Do The Right Thing Yo

While watching the motion picture Do The Right Thing by Spike Lee, I enjoyed a number of scenes throughout the movie, while disliking others. I think that Spike Lee's directing style is very...ADD in the way that it will sporadically cut for no apparent reason and doesn't linger on one scene for too long, much like one of my all time favorite directors, Michael Bay (internet sarcasm). That being said, I found one scene to stand out over most of the others, both in content and cinematography, as it was both unsettling and ridiculous, pushing onto the viewers and array of emotions that left me feeling uncomfortable, not knowing if I found it funny or horrible. The scene I speak of was the montage in a seemingly random place in the film where it cuts to 5 people all of different races, who proceed to spout off just about every known racial slur, and then some unknown, directed at a particular opposite race. I found the clip of it on youtube so you readers don't have to try and remember it if you forgot, though I'm sure for a lot of you you still remember it unless you were asleep.




This scene overall stood out for me because the speed and angle that the camera comes in on to the people is unsettling to the viewer and leaves them feeling uncomfortable and as if the comments are being directed to them, but the comments that come out of their mouths are so ridiculous that you can't really take them seriously, though maybe they were highly offensive back in 1989 and us kids are just too desensitized by the media to feel any sort of emotion other than finding them funny, damn video games. Anyway for me this was the most powerful scene in the film, yes, even more so than Mookie throwing the trash can through the window, though that is up there on my list. Now I ask of you, what do you think the most powerful scene in the movie was?

Battle Of Algiers

I read the New York Movie Review article concerning the Battle Of Algiers written by Pete Rainer. Rainer overall enjoyed the film immensely, as I did as well, but doesn't really fuel that opinion too much into his review of the film. He more talks about the technical aspects of the film and what an accomplishment it is than just talking about whether he liked it or disliked it. He talks about the parallel between the events that happen in the movie, such as the cafe bombings and the hit and run assassinations of French policemen, and how ironic and strange it is that those events happened in the real conflict, many times perpetrated by the very same people that star in the movie. It is very interesting to note that the film wasn't made many years after the fact, but a mere 3-5 years later and shot in the same areas that the actual events took place in.

Rainer also notes the two opposing sides of the movie; The Algerians and the French. The Algerians are represented by one of their leaders, Ali LaPointe, who is brought up from being a lowly peasant to one of the main ringleaders or the FLN organization. At his opposite is the seemingly ruthless yet collected Colonel Mathieau. Both ends of the spectrum are treated equally and Pontecorvo isn't biased towards either side, telling each as it is, as is exemplified in this quote by Rainer.

What reveals Pontecorvo as an artist, and not simply a propagandist of genius, is the sorrow he tries to stifle but that comes flooding through anyway—the sense that all sides in this conflict have lost their souls, and that all men are carrion.

With this, Pontecorvo shows the extent to which the conflict has played out and that neither side is a sinner or a saint over the other, but both have seemed to have lost their souls and forgotten what they are really fighting for.

I also agree with Rainer's point that he makes by saying that

The strongest scene in the movie comes when three FLN women drop their veils and assume a Western look in order to infiltrate the European Quarter and plant explosives in two cafés and an Air France ticket office. We see tired businessmen at a bar, passengers waiting to board buses, teenagers dancing, and, most pointedly, a baby licking an ice cream cone—all soon to be blown to bits

This to me was also the strongest scene of the movie, as it shows both sides of a terrible conflict; The French citizens about to die, whom the viewer feels great sympathy for, but also the Algerian women who have to carry out this terrible act in hopes of winning their freedom.

I think Rainer did a terrific job in his review and touched on most of the key points/ moral dilemmas that the viewer was most likely feeling at the time. I also have to say the this, behind Kiss Me Deadly, was the second best film we have viewed in class so far, as it was entertaining in the intelligent sense in that it actually made you think, a trait not seen too often in most movies nowadays.

Out of The Past

My first experience with film noir was the film we just watched, Out of The Past. Though I have seen movies with film noir overtones such as Sin City, this was the first real one that I have had the pleasure of experiencing. At first I was not very amused by it, even becoming bored with the whole concept of the movie and thinking that the chance meeting in ¡MEXICO! was horribly cliche. My displeasure with the movie intensified as the only thing I could figure out about the plot was why Robert Mitchum died of lung cancer. I then realized the movie is basically a James Bond movie with well written dialog, horrendous action and really really lame villains. Seriously, what was up with them? You can't look menacing and evil when you're wearing a business suit. I don't know why movies still try to pull it off, but it is really starting to bug me. Villains need to be dressed head to toe in some ultra awesome, somewhat stylish, world razing garb. Take Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China for example (one of the best movies ever I might add).














