Self-Evaluation

First of all, I want to say I really enjoyed this class, and I learned a lot of interesting things about cinema. In respect to my postings, I completed all of them and in time, except for two or three of them. I replied one of every kind of posting and I did it respectfully. I think my postings have a good quality, especially the ones I did during the first half of the semester. I believe I would give my Film Viewing Journal an A. I hope everyone will have a great summer.

Quentin Tarantino's Use of Crime

In his movies, Quentin Tarantino presents crimes as normal events that have to be done to keep walking forward in a gangster life or work. For example, in Reservoir Dogs, at the end of the movie, in the scene where a Mexican stand-up happens, everyone aims their pistols on their partners as if it was a normal event to do such a thing. They finished killing each other. They fired each other as if it was nothing to kill a partner. After the incident with the police, Mr. Pink suggests to find the rat of the group and kill him. He says this because it is something they have to do to keep walking forward. If they know who is the rat they are going to kill him, it is just business.
Other examples are presented in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown. In Pulp Fiction, Bruce Willis kills John Travolta to keep himself alive. And Samuel Jackson and John Travolta kill many people because of business. In Jackie Brown, Samuel Jackson tries to kill everyone that could make him fall down. He does this because of business.
Tarantino also presents crimes as ways in which the people who commit them have fun. Two great examples that show this are the torture scene, in Reservoir Dogs, and the scene where Samuel Jackson is raped, in Pulp Fiction. In both scenes, the people who are committing the atrocities are having fun. In Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Blonde dances and sings during the torture. And in Pulp Fiction, we can hear the policeman saying phrases that make us know he is having fun.

Analysis of Violence in Reservoir Dogs

In their movies, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino have different approaches to violence, and present the gangster life in different ways. Scorsese's movies present the gangster life in a more realistic way. Tarantino makes the scenes where violence occurs to see not so realistic, we can’t even watch them explicitly; imagination takes an important part there; this will be explained more detailed as this posting progresses.
Tarantino always leaves violence free to the imagination. The scenes, where violent acts are committed, are arranged in a way that make the audience feel a mix of emotions while watching them. An example that represents this is the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs. In this scene, Mr. Blonde cuts the policeman's face, near the left eye, with a pocketknife or a razor, and then he tears out the policeman's right ear. At first, Mr. Blonde is dancing and singing. Then at the moment he is going to cut the policeman the camera moves out and we never see the act; we imagine it. Then the camera moves back again to the policeman and he has not his right ear.
On the other hand, Scorsese shows explicitly the violent acts in his movies. He does not leave violence free to the imagination; he makes you sense it in a more realistic way. A great example that supports this is, in Casino, the beating Joe Pesci and his brother receive at the “holes.” There, Scorsese makes us watch each hit that those two gangsters received, how they are beaten almost to death, and then how they are buried alive.

Martin Scorsese's Ideology

Scorsese presents being a gangster as a part of life. They are good or bad people, it does not matter, they are just people. He does not concentrate in this act of classification, of being gangsters, between good or bad but in how is their life and what they are searching for. Goodfellas is a movie about how a specific gangster begins this type of life and tries to rise himself up to the top. The most important thing, that a gangster needs, to accomplish this, is respect. To be respected by others gives you power. To achieve this, gangsters do whatever they can. Again, it is not about being good or bad, it is about power and how to gain it. Once a gangster gains respect he will have power to do whatever he want.
In Scorsese’s movies, Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and Casino, he also shows the other side of being a gangster. Gangsters can not make any mistake. Because if they do they will get killed by other gangsters without them thinking it twice. This is what happens to Joe Pesci in Goodfellas and in Casino. In Goodfellas, he kills a made man, a man that can not be touched because of the respect he has gained. In Casino, he also tries to jump this line of respect and gets killed. In Mean Streets, the main characters get also killed because they did not pay a debt and were disrespectful to another gangster.
This is what Scorsese tries to say about gangsters in his movies. A gangster can get power by gaining respect but he can also get killed in any moment by another gangster that is also looking for power.

