Big Fish is a film that was made in 2003 by director Tim Burton with the screenplay by John August. The film is based on the novel by Daniel Wallace. This film tells the story of an old Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) who is on his deathbed, and his outrageous and mostly unbelievable adventures prior to his one and only son Will Bloom ( played by Billy Crudup) being born. Will Bloom is tired of these long drawn out hyperbolic tales he has heard all his life and wants some truthful answers before his father dies. Big Fish follows Edward Bloom’s life, showed from his point of view on his journey through life.
The primary conflict in Big Fish is between an old Edward Bloom and his son Will Bloom. Will is tired of his father’s fairy-tale like stories
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and feels as though he does not know his father at all. “The thing about icebergs is you only see 10 percent. The other 90 percent is below the water where you can't see it. That’s what it is with you dad. I'm only seeing this little bit that sticks above the water” (Big Fish). With his father sick and confined to a bed, Will tries one last time to get some answers. Roger Ebert, a movie critic, sums up Ed Bloom’s reaction in his review of the movie; “Old Edward harrumphs, shifts some phlegm, and starts recycling again” (RogerEbert.com). Most of the story is told by Ed Bloom from his bed in flashback, with Ewan McGregor as a young Ed Bloom. McGregor does a great job in this role and shows a sense of wonder and innocence throughout the movie. The directing technique by Burton is very creative, bright, and visually appealing. The pace of Big Fish is somewhat odd because the story is not told straight through. Most of the movie is told through flashbacks and it skips around from present to past and then sometimes somewhere else when the older Bloom gets sidetracked and goes on a rant about some other issue. The directing goes along with Bloom’s style of storytelling and in one scene where older Ed Bloom is talking to Will’s wife Josephine (played by Marion Cotillard) he sheds some light on why he tells them the way that he does. “You see most men they’ll tell you stories straight through, it won’t be complicated, but it won’t be interesting either” (Big Fish). This method of storytelling can be confusing at first, but it really does have a way of keeping your attention. In Roger Ebert’s review he talks about Burton’s sense of eagerness in wanting to jump into flashbacks and show the adventures that the old Ed Bloom keeps going on about (RogerEbert.com). Finney does a great job in his role as an aging storyteller. John Daily, a movie critic from Cinemaspin.com wrote in his review of Big Fish about how Finney never seems less than genuine in his storytelling makes it almost impossible to tell if they are true or false (Cinemaspin.com). A great thing about Big Fish is that it has an immense amount of value on so many different levels.
It can be perceived as a simple story but it also contains great depth when you really look into it. “Commentary about greed of man, our self-importance, and our tendency to overreact, over think, and over complicate our lives run throughout the film like threads binding this quilt of tall tales together” (Cinemaspin.com). At one point young Bloom very well may have stumbled upon what could be perceived as heaven. After young Bloom leaves his hometown of Ashton Alabama with his new friend Karl the giant (played by Matthew McGrory) to start his journey to see the world, he comes across a haunted trail. At the end of this haunted trail is the town of Spectre. Spectre has streets paved with grass and is full of very kind people who quite like Bloom. After staying in Spectre for a short time, Bloom leaves to continue his journey and meet back up with Karl the giant. John Daily described Big Fish as a pop-up book for adults that can take us on a journey into the child in us all (Cinemaspin.com). Bloom had a variety of interesting tales such as the time he caught a catfish as big as a shark, the time he parachuted onto a talent show stage in China while he was in the military, and the moment when he first saw a glimpse of his future wife Sandra (played by Jessica Lange). “There is a point at which his stories stop working as entertainment and segue into sadism” ( RogerEbert.com).
Will has heard the stories so much that he believes his father is embarrassing himself. With Ed Bloom’s health declining, he is placed in the hospital. Will has one more conservation with his father and Ed Bloom wants Will to tell the story of how he will pass away. Will tells a story that is quite the adventure and that the old Bloom is proud of. At the funeral, Will starts to see people that his father talked about in his stories and he sees now that his father was not actually telling big lies. There were only small differences; Karl the giant being closer to seven feet tall than fifteen, and the conjoined Siamese twins really just being identical twins. Ed Bloom likely did have all of those crazy adventures and he was just telling them as he saw them. Fast forward a few years, and Will Bloom is keeping the legend of Edward Bloom alive by passing these stories down to his son.
The book has vivid imagery making the reader imaging as if her or she was their right beside him in his whole investigation. Such as “In the winter of 1978, through, a fierce blizzard hit southern Connecticut. Temperatures were often below zero and at one point it snowed for thirty-three hours straight. Perhaps it was the cold that killed the fish, or the copper sulfate I helped the caretaker drag through the pond the previous summer to manage the algal blooms, or maybe even the fishermen id noticed trespassing on the estate one day, scoping out my grounds. But whatever caused it, after that never again did I spot a living fish in that pond again.”(Greenberg 12-13). This quote shows how good his imagery, tone, and diction is, when I read it all I could think of is that storm and the pond. The author has an excellent writing style and keeps the reader wanting more. Even though the book has a lot of good things for it the only thing I would tell the author would to give more connections of him to the story. It says “The transformation of salmon and sea bass from kingly and holiday wild fish into everyday farmed variants is a trend that continues with different animals around the globe.”(Greenberg 195). In every chapter about each of the fish it gives some connections to him but it would make it even
Northrop Frye is the author of The Educated Imagination. The book talks about literature and methods that improve and enthralls the reader from common fallacies, to how an author can manipulate what is put in the text. These lesson can be put to use outside in the real world such as advertising. These can also be connected to other media pieces such as other books and movies. The movie Big Fish directed by Tim Burton is one of those media pieces that can be connected to Northrop Frye work. The movie is about a son who trying to learn more about his dying father by listening to stories and myths about his life. The purpose of this reflection is to show that in the educated imagination the chapter
Blackfish is a well-known film about how whales were kept in captivity while being mistreated. This film explained the situation in more of a sequential order stating each event one after another from occurrence. This film was made to inform people of all the cruel and monstrous things that Sea Land and Sea World were doing to the whales.
