The year is winding down and the Film Series is leaving its final, furious imprint on campus with a pair of wonderful films. Though radically different in style and subject matter, “Rize” and “The Graduate” are both terrific films that represent the best of what a campus film series can and must be: gloriously entertaining, artistically innovative films that will get your weekend night off to an appropriately exuberant start.
In this spirit of cinematic celebration, let’s take some time in the upcoming weeks to show some serious cinematic lovin’ to the Film Department’s Senior Thesis Projects. The history and screenplay theses will be presented on Sunday at 2 and 4 pm and this year’s glorious senior thesis films will be presented at the Center For Film Studies during the evening from May 11-14.
RIZE. Friday, May 5. 8 p.m. Goldsmith Family Cinema.
“Rize” will have you dancing in the aisles, krumping in front of your mirror for months on end, flinging yourself up the side of chain-link fences and wishing that your flesh and bones could produce even a fragment of the visual poetry created by the young artists featured in this powerful and exuberant documentary. “Rize” documents the lives of the young members of South Central L.A.’s krumping posses, underground dance pioneers who use street dance culture to forge a creative response to the oppression that surrounds their communities. Celebrated fashion photographer turned documentarian David LaChapelle glories in the breathtakingly visual self-expression of his subjects, while also wisely letting their articulate voices guide the film rather than imposing an intrusive interpretation of their experiences. A visually stunning chronicle of a revolutionary form of artistic expression, “Rize” glories in the potential of art to transform lives, capturing moments of spontaneous and exuberant artistic creation that will send shivers down your spine.
THE GRADUATE. Saturday, May 6. 8 p.m. GFC.
While we may never have the good fortune to be guided through the stormy waters of post-college malaise by a mackalicious Mrs. Robinson, “The Graduate” examines with glorious humor and whimsical energy a precarious state of being that lies ominously ahead of us all. Benjamin Braddock’s return to his ferociously stupid upper-middle-class California suburb and his comic inability to conform to the role of an Upwardly Mobile Clean-Cut All-American College Grad have rightly developed into the stuff of legend within our popular consciousness. Fueled by Simon and Garfunkel’s legendary soundtrack, Dustin Hoffman’s star-making, deliciously neurotic turn as Benjamin and Mike Nichols lively and lyrical direction, “The Graduate” is a great, end-of-the-year opportunity to achieve cathartic communion with both movie history and the great unknown that lies beyond our college years.
Last but not least, we’ll end this year’s Argus Film Series column with a few parting words from Jordan Schulkin, Thesis Film Director extraordinaire and soon-to-be Ben Braddock of the Film Series Column:
“I am graduating. Having been an Argus film critic and/or Film Series previewer for the last three years, there are many sentimental things that I planned to say in this final column of my Wesleyan career. But then I got high.
Instead, here are a few of the many sentences I have had cut from my column over the years:
– ”I will cock smack your unborn children.“
– ”Jules et Jim’s“ love triangle is the ”the thinking man’s gang bang.“
– ”Don’t cry over spilt ball juice“
– ”God jizzumed (rainbows).“
A word written but unprinted is a baby stabbed in the throat. Congraduation to all my fellow seniors… FILM SERIES 4-EVA! Underclassmen: if you don’t know, you betta akse somebody.”
Leave a Reply