Genre Analysis of Goodfellas

The movie Goodfellas fits within the genre of crime film, and more specifically within the subgenre of mafia/gangster film. Many facts support this statement. The first noticeable thing that makes this statement true is the setting of the movie. Many of the movie's scenes take place in bars. In those bars, the people are always smoking, drinking, and making jokes, as if they have no reason to be worried. In most of these scenes, the gangsters fight, and in some of them someone dies.
Other facts that makes the movie fit within this subgenre is that there is always violence and drugs involved, respect, and family-like treatment.
Respect is the word, the most important term when we are talking about mafia and its hierarchy. In Goodfellas, Paulie is the head of the mafia and everybody respects him. He doesn’t have to move a finger. Everybody do as he says, and if they don’t they get instantly killed. Respect is what every gangster looks for. In the movie we see the life of a specific guy as he passes through his gangster life. He, the protagonist, as the movie progresses, is constantly looking for respect, working for it, which is definitely power.
And finally, we can see the family-like treatment the mafia members give to each other. But when we are talking about gangsters, you can’t make any mistake. As soon as a gangster feels that you aren’t a reliable person or they doubt of your intentions you are eliminated from the equation. Goodfellas presents the gangster just like this. They treat each other as if they were a family but as soon as you make a mistake you are a dead man. This is what Robert DeNiro did with everyone that could make him go down.

Meaning in Taxi Driver

I really liked this movie. In it, we can clearly see that Kubrick’s style and Scorsese’s style are different. Taxi Driver is a very interesting movie. We can make many interpretations of the movie’s meanings.

Travis, the movie’s protagonist, was relieved of active duty, in the Marine Corps, through the method of honorable discharge; apparently, because he is mentally unstable. He lives in New York City, working as a taxi driver. In the movie, this place is all messed up. Everyone wants a big change instantly and it’s impossible to achieve, so people gives up and doesn’t do anything to improve the city. Travis gets tired of this. He goes out to make a difference. He saves a twelve-year-old girl’s life, killing her pimp and chiefs. He makes use of violence to save her, but he doesn’t think of this as a crime. It doesn’t matter if he has to use violence to achieve this purpose. Anyways, this was what the Marine Corps taught him. The Marine Corps teaches the marines, the country’s heroes, to use violence to protect their country. He is acting just as that, as a country protector.

Travis didn’t like the world in which he lived, but he didn’t do anything to change it at the beginning. What made him go out and kill those guys? I believe that even do he was mentally unstable his most strongly motivation was his love disappointment. We can interpret that Scorsese is telling us that love is a necessity and loosing it can make someone’s mind to get unstable or more unstable than it is already as in Travis’s case.

Filming the Mean Streets

First of all, I want to say I didn’t like this movie. It just didn’t impress me.

One of the most noticeable differences between Kubrick’s and Scorsese’s style of work is the use of acting.

In “Mean Streets,” the actors perform their work more freely than they do in Kubrick’s movies. Scorsese seems to leave room for improvisation in his movies. On the other hand, Kubrick doesn’t let escape any detail in his works. He has everything meticulously planned; and he makes the actors act the way he want them to do, so his plans can’t “fail.”

Scorsese uses acting in a more realistic way than Kubrick does. This is another way in which the use of acting of both directors differs. In “Mean Streets,” the fight scenes are examples that prove this criterion. In these scenes, the actors perform a bunch of drunken people fighting; and they look exactly like that, drunken people having a fight between drunken people. They just throw punches randomly and walk like drunken people do. These fights aren’t presented in the same way as they are presented traditionally in movies. In Kubrick’s movies, acting is perfectly executed, it is an art. We can’t expect anything different from Kubrick. He is a perfectionist; everything has to be perfect and everything is.

Another noticeable fact that differ the style of work in Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” and in Kubrick’s movies is the type of message they present. Through his movies, Kubrick expresses his ideas and opinions about the world’s most controversial themes, at their time of release. In “Mean Streets,” Scorsese exposes what he saw everyday in the streets of Little Italy, where he lived when he was a boy.

Acting in Full Metal Jacket

First of all, I would like to say I liked the movie Full Metal Jacket. One main reason is that it exposes, as Joker said, a dualism in humanity. This dualism is about the lack of distinction between what’s fair and right.
The character I've selected for my analysis of the movie’s acting is Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence, played by Vincent D'Onofrio. I believe this actor was a very good choice for this role. One main reason is that the character's traits went very well with the actor's strengths. At first, he was playing the role of a stupid person who didn't know anything at all, and that couldn't follow either the instructions given by Gunnery Sergeant Hartman or the other soldiers in their training. He fitted the physical requirements perfectly for this role. He is a heavy man, and I think he can really portray an idiot very well. But he can also make a psychopathic face. The character this actor performed changed completely at some point in the movie. He changed from being a stupid soldier to a psychopathic one.
I believe these kinds of changes in the character's personality, interests, and emotions are very difficult to perform, even by a famous actor. I think Vincent D’Onofrio performed it pretty well. He really looked like a psycho killer in the character's second "phase". He absolutely convinced me about the character's change.
Kubrick selected this movie's actors with discernment. Acting in this movie help made the audience feel the reality that, in all its aspects, soldiers had to live before and during wars.

