MYST Q2: Varsity Blues(1999)

I chose to watch Varsity Blues(1999) for this myst post and I would give it 3 out of 5 stars.  I decided to watch this movie because I have seen pretty much every other high school movie and I needed to see this one to complete the series.  This movie follows a high school senior named Mox who plays back up quarter back for his high school football team in Texas.  His life changes in a big way when the starting quarterback is injured at the beginning of the season due to bad judgement by the abusive Coach Kilmer.  His instant success and fame makes him start to forget who he really is.  But by the end of the movie him and his teammates stage a mutiny against mean old Coach Kilmer and finish out the game with a win.

It seemed to me that the story of this movie was almost following a template that I have seen in hundreds of movies already. This template consists of a main character who is normally pretty well liked but doesn't necessarily have any going for him.  Despite his average lifestyle, the main character is still unpleased with his life and begins to seek more.  Then the character eventually rises to the top, but once they are their, the only way to go is down.  He usually wrongs the people who have always been his friends in his social clime but somehow when he loses it all, he is able to mend his relationships with these people and it is all better.  Then at the end, he still ends up being successful in some sort of way.  Some examples of other movies that I believe follow this same template would be Bruce Almighty(2003) and Click(2006). One aspect of this movie that did set it apart from other films is the fact that Mox comes to the realization that he needs to change and stop Coach Kilmer from mistreating players all on his own.  It was almost as if he knew what needed to be done for the whole movie but it wasn't till the end that he realized he was the only person that could have made a difference.  Even though the story may be a tad unoriginal, it is still a fantastic movie.  There is just something about high school football movies that just really gets me going.  Being a high schooler, it is entertaining to me to watch movies such as this one because all movies about high school portray it in the same way.  No one is ever late to class, there is never anyone in the hallway when an important conversation is about to happen, and the football players are treated like gods when they walk around the school.

One of the cinematic elements that stood out to me the most was how there were always shadows on the characters' faces.  This may have been due to the fact that almost all of the scenes in this movie either take place in a poorly lit room or outdoors at night.  But I thought that the shadows did a great job of making certain scenes in this movie seem a lot more dramatic than they otherwise would have been.  Also, it seemed like James Van Der Beek was sweaty for 90% of it.  It sounds a little weird but James Van Der Beek might just be one of those guys who looks better when he is sweaty, I wish I could explain why.

Myst Post 2, Q2: The Tree of Life

I chose to do this myst post on The Tree of Life(2011) and I would give this movie 3 out of 5 stars.  Even after seeing the movie, I am not really confident in describing what the plot is.  It starts out with Brad Pitt, his wife, and their three sons and they live somewhere in the south.  The majority of the film follows around the three sons and the oldest in particular as they do what kids do in their town.  There is kind of a strange sequence in the film that shows what I assume to be the start of life and the evolution up until now in the universe.  This part of the movie was aesthetically very pleasing and interesting, but I was a little confused as to how that fit into the plot.  Then the rest of the movie studies the evolution of the oldest son from bullying his younger brothers to realizing that it is actually wrong.  It also follows the evolution of Brad Pitt's character as an abusive father to a more understanding human being in general when he loses his job.

The editing and shots in this movie were really the only things that it had going for it in my opinion.  I didn't think it had much of a plot at all.  It was more just a work of art.  It contained a lot of amazing nature shots that made me feel as if I was running through the town with the pack of little kids causing mischief. My interest in the creativity of the filming is really the only thing that kept me from turning this movie off.  I was really just sort of confused throughout the entire movie.  There was a solid forty five minutes of the three brothers running around the neighborhood with other kids just doing random things such as breaking windows, playing with a bee bee gun, and traveling through the forrest.

Toward the beginning of the movie, the oldest brother is rather antagonistic.  He doesn't get along with his father at all and they continue to fight because he is subordinate.  He also bullies his younger brother a lot by doing things such as convincing him to put his finger over the barrel of the bee bee gun.  He is one of the leaders of the neighborhood kids when they are doing things such as launching frogs attached to rockets into the sky.  Nearing the end of the movie, the older brother realizes that his behavior is just not right.  He apologizes to his younger brother for bullying him and he also makes up with his father who is also realizing that he has been a little too hard on his oldest son.

It was hard to rate this movie because the editing and filming was possible the best I have ever seen.  However, I think that the plot took a serious hit with all of the focus being directed toward the editing considering there wasn't really a plot at all.  It was awesome to watch but at the end of it, I really felt that I hadn't gotten much out of it at all.

1975 Film Post

We chose to make a gangster/crime film called Mischief in Manhattan.  This movie takes place in New York in the mid-1970s and it follows a family of three brothers and their younger sister.  The two older brothers are played by Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken were involved in the crime life when they were younger, but they wised up and decided to open a restaurant.  The youngest brother who is played by Dustin Hoffman didn't fit in very well with his older brothers and he stayed in the crime life out of necessity.  Their younger sister who is played by Lynda Carter loves all of her brothers the same but isn't really involved in any of their affairs.  In an attempt to get out for good, Dustin Hoffman rips off the mob boss that he has been working for but unfortunately, his actions do not go unnoticed.  Dustin Hoffman realizes how much trouble he has gotten himself into so he goes to his older brothers for help.  However, they tell him that he needs to learn to deal with his own mistakes and that they will not be helping him.  Out of retaliation, the mob boss has their younger sister killed.  The murder of their younger sister is what convinces the older brothers to get involved.  The film then turns into a story of revenge and the brothers devotion to taking down this mob boss.

We are choosing Warner Brothers as our producer and distributor because they made Mean Streets(1973) two years before and our movie is similar to that movie in a lot of ways. We are hoping to have a very wide scale production because there are a lot of famous stars in our film.  Martin Scorsese is going to direct our film because he directed Mean Streets which also starred Robert DeNiro.  Scorsese is a very well-though of and talented director that has a thing for gangster/crime films.

The reason why we are choosing Robert DeNiro as the lead role is because we know that he works well with Scorsese and gangster/crime films due to his role in Mean Streets.  We chose Walken because he was in The Anderson Tapes(1971) which was a similar genre to our movie and he also is just a very versatile actor who can play in a lot of different roles.  We chose to use Hoffman as the younger brother because he has kind of a young look to him.  Also because his career was still on the rise at that time after he had starred in movies such as The Graduate(19670 and Straw Dogs(1971).  We chose Lynda Carter because she was not a particularly famous actress and she was not all that significant of a character in out movie so there was no reason to have to find a big star for her role.

We are giving our movie a rating of R because it does a have a pretty good amount of violence in it and some brief nudity.  We would have liked to have more violence and nudity but due to the MPAA rating system, we had to cut back a little.  It was important to keep our movie at an R-rating because the X-rating would have limited our audience way too much.  The main 70s theme that we are going to use is having the lead role be an anti-hero.  DeNiro's character does a lot of things that might be considered morally wrong, yet these actions seem right because it is the protagonist who is doing them.  We also want the audience to feel like the actors in our movie are regular people and not super Hollywood stars.

The cinematic element that we are going to focus on is the cinematography.  Our cinematographer goes by the name of Gordon Willis and he is especially known for his work on the Godfather.  We figured that since we are going for kind of a Godfather feel, choosing the same cinematographer would be the best way to do that.  We also felt that it is important in gangster-crime films to really make it look right.  The audience should really have that feeling the entire movie to really add to the story.

I think every member of the group contributed equally to the final product and I honestly think it turned out pretty nicely.  I wasn't really happy with the title that we eventually agreed upon so I guess I would change that if I could.  But overall, I thought we did a pretty nice job.