Lily Tomlin puts the GRAND in Grandma

I would call this movie short and sweet, except it’s more like short and tart, tart, tart!

Lily Tomlin is no ordinary grandma.

Sage (Julia Garner) is a sweet teenaged girl in need of an abortion. Or, more accurately, in need of $600 to get said abortion. Baby Daddy is a loser, so off to grandmother’s house we go to beg for termination money. Except grandma (Tomlin) has just broken up with her girlfriend (Judy Greer) (a mere “footnote” she calls her, bitingly), and has zero cash to spare. So the two embark on a weird road trip of sorts to collect on grandma’s various informal I.O.U.s from an interesting mix of characters (Sam Elliott, Laverne Cox, Elizabeth Pena) that dusts up some old secrets along the way.

I didn’t expect this movie to be so good. I think Lily Tomlin is an absolute goddess, and if we’re being honest, this, my friends, is what an Oscar-winning performance should look like. She’s both hilarious and heartbreaking.

Big congratulations to writer-director Paul Weitz who never gives in to the temptation to soften grandma Elle, and for casting Tomlin, who inhabits the skin so fully, practically licking her fingers because she knows the performance is that good.

Elle and Sage ride around in clunky, classic style in a 1955 Dodge Royal , a car that coughs and chokes and is as irascible as Tomlin herself (in fact, it’s Tomlin’s own car). Grandmother and granddaughter are bonding over their shared mission, but also in their mutual avoidance: mom. Marcia Gay Harden plays Elle’s estranged daughter and the character is written so smartly, and is so well-acted that we forget we’ve only just met her near the end. Even her absence has felt like a presence, and the three generations are a thing to behold.

While serving up a moving little character study, this movie also achieves a creeping, quiet feminism that just feels right. And the way it treats abortion – rather casually, in fact – is remarkable.

Oh Lily Tomlin, how do I love thee? It’s really hard to tell you about the gruffness, the toughness, the cranky acerbicness, and still convey how absolutely vulnerable a performance she gives in this. And it all feels so effortless that you may not think you’re seeing a performance at all.

It’s a really special thing to see three such meaty roles written for women. These characters are complicated and they jump off the page and out of the screen in a moving and intimate way. It’s a tiny movie but deserves a wide audience, so I hope I’ve convinced you to check it out.

Meanwhile: is there any possible way that you’d ever go to your own grandma for abortion money?

The Stanford Prison Experiment

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In 1971 at Stanford University, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo set up a 2 week experiment wherein Stanford students were recruited and paid $15 a day to either be a prisoner, or a prison guard. This ‘experiment’ was aimed to find whether inherent personality traits of prisoners or guards are the primary cause of the abusive behaviour that happens in prisons. The students were screened to exclude those with criminal backgrounds, questionable mental health, or medical problems. They were all deemed stable. Prisoners and guards were established by the flip of a coin.

Professor Zimbardo designed the experiment in order to maximize the depersonalization of participants – prisoners wore sac dresses and caps; guards wore uniforms and sunglasses. He imposed one rule: there was to be no physical assault of the prisoners. Very quickly, however, the participants’ behaviours exceeded beyond what Zimbardo could have imagined. Within hours, those in the role of guard were enforcing authoritarian rules to such an extent that some prisoners were subjected to psychological torture. The prisoners, disoriented, mostly passively accepted the abuse, and could be induced to taunt those that didn’t.

After just 36 hours, one ‘prisoner’ had to be released due to increasingly erratic behaviour. Fully a third of the ‘guards’ exhibited sadistic behaviour to the ‘prisoners’ who, keep in mind, were student volunteers just like themselves. They stripped them, degraded them, exerted them, bullied them, disturbed their sleep. It became an exercise in cruelty that the professor, reluctant to look away from his precious and costly little experiment, was forced to call off after just 6 days.

As a student of psychology, I poured over this data and watched a lot of the footage, fascinated and horrified. We don’t just study this in behavioural psychology, we also study it in ethics. Why? This ‘study’ would not pass muster today, not by a long shot, not by 87 prison yards stacked back to back. Zimbardo was not much of a scientist or researchers. The MOMENT his ‘experiment’ (and you see by my quotations how I long not to call it that) veered away from predicted boundaries and went straight toward DANGEROUS situations, he should have hit the brakes. Instead, he put kids in psychologically damaging situations. Kids who were making $15 a day and didn’t fully understand that they could walk away. FIVE of eighteen had to be removed early because of emotional trauma – and I remind you this lasted only 6 of the 14 intended days.

