1930's Movie Post: Scandal

Scandal is a gangster crime film starring Clark Gable, Bette Davis and Basil Rathbone. Clark plays a detective who investigates the case of a criminal, played by Basil, who robbed a bank. The criminal, as the audience finds out, is an old childhood friend of the detective but their paths separated as they grew older. The movie follows the two perspectives of both the detective and the criminal as they chase one another. In the end, Basil is killed in a shoot out with Clark when he was cornered on his attempt to rob another bank.
We decided to produce the film under Warner Brothers because they were known for their gangster film during the time period. We shot in three strip Technicolor because during this time, a lot of the movies that were coming out were in black and white because it was cheaper, but we wanted to stand out from the other movies that were coming out.
Our film follows the Hayes Code by never showing violence, just implying it. In the last scene where Basil is killed, it shows them standing there in the darkness facing one another and then a graveyard with a head stone saying the criminals name. We went around the code by not showing the shots being fired but that he died by showing his headstone.
If I could change anything about the film, I would change the lead character from Clark Gable to Edward G. Robinson. Robinson played the gangster in Little Caesar in 1931 which was produced by Warner Brothers as well. Clark Gable was a actor for MGM in the '30s, so we had to trade one of the Warner actors in order to get Gable in our one movie. I would have made Robinson the detective because he is under Warner and has played the bad guy in another gangster movie so he knows how the criminal thinks which makes the chase scenes more intense.

MYST Post #3: John Tucker Must Die

John Tucker Must Die is a comedy romance that takes place in high school and follows a group of four girls who devise a plan to break the heart of John Tucker, the hottest guy in school. Carrie, Heather and Beth found out that they were all dating John at the same time and decide to use Kate, a not so popular nobody in school, to get back at him. They planned to have John Tucker fall in love with Kate and then at his birthday party, expose him for who he is and break his heart so he would know what it felt like. Kate was hesitant at first but was forced to go along by Carrie, Heather and Beth. Kate joins the cheer leading team to get John’s attention and lures him in by acting exactly how the girls tell her to. John falls into the trap and Kate and John begin going on a series of dates. Kate begins to fall for John but is snapped out of it when Beth shows her a video of John bragging to his friends that he was going to “score” with Kate and the plan is set back in motion. Now dedicated to bring John down, the group sets up multiple embarrassing moments that back fire, ultimately making John more popular. Katie feels bad and decides to tell the truth to John at his party and everything works out. John is not mad and they remain friends.

       My favorite scene from the movie is when the group gives John estrogen pills in his Gatorade, trying to embarrass him and undermine his confidence. John becomes all soft and emotional at his basketball game and therefore doesn't play as well. The team loses the game and blames it on John, causing his friends to turn on him. The scene is hilarious and is a turning point in the movie because it is one of the first attempts at cracking John that the girls try, and it’s one of their only attempts that works in their favor. The scene is based on the dialogue because that is where the viewer sees the change in John’s attitude.

       The movie lacks technique/style and cinematography majorly. The film has no true plot line that it follows and the underlying message seems to be put out straight forward, yet everyone in the movie are hypocrites. The movie was definitely not made for the visual aspect, but instead for the comedy factor.

       I would give this movie a 3/5 because it is a classic comedy that makes me laugh every time I watch it, no matter how many times I see it.  However, it has no real cinematic aspect to it. The movie has classic lines that are still being said seven years later.

MYST Post #2: Safe Haven

Safe Haven was directed by Lasse Hallstrom and is based on the book written by Nicholas Sparks. The movie starts with a young women fleeing from what looks like a crime scene and she seems to be the killer. She is trying to escape from the police by boarding a bus headed to Atlanta, Georgia and luckily chooses the one bus that is not stopped and searched by the police. The bus makes a stop in the small town of Southport, North Carolina and the woman decides to stay there. That is where the real romance drama begins. Katie, played by Julianne Hough, meets Alex, played by Josh Duhamel, and they instantly make a connection. Alex's wife died a couple years earlier from cancer, leaving Alex as a single parent of two children, Lexie and Josh. Alex does a couple helpful things for Katie and they begin to fall in love with one another. Katie's past comes between them, though, when Alex sees her face on a “wanted for murder” poster and is disappointed that she has been lying to him the whole time. Katie explains that she stabbed her husband in defense during one of his drunken assaults, and Alex accepts the story and vows to protect her. The movie ends with Katie reading a letter that Alex's wife wrote for "the girl" that tells her that Alex really must love her if she is reading the note, and to take care of the children and to take many pictures to document the good times.

