Silent, talking, or making — they all say something.

Talk to most people about director cameos and nearly everyone brings up Alfred Hitchcock, who slipped himself briefly into every film he made. Or maybe they’ll mention M. Night Shyamalan, who gives himself a scene with dialogue in most of his movies. While the former is done quickly and largely tongue-in-cheek, the latter is longer and more serious, more reflective of the actual filmmaker.

Standing between these extremes is Martin Scorsese, who has also popped up in a good chunk of his own films, and in both ways described above. In films like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, New York Stories, The Color of Money, or even Michael Jackson’s Bad video, the director is a blink-and-you-miss-him element, background art, furniture; while in movies like Boxcar Bertha, Taxi Driver, or Hugo he gives himself more of a presence, even some dialogue on occasion. And then there are his documentaries. Like Herzog, Scorsese’s presence in such films aren’t wholly objective, they are meant to reveal how the director thinks about both his subject and the filmmaking process, serving as a kind of doc within a doc.

In a new video for Fandor edited by Leigh Singer, the different ways in which Scorsese appears in his own work is surveyed and examined for intent and impact. What it reveals about the filmmaker will grant you an even larger appreciation for his storytelling ability and his commitment to the art of film.

Scorsese Onscreen: What the Director’s Cameos Reveal About His Storytelling was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘Tragedy Girls’ Has Fun With High School Homicides and Hashtags

Say hello to your new favorite “maniac pixie nightmare girls.”

Tragedy Girls is a goddamn blast. That’s really all you need to know before seeing it because unless you hate smart laughs, gory kills, and kick-ass — albeit wildly homicidal — teenage girls you’re probably going to love this fresh, fast-moving mix of Scream meets Heathers meets 2017. But for those of you who need a bit more convincing, here goes.

Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand, Deadpool) and McKayla (Alexandra Shipp, X-Men: Apocalypse) are best friends and typical high-schoolers — they’re making plans for prom, their phones are bodily appendages, and they’re obsessed with their social media presence. They also share an interest in true crime via their “Tragedy Girls” blog, so of course they’re thrilled when a serial killer targets their town for a string of murders. While the rest of the town worries though the girls see an opportunity to take their brand to the next level.

Using a horny high-school boy as bait they set a trap for the killer (Kevin Durand), abduct him, and demand he share some tips on getting away with murder. The girls soon cut loose with bloody mayhem, but it turns out earning re-tweets and new followers takes more than just disemboweling and dismembering your classmates.

Director/co-writer Tyler MacIntyre’s latest is a wildly entertaining horror/comedy romp that feels exciting and original even as it channels imagery and ideas straight out of Tucker & Dale vs Evil, The Final Girls, Cannibal Holocaust, Halloween, and more. It’s a smart, funny ride that never shies away from the gooey red stuff — keep an eye out for the best gym-set practical gore effect since Death Spa — as the body count rises alongside the laughs and thrills.

Hildebrand and Shipp are terrifically vicious delights as budding sociopaths whose interest in popularity is the sole instinct guiding their actions outside of their friendship. There’s a tease of humanity in each of them, but don’t be fooled — they’re all about the murderous lolz. And who am I kidding, that’s part of what makes them irresistible. They’re snarky ladies, but both reveal strong comedic chops beyond their snappy, witty dialogue and extensive use of “hashtag,” “jelly,” and “hella.” Start planning now for an endlessly appealing “maniac pixie nightmare girl” double feature with the upcoming Thoroughbred (my review out of Sundance).

It’s a refreshing change of pace seeing high-school girls unencumbered by their relationship to boys. Their hearts are their own, and while they dabble with the dicks their true love remains each other as BFFs in life and death.

The girls are front and center, but MacIntyre crafts the world around them with a vibrant energy and style that surprises and captivates through to the end. Toss in a killer soundtrack, a pair of unexpectedly familiar faces, and an absolute and clear love for the genre and you have your next eminently re-watchable favorite. The third act is typically where too many horror/comedies (and horror films in general) lose their way, but while I would have loved to see a little more here it remains a highly satisfying and gleefully nihilistic denouement.

Tragedy Girls is pure bliss for those of us who love a skilled pairing of gore and guffaws. It’s all about the girl-power, and while these girls are using their power for devious and deadly means you can’t help but respect their ambition and initiative. Hashtag blessed.

SXSW Review — ‘Tragedy Girls’ Has Fun With High School Homicides and Hashtags was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Short of the Day

A bag, a man, and a story of ruthless, hilarious vengeance.

My three-word, gut-punch review of the short film American Beauty 2: “Best. Sequel. Ever.”

Allow me to expand.

There are ingenious films, there are hilarious films, and then there is Zak Stoltz’s American Beauty 2, which is both of these things and so very much more. It doesn’t deal with any of the human characters from the first film, rather the empty white plastic bag floating in the breeze, who we all know was the real star anyway.

More than a decade has passed since last we saw ole baggy (Rite Aid Bag #54987, according to the credits), and he’s still doing his thing, drifting along metropolitan alleyways waiting to inspire pretention in any aspiring artist who comes along, or, alternately, smite any fool who dares offend him. Thus enter said fool (Brooks Morrison), who callously douses baggy in neon-colored Big Gulp while dancing his ass off to some classic Limp Bizkit.

From such a simple act is unleashed an epic hunt that results in, well, you have to see for yourself.

Stoltz is keenly adept at establishing the world of his film in mere seconds, and the performances by Morrison and #54987 recall the chemistry of Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, respectively, in the original Cape Fear, or perhaps the T-1000 from Terminator 2 and that lame John Connor played by Eddie Furlong. But the real heroes here are bag whisperers Ellis Bahl, Jimmy Sudekum, Jason Kisvarday, and Brendan Clifford, who no doubt risked life, limb, and sanity while trying to wrest control over the chaotic performance of #54987.

In all seriousness, this is, for my money, short comedic filmmaking at its finest. The situation is simple if absurd, the performances are appropriately over the top, the filmmaking is effectively chaotic and kinetic, and the overall result is a damn fun five minutes. If had three thumbs, that still wouldn’t be enough to recommend this one.

Ooh, and for added fun, take a shot every time you spot a 7–11 reference, you’ll be nice and lit by film’s end.*

Shout out to Short of the Week for showing us the light.

*Editor’s Note: FSR implores you to ignore Perry and please drink responsibly.

‘American Beauty 2’ is Real, and it is Glorious was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘Lilo & Stitch’ deserves better.

Lilo & Stitch is the “Barb” of Disney movies. Yes, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet exist. However, neither of those films have seen as much success and then sunk back into Disney-relative obscurity quite like Lilo & Stitch. The film was a full-fledged franchise in its heyday spawning multiple television series, two direct-to-video sequels, a Kingdom Hearts cameo, and its own video game. To be fair, Disney did have a reference to Lilo & Stitch in Moana — early on, Moana helps a baby turtle make its way into the ocean by obscuring it from birds under a palm frond. A solid “save the cat” moment that creates a presumption of goodness and a sly reference to Lilo & Stitch. Stitch, in a post-credit image, is seen shadowing a turtle and its child in the same way. It’s a fun little throwback to Disney’s first foray into depicting Polynesian culture.

Lilo & Stitch starts with Jumba (David Ogden Stiers), a Russian-accented gray blob of an alien, facing charges brought by the Galactic Federation for “illegal genetic experiments.” Jumba denies dabbling in genetic machinations. That’s soon proven a lie as Stitch (Chris Sanders) is the result of Jumba’s experiments. The Grand Councilwoman (Zoe Caldwell) of the Galactic Federation then expositions us through the baseline of Stitch’s character. Stitch, the little blue-gray space Koala, has been bred to be a mini Godzilla meets Rocket Raccoon. He’s an agent of chaos and destruction. Or, as Lilo Pelekai (Daveigh Chase) later explains, Stitch’s badness level is “unusually high for someone [Stitch’s] size.” Stitch is then sentenced to prison as is his creator. Subsequently, he escapes and boosts himself into hyper-drive landing on the island of Kaua’i.

