Mira Nair(Final)

The common threads through all of Mira Nair’s movies are marriage, strong women, and India. Her films tend to all have a happy note with a twang it them that brings you back to reality. To be blunt about it, her movies seem like cultured chick flicks. This is not to say they aren’t good in the eyes of many men, but to be sure her main audience is women.

Of all of her movies Salaam Bombay(Mira Nair, 1988) was probably the closest in resembling her work as a documenter and in this way it is also probably the most different from her other films. It still had many of the elements that make her movies her own though with the portrayal of India and the semi-love story in it but her roots still showed more than they did in other films which seemed to take away from a story line in the film.

The other movies Monsoon Wedding(Mira Nair, 2001) and The Namesake(Mira Nair, 2006) were both very similar in their relation; both in film aspects as well as in the fact that they were done only five years apart from each other. They both dealt with arranged marriage as well as Mira’s home culture and bringing it to life and merging it with the western culture. Her use of English in Monsoon Wedding to help it seem more realistic to what India is like also served a dual purpose to make it more accessible to a western audience. The Namesake involved two main characters, Gogol, and Ashima, his mother. It goes through how Ashima had an arranged marriage and then had to go to New York to start a new life which in turn made Gogol’s cultural identity confusing for him.

Vanity Fair(Mira Nair, 2004), like many of her films had a very strong woman in the lead. Becky Sharp was a very adaptive woman who used her social skills to manipulate others and survive. She falls in love with a soldier who’s fortune gets cut off from him by his family and so she has to end up finding out ways for them to survive. Later she ends up falling in love with another man and going off to India in he very end of the movie with a man she had met before her husband. Throughout the movie there was an interweaving of a subplot and her loving of India and a desire to see it. She meats the king and performs a very exotic Indian dance for him as seen in the picture. In Mark Pfeiffer’s review he does a good job of portraying Becky as well as explaining the Indian lacing to the movie.

Mira Nair was probably my favorite director we’ve studied this semester. Of all the movies we’ve watched in both art of film I and II, I think Monsoon Wedding was one of my favorites. Mira does a wonderful job of making very intricate stories and putting her own culture into them. The mix of her views on marriage as well as women and her own love for India all culminate together and make her movies very much her own.

Coen Bros.

The Coen brothers seemed to dumb down their characters and make the audience feel sorry for them. The characters seemed to all have some mental disorder, whether it was being perpetually stupid or just being a complete sociopath in No Country for Old Men. They also seem to over exaggerate the use of the cultural settings in their films. In Fargo for one, the use of Minnesotan accents was bluntly exaggerated even if it was comical. They do end up making occasional social commentary in their films such as in Raising Arizona and Fargo with them saying that money isn't everything and that family/love mattered more. Also, in Old Country saying that sometimes you need to let go of life and let it happen to find yourself and that you don't realize this until your older even though that commentary just came across as the man being defeated with his life. Their films are definitely linked together more so than some of the other directors and probably because they write their own work.

Robert Altman

Personally I hated all of his movies but his movies did definitely make you think. None of his movies were of the standard model. They may have not had a protagonist or they may have had a very darkly humored ending. As for "Nashville" not having a definite protagonist, i have seen movies like this before that managed to keep the stories allot more coherent, the lines got a little too blurred as to the point of what was going on. As for "The Player", it was definitely his best work. This is no to say i thought it was that spectacular but his own making fun of how Hollywood worked and having the movie within a movie subplot worked very nicely, in his defense. All his movies were linked by a sense of; well to put it simply, strangeness. None of his movies seemed very close to reality even for a movie.

Akira Kurosawa

Like Hitchcock, Akira had a style that was prevalent throughout his films. His movies all seemed to have a lessen to be gotten out of them. He also kept using the same actors over and over again. Many of his earlier films while before WW2 were fairly different from his later ones after the American occupation. He switched from making the empire look good to displaying a more analytic point of view of human nature. The later movies all seemed to show how the human condition could be very corrupt and how a true hero would be a person to stand up against that corruption even in the face of many trials. He puts in remnants of classic Japanese theater in his movies as well as the use of weather to dramatize scenes. His use of weather, though creative, can be somewhat overdone in some scenes. In many of his films the sky seems to end up being a focus and depending on the mood of the story the colors of the sky are different.

Zodiac

Zodiac has a lot of twists in it and definitely keeps the viewer guessing. The movie starts out, out of the blue. It then leads into a very twisted story of a killer who keeps sending the papers encrypted letters to post and then be solved by the public. Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) as the main character is definitely not the person you would suspect for trying to solve a murder mystery. He is the San Fransisco Chronicle's cartoonist. He then meats up with a police detective and starts one of strangest obsessions of his life. He only finds the killer decades later after the case had been cold for years.
True to the rest of his movies David Fincher did most of the movie with very low lighting. At least in this movie it may have had the purpose of increasing the suspense. He also is very good at making the movie very unpredictable and makes numerous plot twists. All in all this movie was another very good piece of art and it is very much a David Fincher movie.

Alfred Hitchcock

All his movies had very blatant similarities that tied them to each other. That being said they were not necessarily good things. Alfred tended to have very strange men that do not mind their own business. The women tend to always, at least by the end of the movie, want to appease the men for god knows what reason.

His sound usage is interesting even if his characters are just plain creepy. He cuts out sound entirely for some of his scenes and it adds a level of...suspense almost. The lack of sound makes you pay more attention to what is being shown directly in the center of the screen and less on the surrounding parts of the screen.

These to things being said I think Hitchcock is overrated as a director. His overall special effects are corny for the eras they were created in and his characters are strange. The only redeeming factor was his sound usage.

Seven

Seven is definitely a different type of thriller from the norm. The Killer has the cops as his pawns the entire movie like James Berardinelli states in his review. The killer is a deranged nut case to the end. He tries to make a point about the corruption of the world by killing one person for each of the seven deadly sins; Hence the title.

Investigating these murders are two very different but very alike detectives. The older one who is near retirement William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is very jaded about the world but at the same time still, at least subconsciously, thinks he can help it. The younger more arrogant detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) who has just joined the force recently thinks he can save the world all by himself and gets a proverbial slap in the face when he is paired with Will.

The movie itself was very annoyingly dark. The lighting did not allow for the audience to see much of what was going on and took away from many of the details. The only scene with a significant amount of light in it was in the very end. The gore was very prevalent in the crime scenes, which was not to the extent it was bad, but may still have been excessive. The movie was also rather predictable with its ending contrary to what James Berardinelli thinks and I think it could have been put together much better.