The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Birdman is truly a unique experience. Birdman wrenches the viewer through the scenes visually as well as emotionally. The viewer is pulled back the curtain into the life of Riggan Thomson a man in the middle of a major mid life crises financially and emotionally. The audience is slowly filled in on how Thomson got into the position of his shattered state of life all while looking over the shoulder, hovering around or looking through the very lens of Michael Keaton’s character. Thompson, who it becomes very apparent from the first scene is already emotionally weathered is pouring all he has left in his life into his Broadway play an adaptation of a short story on love by Raymond …show more content…
Thomson has wrapped up all the meaning in his life to how he is viewed by the outside world and when that is suddenly stripped away from him after the final installment in the birdman franchise his life comes to a punishing halt. Through his direction of his Broadway play he finds growth as a person and begins to rebuild the relationships with those who are close to him including his ex-wife and daughter who he has been largely removed from for most of his adult life. His daughter begins to help his transition to a modern actor as she begins to open doors of communication through modern day social media promotion after Thompson has shut them all out of his life due to his recent missteps and shortcomings. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film birdman uses poignant audio, visual, and rhetorical techniques to give the viewer a first hand look at what it looks and feels like to rebuild …show more content…
The ending of the film is a topic of debate even between the most well reasoned viewers. As there is a good amount of foreshadowing to Thomson’s attempts at suicide during the low point in his life and the film ends with his daughter looking over the edge to which it appears that if Thomson jumped but it is debated weather he actually fell to the ground or rose up in taking the shape of his superhero character thus completing Thomson’s full transformation. Thomson mentioned his constant attempts to commit suicide to his ex-wife including his failed attempt to shoot himself during the final performance of his play. This ending fits perfectly with the film, as it is completely consistent with the intellectual level that the film displays
For this assignment we were asked to review a movie. I choose to analyze the movie Fried Green Tomatoes from 1991. This movie has many lessons hidden inside, but also has a story of a story. It starts off with a woman named Evelyn Couch going to visit her husband’s bitter aunt, and turns into the daily visits to another member of that house. This woman’s name is Ninny Threadgood, and she always has wonderful stories to tell Evelyn. At first, she seems unsure of this elderly woman’s presence, but opens up quickly. These two ladies have a connection, and Evelynn’s prospective of life soon changes. Ninny tells her stories all along, but in the end it reveals that Ninny was really talking about her life in the past. Evelyn was going through a rough patch in her life, and visiting this woman was all she needed to make some changes. She changed her diet, knocked out a wall in the house, stood up for herself, and changed her
The two films Psycho and The Birds, both directed by Alfred Hitchcock, share similar themes and elements. These recurring themes and elements are often prevalent in many of Hitchcock’s works. In Psycho and The Birds, Hitchcock uses thematic elements like the ideal blonde woman, “the motherly figure”, birds, and unusual factors that often leave the viewer thinking. Hitchcock’s works consist of melodramatic films, while also using pure cinema to help convey messages throughout the film.
In The Pathos of Failure, Thomas Elsaesser explains the emergence of a new ideology within American filmmaking, which reflects a “fading confidence in being able to tell a story” (280) and the dissolution of psychologically relatable, goal-oriented characters. He elaborates that these unmotivated characters impede the “the affirmative-consequential model of narrative [which] is gradually being replaced by another, whose precise shape is yet to crystallize” (281). Christian Keathley outlined this shape in more detail in Trapped in the Affection Image, where he argued that shifting cultural attitudes resulted in skepticism of the usefulness of action (Keathley). In Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, this crisis of action is a key element of the main characters’ failure, because it stifles the execution of classical narrative and stylistic genre conventions.
It is a concurrent agreement in the film industry that Alfred Hitchcock is nothing less than a legend when it comes to the suspense and thriller genres of film. That being said, many filmmakers unsurprisingly aspire to adopt his style in more recent films. Movie critique Andrew O’Hehir suspects that this is the case with Mark Pellington’s production, Arlington Road, which follows the story of a man taken with the idea that his neighbors are terrorists. Although Pellington’s production possesses distinctively Hitchcock-styled qualities in its editing, storyline, and themes, O’Hehir argues that it is “…ultimately just another maddeningly ill-conceived tribute placed at [Hitchcock’s] feet.” However, it cannot be determined if Pellington meant for Arlington Road to be a tribute at all. The film may have a multitude of resemblances to Hitchcock film, but its finale fundamentally distinguishes itself unique to O’Hehir’s assumption.
November 1998, written for FILM 220: Aspects of Criticism. This is a 24-week course for second-year students, examining methods of critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation. The final assignment was simply to write a 1000-word critical essay on a film seen in class during the final six-weeks of the course. Students were expected to draw on concepts they had studied over the length of the course.
The movie “Breaking Away” presents the story of a young man from working class origins who seeks to better himself by creating a persona through which he almost, but not quite, wins the girl. The rivalry between the townies and the college students sets the scene for the story of four friends who learn to accept themselves as they "break away" from childhood and from their underdog self-images.
