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CLASSWORK / HOMEWORK /EXTRA CREDIT - SPRING 2010

82nd Academy Awards - Oscar Winners: 2010

Best Picture
'Avatar'
'The Blind Side'
'District 9'
'An Education'
'The Hurt Locker'
'Inglourious Basterds'
'Precious'
'A Serious Man'
'Up'
'Up in the Air'

Best Director
Kathryn Bigelow
'The Hurt Locker'
James Cameron
'Avatar'
Lee Daniels
'Precious'
Jason Reitman
'Up in the Air'
Quentin Tarantino
'Inglourious Basterds'

Best Actress
Sandra Bullock
'The Blind Side'
Helen Mirren
'The Last Station'
Carey Mulligan
'An Education'
Gabourey Sidibe
'Precious'
Meryl Streep
'Julie & Julia'

Best Actor
Jeff Bridges
'Crazy Heart'
George Clooney
'Up in the Air'
Colin Firth
'A Single Man'
Morgan Freeman
'Invictus'
Jeremy Renner
'The Hurt Locker'

Best Foreign Language Film
'Ajami'
Israel
'El Secreto de Sus Ojos'
Argentina
'The Milk of Sorrow'
Peru
'Un Prophète'
France
'The White Ribbon'
Germany

Best Film Editing
'Avatar'
Stephen Rivkin, John Refoua and James Cameron
'District 9'
Julian Clarke
'The Hurt Locker'
Bob Murawski and Chris Innis
'Inglourious Basterds'
Sally Menke
'Precious'
Joe Klotz

Best Documentary Feature
'Burma VJ'
'The Cove'
'Food, Inc.'
'The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers'
'Which Way Home'

Best Visual Effects
'Avatar'
Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones
'District 9'
Dan Kaufman, Peter Muyzers, Robert Habros and Matt Aitken
'Star Trek'
Roger Guyett, Russell Earl, Paul Kavanagh and Burt Dalton

Best Original Score
'Avatar'
James Horner
'Fantastic Mr. Fox'
Alexandre Desplat
'The Hurt Locker'
Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders
'Sherlock Holmes'
Hans Zimmer
'Up'
Michael Giacchino

Best Cinematography
'Avatar'
Mauro Fiore
'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'
Bruno Delbonnel
'The Hurt Locker'
Barry Ackroyd
'Inglourious Basterds'
Robert Richardson
'The White Ribbon'
Christian Berger

Best Sound Mixing
'Avatar'
Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson and Tony Johnson
'The Hurt Locker'
Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett
'Inglourious Basterds'
Michael Minkler, Tony Lamberti and Mark Ulano
'Star Trek'
Anna Behlmer, Andy Nelson and Peter J. Devlin
'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'
Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers and Geoffrey Patterson

Best Sound Editing
'Avatar'
Christopher Boyes and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle
'The Hurt Locker'
Paul N.J. Ottosson
'Inglourious Basterds'
Wylie Stateman
'Star Trek'
Mark Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin
'Up'
Michael Silvers and Tom Myers

Best Costume Design
'Bright Star'
Janet Patterson
'Coco Before Chanel'
Catherine Leterrier
'The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus'
Monique Prudhomme
'Nine'
Colleen Atwood
'The Young Victoria'
Sandy Powell

Best Art Direction
'Avatar'
Art Direction: Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Kim Sinclair
'The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus'
Art Direction: Dave Warren and Anastasia Masaro; Set Decoration: Caroline Smith
'Nine'
Art Direction: John Myhre; Set Decoration: Gordon Sim
'Sherlock Holmes'
Art Direction: Sarah Greenwood; Set Decoration: Katie Spencer
'The Young Victoria'
Art Direction: Patrice Vermette; Set Decoration: Maggie Gray

Best Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz
'Nine'
Vera Farmiga
'Up in the Air'
Maggie Gyllenhaal
'Crazy Heart'
Anna Kendrick
'Up in the Air'
Mo'nique
'Precious'

Best Adapted Screenplay
Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
'District 9'
Nick Hornby
'An Education'
Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche
'In the Loop'
Geoffrey Fletcher
'Precious'
Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner
'Up in the Air'

Best Makeup
'Il Divo'
Aldo Signoretti and Vittorio Sodano
'Star Trek'
Barney Burman, Mindy Hall and Joel Harlow
'The Young Victoria'
Jon Henry Gordon and Jenny Shircore

Best Short Film (Live Action)
'The Door'
Juanita Wilson and James Flynn
'Instead of Abracadabra'
Patrik Eklund and Mathias Fjellström
'Kavi'
Gregg Helvey
'Miracle Fish'
Luke Doolan and Drew Bailey
'The New Tenants'
Joachim Back and Tivi Magnusson

Best Documentary (Short Subject)
'China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province'
Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill
'The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner'
Daniel Junge and Henry Ansbacher
'The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant'
Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert
'Music by Prudence'
Roger Ross Williams and Elinor Burkett
'Rabbit a la Berlin'
Bartek Konopka and Anna Wydra

Best Short Film (Animated)
'French Roast'
Fabrice O. Joubert
'Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty'
Nicky Phelan and Darragh O'Connell
'The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte)'
Javier Recio Gracia
'Logorama'
Nicolas Schmerkin
'A Matter of Loaf and Death'
Nick Park

Best Original Screenplay
Mark Boal
'The Hurt Locker'
Quentin Tarantino
'Inglourious Basterds'
Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman
'The Messenger'
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
'A Serious Man'
Peter Docter, Bob Peterson, Tom McCarthy
'Up'

Best Original Song
'Almost There' from 'The Princess and the Frog'
Music and Lyric by Randy Newman
'Down in New Orleans' from 'The Princess and the Frog'
Music and Lyric by Randy Newman
'Loin de Paname' from 'Paris 36'
Music by Reinhardt Wagner Lyric by Frank Thomas
'Take It All' from 'Nine'
Music and Lyric by Maury Yeston
'The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)' from 'Crazy Heart'
Music and Lyric by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett

Best Animated Feature Film
'Coraline'
'Fantastic Mr. Fox'
'The Princess and the Frog'
'The Secret of Kells'
'Up'

Best Supporting Actor
Matt Damon
'Invictus'
Woody Harrelson
'The Messenger'
Christopher Plummer
'The Last Station'
Stanley Tucci
'The Lovely Bones'
Christoph Waltz
'Inglourious Basterds'

Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven

http://www.afi.com/10top10/moreDetail.aspx?id=11&thumb=1

Disgusted by Sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett's decree that several ponies make up for a cowhand's slashing a whore's face, Big Whiskey prostitutes, led by fierce Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher), take justice into their own hands and put a $1000 bounty on the lives of the perpetrators. Notorious outlaw-turned-hog farmer William Munny (Eastwood) is sought out by neophyte gunslinger the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) to go with him to Big Whiskey and collect the bounty. While Munny insists, "I ain't like that no more," he needs the bounty money for his children, and the two men convince Munny's clean-living comrade Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) to join them in righting a wrong done to a woman. Little Bill (Oscar-winner Gene Hackman), however, has no intention of letting any bounty hunters impinge on his iron-clad authority. When pompous gunman English Bob (Richard Harris) arrives in Big Whiskey with pulp biographer W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek) in tow, Little Bill beats Bob senseless and promises to tell Beauchamp the real story about violent frontier life and justice. But when Munny, the true unwritten legend, comes to town, everyone soon learns a harsh lesson about the price of vindictive bloodshed and the malleability of ideas like "justice." "I don't deserve this," pleads Little Bill. "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it," growls Munny, simultaneously summing up the insanity of western violence and the legacy of Eastwood's Man With No Name.

