Formal Film Study

For my formal film study I looked at the war film genre by viewing three films, Platoon, The Hurt Locker, and We Were Soldiers. One of the biggest themes that I found between these three films was the theme of a brotherhood. In The Hurt Locker, the squad sent to diffuse bombs is a very tight knight group that depend on each other. One of the main scenes that illustrates this is after a mission, they return to base. The film depicts the three soldiers in the squad wrestling around, drinking, and just having a good time. It offers a break from the war scenes and gun fire that are present in majority of the movie. It also represents a turning point where all the soldiers truly come together as one unit.

We Were Soldiers stresses throughout the movie the importance of the soldiers coming together. In the scene before they head off to war, the lieutenant colonel gives a speech. In it, he emphasizes that the soldiers must forget about race, religion, and other things because "in war, your brothers-in-arms are all you got." It is also evident in the end. After the Lt. Colonel orders his troops to attack a large amount of NVA troops and they break through the NVA lines, the Colonel wonders whether he has done the right thing. He states "I will never forgive myself." because of the amount of troops that were killed because of his orders.

Platoon takes a more mixed stance on brotherhood in war. Platoon shows that there is brotherhood as emphasized by the scene when Taylor is finally accepted as a member of the platoon and is invited to join them in their cabin. However, the film also shows a selfishness and corruption of this brotherhood when Barnes shoots and kills Sgt. Elias. He kills him in order to avoid being charged with unlawful murders, which is a completely selfish act. This is in contrast to the earlier movies were all soldiers are seen doing selfless acts in order to save their fellow soldiers.

I thought We Were Soldiers also does a good job in offering a social critique of the Vietnam era society. In one scene, it shows a book club with many of the wives of the soldiers. When one of the wives, who is from northern states, comments "they have laundry mats around here but they don't let you wash colors. They have big signs that say 'Whites only'". It almost offers a humorous look at racial segregation because of her cluelessness to it. It also shows the contrast in civilian life, where blacks and whites were separated, and life during war time, were the color of your skin did not matter. I think another scene that depicts negatives of the Vietnam war are when the families are informed of the deaths of their loved ones. A telegram is dispatched, and they are simply given a piece of paper that informs them of the death. It seems so impersonal and I think it is emphasized even  better because the director chose to switch between shots of the families getting the letters and the piles of dead American soldiers.

Hurt Locker and We Were Soldiers offer a much cleaner, more pure form of war than Platoon. In Platoon, the soldiers not only have to look out for Vietnamese soldiers, but also must fear of fragging and friendly fire. I think Hurt Locker portrays a much cleaner, less personal form of war. You never really see who is doing the killing or who the enemy is but rather the bombs that they leave behind. We Were Soldiers does an interesting thing where they show scenes of the NVA and their commander talking to his troops. This parallels other scenes of the American commander and helps to add a more human side to the NVA troops. I feel many time in war films we separate the good and bad and it in a way makes us happy when the "bad" guys are shot and killed. This showing of the NVA troops and their portrayal as more human gives more meaning to their deaths and the massive tool that war truly takes on people.

The films all used sound as a advantage but one of the most important aspects that added to the feel was the confusion that was created by the camera. All three films had hectic battle scenes where you did not know where the firing was coming from, with fast cuts and people running everywhere, you feel lost in the battle. Hurt Locker did not do this as much as the other films but mainly because this film there was not many person on person gun fights.

In Hurt Locker, I feel that the large lack of person on person conflict offers a small critique on modern warfare. The soldiers lack any sympathy for the people that they kill and many times they do not even see their faces. In the scene where they are pinned down by a sniper, the unit grabs a 50 caliber sniper and attempts to kill the enemies. They are attacking from a distance where the enemy is barley visible to the naked eye.

1975 Film: Las Vegas Boulevard

Plot: The movie will start showing a bank robbing scene where four friends (Ronnie, Paulie, Tonie, and Steve) enter with ski masks and rob a bank. You discover it is Chicago after they leave and the camera pans out towards credits and you can see recognizable buildings. It cuts back four weeks and shows the 4 friends, who are heroin addicts, living in a rundown housing project. Through dialogue you discover that the four are in need of money to pay back their dealer. It then skips back forward where the four are making their get away from the robbery. They escape the police in a car and decide on taking their money to Vegas in order to make all the money back. It then skips forward to Vegas, where the four begin winning lots of money through gambling, but this begins the attraction of mob members. The mob takes Tonie, and he is never seen again and they begin to rough up Steve, warning him to leave Vegas. Steve leaves; however, the other two, Paulie and Ronnie, remain because of the amount of money they are making. The owners of the casino then decide to pay off the police to make sure these two leave. However, when the police realize these are the two wanted for the bank robbery, they force a standoff at their hotel/casino. Paulie is shot and killed and Ronnie decides to surrender. A conversation happens between the police chief and a mob member. The hit man draws his weapon and the screen blanks for a bit and then a single gunshot ends the movie.

