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Brandon Latham October 14, 2014 | 6:05pm EST There’s a scene in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him/Her in which Connor (James McAvoy) sits in a classroom and sees the woman he loves. He asks if he can bother the man in front of him for a piece of paper and to borrow a pen. Unsure exactly what to say, he writes, “Hi.,” hands the folded note forward and asks, “Can you pass this to the girl with the red hair?” It’s adorable, childish fun, a return to high school and nervous idealisation of romance. He’s perplexed, and perhaps a little crushed when she then storms out of the room. But this scene plays again. This time, the camera is fixed on Eleanor (Jessica Chastain), the girl with the red hair. When she reads the note she looks back to see the man she is running away from, the past from which taking classes was supposed to be a new start, and frightened she grabs her things and runs out. This is the result of the one-of-a-kind structure of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him/Her. First plays one film that tells a complete story and is capable of standing alone, called Him. Him is the tale of a man whose describes himself this way: “I’m 33-years old and my life is a fuckin’ boatwreck.” He struggles to keep his East Village restaurant open while coping with the fact that his wife has just tried to commit suicide and left him with hardly a word of goodbye. By itself, Him is touching and tragic and it makes viewers fall in love with, or at the very least sympathize with, Connor. Then Him ends, and another movie capable of standing alone begins. This one is, you guessed it, Her. It tells the story of a young wife who throws herself off the Manhattan Bridge and is pulled from the East River only to wake up in the hospital to her possessive, childish husband and becomes about her recovery process moving back in with her family. Independently, Him and Her are moving and complex character portraits of the difficulties of marriage. But as Conner says in a flashback to their days young and in love, “There’s only one heart in this body,” and despite the two titles there is only one grand movie. Together, they are an exquisitely devastating presentation of grief. Connor and Eleanor recently lost their two-month old son, which is revealed in bits as Him presses forward. Presumably (rather obviously, but writer/director Ned Benson makes the mistake of assuming we all understand, whereas more development would have made for rich plot), this event — which is a tragedy beyond comprehension — marks the beginning of the end for the once madly in love couple. In Him we gain devastating insight to the way Connor feels, his helplessness and inability to say or do the right thing to help his wife through this. In Her, we learn that the first thing he did was store all their baby stuff in the closet and order Chinese food. Perception and memory affect everything. This is the thesis of sorts for Benson’s project, and the first-time feature filmmaker executes this carefully but without subtlety. In a scene that is repeated in both halves, Connor says “We” in Him and “I” in Her, for example. These scenes are re-shot rather than simply repurposed, partly to correspond to the different color pallets they engage. The dialogue and other details change reflecting the way people remember things differently. This is most potent in attributing blame, and Benson’s greatest accomplishment in the writing is how well he captures the natural human tendency to blame oneself. In an early scene, Eleanor suggests, way too seriously, that Connor have an affair just to spice things up. After she leaves him, he does. When he tells her, full of regret, he doesn’t make excuses, he calls himself stupid and selfish. That’s in Him. The corresponding scene in Her plays differently, and he says, “You told me to, you left.” Which way it actually happened is not shown and completely not relevant. The way he remembers the moment he was genuine and regretful. The way she remembers it, he made it seem like she was asking for it. This complex creation of a film is bound together by its stars, the eponymous him and her. James McAvoy is tremendous, perhaps the best he has ever been, in Him. He is a scared little kid, unsure of what to do about his marriage and how to balance the other pressures in his life. In the latter half, he goes too far in the other direction, risking becoming self-parody as the villain of Her. Chastain, on the other hand, is among the most talented stars working in the industry today. She is flawless in her relationships with her family and her husband, and presents a palpable sense of grief better than her counterpart. The supporting cast of characters are important in ways that are not necessarily applicable to traditional narrative. Connor’s father and best friends, Eleanor’s family are the eyes through which we see who these two people truly are apart from their biased perceptions of one another. More importantly, it is through these relationships that the protagonists shape who they are. It is painfully convenient that the class Eleanor is taking is on the psychology of identity. Connor pulls things his says from things he has heard, mostly from his father. He tells Eleanor at their most emotionally transparent moment that before meeting her, he had no idea who he was, and is back into that anarchic struggle after she left. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby exists in three forms. I watched Him/Her, but at the discretion of the cinema, they may instead play Her/Him, both of which clock in at over three-hours. The time benefits the movie, as it never feels long and the prolonged submersion in the story boosts emotional connection. Her/Him is an equally complete portrait of their lives, but the scenes and characters play differently given the new order. While the first is a film about a man who is left by his wife and slowly puts together the explanation. The latter is a story of a depressed woman on the verge of suicide and a careful unraveling of the people affected by her grief. The third version, which was released first, is what Benson calls Them. Conceived by Harvey Weinstein for marketing reasons, this is a two-hour abridged version that composites the two into one movie about the end of a marriage that seems plain and unimaginitive by comparison. One of the great mysteries going into the film revolved around the title, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. As you’ve probably deduced, that is “her” name, a tribute to the cute story that her parents met at a Beatles event and have the fortunate surname Rigby. “You must hate the Beatles,” says her professor. No, she just knows it is her name, and nothing else matters. “I look at all the lonely people where do they all come from,” the professor says, and Ele looks up at her confused. “It’s the Beatles song you’re named after.”

