The Big Lebowski

This work can be said to be a post-modern piece as Tiller has utilised several techniques common to this style. Bricolage is the creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available. In this case, Tiller, out of necessity, created his canvas board system.

Surrealism is a movement that built off of the burgeoning look into art, psychology, and the workings of the mind. Popularly associated with the works of Salvador Dali, Surrealist art takes imagery and ideology and creates correlation where there is none, creating new forms of art. In this essay I will look to explore the inception of the surrealist movement, including the Surrealist Manifesto, to stress the importance of these artists and their work in the 20th century and beyond. I also will look to films from our European Cinema course to express how films incorporate the influence of surrealism both intentionally and unintentionally.

The following poster was designed by Noah Van Belle to explore the deeper meaning, found in the film The Shawshank Redemption, in just a single and simplistic image. The primary image, which is a rock hammer, represents the motifs of friendship and hope that is displayed throughout the film. The rock hammer is the first item that Andy, the protagonist, obtains from Red, who is also an inmate. This exchange between Red and Andy is the spark of their strong friendship. This friendship proved to be beneficial to Andy not only because he was able to obtain the resources, that he needed for his escape, from Red but he also had a partner to keep him from going insane, in a brutal place such as Shawshank. Red also benefited tremendously from his friendship

“That our feet may swiftly carry out thy command so we shall flow the river forth to thee, and teeming with souls shall it ever be”. Forbidden to be repeated by anyone who is not a McManus, Connor and Murphy allow the family prayer to roll off their tongues, and journey into the ears of the monstrous souls they are about to exterminate. Their religious belief nourishes the idea that they can make the streets of Boston good. The Boondock Saints is a movie about religion, family, and vigilante justice.

“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 American Revolution is almost like the civil war but, it is split in three parts instead of two, happened in late 1700s. The movie, The Patriot, is a fictional movie that shows us the battles and life during American Revolution. Some people were forced to fight because their family members died and some did not fight because they did not wanted to risk their family even though both sides are die-hearted patriot. Family could make people do anything. The producers of the movie The Patriot, Dean Devlin, Mark Gordon, and Gary Levinsohn, chose a composite of different colonists, like Francis Marion, Colonel Daniel Morgan, Elijah Clark, Thomas Sumter, and Andrew Pickens, to make Benjamin Martin look better and the hero with no fault what-so-ever.

Influence is the capacity or power of persons to produce an effect on the actions of others. Victor Flemming, the director of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, depicts a message that revolves around the reversal of power and gender roles. Moreover, Dorothy is a child in her physical presence but lives the role of a hero as she leads the scarecrow, lion, and tin man to the Wizard himself. Through the archetypes such as the hero being a women, Cultural values, and the stages of the journey, Flemming raises the argument that in this case those who don 't have much influence in society are very influential in the Emerald City.

Cash also demonstrates numerous shifts in both the tone and the mood of her work related to the events highlighted in the memories she recalls within her work. In the beginning of the piece, Cash quickly presents this statement to the reader: “I ate my way through a new bag each day, tossing the peels in the flames as I rocked. The bitter, wild aroma of singed oranges cut into the somber iciness of the room, and soothed me. It was my personal statement against the chill.”

INTRO Feminist. What comes to your mind from this word? Is it women who have overcome obstacles and challenged society to treat them as equal with men, maybe for some. However, for a majority of the population the word feminist brings on a sour mood. Just hearing the word sounds like it’s something that should be shunned upon.

Our research topic was on how influential the Wizard of Oz was and how its impact changed the entertainment and dramatic arts industries. We decided to choose a topic that was interesting and something that almost everyone would have some knowledge about. In our project we addressed the characters, music, and the values of the film. The Wizard of Oz is one of the most influential films in history. It was one of the first movies to be filmed in color and whole production cost set a record at MGM studio with the movie costing 2.8 million dollars to make. The success of this film opened so many doors for other movies. Something we also found to be interesting was that The Wizard of Oz was the first videocassette tape released by MGM and CBS Home Video nearly forty years after it hit the big screen.

Familiar with the bowling alley. Vietnam war veteran who inevitably considers himself always right. Hippies that don’t work. That movie, which sparked so much debate and to this day, one of the most deconstructed and analyzed movies. The Big Lebowski is a comedy about a sloppy slacker that likes to call himself ‘The Dude’, who gets into a messy situation of a kidnapping. Regardless of its success in the box office and what critics had to say about it, The Big Lebowski gained its popularity through time and the writings of academics in film and literature. As the story unfolds to the dungeons of nonsense, the audience gets to see fictional characters that undoubtedly relate to real life characters. Such character based plot makes

Ginsberg expresses what Moloch means to him. The “best minds” are exposed to the unpleasant feeling of being remote from society if they did not follow their callings. Those callings create solitude of man from one another and the world as a whole. Members of the American society sacrifice their time and emotions for an unobtainable wealth they can never receive. Ginsberg reflects on poverty of the time the “best minds” were living in which left the children homeless and on the streets. Ginsberg expresses American society taking the young people and making them go mad by stating that boys were in armies and old men in parks. Moloch creates the filth and ugliness the “best minds” are forced to live in if they do not conform to the ideals of the modern society they

Quentin Tarantino directed an iconic film that was filled with humor and violence as well as a nonlinear storyline. The art of the techniques is used to connect the interconnecting storylines of the mobster, fringe players, the mysterious briefcase and the small criminals (Belton, 46). This has presented the film in a chronological manner as a result of its unconventional structure, the extensive used of homage and the pictures of self-reflexity. The holdup stage dinner starts the film in where the technique of time and space is used in order to pick up the story of Jules, Vincent, and Butch (Belton,

The film Pulp Fiction was an immediate box office success when it was released in 1994 and it was also well received by the critics, and celebrated for the way it appeared to capture exactly a certain pre-millennial angst and dislocation in Western capitalist societies. The term post-modernist, often used to refer to art and architecture, was applied to this film. The pulp fiction refers to popular novels which are bought in large numbers by less well educated people and enjoyed for their entertainment value. The implication is that the film concerns topics of interest to this low culture, but as this essay will show, in fact, the title is ironic and the film is a very intellectual presentation of issues at the heart of contemporary

Even when an individual has a strong consolidated reality of their world, it is still susceptible to other’s influence and may eventually conform to this alter reality that is so strongly condoned by people surrounding them. Though one’s reality, formed by experiences of childhood and memory, may be strong and seemingly concrete, the persistent encouragement from others that the particular reality is false may yet have an immense impact on one’s reality. In Ron Howard’s adaptation of the biography of Professor John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, the notion that one’s consolidated reality can succumb to other’s influence is profoundly illustrated. Professor John Nash suffers from schizophrenia, and hence has illusions of people that do not exist. Though he had been strongly convinced that these people do not exist, he still sees them. However, he acknowledges them to be non-existent and a figment of his imagination. This poignantly expounds the strength of impact that other’s influence has on one’s interpretation of reality and indeed strongly disproves the idea that “Seeing is Believing”. Though Professor Nash’s illusions are caused by a mental disorder, it nonetheless shows the effect that the desire to ‘fit in’ to society or