Join us tomorrow at MODEM!
Grizzly Man focuses on the amateur grizzly bear expert Timothy Treadwell. He periodically journeyed to Alaska to study and live with the bears. He was killed, along with his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, by a rogue bear in October 2003.
The film explores Treadwell’s passionate life as he found solace among these endangered animals.
Discussion following the film is led by Kalmár György.
Fb-event: https://www.facebook.com/events/2055226518077521/
(The Art Immortal)
After last week’s fascinating discussion with Ágnes Kocsis (director of Pál Adrienn), this week we are joined by another young and highly successful Hungarian director, György Kristóf, director of the film on the menu of tomorrow’s film club, Out (2017).
The film follows the story of Ágoston, a middle-aged engineer, who loses his job and therefore sets sails to the Baltic leaving her family behind.
The screening (Hungarian audio, English subtitles) is followed by a discussion with the director, moderated by Elemér Szabó (visual anthropologist).
You can find the facebook event here:
Films and Easter eggs? Don’t worry, this is not a post about the cutest/dumbest Easter family comedies. (Although it could’ve been a good idea to list the top 10 most watched films at Easter… We’ll do it for Christmas!)
Surprise or no surprise, apart from your little baskets, films are also full of Easter eggs. These are those moments in films which are inside jokes or refer to other films, literary/visual texts. In “humanities people language” we could call these cross-references or intertextuality/intervisuality. These apply to other visual media, such as video games as well.
To celebrate the bunny holiday, we collected our 7 (you know, seven is a central number in Christianity) favourite Easter eggs in films. Here’s our list for you:
We can see adult jokes (mostly connected to sex, but you know Easter is originally the celebration of fertility) in several Disney films. One of the less subtle moments is when Simba stirs up dust and the word “sex” becomes visible on the screen.
(thesun.co.uk)
Pixar is famous for their movies being laden with Easter eggs. But it is most probably the Pizza Planet Truck that goes the longest way. It first appeared in Toy Story, but then continued its journey at random scenes in A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3, Cars 2, Monsters University and even Brave (as a wooden replica, obviously, there were no cars in Medieval Scotland…)
(pixar.wikia.com)
Walt Disney wasn’t the only guy who liked Easter eggs (although the term might not have been in use during his lifetime…). Alfred Hitchcock made cameo appearances in most of his movies (actually in 39 of his 52 major films). Here’s a picture of him in The Birds. He’s the one with the two doggies.
(the.hitchcock.zone)
Another cameo king is Stan Lee, former editor in chief of Marvel Comics, who appeared in minor roles in Marvel movies, playing a range of characters from himself (in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer) to a strip club DJ in Deadpool as you can see below. Rumour also has it that there are some pre-shot scenes with him in case he dies. Long live Stan Lee!
(geekytyrant.com)
Believe it or not, R2D2 and C-3PO make a short visit to Han Solo’s other life as Indiana Jones. They appear as hieroglyphs in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Can you find them?
(mentalfloss.com)
Watch out if you see an orange appearing on screen while you’re watching The Godfather. The appearance of this fruit means that someone is going to die shortly.
(darthmaz314.com)
During the credits at the end of The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Marauder’s Map shows two footprints in a highly interesting position (bottom left corner).
(illuminatimovies.net)
We wish you a Happy Easter egg hunt be that for real or cinematic eggs!
(capcana.com)
This week IEAS Film Club with the moderation of Petra Visnyei brings you Lady Bird (2017), the story of an artistically inclined seventeen-year-old girl who comes of age in Sacramento, California.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1479963552126971/
(wgs.mit.edu)
Join us for the screening and discussion of the film tomorrow from 18.00 at Studio 111.
Join us tomorrow (20 March 18.00 St. 111) and let’s watch three short films.
Oats Studios is a garage project of District 9 director Neill Blomkamp, which he launched in order to promote talented young filmmakers and their vivid imagination. In three short films of Volume 1 – Rakka, Firebase and Zygote – first he and his crew explore what is left of Blomkamps’ iced Alien Project.
Bring along your boyfriend, girlfriend, flatmate, comissar, your non-violent pet and your non-violent grandmother. Entry is free, but make sure you bring some snacks, possibly something you can rattle with during the screening to enhance the experience.
After the screening a casual discussion is going to be held about the topics the short films touch upon. Discussion is moderated by Bodnár Péter.
Péter Bodnár is reporting from, well, not from next to the Red Carpet, but he does have a red carpet in his living room.
