The New Kid in Class

The Perks of Being a Wallflower was a very intelligent film that kind of took us through the sight of a highschooler named Charlie who is seen as a outcast. This is until he meets Sam and Patrick seniors that invite him to sit at their table for lunch effectively inviting him into their lives as well. They take him through a journey of building up his character and try to build up his courage along the way.

I would like to note that it seems that the character growth in this movie seems to be a exponential growth through the Acts of the movie. Charlie is very fragile with little character development and has very little emotional basis. But through the movie Acts this growth is is exponentially meaning it slowly grows tills it rapidly goes up. This emotional growth is shown through Charlies flashbacks, his love interests, and his experiences that come to a point of no return where it exponentially goes out of control as we see in the third Act where he is in the hospital.

The emotional growth that we see can be attributed to the narration that we hear from Charlie himself that shows the development he is having emotionally. The funny thing is that the movie is called The Perks of Being a Wallflower yet at the end its not as much a perk because it ends up putting him in a hospital.

I really enjoyed this course even when it was confusing at times. It gave me a new appreciation of movies that I watch and showed me the ins and outs for movie production. My favorite movie from this semester had to be Glory it was easily very wonderful to watch. I do wish you would incorporate Queen and Slim because it is a very well done movie that has so many undertones that will allow future classes to dig out a lot of material.

Perfection on Screen-Final

Perfection is known to us as something that isn’t wrong that there is nothing that can replace it. Perfection is what we all strive for in life and not striving for perfection is not living a life worth living. I believe the perfect movie is one that has been overlooked in every facet even by my professor that did not see it. This movie brings every emotion possible to people that understand struggles within the African American community. The movie I am talking about is none other than Queen and Slim. This was perfection in the making when it came to camera angles, lighting, choreography, and the lines said within it. Most people only see this film as a drama or romantic film, but it takes in so many genres on to itself that it would be foolish to bound this film to one path. Queen and Slim told the stories of a whole race of people in the United States giving African Americans their own love story that wasn’t stuck to the narrative of Caucasian love films. This story was the perfected version of a hybrid genre film that aced every line with accurate intent.

It is to my belief that many people in and out of the film industry has this look at movies as being straight forward that it needs to have one plot line that goes from beginning to end. That films can have only one genre that defines the film, that brings it to a certain light with an audience of people. Queen and Slim defies these rules by having many genres that play in and out of the film at multiple instances. These different genres get played in ways that make you confused as you watch, but then reveal themselves to how they truly are a little bit later in the film. This is true with the romantic side of the film that made you think that there was no way these main characters ever fall in love. But by the end you see how a life experience can truly make you realize your love for someone. This can also be articulated into the crime-drama that plays into the film with how Queen and Slim are on the run from the cops, but as we see from the beginning of the film they aren’t the ones who committed the crime and their actions are justifiable.

The genre to most African Americans who have seen the film would probably described as a horror film. On the description of the film horror is not listed as the genre, but to many in the audience I believe it is a real life horror. Imagine you are a black couple and the situation that a cop tries to kill you because you are black happens and you try to protect yourself. This image is one many African Americans have to deal with everyday of their lives. The thought of any day being your last because of a racist cop confronts you. To me that is the definition of a horror film that makes me in ‘subtle words’ shit my pants because this situation could happen any day of my life. This film paints a very accurate picture of what Africans Americans go through everyday in life which gives it the edge over other films in today’s world “Most importantly, consider that a genre’s single most identifiable trait is its CULTURAL CONTEXT“(Week 6 Genre, Dr. Schlegal, August 6th, 2020).

With this film created I believe there is a new genre that has been made and more movies are following this trend line as well. This new sub-genre will be called African American Real Life Drama. This is because the film plays off the fears of African Americans discussed early. It creates this feeling of personal resilience because we are still living through this film today “It’s almost a battle cry for every black person we’ve lost from a (police officer’s) gun or a vigilante’s gun simply because of the fact that they’re black,”(Why Lena Waithe’s powerful new movie ‘Queen & Slim’ will have audiences talking, USA Today, Anika Reed, Nov. 26th, 2020). This shows how the wrighters and film directors knew what they were creating and how it will resonate with the African American population even if it doesn’t gain ground with the predominantly white film industry.

I truly believe with this films creation it will cause a chain reaction with new films about black suffrage being unveiled. This might be the start of Hollywood finally seeing and understanding their flaws of not including African Americans in the broad spectrum of the film industry. But with social tides changing it has been long overdo for this change of heart, but instead has only come because they can’t ignore the market of the African American population within the U.S. This is a change well needed that I believe will lead to great things in the film world.

