Alienation in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Happy Together"
Thesis - 5 pages - Film studies
The turmoil surrounding the ending of a relationship is universal. For this reason t is well-covered territory in popular culture. Tales of heartbreak and reconciliation are a staple of the Hollywood film industry. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Happy Together (1997) both...
Leaders of the New Wave: An essay on Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
Jean Cocteau once wrote, "true realism consists of revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing." But where do we find this "true realism?" Since our reality is blinded by our habit, daily rituals, obligations, and preconceived notions, it seems fruitless...
How does the 1976 film network accurately reflect ideologies and practices of modern television?
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
The ideologies and practices evident in modern television are succinctly foreshadowed in the 1976 Hollywood classic, Network. This prophetic Oscar-winning film satirically dramatised a series of predictions, most of which were fulfilled in modern television. The film shows that ratings have...
Formulating nationalist conversations: An investigation of the function of West African Cinema
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Traditional African filmmakers, considered themselves part of an emerging third world cinema and used film as a tool of revolution, a means of political education to be used for transforming consciousness, however now there is a new generation of filmmakers that have been supposedly "freed from...
Film Critique: The Asphalt Jungle
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
The first wave of urgency to escape the world of corruption, greed, and immorality inside the shady underground of the urban city ("the jungle"), is brought forth by protagonists Dix Handley and Alonzo Emmerich in two scenes of John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. The first scene takes place in...
Spike making Malcolm his own
Essay - 7 pages - Film studies
Despite intentions to stay true to an original source, a director's view will almost undoubtedly change certain elements of the film. This happens in the case of Malcolm X. Spike chose not to tell the story chronologically, as the autobiography mostly does, and this adds to the film in many...
Analysis of do the right thing, spike lee (1989)
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Do the Right Thing was released in May 1989 in Cannes. Spike Lee directed, produced and wrote the screenplay for the film. It tackles the subject of race relations by depicting the ethnic communities of the Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where Spike Lee grew up. Spike Lee plays the...
What makes a popular soap opera?
Essay - 6 pages - Film studies
A soap opera is a work of fiction taking the form of a serial, generally televised or radio phonic. They made their appearance with the radio in the Thirties. When the large networks started to develop, naturally these series followed .This designation comes from the fact that the first American...
Comments on "Thank you for smoking" by Jason Reitman in the light of business ethics
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
“Thank you For Smoking” is a movie from 2005, about a tobacco industry lobbyist, Nick Naylor. As the negative effects of tobacco on health are no longer easy to deny, the tobacco companies join in the creation of the Academy of Tobacco Studies. The purpose of this academy is to prove...
Shrek
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
Shrek the ugly, antisocial Ogre is happy living by himself in his swamp, frightening away any visitors, until he rescues a non-stop talking donkey and then gets invaded by a host of displaced fairy tale characters, evicted by the evil Lord Farquaad who wants to chase away all different and...
The African-American cinema: Between protest and integration
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
The invention of cinema happened at the very same time as the establishment of the segregation in the South. This social and political system, which advocated prejudices and inequality of races, is definitely going to stigmatize the nature of the relationships between the American cinema and the...
Sound in two Hollywood films: 'singin' in the rain' and Thelma & Louise
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
Singin' in the Rain is a musical created in 1951 by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, Thelma & Louise a road movie created in 1991 by Ridley Scott. These two works could sound different; nevertheless they have a common point, which is the important role of sound, and especially music, within the...
Olivia Ruiz in concert at the Bataclan on 3 and 10 of April 2006: From "the real TV" to "the real artist performer"
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
In France, the Loft Story TV programme paves the way for the real television. Now, lots of viewers watch “ordinary” people eating, sleeping, and arguing… Overnight these stage actors become famous just having talent to be on television. Andy Warhol was right when he said “In...
Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliette
Essay - 6 pages - Film studies
Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge are two movies directed by the eccentric Baz Luhrmann. In these love stories, Baz Luhrmann especially stake on the visual and the abundance: the abundance of decorations, the abundance of colourful visuals (Moulin Rouge « uses the colourful musical setting of the...
Pornography in the Finnish context
Case study - 3 pages - Film studies
Since 1970s, some changes have been made in the Swedish and Finnish pornography market. The consumption of pornography has increased in terms of supply, variability, and accessibility. Pornography and pornographic material for a variety of tastes can be obtained in convenience stores, (sex)...
