In America is a movie about an Irish family that immigrates to New York in order to find better work and improve their lives, but end up finding that it is very difficult to live in the U.S. This is due to the problems they face involving health, money, and the overall environment of the place they live. There are many aspects of cultural geography that are brought up throughout the movie. Some examples include the neighborhood they live in, class of people, and the health factors that impact the people that live there.
The movie begins with John, Sarah, and their daughters Christy and Ariel cross over the border from Canada into the United States with the mission of finding a better life and jobs. There first trouble is finding an apartment, but they eventually find one in New York City in a poor neighborhood in Hell’s Kitchen. Next, John and Sarah struggle to find jobs. John is an actor and is constantly practicing, but has no success in finding an acting job. The family faces many problems due to their poverty and John feels like it is his job to provide for them and make them feel comfortable. For example, he does all he can to find an air conditioner for them because of the extreme heat in their apartment.
One idea that is clearly shown in this movie is that their dream did not work out as they expected. They came to America in search of the American Dream and went to one of the most important cities. However, they did not expect to be put into the culture that they were put into in New York. An example of the difference in cultures they experience in New York is when the girls have to make costumes for their school. Their costumes are homemade, while all of the other classmates were bought. This shows that the...
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...nment impacts who people are. However, it is not just the environment that determines the individual as suggested in determinism. An article in Environmental Review states that, “the environment is simply there, like clay, sometimes malleable by man the builder” (Sprout 1976, 64). This means that the environment suggests different paths for humans, but the path being chosen is up to the human. This is environmental possibilism. Therefore, the rough neighborhood in the movie does not completely determine how the family will turn out. Instead, Hell’s Kitchen offers chances for the family and they have to decide how they want to use them in their lives. In this scenario, John chooses to live a moderate, but happy life with his three children and wife. His environment does not force him to be like many of the other people in it such as drug dealers and criminals.
The film reflects the class difference from beginning through the end, especially between Annie and Helen. Annie is a single woman in her late 30s without saving or boyfriend. She had a terrible failure in her bakery shop, which leads her to work as a sale clerk in a jewelry store. When Annie arrived Lillian’s engagement party,
This is an immigration movie geared towards kids to show and teach them about immigration to America. It shows them the reasons they (the Mousekewitz) left their homeland Russia to come to America. In their case it was to escape the Czarist rule of the cats, parallel to most immigrants who escaped their land due to religious and political persecution. Once aboard the ship to America, it showed the long and unpleasant trip to New York Harbor, where in this movie, Fievel gets separated from his family to inclimate weather. Once they arrive in New York Harbor, it shows children the happiness immigrants got when they saw the statue of liberty and the process through Ellis Island to become a citizen of America. The rest of the movie takes place in America where it shows “political machines”, such as Warren T. Rat, who really is a cat but takes advantage of new immigrants by dressing as a mouse and receiving the mice’s trust. With trust came their money and broken promises, just as “political machines” really did back then. The movie shows the immigrants hardships and poor living conditions in America with tenement housing and unsanitary conditions.
The film’s brilliance lies in the choice to show three distinct familial units with varying and different responses to their disadvantaged circumstances. The three boys who are the main subject of this film each experience a set of challenges and disadvantages associated with growing up in poverty. Appachey lives with his mother and younger siblings and has little to no adult supervision because his single mother must work long hours to support the family. Harley lives with his grandmother because his mother is incarcerated for attempting to kill the man who sexually abused her son. Harley suffers from anger and personality disorders and has a difficult time fitting in at school. Andrew lives with his father, mother and sister but is subject to repeated and frequent moves due his father’s inability to secure stable employment. His mother also suffers from significant mental illness and bouts of manic
When you look at someone, you see a person, but sometimes, you forget that that person has a story. I learned that when I watched the film, I Learn America. When I first watched the movie, I saw students that have come to America. They have come to an international school in New York to learn English. As the film goes on, you see that each of the students that they focus on have struggles that they have/had to overcome to come or stay in America. Before, I did not realize how much they had to go through in order to come to the United States. As educators, we have to get to know our students. We have to understand their lives and their backgrounds and create a good teacher-student relationship and help students build a “home away from home”.