Brandon Latham October 12, 2014 | 10:37am EST In the opening montage of Gone Girl there is a series of ordinary homes, an ordinary Main Street with an ordinary bar and even an ordinary lamp post clock at the heart of what these Midwestern folks must consider a pretty ordinary downtown. It is simple and run-down and altogether safe, if unexciting. Nick Dunne fits in just fine. He wears loose fitting clothes and goes down to the local watering hole — named The Bar and owned by Nick and his sister Margot — to play board games and complain about his wife, Amy. While Nick is from this suburban part of Missouri, Amy is a New Yorker. With her beautiful blonde hair and taste for form-fitting, high fashion, she does not fit in. To her, Nick’s hometown serves as little more than an open air prison, and their marriage is falling apart. He is bored of her and tired of catering to her. She is suspicious of him and feels expendable. She writes in her diary that she fears for her life, as if Nick might kill her, but says that it feels as if he has killed her already. When the action kicks into gear, on the morning of their fifth anniversary, Amy is missing and there are signs of foul play inside the house. So, maybe he did. Gone Girl is the latest in a line of ambitious and brilliant literary adaptations by master filmmaker David Fincher that includes The Social Network (from The Accidental Billionaires), Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Adapted for the screen by the original novelist Gillian Flynn, it is almost a perfect marriage of material and auteur. Fincher, a director of notorious commitment to his vision, deals in the sort of tropes the applied perfectly to the cavernous mystery of Gone Girl. He creates the mood of his interiors by painting with a dark, glossy palette and has an impeccable sense of pace, as evidenced in his masterful period piece Zodiac, perhaps the most similar film in his catalogue to Gone Girl. These two films establish Fincher as a direct descendant of the noir tradition, in which the action is set in the rain and in the shadows and lonely men isolate themselves from the imprisonment of domesticity. Both thrillers seek to solve crimes. The former is the historic tale of the enigmatic Zodiac Killer, who terrorized the Bay Area for years while taunting the press and police with anonymous messages. Gone Girl also becomes a parallel police procedural and independent investigation. But story is not what makes a great movie, it is how the story is told, and both take on a soft visual style that detracts from realism but thrives due to its expressionism. Fincher’s attention to detail makes watching Gone Girl a unique experience, and one that is hard to imagine with anyone else at the helm. Not only is the progression of the story fascinating, if imperfect, but the way the screen presses forward like a living canvas — voyeuristically seeking out clues alongside the detectives and creating a dark world that is a clear descendant of the great European expressionist works — separates it from the weaker pulp in its dense genre. The movie opens with its titles, like any other movie.. Except the opening credits fade in quickly, and then without hesitating for a moment, immediately fade back out. From the initial credits even, everything in Gone Girl is fleeting; from that first seen at The Bar, everything is a game. What the mysteries of Gone Girl serve as is a skeleton on which to build commentary, humor and honesty. Narrated by Amy through her diary, Gone Girl bends its chronology just as much as Flynn’s temptuous screenplay makes you bend your brain. Nick’s search for his missing wife may be going terribly, but he did not always have such bad luck. Before the recession took the jobs of countless writers and entertainers, Nick and Amy were happily dating in New York City, kissing under a shower of raining sugar and casually making sex jokes in front of perfect strangers. It was all too good to be true until they got married. Instead of their lives together becoming exactly what they had dreamed of, it became exactly what they deserved. Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike play the happy couple to perfection, but truly impressive thing about their landmark turns is that they also play the present-day unhappy couple to perfection. Affleck as Nick, whether delivering the over-confident, boastful lines of Nick’s youthful bliss; or the egotistical, contemptuous lines of his present predicament, is spot on. He emphasizes the two sides of Nick by bringing attention to the fact that they are not very far apart. Pike’s performance as Amy is the showier of the two, and is sure to attract awards season attention. Most often relegated to supporting turns — mostly to stand there and be eye candy — the Bond Girl used Gone Girl as her first opportunity to show us what she can do. Whereas Affleck was effective for his subtle transitions, Pike was triumphant for her instantaneous pivots between light and dark. It is hard to blame Nick for having such a hard time understanding his wife — though there is no excuse for his behavior — as she is like a chameleon, manipulating herself to best seize the opportunities of her environment. The impeccably clever twists and turns that Gone Girl leads us on from Amy’s disappearance turn it into a movie that can best be described as enchanting. Viewers are invited into Fincher’s and Flynn’s world and willfully oblige. At 149-minutes, Gone Girl is a commitment, but once the pacing and completeness of the arc is realized, you realize it couldn’t spare to be a minute shorter. Its comments on marriage will be welcome by some and dismissed by others, for they are cynical, but its comments on the state of sensationalist media and pseudo-events is on the ball in today’s 24-hour news obsession. Amy is soon presumed dead after vanishing from her home, and even though the police are slow to act, the only thing on everyone’s mind is that Nick must be guilty. He is bad at publicity — nothing says “I killed my wife” like smiling for pictures in front of her missing-persons sign and actually saying “I have nothing to hide” — but that is not the crime that the media plays it up to be. At one point, two detectives are debating what to do about Nick, and have this exchange: “Have you ever heard the phrase that the most obvious answer is most often the correct one?” / “Actually, I’ve found the opposite to be true.” At this point in the story, the audience is already privy to who is responsible for the disappearance, and of Nick’s role in it. The unspooling of dramatic irony is what turns Gone Girl from a