Kaua’i is photogenic. The island has been captured on film many times — Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park are just two instances that spring to mind. However, in Lilo & Stitch Kaua’i isn’t standing in for a nameless jungle and is instead playing itself for once. Similar to Disney’s Pocahontas, Lilo & Stitch luxuriates in the landscape of its setting. Pocahontas envisions its New World as vast, mysterious, and colorful. Lilo & Stitch opts to make Kaua’i equally as vibrant while stressing the confining aspects of island living. The only time Stitch ventures around the island with any expansive visual gusto akin to Pocahontas is when Stitch, craving to destroy a large city, high-jacks a tricycle and goes in search of a city and finds none. Lilo states: “It’s nice to live on an island with no large cities.” Isolation was a primary goal when choosing Kaua’i as the feature’s location. Initially, the story took place in rural Kansas, but landlocked Kansas does not necessarily scream isolation as much as a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Following the decision to move the location from Kansas to Hawai’i, the story and style of the film shifted. Part of that change was the attempt to capture the sense of community within Hawai’i. In an interview with “Hana Hou!”, Hawaiian Airlines’ magazine, DeBlois and Sanders observed that during their research tours their guides seemed to “know everybody.” They acknowledged that island life, especially rural island life, is characterized by the type of small town whimsy that politicians center their discourse around. Everyone knows everyone. Communities are small. There is no mystery. There’s just a main street, some houses, and the ocean. Lilo & Stitch reflects this in a way that Moana does not. Whereas Moana and Pocahontas’ vistas show off stunning feats of animation, Lilo & Stitch concerns itself with using setting provide the context and enrich the characters.

Lilo & Stitch loves its island but does not shy away from the island’s limitations. Part of this is that Lilo & Stitch’s contemporary timeframe allows it to show actual Polynesians working in the tourist trade. Hawai’i’s economy is so contingent on the tourist trade that any ebb and flow of the economy can make or break families. If coal is the lifeblood of West Virginia, honeymoons are the lifeblood of the islands.

The film layers a complex visual depiction of island life through incorporating the tourism trade into the foreground of the narrative. Lilo takes Polaroids of tourists tanning on the beach. Nani references the fact that the Luau she works at is a “good job.” Further, it’s shown that outside of tourist jobs there isn’t much around. We see Nani try to gain employment from grocers and tiny shops all in vain. Further, the background and music choices nail the feel of the shabby, outdated hotels and restaurants. Elvis plays on a record player in the house. Nani and Lilo’s house has an empty feeling. The rooms are messy and the appliances shabby. It’s a similar feel to the abandoned coal and factory hubs you see in the United States. In the end, it is a good reminder that regardless of geography all American’s are subject to a merciless economy. Lilo & Stitch doesn’t shy away from this harsh reality of modern island life.

Moana has received criticism for its depiction of Polynesian culture and the relative sanitization of Polynesian legend, and that’s somewhat logical given that Moana isn’t grounded in a real island. Her location is a fictionalized island with real historical context and legend worked into it. The film is a Disney princess film, and it polishes itself with a high gloss to accomplish this. It’s commercial and simplified, and because of this, it feels more tourist-focused than the film with actual tourists in it. Polynesian culture is packaged cleanly for mass consumption. Though Moana gets a lot right, the most accurate thing it does is evoke the feeling of being happy to have a seat at the table while acknowledging that your place is reserved due to the novelty of your cultural experience.

Once in Kaua’i, Stitch is mistaken for a dog and adopted by Lilo and her sister, Nani (Tia Carrere). Lilo and Nani have suffered the loss of their parents. Whereas other Disney films treat the loss of parents as a justification for action and adventure, Lilo & Stitch concerns itself with the real business of life after becoming an orphan. Lilo, like Moana, isn’t running around worrying about going to some ball or signing coercive contracts to get some human legs. She’s a small child trying to cope with the loss of her parents, and like any child, she concerns herself with mystical answers to complicated questions. She runs out to the ocean every morning to feed Pudge the fish, who she believes controls the weather, because her parents died in a car accident during a storm. It’s such an earnest, childlike reaction to personal tragedy that it almost seems out of place in a Disney movie filled with alien-based mischief. In less-skilled hands, it would get slapped by critics for contributing to an uneven tone. Lilo & Stitch overcomes this by grounding these concerns into the central theme of the narrative: family.

At the center of Lilo & Stitch’s story is the idea of ʻohana or family. The idea of the collective working together. This sense of family extends not only to the sisters dealing with the loss of their parents, but Polynesian culture as family. The context of the island and the use of island slang places the characters in a distinct cultural milieu. Lilo and Nani are not divorced from their surroundings their story is emotionally deepened by it. The economic depression of the island raises the stakes of Nani’s job search and fight to keep her sister. The limited pool of potential friends available to Lilo drives her into herself, and the island’s location keeps Stitch from acting on his aggression. Kaua’i pushes back on the characters as they move within it. Where Moana concerns itself with re-imagining myth and legend, Lilo & Stitch focuses on the personal and intimate.

Nani and Lilo have one of the most genuine and raw sibling relationship ever depicted in a Disney film. The film establishes it early and never relents. Frankly, when it comes to depicting sisters Lilo & Stitch even outpaces Frozen. We are introduced to Nani and Lilo’s relationship through a disastrous social services check. Subsequently, Nani attempts to explain to her sister the gravity of their current situation. They need to make changes to how they do things but Lilo, depressed and friendless, doesn’t want to participate. Nani, at only 19, is not entirely up to the challenge of raising her younger sister and it shows. Not only that, but the dynamic between sister and legal guardian has not been entirely navigated. As a result, Nani and Lilo have a sibling fight during the film that is so relatable it borders on uncomfortable. Both sisters know what to say to wound each other as they know each other on a level that only siblings can.

From the outset, this is the kind of plot that Disney doesn’t do much anymore. Dare I say, it’s almost Pixar-style storytelling with the use of a jarring event like the arrival of an equally damaged Stitch to an already fragile family unit. Combine the interpersonal family drama, the mourning of both parents, and a depressed tourism-based economy and you have the raw materials for a touching family drama. Add in Stitch, as comic relief struggling with his own identity crisis, and you have a Disney movie. Lilo & Stitch is the perfect bridge between finding community and finding self.

Where does this leave us? For starters, Lilo & Stitch gives a progressive depiction of sisterhood that far predates Frozen. All of the cultural representation that Moana is praised for, Lilo & Stitch both predates and expands. All of the complicated historical effects of colonization that Pocahontas attempts to address, Lilo & Stitch confronts. In short, Lilo & Stitch deserves better simply because it does everything better.

Island Life: Revisiting ‘Lilo & Stitch’ After ‘Moana’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A film by Scott and a TV Show by Boyle chronicle a 1970s kidnapping.

Fresh off The Martian and Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott is returning to earth for his next project, and to the all-too-human subjects of greed, power, and family. Scott will be directing All the Money in the World, a Black List script by David Scarpa that recounts the real life kidnapping of John Paul Getty III. Getty was the grandson of J. Paul Getty Sr., one of the world’s wealthiest men at the time, but had become estranged from his grandfather after his mother, Gail Harris, had divorced John Paul Getty II. When, one night in 1973, Getty III (known as Paul) didn’t return home, a ransom note soon appeared demanding $17 million for his return. Getty Sr., suspecting that the young man may have staged his own kidnapping, initially refused to pay — until a lock Paul’s hair and his severed right ear were sent as proof. The notoriously callous Getty Sr. nevertheless continued to negotiate with Paul’s captors until eventually settling on a sum of $2.9 million (divided into the $2.2 million tax deductible maximum, and an $800,000 loan to Gail Harris).

Such a lurid and tragic story virtually cries out for Hollywood adaptation — which is presumably what Danny Boyle thought when he announced last year that he’d be chronicling the same events in a TV series for FX. As of one week prior to Scott’s announcement, Boyle was still in development on the project, which he has reimagined as a five-season, fifty-year saga about the Getty family. The series, fittingly titled Trust, would begin in the 70s with the kidnapping of Getty III and chronicle a different decade in each of its five seasons. Boyle plans to direct “the first two or three” episodes of the series, which means that (so long as one team doesn’t bail out) two of the finest directors working today will be tackling the same story in two different media at the same time.

This isn’t the first time that the cultural zeitgeist has produced two adaptations of the same material in rapid succession: biopics of Alfred Hitchcock, Truman Capote, Yves Saint Laurent, and Steve Jobs have all come in pairs in recent years (Boyle directed the better of the two Jobs films). But the Getty story provides something unique. Given that Scott’s film and Boyle’s show wouldn’t be in direct competition, fans may revel in the chance to see how the same story is channeled through two different masters’ visions. Will Boyle’s feature a frenetic style, while Scott’s veers more classical? Will performances differ on the big and small screens? And what of the moral stance? Will Boyle focus more on the class critique, while Scott seizes upon the intrigue of the kidnapping? Or will it be the reverse?

If, fingers crossed, both adaptations continue to move forward, the result may be a rare opportunity to see directly how medium and filmmaker affect the treatment of a particular subject. Though both Scott and Boyle are famously visual, their styles differ greatly, and a story as rich as this affords numerous opportunity for selection and interpretation. Suffice it to say, we’re excited.

Ridley Scott and Danny Boyle are Tackling the Same Subject was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the major studios tinker with photorealistic character designs, can Hollywood find the future of animation in its past?

