Frank Underwood: House of Cards and the Fourth Wall.

    House of Cards is a hit Netflix Original Series that has run from 2013 and released it's third season on Netflix as of last February. It revolves around Frank Underwood (played by Kevin Spacey) a corrupt and often maniacal politician in Washington doing anything he can to get on top. The show itself is great for so many reasons, blocking, sound, color; but I think what really grabs people's attention is the fourth wall breaks (breaks from the story directed at the audience) periodically scattered across the show. Here's a quick video to demonstrate.

   
      Fourth wall breaks, to me, are typically found in comedies and typically movie, not TV shows. The classic fourth wall break can be seen in movies like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Space Balls, Annie Hall, ect...But to see these breaks in television I think was a new experience for me and here's why it works.
     They allow us into the world of Frank Underwood, it gives us his moves and his plays before his opponents know what's coming. By allowing this we also start to sympathize with an almost unlikeable character. It also doesn't come across as cheesy or overdone. This show has a very Shakespearean storytelling style to it, and as actors often broke the fourth wall in plays to give monologues Frank Underwood masterfully does the same in this show.
     Fourth wall breaks are an technique that can only really work when it is used tastefully and well. If it isn't the audience won't receive it. House of Cards manages to do this in the best way I have seen in a long time not only drawing us into the story more but propelling a narrative in a more interesting way.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

For about seven years now, my all time favorite movie has been Fight Club by the amazing director, David Fincher. From the perfected cinematography to the phenomenal acting, there are too many good things to say about it. Here is a list of why Fight Club is one of the best movies of all time:

1.     Perfected cinematography

Fight Club is probably one of the cleanest films I know. Every shot and every cut is completely intentional and flawless. Shots are well composed following the rule of thirds with a variety of angles and perspectives.

2.     Phenomenal acting

We all know that Brad Pitt is one of the most well known actors out there but his relationship to Edward Norton in this film is one-of-a-kind. Seeing the narrator’s bland personality next to Tyler Durden’s rebellious charisma is a groundbreaking performance. Not to mention the animated presentation we get from Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer, the two main characters’ love interest.  

3.     Insightful and thought-provoking quotes

The quotes from this movie are ones that really tend to stick with you. Tyler Durden doesn’t want to waste a second of his life away, so the words that come from his mouth are quite powerful. Here is one of my favorite examples: “You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

4.      Subliminal messaging

There are a lot of interesting facts about this movie that many people are unaware of. For example, throughout the entire film, there is a flash frame of Tyler Durden on the screen four times before we actually meet his character.

5.     Ominous coloring and lighting

Last but not least, one of my favorite things about this film is the coloring and lighting. It is tinted blue throughout giving it an ominous effect and the lighting within every shot amplifies what’s happening.

Overall this is an amazing film. I highly recommend seeing it multiple times. Every time you watch, I guarantee you will notice something new that you never did before. It’s a movie full of surprises.

Gone Girl, David Fincher, and How to Make a Decent Adaptation

Before I get into things in-depth, let's just clear the air here: Gone Girl is pretty fucked up. The book, the film, the whole damn premise of the story is some of the darkest, most messed up stuff I've ever heard. I'll do my best not to spoil anything for people who haven't seen/read it yet, but let's be honest, I probably will at some point. Just a heads up.

(Side note for anyone who has seen the film, I just saw that the movie was rated R for - among other things (cough cough Ben Affleck's penis) - a scene of bloody violence. A scene. Just one. I think we can all assume what it was.)

Touching less on the technical aspects of David Fincher  - Emily already beat me to that - I'd like to focus more on how he makes, as the Economist called it, a "perfect adaptation." Never one to shy away from adapting books, (3 of his last 4 feature films were based on short stories or novels; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and now Gone Girl) Fincher always seems to find a way to circumvent the pre-established audience and market for a certain book and create something that is uniquely his. The question I'm interested in answering is: how does a director give a film his/her own personal flourish while simultaneously staying true to the source material?

