MYST Post #2 Quarter 4

After watching Kill Bill Volume I for my formal film study, I decided to watch Kill Bill Volume II shortly after. What I found was a movie I wasn't sure how I felt about. It definitely wasn't as good as the first one overall, however the end of the second one from about 75% In (where her training with Pai Mei begins), is amazing. This sequence from the movie is way better than any other sequence in the first one. The second movie starts off with the same opener as Part 1 and as if seeing the same scene again in a week wasn't bad enough, this time it was in black and white. The wedding is explained better in this movie, giving some pretext to the first movie. It pulls this off pretty well and is also the first time you see Bill's face. Now a few boring scenes occur and she gets shot, and for almost 15 minutes we're watching Uma Thurman get burried alive, however the effect of the black screen with the loud noise of the dirt falling is somewhat cool. Then the good part of the movie comes where we learn some more backstory of Beatrice and Bill and learn of Pai Mei and begin her training in China. Some impressive special effects in the flashback happened and now she is escaping from the coffin using a technique she never mastered in the flashback scenes. A great fight scene happens and Beatrice heads off to Kill Bill after all the girls are dead and Bill's brother. When she gets to Bill's house gun drawn she catches him playing with their daughter, something briefly mentioned at the end of the first movie that I guarantee the audience had forgotten about. This made the end of the movie amazing because you could tell it wasn't going to end with her just storming in and shooting him like you would think. A long scene of them talking and getting to know each other agian occurs and them once the daughter goes to bed they talk seriously. They decide to fight and she does Pai Mei's Five Point Exploding Heart Texhnique.

FFS2: Quentin Tarantino Throughout the Decades

For my formal film study I chose to watch 3 Tarantino action films throughout the decades, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Kill Bill Volume I. There are many factors that make up Tarantino films including, non-linear story telling, excessive talking, long scenes and shots, vulgar language and extreme gore. Some common styles I noticed were that almost all of his films are action movies. The famous thing with Tarantino films is the non-linear story telling. The stories are told in no particular order nor from start to finish, making everything segmented, but come together at the end. Another key thing between the 3 that I watched is that they didn't follow any particular order. For example in Reservoir Dogs the story was told from what appeared to be the beginning restaurant scene, but in fact is somewhat towards the middle of the movie. The movie then breaks off into backstories of each character spliced in the middle of the present scenes. In Pulp Fiction, something similar happens where the movie starts off at what appears to be the beginning at the coffee shop scene, but is actually the ending of the movie. However, the last scene in the movie isn't the last scene in the storyline, but actually towards the beginning. See how this can get confusing? It actually isn't if you are to watch the movie, it just seems this way when you read about it. The way that the movie is set up flows beautifully and Pulp Fiction was definitely my favorite of the 3 to watch. One more characteristic of those 2 movies is they both end (storyline wise) in a tragedy where everyone, or the main characters die ironically. *Spoiler Alert* In Reservoir Dogs all of the main characters were set up by Mr. Orange who was actually an undercover cop the entire time. You find this out during the middle of the movie which is very different then how other directors were doing things. The boss walks in and pulls a gun on Mr. Orange saying that he set them up. Mr. White pulls a gun on the boss saying there is no way that Mr. Orange could have done it. This causes the bosses son to pull a gun on Mr. White. They all shoot and Mr. Orange confesses to Mr. White that he was a cop just as the police are entering the warehouse to kill all of them. This is someone similar to the ending of the storyline in Pulp Fiction where Vincent is killed after stepping out of the bathroom. This is apparently common in Tarantino films. On a side note he makes a few cameos in Pulp Fiction as Jimmy and in Resevoir Dogs as Mr. Brown. As mentioned above the movies are'nt told in a particular order, rather in chapters or parts. Resevoir Dogs is told in backstories of the main characters that are woven into the present story. Pulp Fiction is told in the different stories of the character pairs and Kill Bill is told in Chapters of the difference women Beatrice plans on killing. Tarantino uses titles of text on screen to start the different sections which is strange because almost no other director does this. The next thing that is popular in Tarantino films is his use of excessive conversation. Some scenes go for almost 10 minutes of straight conversation. It plays out almost like the Godfather trilogy  where most of the time it's conversations and you rarely have any action. This gives the characters deeper emotions and gets you connected to them on a more personal level. The last thing in Tarantino films is his use of extreme violence. He quotes, "I refuse your question. I'm not a slave and you're not my master... It's none of your damn business what I think about that... I have explained myself many times over the last twenty years, I just refuse to repeat myself over and over again."

