ISSUE #37
BEAM FROM THE BOOTH | GRAND RAPIDS FILM SOCIETY
[EDITED BY: GRIFFIN SHERIDAN]
Hello and welcome back to an all-new installment of BEAM FROM THE BOOTH brought to you by GRAND RAPIDS FILM SOCIETY!
What a great time we had last week between OPEN PROJECTOR NIGHT and our LORD OF THE RINGS COSTUME PARTY! Thanks to all of you who joined us for these events, both were truly a blast.
We have two more events taking place before we bid farewell to 2023. First, on THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14th, our FILM SOCIETY ROUNDTABLE social event makes it’s return. After having to cancel last month’s Roundtable, we are even more excited to be hosting yet another of these social events. Come chat with your fellow GR cinephiles and filmmakers from 5:30pm–8:00pm next Thursday.
Then: on SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17th, we are pulling our film projector back out for our annual screening of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE ON 16mm FILM! Those who attended this event last year know how truly special it is to experience this holiday classic on celluloid. Whether you’ve seen it a hundred times or just a few, we encourage you all to join us for this special holiday event.
THE LORD OF THE RINGS AFTERWORD
[BY: GRIFFIN SHERIDAN]
I find it incredible the way Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring still brings the house down. Even over twenty years removed from its original release, and on the other side of a handful of other blockbuster fantasy adaptations, there are very few projects that have the same truly transportive quality.
Surely part of the energy present in the Wealthy Theatre this past Friday night was due to the fact that we packed the place full of die-hard fans of the franchise, but many of the conversations I had afterward — even those I had with people who had never seen the film before — all had the same tone: that of sheer astonishment at the amount of craft and care present in every frame of these films. I am hard-pressed to think of a Hollywood film of this scale to make such clear use of it’s enormous budget and production time. It’s hard not to imagine that every member of every department in the crew is anything but a master of their craft...and Jackson ended up being the perfect orchestrator of such talented individuals.
Save for a small handful of moments where you can feel the age of the film in things like its use of early-2000s CGI, the film feels truly timeless. While audience members are free to draw whatever comparisons to their contemporary world they would like, the truth seems to be that nothing in the film is meant to be a one-to-one reflection of our world, much like what Tolkien insisted about his original novels when they were released in the 1950s. Jackson and company’s decision to not pack the film with allusions to the 21st century (which I imagine could have only become easier after the first film’s release in late 2001) is what makes these films feel like true works of fantasy; and yet, they can still act as parables of how to persevere, even in the face of tremendous power and great evil.
What makes these films so special is how the filmmakers find such technical ways to perfectly convey those ideas and the emotional state of the characters and the world they inhabit. From the rumbling bass every time the One Ring falls to the ground to Howard Shore’s motif-filled score, the production imbues Middle Earth with a sense of reality — of this being a real place with easily relatable stakes and characters.
For those interested in learning more about the production of this film, the crew notably went to great lengths to give audiences an all-encompassing look at the making of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. With the release of each ‘extended edition’ on DVD came multiple discs packed with hours of behind-the-scenes featurettes (referred to as “The Appendices” in their initial release). Those special features have come and gone across the numerous re-releases of these films in the past two decades, but they have also made their way onto the internet. We’ve put together a YOUTUBE PLAYLIST full of some of these supplementary materials, particularly those focused on the elements Fellowship receives the most acclaim for: cinematography, score, make-up, and visual effects.
We were so pleased to host this event for the community, so much so that we just might have to follow it up with another couple costume parties...stay tuned, friends!
ECHOES
[BY: SPENCER EVERHART]
Echoes is an exclusively-visual column based on the MUBI Notebook series of the same name – a fun way to find the repetitions, reverberations, and recapitulations in images throughout cinema history.
murmurations (Rebecca Meyers, 2013)
Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)
LEARNING TO LIKE SALTBURN
[BY: MATT EVERITT]
I have a really hard time not letting Letterboxd influence my opinion of a movie. My star rating will usually go up or down an entire star (sometimes more) after I see what everyone else is saying. I have been working through this depressingly shallow revelation with my therapist and those closest to me.
