The Battle of Algiers

I liked the Battle of Algiers because it didn't necessarily provide a point of view to side with and it showed that both sides did equally bad things during the war.
The New York Times article concentrated mostly on connecting the movie to current events and morality and left out details of the movie. It talked about many of the themes brought up by the movie about torturing as well as defeating terrorists. The article showed that even if you win the battle but ultimately lose the war just because they didn't have the people on their side. It kept mentioning how the pentagon used the movie to help analyze how to fight terroristic wars and gorilla tactics. Another movie made about the battle of Algiers was compared to this movie and it showed how this one was allot more partial than the other one was.
Over all I think the article focused a little too much on the ideas from the movie and not enough on what the movie was actually about. It was an in complete analysis.

Chinatown

Out of all the films we've watched all this year this has to be the worst ending one we've watched. It was almost overly so even for a noir. Since that is the point of a noir though I can see why they made it that way. For the most of the movie it was good and the acting was pretty good, I wouldn't say great but it was good. Unlike in previous noir movies we've watched the main character JJ Gittes is a likable person as well as is Mrs. Mulray who may have been a seductress but was also the most pure intent people in the movie. The entire movie kept referring to "Chinatown" which was not truly understood until late in the movie. It is referring to the state of life that most of them live in. Life being corrupt and the ones with power win all the time and even the best of intentions will just end up getting people killed no mater how hard you try. this is fitting with the noir movies almost to the nth degree. For the most part I liked the movie until the end in which afterward I decided I never wanted to see the movie again.

Kiss Me Deadly

Of the films weve watched so far this has been one of the weirdest ending ones we've had. That aside I liked it better than the out of the past movie. The connection between Cristina and the box was never fully explained and the ending didn't make a whole lot of sense but the actors did an ok job. It was a B-movie after all though. The sex crazed woman/not actual room mate needed to go away and from what Mr K. told us about the book it was based off of, I wish the ending was like the books and the way she died...I know, I'm horrible. Depending on the ending and how you interpreted each of them, the second one we watched seemed like it fit a film noir better as for the first one seemed too happy in the fact that the got out of the house alive, but either way I think the audience was supposed to assume the world ended so I guess either fit.

Out of the Past

Out of the past was an interesting movie. I wouldn't say it was either good nor bad. Robert played a very tough guy who showed very little emotion. Throughout the movie he stayed in his role very well. Some of the scenes were over the top but something tells me that that was the point. Jane had an hard role to pull off as well, she had to play the nice girl that no one would ever suspect while still being a devious and semi-sadistic seductress. Throughout the entire movie I heard people saying they hated her. She played the role very well. The ending from what Mr. Kloby has told us about noir films was right on the money. Both the characters die together and nobody wins.

Eternal Sunshine

Eternal sunshine is by far my favorite movie so far this semester. It was a little confusing at first but you start to get the hang of whats going on in the movie as it progresses. Most of the movie is a flash back after the first scene on the train, they go back and explain that Joel once dated Clementine and that in her impulsiveness Clem had her memory erased of Joel. In his anger at what she had done he erased his memory of her. While he is getting his memory erased they show all of his memories and all the past the two of them had together and he realizes that he doesn't actually want to loose her memory. He tries to hide Clementine in other memories to save some part of his life with her but they end up finding her and erasing her. In the end they all end up meeting each other again and even with their memory erased they still end up finding each other and end up together. The movie was good at showing that sometimes no mater how hard a memory is to bare that if you didn't have it you might feel incomplete. It shows that we need the bad to have the good and sometimes we don't need to completely forget the past to start over we just need to get over the bad things. If we forget all the past we forget the good to. This movie really makes you think about yourself and life and I think that adds to the romance of it.

His Girl Friday

His Girl Friday is probably the best movie we've watched this semester. It was funny and i liked the main character she was just as the female lead of any screwball comedy should be; she was strong intelligent and had an attitude. Her husband was rather unusual in the fact that he was also strong in the screwball. The writers did a wonderful job of making the movie upbeat; even when a character tried to commit suicide the scene was still somehow a happy one... The fast pace and speedy talking were what did it especially during the scenes when something big and newsworthy happened and they were all on the phone. Walter had a very strange way of showing his affection to Hildy. He made her see that she loved the newspaper and was too free-spirited to ever settle down with Bruce and in the process keeps screwing up Bruce's life. It was a battle of whits through the whole movie and it was great.