Fincher, probably talking about how creepy his films are.

There's been plenty of bad book adaptations. More bad than good, actually. The handful of really good ones - Lord of the Rings, Blade Runner, No Country for Old Men, to name a few - all have the same basic thing in common: they capture the essence of the source material, along with the plot. In one of the more informative articles I think I've ever found on the A.V. club, one of the contributing writers, Scott Tobias, brings up a really interesting point about adaptations. When talking about Gary Ross' film adaptation of the Hunger Games, he says that "Films content with merely illustrating books are more concerned with problem solving and translation than artistic expression." This is something I'd never considered before. A literal, direct-from-the-book adaptation is almost no fun at all: if you're going to just film everything right from the page, there's a sense of "well hey, what was the point?" If the audience already knows everything, it's basically just a rehashing of the book, just with less.

It's pretty safe to say that Fincher gets this. The very first thing he did right was to hire the author of Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn, to also pen the screenplay (her first). This assured not only that the story would be close to that of the novel - pleasing the already established fan base - but that the general tone (cold, dark) would be the same as well. Films are much less intimate than novels by nature. In many books - Gone Girl included - we can literally hear inside the characters heads. One of the many goals for adaptations is to find a believable substitute for these internal voices, and to show character's emotions and thoughts in a much more visual manner. Gone Girl succeeds at this on every level.

While it stuck surprisingly close to the book (Flynn only cut out a few minor, expendable characters and events to cut down on the already lengthy 2.5 hour runtime) I never found myself knowing what would happen next. Apart from the acting (a pretty great Ben Affleck and a really great Rosamund Pike) and the score (the always amazing dynamic duo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross gave the film a super weird, super dark tone throughout) I thought the film did a particularly nice job of depicting the various news shows breaking the story about Amy going missing. The 24 hour news cycle was a big part of Flynn's book, but it was only elevated here; the whole thing worked better on a more visual level.

Apart from a few underdeveloped areas (Amy's "cool girl" monologue - one of the best parts of the book - was more or less glossed over) I thought Fincher did an amazing job of taking a very dark, very complex subject matter and turning it into something that was not only visually stimulating but also really fucking creepy. The atmosphere, tone, and message all matched that of the book, all while giving me a whole new perspective on the story as a whole.

David Fincher: The Don'ts to Filmmaking

“Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.”

                                                                                                                       -David Fincher

   Every filmmaker has their list of dos and don’ts and David Fincher is no exception. Producer and director of countless films such as Seven, Fight Club, and this year’s highly anticipated Gone Girl, he has honed a skill that has arguable been very influential.

   And if you want to understand his craft, you need to ask yourself this: what does David Fincher not do? To put it simply, there are three things he does not do: handheld shots, close-ups, and camera movement. But it’s not a matter of casting these aside, but using them when the times calls for it.

   In terms of handheld operation, Fincher is notorious for having as little to one shot not placed on a tripod or Steadicam. The reason for this is the way he wants the camera to act in any given scene. Camera shake (the most well-known trait of handheld) puts the audience in the scene with the character but a smoothly gliding shot drags us out of the scene. Normally, most filmmakers want to avoid this as they don’t want their audience to become separated from the story they’re trying to tell. But to David Fincher, this is exactly what he wants. He wants the camera to be this omniscient character. It forces you to really look at everything that’s happening on screen. Without the camera shake, you’re eye has nowhere to look but at the action. It’s subtle but a very powerful technique when executed properly.

   Close-ups are similarly a need-by basic sort of deal. Excessive close-ups will distract an audience and can potentially exclude too much for to hold their attention. Yet, having only a few close-ups in any given film is a crafty way to tell the audience that they need to look at something. It’s similar to grabbing a person by the face and physically shoving their attention at an object. It’s the equivalent of shouting, “you need to see this!” It’s a subtle way to tell an audience that what’s happening on screen is about to impact the movie in huge way.