Director: Martin Scorsese. His experience from the film Mean Streets, Scorsese would be able to portray the moral ambiguity that the main characters face. I want the film to not convey the main characters as bad people exactly, I do not want them to be sorry for how they live their life, and I want the audience to root for the characters the entire film. I think Scorsese does a really good job with this.

Actors:

Robert de Niro as Ronnie. De Niro works very well with Scorsese and I think he will be able to play this part well.

Al Pacino as Paulie. Pacino is known for his role in the Godfather and I think that would really help him with his role in this movie.

Harrison Ford as Steve. His role in American Graffitti will help him with this role.

Gene Hackman as Tonie. He would play a good role because of his part in the French Connection as the cop. I think that he would be able to transition and play this role.

Jack Nicholson as the mob hitman. He would play a good hitman because of his age and experience in films. This also is not a large part in the movie.

Marlon Brando as the unnamed mob boss. This is a really small part but I think because of his recognition in the Godfather, it won’t require dialogue to explain his position of power.

Bill Butler as the cinematographer. He has a lot of experience with films such as in the Conversation and Jaws. I think this would really help him.

I would use United Artists as my studio because they would offer the most freedom and the film is more experiemental than other films, ecspecially with such a complicated story.

MYST Goodfellas

Goodfellas

For my MYST I watched the movie Goodfellas. This movie is easily one of my favorites as it takes you through the life of Henry Hill, a mobster in New York City. The movie begins in the 1940s when Henry is just a teenager and takes you through the next 30 years of his life. Henry Hill begins working with the mob when he is just a kid. When he gets caught selling cigarettes, he is taught the greatest lesson from his boss and mentor, Jimmy Conaway, "never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut."

The film starts out foreshadowing an event later in the movie. A made man, Bats, was kidnapped by Henry and his friends Jimmy and Tommy. The first scene in the movie shows them opening the trunk and Tommy then stabs Bats to death with a kitchen knife. The film then goes back to a young Henry Hill and the violence goes down dramatically. But as the film progresses, Scorsese uses more and more violence and killings to show the ruthlessness and brutality that is in the mob during the 60s and 70s. The film is also very good with its soundtrack. It plays music from certain decades so you get a better feel for the year because of the amount of time this film takes place over.

Goodfellas starts out by showing the glamour and excitement of life in the mafia. Henry even makes jokes about people who work for a living. When he betrays the crime family at the end, he is still unable to say anything wrong with mob life and still is against normal life. This movie is also based on a true story and a book. I give this film a 10/10.

 

MYST #2 Contagion

 

 

 

I watched Contagion for my second movie. The movie is about a mysterious disease that begins to spread world wide after exposure to a few victims. The disease progresses into a full blown epidemic and the world attempts to discover a vaccine before all people are wiped out. The movie follows a couple of key characters. Matt Damon plays a character whose wife and son were killed by the disease, but he is discovered to be immune to it. He struggles to protect his daughter from contracting the disease because he does not want to lose the last remnants of his family. Jude Law's character is a journalist who is attempting to find out drugs he could use to cure the disease. He believes there is a government conspiracy attempting to cover the cure up from the people. The movie also follows doctors from the CDC and the WHO that are trying to find the cure to the disease in time to save everyone.

 

 

I thought this movie was pretty good, but it did seem very similar to another movie I had to watch last year, Outbreak. Contagion uses quick cuts in the movie in order to show the different stories between the characters, which happen simultaneously. It can get confusing with the amount of characters there are and the knowledge that each character has, so you have to be paying some pretty close attention to understand some of the parts. I also thought the ending was very anti climatic. I do not know exactly what I was expecting to happen, but it seems that the disease is just cured and you see where the disease came from in a short, dialogued clip.

 

 

I enjoy this movie although the ending wasn't anything special, or anything I didn't expect. I would give this movie a 6.5/10.