          My least favorite scene from the movie was the scene where Katie and Alex meet for the first time. I didn't like the scene because of the camerawork. The shots and angles used didn't match the events happening in the story. The scene was very important because it was the first time Alex and Katie meet, establishing the “love at first sight” factor. The scene should have been shot in close-ups and medium shots, but instead was filmed in wide and extreme wide shots. The camera was placed three aisles back in the convenience store from where the actors were standing. I didn't like the use of the angles because it made me feel distant from the character’s conversation instead of within it, feeling the connection made and the instant love in the actors’ eyes.

          I went into this movie with the impression from my friends that the movie was an amazing love story. Knowing it was based on a Nicholas Sparks book, I was prepared to possibly cry, like I have in all his other book-based movies. I personally don’t like romantic movies, so I was a little skeptical to see it and was disappointed in the movie. I didn't like the Hollywood fantasy and unrealistic plot line. Also, the dialogue was very awkward. I usually like movies that have an awkward main couple because to me it is more realistic to real life couples, but this couple just didn't seem to work at all. The pauses between the lines were too long making the conversations drag on for what seemed like forever. The movie just didn't seem to flow smoothly and jumped around from scene to scene.

          I would give this movie a 2/5 because it was unrealistic, choppy and just like every other love story movie made.  The morale of the story was sweet -- that Alex truly loved Katie and, instead of leaving her when she made a mistake, he forgave her and helped her with her problem.

Formal Film Study: Stephen King Book-to-Movies

Stephen King is a contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy author. He is also considered a screenwriter, columnist, actor, television producer and film director. He has published 50 novels, including seven under a different pen-name. His books have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books. Stephen King is most known for his books Carrie, The Shining, Misery and It. I decided to study the movies Stand By Me, Misery, and The Shawshank Redemption..

Stand By Me is based off King’s book The Body. The drama comedy follows the story of four young boys who set out on a hike during Labor Day weekend of 1959 to find a dead body of a missing boy their age. The movie begins with a man looking at an article about an attorney who was stabbed to death. The man then goes into a flashback of his childhood with the story of their adventure. After hearing about the body from his older brother, Vern tells his friends about its location and they decide to find the body and become heroes of the town. During their trip, though, they run into many obstacles that begin to tear their group apart, but they always find a way to forgive one another. When they finally find the body, they decide that t is best to leave the body where it is and make an anonymous tip to the police about the body. In the end, after the hike, the group of friends all go their separate ways with their paths never really crossing again.

Misery is more of a horror thriller with the main character psychologically insane. A famous author named Paul Sheldon gets caught in a blizzard on his way back to New York from Colorado and ends up veering off the road and crashing his car into a ditch on the side of the road. He is thought to be dead by the viewers, but he is saved by an unknown person who prys him out of the totalled car. Sheldon wakes up in what looks like a guest room in someone’s house and is greeted by the smiling face of Annie Wilkins, his biggest fan. Annie explains how she saved his life and now she is dedicated to nursing him back to health until the roads reopen and he can go to a real hospital.  But the truth is, she has no intentions of letting him leave her company or her house. When Annie finds out that Paul had killed off Misery, the main character of his most famous novel series, Annie gets very agitated and things get very tense. She forces Paul to write the next book in the series where he must bring Misery back from the grave and chooses her true love. Paul begins to see that Annie is insane and tries to escape...but she has locked the doors and shut off all outside communication. Meanwhile, the local sheriff is on the case of tracking down the missing Paul Sheldon.  Annie ends up shooting the sheriff after he discovers Paul locked in her basement. As Paul begins to finish up his new novel about Misery, he asks Annie to get the three things he always has when he finishes a novel. Annie is so excited that Paul wrote Misery back into the novel and that the novel is almost done that she begins to let her guard down. Paul seizes the opportunity and attacks Annie. They fight for a while and Paul ends up killing Annie in the end.

