Viewers' Sympathy for Derek Bently in
the Film Let Him Have It
Peter Medak gains sympathy for the character Derek Bently by showing
his misfortune throughout the film.
Derek Bently was wrongly executed. The film shows the mistakes of the
decision and the dangers of capital punishment. Derek has epilepsy and
isn't very intelligent. These factors are used to create sympathy for
Derek and create a feeling that he isn't fully in control of himself.
Because of his low intelligence, Derek gets into trouble. He is caught
when his friends vandalise a shed and is sent to Kingswood Approved
School. At nineteen Derek meets Christopher Craig who likes pretending
to be a gangster, He uses Derek and gets them into trouble.
Christopher goes mad when he and Derek are caught by the police and
shoots a police officer, killing him. Derek was controversially hung
for encouraging Christopher Craig to shoot the policeman. People have
very strong views on capital punishment because many people who
survive today to watch this film lived through times when capital
punishment took place in this country so are reminded of something
close to them. The film shows the effects of capital punishment,
developing preconceived views which people have. The hanging of Derek
Bently was particularly controversial because of the circumstances
surrounding the case such as Derek's intelligence and the fact that
Christopher Craig who was the one who shot the policeman was only
given three years imprisonment. Also Derek Bently's murder charge
rested purely on the words "Let him have it Chris", which could be
taken as words of encouragement, as the jury decided but could have
been a cry for Christopher Craig to let the policeman have his gun.
Bias is used on several occasions during the film as a tool to make
the viewers feel sympathetic towards Derek.
The judge of the trial is extremely biased against Derek Bently. I
believe that Peter Medak makes the judge this way so as to generate
more sympathy for Derek from the viewers and to again put forward the
For the second movie we had to watch, I chose The Good Lie. The Good Lie is the story of the thousands of Sudanese children who were left orphaned and displaced by a civil war in the 1980s. The Good Lie tells a story of six of these kids that made it to America who suffered atrocities, watching as rebel soldiers ravage and burn down their village and seeing their parents get murdered. In addition to these awful events, they survived extreme physical hardships, walking barefoot, escaping from gun fire for about 800 miles to safety in the Kenyan refugee camps. The movie opens with the grueling journey undertaken by these five boys and girl. They fend off dangerous wild animals, dehydration and soldiers during their trek, and one boy passes away and another is taken off by soldiers. When the remaining quartet reaches safety, they band together ever closer.
Americans today tend to believe that guns are dangerous and they should not be in the place of anyone’s hands. There is much debate over who should have one and who should not. What is not commonly conversed is how to properly use one. David Shipley, the author of the article The Rare ‘Good Guy with a Gun’, acknowledges this understated issue. Being a “good guy with a gun” is not enough to stop a bad guy with a gun. You do not only need a gun but also experience, knowledge, and adequacy.
The movie is set within a short space of time (almost real time) in which we see Four of the Six active members of a jewelry heist gone wrong dealing with the repercussions of their crimes. Amongst them is Mr. Orange, or, Undercover Cop Freddy Newendyke, as he’s revealed to be toward the end of the movie. He is the Undercover Cop, The Rat that everyone is talking about. Orange single handedly destroys their operation and essentially Joe Cabot’s criminals-for-hire business seeing as he died by gunshot in the end. However the operation costed Orange his life, or presumably so. That’s something I’ll get to later.
Everyone has that one friend who is a complete goofball: the one who is just different from the rest and can be a little abstract. The misfit may be easy to spot in a crowd and be judged; however, Tim Burton accepts the oddball and takes the concept of character dramatization one step further. Through his movies, Edward Scissorhands and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the outcast tries to break through the social barrier by reaching out to the community and trying to fit in. With Burton’s imaginative characters, Burton shows how being an outcast gives a person the potential for success.
A two-year old boy, Adonis, was sent to the hospital after being left strapped in a car seat overnight, and the father of the boy is now in custody, awaiting charges of child endangerment. The police reveals that the father, Daniel Ribot, 32, took his son to his second birthday party on Saturday night in Paterson, New Jersey. Once the celebration came to an end at about 2:30am, Luz Marie Ramos, mother of Adonis, walked Ribot and Adonis out to Ribot's black Lexus, and strapped the boy in a car seat. The father, Daniel Ribot was supposed to drive his son back to the family home where Ribot's mother (Adonis' grandmother) also lives. Instead, Ribot parked at an auto body shop about a half-mile away and left Adonis inside the car. Ribot then walked
Lennie shows how his great strength brings harm to him when he kills. George wanted Lennie to be at peace and thinking of good things when he met the end of his life instead of being afraid of being killed by people who did not understand him. It was an act of unselfish kindness at a time when people of mental illness such as Lennie, was seen as undesirable, and often monsters. Does George have the right to kill Lennie? Legally? What about ethically? What does George's action suggest about justice within the play and in the world as a
In the play Twelve Angry Men, a boy is on trial for supposedly murdering his father after a night of arguing. Rodney King, twenty-five, was beaten by four caucasian Los Angeles Police Department officers on March 3, 1991 (CNN Wire 1). On this day, King was pulled over for exceeding the speed limit while intoxicated (Kaplan 1). The jury of both of these cases played a major role in the verdict of each case. In the play Twelve Angry Men, the twelve men that make up the jury are faced with a difficult decision to make; deciding whether or not a nineteen year old boy was guilty of murder. Fast forwarding forty-three years later, twelve jurors were given the Rodney King case in which they had to decide the fate of the four Los Angeles officers that brutally beat Rodney King, an African-American citizen. Being a member of the jury on the Rodney King case must have been a difficult task given the evidence surrounding the trial.
