2012. USA. Dir: Benh Zeitlin. With Quvenzhane? Wallis. 93 min.
Fierce, uninhibited six-year-old Hushpuppy grows up in a ramshackle bayou habitat, learning survival skills from her mercurial father in anticipation of an incoming flood. A commune of proud Wes alumni shaped this emotionally delicate and spiritually powerful indie jewel.
Tonight / 8 p.m. / Goldsmith Family Cinema / Free
The Argus bookies have good money on Movie 43 coming from behind for a cross-category sweep.
Want to hear Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s smooth, deep voice announce the best movies of the year? Plan to keep your fingers crossed for Wesleyan University favorite Beasts of the Southern Wild, which has four nominations? Katy Thompson ’15 has a plan for those of us who don’t want to watch the Academy Awards alone:
The Oscars are this Sunday, Feb 24!
Need a great place to watch the Oscars, hosted by Seth MacFarlane? Come to Film Hall’s Annual Oscar Party. Located in the basement of Nics 6, the Film Hall lounge offers a large projector great for watching the Academy Awards. The red carpet starts at 7pm and the award show will begin at 8 p.m. Come with your friends and answer our fun questionnaire for a chance to win prizes.
Popcorn will be provided.
Date: Sunday, February 24th
Time: 7–12 p.m.
Place: Film Hall Lounge, Nics 6
Cost: Free!
Last month, while you were chillaxing in your break cocoon, the New York Times devoted an article to lesser-talked-about Wesleyan filmmaker and Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer ’97, whose latest release, Gangster Squad, stars Sean Penn in the story “of the struggle between good and evil on the streets of Los Angeles, in a post-World War II era that was known for shady compromise between the two.”
Unlike his Cardinal peers, Fleischer wasn’t a film major at Wesleyan. He got involved in the industry by way of coding Web sites during the dot-com boom, which led him to Los Angeles, which led him to Mike White ’92 (who co-produced and wrote Dawson’s Creek and Freaks & Geeks, but whom you might more readily recognize from his classic role in School of Rock, which he also wrote). Then, Fleischer moved up the ranks. About halfway through the Times article comes a classic, tried-and-true glimpse into the innerworkings of what has come to be termed the “Wesleyan Mafia” in Hollywood, which is apparently the real engine behind Fleischer’s early career:
Before long he was building sites for big companies like Microsoft.
That led to a Web-related job in Los Angeles, where he met Mike White [’92], a filmmaker and television producer who had also attended Wesleyan and who got Mr. Fleischer hired as a production assistant on the TV series “Dawson’s Creek.”
It was a short step to a job as assistant to the director Miguel Arteta [’89], another member of Wesleyan’s movie mafia, on the film “Chuck & Buck,” starring and written by Mr. White.
Beasts of the Southern Wild, the masterpiece by Benh Zeitlin ’04, just scored four Academy Award nominations this morning, including Best Picture, Best Director (Zeitlin), Best Adapted Screenplay (Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar), and Best Actress (Quevenzhané Wallis).
Wallis, just five years old during filming and now age nine, is the youngest person ever to receive an Oscar nod for Best Actress; the old “record” was held by Keisha Castle-Hughes, who was nominated for Whale Rider in 2004 at the age of thirteen. Following her Beasts success, Wallis has been cast in the film Twelve Years A Slave, which also stars Hollywood heavyweights Brad Pitt and Paul Giamatti.
In addition to his Oscar nods, director and writer Zeitlin has won a slew of prestigious film prizes at several film festivals, including Sundance and Cannes. The film has received universal acclaim, even catching the eyes of President Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey, who proclaimed Beasts was one of the best films of the year. Zeitlin and one of the film’s producers, Dan Janvey ’06, also made the trek to Wesleyan this past semester to discuss the film, which was screened during the Wesleyan Film Series.
All I can say is, cue the brag-heavy Facebook statuses and tweets:
“This is sort of old man talk right now. I mean, I just turned 30…”
While the rest of my friends live-texted me as they sat in on “Diversity University: In Theory and In Practice” this past Monday night, I had the pleasure of strolling over to the CFS to listen to Benh Zeitlin ’04 and Dan Janvey ’06 discuss their critically acclaimed film Beasts of the Southern Wild.
