Kwami McLeod
Rhetoric 101
The Longest Yard
(Stereotypes and all)
What our society has become truly amazes me every day. The things we watch and enjoy as a culture are sometimes highly offense. I choose to look at the movie The Longest Yard for an in depth look at stereotypes in our society. After watching and studying this movie I can only ask myself one question: What have we become? The Longest Yard is a movie about a former NFL MVP quarterback (played by Adam Sandler) jailed for joyriding his girlfriend’s car. Crewe (Sandler) is forced by the jail’s warden to create a football team to play the very guards that lord over them. Yes, The Longest Yard movie was very funny and entertaining to many audiences, but it featured many
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Yet the movie depicts the guard’s team as thus. They are all of Caucasian descent and act like the stereotypical white male athlete. They curse, take steroids, and readily look for reasons to attack the inmates. There is, yet again, another hidden stereotype. Do all Caucasian athletes act that way? Not at all, for everyone is different and nobody is the same person. The guards in The Longest Yard are also aggressively racist. They look to attack the black males of the prison at all times and act in any way to evoke a response from them. Yet this movie still can make anyone laugh. The overly aggressive nature of the guards is so unrealistic that many audiences found it hysterical. Maybe this is why the inmates of the movie were even funnier to watch.
The inmates in the prison are very comical to watch and study. They are portrayed heavily as uneducated idiots. One side character in the movie sees a sign for football try outs and says, “What are football tree outs?” this brings a great laughter from the audience as it is a funny portrayal of prison stupidity. This truth is that no prison’s inmates are that uneducated for they have libraries and education materials in almost all prisons. The inmates, not unlikely the guards, show very aggressive and vengeful attitudes and play with much anger during the game. You can see this in Crewe’s intro in the prison. He is stared at intensively by everyone in the prison and treated harshly. The most comical type of
The Shawshank redemption depicts an innocent man, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), sentenced guilty for murder of his wife and her lover. During the movie we follow Andy’s time in prison and with famous actors Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman working together with director Stephen King, the Shawshank redemption sends a strong message about both incarceration and hope. In my opinion it would be an insult to the film industry in whole to even attempt remaking a movie this powerful. Stephen King has created a character that, despite his wrongful conviction, is able to see light where there is dark. Andy Dufresnes makes the best of the future instead of evaluating the past.
When we got to the prison, I was surprised to see multiple buildings all around a center courtyard. The inmates were dressed in green or gray and were busy doing various activities. The first thing that really swept me off my feet was when we visited the inmates near the gym in the knitting room. The things they were making required so much talent, which is something I had never considered prisoners to have, mostly because I had never thought about it. I was even more shocked by the talent of the brick layers and the high success rate that is found in the inmates that
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
Whenever you imagine prison, you think up ideas and violent images that you have seen in the movies or on TV. Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet “just” occurrences which are stereotypical of everyday life in prison. Perhaps it could be a combination of your upbringing, horrific ideas about the punishment which our nation inflicts on those who violate its’ more serious laws that keeps people frightened just enough to lead a law-abiding life. Despite it’s success in keeping dangerous offenders off the streets, the American prison system fails in fulfilling its original design of restoring criminals to being productive members of society, it is also extremely expensive and wastes our precious tax dollars.
The classic movie 12 Angry Men opens with clips of a courthouse, ultimately panning to a specific court room where an 18-year-old boy is on trial for killing his father. Despite the case being the central point which the story revolves around, the movie isn’t about the boy or even his father. The movie is about the 12 jurors who are in charge of the boy’s fate. If they decide he is guilty, he is sentenced to the death penalty, which meant death by the electric chair.
Conditions inside the prison were no better. For starters, many of the prisoners were those who had committed menial crimes. Worse so, many were war heroes, back from Vietnam who couldn’t find a job and thus had to go about other illegal means to stay alive, and thus were thrown in prison. Attica prison in particular was famous at the time among prisoners for having the most horrific treatment of their inmates. Guards did whatever they could both legally and illegally to keep their prisoners in perpetual fear and discomfort. The prisoners were not just treated like children, but as animals. The one thing prisoners treasure the most is their contact with the outside world. It keeps them sane and allows them to remain in some type of contact both with their families as well as with what is going on outside the prison walls. But, guards did whatever
The setting of the jail helps the audience to think about the reality of the horrible conditions of people who are incarcerated. They prisoners are treated like animals. They have filthy conditions and it similar to living in a barn. It is cold and dark and the bedding is straw. When Herrick enters, it says that he nudges a bundle of rags lying on a bench which implies that you cannot tell that there is even a person in the cell. The audience is aware of how these people suffered for no reason.
