FILM 1947: 9 TO 5

FILM 1947: 9 TO 5 

TRIVIA: This was Dolly Parton's theatrical film debut. In preparation for her role as Doralee Rhodes, she not only committed to memory her own part, but the parts of every other role in the film. Apparently, the two experienced starring actresses, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, burst out laughing when Parton let on that she believed that pictures were filmed in the chronological order of a film's script. 

Apparently, Dolly Parton was cast because Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin felt that she would "bring them the West". Parton was both a lead actress (along with the other two) and sang the title song, "9 to 5", which was Oscar nominated and won two Grammys. In an interview with Isaac Mizrahi, Parton states that when she wrote and performed the theme song to Tomlin and Fonda, she used her long acrylic nails to create the beat of the song.

The movie spurred a reasonably successful sitcom television series Nine to Five (1982) which went for eighty-five episodes, and aired between 1982 and 1988. The first three seasons were broadcast on ABC between spring 1982 and fall 1983, while the second and final season aired in syndication between 1986 and 1988. Dolly Parton's younger sister Rachel Dennison played Parton's role Doralee Rhodes on the show. 

Dolly Parton accepted the role with the condition that she would write and sing the theme song, which was nominated for an Academy Award and won two Grammys. Parton made the same deal for almost every other movie, in which she has starred. The exception was Steel Magnolias (1989), which declined to use the Parton-penned song "Eagle When She Flies".

To prepare for her role as Judy Bernly, a middle-aged divorcée entering the workforce, Jane Fonda interviewed numerous women who had entered the workforce late in life due to divorce or widowhood. It inspired Judy's first day outfit: a frilly, conservative wardrobe with over-sized glasses, elaborate hats, and an over-done hairstyle.

Dolly Parton's almost shy and reclusive husband, Carl Dean, never appears in public with her nor accompanies her to any musical concerts or other events. One of the few times he made an exception was during filming of this movie, Dolly's theatrical film debut. When he walked into the studio, Jane Fonda pointed him out across the room and said, "Look at that handsome man! I call him, he's mine!" to Lily Tomlin. Dolly then "spilled the beans" that he is her husband. After a few minutes conversing together, Dolly broke the news of being married to him and introduced him to the other actresses. When Jane heard Dolly's remark, she was extremely and deeply embarrassed, especially after she made a remark to Lily as if she was out "husband hunting".

As of 2018-2019, a re-make movie with the original stars is in production.

The first female dominated film to gross $100 million dollars.

FILM 1909: SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

FILM 1909: SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

TRIVIA: Donald Glover originally planned to play the lead role of Cassius Green, but was unable to do so due to scheduling conflicts with Solo: A Star Wars Story. He recommended his Atlanta co-star LaKeith Stanfield for the role instead.

At one point, Detroit wears a pair of earrings with the phrases BURY THE RAG and DEEP IN YOUR FACE. These are lyrics from "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" by Bob Dylan, which is a protest song about a poor African-American woman murdered by a wealthy white man. ("Bury the rag deep in your face/ Now's the time for your tears".)

During the bar scene, when Danny Glover's character is asked why he isn't dancing, he responds with the, "I'm too old for this shit" line made famous from his role as Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon movie franchise.

Director Michel Gondry is paid tribute in the director's name for the claymation sequence, Michel Dongry. Gondry's influence is clear in the scenes where the garage transforms into the luxury room.

Director Boots Riley wanted to credit the claymation film within the film to Michel Gondryas a tribute to the director. Because the film was a parody he didn't legally have to clear the use of Gondry's name, but decided to reach out to him anyway to make sure he was comfortable with the homage. Gondry wanted stipulations put on the use of his name and after Riley agreed he receive a message from Gondry's agents denying him permission to use his name anyway. Riley then changed the name of the director to Michel Dongry as an insult to express his frustration with him and announced he would continue insulting him in future movies until Gondry responded.

The voice of the elevator is Rosario Dawson. 

Boots Riley was the lead vocalist for the hip-hop group The Coup. He made the album "Sorry to Bother You" in 2012, which he then used in the movie, meaning he effectively made the sound track 7 years before the film.