mystery to a full-fledged thriller as Nick is literally fighting for his life. This rural noir has him figuratively chased around the country by angry townspeople, Amy’s family and the police. Even the based laid plans, which make up the mystery of the bulk of the film, fall apart, and with the characters now making things up as they go, we are simply along for the ride. The irony becomes painful to sit through, in the good way, as if you just want to shout to the screen but you know the characters won’t hear you. Supporting characters are played by big names such as Neil Patrick Harris and Carrie Coon (and yes, Tyler Perry). Coon is fresh off a breakout turn in HBO’s The Leftovers and Tony-winner and Emmy-nominee Harris is slowly building a big screen career. Both are supremely talented, but beyond that Harris is impeccably cast as Amy’s ex-boyfriend and stalker. With a loose-polo shirt and cheesy sunglasses, he is far removed from Barney Stinson. At first glimpse, anyone familiar with his How I Met Your Mother stud immediately knows, without a word about it in the script, that something about this character is not quite right. The details of the plot are only loosely bound — why no return to Nick’s dad, for example — but increased directedness throughout the movie fuels the final act. The audience’s empathy will be palpable but unpredictable. Nick is on a sure march to Death Row, Amy’s domestic prison has effectively killed her already. But in marriage these two are sparring partners, the roots of one another’s woes. On screen, their quarrel is the source of our entertainment.

Brandon Latham October 7, 2014 | 11:19pm EST Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children is an art film disguising itself as a star-driven dark comedy. It is meticulously paced but episodic, built on its characters but highly impersonal. And while it fails to reach the heights of the filmmaker’s prior works, it is unapologetically a Jason Reitman picture. The film opens with a peculiar sequence of shots of the Voyager 1 spacecrafts buzzing past planets on its way out of our solar system. The rings of Saturn, Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot feature in the series, with narration providing information about Voyager’s voyage. The space probe is equipped with a record player designed to give potential extraterrestrial life its first glimpse at human kind. The sound of waves, jazz and even the human heartbeat echo through empty space. These are the markers of life on Earth? The details we find most important to define our existence? Afterall the probe was launched before home computers became commonplace so people did live empty lives during which time their only entertainment was jazz, their only feeling of security a steady heartbeat. Men, Women & Children seems to believe that this is how people today have come to think, and awards itself the task of correcting this. Reitman, who wrote and directs, does not shy away from topical subject matter — as in Juno, his landmark comedy about teen pregnancy and the abortion issue; or Up in the Air, commentary about the loneliness of economic hardship released in 2009, the heart of the recession — and Men, Women & Children is no exception. Just before concluding the Voyager 1 episode, the audience is shown the famous Pale Blue Dot photograph, taken of Earth by Voyager 1 from the furthest reaches of our solar system in 1990. It shows Earth as an infinitesimally small spec in the vast ocean of space, a sobering thought for the egotistic human race. What the film does, by juxtaposing this humble dot with commentary on the pervasiveness of social media is quite clever. Social media is all about the individual, about self-promotion. It requires a degree of healthy self-admiration, the sense that what you are doing or what you have to say is worthy reading for others. While everything that makes up everyone alive now, or has ever lived, or will ever lived is that lonely Pale Blue Dot, a Tumblr page can be all about you. That’s what the Internet offers in Reitman’s hyperbolized world view. Re-enforcement of one’s importance, of one’s beliefs. If a high school girl feels like she needs to maintain a toxically low weight, there’s a chatroom for that. If another needs to feel like her beauty is appreciated, there’s a photo-sharing site for that. If a woman needs to feel wanted again, there’s anonymous dating. What all of this invisible support offers is the chance to forget about what is actually going on around you. The aforementioned ordinary people no longer need to listen to parents, or do auditions, or fall back in love because the Internet gives them options. The omniscient narration carries throughout the picture and underscores the public nature of the world of Men, Women & Children in which there is nothing truly secret and no being truly alone. The film’s ensemble exists in a way that emphasizes the accuracy of the term “World Wide Web,” because every one of the many characters is connected by the climax. They exist in ordinary places, ripe for social interaction: the mall, the cafeteria, a football game. They just choose to keep their eyes buried in their smart phones instead of striking conversation. Is this what Reitman really thinks about high schoolers? TimeOut New York’s Josh Rothkopf took a common complaint about the film and I think said it best: Men, Women & Children is “the first Reitman film to make the 36-year-old director seem about 400 years old.” Indeed, it seems out of touch, but the script exaggerates to make a point, the part of this issue that I will not forgive is the innocence of the adults. Innocence is not a perfect word there, but it might be the best. Yes, the “Men and Women” of Men, Women & Children are just as devious as their younger counterparts — especially the catastrophically miscasts Jennifer Gardner’s Patricia, an overbearing mother who reads a transcription of every digital interaction her daughter has — but they are shown to have skills their children lack. When Tim, played by The Fault in Our Stars revelation Ansel Elgort, approaches a girl he stumbles over his sentences and chooses not to say much, saving the meat of the conversation for a later Facebook message. His father, on the other hand, played by Dean Norris, asks a woman out by being to-the-point, actually using words like, oh you know, “date.” Why is high school football stud Tim so far behind his own father, who is going through a divorce? “I guess I was just scared.” The omnipresence of social technology — Words With Friends with your spouse who is in the bed next to you — is alarming and, if accurate, makes