Christian Blauvelt's Outstanding Student Film of the Week: Should Have Stayed in Bed

How does comedy work on film? Usually a singular, instantly identifiable presence guides our emotions. We’re drawn into the world and characters of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lucille Ball, Jacques Tati, Bill Murray, Steve Carell or any other comedy auteur. Having a singular personality to relate to and follow on a discrete journey builds narrative tension and ups the stakes for our emotional investment.
Aut Phanthavong’s Should Have Stayed in Bed lacks such a clearly defined hero. The closest thing is a fish, who exists wholly in voiceover. What makes the film work, however, is how it creates comedy through cinematic techniques, particularly editing. Rather than just relying on the comic timing, facial expressions, and reaction shots of a single performer, Should Have Stayed in Bed pulls out tricks like a subjective shot from the fish’s point of view as she looks at a plush fish on which she has a crush.
The story of Should Have Stayed in Bed is simple: a goldfish owner named Sebastian wakes up, spends his day navigating his treacherous school life, and because of all his campus-based distractions ends up neglecting his pet. Tragedy might ensue if Sebastian can’t feed her in time.
Phanthavong does a great job building the stakes for Sebastian that we know are going to prevent him from feeding his goldfish: he gets a drink spilled all over him, has car maintenance problems, etc. Even near the beginning, though, it’s clear that all may not be as it appears since he recognizes his goldfish’s faux British voice coming from a girl he meets. Does this mean that everything we’re seeing is a dream? That Sebastian may never have gotten out of bed? Maybe, maybe not. That’s up to you. It can take a couple viewings to come up with a reasonable hypothesis of what is really going on here, but that ambiguity just makes it all the more engaging.
The film is dripping with charm, and even if the characters are not the most memorable, the situations they’re in are. The way that Phanthavong makes everything unfold is the point here, with whimsical flourishes along the way like the exaggerated barbershop quartet vocalizing that provides ironic accompaniment to the visuals.
Should Have Stayed in Bed doesn’t have a particular point or message, but it’s all the better for that. It doesn’t feel any necessity to imbue its narrative with significance or make a statement about animal rights, for instance. If all films had to have “a point,” I think we’d all just want to stay in bed.

Student Film of the Week: White Lies

Writers are often told, “Write what you know.” That can be difficult when you’re still a college student and haven’t had much life experience. Actually, some of the best writers haven’t experienced anything close to what they write about. But when a story comes around that’s as genuine as Jessica Dito and Frank Sun’s White Lies, you know that it’s key themes and ideas are woven somehow into the fabric of their experience.

White Lies is about a grown woman thinking back to the lies her mother told her to protect her from the harsh realities of the world. There was Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy. Then there was the lie that her cat Gus had just “gone away for awhile” to a “nice place.” Finally, though, when her serviceman father is killed, there’s no way to shield her from reality any longer. But understanding now what her mother was trying to do, that she was trying to preserve for her daughter the innocence of childhood, makes her appreciate her mother’s love for her all the more. “I forgave my mother, and I hope someday my daughter will forgive me too.”

Whether or not the actual events of this film occurred in the lives of Sun or Dito is less important than their grasping at universal truths. Everybody’s parents lie to them at some point, not out of malicious deceit but from benevolence, from the knowledge that falsehoods can be easier to take at a young age than harsh reality. That Sun and Dito have made a film about universal truths that is also so attuned to nuances of the human experience, shows a master’s ability to capture both the universal and the personal, the general and the specific.

What could have been a pedantic film about “making a point” becomes much more interesting because of the personal nature of what happens on screen. The film starts off with the little girl staring out of her car window, then cutting to close-ups of her late father’s flag, her mother’s wedding ring, and her mother looking in the rear-view mirror to check on how her daughter is doing. It was a smart choice not to let the voiceover narration play too large of a role in the film, but rather use it just to set up the basic ideas. Instead, setting up the relationships between the characters and what they are doing through the visuals is a much more effective choice. Right away, we know that someone close to the little girl (probably her father) has died in combat because she is holding the flag, and that it’s her mother driving the car because of the concern she shows looking back at her daughter through the mirror.