The Shawshank Redemption is a drama about an innocent man stuck in jail. In 1947, banker Andy Dufresne was convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, and was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences at Shawshank State Penitentiary. Andy befriends the contraband smuggler, Red, who gets him a rock hammer so Andy could make chess pieces. After Andy overhears a guard complaining about taxes on a forthcoming inheritance and informs him about a financial loophole, Andy ends up becoming the prison’s bookkeeper.  Soon he discovers that the warden was collecting kickbacks. Andy continues to loiter the money using an alias on behalf of the warden.  Years later, a new inmate, Tommy, comes in and joins Andy and Reds friend group. He reveals that an inmate at another prison claimed responsibility for an identical murder, suggesting Andy's innocence. Andy approaches the warden with this information, but the warden refuses to listen...realizing that he would lose Andy’s bookkeeping skills if let go. He instead places Andy in solitary confinement and has a guard murder Tommy, under the guise of an escape attempt. Andy refuses to continue with the scam, but the warden threatens to destroy the prison library if Andy doesn’t go along. After Andy is released from solitary confinement, he tells Red of his dream of living in Zihuatanejo, a Mexican Pacific coastal town. While Red shrugs it off as being unrealistic, Andy instructs him, should he ever be freed, to visit a specific hayfield near Buxton to retrieve a package. The next day at roll call, Andy’s cell was empty. Furious, the warden throws one of the rock chess pieces at a poster in the cell and the rock went right through it. Andy had escaped through a tunnel he dug in the wall with his rock hammer behind the poster. Andy was finally free and went to live out his life in Zihuatanejo where he would be met up by Red in the future.

Both Stand By Me and Misery were directed by Rob Reiner, a director, actor and producer. As stated from The New York Times, William Goldman says ’'His films have a certain comedy style, coupled with a sweetness and toughness,”. Rob’s films have a funny aspect to them but are more complex than what is shown. In the movie Stand By Me, the boys are not just going on an adventure to find a corpse, they are coming of age and heading into Junior High where they will ultimately split up. Also, when the boys find the corpse, the main character, Gordie, is faced with the flashbacks of his father blaming him for his brother’s death.  Thats when the turning point of the movie happens. Instead of becoming heroes by finding a dead kid’s body, they decide to become heroes over something truly noble. Although Misery does not have as much comedy throughout as Stand By Me, it still has funny segments. Misery has more of the horror aspect. Rob’s cinematic use in the movie is more of a gritty look. He uses many closeups of the main character, Annie’s, face that shock the viewer when popped up on the screen. The overall mood he set for the movie is much darker than Stand By Me, and with every scene it leaves the viewer thinking they know what might happen next.  Usually, they are wrong...the movie has many twists that you don’t see coming.

The overall connection between the three movies is that each of the main characters go through a traumatic and life-changing event.  Gordie, in Stand By Me, at a very young age, sees the dead body of a kid near his own age.  This triggers memories of his father saying that it should have been Gordy that died instead of his athlete brother.  He convinces the rest of the group to leave the body alone, instead of returning it to town and becoming heroes.  In Misery, Paul Sheldon nearly dies in a horrible car accident, only to be rescued by an insane superfan and held hostage.  He struggles for months to keep Annie convinced that he is rewriting his book while he tries to figure out a plan of escape.  He ends up killing Annie and uses his ordeal to inspire a new best seller.  In Shawshank Redemption, Andy is wrongfully accused of murder, then sentenced to life in a run-down and corrupt prison.  While he was in prison, he uses his time to do good things for other inmates, like helping one get his diploma and establishing a prison library.  He bides his time, eventually becomes a trusted prison employee, only to use the warden’s corruption to bring down the warden and set himself up for life after he escaped.