The film Days of Heaven (1978), directed by Terrence Malick, is a populist agrarian film that follows the lives of poor lovers who travel to the Panhandle, Texas to find work in 1916. Populist Agrarian films emerged throughout the 1930 's, a period during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, which accompanied poverty, starvation, and homelessness in its wake. in my opinion, the Days of Heaven is a revisionist film that portrays a dystopian agrarian way of life.The urbanization of society is depicted negatively whereas rural, remote areas of wide and empty land are associated with paradise. However, the rural town of Texas Panhandle is consumed with darkness by the protagonist 's selfish pursuit of money, property, and leisure.
Days of Heaven is a critically acclaimed film, primarily due to its unsympathetic characters making it incredibly difficult for the audience to relate. Agrarian and Western film genres share a quality of the everyday man. In John Fords, The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Tom Joad fits that category to a tee; however, Bill, played by Richard Greer, is portrayed as a selfish, violent, and cowardly anti-hero. For example, Bill fled after accidentally killing his supervisor and fled again after stabbing the wealthy, prominent farmer. In the first act, the dialogue between Bill and his supervisor is interrupted by noise in the factory. However, the second offense takes place on land with no bystanders. It is quiet, yet there is no dialogue between Bill and the
After watching the movie “Where the Spirit Lives”, I have had some strong feelings towards what was done to the First Nations People of Canada. At the beginning of the movie, it showcased the job of the Indian Agent, a man whose job was to interact with the tribes of the aboriginals in hopes of taking their children to the brutal residential schools. In this scene, the agent was trying to act friendly and tried to make a good impression on the aboriginal children. After watching this scene, I was angry because the Indian Agent made the children think that they were going somewhere nice and that they were going to be treated well. In reality, it was quite the opposite.
The movie 28 Days stages an out of control alcoholic and drug addict Gwen Cummings. Sandra Bullock is the main character in this movie. Gwen is an alcoholic writer who lives with her boyfriend up north Manhattan. It starts one night when Gwen and her boyfriend is partying and causes her to oversleep and be late to her sister's wedding. She created a disaster in which ruined her sister’s wedding by getting to drunk and messed up the cake. Gwen then stole her sister's limo to look for another cake and drove it into someone's house due to her heavy intoxication that caused her to be sentenced in rehab or jail; she chose rehab for help. Gwen was so happy and high off life that she wasn't expecting to be forced to give it all up. She was determined to get through her 28 days of rehab so that she could get back to her partying ways. Once she entered rehab she wasn't quite interested in participating in any of her therapies or her group projects.
Requiem for Detroit? is a historical documentary, released in 2010 and directed by Julien Temple, about the decline and collapse of Detroit, one of America’s largest cities. It chronicles Detroit’s journey through its success in the automobile industry all the way through its urban decay and industrial collapse to the present day. As the film draws a close, Temple also suggests some ways forward for Detroit. He presents possibilities and clearly shows which he thinks is most likely through his use of interviews with subjects and visual representations of these offered opinions. The intended reading that Temple offers viewers is a complex one, with many anti-consumerist and anti-corporate ideas and leanings. Despite the ‘doom-laden’ feel of much of the text, Temple paints optimism for the potential for a progressive and productive future for Detroit. Throughout the documentary he clearly expresses this intended reading through effective use of motifs, shown by visual and sound techniques, music and interviews with both privileged and non-privileged characters.
Any movie can have a romantic plotline, consisting of a picturesque town, a lonely woman, and forbidden love, but only one can narrate societal hypocrisies and social stigmas while paying homage to a classic Hollywood melodrama directed by a German-expressionism-influenced director from the 1950s. Enter stage right, Far from Heaven. Directed by Todd Haynes, this film, set in the 1950s, tells the story of Cathy Whitaker, a suburban housewife who seems to have the perfect life—until it starts to fall apart, and she has to learn how to keep her husband’s homosexuality and her personal infatuation with her gardener, an African American man, from affecting her flawless image and place in society. This movie was heavily influenced by the midcentury melodrama All That Heaven Allows, directed by Douglas Sirk, as suggested by the somewhat similar plotlines, but their similarities are heavily apparent in the cinematography and mise-en-scène. What makes Far from Heaven unique from its predecessor, though, is how it uses modernized topics in its storyline in order to unveil the hypocrisy of society and the Whitakers’ dysfunctional relationship.