This weekend, families with hit their local multiplex to relive the wonder of Beauty and the Beast in its new live-action format. And whether the film is a runaway hit or only a modest success, Disney shows no signs of plugging its pipeline of live-action remakes. According to this 2016 Time piece, Disney is currently working on no fewer than twelve (that’s one-two) remakes of their popular animated films, meaning twelve more movies featuring up-and-coming actresses, revamped musical numbers, and CGI creatures that take a deep, deep dive into the uncanny valley.

While this brand new surge of Disney movies are likely to each be a technical wonder, for my money, there’s something oddly pedestrian about converting the beautiful Disney animated character designs into a series of photorealistic CGI models. While the animation work is stellar, these films’ modern digital effects seem more of their era than achieving a timeless aesthetic that will usher in a new phase of Disney classics. With Hollywood now awash in fully CGI characters, it is only a matter of time before some studio begins to experiment not with the realism of its characters but its more cartoon-ish qualities. Hopefully, that will mean a return to the more conventional live-action animated movies of yesteryear.

Live-action animated movies — or animated live-action movies — were rarely more than a curiosity, but there is an interesting history of blended movies in Hollywood. Once upon a time, Gene Kelly danced with Jerry Mouse, Mary Poppins and Bert soft-shoed their way through a barn house choir, and Angela Lansbury rocked out at the bottom of the beautiful briny sea. Perhaps the most successful of these films, however, was 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the predecessor to The LEGO Movie both in terms of creative animation and legal finesse. In a display that seems shockingly implausible today, Warner Brothers and Disney characters intermingled with shocking abandon; a 1988 issue of The Monthly Film Bulletin referred to the film as a “technical and logistical landmark,” as much for the film’s “devotion to animation/cartoon trivia” as its technical achievements. The film was a smash hit worldwide, breaking $300 million at the global box office and inspiring awkward imitators like the 1992 flop Cool World.

But while the technology that allows animated characters to appear onscreen has progressed by leaps and bounds, this style of film has a less than stellar track record at the box office. Using Bob Chipman’s live-action/animation hybrids list as a reference point, we can clearly see that the films released since 1996’s Space Jam have failed to earn back their initial investment, let alone set the international box office on fire. The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle grossed a little more than $35 million worldwide against a $75 million budget; Monkeybone cost $75 million to make and only pulled in $7.6 million worldwide; Osmosis Jones earned $14 million despite a $70 million budget; Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the big winner of the group, pulled in $68.5 million against an $80 million production cost. Perhaps the closest Chipman comes to identifying a successful hybrid film is George Miller’s 2006 film Happy Feet, which is still primarily a film with photorealistic animation (or, at least, as photorealistic as animation got back in 2006).

If It Ain’t Broke: Visual Comparisons Between Beauty and the Beast, Animated and Live-Action

Sure, some modern movies do attempt a more cartoonish visual style, often to incredibly mixed results. Films like Monster Hunt or Monster Trucks — or any movie with CGI creatures that has “monster” in the title, really — are less viable summer films and more foreign curiosities or offseason gambles. Animation prefers photorealism; movies like Kong: Skull Island and Rise of the Planet of the Apes are treated as the next phase in cinematic evolution or as an evolving artform in-and-of-ithemselves. Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes films, is hailed as a pioneer of what Rolling Stone magazine refers to as “post-human acting.” Andy Kebbler, who pulled double duty in Kong: Skull Island and starred in last year’s big screen Warcraft adaptation, has also described motion capture as getting to the “essence of the performance” of an actor.

And that seems like a shame, because modern technology has opened the door to any number of animation styles. Robert Zemeckis’s dalliances with rotoscoping (The Polar Express, Beowulf, A Christmas Carol) have offered one such answer for stylized animation; Richard Linklater’s experiments with cell-shaded animation (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly) offer quite another. As Disney pushes the boundaries of photorealistic CGI, artists like Don Hertzfeldt have found poignancy in seemingly rudimentary animation styles, suggesting that storytelling — not perfectly rendered three-dimensional images — are still what drives the animation world forward. Filmmakers don’t need to ape the classic animation style of Hanna-Barbera or Warner Brother cartoons to bring a live-action movie to life; they need only find the right aesthetic that blends together the real world with the animated reality that exists in their head.

The competitive advantage of any studio comes in their ability to differentiate their product from that of their competitors. Once every studio has access to the same photorealistic 3D modeling — once Sher Kahn in Jungle Book and Caeser in the Planet of the Apes films are virtually indistinguishable from their real-life counterparts — some adventurous studio will choose to push the boundaries of animation in another direction and offer us a hybrid live-action film that aims not for realism, but for a surrealistic dream logic. With another Space Jam film already scheduled for 2019, a return to glory for the live-action animated movie could be in the cards. Here’s hoping that Hollywood learns its lesson before we get stuck in an uncanny valley we can’t climb out of.

Is It Time to Revive the Animated Live-Action Movie? was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So strange it could be true.

This week’s fan theory is ripped from the headlines and hot off the press, so let’s jump into it straightaway, because this time next week it’ll either be proven or passé.

You’ve heard about this movie Life, right? Not the Martin Lawrence/Eddie Murphy prohibition-era prison escape movie (which is awesome), rather the new Alien-esque sci-fi thriller from the writers of Deadpool starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, and Rebecca Ferguson as part of the crew of an international space station who discovers life on Mars in the form of some goo or something that naturally presents a dire and all-to-real threat to humanity, leaving it to our intrepid crew to find a way to destroy it before it can reach Earth and destroy all of us.

The film got some headlines this week when a Redditor by the sweet tag of Toomuchsoul spotted something familiar in Life’s latest trailer: footage from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. It’s just a brief crowd shot, but it sticks out like a sore thumb as it’s the only shot in the trailer that doesn’t take place in space.

It’s inclusion was taken to be just another example of stock footage recycling — it actually happens more than you think — but then something seemingly unrelated happened: Sony, out of the clear blue, announced they were developing a standalone Venom movie for next year. That’s when the internet started sizzling, because it only took about point-two seconds for people to connect Venom, being one of the villains from Spider-Man 3, to Life.

See, in the comics and the movie, Venom isn’t a humanoid, it’s an alien symbiote that attaches itself to a humanoid and takes them over. In the comics, the symbiote came home with Peter from the Secret Wars, and in Raimi’s film it falls to Earth on a meteor. In both cases it attaches first to Peter, turning his classic red-and-blue suit black and making him do terrible, terrible things like dance, then to Eddie Brock, who becomes Venom. Looking back on the Life trailer, said goo from Mars does appear to be some kind of adhesive symbiote capable of starting small and spreading man-sized, and the inclusion of a single crowd shot — on Earth — would seem to indicate our crew isn’t successful in destroying it.

That leads to one very interesting question: is Life a secret prequel to next year’s Venom?

All the above evidence is well and good, but what really gives this theory legs are Reese and Wernick, the writers, who do have Marvel connections via ­Deadpool, and Sony, the studio behind Spider-Man 3, Life, and Venom.

Now, of course, there’s also some detracting evidence, like the fact that neither Reese nor Wernick appears to be attached to Venom in any way — though they wouldn’t have to be — and more notably the inclusion of Ryan Reynolds in Life, who of course already acts in the Marvel Universe as Deadpool. Detractors would say that his presence negates this being a surreptitious Marvel prequel.

That is, unless his character dies in Life.

Then he’s just an actor playing two unconnected roles in the same universe, kinda like Chris Evans has been the Human Torch and Captain America. Not technically the same universe, I know, but for that matter Deadpool and the current Marvel Cinematic Universe aren’t synced up yet, which would make Reynolds’ roles in Deadpool and Life more like Michael B. Jordan’s in Fantastic Four and the upcoming Black Panther: related by comic blood, but not cinematic. Plus, if you’re going to use someone as a red herring detractor, Reynolds is the guy.

So what do you think? Has Sony just pulled off the sliest prequel in cinema history, or do Redditors have too much time on their hands? Sound off your thoughts in the comments, but do it quick because we don’t have to wait too long to find out if this is true or not, as Life opens next Friday. And whether it turns out to be a theory that holds water or leaks like a colander, it’s a helluva lot of fun to think about.

Catch up on Fan Theory Fridays right here.

Special thanks to FSR’s Christopher Campbell for cluing me to this one.

Fan Theory Friday: Is ‘Life’ A ‘Venom’ Prequel?!?! was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to the University of QT.

Without question or the slightest hint of a doubt, I feel wholly comfortable saying that there are more video essays, compilations, montages, and supercuts dedicated to the work of Quentin Tarantino than any other director out there. He has been an object of fascination bordering obsession from the first scene of Reservoir Dogs, and with each new film he releases, the fervor surrounding his mythos only increases. Largely this is due to QT himself, who’s as good a hype-man as he is a filmmaker, but that’s just one more reason we love him: confidence. QT knows he’s the shit and he’d be the first person to tell you that if the rest of us would ever shut up about it.