    And the last don’t on this list, may seem like the strangest. It’s all about camera movement, or the lack thereof. David Fincher, if he can help it, likes to keep his camera in one place. This allows the scene to play out as it might be viewed realistically from a person on the outside (as he sets the camera up to be in the first rule).  This adds to the idea that what we’re seeing on screen is important and all of our attention needs to be focused on that specific thing. The lack of movement forces our eye, much like the lack of camera shake, to really look at what’s happening.

   All three of these techniques end up creating  the same thing: a movie we can’t force ourselves to look away from. They’re subtle, their powerful, and they’re not something to be overlooked. As Fincher said, “people will say ‘there are a million ways to shoot a scene,’ but I don’t think so. I think there’s two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.”

House of Cards Part Two: The Troubling Aspects

Alright, House of Cards essay part two. Let's go. SPOILERS GOING FORWARD

Part of what got to me was that the dialog was not doing it for me. Now, dialog is especially subjective. They way people talk is so varied by nature and in art specifically it can be used to convey story, theme or character in so many different ways that saying any particular style of dialog is bad as opposed to you think it’s bad is a bit foolish. So let me say, I think the House of Cards dialog is bad. See, the dialog’s rote. Very, very rote. There is an air of importance and elegance to it, a style clearly modeled after Shakespeare and other regal models of speaking. And there are some moments when this pay off in dividends and the lines crackle with life and intrigue, such as:

I’ve always loathed the necessity of sleep. Like death, it puts even the most powerful men on their backs. – US Housed Majority Whip, Frank Underwood

Spacey really nails the dialog as Frank, taking potentially corny lines and selling them with a Southern drawl and a slight smirk. But there are far too many moments that leave me cringing and pretending I did not just hear what I heard, such as when a journalist is also debating the nuances of sex with Frank Underwood:

Time is precious; powerful people don’t have the luxury of foreplay – Poorly Written Journalist Character, Zoe Barns

...or when said journalist’s called a cunt fired by her editor and she tweets about it, telling him why he’ll regret this:

Call me what you want, but you should remember that these days when you’re talking to one person, you’re talking to a thousand. – Really, A Character So Bad And Poorly Conceived I Fear The Essay’ll Descend Into Irate Babbling If I Get Into It, Zoe Barnes

             Anyway.

That last bit right there is performed with the air and bravado of the final moments of Braveheart while having the actual resonance and quality of something more along the lines of my 9^th grade one act play about the President contemplating leaving his wife while in office for an old high school flame. Dialog like this, very wordy and ornate, needs to be saying a lot while also leaving some things off the table. But the characters are always speaking in one off aphorisms like they’re some tear away cat calendar sitting on somebody’s office desk that’s weirdly political. Deadwood had a similarly obtuse sense of language but then the words fuck or cocksucker or hooplehead would be uttered every other five seconds and that would really help to undercut the more up-its-ass moments of linguistic brandishing. On House of Cards, the ornate dialog comes across saying a whole lot about not that much at all just to show they can. And Frank ends up being the only character to make any of the dialog work. Though that may result from a more dire issue I was having with the show. 

Aside from the alcoholic Peter Russo and Frank, no character did all that much for me. Everybody on House of Cards wants something but that’s all most do. Work to get what they want and then either succeed or fail. All characters in any narrative want something, that or they want to want something. But the best writing brings characters beyond that. The characters feel conflicted about their wants, their wants get in the way of their own best interests, they have multiple wants all at once and they exist in vicious conflict with one another. All this spools out into dynamic, well-realized characters that are far more complicated than just their goals or the plot they take part in. House of Cards never arranges its characters in meaningful enough situations to ever pull of half as messy a confluence of motive as its characters need to thrive. Instead they succeed or fail and then move onto the next opportunity for success. These characters, in their most boring insipid moments, are lifeless husks of wants. It leaf a real sour taste in my mouth and left me thinking even worse of Washington D.C. than I already did. 

