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Such a Lovely Place: Exploring the Imaginary in The Grand Budapest Hotel

2/25/2015

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Written by Steven Collier
    Director Wes Anderson is no stranger to saturating the screen with his trademark visual extravagancies. From the vivid primary colors of Fantastic Mr. Fox (Anderson, 2009), to the cartoonish architecture in Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson, 2012), to the impossible animals that populate The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Anderson, 2004) his filmography perpetually brims with an enchantingly childlike sense of wonder. It perfectly complements the equally whimsical tones which normally punctuate his movies. However in The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014), Anderson creates a picture in which the narrative actually supports the director’s unique stylistic embellishments.  

    While The Grand Budapest Hotel’s story is primarily a quirky, comedic mystery, the way in which Anderson presents this yarn simultaneously creates an enormously potent metanarrative. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a story about stories, and especially how susceptible they are to transmogrification whenever retold. This concept is brilliantly realized through the transformation of background locations presented throughout the movie.

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    The Grand Budapest Hotel opens in the modern day. The audience is shown a series of scenes in which a teenage girl (Jella Niemann) treks through a lonely, dilapidated graveyard to find a memorial dedicated to a nameless author. It’s a ritualistic pilgrimage to a decaying literary Mecca. This is demonstrated by the girl’s ceremonial act of taking a hotel key and hanging it upon one of the innumerable hooks which adorn the monument, where it joins the ranks of hundreds of similar offerings. The girl then takes out a book, written by the enshrined author, entitled, “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”
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    The movie then cuts to a filmed interview with the unnamed author (Tom Wilkinson) made in 1985. He proceeds to offer the first spoken lines of the movie:

“It is an extremely common mistake. People think the writer’s imagination is always at work, that he’s constantly inventing an endless supply of incidents and episodes; that he simply dreams up his stories out of thin air. In point of fact, the opposite is true. Once the public knows you’re a writer, they bring the characters and events to you… The incidents that follow were described to me exactly as I present them here, and in a wholly unexpected way.”

    This statement is critical, as it is the only paltry evidence offered that any of the film’s events ever occurred. Everything that follows onscreen is nothing more than the visualization of the author’s story. This includes even the segments which are narrated by others, as they only exist as inhabitants of the author’s ongoing narrative. However, we’ll get to them a little later.

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    The author’s story begins in 1968, while he stays at the Grand Budapest Hotel, a luxury hotel that has seen far better days. There the author (Jude Law) encounters the establishment’s reclusive owner, Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), who claims to be an enormous fan of the author’s writing. The two quickly hit it off, and Zero offers to tell the author of how he came to be the hotel’s proprietor.
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    At this point, Zero begins to narrate a story within the author’s narration. Zero’s story takes place in 1932, when he was a lobby boy within a still prospering Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson wastes no time in showcasing the marked difference time has wrought upon the structure. Unlike the grey, utilitarian building of 1968, the Hotel of the 30’s is a sumptuous piece of architecture. Bursting with color, and festive cupolas, its appearance is deeply evocative of an elegant, layered cake. However it is unlikely that either ever existed in any real, tangible manner.

    My reason for saying this goes back to the way that the Grand Budapest Hotel is introduced: not as a dilapidated building, nor as a flourishing getaway for elite clientele, but as an illustration on a book jacket. The dilapidated hotel only exists as part of the author’s recounting of a trip he allegedly took in the 60’s. Similarly, the hotel of the 30’s only exists as part of a story allegedly told to the author while on that trip. The establishing shots of the movie further reinforce the idea that the Grand Budapest Hotel exists only as a sort of metafiction within its universe, as it is only visible as a story, as a novel. Even at the movie’s end, the hotel bows out as it was introduced. The film’s final shot returns to the young woman still holding the book, as she sits beside the monument to the Author.

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    Anderson never shows the audience The Grand Budapest hotel in any context outside of a metanarrative. This constantly reminds the audience that first and foremost The Grand Budapest Hotel exists as a story. As such, its state is dictated entirely by whoever is telling that story. When the Author speaks of it, the melancholy resort is drab and exclusively populated by disenfranchised souls. When presented through the sentimental eyes of Zero, it springs to life as a brilliant structure filled with adventure, romance, and comradery. The definitive truth of The Grand Budapest Hotel seems left up to the anonymous reader’s discretion, yet she never expresses her thoughts on the matter.