Luckily a grad student convinced Zimbardo that not only was he passively allowing these unethical acts (and HELLO – as psychologists, we’re supposed to HEAL not damage!), but that he himself had become absorbed by his role as the “superintendent” of the prison. He had lost all objectivity. This whole experiment was a waste – because he could not remain neutral, any observations that we can make are subjective and anecdotal at best (let alone impossible to reproduce!).

If this sounds too crazy to be true, well, I wish that was so. This wouldn’t be allowed to happen on a University campus anymore, but it sure as hell feels familiar if you look over what happened at Abu Ghraib with fresh eyes. If it sounds kind of like a movie, well, now it is.

It stars Billy Crudup (Big Fish) as the famed professor, Nelson Ellis (True Blood’s Lafayette) as an ex-con consultant, and a bunch of young men as the students: Ezra Miller (Trainwreck) as prisoner 8612, Tye Sheridan (The Tree of Life) as 819 and Thomas Mann (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) as 416.

The movie, thankfully well-acted, is chilling, troubling, and thought-provoking. The cruelty is relentlessly one-note, so if you watch it, you’re going to want to pencil in some debriefing\discussing\come-down time immediately after, because the saddest part about it is that 45 years later, it’s just as relevant.

The Walk

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Film nerds will remember a documentary released some years ago called Man On Wire. A mix of footage, reenactment and present-day interviews painted the story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers. (I remember this film so vividly I described its Academy Award nomination as “a year or two ago” to Sean when it fact it won in 2008).

Robert Zemeckis has bravely adapted this story in The Walk, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt an inspired choice as Petit.

The achievement, the thing to see, is of course the walk itself. In dizzying IMAX 3D, the effects glorifying the height are so realistically rendered that audience members feel real vertigo. If you’re not big into heights, may I remind you that the World Trade centre stood 1,362 feet above the ground, and Petit made his walk without a net. This has induced nausea and even vomiting in some audience members, and while I felt fine in that respect, I did experience some spine-tingling anxiety when nearly the whole of the second half of the film is spent up in the clouds, perched extremely precariously, sometimes tauntingly so, upon a wire we know to be improperly installed.

Petit narrates the story to us from atop another of New York’s tallest destinations – the Statue of Liberty’s flaming torch. This narration lends a fairy-tale quality to the film that it didn’t need or benefit from, and in fact it felt like an affectation. The first half of the film is slow-going. It takes an hour to get to the good part, but if you believe that things are worth waiting for, then you’re in for a treat. I’ve had 3D fatigue for quite some time now, but here again is a movie that actually uses it (like Everest) not just to drive up ticket prices, but to stoke the feeling of soaring (or of falling, if you’re a pessimist) in the audience like no other image ever could. Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography is stunning and breath-taking in that very literal way of having stolen the wind right out of my lungs.

The walk itself, as Petit always delights in telling us, is completely illegal and planned in secret. This part of the story almost feels like a heist movie, between the planning and the recruitment of compatriots. But once Petit puts one foot to the wire, it becomes a work of art. Early morning commuters stop traffic to look up, look waaaaaaaaay up at these buildings newly erected, not yet a beloved part of the city’s skyline, and suddenly they’re injected with life and meaning.

Is this movie Zemeckis’ love letter to the twin towers? It’s quite a tribute, handled with love and respect. The movie may be uneven, and a little brainless, but it is without a doubt visionary, if only you dare not only to keep your eyes open, but to do what the wire walker must never do: to look down.

Anyone have a problem with heights? Has it stopped you watching certain movies before?

A Farewell to Helen Mirren’s Fabulous Tits

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Helen Mirren, the 70-year-old British bombshell, has announced that her breasts have gone into retirement. No more nude scenes, no more topless shots – “My pleasure pillows are purely for my husband now.”

Helen’s boobies first appeared to us in 1969’s Age of Consent and as recently as a 2010 (nude) photo shoot for New York magazine. They were also featured in a 2011 SNL skit entitled “Helen Mirren’s Magical Bosom.”