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BOOK 158: THE YELLOW WALLPAPER: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story") is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental.

Gilman's interpretation

Gilman used her writing to explore the role of women in America at the time. She explored issues such as the lack of a life outside the home and the oppressive forces of the patriarchal society. Through her work Gilman paved the way for writers such as Alice Walker and Sylvia Plath.

In The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman portrays the narrator's insanity as a way to protest the medical and professional oppression against women at the time. While under the impression that husbands and male doctors were acting with their best interests in mind, women were depicted as mentally weak and fragile. At the time women’s rights advocates believed that the outbreak of women being diagnosed as mentally ill was the manifestation of their setbacks regarding the roles they were allowed to play in a male-dominated society. Women were even discouraged from writing, because their writing would ultimately create an identity and become a form of defiance for them. Gilman realized that writing became one of the only forms of existence for women at a time where they had very few rights.

Gilman explained that the idea for the story originated in her own experience as a patient: "the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways"

She had suffered years of depression and consulted a well-known specialist physician who prescribed a "rest cure" which required her to "live as domestic a life as possible". She was forbidden to touch pen, pencil, or brush, and was allowed only two hours of mental stimulation a day.

After three months and almost desperate, Gilman decided to contravene her diagnosis and started to work again. After realizing how close she had come to complete mental breakdown, she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper with additions and exaggerations to illustrate her own misdiagnosis complaint. She sent a copy to Mitchell but never received a response.

She added that The Yellow Wallpaper was "not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked". Gilman claimed that many years later she learned that Mitchell had changed his treatment methods, but literary historian Julie Bates Dock has discredited this. Mitchell continued his methods, and as late as 1908 – 16 years after "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published – was interested in creating entire hospitals devoted to the "rest cure" so that his treatments would be more widely accessible.

Other interpretations

The Yellow Wallpaper is sometimes referred to as an example of Gothic literature for its treatment of madness and powerlessness. Alan Ryan, for example, introduced the story by writing: "quite apart from its origins [it] is one of the finest, and strongest, tales of horror ever written. It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not." Pioneering horror author H. P. Lovecraft writes in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) that "The Yellow Wall Paper rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined."

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in her book Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper", concludes that "the story was a cri de coeur against [Gilman's first husband, artist Charles Walter] Stetson and the traditional marriage he had demanded." Gilman was attempting to deflect blame to protect Gilman's daughter Katharine and her step-mother, Gilman's friend Grace Channing.

Anglican Archbishop Peter Carnley used the story as a reference and a metaphor for the situation of women in the church in his sermon at the ordination of the first women priests in Australia on 7 March 1992 in St George's Cathedral, Perth.

Sari Edelstein has argued that The Yellow Wallpaper is an allegory for Gilman's hatred of the emerging yellow journalism. Having created The Forerunner in November 1909, Gilman made it clear she wished the press to be more insightful and not rely upon exaggerated stories and flashy headlines. Gilman was often scandalised in the media and resented the sensationalism of the media. The relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper within the story parallels Gilman's relationship to the press. The narrator describes the wallpaper as having "sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin". Edelstein argues that given Gilman’s distaste for the Yellow Press, this can also be seen as a description of tabloid newspapers of the day.

In Paula A. Treichler's article "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'", she places her focus on the relationship portrayed in the short story between women and writing. Rather than write about the feminist themes which view the wallpaper as something along the lines of "...the 'pattern' which underlies sexual inequality, the external manifestation of neurasthenia, the narrator's unconscious, the narrator's situation within patriarchy," Treichler instead explains that the wallpaper can be a symbol to represent discourse and the fact that the narrator is alienated from the world in which she previously could somewhat express herself. Treichler illustrates that through this discussion of language and writing, in the story Charlotte Perkins Gilman is defying the "...sentence that the structure of patriarchal language imposes." While Treichler accepts the legitimacy of strictly feminist claims, she writes that a closer look at the text suggests that the wallpaper could be interpreted as women's language and discourse, and the woman found in the wallpaper could be the "...representation of women that becomes possible only after women obtain the right to speak." In making this claim, it suggests that the new struggle found within the text is between two forms of writing; one rather old and traditional, and the other new and exciting. This is supported in the fact that John, the narrator's husband, does not like his wife to write anything, which is the reason her journal containing the story is kept a secret and thus is known only by the narrator and reader. A look at the text shows that as the relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper grows stronger, so too does her language in her journal as she begins to increasingly write of her frustration and desperation.[19]