Dorian Harwood’s profession as nurse also shapes his actions in the jury room. In the jury room, he acts with compassion and respect. As a nurse he does the same. His compassion lies in caring for another. He relates that to the trial by thinking of the boy as one of his patients. He wants him to have a fair chance at life, and therefore wants him to have a fair trial. In the jury room, he acts with respect because he is very unsure about the case, and really does not know how he feels about things. So when it is his turn to talk he passes to hear the others before he makes the wrong assumption. With these actions he shows a lot of respect for not only the boy on trial, but also to the other juries.
The group initially started with a process of arriving at a decision by voting and there was a groupthink causing everyone (apart from juror 8) to vote guilty. Then a secret ballot was carried out and it was decided that the jury would debate for at least an hour before deciding on the fate of the boy. The first turning point in the jury's decision-making process occurs when Juror 8 dramatically produces a switchblade exactly like the murder weapon, thus disproving the prosecution's argument that the murder weapon was unique in design, Juror 8 had walked through the defendant's neighborhood earlier that week and had bought the knife from a local pawnshop, even though he knew it was against the law to purchase a switchblade. Juror 8 thus causes a few jurors to question the strength of the prosecution's case; his illegal purchase of the switchblade enables him to break the force of the majority's resistance to his viewpoint.
Juror #3 is very biased against the 19-year-old boy that is being tried, and this affects all of his thoughts and actions regarding the case. He has this bias because his own son hit him in the jaw and ran away from home at the age of 15: “I’ve got a kid…when he was fifteen he hit me in the face…I haven’t seen him in three years. Rotten kid! I hate tough kids! You work your heart out [but it’s no use] (21).”According to this quote from the text, this juror condemns all teenagers and feels resentment towards them. He especially feels strongly about the boy being tried, because the boy grew up in the slums, and this juror is also biased against these people who grew up there. It is because of these feelings that he is strongly cemented in his vote of guilty.
The Factors Influencing the Way Each of the Members of the Jury Perceived the Murder in Twelve Angry Men
The American society has been under the influence of the media since the early 1900's. The invisible pressure is hidden behind subconscious and subtle images and messages. One of the main examples, in this case of the cinematographic media, about spreading and validating stereotypes, is the movie "Clueless" from the year 1995. We can find many examples in this project about this aspects. The protagonist "Cher" is a clear example of how many times the media characterize teenagers as superficials, fashion and trend addicts and careless spoiled young women. One of the scenes that expose clearly this stereotypes, Is the scene when Cher has to go to her driving test and she wants to wear super exclusive clothes to impact her DMV officer.
Transitioning the focus of how queer and cultural representation in the media, between 2010 -2015, the vision is present. Many story lines tackle the kind of resistance that might appear in families whose members classify across lines of sexuality, race, and ethnicity to explore diversity. Reaching into how gay and lesbian representation in the media is perceived, the 2013 ABC Family series, The Fosters, is a great example of queer visibility on television after 2010. The American drama series follows the lives of charcters, Lena Adams and Stef Foster, who are an interracial couple living in San Diego, raising Stef’s biological son, Brandon, along with their adopted twins, Jesus and Mariana. As the TV series begins, Lena’s occupation is a
...st do everything in his power to prevent the execution of taking place. This conflict further develops after Ted starts uncovering disturbing details about the case, and after he sees Eric Sweeting failed execution he is alarmed that this may occur to Darryl if he doesn’t act fast.
In the first three episodes of the series Mad Men the main character Don Draper works for a company that creates ads, in the 1960’s, his boss at this company is Rodger Sterling. In the first episode the company that Draper works for is trying to come up with an ad that convinces people that cigarettes are not bad for people’s health. Don Drapper is a high up executive ad man at the company he works for and is trying to find new clients to create ads for. Peggy Olsen, another main character is just starting at the company as Don Drapper’s new secretary. Betty Draper is Don Draper’s wife, they have two kids together. Peter Campbell is a 26 year old up and coming sales man for the same company and works alongside Don Draper. In episode two the company is trying to come up with an ad for right guard spray deodorant. Also Betty Draper is having problems with maintaining control of her