Panic Room

Panic room is a classical thriller staring Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker, and Dwight Yoakam. The story revolves around a mother (Jodie Foster as Meg Altman) and her daughter (Kristen Stewart as Sarah Altman) moving in to a new house after meg and he husband's divorce. The house Meg and Sarah moved into was huge and had a hidden panic room. shortly after moving in, a group of petty thieves(Forest Whitaker AKA Burnham, Dwight Yoakam AKA Raoul, and Jared Leto AKA Junior) break into the house because there was 3 million dollars hidden in the house and they planned to take the money. when they broke in they had originally thought that the family had not moved in yet. when Burnham found out that Meg and Sarah had already moved into the house he wanted to leave but Junior convinced him to stay to do the job. shortly after Burnham, Raoul, and Junior break in Meg wakes up to use the restroom. she hears the men downstairs so she went to the panic room to look at the video cameras. she sees the men and runs to get Sarah and the men hear her. she wakes Sarah up and they run towards the panic room but junior begins chasing them but Meg and Sarah made it to the panic room. the three men go to the camera to communicate with Meg, they tell her what they are after is in the safe and the need in and if she lets them in they wont hurt her or the kid but Meg tells them that they are not getting in and that they should just leave because the cops were on the way. Burnham knew that the was lying because they cut the cords to the phone before-hand. the three men begin trying to get Meg and Sarah out of the panic room. the first thing they do is drill a hole into the ventilation shaft and pump propane into it, this backfires because Meg had found a lighter she used it to ignite the propane catching one of the men on fire. eventually Meg remembers that her phone was in the room right outside of the panic room. As the three men were downstairs arguing about how they were going to split the money, Meg left the panic room to get the phone. She

looked on the table but it was not there so she looked under her bed and the phone was under it. as she was reaching for the phone she knocked over a lamp that was on the nightstand, the three men heard the the lamp fall and ran up the stairs but before they could get to her she had already made it to the panic room with the phone in her hand and just like in all movies the phone had no signal. at this point Sara's blood sugar was low and she had diabetes. Meg got the phone in the panic room to work and instead of calling 911 she called her ex husband. Junior started to get cold feet and told the other two men that he was going to leave, as he was opening the door to leave Raoul shot him in the head. the door was standing wide open and the ex husband was standing outside. they pulled him into the house and found out that he was the ex husband. Raoul took the husband to the camera and started beating the life out of him to prompt Meg to open the panic room door. with her daughter about to die and her ex husband getting beat up she makes a run for the daughters insulin. Burnham goes into the vault and sees Sarah on the floor shaking. Meg jumped Raoul from behind he managed to get away from her but dropped his gun in the process. He ran to the panic room and Burnham shut the door Meg slid the insulin in before it shut. in the process of the door shutting Raoul's hand was shut in the door. He plead Burnham to open the door but he wouldn't because he knew the gun was on the other side. Meg yelled for them to give the insulin to Sarah so she wouldn't die. Burnham yelled out if she drops the gun and goes downstairs he would. Burnham gives Sarah the shot then begins to drill into the safe where the money is. As he begins to open the safe the cops show up at the house. the ex husband had called the cops so Meg has

to convince the cops there is nothing wrong so the two men wont kill her daughter. She gets the cops to leave. the two men get the safe open to find nothing in it besides an envelope with bonds in it. there was 22 million dollars worth of bail bonds. they take the envelope and leave the panic room. as they are leaving they get into a big fight. Burnham gets away but he is about to jump the fence when he hears the fight and goes back into the house and just as Raoul is about to bash megs head in with a hammer Burnham shoots Raoul in the back of the head. the cops bust in to the house, Burnham takes of through the back door, hes about to jump the fence but the cops get to him before he can.the movie ends with Meg and Sarah looking for a new house

                 This movie is a classic thriller due to no other thriller having the same plot line. the reason it is a thriller is due to how suspenseful the movie is. You don't know if the men are going to get in to the panic room and if they will they kill the two girls or not. when they get in to the safe will there be money or was the whole crime worth nothing. those are the type of aspects that make the movie a thriller.

Django Unchained

I chose one of my favorite movies, Django Unchained, to write my blog over. Django unchained is considered to be a Drama/Blaxploitation. This film that was made in 2012 is a American Revisionist Western film written and directed by Quentin Taratino. Django Unchained was a remake to Sergio Corbucci’s 1996 film, which is actually the second remake of an Italian film. 

