Akira Kurosawa

I personally thought he was my favorite director that I have seen so far in Art of Film II. His use of dark humor in his supposedly serious movies is just great. For example, the scene where the right hand man of Jiro plays dumb and brings back the head of a stone fox. Though sometimes he does take some shots too far and leave it on the character for too long in my opinion, but it is something new I hadn't seen before. The types of heroes is a bit different from the type I'm used to from American films, his heroes aren't invincible, they actually can get hurt pretty badly (Sanjuro for example in Yojimbo). His use of weather, strong winds, rain, nature is never weak in his films.

My favorite movie out of the three we watched would probably have to be Yojimbo, just because of the loads of dark humor in that film. Kurosawa never made a comedy but Yojimbo was pretty close. It was interesting to see an action film incorporate so many jokes and laughs, I had never seen that before in any American films. Sanjuro as a character seems to be very likable as well, he has the skill of any great samurai, but he still acts and looks like a commoner, and pretty carefree as well. I think foreign films bring a lot of new ideas to movie making that Americans just don't seem to be able to create once they are stuck in their film making norms. They can sometimes bring a new experience to viewers.

Spirited Away

This film is one of the most recent films created by Hayao Miyazaki. I really liked this one too, but the story was a little hard to follow. The film just made take up some much random information about the spirit world, but I did like the creativity. I think my favorite part of the film is when the giant baby and the evil bird get turned into a baby and a little bird. Then the bird flies around carrying the mouse around for a lot of the movie. I thought that was just very funny and creative of Miyazaki. The animation was better than ever before, everything looked so real, yet still animated, I especially liked the water in this film. Once again, a film from studio Ghibli can not go without a great soundtrack, and this film has a nice soundtrack.

There were so many random things that happened in this movie. For example, a giant water spirit leaves a brown ball of something when it leaves, and she thinks it is medicine? I would have thought it to be something else... but that might just be me. The boiler man and the little coal guys were pretty cool, the little coal guys look just like the dust bunnies from Totoro. There were many random events, but not enough to lose the storyline. I still liked them for their creativity and just for fun. But it sort of takes a little away from the movie itself. The ending had nothing to do with the movie at all, where Haku reveals who he really was. We never knew she almost drowned as a kid in a lake, I do not remember the film ever mentioning it even once before revealing it in that scene. The theme of "Don't judge a book by its cover" is also in this film and it fits in really well. But overall I really liked this movie, another great job by Miyazaki.

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was pretty unique when he started making his own films. His use of montage with sound to tell a story was very original back in his time. He also had his typical story lines full of suspense rather than surprise, this included the wrongly accused man or knowing a man has committed murder but just following him to see get caught. His fear of police and obsession with blonde women was pretty clear in many of his films. He always had the police ending up seen as weak and useless, and having a blonde woman as one of the main characters. Out of the three films that we had watched in class, I liked Vertigo. I liked the twists and turns throughout the movie, and when we were actually told the truth about everything was pretty satisfying. Then allowing the movie to progress after the point of us knowing the truth allowed us not to be left asking as many questions as we would have if it had just ended with us finding out what happened. There was still the last scene with the main character just standing there after the woman had fallen off the tower and fell to her death, we never found out what happened to him.

Overall I did not find myself to like Hitchcock as much as I thought I would. I think it is mostly because his style of film making has been copied over and over throughout the years by other directors. It just seems like I have seen his techniques used too many times already. At first I liked his background stories that were full of suspense, but those too had been copied and used countless time by other people. Even though they were original at the time, it just seemed a bit boring to me. The endings were typically predictable, with the exception of Vertigo in my opinion, which was why I liked it the most out of the three we watched in class.

Princess Mononoke

This is probably my favorite movie out of all the other movies that were created by Hayao Miyazaki and Ghibli Studios. This movie had everything, action, suspense, romance, and even his trademark concern for nature. The film is about a boy that had been living peacefully in his village when a demon boar attacks. In order to save his village, the boy becomes infected with what drove the boar to become a demon (pollution). He is told to leave his village, and he begins his journey. He meets a family of wolves and a human girl (Princess Mononoke) that lives with them, but they are hostile towards the boy. He also discovers that there is an iron mining village that is polluting the environment, but befriends the people that live there. He must then choose who to side with, the iron town or Princess Mononoke, industrialization or the environment. The main reason why I liked this movie so much was because, it felt like Miyazaki wanted to really just tell people that we should be concerned about the environment instead of just hiding it in the background of most of his other movies. He basically comes out and says that the environment is dying due to our pollution and irresponsibility.

