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Which Film Was Made Just For You?

Which Film Was Made Just For You?

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Inside Llewyn Davis

We all have our films with which we have some kind of indelible personal connection – though they may not be necessarily our favorites. Perhaps it means something particular to you whose meaning wouldn’t translate to other people, or maybe the film is representative of a particular moment in your life or  an aspect of your personality, or maybe you feel like the elements of the film are so tailored to your taste that it couldn’t have been meant for anyone but you. Whatever the reason, there exists with certain films a strong personal connection that’s yours and yours alone. Sometimes it might even feel absurd that people have the same access to this special film that you do; after all, it feels like it was made just for you.

Here are the films our writers consider to be theirs and theirs alone.

Alistair Ryder: Boyhood (2014)

Boyhood_69114
Boyhood (2014) – source: Universal Pictures

Directed by Richard Linklater

The film I feel was made specifically for me is one that I have only seen once, with very few parallels to my life as a whole. Not only that, it is one that I’ve gushed about on this very website before (I named it my favourite film of 2014) and has been praised by so many people it feels pointless even bringing it up again. For many people within my age group, Boyhood will likely be regarded as a film made specifically for them, a truly authentic coming of age tale that manages to craft ordinary slices of everyday life into genuinely moving drama.

For me, I was a year older than Mason Jr. for every year of his life in the year’s shown onscreen, which made many of the events relatable, even if I’ve never been to the idealized Texas of a Richard Linklater film, that feels like heaven on earth as opposed to a notoriously “red” state. I too have had to deal with shitty step-dads with inane anger issues, but these aren’t the scenes that correlate to the best moments of my teenage years. Boyhood is miraculous as it avoids the general coming-of-age experiences everybody has for the first time in order for the quieter moments – scenes in life that feel mundane at the time, but as you grow up and look back fondly at the memories of people you see less and less that you spent these moments with, just makes you think how many happy memories are buried within the everyday.

On a more specific level, there’s the soundtrack, which in its later stages seems to represent exactly what I was listening to each year. Soulja Boy’s godawful “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” in the 2007 sequence was frequently played when me and friends DJ’d on our high school’s radio station in the very same year (on a side note, at 13, we were the youngest ever presenters of the breakfast show). On a more emotional note, there are two tracks from Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs album, which I distinctly remember listening to as I made my way to university for the first time – for some reason, any track from that album triggers an emotional gut-punch to me, as I realize it was ever-present in the background as I started my last stage in growing up. As the credits roll and “Deep Blue” closes the soundtrack, it’s clear that the album also represents Mason’s final stage of growing up as he arrives at college, staring off into the future, not realizing adulthood is finally here.

Raul Marin: Shame (2011)

Source: 20th Century Fox
Shame (2011) – source: 20th Century Fox

Directed by Steve McQueen

There have been plenty of movies that have blown me away, shocked me, and surprised me. These movies would most likely be in your top-10 list of all-time greatest movies. A more intriguing question is: what movie was made just for me? The answer is Shame. This heart-pounding drama from Steve McQueen, who is one of my favorite directors, left me speechless the first time I saw it. Everyone has heard the saying that we’re all weird in our ways. Well, I would take that expression a step further and say that we all have our own addictions. In many ways, they define who we are. They can affect our mood, desires, and motivations.

After watching this film, you realize that your addictions cannot control your life. There is a price to pay if you let them. Before I realize it, I haven’t lived life because I’ve been consumed by my addictions. This film teaches me to live my life by the triumphs and falls that occur, not by what I want. When I look at Brandon on screen, I see myself. I have had addictions that drive me mad, and make me feel as though I cannot survive without them. As the drama in this film unfolds, it made me realize that you always have a choice. No matter what your addiction is, the power to end the storm lies within your mind. Your mind has the key to liberating you or locking you in the prison of your addictions. Ever since I saw this film for the first time, and every time since then, I laugh and cry, think and scream, pause and reflect, because it’s a beautiful film that reminds me of who I am.

