In Zhen-Liu’s, The Change of Love in Movies since 1960’s, he describes the adapting nature and ever-changing acceptance of love since the 1960’s. Some of the key points he acknowledges are that in modern society, sex and violence are easier transformed to meet the audience’s wants and the 20^th century movement of women activists enabling versatile women’s roles. In breaking down the changes in sex and violence in movies, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is a prime example of the traditionally unconventional role of women in film really take leaps outside of the boundaries.As a young woman, Bonnie decides to run-off on a killing and robbery spree with a recent ex-con. They proceed to fall in love and ultimately are killed in a shoot-out with police. Bonnie portrays a free-spirited woman, who has no obligations to tradition or rules much the 60’s – 70’s Hippy era. You can see how although this was a 1930’s story, it only truly became popular until a later decade where It was more enticing to be a “lawless” woman.

As the 60’s and 70’s engaged new women roles, Batman (1989) provided for another seemingly new role for Catwoman. Zhen Liu also uses Forrest Gump’s relationship between Forrest Gump and Jenny as an appeal to love and romance in a modern movie. Their relationship embodied the true meaning of love that “ordinary” Americans would assume, “protection and persistence.” Finalizing his essay with a unique Chinese film, Zhen Liu discusses the differences in Western views and Chinese views. It interesting how he explains that there is an interest in the feeling of love by westerners versus in Chinese culture there is more emphasis put on the comfortability of marriage – which is portrayed in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Zhen Liu sums up his writing by saying that although movies and TV end – our lives can be inspired by these different types of movies that explore love in many different ways.

 

Taking a sharp turn away from the changes in romance and love in films since the 1960’s, Hui Zhong’s essay captured the way violence has been portrayed and utilized in the film industry. Hui Zhong’s, How does Film Violence change since 1960s, discusses many key points – such as how the decade of the 60’s was a very violent one with the assassination of sitting United States President John F. Kennedy and ending with the Vietnam War. He also reflects on the introduction of rating systems that helped movies gain notoriety from the typical audience member and not critics. A great example of a front-runner in the 1960’s was Bonnie and Clyde, which projected “criminal violence wantonly on the screen and in the pursuit of stylish violence, strung sensuousness, romance and political commentary,” according to Hui Zhong. This unique film combined a traditional sense of violence through murder and robbery with a unique “publicity of romantic violence” too. Additionally, because this story is based during the Great Depression, it also connects the common people together through a shared violence towards the banks that they believed to have taken all their money. In exploring a more grotesque on-screen violence, the film Deep Red is a substantial movie. This type of violence sounds to be more theatrical from Hui Zhong’s description, “Here violence was morphed into colors, music, psychological traumas in the childhood and tracking motion camera shot identified with the murderer’s perspective.” Deep Red showed a new type of violence, branching out from the vampires, supernatural fantasies and psychopathic murders by a more methodical styled violence – almost like its own form of art (Yikes!) On another spectrum of violence came Hard Boiled. Hard Boiled is a Hong Kong action film that according to Hui, “contribute its own understanding of violence by aligning the choreographed gun fighting scenes with character’s intimate understanding.” A significant point by critic Scott Tobia states that, “Hard Boiled hits the action beats hard when it gets to them but invests more thought and energy into character work and genre deconstruction than it tends to get credit for.” This film uses violence as character development, you may notice that throughout many violent scenes, Tequila or Tony will often reconcile in some way what had happened. Last, but certainly not least, is Pulp Fiction. This film is one of the most interesting and out-right violent films on this list. From drug-fueled violence and death to revenge-rape, this movie has it all. Hui Zhong points out from Roger Ebert’s critique that, “it was constructed in such a non-linear way that the story doubled back on itself and characters popped into each other by a funny coincidence of violence.” It is interesting to consider how this underlying disorganization actually helped the film to cause a sporadic and enticing series of violence. Hui Zhong also includes an excerpt from director Quentin Tarantino that states he wanted to spend time with these criminals and see how their crimes actually bonded them together. The ending of this piece sums up all four movies by reconciling that violence began to take on a more artistic form of film after the 1960’s, utilizing it as character development in many instances.

 

Although the two previous essays by Zhen Liu and Hui Zhong explored one pivotal message through film, Kory Saxe’s, The Evolution of the Film Industry Through Fifty Years explores how films have changed conservatively, economically, technologically and socially. A major film that broke many barriers in the 60’s was once again, Bonnie and Clyde. Kory begins to describe how the film was controversial on the points of sex and violence. The movie did not hide violent gun scenes and according to Saxe, also paved the way for modern movies such as Pulp Fiction. Bonnie and Clyde pushed the bounds of conservatism in movies by releasing the violent, sexual nature of Bonnie and Clyde’s relationship. Secondly, an extremely low-budget film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was a foreign film produced in Germany in 1974 by Fassbinder. The way Kory describes this film, portrays it as a champion underdog. This film had such a low budget, “This film was shot in only fourteen days at a cost that it equivalent to $98,000 USD.” Yet won such an amazing accomplishment in the realm of economics and technology. According to Saxe, this was also a time in the US when movies were beginning to spend very large amounts of financing on movies, including marketing and big-name actors. One great example Kory highlights is A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. A great reference is pinpointed called A philosophy essay entitled When Robots Really Become Human Simulacra, which describes David as gaining human intelligence when he showed the emotion of fear during a life threatening encounter. It will be interesting to see if this movie makes a comeback, somewhat like Shawshank Redemption. Saxe points out A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was a “flop” at the box office because it may have been a little too ahead of true technology advancements that audiences did not enjoy it – these movies are all over our TV’s now. Was it ahead of its time or just not a popular film? In the mid 2000’s is when Hollywood really started to experience an entirely new realm of film making with technological advancements. Saxe discussed how Inception not only had an all-star cast, insanely large budget and the help of CGI. It cost $168 million to make and 5x its investment in revenue. What a success! Saxe says, “As technology advanced it became much easier for low-budget films to adapt and use cheaper technology to make a better quality product while still incorporating an unconventional style and displaying social issues that mainstream audiences may be uncertain about.” Tangerine is one of these films that utilized technology in a new sense. The film cost $100,000 and brought in $1,000,00 while all being filmed on an iPhone. A key portion of this success was the decision and timing to follow such a highly-sensitive topic of the tile: Transgender sex workers. Kory compares Tangerine and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence by saying that in relative terms, Tangerine was a success and used such little technology but had a large impact on its audience, while A.I.: Artificial Intelligence had such great technology but did not appeal to people’s social concerns. To finalize her topic, Kory Saxe reveals that the conservative nature that once ruled the film industry, began to shatter after the 1960’s through “violence, gore and questionable themes that brought viewers into theatres and money to the industry.” It appears that the as the generations came and went, so did the film industry. Through ever-growing moral compasses of audience members, the movie industry has adapted and thrived in the post 1960’s world.