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Arts
Tuesday, January 10, 2017 — 5
‘Fences’ hopes to break
away from theatre roots
Despite Viola Davis’ s strong performance, film adaptation
of classic August Wilson play falls short of expectations
Someone give Viola Davis
an Oscar right now. Right
now. Don’t even wait until
February.
The actress, made famous
by
her
role
as
Annalise
Keating on “How to Get Away
With Murder,” is the shining
light of the film
adaptation
of
“Fences.”
The
power and grit of
her performance
as Rose, a 1950s
Pittsburgh
housewife,
is
unmatched,
not only in the
film
itself,
but
in
this
entire
awards
season.
She’s
up
for
best
supporting
actress at the Golden Globes
and likely will be for the
Oscars
as
well.
I
really
can’t say enough about her
performance. She’s perfect.
We do not deserve Viola Davis.
Denzel Washington (“The
Magnificent Seven”), who also
directed the film, has a hard
time keeping up with Davis.
He plays Troy Maxom, Rose’s
husband
and
the
central
figure in the film. He’s also in
a uniquely difficult position.
“Fences” first premiered as a
play with the same name by
August Wilson in which Davis
and Washington previously
starred.
The
most
iconic
portrayal of Troy is that by
James Earl Jones (famous
for his roles as Darth Vader
and Michigan hype video
narrator)
in
the
original
production of the play. Jones
won a Tony for the role and set
the bar impossibly high — at
least too high for Washington
to clear.
The plot of the film follows
Troy as he tries to reconcile
his past failures and deal with
his son’s desire to play college
football
(played
by
Jovan
Adepo of “The Leftovers”).
Troy was once a great baseball
player, but never made it to
the major leagues, a failure
he blames on his race. He
worries the same will happen
to his son if he tries to make
it to the NFL,
so Troy pushes
him
away
from
sports.
The
tension
and
conflict
between
the
two
men
is
underdeveloped
and
largely
unexplored,
which
is
disappointing,
as
for
the
majority of the
film it is the central source of
conflict.
But, “Fences” is stuck in
its theatrical roots. Almost
all of the action takes place
in and around the Maxom
family house. For an almost
two and a half hour movie,
visually, it’s boring. Most the
time, the characters appear in
medium or long shot, the type
of view one would have of an
actor on the stage. The actors,
most noticeably Washington,
feel like they’re giving a
performance for the person in
the back row who might not be
able to see or hear — something
that’s unnecessary in a film. It
feels, ultimately, like you’re
watching a recording of a play,
instead of a film.
As a play, it works. As a
movie, it’s disappointing in
its
unwillingness
to
take
advantage
of
its
medium.
There’s
a
reason
Denzel
Washington
didn’t
build
his career on his directorial
abilities. There are moments in
“Fences” of real visual beauty,
but many of the shots are lazy
— tracking shots lose their
subjects, the camera switches
from
stable
to
handheld
in jarring transitions. The
editorial and cinematic seams
are on full display.
The story Washington has
to work with is incredibly
rich. August Wilson is a poet
of the everyday, spinning
vernacular
into
lyrical
dialogue. He weaves the lives
of the Maxom family together
with
exquisite
intricacy.
The transition from stage to
screen seems to be one of the
most difficult to make (unless
you’re Shakespeare, I guess).
“August: Osage County” is a
great example of a work that
excelled as a play and fell
flat as a film. Unlike literary
adaptations, with plays there
is already a visual record of
the work, so films adapted
from plays tend to feel more
like remakes than adaptations.
“Fences”
is
the
perfect
example of a stage to screen
adaptation that falls victim to
its transition. Unfortunately,
“Fences” cannot escape its
origins.
DO YOU LIE TO YOURSELF TO
FILL THE EMPTY SPACES IN YOUR
HEART JUST LIKE WE USE DEAD
ADS TO FILL UP EMPTY SPACES IN
OUR PAPER?
If you’re in as deep an abyss as we are, apply to Daily Arts! Contact Anay Katyal at
anay@umich.edu and Natalie Zak at npzak@umich.edu for an application and our favor-
ite piece of existential dietary advice.
