My two films I watched this week are Dead Poets Society and Sex, Lies, and Videotape. These two films are quite different in their plot, but they are both unconventional and low budget.
The first film, Dead Poets Society, stars Robin Williams in 1989.
This film is categorized as a feel good unconventional film and the director is Peter Weir. The budget for this film was 16.4 million and grossed over 230 million world wide. They originally released it in limited amounts to build word of mouth and that definitely worked in the end!
The second film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, has a new director by the name of Steven Soderbergh with many actors who became much larger after the film. Steven Soderbergh : Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape, states that Soderbergh is, “The industry’s only director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer-actor-editor, Steven Soderbergh is contemporary Hollywood’s most innovative and prolific filmmaker. The film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, he wrote the script in 8 days, and that some of it was based on his own childhood. This information was found on Film Comment. Here is a video at Sundance Film Festival years after the release and the reactions from the cast, crew, and audience are really fascinating to see.
In this book, Indie : An American Film Culture, Sex, Lies and Videotape is an indie comedy and the author leaves an interesting statement for the 80’s and 90’s were evolving into the industry. “America’s independent films often seem to defy classification. Their strategies of storytelling and representation vary widely, and they range from raw, no-budget productions to the more polished releases of Hollywood’s’specialty’divisions. Understanding American indies involves more than just considering films. Filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, festivals, critics, and audiences play a role in the art’s identity, which is always understood in relation to the Hollywood mainstream.” This takes it to a much bigger role of society and that it is not just a film.
One of the questions from this past two weeks is about the changes in movies as a business, technology, and also a reflection of society, politics, and culture. I think this is interesting to look into, both films. I think to an extent, that Dead Poets Society has themes and an audience member sense of feeling that will continue to be relevant in the modern day. Parent’s demanding too much from children, love, and the people in our youth that have a huge impact on our lives. In Sex, Lies, and Videotape, I think that the sense of being lost, and having people that we see as untruthful and then finding people, and opening ourselves up to people are always going to be relevant in the world.
I see many “background” similarities in the film. One is the feeling of “nothing”. In Dead Poets Society, it was Neil, the young, inelegant, passionate boy who was not able to follow his own dreams and that left him with a huge hole in his life. In Sex, Lies, and Videotape, we see Ann, following thru life, worried about the things she can not change and the sense of “nothing”. She isn’t intimate with her husband and she is floating thru life genuinely not living. I think that this is a common theme throughout both films.
There is a difference in the movement from the films of the 60’s and 70’s into the 80’s and 90’s that I think is really interesting in that, they story lines are becoming more realistic and more of a dramatic feel to them. We are not in outer space like, Solaris, we are not in Transylvania in Young Frankenstein. We are at home, in a normal household in the US. I think there was this shift to make an impact on a more grand scale of the audience.
In American Cinema of the 1990’s:Themes and Variations., there is a shift of the films and also what was needed as a society. This quote I believe properly explains the shift, and the outside input on not just the US, but also the world.
“The essays in American Cinema of the 1990s examine the big-budget blockbusters and critically acclaimed independent films that defined the decade. The 1990s’most popular genre, action, channeled anxieties about global threats such as AIDS and foreign terrorist attacks into escapist entertainment movies. Horror films and thrillers were on the rise, but family-friendly pictures and feel-good romances netted big audiences too. Meanwhile, independent films captured hearts, engaged minds, and invaded Hollywood: by decade’s end every studio boasted its own’art film’affiliate.”
This is so interesting.
Two unconventional smaller films had outsized success at the box office: they are good examples of independent cinema.
These two films show how independent cinema focuses on intimate feelings that are perhaps timeless; they defy classification, and they (at least these two) have an interest in realism–which is often about the gap between our hopes and reality.
Your final quote suggests nicely how big a gap there is between the big-budget commercial films and these indie films–which are closer to how we think about art, rather than a product made to make money.
I enjoyed how you started off your essay by saying that these films are very different even though the process of making them were quite similar. This starts off by showing how movies can be about anything as well showing the reader how much you know about these films. Another thing you did very well is analyze the tiny details of both films and connect them together, like the background changes.
Wow, I really like your blog! Although I didn’t watch the same movies for class, I have seen Dead Poets Society. What I like about your blog is its less about a movie review and more of an analysis of the film, genre and impact on American cultural. Considering the success of Dead Poets, it hard for me to classify it as low budget but I faced the same dilemma with one of my own choices Basic Instinct.
It’s so interesting that if you compare the same film to a different film, you see different things.
DEAD POETS is low budget partly because it happens largely indoors in the same rooms, again and again, and with no explosions, car chases, or the like–nothing requiring stunt performers, for instance. (They didn’t have digital FX back then!)
I really liked how you mentioned the overall budget for Dead Poets Society and it made way more in the long run. It’s really interesting to see what movies go over budget and have low expectations to them making a major profit at a succeeding rate around the world. I also liked how you compared two characters from the different movies, Neil and Ann, and how they both share the same feeling of nothing.