Bottom line, not since perhaps Kubrick has the totality of a director’s career been held in such high regard, nor has a director been so meticulously dissected. Case in point? The 13 essays and 2 galleries compiled below that represent the best work about Tarantino that I’ve covered over the last few years.

We got everything and the kitchen sink here: serious essays, funny essays, Tarantino on Tarantino, tributes to dialogue, to violence, to laughter, and even a feature-length fan edit of Django Unchained that simply must be seen.

This is one-stop shopping, all you need to know about all things QT — including how his films connect to one another — in one handy post you can bookmark and return to time and again. Enjoy.

• INSPIRED BY: THE VISUAL REFERENCES IN THE FILMS OF QUENTIN TARANTINO
• [watch] Blizzard of Influences: THE GREAT SILENCE in Quentin Tarantino’s THE H8TEFUL EIGHT
• [watch] If Quentin Tarantino Directed ‘SUICIDE SQUAD’…
• [WATCH] FUNNY HA-HA: LAUGHTER AND QUENTIN TARANTINO
• [WATCH] GOT ROOM FOR ONE MORE? THE FILMS THAT INSPIRED QUENTIN TARANTINO’S ‘THE HATEFUL EIGHT’
• Django Rechained: The Fan Edit
• [WATCH] STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU: FIRST AND FINAL APPEARANCES OF TARANTINO CHARACTERS
• [WATCH] HEADSPACE: THE SELF-MYTHOLOGY OF ‘INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS’
• [WATCH] THE CINEMATOGRAPHY OF QUENTIN TARANTINO
• [WATCH] QUENTIN TARANTINO TALKS ABOUT HIS CINEMATIC INFLUENCES: JOHN WOO, ANDRE DETOTH, JEAN PIERRE MELVILLE AND MORE
• [WATCH] TOP SHOT: QUENTIN TARANTINO FROM ABOVE
• [WATCH] COOL LIKE FONZI: QUENTIN TARANTINO’S SLOW-MOTION
• [WATCH] THE KILLS OF QUENTIN: ADDING UP THE TARANTINO DEATH TOLL
• [WATCH] VIDEO ARCHIVES: QUENTIN TARANTINO ON THE POWER OF A FILM GEEK’S OPINION
• [GALLERY] BETTER THAN A PACK OF RED APPLES: THE FILMS OF QUENTIN TARANTINO AS DIME-STORE NOVELS
• [GALLERY] THAT’S A BINGO: 9 MINIMALIST QUENTIN TARANTINO POSTERS
• Pulp Fiction, a Silent Film by Quentin Tarantino
• It’s All Connected: Your Map to the Cinematic Universe of Quentin Tarantino

The Ultimate Video Essay Guide to Quentin Tarantino was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘M.F.A.’ Butchers Opportunity To Confront the Realities of Sexual Assault

The problematic SXSW title combines a severe mishandling of campus rape with a mediocre psychological thriller.

What could be worse than a fundamental misunderstanding of an issue as important and sensitive as campus rape? The answer, as provided by controversial SXSW title M.F.A., is to write a limp, cliched psychological thriller around it. It is difficult to report negatively about a film that focuses on sexual assault when so few films are brave enough to, but when it is handled as poorly and dangerously as it is here, it is important to address its problems head-on.

From its first moments, M.F.A. wastes no time in establishing its protagonist and the world in which she lives in. This is the story of Noelle (Francesca Eastwood), an art student working on her titular master’s degree at a fictional California university. Immediately, we are introduced to the ins and outs of her daily life, from her classmates’ vapid critiques of her paintings to her infatuation with one of them (Peter Vack). The plot takes motion when she takes him up on an invitation to a party that leads to the film’s first brutal and unflinching rape scene; it’s a deeply upsetting sequence so explicit and exploitative in its execution that it still would have felt undeserved in a film that wasn’t already so problematic. Noelle’s initial reaction to this assault is perhaps the film’s only high point; it’s a depressing and realistic few minutes that portray her feeling of alienation and loss of control.

The realism and sensitivity are short-lived, however, when the film quickly goes down an absurd path that decides to eschew the modern truth of films like The Hunting Ground for something that feels more like a Tumblr-directed I Spit On Your Grave. When Noelle takes her case to her school’s counselor (reminder, this is a Californian arts university in the year 2016), she is immediately told to stop pursuing it. Despite this fictional liberal arts college’s absurd lack of sexual assault resources, she then attends a student-led survivors group where the film tastelessly makes fun of female students trying to protect each other from assault. Noelle is bent on seeking true vengeance, and she is only further pushed by a viral video of a rape at the university — another abusively long and graphic sequence that needlessly lingers on the assault.

This “true vengeance”, unfortunately, does not entail a plot about the exposure or humiliation of these sick campus rapists, but rather something far more simplistic and harmful: Noelle begins killing them, one by one, and in ways less imaginative than your favorite network crime procedural. Somehow, she is able to elude officials, leaving them to scratch their heads over art students being thrown off balconies and frat boys bludgeoned to death in the shower. The film never veers back to the realism or nuance of its first act, instead going full speed ahead with every thriller cliche in the book (not even Clifton Collins, Jr. can save the terrible detective subplot) and ending on a spectacularly unsubtle and cruel note that you will have to see it to believe it. Also thrown in for good measure are a conspiracy involving the school’s counselor and an utterly unnecessary romantic subplot with one of Noelle’s classmates.

M.F.A. is a rare film in that it actively made me angry that I had seen it. It is discouraging and depressing to watch a film that so tastelessly handles the issue of sexual assault to serve its own needs; to see a film with two overly graphic rape scenes also feature mediocre thriller conventions and terrifically unsubtle characterization of being a survivor is not a fun experience, to say the least. My personal issues with this film aside, it is simply not a good movie. The dialogue is stilted and serves no purpose other than to further the plot, and the score is almost laughably inappropriate in how it evokes the mood of a vampire film rather than one about campus rape. In one particularly cringe-worthy moment, our protagonist types out her graduation speech, smoking a cigarette and drinking wine so as to look especially cool. “Dear fellow graduates,” she types. “Why art?” The audience I was with couldn’t help but laugh, but I was far too upset and offended by the film’s larger problems to find humor in its shortcomings.

SXSW Review — ‘M.F.A.’ Butchers Opportunity To Confront Sexual Assault was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We take a look at new Blu-rays of two ’80s classics.

Shout! Factory’s relatively young collectors label, Shout Select, is something of an odd duck. This is less of a criticism than an observation as their releases so far bear no real discernible through line. We’ve gotten well-deserved Blu-rays of eagerly awaited ’80s classics like To Live and Die in LA, Road House, and Midnight Run, but the label has also released/announced titles like Death of a Salesman, The Chinese Connection, and Simon Pegg’s forgettable 2012 film, A Fantastic Fear of Everything. So yeah, there’s something of an odd inconsistency across the catalog.

For now though we’re here to discuss their latest releases, two ’80s films of varying acclaim and renown — John Milius’ Red Dawn and Dennis Hopper’s Colors.

Red Dawn (1984)

A small town in Colorado begins its day like any other until strangers drop from the sky. Soviet and Cuban military forces parachute onto the high school’s football field and start shooting adults and students alike. In the chaos of the town falling under attack a group of teens — Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, and others — hop into a pickup truck and head for the hills. The town is quickly occupied, and while the teens find relative safety camping in the woods they decide they have no choice but to fight back.

The “what if?” scenario of a foreign military force invading the United States in modern times is a fascinating one as most people think the next big war will be decided with nukes, and it’s one we rarely see on the big screen. (Seriously, there’s this, Chuck Norris’ Invasion USA, and…?) While missiles and urban targets are mentioned here the focus of John Milius’ (Conan the Barbarian) action epic — scripted by Kevin Reynolds (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) — is the small-scale action centered on a remote American town. While still far-fetched, the locale and setup allow for enough suspension of disbelief to make the action and events carry some degree of realistic drama.

It helps that the action is pretty damn solid too with gun fights, heavy artillery, and impressive amounts of destruction occurring on a fairly regular basis. It’s set in Colorado, but the New Mexico filming locales offer as beautiful a landscape as you could want as we move from fall into a snow-covered winter.

We don’t get much in the way of character development, and the simplicity of that end result is that the film never really manages to become more than a basic action movie. I’d argue the novelty of Red Dawn’s plot elevates it enough above the generic fray, but I also acknowledge that part of the film’s appeal comes from my memories of seeing it in the theater as a 13 year old. It’s exactly the kind of movie that spoke to teen me as the film’s youthful leads got to shoot guns, save the day, and hang out with Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey.

