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Post by inferno on Feb 19, 2009 11:53:15 GMT -5
MASTER EBENEEZER STEVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Post by Harry Locke IV on Feb 19, 2009 19:39:48 GMT -5
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Post by whatsabromance on Feb 19, 2009 22:05:45 GMT -5
Brother Harry, to you i pose a few questions. and i wish to hear your thoughts. is it the moral or message of a film that makes for a good or bad film? is there any truth or value in the entertainment?
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Post by manofepictales on Feb 22, 2009 0:26:23 GMT -5
Tarantino doing a war movie... Should be interesting.
And it's an insult to ask Harry whether a films' morals are important to him. It's obviously important when he counts the Kill Bills, Sin City, and Pulp Fiction among his favorite films!
I actually don't care either way so long as it isn't forced, and think most people feel the same way.
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Post by whatsabromance on Feb 22, 2009 18:48:11 GMT -5
i don't think it is an insult. i'm curious to hear it from the horses mouth. i don't like to assume things. and i think elaborating on what he appreciates in the quality of a film is exactly what this forum is up here for, to ask questions to the filmmakers themselves, to actually go beyond the surface and broaden our own horizons by gaining insight on what others are thinking and why they are thinking that.
or should this not be that? sorry. my bad.
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Post by publicist on Feb 22, 2009 18:53:10 GMT -5
ya but how do u expalin tombstone as his #1 fav film
~Publicist~
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mslottielenya
Invader
Listen close to everybody's heart and hear that breaking sound.
Posts: 143
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Post by mslottielenya on Feb 23, 2009 4:08:44 GMT -5
It is Tombstone ...............................explicated w/ ease
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Post by Harry Locke IV on Feb 23, 2009 11:24:22 GMT -5
whatsabromance has posed a really good question, she's fair in asking...I actually really like it when people allow me to get critical about film!
I've got a good response to this, I just haven't had time to type it. I'll try to reply back tonight, along with the posting of my Chinese Democracy review!
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Post by Harry Locke IV on Feb 23, 2009 13:22:25 GMT -5
Oh, and I'm pretty sure manofepictales was being sarcastic in his post. But he forgot to put his sarcasm tags [/sarcasm]...see!
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Post by whatsabromance on Feb 23, 2009 15:05:33 GMT -5
thanks for the clear up. being up here in wiscompton i've always got my defenses up!
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Post by Harry Locke IV on Feb 23, 2009 23:36:11 GMT -5
whatsabromance, in response to your question posted earlier... Personally, it would be intrinsically wrong of me to categorize a film's worth based solely on its moralistic values, and what is aesthetically packaged and delivered to viewing audiences. The answer lies much deeper in the roots of cinematography & storytelling, and even then the answer is convoluted. You see, the composition of film in itself is a very simple equation of real world technologies. You have the camera, the sound capturing device, a couple of schmucks to act, another schmuck to write, and the Macintosh to put it all together (or the PC too, but then there's the whole crashing part preceding it all). Essentially, anyone can make a film these days. Kids with video-enabled Blackberry's think they're the next Scorsese just because they caught a Kodak moment of some obese kid doing a keg stand. Of course though, we will not consider this art, and almost look upon it as defilement of the video industry when compared to work of the serious amateur, and of course the battle hardened pro. This is mainly because it lacks the foundations of a concrete story, the soul of moving pictures. In order for me to care about a movie, and to consider it as good, great, or a masterpiece; the film first has to care about itself enough to take it's story serious enough. Being