    As such, she becomes a representative of the movie’s audience. Just as the reader has traveled to the author’s memorial and offered her key as ritual tribute, so too has the audience traveled to a theatre and offered their own admission for the privilege of exploring The Grand Budapest Hotel. Neither the audience nor the reader actually enters a real building, but that does nothing to prevent either from experiencing it. And I believe that’s the ultimate message of Anderson’s latest offering: when we invest ourselves in them, imaginary places do take on a strange sort of existence. Regardless of circumstance, whereabouts, or even reality we are all capable of reaching a shared destination through the venue of narrative. Author, Zero, Reader, Audience, we have all been guests within The Grand Budapest Hotel.
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The Foundation of Marvel Studios? Bryan Singer's X-MEN in reforming the comic book adaptation

2/24/2015

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Written by Anthony Watkins
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What can be better than working by yourself? Working as a team. When you have a team, you know that someone has your back---that someone is working alongside you fighting, wrestling, and struggling for the same cause. You look out for each other.  If you fall, someone is there to pick you up. Sure, there is more strategy and planning involved, but that's half the fun. As part of a unit, you get the feeling of having value and worth. When you succeed, there is no better feeling than going to your teammate and shaking hands, saying "Well done." It is an emotion that can only be achieved by being a part of a group. 

In the comic book universe, one of the most famous teams is the X-Men--a group determined to maintain peace between mutants (higher evolved humans who possess superhuman abilities) and humans. Each member is needed, as one cannot undertake the fight on his or her own. At the turn of the millennium, director Bryan Singer successfully brought this beloved team to the big screen with X-Men (2000).  The film was a box office hit upon its release, grossing over $55 million in its opening weekend and going on to gross over $157 million in 2000 (IMDB). But how did this superhero film give rise to one of the largest franchises in film history and what made it such a vital piece to Hollywood and Marvel?

After the disastrous Batman and Robin (Schumaker, 1997), faith in superhero films seemed to hit rock bottom. As a result, that faith had to be restored at some point through a well-crafted adaptation of a comic book series. Bryan Singer accomplished exactly that with X-Men. In his article for Empire, Chris Hewitt noted, "Without X-Men, it’s likely that Hollywood would have got around to Spider-Man and rebooting Batman eventually – just as someone else would have come up with the A-bomb had Robert Oppenheimer not cracked it – but in very different forms. Singer’s 2000 movie is the catalyst for everything that’s come since, good and bad. Without it, there’s no Marvel Studios" (Empire).

The film succeeded in featuring a strong cast in Academy Award winners Halle Berry and Anna Paquin, Academy Award nominee Ian McKellen, Golden Globe nominee Patrick Stewart, and actors Hugh Jackman, Famke Janssen, and James Marsden. It’s safe to say the characters in the film were perfectly cast, as a great chemistry emerges between the X-Men as they battle the villainous "Magneto" (Ian McKellen). Notably, the team aspect of the film helps separate it from other comic book adaptations such as Batman (Burton, 1989) or Superman (Donner, 1978). Within the group, special emphasis should be put on the casting of "Wolverine," which has arguably become Hugh Jackman’s defining role. Jackman not only possessed the physique for Wolverine, but also the emotion and intensity that comes with bearing the signature adamanitum claws and skeleton.

Besides the well-rounded cast, X-Men possessed a strong narrative and character development, especially with Jackman’s Wolverine. He goes from a hopelessly confused individual with no identity to someone who finds a place in the world and with the X-Men group, all the while maintaining the short-tempered manner that fans of the comics know and love. He ends up being a character audiences can easily identify with and feel sympathetic for as he develops relationships with the other X-Men.
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Possessing the physique and temperament necessary for the character, Hugh Jackman made the Wolverine his own in Singer's X-Men. 
Singer’s film also has strong themes and social commentary that was (and still is) relevant for society. Rogue (Anna Paquin) is a character who is isolated from the X-Men due to her unique ability to harness another mutant's power--at the fatal expense of the mutant. This causes her to feel alone and extremely detached, as well as unable to find love. This is partly remedied when Bobby/Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) takes a liking to her, and when Wolverine becomes a father figure to her. Rogue and her power are symbolic of our own isolation that we feel at times, especially in the presence of new or extraordinary people. The main conflict in the film, the clash between humans and mutants, can be applied to the conflicts that appear in our world today, such as between governments, religions, race, etc. Of course these differences aren’t as drastic as in X-Men, but nevertheless the film emphasizes the fact that even though we as humans may look like one species, we have clear differences that lie inside each of us, and the resulting conflicts can sometimes blow out of proportion or end disastrously.