Mike Daringer: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Source: Sony Pictures
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) – source: Sony Pictures

Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

Inside Llewyn Davis is an incredibly personal film for me and seems to have been produced as a commentary for my life, and not just because it’s made by my favorite living directors, Joel and Ethan Coen. As a Coen apologist this is near the top of their work for a bunch of reasons, the main one being that they dove into the pain of living as a musician (as they similarily did with being a writer in Barton Fink). Adapting the ancient Greek legend of Sisyphus, the Coens transplanted the torture of everyday living into the born loser, Llewyn Davis. Llewyn can’t catch a break to save his life in the folk music scene, and when the rare chance of success does appear Llewyn finds a way for it to screw him over.

Inside Llewyn Davis was made for me and my inner “asshole,” bent towards the pop-art community of sellouts and lame-wads. But on a deeper level the film speaks to the relativity of time and circumstances and postulates that one is always a product of their environment, and can never escape it. Whoa, talk about a sucker punch to the abdomen.

But the film is also incredibly beautiful and that, above all else, is what art should be – something that is creative, that dares and defies. What more can somebody ask or want from a movie? Nothing else for me, anyway. So as Llewyn concludes his cyclical life I’ll do the same and longingly look offscreen and mutter, “Au revoir.”

Manon de Reeper: The Matrix (1999)

Matrix
The Matrix (1999) – source: Warner Bros.

Directed by The Wachowskis

There are few films I feel such a close connection to as The Matrix. The Matrix was released in cinemas when I was just 10 years old, but I saw it around that time. I have seen it many, many times since, and it’s been present in many of my film deliberations and studies. It was maybe most relevant to me when I was taking philosophy classes in high school, and though I’d never really read about The Matrix online or on paper, I finally made the connection as to why it struck such a chord with me.

At around the same time as The Matrix was released, I was playing the first edition of The Sims a lot. It made me wonder: are we real? Are we too, like my sims, controlled by higher beings or an unseen force? What is free will? Does it even exist? The Matrix, in a way, posed those questions too. Is the world we see around us, real? How can you even tell? In The Matrix, Morpheus and Neo et al. find answers I was looking for, but couldn’t find.

As I was taking this philosophy course, I was taught about the theories of the 17th century French philosopher René Descartes. He posed such theories as dualism and that of the evil demon, which basically are what The Matrix is about. For a while then, in high school, I was obsessed with these theories, and how they’re presented in The Matrix. In fact, it was rather depressing. There was no way I could prove whether my reality, my world, is real, or not. Even “cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”, not incidentally also a proposition by Descartes) couldn’t convince me.

All in all, The Matrix feels like it was made for me. Since high school, I’ve kind of given up on trying to prove my world is real. I’ll just accept that my reality is like the allegory of the cave.

Amanda Garrett: Stagecoach (1939)

Source: 20th Century Fox
Stagecoach (1939) – source: 20th Century Fox

Directed by John Ford

John Ford’s masterpiece, Stagecoach, has many distinctions. It is one of the best known of old Hollywood films and many critics rank Stagecoach as the first adult Western. Stagecoach also features a star-making performance from John Wayne as an outlaw on the run, and some of the most exciting action sequences ever made. Despite all this, I’ve always felt that Stagecoach was a movie made just for me.

My special relationship with Stagecoach began in childhood when I first saw the film on a Saturday afternoon matinee. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but it was somewhere in the grade school range. I had never really paid attention to movies before except for Bugs Bunny cartoons, but Stagecoach captured my imagination that day.

Stagecoach tells the story of a diverse group of travelers – a drunk doctor played by Thomas Mitchell, a Southern gambler played by John Carradine, a prostitute with a heart of gold played by Claire Trevor – who are making a perilous journey across Arizona. They face many dangers, ranging from swollen rivers to Apaches that leads to one of the most exciting chase scenes in movie history.

I enjoyed the movie as a child because it was fast-paced and exciting and there is a lot of roustabout comedy between Mitchell, who won a best-supporting actor Oscar, and a sheepish “medicine” salesman (read whiskey drummer) played by Donald Meek. However, Stagecoach, like many of the best old Hollywood movies, works on many levels. Unlike today, where most movies are marketed to a niche audience, most Hollywood studios in the 1930’s tried to get the broadest possible audience into cinemas. Ford was both a popular director of action movies and an auteur, and his mastery of motion pictures as an art form is apparent in every frame of Stagecoach.