Reitman’s cautious commentary worth-while. Teens, in the height of their years of social dependence get together to watch Netflix, for example, which Reitman shows without saying anything about it. Undoubtedly, 15-year-olds in the audience won’t even notice the irony, but adults will engage in a collective eye-roll. But what can these parents do? Men, Women & Children has parents doing things on every extreme from managing a promotional site for sexy photos to tracking cell phone location at all times. Both modes are harmful, and conflicted parents somewhere in between don’t fare much better. Where Reitman’s smart commentary derails is when it seeks to deliver the finishing blow, highlighting the consequences of social pressures in the digital age. No fewer than two characters wind up having near-death experiences, and a marriage threatens to dissolve. Men, Women & Children is an imperfect movie in many ways, mostly stemming from the writer’s arrogance and Hollywood’s misguided need to cast stars (with the exception of Judy Greer, who is tremendously tragic, the film would have benefitted from new faces with which the audience can identify). It’s It’s a Wonderful Life-esque moral — that no matter how meaningless you feel, it is not worth dying over — is done-to-death, as have its archetypal characters. So it’s not a great piece of movie-making, so what? Men, Women & Children is an important commentary that may ignite a passionate if small following, and its ultimate question will spread and seek answers. At one point, a character says, “Just let her be a teenager,” so, what exactly does that entail when teenagers are as much themselves in role-playing games as they are on the bus?

Tiffany Wong May 2, 2014 | 1:22pm EST Last semester, AmLit turned your heads toward the treasure trove of Issuu.com. We loved one of the magazines so much, we reached out to the lovely duo behind the Vancouver-based magazine Freckled, Ting Shuen and Shanene Lau. Their dreamy magazine features up-and-coming photographers, artists, and writers – a lot like a magazine we know and love… What drove you to create Freckled Magazine? Summer 2011 was a big year for independent online art zines starting up within the Flickr and Tumblr community that we used to be a part of. The two of us admired everyone’s projects from afar, but they were mostly all fashion based and we started talking about how we’d do things if we started up our own project. We turned out having very similar curatorial goals and decided to start one up for fun, so we could have a way to bookmark our favorite artists and share them with our friends, family and our followers on social media networks, but in a more cohesive way. We definitely didn’t expect to reach out to so many people from all over the world. I remember messaging Ting on Facebook months ago, telling her that we had a reader from Macedonia! Who would have thought? Have you ever had any experience in publications before? Freckled is the first and only publication thus far that either of us has worked on. We’re constantly learning new things on the job. How did the two of you meet? We’ve been best friends for ten years and counting. We attended the same elementary school and quickly became friends in our community band, where we both played clarinet. Where did the publication name come from? There’s a particular photo by Lauren Treece that both of us adore and that really resonated with us when we were thinking about the specific types of images we wanted to feature in Freckled. This one stuck with us the most, I think. It was a really warm, starry summer and seemed to fit with that specific moment in time when we were really struggling to find the right name. Our other intention with calling our magazine ‘Freckled,’ was to express diversity in image and lifestyle. Freckled – spread out like stars in the sky. We get a lot of people who immediately think of freckled faces and redheaded girls, though (also Ting has freckles). Where do you find your photographers, writers, artists, and “sartorialists”? Through various social media platforms and everywhere else…Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, word of mouth etc. We even look for illustrators’ names on the backs of cards in cool stationary stores. Why did you choose to stick with online publication? Will you ever move to print? It was the most convenient and viable platform to host online. We’ve been talking about going to print for quite awhile now, so you’ll just have to wait and see what happens! Describe your work method – what steps do you take to create each issue? Up until this point (issue #9), we’ve released issues seasonally, so four issues per year. We curate the content based on the seasons and the colors and feelings that seem to accompany them. Usually both of us will have a few artists in mind and then we spend hours upon end searching for artists who we think will fit the aesthetic of said upcoming issue. Ting does most of the emailing, runs the style and writing sections, and I work on the layout. Because you’re based in Vancouver, how do you interview and photograph your subjects? We interview through email since most of our contributors are international and we have a very small Vancouver-based team. We’ve all been friends for 5 years and we’ve definitely dreamt about having an international team, so hopefully that will happen sometime in the future. The style bloggers have friends take their photos or either takes the photos themselves (it’s convenient since that’s their usual method, so we can count on the quality and style from existing photos). However, most of the musicians and bands that we’ve featured so far are local, which is great. Ting got to meet up with all the bands/musicians and has had so much fun photographing them and getting to know them. What are your future plans for Freckled Magazine? After the next two issues are released, we’re planning on taking an indefinite hiatus. During our break from publication, we’ll be working on an official website, and some exciting new counterparts. Freckled is going to expand into a blog and become much more of a multi-media concept. Going to print will still be in our sights, although that goal might be a little further away. What advice would you give for creators of start-up publications? Plan and keep organized. Stay true to yourself and have a clear vision at all times. Also, make sure you’re doing something different to make yourself stand out from other publications. Oh, and names are important too. You’ve got to pick something that people will remember and fits with the style of your publication.