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The Usual Suspects

Bryan Singer's Heist Thriller

http://web.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/usualsuspects.htm

Plot and Story in The Usual Suspects

The plot of The Usual Suspects, a mystery/detective film, cues viewers to create and compare what are, in fact, multiple stories. Viewers infer storylines from cues in the plot to invent possible solutions for the "who-done-it" character. But the "correct" story is only revealed during the final moments of the movie.

The Usual Suspects is a narrative film which we shall consider to be "a chain of events in the cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space" (Bordwell and Thompson, 65). Verbal Kint, our voice-over narrator throughout much of the movie, uses narrative manipulation to limit the viewers' range. "We make sense of a narrative...by identifying its events and linking them by cause and effect, time and space" (Bordwell and Thompson, 66).

Often viewers infer events that are not openly presented by the film. But we must draw a distinction between story and plot. "The set of all the events in a narrative, both the ones explicitly presented and those the viewer infers, composes the story" (Bordwell and Thompson, 66). In other words, the story is the entire sequence of events that may be shown during the movie, or that we can conclude happened outside the camera. "The term plot is used to describe everything visible and audibly present in the film before us" (Bordwell and Thompson, 67). Everything that a viewer witnesses in the movie is the plot. The diegesis (or everything that may naturally occur in reality) is the story action, but nondiegetic material (such as opening credits and sound effects) contributes to the plot.

Story and plot overlap in some areas, while they do not in others. Bordwell and Thompson explains:

The plot explicitly presents certain story events, so these events are common to both domains. The story goes beyond plot in suggesting some events which we never witness. The plot goes beyond the story world by presenting nondiegetic images and sounds (67).

The filmmaker turns a story into a plot. As viewers, all we have before us is the plot--the arrangement of the material in the film. The simplest way of explaining the overlap of plot and story is seen in the diagram created by Bordwell and Thompson below:

The Usual Suspects centers on a group of five convicts: Dean Keaton, Verbal Kint, Todd Hackney, McMannis and Fenster. Through the narration of Verbal we discover that these men join forces to commit a set of rash crimes. Through a confusing series of flashbacks (scenes from the past) and flashforwards (scenes from the future) we learn that the gang is approached by a crooked lawyer named Kobashyi who represents the famous underground drug dealer Kaiser Soze. Kobashyi explains that Soze has a "job" for convicts: they are to stop a $91 million Guatemalan drug deal that would put Soze out of business. Kobashyi threatens the men to carry out the crime, and even kills Fenster, who tries to back out on the deal. Viewers learn that during the raid on the Guatemalan boat carrying the cocaine, the ship is set afire. Only Verbal, a cripple, appears to have survived the blaze.

As viewers experience more of the plot, each of us begins to invent a "who-done-it" solution from the cues. We, along with the detective who interrogates Verbal, are left with some unanswered questions. Who is Kaiser Soze? What really happened on the boat during the raid?

The Usual Suspects cues viewers to invent multiple stories as possible solutions to the suspense. First we are cued to question the validity of the rumor that Kaiser Soze exists. Kobashyi represents him throughout the movie; viewers never meet Soze as a character. As Verbal slowly repeats his story to the detective a second solution is planted. The detective is convinced that Keaton, the "playboy" member of the gang, is actually Soze. He concludes that Keaton set the gang up, killed the remaining members, set the ship on fire, and escaped with the drugs. Verbal is visibly shaken by the detective's conclusion and denies that Keaton could "ever do such a thing!" He stutters, cries and wonders why Keaton did not kill him also. Verbal moans, "It's cause I'm stupid and a cripple! He felt sorry for me!"

As more information pours into the police station from outside sources, the detective learns that there was not any cocaine on the ship. Soze set the gang up. Instead, a witness that could attest to Soze's drug dealings was a prisoner on the boat. The witness was going to be sold to the Guatemalans to alert the police to Soze. Shocked with the news that the"job" was setup by Keaten, Verbal is released from custody. Dumbfounded, he limps down the outside steps and drags himself along the sidewalk, hampered by his crippled leg.

Viewers concur that, in fact, Keaton is Soze, and the story seems to end here. Quickly the plot twists and slaps viewers in the face with the third and "correct" story. As Verbal limps down the street, he gradually straightens his walk, stands tall, and shakes out his "deformed" hand to light a cigarette. A Jaguar waits for him at the corner; through the window we see that Kobashyi is the driver. Aghast, viewers realize that Verbal is not a cripple--he is Kaiser Soze! We are shaken that we were so easily fooled by the conniving cues planted by the filmmaker.

Here is a simple list visualizing how the "correct" story in The Usual Suspects overlaps the plot. Sections "D," "E," and "F"--all part of the film's plot--overlap the film's story.

a. crime conceived (Soze wants to kill witness in a cover-up scheme)

b. crime planned (Kobashyi threaten gang into accepting the "job") story

c. crime committed (Soze kills witness and remaining gang members)

d. crime discovered (police find the burning ship) plot

e. detective investigates (interrogates Verbal at the police station)

f. detective reveals a, b, c

The formal layout of The Usual Suspects is a replica of a tradition detective films.

The "correct" story reinforces our cultural assumptions with two stereotypes. Viewers never expect Verbal to be Kaiser Soze because (1) Verbal is crippled and does not have the physical abilities to mastermind the crime, and (2) therefore Verbal may also be lacking in his mental abilities and could not mastermind such a brilliant cover-up. We can deduce that Verbal masquerades as a cripple for exactly these two reasons. He does not expect the detective or his former gang members to even suspect that he will cleverly betray them. He uses random anecdotes in speech and pretends that he is "slow" both mentally and physically--this is exactly what the other characters expect of him!

The plot of The Usual Suspects cues viewers to create and compare multiple solutions of "who-done-it" until the "correct" story is revealed. Viewers and the police detective are on equal levels as they follow clues to unmask the identify of Kaiser Soze. The filmmaker created The Usual Suspects knowing each plot cue that leads us down the wrong storyline serves to heighten our drama and suspense.

"Are you as smart as Keyser Soze?" "Let's find out."

QUESTIONS: 1) Is Keaton really as bad as Kujan says?

Did he really kill all those people and set up all those deals? He didn't seem so bad to me.

2) Sometimes it's difficult to tell which events are real and which aren't.

Which events actually happened, and which ones did Verbal make up?

3) I'm a little slow on drug slang, so is the drug on the boat cocaine or marijuana? I'm pretty sure it's cocaine as 91,000,000 dollars of marijuana sounds a bit ludicrous, but it's referred to by Kujan as Dope, which in the UK means pot/marijuana. Could someone correct my slang and tell me what is on the boat?

4) Why do the gang decide to kill Kobayashi (when they are dressed as repair men and shoot the other two men in the elevator)?

5) What is the significance of the order each character receives their personal envelopes from Kobayashi?

A. It's in the same order they accidently stole from Soze

B. It's in the same order they are killed

C. It's in the same order of their first names

D. There is no significance

6) What did Fenster and McManus supposedly steal from Keyser Soze?

A. wiring

B. steel

C. guns

D. money

7) Which harbor is the ship with the supposed 91 million dollars of cocaine docked at?

