Blog Archives

This Barbie is Saving Movie Theaters!

2/28/2024

By Megan Sechrist

It is no secret that movie theaters, like many other businesses, took a hit during COVID-19 which still affects their traffic to this day. With the birth of streaming services like Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, MAX, and Tubi, we can watch all of the most anticipated films from the comfort of our own homes. Many films today go straight to streaming services and just skip the theater run entirely. I’ve seen quite a few films in the theaters this year and I can confidently confirm that I was only in two max capacity theaters this year: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.

   Teenage girls are often viewed as “obsessive fan-girls” when it comes to things that they enjoy. Young women are criticized for their hobbies and interests which is an idea that Gerwig fights against in her films. Strong, outspoken characters like Lady Bird McPherson and the March sisters, along with Gloria, Sasha and Barbie herself battle gender stereotypes in their respective scenarios. It is no wonder why young women flock to theaters around the world to watch these films that inspire them to be themselves. It is young women who single handedly saved movie theaters in 2023, and it all started with Barbenheimer.

     The term “Barbenheimer” refers to the two most highly anticipated films of the summer, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which were both released on July 21, 2023. Very quickly, people realized that it would be a box office race between these two films to see which would have the better opening weekend numbers. There was a clear divide in the media over who was going to see which movie, as people started to pick sides and buy tickets in order to help their favorite win the box office race, until someone suggested seeing both. All of a sudden, movie-goers across the nation were excited to see both Barbie AND Oppenheimer, with some fans even going all out with a costume change in the middle of the showings. It became such a spectacle that even Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie hopped on the train by buying their tickets to see Oppenheimer! Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) joined the trend by supporting Barbie in the theater. Murphy is quoted saying “I’ll be going to see Barbie 100% — I can’t wait to see it… I think it's just great for the industry and for audiences that we have two amazing films by amazing filmmakers coming out on the same day.” for People Magazine. At the end of the record-breaking weekend, women made up 38% of the Oppenheimer audience and 71% of Barbie audiences. As for the box office, Barbie ended up making $155 million ($70 million in the first day) and Oppenheimer walked away with $82.4 million by the end of the weekend. Barbie ended up winning the box office race and broke the record for highest grossing film directed by a woman, all because women wanted to see a reflection of themselves on the big screen.

  Greta Gerwig has become an inspiration for young women across the globe. Being one of the most famous women directors in modern cinema, Gerwig has spoken a lot about her experience in the film industry and how women are making more of an influence now than they ever had! Her characters are often compelling women who are fighting for their place in a world that doesn’t always accept them. These women reflect Gerwig’s personal journey, especially in her career. She is fighting for her place in the film industry; an industry that has always been dominated by men. Gerwig is quoted saying, “For so many female characters, and for women in general, the idea that desire and ambition are shameful is everywhere.” The fact that she is able to create women who fight to be themselves is just what we need at a time when young women have this much influence over an industry as powerful as Hollywood.

It would be ignorant to talk about the influence of young women on the movie theater industry without also talking about their influence on social media, especially TikTok. TikTok is one of the most influential apps in the world right now for younger generations, and teenage girls use it to influence each other. Ideas can go viral overnight on TikTok, one of these viral ideas being the idea of seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer as a double feature. Women caught wind of the idea of making a day of seeing both films and went right along with it. Barbenheimer became not only about seeing movies but about being with friends and family. Without the encouragement to see both movies and the threat of feeling left out of conversations, neither film would have been as successful as they were. All that encouragement came from social media influence, which reached an even higher level when Taylor Swift announced the theatrical release of her Eras Tour.

It is quite obvious that Swift’s key demographic is young women. Her most popular music is all pop tunes with themes of romantic relationships, but she writes so much more than that. Taylor Swift writes music about grief and loss, the struggles of being a woman in power, friendship, innocence and childhood, and so much more. It is the complexity and relatability of her music that captivates women, creating some of her most dedicated fans. It is no surprise that her newest film would ride off the success of her re-recorded albums and her renowned Eras Tour. Through her social media, Swift encouraged her fans to see her film in their Eras Tour costumes, trade friendship bracelets, and sing and dance around to all of their favorite songs. AMC jumped on the bandwagon by making collectable cups and popcorn buckets, free posters, and AMC brand friendship bracelets. After the success of Barbie, Swift’s team as well as AMC knew exactly what to do to appeal to young women in order to prompt them to come to the theaters. AMC was so onboard for what this would do for their company that they issued a statement informing all Swifties that singing and dancing is allowed and encouraged in the theaters during showings of The Eras Tour. Because of the dedication of Swift’s fanbase, as well as efforts from AMC, the film grossed $92.8 million during its opening weekend. These events are inspiring other famous women to try their hand in the film industry so the queen herself, Beyoncé, released a concert film of her tour, Renaissance, at the beginning of December 2023.