Nolan Miller April 21, 2014 | 5:38pm EST Opening with a creepily masked serial killer on a stage playing cards with a crying little girl, the orchestra and all the seats around them filled with the bloody dead bodies of men, women, and children, Nick Spencer, Riley Rossmo, and Frazer Irving’s Bedlam Volume 1 is immediately beyond disgusting. A grey, mechanized looking caped figure with a black space helmet on crashes through the skylight and lands center stage in front of the masked man and child. What happens between the grey figure’s dramatic entrance and the detainment of the serial killer is too horrific to describe here so I will simply pull from the serial killer’s speech before he is knocked out; “See, you have no concept of the bigger picture here. I mean, look around, what was it Stalin said? Kill one, it’s a tragedy, kill a thousand, it’s a statistic?” Ten years later a man named Fillmore wakes up to a recording of an extremely positive speech of redemption, hope, honesty, and thankfulness playing out of his alarm. He climbs out of bed and wearily treads to the bathroom where he looks in the mirror to see the masked serial killer of the previously described prologue looking back at him. A quick flashback reveals that after his detainment, the serial killer named Madder Red presumably blew his head off accidentally from a bomb he placed in the police department where he was being held. However, flashing again back from the Madder Red era in black, white, gray, and red to the present day with full color illustration, we see Fillmore standing in front of his sink staring at the image of Madder Red in the mirror. As he swallows a handful of ironically red and white colored pills he says “We are not who we were – we are who we are.” The story proceeds to explore this statement as well as the quote on the front cover asking “Is evil just something you are or something you do?” by cutting back and forth between Madder Red from ten years ago after his arrest and publically perceived death and Fillmore in the present day. The episodes of Madder Red depict him going through a horrific rehabilitation in an insane asylum involving both a lobotomy and an attempted suicide. His doctor seems to be a mad scientist type complete with ghoulish nurses whose mouths are sown shut, yet Madder Red’s improvement is oddly visible as the story progresses. In the present day, Fillmore has a benevolent epiphany that he wishes to help people now. A bizarre chain of events ensue as Fillmore is arrested after claiming responsibility for a string of murders he did not commit to get the attention of the Bedlam Police Department. The apparently now good Fillmore proceeds to assist a certain Detective Acevedo with her investigation of a string of murders, á la Silence of the Lambs. The murders end up being the work of a previously molested man who now does the bidding of his molester, an incarcerated church priest. What makes Bedlam so fascinating is the intensity of the character study. Over the course of the book we witness the final act of a serial killer at the height of his fame and depravity, the graphic lobotomy of an institutionalized psychopath and his near complete turn-around, and a man struggling with daily life after ten years in a psychiatric ward. It’s tough to convey just how unique Bedlam succeeds in being despite such a tired and basic plot. The only conclusion I can make is that the book questions the very nature of evil, and more importantly evil men, by terrifying in an absolutely enthralling way. Those with weak stomachs be warned though, Bedlam makes all horror films seem hilariously tame.

Tiffany Wong April 11, 2014 | 4:26pm EST In Part I of the Vimeo Spotlight, we watched animated videos together, but this week, we’re featuring three live action (yes, real people!) short films that manage to whittle down the magic of cinema in less than fifteen minutes and on your computer screen. Montages, murder, and marriage – we’ve got it all right here. Moments | link Created by a filmmaking collective called Everynone, “Moments” celebrates life by focusing on the B-roll of day-to-day life. The short ties all of these moments together, easily transitioning from a kite flying up in the air to a newspaper being thrown onto a porch. It’s a video of relatables – from the intense game of kickball to the race to catch the bus – that makes its audience realize that there are beautiful moments all around us that essentially make up the lives we live. Prospect | link “Prospect” is a science fiction short, a coming-of-age story, and a thriller wrapped up in a thirteen minute film. The piece focuses on a teenage girl and the specific circumstances that force her to grow up quickly and quietly. Set on a toxic alien planet, the girl and her father harvest precious materials that they hope to sell for millions back on their home planet. “Prospect” premiered at the 2014 SXSW Film Festival and it’s clear why the film was chosen for the festival – the cinematography is spectacular, the plot is strong, and the moss-filled, damp, forestral scenery is out of this world. Literally. I Fenicotteri (Flamingos) | link Directed by Francesca Coppola, you would think that “I Fenicotteri” is just another family gem in the Coppola dynasty. Although the Italian filmmaker is not related to Francis Ford or Sofia, her film has garnered attention in all the right places. Released in 2012, it premiered at the MoMA, as well as Lincoln Center as part of their New Directors/New Shorts Program. Set in 1989 Milan, the short is about the delicate nature of father-daughter relationships pre-divorce. An innocent trip to the park to see flamingoes reveals the wavering reliability of a father who seems a bit lost, and the confusion and fear a child feels when she’s taken along for the ride.