A. San Diego

B. San Francisco

C. San Pedro

D. Santa Barbara

8) Who was the informant that the Hungarians had on board their ship?

A. Andre Martinez

B. Alexi Makovits

C. Antonio Montana

D. Arturo Marquez

9) Which character said the line, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"?

A. Kint

B. McManus

C. Kujan

D. Hockney

10) What nationality is Keyser Soze supposed to be?

A. German

B. Argentinean

C. Swedish

D. Turkish

BASIC NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

Films are great storytelling devices. And for many audiences, this is exactly what they want when they go out to the movies Ñ a great story, with powerful characters and complex plot twists.

If we're watching a suspense thriller, it's great when unexpected twists are thrown into the film to surprise us in some way. Not contrived twists. But subtle twists which force us to rethink the movie we've just seen. Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995) was like this. So was M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999). If weÕre watching comedy romances, most audiences are satisfied if the film traces a reasonably complicated story that ends with a couple living Òhappily ever after. Cameron Crowe's Jerry Maguire (1996) was like this. As was Liar, Liar (Tom Shadyac,1997) and the classic screwball comedy, His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940).

No matter the kind of film, when we talk about movies in this way Ñ good stories that entertain us for two hours Ñ weÕre talking about the story content of the film. But there are also other ways of describing how stories are put together. Imagine for the moment that stories are like buildings. Buildings work when both their content (offices, stairs, elevators, etc.) and their design (the way all these elements are assembled) function successfully together. The same is true for stories. When we think about stories in terms of both their content and their design, what we are looking at is the narrative structure of stories.

What is Narrative Structure?

Narrative structure is really about two things: the content of a story (i.e. what a story is about) and the form used to tell a story (i.e. how a story is told). Two common ways to describe these two parts of narrative structure are: story and plot.

Story refers to the raw materials of dramatic action as they might be described in chronological order in a film. Plot refers to the form of storytelling, or the structure, the story follows. An example may be helpful.

If we want to analyze narrative structure, we can use who,what, and where questions to look at the story or content of a movie. How questions are used to examine plot structure.

So, to describe the story in Star Wa r s, for example, we would need to answer the following questions:

Where is the story set?

What event begins the story?

Who are the main characters?

What conflict(s) do they face?

What happens to the characters as they face this conflict?

Who wins the conflict?

What rewards do they receive?

To describe the plot structure of the movie, we would need to answer these questions:

How is the major conflict in the story set up?

How are the main characters introduced?

How is the story moved along so that the characters must inevitably face the film is central conflict?
How is the dramatic confrontation set up as the film draws to its close?

How does the film resolve most of the major conflicts set up at the outset?

In each case, story and plot are slightly different ways of analyzing a movie.

From the audiences' perspective, story and plot refer to the different ways movies construct

meaning for spectators. Story is about trying to determine the key conflicts, main characters, setting, and events in a movie. Plot is about determining the stages at which key conflicts are set up and resolved. What's interesting about most of the movies made in Hollywood is that, while the stories may change, the plot structure is virtually identical in most of the movies made by America's Dream Factory.

H O L LYWOOD AND THE CLASSICAL NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
The most common narrative structure in mainstream films is called the Classical Narrative

Structure.

The Classical Narrative Structure

The Classical Narrative Structure is called this because it is the way most movies are made in Hollywood. It's not classic because it is the oldest structure of storytelling or the best. But the most common. It is the storytelling structure in Star Wars, Buster Keaton's The General (1926), The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), and any number of other films we might think of. It's based on a three-act format that organizes the story in the following way.

Act I The Setup

Here, we are introduced to the main characters in the story, their goals, and the obstacles they are likely to face to achieve their objectives. The main conflict in the story is introduced, as well as the major antagonist (the villain) who will stand in the way of the protagonistÕs (the hero's) objectives. We can call Act I in a movie the Hook. It sets up the story so that the film engages the attention of the audience and suggests the story's likely development. Act I generally takes up about onequarter of a film's total length.

Act II The Development

Here plot complications are added to the story. An increasing sense of urgency is created when the main characters encounter obstacles that stand in the way of their journey. The second act generally occupies the middle two-quarters of the film and it often includes a false resolution to the main conflict set up in Act I. Once the false resolution has been encountered, the action in the movie generally points inevitably toward a necessary climax.

Throughout Act II, Cause-Effect Relationships propel the main characters along. Cause-effect relationships involve actions that force a reaction on the part of some character, leading to a new action and reaction, and so on.

Act III The Resolution

In the final segment of the film, the results of the story's main conflict come to dramatic confrontation. This is called the Climax. It is the point where key struggles are waged and an eventual victor is determined. In Hollywood films, needless to say, the eventual victor is usually our hero.

Following the climax, Closure is introduced into the story, which simply means that all the major conflicts, issues, or ideas in the story are resolved. The so-called ÒHollywood ending is the most popular kind of closure in the classical narrative structure. Films with this kind of conclusion usually close with a sense that the protagonists in the film live happily ever after.

Usual Suspects Trivia:

Bryan Singer had wanted to do a film with Kevin Spacey for years. In fact, Chris McQuarrie wrote the screenplay with Spacey in mind.

The film was shot in 36 days, and came in under budget at a mere $5.5 million dollars.

The lineup scene at the beginning of the film was originally to have been played straight-faced. However, they couldn't get a take, as the actors kept cracking up over their "line". Finally, they decided to leave the scene as is, and in fact this remains one of the funniest scenes in the film.

Adding to the flavor of the lineup scene is the nearly incomprehensible Fenster. Apparently, it was actor Benicio Del Toro who had the idea of giving Fenster the accented, slurry speech. The other actors complained to Singer that even they couldn't understand him. To which Singer replied, "Let the audience in on it, then." So periodically, you will hear other characters in the film ask Fenster, "What did you say?"

Five people in all played Keyser Söze; Kevin Spacey, of course, but also Gabriel Byrne, Bryan Singer, and John Ottman played Keyser on the Tanager, and a friend of Bryan's played the young Keyser as he walks away from the burning village.

There is a lot more trivia in the boxed video set for The Usual Suspects; one tape is devoted to a running commentary by director Singer and screenwriter McQuarrie.

Paul Haggis' "CRASH"

In this adrenalised panorama of looming apocalypse in Los Angeles, the daily dramas of Los Angelinos don’t merely coincide; they collide. White cops, black and Hispanic detectives, Korean accident victims, black TV director, Middle Eastern store keepers, Mexican locksmiths, black car thieves, the white DA and his spoiled rotten wife: all are trying to keep their heads aloft in an environment toxic with racist paranoia and, to a Kiwi eye, riddled with guns. Like the equally operatic Magnolia, Crash is a feast savoured by terrific Hollywood actors usually starved of the complexity and dramatic edge built into every one of its voluble, keyed-up characters. “Not just one of the best Hollywood movies about race, but, along with Collateral, one of the finest

portrayals of contemporary Los Angeles life period. Fresh as a daisy, unencumbered by genre and corrosively funny (Haggis co-wrote the vivacious screenplay with Bobby Moresco, who, like so many Hollywood Turks today, comes out of hipster TV), the film appears on casual inspection to be a kind of six degrees of racial separation, whose dominant mood is unbridled fury played for both entertainment and tragedy… Haggis caters to no racial pieties, left, right or center. Instead, all his deeply prejudiced characters get their due as individuals struggling to carve decent lives out of chaos.” — Ella Taylor, LA Weekly. “The characters run afoul of each other, say things better left unsaid, and get into terrible trouble. And yet the movie isn’t exasperating in the way that movies about steam-heated people often are. Crash is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive.” — David Denby, New Yorker

Crash

There's a long and, on the whole, honorable tradition in films of what you might call the circular story, in which everyone exists to serve a portion of a plot that ultimately comes back upon itself to complete the circle. It can be witty ("Dinner at Eight") or ironic ("La Ronde") or, as in "Crash," tragic. In each case we meet people who exist only to prove a point, you might say. They have no lives outside of the scriptwriter's plan for them; they're used and then thrown away.

