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).