Sun and Dito handle the montage of moments where her mother lies to her extremely well. When the narrator mentions Santa Claus, a left-to-right tracking shot surveys the scene of Christmas morning then smoothly dissolves into another tracking shot of the girl discovering that the Tooth Fairy left her money before dissolving to yet another shot of the mother’s face obscured in shadow, with only her eyes illuminated by a key spotlight. That one shot of her mother covered in shadow but for her eyes, conveys such longing and hope for her daughter that she will never have to know pain or despair, but understanding that sadness is inevitable and a part of the human experience.

While all-too-many student filmmakers are merely making genre parodies full of inside-jokes for their friends, how refreshing it is to see a student film break out of merely the student experience and grasp at a greater humanity. White Lies isn’t just a great student film, it’s a great film.

Ben Kweller + OK Go = an awesome time. And lots of dancing, probably.

Am I the only one who's excited for this year's A&O fall show? OK Go and Ben Kweller definitely beat past shows - I mean, I'd never heard of Jurassic 5 until they came to campus.

And trust me, guys, I've seen OK Go live and they do not disappoint. Though they don't run on treadmills on stage (that would be really hard), they end every show with their original dance to "A Million Ways," which is also awesome.

Fun fact: The guy lipsynching? Not the lead singer. The real lead singer is the lanky guy who walks into the frame at the beginning of the video.

Kweller is a singer-songwriter with some really catchy stuff. Can't say I'm an expert on his stuff, but the buzz on campus makes it seem like many Wildcats are more excited about the opening act than the headliner. And Kweller's no stranger to sweet music videos. Check this one out, for the song "Penny on the Train Track." More silly dancing, but this time straight out of the retirement home.

I want to be like this lady when I grow up.

Interested in the show? It's at Patten Gym, Wednesday December 5th at 7pm. Tickets are $10 at the Norris Box Office. Plus, part of the proceeds go to DM, so you're helping to cure pediatric cancer while enjoying great acts.

Todd Haynes: "Don't understand my movie? Piss off."

I’m Not There is a challenging film, illuminating to Dylan fans and completely impenetrable to those who know nothing about the greatest American songwriter of all-time. The film is a loose biopic of Dylan, jumping across different periods of his life with six different actors playing the singer, most notably Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, and Christian Bale.

Blanchett plays the most recognizable version of Dylan, the electric troubadour that blazed audiences in 1965 and 1966, donned in black shades and a leather jacket while running around England. Bale is the confused folkie breaking his way onto the scene in the early ‘60s and quickly becoming disillusioned with the scene, while Ledger is the successful actor with a troubled family life who gets his start by playing Bale’s character in a movie. Sound confusing? It is. No one’s real names are used in this movie other than Allen Ginsburg – you have to infer that Charlotte Gainsbourg is playing Sara, Dylan’s first wife, and that Julianne Moore is playing Joan Baez, one of his first loves.

Then, some parts are just confusing. Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid (!), the outlaw who is laying low after a showdown with Pat Garrett, the sheriff who chased him. Now, here’s where knowledge of Dylan comes in handy, because Dylanites will recognize these names, as Dylan scored the music to the Sam Peckinpah film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The metaphor is simple: at that point in his life, Dylan was hiding from the spotlight, releasing disappointing albums that seemed phoned-in, much like Billy the Kid is trying not to get found out by Johnny Law. But in the film, Billy eventually has to confront society, much like Dylan did. This only dawned on me ten minutes after the movie ended, and I’m a giant Dylan fan – again, not for the casual fan.

The dialogue is a little clunky at times, and director Todd Haynes somewhat annoyingly romanticizes Dylan at times. It’s clear he greatly reveres Dylan, but lines like, “I know more about you then you’ll ever know about me!” sound canned. There’s also the problem of the movie’s insular nature – if you’re not a Dylan fan, this movie will make no sense to you. That’s got to be a problem.

