Planet Terror Post

**Concept 316**

"Planet Terror" was directed by Robert Rodriguez and was the first of the Grindhouse double feature collaboration between himself and Quentin Tarantino. Rodriquez’s film is a movie that in a way pays homage to the Grindhouse tradition and the zombie movies that came before it. One of the "Planet Terror" influences was Zombie Flesh Eaters, directed by Lucio Fulci in nineteen-eighty.

Zombie Flesh eaters was a movie about a young woman who goes to a tropical island to find her father who's doing research after hearing that he has become mysteriously ill. After they enlisted the help of a reporter and a sea-faring couple, the group arrived on the island and discovered that it was plagued with the walking dead. The influences from this film, on "Planet Terror", can be seen in two very similar scenes; the buzz-saw scene from "Planet Terror" and the eye poking scene in Zombie Flesh Eaters.

By using a similar scene in his own movie, Rodriquez was paying homage to this particular film and its director.Another large influence on "Planet Terror" was the movie “Dawn of the Dead”, directed by George Romero in nineteen-seventy eight. This film was about four survivors of an expanding zo

mbie apocalypse that take refuge in an abandoned shopping mall, following a horrific SWAT evacuation of an apartment complex. This film was the most popular of a series of zombie films directed by Romero and was an influence on many of the zombie movies that came after it. Rodriquez even used Tom Savini, who did the make-up and special effects in “Dawn of the Dead”, in "Planet Terror". Although Savini, who played one of the deputies, did not do the special effects in "Planet Terror", Rodriquez has been known to frequently use students from Savini’s special effects school to work on his films.

Following on the list of Rodriquez’s influences is “Contamination” by Luigi Cozzi. The basic premise of the film is that a ship pulls into New York Harbor with no one on board. The police find a cargo full of green pulsating eggs. Upon contact, the eggs explode spreading a green acid like substance that seeps into the skin and explodes. It is later discovered that the eggs are being manufactured in South America by a one-eyed Martian that grew from a tiny seed a former astronaut brought back from a expedition to Mars. The movie was extremely gory (for its time) and and director Cozzi hoped to follow in “Zombie Flesh Eaters” footsteps in the box office. Even now, the US video versions under titles “Contamination” and “Toxic Spawn” are heavily edited.

Most people are familiar with Quentin Tarantino's weird sense of humor, and this can be found as a similarity in Rodriquez’s “Planet Terror”. Although the film was full of blood and guts, there was also an element of situational humor as well—for instance, the “I'm not kidding, Tommy” scene where Dr. Dakota Block tells her son, Tommy (who has a nasty habit of not following his mother's orders) not to shoot himself in the face. And then as soon as she leaves the car he does. It's that type of dark humor that Rodriquez shares with Tarantino. An example of this would be Tarantino's “Pulp Fiction” scene where Vincent shoots Marvin in the face. The situation is bad, but it still has a comedic ring to it. "Planet Terror"s theatrical release was considered a box office failure, even though it was embraced favorably by many of the US’s critics. Rotten Tomatoes, a film reviewing website, gave "Planet Terror" an eighty-nine percent approval rating and an average rating of seven point seven out of ten. However, the film was not warmly embraced by the majority of the movie watching public. Rodriquez’s film cost fifty-three million dollars to produce, but only made eleven and a half million dollars during the opening. Upon "Planet Terror"s international release, the Grindhouse double feature was separated, with "Planet Terror" being released approximately two months after Death Proof. Finally, the most obvious similarities that can be found between Rodriquez and Tarantino's work are the use of excessive violence, the fondness of pop culture references, the exploitation of women yet women heroes, lots of action, and use of recurring actors and actresses. By “exploitation of women yet women heroes”, we point out that although Tarantino and Rodriquez both have used their actresses as heroes (“Planet Terror” has Rose McGowan as the gun toting heroine), these women have been dressed scantily and are often depicted in roles such as a nurses, mothers, lovers, etc. The directors' women are modern day damsels in distress. Although “Planet Terror” didn't receive the box office standings that directors hoped for, it received mix reviews from critics—some hated while others understood the significance of the Grindhouse tradition and how Rodriquez was attempting to pay homage to it.

Works cited:

"Contamination." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 18 July 2008, 1:06 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 12 July 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contamination_(film)>

Lemire, Christy. “'Grindhouse' an Epic Homage to '70s Schlock.” 10 July 2008 <http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/grindhouse/>

“Planet Terror.” Wikipedia,The Free Encyclopedia. 21 July 2008, 4:58 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 12 July 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Terror>

Walters, Ben. “Dawn of the Dead.” 10 July 2008

Run Lola, Run!

