MYST Post #4 Quarter 2

The movie I chose to write this post on is Philadelphia (1993). I would give this movie 5 out of 5 stars. It is about a homosexual man (Tom Hanks) who is fired from his job as a lawyer shortly after he is diagnosed with AIDS.  Tom Hanks then sues his bosses because he feels he was fired because he has AIDS and Denzel Washington is his attorney.  Washington's character is reluctant at first due to the heat he will likely take for representing a homosexual. So the main story follows this very controversial trial between a bunch of very powerful lawyers and a homosexual man who feels he has been wronged.  But also Denzel's change of attitude toward homosexuals during the progression of the trial.  I recently watched this movie and it made me question my status of a self proclaimed movie-buff because I am just now seeing it.  This is one of the best movies I have ever seen and I would give most of the credit to Denzel Washington.  His role is one of those roles where it seems like he isn't acting; it seems like he is actually in the situation.  The court rooms scenes are some of the most powerful scenes I have ever witnessed.  Considering that the movie came out during the AIDS scare, it was definitely raised some eye brows.  I imagine there was still a pretty negative connotation surrounding homosexuality when this movie came out and the director was probably taking some risks when writing this movie.  That being said, director Jonathan Demme does a good job of representing the hostility toward homosexuals during this time period throughout the film.

There is a specific camera technique that is used through out this movie that has an outstanding effect on the scene.  It is used in most of the court room scenes and it starts from very far away, then slowly moves closer and closer and eventually ends up zoomed in on the speaker's face.  The zoom always seems to be in perfect synchronization with when the speaker is really getting to the main point of their argument.  The director also chose to use a lot of different lighting in the court room scenes.  For example, there was always a lot of light on Tom Hanks' forehead, but a lack of light on the lower half of his face to make him appear more sickly and frail.  Even though it is just an effect, the make up people did a great job with making Tom Hanks look as though he is very ill.

This movie is extremely emotional and some may even call it a tear-jerker, but I think the main thing that added to the emotion of the story is that the character in the movie were crying a lot.  Usually I don't like movies where the character are crying all the time because personally, it makes me a little uncomfortable.  However, the times when character are crying in this movie seem like times when people really should be crying and the emotion doesn't seemed forced at all.  Great acting performances by both Hanks and Washington.  I the most powerful/emotional scene is when Denzel and Hanks are preparing for the trial after a late night party and Hanks insists on listening to one of his famous Opera selections.  Hanks is describing what the women is singing about and the story is eerily relatable to his current situation.  After, the director does a good job of illustrating the fact the Denzel was very moved and maybe even changed a little by the whole situation.  The director makes a point of letting the audience know what the characters are thinking at all times and this helps to recognize their development through out the film.

Myst Post #3: Due Date (2010)

Due Date is one of the best comedies I have seen in the past 5 years.  Even though Zach Galifianakis plays a similar character to his infamous role as Allen in the Hangover series, it is still equally as funny. Personally, I think that Robert Downey Jr. is one of the most talented actors of this day and age and his role in this movie as a tightly wound business man who is just trying to get home for the birth of his child is great.  The idea of two men who end up having to travel across the country has been done before in a movie called Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.  John Candy is the equivalent to Zach G's character as the eccentric, go with the flow kind of guy is just trying to be friendly.  While Steve Martin's character is similar to Downey Jr.'s character as the high strung, strictly business kind of guy who's top priority of getting home on time is far more important than forming any type of relationship with the goon he is stuck with.

One of the reasons why I liked this movie so much is because I felt that Downey Jr.'s character was very realistic.  His reactions to the wild events that take place in the film seem as though that is how he would actually react in real life.  Zach G's character is a little more unrealistic, but provides significant comic relief during some of the more serious scenes of the movie.  Zach G. also just has one of those appearances that makes you want to laugh at whatever he says.  Although he also proves that he can play a rather serious role in certain scenes of this movie when him and Downey Jr. start to open up to each other about their personal lives.  As I said before, he plays pretty much the same character as he did in the Hangover, but it really just never seems to get old.  His outrageous behavior and complete obliviousness to everything that is going on around him just makes make for one of the funniest movie characters of all time, in my opinion.  Even though it is pretty easy to predict that they will eventually become great friends in the process of their crazy cross country road trip, it is still a great story.  The director chooses to reveal a lot more information about Zach G's character's personal that Downey Jr's and I'm not sure as to why that is, but I wouldn't say that it takes away from the story at all.

