Director Study Post #1: The Godfather

We decided to do an in-depth study of the renowned director Francis Ford Coppola. The movies we have chosen to study include all three Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now.
Anyways, on with the analysis or something. I'll start with an analysis of the opening chunk. This scene expertly defines the main characters in a very clear-cut manner. The movie opens on the day of Vito Corleone’s daughter’s wedding; It’s Sicilian tradition for the father of the bride to agree to any and all favors to anybody who asks… as long as they kiss up to him in the process. The opening minute or so deals with a specific problem from a man named Bonasera, and the only way the Godfather is even willing to offer his support, he makes Bonasera kiss his hand and beg for his assistance. This clearly defines the main leader already – a rigid, egocentric, powerful man with apparent attitude. As the party goes on, the Don goes on granting several more requests, until he reaches the last one – Famous actor Johnny Fontane. Johnny wants to have the lead role in an upcoming movie, but the director of the movie (Mr. Woltz) refuses to give it to him.
Vito Corleone turns to Tom Hagen, a pro, standing in another part of the room and asks him to take care of the problem that night. When Tom arrives to Mr. Woltz’s studio, he attempts to smooth-talk Woltz into promoting Johnny to the lead role, and even threatens Woltz with possible bad outcomes if he didn’t cooperate. Eventually, Woltz is informed that Tom works for Mistuh Corleone, and invites Tom to his elegant estate, showing him his over 9000 prized horses before wondering what’s for dinner, and apologetically explain that Johnny is basically a failure. Tom immediately excuses himself from the table, claiming that the Don likes to hear bad news immediately, and somehow severs the prized horse’s head and sneaks it into Woltz’s bed without awakening the grumpy old man. Woltz awakens confused and screaming, and it made me lol.



Basically, Coppola develops the characters relatively quickly and does a very nice job. He makes it clear-cut that the Godfather is not somebody to mess around with, much less refuse to cooperate with. It’s also very clear that he’s got cronies that are willing to do anything to maintain the Don’s excellent reputation.

Director Study Thing

I am werkin' wid' Will Roach, Peter Robinson, and Jared Wong or something


I dunno what else I'm supposed to put here, so I'll just list our top three directors:
1. John Carpentor
2. Akira Kurosawa...Which we apparently can't do.
3. <Insert Director Here> AKA, That One Guy Who Directed Apocalypse Now

'nother post about movies, or something?

Yet again, I don't have any new movies that I've seen recently, and I don't entirely feel like talking about the moviefilm we been seeing in class, so I guess I'll try something new. I'm going to make up my own story for a movie or something, but I'm going to be rattling it off from the top of my head; I'm making it up as I go.
I'll probably only cover part one or something in this post as I have no idea what I'm doing yet.
So this dude is sitting at his computer just surfin' the 'nets when he decides to write a story. He tries to make the story super-cool by writing about a guy that's writing a story, trying to make it look like he's referencing himself or something like that. Little does he know, the character that he made has a mind of its own and decides to sabotage the poor sap's story by adding random sound effects and strange telemographotational devices to completely confuse the reader. The writer of this story decides to get pissed and vanishes into thin air. Wait a second... Where'd he go? Honestly, I don't know where he went. This is kinda creepy. Hold on a sec, I just heard a loud noise coming from my kitchen. OH MY GOD HE'S GOT A KNIF--
fdsajfdksakckxzjclx vvvvvvvvvv
nvmind thatr. i am k. dont wery abut iit

Well, let's see.. Nothing extraordinarily exciting happened recently, so I'm going to make this post about a random movie I saw for the Western paper. The movie was entitled Shane, and was probably one of the worst movies I've seen recently. The general plot was completely unoriginal - Poor farmer is harrassed by evil thugsters, lone hero rides in and chases the thugs off, farmer begs for hero's help, and hero eventually saves the day and rides off into the sunset. I happened to view the trailer for this movie as well, and I must say it was one of the worst trailers I've seen for a movie; One could deduct the entire movie from start to finish simply by watching the trailer and piecing it together.



There was one memorable thing the director/cinematographers did very well; The long shots of the mountains and other stuff looks very nice. The majority of the film was filmed near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with many shots depicting the grand tetons in the background. That's the only coo' thing I can think of, though.

The acting was meh, even though some of the actors somehow got awards for their roles; The sound/music was just ANNOYING, with trumpets blaring out at random moments, including several times where nothing interesting was going on. If I remember correctly, the timing was off by several seconds more than once, too. The trumpets would start screaming, nothing would be going on, then the people would ride over the crest on horseback, which was nowhere near scary/dramatic enough to even require trumpets in the first place.

<3 Trash Cinema

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, I can write about absolutely anything that I feel like talking about. Just in case I'm mistaken, I'll just continue to blog about movies in general. I've noticed that I tend to enjoy just about any movie that I come across in some way or another -- Granted, some of them I like considerably more than others, and there are a few that I will probably never have the desire to watch ever again, but (I think) I still enjoyed them nonetheless. I mean, I can't remember anything excruciatingly horrible about any movie in particular that I've seen where it completely ruined the movie for me; Most of the time, when something is really lame, it makes for a good laugh. Or at least a chuckle. Or a snort. Or something.

Alright. I take back what I just said; there's a couple exceptions. The absolute worst movie I have EVER seen is definitely under the genre "Trash Cinema". At least, that's what it's under on eBay...
I believe the title is Olum Savisci; The final battle ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzaWJTOlca4 )
is probably the most annoying yet funny thing I have ever witnessed in a full movie. The movie uses maybe five or six sound effects total during the entire fight scene. There are also several other movies with that actor in it (Cüneyt Arkın) with about the same quality; There's a Turkish Star Wars, Korkusuz (aka Turkish Rambo), and Son Savasci to name a few. They're all equally corny, equally low quality, and some are even funnier than the one I linked earlier.

Here's another awesome scene you should definitely watch
(from Turkish Rambo):!
If anybody can figure out where/how he gets all those rockets, I'd be more than happy to hear it. It's been bugging me for awhile now. Not really though.
Anyway, none of the movies tend to really have a plot (especially the Star Wars one. The video is uploaded by the same guy as the above two videos on Youtube, so all you have to do it click their name to find it), and tend to involve lots of explosions and/or yelling. Which isn't usually a bad thing. Oh, also, if you so choose to watch the Star Wars clip, try to figure out what exactly is going on. And, if you can, figure out why that one guy is jumping all over the place randomly ripping off heads, and also why that causes massive explosions. I'd be more than happy if anybody can figure that out as well.

Art of Film

So, uh.. Film is great. I like to watch movies. I don't entirely know if I enjoy analyzing the crap out of 'em yet, though, but I feel like can 'get into' movies pretty easily.
I just saw Raising Arizona last night on the interwebs, and it wasn't as good as I was expecting it to be, but I still really enjoyed it. Other than that I haven't really seen many movies recently... The movie before that was Indiana Jones at the two dollar theater sometime during the last week of summer.
Dunno what else to say here, so I guess that's it.

GAHHH

Hai