Hollywood is an interesting entity, it provides the world with entertainment that is exciting, emotional, unique and so much more. At the same time, however, it’s hard not to see Hollywood as a money grubbing industry, full of sleazy deals, awful movies and it has even produced films completely diluted of originality. One style of filmmaking that often gets this label of unoriginality is remakes, which “While genre films, cycles, and sequels… have found their legitimate place in film theory and criticism, the same cannot be said for the remake, which at least since the fifties, has been treated as a less than respectable Hollywood commercial practice.” It’s true that most people don 't like remakes, since the main purpose of the remake is to retell a classic or beloved story that was already good to begin with. Good movies are the subject of most remakes for financial …show more content…
Which seems to be a sentiment that many filmmakers themselves seem to share, as filmmaker Zack Snyder once said about his remake, Dawn of the Dead “I had no desire to remake the picture. A remake, to me, is you take a script and you shoot it again… A re-filming of the original version was so not needed. Reinterpretation is what we wanted to do. Re-envision it.” Snyder actually brings up a great point, reshooting a film is not the way to remake a movies, instead you need to tell the story in a very different way. This re-shooting of a film rarely happens, a perfect example is Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho, which by all accounts has been considered a terrible movie by critics and audiences alike. This actually brings up a very good point that their are in fact many different styles of remakes, which makes the concept of a remake stand out as being a unique form of
The film Sunset Boulevard, presented in 1950 is a black and white film. The film is about Norma Desmond an old actress, who has issues accepting that she is becoming old. The main actor in the film is Gloria Swanson, who plays Norma Desmond, an older woman who believes she is still young. Desmond is not content with the fact that Hollywood has replaced her with younger actresses. The next actor Nancy Olson, plays Betty Schaffer who falls in love with Gillis despite being engaged to his friend. The third actor is William Holden who plays as Joe Gillis, who has financial problems and decides to turn himself into a gigolo to earn money. The dilemma with Joe is he does not want Betty to know about his job because he knows he might lose Betty as
“There once was a time in this business when I had the eyes of the whole world! But that wasn't good enough for them, oh no! They had to have the ears of the whole world too. So they opened their big mouths and out came talk. Talk! TALK!” (Sunset Boulevard). The film Sunset Boulevard directed by Billy Wilder focuses on a struggling screen writer who is hired to rewrite a silent film star’s script leading to a dysfunctional and fatal relationship. Sunset Boulevard is heavily influenced by the history of cinema starting from the 1930s to 1950 when the film was released.
Hollywood has played a big part is our lives. Growing up we’ve seen numerous movies, some that scared us others that touch us, and those images stayed with us forever. So what happens when Hollywood takes a classic piece of literature such as Frankenstein and turns into a monster movie. It transforms the story so much that now some 50 years later, people think of Frankenstein as the monster instead of the monster’s creator. It became a classic monster movie and all the high values of the original were forever lost.
A League of Their Own (Marshall, 1992) explicitly characterizes an American era when a woman’s place was in the home. Even our modern perspective implicitly follows suit. Although women have gained rights and freedoms since the 1930’s, sexism remains prevalent in America. This film offers an illustration when men went to war and big business men utilized women as temporary replacements in factories, sports, and so on. Here, course concepts, such as gender socialization, gender expressions, role stereotypes, emotion expressions, and language, correspond to the film’s characters and themes.
The film industry suffers from ups and downs. The industry itself is always making new things happen from older ideas. The remaking of classic films has become a common thing; however, some are remade very poorly. The film industry decided to remake the film “The thing”. The film is a very unique remake because it acts as a prequel to the original film. The original film was made in 1982 and the remake was made in 2011. The original film was a very unique horror film, and so was the remake. These films both share similar stories, as well as the remakes little twist to the original story. The original film is set in an American scientific research film. The remake is set as a prequel and shows what happened in the Norwegian scientific research station. These films, share many things, but only one was praised. Critical analysis is very crucial when comparing
Tim Burton’s Batman received a wide variety of reviews from critics and fans, alike. The majority of viewers enjoyed Burton’s take on the classic tale, while others did not appreciate the slight modifications on the original plot. A major difference Burton incorporated in the film was the overall dark tone, contrasting previous superhero movies. Unfortunately, this decision also brought Burton a lot of criticism; while many fans welcomed his new ideas, some did not like seeing Batman, a comic book hero, as the obscure man in a costume. Nevertheless, the film attracted millions of viewers because everyone was eager to see their childhood superhero in a movie that would surely become a blockbuster. After over 20 years since the last Batman movie, many fans had reached the target age of Burton’s film after growing up reading the Batman comics. Though some would be disappointed by certain music choices or the weak plot, popular opinion deemed Batman a success; Jack Nicholson’s performance along with the film’s production design blew viewers away, creating one of Burton’s many unforgettable movies.
In the day when a movie, film or musical was released with big name stars they were watched, enjoyed and either loved, liked or were thought to be tastefully done whether it was fitting to one’s own taste or not. Now all you hear over the air ways takes your breath away in wonder instead of awe. More and more classics and iconic action films are being remade in lieu of the writers creating something new that hasn’t been done before.