"Crash" is the directing debut of Paul Haggis, who wrote "Million Dollar Baby," and he has story and cowriting credit here. It begins on a rare snowy night in Los Angeles when the car of LAPD detective Graham (Don Cheadle) and his partner/girlfriend Ria (Jennifer Esposito) is rear-ended and Ria and the Asian driver of the other car have at each other with racist taunts. It then cuts back to the day before, when we see the first of what will be a series of vignettes each containing a moment - or a lifetime - of racist actions. No one is exempt: the good are bad, the bad are good but mistaken; everyone has a story that is the same story.

A racist cop (Matt Dillon) taunts a black couple, Cameron and Christine, with a humiliating traffic stop, an action that mortifies his young partner (Ryan Phillippe) and precipitates another humiliating fight between the couple (Terrance Howard and Thandie Newton). Cameron is a successful television director who then must bow to his producer who makes him reshoot a scene because a character isn't 'black' enough. Two young black men (Ludacris and Chris Bridges) deplore racism and then carjack the Lincoln Navigator of a white couple (Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock). Bullock in turn is the racist employer of a Latina maid; Fraser is the District Attorney who doesn't want to lose the black vote.

On and on it goes. The bad Dillon turns out to be consumed with love and concern for his sick father, and then makes a heroic rescue - an homage to "The Princess and the Warrior" - of the very woman he humiliated. The Iranian proprietor of a shop is convinced that the apparently Latin locksmith repairing his back door (Michael Pena) is a black man who will rob him later; he buys a gun from a racist store owner who derisively calls him Osama. There's much more, and no one but the locksmith is exempt from a racist act; in fact a scene between the locksmith and his daughter gives us the one moment of true love and compassion in the film. And ultimately the film comes back to the moment when Cheadle's car is rear-ended.

Haggis as director shows great visual skill and a secure command of his scenes; he has found a way to persuade us of the power inside each vignette without hammering his point home. And the actors are excellent (though Fraser seems too youthful for his role). Dillon, Ludacris and Cheadle particularly all compel our attention when they're on screen. But whenever the film comes close to greatness - whenever, that is, we in the audience have lost ourselves in the power of the moment as we watch - the contrivance of the story pulls us back; it's just a movie after all. No matter how believable Haggis and his cowriter Bobby Moresco make the scenes as they are acted out, the film lacks the resonance of great art. Oh, we say; what's coming up next? And something always does. "Crash" plays like an exercise in screenwriting rather than a lesson for our lives, which is the mark of great art.

Study Questions:

1. Select three of the main characters in the film. Compare and contrast their different feelings about race. How did their perspectives influence their behavior? What were their blind spots? What were their virtues?

2. Consider Anthony's rant about the way white people still discriminate against black people. Do you think his perspective is accurate? Exaggerated? Completely wrong? How does his behavior influence the way people look at him?

3. Discuss the episode in which Ryan pulls over the married couple. Did he have good cause for stopping that vehicle? Who in that scene do you most relate to? Why? What would you have done in Thomas's place?

4. Discuss the episode in which Graham has to make a political decision that will affect both justice and his career. What would you have done in his position?

5. Talk about ways in which you encounter discrimination in your own daily life. Do you ever find that your own behavior is influenced by either the racism of others or your own imperfect perspectives?

6. What can we do, day-to-day, to search our own hearts and practice better relationships with people of different origins, colors, and cultures?

JAWS

Spielberg's horrifying film about a Long Island town whose tourist business is suddenly threatened by a Great White Shark

SHARKS AND STRUCTURE

http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC10-11folder/JawsRubey.html

Creating Dramatic Structure for Screenplays

http://www.tbc.school.nz/elearning/localsites/Video_Site/Focused/3act/index.html

Christopher Nolan's MEMENTO

Key Concepts Memory, identity, reality, truth, loss, revenge, healing, time, chronology.

Background

The original short story upon which the film was based is by Jonathan Nolan and is worth reading. It is available at the following web link:

http://www.impulsenine.com/homepage/pages/shortstories/memento_mori.htm

This was director Christopher Nolan's second film and it won him the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Taking the unusual step of writing the film backwards was a careful decision. Nolan said: 'I arrived at the conclusion to withhold the knowledge from the audience that was withheld from him [Lenny] because of his condition.' This is highly effective and allows audience participation in his condition to a surprising degree.

This feeds into the current postmodern debate over the past, reality and truth. Can we ever know the past? Is Shelby's condition an example of our modern attitude to it: on the one hand obsessed by remembering and yet on the other desperate to move on to the latest trend. Recent examples of the two phenomena are the David Irving 'Holocaust Denial' libel case and the annual rush for the 'must-have' children's Christmas present.

In terms of significance, the film challenges the viewer to think about the memories that we make. It suggests that we create our own world through elective memories, and that all of us are plagued by the memories which impose themselves without being invited. Lenny's only really poignant cry in the film is: 'how am I supposed to heal if I can't feel time' and we are left wondering how we can heal our own memories.

Everything you wanted to know about "Memento"

http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/movies/feature/2001/06/28/memento_analysis/index.html

Study questions

Why does the film run with a 'backwards chronology' and how does this help us to understand Lenny's condition?

'You don't want the truth; you make up your own truth,' Teddy says to Lenny. How fair an assessment is this of the person Lenny has become?

Why are Lenny and Teddy friends?

What is the significance of Sammy Jankis to Lenny's worldview?

Natalie tells Lenny: 'You don't know who you are since the incident.' Who does the film suggest Lenny is?

'Habit and routine make my life possible,' says Lenny. How important are habit and routine in making the film work?

What really happened to Lenny's wife?

Does a photograph actually capture a memory or dictate it?

Action questions

To what extent is Lenny's condition a comment upon 21st century society?

Lenny ends the film saying: 'We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are.' How true is this?

'Do I lie to myself to be happy?' asks Lenny. What kind of lies do people use to make themselves happy? How can these be challenged?

Christians often talk about their identity being 'in God'. What do they mean by that?

Memory is often associated with guilt. How far should Christians feel 'guilty'?

Are facts more reliable than experience? What, indeed, are facts?

Do we create memories, or are they created for us?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Love as Fate and Willing Acceptance

Synopsis Central Idea Love will be given a chance through fate but will only lead to a happy relationship with trust and willing acceptance of each other’s faults.

Summary Joel and Clementine are at the pained end of their relationship. After a fight, Joel finds out that Clementine has had all her memory of their relationship erased. He reacts by pursuing the same operation. As his memory of their relationship is erased from the present moment backwards, he reaches some sweet memories of happiness he would rather hold onto. Joel turns

around and actively seeks to stop the process to save his memory. He takes the Clementine in his memory and they hide in his memories of early childhood to avoid being detected and erased. As they avoid detection together Joel rediscovers the joy of Clementine’s companionship and the root of their love. Their escape fails and the operation is completed successfully. Joel wakes up with an unknown urge to go to where he had first met Clementine. There, he runs into a similarly searching Clementine and they unknowingly fall in love a second time. Upon returning home they discover audiotapes from their operations, revealing their own taped bitter feelings about each other at the end of their last relationship. Together they choose to try again with greater acceptance of each other knowing full well the pain and compromise that will come with their love.

