After finishing Yojimbo for the third time I wondered to myself what is the addictive nature of this movie. I found myself not solely thinking of Yojimbo but wondering about other movies that have recently had a similar almost “obsessive” effect. There are some films that truly do revolutionize movies. Be it [...]
I have to say I am not surprised that I was underwhelmed with the movie Portrait of Jennie. While I was reading the book I couldn’t help but think to myself: “this was not a book that should be made into a movie”. Sure at the very basic level the story was put onto [...]
In our last class we noted that there are very few female-character-driven films. In fact there are very few films that strive to portray the broad-spectrum of roles that both genders play in relationships. The writer/director who I find does the best job of presenting an interesting spectrum of relationships and gender roles [...]
While Reading Portrait of Jennie I came across a quote which immediately struck me: “Art should belong to the masses.”…”Art can have meaning only to the creative spirit itself.”(50) I am concurrently doing a study of Pablo Nerudas Odas Elementales which in their very nature seem to coincide with the “Art should belong [...]
It is interesting in Morris’ films that he shows how we all create our own “truths” to give meaning to our lives, but the essays we read approach truth in a different manner. Through our ingenuity we have taken film which in many ways, as kracauer would have said, is unrivaled in its [...]
We have discussed how most of the time people say: “I liked the movie but the book was better.” We also need to look at films and recognize that there are many beautiful films that could never be written as a book, or not succesfully. Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven is one example [...]
When we were discussing the difficulty of portraying the inner thoughts of a character on film, without using the crutch of a voice over I began to think of what artistically do film-makers do to solve this problem. Early Cinema is full of this problem and gradually film-makers have developed “answers” to this problem. [...]
As we all know many movies are made from books, but what makes film adaptations of books a success? For me it is important that the film portray the feeling of the book, and to a great degree it does need to follow the plot of the book otherwise it may only be “inspired” [...]
While there are many possible symbolic meanings of the hat in Miller’s Crossing, I saw the hat as an homage to the Glass Key. Through Tom’s dream about the hat the Coen brother’s are showing Tom’s attitude’s similarity to the attitude of Ned in the Glass Key. Throughout the beginning of the movie [...]
The use of Camera Focus in Miller’s crossing got me focusing on it much more when I was watching movies over the Fourth. I have always enjoyed photography and the powerful nature of carefully framed and thought out images, and a lot of the trouble I have with film is that it is hard [...]