The best parts about this movie are the opening sequence and the soundtrack. The movie balances Dylan tunes and Dylan covers from the official CD release, with artists from Sonic Youth (check out bassist Kim Gordon making an appearance, by the way) to Cat Power to Stephen Malkmus to the Hold Steady. In one of the movie’s few song sequences, there’s a phenomenal version of “Going to Acapulco” as performed by Jim James of My Morning Jacket and Calexico. It’s better than the original and got me to Borders to try and buy the soundtrack, which I failed to do. Check it out at the myspace for the movie, which you can Google.

If you are a Dylan fan, you should see this movie. If you’re not, then you can see it anyways, but don’t be put off by the references you won’t understand and the songs you don’t know. Just take it as an opportunity to brush up on some Bobby.

Better than: Walk the Line

Worse than: No Direction Home

Student Film of the Week: Robin's Cage

How much control do we have over our own lives? That seems to be the central question in director Tim Aumun’s Robin’s Cage, a collaboration between five students at Juniata College and submitted by Jigar Patel. Aumun seems to be questioning how much freedom we have to script the itinerary of our existence, and whether, in fact, we’ve become such prisoners of routine that we’re as trapped as a robin in a cage, unable to soar.

The film is about a young man named Robin who awakens every morning at the sound of his alarm to undergo the same routine: school, homework, chores. He doesn’t seem to have any genuine human contact; his parents aren’t there to see him off in the morning. His only connection to his mother is through the Post-It Notes and voicemail messages she leaves to tell him what to do. Robin goes to class, and there he encounters a lecture on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which seems to directly address the imprisonment he’s feeling. Whether he understands the lecture, or whether he’s become so lost in his routine that school has just become a chore and not an enriching experience is uncertain. The latter is more likely, however. Once he leaves school for the day, his mother’s voicemail tells him to pick up some milk, which he purposefully drops on his way back from the store, an act of rebellion against this incessant routine. When he arrives back home he discovers his robin’s cage is open and that his pet is now free, even if he can’t be.

The stylistic techniques that the Juniata College students deploy for the film are unusual but deepen the film’s mysteries. The opening credits and title of the film are written on Post-It Notes, stuck to Robin’s wall. Of course, Post-It Notes are the main method of Robin’s mother decreeing what her son should do and how his routine should unfold. But this unusual approach to revealing the film’s title also recalls Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), where the title is only presented near the very end of the film written across the wall of Kurtz’s (Marlon Brando) compound.

It’s admirable that for a film about psychological frustration Aumun and his Juniata colleagues didn’t resort to cliches of psychological drama like voiceover narration, searing close-ups, or subjective shots. Instead, there is an expressionistic quality to the presentation of the narrative, where the elements of the setting (the post-it notes, the “Are You Sick?” poster at the grocery store, the lecture itself) create a symbolic collage of the factors governing Robin’s attitude and behavior. The setting itself reveals his mental state, while he in fact remains more or less passive and expressionless when we see him. This is a clever method of establishing an authorial voice, bringing a unique and fresh perspective to familiar material.

If good filmmaking should show and not tell, then Robin’s Cage succeeds by presenting its narrative in primarily visual terms. Robin himself may still be a prisoner of his circumstances, but these filmmakers from Juniata College have shown that they don’t feel constrained by the limitations of conventional cinematic technique.

Rockin' in the Free World with Neil Young

How can it be that Neil Young hasn’t made a joke out of himself by now? It seems like every other 70’s rock mainstay, from Aerosmith to the Rolling Stones, has become a parody of themselves, a bunch of geriatrics flopping around on stage, playing their hits to people who never cared about the band when they were still relevant. Even Bob Dylan, one of Young’s singer-songwriter peers, has become even more detached from his audience than he was when he was young, showing up in commercials for Victoria’s Secret and Cadillac, playing unrecognizable versions of his songs in concert, unconcerned with what his fanbase thinks. But Neil Young has stayed eternal, as evidenced in his sold-out show at the Chicago Theatre in downtown Chicago, playing a mix of acoustic and electric songs that ranged from number #1 pop hits to unreleased gems from a rich back catalogue.