entertaining is simply not enough to be considered "great", by today's standards. This is mainly because "entertainment" is nothing more than a transient fad, and has no substantial base. Entertainment is constantly changing with both the times of the era, and our own individual maturation. Therefore, a more substantial bond must be formed between us and the art that is delivered through cinema. In order to do this, we as filmmakers are daunted with the task of not only "entertaining" you ( a transient action) as an audience, but to permanently captivate your emotions (sustaining action). In order to achieve this, it takes a careful marriage of the aesthetic tools of filmmaking (cameras and the like) with the compositional tools of cinema (screenwriting, creative designing) to create what I would like to call "the total package". Let me explain one step further... "The Total Package" is what we sale to you, the audience, which contains the fundamental tools necessary to make a film not only entertaining, but "great". It has fantastic story, talent, technical workmanship, and that swagger that makes it an all time great. It is a film that entertains you as you are watching it, but also impacts your emotions so that you may remember it for some time. However...there are films that will try and sell you bootleg versions of "The Total Package", they will give you the entertainment you seek, but fail to leave an impact on your emotions. Thus, they fade into obscurity...(iRobot, XXX movies, Daredevil with Ben Affleck). Summer blockbusters are often culprit of selling viewers "The in-Total Package". Fast production cycles, and the need for studio cash leads to soulless films. In the end, the audience gets slanted, and loses 9 bucks. At best, you'll get "entertained", while your emotional memory goes to bed getting no action. Now it all sounds simple doesn't it? Good films, tell good stories; while bad films, tell bad stories. Not so fast though! It is still quite possible for bad films, mediocre films, decent films, and good films to resonate with us for years to come. All they need to do, is still strike an emotion. Sometimes a film can be so atrocious that it strikes an emotion of anger within us, thus forever sealed within our thoughts; or so bad that it's comedic, and thus the same effect is made. All that is needed, is for an emotion to be struck within the watching audience...and bam! Anything can happen. As a final example to this I give you Kyle, my roommmate/your future husband. His favorite action flick is "The Rock". Now while I completely agree that "The Rock" is a great flick (featuring Nick Cage before the joke he is now), ranking it as one of my all time greats it is not. However, he told me of how when he and his brother were children, they use to watch the film all the time, and that he still loves it as much now. Why? It's all in "The Total Package". Something given to them in the package resonated with that childhood emotion of strong masculine characteristics, and made the film great in their eyes. From there, the rest was history. There's more to this concept, as what I have quickly typed here as I wait for the Nyquil to kick in has some arguable points to it. But, you get the general gist. Any film that has done enough to make YOU, the individual watcher remember it. Has given you The Total Package. For me, it's the memorable cast of characters in films such as Tombstone, Sin City, and Kill Bill that resonate with my emotion of wanting to be the bad ass, the rogue, the strong aggressive character; as well as the masterful dialogue (<---I'M A HUGE SUCKER FOR COOL LINES). Any questions? Feel free to leave em!
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Post by thescarletenigma on Feb 24, 2009 18:09:25 GMT -5
What did I tell you about bringing all that film studies mess out of the classroom! Good post though!
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Post by manofepictales on Feb 25, 2009 0:34:39 GMT -5
I was indeed joking, as I suppose I should've made clear. If I ever post something that seems the slightest bit sarcastic, it probably is.
And nice essay Harry.
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Post by inferno on Feb 28, 2009 4:02:38 GMT -5
After all that I'm just anxious to see whatsabromance's response.