Shout Select’s new Blu-ray uses a previous master so if you’ve seen the last Blu-ray release then you know what to expect here — a solid, if unspectacular picture and audio presentation. The disc includes the trailer as well as the following special features:

• *NEW* A Look Back at Red Dawn [1:09:08] — Jane Jenkins (casting director), Doug Toby (played Aardvark), Thom Noble (editor), and Jackson De Govia (production designer) share thoughts on the film’s production.
• Red Dawn Rising [23:02] — A 2007 featurette with Milius and lead cast members remembering their time on the film.
• Training for WWIII [9:49] — Additional interview segments from the 2007 featurette focused on the cast’s training with guns and military tactics.
• Building the Red Menace [9:37] — More from 2007, this time focused on bringing military gear into the production to replicate an invading force.
• World War III Comes to Town [13:27] — Again from 2007, this featurette has residents of Las Vegas, New Mexico recalling the time Hollywood came to town.

Red Dawn [Collector's Edition] [Blu-ray]

Colors (1988)

A small L.A.P.D. anti-gang unit is tasked with tackling the city’s rising tide of gang violence, and it only gets more complicated when a brash young cop (Sean Penn) joins the squad and is partnered with a surly veteran (Robert Duvall). The pair hit the streets and face a never-ending parade of criminals and their victims.

Dennis Hopper’s fourth film as director — comfortably saddled between two of his more forgettable titles in Out of the Blue and Catchfire — is something of a time capsule-look at the ticking time bomb that was Los Angeles leading up the the Rodney King beating and eventual riots in the early ’90s. It was a controversial release too at the time as theaters and authorities were concerned about gang violence breaking out at screenings.

While much of the film’s hype was around those real-world issues, the film itself is actually far less of a powder keg narratively-speaking. The plot is simply cops on one side and gang members on the other with minimal effort made towards the familiar mismatched partners shtick. A more plot-focused take on similar themes can be found in the superior Dark Blue, but what Colors lacks in story in mostly makes up for in action and casting.

Hopper’s direction moves between star moments with the leads, both of whom give solid albeit predictable performances, and some down in the trenches street action including foot chases, shoot-outs, and walk-throughs of scenes post-violence. Cast-wise the film also marks early appearances for Don Cheadle, Damon Wayans, and others. All of it works to make Colors an entertaining, by-the-numbers action/drama worth a watch for fans of Penn and/or Duvall.

Shout Select’s new Blu-ray includes an unrated cut incorporating extra footage from the international version and a previous unrated edition. The disc includes two new interviews.

• *NEW* A Cry of Alarm — An Interview With Screenwriter Michael Schiffer [28:46] — The film’s writer talks about how he got the job, the research he did in the streets of L.A., and Penn’s suggestion that he wanted the film to feel like 1966's The Battle of Algiers.
• *NEW* Cops & Robbers — An Interview With Technical Advisor/Ex-L.A.P.D. Gang Division Dennis Fanning [16:53] — The ex-cop talks about hsi time on the force, how Penn pulled him into appearing onscreen, and his love of Hopper. He also has some pretty harsh words for the current L.A.P.D.

Colors (Collector's Edition) [Blu-ray]

Shout Select Fights Russians, Crips, and Bloods With ‘Red Dawn’ and ‘Colors’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wolverine is basically Old Man Peter Pan.

A new TV ad for Logan suggests that you don’t go see “The Beauty” this weekend, as in the just released Beauty and the Beast, but go see “The Beast” instead. I agree with the recommendation, yet if Wolverine is to be likened to any character from a Disney classic, it should only be Peter Pan. And with Logan the comparison is especially interesting.

Oddly enough, Hugh Jackman recently starred as the villain Blackbeard in a prequel to the Peter Pan story as we know it, and it was properly — pun intended — panned. Logan is the better reworking of the material, which originated with dramatic and literary works by J.M. Barrie. This time Jackman is the Peter figure in a kind of epilogue to the tale. Forget Hook, because Logan offers the only old man Peter Pan we need.

Before you start picking apart the idea of Logan — or the overall Wolverine arc of the X-Men movies — being a live-action remake of Peter Pan, let me note it’s not my intention to make such a claim (I’ll leave that to YouTube’s Couch Tomato, who regularly finds parallels between movies, as he does this week with Splash and The Little Mermaid). There’s not much there in the way of what Logan can do to make us rethink Peter Pan, only vice versa.

Wolverine is a kind of forced Peter Pan figure. He doesn’t have Peter Pan syndrome so much as he has a Peter Pan condition. He simply can not age — at least not in the world of fairy tales, represented in Logan in the form of “X-Men” comic books, which is also to mean the other X-Men movies. He’s been stuck in a personal Neverland for about 200 years, until something finally made him grow older. That something is not adamantium poisoning so much as it is his stepping out into the more realistic world of Logan.

Because Wolverine is already an adult, the only place for him to advance to is death, and unlike the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, he’s not so reluctant to face this change. Yet at the end of Logan, his death leaves him as still the stuff of legends, while his Wendy, X-23, who is also his daughter (you could speculate that Wendy is Peter’s daughter with Mrs. Darling if you wanted), and a bunch of Lost Boys and Girls go off to try to have normal lives.

The death of Wolverine as the death of Peter Pan is, in a way, also a death of the superhero figure, of which Peter is a prototype example. Logan is a meta superhero movie, a deconstruction that acknowledges itself as make believe, with the in-story comic book counterparts, and that battles itself, with Wolverine fighting his younger, movie franchise version self as represented by the clone X-24 — also akin to Peter wrestling with his shadow.

The Doubles of ‘Logan’

Logan also is itself the literal growing up of the superhero genre, or at least a big section of it. Deadpool may have been the first R-rated entry of the previously kid-friendly X-Men franchise, but Logan is the point where it’s also matured. Superhero movies have been dark and edgy before, but that was just like kids being goth. Logan feels more like a movie for grownups, and it’s going to inspire more superhero movies for grownups now.

Where any comparison to Peter Pan falls apart for Logan is in the lack of a parallel for the Professor X role. If anything, he’s a paternalistic Jiminy Cricket, helping Wolverine, who was once made into a partially mechanical puppet, become a real man, who then must become a man of the real world. Otherwise, a lot lines up fine. The Reavers are pirates, complete with a leader sporting a metal hand substitute. Caliban is Tinker Bell for helping the Reavers locate Wolverine and friends.

Of course, you can make the case for a lot of superheroes being like Peter Pan, and Marvel even retold Barrie’s story with Captain America in the role. Such is the nature of a genre consisting of so many men with parent issues and a love of dressing up and playing with toys in the name of acting the hero. Wolverine is just the most fascinating because he never asked to be the Boy Who Couldn’t Continue Growing Up.

He was orphaned into a world he didn’t want to be in by genetics. And after so many missed opportunities to properly tackle the most interesting themes to be found in the Wolverine character and story — many of which he shares with Peter Pan, including the issue of immortality and seeing everyone else age and die — Logan satisfies the most, especially by daring to end the way it does, the only way it should. It may not exactly be a version of Peter Pan, but it certainly, brilliantly shares some of its DNA.

Why ‘Logan’ is the Best Live-Action Version of a Disney Classic in Theaters Right Now was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Short of the Day

Ever laughed and cried at the same time?

Breaking up is a hard to do. Everybody knows that, there’s a billion songs about it, including one I stole that first sentence from. But some break ups are much, much, much harder than others, and those typically result from one of the two involved parties’ vehement resistance to the dissolution of love. You might not think one such of these situations would be fodder for comedy, but in the case of Break Down, you’d be wrong.

To be sure, Break Down is a dark comedy, but in its darkness there’s a sense of mockery that balances sadness with absurdity, resulting in a short that’s far more laughs than tears. For the audience, at least.

Charlie just wants out of her relationship with David. She has her reasons, she’s even written them down, two full pages, and she’s not looking to scream, or fight, or play the blame game, she just wants to say her piece and hit bricks, clean as a Katana cut. David, however, being the self-involved, morose little man he is, can’t let things go that easily, and their last moments together keep getting dragged out in a hilarious if sullen fashion until they crescendo at a subtle and bittersweet conclusion.

Besides being dark and funny, there’s a palpable tenderness to Break Down that elevates it above the realm of comedy into something more oddly realistic for all its eccentricities. You really feel for both leads, played by Davey Johnson (who astute readers of this column will recognize as the father in The Cub) and Kate Freund (The Sarah Silverman Program), and the script by director Christopher Winterbauer is whip-smart and achingly elegant.