Analysis

JOEL                      I don’t see anything I don’t like about you.
CLEMENTINE      But you will! But you will, and I will get bored with
                                      you and feel trapped, because that’s what happens with me.
JOEL                           Okay.
CLEMENTINE     Okay.
JOEL                     Okay. [END]

ETERNAL SUNSHINE’s narrative is essentially a love story told backwards. It deals with the traditional problem of reverse narrative in a new way. The traditional problem is that if the audience already knows the ending (bitter breakup), then telling the story in reverse asks the audience the question of “is it worth it?” as we watch the story back to the beginning (falling in love). This intellectualizes the experience rather than giving us dramatic action. ETERNAL SUNSHINE deals with this problem of intellectualization by giving the protagonist an active role in the reverse narrative. Joel is able to interact with his old memories to try to stop the process of erasing; this attempt to escape is the major sub-plot of the film. The catharsis of the audience comes with his rediscovery of his love for Clementine as they try to escape together. They fail to escape at the climax of this sub-plot and his memory is erased. But the lovers meet again by fate and once again fall in love. This fake climax of the main love-story plot is placed at the beginning of the film and again at the end of the film – the audience realizes the despite losing all their memory, the lovers meet and fall in love again. If the film ended there, it would have been a good film, and the central idea would have been “Love happens because of fate”. But the problem would have been that Joel went through this huge journey of discovery and change but that all seems to go to waste if fate was just going to put them together again – he needs to be the one making an active choice that demonstrates his internal change at climax. The real climax of ETERNAL SUNSHINE comes out of the reversal at the end, in which the Joel and Clementine discover their bitter past and must choose whether or not to commit despite their past. This resurfaces Joel’s inner journey. He and she choose to commit, completing Joel’s journey of internal change with an external action. The central idea now becomes “Love happens because of fate but it will only result in a happy relationship with open acceptance of each other and the painful compromises that come with love”. This real climax fueled by true character change, dilemma and choice is what makes the film great. The climax completes the audience catharsis experienced through Joel’s rediscovery of love; as a result he wins the girl and we are touched by a great story.

JOEL                      Okay.
CLEMENTINE      Okay.
JOEL                      Okay. [END]

Plot Structure

PLOT TYPE PLOT CENTRAL IDEA ARC MAIN Joel-Clementine Love will be given a chance through fate but will only succeed with willing acceptance of each other’s faults. Will they find lasting love together? Joel and Clementine fall in love by fate twice. Then choose to love each other on the third time by accepting that they will have pain along with the love. SUB-PLOT Escape Operation Joel-Howard

Love as fate that can’t be erased. Will the operation erase Joel’s memory? Joel engages Howard (Lacuna Inc.) to erase his memory, he changes his mind half way through, tries to stop the procedure but fails. SUB-PLOT Clementine-Patrick Love as fate can’t be faked. Will Patrick win Clementine with love’s words and actions? Patrick falls in love with Clementine and uses Joel’s memory and artifacts to try to win Clementine over. He fails. SUB-PLOT Stan-Mary Love can’t be forced. Love needs to be built on trust. Will Stan win Mary’s love? Stan falls in love and tries to win Mary over but fails when Mary falls in love with Howard a second time after her memory was erased. SUB-PLOT Mary-Howard Love as fate can’t be denied. Echoes Main Plot. Will Mary and Howard find love together? Mary erased her memory because her love with the married Howard can’t possibly last. But she falls in love with him again. because Howard was too weak to put on distance with the new Mary. Upon discovering Howard’s deception she destroys Lacuna Inc.

Groundhog Day: Breakthrough to the True Self

An example of an exceptional work of moral fiction is the apparently minor comedy, Groundhog Day, which shows us a character who has to be exiled from normal life so he can discover that he is in exile from himself. In the movie, actor Bill Murray plays Phil, an arrogant, Scrooge like weather forecaster who spends the night in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where he is to do a broadcast the next day about the annual ritual of the coming out of the groundhog. He wakes up the next morning,

does his story and is annoyed to discover that he is trapped in Punxsutawney for a second night because of a snowstorm that comes in after the groundhog ceremony.

When he wakes up in his guest house room the next morning, lo and behold, it is the morning of the day before all over again. Everything that happened to him the previous day -- the man trying to start a conversation at the top of the stairs; the old high school acquaintance recognizing him on the street, the ritual of groundhog day -- it all happens again.

And, once again, due to inclement weather, he is forced to spend the night. When he wakes up the next morning, it is the same day as yesterday and the day before, with the same oncoming snowstorm keeping him stuck in town and the same events repeating themselves like a broken record.

And so it goes, day after day, as this misanthrope of a human being finds himself trapped in Punxsutawney on groundhog day in what science fiction would refer to as a time loop. If he does nothing different, events will repeat themselves as they were on the original day. But if he changes his behavior, people will respond to his new actions, opening up all kinds of possibilities for playing with the unfolding of events. Either way, with each "new" day, he alone remembers what happened in previous editions of the same day.

At first Murray's character responds with bewilderment. Then he despairs and begins to treat life as a game: he risks his life and gorges on food, expressing both his sense of hopelessness and his growing recognition that, no matter what he does, time will reset itself and he will wake up as if nothing had happened.

In one scene, which turns out to be central to the movie's theme, he expresses his despair to two working class drinking buddies in a local bar.

One of his two inebriated companions then points to a beer glass and sums up the way he is responding to his situation: "You know, some guys would look at this glass and they would say, you know, 'that glass is half empty'. Other guys'd say 'that glass is half full'. I bet you is (or I peg you as) a 'the glass is half empty' kind of guy. Am I right?"

But as the days pass endlessly into the same day, this half-empty character finally finds a purpose in life: learning everything he can about his female producer, Rita, played by Andie MacDowell, so he can pretend to be her ideal man and seduce her. When that fails, and his efforts net him slap after slap, day after day, his despair deepens and he begins to spend his days killing himself. He kidnaps the groundhog and drives over a ledge into a quarry; he takes a plugged-in toaster into the bath; and he jumps off a building, always waking up whole in the morning.

In desperation, he reveals his plight to the female producer and she stays with him (without sex), in his room, through the night. Once again, he wakes up alone in the same day.

But, enriched by this experience of intimacy, and by the fact that someone actually liked him for who he is, he finally figures out a constructive response -- he begins to live his life in the day allotted to him, or, rather, he begins to live the life he never lived before. Instead of allowing circumstances to impose themselves on him, he takes control of circumstances, aided by the fact that he has all the time in the world and the safety of knowing what will happen next.

He begins to take piano lessons from a music teacher who is continuously surprised at how proficient he is, since she always believes it is his first lesson. He learns how to be an ice sculptor, which is the perfect art form for him since everything he does will have melted away when he wakes up anyway. And he becomes more generous.

Then, an encounter with death -- an old vagrant dies in his day -- has a deep effect on him. At first, he can't accept the man's death and, in at least one subsequent edition of the day, he tries to be good to the old man, taking him out to eat (for a last meal) and trying, unsuccessfully, to keep him alive.