Unforgiven

Unforgiven was allot better than stagecoach was; I just have to say that now. It was much more realistic and it had a better story line. The storyline had more emotion in it over the killing and it did not have the Indian stereotype in it. It being a revisionist Western it made the audience think allot more about what was going on in the movie vs. the classical Westerns just made the hero good in every way and made it so thats all you really needed to know. When Will started drinking towards the end he went back to his old ways and he started killing again and killed Bill for what he did to Ned. He did it purely because of revenge and as the movie pointed out not at all for what he "deserved" even though in some ways he very well may have. This is where the movie gets its title, it is because Will (and others) are never forgiven for their pasts.

Finding Nemo

Finding Nemo, as I am sure most of you know, is about a clown fish named Nemo whose mother and siblings were eaten at the beginning of the film and who was raised by his dad. He is captured by a human diver and brought to a dentist who plans on giving him to his fish killer of a niece. His dad Marlin is trying throughout the movie to find and save his son and be reunited and in the process goes through bunch of adventures.

The thing that brought real humor and belief into the story was the voice acting. Marlin’s Voice actor did a wonderful job of portraying an over protective father and Dory’s voice actor (Ellen Degeneres) played a very forgetful and borderline psychotic fish. Nemo’s Voice actor did a good job of being a fearful yet still optimistic kid. Marlin wouldn’t let his son do anything fun for fear he would loose him like his mother and so his voice was always whiney the entire film. Dory on the other hand, you couldn’t have an entire conversation with and her voice always seemed loopy and out of it which added most of the humor and some frustration to the movie.

The set in the movie also greatly added to the story. The exec producer John Lasseter had all of the staff get certified to go scuba diving. He wanted the set to be as realistic as possible so he had them all go to the coral reefs and look around to get an idea of what the environment was so they could copy it virtually. They really worked on the water simulator to get the ripple effects and splashes to work right by making the water react with itself. They modified the simulator used in the Monster’s Inc. movie named Fizt used for the fur movement on the monsters and renamed it Splasht for the water effects. At some point during the movie though, the background looked completely realistic while there was cartoon fish swimming in it and the contrast was not necessarily a good thing. There were really only 4 types of fish skins that covered all of the fish in the movie; iridescent, velvet, metallic, and gummy. The colors were just modified depending on the fish they were trying to mimic. There were 2 types of fins in the movie as well; there was Marlin’s type of fin called the rower and Dory’s type called the flapper(because the flap them like a birds wings).

Finding Nemo was a good movie for the most part but lacked believability if you know anything about how sea turtles work and the fact that if the sharks were to not eat fish they would dye. Sorry to say but for the sharks fish are not friends but in fact, food. For any of the ones that have not seen this movie I would recommend seeing it just as a right of passage if nothing else.

Stagecoach

I have never been much of a fan of westerns but as far as they go this one wasn't that bad. Stagecoach had some more modern day themes in it then your other westerns. For one, in other westerns the hero would fall in love with the "lady" in the movie and not the whore. The fact that Ringo treated Dallas with such respect was contrary to what society would have liked back when westerns were first starting to be made. With a more conservative attitude previous generations may have frowned upon the whore wining over the hero.
Something that wasn't necessarily from this day in age though, was that throughout the entire movie Ringo was very docile and only tried to escape once. This is coming from todays viewpoint where in every movie the criminal is always trying to escape every chance he gets and is never docile at all. Ringo had the "good old fashioned honor" which is typical for most westerns. The hero has to have some honor in order to be the person we sympathize with them. This goes with many movie genres as well but somewhat more so for westerns because of the classic idea that is a western.

Citizen Kane

In Citizen Kane they showed the audience more things than the characters in the film knew about and to make a point using different camera angles. They showed the sled in the end to solve the mystery of what "rosebud" was. They showed the 2 different sides of Susan’s debut when they opened once from the back showing all of the audience that Susan had to face knowing her voice was not good and once from the front showing her facial expression as it did so. Also the entering and leaving as they traveled up and down respectively at the gate of his castle was a way to provide closure. All these things made the film more complete for the audience in that it helped them see the bigger picture even if the movie characters did not.

The Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai was over all a good movie. It had some noticeable flaws though and I would not necessarily put it in a best movie category. The plot had a lot of potential but did not deliver all of it. The movie was slightly lacking in some important story development aspects.

The characters were very dynamic but underdeveloped. They hinted at some of their background but they did not elaborate on much of it, especially with Kambei and Kikuchiyo. Kambei never gave any information on his past and his relations with some of the other samurai. They acknowledged that he knew them and that they were friends but never went deeper. Kikuchiyo had a past with adapting a samurai’s persona but not truly being one that was not explained as well. Kurosawa concentrated more on the philosophy of the story than the characters in it.

The acting was pretty good but there were a few moments where the emotion just did not seem believable but the dialog in the movie was pretty good throughout. The costumes and the setting were authentic to Japan in that time. They were a little too revealing for my liking though (basically men in thongs). The music was generally slow and authentic but had some faster points in the battle scenes. There were not many special effects when this movie was made in 1954 and very few if any were used. It was very slow moving in some scenes and the movie reaches almost 3 ½ hours in length and there was not that much action and the action that was there was toward the end.

On the more positive side, the movie did a great job of showing the difference in classes. It creates struggles with the town and trying to get help and it also causes Kikuchiyo problems when trying to becoming one of the group. The class problems also create tension when the father of Shino does not want her to fall in love with a samurai because of the class difference and it eventually leads to a love conflict in the end that is never resolved.

Much of this movie I could probably understand better if I knew more about the Japanese culture. Many of the things in here were cultural and it was assumed that the watcher would know what is going on. I did not understand many of the characters’ gestures and phrases to each other because of this. It may have made the acting, especially, more believable if I had known these things. For the most part the movie was good and I would recommend that you see it but just expect it to be a little slow in some parts and there to be missing some of the background information.

Resident Evil 3: Extinction

This movie was the best one yet. I have seen all 3 of them and this one may have been a little slower but it still kept me interested. It could have gone into a little more detail about the doctor but the rest of the movie was easy to understand if you have seen the other 2. The soundtrack was pretty good as well as the movie itself. If you are like me you will love the psychic powers she has, she does not over use them though, so the movie is not like X-Men and she is still down to earth. They set the movie up for a sequel but I do not know if they will have one.

The Brave One

This review by Lisa Kennedy from the Denver Post about "The Brave One" gave me a more in depth picture about the movie than the other reviews posted and also had the same opinion as I. While I have not seen the movie this review makes me want to see it even more. She goes into how as an individual person on a moral level this movie asks some very interesting questions of humanity. The movie makes you root for the main character Erica but also condemn her as well. “The Brave One” looks, at least to me, like something worth watching.

In the beginning in order to help portray Erica’s feelings they show in graphic detail her and her husband being mugged from one of the muggers’ camcorders. After this, it becomes a story of her trying to get her life back, but she as a person changes. In one of the trailers it shows her talking to a cop who was asking her how a person deals with something like a mugging and she says she became a different person. After she realized that she could never go back to normal she started looking for revenge and then became a vigilante. “The Brave One” offers a window into the dark parts of human nature as we see her begin to slowly rid the streets of crime by killing the people that commit them, in a completely lawless fashion.

Erica, throughout the story, is trying to deal with her increasing alienation of herself and what she is becoming and what she is doing. You come to realize that throughout the movie that it is not completely the mugging that is changing her; it is as Lisa would put it “it is because of not-so-extraordinary circumstances that her old self is being lost to her.” She is loosing herself to her fear and revenge. Her neighbor who seems to be the “rote wise black woman meant to mammy Erica back to righteousness” has a past and brings up the concept that maybe it is braver to not be violent. She brings into question who the title of the movie really is describing.

Some of the bad things about the movie are that the movie unfolds too slowly. Most of the film is meant to be a thinking film more than an action film. Some of the dialog could also use some work. The “cat-and-mouse” game between Erica and the cop could have been done better. Though, I like action movies I still think this movie would be good to watch because I think it will give me something to think about during and even after the movie has ended. If I can get over the slowness of the movie I think it will give me good food for thought.