One word comes to mind. Badass. Come to think of it, the dialog and the plot were the only things this movie really had going for it. Now I don't know about you, but in this day and age filled with Michael Bay influenced epics, movies without awesome explosion, bloody fist fights and Bruce Willis destroying a Harrier jet singlehandedly, that is just not cool. Behold my mock up drawing of what would have made this movie better.



















Glorious. I say we as film viewers should unite and protect our 3rd Amendment rights and refuse soldiers to quarter in our homes during peace times. I then say we should move on to our 1st Amendment rights and encourage all film directors to make no more pretentious movies with these things called "plots" and "cinematography" and take a lesson from the Jerry Bruckheimer School of Film. If someone is not shooting, being shot at, being stabbed, escaping an exploding building, sword fighting, plane fighting, fist fighting, or anything that excites the typical American, the film should be immediately banned by the MPAA. Well, rant over, now excuse me while I go watch Bad Boys II and 300 back to back while simultaneously burning my three Wes Anderson films I own. Perhaps that will teach him a lesson to put some action in his movies every once in awhile.

Behind The Camera: Raging Bull

Having first peeked my interest with the excellent use of the steady cam during the (long) power point that introduced the year, I decided to view Martin Scorsese's 1980 classic, Raging Bull. Being a fan of his other films, namely Goodfellas, I went into this film expecting technically good things from it, knowing Marty's capability as a director.

Along with Robert De Niro's stunning performance as Jake La Motta, a boxer who's life is illustrated in a downward spiral that makes up the movies biographical plot, the aspect of film that really sets this movie apart and earns it it's title of a "Great Movie" is it's cinematography. Shot entirely in black and white, the film's chief Cinematographer, Michael Chapman, does a fantastic and beautiful job of evoking much more emotion than what colored film could ever say.

The range of tonalities in the film is kept to very jarring, low-key lighting, rarely setting a comforting mood in the movie. Chapman, who has done Cinematography on Scorsese's other movies, is known for his experimentation with light and what kind of effect that has on the viewer. This is analyzed to great depth in this blog post, showing some of the highlights of the lighting techniques in the movie.

Chapman truly shines in the scenes in the boxing ring, where La Motta's true emotions come out and most of the action takes place. Along with his wonderful use of lighting, combining the flashing, bright camera bulbs with the dark flying blood and spit, he also has many unique camera uses that he throws into the mix. Evoking the chaos of the inside of the ring, he uses 360 degree pans of the scene, tilted camera angles, long take steady cam shots like the one observed in the early days of class, and slow-motion, which is well illustrated in the film's opening scene shown here.

Along with the slow motion, I think that scene is great for the deep focus camera view where you can see everything in the frame, except the near rope is very clear and black while the other side of the ring is foggy and mysterious, creating a dream like sense of being for the sequence. To create sequences like this, Chapman used things such as fog and mirrors to alter the lighting in the area and make in surreal, and this is demonstrated throughout most of the film in black and white, with only one montage being in color of old home movies which in and of itself is a technical achievement.

Personally, my moment where I began to really appreciate the Cinematography of the movie is during the first fight of the movie. As La Motta fights against his opponent Jimmy Reeves, there is complete chaos as light bulbs flash, people yell, and blood flies everywhere. La Motta punches Jimmy against the edge of the ring, jumping from the view from behind his back to the view of a spectator, a photographer in the crowd, who snaps a photo negative of the image as seen in this picture.


This moment made me pause the movie and reflect, something I rarely do because of technical aspects of the movie. It is because of this and other moments like it that the Cinematography is considered to be one of the greatest aspects of the film and earns it it's place among the greatest movies of all time.

Citizen Kane : What impressed me.

Overall after viewing Citizen Kane I was very impressed by the level of detail and work that went into such an old film. Orson Welles really created something wonderful with the limits in cinematography that they had back then which is made even more impressive by the fact that it was his first movie that he had ever done and that he co wrote, produced, directed and starred in it.