I don't think the use of camera angle was really a huge concern with this director.  Not that it is not well done or anything, there just wasn't really anything that necessarily stood out to me.  However, there were a lot of aesthetically pleasing shots of their car zooming down the highway with some pretty stunning scenery.  One scene in which I thought the camera angles were very cool is when Zach G's character lets his father's ashes go into the Grand Canyon.  I was also very pleased with the soundtrack to this movie.  I actually looked it up after watching it and got a bunch of songs for my personal music library because I really liked what I heard.  It wasn't just the song choice though, it was the timing of the songs.  The soundtrack does a great job highlighting the mood during the movie and that is one of my favorite aspects of any movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY681pYcG7E&feature=relmfu
This is the Grand Canyon scene which includes some great scenery

Myst Post #2: Hardball (2001)

Myst Post #2: Hardball (2001)

I chose to do my review on Hardball because it really surprised me, in a good way.  Typically, I don't like Keanu Reeves because I think he is way too emotional and strange.  For example, his work in the movie Point Break (1991) just did not fit the role he was playing.  Personally, I feel that this is his best movie because he just plays the role exactly as it should be played.

I gave this movie 4.5 out of 5 stars because I was very pleased with all aspects of this film.  The director does a good job developing Reeeves' character from a pathetic sad sack into a hard working compassionate man.  When the movie starts, Reeves is so far in debt from gambling that his bookie is about to kill him.  He then goes to a man who offers to pay him to coach a little league team made up of  foul mouthed inner city kids who just want to play some baseball.  The kids in this movie really do a spectacular job of portraying kids from the south side of Chicago, most of whom live in the housing projects.  (I also love pretty much any movie that is set in Chicago) I guess just being told about it, I would probably think this movie sounds a lot like Bad News Bears, but it takes place in ghetto rather than a nice suburb.  And that is actually pretty accurate.  Both stories start out with a man who coaching a bunch of kids against his will, but then ends up developing a nice father-figure type relationship with all of them.  One of the things that sets this movie apart from Bad News Bears is how much the personal lives of the kids are followed.  The dangers of living in the housing projects in the south side of Chicago really come through in many aspects of this film.  For example, when Jefferson Albert Tibbs is jumped when walking home from baseball practice.  I thought Reeves did a wonderful job playing a flustered man who, on top of having a bookie that wants him dead, now has to teach some kids who have virtually nothing in common with him how to play baseball.

I would say my favorite scene in the movie is when Keanu takes the whole team to a Cubs game and all of the kids are so excited because they have never been to a major league game before.  Sammy Sosa actually makes a dazzling cameo which is just classic Chicago.  Similar to when Coach Gordon Bombay takes the Mighty Ducks to a Dallas Stars game and all the players get to meet Mike Madano in  the Mighty Ducks.  Another great scene in this movie is when Keanu and his gambling friend are at Slugger's downtown which is also a Chicago landmark.  This is an important scene in the movie because at this point, you think that Keanu is a changed man and he is totally committed to the team, but this scene shows that he still has issues with his gambling addiction.

Most of the scenes in this movie are pretty conversational so the camera is not very close, but it makes the viewer feel as though he is actually there.  There are a lot of shots in this movie of scenery in Chicago which accent the film because it is mostly shots of the projects.  These shots help the viewer to really get a feel for the environment in which this movie is taking place.