The representation of American teenagers in films during the 1950s and 1990s
Thesis - 13 pages - Film studies
The ‘teen film', ‘teen flick' or ‘teenpic' has changed since the 1950s when it started to define itself through Juvenile delinquency films. As was recently commented, ‘the teen flick has lost its shiny innocence and become a cynical brute' (Maher; 2006: 13). Over the course of...
Representations of gender and sexuality in films
Thesis - 7 pages - Film studies
‘The street's getting worse everyday here. The whores were bad enough but the drags are wiping us out. I can't stand the drags. (…). They confuse transvestism with a circus. Worse, with mime'. In All About My Mother (Almodovar; 1999), the character Agrado stresses the importance of...
The X-files (1993-2002) - A cult text
Thesis - 7 pages - Film studies
The X-Files (1993-2002), about two government agents investigating unsolved cases relating to paranormal activities, was a quality drama which became a cult hit with audiences and subsequently an international cultural phenomenon, generating vast amounts of secondary texts including merchandise...
Sex and the city: Analysis of a sitcom
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Sex and the city is a popular American cable television program, which is adapted from Candace Bushnell's book of the same title. Sex and the city was the idea of a single woman in her thirties writing about relationships and using that column as a tool of self-discovery about her own life,...
Film studies: signs and postmodernism
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
‘L.I.E: Long Island Expressway. You got the lanes going east; you got the lane going west. You also got the lanes going straight to hell...' Thus opens L.I.E., a film about a fifteen-year-old boy who becomes involved in an unusual relationship with a much older man. Here, the first words of...
Schubert's piano trio in e flat in Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick, 1975
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
In this paper, I will analyze the use of Schubert's piano trio in e flat op. 100 in Barry Lyndon, a 1975 Stanley Kubrick's film. First, I will consider the music independently of its original context. In a second part, I will see how Kubrick uses it in its film, and whether the music fits in the...
Postmodernism and cinema
Thesis - 7 pages - Film studies
‘It's about flights of fantasy, and the nightmare of reality, terrorist bombings, and late night shopping, true love, and creative plumbing.' (Gilliam; 1985). This tagline for the film Brazil highlights most of the concepts present in postmodernist criticism of cinema and television. Indeed,...
Disney: The beauty is the beast
Essay - 7 pages - Film studies
Walt Disney Productions is a multimedia conglomerate, not only producing a majority of the children's cinema on the market today, but also submersing itself in the children's toy market, owning television stations such as ABC and the Disney Channel, and even creating their own town called...
Alice and Anna: The women of 'Closer'
Essay - 9 pages - Film studies
Feminist film criticism during its glory days focused on three major themes: the objectification of women on the screen, their marginalized role in the narrative, and the effect that movies as a product of popular culture have on that popular culture. These three perspectives, which began to be...
Masculinity in Korean and western films
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
Korean cinema has made significant progress over the years. Two of the greatest Korean movies are A Stray Bullet (Obaltan) directed by Yu Hyun-mok (1960) and The Coachman directed by Kang Dae-jin (1961). A Stray Bullet is about a man named Chul-ho who leads a life of honesty and morality. Despite...
Dark comedy in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen
Essay - 6 pages - Film studies
Joel and Ethan Coen have made eleven very different films since 1984. From a film noir set in rural Texas to a Homer's “Odyssey”-inspired convict film, their films jump from genre to genre. Each one, however, is imbued with the Coens' authorial signature. Their heroes are flawed, their...
The cultural effects of Sacha Baron Cohen's 2006 film Borat
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's 2006 film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan has garnered much critical attention for its humor, both positive and negative. Cohen plays an extremely bigoted Kazakh journalist named Borat trying to understand American...
Kurosawa's samurai films and the Westerns that were inspired by them
Essay - 7 pages - Film studies
The films of Akira Kurosawa, from his adaptations of Shakespeare's plays to his samurai films, have influenced filmmakers from the 1950's to the present. This influence is most obvious in the Westerns that were adapted from his samurai films. In 1960 “Seven Samurai” (Kurosawa, 1954) was...
Cinema of the absurd: The baby boom generation in The Big Lebowski
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
After World War II, America experienced what would eventually be termed the “baby boom,” in which about 75 million births occurred between the years of 1946 and 1964. The “baby boomer” generation has been constantly examined since its inception, and the world during its time...
Sexuality in modern melodrama
Essay - 7 pages - Film studies
The depiction of sex and sexuality in American cinema was slow in maturing, but in the last two decades there have been a growing number of popular melodramas that depict sex as a meaningful part of a relationship. This practice distinguishes modern melodramas from the classical Hollywood type....