Most of the movie is taken in Joel’s mind or his memory removal process. Starting from his nearest memory that they broke up till his last remaining memory of Clementine that they first met at a beach. I think the most possible reason the movie is called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind is referring to the deepest memory (or say, soul) survived and reserved in their both minds that brought them back to the beach and met each other again. This title quotes entirely from Alexander Pope’s poem which know as describing a very contradictory mood from the unattainable love. So does it, the movie shows Joel wants to remove all memory of Clementine while he still loves her, but then during the process he changes mind and want to try his best to keep these memory which is the “spotless mind”. In my mind, the soul theory is the personal identity that the movie most engage. According to the soul theory, to have a same identical, it’s not necessary to have a same memory, but it’s necessary and sufficient to have the same soul. In the movie, though Joel erased his memory, he still has his soul which makes him fall in love with Clementine again, even in theory he can never love her then. On the other hand, this movie seems to intensely against Loke’s memory theory that sharing a memory of an experience is necessary and sufficient to be a same person. And I think the movie also presents its own personal identity that for one person to be identical to the other person, they should have
In the movie Silver Linings Playbook, Bradley Cooper plays the main character Pat Solitano Jr. The movie starts off with Pat being released from a psychiatric facility. Pat’s time spent in the psychiatric facility was a plea bargain that his lawyer advised him to make. The court only mandated eight months of inpatient time, and against the will of the doctors in the facility, his mother is discharging him because she thinks that eight months is sufficient time for Pat to become well. On the drive home Pat wants to stop at the library so he can pick up a copy of all the books that his ex-wife Nikki has on her high school teaching syllabus, so that he can connect with her and get his job back. When they get back to his parent’s house it
After enduring a string of abusive relationships, Jean arrives unannounced at her estranged father-in-law 's ranch in Wyoming, with her daughter Griff. Griff 's father and Jean 's late husband died years ago in a fatal car crash while Jean was behind the wheel. Her father-in-law, Einar, has never gotten over it and still blames Jean for his son 's death. Einar lives on the ranch with his business partner, Mitch, who was mauled by a bear one night when Einar was drunk. This film reflects on forgiveness and rebirth, as family members work through their problems related to various communication and relationship theories. The main characters in the film are interdependent with each other, often times seen interfering with one another in terms of conflict resolution. This paper will analyze how the main characters cooperate to keep the conflict in motion throughout the film An Unfinished Life through the use of systematic collection of information about the dynamics of conflict resolution (Conflict Assessment, n.d.).
Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life focuses on Jack, played by Sean Penn as a man and Hunter McCracken as a boy, adrift in his life and reflecting on his childhood in 1950s Texas in a nearly two-and-a-half hour drama. Though the film is difficult to follow because of its highly experimental nature, the audience is left with impressions of the film’s spectacular visual and aural presence, both of which show evidence of the influence of Christianity, which is omnipresent in the American South. The theme is introduced at the beginning of the film by Mrs. O’Brien, played by Jessica Chastain, as she speaks in a gentle voice-over about the way of nature and the way of grace. In his book How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, famous American theologian Francis Schaeffer concluded that nature is as “the lower” while grace is “the higher” (Schaeffer 55). In the religious context of the film, this means that as nature is self-serving and representative of humans on earth while grace is other-serving and representative of God in heaven. This divide between the way of nature and the way of grace finds itself present in various aspects of the film. While Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life does not offer conventional evidence of the theme because of its experimental nature, the visuals, music, and underscoring of the film support the audience’s interpretation of the main theme of nature versus grace.
The movie Silver Lining playbook is an award winning movie that exposes some social disorders that the community as a whole as engaged in for years. “A word-of-mouth hit in 2012, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook has been popularly discussed as successfully targeting an adult audience under-served in contemporary Hollywood, as “authentically” reflecting the parenting challenges of its star and director, and as portraying a “modern” romance about a sympathetic, deeply damaged protagonist couple” (Nadel P1.).
Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry found the perfect, fragmented form to simulate memories in the non-linear storyline of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). The thematic elements of the film helps this simplistic story of love found, lost, and found again develop into a complex pattern, much like the workings of the brain. Each character is everything you would expect them to be in real life – down to earth, imperfect, and hopelessly searching for the love someone can only dream of. We can relate to them because we all long for more than we are, and want the best of us to be shown to someone else. Memories make up who we are, they define us. Life teaches us lessons which shape our memories, and in turn, we learn from them. What if those memories were gone? Are we still destined to be the same person? The protagonist of the movie is Joel, and the story surrounds his relationship with Clementine. The antagonist can be seen as Patrick, who tries to destroy their relationship, or Lacuna Inc., whose purpose is to make them forget their relationship. Charlie Kaufman has created a beautiful story that incorporates so many valuable forms in cinema, and leaves viewers on the edge of their seat until the very end. My goal is the show the class concepts of this narrative, as well as demonstrate how the way the film’s story is told
Throughout the movie, The Notebook, there were many different aspects that corresponded with the material learned throughout the semester. There were times were you were able to pin point why each problem was faced based on different character backgrounds. As began to watch the movie, you start to understand the culture aspects of each individual by the way they talk and present themselves, which caused many situations to arise. Also, these many situations arise throughout the movie that affected the outcome of decisions made: biological, psychological, and social/environment. However, diversity played a magnificent role from the beginning to the end. So, therefore, throughout this paper you will have a better understanding of the analysis of this film, which should provide information about the movie.
Jesus of Nazareth was a beautiful movie recapping the life of Jesus Christ. This film had no bareness, no vulgarity, and no sex scenes. It was ideal for both the young and the older audiences. I do not recall anything that may have gone against the word of God. Jesus of Nazareth embellished the birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It remained true to the four New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
The federal government placed many restrictions and discriminatory actions on the black troops. At the beginning of the Civil War, African Americans were not allowed to serve in the U.S. military. By the summer of 1862 it was clear that additional troops were needed. To meet the need, Congress passed two bills that allowed the participation of black soldiers in the Union Army. The Government established segregated units called The Bureau of Colored Troops. The measure lacked popular support and the U.S. Army did not begin recruiting black soldiers until 1863.
exactly why the branch is there and who it is from. If the film had
“Children of Heaven” is a film that portrayed a story mainly about a brother and sister in Iran and a missing pair of shoes. The plot brought into perspective a different culture both within the family environment and between the rich and poor neighborhoods. In addition, the film described a variety of people’s attitudes when they encounter setbacks. The most significant aspects of the film were the social factors that distinguished fate, and the embodiment of the family value that displayed precious love. Moreover, the effect of environment, which depicted the different aspects of the community.