Nothing about Saltburn’s trailer made me want to see it. I had been a fan of Emerald Fennel’s first film Promising Young Woman (scandal noted, I know that as a man this is my ‘I would have voted for Obama again if I could’ moment) despite a lot of critics and Film Twitter having some VERY hot takes that made it seem like they thought she should never make another movie; which is just an odd feeling to have towards...anyone? Whatever — she went on to win an Oscar for that movie and rightfully got a bigger budget and some huge stars and made a horny hot guys movie (which makes it sound a lot better than any of the marketing did now that I think about it). Anyway, the first impressions I saw online made it seem like it was your moral obligation to think this movie is bad:
And this one from a critic who I’m usually 10/10 on:
And this fav from Letterboxd:
But then I saw an equal amount of people making it seem like you’re morally obligated to like the movie:
And thus we had a little culture war on Film Twitter.
Neither view moves the conversation forward. You’re saying you’re one kind of person if you like it and another if you don’t...which is really saying it doesn’t matter if you liked the movie or not, it’s about the kind of company you want to keep. ‘Are you high-minded like us or low-minded like those people who don’t get it like we do?’
Normally, I like siding with the critics who tend to see films as ~ *CiNeMa* ~ and who love the Safdie brothers for the way they express their view of society through their frenetic voyeuristic style. And those people were telling me (without much evidence) that this movie is shit and morally reprehensible.
So I finally saw it thanks to my wife’s interest in the movie due to her not being on Film Twitter like the normal person she is. When the movie was over, I was shocked that I enjoyed it and that my little brain couldn’t find anything in it to warrant the level of vitriol thrown its way.
I spent a few days troubled by that. Did I miss something? Am I bad at watching movies? Why can’t I see what everyone else is seeing?
I’m not used to going against the grain for fear of looking dumb. And it helps to stop looking so much at what other people think of a movie before I even get a chance to see it. Things feel like they’ve gotten a little extreme, and I miss not thinking about what star rating I’m gonna give a movie six minutes after it started.
So the best part of Saltburn for me is learning it’s okay to like Saltburn.*
*Later I learned writer/director Fennell took the plot from an earlier film by Pier Paolo Pasolini called Teorema (1968), and she gutted the spiritual core of it and didn’t replace it with anything other than Bloc Party needle drops. I love Bloc Party, but there’s the fact that she also rewrote a lot of the film to match her own privileged upbringing which inadvertently tips the scales for how I feel about the ending of the film. So I no longer like Saltburn that much. But that’s an entirely different conversation.
OPEN PROJECTOR NIGHT: SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN!
We wanted to take a moment to remind you all that SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN for our next OPEN PROJECTOR NIGHT event. If you are a filmmaker connected to the state of Michigan (from here, currently live here, have a film about here, etc.) and want to see your short film on the big screen, we encourage you to submit your work on our FILM FREEWAY page.
The entry deadline is FEBRUARY 21st, and the event is currently scheduled for MARCH 20th.
If your film is selected, it will be screened alongside other hand-picked shorts, you will have the opportunity to take part in a filmmaker Q&A, and you could even take home a cash prize if your short wins our ‘Audience Vote’ for their favorite shorts of the night.
Have questions? Reach out to us at GrandRapidsFilmSociety@gmail.com!
UPCOMING EVENTS
WHAT: A free GRFS social event! Come meet likeminded local cinephiles and filmmakers. Be sure to RSVP!
WHEN: Thursday, December 14th, 6:00pm (Doors: 5:30pm — arrive early to mingle!)
WHERE: Annex - Front Studio (right next to Wealthy Theatre!)
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE on 16mm FILM
WHAT: Our annual GRFS holiday tradition continues! Catch this matinee screening of the classic film like you’ve never seen it before: projected on 16mm film!
WHEN: Sunday, December 17th, 4:00pm
WHERE: The Wealthy Theatre
And so we’ve arrived at the end of another BEAM FROM THE BOOTH! We appreciate you taking the time to read it and truly hope you’ll continue to do so. Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to get each issue in your inbox every SUNDAY, and stay up-to-date on all things GRFS.
Plus, join us on social media! We’d love to chat with everyone and hear YOUR OWN thoughts on everything above (you can also hop in the comments section below).
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Look for ISSUE #38 in your inbox NEXT SUNDAY, 12/10!
Until then, friends...
