Robert De Niro's Taxi Driver

Harold and Maude, a movie directed by Hal Ashby and released in the 1970’s, did not receive much attention and popularity when first released. Since the movie depicted obsession with suicide through a 20-year-old character Harold, the movie received backlash because during the 1970’s there were high rates of suicides among teenagers and college students. However, over time college students found the movie very entertaining, therefore bringing the movie into the lights and making it a cult hit. In Blue Velvet, a neo-noir mystery film directed by David Lynch and released in 1986, received a variety of critical responses from a wide range of audience, but this movie’s unique style earned Lynch his second nomination for Best Director. The idea of innocent getting caught in a web of evil is portrayed through the character Jeffrey Beaumont, who first encounter’s a severed ear in a grassy abandoned field. In this paper I will compare and contrast these two movies that include key actors Bud Cort, played as Harold, and Kyle MacLachlan, played as Jeffrey and include a few key points that have made these movies enjoyable to watch.

He was instantly paralyzed and from then on his life changed. Travis himself can be considered a tough, and brave person all while caring for others. He is strong throughout the whole book, relearning how to do the every day activities. Travis is also tough considering what he had gone through. He had to be both mentally and physical strong to survive through his experience.

Throughout this course, you have been compiling a blog and writing essays that analyze various elements of film such as theme, cinematic techniques, and genre. It is now time to combine those elements into a comprehensive analysis of one movie.

One of the main concepts when it comes to understanding film noir, first is the understanding of the definition. Film noir is “a cycle of postwar films that employed low key lighting and were literally dark” (Nichols, 500). In this particular genre, we are in a world where there is a lack of honesty and trust, many cases of seduction and betrayal, and darkness submerges people (Nichols, 250). Moreover, film noir reflects a tone of darkness, “exploring themes of seduction, betrayal, and murder” (Nichols, 58). In this film, we will learn more of how seduction and betrayal is used to express the darkness of the film. Some other traits of film noir that should be understood before exploring the two scenes is understanding the setting. In most cases, “film noir takes place in public spaces such as urban streets, cafes,

Damien Chazelle’s critically acclaimed American drama film Whiplash (2014), presents a thought-provoking and confronting depiction of volatile and manipulative relationships, in which Andrew Niemen, a young ambitious jazz drummer is pushed to the brink of his ability and sanity by his ruthless teacher, Terence Fletcher. Nieman’s passion to achieve perfection quickly spirals into an obsession. Whiplash proving highly popular with audiences utilizes cinematography to explore the central themes, the battle between being a good person and being remembered and the effects of a volatile and manipulative student-teacher relationship. Whiplash utilizes conventions and ideas from the drama genre to communicate these central themes and film

The star-studded romantic comedy Midnight in Paris is one of Woody Allen’s most recent films which he did both, wrote and directed. It is a film about a man named Gil (Owen Wilson) who travels to Paris with his fiancée’s parents in order to expand his imagination and he ends up embarking on a journey to the 1920s while walking the streets of Paris at night. Not only is this film engaging and witty, but it also manages to provide both, overt and covert examples of postmodernism in film. By analyzing Woody Allen’s 2011film Midnight in Paris, we can identify the presence of many underlying motifs in both the narrative and the characterization of the film when using some of Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard’s concepts on postmodernism.

In Taxi Driver, Scorsese manages his camera angles and editing to emphasize Travis seeing the world through glass or mirrors, especially the windshield and rear-view mirror of the taxi, through which all major characters enter Taxi Driver: Betsy through the panes of an all-- glass office; Palantine through his rear-view mirror; and Iris and Sport in a fleeting glance in his mirror. As Travis meets with a black-market gun dealer, and in this scene the weapon literally becomes the organ of perception. Scorsese situates his camera on Travis' arm as that arm takes the weapon and slowly pans it across the window looking down on the street below. Finally, in the scene which has made Travis Bickle a cinematic icon ("Are you talking to me?"), Travis looks into his mirror, challenges imaginary adversaries, and draws his various weapons in assault. The ambiguity of the image is poignant: Travis looks into a mirror and makes a self-destructive gesture foreshadowing his attempted suicide at the climax of the film, and Travis peers through the looking glass and

