I chose the movie clip entitled “King Kong”. It’s from the movie “Training Day” starring Denzel Washington. Training Day is a movie that follows a corrupted detective’s day to day mischief as he schools a rookie cop. Training Day depicts a product of the matchup between screenwriter David Ayer, who grew up in South Central Los Angeles, and director Antoine Fuqua, who grew up on the rough side of Pittsburgh. Both Ayer and Fuqua are highly familiar with the highly intensified relationship between police and criminals.
From the moment you set eyes on him you can relies that Alonzo is a strong willed individual who demands respect from everyone he meets. Denzel's performance is absolutely captivating. He does an excellent job at portraying the character of Alonzo. Every scene he's in he gets the audience intrigued with his dominant personality and cocky attitude. Ethan Hawke (Jake Hoyt) provides excellent backup. Jake on the other hand is a wet behind the ears rookie narcotics cop who reports in to his first day of training. He has no inclination of the type of day awaiting him and soon thereafter learns he may have gotten himself into much more than he had bargained for.
The director Antoine Fuqua vision for this film was to bring that intense love-hate relationship onto the big screen and showcase it for the world to see. To ensure a convincing film setting, Fuqua shot on location in some of the most hardcore neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Fuqua also wanted to show the daily struggles of officers tasked to work in the rougher neighborhoods of cities and how easy it can be to get caught up in a street life filled with killers and drug dealers. Overall the film displayed the city of Los Angeles in a different perspective. One which m...
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...this scene an enraged Alonzo yells at a group of locals in a neighborhood in which he was once well respected and had power over everyone there. To his surprise the crown of people betray him by refusing to comply with his orders. Every element of the mise-en-scene work in harmony and well meticulously placed. The dark lighting, Alonzo frantic movements, the fact that Alonzo was in the center of crowd, and even the scene being set in the middle of a worn down project complex all play their parts in the mise-en-scene and presenting the filmmakers vision.
Overall, Training Day proved to send a powerful message and gave us a small glimpse of what is truly happening in our society. The film shows the effects that drugs and violence are having in our cities. Training Days takes us into world of crime where corruption is happening among our most trusted police officers.
As I mentioned earlier, the clutter in the Gunderson’s home does speak volumes about who they are as people. Well very proud and honest people, they are very flawed and blue collar. This clutter is continued on in the kitchen. The shelf behind the kitchen table is filled with pictures and other nick-nacks. This clutter is eerily reminiscent of the middle class household portrayed by the MacGuff’s in the film Juno. These families both are not going to make sure everything in their home is pristine, but their way of life is really not too uncommon. It really does embody a lot of blue collar America. Another good use of mise en scene in this sequence was the very gray and desolate skyline during the murder investigation. Murder obviously is not a light topic, so the dark atmosphere in the sky very much fits into the theme of this scene. The last thing I’d like to mention about mise en scene and staging takes me back to the opening zoom of this sequence. Along with the visual theatrics zoom, the sudden appearance of nondiegetic music also insinuates this is quite an important scene in the film. Once we hear the dramatic strings, we know something dramatic is about to happen, especially because the music is clearly not coming from something on the screen. This nondiegetic sound can be a useful tool to setting a scene and properly utilizing mise en scene and at the end of day, setting the scene is key in a naturalistic
Throughout our lives, it seems when we have no one else to help us, our most challenging problems occur leaving ourselves to use our wit and emotion to persevere. People can have test or a big game where we have teachers and coaches to help us prepare and succeed. However, in the movie, High Noon, a Marshall named Will Kane is faced with a challenge of an arriving Frank Miller looking to kill. In the short story, "The Most Dangerous Game", a hunger named Rainsford is deserted on a island after he fell off his yacht, and he would soon find out a sociopath with the unique taste for hunting down humans was out for him. With the two characters in these suspense-building products somewhat trapped we can take out many lessons and ideas from the action packed movie and short story. The movie, High Noon, and the short story, "The Most Dangerous Game, are alike and at the same time very different.
We have much to learn from Mike Davis, CITY OF QUARTZ (Vintage, 1992) who discusses the paradoxical effects that the representations of Los Angeles in hardboiled novels and their translation into film noir cinema had on the image and myth of that city.
The film that I saw during my History & Philosophy of Sports class was The Real Olympics which was released on August 3rd, 2004 by the PBS Video studio This film was about ancient history in how the games were played. In reality,” The Real Olympics sets out to demythologize the legendary sporting event by comparing and contrasting the ancient Greek games with their modern-day counterpart through archival footage and dramatic reenactments” (Real Olympics). This film that the instructor chose to show had a lot of significance to what he taught in the class specifically regarding to Greek athletes. Relating to the Greek’s character, it said during the film,” Winning is everything, losing did not matter.” Winning is the number one reason they
Aside from its acting, the other major influence which Mean Streets had upon American film-makers was through it's use of a rock n' roll soundtrack (almost perfectly integrated with the images), and in its depiction of a new kind of screen violence. Unexpected, volatile, explosive and wholly senseless, yet, for all that, undeniably cinematic violence. The way in which Scorsese blends these two - the rock and roll and the violence - shows that he understood instinctively, better than anyone else until then, that cinema (or at least this kind of cinema, the kinetic, visceral kind) and rock n' roll are both expressions of revolutionary instincts, and that they are as inherently destructive as they are creative. This simple device - brutal outbreaks of violence combined with an upbeat soundtrack - has been taken up by both the mainstream cinema at large and by many individual `auteurs', all of whom are in Scorsese's debt - Stone and Tarantino coming at once to mind.