Formal Film Study

For my formal film study, I decided to study two films by the director Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. The Godfather is about the Corleone mob family. It follows Micheal Corleone, the son of mob don Vito Corleone, and his struggle of deciding between joining the family business or staying as a law abiding citizen. Micheal decides to join the family after the death of his brother and the assassination attempt on his father. Apocalypse Now follows Captain Benjamin Willard as he tries to hunt down a colonel who has turned against American orders.

One thing I noticed about the style of Apocalypse Now is the closeness of the camera. It is very rare to see far shots and the camera tends to stay up close to the characters. It's pretty important too, Coppola uses a lot of dialogue to set the story and to develop characters. The dialogue in Apocalypse Now differs from that of The Godfather because although there is side dialogue between the other characters, the most important words are when Cpt. Willard's thoughts are played out loud. This shows what he is thinking and sets the story as he researches more and more into the colonel and what led him to defect from the US army.

The Godfather uses very similar style to Apocalypse Now. There is a lot of dialogue (which helps contribute to its lengthy time). The dialogue is usually very important in this film, there is not a lot of dialogue that is used as just filler like in Apocalypse Now. If someone is talking in The Godfather, you need to be paying close attention. The amount of different people and the different family names can make it very confusing if you aren't paying close attention. The Godfather uses long, drawn out scenes to add to the effect. It forces you to stay with the violence in a way. When someone is shot, you aren't just cut to another scene like in many other movies. For example, when Micheal's brother, Sonny is shot on the highway, the camera doesn't just pan out to a new scene. It actually zooms towards Sonny as he dies, forcing you to see him takes his last breath. It then pans out to show the other mobsters who had just shot him and the indifference they have to killing him.

I feel like these films have a lot to say about how violence is viewed in our culture. In both movies, killing another person is seen as just a fact of life. The enemies are seen as less than people and are killed without any regard to anything. In Apocalypse Now, there is a scene where they have to pull their boat over in order to do a routine check on a Vietnamese boat passing by. As the begin to search, one of the woman on the boat makes a sudden movement toward a basket the soldiers were about to search. Immediately, the soldiers opened fire, killing everyone except the woman. She was severely wounded and the Navy soldiers on the boat attempt to led her onto to the boat so they can get her help. Cpt. Willard, in an attempt to hurry to his objective, pulls out his pistol and shoots the woman in the head and replies that his mission is the priority.

The Godfather also has this same indifference toward killing. When Micheal finds out that the other families attempted to have his father killed, he decides that he will have his revenge. When they Corleone family is discussing what to do, Micheal, who is still a lawful civilian, tells them "I'll kill him". When he grabs the gun form the bathroom, he immediately comes out and shoots the two that he believed to be responsible for the attempt on his father's life.

One big thing I noticed that is prevalent in Coppola's films is the amount of realism he puts into it. In both movies, you see actors drop things, stumble over words, and forgetting to do things. This adds a more humanistic aspect to it. He also uses dialogue to add to the realism of the films. In Apocalypse Now, he uses the music when they play the radio and the random talk between the soldiers to set the atmosphere of where they are at. It makes it seem very realistic when everything is not constantly trying to add to the story. The Godfather adds a sense of realism because the main character isn't really a "good" guy. Coppola moved away from past mob movies and "In contrast, The Godfather presents the gangster's perspective of the Mafia as a response to corrupt society" (De Stefano 68).

1935 Movie

Our film was called Scandal. It was about an FBI agent, Special Agent Smith (played by Clark Gable) who attempts to bring down a bootlegger in the 1920s. The bootlegger, John, is played by Basil Rathborne with his sister, Carol played by Bette Davis. Carol and John are separated when they are very young. Carol and Smith begin to have a love relationship, however it is very tame in order to comply with the Hay's Code and because we wanted the love interest to be a side story rather than a main point of the plot. The movie would start and tell the two stories of the villain and hero as children to show how they got to the points they are at. The villain had experienced his father passing away and his mother abandoning him. He and his sister got separated and he began to turn to crime in order to gain food. This later led to him starting bootlegging.

We chose Clark Gable because of his experience in playing these roles. He has been in movies and played the lead role so he has a lot of experience. We were able to obtain Clark Gable because we trade Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to MGM.

We chose Basil Rathborne because of his experience in playing villains. In many of his previous films he has played the villain that the audience can sympathize with, which is one of the elements of our story.

We had Mervyn LeRoy as the director. He directed many good films such as I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and many mob movies. This would allow him to translate well over to cop movies and his experience in mob movies will help a lot with this film.