This is one of those films that never occupies the same emotional space twice, everything is a progression or digression from the feeling before it, and the way Winterbauer structures and balances this makes Break Down not just highly-entertaining, but highly-effective, impactful, and resonant. I’m pretty sure you’re going to love it.

This is another short that premiered over at Short of the Week. Give them some click love.

‘Break Down’ is a Dark, Absurd, and Elegant End to a Love Gone Sour was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An FSR/OPS original video essay.

Jeff Nichols’ Mud tells of a lost soul (Matthew McConaughey) returned to the small river community that raised him for the dual purpose of evading the law and reuniting with an old love. It also tells of a young boy (Tye Sheridan) who over the course of the film and the perils he encounters — both physically and emotionally — learns how to be a man. It is a film of fathers and sons, real and metaphorical, and ultimately it is a story about love.

In my latest video essay, I explore the connection between the film’s various father figures and their influence and impact on a young man’s coming-of-age.

For more original video essays, click here.

Somethin’ Your Daddy Never Did: Jeff Nichols’ ‘Mud,’ Love, and Manhood was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘Beauty and the Beast’ maintains today’s biggest box office trend.

“It was Beauty and the Beast killed the beast…at the box office.” — paraphrasing fictional character Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong/Dudley Moore/Jack Black) seems appropriate on the occasion of Disney’s latest remake crushing the competition over the weekend. Both Logan and The Belko Experiment ran ads telling people to see “the beast” instead of “the beauty,” though that campaign would have made the most sense for Kong: Skull Island given King Kong is the source of that quote above. Well, Beauty and the Beast made more than three times as much as all those movies put together in its debut. Moviegoers overwhelmingly preferred the beauty.

Today is the rare Monday morning where a hit really does look like history. The spin and hype about Beauty and the Beast being a big deal is deserved. Taking in a $175m domestic gross, the live-action adaptation of the 1991 animated classic truly has broken the March record for best opening, even with adjustments for inflation, edging ahead of last year’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. It’s also taken the Spring opening record, the PG-rated movie opening record and best PG-rated IMAX release. It’s also, obviously, the biggest opener of the Disney remake bunch, which includes Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, and The Jungle Book.

What this success means, of course, is that Disney has a strong defense to keep on adapting its animated features, something that makes a lot of us groan with disappointment with every new announcement. Sorry, guys, but it’s clearly what the people want, along with their Star Wars (Beauty actually performed better than Rogue One), Harry Potter (which like Beauty stars Emma Watson), superhero, and dinosaur movies. Beauty comes in sixth for all-time domestic openings, the rest of the top 10 falling into those other categories — that’s not adjusted for inflation, which when figured in drops the new Disney release to 12th while moving Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest up higher. Otherwise the list is mostly unchanged.

It’s also great for director Bill Condon, who now has three of the top 20 openers of all time (two of them with the inflation adjustment), though neither his name nor his talent were necessarily contributing factors to such success. What also should be taken into consideration, always, with these big box office numbers is they’re achieved with much wider releases than were seen for the original Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Batman, Beauty and the Beast, etc. The same goes for the figures we see for global box office, with more cinemas, more markets, more simultaneous releases being reported. Outside the US, Beauty overshot expectations and grossed another $180m.

What this also means is that glorified fan films continue to be the big sell these days. That isn’t as much a knock on Beauty as it might seem. That’s just where we’re at these days. When the modern blockbuster era began in the late ’70s, the movies were big, high-quality homages to lower art cinema such as serials, and then everything was B movie fare turned on its head as big budget spectaculars. First stuff was made by guys who loved the things they were reworking on the grander scale, and then the studios followed suit with what seemed to be the same idea. Now the fandom has come back around, but it’s not inspired homage so much as nostalgic continuations.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which holds the opening weekend record, is a fan film, just one that is officially authorized and recognized as canon. It continues a story without involvement of the original creator and is made by someone who grew up with the property and is indeed a fan. And that’s not a bad movie. Jurassic World is directed by a fan of Jurassic Park. And that’s not a good movie. Batman v Superman plays more like it’s in the tradition of fan films and mashup videos pitting characters against each other than comic book adaptations, even if superhero battles are also found on the page, as well. That’s fine if the initial gimmick of the pitch is supported by a strong story, and it’s not fine if not.

There’s no direct quote that I can find, but many articles and interview intros have referred to Condon as a fan or even “superfan” of the 1991 animated version of Beauty, and Watson has also admitted a certain fondness for the original. In remaking the movie, they’ve then similarly created a sort of fan film, not unlike the amateur shot-for-shot Raiders of the Lost Ark remake that some kids famously worked on for years. And scene to scene, it’s not all that different from cosplay reenactments of iconic moments. The distinction is that it is officially authorized, it is well-funded, and it is produced above and below the line by very talented professionals.

Technically you could argue that most non-original movies today are fan films, whether they’re adapted by people who loved the book being translated to the screen or remade by a movie buff with respect and nod to the previous version. A lot of the time that is a benefit in terms of the passion for the material. But also a lot of the time it means too much faithful copying and devotion to both creators and their followers. Sometimes, in the cases of The Force Awakens and to a minor degree Beauty, we get a little extra in terms of fresh characters or story depth, but with both there’s still too much that’s replication over renovation.

If It Ain’t Broke: Visual Comparisons Between Beauty and the Beast, Animated and Live-Action

Straight remakes, like Beauty, are problematic for their redundancy, and even more than the past Disney remakes, this one appears most faithful in its plot and costuming. To the point where it’s easy to mistake cosplayer photos for movie stills. It makes sense that it’s what Disney fans have wanted most. Seeing beloved animated classics turned to flesh and blood is something fans get a kick out of at Disney theme parks around the world. But it’s actually cheaper to watch Luke Evans portray Gaston at the local movie theater than seeing a Disneyland cast member in person or, another alternative, attending the Broadway adaptation.

And these movies are more adaptation than remake, too, because they’re a translation to a slightly different medium. People don’t read as much as they used to, so a very popular animated film like Beauty being turned into a live-action movie is similar to, say, an old best seller such as “Gone With the Wind” being brought to the big screen. In both situations the studios are giving fans of something an extension of that thing to be enjoyed in a new way. But now there are more fans in the middle delivering the product to the fanbases. That’s obviously working very well for both parties. What it’s doing for the movies as a creative art form, though, is up for debate.

Disney Cosplay Film is Humongous Hit was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A look at Disney’s live-action remakes to assess whether the music of the originals is still necessary.

As Disney celebrates opening their live-action take of Beauty and the Beast to the tune of $170m domestically, they are also preparing another re-imagining. It should come as no surprise that many of their properities are making the transition to live-action and Mulan is looking like the next movie to get a fresh treatment. The only problem is that Disney is considering releasing the movie without music.

“Yes, from what I understand, no songs right now, much to the horror of my children.” Director of Mulan, Niki Caro.

When the new director of the live-action Mulan sat down with Moviefone while promoting her new film, The Zookeeper’s Wife, she confirmed that Disney has no plans to make the new Mulan a musical. That means all the hit songs you might remember from the original animated film are gone. No “Honor to Us All”, “Reflection”, “A Girl Worth Fighting For.” Probably the most missed song of all will is “I’ll Make a Man Out of You”.

Outside of Beauty and the Beast, this has been the direction of many of the live-action Disney re-imaginings. The Jungle Book managed to keep some of its songs although it wasn’t a musical either. The director of Jungle Book, Jon Favreau, struggled with trying to keep some of the music people adored with the original version, while also favoring the action/adventure tone of his live-action feature. “We wanted to include enough music to satisfy people who grew up w 67 film but not make it a musical or betray action tone,” he said at the time. Cinderella, on the other hand, was without its musical tunes of ‘A Wish Your Heart Makes’ or ‘Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo’, because that just wasn’t the direction the screenwriters wasn’t to go with for that production.

With the way Niki Caro worded her response, she must be disappointed that Mulan won’t feature any of the original music from the animated feature. Disney is doing a lot of things correctly with this new adaptation; they hired Niki Caro (a female director who will become only the second woman ever to helm a feature budgeted at over $100m for Disney), Disney is making a great effort to make sure the film is culturally authentic, and they are setting out to only hire Chinese actors for the parts including Mulan herself. Caro is even promising that Mulan will be “…a big, girly martial arts epic. It will be extremely muscular and thrilling and entertaining and moving.” That should excite many fans of the original, but not bringing the music, at least in some form, would be a mistake.

Disney and musicals have always seemed to go hand-in-hand. Walt Disney himself was always pushing the boundaries of his art by creating cartoons that specialized in the usage of sound. The first appearance of Mickey Mouse was in Steamboat Willie, a cartoon short feature that pushed for being the first synchronized sound cartoon. It opens with Mickey famously whistling a tune that would become synonymous with the cartoon and company for that matter. Disney wouldn’t be pleased with just accomplishing that feat. He took it a step further with Fantastia, marrying classical music to vivid imagery. He was always pushing the limits with animation and music. The Disney Company’s best features continue his vision.