As a movie, it’s
disappointing
in its
unwillingness
to take
advantage of
its medium
PARAMOUNT PICTURES
What makes you ugly cry? Submit responses to cnsnider@umich.edu
MADELEINE GAUDIN
Senior Arts Editor
PARAMOUNT PICTURES
If this shows up on my Facebook feed one more time I’m going to lose it
How ‘Bee’ turned meme
FILM NOTEBOOK
Memes
are
the
most
inexplicable “cultural” products
of today. What becomes a meme
is so unpredictable, and it’s that
randomness which makes them
so hilarious
— of course, only if it
isn’t a “stale” meme. The amount
of time a meme is relevant ranges
anywhere from one week to
nearly three months or longer.
And, when a meme is deemed old,
it loses all credibility; it falls to the
dark depths of meme purgatory.
In the Fall of 2016, DreamWorks’
“Bee Movie” was introduced to
the honorable ranks of meme-
stardom. Although the meme
itself has died, its legacy will live
on forever, inspiring memes for
months (or weeks) to come.
Memes are not limited to a
picture captioned with white
block text in Impact font. In fact,
this meme style is rather archaic.
Today, memes can be anything
from short videos on Vine and
Instagram to a picture of a
clenched fist from the childhood
cartoon “Arthur.” Comic Sans is
generally the font of choice for
meme creators. Strangely enough,
the “Bee Movie” memes tend
to be edits and mashups of the
movie itself, like the aptly titled
YouTube video “The entire bee
movie but every time they say bee
it gets faster,” that received an
astonishing 15 million views — a
meme miracle.
The
origins
of
the
“Bee
Movie” meme are ambiguous.
By November 2016, it gained
significant
momentum
and
eventually
became
the
most
popular
meme
on
the
web.
Discovering a meme ahead of the
curve is like discovering a band
before they get big. There’s a sense
of disappointment due to the
meme, or band, feeling less special
once everyone knows about it —
but also pride. “I found this first,
therefore I’m cool!”
Other similar mashups and
edits
of
“Bee
Movie”
have
been shared on Facebook and
Instagram.
According
to
the
meme expert Anthony Fantano
— more famously known as The
Needle Drop — the “Bee Movie”
meme
is
“disoriented,
mind
altering and almost psychedelic,
in a way.” Despite there being no
original content, some amount of
creativity is still needed to produce
these mashups. Someone had to
watch “Bee Movie” and actively
think about making a meme out of
it. For this, I applaud the creator,
whoever this individual may be.
Memes are a godsend for weird,
awkward internet-forum dwellers
across the world. That creepy kid
from high school who sat in the
back of every classroom drawing
questionable pictures is now
probably a virtual star.
Although it’s impossible to tell
what will become a meme, the
“Bee Movie” is an ideal candidate.
It’s not a great movie, but also not
a terrible movie. It’s not new, but
old enough to have some amount
of nostalgic value. To top it all off,
Jerry Seinfeld (“Seinfeld”) voices
Barry, the loveable bee who falls
in love with a human voiced by
Renée Zellweger (“Bridget Jones’s
Baby”). Meme culture loves ’90s
nostalgia, so it only makes sense
that a movie written by and
starring Jerry Seinfeld would
transcend into the meme world.
The mashup style and the
edited format of the “Bee Movie”
meme have already impacted
others. In December, an influx
of “Star Wars” meme-videos of
lightsaber fights dubbed with
random dialogue every time a
lightsaber collides invaded the
Internet. Nonetheless, a similar
meme as popular as the “Bee
Movie” meme has yet to come,
and it will be nearly impossible to
do so.
WILL STEWART
Daily Arts Writer
The Cult of Girlhood
As we grow into ourselves,
our minds become instruments
for
categorization.
Everything
becomes
relational,
easily
compared to something else. We
obsessively classify what we see,
identifying the people and things
around us as “this,” but not “that.”
It helps us make
sense of a potently
dynamic world, but
categorization
is
dangerous. It leads
to pigeonholing and
expectations of what
people can and can’t
be.
Characters
in
literature often evade
these anticipations.
But the trend of
disintegrating
the
boundaries
constructed around identity is, for
me, most openly apparent in books
that examine girls crossing the
threshold into womanhood, and
the causalities that so often occur
during that in-between state.