Kate Broadwell April 11, 2014 | 5:07pm EST Disjunctive shots of a sleeping Lucy Harmon, played by Liv Tyler, flicker across the screen as a stranger aboard her train secretly films her sleeping on a camcorder. So it seems that everyone views Lucy as an object of lust in Bernardo Bertolucci’s film, Stealing Beauty (1996). The film follows the story of Lucy, an American 19-year-old girl who goes to the golden Tuscan countryside to stay at the villa of several family friends and an eclectic group of other locals. Though she’s been sent there to have her portrait sculpted, Lucy in fact has other motives for her stay. Within a messy, scribbled journal that belonged to her mother who committed suicide, a poem speaks of a man who feeds her mother an olive leaf and beats a viper – referring to Lucy’s father. Knowing her mother spent her earlier years at the villa, she is certain that her father must be on the villa’s premises. Lucy also has other, less tangible desires. She hopes to reconcile with a former love interest, Niccolo (Roberto Zibetti), whom she met four years before during her last visit. In doing so, Lucy can fulfill her dream to lose her virginity in Italy. Anyone who has seen Bertolucci’s other pieces such as Last Tango in Paris and The Dreamers, is familiar with his slow, vibrant, often sexualized style in which characters seem to always be “searching” for something. Stealing Beauty is no different. Everything about the movie is undeniably beautiful; each frame works conjointly to paint a dream-like picture of the villa, from the golden Italian countryside, Lucy’s poetry, to the bohemian lifestyle of the villa’s residences. The villa almost seems to exist in suspended time. People come and go as Lucy quietly floats around with a clueless demeanor around the villa, occasionally exchanging dialogue with the residences or posing as a model for Ian (Donal McCann), the sculptor. As she writes in her journal, she is “as quiet as a cup.” Throughout the film, originally written songs like Cocteau Twin’s “Alice” make these scenes take on a sudden eerie feel, giving a sense of intrigue and mystery to Lucy’s presence. While many moviegoers are used to films being centered around the developed main character, Bertolluci instead seems to have created Lucy simply as a catalyst that makes each character asses his or her own story. One might argue that the film is not even centered on Lucy finding an elusive parent figure at all. As she romps around the courtyard sparking the sexual imagination of the men of the villa, she acts seemingly unperturbed by each man’s advances. As a result, any meaningful connection between her and the villa’s residents does not really exist. The only person she does form a close bond with is Alex (Jeremy Irons), a gay playwright dying of AIDS. By the end of the film, everything that has been built up expectantly happens. Lucy finds her father, her playwright friend assumingly dies after being rushed to the hospital, and she loses her virginity, all in the last twenty minutes of the film. After reading her mother’s poem once more, Lucy reaches a realization that draws her to connect the Ian the sculptor to her mother. When Lucy confronts the sculptor with questions about his relationship with her mother, Ian realizes Lucy is indeed his daughter and the two embrace. The now finished sculpture symbolizes the discovery of who Lucy truly is. The film quickly wraps up with Lucy losing her virginity that night, though not to Niccolo, who turns out to be just as creepy as the next, but rather his shyer friend Isvaldo (Ignazio Oliva). As the ending scene zooms out on Lucy happily walking back to the villa after her night with Isvaldo, the audience is left unsatisfied. Was that it? Nothing is ever explicitly explored deeply in the film, rather actions are forgotten just as fleetingly as they happen. Some criticize Bertolucci for trying too hard to make the film about actress Liv Tyler’s own life, who grew up believing her father was someone else, which doesn’t give Lucy much individuality. The film certainly makes for an interesting coming-of-age story but it is up the viewer to interpret the real motives that Bertolucci is trying to convey and decide if Lucy makes for a truly significant character.