1935 Trading Bases

Our story starts out with a couple that has just gotten engaged but the next day, the husband finds out that he has been drafted byt the U.S Military to fight in World War I.  After some time apart the husband decided he can't stand the separation any longer so he fakes his death in order to return  home.  Meanwhile, his wife couldn't stand the separation either so she decides to fake being a boy so she can join the army to be with her soulmate.  In the process of all this, they "Trade Bases", the husband ends up at home while the wife is at war.  Obviously this movie is coming out about 20 years after WWI was over, but we thought that this was a good time with new advances that have been made in film to create a war drama.  We thought that a war drama would be a good fit for our movie because it wouldn't violate any of the conditions of the Hays Code.  There wouldn't be any graphic war scenes or intimate love scenes, just an honest story of two people who can't stand being apart.

We chose to use 20th Century Fox for our studio because they have a lot of money and a wide selection of actors and actresses.  Also, they had never really come out with a big war movie and we figured that we would make their first war drama.  We knew that we wanted to make a large scale movie and 20th Century Fox was a great choice because they had the money and the connections to make a real blockbuster.  For the role of the man in the relationship, we chose Tyrone Power because he was in his early twenties when this movie would have come out, and that makes perfect sense for someone who is getting drafted by the army.  Tyrone Power was also in contract with our studio se he was an easy choice.  For the leading female role, we chose Janet Gaynor because she was one of the main actresses of 20th Century Fox and also because she was in her late twenties so we could make he appear to be the same age as Tyrone Power.  One of our supporting actors is Raymond Griffith who plays the platoon leader of the the main character.  Also because he was in his forties when the movie came out and we thought that a platoon leader would have to be someone who looked a little more distinguished.  We chose a man named John Ford for the director position because shortly after 1935, he started making a lot of successful war movies.  He also had a contract with our studio so he was the obvious choice.  The area that we wanted to specialize in was cinematography and for that purpose we chose James Howe as our cinematographer.  James Howe specializes in deep focus shots which would be key for our battlefield scenes because we would be able to show a very large battlefield with detailed focus all over.  I think that the one thing I would have changed if I could do the project again would be to have spent our time more wisely.  We didn't end up having enough time to finish our poster because we got  little off task during our work time and I wish we would have been more focused.

Formal Film Study: Gangster/Crime Films

The three Gangster/Crime films that I chose are Goodfellas(1990), Scarface(1983), and The Godfather(1972).  Crime and murder are major themes in all three of these movies but Scarface differs from the other two in the type of crime.  Considering crime is one of my favorite genres, these were three movies that I needed to see and this project was the perfect opportunity cross some movies off of my must-see list.  Although Scarface doesn't focus around the Italian mafia, it still is based around organized crime.  I have found that there are a lot of similarities in these movies that relate two of them but are not present in the third movie.  However, that third movie is not always the same one.

One of the most noticeable things that brings these films together is the violence.  The violence is not just murder; it is very brutal and violent killing.  Not that I am an expert on organized crime, but I think this violence was necessary to truly portray what happens in real life.  With exception to war movies, there were more deaths in these three movies than I have ever seen.  I think that the deaths in the Godfather and Goodfellas were more meaningful overall because most of those deaths were big characters and I was truly surprised to see them die. For example, when James Caan's character is ambushed when he is on his way to get more revenge on Carlo for abusing his sister. There were many meaningful deaths in Scarface such as when Manny dies or when Tony Montana kills frank but a lot of the deaths in the movie were of character you never really got to know.  Such as the ending scene in the movie when Tony is fighting off of all the men in his house and he kills dozens of meaningless characters.  There is a lot of killing go on, but the deaths are insignificant.  