When he stops trying to force death to relent, his final defenses fall away and his compassion for the old man transfers to the living. He begins to use his knowledge of how the day will unfold to help people. Knowing that a child will always fall from a tree at a certain time, he makes it a point to be there and catch the child every time. Knowing that a man will choke on his meal, he is always at a nearby table in the restaurant to save him.

Slowly, he goes through a transformation. Having suffered himself, he is able to empathize with other people's suffering. Having been isolated from society, he becomes a local hero in Punxsutawney.

Now, he sees the glass as half full, and the day as a form of freedom. As he expresses it in a corny TV speech about the weather that he gives for the camera, at the umpteenth ceremony he has covered of the coming out of the groundhog:

"When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the of warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter."

In other words, having accepted the conditions of life and learned the pleasures afforded by human companionship, he is no longer like all those people who fear life's travails, and try to use the weather forecast, by human or groundhog, to control events. He accepts "winter" as an opportunity.

Finally, the female producer falls in love with the good person he has become and she again spends the night (although he falls asleep so, again, there is no sex.) They wake up in the morning. She is still there and it is the next day.

In a last bit of irony, the couple, (who get to know each other, in the Biblical sense, once the new day begins), decide to settle down in Punxsutawney. Like Maxwell Klinger in the last episode of MASH, Murray's character will end up living in the one place he couldn't wait to escape.

What is so powerful about Groundhog Day is the way it lets us experience what it would be like to make a breakthrough like this in our own lives. The movie shows us a character who is like the worst in ourselves. He is arrogant and sarcastic, absorbed in his own discomforts, without hope, and cut off from other people. Like us, he finds himself in an inexplicable situation, seemingly a plaything of fate. But, unlike us, he gets the luxury of being stuck in the same day until he gets it right. Whereas most of us go semi-automatically through most of our (very similar) days, he is forced to stop and treat each day like a world onto itself, and decide how to use it. In the end, he undergoes a breakthrough to a more authentic self in which intimacy, creativity and compassion come naturally - a self that was trapped inside him and that could only be freed by trapping him. Like many of the heroes of fiction, he can only escape his exile from himself by being exiled in a situation not of his choosing.

In telling this story, the movie hits on a message that is commonly found elsewhere and that appears to express an essential truth. When we get beyond denial and resentment over the conditions of life and death, and accept our situation, it tells us, then life ceases to be a problem and we can become authentic and compassionate. Murray's character makes two such breakthroughs: first he accepts being condemned to being stuck in the same day, then he accepts the fact that everyone else is condemned to die.

Inevitably, the movie also has mythic resonances and literary counterparts. Murray's character is like all kinds of saviors and heroes in well-known stories, secular and religious, who experience some combination of suffering and courage, until they go through a transformation to a new state of knowledge. Among the religious and mythic elements we can recognize in the story: he fights off his demons; he is changed by an encounter with death; he experiences a kind of rebirth; he appears to people to exist in time but he also exists outside of normal time; he manifests deep compassion; he is in the world but not of it, suffering with a special knowledge that he uses to save those around him; and he is given a second chance in life by the love of a beautiful woman. He condenses images of Buddha and the Beast, Scrooge and Jesus.

But the movie keeps myth and archetype, as well as message, blessedly in the background. It also employs only a little visual spectacle and only the barest minimum of fantasy, in the form of the ever-repeating day, to tell the story. It is effective because it is understated, allowing Murray and the theme to engage us.

Perhaps it gets a little too sweet as it moves toward a conclusion, but that is forgivable. At the end, it saves itself from going over the top by revealing that Murray's character still has some of the old, calculating, self inside him. As he and his new mate walk out of the guest house into the new, snow-covered day, he exclaims, with his new enthusiastic wonder at life: "Its so beautiful -- Lets live here."

Then, after the obligatory kiss, he adds: "We'll rent to start."

Happily-ever-after is very nice, the character slyly tells us. But in the real world it's important to keep your options open, just in case you need to beat a quick retreat.

http://www.schindler.org/psacot/20010813_ghd_lin.shtml

The story of Groundhog Day includes a number of phases:

1. The beginning, which takes place in normal time, in which the character is self-centered and embodies hate of self and others, defense and constriction.

2. The bulk of the movie, which takes place in an enchanted timelessness in which the character becomes other-directed, loving and free.

This has a number of subphases, which can, more or less, be described as:

bewilderment;
despair;
risk-taking and treating life as a game with selfish ends;
first breakthrough to intimacy;
generosity and the embracing of life;
shock at, and refusal to accept, death;
acceptance of the circumstances of life and death , and breakthrough to deep compassion (love);
being celebrated as a local hero and a second experience of intimacy in which he gets the object of his love.

3. The end, which has moved back into normal time, but which is now enchanted in a different way, by the attitude of the main character.

Run Lola Run

The film follows the events between a woman, Lola, and her boyfriend, Mani, who she desperately tries to save from death by helping him obtain a huge amount of money he carelessly lost. It takes you on three different journeys with Lola, all controlled by fate, showing you what would happen in each.

Director: Tom Tykwer

Starring: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu

"Run, Lola, Run - Film as Narrative Database"

Lev Manovich's analysis in the Language of New Media casts database and narrative as natural
enemies. Although he sees a future for digital works that reconcile these two modes, he also
recognizes that some linear cinematic works have already combined these forms. His exemplary
database film is Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. However, there are other works with even
stronger claims as narrative databases. Run, Lola, Run is arguably the purest form of this
specialized genre, which includes such diverse works as Rashomon, Time Code, Memento, and
the BBC adaptation of The Norman Conquests.

This paper is based on three readings of Run, Lola, Run. I will argue that each of these readings
is a "remediation" (to use the terminology of Bolter and Grusin) of another media form. Bolter
& Grusin5 use the term "remediation" to describe a group of related concepts. They first
maintain that all media experience shifts between two separate states of reception: immediacy &
hypermediation. They call this ongoing dynamic balance "remediation". We'll return to this use
of the term remediation later in this discussion.

Bolter and Grusin also argue that all media "remediate" other media. This definition of
remediation refers to the fact that media works constantly borrow, reference, steal, appropriate
and re-use both content and form derived from other works and from other media. My paper's
three readings start with this definition of remediation: they describe the reflection of the
structure and style of one media form in the design of another.

The first, and most obvious remediation that one sees in Run, Lola, Run is the remediation of the
rock-video form within the context of a feature film. The rock-video is one of the prime
examples of the video "short-form" (the others being commercials and series-opening "tag"
sequences). These forms are structurally interesting. The history of classic theatrical film
narrative is the history of the cinematic long-form: the 90 to 120 minute movie story. The rise of
television led to several variations of the televisual short-form: in particular commercials and
series openings. Both these forms must satisfy a dual imperative that is at the same time rigorous
and contradictory. Commercials and series openings must be simple and direct enough to
engage and satisfy on first viewing. At the same time, they must be rich enough to sustain
engagement over a large number of repeated viewings. The standard of craft that this double
imperative imposes on the short-forms is considerable. The third iteration of the video shortform
was the rock-video. Now that it has ossified into a predictable and formulaic pattern, it is
easy to forget the richness and depth of this genre in its early form. In its heyday of the early to
mid 80's, the rock video was a testbed for cinematic and narrative experimentation and creativity.
Many works in this genre met the dual challenge of immediate interest and sustained engagement.
In the process rock videos pushed the boundaries of cinematic editing, composition, mise-en-scene,
and narrative.