(Source: digitalspy.com)
Last night in Los Angeles, the 90th Academy Awards Ceremony took place. There were winners and losers, but pity the losers not, they were present in the greater number, so they had more compassion going for them. If you run through the list of winners, it paints a quite dull picture of the event, as mostly the expected nominations won, with little to no surprises. Especially so, if you take into considerations that no death was reported from the scene, considering the Dothraki standards, of course. Without further ado, let’s dive into the winners. Not all of them, but the meaningful ones. For those of you, who hunger for the complete list of categories, their nominations and its winners, check out the official webpage of the Awards at oscar.go.com.
Best Picture: Shape of Water
Aaaaaaand I’m already counteracting myself. The first category we check, probably the most important one is somewhat of a suprise. Not that big though, Shape of Water was the expected film to earn the greatest amount of statuettes this year, but still. The film shared this category with the likes of Dunkirk, Darkest Hour and Lady Bird, for all of which good arguments could be made. Also, where is the Three Billboards from this category? Although I did not see all of the films (Shape of Water is still something I have to consume), in my eyes it is a monumental task to make a better film than Three Billboards. With that one missing its entry, Shape of Water seems as good as the next one to win this.
(Source: digg.com)
Actress in a Leading Role: Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Okay, I admit, I cheated. Most of the times (all the time) the Best Picture is followed by the Best Actor in a Leading Role. But why not put women ahead? So we’re doing it. Three Billboards’ leading actress McDormand deserved this one, she did a hell of a job for the film. This category this year was not that strong, I feel like the other contenders are great actresses, but in their nominated role they just could not get anywhere near McDormand.
(Source: nytimes.com)
Actor in a Leading Role: Gary Oldman – The Darkest Hour
So the dear and deeply respected comittee of the Academy decided to kill the memes of these last couple of years and giving out Oscars for people, whose names the audiences around the globe has screamed for years now. After Leo getting his own, Oldman gets one as well. Well deserved, not just as Churchill this year (but definetly for Churchill as well), but for being such a great actor for decades now.
(Source: digitalspy.com)
Actress in a Supporting Role: Allison Janney – I, Tonya
I have not seen this one yet, but from the list of names in this category, the nominations were quite.. average. Not to take any credit away from the nominees, but this category seemed.. honestly?.. meh.
(Source: roundhouseradio.com)
Actor in a Leading Role: Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Another well deserved one. Sam Rockwell lives in the mind of most as ‘the guy from those movies’. Everyone knows his face, but not his name. Hopefully this changes with this years Academy Awards, as he acted phenomenally in Three Billboards. Although the competition does not seem the harshest, it does not diminish the value of his acting.
(Source: variety.com)
The other categories went on mostly as expected, but it was definitely good to see Bladerunner win 2 statuettes, and very disheartening to see that the Hungarian nominee did not win its deserved award for political/pr reasons, while it was put as the undisputed best in its category by critics. But at the end of the day, it’s the Oscars… Where politics and public opinions matter quite a lot.
(Source: timegoesby.blog.hu)
After this short review of the Oscars (for more, visit the web page of the Academy, or you know.. just google it, for weeks this will be all over the search engine’s pages) if you did not have your fill of films and cinematography, join us tomorrow (Tuesday) at 6 p.m. in Studio 111 of the Institute, where we’ll screen The Darkest Hour, and hail an ode to Gary Oldman after the screening, in appreciation of his long awaited statuette.
Join us tomorrow for the screening of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl at the Institute of English and American Studies, Studio 111 (Feb 27 18.00)!
The film is the story of high schooler Greg, who spends most of his time making parodies of classic movies with his co-worker Earl, and finds his outlook forever altered after befriending a classmate who has just been diagnosed with cancer.
Discussion of the film will be moderated by Kovács Réka.
You can listen to Bodnár Péter and Feldmann Fanni’s teaser conversation below.
See you tomorrow!
Let’s start the new semester with a peek back to last semester’s English Majors’ Week!
The moderator of the Film Club screening, Bodnár Péter was joined by Molnár Gergely to have a conversation about the film and to try and save the King’s grace. Give it a listen! You can also read Péter’s thoughts on the film below.