Even though Scarface seems like the third wheel to the three movies that I chose, there were some instances where The Godfather and Goodfellas were on the outside as well.  For example, in Goodfellas and Scarface the main character's uncontrollable want for more eventually led to there demise.  Although Henry does not die at the end of Goodfellas, he essentially does because he loses everything he once had besides his family.  His greediness with the money from the cocaine business eventually led to him doing the one thing that Jimmy Conway told him never to do; rat on his own guys.  Then he ends up in the witness protection program living like just an average guy when he, at one point, had it all.  Tony Montana on the other hand was little more aggressive and a little less subtle with his goal to," Own the whole world and everything in it".  In his case, you could tell the whole movie that he was out of control and he would eventually pay for his reckless behavior in the end.  Even though cocaine was the thing that ultimately led to both of their downfalls, the two stories are developed in different ways focusing on different aspects of their lives.  With Scarface,  there were a lot of times when the screen would just say 1 month later and you would just kind of infer what happened because the focus was not so much on how he was gaining the power specifically, but more on how he was handling the growing amount of power.  Goodfellas goes into a lot more detail of exactly what kind of crime is going on and how it is being done.  I think this is partially due to the fact that Goodfellas had the main character as the narrator and he was able to explain the ins and outs of their crime.  For example, he explains how the mob would rob trucks and the airports whenever they needed money, then later he explains every detail of how they are moving the cocaine.

All three movies are historically accurate for the most part.  The Godfather and Goodfellas both take place in the late 40s and 50s and that is when gangsters were big.  Scarface takes place in the 80s during the cocaine boom.  Personally, I thought that the way that director Brian De Palma fit Tony Montana right into such an interesting part of American history was just awesome.  Similar to how Forrest Gump is slipped into several major events in America's history, Tony Montana plays a very realistic role of a strong willed immigrant who works his way up through the cocaine business.  I have seen some documentaries on the cocaine boom of the 80s and Scarface is actually pretty accurate in the way that Tony Montana lives with all of the money that he is making.  The Godfather and Goodfellas portray the Italian Mafia and Italian families in general.  Both films stress how important and close knit Italian families are.  Scarface on the other hand doesn't introduce Tony Montana's family until at least an hour into the movie.

There were a lot of really interesting uses of camera angles in all three of these movies.  One of my personal favorites is pretty much every scene with Marlon Brando in the Godfather.  They use a lot of cross lighting, thus creating a lot of shadows on his face.  This lighting did the perfect job in further portraying him as the wise and mysterious "Godfather".  The use of lighting in Scarface is very different.  I found that the most frequent type of lighting was a lot of light on Tony's face and sometimes body, but a dark background.  I think that the director just really wanted Tony to be the center of attention in every scene that he was in.

MYST POST #1: Reservoir Dogs (1992)

I gave this movie 4.5 out of 5 stars because overall, I thought it was a fantastic movie, but there are certainly some things that I would change.  I'm glad that I went into this movie with absolutely no knowledge of what it was about because the twists and turns really kept me on the edge of my seat.  This movie did a great job of building suspense at key points with the use of very loud audio. There were numerous scenes in the movie where the characters are all just screaming at each other, and the viewer really has no idea what might happen next.  Another aspect that added to the suspense is the way the director developed the characters.  The viewer doesn't really know much at all about the characters which made it interesting to watch because the characters in the movie didn't really know anything about each other either.  The only information you knew about the characters is what you picked up from the dialogue because there is no narrator.  Also, the movie starts at the end, then flashes back throughout, providing the viewer with additional information, so you really don't have it all figured out until the director wants you to, which is right as the movie is ending.

Even though about 75% of the movie takes place in a single room in some warehouse, I never really found myself wishing that the movie would take me elsewhere.  Also, the director primarily uses a camera angle that is very up close and personal.  The camera angle usually gives you the illusion that you are standing right in the middle of the action.  The setting in the warehouse is aesthetically uninteresting but because of this, the viewer is forced to really pay attention to and appreciate the dialogue that is taking place.  It is never directly explained what is going on in the movie so the viewer really needs to listen to the conversations and catch the subtle hints.  Most other movies give very obvious foreshadowing hints.  For example, the camera will focus on one particular object or person, and you then automatically know that it will be significant later in the movie.  This movie does not do that at all.  I found myself asking more questions while watching this movie than I ever do.  The predictions that I did make while watching the movie all ended up to be completely wrong.  I personally love movies that I actually make me think about what is going on and this movie definitely

did the job.