Django stars a Southern slave (Jamie Foxx), who tries to escape a rough plantation with the love of his life/wife (Kerry Washington). Of course they get caught, they were labeled as runaways and then were sold in different states.This is a very significant part in the movie because from this point forward everything that Django does is to find his wife again. 

Throughout this film taratino is giving us some extremely bloody gunfights, he gives us a comedic Klu Klux Klan scene, as well as some of the hardest-hitting revenge ever. I really enjoy this movie, because Taratino makes sure he touches on historical truths. He displays slavery in the movie like people had never seen before. He gives us moments where the violence exits the entertainment stage and actually becomes serious violence. 

The main themes that I believe Taratino wanted to get across was slavery, ability, race, power and sexuality. These different themes are all showed multiple times throughout the film and are not hard to see. Slavery is shown from the beginning of the movie to the very end. Django begins this movie as a slave and very early into the movie becomes a free man. In some areas, Django still received treatment like he was a slave, and this is when race comes into play because the Whites believe they can treat him anyway they want, not knowing that he’s a free man. Django and other blacks were classified as “Niggers” quite a bit throughout the film.

Power and Sexuality was displayed when the film shows what goes on at the slave plantations. The owners do whatever they want and pick and choose who they want to treat with respect. Most women slaves got lucky and were mainly house slaves. Men were outside slaves who actually had to do physical work in order to maintain the plantation. There was a black male who was privileged to be an inside slave, due to the power the plantation owner had. The setting of this film really helped bring out a true raw picture of what slaves really had to go through. The characters were primary black and of course the characters that were white always came with some type of conflict towards the blacks. I think it is interesting how the black slaves out number the slave owners but are still outpowered. By some facial expressions of the slaves you can tell that they are obviously nervous/scared or highly pissed off about the situation they are in. This personally is one of the best drama movies I have watched. The ending of this film can make you cry and appreciate how blessed we are to be free and not have to experience being a slave. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/movies/quentin-tarantinos-django-unchained-stars-jamie-foxx.html

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TearJerker/DjangoUnchained

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/django-unchained-film-review-399663

La La Land: A Genre Study

La La Land is a sweet, colorful, whimsical film about two young, eager, struggling artists. While the film is obviously dazzling, it is also quite difficult to place in the genre cycle simply because the genre remains undetermined. You might think, “it’s obviously a musical,” while others might decide, “it couldn’t be anything other than a drama.” Depending on the genre assigned to the movie, the status of its place in the cycle changes (I’d argue that in a musical genre, the film could be quite revisionist, while in the drama category, it would be classical, but that is a debate for another time). For all intents and purposes, I’d like to propose La La Land is a romance, and it falls into the classical stage of genre theory. Of course, this can be debated on end, but as I tallied tropes this evening, I realized that if nothing else, the film does tell a fine romantic tale.

Side note:  I didn’t want to be the only girl in the class and the person who picks a romance to write about, but here I am, and I’m embracing it. In an early scene of the movie, Sebastian (played by Ryan Gosling) asks his sister, “why do you say romantic like it’s a dirty word?” The desire both characters and artists show in this film for majesty and romance makes it hard to see the movie as anything else. It’s romantic, and that is okay.

Anyway, what makes it a classic romance? Well only that it’s the same story as it was yesterday and the day before that and before that... Boy meets girl. Boy dislikes girl because girl does something to upset him, or inconveniences him, or catches him at a bad time. Girl (who has red hair, and a blonde friend, and, you guessed it, a brunette friend) does something cute and leaves her big shot boyfriend for the struggling artist she just met. Boy and girl fall in love… and angelic choirs sing operatic music as the screen fades to black on two words in a darling font:  “The End.”

The casting directors picked Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone for goodness sake. That’s classical romance if we ever saw it! Some other classic romance tropes the movie so artfully employs include:  the characters first encounter each other at Christmas time (while this isn’t a big theme, Christmas and romance go undeniably hand in hand these days thanks to Hallmark), the characters do a big number together in the beginning of the film about how they are not going to fall in love with each other, and then, of course, they begin to fall in love, they run into each other coincidentally a couple more times (or, who knows, maybe it’s fate… it is a romance after all), they lean in for a kiss at the movies and are rudely interrupted by a glitch in the system, they have an egregious falling out over dinner because the timing is off, they make up over some dramatic event (like a super successful audition). It’s the same story.

