Get a Life

I am telling you to get a life because if you spend so much time on the internet that you found this page and bothered to read it, then you need to get a life. This is not a well known page. This blog was made as a school asignment for art of film, and all those comments were from people who were asigned to comment on classmates blogs. Why did you even bother to read this? Just go outside and play or something. Quit sitting on your fat ass and go do something. Now you may ask why I made this blog page in the middle of the summer. I made this blog post so that this account dose not get purged by an anti-spambot program. I am worried that if this stays idle for too long, I might need to go through the process of setting up a new blog account again. After I type up this page though, I am going out to mow the lawn. That is outside where other real people are. Also I think I will get a camera so my Youtube page does not get deleted. I need more views so please go to my Youtube page if you do not go outside.

Wes "Crazy" Anderson

Wes Anderson is awesome! Anderson gives his characters crazy personalities. These personalities are mild enough that the characters in his movies could remind people of their friends. (I wonder if they remind my friends of me). The characters in his movies are not too crazy to live and function in the real world. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is an amazing example of the insanity of Anderson’s stories and characters. The Life Aquatic is a movie about marine biologists who are trying to get revenge on a shark. (I know it is nuts). The team in that movie works very strangely. Everyone gets a Glock, but the interns share one among each other. There is also a guy from the banking company who is just referred to as “the stooge”. The Bill Murray character is so casual about everything. If you click here you can see review that summarizes the characters and the craziness of the movie. The Life Aquatic has a cartoon like visual style. When they show the shark, it is all done by cartoon animation. The computers and other high tech gear they have comes from the 1980’s.
If I show this to the next generation of people, they might think this movie was from the 1980’s or early 90’s because I saw no sign of any technology from the 2000’s. None of the animation looks any more sophisticated than the animation in the Simpsons. This style helps make the crazy ship crew feel more acceptable in the world created by the film.
After seeing The Life Aquatic, I have come to the conclusion that, Akira Kurosawa is to Toshio Mifune as Wes Anderson is to Owen Wilson. Owen Wilson is in most of Wes Anderson’s movies. In Bottle rocket, Owen Wilson played the main crazy character that wanted to do something illegal. Rushmore was also a bizarre movie. Max Fisher was the main character and he wrote the most disturbing plays and people loved them. Owen Wilson was not in Rushmore, but he should have been. It is hard to describe Anderson’s style, but Klobs said it best. There are lines like, “That’s Applejack! Come on!” (Bottle rocket) that are really funny when you know the context. Anderson’s movies are even better on a second viewing just to take in how crazy it is. Crazy is the best word to describe Anderson’s style.

The Cohen Brothers

The Cohen Brothers seem to be arrogant in terms of their style. They have been criticized for holding their characters up for ridicule, and I am doing it again. They are also arrogant because they never really told much to interviewers. That being said; they are good enough film makers that they have the right to be arrogant.
Fargo is a good example of the Cohen brothers having less than intelligent characters in their films. I do not mind the way that Minnesotans are stereotyped in Fargo, but I do mind the fact that the dumbasses in the rest of the country think all Minnesotans have that accent. The accent in Fargo is a rural accent, so do not say “oh, yeah sure yabet’cha” until you know what city someone is from. The Chon brothers are not that clear when answering interviewers questions either. In class people would ask Klobs about what the Cohen meant by one scene or another, and the response would always be something like “They never gave anyone a serious answer about that.” That just sounds disrespectful to me. They are like Randy Moss in a way. Both of them are good enough at what they do that they can be arrogant, and they both messed up Minnesota’s image. I miss Randy Moss; we need him back on the Vikings, so he can take full advantage of his proximity above the law. Back to the Cohen Brothers now, I think they are great film makers, but they might be assholes if I ever met them.

Altman

I have learned throughout the course of The Art of Film II, that movies can be just as philosophical as books. I find philosophical art works to be arrogant as opposed to profound. Robert Altman has that issue in the film, Nashville. It is a movie with a poorly orchestrated plot and little to no entertainment value, much like the books that we are given to read in school. Also like the books that we read, Nashville is of the philosophical genre. I hate the philosophical genre. It is like political activism from somebody who speaks in metaphoric proverbs. I am more partial to similes like the previous sentence and this one.
In spite of my hate for the philosophical genre of art, Nashville was a great portrait of American culture. It was loosely connected series of events during the bicentennial of the USA. It portrayed a mixing of a little pop culture in an all-American setting. The setting truly was a good portrait of what America is like on average. The bars and public forums as well as the wide variety of characters were a great snapshot of our country. A snapshot of the USA is not complete without a political campaign. The presidential candidate in the film was campaigning on a generic platform that many senators and governors use even today.
I did not like the way it criticized show business and politics because the audience can not relate. If I were one of the hundred thousand famous people in this country of 300million people, then I guess I could relate to everything he was trying to convey, but I am not a corrupt politician yet.
Another issue that I have with Altman would be his boobs. It is hard to take a philosophical movie director seriously when he has boobs in his films. At least he did not write his own sex-scene (in the movies we saw), unlike Spike in Do the Right Thing. You could speculate that the producers made Altman have nudity in his films, but I would rather speculate that Altman had some creepy addiction.
I would like to say more but my parents want me to go read Leviticus 20:13 repeatedly after they read my last paragraph.