At the end of this movie, I still had some questions that were unanswered.  Event though the information was not critical to the story line, I was still curious.  You never find out what specifically happened to two of the guys  which again, was unnecessary information.  I guess it was just my curiosity.  I wouldn't say that it was an issue because the movie did eventually answer all of the questions that needed to be answered.  I also thought that the cast selection in this movie was perfect.

The only other movies I have seen that I can relate to this movie are other movies by Quentin Tarantino.  For example, Pulp Fiction (1994) does not tell the story in typical narrative fashion.  It has several sub plots going at once that all come together at the end.  Inglorious Basterds (2009) is another Tarantino movie that really makes the viewer think about what is going on.  All three of these movies are very unpredictable.  The scene in the link below is perfect example of the main way that the director chooses to build his characters in this movie.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-qV9wVGb38

Review of the Reviews

http://entertainment.time.com/2011/09/09/warrior-movie-review/Negative Review
http://www.vulture.com/2011/09/movie_review_warrior.html Positive Review

I chose to do my review on the movie Warrior (2011)It seemed to me as though the positive review was more generic and didn't really focus on everything that was at hand.  Although it was easier for me to read this review because I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, I found myself agreeing with the negative review more.  I didn't think that the positive review was all that well written because it basically just said that the movie was awesome.  I prefer a positive review, but I really like a review that can also point out what was wrong with the movie.  Out of all the movies I have seen, there has yet to be one that I have found absolutely nothing wrong with.  Similar to most reviews I have read, this one has a lot of summary of the plot and key points of the movie that really stood out.  The tone of this review was very up-beat and high tempo while commenting on the especially uplifting scenes of the movie.  The author was primarily focusing on the high-action fight scenes and the awe-factors of the movie.  He didn't comment much on the actual story as a whole, which is one of the issues I had about this review. I think that he failed to acknowledge the parts of the movie that could have used some work.

I thought the negative review did a better job of actually reviewing the movie by noting both the positives and negatives of the movie while taking a definite stance.  This author felt that certain scenes in the movie were "cheesy" and that the whole thing was just a little too unbelievable.  One of the things I really agreed with from this article was how "the story darts around too much".  This is something that I actually noticed about the movie.  Another point the author made that I really identified with was how the main character hates his alcoholic father so much, yet, he still asks him to be his trainer and they spend hours a day with each other.  The tone of the review seemed very skeptical. It was almost as if the author was explaining what the average person would see, then dissecting it and explaining how it's really just fluff.  The main point of the author's argument was to explain how their were just too many elements to the story.

"He hates the guy so much he doesn’t want him to bring him a cup of coffee in the morning, but he’ll spend day and night training with him?"
Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2011/09/09/warrior-movie-review/#ixzz25T7mQFij
One of the major story lines is how much both of the sons hate their father, yet one of them is willing to train with him all day.  I was wondering the same thing while I was watching the movie.
 "The movie leaves you a wreck — yet pumped."
http://www.vulture.com/2011/09/movie_review_warrior.html
I'll admit that I was tearing up a little bit during the final scene.  But at the same time, I also felt content because everyone gains something great from the result of the fight.  The tears were not from sadness, the scene as a whole is just emotionally gripping.

If I had never seen the movie, I would think that the negative review is more convincing because it doesn't say that the movie is bad, it just points out the things that could be changed.  However, this review does make the movie seem a little cheesier and predictable than I found it to be.  The other review just seems like someone who likes fighting movies regardless of the story surrounding.  The negative review simply seems more honest.  The review is written from a more logical standpoint because it focuses more on what is realistic.  

One thing that I would include in a review of this film would be the fact that there is just way too much going on.  I found that there were certain aspects of the plot that were introduced, but never really followed up on.  I would tie into that by commenting on how the movie is a little over two hours long and there are still aspects of the plot that are not explained throughly.  I would leave out that Nick Nolte's character wasn't that impressive because I completely disagree with that statement.  I felt that his character was crucial to the development of the story and his performance as an actor was spectacular.  I would also add that this movie really sends you on an emotional roller coaster.  My heart would actually start beating faster during certain scenes because I was just that into what was happening.