Remember Moonrise

Michael C here to make sure memory one of 2012's masterpieces isn't washed away in a flood of Oscar bait. 

The more I think about the final moments of Moonrise Kingdom the more it feels like the saddest thing I’ve seen at the movies all year.

At first glance it feels like the ending couldn’t be much happier. The young lovers are reunited, the storm has passed, and even if things aren’t perfect life is left in greater balance than when the story began. Yet on repeat viewings a nagging feeling of loss rises to the surface. Sam and Suzy are together but it’s not accidental that the last thing we see them do is say goodbye to each other. We first meet Suzy as a raven and now the soundtrack sings of birds flying away in the changing seasons. In film’s closing moments we see Suzy pause to acknowledge Sam’s painting of their beachfront camp. Their stolen adventure sits there, already frozen in the past.

This For Your Consideration reminder continues after the jump...

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Melanie 'Must Be Going'... With A Playlist

Hello everyone! My little guest blogging stint has come to an end.

It has been really fun, and I want to thank Nathaniel from the bottom of my heart for entrusting me with his wonderful blog for a few posts.

"Hello, I Must Be Going" September 7th in theaters!

So, right now I am preparing for a movie that I'm shooting in October, and one of the things I always do to prepare is to create a playlist for my work. It's a collection of songs that will bring up specific feelings for me, or music I think the character would like, or songs that have an energy to them that feels right for the tone of the film. I usually find that while we're shooting, I will start to listen to one song from the playlist kind of obsessively, and that song will be my "theme song" for the movie. 

When I was shooting the strip club scene in Away We Go, I listened to the Band Of Horses song "No-One's Gonna Love You" so many times that it became the number one most played song on my ipod the next day. Doing The Informant! I only listened to music from the soundtracks to 80s movies. "Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong" became my song for that one.  I have also noticed that I kind of do that same thing in my life... my theme song for the summer has been Conor Oberst's "Lenders In The Temple". I just keep going back to it right now. And crying, because it's gorgeous, and heart wrenching. 

the strip scene in "Away We Go"

My favourite thing about this little guest hosting thing has been interacting with all you smart, funny, film lovers in the comments.

So for my last post I would love to hear any and all of your stories about theme songs! Perhaps your life has a theme song right now? Maybe you like to listen to music at work, like I do, to get you in a certain frame of mind? Maybe there is a movie that uses music in a way you have really loved? My two favourite directors soundtrack-wise are Sofia Coppola (I lost my mind when The Cure's "All Cats Are Grey" started playing in Marie Antoinette!!!) and Wes Anderson (Nico in The Royal Tenenbaums comes immediately to mind). Or, we can be negative too! Maybe there's a song you hate that is used all the time in movies? If you have a story, or even just a random thought, I want to hear it.  And ask away in the comments if you want to know what my song was for any particular movie. Thanks for reading everyone and thanks again Nathaniel!!!

Wishing you all good things.

xo, Melanie

[Editor's Note. Thank you again to fine actress Melanie Lynskey for these amazing peaks into her process (here's a playlist to accompany her post), behind the scenes, into her DVD collection, and especially those love letters to and from her favorite talents in the movie industry. Give her a huge round of applause -- she really went all out! -- and go see "Hello, I Must Be Going" on Friday, September 7th when it opens. It's her best performance yet and a too rare opportunity to see her carry a whole film.  -Nathaniel R]

'Growing Up Cinephile' by Leslye Headland

Photography by Bruce Gilbert, Provincetown International Film Festival[Editor's Note: Leslye Headland, whose debut film 'Bachelorette' opens on September 7th is today's very special guest blogger. I'm loving this memoir  -Nathaniel R]

When preparing for this guest blog, I thought about what I would’ve written about if I were guest blogging seven years ago as my blogger alter ego, Arden. Most likely I would’ve wanted to get super nerdy and introspective so here we go:

If you’re like me, movies are your life. They cheer you up. They bring you down. They connect you to people. They alienate you from others. You develop passionate arguments about the state of film today. You rehearse those arguments in your head then unleash them upon unsuspecting acquaintances during an otherwise friendly gathering. They can get you a job. (I truly believe my first assistant gig was secured by my encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars). They can get you laid. (My number one turn-on in bed? Oscar trivia.)

As Truffaut said, we are sick people. But we weren’t always this way. What happened? Well, if you go back in your life, I bet you can find the most formative years were shaped by a handful of films. I decided to take a look at the symbiotic nature of what I watched and when I watched it.

SENTIENCE!

Love and Death (1975, dir. Woody Allen)

This is the first film I ever remember watching. I slept on the top bunk in the bedroom I shared with my sister. From there, I could see the TV in the living room and would watch films my parents put on when they thought we were asleep. Love and Death was mind-fuck for an eight year old. Absurd physical comedy coupled with Prokofiev? It looked like a grown-up film but it was funny enough to entertain a child. However all the Bergman references were unsettling. I was filled with joy and a tinge of dread. Later in life, a professor described my senior thesis directing project as “the work of a sincerely disturbed person who has an infantile sense of humor.” I blame Woody.

CHILDHOOD!

The Philadelphia Story (1940, dir. George Cukor)
Rear Window (1954, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

 

Being brought up in a strict religious home where pop culture was shunned, it was all glamour all the time. No 80s teen movies or cartoons for me (I didn't see The Goonies til I was 27) ...