Run, Lola Run is a 1998 film by German screenwriter and director Tom Tykwer, starring Franka Potente as Lola. The film is a unconventional non-linear film that covers a time frame of 20 minutes as Lola attempts to change her and her boyfriends fate each time. The spiraling script uses the "multiple lives" concept to pull in the audience in as we watch very small details drastically change the outcome of a situation. The camera movement in Run, Lola Run serves as a method of imitating and examining human behavior, and evoking an emotional response from the audience.

There is a beginning scene where the camera sweeps through the entire town and into Lola's apartment defying human speed. No human being would be able to move like that (not even modern day human action heroes). One can connect another scene where Lola is running during one of her "cycles" for her father's bank, and it's a long shot. The camera is still ahead of Lola, as if it is taunting her (and the audience) because she can't keep up. It adds to the suspense, and Alfred Hitchcock (as everyone knows as the master of suspense) has a rule of thumb for this technique of dealing with women in film, "If all else fails while trying to make a scary movie, torture the women!". That idea can be applied to Lola and the camera's taunting. The audience is secretly rooting for her because we know that Lola is vulnerable. She has feelings, she cries, she falls, and she's afraid just like the average Joe, again, unlike the average action hero. Her not being able to keep up with the camera adds to

this vulnerability, evoking more sympathy from us. Tykwer states in Tom Mes and Joep Vermaat's interview with him,


"Sometimes a movie doesn't offer you this opportunity, you can't change opinions about characters several times in a film like Lola Rennt [Run, Lola Run], you know. You have to be clear about the characters in the beginning and then you just go for it...." .

With this in mind, the film utilizes the character development aspect to draw multiple emotions from the audience, including compassion and anxiety. The sweeping motion is performed in a matter of seconds, taking the whole town and arriving at Lola's apartment. Defying these elements is something that would be extremely useful to Lola as she runs, and yet these are things she can not achieve because is human.

One of my favorite scenes in Lola is when, during the first "time cycle", Lola is thinking of all the people in her life to ask for money. Tykwer shows her thought process through a series of jump cuts. This has two effects: it heightens the suspense of the movie and it shows how the camera and editing can imitate human behavior. Because fast cuts can be used to excite the viewer's visual senses, they can influence the audience to become more engaged as the plot begins to thicken. We now have a defined problem (she needs money) and a shot of her springing into action in an attempt to solve it (she has to think of where to get it from). In the scene of Lola thinking of all the people that could lend money, the jump cuts are representational of what goes on in someone's head that's under pressure and has to think on their feet. Her mind is quickly scanning and accessing each person, thinking of background information that would help her make the decision and then relaying that to the problem. It is interesting to think about how although a human body is no match for a camera's movement, the human mind can create scenarios, special effects, etc. that the camera will never be able to duplicate. Just thinking about the mechanics behind a camera, and the limits a camera lens has compared to the human eye is a great example of brain superiority.

Thus, Run, Lola Run goes far beyond the modern day action flick that is designed to merely give you a sensory overload. This film takes a chance on character development through editing, and examining human behavior through imitation through camera movement (instead of explosions and car fights) to evoke human emotion.




In photo:Tom Tykwer

Creating Art from Art: Web Excursions and other things

What happens when you take a handful of naked Barbie dolls, figurines from a pop-culture movie, and an artistic French guy that has a computer and a dream? You get popular Evan Mather's "Les Pantless Menance", a graphic 3-D mash-up that spoofs George Lucas's Star Wars: Phantom Menace. In today's society, what makes art...art? Certainly there is a debate over the originality factor of the new wave of web artists, who often "borrow" main ideas (and even characters) from other already popular works to push their way to Internet fame. According to Wikipedia (what better way to define art and understand Internet art than to look it up via an electronic encyclopedia?), art is as follows:

"...is made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind and/or spirit. There is no general agreed-upon definition of art, since defining the boundaries of "art" is subjective, but the impetus for art is often called human creativity."


Wikipedia goes on to say that art often creates similar characteristics, including but not limited to skill, judgment of value, communicating emotion, creative impulse, and symbols. If one were to take this into account, then yes, web movies like "Les Pantless Menance" definitely belong in the art category. I suppose the old school artists ( you know, the ones who created masterpieces and etched their name in history forever) will have to move over to make space on the wall as a HD television plays modern day art displaying naked children toys and their heads exploding for thrills.