Evan Mills April 7, 2014 | 5:19pm EST Politics and Prose is a well-established caffeine and literary landmark in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of Northwest Washington. Every once in a while I step in to browse the books and sip the coffee. But I was surprised one brisk Friday afternoon to stumble upon a gathering of folks not typical to what you expect in the District. Well, at least in the atmospheric heights of upper Northwest; where the urban bustle and eccentricity of the rest of the city seems so painfully far away. I wasn’t expecting what I found. In fact, I was even a little annoyed as I stepped over the backpacks, travelling sacks and assorted luggage items scattered along the walkway between tables. But as I trapezed along the cluttered aisle, I noticed that there was an unusually large amount of people accompanying these items, and that I was stepping over an unusually plentiful collection of musical equipment. So at this point I began to realize that I had found what I have been looking for in DC ever since I transferred to American University from New Orleans: an amateur folk and bluegrass open mic night. I know DC has a long and rich musical history and that there are many hole-in-the-wall music venues to be discovered throughout the city; but finding such a chilled out musical gathering can be hard. It turns out Politics and Prose holds open mic night every Friday evening in its coffee shop downstairs called Modern Times, and some of the performers I saw were very impressive and entertaining. There were the college cover artists, the slightly older bluegrass jammers, the lonely, soulful song crafters, and even a crazy old guy who played the banjo and managed to sneak his fingerpickin’ into everybody else’s set. Personally, I love singer-songwriters and acoustic jams. I was really impressed by the talent I saw at Politics and Prose. So next time you don’t feel like travelling all the way to U street NW or H street NE, or dropping $20 to get through the door of your typical Dupont club, check out open mic night at Politics and Prose. For more information, check out the page on Modern Times Coffeehouse’s website.

Mia Saidel March 31, 2014 | 2:44pm EST After entering the grand, marbled National Gallery of Art to escape the day’s drizzle and wind, cold and accompanied by a dripping umbrella, my eyes satisfyingly took in the seminal works of Giotto and Botticelli. Following a crowd of people, I came across one of the featured exhibits in the Founders Room of the West Building and was surprised at the humble, archival display. The display consists of a long, rectangular glass case containing war documents and memorabilia. Yet, as I took a closer look and observed several elderly gentlemen salute the case, I realized its contents spoke of reverence and artistic history. Monuments Men and the National Gallery of Art: The Inside Story inaugurates the first look at one of the world’s most comprehensive efforts in preserving monuments and priceless artwork during and after World War II. Men and women in the infantry as well as multinational art historians and museum curators were deployed to Allied-occupied countries to save these cultural artifacts from destruction and rescue them from hidden repositories created by the Nazis. Photographs, letters of correspondence, and telegrams donated by families of these “Monuments Men” attest to the stupendous efforts that these individuals took in defending historical sites and artifacts during wartime. Many of the officers had personal ties to Europe; some were Jewish refugees, others spoke the language. Together, with the shared desire to secure these cultural symbols and protect them from destruction, the Monuments Men ensured the return of an estimated 5 million artifacts to their countries of origin. The newly opened National Gallery became a pivotal institution in the lobbying efforts to President Roosevelt and Allied Forces to create the presidentially appointed Roberts Commission on June 23, 1943, named after the chairman Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. The commission lasted until 1946 and birthed the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program (MFAA), which was led by National Gallery director David Finley. 400 men and women were sent to approximately 1,000 troves in Europe to uncover crucial artwork. Among the sites was Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany, where over 6,000 pieces were recovered from the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce that was responsible for the “legalized” looting of the houses of persecuted Jews. The Altausee salt mine in the Austrian Alps was discovered in 1945 to possess 15th century European masterpieces such as Jan van Eyck’s “Adoration of the Lamb,” and the Tuscan villa of Montegufoni harbored most of the Florentine collections. Prior to the commission, no nationally organized army worked to protect monuments and relics in countries in which and with which it was at war. It is hard to fathom the truly insurmountable conditions that these men and women faced in order to preserve the cultural treasures. So often is freedom associated with national borders and ideology. However, we often forget that freedom is not limited to this; art represents liberty in the expression and autonomy it illustrates. The exhibition is a true testament to how certain soldiers and war personnel during World War II became more than just warriors; they proved to be cultural heroes. After gazing one last time at the photographs of the men and women, soot-faced and all, proudly holding up the prized artwork, I wrung my umbrella and walked outside. The rain and wind no longer seemed so formidable. Monuments Men and the National Gallery of Art: The Inside Story will be on display until September 1, 2014.

Pamela Huber March 31, 2014 | 8:04pm EST Take a quick peek in at an AmLit meeting and you might be shocked to learn how many artists and art appreciators are working quietly in the shadow of AU’s future politicians and humanitarians. These are the kids that make references to Sylvia Plath in your gender and politics class and crack satiric jokes. AmLit, AU’s student run literary arts magazine, is big, no way getting around it. Some 65 students make up the general staff of the magazine and votes on its content with a smaller pool of editors running the mechanics of the club. This past year saw a huge expansion in the editor pool, with editors-in-chief Sam Falewee and Michelle Merica creating many brand new assistant editor positions to help new staff members get involved in the inner workings of AmLit right away. Additionally, Sam and Michelle added film to the magazine’s four preexisting sections of photography, prose, art, and poetry, which all students can submit their work to for publication. Yet, despite AmLit’s size, the fact that it has been around since 1977, and the national acclaim it has received from organizations like the Associated Collegiate Press, a lot of people do not know much about it. And those who do don’t always understand our process or our aesthetic. AmLit is committed to showcasing AU’s best talent in the creative arts and holds itself to a high standard; the magazine has a 13 percent acceptance rate. With the average submissions drive raking in around 200 photographs and 100 poems without breaking a sweat as well as another 100 pieces in the other categories, the process can get highly selective. AmLit has one of the most democratically fair publication processes on campus. There are no requirements to join the general staff who vote on submissions. Additionally, the magazine accepts submissions on a completely blind basis, i.e. if your piece is up for review or you know who the author is, you cannot vote or speak about the piece in a review session. Favoritism is not possible. Since the editors-in-chief alone compile all of the submissions data, they are not allowed to speak about or vote on the submissions. In spite of the blind voting process of review sessions, a quick scan through different issues’ tables of contents does sometimes reveal many of the same names popping up again and again. This pattern arises in part because those whose pieces are admitted each semester not only have talent, but they submit a lot semester after semester. Also, attending review sessions allows people to hear constructive criticism of their work, edit it, and resubmit next semester. A love for the arts drives the AmLit staff each semester to dedicate weeks of their lives to reviewing hundreds of submissions. Rich discussions at review sessions provide the chance for everyone to voice their opinions, regardless of whether they study literature, economics, or biology. The result is more than just a published magazine – it’s a home for the expressive, the spirited, the dreamers.