“Well, I didn’t know my boobs were legendary, quite honestly, at that point,” she told Alan Cumming in a recent interview, seemingly halfway between flattered and embarrassed.

Now, as often as I might cringe when a woman takes her top off in the movies (because why? Is this really necessary? Is this even nice?), I have no problem imagining that every single time Helen did it, it was from a position of power. The woman, and her cleavage, are feminist icons.

In fact, you may note that she achieved Damehood from the Queen, in the Order of the British Empire for services to the performing arts in 2003, the same year she appeared topless in Calendar Girls. Coincidence?

Helen Mirren is gorgeous at any age, but her confidence and sassiness in her 70-year-old skin is what makes her sexy, and damn is she sexy.

Screaming Bloody Murder

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The Wilhelm scream is, as you may know, a stock sound effect that’s been used in hundreds of movies, beginning in 1951 in the film Distant Drums when a soldier is bitten and then dragged underwater by an alligator. It is likely voiced by Sheb Wooley (best known for his one-hit wonder “The Purple People Eater”) and named after Private Wilhelm, a character in the 1953 western The Charge at Feather River who gets shot with an arrow (but this was already the 3rd movie to use the effect).

The Wilhelm was re-discovered by sound designer Ben Burtt (it was a reel labeled unforgettably as “Man being eaten by alligator”), who incorporated it into a little film he was working on called Star Wars. And then he kept on throwing it into all kinds of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg productions over the next decade until other sound designers picked it up and made it a tradition, or almost an in-joke among the industry. In fact when it appears in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, it’s when a man is being eaten by an alligator. In-joke on an in-joke? Today it’s used religiously by Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, and Tim Burton. You can hear it in Titanic, Inglorious Basterds, Spiderman, Planet of the Apes, Despicable Me, Sin City, and a hundred more.

Lesser known is the Howie scream, which made its debut in the 1980 film The Ninth Configuration but got its name from Howie Long’s death scene in the movie Broken Arrow. Its common labels Gut-wrenching scream, and Fall into distance give you some idea of how it’s popularly used.

Some of my favourite screams on film:

Janet Leigh in Psycho. Unforgettable.

Susan Backlinie in the opening sequence of Jaws. It’s gurgly and gasping and totally desperate.

Ronald Lacey in Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are lots of good Nazi screams in this movie, but Lacey’s final scream is classic. The burble at the end as he’s melting? Ooof. Brutal.

Margaret Hamilton as the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know if it’s a scream so much as a shriek but it pierces the ear unlike any other before or since.

Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Remember his last pod scream? Of course you do. Fuck.

Shelley Duvall in The Shining. That poor woman. Her scream is so visceral you might be led to believe she didn’t quite trust Jack Nicholson with that ax.

Fay Wray is the scream queen for sure throughout the entirety of King Kong. Just watch her facial contortions and body language as she gives the alarm over and over again.

Now I’m not sure that you’re the equal of Fay Wray, but if you’re anywhere close, now’s your chance to prove it.

Andrew J.D. Robinson is a powerhouse director, producer, and all-round film-industry juggernaut to the city of Ottawa, and one of his many current projects is a Scream Queen contest as part of his 15 Seconds of Horror Film Challenge.

He’s looking for entries from one and all, so if you have a camera and a vocal cord (or two), you’re good to go. All you have to do is unleash your inner murder victim. One loud, terrorized, blood-curling scream, and you’re done. Andrew’s assembling them all into what I can only imagine will be the most alarming montage in movie history.

So do your best – or your worst – and send them to Andrew at workobeyfilms @ gmail.com by October 21st and be sure to include any social media of yours you’d like to be linked to. And then please god send it to us. Post them right here in the comments.

Healing Fest 2015

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Matt and I decided to curate a little film festival for our coworkers. Our theme was Healing, and so we have put forth the following selections:

Good Will Hunting: Hey, remember Minnie Driver?

Ordinary People: See Donald Sutherland before he was old!

50/50: Seth Rogen will teach you how to use cancer to your advantage when picking up girls in 50/50

Postcards From The Edge: Now with 20% more old lady thigh!

The Lookout: See Chris Pratt before he was famous and when he was played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

As Good As It Gets: Carol the waitress, meet Simon the fag.

Reign Over Me: 9/11 + Adam Sandler = do I have your attention?

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: “A stroke of genius” says Matt.