Reed, Anika. Why Lena Waithe’s powerful new movie ‘Queen & Slim’ will have audiences talking, USA Today. Nov. 26th, 2020.

Schlegal, Nicholas. Week 6 Genre. August 6th, 2020.

Couldn’t post pictures google wouldn’t allow me to images…

Untold History

The American Civil war was a very dark time in our history with facts being bent to some peoples pleasures as they want. This was a conflict that held the highest number of American deaths than any other conflict. Glory tells a nonfiction with some historical accuracy story about African Americans in the war for their emancipation. It was a film that told the essence of how African Americans were treated and fought within one of the first African American regiments. This regiment had everything up against them seeing as they were deemed experimental, but this film still gives us a story of their own victory.

Glory was a 1989 film that starred Morgan Freeman, Matthew Broderick, and Denzel Washington as the main characters. The film Glory was directed by Edward Zwick and although it was filmed more than 30 years ago it feels like you could be persuaded to believe it was made today.

The characters in this movie give us a very accurate representation of how African Americans were treated in the United States military during the Civil War. It can be seen how the Commander of the regiment was a white man that clearly never had to go through any of the struggles that the African American men had to go through. Even though all the African American soldiers were free men it seemed to me that they never even had a taste of freedom that the North said they had provided. The soldiers were still shackled by the chains of the past and also shackled by the skin they had that acted like a target sign for white people to treat them differently. Many of the things we see in this movie that were important parts are still problems in society that we have yet to addressed yet. One of these being the underwhelming support of black communities morally and economically which can be seen in the film with the lack of shoes the men were given to fight with. They expect the black soldiers to fair okay in these conditions when they haven’t been given a fair and impartial chance.

Get Out of my Nightmare

This movie Get Out tells a fear that every black man sort of haves if they were to fall in love with a white women who has a rich family. This movie starts out with Chris as seen as a normal black male who meets as he thinks the love of his life Rosie. This quickly turns when after meeting the family that the party he is attending is very different. Chris starts to slowly realize he is apart of something more sinister than he knows.

This movie is clearly a well orchestrated horror that plays off some of the consequential fears of African Americans in society. This is because it is not out of the realm of possibility of a white secrecy group that abducts black men to do harm to them. This has happened it society before and this movie perfectly plays off this fear.

Not only does it play off the fears and horror that any audience member should be feeling it plays off the awkward tension that Chris feels. This is evident at the party where Chris seems to be one of the only black males at the party and everyone has their attention on him. This gives the film an even more suspense feeling as we the audience are picking up every movement Chris like he can feel ours as well. This is another awkward thing in society that African American men feel when in a group of densely populated Caucasians when it feels like all eyes are on us and they are watching every move seeing what we will do.

This film uses all the fear, horror, and awkwardness to culminate into a depiction of how post slavery most have felt to African Americans. This gives that extra fright factor to African American that anyone else probably couldn’t know. There’s always some little fear of a society of white people trying to steal away what they think is theirs and in Chris’s case it was his very body. This is what has helped in the success of this film which led it to doing very well in the box office.

From unknown to history books!

Ed Wood, a director who was relatively unknown for the creation of his 18 films that were seen as some of the worst films ever made during the time he was alive. But as we now know his films have been praised as some of the most revolutionary and art defining films created. They have also been seen as creating a whole new style that resonates with all the films he created and have been imagined in a direct film about Ed Wood by Tim Burton that starred Johnny Depp.

This film gives us an inside look on how some people use to create their lives in the film career. It shows the hopeful Ed Wood being very high spirited in the way he try’s to pursued investors to invest in the films he create. Throughout the film it shows how determined and the drive Ed Wood had to create his underfunded films that were not a part of the mainstream movie collections of the time.

One thing we have talked about in class is Auteur Theory which is that movies can be recognizable from the style that a director casts on to the movie he develops. This is also a developing theme among Tim Burton Films as well that have been known to have a particular genre and themes to them. I can name almost every single Tim Burton film because they result in the same artist style that confirms the Auteur Theory; Frankenstein, Beetle Juice, and Sweeney Todd. But there is one film that resembles this like its cut from the same editing tools which is Dark Shadows that has similar mise-en-scene. Another aspect of Tim Burton films is the usage of Johnny Depp who is highly regarded as one of the best quirky and original actors to ever see the film screen.

But in all honesty, this movie can somewhat be seen in a sad light to how Ed Wood’s career was; this man had to lie, scratch and climb mountains to even get money to even think of creating the kind of films he loved. Even when people said it was the worst films ever he just would laugh and sarcastically say his next one would be better. This movie by Tim Burton truly shows the dangers of trying to join Hollywood. It shows the struggles any director has when trying to produce a movie in a industry he loves that seems to not love him back.

