"So noir...so noir..."

Honestly, if it wasn’t for this class, I don’t think I would like or appreciate this movie as much as a do. I have a feeling that I would have watched the movie, judged it on the fact that it was made in the early 1990s, hated the ending, and called it a terrible movie. However, knowing what kind of movie it is (film noir) and discussing some of the themes and messages the director was trying to convey helped open my eyes to some of the other aspects of movie making and looking a little bit past the plot, effects, and ending for a good movie.

In summary, The Player is about a movie executive – very close to losing his job - that starts receiving threatening and blackmailing postcards and messages. In his anger and anxiousness to end this harassment, he accidentally murders a writer whom he thought the messages were coming from only to find that he killed the wrong man. He starts becoming a darker, soul-less person as the movie progresses and he tries to cover up his murder. Finally, he ends up keeping his job, marrying the widow of the person he killed, and getting away with the murder that everyone knows he committed.

We talked about a lot of the different cinematic aspects of this movie which makes it good. First of all, this was a film noir movie. It’s a dark depiction of the movie industry. It shows the evil, conniving, and, often, selfish motives of the writers, directors, and executives that make movies we all enjoy. The movie plot was very dark and the ending elicits an uneasy feeling. Some of the icons that let me know this was a suspenseful film noir were the dark, shady bar that leads to the murder scene and the alley way where the murder was committed. I did not automatically think film noir, but it started to click as the movie continued. Also, The Player is a good satire of the movie industry; it shows the lack of creativity and substance in Hollywood and the selfishness of many of the people involved in making movies. I thought it was funny that almost every movie pitch was either a sequel to another movie or a blend of two completely different movies. I also liked how every writer wanted to use either Bruce Willis or Julia Roberts as their leads because they knew the audience loved those actors. Moreover, I thought the cinematography was pretty creative. There were two things that struck me as creative in this movie. First, the use of the famous movie posters to allude to the plot of the movie and give the viewer an idea of how to feel about the movie was interesting. It was blatant and bold and the first time I’ve noticed anything like that in a movie (now I’m curious to see how often directors do this). Second, there are a few scenes where the sound and focus shift from something in the foreground to something in the background, vice versa. I liked that a lot. It was very striking, especially in the opening scene (which was an amazing single shot).

Overall, I liked this movie. Like the ones before, it was very eye-opening for me.

More Action!!!

We started off class by watching a couple short, low-budget films, so we could get an idea of the type of final products we could potentially produce with our resources. I really enjoyed the minesweeper video because I know a lot of people that were (probably still are) addicted to minesweeper, and I thought it was clever for them to portray minesweeper as a war movie. I think those short films were very inspiring in helping us develop our idea and understand that we could still make a very good movie even with our limited experience and resources.

Our movie is starting to take a lot of form. Now that we have the storyboard complete, we have an idea of the important scenes and desired camera scenes for each scene. We have a better understanding of the flow events, what scenes we need to emphasize, and what scenes we brainstormed but would not work out for the movie. Right now, we’re getting our actors together, finalizing our script, and getting a better idea of how the actual shooting process will go once we have the cameras on location. First, find our actors. We have two more characters that need to be confirmed, our main character and our main antagonist. For our protagonist, I think our group all envisions a regular student who has to endure exaggerated and extraordinary circumstances. I think it’s very important that they seem like a normal student so that our audience can easily identify with him (her maybe??? Lol). I don’t want to say much about the casting of our antagonist because I think that will be a nice surprise, but I hope we can get him confirmed. Our script is relatively short because this movie focuses more on the actions rather than the conversations, so I think that will be finished this week.

In my opinion, our movie is coming together very well, and I am very excited to start shooting. I kind of see this movie being something similar to Red Eye (yeah, the movie with Rachel McAdams!!!) in that this movie is more about the running, the stress of being rushed, unexpected occurrences, suspense etc. instead of having explosions, big fight scenes, ninjas etc.

Blow-Out!

Blow-Out was a completely different movie from the previous two that we’ve watched in class. This movie was made in the 1980s rather than the 1950s, so the production value was much closer to movies we are used to. Blow-Out is about a sound man, Jack Terry, happening upon an attempt to frame a congressman who is running for president. The framing goes wrong and the congressman is killed, and Jack Terry is the only one of the few witnesses that is willing to tell the truth despite a conspiracy to keep the murder from becoming public knowledge.

I was not very impressed by the actors (though they were not terrible actors) as much as I was by the cinematography of the movie. As Donna said the director, Brian De Palma, was very “ballsy” in this movie. He knew what shots he wanted, what emotion each shot would convey, and how to captivate the viewer very well. And that’s what he did. One of the shots I enjoyed from the movie was in the scene where Jack loses the video of the incident and realizes that someone has erased all his tapes. The camera turns completely around the room a couple of times with Jack in the shot looking in different shelves and all over the room looking for a tape that hasn’t been erased. That scene captures the exact feeling of frustration, agitation, and excitement you get when you lose something. I saw that scene and right away thought about times where I’ve lost things and the feeling and emotion was very similar to what was on screen. I also liked the shot right after. If I’m not mistaken (because it has been almost a week), it’s a birds-eye-view of the room as Jack Terry walks out and you see the tapes and stuff scattered across the room just to show how frantic Jack was. There were a few chase scenes but I’m pretty sure they were car scenes so I don’t think it will help in our movie. However, this movie is inspiring in that it encourages me to analyze my scenes and try different ways to invoke the emotions of the characters and tones in the scenes.

I enjoyed the visual aspects of the movie as well as the overall theme. I think this movie said a lot about American’s and our attitude and culture. It depicted American’s as a whole as being very oblivious to some of the things that occur in government and politics. And I can completely identify with that. It’s crazy to think, but there are things going on every day within our government, military, even schools that we don’t and might never know about. I thought the fact that there was that bell ceremony occurring during the conspiracy sort of emphasized that obliviousness and that feeling of false safety. Moreover, the fact that Jack ends up using the scream of Sally dying in his horror film exemplifies the cold-heartedness and lack of sympathy in American movie makers. I remember asking myself why was that scream so important and having that question linger throughout the movie, so I thought it was clever that De Palma (or most likely the writer) had the scream at the end. I thought that was a powerful way of stress one of the overall themes of the movie. The two themes of obliviousness and a self-centered mentality are related because it says that Americans are very self-oriented and are more concerned about self improvement. Thought this movie doesn’t place Americans in a good light, it does convey those themes very strongly. It’s a good movie in my book…