Before 1965, many films shared a similar type of story structure. For example, a gangster film would introduce the protagonists as do-good characters with few flaws and put them next to a morally inept antagonist, then with the audience’s support, maintain an escalation of beneficial occurrences for the protagonist and a series of downfalls for…
Author: Keenan A. Levens
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai Vs. Hard Boiled
After the blockbuster boom of the 70s and 80s, corporations found that there is good money to be made in the movie industry. With this realization came a different way of producing movies; with very large budgets and big stars. Then the popularity of home video brought forth a need for more product for the…
Music in Film
Music can have a heavy effect in film. It sets a mood and makes the viewer predict what might happen or heighten the scene already taking place. Music can psychologically manipulate a viewer into thinking one way rather than the way they might have without music. The video below begins with a very corny scene…
Goodfellas vs. The Godfather
Movies made in the 70s and later pushed boundaries and quickly progressed the evolution of film. Each genre of film was revolutionized by a few certain films and for the crime/mob genre, the first major success was The Godfather. The Godfather was originally a nonfiction book by Mario Puzo that didn’t receive the greatest reviews….
Lighting
Lighting has been crucial to acting since the concoction of plays. Lighting is obviously a necessity to see what characters are feeling, but also with many movies watched at drive-ins, most movies had to be very brightly lit to be visible from their cars. In early Hollywood films, three-point lighting was often used to capture…
Rashomon & Bonnie and Clyde
Here we have two drastically different films. Rashomon, a low-budget, unconventional Japanese film that went against trends of the time, using a unique story telling technique with four characters retelling different interpretations of one murder with a series of flashbacks. On the other hand, we have a New Hollywood era conventional film, Bonnie and Clyde…
New Wave Cinema
Rashomon is a legend in film. It was a low-budget movie that tells a narrative of a murder in the perspective of four witnesses. It was received well, winning awards for Best Foreign Film and Best Directed Film. What made Rashomon so great was not only the unique style of telling different sides to the…
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
I ran into this movie by scrolling through an iPhone app called iFunny in which there were pictures containing funny captions. One picture I saw was simply a scene from the movie where a knight was missing all his limbs and the caption read “It’s only a flesh wound!” Interested, I searched the line on…
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