The third chapter will mainly discuss Woody Allen?s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) to examine how a theme about cinema-goers reflects a desire from the filmmaker and the audience. The film fabricates a fantasy where the protagonist of a film called ?The Purple Rose of Cairo?, Tom Baxter (enacted by Jeff Daniels), ?steps? out of the film during a screening. He joins Cecilia (starred by Mia Farrow), a frustrated waitress and aggrieved wife who has watched this film countless times, and starts an adventure in the real world. Confronting the chaos caused by Tom arbitrarily leaving the screen, Gil Shepard, an actor who impersonates Tom, comes to persuade Tom to return to the film, while pursuing Cecilia at the same time. In the end, Cecilia chooses to stay in reality but ends up alone due to Gil abandoning her for his career in Hollywood.

Both of these men had grievances about what they had done to the other and neither thought that they would be able to apologize for what they had done. However, this coincidental meeting gave them the opportunity to apologize and move on from the past. It also helped them in the sense that they were no longer grieving over their lost friend, since neither of them had been killed. While the way that this relationship does not show physical help, it does show how two people can help each other mentally, despite their different

Unlike most films, Baby Driver integrates sound and cinematography in a unique manner, creating a symphonic orchestra of film composition. The initial heist and getaway of the film is a prime example of how audible and visual filmmaking can have such a large influence on each other, creating a piece of cinema that is driven by a distinct beat. Although in most films no actions are arbitrary, Baby Driver takes this premise to an entirely different level, directing every action to sync with the music in the scene: whether it be diegetic or non-diegetic to the character. Within the first five minutes of the film, the audience is introduced to the characters, setting, plot, and general motivations of the story without any dialogue. The opening scene employs a brilliantly creative combination of cinematography, music, and directing to convey the characters’ location, purpose, and emotion. This scene also sets the mood and tone for the rest of the movie. Director Edgar Wright and Director of Photography Bill Pope’s manipulation of mise-en-scène—through the use of sound, shot composition, and direction—creates a masterful scene of cinema that captivates the audience, pulling them into the world of crime and the story of a reluctant getaway driver. Each shot and beat is perfectly paired with a specific purpose to communicate the story to the audience. As a result, the opening scene of Baby Driver is an archetypal example of how to communicate a story to an audience without any

I was always curious how two completely different personalities could join together and become friends. No one could possibly tear their friendship apart. Riding the rollercoaster of life caused Winnie The Pooh and Piglet to become best friends.

Furthermore, the shot at 14:25 predominantly utilises the techniques of lighting, camera angles and sound as a means of appealing to the viewer’s emotions of suspense and anticipation. This fundamentally enhances the meaning and significance of the shot in terms of catalysing and foreshadowing the future difficulties of Roger

As the audience knows well already since the very first scene, Sunset Boulevard does not have what one would call a “happy ending.” In this sense, the movie gives itself away as film noir considering the fact that all such works of cinema which fall in this style category are known to have dark themes predominantly sending a message of hopelessness and meaningless existence. With Joe’s lifeless body floating around in a swimming pool in mind throughout the entire movie, audiences of this motion picture are filled with a sense of pointlessness for Joe’s life, since his personal resolutions and growth as a

“All my life I’ve been a lonely boy.” Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 is a peculiar, surreal film to analyze. As a semi-autobiographical work, Buffalo 66 greatly exaggerates the events in the film and makes the viewers suspend disbelief on more than one occasion. Yet despite this, the main focus of this film is a broken Billy Brown’s emotionally raw journey seeking revenge but instead finding unconditional love through Layla in the end, and the formalist film techniques used here enhance this. Through the deliberate use of photography, staging, and movement, Buffalo 66 works as a formalistic classicism film, a predominantly classicism film with strong elements of formalism, on the style continuum.

     The character of Travis Bickle roams the nights in his taxi cab, and witnesses all of this “open sewer”,