The movie I decided to analyze for this course was American History X (1998), which stars Edward Norton. Though this movie isn’t widely known, it is one of the more interesting movies I have seen. It’s probably one of the best films that depict the Neo Nazi plague on American culture. The film takes place from the mid to late 1990’s during the Internet boom, and touches on subjects from affirmative action to Rodney King. One of the highlights of this movie that really relates to one of the key aspects of this course is the deterrence of capital punishment. Edward Norton’s portrayal as the grief stricken older brother who turns to racist ideologies and violence to cope with his fathers death, completely disregards the consequences of his actions as he brutally murders someone in front of his family for trying to steal his car. The unstable mentality that he developed after his father’s death really goes hand-to-hand specifically with Isaac Ehrlich’s study of capital punishment and deterrence. Although this movie is entirely fictional, a lot of the central themes (racism, crime punishment, gang pervasiveness, and one’s own vulnerability) are accurate representations of the very problems that essentially afflict us as a society.
It is the very departure from genre that may warrant the success of a film. Perhaps the formula has been done too many times, leaving the audience unfulfilled, or the very topic no longer holds any interest.
I searched around a bit on the web, and found some interesting trends and information on major film releases in the past 20-30 years. I had not realized just how much we have been bombarded with unoriginal films from the film industry, some of which were excellent, and others, which were dreadful. I looked at the top tens films of 1981, 1991, 2001, and 2011, and the shift in what kind of content we were seeing on the big screen. It led me to this conclusion: Hollywood is clearly running out of ideas, and the amount of sequels they have made shows that they are barely keeping their head above water when it comes to original stories and ideas. But is this really their fault? I believe that the American movie-going public, as well intentioned as they may be, are fueling the unoriginality on our silver sc...
In our care of the older adult class we had the opportunity to view the movie “Up”. I had seen this movie when it was in the theaters in 2009. The main characters of the movie are Carl Fredericksen who is a retired balloon salesman. Carl lives in a home that he seems to have lived in all of his adult life. Carl shared the home with his wife Ellie and they spent a lifetime together and had an adventure book that was never completed. Ellie had since passed away so Carl now lives all alone. Carl has a visitor who comes to his home looking to help him with a task such as “crossing the street” by an young boy by the name of Russell who is a member of the Wilderness Explorers, which I thought seemed to be similar to The Boy Scouts of America. Russell is attempting to get a badge for helping a senior citizen, by assisting the elderly. There are some minor characters in the opening scene of the movie, the late wife of Carl, Ellie, construction workers
As a filmgoer sits down to watch a movie, they want to be wowed . Movies are supposed to engage the moviegoer; as well as captivate the eye leading the viewer to , in a sense, get lost in the movie. There are key criteria components that make a movie successful. Two movies that carry out those components well are movie titles from Scorsese “The Departed” , as well as Christopher Nolan “Memento”. Both movies provide a respectable amount of creativity, while bearing a large amount of content for the viewer to “get lost” in. A substandard movie leaves the viewer with a bad taste in their mouth; on the other hand, a well made film satiates the hunger for a good film. The viewer should feel a connection to the movie whether emotional, or sympathetic
However, to often in Hollywood the city of glamour and glitz, fortune and fame, movie producers have a tendency and even feel at liberty to rewrite American history. In my opinion this is all done out of greed. The movie industry, is all about money, therefore producers are obligated to do whatever it takes to keep it rolling into theatre box offices across the country. Producers know that people look to movies as a source of entertainment. Movie-goe...
In today’s time, films have been so much more than high priced motion pictures. Films are the back bone to our weekends, first dates, and so much more. With that being said, there are large expectations for new movies that come out and the first impression can be the difference in audiences everywhere deeming these films “good” or “bad”. In the article “FX Porn” David Foster Wallace argued that a “good” film follows a strategic cycle, he claimed that this is a well thought out process that has been critiqued to the “T” and is used by many people in the movie industry today. This cycle consists of having likeable actors, simple plots, and lots of advanced editing, per Foster Wallace these are the characteristics that we base our opinions of films off. Forster Wallace says, “What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes — scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff — strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.” As a movie watcher, these elements are great pluses to movies, but the standards that we base our opinion on should not be limited to such simple aspects. Audiences are constantly putting films in the
Over the course of the semester and watching many different films starting at 1927, my view on films and my filmic experience has changed in multiple ways. Starting with the film It (Badger, 1927) and six weeks later watching The Graduate (Nichols, 1967); I saw the differences in how the films were capturing the characters and the advances in technology. Watching Annie Hall (Allen, 1977), which came out 10 years after The Graduate, I saw differences how they went about showing the moments of intimacy since The Graduate came out when the production code was in effect. Seeing how films started with black and white and not having camera movement, to the camera moving and start having effects such as shot-reaction shot, breaking the 4th wall to