My only guess for the new turn of art would be the society we live in. With older art, artists chose their to use their paintbrush to tell a story about the times they lived in, which happened to be social issues (politics, crime, gender issues, etc.). Today, we do the same thing, but our interests have undoubtedly took a change from what filmmaker Scott Stark suggested in his letter to Jane Fonda, "...a certain kind of selfless idealism, replacing it with a more self-centered view".

Perhaps we are running away from the problems of today's society, with crime, lack of morals, and a sense of helplessness to change anything. Instead of turning to art to remind us of our problems, maybe we're turning to art to help us forget, and submerge us into a roller coaster ride of images and sound juxtaposed together to create a "film" that will satiate our senses. Is this necessarily wrong? It certainly is interesting. Now, instead of art being held by an elite group of society, the average-Joe can become an Internet Michelangelo with the help of technology and an imagination.

Sharon Lockhart's Goshogaoka

Goshogaoka is a 20 minute film made by Sharon Lockhart that chronicles a day of a young girl's basketball team in a junior high school near Tokyo and their routine. The film was shot on 16mm. Throughout viewing the film, the audience falls into the hypnotic choreographed movements of the young girl and the drone of their voices as they harmoniously chant along with their exercises. Lockhart strives to link art and the human body through her film while taking a non-conventional approach to choreography in film.
In my film class, Concepts Production, we discussed Maya Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time and non-dancing elements. Ritual is a 15 minute film made in 1946 on silent, black and white film. Main character Rita Christiani begins the film when she encounters Maya Deren herself and is startled when Deren disappears. This begins a dream-like sequence of where Christiani is transported to a dinner party and then onward to dance with dancer Frank Westbrook. Goshogaoka shares the non-dancing element factor. Both films have dance like gestures, with Goshogaoka's girls robotic back and forth movements, that are curiously graceful and Ritual's famous dinner party scene, where Christiani is interacting with others at a dinner party and one could swear that the guests were dancing as they gracefully sought out someone and then another and so forth.


In Deren's article, "Ritual in Transfigured Time", she states,

"...if one were to omit from an actual party all the long conversational pauses, there would be left mainly that constant moving pattern of smiling, social anxiety; each person seeking to reach someone at the other end of the room, or moving, tentatively, to meet someone new, or embracing an old friend, or edging away from someone dull towards someone interesting."

The same idea can be applied with Lockhart. If one were to take away the chanting of the girls and the actual basketball that is being used, there would only being the rhythmic movements of each individual who strives to fall in the same place the person before the was. Goshogaoka focuses on the art of the human body, and the way our body becomes (in a way) a machine whose main purpose is to carry out a task, smoothly and efficiently. Isn't this what dancing is, as well? To piece together an amount of movements that serve to tell a story, one bit at a time?

The difference between Deren and Lockhart and their films respectively is the individual aspect of each film. While Deren's film incorporates two dancers, the rest of her cast are not. Christiani and Westbrook have a dance sequence, true, but the rest of the time the characters movements are mimicking the fluidness of life itself. Although the same could be said about Lockhart, her team of girls work as one unit. Their bodies are part of one big machine (think the kid's television show, "Transformers" if you will). Ritual is about an individual's experience as she moves through a surreal world, while Goshogaoka is about a mutual experience amongst many individuals. Despite these differences, however, both Ritual In Transfigured Time and Goshogaoka use non-dancing elements explore the art behind human motions and interactions.

Compare and Contrast: Montgomery vs. Porterfield

Matthew Porterfield's film "Hamilton" is about an interracial family and a young single mother's quest to find her daughter's delinquent father and let him know that she is leaving for the summer. Jennifer Montgomery's "Notes on the Death of Kodachrome" , according to Montgomery, "...purports to be about the discontinuation of the much-loved format, Kodachrome, and with it the further endangerment of super-8 film. It begins with a short, experimental s-8 film made in 1986, which makes prophetic assertions about the future of artistic expression and the dangers of bodily intimacy. From there, the film jumps to 2005, and to digital video. The filmmaker tracks down three old friends who borrowed, and never returned, pieces of super-8 equipment."