MYST Post #1 Quarter 4

I watched the Godfather Part II the other day and was very surprised at how well the sequel was compared to the first movie. Many contemporary films that are released today happened to be sequels for whatever odd reason, but for the most part they don’t compare to the original. In my opinion the Godfather was the more fun movie to watch, however Part II was directed and filmed much better as well as Robert Dinerros performance as a young Vito Corleone. The movie tells two stories simultaneously of Vito Corleone’s rise to power from Cecily to New York and continuing the story of Michael Corleone’s mafia empire in Nevada. *Spoiler Alert* The movie starts with titles telling us some pretext to the scene unfolding which is said to be Vito Antolini's father's funeral. He is said to have upset the local mob boss and was murdered, his other son swore revenge. Gunshots break out and Vito's brother is killed where his mother stands over him widowed and now the mother of only one child. She goes to the mob boss to ask him to spare her only son, but which he refuses to saying he will one day seek revenge. She immediately tries to kill him with a knife, but is disarmed and shot after telling Vito to run. Thanks to the help of a random family, he escapes to America. The film the skips to Micheal's story where they are at his son's communion. Later he his almost killed in an assassination attempt where he flees for a long time. Back with Vito he is now older and starts his own small mob which makes money from the olive oil industry. After the local mob boss in New York finds out about it he asks for a cut. Refusing to pay the fee, Vito kills him and becomes the new mafia lord. Michael finds out it was his brother who set him up and the movie ends with a death sequence similar to the first godfather where Fredo, Micheal's own brother dies as well, all plotted my Michael. *End Spoiler* The film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on the book by Mario Puzo.

Most of the shots in the movie are from far away or mid shots, very few close ups and if they are they dont last long. There is a strange use of light and dark the Coppola continues to use in this film as well as the first to have dark represent shadiness and corruption while the light shows the faces they put on in public. The scenes in the past of Vito that take place in Italy are in sepia, but its almost not noticable to where it almost looks like an orange color. The scene the stands out to me the most is tworads the beginning of the film when the senator and Micheal have their first informal conversation in his office. The scene opens with a long shot of everyone in the room and many shadows. Out the window is a sunny ceremony full of happy people, but the room where the "business deal" is going on in is dark and black.

Formal Film Study: James Cameron

I chose to research director James Cameron for my formal film studies project. James Cameron has won many awards and Oscars in his career, has been married 5 times and is known for his love of special effects. For the 3 movies I watched some of his most popular films including the award winning Avatar, famous Terminator 2, and the not so heard of Ghosts of the Abyss. They were not all related, however they were from different eras and they were some of his big films, so that is why I chose them. For the most part of this post I will be referring to Terminator and Avatar, because Ghosts was so diferent from the others. What I mean by this is that Ghosts was a documentary and was underwater for the most part, providing almost no action scenes or similarities to the others. The reason I chose James Cameron is because I had only seen a few of his movies up until recently when I began to take an interest in his love for action movies. Terminator movies are often regarded as some of the most popular old time action movies and especially Arnold's most famous appearances/roles. In fact the phrase, "come with me if you want to live," which is referenced in many other movies and even by people is from the series. After hearing all of this about them I knew I had to watch at least one of them. Judgement day wasn't the one I chose for any specific reason, it was just the only one that was on Netflix... Avatar I had seen when it first came out in theaters, but never really paid much attention to it or tempered anything from it until we watched it in class, which made me want to finish watching it agian. Ghosts of the Abyss was not a good choice and was random, which would soon prove to be brutal to watch.  

James Cameron is known for his special effects, however that wasn't the first thing I noticed while observing these films. The first thing I noticed was the amount of fast changing scenes the occur in all 3 movies. There is a particular scene in Terminator 2 where Arnald and the mom and boy are driving away from the T110 terminator and the camera changes so quickly from the point of view of the car, the point of viewe of the bad guy, the car itself, and the bad guy from an omniscient perspective. Whether this is due to the action sequences, or personal preferences I do not know, but it was consistent in all 3 movies (rarely in Ghosts.) One explanation is that the fast changing scenes make fighting look more realistic because the punch could look like it was real if the camera changes views just as someone makes contact. This was present in Avatar as well almsot everyone there was fist fighting, however sines Avatar was filmed a lot more recently, they used green screen effects for most of the creatures and deaths/explosions. For example, people dying from arrows seemed to be a common thing in the movie and over repeated sound effects from Star Wars were used almost constantly. Another thing that seemed to be hinted by the conflict between man and machine is that Cameron had some strange affection basing his movies on the struggle of rapid growing technology. Terminator 2 was about how during WW3, the entire world was destroyed by nukes set off by a computer program created and then robots took over the world while a few survivors from a military group know as the resistance. When the robots send a terminator to kill the leader of the resistance in the past, so does he to try and stop the robots from winning the war. In Avatar, it talks about how we get the technology to travel through space/take the form of aliens and attempt to take over and destroy the peaceful aliens' home world of pandora. This movie also Is based on a war between human controlled robots (this time reversed) and people (or Navi aliens), who start off seeming like the bad guys, but by halfway through the movie you realize are the good guys.  The movie that stood out the most was Ghosts of the Abyss because it was different than any of the other films. It was more of a documentary and it was all underwater filming. The movie was based on exploring the wreck of the titanic for no apprent reason other than that James Cameron also had a strange interest/hobby in deep sea diving? The movie is documentary like and had a strange ending about 911, I dont know why it was necesary.