With X-Men, Bryan Singer successfully renewed interest and credibility to the superhero genre. From the project stems one of the largest and highest grossing franchises in film history; two sequels sprung from Singer’s original film, X2: X-Men United (Singer, 2003) and X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006). Two films focused on Wolverine, X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Hood, 2009) and The Wolverine (Mangold, 2013), and two films focused on the X-Men characters' backstories,  X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014). With Singer returning to direct for X-Men: Apocalypse, the franchise has expanded to eight films, with the vast majority enjoying tremendous critical and commercial success. Singer can be proud his well-casted, well-written, and allegorical original film spawned such an illustrious franchise.


WORKS CITED

“Bryan Singer On The Complete Story Of The X-Men.” Empire. 2014. 22 Nov. 2014.
            <http://www.empireonline.com/interviews/interview.asp?IID=1892>.

 IMDB. 2014. 22 Nov. 2014. <http://www.imdb.com>.
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An Unforgettable Performance: Julianne Moore in "Still Alice"

2/22/2015

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Written by Steven Collier
Still Alice (Glatzer & Westmoreland, 2014) tells the heart-wrenching story of a Linguistics Professor’s (Julianne Moore) struggle to persevere through an unexpected diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a film that stares unflinchingly into the grim realities of an affliction which destroys countless lives each year, showing how the disease steadily robs its victims of their very minds. As memory crumbles away so too does all concept of family, history, and expression. This gradual erasure of self is a horrifying fate, and one not easily conveyed. Yet, Julianne Moore heroically rises to the occasion and delivers a remarkable performance as the titular "Alice."

Moore’s strengths in this film are apparent from the first scenes, where Alice is celebrating her 50th birthday. Amongst her family, she is intelligent, outspoken, and endlessly lively. Indomitable, Alice carries herself with the crisp authority of a seasoned lecturer. Her unflappable bearing and cool charm cannot help but capture the attention of cast and audience alike. And it’s almost unbearable to watch.

Anyone who saw so much as a trailer for this movie, enters the theatre knowing how it must inevitably end. And, Still Alice takes great advantage of this. The directors do not try to sucker punch the audience with Alice’s diagnosis. Instead the film opens with unabashedly tragic undertones. Even in the midst of Alice’s birthday, relentlessly maudlin background music plays over the festivities. This is a wake for the woman our protagonist once was, the attendees just don’t yet know it. However, the audience does. And, all they can do from their seats of knowledge is watch the tragedy play out.

Moore’s first fifteen minutes onscreen are some of the finest, most concise character establishment I have ever beheld. She has very little time to introduce Alice, much less make her into a character with whom audiences will empathize. Yet, Moore accomplishes this masterfully. Every action Moore makes from solitary jogs, to casual lunches with her children, to even quick games of Words with Friends on her cell phone all serve to quietly demonstrate the brisk intuition and relentless drive which make Alice such a strong protagonist. They form a rich, emotional/intellectual mosaic of everything that will be stripped from the character for the film’s duration.

Alice’s character arc is not one of progress, but of regression. In every subsequent scene, Moore whittles off another tiny piece of the incredible woman we met ever so briefly at the start of the movie. First, her vocabulary trickles away. Then, her normal collectedness disintegrates in fits of manic anguish. Gradually, her skin becomes increasingly pallid, and her eyes grow dimmer. By the end of the movie only a husk remains. And yet, as the title promises, even under the total influence of Alzheimer’s Julianne Moore is undeniably still Alice.