An episode of The Twilight Zone — "Something in the Walls" (1989) — is a variation on Gilman's story, in which a woman commits herself to a mental institution and insists on plain white walls and no patterns within her hospital room, after having seen faces in the patterns of her bedroom's yellow wallpaper and hearing ominous voices from those faces.

The TV series Pretty Little Liars (2010) uses the original book cover as a wallpaper design in Aria Montgomerys bedroom.

The TV series American Horror Story season 1 (2011) references The Yellow Wallpaper in the eighth episode.

(Information from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Wallpaper )

FILM 1574: BROOKLYN 

TRIVIA: John Crowley divided the movie into three different visual movements. The first movement is before Eilis leaves post-war Ireland and is with tight frames and filled with green tones. The color scheme was created by photographic reference of the time. The second movement begins when Eilis leaves for Brooklyn and the first proper wide shot is featured, while the colors become more playful as a nod to how America in 1952 was on the cusp of pop culture kicking off. The third movement is back in Ireland, brighter, more glamour and "subtly more colorful" than the first movement. Crowley wanted to showcase Eilis has changed and looks very different: "There is a slight dreamy quality to that last third," he says.

The city of Brooklyn in the film was actually shot in Montreal for budgeting reasons, as the production was unable to turn 2015 Brooklyn back to 1950s Brooklyn. Only two days of production were spent in Brooklyn, one in order to create the brownstone exterior shots and a second to film at Coney Island.

Saoirse Ronan herself was born in The Bronx, New York, but raised in Ireland to Irish parents. She considers 'Brooklyn' to be one of her most personal films and it marks the first time she plays an Irish character in a film. (In The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) she spoke with an Irish accent but played a citizen of a generic fictitious European country.) In an interview with David Poland she expressed her concern with taking the role:"I felt like I can't mess this up, because all of Ireland will be watching. I felt a huge responsibility to the country to really capture what the story was." However, she said the warm reception at the Sundance Film Festival made her realize the universal essence of the film.

While this is Saoirse Ronan's first time using her native Irish accent, the dialect of her character differs from the one she uses in reality. In this film, she uses a Wexford accent, as her character is from Enniscorthy, while she speaks with a Dublin accent in her private life.

Irish author Colm Tóibín's idea for the novel came from a child memory, in which he overheard a woman talk about her young daughter's move from Enniscorthy to Brooklyn. In 2000 he wrote a short story about this memory, but expanded it to a novel years later, after living in United States himself, as well as teaching literary courses, where he said he was inspired by Jane Austen's "method of examining a single psychology, using an introspective, sensitive heroine, some comic characters and some romance."

Saoirse Ronan received 51 award nominations for her performance.

Julie Walters claims her character is reminiscent of her real-life aunt. John Crowley offered the role to Walters because, among other things, he knew of her Irish descent; "I knew Julie had an Irish mother and I had a suspicion that she would know that woman inside out, and of course she did. She knew who she was, right down to what her hair should look like and what she should dress like. Her accent's impeccable and of course she's a hysterically funny actress, but here she's doing it in a very real way. It's beautifully played."

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FILM 1460: IKIRU

TRIVIA: When Takashi Shimura rehearsed his singing of "Song of the Gondola," director Akira Kurosawa instructed him to "sing the song as if you are a stranger in a world where nobody believes you exist."

The song sung by Kanji Watanabe, in the bar, is called Gondola no Uta, "The Gondola Song". Written in 1915, it is a song about women and how they should find love before their time has run out.

Director Trademark: Akira Kurosawa:  [weather]  Rain is present during the construction site scene. The swing scene, on the other hand, is calmly accompanied by snow.