The Bad and The Beautiful (1952) and State and Main (2000) are films within films that unmask Hollywood Cinema as a dream factory and expose the grotesque, veneer hidden by the luxury of stars. The Bad and the Beautiful, directed by Vincent Minnelli, is a black and white film narrated in flashback form. The films theatrical nature requires more close-ups than wide-screen shots to capture the character’s psychological turmoil. For example, Fred and Jonathan’s car ride is captured in a close-up to signify their friendship; however their relationship deteriorates after Jonathan’s deceit. While the camera zooms out, Fred stands alone motionless. Here, Fred is captured from a distance at eye-level and he becomes ostracized by the film industry and
My Mise-en-scene analysis is on American Beauty on page 217: number 1(The dinner scene). The frame itself is a very closed, tight shot; there is no way for the characters to escape and they're left with only confronting each other in this very little space. The shot of the camera isn't necessarily far away or close either. It's neutral, and we can see the full action of the family's dinner conversation happening right in front of us. My eyes were immediately attracted to the bright, white table and then my eyes focused on the faces of the family. The scene's texture is slightly fuzzy, and is not very detailed. But the character's faces are still recognizable. The foreground of this scene is the table with the man and woman sitting at each end; the middle is the girl-who is
The movie Older Than America is an informational narrative of the treatment of indigenous people in the United States. The fourth cinema is a movement in which people of indigenous backgrounds tell the stories of their people, in a realistic and less Hollywood style. The Movie, Older Than America, is set both in the present and in the recent past, and explores the conflict of identity which plagues many native people. It poses the question; does it wipe the war paint off the lens? My answer to that is yes, it more than scratches the surface of the mistreatment of “Human Beings” by Euro-Americans. The demonization of the Catholic Church, and its duplicity in the abuse of its power over helpless children was the overriding story in this film. In this film the Catholic Church is representative of the United States
The Latin American film genre is one of the most known genre worldwide and one of the most popular and successful of all of the genres in this business around the world. Yearly a number of productions from Latin America become favored and demanded successes, often-earning high levels of recognition and recommendation. In foreign film categories and in events and functions such as the Oscars, which are very highly respected around the world, Latin American films are awarded and praised and unquestionably make audiences sit on seat’s edge to bear mind films being produced in countries here. Latin American films are most likely to be as successful as they are because of the mixture of all of the elements, which their cinema provides, including
América’s view of the US changes drastically as the story progress. In the beginning of the story she is full of enthusiasm about coming to America with her husband Candido; due to the fact he promised they would have a better life. As the story progresses reality hits and she realizes that the American Dream isn’t easy to achieve. América realizes this by how she finds herself settling in a canyon with no clean water, not enough money and then having to work a lot after Candido is in the accident and then proceeding to steal from a garden just to have vegetables for her family.
I started taking drugs at the age of 14. The first drug I had was LSD, and it was given to me by my father. He had an abundance of them. He worked for this guy named George. When I was 20 my doctor put me on Zoloft for anxiety. He did not tell me how addictive it would be. I am now on many drugs such as oxycontin, cocaine, vicodin, methamphetamine, and many other opiates and narcotics. I have tried to get sober and have gone to support groups, but I did not actually want to stop. As soon as I left I went back to drugs. This is just one out of millions of stories of people who have become addicted to psychotropic drugs in the United States. In the documentary American Addict 2 - The Big Lie, released in 2016, Sasha Knezev depicts how the pharmaceutical
In this movie, American Pastime, Kaz and Emi and their sons Lane and Lyle, were all sent to an internment camp with the rest of many Japanese descendants. Not only did the pairs have an age difference, but they did have a difference in the way they interpreted the meaning of living in the camp. Kaz and Emi are much older and since they been through it all, they truly understood the struggle. On the other hand, their sons, Lane and Lyle, although they might have faced obstacles in their lives, they both are much younger and had much to learn. As you watch “American Pastime”, you can tell how less reluctant Kaz and Emi were to get out of the camp. They didn’t fight it, they just let it happen. The reason I concluded that they don’t seem to feel
...allowed to reach her American Dream without being frowned upon by others. Materialism, and the fears of judgment, are restrictions for these characters that keep them from reaching their true happiness and American Dreams.
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.
The movie “This is England” was released in 2006, written and directed by Shane Meadows , a story taken, in part, from his life as a boy growing up in the Midlands of England. Mr. Meadows work presents to the viewer a representation of the cultural depiction of the street gang known as Skinheads, in a non-stereotypical light. This is England is a drama combining peer pressure, gangs and gang violence, social gatherings, loss and companionship of youths in a working class environment of a small town in England. This is England has been nominated and has also won multiple awards, according to IMDb.com, several nominations are from the British Academy of Film and Television (BAFTA), Golden Kinnaree Award for Best Film, Best Screenplay for British Independent Film Awards and won the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film additionally won Best European Film from the Mons International Festival of Love Films. This film stars Thomas Turgoose as Shaun, the 12-year-old troubled youth whom this film revolves around, Stephen Graham as Combo and Joseph Gilgun as Woody. Shaun's troubles seem to begin with the loss of his father, an officer, killed during the Falkland War. Subject to bullying from other local gang types, Mods, New Romantics . . ., depression takes it toll on young Shaun. Seemingly, being a loner, Shaun happens upon a small group of older teenage kids, Skinheads, led by a charismatic boy named Woody. Woody takes an immediate liking to Shaun and invites him to join his group. Shaun finds camaraderie in being a part of this group, and they all enjoying the carefree life of being kids, although sometimes the play progresses into vandalism like where a small group of abandoned, derelict housing units meet further destruction a...
The movie was an interesting movie because it has the ability to make you react with many emotions. The movie follows characters that live in Los Angeles and the characters are involved in each other characters’ lives. With each character I had a first impression and I would most of the time end up with different impressions of them in the end. There are a few concepts I noticed and created after watching the film. I had a variety of emotions while watching the film, the most notable emotions were angry to hopeful. Regarding racism the action I could take is to not always rely on stereotypes.