It’s really impossible to overstate the magnitude of this performance. Alice is more than a three-dimensional character. She’s a fully realized individual. Any less of a performance would not be able to carry a picture such as this. In her portrayal of Alice, Julianne Moore manifests a character that remains not only recognizable, but actually relatable, throughout the entirety of her degeneration. From academic titan to gibbering wight, Julianne Moore never seems to portray anyone other than the same character. And she does it by embracing and embodying the one enduring constant in Alice’s life: her beautiful, undeniable humanity.
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The Element of Human Perception in Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects

2/12/2015

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Written by Anthony Watkins
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One of director Bryan Singer’s most celebrated films is the 1995 crime drama The Usual Suspects. Starring Stephen Baldwin, Gabriel Byrne, Benicio Del Toro, Kevin Pollak, and Kevin Spacey, the film tells the story of five criminals who meet in a police lineup and the subsequent events told by one of the members of a drug deal that went terribly wrong. Featuring strong performances from its lead actors, a smart, ever-twisting screenplay from Christopher McQuarrie, and sharp, noir-style cinematography, the film is regarded as one of the smartest crime thrillers ever to be released. This short article will take you behind the scenes of its famous twist ending—specifically how Singer used human perception to manipulate audiences. If you haven’t seen this film yet, I highly recommend viewing it before continuing reading!

The most brilliant element of The Usual Suspects is that the story of the drug deal is told by one of the criminals, Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey). Through his re-telling of the events, Verbal manipulates the audience into believing what he wants them to believe, and we fall for it. We can’t help but believe him, as what he says directly follows what we see on screen. However, at the end, we realize he has been deceiving us all along. Of course, director Bryan Singer wanted to reveal this in the most convincing and effective way as possible. The original plans for the reveal of Verbal as Keyser Soze were quite different from the final cut of the film. Kevin Spacey notes, “We had some discussions about, do we want it to be cosmetic? Does Verbal come down the stairs of the police station and as he’s beginning to walk away, shed his jacket and tussel his hair and get into the car and maybe a jacket comes out of the car and he puts on a different sports coat and suddenly he puts on a pair of dark glasses and suddenly physically he changes…and ultimately we found what would be more profound and debilitating for an audience in terms of going, ‘What a minute’, was if absolutely nothing changed but your perception, literally as if the angle from which you were watching our character completely shifted 380 degrees and you suddenly saw that person entirely differently and nothing had changed but the way you viewed it” (The Usual Suspects DVD).
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Director Bryan Singer tantalizes audiences over the question, "Who is Keyser Soze" using flashbacks that skillfully obscure Soze's identity.
Singer and Spacey implement human perception earlier in the film during the initial interrogation of Verbal. Kevin Pollak notes, “Certain moments of Kevin’s performance, which obviously wouldn’t change from the first time you saw the movie to the second time…but the exact same performance would have two different readings and reactions from the audience from the first time you saw the movie to the second time” (The Usual Suspects DVD). One of these moments is when Verbal is first set in the interrogation room. The camera focuses on Verbal’s facial reactions. Pollak notes, “He looks bored out of his mind. The second time you see the movie, knowing he made some of the story from the bulletin board, you think you see him reading from the bulletin board. Same performance that you swore the first time you saw the movie he looked bored” (The Usual Suspects DVD). This is of course part of the brilliance of Kevin Spacey’s superb acting, from which he received an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. He quotes, “How amazing it is that the truth can be looking you right in the eye; it could be staring at you and you miss it” (The Usual Suspects DVD).
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Another subtle moment in The Usual Suspects that gains significance through the second viewing of the film is when Verbal is looking (apparently) at chief Kujan, but is really looking at the bottom of Kujan's coffee cup to use the text in his fabricated story.
Besides being a riveting, well-paced and superbly written crime drama, Singer’s The Usual Suspects has significant relevance for the real world. People we meet are not always who they seem. We as humans tend to judge someone based on their physical characteristics or even how they act. But, as The Usual Suspects displays, we cannot always be so sure about someone based on these characteristics. There is something more to that person, a complex individual beneath what is visible. Although sometimes desired, we cannot read someone’s mind or true intentions. There is always something hidden. In the end, “maybe there’s just a Keyser Soze in all of us” (Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects DVD).

 

WORKS CITED
The Usual Suspects. Screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie. Dir. Bryan Singer. Special Edition DVD. Polygram Filmed Entertainment, 1995.

 

 

Here is the ending to Singer's The Usual Suspects. (Again, if you haven't seen the film, please view it first!) The twist ending forces audiences to entirely change their perception of Verbal and now want to go back and re-watch the film.
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