Once more, at the end of the film, it’s the same story all over again. When the montage comes up and it basically reprises everything that happened in Mia and Sebastian’s life, except allows them the decent kindness of coordinating, coinciding happily ever afters, it tells the same classic story. And the film doesn’t employ every romantic trope in the book to be ridiculous, or satirical, or unkind. It employs the tactical tropes because they work. Because in a la la land of bliss, ignorance, fantasy, or simply distance from what is real, these tropes make sense. And, in the world of us… in the real space which we all exist, the falling outs, the “I’ll always love you too’s,” the happily ever afters, just not together… they make sense. 

While the ending is not something we’d like to see in a romance, it is a tragically refreshing reminder that la la land is exactly that. So, yes, even with an ending that makes viewers’ hearts physically ache, this movie is rightfully found in the classical stage of the genre cycle.

Winter Light - Silence of God?

Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 classic, Winter Light, is one of my favorite films of all time and is easily one of the most important to me. This is a difficult movie to describe in words, and I think anyone who has seen it will understand why. Ingmar Bergman nearly always placed feelings and tone over plot so I will do my best to describe how this film makes me feel.  As someone who has struggled with faith and its implications, I found the film’s treatment of certain subjects like the presence of God in an evil world and the failure of the film’s protagonist to be the shepherd he so desperately longs to be, so touching and honest that somehow in even its most bleakest moments, I found a lot more hope in it than I had anticipated. 

The film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3w0IQsN8XQ&t=2766s

Before I talk about this movie more in depth, I think it would be necessary to explain some context. Winter Light is the middle part of a trilogy, commonly called the “Faith Trilogy” or the “Silence of God Trilogy” or sometimes even just the “Bergman Trilogy.” As you might be able to guess, each film deals with uncertainty with the existence of God. The first film in the series, Through A Glass Darkly, deals with the idea of a literal God being illusory and instead equates God with feelings, such as love. Winter Light deals with the breakdown of a pastor’s faith as he fails to be there for his parishioners. The final film, The Silence, has pretty much nothing to do with God or religion. And that is the point. The Silence depicts a world where there is no God, whereas the previous two films are preoccupied with the notion of God. 

This film is most definitely a drama, but I feel like it falls under some category that we could call a "psychological drama." This movie is about a crisis of mind and emotions. It is the very same genre that one could place First Reformed (which is extremely inspired by Winter Light to the point of being a soft remake) and Scorsese's 2016 masterpiece Silence, which is thematically the same just in a different context of suffering.

Probably the most powerful allusion this film uses, at least to me, is that of the main character. His name is Tomas, which is an obvious parallel to the apostle Thomas in the New Testament. Just like his namesake, Tomas in Winter Light struggles with serious doubt about God’s existence, and even questions whether or not it would be better if God never existed at all. At that point life could be explained as merely the result of a chemical reaction, evil wouldn’t seem so foreboding and mysterious in an impartial universe, and death would be a simple “snuffing out” of life. No complication, no suffering, and ensured peace. 

That may seem depressing and nihilistic on the surface level, but I find it encouraging because I have always found the story of “Doubting Thomas” to be powerful. For those unfamiliar, the episode is recorded in the Gospel of John, during the 20th chapter. After Jesus’ resurrection, Thomas refuses to believe that the man before him is really the risen Christ and it takes his tactile investigation of Jesus’ stigmata to finally believe in the resurrection. This prompts Jesus to respond with one of his immortal quotes “Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believed.” I always considered this to be encouraging in spite of my own doubt because for all intents and purposes St. Thomas really should have had a leg up as far as faith goes. After all, he interacted with Jesus in the flesh and witnessed key Biblical moments in real time with his own eyes. Yet, even after everything he had seen Jesus do, he was still skeptical of his resurrection. The fact that anyone can have even the smallest faith two thousand years after all of this happened, is incredible. Of course, this theme is solidified in a monologue towards the end when Tomas has a conversation with the sexton. The sexton, who has been through tremendous physical suffering, holds the opinion that the focus on Jesus’ physical torment on the cross takes too much of the focus. He argues that the pain of the crucifixion was hardly the worst pain Jesus felt, in fact it was really brief in comparison. He argues that throughout the Gospel account, the apostles continuously misunderstood Jesus’ teachings. They simply did not understand. And when, after the Last Supper, Caiaphas came to arrest Jesus, his apostles deserted him and Peter denied having known him. Being misunderstood and alone, he argues would have been a painful experience. After all, the apostles had been with him for three years. And during his crucifixion, he cried out to God “why have you forsaken me?” The sexton argues that Jesus, in his suffering, momentarily thought that even his heavenly Father had abandoned him. Momentarily, he thought that everything he preached was a lie. He experienced doubt. That, the sexton argues, was the most painful of all. Enduring the silence of God.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail Parodic Genre Cycle