1935 Film Project

We chose to do Bonnie and Clyde for our project because Bonnie and Clyde were just killed in 1934 so it would still be fresh in everyone's mind. We then chose Warner Brothers for our studio because they made a lot of gangster movies at the time. James Cagney was chosen as Clyde because he and Jean Harlow (who we chose for Bonnie) had worked well together in a movie called Public Enemy. The director, William A. Wellman was reputable director at the time so we decided to use him as well. We decided go with black and white because it was popular at the time, awards were still given for black and white movies only and 1 color movie because color was still considered experimental at the time. In conclusion, all of the choices we chose were for a reason and had something to do with the time period, nothing was random.

MYST Post 1: The Hunger Games

     I recently watched the Hunger Games, which was a movie I was long overdue to see, and I have to say it was a lot better than I thought. *Spoiler Alert* The plot involves a young girl named Katniss who volunteers to take her younger sisters place in an event that takes place once a year called the hunger games. After struggling to impress the heads of the games, she receives the highest score out of all the other competitors the day before the event begins. She is then dropped off in a large forested arena with 23 other kids to fight to the death, most of which die immediately. Death after death things begin to look up for Katniss until she realizes she might have to kill her friend from the same district as her. They are then informed that there can be two winners, as long as they are from the same district. After killing all the other kids, they are regretfully informed that the rule has been changed again and that there can only be one winner. Neither of them could live without the other so they decide to kill themselves with cyanide like berries. The heads then stop them just as they are about to ingest them and tell them they both won.*End Spoiler* The movie was directed by Gary Ross who also directed Pleasantville, a movie I saw back in 7th grade.
  
     Most of the shots are done in away to show the intensity of what the main characters are doing. what else is very interesting is its use of colors to depict mood. For example, the first 30 minutes of the movie take place in District 12, the poor miners district, and it is composed of almost all black, white and grey colors. However, the lavish capital city is full of different colors and so are the people.

    *Spoiler Alert* One of my favorite scenes is where Katniss and Peeta are about to kill themselves at the end of the movie.  The use of light and shadow bring out all of the hard edges of the characters. The thing that makes this scene so great is that it uses all close ups. In fact the camera almost never shows anything but close ups of people. The music is almost enough by itself to evoke tragedy. I believe this is the most powerfully scene in the movie because it shows just how much talent Ross has in his directing.

Film Intro Survey

What is the first movie that really made a strong impression on you?
Bugs Life when I was little, that movie scared the heck out of me.

3-4 of your favorite generes?
Comedy, Action/ adventure, Mystery/ Thriller

3-4 of your least favorite generes?
Romance, Romantic Comedy, Silent

5 Favorite films?
Unkown, the Knowing, Saw II, Hangover, Dark Knight Rises

3 characteristics of what you consider to be a good movie?
Funny or intense, no cheesey lines, great acting

5 least favorite movies?

Let's go to prison, Spider-Man, rouge river, wizard of oz, sharknado

3 characteristics of a bad movie?

Cheesy love interests, over dramatic acting, bad effects, poorly written script

Favorite directors?

Christopher Nolan, George Lucas, James Cameron, Stephen Spielberg

Favorite actors?

Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Harrison Ford, Robert Downey Jr., Marky Mark Wahlberg

3 films important for others to see?

The Dark Knight, Avatar, Goodfellas

Oldest favorite film?

The goodfellas

Best movie that's been released in the past 2 years?

Fast and Furious 6 and Hangover III

5 movies I need to go see?

This is the end, World War Z, American Hustle, Beer fest, 22 jump street