Many people have testified to the authenticity of House of Card’s depiction of modern day Washington D.C. And while I did not necessarily dispute these claims, I did think the show was squandering this realistic atmosphere. Authenticity is powerful a powerful narrative device because when the viewer is presented with an at least a credible facsimile of reality, they are far more open to accepting the lessons and virtues of the narrative. But House of Cards does nothing with this. No time is spent exploring or explaining the sociological, psychological or even ethical circumstances that birthed such a corrupt and cynical environment as Washington D.C. It just is the way it is, apparently. The one attempt it makes at achieving something like this is also, not coincidentally, its most successful character, Peter Russo.

On a show filled composed power players that only calculate and seek, Russo is just a refreshing mess. Drunk, divorced, sleeping with employees. Underwood himself finds him drunk driving with a hooker. He gets Russo out of jail on the condition Russo abandons the project he’s been working on for his hometown longshoreman. Going back on promises that got him elected torture the man, and it becomes clear this is a good enough man who just got caught up in the fire and fuel that corrupts all power. It’s the rare moment on House of Cards that does not work on a “Damn that was smooth and clever,” level but an “Oh please make this end please this hurt my soul,” one. For a moment, House of Cards says something substantial with its narrative and I was encouraged by this plot development. Maybe the show has secretly been about him all along. An example of how a good heart does not get far in Washington D.C. and the choices, the compromised he has to make along the way.

Underwood later pays Russo for his sacrifice back by getting his name on the ticket to be the democratic nominee for the Governor of Pennsylvania. Granted, the audience does not know where this fits into Underwood’s plans and the writers did not either as they later admitted but I was still pretty happy my boy Russo was getting his shot. Watching him go back to those same longshoremen to convince them he was worth fighting for and then winning them over with pure honesty, that was powerful. Encouraging. Russo became a sole pulsing heart in the real dark soul of the show. His presence both conflicted and empowered its cynical tone.

Then they blew it. Then they made clear what the show was really about then I started my bile spewing.  More on that next time!

House of Cards Part One: The Parts to Like

So on my 22^nd birthday, I got a package from my girlfriend. I was at the age when I wasn't expecting too much, just happy to get something. Hopes for something cool and mysterious were not high but there were there. I opened it up. It was the second season of House of Cards on DVD.

A cheeky grin and a hushed string of expletives followed.

See, around episode eleven of House of Cards, I decided a casual distaste for the show would not suffice and I would instead need to take upon myself a rather fiery, impassioned crusade that involved spewing overly-analytical bile upon any person who crossed my path with even a vaguely informed positive impression of the show, a mindset that would win me no friends but a whole series of very, very casual acquaintances that probably wouldn’t mind not seeing me again. I made this clear to Ms. Ryan O’Leary and perhaps labored upon the point a tad too often because a week later all talk of House of Cards was banned. A few months later, smartass little bastard, she had a joke at my expense with my birthday gift.

House of Cards came into play with perfect timing. People are dissatisfied with the wallowing cesspool of greed and incompetence that defines the government, with 75% of people expressing dissatisfaction with the direction of America and Congressional approval ratings at an all time low. And yet at the same time there is also a distinct absence of mainstream entertainment willing to address this unease. It was Kevin Spacey’s first big project since we, as a people, realized we missed Kevin Spacey. Also, acclaimed director David Fincher’s first foray into television after a wildly successful career in film. All this delivered to viewers via Netflix’s revolutionary bulk delivery of episodes, an innovation not unlike when HBO first debuted The Sopranos fifteen years ago without commercials but with boobs and fucks and blood. Yes, House of Cards had the narrative of innovation and singularity behind it to be considered for entry into the Pantheon alongside the other greats such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men. And Deadwood if you pretend it has an ending, which I do, and Twin Peaks if you ignore the ending, which I don’t. Honorable mentions to Hill Street Blues for kicking it all off though. That show gets something like a plaque on the wall or they name the whole building after it.

Anyway.