Over the years, films have been using stereotypes to portray humor through its characters and environment (3). Stereotypes are associated with almost everything and everyone no matter how people classify themselves. For further clarification, stereotypes are associated with people, groups, races, ethnicities, objects and locations. The Longest Yard (2005) by Peter Segal, perpetuates the use of stereotypes to portray its characters and environment through racial, gender, and prison stereotypes. These specific stereotypes are shown throughout the movie and are examples of stereotypes that have been passed down for generations. Films use stereotypes so that they are able to appeal to a larger target audience (3). The purpose of this paper is to analyze common stereotypes of racial, gender, prison, and athlete stereotypes in the film The Longest Yard.
Any Given Sunday and North Dallas Forty, made over 25 years apart, are two of the most famous football movies ever made. Both of these movies focus on an examination of American values as seen through the lens of a professional sport, both on and off the field. Any Given Sunday and North Dallas Forty do indeed have many striking similarities. Furthermore, it seems that both movies try to give a detailed depiction on the corporate mentality of modern day professional football; while at the same time, still working to deliver a traditional, likeable sports flick. Though there is a large time gap between the two films, they have similar messages and much in common.
At the beginning of the Shawshank Redemption, Andy gets framed for the murder of his cheating wife. Which makes his life take a darker turn with him going to Shawshank prison. Shawshank prison is one of the worst prisons ever, the prison guards abuse the prisoners, and the warden orders them to do so and will do anything for money. The prison uses fear as a way to keep the prisoners in line. When you first show up to Shawshank they take you in, strip you down, and spray you with water. After that, they throw this powder on you then give you your clothes and walk you to your cell naked. The prisoners have a game to see who breaks down first, so they yell at the new prisoners until one breaks. Their goal is to break the person they bet on this shows fear because when a new prisoners break they cry and become very scared and the one who broke in the film was murdered by a guard.
Green mile is a movie about how justice is served and whom deserves justice, Green Mile is a movie about racial stereotypes. It has a big influence on how certain people of different race view African Americans and minorities in general. The black man is the most categorized races in history, always been presented as negligent people, unintelligent and unable to make certain decisions. Instead, the black man is portrayed as a savage and barbaric man who is a savage, less than human. In the early days and still now it is not unusual for a black man to be killed for raping and killing a white woman with little to no trial with a chance to have his day in a real courtroom with a jury of his peers. This type of standard was more popular during
The area of the criminal justice system that is showcased in the Shawshank Redemption is the prison system. By following the story of the main character Andy, both the problems and realities of the system are highlighted. Throughout the film, the characters are portrayed in many ways. The most alarming ways that the prisoners in the film is as lower class citizens. By making this point, the writers are eluding to the fact that the system is corrupt because of the subculture that exist within it.
Twelve Angry Men is about a jury who must decide the fate of an 18 year old boy who allegedly killed his father. The jury must determine a verdict of guilty beyond any reasonable doubt and not guilty. A guilty verdict would mean that the accused would receive the death penalty. After a day of deliberation and many votes, they came up with the verdict of not guilty. I believe they achieved their overall goal of coming up with a verdict they were all able to agree with. It seems there were some individual personal short term goals that were not met. One being that the one juror was not able to go to the baseball game. Another was that a juror was not able to take out the anger he had towards his son on the son accused of killing his
The actions of the black characters support the cultural stereotypes that are pervasive throughout this film. A stereotype is a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing (Iftkar, 2013). Blacks are
The movie “Shawshank Redemption” shows what goes on in a prison. The movie depicts the part of a prison that most people are not aware of. People think of a prison as a place a person is tortured physically as well mentally. However, all that being said true, friendship, hope, and loyalty exists in prison. The movie shows how the main characters Red and Andy build a friendship that lasts in life after prison and loyalty among the inmates. Besides the development of friendship, the movie clearly shows the everyday routine of a prisoner’s life. The movie focus on the main characters Andy, who used to be the vice president of Portland bank before entering prison convicted with a double murder of his cheating wife and a man she was with and