Lola is a rock video remediated through the magnification of scale. It merits this classification
for two reasons. First, it borrows many of the specifics of the rock video form such as the
reliance on music, the bold use of cinematic craft (quick cuts, dramatic angles, moving camera),
and the rapid delineation of character and type. Second, it meets the two-fold requirements that
rock videos share with the other members of the video short-form: combining immediate
engagement with sustainability. In the process of achieving those goals, it actively explores the
dynamic boundary between immediacy and hypermediation.

The factors that enable immediate engagement with this work are the same ones that Bolter and
Grusin use to describe their sense of immediacy. The common variable is drawing the audience
quickly and surely into the world of the film. The solid continuity within the dramatic scenes
makes it easy to follow the flow and the emotional arc of the story. The design of the narrative
also affords an early engagement. At a high level the story is a standard quest/love story. As
such it presents us with romantic love, challenge, danger, and suspense - all leavened with a
sense of wit and humour. The characters are human enough to relate to, and idiosyncratic
enough to maintain our interest. Stylistically, the use of insistent and engaging techniques (such
as the exquisitely tracked running shots, or the driving techno beat) quickly draws the audience
into the work, and makes it easy for them to stay in the film world.

The hypermediation, on the other hand, helps to sustain repeated viewings. The mix of
embedded media components gives the film a heterogeneous texture: live-action cinema, liveaction
video, animation, polaroid stills. Multiple viewings enable the viewer to savor that
texture, to anticipate the radical media shifts (such as the polaroids), and to appreciate the subtler
ones (such as the use of video footage for the scenes with Lola's father and his lover).
It is, however, the richness of the plot that most profoundly supports multiple viewings. Lola
works through three complete narrative arcs of her own - each with its own self-contained plot
development and differing final resolution. Second, associated directly with her three alternative
narrative arcs are the various related stories and outcomes of the others in her life: Manni, her
father, her father's lover, the man in the car, the bank guard, the three thugs in the other car, and
the bum who stole the bag. Finally, there are the collateral story branches of the polaroid people:
the buggy lady, the bicycle boy, and the bank corridor woman. This multi-variant and multilevel
plot structure extends traditional concepts of cinematic continuity, causality, and narrative.
The effect of this extension is to encourage and support multiple screenings of the film. This
effect is further amplified through the rigorous application of a tight formal structure. I'll return
to this final point in the third reading.

Before then, I want to describe a second reading of the film. Henry Jenkins makes the case for
reading Lola as the remediation of the video game within the logic of cinematic form Jenkins's
reading is layered and convincing. He starts his argument by reviewing the language and
imagery that frame the opening of the film. The first opening quote speaks to the cyclical nature
of interaction and exploration in the game of life: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the
end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started" – T.S. Eliot The second is even
more explicit: "after the game is before the game" – S. Herberger. The quotes are followed by a
clock (time is often a factor in real and virtual gaming) and a dream-like montage of foggy
figures (who turn out to be characters in the movie). This foggy world ends when the bank guard
from the movie announces that "In the end, isn't it always the same question, and the same
answer: the ball is round, the game last 90 minutes, and that's a fact...", and proceeds to kick a
soccer ball into the air and start the cinematic game. We then see the cartooned production
credits. Jenkins points out that the imagery and the action in the cartoon are very game-like.
The proto-Lola figure runs through the spiral dodging obstacles (webs, clocks, teeth) and
smashing targets (dogs, production credits). It is very much like a 'twitch ' driven video game.
(Her stance and arm motions predict those of real gamers doing full-body playing using the
breakthrough Sony EyeToy game Anti-Grav9.)

Jenkins goes on to argue that the setup of the movie proper (Manni's call to Lola, and Lola's
decision to act, and to seek help from her father) is the equivalent of a 'cinematic' – the filmed
prologue to an interactive game. It outlines the rules of the "game", the assets, the goal (100,000
marks), and the time limit (20 minutes). The film's treatment of time supports his reading in
other ways. Time is experienced with extreme urgency in the film. Quick cutting, frenetic
action, and the driving techno beat of the music contribute to this incessant pace, which in turn
evokes the adrenaline-packed urgency of an interactive video action game. A clock was part of
the opening sequence, and another forms the base of the three-way screen splits that set up the
conclusions of Lola and Manni's first two encounters with the 'game's' endplay. Motion is not
only a support for the game-like pacing of the film. It is a significant shared metaphor on its own
terms. Jenkins points out that movement of protagonist across space is a key esthetic parameter
of many video games. Obstacles and interruptions have to be maneuvered and overcome
without a loss of speed and progress.

Finally, he points out that the film embraces the interplay of choice and chance – the essence of
videogame play. The casino sequence is the most direct expression of this theme, but the
choice/chance duality is the contextual foundation upon which the film's narrative is applied.
Lola chooses her father as the vehicle for Manni's financial salvation. She chooses to "restart the
game" when she doesn't like the endings to the first two iterations of her run (her death and
Manni's death respectively). She reacts differently to the dog in the three variations of the
opening cartoon. She chooses various forms of theft, violence, and gambling. Her choices in
turn become chance factors in the lives of the polaroid people, her father, his lover, and his
business partner.

Jenkins's argument is a consistent and compelling reading of the film. It maps smoothly against
the work, matching both content and style. The obvious limitation, of course, is that the essence
of the video game experience is interactivity and choice. Unfortunately the film can only depict
interactivity, it cannot overtly present it.

Hollywood: An Empire of Their Own

In the 1920s, six Jewish immigrant businessmen headed for Los Angeles to set up studios that became the foundation of the nation’s motion- picture industry. Ostensibly, the movies they produced reflected America’s abiding myths and soon became part of mainstream culture. Yet it’s possible to look at these classic films in a completely different way.

This documentary, based on Neal Gabler’s bestseller, argues that the Jews “invented” Hollywood: They created a celluloid fantasy about family, patriotism, and romance out of their own wretched histories and desire for new lives— seeking also to reinvent themselves and erase their Jewish past. Using old footage, interviews with family members and film historians, including Gabler, we view familiar images and story lines in a new way, noting intriguing intersections between immigrant dreams and American bravado, the success of the little guy, and lifestyles of glamour and beauty.

Journal Questions: (1 page response for each) - Due

1) Give examples of how images we think of as quintessentially American may really originate in the Jewish immigrant experience. What elements of American culture enabled these fantasies to have such a powerful affect?

2) How “real” or “unreal” were the movie moguls’ lives. How much responsibility do you think they really owed their past? (Give a brief history of a few of the movie moguls: Warner Brothers, Wasserman, Selznick, Mayer, Goldwyn, Laemmle, etc.)

3) What do events in the moguls’ final period reveal about social/ political forces in America? How are today’s mogul’s Geffen, Katzenberg, Kerkorian, Spielberg, Zanuck, Redstone, Murdoch similar to the Supreme Hollywood Rulers of yesterday?

(Keep in mind that today’s executives hold the power to "greenlight" a film - effectively taking it out of development and into production. However, this power can have a cost. Because of the volatile nature of the industry, many executives may not stay long in their posts. The film industry is a constantly shifting thing and is viewed by some as a business of interdependencies where no one is thinking long-term. It is not a monumental, one-way system.)