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Post by Harry Locke IV on Mar 5, 2009 8:04:31 GMT -5
After all that I'm just anxious to see whatsabromance's response. Meh...I don't think I'm going to get one. But while we're preaching film philosophies up here, I'm going to post up my entire paper I just did for film studies on comparing Children of Men, with an essay done by film analyzer Laura Mulvey on the representation of women in film through Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis theory. The instructions for the paper were to take a specific study of film we learned, and apply it to a film we watched. But the film we applied it to, couldn't be the one that taught us the specific theory. So for example, the feminist analysis that I used was taught to us by using the Wachowski Bros. film "Bound", which features a story predominantly carried out by two strong willed lesbian gals. I took that ideology and whipped it onto Children of Men...the results...were very interesting. So, here you go (we had a 3 page limit, double-spaced, so it's a lot more concise then what I usually write, it should be a quick read)! *NOTE: Anything with "thingy" in it...is probably "v a g i n a" or "p e n i s". Just to avoid confusion! Averting the Gaze in Children Men by Harry Locke IV Film theorist Laura Mulvey’s seminal 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, was a paradigm shift in how feministic scholars began to analyze the roles of women in mainstream cinema. By bringing forth the marriage of renowned psychologist Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, and dominant ideology in mainstream Hollywood, Mulvey was able to craft a compelling criticism on the blatant exploitation of females in films of her time (1970’s). However, contemporary films such as Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, demonstrate the subtle ways in which many of Mulvey’s noted vices have been transformed into representing a female character as that of power. Mulvey’s studies are rooted deep within the ideology of a Phallocentric world, and is a play upon Freud’s ideal that all women share envious feelings towards their male counterparts for being endowed with a thingy. In contrast, the theory promotes the ideal that the female girl thingy invokes a subconscious fear of castration within the male population. Children of Men utilizes this ideology in the most deviated of ways by creating a world in which women are no longer able to conceive children by the effects of some unknown disease, thus in a sense, an international castration has been bestowed upon all men within the film’s story. With the greatest proponent of the male thingy crippled— reproduction—the image of the fertile womb has become infinitely more powerful then that of the thingy. A woman who can conceive is a symbol towards progression, which is desperately yearned for in Children of Men’s world of dilapidation. The film continues to build off this shift of power, by utilizing its main female character as a deviation from the sort of role criticized in Mulvey’s article. Mulvey argued that women were relegated to little more then objectified sources of pleasure in classic cinema, marking them as proponents of scopophilia, and tools to invoke scenes of eroticism or for the male character/audience to “gaze” at. Children of Men also deploys this importance sense of “gaze” with Kee, the film’s crucial female protagonist. In one of the more revealing scenes of the film, Kee reveals her pregnancy to Theo (the male protagonist) by exposing herself topless, amongst a barnyard of cattle. While the brief nudity can be seen as an exploitation of female eroticism, the cinematography combats this by displaying Kee as almost messianistic in comparison to those around her. Rather than gazing at Kee with the mindset of sexual objectification, the direction of the film leads both the audiences and in-film characters to gaze in awe at the power, and beauty of fertility. In this moment, Kee becomes the most powerful character in the film. Her success or failure, impacts the lives of those captured within the story. While Children of Men largely flows against the grain of how it displays its female characters, the film treads on borderline grounds with the accusations written by Mulvey in her essay. Mainly the proponent that males are visualized as the active personas, while females the more passive types. Though Kee is viewed as one of the potential controllers of the world’s future, it is Theo who is the most visually active throughout the film. Theo represents the rugged; tough-as nails masculine character audiences would expect to serve as a bodyguard type to Kee. The audiences are directed into gazing at the power of Theo’s male presence as he talks Kee into leaving the radicals, performing much of the aggressive action, and ultimately getting Kee to the ship she needs to be on to escape the bedlam of an anarchic Europe. However, Cuaron is not quick to let the aggressive actions of his masculine protagonist take the story completely away from the importance of femininity. The film is littered with strong female characters (Julian the radical leader, Miriam the mid-wife who sacrifices herself for Kee’s safety, and the Gypsy-esque woman that assists Kee and Theo in their escape) that assist in grounding the more aggressive actions of Theo, who actually commits murder when he takes out a crazed assailant in Sid. Essentially, the audience is forced to gaze at the active actions of the female characters in conjunction with their male counterparts. In doing so, it becomes clear that this is not strictly a world of men acting and women watching, but one where both genders are offering equivalent efforts. This act of women offering progression to a film’s story was one of the criticisms in Mulvey’s original essay, who felt that women often stalled the progressive action in a film’s story with their passivity. Children of Men illustrates and celebrates the importance of femininity in society, by showing a world thrust into sheer anarchy when the natural order of the womb and reproduction has been threatened. Cuaron is able to achieve this by taking many of the preconceived notions of females in cinema (and those discussed heavily in Mulvey’s articles), and representing them in more of an equal light between the male and female characters. The result is a film that represents the power of women in a more realistic fashion, rather then those that highlight women in almost paradoxical gender switch films (i.e. Bound, Kill Bill Vol. 1 & Vol. 2), or as eye candy for fearless male characters. In doing so, the path for stronger, less subordinate roles for women in dominant cinema continues to extend its distance.
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