One of the coolest aspects in the film I thought was the editing and how it was done so wonderfully for that day and age. Welles' use of deep focus in nearly every shot of the movie provides something that we don't usually see in movies, be them older or contemporary. Almost every shot is vivid where every detail can be seen. Where with a conventional film camera you could see for example the foreground with the background blurred out, in Citizen Kane you can see everything that is going on in the foreground, the mid ground, and the background. A great example is in the above screen cap from the beginning of the movie when Kane's parents are about to send him away.

You can clearly see Charles parent's in the foreground, his future guardian in the mid-ground, and Charles playing with his sled in the snow out the window in the back ground, nothing blurred out. According to the wikipedia article about the film, they used In-camera tricks to make the deep focus shots work. For example, they shot the foreground of the frame first, then rewound the tape and shot the mid-ground over it, then finally doing the same thing with the background to make it one consistent shot. This technique was very groundbreaking and advanced for this time, and is overall what makes the cinematography of the movie the most impressive to me.

Film Review: City of God

The movie City Of God, co-directed by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, is a movie unlike any that I as a film viewer had seen before, and I have seen many films. The film is a harrowing journey through a decade of love, friendship, violence and betrayal that occurs all in the hellish streets of the Brazilian slum in western Rio De Janeiro known as the City Of God. The story of two boys are told through the eyes of one of them, intertwining as they go from being childhood acquaintances to eventually growing into two very different young men.

The main character and narrator, Rocket (played by Alexandre Rodrigues), is a timid and quiet boy who has dreams of becoming a photographer within the City of God. He documents the events that occur within the decade that make City of God a worthwhile view. While Rocket is an important part of the story, he pales in comparison to the films true star, Li'l Ze played magnificently by Leandro da Hora. The film centers around Li'l Ze's rise to power, as a shrimpy little kid growing up in the slums, to the most powerful drug trafficker in the area. What makes the movie so powerful in regards to character is that we follow them as they grow up, from small children looking up to the local hoodlums, into their adolescence as they discover the violent side of life, and finally when they reach their final, separate destinies at the end of the film.

The screenplay, written by Bráulio Mantovani, is one of the best in recent memory. The story is divided up into several "tales", much in the fashion of a Tarentino film, each separated by a very effective freeze frame with the title of the story, which I thought was a very cool element added by the film editors. The intertwining of Rocket and Li'l Ze's life is magical in the movie, as Rocket's life is effected greatly by Li'l Ze's actions, yet Li'l Ze doesn't even know who Rocket is.

The intro itself deserves it's own paragraph of praise, not only for being very unique, but done in such a manner that it brings the film around full circle at the end so the viewer feels content and knowing all that has transpired in the movie which is refreshing in this day in age when movies with plot holes at the end seem to be quite frequent. The opening scene shows and unknown gang chasing a chicken through alleyways, shooting at it recklessly for what seems like no reason at all. It isn't until near the end of the film that this very strange scene is explained and shown to be the most important in the movie.

The range of tonalities and overall use of color in the movie deserves to be mentioned as well, as when Rocket and Li'l Ze are kids, the City of God is shown to be in a barren desert of sorts, using alot of orange's, reds and yellows to show the landscape. As they and the slum develops and gets older, the colors change to be more monochrome, dark, and grey, perhaps showing them transition into another, darker, phase of their life.

I also feel that my favorite scene deserves a mention, as it is in my opinion one of the most fascinating and well done scenes in film ever. It shows, in fast motion, how a few people transform an old woman's house from a nice, warming place to live into what basically equates to a crack den. It is all shown in one take and has a very eerie feel to it as you see all that goes on, violent or otherwise, as the room changes into a drug dealers hideout. It reminded me of a scene from another one of my favorite movies, Requiem for a Dream, which also uses the same kind of time lapse frame to show effectively what takes place in a room over time.

Overall, City of God is perhaps one of the most real and unforgettable masterpieces released so far this century. Showing things for how they really are in drug ridden, hellish slums, it manages to encapsulate all of your senses and truly make you believe that it is not Rocket taking part in these events, but you.

Director Dedication

Hello wonderful, compulsary viewers.

Today I will enlighten you with a few kind words of possibly the greatest director in the world, Uwe Boll. Now you may be asking yourself "WTF WHOS UWE BOLL LOL?", thats why I am here to tell you.






This is Uwe Boll.





















