Top 10 Films About Film

 

I have a new guest post guest post up on The Top 10 Blog, called "Top 10 Films About Film." Click here to check it out!  My last post for The Top 10 Blog was called "The Top 10 Dream Films: Reality?! Never!"  Click here for that post!

Film & The Future of Narrative Soul: Thoughts

I was thinking about the connections between Hanna:

and the semi-recent film, Never Let Me Go:

There is something immensely creepy about scientifically engineered humans -- soulful, expendable, throwaway people (and this is a theme in both Never Let Me Go & Hanna).  It made me wonder about nature versus nurture when nature is so heavily nurtured.  There was a really interesting article in Discover about nature and nurture in the film, Hanna.  Click here to read "Hanna: A Transhuman Tragedy of Nature vs Nurture."

In this www.high-tech world of "ambient awareness" via Twitter and the imminent Google chip implant, what are the boundaries of the human body, the reaches and worth of a soul?  We're scientifically engineering our own memories, digitally enhancing, click-and-dragging our emotions into compartmentalized albums on Facebook.  Does new technology give us longer lives, or lesser appreciation for the lives we create? In terms of reality extending beyond the narrative of our lives -- on blogs and Facebook walls -- and becoming stretched and indestructible like a science fiction-esque cloudless sky of singular consciousness, I think of Zadie Smith's incredible essay, "Generation Why."  Click here to read the whole article.  How does the timelessness of a cyber-sky affect the crafting of our personal design, avatar personas, online presences, and beautifully fragmented-and-integrated, constantly moving-and-improving personal narratives?

When we undulate involuntarily along a 'feed, moving like breath, rhythmic and typing, editing has become synonymous with existing.

Check out this amazing short film about the 'Today' project by Jonathan Harris.  Harris creates and maintains a permanent string of images as a narrative life memory by taking a picture every day (it's like stop-motion soul-scribing):

This reminded me of something I listened to a while back on This American Life called 'Plan B.' The story near the end of the program reveals the rather mundane and somehow surprising and heartbreaking fate of inanimate objects.  Click here to listen to the program.

Everything leaves traces behind.  Everything has a narrative reality.  But how permanent can a narrative become in terms of the traces it leaves behind?  In the film Never Let Me Go, Kathy stands on a hilltop where lost things vanish.  The feeling of that scene made me think of the fate of people as 'things' in science fiction and how modern science is transforming the fate of the narrative into cyber-sci-fi (even transforming within the narrative to extend beyond the boundaries of the narrative -- soul and memory dissipating in an easily accessible and expansive digital sky).  In the story of our lives, humans trickle down a hill, fall to pieces and disappear into a Milky Way river of lost objects, live-streaming over the narrative horizon.  We are carried away in the afternoon breeze.  Gone?

Digital imprints are impressive.  Nothing is ever lost or permanently erased on the Internet.  We can shape beautiful designs and memories in the pixilated sand, untouched by the wind.

... just a passing thought :)

Fire and Rain

You may have completely forgotten about Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty, starring a then 16-year old River Phoenix.  It's a beautiful film.

If you've been honoring the dearly departed director with 12 Angry Men, Network and Dog Day Afternoon on a loop & you're looking for another Lumet masterpiece, definitely check this one out:

That scene still makes me cry.

Music Box Hanna

After a phenomenal brunch at Good Enough to Eat on the Upper West Side, we headed to the Lincoln Square Theater (a truly Disney-fied wonder.. they can bury me there) to see the film Hanna.  My thoughts on the film:

Open the music box.  Inside, the ballerina is lethal.  She whirls to unheard music, feels nothing, just misses the heart.  Once upon a time, a girl with icy white eyebrows emerged from her enchanted house in the woods.  The rest is written in a fairy tale – the Grimm kind.

Hanna is extraordinary.  It was directed by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, The Soloist).  I won't give away too much here because I like the idea of diving into this film and getting swept away.  It's an adrenaline flick, the kind of movie that catapults you out of your awareness.  It's a fairy tale that feels exotic, Grimm.    

The film focuses on a mysterious and icy cool young girl named Hanna (the ridiculously magical Saoirse Ronan) living and training with her father (a bearded and bedraggled Eric Bana) in the middle of nowhere.  Seriously, young Hanna guts a deer in the first 5 minutes of the film and you know she means business.  Hanna has no expression, no fear.  Her eyes radiate from a mummy mess of animal furs.  It's as if she was somehow formed in a world of ice.  She has luminous blue eyes -- an unrelenting and guiding force of the soul -- and a face that has been chipped away to reveal an ice-picked princess, a ghost.  She's a weapon: sheer, sharp, deadly cool and more like the coil that spins the music box than the ballerina trapped inside, endlessly spinning (imagine the vapid expression of a carved face-suddenly awakened). The film emerges from the forest at a high speed driven by the thumping heart of The Chemical Brothers score, pushing the narrative forward, cutting and whirring inside a box (a different world), whirling around inside itself.  

Hanna is pursued by a Cate Blanchett (the most stunning Big Bad Wolf in the history of the fairy tale) and that's essentially all I'm going to say about the plot:

A few quick associations:

Hanna reminded me of a Tom Tykwer film.  It had that femme-techno urgency a la Run Lola Run or The Princess and the Warrior (and Soairse Ronan's ravishingly washed out look is like the flip side of Franka Potente's eery angelic grace):

Also, check out Tykwer's short from the film, Paris Je T'aime (it has Hanna's whirring urgency and emotional tempo): 

Saoirse Ronan is so expressive and so lovely, it's hypnotic to watch her when she's still:

She was nominated for an Oscar for Wright's Atonement at the age of 13:

Wild and wielding a bow and arrow, I can absolutely see why Ronan was considered for the Katniss role in the upcoming film adaptation of the book, The Hunger Games.  And this is an interview with Ronan:

I was considering Ronan as a young Sarah Polley: 

And the deadly father-daughter dynamic reminded me of Kick-Ass:

or The Professional:

or even Paper Moon:

Let's think of Hanna as a world inside the music box.  Experience the film the same way you would the box.  It's not the typical movie that aims directly for the heart.  It appears to miss its target on purpose  It's cyclical.  It opens and shuts.  It begins and ends on the same moment - missing the heart (literally, figuratively).  Some said the film was lacking an emotional core, but I believe the emotion just slipped in at a different place (at a faster pace).  It felt the way music does.  It moved like music.  (Click here to read about the psychology of music.)  Music tells us how to feel.  The film-music's feeling drove us into the coil, pumped us through the techno-beating heart of Hanna.  It's an active barometer, intimate and unreal, seeping into plot and iris.  The music inside transports us, moves us.  And then we shut the box.  The music stops.  After all, what do you find at the heart of a music box?  Cranks and levers, a spinning doll.  Music.  

For the fanatic, here's an additional Hanna reading list - enjoy!

Click here to read: "Hanna: Saoirse Ronan, a Jason Bourne for the Glee generation" from the LA Times.

Click here to read: "Joe Wright and Saoirse Ronan Talk Hanna, Fairytale Violence and Girl Power" from The Finger Dandy.

Click here to read The Rolling Stone review of Hanna.

Click here to read Roger Ebert's Hanna review.

... a few of my favorite things

Yes, for some reason, I think we can find the meaning of life here:

Perhaps we can play with Marlo & dash through the cyberstreets, looking for love:

Or what about a little sunshine?