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Best Shot: "The Royal Tenenbaums"

In the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series anything with a webspace is invited to join us in choosing a single "best" shot from pre-selected films.

When I first saw The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001, I loved it but wondered quietly if it didn't lose a little steam as it went. That'd be a bittersweet but fitting artistic fate for a movie that's about a family of child prodigies who can't escape the long shadows of their early promise and exist in a kind of static bewilderment at their present emotional state(s). As it turns out The Royal Tenenbaums, unlike the Tenenbaum children, only improves with age. It's looking more and more like Wes Anderson's indisputable masterpiece.

Still, it's easy to see where my initial feeling sprang from. The movie opens so well, with unimproveable voiceover work by Alec Baldwin (clinically observant but never unfeeling) detailing the overachieving childhoods of Chas (Ben Stiller), Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Richie (Luke Wilson), followed by endearingly deadpan "22 years later" character cards that it just has to be downhill from there? 

Not so.

The movie keeps reintroducing us this eccentric troubled clan. I don't normally choose iconic familiar shots as "best" both out of fear of cliché and out of the archaeological instincts of the cinephile -- always looking for new things to admire in a beloved film. But I give up here. Whenever I think of The Royal Tenenbaums, I think of Margot and the greenline bus.

We've already met Margot twice: Once as a precocious unhappy child playwright. Then as a beautiful miserable adult in a brilliant two-part scene wherein Anderson invites us to compare the omniscient narrator's observations about Margot with her detached relationship to her husband (Bill Murray, besotted and baffled and hilarious) and her instant regression with her endlessly supportive mother Etheline (Anjelica Huston, perfect throughout). "Why does he get to do that?" Margot whines about her brother moving back home.

This, my choice for Best Shot is our third major introduction.

With each introduction Anderson gives us not just more character details, but reenforcing self-referential humor (how great is the "no smoking" sign on the bus in a scene that at first feels devoid of the usual cluttered wit of the Anderson frame?), and fresh ways of thinking about these indelible characters. In our third introduction, though we're already as baffled by her as Raleigh and as worried for her as Etheline, we're suddenly seeing her through Richie's eyes; her sad-eyed beauty is intact but she's lit up by sunshine and meant to be loved obsessively... or even incestuoustly. Who can blame Richie? 

The movie's obsessive accumulation of introductions, its front loaded feeling, are a gorgeous almost spiritual mirror to the Tenenbaums own experience, continual promise trapped in static adolescent pain. It takes something as jarring as weddings and deaths to nudge them forward.

These are the other two shots I considered, both of them because of Margot. In truth when I'm watching the movie it feels perfectly balanced as an ensemble piece (and I love every character... especially Pagoda and Etheline) but outside of the actual experience of watching it, Margot tends to absorb my imagination.

Wes Anderson understands, as too few modern directors do, that two, three, four and even five-shots can sometimes give you more information about a single character than a closeup of that same character can; you need to see how they fit into the world they live in. Margot internalizes her otherness as the adopted child and the movie beautifully finds its way in to this girl's notoriously secretive headspace.

This view of Margot apart from her family is repeated in the hospital scene where she leans against a door while the other characters huddle near Richie's bed, barraging him with questions about his suicide attempt. She's inside the "Recovery Room" but she's not healing.

Of course it's dark, it's a suicide note."

This time Wes Anderson and his cinematographer Robert Yeoman move the camera in for a heartbreak closeup. Margot is further away from Richie than anyone in the room but she's the closest to him. They're just going to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that.

Armchair Audience [Best Shot First Timer. Welcome!]
For Your Speculation [Best Shot First Timer. Welcome !]
Intifada "died tragically rescuing his family..."
Serious Film "wounded zebra"
Antagony & Ecstasy "in all honesty, my second favorite shot"
Amiresque 
Low Resolution "...well, it can't be very good for your eyes anyway"
Okinawa Assault
Film Actually [Royal Tenenbaums Virgin!]
Pussy Goes Grrr "Wes Anderson never wastes a frame." 
Movies Kick Ass "group hug"
Against the Hype [Welcome him back!]  
Encore Entertainment ...

Final 4 of "Hit Me" Season 3 (Join us!)
August 1st How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)
August 8th Sherlock Jr (1924)... only 44 minutes long and available on Netflix Instant Watch. 
August 15th Singin in the Rain (1952) for Gene Kelly's centennial month!
August 22nd Dog Day Afternoon (SEASON 3 FINALE - 40 years ago this very day the events in the film take place)

Burning Questions: Are We Ignoring Wes Anderson's Dark Side?

Michael C. here to try to look past the standard take on one of our leading filmmakers. 

Steve Zissou: This is going to hurt.

I have decided that I am no longer interested in reading reviews of Wes Anderson films that contain the word “quirky” in the opening paragraph. Same goes for “twee”.

Over and over I read that, what do you know, Wes Anderson has gone and made another Wes Anderson movie. It’s about time, don’t you think, that people take a more substantive look at a one of the most distinctive bodies of work of the last two decades? A body of work whose deeper currents are often ignored amid the same old talk about flat compositions and diorama sets. Anderson’s movies have a lingering impact that defies those would dismiss his carefully composed world as emotionally detached. Right below that carefully composed surface are the deeper currents of a director preoccupied with death, loss, and alienation.

With all the focus on his signature colorful style are we ignoring Wes Anderson’s dark side? 

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