Someone spilled the blood

With the seasons changing into fall everyone knows what comes around, creepy times. That’s right Halloween is on its way with all its frights and scares along with it. Beside the costumes, candy, and haunted houses come the scary movies that usually populate this time of year to make the holidays even more special.

The Final Girls we get a look into the festivities up close when Max and friends are transported into a movie when they try to escape a fire raging through the screen. They quickly find out that the movie that they were transported to is a horror film same one that Max’s mother auditioned for. This makes for a daring movie that plays on the 80’s common slasher films in which the group of friends need to get through.

Final Girls plays off of the notion of slasher films such as the Jason films. The characters therefore have to use their knowledge of horror and slasher films to make it through this death trap of a film. The movie plays on this notion with its name “The Final Girls”, this means the girl that is at the end of the movie that is able to overcome the hardships to be the last one standing and walk away at the end of the film.

The meaning of this whole film is to play off the original thoughts of what a horror film is supposed to be. It plays off the tendencies that characters take in horror films to truly show the meaning of them in the end. This is that they need to have blood, scary, insight a panic in the watcher, that could also involve irritation from simple mistakes that characters make.

Masterpiece at work

In 1917, it shows the wonders different camera angles and music can go to completely changing the tone of a movie. This movie is incredible with how it changes tones in a instant with just a different setting which is no wonder why it was critically acclaimed. It brings life the calmness, horror, sadness, and rage that comes about a way not many in today’s society is to familiar with.

In the first scene we get the calmness as the two soldiers are resting showing us the lull of war the past times the soldiers are able to get. This is very unlike what war is most probably thought of in our heads, that there is no rest time and there isn’t beautiful back drops of landscape like as we see.

But then when they get their orders the pace of the movie changes and the mood changes as well signifying the dire need to get to the Commander to deliver the message. This shows the love that the soldier feels towards his brother which makes it apparent that nothing will stand in his way to reach him. Along with how the pace evolves the music picks ups to create a suspenseful mood to get us as watchers ready for the story as a whole.

Later we as the soldiers are making their trip they get the view of a dogfight between opposing aircraft’s. This brings out a sort of awe in the characters especially because prior to this war there was no such things as planes being used in such a way. Therefore the feeling of seeing this is kind of the same as how modern people would see a modern aircraft in a dog fight because it just hasn’t been done on a scale as large. Then we get a suspenseful moment where a plane is coming right at them, we know this because how the camera is aligned in with the aircraft you see that its coming right at us as well the viewers. Not knowing if the plane is a friendly or not the soldiers rush to the rescue, even knowing sure well it could mean risking their lives. Even when it is discovered that it is an enemy pilot the peaceful backdrop of the landscape still allows for humanity to be discovered. Until one of the soldiers turns back to the pilot killing Will. This scene creates a suspenseful atmosphere that resonates until the last parts of the movie.

With the soldier all on his own the movie creates a culture of loneliness with the soldier because his friend just died and he has an almost impossible task that just gets harder without his teammate. Through out the rest of the movie you feel the fear that this soldier has to incur especially in the towns that are reduced to rubble.The lighting to the set is gloomy and absent at times that could also resonate with how this soldier feels inside knowing that he could die at any moment.

Towards the end of the movie when the soldier reaches the line where Will’s brother is stationed it gives us as viewers a bit of hope hes just about there, he just needs to make it a few more meters. This hopefulness is drowned out by the noise of the rings for the attack like he was too late but pushes on. In this shot you can see the grande scale of this war that its thousands of peoples stores, even though we have only focused on two peoples story so far. When we get to the Commanding officer I felt rage seeing how even with direct orders and knowing that it would cost thousands of lives he was still will to risk the men’s lives. We as a viewer almost feel a disgust towards the commander as he looks down on our protagonist.

Lastly we feel a sadness and regret with the peaceful backdrop again but the soldier meets Will’s brother and needs to tell him that Will has died. With their handshake and the camera fixated on the hands its as if there is now a bond between them even though it was through a tragedy they both felt. I absolutely love how this movie takes you on an emotional roller coaster that involves hope, sadness, peace, calmness, tragedy and much more. I believe this is a story that many should watch to truly know how soldiers lives were changed in WW1.

In Visions of Light it was clear the effects the evolution of the camera had on cinematography through the ages. It can be even seen in today’s movies the methods that were developed by the movie business. The evolution of the camera and its techniques have allowed for greater availability to public use and normal people can now make very profound cinematic revolutions that wouldn’t have been possible 40 years ago. The evolution of the common production camera today has also had a effect on how actors were seen on set and played their roles to allow for a deeper meaning to character they play.