Sound in A Clockwork Orange

First of all, I believe the film was very interesting. The way the director presented the story was formidable.
The scene I selected was the one where the former protagonist‘s friends “taught” him a lesson. They sank his face into the water, while they were beating him at the same time, to make him lose his breath. A mix of sounds was integrated into the scene. He mainly used two types of sounds, one with a low pitch and one with a high pitch. The sounds with the high pitch were music sounds (sound special effects) incorporated as if they were evoked by each of the hits the protagonist received, while the sound with the low pitch was the laughing of the boy who was sinking the protagonist’s head into the water. According to the director’s desires, this mix of sounds was put in to provoke certain reactions in the audience and to accentuate the action occurring there and emphasizing its meaning. The high pitch sounds helped the audience feel the intensity experienced by the protagonist, an approximation to death, while the laughing was put there to show the sadism and madness in those boys’ minds.
Another fact I’d like to mention is that those boys were police officers. A social problem that is still current was presented in this scene. It is an example of how people take advantage and abuse their power for their own satisfaction. It’s an irony, police (law enforcers)-dishonesty, presented by the director in the movie.

Editing in 2001: A Space Odyssey

The scenes I selected were the ones at the end of the film; where we saw Dave growing old at a rapid rate. First of all, the director began with an establishing shot. With this shot he showed the audience the setting of the next scenes. In these scenes, the director followed the 1800 rule. The camera positioning and the camera movements were impeccable. The camera never passed through the axis of action maintaining the spatial and temporal relationships between the shots, making it impossible for the audience to get lost.
The overall rhythm was established by the director in an excellent way. The duration and frequency of these shots were suitable enough to fulfill the requirements of the content curve. Each shot lasted the time needed for the audience to absorb the information provided in them. The director also used ellipsis, shot/reverse shot and point-of-view editing. He utilized and combined these techniques to present jumps of stages of Dave’s aging. With this, he skipped the necessity of presenting time linearly and continuously, making it easier to portray his aging. Using point-of-view editing, the author showed us what each Dave was watching in each stage and his subjective view.
In conclusion, the director combined all of these techniques with the purpose of giving his shots their due importance in the movie.

Cinematography in Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove is a very peculiar comedy, since it’s black comedy, and I’m not accustomed to it. I disliked it, even though it made me laugh in some occasions.

The scenes of the movie I selected are the ones taken inside the plane. In these scenes the director desired to take the shots in a particular way, with pan shots. This kind of approach was very useful to capture certain shots and to vary what had been the norm in these scenes which had been close-up shots. With this technique the director was able to move the camera more freely and insert the viewer into the scenes in a very vivid way. In addition, it also allowed the viewer to really feel the tension presented in the air.

Another tool or method well-employed by the director was lighting. He used various types of illumination during the movie. These types of lighting effects were utilized with different purposes. As examples, he used back lighting in some scenes: some with the general who ordered the airplanes to attack Russia and others with another general, the one that favored the “war” as a means to solve problems (who also differed and debated with the President). These dark ways of thinking and intentions were projected to us more clearly or obviously with this effect of back lighting. The director also used complete darkness with Dr. Strangelove. He did this to give the audience the impression that they’re in front of a character who possesses a darkly mysterious mind.

Mise-en-scene in Lolita: The Drive-In

The scene I chose was the one where the characters are watching a horror movie at the drive-in. Throughout the scene, the filmmaker establishes the characters’ desires and intentions. He achieves this by using certain elements, for example: showing the reaction of the characters to the movie they were watching. The movie accomplishes this, by providing frightening sounds and images, which the characters use as excuses for making physical contact with each other in a more “accepted” way.
The filmmaker also uses lighting to make us notice the characters’ desires. There is a poor external light source that passes through the windows while the characters wear dark clothing. This lack of light makes the contrast easier between the characters’ clothes and their hands and faces, adding importance to the movement of their hands and expressions. Both women take hold of Humbert’s hands, thus highlighting their desires towards him. Then, Humbert displays his own interests by letting go of Charlotte’s grip. Later in the movie her rejection-fueled despair drives her to an accidental death, which proves that this scene gives us information of what is going to happen as the movie moves on. Further exposing himself, he puts his free hand on top of Lolita’s. This excess gives us a clue of what will later transform itself into Humbert’s uncontrollable obsession for Lolita. This scene is filled with foreboding, as it provides a general feeling of what the characters’ attitudes toward each other will become as the film progresses.