The fight between industrialization and the environment is very much real, both in the film and in the real world. Miyazaki just shows us how he sees how industrialization and the environment are interacting with each other in this film. He seems to believe that the environment will strike back if industrialization goes too far and pollutes too much. We can see the results of green house gases and global warming today. Miyazaki shows that humans can not abuse the environment as much as they want without consequences and that humans must respect the environment if they plan to take things from it.

Once again I was amazed at the detail of the animation and the wonderful music made specifically for this film. Then there are things that surprised me when I first say the movie, so much violence and gore from Miyazaki. The film has a lot of violence and gore. For example, the boy accidentally shoots off a samurai's arms with an arrow. I thought that was pretty entertaining, but I believe many people were like me and suspected a more tame movie. I feel bad for those parents that brought their children to watch this movie and finding out that it was nothing like Totoro. It was unexpected, but I think the violence and gore was a nice change by Miyazaki. Any fan of Miyazaki should really watch this film if they haven't already done so.

Director Blog 1: My Neighbor Totoro

I have watched this movie multiple times over the years, but it never gets old. I enjoy how innocent the movie is. Theres a big giant fluffy bear/squirrel thing that has magical powers as one of the main characters, what more would someone want? He even comes with a smile that takes up 2/3 of his face(Freaky the first time I saw it)! Then there was the cat that was also a bus, I thought that was very creative and original. The film was trying to show the importance of nature while also showing how powerful the imagination of a child can be. The film switched back and forth between reality and fantasy, mixing them together slowly until the end where people could no longer tell them apart. My favorite scene would probably have to be when the kids and Totoro were waiting together for a bus and Totoro kept jumping in order hear more rain drops hit the umbrella. It reminded me of when a child figures out that one thing causes another and thinks that it is interesting, so the child keeps doing it. But the one thing that Miyazaki does not want the people that watch his movies to forget is the importance of nature, that is why it is present in almost all of his films. Such as in this film where Totoro and the children planted seeds and made them grow spontaneously into gigantic trees.

One of the main reasons why I liked this movie was how well the music and video worked with each other. Both the animation and the music must have taken a lot of effort. The music just fit into the movie so well, and it wasn't like anything I had heard before when I first saw the film. This film was way ahead of it's time, I don't remember seeing any other animated films with fully original music and an entire orchestra to back it up. The music is very soothing to listen to and I liked how much effort was put into it. (I also already wrote a blog about this film in Art of Film 1 (Tonari no Totoro, in 2007), so I would just be repeating myself if I wrote more.)

Do The Right Thing!

I found this film strangely entertaining. I think it was because the style of the film reminded me of the television show Fresh Prince with Will Smith. I thought it was well made, I liked the cinematography, it showed many different angles and shots of the neighborhood. The entire setting of this place had nothing real about it, the people didn't really act like that, it was a creation of Spike Lee. They had to clear out that neighborhood, cleaning out all the drug addicts in order to shoot the film. Overall I thought the film was pretty fun to watch. I feel like I should mention the death of Radio Raheem, It is a tragedy when a young person dies for such a small issue. Spike Lee then tries to hide it by not making it a big deal, making the destruction of Sal's Famous Pizzaria more important. I thought he was trying to show that people considered Sal's Famous Pizzaria was more important than the life of an adolescent African American boy. Then the movie critics basically did what he said they were going to do and didn't even mention Radio Raheem. It seemed sort of like a trap, seeing who caught it and who didn't, and those who didn't would be prosecuted by Spike Lee himself in his interview about he film. Overall I thought this was a very entertaining film and would recommend it.

The Battle of Algiers!

NPR: Movie Review 'The Battle of Algiers' by Kenneth Turan - Morning Edition
http://www.npr.org/templates/dmg/dmg.php?prgCode=ME&showDate=09-Jan-2004&segNum=14&NPRMediaPref=WM

My classmates might have found this movie to be quite annoying, mostly because they didn't like the subtitles, but I actually liked the movie. I liked the effort in trying to make the film unbiased, to show both sides of the conflict. I also liked how they tried to make it as realistic as possible, with scenes that looked like they were from a documentary. They were even able to get an operational tank for one scene. This film was made only a couple years after this actually happened which is surprising to hear. I really liked this film overall and would recommend it to someone if they are researching the battle of Algiers, or they just want to see an old war film. This film is still even relevant today as the review says, even though this review was made years ago, our present day situation in Iraq can be compared and similarities arise. The gorilla warfare in the city look very familiar. The way the film was shot made it look realistic and basically stated, "This is happening now!" to the audience.