We chose Warner Bros as the studio because they are known to film mob/cop movies. Also, they are more likely to allow us the experiment with things like the plot. We used 3 strip technicolor because we wanted to be able to separate our movie from the other cop movies that were coming out at this time.

We chose Ray Rennehan as our cinematographer because of his previous work with color films. Since we are doing the film in color, we wanted a cinematograpehr that was experienced in it.

MYST Office Space

For my movie I watch Office Space. This film is a comedy about three friends that work at a software company. However, when they find out that two of them are going to be fired, they decide to hatch a scheme to make lots of money by taking from the company. Rob Livingstein plays Peter Gibbons, the main character who went through hypnotherapy so he lost all his worries and cares.

The film is directed by Mike Judge. He is known for mostly animated shows such as Beavus and Butthead and King of the Hill. This film is different than these because they use live actors, however the comedy remains fairly similar (although more plot is thrown in than seen in Beavus and Butthead).

One of the main scenes of the movies is after they install the virus to steal the money, they steal one of their worst nemesis's at work, the fax machine.

In this scene, the camera moves quickly between the three friends and showing the copier being destroyed. The camera does not show the people in the same frame as the copier. Also, the music provides a more violent and action feel to the scene. It also provides contrast between the personalities of the character witht he music that is playing. This scene works well because it shows the anger and frustration the characters have over their work although they place the blame onto the copier. It also provides a sort of comic relief because you just watched them place a virus into the computer and the beating of the copier makes a contrast by giving a more lighthearted tone, which is what the whole movie is meant to have.

I really enjoyed this movie and I would give it a 8/10.

Review of the Reviews

The first review of the Dark Knight was a positive one from Timeout. The review started with opinions the author had on overall aspect of the movie. The author than moved towards describing the actors and how their performances affected his review. He then went on to compliment the filming and directing and ended with a conclusion to restate his ideas in the first paragraph. The author persuades you to liking the movie by showing you that the actors were good together and were able to play the roles very well although he does not speak much to the story of the movie. The reviews tone is favorable and you can tell by the word choice used by the author that he is favorable of the movie. The author focuses mainly on the actors. He references how they were able to embody their characters and they worked very well together on the screen. The author references how Christopher Nolan had to separate the interesting parts from the Batman comics in order to make the movie fun and captivating.

The second negative review of the Dark Knight was from the Wall Street Journal. The author organizes the article by dividing the paragraphs between different descriptions of how the acting was. The author references how the old Batman films were made and shows the stark contrast between Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson. The author liked the Nicholson joker better and so did not have a very good view with how Ledger portrayed the Joker. The author focuses mostly on the acting of the film in his paragraphs.

I agree with the statement made in the negative review that "the elaborate action sequences are pounding but arrhythmic, like extended cardiac seizures". I think the music used during these scenes made it very extravagant and the camera work added a lot of excitement by switching between camera shots.

In the positive review, I agree with the statement "Nolan sidesteps the analyst’s couch and plunges us straight into battle." The beginning scene puts you right into the action and shows you exactly how the character of the Joker is. You can see how the Joker acts first hand without any earlier descriptions from other characters. It also creates a more suspenseful movie because the Joker acts in such a restless and compulsive way that you never really know what to expect from him for the rest of the movie.

I think the positive review would be more convincing. It had much more reasons that related to the actually movie rather than relating it back to previous Joker actors. The second review relied too heavily on past movies that it did not really focus on the negatives of the current Dark Knight movie.

I would like to leave in the way that the acting is. I really like how the Joker is portrayed in the Dark Knight because he truly embodies a criminal that you never really know what is going on in his mind. I think I would leave out references to other Batmans such as the TV show or the older movies because I believe the new trilogy is meant to be completely different and the director took a whole new approach to Batman's character.

Film Intro Survey

1. Toy Story because I liked how Buzz Lightyear and Woody were able to become friends at the end of the movie.

2. Gangster/Crime, Comedy, Mystery/Thriller

3. Silent, Indie/Art-house, Horror

4. Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, Supertroopers, Green Street Hooligans, Fellowship of the Ring, The Dark Knight

5. character development, good plot line, original script

6. Spiderman 3, Batman & Robin, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Reviving Ophelia

7. long, dragged on scripts, characters that don't change, forced sequels

8. Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino

9. Robert De Niro, Christian Bale, Neil Patrick Harris

10. Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Saving Private Ryan

11. The Sting

12. The Dark Knight Rises

13. The Wolverine, The Worlds End, Less Than Zero, Man of Steel, Django Unchained