House of Cards, in case the reader is unaware, is about a Congressman with a nice southern drawl but probably a penis a couple sizes too small for his liking cause he sure works hard to compensate for something we’re never really made aware of by ruining a variety of lives until he reigns supreme and powerful at the top of it all, named Frank Underwood. Slighted and angered when he’s denied the promised position as Secretary of State by the administration, he crafts an elaborate plot to attain revenge and power. Shenanigans follow.

There was a lot to like as I started watching. Sometimes, to marvel at. Spacey as Frank Underwood kills it, giving him a somehow simultaneous edge of camp and malevolence. Robin Wright, as his wife Claire, is just as good, though Claire is not given nearly enough interesting material for Robin to shine as much as she could. Of the bunch though, the stand out is Corey Stoll as an alcoholic congressman looking to clean up his act for the big time named Peter Russo. For the first few episodes he was the only actor of the ensemble to ever make feel any emotions, but that’s more due to the character than anything. The plot machinations can be hit or miss, but there are certain moments and episodes that offer a real cathartic look at just how dreadfully fucked government can be. On a technical level, the cinematography is a pitch perfect collection of dull grays and blues that bring to mind for whatever reason a cold unexpectedly caught on a cloudy summer day or a dreary day spent in a hospital room when it’s raining outside but for some reason you leave the window open. It’s a perfect match for the cynicism that underpins every facet of the show.

All this added up to a good show. In its strongest moments, a really good show. But as I kept watching, I still felt a distance. When a TV show hits me, it burrows into my gut and rests there. I’ll spend countless hours, though only really countless because I don’t care to know how much time I’m wasting on this shit, reading, understanding, analyzing, rewatching the parts I can’t quite let go of. And it wasn’t happening with House of Cards. But it was with everyone else. Next week, I'll get into what wasn't clicking with me. 

David Fincher and The Social Network

The Social Network is an award winning film by David Fincher. It tells the story of how the social-networking site of Facebook was founded but it is also so much more than that. It uses this story as a backdrop of friendship and betrayal. Based on the novel The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, The Social Network is arguably one of the best films from the last few years.

David Fincher known for movies like Se7en and Fight Club is considered a visual artist. His films are very stylized in terms of color and composition. Looking past the technical side he also works well with actors. Not only does he allow and plot time for experimentation for the actors, he is also determined to get their best performances. In the opening scene between Mark and Erica, which was over eight pages of straight dialogue, he took 99 takes. He did this to break the actors and strip the acting away from them. Instead of sounding like rehearsed lines it looks and feels like two college kids simply talking as their characters. There is no acting going on. They know the lines inside and out and now Jesse Eisenberg and Rooney Mara have become Mark Zuckerberg and Erica Albright.

Fincher is also great with special effects. Actor Armie Hammer played both the Winklevoss twins but there are many people out there that think that there are two Armie Hammers in the real world. Josh Pence actually played one of the twins from the neck down and had Armie’s face digitally replaced over his. To further match each other’s movements and rapport they spent 10 months in twin boot camp together. This makes scenes like the rowing scene at the Henley Sequence possible.

My friends and I were so excited for this movie to come out that we even decided to recreate the amazing trailer shot for shot all in one 24 hour span during finals week of last year. Without telling our friend who looks like Jesse Eisenberg (so he would not know what he was doing) we ran around campus recreating the scenes from the movie. We later spent weeks editing it all together to make it match with the original trailer. If played side by side with the original they would match perfectly (which I have actually created a file doing so). Even though it is filled with inside jokes between friends it was posted online and have since received a large number of views (currently we just hit 800). A few weeks ago I was even asked to talk about the trailer on Ithaca College’s television show The Screening Room: Director’s Corner. If you are interested you can check out the interview here. I am the third and last person interviewed in episode five from the Fall 2011 season.

The Social Network is a brilliant film by David Fincher that I cannot speak more highly of. The acting, directing, writing, and soundtrack are just amazing. This film actually made me want to go back and re-watch other Fincher films and currently has me very excited for the upcoming Fincher release of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If anything like Fincher’s previous work I am sure it will be spectacular.