The Room

'The Room' (Wiseau, 2003) is a widely known film within the industry yet for the wrong reasons. It is named one of the worst films for it's narrative, acting, continuity and overall sub-plots. This could be down to the film being an independent with Tommy Wiseau producing, writing, directing and staring in the film.

This film made me realise that the films we watch and enjoy, are the ones we take for granted with us not concentrating on every shot and narrative involved because they are so fluent and natural with the continuity. When actually the film-makers have to plan out each shot and character's back story and characteristics, portraying relatable human reactions and situations. They also carry out the subplots and have a meaning to everything shown on screen. This is something that this film 'The Room' widely lacks.

The Room has many subplots which enter and exit the film narrative within minutes, such as this scene where a gunman is attacking Denny, Johnny's adopted boy, for a drug related reason. The narrative never follows this situation up.

The whole film is written to make Johnny seem like the most caring guy ever, with his daily romance to his 'future wife', taking in a innocent boy, all his friends and work colleagues admiring him, a successful banker and with everyone taking advantage of him to make us feel sorry for him. When Wiseau was writing this film, the subplots involved may have been more suitable for a serial or series for the Television, as Wiseau seemed to want to explore a range of ideas and story lines which can't be portrayed well with conclusions in a hour an a half long film.


Other examples of unplanned subplots include why Johnny has taken on Denny and the mentality of Denny as he is sleeping with girls yet doesn't understand what Johnny and Lisa's intentions are when he joins them in a steamy pillow fight on their bed.

The long sex scenes are very cringe worthy to watch also as they are long cuts consisting of a long scene, always with a rose involved for some reason.

Lastly, when the Johnny's best friend and Lisa have been on the phone to one another, he suddenly pulls out a voice recorder tape which we as an audience never see until this moment, not really following Johnny's story as we are continuously disconnected from his actions and emotions and I felt more attached to the 'future wife' character.

World cinema - dogtooth

In the world cinema screening, we watched Nine Queens which is a film of the 'New Argentine cinema'. When reading the weeks reading on the film, i came across this quote:

 

''If anything can be said to characterize the heterogeneous corpus of films and aesthetic projects that constitute the so-called ‘new Argentine cinema’  it is that they all stage narratives of disintegration (communitarian, political, social, economic, cultural, familial and personal)'' - Gabriela Copertari, 2006.

This explains that world cinema tries to portray their country's realistic history and the change of the society today, which different audiences from different backgrounds and countries may interrupt in different ways. However, this still gives the countries to express their views and opinions on the country they live in, rather than leaving it to Hollywood to stereotype them.

Dogtooth is a Greek film, produced in 2009 and is also known as Kynodontas in Greek translation. I particular enjoyed this foreign language film as even to the Greek audience, the language is foreign, with the children being brainwashed and taught different meanings to different objects and situations within their world, by their mother and father. Therefore, the foreign film does not reflect Greek society yet allows a very different strange viewpoint to be expressed from Greek cinema, to the world. Yet this film still portrays very different messages to audiences across the world. For example, some audiences believe the film shows a metaphoric message of today's society with children believing and abiding by rules of the elder generation and their parents. This doesn't defeat that fact that this film is within it's own narrative genre, with nothing like it in the cinemas.

The mother and father tell their daughters and son that the bush in the garden is their brother and that cats are the animal to fear from, with the son chasing the cat with garden clippers. The young girls also believe that if they give someone a gift then they should give a gift back. however, this leads to some slight incest with them licking one another's 'Keyboards', which they have been told is the definition of their body parts. Much of this weirdness goes on within the film but although the audience including myself finds this film a hard watch, completely crazy, he film does reflect the what if factor. The what if in the sense that our society brings us up and we learn from others who tell us what is right and wrong and the definitions of elements within our world but we just go with what we are old. To these children in his film world, they know no different and believe everything they are being taught is how everyone lives.

Copertari.G. (2006) Nine Queens: A dark day of simulation and Justice. Routledge, London. 20 August.

Western - Django unchained

Django unchained is properly the most modern form of the western genre yet has a lot of the traits of a classic Western taking elements such as the fast zoom in shots which particularly interest me as watching this 2012 film, these elements of the cinematography stand out as its something that we no longer see within films.

Other features of the film that targets it as a western includes the use of sound, with the gun shots and non-diegetic stereotypical western soundtracks. Along with the symbolic sound representing a western, I also noticed that most westerns are set in a distant past period, with Django Unchained picking up on the cowboy hats and guns, along with the history of black slavery with the movie being set in 1858.

Leonardo Dicaprio plays the bad guy, Calvin Candie, in which in preparing for this role, Jamie Foxx quoted on The Ellen DeGeneres show that Dicaprio would ignore Foxx when on set to get into his nasty racist character.




I think that Quentin Tarantino was the perfect director to bring back the Westerns into modern day cinema, as he thinks through every shot with clarity and metaphoric meanings. For example, he makes blood look beautiful in his cinematography such as when the man in the fields is shot and the white roses get splattered in bring red blood, portraying a clean setting turning bad within a few seconds. He has also done this in Kill Bill with the blood spraying from the chopped off head like a water fountain.

This shows that Tarantino has experience from the blood and clever fight scenes needed for a good western. This picture shows the sized room used for the complex shooting scene which is similar to he highly complex fight scene in Kill Bill.