Movie Enthusiast Issue 20: Movies—they make us throw things across the room in rage
I can vaguely recall an awards show opening number from a few years ago that celebrated all the many feelings we get at the movies. (Yes, I realize I’ve just described the premise of basically every awards show opening number in the history of awards shows.) “The movies—they make us laugh, they make us cry, they terrify us out of our wits, they make us fall in love with the world all over again!” Intriguingly, nobody ever touts one particular emotion that movies are pretty darn good at evoking: anger.
Who wants to take a guess at how many theatrically-released movies from the past year played the “this will make you furious” card as a selling point? I haven’t checked, but The Big Short, inspired by the inside story of events that led to the global financial collapse, is the only one that springs to mind. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that documentaries, particularly of the environmentalist and civil rights variety, also regularly promise a healthy dose of fury in their marketing campaigns to get viewers with a certain penchant for outrage in seats (or in front of Netflix-streaming devices).
Otherwise, most movies seem to bank on wooing viewers away from the bottomless fountain of outrage spewing forth from their every mobile device and social media app. Since box office returns are dependent on good word of mouth, a movie that alienates its opening night audience with a rage-inducing plot twist or central premise taken to an infuriating conclusion isn’t likely to win any audiences on days 2, 3, 4, and onward. Thus: The movies! They make us laugh, they make us cry…
Now don’t get me wrong: there’s something perversely thrilling about movies that, intentionally or not, end up ticking you off. Let me use as an example the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1981 film Blind Chance. Brief synopsis: a young man in Cold War-era Poland has a train to catch, and in three branching storylines the film shows three different directions his life could go in at the train station. In scenario 1, he catches the train, gets to his destination, and then ends up a political prisoner. In scenario 2, he misses the train, gets in a scuff with a police officer, ends up in jail where he converts to Catholicism, and upon release gets married—though without feeling entirely fulfilled with his life. In scenario 3, he misses the train but this time runs into his childhood sweetheart, with whom he settles down and contentedly starts a family. [spoilers ahead] At the end of the film, protagonist v3.0, satisfied beyond measure with his life, kisses his wife and child goodbye to go catch a flight. We watch his plane take off from the airport. And then it blows up in midair. THE END.
Rare is the movie that lures you into caring enough about its characters, their stories, and the internal logic of the movie itself, only to snap the mousetrap on you when you least expect it. Blind Chance is one such movie; my reaction to that ending wasn’t of the “aww shucks, why’d they have to go and do that” variety so much as of the YELLING AT THE TELEVISION IN DISMAY variety.
Given how common it is for a movie to leave me with no strong feelings towards it whatsoever, I almost wish more of them would take such chances with testing their audience’s patience for sudden tragedy. Or maybe this just means I ought to spend less time on Twitter, ground zero for outrage, to decondition myself from seeking out these feelings in the first place. You be the judge!
Articles, News, and Interviews
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47 Movies that never made it past the drawing board, including a Stanley Kubrick Lord of the Rings adaptation starring The Beatles, Jean-Paul Sartre's Freud biopic, and a Salvador Dali-penned screenplay for the Marx Brothers.
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Argentina is introducing cinema classes to elementary school curriculums. Sweet!
Meanwhile in North America: a new initiative in New York City will create a $5 million fund for film and theater projects by, about, and for women.
Poster of the Day
Time for some geeking out over typography! Let's have a look at some of the posters for film's from this year's New York Film Festival (ongoing now)! Check out the spunky lowercase title on Pedro Almodóvar's Julieta, the sassy Q on that Aquarius poster, or the classy ligature in Mia Hansen-Løve's L'avenir (“Things to Come”)! I bring all these up because, curiously, every other poster feature in this roundup features sans-serif type, save for Paterson, which goes the handwritten route, and I, Daniel Blake, which has that whole spray-painted thing going on. Nevertheless, among the sans-serifs we do have the standout text placement of La fille inconnue, the attention-grabbing color scheme of Fire at Sea, and the thematically-appropriate chunkiness of the Toni Erdmann font. What does all that say about the state of movie poster design in 2016? Maybe this can be a topic of discussion for next time.