Kurosawa

I hate Kurosawa films. They remind me of being back in AP American Literature. Reading subtitles, helps me associate his films with reading the printed text in books. The social comments in his films are another thing that reminds me of AP American Literature (APAL). The way he makes his point overly subtle in Ron, mimics a lot of the other crap that we had to read in APAL.
I hate it when these authors make their social comments in some secret form using symbols and metaphors. They are way too open to interpretation. I have seen people go off on some of the wildest tangents about some poem in APAL. The ending scene of Ron was overly enigmatic. If we had more nerds in Art of Film, then I am sure they would try to relate that final scene to the war in Iraq. In the ending scene the blind guy is alone on the edge of a cliff and he accidently drops a scroll with a picture of Buddha. The ending shot is a fade to black on the discarded scroll. I thought that was a well done scene, but I can not stand all of the interpretations of it that were brought up in class. I can see why he had to be a subtle in his work though. There were those censorship programs instituted by the US government after the war, but I still do not like artist talking about society.
I also hate it when artists think they can comment on society and get taken seriously. Artists, to me, are a category of people that include: singers, painters, writers, sculptors, actors, directors and other things that are not on the top of my head at this moment. I do not like social commentaries (unless it is funny) coming from people in the same category as Snoop Dogg or Ralph Waldo Emerson (both of which were likely to have been on dope). I also found Kurosawa boring. In Stray Dogg, there is an eight and a half minute sequence of the Tokyo black market being panned over. Its point is lost in the boredom somewhere (just like every book in APAL).

Silent but Deadly

Nothing to remind you that this blog was written by a high-schooler better than the title of this post. We watched a more classical Charlie Chaplin movie titled “Police.” It is about a man who just got out of jail and goes into burglary. Charlie Chaplin is just plain crazy in this movie. The movie had not sound except for the non-diagetic music. The acting was really key to narrating the story. Chaplin played the main character and it helps when the actor is in perfect sync with what the director wants.
The camera work is another key element of this movie. There is not that much camera work. The camera remains fixed without zooming or panning. This is probably because Charlie Chaplin learned to direct live theatre instead of films. In live theatre, only the most invasive audience members can get the types of close-ups and subjective shots that movies give us, so naturally they did not teach any of these things to directors until art schools recognized film as a form of art (and that took awhile, even today you can find someone narrow minded enough to think that books are automatically better than movies).

The Hitchcock Unit

I think Hitchcock was over rated. His films did use many techniques that make him a good topic to study in Art of Film, but I did not find them entertaining. Hitchcock was a good but over rated director.
His title was "the master of suspense." The use of suspense in his stories makes is spot on. In Virtigo, the evil plot twist is revealed in just the right way so that it makes you wonder when and how the main character will uncover it. He also makes great use of subjective shots for when the characters are looking at something. The example from Rear Window has been brought up many times in class. He does an amazing job telling these stories, but the stories are not that entertaining.
The plots for his movies are entertaining as stories but not as movies. Rear Window and Virtigo are very slow to begin with and do not noticably pick up the pace in any way. I did not find these movies as entertaining as some of the others that I watched, but that is ok. These movies were better learning tools than entertaining tools, and that is exactly what we should watch in school.