Music to my Ears, My King
In the Film Club podcast on King Arthur – The Legend of the Sword I talked about some features of the aforementioned film with Gergely Molnár, some of which can be seen as a potential attempt of saving graces for the film. And the films seems to be highly in need of that, as the new King Arthur was not received with a critical appraisal. The film stands with a 29% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is less than graceful. On the other hand, the audience score is standing at a much stronger 69%, which might be thanks to the elements which we discussed in the podcast. One thing we highlighted that helped us enjoy the film more is the music. The melodies created by Daniel Pemberton helped deepen the immersion and he managed to create songs that not only supplement the scenes, but actually make them better. Although a lot of new films have a soundtrack which is quite good by today’s standards, it is not often that we have a soundtrack which saves the experience of a film that is otherwise far from perfect. The themes Pemberton created are so alluring and mesmerising, that they are stuck to my ears even to this day (which is – to be fair – a long time after the English Majors’ Week screening of the film, and even longer after I had first watched it). The tunes that leave this strong an impression usually belong to the titans of cinema soundtracks like John Williams, Howard Shore or Hans Zimmerman. If we take a look at Pemberton’s previous works, we can see that although he contributed to several good films, none of his works stood out as much as King Arthur.
When we look into the musical scores of the film, there are two pieces that stand out as the odd ones. Two songs that were not originally made by Pemberton. Both of them were, however, re-suited to the mood of the film, with which, once again, Pemberton worked wonders. One of them is Sam Lee’s “The Devil and the Huntsman,” which accompanied a long scene of the hero’s journey before the final battle. The scene was music video-like, and it felt more like the shots belonged to an overpriced video clip, rather than the music serving as a background. The other song is what originally was named “Lament – Light of Aidan” and its origins are clouded. One thing is for certain, “Light of Aidan” is owned by a companyfounded by Guy Ritchie, director of the film. He, alongside with Pemberton, decided to re-imagine the original, and name it “The Politics & The Life.” Not much has been changed compared to the original, only a lot more instruments got involved. What is special about this song for Hungarian viewers is that “Light of Aidan” was first used as a background music for a fan-made trailer of a video game, Halo ODST. All things considered, the music of King Arthur – Legend of the Sword might very well be its best feature, which leaves me sad, as a soundtrack as good as this could have reached greater heights with a better film.
Special thanks to Nagy Tibor for helping us out with the recording. If your speakers are broken like mine are, you can also read Fanni’s thoughts on the film below.
“In moonlight all black boys look blue”
When I first watched Barry Jenkins’ Academy Award winner film, Moonlight, I did not really understand this sentence, which seemed then and seems now as well a central idea in the film. I wondered what moonlight has to do with homosexuality – since the film is celebrated as fresh depiction of homosexual identity formation –, why the blue colour, as an implication of night-like shades, is so dominant that the film uses a blue filter, and anyway, how come that such an ambiguous sentence could stand in the middle of such a complex film. It took me two more times of watching Moonlight and a discussion with Malou Kürpick to come up with my interpretation of this sentence.
In moonlight, black boys might look blue, but moonlight also induces blurriness, uncertainty, the lack of sharp edges and clear borders. A visual environment in which it becomes harder to find one’s way around. When I shared this with Malou, she pointed out that with this I basically say that moonlight could be interpreted as dangerous, shady, and eventually, a negative circumstance. However, for me it means something completely different. The loss of clear cut borders and sharp edges evokes the possibility of transgressing these borders, instead of thinking in well-described categories, we are encouraged to see things less separated, isolated from each other. When their edges blend into each other, it is not so easy to say where one thing ends end another begins.
This is especially what I enjoy and appreciate in Moonlight. It is not just a film about a gay boy’s development into a man, it is a film about a black, working-class, gay boy, who comes from a troubled family background with a missing father and a drug-addict mother, and who finds a father figure in her mother’s drug dealer, who is bullied severely at school and is deported into an institution for juvenile delinquents, and builds himself from scratch as a hyper-masculine black drug-dealing man, with a muscle car, gold necklaces, luxury watches and even golden fronts above his teeth.
Yet, Moonlight does not treat these issues separately from each other. Each and every one of them is connected, creating a web-like structure of issues to deal with and talk about. It is impossible to pick only one of these and discuss it separately from the others. This film is as intersectional as it is possible. I regard this intersectionality as Moonlight’s greatest achievement. Many people implied after the Oscars that the film only got its Award for Best Picture because it was about a gay black man, satisfying two marginalised groups at once. Yes, the film is about a gay black man, but it is so much more than that. With its fragmented structure Moonlight presents the viewer with a complex identity problem, in which neither being gay nor being black dominates. They are elements, and significant elements in Little/Chiron/Black’s identity, but still, they are “only” parts of a multilayered and complex human being’s identity.
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