Life As A House: “A movie more emotionally manipulative than my mother-in-law” says Jay.

What’s your pick?

50/50

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Cancer, you bitch. She strikes again in this weirdo comedy about a young, prime-of-life dude (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) when he’s struck down by a big, bad tumor with an ugly face. Okay, I made up the part about the face.

Lucky for JGL, he has emotionally stunted pal Seth Rogen along for the ride, who’s there to tell him bald is a bad look on him, and that if he was a casino game, his 50/50 odds would actually sound pretty swell.

Adam (JGL) is a super cautious guy. He waits at the cross walk for the signal to turn. He refuses to drive because accidents are a leading cause of death (true, a couple of slots behind cancer, but still). When the doctor tells him of his tumour, his knee-jerk response is “That doesn’t make any sense though. I mean I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I recycle… ” And we agree. It doesn’t make any sense. Cancer doesn’t play by any rules that we’re comfortable with.

Screen writer Will Reiser is using his own experience of cancer in his 20s to inform the script. His friend Seth Rogen was along for the ride and slips very comfortably into recreating the role. In real life, Rogen was apparently on the toilet when Reiser told him his diagnosis but that was deemed too gross to make the movie. They don’t pull many other punches, though: this isn’t your mother’s Terms of Endearment.

This is about a guy in his 20s who gets very sick and faces his own mortality. Does he channel cancer sympathy to get himself laid? Sure he does. Does he consume lots of legal weed? You betcha. Does he have sex with hookers while skydiving? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out, but I will tell you this: it isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

This is a surprisingly grown-up script; it toggles between the drama and the laughs pretty seamlessly. It feels honest. Rogen is vulgar, but decent, and that begins to tug on you in quiet and unexpected ways. Director Jonathan Levine manages not to succumb to the usual morose offerings of the genre and presents something touchingly humane. The excellence in casting extends to Bryce Dallas Howard as a girlfriend found wanting, Anjelica Huston gives a powerful turn as a fuss-budget mother, and Matt Frewer and Philip Baker Hall are welcome additions as co-cancer buddies. I’ll even magnanimously grant that Anna Kendrick is pretty funny as a newbie therapist trying real hard to walk the line. But it’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt who’s leading the pack with a really low-key, uncompromising performance.

Halloween Thursdays: Alfred Hitchcock Movies

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Wandering Through the Shelves has us celebrating Halloween all month, representing a bit of a blindspot for me since I have a pretty low tolerance for being scared. So, when paying tribute to the Master of Suspense, I have selected three of my favourite (but not necessarily the scariest) of his films.

Lifeboat (1944)– I watched Lifeboat last night in a Greyhound bus station. It was the first time I’d seen it in over a decade and I couldn’t believe how well it holds up. Set entirely in a lifeboat, it’s staged and written like a play with some of the best dialogue in Hitchcock history.

Rear Window (1954)– I’ve already written a full post about my weakness for characters that share my love of voyeurism. James Stewart and Grace Kelly find themselves wrapped up in a murder investigation when eavesdropping on their neighbors.

Vertigo (1958)– I’ve watched Vertigo several times but almost always skip the last scene. It just gets to me. Most of you will know this classic well but, if you haven’t seen it, the less you know going in the better so I will avoid giving much away. Just see it.

Life As A House

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This movie is as emotionally manipulative as my mother-in-law, and just like any number of Thanksgiving dinners at her table, I need wine and tissues in equal measure to get through it.

George (Kevin Kline) has an aggressive, sadistic kind of cancer that aims to kill him quick, leaving him just enough time to trick his distant, alterna-punk teenaged son into loving him just a tiny little bit. Hopefully, at least.

Hayden Christensen, reviled for his turn as Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones, gets the hulking task of playing the repugnant teenaged son. You know he’s bad news because he’s got piercings, and may wear eye shadow. This makes parents uncomfortable!

His parents split up when he was young and even though they both seem like happy, loving people, this messed him up bad. Bad enough to listen to Limp Bizkit and dye his hair blue! Is he irredeemable? George hopes not, so with his remaining days, he decides to engage in a little restorative demolition to tear down the piece of shit house he’s always hated, and erect a new one in its stead.

With every nail hammered into a two-by-four, a tiny hole in his heart is healed.