The best Disney films arguably feature the best musical score. Even more successful Disney animated features as of late, like Tangled and Frozen, succeed because they have music that resonates far beyond the brief run times of their films. More often than not, the best films that have come out of Disney have been measured on their soundtracks. When you take the music out of these films, they become a little bit more generic.

Can you imagine if Disney’s Beauty and the Beast didn’t have songs? How about The Lion King? Well thankfully while we already know that Beauty and the Beast and Lion King have their songs in tact, other features aren’t going to be as lucky it seems. It’s hard to imagine many of the Disney classic films without their music, but it seems if it was a film without a truly signature soundtrack, the music is discarded altogether. Other than the two aforementioned films, the upcoming Aladdin and Little Mermaid features will likely be musicals as well.

Hopefully Caro and the screenwriters for Mulan will find someway to include the songs in Mulan. It would be disappointment for sure that only select films are making their transition to live-action with music intact. There’s still sometime for that to change before the film releases late 2018, but until then I plan to listen to ‘ I’ll Make A Man Out Of You’ a few dozen more times at least.

A ‘Mulan’ Without The Songs was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘Deidra & Laney Rob a Train’ Is Dual Genre Delight

The high school heist earns the pun “Ocean’s For Teen.”

Contrary to the title, Deidra and Laney rob many trains. They become prolific thieves, mastering and streamlining their illegal profession into the delicate series of events we usually see in heist movies. All while the sisters attend high school. Yes, Deidra & Laney Rob a Train is both a caper film and a high school comedy and for every moment it stumbles at one, it excels at the other.

Put into a desperate living situation after their mother’s (Danielle Nicolet) nervous breakdown-induced incarceration (she liberates a TV from her blue-poloed electronics store job, then this mortal coil), elder sister Deidra (Ashleigh Murray) must care for her younger sister Laney (Rachel Crow) and kid brother Jet (Lance Gray) against forces such as mortgage payments and snooping CPS agents. I like movies that understand how a small part of the world works and use that knowledge to inform how their worlds unfold. Deidra & Laney understands a few parts very well: commercial trains, high school drama, and the suburban working class.

On top of finding money to pay for bail, bills, and food for the family, Deidra’s a senior. Valedictorian, too. That means college is — unexpectedly for her school — an option. We learn this via an animated performance by Sasheer Zamata as the world’s coolest guidance counselor, a job that movies already romanticize like English teacher or lawyer. She’s here to get Deidra into the Ivy League so they can both move on to bigger and better things, but pressure mounts as the problems pile up and the solutions dwindle.

Sydney Freeland’s direction keeps the film inventive, snappy, and bubbly — the perfect combination to bridge the gap between unpopular Laney’s surprise nomination for Miss Teen Idaho and the decision to start stealing from boxcars. This final solution comes not just from the meandering track behind the family’s house, but a meandering ex-member of the family. Their father Chet (David Sullivan), deftly defined as a complex combination of charming and toxic, is a yard mechanic whose trainjacking knowledge offsets his deadbeat finances. He mentions the crime in passing, but by now we know that Deidra is an ambitious girl.

Then the fun really starts. A beautiful montage of planning, explanation, and execution empowers the sisters with all the moxie of Hollywood’s vaultbusters and an easy-breezy familial bond forged by hateful words and loving gestures. The script may include a few too many pet names (“glitter bunny”?) that underestimate how believable their relationship already is to its audience, but the pace is quick and the conversations always feel real. First time screenwriter Shelby Farrell captures the dichotomy of petty immaturity and graduate-and-you’re-not-my-problem responsibility thrust upon high schoolers on the cusp of the real world. She also shows how far past that cusp some students — minority students, impoverished students, disabled students, anyone that may not have the same privileges as the rest — are pushed.

And yes, the family members (aside from Chet) are people of color. It’s not an accident. The film allows them to be simultaneously hard workers undone by the system and badasses finding empowerment where they shouldn’t (either by robbing trains or finding the small pleasures in prison), weaving complexity where kitsch or indie insufferability could overwhelm. The family is real, even if the train is just the way we understand them. They’re the 63% of Americans who’re one emergency away from being on the street. The crime is the dreaded hypothetical, discussed over microwaved dinner, proving both desperation and ability.

All this subtlety would be for naught without the leads. Ashleigh Murray wows whether in science class or busting a lock with a hoe. She crackles and sparks as she seeks personal success, preens and flexes when she achieves it — all standing completely still. She and Rachel Crow share the quick jabber and lived-in facial expressions that fade the idea that they’re actors far into the background. When they’re in front of us, all we’re wondering is what they’ll do after throwing a boxload of jeans off a moving train, forever changing the meaning of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

The script can get a bit too cutesy at times (all the basic white girls at school obsess over Taylor Swift) and Jet’s character exists as cliched plot motivation more than anything (always need a child being threatened by authority), but the film’s a delightfully vulgar blast. The teens talk like teens. It’s surprisingly refreshing to hear “Aw, shit” from a young person outside a Judd Apatow film. Tim Blake Nelson’s over-zealous train cop is the one tonal misstep in the whole precariously pitched movie, somehow not threatening enough while being an attempt at the wrong kind of humor. The rest of the film is so sharp that his character’s bumbling makes it feel a lot more low-rent than it deserves. Heroes of this caliber, even if they’re teen criminals that use their money to stunt on their bitchy ex-friends, deserve a villain to match.

I’m not wont to recommend the creation of more films in a genre mashup so rife with pretentious pratfalls as teen/heist, but if they’re all about sisters finding personal empowerment through a bit of Robin Hoodery (and they’re all directed by Freeland), I’m game for much more.

Review — ‘Deidra & Laney Rob a Train’ Is Dual Genre Delight was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How QT established his film’s central tension in the opening minutes.

The opening sequence of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a 17-page slow boil that introduces us to Colonel Hans Landa (Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz), aka “The Jew Hunter,” as he pays a visit to a dairy farmer in the idyllic French countryside. He’s there because of all the Jewish families living in the area, only one hasn’t been accounted for, which Waltz believes is because someone — namely the dairy farmer — is hiding them from the Nazis. As he downs the farmer’s delicious milk, Landa calmly, cooly, and masterfully manipulates the farmer through false promises to reveal that he in fact is the one hiding the unaccounted-for family. This is when Landa shows his true colors by inviting his troops inside to spray bullets through the floorboards, killing all the hiding family except for young daughter Shoshanna, who Landa allows to escape into the hills.

It’s a time bomb of a scene — after all, there’s no such thing as a polite Nazi — and more than being yet another exemplary example of Tarantino’s prowess with dialogue and character, according to the latest video essay from Michael Tucker for his Lessons from the Screenplay channel on YouTube entitled “Inglourious Basterds — The Elements of Suspense,” it’s also a masterclass in building an entire film’s dramatic tension from a single scene.

Too often, I think, when we talk about Tarantino the writer we linger on what I first mentioned above, his characters and their dialogue, and while that is certainly one of QT’s fortes, never forget that he is also a ridiculously talented storyteller capable of creating unique moods, atmospheres, and tones at the same time he’s shocking us with words and actions.

Y’all know by now how much I dig Tucker’s work, and yet again I find myself saying this could be his best essay to date and whole-heartedly believing it. Press play and judge for yourself.

Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France: ‘Inglorious Basterds’ First Scene Explained was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What the fairy tale’s success among adults suggests about society.

Beauty and the Beast, the latest in a string of live-action Disney adaptations, exceeded lofty expectations this past weekend to gross $350 million worldwide. Though impressive, this development is not necessarily surprising: live-action titles like Maleficent, Cinderella, and The Jungle Book have all chalked up substantial box-office returns, and the original Disney animation is widely beloved. What is surprising, however, is that a reported half of the film’s audience was non-family; that is, adults seeing the film without children. Beauty and the Beast is not Harry Potter — its themes are simple and unambiguous, its cartoonish characters painted in broad strokes. So why might a fairy tale about 17th century France generate such worldwide appeal?

One of the most striking aspects of director Rob Condon’s live-action adaptation is how familiar it is. The film’s visual design, down to the characters’ costumes and the composition of certain shots, recreates the look of the 1991 classic to a tee. One gets the distinct impression that the film is not so much trying to shake up our memories of what Beauty and the Beast is but to invoke them; to reassure us that this is indeed the classic story we remember, and that we need not worry about the undue violation of our expectations. Overblown controversies about the film’s gay Le Fou aside, Condon’s film is anything but subversive. This Beauty and the Beast does little beyond racially diversifying the cast to bring the fairy tale into a modern context.