Adapted from the novella written by James M. Cain, Double Indemnity is a melodramatic film noir that highlights the conflict its characters face through adultery and murder which develops from the dissatisfaction and alienation that arose in the era of modernity as shown in most noir films. Unlike most noir films, Double Indemnity set the bar in terms of structural themes to follow and elements that eventually came to be considered essential in the noir genre. The film was seen to be a full embodiment of what the genre should be. Double Indemnity is an archetypal noir film, which portrays noir elements through its style, the characters, its writers’ backstory and the history of Los Angeles, the city in which it is set. This essay will examine how Los Angeles is integrated not only into the location but also into the storyline of the characters and their motivations but also the filmmakers’ lives. It does this through characteristic noir motifs like “the urban cultural landscape, the lack of rootedness of the characters, and the self-deceptions that center their world” (p. 437) affect the protagonists in the film. Double Indemnity’s use of Los Angeles as its primary location exposes the innate decadence and decay of the city through film noir stylistic elements. Billy Wilder directed Double Indemnity and the film became the archetypal noir film because it embodied all the characteristics of a typical noir film, which include “claustrophobia, paranoia, despair and nihilism” (Place and Peterson, p. 327) course kit source. Los Angeles, the city used primarily as the location in the film becomes not merely a backdrop but a character in the film through its physical and implied characteristics. The context through the stories of Wild...
In the movie Dazed and Confused teen rebellion is exponentially dramatized, and through the films mise-en-scene the audience grasps the mood of the subject which reveals each of the characters and creates the overall theme of the movie.
...od and bad in life. Training Day scripted too much negativity into a movie that took place over only one day, and that is why it is not realistic.
Society is faced with various problems that hinder the development of its communities. These issues affect the society in a numerous of ways and has a major effect on the citizens of the community as well. Social adversities causes grief and is also the cause of crimes and other miscellaneous activities that occur in inequitable areas. In the film, Fruitvale Station, there are abundant amounts of these adversities and societal issues that are illustrated. Fruitvale Station is a great example of a film that shows accurate social issues that occur in today’s society. The movie demonstrates issues of inequality, racial prejudice, gang involvement and also unemployment. It also shows how the people who are forced to live with these issues, fight for survival to maintain to see another day.
The movie “Training Day” is a simple motif of good cop vs. bad cop. When rookie cop Jake Hoyt, Ethan Hawke, who is escorted by Alonzo Harris played by Denzel Washington through the city of Los Angeles to train his way as a narcotic unit. As the movie progresses Jakes impression of Alonzo was not the idea of being ‘hard’ on the streets, but a sense of corruption, where Jakes attempt to figure out what is justice and what crosses the line in order to protect the community.
New York City that is depicted in Taxi Driver seems to be too real to be true. It is a place where violence runs rampant, drugs are cheap, and sex is easy. This world may be all too familiar to many that live in major metropolitan areas. But, in the film there is something interesting, and vibrant about the streets that Travis Bickle drives alone, despite the amount of danger and turmoil that overshadows everything in the nights of the city. In the film “Taxi Driver” director Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader find and express a trial that many people face, the search for belonging and acceptance.
Fruitvale Station was a powerful, strong, and saddening movie for viewers globally. In January 2009, Oscar Cruz, was killed execution style by a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) officer, when he was both un-armed and handcuffed. The film displays a day in the life before, and the moment Oscar was killed. Oscar was a young, African American male whom was a son, boyfriend, and father. The movie displayed the positive, and negatives aspects of Oscar’s choices in his life. He was not a saint; however, he had a big heart. The movie showed Oscar going through the struggle of losing his job at a grocery store, and contemplating selling drugs again. Oscar has a flashback of when he was in jail, and throws a bag of weed into the ocean. He and his girlfriend are arguing, fighting, and then making up. They take their daughter to a party, and he picks up his mom a birthday card. Essentially, the movie displays that Oscar Grant is a real person, who faces the same struggles many of us do regardless of our race. He loves his family, argues with his significant other, makes up with significant other, cherishes his daughter, loses his job, struggles with money, give stranger’s advice and is continually looking to change for a better, happier life. In this portion of the movie, there is a keen focus on showing viewers who...
New York circa 1950 to 1960, when the film would take place, was full of gang violence and juvenile delinquents. Arthur Laurents, and Leonard Bernstein had been meeting up, trying to collaborate on a work which would end up falling through. Spying a Los Angeles Times headline on gang violence in 1955 be...
Mise-en-scéne is something that we see in movies all the time. It’s translated from French and means the staging the different aspects of a movie such as setting, lighting, subjects, or almost anything else. Any common movie, such as Inside Out, shows Mise-en-snéne in it. Three big parts of Mise-en-scéne that are shown in the movie Inside Out are cinematography, sound, and editing. Inside Out uses all of these by describing a plot in which there are feelings in our brains which connect to different memories that we can remember at any time. There were five main emotions that controlled the person on the outside whose name was Riley. The five emotions were named, Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness. They helped Riley as she moved away from
This movie takes place in Los Angeles and is about racial conflicts within a group of people which occur in a series of events. Since there are a wide variety of characters in this movie, it can be confusing to the viewer. In the plot, Graham is an African-American detective whose younger brother is a criminal. His mother cares more about his brother than Graham and she wants Graham to bring his brother back home, which in turn hurts Graham. Graham?s partner Ria is a Hispanic woman who comes to find that her and Graham?s ethnicities conflict when she had sex with him. Rick is the Los Angeles district attorney who is also op...