Why, you might ask, is this handsome man directing films instead of modeling for Calvin Klein? The Simple Answer to that is a wonderful loophole in the German Tax System. Wikipedia puts it best:

Boll is able to acquire funding thanks to German tax laws that reward investments in film. The law allows investors in German-owned films to write off 100% of their investment as a tax deduction; it also allows them to invest borrowed money and write off any fees associated with the loan. The investor is then only required to pay taxes on the profits made by the movie; if the movie loses money, the investor gets a tax writeoff.

Boll uses the German taxpayers dollars to fund his wonderful movies, which are all based off of video games by the way. Now the country of Germany has gotten smart and removed this funding, but Boll continues strong making movies.

Now what makes his movies totally awesome you might ask? You look no further than this terribly badass montage from his first fantastic movie, House of the Dead.






Amazing. Not since Romero's Night of The Living Dead has fighting zombies been so....breathtaking.

His movies range in content from a vampire princess getting revenge on her father in Bloodrayne, to archeologists unearthing deadly secrets in a cave in Alone in the Dark. While they are all so different from one another, you can be sure when viewing them they have that magical Uwe Boll touch.

Naturally, because his films are beyond human comprehension in terms of quality, he has a lot of critics. But, as the photo above illustrates, Uwe Boll is the Samuel L. Jackson of directing in terms of personality. He doesn't take no guff from no one, and fiercly fights back his (sadly, mostly) negative critics. Literally. No, I'm serious. He challenged 4 critics to a boxing match in what was known as "Raging Boll", a cute little homage to the Scorsese classic. He was very graceful in boxing his opponents, who had no boxing experience, and really showed them whos boss.





So there ya have it folks. Now you are in agreeance with me that Uwe Boll is the greatest film director alive, outclassing other greats such as Paul W.S. Anderson and Michael Bay, he is truly in a league of his own. I encourage you to check out all of his movies as after watching them you will never look at other movies the same again, as they all pale in comparison to his masterpieces.

Critique The Critic: Memento

My First Art of Film Blog entry will be about Owen Gleiberman's Review in the popular magazine Entertainment Weekly about a film I just recently watched, Memento. Owen gives it overall a very positive review, giving it a final score of "A" using the standard letter grade system. I generally agree with his review of the film as it reflects a lot of my thoughts about it. I enjoyed the film very much. Gleiberman gives a brief synopsis of the film intertwined into his analysis of what happens in it. He describes the film as a " obsessive and hypnotic thriller", which i think fits the movie perfectly. As it is shown chronologically backwards, it pays very fine attention to detail about how things happened in the previous scene.

Although I agree with his review on the film, i find the way he critiques it to be very odd and ineffective. He ruins key parts in the film, not even marked by the usual *Spoiler Alert* tag frequently found across the net, and takes away some of the enjoyment in having the viewers experience the movie for themselves. Now I realize that reading a review will always have the risk of spoilers, but Owen takes it to the extreme, citing examples of the work for pretty much all of the review and not taking in his own analysis.

"Leonard tracks his investigation -- and, indeed, his very existence -- through a series of Polaroid photographs adorned with hastily scribbled captions that attain a nearly totemic significance (''Don't believe his lies''), and by adorning his body with elaborate black ink tattoos of ''facts'' and clues that add up to an enigmatic map of the killer's profile."

This ruins some of the magic of the movie as it is a major part in it and instead of having people figure it out for themselves, he makes it so that they are expecting certain elements of it to occur which makes it not as special of a movie. He grammar and word choice is also not what I'd expect from a well paid reviewer of a magazine such as EW. Now I'm not expecting some pretentious review with long, drawn out metaphors trying to relate this movie to others, but there is a clear example of this hum-drum language in the following passage lifted directly from the review.

''Memento'' has scenes that command you with their cleverness, like the one in which we learn how Natalie got her bashed lip, or the moment when Leonard finds himself in the middle of a chase and can't remember whether he's the pursuer or the pursued."

This level of writing is about on par with a 13 year old, rambling off random examples of scenes that the viewer will probably find unique and entertaining instead of really delving into what makes the movie stand out so much from the rest. Overall the film really is a wonderful work of art, and overall i generally think that Owen's review was favorable enough to draw major crowds to the movie theater. However, I do not believe that his lackluster review style of putting such a unique movie into drab, layman's terms really does it justice.

First Post

This is my first post for Art Of Film I and i am very excited to analyze movies and expand the ways in which I critique them this semester.