Monty Python, or as many people have come to associate the name with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Originally a comedy group Monty Python expanded their horizons to the land of cinema taking a parodic approach to many different genres of film. In many cases the films in themselves are parodic of comedies as well as the source material used in creation. Monty Python and the Holy Grail as stated is in the parodic portion of the genre cycle. The move in itself is self-aware of its nonsense and in many cases goes over the top for it’s gags or jokes purely for the comedic effect. Within the first few moments of the film we see an example of these over the top gags, wherein a pair of characters approach a wall, one galloping and the other clacking coconuts together to simulate a horse trotting. 

The gag of the coconuts and galloping continues throughout the film, with even a select few character commenting on how “medieval Europeans” came across coconuts. Characters even are presented in an over the top comedic manner, such as introduction of the Knights who say “Ni!” also referred to as the Knights of Ni who upon any form of irritation exclaim “Ni!” at varying intervals. Another example of characters being portrayed over the top just for the sake of a gag or a joke is that of the Black Knight, whose reputation has earned him a place in internet history. The Black Knight’s reputation has extended far beyond the film and even became an internet meme for his iconic lines

“Tis but a scratch” and “Just a flesh wound” both said after having an arm cleaved by King Arthur. The final scene of the movie in itself is a large set up pun, where the “final battle” is broken up by the police that were investigating the death of a historian. The introduction of the police and the aforementioned investigation hammer the final nail that the movie was self-aware. The “quest for the Holy Grail” was but a group of LARPers that got too invested in the story. An iconic scene that tends to be brought up when speaking of the comedic and parodic aspect of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the scene with the Rabbit of Caerbannog. During the film the Knights are tasked with slaying the “Caebannog” when the group approaches, they are met with a small white rabbit. The parodic nature of this scene is that while many comedies would end the joke with the reveal, Monty Python continues to show that the rabbit is very much so a most vicious beast as it decapitates a knight with one swift leap and an even more so vicious bite. The rabbit is bested with a weapon so powerful and comedic it has extended to the realm of video games, seen in both the Fallout franchise as well as the Worms franchise, as well as the Ready Player One film. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Monty Python is the quintessential “cult classic” comedic group, known mainly for Monty Python and the Holy Grail their other films have created a wave in the parodic step of the genre cycle.

The notable weapon being the “Holy Hand Grenade” quite a comedic choice of weaponry for a “medieval” film such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Monty Python is the quintessential “cult classic” comedic group, known mainly for Monty Python and the Holy Grail their other films have created a wave in the parodic step of the genre cycle.

Legend of the Blue Hole: 'Scream' for the Thriller Genre?

One of my favorite independent films that I've ever seen is actually a short film that was supposed to be an anthology similar to that of The Twilight Zone, a TV series started in 1959 where people encounter sometimes supernatural entities and situations. This film, directed and written by James Rolfe, is entitled Legend of the Blue Hole. The entire film is on YouTube, and I recommend watching the film before reading the post:

Part of the thriller/sci-fi genre, this film centers around a student who is seemingly obsessed with urban myths such as the Jersey Devil, UFOs, and aliens. While sometimes mistaken for horror, the thriller/sci-fi genre has done through its own four stages.

While not technically a film (well, there was one horrible film made of it), The Twilight Zone was an excellent entry into the thriller/sci-fi genre. Episodes such as "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" perfectly establish what the genre was supposed to be. Often there is a single protagonist who experiences some kind of supernatural entity. Sometimes they can be warned to stay away from this thing, or not even be aware that the entity is supernatural. These films also include an interesting twist or one that makes you sit back and just say "wow." Thus, I find an example for each stage to be:

Primitive: The Twilight Zone
Classical: The Sixth Sense
Revisionist: Zodiac

And that brings us to parodical, which I believe is where Legend lies. Similar to Goosebumps or even what James says to be his inspiration in Creepshow, there's a shop owner that warns him of the dangers in the blue hole, in an almost comedic manner. This film really reminds me of what Scream was for horror, continually poking fun at what was known to be standard in the thriller/sci-fi genre, with the most obvious joke being the very ending. The use of papyrus font I believe was also an attempt to parody the edginess of the genre.

I really enjoyed Legend due to its creativity, and its use of time old tropes while still remaining fresh. Let me know what you think!