Inspirational women such as Taylor Swift, Greta Gerwig, and Beyoncé are paving the way for women to be present in all aspects of the film industry. During her Little Women press tour, Gerwig said “It feels that there is both a sisterhood, which is wonderful because nobody wants to be at the dance party on their own, and also that their [women filmmakers] films are being put alongside great male filmmakers’ without an asterisk. I’m happy for it to be special and not special at the same time.” The idea of women in the film industry is becoming more and more normalized and that, in part, is due to the overwhelming support from the women going to the theaters. We, as women, know how to have fun at a movie. It is a social event, it is a place for us to appreciate art, and it is a place where we can watch ourselves reflected on the screen and finally feel like we are making a difference in the world of film; starting with saving theaters!

Author Megan Sechrist, at the showings of Barbie and The Eras Tour.

The Wonderful World Building of Henry Sugar

2/21/2024

By Lau Lu-Zheng

Of all the auteurs (directors known for their signature style) in modern-day Hollywood, Wes Anderson is certainly one of the more recognized by the general audience for being a visual maverick. In fact, during the late pandemic to 2023, a trend appeared throughout TikTok and the likes featuring people depicting a day in their lives in a Wes Anderson aesthetic, brandishing his unorthodox style of muted warm colors, symmetrical compositions and focus on subjects as well as objects, not to mention the close-ups and fourth wall breaking — all these things were considered in these shorts.

While this was an attempt to celebrate his unorthodox aesthetic, paying homage to some of his more popular works, such as his leap into animation, Fantastic Mr.Fox (2009), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and The French Dispatch (2021) (almost all of the shorts revolved around a recognizable theme, Obituary, from the soundtrack), Anderson seems dismayed by the audience’s emphasis on his style, but not the content of his works. “Is this really how people see my films?” Anderson ponders in an interview with Collider. “Even if the form is essential, a film is first and foremost a script, a cast…”. After all, a beautiful shell is still a shell, the story must be aided by the form, not the other way around.

Anderson proves this point with his latest works: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and its three sibling films: The Rat Catcher, Poison, and The Swan, in his first partnership with Netflix. In fact, according to another interview with Deadline, Anderson had been dreaming of filming Henry Sugar for a while, but had concerns with adaptation from the original novel by Roahl Dahl.

“Because I realized that much of what I’d always loved about the story was simply his voice throughout it, and I said, “Well, there’s one way to keep his voice — just use it.” And so that’s what we did.” Dahl continued. Hence, the film’s style was encouraged by the content of Henry Sugar: It became a sort of meta-narrative depiction of a mysterious fictional or non-fictional “Henry Sugar”, narrated by characters of the story itself to the camera, all the while told by Roahl Dahl himself (played by Ralph Fiennes) in a set as closely resembling his study room, using old photographs.

The film revolves around a character nicknamed “Henry Sugar” for the sake of animosity: Henry trains and meditates daily like an Indian monk he had read about to see through cards at his local casino. Dahl tells the story in real time, and as that happens, so do the characters, all aware that they are acting and, in a way, performing the scenes out like acts in a theater with the sole purpose of explaining the story. While this happens, a hundred moving props and set constructors whirl around moving characters to set the scene. The cinematography involves dolly shots from miniature replications to real life, seamless transitions from prop to prop, and on-stage tricks like quick dress changes, all the while boasting the beautiful symmetry and colors of Anderson’s worldbuilding.

The meta-narrative world goes into different stories within the stories, from a scene of Roahl Dahl telling a story about Henry Sugar who reads a story about a doctor who tells his story about a monk, and the likes. The characters hardly move, but the world changes around them, from backgrounds of early London to India, a library, circus, and casino, crossing space and time non-linearly, creating a dreamlike world. The mastermind behind the elaborate set design, Adam Stockhausen mustered his background in theater and procured interlacing and well-timed sliding background sets, props, and intricate tricks like a few trompe l'œils, in this case, the apple boxes that were slid to the perfect position to create a camouflage illusion, to mimic levitation.

