altman

One of the peculiar scenes of the Long Goodbye was the final scene of Marlowe shooting Terry Lennox. This scene struck me as being very out of place in the film with Marlowe being serious and the violence which he seems to avoid throughout the other part of the film. Such a blatant turn of events seems like a ridiculous way to end the film that has been laid back the whole time. I think that the confrontation is a necessary scene but the abrupt shooting kind of ruined the ending for me. This was exaggerated by the fact that the shooting was very over-the-top with Lennox flying back into the river. I would have had Marlowe bring him back to the US and turn him over to the police to create a better ending.

coen bros

The Coen brothers were one of the most interesting directors we have viewed in Art of Film with their wide range of movie genres. We watched Raising Arizona which was a kind of screwball comedy and No Country for Old Men which was a kind of dark thriller, which I particularly enjoyed. This seems to be a odd range of genres in of itself, but this becomes more intriguing when we add in Fargo which is almost a mix of the two, with its comedic characters but has a dark plot. This type of film seems to be manifested again in the Coen's new movie Burn After Reading with its dimwitted characters but criminal plot.

Gran Torino

Clint Eastwood has been known for years for his portrayal of tough-guy, no-nonsense cops and cowboys in many films. But after taking to roles behind the camera, he may now be known better for his direction of bleak dramas ranging from Unforgiven his latest film, Gran Torino. Eastwood has also directed several movies that deal with the theme of war and plays a Korean War vet in Gran Torino. Eastwood himself was in the military and met some other actors in the service while never seeing action. I think that Eastwood's service in the military is the source of this recurring theme of war heroes throughout his films.

Along with the theme of war, violence is a common companion throughout many of Eastwood's. And while it is a common theme, violence is not portrayed to be honorable but as a burden that a man doesn't want to bear. It was shown in both Unforgiven and Gran Torino at the end of the films when Eastwood's character makes speeches about the terrible burden of taking another's life. This comes as oddity to me as Eastwood made a name for himself in Sergio Leone's spagetti westerns where violence was the main theme and draw of the film.

Christopher Nolan= sweet

After viewing Memento in class, I have decided that Christopher Nolan is definitely my favorite director. He has made movies that appeal widely to me, from The Dark Knight to The Prestige his style fits perfectly for me. His movies seem to be characterized by the sharp plot twists that throw you right on your head and make you think back on all the clues that seemed odd before and now seem to all fit. A great example of this is the scene in The Prestige where Rebecca Hall's character mentions that Christian Bale's character's severed finger wound seems to have been reopened. When viewing the film, this seemed like a trivial detail to me at the time but has huge impact on the plot. It is twists like this that seem to be able to really make a film pull you in from a mere viewer to an active participant, trying to figure out the next turn.

Nolan seems to enjoy the theme of obsession throughout all of his films from Leonard's quest for revenge to the battle of the magicians in the Prestige to Batman's fight against villainy, all of his characters seem to have a goal they pursue with little hesitation to determine the consequences. This is another part of his films that I particularly enjoy as once the main character has seemingly finished his quest he is forced to start picking up the pieces of the mess he has made along the way to his goal.

007

3 days, that's all that's left until the latest installment in the James Bond series. After the success of the first movie of the Daniel Craig era, Casino Royale, the hype seems to be buzzing around the Quantum of Solace quite well. I believe that if this film performs as well as Casino Royale, it will be seen as the revival of the James Bond series from the Pierce Brosnan version. Brosnan didn't quite seem to fit the true mold of Bond, the charismatic portion of him was played well, but the ruthless killer aspect was lacking in my opinion. Everything in the Brosnan films was about getting the girl, the mission almost seemed like an afterthought in a couple of the films. While Bond needs to be smooth, there also needs to be some toughness and substance behind the tux. The previous version was also a bit too stylized for my liking, the transition to the more realistic setting, action and villians was a great move.

The transition seems to be set to correct one of my biggest gripes about the previous films and its relatively unrealistic choice of weapondry. In most previous Bond movies, he fights off guards with a tiny compact Walther PPK, while the new poster features Daniel Craig holding a bit more suitable weapon, a HK UMP submachine gun which is much more realistic than Bond is making 30 yard shots with a sub-compact handgun without a second thought. Hopefully these small flaws have been corrected and Quantum of Solace sets the standard for many Bond films to come.

Westerns, the ultimate let-down

So for the last couple of weeks we have been watching westerns in class, and I have to say that I have not been very impressed. Well, impressed may not be the correct term here, actually a better way to say it would be that they did not live up to my expectations. When you think of the stereotypical western, you think of tons of gunplay and the scenes of bar-scenes and shootouts, at least that's what I think of. Instead, I was stunned by the amount of frill that some of the movies exhibited. For example, the scene at the train station in Once Upon a Time in the West, the scene dragged on for a completely unnecessary amount of time, I mean come on, I don't wanna watch some dude swat at a fly for what seemed like 5 minutes. That movie was full of ridiculously long scenes, Jill arriving, the auction scene, I could go on and on.

After going through all this filler we get to the shootout scene, the big attraction where all of my gripes will be wiped away after the greatness of this scene, right?. Wrong, My Darling Clementine is a prime example of the shootout, the main feature being a complete let-down. First of all, practically every shootout is over in less than 15 seconds. and secondly it is ridiculously unrealistic. Men are shot through the heart every single time with some fairly crude handguns and then fall over in the most awkward fashion imaginable. The only redeeming factor in all of this is the story, which many times follows a fairly intriguing plot, such as Once Upon a Time in the West. But in other westerns, see My Darling Clementine, the plot comes out to be utterly predictable and dull, making for an overall disappointing film.

First Art of Film post

Recently I watched the film Four Brothers directed by John Singleton and was released in 2005. I have been itching to see this movie since it was released and I was really excited once I finally got to see it the other day. The film's plot revolves around the 4 adopted Mercer brothers whose mother, who lives in Detroit, is ed in an apparent story robbery and the brothers return to Detroit for the funeral and vengeance. While all the brothers come from the same adoptive family, they all set out on vastly different lives for example, the main character Bobby (Mark Wahlberg) is a hot-head who has just gotten out of jail and leads a very different life than his brother Angel (Tyrese Gibson) who just returned from a stint with the Marine Corp. Bobby leads the brothers on a quest for vengeance, and soon learns that the neighborhood has changed a lot since he left it and his mother's was much more than a simple robbery gone wrong. The film continues on after this discovery with twists at every turn and the truth is not fully understood until the end. This type of story-telling is one of my favorite types in movies because you can develop an idea of where the story will go and you get to find out if your suspicions about things are true in the end.

The movie is also appealing to me for a bit more obvious reason, as it centers a lot of the film around intense action scenes, with car-chases and shoot-outs galore. The movie also taught me a couple of tricks when dealing with police, for example, never confess to the police on the grounds that they supposedly found one of your hairs at the crime scene, and if being interrogated about what you were doing, make sure to use the alibi, "having sex with your wife". Overall this movie appeals to just about every type of film I enjoy, including the thinker, comedy and action genres at one point or another. One of the other things I just happened to notice off-hand during the movie was that Mark Wahlberg's character looked a lot like James Hetfield, the singer from Metallica, which happens to be my favorite band, just a random thing that went through my head while watching the movie. You can judge for yourself...

Mark Wahlberg













James Hetfield































But if you look back....




















...maybe not.