Tiffany Wong March 30, 2014 | 6:11pm EST Everyone knows where they can watch videos of cats playing the piano or children on anesthesia highs, but where can we find high quality, high definition videos that are tastefully curated and bursting with creativity? Enter: Vimeo. As a beacon for budding filmmakers and artists, the website is a hub of visionary videos that have been picked up by SXSW, handpicked by the Vimeo staff, or just enjoyed by the online community. This article focuses on three films that spotlight the power of animation. To This Day | link Based on a spoken word poem by Shane Koyczan, “To This Day” is a film project that sheds light on the lasting effects of childhood bullying. With 84 animators and motion artists on board to volunteer their talents – whether it be in claymation, two-dimensional animation, cut-out animation, or other styles – the 8-minute film is the definition of art for a cause. Every line is brought to life with every clip and all of the 22 clips seamlessly transition from one to another. It’s a powerful film, one that not only gets its point across, but also showcases the extent of creativity in film, which is basically endless. I Met the Walrus | link “I Met the Walrus” was created by James Braithwaite and directed by Josh Raskin, and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2008, and won an Emmy in 2009. The film is centered on an interview recorded by a 14-year-old Beatles fan named Jerry Levitan in 1969. Determined to land an interview with John Lennon, he snuck into the rock star’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced the Beatle to participate in the interview, catching it all on a reel-to-reel recorder. Mixing original illustration with vintage photographs, Braithwaite brings animated life to Lennon’s words on revolution, peace, and the role of the youth at that time. The commitment to the original recording is also astounding and extremely humbling, especially when we can hear the room’s telephone ringing, Lennon have another conversation with someone else in the room, and for the late Beatle to exchange goodbyes by saying “Peace.” Swing of Change | link Created by a team of four graduate students, “Swing of Change” is a short film that explores the themes of racism and change through the power of music. Its main character, a barber, is stuck in the past, cutting the hair of only white customers and listening to military music despite the city’s burgeoning jazz scene. After getting into a scuffle with a black jazz musician outside of his shop, he snags the musician’s trumpet, which he discovers to have magical powers. The animation’s attention to detail is astounding – from the grit on the bottom of the barber’s shoe to the shine on the graphophone’s needle, “Swing of Change” is not to be taken lightly. The students’ ability to capture the camera technique of focusing in and out on certain objects and characters shows learned expertise. And with a strong plot and a three-dimensional main character, the short is as gold as the magical trumpet itself.

Sarah Shelton March 25, 2014 | 9:42pm EST A soulful voice effortless in nature, but beautiful in execution is rare in this day in age where artists have dollar signs in their names. Sam Smith is bringing honest talent back to the music scene with his freshman album and tour. The twenty-one year old who has achieved fame because of his stellar voice made his first stop in the District on his American tour this past Thursday (3/20). The U Street Music Hall housed the event and all audience members, as well as Sam Smith himself, feel right at home. The room where the concert was held was smaller than the 9:30 Club but larger than the Davenport Coffee Lounge. Everyone in the crowd could see Sam when he entered from stage right in his fitted blazer and custom gold Nikes. His charm and boyish smile pulled everyone into his spell before the set even began. Along with him were his five, seemingly flawless, band members. All dressed as if they were coming straight from a Nylon Magazine photo shoot, Sam Smith and his ensemble not only sounded like heaven, but looked like it, too. He played songs from his upcoming album In the Lonely Hour, which is to be released early this summer. Some of his most popular songs like “Nirvana” and “Money on My Mind” were crowd pleasers indeed. In addition to his own songs that have gained quite a lot of popularity, Smith also played a cover of the song “Do I Wanna Know?” by the Arctic Monkeys. Awesome visuals and choreographed dance numbers were nowhere in sight because the music and Sam Smith’s voice was, rightfully, center stage. The composition of the band mixed with Sam’s buttery, deep voice was the perfect combination to accomplish an excellent and unforgettable musical experience. Sam Smith’s tour continues in the United States until the end of April, and then he will continue to play across Europe and in his home country, the UK, for summer festivals.