In many of the works we have read this year, there have been many critiques to the Chinese Communist ideals. These works solely critique the ideals of communism, and promote change in the way that it is implemented in life. The movie “Blue Kite,” tries to show what life was like under the communist government in China. By showing the people the true agony and suffering during the regime, they hoped to change the ideas of many people about communism. While the majority of scholars and students believe that “Blue Kite” is solely a critique of communistic ideals in China, I believe that it is a promotion of more progressive and democratic ideas shown through the Chinese government emphasis on little to no family life, and the visual and metaphorical
Ethel Waters overcame a very tough childhood to become one of the most well known African American entertainers of her time. Her story, The Eye on the Sparrow, goes into great detail about her life and how she evolved from taking care of addicts to becoming the star of her own show. Ethel was born by her mother being raped at a young age. Her father, John Waters, was a pianist who played no role in Ethel’s life. She was raised in poverty and it was rare for her to live in the same place for over a year. Ethel never fit in with the rest of the crowd; she was a big girl, about five nine when she was a teenager, and was exposed to mature things early in her life. This is what helped shape Ethel to be the strong, independent woman she is.
The Classical Hollywood style, according to David Bordwell remains “bound by rules that set stringent limits on individual innovation; that telling a story is the basic formal concern.” Every element of the film works in the service of the narrative, which should be ideally comprehensible and unambiguous to the audience. The typical Hollywood film revolves around a protagonist, whose struggle to achieve a specific goal or resolve a conflict becomes the foundation for the story. André Bazin, in his “On the politique des auteurs,” argues that this particular system of filmmaking, despite all its limitations and constrictions, represented a productive force creating commercial art. From the Hollywood film derived transnational and transcultural works of art that evoked spectatorial identification with its characters and emotional investment into its narrative. The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor in 1940, is one of the many works of mass-produced art evolving out of the studio system. The film revolves around Tracy Lord who, on the eve of her second wedding, must confront the return of her ex-husband, two newspaper reporters entering into her home, and her own hubris. The opening sequence of The Philadelphia Story represents a microcosm of the dynamic between the two protagonists Tracy Lord and C.K. Dexter Haven, played by Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Through the use of costume and music, the opening sequence operates as a means to aesthetically reveal narrative themes and character traits, while simultaneously setting up the disturbance that must be resolved.
American Psycho is a savage account of a wealthy investment banker in the late 80s that commits heinous acts of murder, rape, and torture. Although on the surface, American Psycho seems as though it is just another horror story, it actually has a much deeper message. This story is a harsh critique of a superficial Wall Street society in the late 80s that was rampant with materialism and greed. This is the society in which the main character Patrick Bateman lives–where appearance, material possessions, and status define a person. This superficial existence leaves him hollow and dead inside and turns him into a psychopathic killer. A society such as this, devoid of any morality, inevitably creates psychopaths such as Bateman. The film shows an excellent portrayal of a vacant, nihilistic killer with no feelings or emotions. However, there is something more to the story that the film did not quite capture. The book seems to not only be a satirical take on this society, but a tragedy as well. Recreating the dinner scene with his secretary Jean shows that underneath the surface Patrick Bateman is, indeed, a human being with real feelings and emotions, and that it is a great tragedy that this superficial society has turned him into a monster.
Even aside from the ambiguity of what is real within the text of the film, Black Swan clearly presents imagery that goes beyond what is seen and experienced in our world. Based on Arnheim’s perspective, Black Swan is art because it experiments with the forms of color, sound, framing, and with editing of time and space. Application of his theories illuminates the ways in which these aspects of film effect viewers’ process of making sense of reality, and how that interpretive process can be intentionally altered. In this respect, any filmmaker who uses film’s formal elements to create and effectively communicate meaning over and above simply conveying what was in front of the camera at the time can be said to be creating art.
Think about your favorite movie. When watching that movie, was there anything about the style of the movie that makes it your favorite? Have you ever thought about why that movie is just so darn good? The answer is because of the the Auteur. An Auteur is the artists behind the movie. They have and individual style and control over all elements of production, which make their movies exclusively unique. If you could put a finger on who the director of a movie is without even seeing the whole film, then the person that made the movie is most likely an auteur director. They have a unique stamp on each of their movies. This essay will be covering Martin Scorsese, you will soon find out that he is one of the best auteur directors in the film industry. This paper will include, but is not limited to two of his movies, Good Fellas, and The Wolf of Wall Street. We will also cover the details on what makes Martin Scorsese's movies unique, such as the common themes, recurring motifs, and filming practices found in their work. Then on
Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a fantastic film that combines seemingly disparate ideas into a coherent theme and narrative. The theme that seems so prevalent in the film is the struggle to move on and find love and admiration. The movie tries to understand this struggle by asking the question of what defines art and whether Hollywood-like spectacle approach to art is a good thing. The film also faces the viewer with the internal conflict that these characters face when having two types of personalities on and off the stage. The movie conveys this theme through its use of cinematography, acting and production design.
Entrails torn from the body with bare hands, eyes gouged out with razor blades, battery cables, rats borrowing inside the human body, power drills to the face, cannibalism, credit cards, business cards, Dorsia, Testoni, Armani, Wall Street; all of these things are Patrick Bateman’s world. The only difference between Bateman and anybody else is what is repulsive to Bateman and what is repulsive to the rest of the world. Bateman has great interest in the upper class life, fashions, and social existence, but at the same time he is, at times, sickened by the constant struggle to be one up on everybody else. On the other hand Bateman’s nightlife reveals a side of him never seen during the day. Bateman is relaxed, impulsive, and confident while torturing and killing. He doesn’t have to worry about being better than anyone else. The only competition he has is his last victim. Torture and murder are the two true loves of Patrick Bateman.
A Beautiful Mind may have been developed to be a crowd-pleaser as well as a tear-jerker, because you know this is a man’s life without falsities. It is blatant and true, that’s all. This film proves that there are still instances when Hollywood-produced, big budget movies are worth a viewer's investment of time and money.