Monsieur Verdoux

In his 1947 film, Monsieur Verdoux, Charlie Chaplin plays a highly skilled killer/con-man/ladiesman/hand model. The title character, Verdoux, goes around France in the late 1920s marrying women, killing them, then running off with all their money. This movie was interesting due to some of the changes that Chaplin made in his style in 1947, but even more interesting because this movie was the reason why Chaplin was hated by Joe McCarthy.
The look and feel of this movie is unlike any Chaplin movie that I have seen before. The script was writen by Orson Wells, but Chaplin bought the script from Wells. Not that much of Chaplin's physical comedey is in this movie. Most os the humor comes from when Verdoux implies that he is about to kill someone. for instance, one of his wives kept nagging him about locking the doors before they went up to bed. Verdoux said to her "I took extra care this time." Another aspect that made this movie different was the sound. In this movie, the sounds of footsteps and doors closing could be heard. there were none of those creepy gaps in the sound like in the Great Dictator. Charlie Chaplin also changed his look after WWII. After WWII people named Adolf started to go by "Alfred" and Chaplin got rid of the mustach that made him look like Hitler. I did not recognize him in this movie without the Hitler-stach or any of the falling down all the time. I do not think that anyone would think this was a Chaplin film unless Wikipedia and Netflix told them so.
I do not know how McCarthy knew this was a Chaplin movie. It is not like he had Netflix or Wikipedia (Al Gore did not invent those things yet). Joe McCarthy blacklisted Chaplin for making this movie. At the end, Verdoux is captured and can not escape without breaking the Haze code. Under the Haze code, people who engage in acts of sex or violence in movies can not live happily ever after(ie they are "badguys"), unless they are disposing the "badguys." Verdoux killed a bunch of people, so he was a "badguy" and had to be brought to justice. As Verdoux is on trial, he makes a speach comparing himself to capitalists and arms dealers. This speach condemned "Merchants of Death" (arms dealers that got the US into WWI) and most capitalists. He called them murderers on a larger scale for making bombs that kill people. Shortly after we find out that Verdoux is a commie, he makes his walk to the gillotine.

The Great Dictator

The Great Dictator was one of Charlie Chaplin’s first movies with sound. This movie was made in 1936 and ridiculed Hitler around the same time he was coming to power.
This movie interested me because last year in US History, Mr. Simpson, the history teacher, said that this movie accurately reflected the way Americans saw Germany. He said that Americans did not take Hitler seriously as a threat in the mid 1930s. Charlie Chaplin acts just the way he does in any of his other comedies when he portrays Hitler. The three stooges are basically a mitosis of a typical Charlie Chaplin character, and that does not look like a serious threat to me. Charlie Chaplin has a very quirky style.
Chaplin’s style has a few interesting key techniques. In order to replicate his style, you need to get his walk down. He walks with his feet perpendicular and pointing outward. Doing this will be accompanied by a tendency to kick slightly and lean back as you walk. Walking like this in public will make people think you are drunk or just a creeper. Most of his humor is physical, like falling down or picking fights with inanimate objects. The idea of picking a fight with an inanimate object more specifically reefers to having difficulties with various contraptions. For instance, in the beginning of the Great Dictator, Chaplin portrays a soldier in WWI who tries to load a cannon, but he has some problems operating the mechanism. Another classic example from a different film is when his coat gets hooked on a nail on a swiveling table. Then he tries to get a glass on the other side of the table.
Chaplin mostly had experience with silent movies and so he still used much of that same physical comedy. Another sign of this movie being an early sound movie is the fact that some sounds are missing. Doors shut soundlessly. No sound is heard as combat boots march across gravel to a plane. I think that biplane was the infamous German stealth baron. Its engine had an inaudible drone.

Art of Film II

This is a divider between what I posted for the first and second semester in Art of Film.
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Do the Right Thing

After seeing "Do the Right Thing" I thought that Spike Lee was one of the best film makers that we have ever watched in class. The cammera angles and the bright colors in the movie made me think of "Citizen Kane". If "Citizen Kane" was in color, I think it would look very much like "Do the Right Thing." The social comments of the movie are well sybolized. They are not partonizing with how explicitly they are made, and the social comments are not so vailed that they could mean anything. "Do the Right Thing" is very moderate compared to Spike Lee.
When Klobuchar showed us interviews with Spike Lee, I got the impression that he was nuts. Spike Lee might get the impression that I am a racist for thinking he was nuts, but most of my class though he was a "vairiant-McCarthyist" (a word with only one dash for: someone-that-thinks-everyone-is-a-racist). Spike Lee has a big ego. He reminds me of those crazy evangelicals that think God spoke to them directly. I do not think Spike Lee has enough piety to commune with god(s). Spike Lee wrote his own sex-scene in "Do the Right Thing." It did not really add anything to the movie, and it was not one of those implicit sex-scenes either. I explicitly showed Spike Lee's charater's girlfreind(and that is all I can go into). Spike Lee looked like he was having fun with that part of the movie or was it just "good acting." I find it pathetic that Spike Lee would have done that for personal recreation.