"A Little Princess" - 1995

This is one of my favourite movies of all time.

It's the story of a young girl named Sara who has lived in beautiful India all her life, living in luxury with servants, friends, and a father who loves her very much - but is ripped from her home to attend a boarding school for girls in New York (run by the pretentious Miss Minchin) while her father goes off to fight in the ghastly trenches of World War I.  Because she has lived separate from "normal" girls of her age, she finds the culture shock upsetting and difficult to comply with.  Her father demands that the boarding school treat her like a princess and says his goodbyes.  A short while later, Sara is told that her father has died, leaving her penniless.  Suddenly, she is forced to work as a servant to the boarding school, and things go from bad to worse to hell until, finally, Sara receives the best surprise of her life.

First of all, I know that this adaptation wasn't incredibly true to the novel.  But I'm not one to judge the quality of a movie based on how well it depicted the book.  A movie is separate from its book and should be reviewed for what it is.

My favourite thing about this movie is the juxtaposition of gorgeous Indian culture with the harsher, colder Victorian style of America during this era.  This is accomplished in several different ways.

For one, the music in this movie is all-around amazing.  In the very beginning, you're hit with this gorgeous sitar music (some people might have thought it was cheesy, playing on the stereotypes of India like that, but I say otherwise.  It's beautiful music, so enjoy it and shut up!).  This opening theme recurs many times throughout the film, as Sara reminisces and connects things in her new life to things from her past.  The tune is warm, exotic, and uplifting, just like its name - "Kindle My Heart."  On the other hand, when the mood is supposed to seem empty, hopeless, and stern, a staunchly refined choir is heard.  English poet William Blake's poem "The Tyger" is, ironically, full of rainforest imagery and sung to fit the Victorian ideals of music instead.

Colour is also used to represent the two different worlds.  Sara's homeland is represented by oranges, yellows, and reds - warm colours - corresponding to both the mood, temperature, and wildness of untamed India.  New York is portrayed as a very green and grey atmosphere.  The skies are either overcast or raining, not sunny like Sara's memories of India.  Miss Minchin dresses in stately, grey clothes.  The girls of the school dress in green uniforms for school and green with white frocks for play, always with green hair ribbons.  The school's interior and exterior are also overwhelmingly green - almost as if a failed attempt had been made at bringing nature into the ugly and industrial city.  It only ends up feeling gloomy.  The warm colours only appear when hints of Sara's life in India show up; the clothes of Ram Dass, the Indian man assisting the elderly neighbor of Miss Minchin's school, a pair of yellow shoes given to Becky, the black servant of the school, and the decor of the magically-transformed attic room where Sara is forced to live - all stand out vibrantly against the otherwise green environment.

One trait that Sara makes absolute certain not to lose in the chaos of her new life is her imagination and ability to make up vivid stories.  Yes, the scenes that depict her stories coming to life are very obviously unrealistic, but I think they were meant to be that way.  Playful and colourful, dramatic and exaggerated.  No harm there.  And a lot of people don't notice this, but if you pay attention, the "Prince Rama" of her story is played by the same man who plays her father, Captain Crewe, and the princess played by the same actress who plays her mother, showing that she really has a feel for how much her parents loved each other, and her father's sorrow at losing his wife.

I'm glad the subject of race was touched on in this film.  When Sara comes to New York, she has absolutely no idea that white people held a higher rank than blacks at the time, and is very confused about it.  There is a point in the movie where a young girl explains that Becky, the servant, isn't allowed to talk to the girls because "she has dark skin," to which Sara replies, "So?"  The girl responds, "Doesn't...that mean something?" but has no idea what logic drives the argument, having already been brainwashed by the ideas held in the era about race.

Most beautiful scenes in the movie: The entire beginning up until the end of the scene where she is dancing with her father; the scene where Sara's door opens, letting the snow into her room, and she dances in it, happy for just a few moments in spite of her predicament; and the scene where she wakes up in her transformed room, where everything is draped in orange cloth, a fancy breakfast magically awaiting her in her usually dank attic room.  This last scene begins with three or four rapidly repeated shots of her waking up from different angles as the sitar theme sweeps in and gives off the feeling of awe washing over her.  This same technique is used again at the end, when the snobby Lavinia, a classmate, hugs Sara goodbye.  There is some kick-ass camera work in this movie.

The acting was...average...throughout the film.  Can't be too harsh, though, with the large number of first-time child actresses.