A Personal Journey with Martin
Scorsese Through American Movies

Martin Scorsese is one of the few modern American directors whose films can stand alongside the cinema's greats - Griffith, Murnau, Capra, Hitchcock, Welles, Bergman, Fellini. Each name conjures up a personalized window on the world, a unique approach to storytelling and often innovative cinematic techniques. So it is only fitting that Scorsese traces the impact of these film masters on his own work in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995). In this documentary, he cites the films and filmmakers who first made him want to watch movies and later become a film director.

Along with Scorsese's narration, A Personal Journey uses clips and interviews to create something of a scrapbook of the director's life at the movies. As Scorsese puts it, "I've chosen to highlight some of the films that colored my dreams, that changed my perceptions and in some cases even my life. Films that prompted me for better or for worse, to become a filmmaker myself." And most of the time, these films are not the ones frequently exalted in Hollywood documentaries (the blockbusters, the Academy Award winners). Scorsese is instead fascinated by movies with a clear directorial independence and non-traditional filmmakers, particularly "the ones who circumvented the system to get their vision on the screen."

To most moviegoers, the Scorsese world is inherently a New York story full of tough guys and gangsters, as depicted in his most memorable films: Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980) and Goodfellas (1990). And so, it would seem that his formative movie experiences fed on similar stories. But Scorsese's canvas also covers an impressive cinematic range, from religious controversy in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) to the lush period romance The Age of Innocence (1993) to the big band musical drama New York, New York (1977). And A Personal Journey follows the director down this road, exploring not only the gangster film, but also the Western and the musical. It takes a look, through Scorsese's eyes, at what he calls the Director's Dilemma, the continuing struggle between directorial vision and Hollywood commerce. And examines the Director as Storyteller, as Illusionist , as Smuggler and as Iconoclast. Janet Maslin of the New York Times called A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, "a film course with one of the world's greatest teachers."

The first segment, Director's Dilemma, features interviews with Billy Wilder and Frank Capra, who expresses his idea of "one man, one film" -- the belief that the director should be solely in charge of his movie's destiny. But, not every director was comfortable with Capra's "name above the title" freedom. As Scorsese explains, many directors (like Clarence Brown and Michael Curtiz) managed to thrive within the studio system. And others, like Vincente Minnelli, even needed the collaborative influences around him, especially the producer-director relationship, to develop. In the Director as Storyteller section, Scorsese explores three quintessential American genres: the Western with clips from John Ford directing John Wayne in Stagecoach (1939); the Gangster movie from its early roots in Regeneration (1915) to The Roaring Twenties (1939), which Scorsese sites as a major influence on Goodfellas; and the Musical with numbers from 42nd Street (1933) and My Dream is Yours (1949), which inspired Scorsese's New York, New York.

The Director as Illusionist traces the history of film through technical changes (sound, color, widescreen) and developing techniques (dissolves, tracking shots), to create as Scorsese says, "a new language based on images rather than words." Featured clips include D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), both versions of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments(1923 and 1956), Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and Kubrick's 2001 (1968). Also interviewed is George Lucas, who discusses the way digital effects have changed epic filmmaking. The Director as Smuggler focuses on the world of B-movies, film noir and 50s genres where subtext became part of the story. And directors like Fritz Lang, Aldo Ray and Sam Fuller, who managed to sneak in political or social issues by disregarding the rules all together.

Finally, the Director as Iconoclast looks at the maverick directors from Griffith and von Stroheim to Kubrick and Cassavetes who openly defied Hollywood. Well known cinema rebel Orson Welles explains that he "always liked Hollywood very much. It just wasn't reciprocated." Other interviews feature discussions with Elia Kazan on Brando in On the Waterfront (1954) and Arthur Penn on the desensitized violence of Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

A Personal Journey ends there. Scorsese is not yet ready to take an objective look at his contemporaries and peers. But what the documentary does offer is a reverence for movie making that today's film students, hopefuls and all movie lovers can learn from. And it leaves you wanting to know more. As Scorsese tells students who ask why they should study the classics, "do what painters used to do. Study the old masters. Enrich your palette. Expand the canvas. There's always so much more to learn."

Monday, September 21st and Tuesday, September 22nd

Unit 1: Structure/Story/Form

FILM: Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige"

Set against the backdrop of turn-of-the-century London, "The Prestige" is a mysterious story of two magicians whose intense rivalry leads them on a life-long battle for supremacy -- full of obsession, deceit and jealousy with dangerous and deadly consequences. From the time that they first met as young magicians on the rise, Robert Angier and Alfred Borden were competitors. However, their friendly competition evolves into a bitter rivalry making them fierce enemies-for-life and consequently jeopardizing the lives of everyone around them.

Observations on Film Art
The Prestige
by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=3878

The Prestige

View more presentations from jamarch.

Friday, September 18th-

*Last day to hand in "Watching Rated R Films"
contract signed by parents.

*Film Intro/Credits - Best Opening
Sequence Notes (Handout DUE TODAY!

*PLOT-O-MATIC Web Assignment DUE TODAY!

SCREENING:BMW FILMSShort Movies
The Hire Film Series

_____________________________________________________________________________________
Thursday, September 17th-

*Continue watching Film Introductions - Credits - Best Opening Sequences
Take notes on Handout.

Film Clips:

Dawn Of The Dead Intro
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Raising Arizona
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Wednesday, September 16th-

*Quarter I Seating Chart "

*REVIEW - How to read a film -(Handout)

*Begin watching Film Introductions - Credits - Best Opening Sequences
Take notes on Handout.

Film Clips:

Blade Runner (Opening Titles) Original Version - 1982
Apocalypse Now: Opening Scene
Once Upon A Time in the West - Opening Scene

_____________________________________________________________________________________
Tuesday, September 15th-

Film Review Due Today (see handout for details)

I. Creating A Film Plot
http://www.maddogproductions.com/plotomatic.htm
Click on the link above to navigate to the PLOT-O-MATIC web

Use the web site to create your own film plot. Just pick out the characters and plot elements
you want to include in your movie. When you're happy with your choices, hit LIGHTS! CAMERA!
ACTION! and voila! A plot pitch you can take to the bank!

Assignment due Friday September 19, 2009

II. Watch quick Montage of the "History of Special Effects" and
Studio Daily CGI Demonstration.

___________________________________________________________________________________
Monday, September 14th-

*REVIEW "Film Studies Syllabus"(handout)

FIRST WEEK ACTIVITIES

IceBreaker: Movie's Little Questions

Out on that first date? At a loss for a way to fill up those long silent moments? Try asking your date some of these questions. Afterall, if they can't talk about movies there is probably no future in the relationship anyway. Better to find out now before you get too attached.

The movie that I saw most recently (and loved)

The movie that I saw most recently (and hated)

A movie that was most like my life

A movie I would want to own the soundtrack for

The best movie ever made

A movie that takes my breath away

A movie I would stand in line to see

A movie I can watch again and again

The funniest movie I have ever seen

The saddest movie I have ever seen

The most romantic movie I have ever seen

The most action packed movie I have ever seen

A movie that I would like to star in

A movie I would like to direct

A movie I would like to do the special effects for

A movie I would never take children to see

A movie that kept me awake all night

A movie that never should have been made

A movie that put me to sleep

A movie I would take all of my friends to see

A movie that I remember from my childhood

A movie that reminded me of school

A movie that reminded me of my childhood

A movie that I was absolutely dragged to

A movie that I want to see as soon as possible

A movie that had the best lines

A movie that did not live up to my expectations

A movie that exceeded my expectations

A movie that I regret having seen

FILM STUDIES