I’m poking fun, because it’s very pokable, but there are some fine performances here. Kevin Kline in particular elevates the syrupy material, but I can’t help but feel bad for him when he’s forced to deliver very obvious speeches about all the themes the director doesn’t trust his idiot audience to have picked up on ourselves. Um, dude, it’s called Life As A House. That’s a pretty heavy-handed hint.

You know about 20 awkward minutes in that the ending’s going to come with a neat bow wrapped around it, everything resolved so fucking tidily, but there are real moments of truth between the globs of mawkishness. If you can bear it, you should.

Unable to Find the Disabled

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I have what you might call an invisible disability. I hurt all the time. All the fucking time. The last time I wasn’t in agony was 2003. Some days getting out of bed is beyond me, but every day is a challenge. I work through pain, and smile through pain, and watch movies through an enormous amount of pain. But I don’t use a wheelchair. I park in the disabled-accessible spot, and get out of my little red convertible in high heels and lip gloss and I don’t fit the picture of what disabled should apparently look like. If looks could kill, the dirty looks that come my way would be enough to disable me if I wasn’t already. And I’m not alone:

This nasty note may have come from a good place, but it was left on the van parked rightfully in a disabled spot. The van’s driver had her daughter with her, who suffers from hypophosphatasia, a rare genetic condition that causes bones to break – every step she takes could potentially result in a fracture.

This one was left by another anonymous coward on the vehicle of a young woman with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which affects every organ in her body, causing her blood pressure to drop suddenly or her heart rate to accelerate, leaving her weak, or faint. I’m sure she’d gladly trade you her parking space for your health.

This awesome note-writer is actually right, for once. The BMW did belong to a young male professional – who happens to be paraplegic. It’s crazy but true: we don’t all drive vans. Sometimes us disabled folks drive cars that look surprisingly like yours! Unfortunately, they do not magically cure us of our illnesses, just like they seem not to cure your stupidity.

Anyway, I could go on and on, but you get the point. As if a lifetime of disability isn’t enough, you also get the fun judgement! And to get to my point (and I do have one): you also get zero representation at the movies.

Well, okay, not zero. But most times that disabilities are depicted in the movies, it goes like this: he was a nice normal guy, ironically loved using his legs until that tragic accident where he no longer could, now he’s super mad and who can blame him, but then he overcomes it, wow, what nobility. As good as both The Butterfly and the Diving Bell and The Intouchables are, the point of the movie is the disability. I’m looking for movies where the disability is incidental, and those are much harder to come by.

Notting Hill: One of Hugh Grant’s friends just happens to be in a wheel chair. She’s not a tragic character, she’s just one of the guys, none of whom are afraid to poke fun at her condition. The scene where they’re all rushing to reunite Hugh with Julia Roberts and she (played by Gina McKee, who is also terrific in Atonement and In The Loop) wants to sit it out because she’ll slow them down but her husband insists, and quickly packs both her and her chair into the car so she can still be one of the gang – that’s what I’m talking about.

Finding Nemo: Little Nemo has a “lucky fin”; it’s underdeveloped after an accident and it means he’s not a strong swimmer. But he’s brave and adventurous anyway, and refuses to be left behind. He can do anything his friends can do, and he’ll prove it til he’s in peril. In fact, much of this cast is a testament to accepting those who are differently abled: Nemo’s dad has anxiety, Dory has memory loss, and I believe there was even a little obsessive-compulsive cleaner fish in the tank. And yet they’re all just getting on with their lives the best way they can.

Four Weddings and a Funeral: In this one, Hugh Grant has a brother who is deaf. Grant had to learn sign language for his scenes with David Bower, who is also deaf in real life. Again, nothing is made of his disability, it’s just a fact. Brothers can be deaf. This brother in particular was deaf, and also a lady killer, and also quite sensitive to his brother’s true feelings.

Saved!: Macauley Culkin plays a paralyzed high school student. He’s a normal guy who just happens to use a wheel chair – he’s sarcastic, horny, and tired of his goody-two-shoes sister. He’s also learning to enjoy a measure of independence.

Nothing against My Left Foot, but it is nice, and I think, important to show people with disabilities who aren’t particularly courageous or noble, but who are simply living among us, touching butts and stealing the last brownie just like any other jerk. This list is woefully short – certainly I’ve missed many. If your memory is better than mine (and believe me, it is), let me know in the comments!