I cried TWO times in this movie.  The first time was when Sara has just been told that her father has died and, instead of being comforted, is yelled at and sent to live in the attic, where she sobs and cries out for her father.  The second time was at the climax of the film, when Sara's father (who is not dead, and has actually been taken in by the elderly man next door) wakes from his amnesia and saves Sara from the police, finally remembering who his daughter is.

This was intense, for a kid movie. The ending was far-fetched, though.  I'm still trying to figure out why Ram Dass simply looking at Captain Crewe was enough for him to remember Sara.  If he didn't remember his life in India when Ram Dass was explaining the language of his home country, I don't see why he suddenly (oh so fortunately) remembered right when it was most important.  But then again, it was targeted for young audiences.  And hey, who doesn't like a happy ending once in a while?

Fear not, lovers of romance, myself among you!  This movie contains something for you as well, despite taking place in a dreary school for girls.  The sister of Miss Minchin, Amelia, has an ongoing love affair with the milkman, which is helped along by Sara, who dreamily describes to Amelia how amazing her life could be if she ran away with her lover, away from the cold confines of the boarding school.

This movie is amazing, and I'm going to have to try my best not to go overboard and give it ten million stars.  It had great character development (except in the case of Miss Minchin, who is an eternally vile sort of anchor), principles, and art.  Still, my taste in movies tends to lean toward the surreal, dramatic movies...whatever that means.  So I'm going to under-star it by my standards.

Stars: 3.5/5

"Fat Girl" - 2001 (French title: "À ma soeur!")

Okay, so my friend let me borrow about nine movies to watch and critique, and this one was the first on the list.

To give a really crude summary, the story is about two sisters of ages 15 and 12, who are on a vacation with their parents.  The older one is pretty, thin, and flirty (taking after her mother), and the younger one is fat and often forgotten.  Her name is Anaïs.  The older girl, Elena, meets a boy, who seduces her into sleeping with him.  Her mum finds out about it and decides to drag the girls home.  However, on the way home, Elena and her mother are violently killed by an outlaw, and Anaïs is raped - but denies to the police that she was.

Okay, now for the critique.  I jump around a bit, so until I get better at this, forgive me.

The movie is all in French.  I usually love French films, because I feel like they have a really different perspective of the world than American filmmakers have.  Plus, they aren't as afraid to sort of push the envelope - they tackle subjects that I've seen American films water down, and make them real and controversial, as they should be.  I like that.

However, when a film is in a different language, it's hard to tell if their acting is very good or not...at least in the way they speak.  But from what I got, all of the emotion was realistic.  I mean, everything else that goes into it is pretty universal.

In the beginning, I thought the older sister was a bit of a prat to an extreme, almost unrealistic degree.  She and her sister are always together in the movie, and the older sister spends a great deal of her time putting down Anaïs, calling her fat, a pig, etc...  It was a little overboard, but I'm willing to pass it off as sibling rivalry.  I've never had a sibling, and therefore have no way to gauge sibling rivalry, but I've heard that it can be pretty bad.

Plus, we find out later that Elena's parents' condition for letting her out is that she has to bring Anaïs with her.  I can completely see how that would make the older sister frustrated.

Anaïs, you can definitely tell, isn't too cool with being constantly ridiculed.  Obviously.  Of the two girls, she is the least like her mother.  Her sister can have anything - the boy, the pretty dress, the romance - and she knows that her sister only regards her as a nuisance, a "ball and chain."  She longs to feel comfortably sexual, like her sister, and states that she wants her "first time" with someone to be with no one special so that she's already "broken in" by the time she meets her love.  This will spare him of the complications of being a girl's first lover, she believes.

As for the boy, Fernando, I think he had even ME convinced that he loved Elena!  He's honest with her, right off the bat, that he's been a bit of a playboy in the past, and she confides in him that she's afraid she'll just be like every other girl he's been with if she gives herself up to him.  He takes time to meet her family and talk with her...it really did SEEM like he had become a different person for her...until he started requesting sexual favours and pressuring her when she refused.  He even had the bollocks to say something along the lines of, "If you don't, I'll have to find an older girl, and I don't want to do that."

Typical jerk, you know?

Anyway, when he finally gets his way, the couple doesn't even mind that little (har har) Anaïs is in the room with them.  S'matter of fact, there is a LOT of sexual activity in this movie, and all of it happens in the room that the sisters share, as if Anaïs is invisible.  She cries herself to sleep as it all happens.

