Pillowman Analysis

Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film version of Shakespeare's midsummer night’s dream was able to modify the audience experience of the play. Michael Hoffman had successfully turned the play into a film and was able to show a visible expression of the characters to the audience. He had also made some changes, like the settings and made his version modernized. Though the film was based on the Shakespeare’s play, the audience’s experience is still different.

Aristotle once said, “The secret to humor is surprise.” It is clear that Martin McDonagh feels this way as well. He makes ample use of humor in his work and he implements the surprise by having the humor be dark and gallows humor. Dark and gallows humor, and gruesome descriptions are especially apparent in McDonagh’s play The Pillowman. Let’s explore critical and personal responses to McDonagh’s work, including: The Pillowman and Hangmen.

Nazi racial ideology has baffled the cultured mind since the atrocities were first made known to the world with the end of WWII. Though the inconceivable horror Jews and other nationalities endured under Nazi reign is common knowledge in our culture and is found in almost any modern history textbook, the mindset that made such atrocities acceptable to Nazis under Hitler’s regime remains a mystery to many. Maxine Kumin admirably conveys the thought process behind this oppressive outlook through the seemingly simplistic poem “Woodchucks”. The purpose of the poem is to align the readers with the narrator’s apparently reasonable yet somewhat sociopathic view of the woodchucks as an inferior life form while building an

The swearing and jokes were part of the script so the director couldn’t do anything to change it. But, that still doesn’t make it appropriate for the audience at the theatre. Many of the people watching the play when I was at the Huntington were students and teachers, so a different play might have been more appropriate for school children.There were scenes were one of the actors would tell a joke about the use of a condom. All of the male viewers were laughing while I noticed a few of the female viewers sitting around me seemed very disturbed by those types of jokes. The play also featured music that used derogatory slurs such as the n word which some viewers could find unsettling or offensive. I believe that if this play is to be shown at the Huntington or any theatre it should be advertised as a play for adults and not for school trips.

In this essay, I would like to analyze gender roles using the example of the main characters from the comedy movie, “Anchorman”(2004). I would like to look into female and male characters individually and compare the similarities and contrast the differences between them.

Have you ever read something that didn't make any sense to you? Well that happens to almost everybody when they read Shakespeare. While Michael Mack gave a speech to incoming college freshmen telling them that Shakespeare is remarkably difficult to read he makes his point stand out even better. Mack develops an effective argument that explains to the readers that just because you may not understand something at first doesn't mean you shouldn't try again. He learned this through his use of past experience of working with Shakespeare’s work, and appeal to audience.

“The past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it,” explains Rafiki, the wise baboon from The Lion King, to Simba, a young cub, in order to teach him a valuable lesson: to use other peoples’ mistakes to avoid making the same ones; when people reflect on their past and are willing to confront the mistakes head on, they can be very successful. Waking Sleeping Beauty, directed by Don Hahn, gives viewers an inside look from 1984 to 1994 when Disney reached the peak of “The Disney Renaissance”—during this period of time, Disney Animation Studios produced some of their best animated movies. Although Disney was successful during this era, it took a lot of work for them to get to

Many different depictions of gender roles exist in all times throughout the history of American culture and society. Some are well received and some are not. When pitted against each other for all intents and purposes of opposition, the portrayal of the aspects and common traits of masculinity and femininity are separated in a normal manner. However, when one gender expects the other to do its part and they are not satisfied with the results and demand more, things can shift from normal to extreme fairly quickly. This demand is more commonly attributed by the men within literary works. Examples of this can be seen in Tennessee Williams' “A Streetcar Named Desire”, where Stella is constantly being pushed around and being abused by her

The whispers of everyone talking about the international sensation “mattress girl” echoed through the minds of many students at Columbia University. In the article, “Meet the College Women Who Are Starting a Revolution Against Campus Sexual Assault,” Vanessa Grigoriadis uses many techniques to inform her audience of the many issues regarding rape on college campuses. Through her professional source, extensive research and powerful interviews with rape survivors, she visually and emotionally conveys her audience in an effective way of the realism of rape on college campuses and what little universities do to handle it.

The gender differences in the play are obvious and important to the story. The men in this play exhibit some traditional stereotypes of men during the time period, such that they were aggressive and self-centered. The women seem to be more cautious, intuitive and sensitive. These traits allow the women to come a lot closer to figuring out the murder than the men do. At one point in the play the women find a quilt that Mrs. Wright had been working on. Mrs. Hale asks Mrs. Peters, “I wonder if she was goin’ to quilt it or just knot it?” (658). Just then the sheriff comes down the stairs and once again ridicules the women for worrying about such little things. “They wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it!” (658), he exclaims. This is actually an important piece of evidence in the story, as the ladies find out later. They realize that she was extremely nervous about something while she was sewing, because she usually sews “so nice and even” (658), but the piece she had been working on was “all over the place” (658).

At first, I was not as enthusiastic about the movie as I now am. In fact, upon first hearing of the film, watching a French play sounded completely unappealing to me; however, the English subtitles allowed you to accurately follow along with the story and did not at all take away from the dramatic

In The Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon uses a very distinct style of aesthetics to describe the world around her and her perception of it. She describes everything with a romantic persona that shows her outlook of the world in a beautiful, passionate way. From the very beginning of The Pillow Book, Shonagon’s romantic aesthetic is overwhelmingly evident. The first sentence of the book, “In spring, the dawn – when the slowly paling mountain rim is tinged with red, and wisps of faintly crimson-purple cloud float in the sky.” shows how much detail Shonagon uses to describe her surroundings. Shonagon uses words that paint a picture in your mind of exactly what she is describing. She views the world as

Our group proposed, presented, and directing the stage performance for the Twelfth Night. In the beginning of the semester I had no clue of what to expect from this course, and reading the syllabus made Shakespeare’s Plays seem complex. I am somewhat familiar with William Shakespeare’s plays stemming from a Shakespeare course that I had taken at Harold Washington (City College of Chicago). My professor (Hader) informed the class that if we were looking to go on to a four-year university as an English major that we will have to take another course, and it will be taught from a different perspective or angle—quite frightening. As a person who had not connected or have read anything that the playwright had ever written, I was afraid that I

The presentation of women on screen is another highlighted issue in many of the gathered sources. Because men were ultimately in control of what went on the screen much of what the audience perceived were women from the male imagination or fantasy. Bernard Beck elaborates in his article Where the Boys Are: The Contender and other Movies about Women in a Man’s World that, “…women have been used to dress up a male story or motivate a male character” (Beck 15). Women were often insignificant and trivial characters. Although, Kathe Davis disagrees to a point. In her article, Davis offers a dissonant opinion to the fore-mentioned insignificance of the female character. She instead describes many female characters as “predators,” and analyzes the roles of lead women in three prominent films of the nineteenth century. In each film, she finds parallels and similarities of cases of “female emasculation” and instances where “women are turned into objects of male desire” (Davis 47-48). Davis does not perceive female characters as being insignificant, just stripped of their power and misrepresented. She discusses how females of power are often portrayed as crazy

Often, pieces of literature have been analyzed and made into a motion picture in the hopes of further developing the themes presented in the work. Though the Shakespearian play, Hamlet, has been interpreted and converted into a film numerous times by different directors, Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation particularly captured the essence of Hamlet and helped the audience truly understand the events that transpired in Act Three Scene Two of Hamlet. It is in this act, Hamlet plan to reveal King Claudius’ treachery is played out. Hamlet exposes the king through adding an extra sixteen lines to the play which depicts him killing Hamlet’s father. With the directions Hamlet gave to the actors, Hamlet is able to make the audience recognize the king’s