For those of you who have been living in a cultural bubble for the past year, Wesleyan alum Zeitlin co-wrote and then directed Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film about a young girl named Hushpuppy who tries to cope with the environmental struggles of living in the Louisiana bayou and her own emotional turmoil as she deals with her terminally ill father. The film has captured the imagination of film critics and audiences everywhere, and it even caught the eye of Oprah Winfrey and our newly re-elected president Barack Obama. In addition to widespread acclaim from critics, Beasts took home the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, the Grand Jury Prize for Drama at Sundance, and the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival, to name a few of the many accolades. Even more impressive, over 28 other Wesleyan graduates worked on the film, including Janvey, who served as one of Beasts‘ producers.
At the event on Monday, after some slightly awkward (and slightly awesome) banter between Film Studies’ Jeanine Basinger and the two filmmakers about which famous Wesleyan alum had sex in the Davison Art Center, Zeitlin and Janvey held the “world premiere” of the official behind-the-scenes footage from Beasts, followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Read after the jump to hear about some of the crazy sick nasty stuff that happened on the set of Beasts, as well as what Zeitlin and Janvey had to say about their Wesleyan experiences and beyond.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t snag Quvenzhane for a Q&A after the film.
It’s halfway through the semester, and you know what that means: your shared Wesbox contains another meticulously folded black-and-white calendar containing terse blurbs for approximately 19 critically acclaimed films that you haven’t seen and maybe five that you have. As usual, the lineup was cruelly crafted behind closed doors by an evil-minded, thin-lipped committee of cackling—wait, no, that’s Spring Fling. (Kidding, Will.) If you’re too lazy to trek to Usdan in the rain, here’s a preview.
The no-brainer sell-out feature this time around is Beasts of the Southern Wild, the massively acclaimed semi-apocalyptic New Orleans fantasy by Wesleyan alum Benh Zeitlin ’04 that’s captured the imagination of everyone from Roger Ebert to Barack Obama. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and played at the Goldsmith over Reunion & Commencement, but that was before the hype really hit overdrive. With serious Oscar buzz mounting, you’ll want to get to the Goldsmith early on Friday, November 19. (Wes hasn’t managed to get Zeitlin back to Middletown yet, but you can read a recent Argus interview with the homegrown director here.)
“I don’t like to name drop, but the first person to tell me about this was the President of the United States.”
As if the tremendous critical acclaim and Oscar buzz wasn’t enough, it turns out even Barack Obama thinks Beasts of the Southern Wild is pretty much the shit. The commander-in-chief liked it so much he recommended it to Oprah. As Oprah recalled during a recent OWN interview:
I don’t like to name drop, but the first person to tell me about this was the President of the United States. I was interviewing the president for an interview that’s going to be in O magazine . . . and as I sat down putting on my mic, he said ‘have you seen this movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild?’ I hadn’t even heard the phrase so I didn’t even know what he was talking about. And since then at least a dozen different people said to me, ‘have you seen this movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, you have got to see this film.’
This isn’t a film series showing post, but by goodness, in a year or so it could be. The Wesleyan Mafia left its mark on the film world again this past weekend in the form of Beasts of the Southern Wild, a SFFS/KRF grant-winning movie by up-and-coming filmmaker and Wesleyan Film Studies alumnus Benh Zeitlin ’04. The film, described as “a dreamy exploration of survival on the flooded Mississippi Delta,” not only took the grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition at Sundance this weekend (Zeitlin accepted the award while holding up the film’s star, eight-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis). It also signed with Fox Searchlight for $2 million. GO, WESLEYAN MAFIA, GO, eh? (Speaking of which, the film’s three producers includes Wes alum Michael Gottwald ’06, who was assistant director for Zeitlin’s thesis film, Egg, and completed his own feature Frame of Reference in 2006.)
I haven’t seen the film, of course (I certainly hope to soon, preferably in the mighty Goldsmith itself), but from what I’ve read, it’s a rather surreal exploration of a girl named Hushpuppy living with her father “at the edge of the world”—the impoverished, flooded Louisiana delta.