Decades after I first watched Stagecoach, I still find new things to appreciate, whether it’s the fine performance of Wayne as the honorable outlaw the Ringo Kid or the atmospheric black and white cinematography from director of photography Bert Glennon. Ford is one of the few directors – Alfred Hitchc*ck is another – who had complete control of the camera, and his shot compositions are always revelatory, especially the final gunfight scene where shadow and light plays across Wayne’s face as he heads out to meet his fate.

Julia Smith: Waking Life (2001)

20th Century Fox
Waking Life (2001) – source: 20th Century Fox

Directed by Richard Linklater

I became a great fan of Richard Linklater when I first starting studying film, and while I liked a lot of his feature films it was Waking Life that really drew me in. I sometimes feel like I’m the only person who has ever seen this film, or at least the only person who has ever gotten it. For me, Waking Life is more than a film, it is this great mental and visual adventure through the possibilities of the human mind.

For those of you who may not have seen it, Waking Life is a fully rotoscoped film. That is to say it looks like an animation but is a series of live action vignettes and conversations performed by actors (and sometimes characters) from Linklater’s previous films, along with contemporary philosophers and teachers. The series is linked together by a single character played by Wiley Wiggins (who also appeared in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused), who for all intents and purposes is in some kind of purgatory. Or is he? Is he simply dreaming?

As the series of conversations and ideas unfold, always on the subject of the imagination, dreams, people and relationships, a question begins to emerge. Are we living our lives to the full? What are the boundaries and how do we overcome them? What do we want? This film plugs right in not only to my idea of dreams and the Jungian concept that they are the key to what we really think, but also my fascination with the heights of human endeavor and the idea that the answers to what we seek lie in meeting and experiencing as much of the world as possible.

I wouldn’t be able to tell you what Waking Life might really be about. Because that would be me discussing it objectively, as though this were made for all of us and I’m making up some personal interpretation of it that does not exist. Of course, it wasn’t made for you, it was made for me. It is a film which I feel reaches into every idea I’ve ever had and splatters it across the cinema screen. If you don’t get it then that’s okay, but I would still love for you to watch it and see if you feel the same way.

Arlin Golden: Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez! (2012)

Source: Everything is Terrible!
Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez! (2012) – source: Everything is Terrible!

Directed by Everything is Terrible!

Everything Is Terrible! is as an online video collective, based in Chicago and LA, that specializes in taking obscure VHS tapes from the 80s and 90s and editing them down to a short video expressing the core worst thing about it. They are sometimes disturbing, often confounding, but almost always  hilarious. In 2009 they expanded their scope and made their first feature-length collage, Everything Is Terrible: The Movie. That film took their short videos and edited them all together to create one thematically cohesive work of art, which they followed up with a similarly structured sequel a year later. After the success of their website and features, an increasingly complex live show which they took across the United States, and a campaign to amass the world’s largest collection of Jerry Maguire VHS tapes (a campaign in which they have actually far surpassed succeeding), it was time for a bold move.

On March 11, 2011, they announced a kickstarter campaign to fund the creation of a film that would not only be made exclusively from dog footage, but that would also be a remake of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 psych-pop classic The Holy Mountain, which just happens to be my favorite fiction film ever (though arguments can be made that it’s a documentary of sorts as well). It was as if some demented focus group was put together to appeal directly to me, like giving Homer Simpson a donut made out of beer.

Naturally, I had to donate to the effort, so in a small sense, the film actually was kind of made for me. Somehow, there were enough people out there deluded into thinking that it was intended for an audience larger than myself, so the project got funded, and a year later Doggiewoggiez Poochiewoochiez! was unleashed onto the world. It was probably impossible in execution for the film to match the high-concept from which it was conceived, as it can be a little overwhelming to those new to EIT’s particular brand of collage montage. But it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless; the passion and effort that went into all the edits and cuts is palpable and the cumulative effect of the film is completely astounding. Though not exactly the movie the execs over at the Arlin dream-project development team conjured up, it’s proof nonetheless that sometimes, everything can be wonderful as well.

Do you have a film you feel was made just for you? What is it? I hope it wasn’t on this list, otherwise it might mean a fight. What is it?

(top image: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) – source: Sony Pictures)

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