After watching "Hamilton", the most obvious contrast between his film and "Notes on the Death of Kodachrome" is dialogue. "Hamilton" relies on very little of it, and therefore it hard to fully establish ties between the family members and their true roles in film. However on "Notes" dialouge is abundant, in which most cases Montgomery has her subjects speaking directly in the camera as they tell their stories about her equipment and their personal life. Because of this, the audience isn't given the conventional means of characterization with "Hamilton", but "Notes" shows and tells the personal and professional struggles and conflicts each subject has (such as speaking about a battle of AIDS).


The second contrast between the two films is emotion. "Notes" offers up extreme facial and body expressions, lively characters, laughter, ect. "Hamilton", on the other hand, has no drama of any sorts--there is subtle facial expressions, a sort of robotic boredom to the verbal interaction amongst the characters and very little dramatic body movement. While in "Notes" it is clear that life is an adventure worth living, "Hamilton" proves that for some life is merely routine. A trademark theme amongst Montgomery's films is her provocative, in-your-face, very political scenes that tell tons of the feminist movement and her personal beliefs and quests. And the only controversial thing in "Hamilton" is the older mother isn't married and she has both white and biracial children.

In the end, "Notes" is a work of closure. Montgomery finds her equipment, reunites with old friends, revisits footage from the 70s and gets ready to enter a new field of work. Ironically, "Hamilton" is almost the complete opposite. Although the delinquent young father is found and given the message, we're left with the scene of the father and a random neighborhood boy riding off in the distance, leaving us with new questions and confusion. Both films, however, each explore unconventional ways to tell us a story.

Jennifer Montgomery's Little L Breaks Territorial Ground

Jennifer Montgomery provides an inside look of the territorial minds of young girls in her provocative film "Age 12: Love with a Little L". Montgomery's description of the film is "...depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire,transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission".


Throughout the film, the audience is exposed to young women "marking" their territory, whether it is the ground or a human being by urination. In one scene, a young girl pulls down her underwear and urinates in front of the camera, and then calmly pulls her underwear back up and walks away. On top of this being a provocative scene, it shows how young women are territorial (sort of like animals marking their territory) and also explores the unspoken question of why it is acceptable in our society for men to make such gestures but for women it is considered disturbing.


Montgomery continually forces her audience to examine how they have been molded by society's way of viewing women with scenes such as a young women acting out animalistic expressions (growling, pointing ears forward, ect.) as they mimic territorial acts. "Age 12: Love with a Little L" will definitely challenge your perspective on sexual roles in modern society.

Scott Stark in "More That Meets The Eye: Remaking of Jane Fonda"

In class we watched "More That Meets The Eye: Remaking of Jane Fonda" by Scott Stark. The purpose of his video is to make fun of Jane Fonda's change from a political activist to a fitness guru. "More That Meets The Eye" is a twenty minute comedy, where Stark workout to Jane Fonda's best-selling Jane Fonda's Workout, made in the 80s. Stark is seen wearing unreasonably tight sweat pants, a baggy red sweatshirt, and a little t.v. In each scene, Stark is in a different place, rather it's a grocery store parking lot, on the balcony in the rain, a patio over-looking a baseball game or his living room. Besides two stills (one at the beginning and one at the end), we never see Fonda and her workout class. Instead, we hear her as we watch Stark, and various images of influential political activists such as Malcolm X. Running vertical is text, quotes from various political statements Jane Fonda has made. On the bottom, running horizontally, are snippets from her book, My Life So Far talking about her personal battle with sexuality, image, and health.

The point is to contrast the two Fondas: the one that was very controversial and outspoken about the Vietnam war and the one that was a leader in the workout business. In a letter to Jane Fonda, Stark wrote:

"The original idea for the video, which I began shooting in the early 1990s, was that your exercise video series, coming as it did at the cusp of the 1980s, was emblematic of a cultural shift from the politicized, activist climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s into the me-decade of the 80s. You, as Jane-Fonda-the-activist morphing into Jane-Fonda-the-exercise-queen, were certainly a symbol of this cultural shift, and even in many ways one of its driving forces. Some have seen this shift as a betrayal of a certain kind of selfless idealism, replacing it with a more self-centered view of changing the world through self-improvement."

After watching the video, I was curious to know what was the real story behind Fonda, and sought out the book (I haven't read it yet). In my opinion, this spark of interest on my part makes Stark successful. He seemed to have both awe and disgust for Fonda's different personalities, and through each and every scene we saw that. My favorite scene is him working out in the grocery store parking lot with a picture of Fonda on a car nearby. I would highly recommend this for those who are interested in finding a different perspective of Jane Fonda.