up shots of his leads. His tight focus allows for their facial expressions to do much of the dramatic heavy lifting. However, when the rare widescreen, outdoor shot fills the screen, one gets a scene of how vast the world is which continues to exist outside of these characters’ deeply personal struggles. Mills’ vision may be ambitious in terms of character depth, but he recognizes the limitations of his film’s scope, and thus his reach never exceeds his grasp.

Where he succeeds most resoundingly is in forging real emotional bonds between the characters onscreen and audience members. Mills never hits you over the head with emotional highs and lows, but rather presents a mixed bag throughout. One such bittersweet moment comes in a plainspoken heart to heart between Dorothea and Abbie. Dorothea informs Abbie, concerning Jamie, “You get to see him out in the world, as a person… I never will.” Abbie responds by presenting her an overexposed polaroid of Jamie at a punk show, with a goofy, probably inebriated expression on his face. The scene is heartrending and relatable, due to the multilayered connection we have to Mills’ characters. At once we feel for Dorothea, Abbie, and Jamie, all for different reasons.

Unlike Beginners, the believable emotional heft of 20th Century Women is never undone by questionable directorial choices. Although the kaleidoscope trail of cars cruising down coastal highways (a nod to the classic Czech New Wave film, Daisies) does feel a little heavy-handed the fourth time around, for the most part, Mills’ quirks feel entirely fitting and deserved by the unconventional script. The only time I questioned the world presented before me was when Jamie hopped into an acquaintance's car to head to L.A. for a DIY punk show, and I wondered if high school could actually have been this cool in 1979.

20th Century Women ends with a shot of Dorothea riding in the cockpit of a biplane, seemingly carefree, laughing exuberantly. The view is sumptuous and refreshing. We have already been given the details of her eventual death, as she states omnisciently, “I will prepare for Y2K before I die.” “As Time Goes By” starts playing, I cry, and we understand that as vivid and complete as the preceding two hours have felt, Mills’ film will not presume to be anything more than it is: a portrait of three women, a man, and a teenager living in Santa Barbara in 1979.

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ButtBoy Films TM (name subject to change) MANIFESTO

tumblr-browsing ~cinephiles~, facebook friends, twitter followers (who aren’t also facebook friends), my parents, maybe someday employers.......welcome to my page guys! Mr. Magorium’s Longwinded Amateur Film Criticism Emporium

Also known as ... ButtBoy Films TM! (name is subject to change)

Get stoked gang --- because I am about to lead you on your dream tour through all of my fav flicks! I’m talking flicks that make me do a big belly laugh... flicks that make me sob man-baby tears in the theatre... the fucking works man!

I (Dylan Adamson) have been watching flicks for a minute. I love them so much. Sometimes I like to think that I know a lot about them but I don’t really know that much. But i sure do <3 to write about em!

If I had to pick my favourite flick... of all time.... oh man. I don’t even know. Maybe Boogie Nights but also maybe McBain’s “Undercover Nerd” (as seen in my tumblr icon). 

I’ve been writing about music and movies for my school paper (the McGill Tribune) for a lil bit and I really do <3 it but a lot of the time I write way too many words! Like way more than I could reasonably expect them to print in a student weekly publication. SO the whole kind of thing with ButtBoy Films TM (name subject to change) is a platform for me to post the stuff that I would rather not chop in half to get published!

I’ll also post the stuff that does get published because I am nuts.

I don’t really have any kind of clear vision for what this tumblr is going to be like but I am having an OK time thus far. Designing the thing was fun anyways. Hopefully as I post more crap I will get better at straddling this strange line i’m currently stomping all over between super self-conscious irony and ~serious amateur film criticism~. It should be a wild ride for all of us.

ANYWAYS! that’s about all I’ve got to say! 

Thank you for reading!

BBFTM (name subject to change) ----- signing off.