All in all, Henry Sugar treads new exciting waters for storytelling, melding novels and films into greater cohesion in the field of adaptations and adds just another point to Wes Anderson’s brilliance at using his signature aesthetic not just for the aesthetic (while it certainly is easy on the eyes), but to express the story — the content and crux — as it wants to be told.

A Ghost Story: Loss & Longing

2/7/2024

by Eli Alderfer

*This Article Contains Spoilers*

David Lowery’s A Ghost Story is captivating yet aesthetically mellow. Although the film is about a ghost after life, it is not a horror film but rather a softly drawn drama that reflects on life, death, and love beyond the grave. Lowery’s perspective on grief is heartbreaking in the most poetic way

A Ghost Story tells a simple tale across various timelines, following C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara), a young married couple in their first home together. The narrative finds its structure after the death of C in the beginning of the film. C takes the form of spirit, wearing a sheet over his body for the remainder of the film. Devastated by the loss of her husband, M lives in quiet solitude, as C watches over her from the afterlife. Generations come and go throughout the home, offering many perspectives of lives across time. Lowery’s portrait of a soul is a unique blend of loving and longing, framed in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio to express the feeling of being metaphorically boxed in. C’s ghost cannot escape being confined to his past life, because he has not yet let go. His sorrow torments him, holding him hostage for generations. Flashbacks of happiness, sadness, and hard times intermix with C’s fading memory of his beloved M. C perceives time differently than humans, and so audiences get lost in an unending existence, only held still by feelings of love and longing.

While the film explores the abstraction of time, A Ghost Story’s main focus is on the idea of heartache. Lowery’s angle on grief is distinct, as it looks at it from both sides. Most films about tragedy and loss only look at grief through the eyes of the living, but Lowery questions the living emotions of the deceased. In A Ghost Story, we see both C and M struggle with grief and denial. Although they are in different dimensions, they remain connected through the pain of missing each other. The atmosphere of emotional pain in a sci-fi-esque drama is a unique vision that blossoms from a beautiful film.

  The film communicates through compelling visuals rather than dialogue. The few instances of dialogue that are present provide depth to the story as thought provoking ideas rather than expositional interactions. Much of the dialogue centers around the main question: “How are we remembered when we’re gone?” The film explores this idea through emotions and the passage of time spanning from C’s existence. A Ghost Story achieves a sense of inspiration for life, reminding us not to waste away our lives, because at any given moment, it could all come to an end.

The acting in A Ghost Story is notable as Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck perform well together, but it is when their characters are separated that their emotions shine. Even with a sheet covering his body for most of the film, Affleck is able to make us feel the sense of emptiness his character endures. Despite the lack of dialogue, the audience is able to connect deeply with the characters, due to Mara’s and Affleck’s silent emotion, presented through expression rather than verbally. Emotion can often be found in the eyes, and so A Ghost Story integrates many close shots of the characters’ eyes in order to provoke empathy. Affleck and Mara are able to pull on the heartstrings of the audience, making the experience a more fulfilling watch.

   The cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo alone is enough to encapsulate the thematic emotions of A Ghost Story. The visuals bring a soft and dreamlike feel to the story, which helps to further the idea of death and timescapes. As a film that does not include much dialogue, it is important for the visuals to be engaging, and A Ghost Story executes this perfectly through the use of colors and lighting. Warmth and comfort are identified through soft, yellow tones, while regret and loneliness are shown through dull greys and blues. The colors contrast each other, as does C’s mentality over time. This dreamlike atmosphere builds mysticism and shows the passion put into this film.

   The musical score brings yet another layer of emotion to the film. The original score by Daniel Hart is a somberly dramatic addition, which proves its importance due to the lack of dialogue. The film also features the original song “I Get Overwhelmed” by Dark Rooms, which helps convey the themes of anxiety, depression, and longingness. The lyrics explore the overwhelming state of the world we live in, and the pain that comes with life, but without pain, there could be no healing. This song sets the tone of the film early on, and is played again at the end as it re-encompasses the loss felt between both C and M. A Ghost Story is brought to life by the emotional score, satisfying the space left by the speech-free script.

   Lowery’s elegant tale of the afterlife is poignant, but may not be for everyone. A Ghost Story is a fascinating perspective on love and despair, but its lack of dialogue prevents it from reaching the necessary character building and connection. The cinematography and score make up for what is lacking, creating a rare spectacle that is in a class of its own. With only a ninety minute runtime, A Ghost Story is a short, worthwhile watch as an independent and poetic tale.