The only time Elena actually starts being nice to her sister is the day after Fernando has had his way with her...I have my suspicions that it was not out of guilt for having made her sister listen, but out of fear that Anaïs would tell their parents.

Every now and then, Anaïs is shown singing a haunting little tune to herself.  At first, the song is about being bored and lonely, but throughout the film, it becomes steadily more full of self-loathing and contains more and more suicidal undertones.  To be honest, I was expecting the end of the movie to include suicide.  That was my guess.  Turns out, it was quite the opposite.

Now, the ENDING was insane, guys.  I don't think I've ever seen such an unexpected conclusion.  Up until maybe the last ten minutes, everything in the movie was really...calming.  The colours, the sounds, the way people interacted with each other...all of it was very mellow and intimate.  Really, it just wasn't the kind of movie where you would expect any sort of deviation from all of that.

Tired from having driven all night after whisking the girls away from their vacation place, the mother decides to pull into a rest stop to sleep for the night.  Without any warning at all, a criminal hacks through the windshield with a hatchet, slamming it into the side of Elena's head just one second later.  Then he grabs at the mother's clothing before strangling her to death.  Anaïs watches all of this with a blank expression, as if she doesn't care - even as she flees from the car, slowly backing away from the murderer of her family.

The man forces her onto the ground and rapes her (it's quite a disturbing scene, really...I've never seen a more grisly rape in film before, psychologically speaking...I can't BELIEVE they filmed this with such a young actress, but I'm glad they went ahead and did it).  Odd thing is, halfway through the rape, Anaïs is clinging to him, like someone holds a lover.  As if she doesn't mind.  Not as though she enjoys it by any means, but with an indifferent face.  When he's done, he leaves her alive and runs off.

She doesn't report the rape, when police come to the scene of the crimes.

I froze, wide-eyed, and my hand FLEW to my mouth as soon as the windshield shattered - and I think I stayed in that position until the credits kicked in, actually.  I think it was awesome that the shot where the man breaks the window and kills Elena was done from the perspective of someone sitting in the car.  It really gave me that sense of panic that the family must have felt, being awakened by this crazy man.

There are a lot of theories as to why Anaïs chose not to tell the police that the man had raped her.  Stockholm Syndrome is one such theory, but I don't buy into it.  If that were the case, the rape scene would be the only scene in the movie, and the rest could be discarded.  No.  I think that the point was a combination of the twisted fulfillment of Anaïs's desire for her "first time" to be with no one special, as well as the gratefulness she had towards the man for having chosen her, instead of Elena, for his sexual outlet.

Up until the end, I thought it was really strange that most of the movie focused on Elena, instead of Anaïs, whom the movie is named for in its English title.

I feel like everyone should see this movie.  It realistically portrays the struggles of girls, the psychological damage that being overweight and ridiculed can create, and the ignorance of wealthy parents.  Oh, and it also made me afraid of rest stops even more than I already was.

Stars: 4.5/5

Greetings!

Hello, all!  And by all, I of course mean Ashley, Charlene, and Joey, the only people who I think might be reading this at this point.  Maybe some day I'll gain a bit of readership, but you've got to start small, right?

Here's the story.  I'm a journalism major at Indiana University, and I came into my freshman year thinking I wanted my minor to be political science.  I guess I was really gung-ho about the election, so for awhile, I thought political journalism was my calling.

Nuh-uh.  Not even close.

I started getting absolutely sick of the political scene (even though my candidate DID win, if that tells you anything about me), and realized that I'd rather have a different focus.  Same field, still journalism, but with a different concentration.

I realized that I spent nearly half of my waking hours (and being an insomniac, that's a LOT of hours) watching movies in my room.  Movies are my escape...I can really get into a movie, to the point where I feel really out of place in my own life once I leave a theatre.  And to be entirely arrogant, I've always felt that I take a lot more from movies, and notice more, than a lot of other people do.

So!  I'll be using the blog to critique films.  When I was younger, I always wanted to direct movies (and for a short, slightly embarrassing while, I wanted to act).  But all of that is really risky, so unless I become so confident in myself through film courses at IU that I'm willing to depart from journalism, I'll be keeping with it.  Maybe work for an arts desk or be a critic.  I'm hoping that this blog will get me sort of used to writing about stuff like that.

I doubt I'll post every day.  Like, I highly doubt it.  But I'll post whenever I watch a movie that I want to talk about, which is pretty often.

Hope you enjoy!

-Michelle-