The film’s appeal, then, seems to be as a kind of foothold, less a bearer of cultural change than a bulwark against it. In a world that grows increasingly complex and unpredictable by the day, adult audiences seem to need such a foothold — an assurance that things have not changed as much as it seems since 1991, or indeed since the 17th century. The tension between tradition and revision has always been a part of fairy tale, and as theorists like Maria Tatar note, the archetypal pairing of Beauty (male or female) and Beast (male or female) far predates our modern conception of the story. “Beast was not always a suitor living in regal isolation;” Tatar writes, “Beauty was not always kept in a castle.” But the relative gradualness of cultural change in eras past has assured that fairy tales could retain their perennial relevance. Stories could change just enough to meet the demands of a new audience while nevertheless feeling timeless.

It is worth asking whether this pattern will continue in the coming decades. How will classic fairy tales fare amid a global landscape that becomes less and less recognizable? Such tales are predicated on the existence of certain constants in human nature: the duality between humans’ animal and rational spirit, the role of empathy in romantic love, and our ambivalence about beauty. These tensions indeed feel like constants, and Beauty and the Beast’s success suggests that their relevance endures. But it’s hard not to suspect that the film’s appeal is as much the result of future shock as deep resonance.

Will Beauty and the Beast survive our changing relationship to non-human animals, shifting conceptions of gender, or rapid technological advance? At the moment, it seems it will. But so long as cultural progress drives humanity further and further from its unconscious animal nature, fairy tales may increasingly seem like quaint if not downright unwelcome reminders of our past. As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim famously explained, fairy tales help the child bring unconscious challenges into the conscious mind, facilitating the process of psychological maturity. If Beauty and the Beast’s success among adults is any indication, the modern world has driven many aspects of our nature into the unconscious. We may not like what we see when such beastly qualities come into the light.

‘Beauty and the Beast’ in the Modern World was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Taking a look at the French director’s fascinating filmography.

One of the biggest films of 2016, La La Land, owes a thing or two to French director Jacques Demy. The bright, colorful musical visually mirrors Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), and director Damien Chazelle was able to capture something of the melancholic sweetness of Demy’s musicals. Demy is not one of the most famous French directors, however his films have a specific charm and intelligence that no other filmmaker could match. The way he blended Hollywood style with French culture was unlike any other filmmaker at the time.

Demy began his career in 1960s France, during the time of the “Nouvelle Vague” or French New Wave. This was the time of films such as Breathless, Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows, and Le Beau Serge. However, Demy lies a little bit outside of this group of filmmakers, and is more frequently associated with the Left Bank group — which also includes Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Demy’s wife, Agnes Varda. Robert Farmer of Senses of Cinema notes that these filmmakers’ works were more politically, aesthetically, and intellectually demanding than those of Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol.

Demy’s early works such as Lola and Bay of Angels bear more of a resemblance to the traditional French New Wave films, with their grainy black and white cinematography and hand-held camera work. Demy is particularly interesting because his films are less literary and are more traditionally cinematic than the other Left Bank directors. By 1964, Demy had found the perfect balance between classical Hollywood cinema and intellectual European art cinema. His films look lush and sumptuous, yet the visuals do not distract from his underlying critiques of social class, gender roles, and French society. Demy’s films frequently take place in fantasy worlds, yet still address real-life issues: they are musicals (Umbrellas, Young Girls, Une chambre en ville) or fairy tales (Donkey Skin, The Pied Piper), and magic and fate become intertwined with practical matters such as money, marriage, and work.

Jonathan Rosenbaum points out that Demy is frequently misunderstood in English-speaking countries in that he is not considered a political filmmaker. Rosenbaum notes that while Demy did make musicals, fairy tales, and films drawing on classical Hollywood, he also dealt with the real world and real places, such as Cherbourg and Rochefort. Although his films take place in fantasy worlds, they also address serious issues such as the Algerian War, heartbreak, labor strikes, and single motherhood. Rosenbaum writes that Demy’s musicals are unique in that they are sung-through, with narrative information being conveyed through song, rather than having the songs halt the narrative, as in traditional musicals.

His first musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, is a tragic love story in which the young lovers, played by Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo, are separated because of the Algerian War. The film is melodramatic and colorful, with the over-the-top visuals mirroring the dramatic narrative situations. It sometimes seems as though the screen is bursting with feelings, which is heightened further by the fact that characters sing their lines rather than simply speaking. Within this world of bright orange and pink wallpaper and color-coordinated costumes, Deneuve and Castelnuovo deal with the heartbreak of war, unplanned pregnancy, losing family members, and the difficulty of returning to one’s hometown after serving as a soldier. Just because the world appears bright and people constantly sing and dance, does not mean that everything is good and happy all the time. This is not mindless entertainment, even if it appears that way.

Similarly, The Young Girls of Rochefort is not as sunny as it appears either. After all, about halfway through the film an axe murder takes place, and the characters cheerfully make jokes about it as they read about it in the newspaper and pass by the crime scene. Rosenbaum notes that the film begins with dancers performing on a suspension bridge, which is a reference to Demy’s childhood as he grew up around suspension bridges. The dancers perform inconsistently throughout the film — sometimes all of the characters onscreen dance in unison, and other times only a few people dance on the periphery of the frame while the other characters walk or stand still. Rosenbaum notes that this instability gives one a sense of unease and exuberance at the same time — something only Demy is able to achieve. Rosenbaum refers to this as “defamiliarizing,” or making strange, the form of the musical. His films borrow visuals and musical cues from Hollywood musicals of the 1950s — such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Singin’ in the Rain, and An American in Paris — but the themes he deals with are not as simple as heterosexual romance or being successful in one’s career.

In Rochefort, Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac star as artistically talented twin sisters who long to move away to Paris. Their mother, played by Danielle Darrieux, owns a french fry shop, and works constantly while raising their little brother, Booboo (Patrick Jeantet). Demy addresses single motherhood here, suggesting that just because a woman has raised three children on her own, does not mean she cannot also be a successful businesswoman. Her daughters seem to follow in her footsteps, as they live independently from her and make their way through life by giving music and dancing lessons to children. The women in Demy’s films are interesting, complex, and successful. Deneuve and Dorléac’s characters have distinct personalities and each want different things out of life, yet they constantly support each other along the way.

The film is also visually fascinating, as all of Demy’s films are. It is well-known that the film was shot on location, and that Demy had shutters and walls repainted in bright pastel colors in order to make the world of the film more cohesive. The twins wear the same costumes — the same dresses, hats, jewellery, and shoes — although each one is always in a different color from the other. Everything onscreen is symmetrical, especially the dance numbers that take place in the town square. The wide frame makes this symmetry all the more impressive, as Demy had to carefully compose these large-scale shots. As I mentioned earlier, his references to Hollywood musicals are twisted — he takes the colors and the beautiful shot composition from Stanley Donen’s films and amplifies them as much as he possibly can.

In 1970, Demy directed Donkey Skin, also starring Catherine Deneuve. This film is a musical as well as a fairy tale (based on Charles Perreault’s Donkeyskin), and is just as visually beautiful and intense as the two other films I have mentioned so far. In much the same way that Demy makes the form of the musical seem strange, he does the same thing with the fairy tale in Donkey Skin. Demy takes the traditional elements of a fairy tale — Medieval setting, kings and princesses, a castle, romance, magic — and twists them around, making them seem humorous and slightly disturbing. He also makes references to Jean Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast, including having human actors play statues, and casting Jean Marais, who played the Beast. Demy takes elements from this classical fairy tale film, and spins them around to fit his own strange interpretation.

The film mostly deals with incest, as the King (Jean Marais) is set on marrying his daughter, played by Deneuve — clearly not light and romantic subject matter. The Princess is so disturbed that she flees the kingdom and ruins her appearance so that she appears to be a poor beggar who wears donkey skin as clothing. The terrifying prospect of her father attempting to marry her makes her leave behind her past identity entirely. Of course, there are also some lighthearted and whimsical scenes such as when the Princess bakes a cake for the Prince, which includes Catherine Deneuve singing to herself across reverse shots. The ending is also quite humorous yet also strange, as the King and the Lilac Fairy (Delphine Seyrig) arrive in a helicopter to announce their marriage to one another.

I have only outlined three of Jacques Demy’s films here in order to explore his eccentric and unique filmmaking style. To this day, there is no other director who so perfectly blends melodrama, Hollywood glamor, and harsh social critique. His films are endlessly entertaining and emotional, yet at the same time they confront uncomfortable realities about life, specifically French life in the 1960s and 70s. Demy cultivated a strange but beautiful filmmaking style, and, together with his wife Agnes Varda, is one of the most unstoppable and underrated French directors of all time.

The Magic of Jacques Demy was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.