Young opened up by his lonesome surrounded by several acoustic guitars and two pianos, dressed simply in a beige jacket and a white buttoned shirt (or maybe not, my memory is hazy). When he started singing, it became obvious that his voice hasn’t deteriorated in forty years of playing – it’s still the same thin, almost-falsetto yowl that he draws out with pained facial expressions. He replaced Jack Nietzsche’s string arrangements on “A Man Needs A Maid” with an electric organ, filling the spacious Chicago Theatre with the stark piano arrangements that accompany “Maid,” one of his most depressing songs. “Harvest,” the underrated gem off the album of the same name, was a pleasant, understated beauty, as was “Journey Through the Past,” most recently featured on his recent archive album, Live At Massey Hall.

It’s often said that the mark of a good song is whether or not it can be stripped down to just a singer and an acoustic guitar. This line of thinking is pretty ludicrous, but Young took “Cowgirl in the Sand,” an eleven-minute guitar jam off his second solo album Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and reduced it to a simple acoustic ballad, which worked fine without the layers of guitar fuzz and solos.

After a brief respite, Young came back on stage to play an electric set, somewhat dominated by songs off his most recent album, Chrome Dreams II. Even at his age, Young still jumped around on stage and went wild on guitar – his closing song, “No Hidden Path,” was an insane fifteen-minute epic guitar fest that seemed like improvisation. Young would float out of the song’s rhythm and stab back into the melody with a barrage of guitar daggers, slapping his strings to create a ton of feedback as his band rocked along. It’s a daring song that builds off the feedback-based guitar bands he directly influenced, like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr, that sounded great if not a little excessive (but fifteen-minute songs usually are).

He encored with “Cinnamon Girl,” which still kicks like a bitch almost forty years later, and finished with “Tonight’s the Night,” the chilling requiem for dead roadie Bruce Berry. Young briefly came out at the end to play a few minutes of instrumental music with his band, teasing the audience but ultimately leaving on a high, disappearing to a standing ovation. It should be obvious that I’m a giant Neil Young fan, owning most of his discography and having lost my shit upon finding out he was coming to Chicago, but I’m trying not to turn this into a piece on the hundreds of ways he is great, so just keep this in mind: Neil Young is awesome. He is awesome in concert. If you see him, you will have an awesome time. Awesome.

Set List:

Acoustic
1. From Hank to Hendrix
2. Ambulance Blues
3. Sad Movies
4. Man Needs a Maid
5. No One Seems to Know
6. Harvest
7. Journey Through The Past
8. Mellow My Mind
9. Love Art Blues
10. Love Is A Rose
11. Cowgirl in the Sand
12. Heart of Gold

Electric
13. The Loner
14. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
15. Dirty Old Man
16. Spirit Road
17. Bad Fog of Loneliness
18. Winterlong
19. Oh, Lonesome Me
20. The Believer
21. No Hidden Path

Encore
22. Cinnamon Girl
23. Tonight's the Night II

2nd Encore
24. Sultan

Why The Internet Was Invented: Crank Dat Mashups

If you haven't heard "Crank That Soulja Boy," you clearly have been living under a rock. Or just haven't been around the frat quads lately. For those who are unenlightened, watch this.

Now of course, since it's YouTube, people had to create mashups. Some of the best include Crank Dat Barney, Family Guy, and of course, Superman.
But my latest obsession? Crank Dat Obama.

You know, he dances exactly like I thought he would. Really uncomfortably. But looking at the song he actually danced to, he's not that horrible.

Regardless, it goes to show that Soulja Boy can make anything funny. Even those kids dressed as Teletubbies for Halloween weren't that funny until they came running down my hall with a boom box, doing the Soulja Boy dance.