Teenage girls are written as
adrift, beautifully damaged and
desperately looking for love. The
difference between typical high
school romance novels and heart
wrenching literature is where
they find this love.
In “The Girls,” the debut novel
by Emma Cline, protagonist Evie
Boyd retrospectively reflects on
her time in a cult in the late 1960s.
Inspired by the gruesome Manson
murders, fourteen year old Evie is
quickly inducted into the swirling,
dreamy world created by cult
leader Russell. A charismatic
narcissist,
Russell
surrounds
himself with runaway teenage
girls who are mesmerized by his
nonchalant power.
And yet, the novel barely
focuses on what the collective
culture has remained fascinated
with — the new incarnation
of Manson in Russell and the
violence that he was able to incite.
Cline is much more preoccupied
with the girls who join him and
their reasoning, their struggles
and their dreams.
The reason that Evie enlists
in the group at all is her instant
attraction to Suzanne, one of
the older girls in the cult. Evie
tolerates Russell, but she is
instantly and deeply in love with
Suzanne. Evie explains, in the
astral prose that surges through
the novel, “girls are the
only ones who can really
give each other close
attention, the kind we
equate with being loved.
They noticed what we
want noticed.” Russell
creates
the
toxicity
of
the
hallucinatory,
kaleidoscopic commune
— none of the members
have any money, but
the girls are forced into
a sexual and emotional
barter
system
when
interacting with the men who
frequent the commune. Only
the girls have any interest in
constructing a home out of
the
commune,
attempting
to
create a semblance of a domestic
atmosphere. The girls all “share”
Russell, emotionally and sexually,
and some have children who
live with them as well. Though
the girls are still close to being
children themselves, they act with
the weight of adulthood on their
shoulders. Evie, Suzanne and
the other girls must constantly
balance
their
burgeoning
sexuality
with
the
imposed
humiliation of their desire; they
must cope with their uneasy
feelings about their supposedly
harmonious,
unconventional
living situation.
While I read “The Girls,” I
couldn’t help but think of another
book in which a band of sisters
gathered to be more than what
anyone thought they possibly
could be. In Jeffrey Eugenides’
“The
Virgin
Suicides,”
the
Lisbon sisters, beautiful, blonde,
and
perpetually
unattainable,
personify teenage angst. Another
retrospective novel told from
the perspective of the currently
middle aged male worshippers
of the Lisbon sisters, “The Virgin
Suicides” allows the men to
indulge their nostalgia and try to
figure out what went wrong. Why
did these hauntingly beautiful
girls, bored in their pastel suburbia
of Grosse Point, Michigan, kill
themselves?
In “The Virgin Suicides,” the
boys eventually steal the diaries of
one of the sisters, in an attempt to
get in their minds. The boys never
actually speak to the girls — all
communication is done through
music played over a telephone or
notes left around town.
The boys begin to realize how
much they don’t understand about
the Lisbon sisters, explaining, “we
felt the imprisonment of being a
girl, the way it made your mind
active and dreamy, and how you
ended up knowing which colors
went together. We knew that
the girls were our twins, that we
all existed in space like animals
with identical skins, and that they
knew everything about us though
we couldn’t fathom them at all.
We knew, finally, that the girls
were really women in disguise,
that they understood love and
even death, and that our job was
merely to create the noise that
seemed to fascinate them.” These
teenagers only have ideas of each
other, but also only have ideas of
themselves. It takes reading the
novel as an adult to see how much
is a purported, assumed identity;
none of them actually understand
themselves or the world around
them, but being a teenager makes
you good at faking it.
So what does it mean to
be a teenager, in print and in
life? Is it the blatant defiance
of
categorization,
the
ability
to
contain
multiplicities
and
contradictions
without
being
concerned about an identity that
makes sense? I don’t know. I
think it’s the way that everything
becomes saturated with meaning,
how people and places and words
and colors ring through your brain
without a purpose. I wonder if we
would continue this concentrated
significance to adulthood if we
could. But it might hurt too much.
The challenge of defining adolescence in print and real life
REBECCA
LERNER
Managing Editor
B-
“Fences”
Paramount
Pictures
Rave, Quality 16
LITERATURE COLUMN
FILM REVIEW