The stories of each fish flow together as each story shows how humans have pushed to gain more control over the ocean and the delicious animals that swim in it’s depths. Greenberg starts in the free-flowing rivers where salmon are commonly found. It is there that early humans of the Northern Hemisphere most likely began their infatuation with fish. Greenberg puts it as, “It(salmon) is representative of the first wave of human exploitation..” (170) Once Europeans learned to fish, they had the ability to fish in shallow ocean water which is where sea bass are usually found. Later, fishermen s...
Most people in society simply go about their daily business with their heads down, few actually try and take matters into their own hands and make a real change, but among the rarest of people, are the men and women like Edward Bloom. He is the main protagonist in Tim Burton's "Big Fish", who, on his deathbed, attempts to reconnect with his distant son by telling him the extraordinary and dramatized story of his life. Through the structuralism lens, the truth of the story is that Edward Bloom is a larger than life character who impacts all those he meets along his journey. This truth is revealed through: the setting of the circus, the conflict that Edward experiences during the Korean War, the character of Karl, the town of Ashton, and finally
ultimate theme of 'The Fish" is that the carelessness of how we treat others and
Blackfish is a 2013 documentary attempting to elevate public awareness regarding the orca that are being kept in maritime amusement parks, specifically SeaWorld, and the inherent danger of their captivity. The film is effective because it raises a set of important ethical questions for the viewer while presenting with a necessary fact-based style of documentation that does not evoke gratuitous scenes of abuse in order to inspire sympathy, unlike some of the other films that are intended to raise awareness about animal abuse. The film focuses on one orca, commonly referred to as a killer whale, in particular by the name of Tilikum. The documentary begins as a group of contract fishermen hunt a family of killer whales off the coast of Iceland.
A fish is a creature that preceded the creation of man on this planet. Therefore, Bishop supplies the reader with a subject that is essentially constant and eternal, like life itself. In further examination of this idea the narrator is, in relation to the fish, very young, which helps introduce the theme of deceptive appearances in conjunction with age by building off the notion that youth is ignorant and quick to judge. Bishop's initial description of the fish is meant to further develop this theme by presenting the reader with a fish that is "battered," "venerable," and "homely." Bishop compares the fish to "ancient wallpaper.
He teaches the kid what to do in order to successfully reel in a large, beautiful fish. Ironically, the narrator is the one who learns from the kid in the end. At the beginning of the story, everything is described negatively, from the description of the kid as a “lumpy little guy with baggy shorts” to his “stupid-looking ’50s-style wrap-around sunglasses” and “beat-up rod”(152). Through his encounter with the boy, the narrator is able to see life in a different way, most notable from how he describes the caught tarpon as heavy, silvery white, and how it also has beautiful red fins (154). Through the course of the story, the narrator’s pessimistic attitude changes to an optimistic one, and this change reveals how inspiring this exchange between two strangers is. This story as a whole reveals that learning also revolves around interactions between other people, not only between people and their natural surroundings and
In Daniel Wallace’s novel, Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions and Tim Burton’s film, Big Fish, the relationship between the dying protagonist, Edward Bloom and his estranged son, William Bloom, is centrally to the story in both the novel and film. Like many fathers in today's society, Edward Bloom wishes to leave his son with something to remember him by after he is dead. It is for this reason the many adventures of Edward Bloom are deeply interwoven into the core of all the various stories Edward tells to mystify his son with as a child. Despite the many issues father and son have in their tense relationship as adults, Daniel Wallace and Tim Burton’s adaptation of Wallace’s novel focalizes on the strained relationship between Edward Bloom and William Bloom. In both Wallace’s novel and Burton’s film, they effectively portray how the relationship between Edward Bloom and William Bloom is filled with bitter resentment and indifference towards each other. Only with William’s attempt to finally reconcile with his dying father and navigating through his father fantastical fables does those established feelings of apathy and dislike begin to wane. With Burton’s craftily brilliant reconstruction of Wallace’s story does the stories of Edward Bloom and his son blossom onto screen.
In the movie, the ideal marriage of Gavin and Babs begins to come apart, when Gavin cannot deal with the loss of the glory he had in his youth.
Consider other parallels: heroes Leopold Bloom and Lester Burnham (same initials, LB) are both middle-aged, middle-class, mediocre, unappreciated admen (Lester describes himself as "a whore for the advertising industry"[49], neither of whom has had sex with their wives in years . Ultimately both Bloom and Lester yearn to regain the past unity and warmth of their homes.
In the novel Big Fish by Daniel Wallace, we are told the story of Edward Bloom, a man of many adventures, who is somewhat of a myth. Big Fish is a collection of the tall tales Edward tells his son about his life, and also of the effect his tales had on his son. The novel comes from an American author from Alabama, while the movie comes from Hollywood and is directed by Tim Burton, who is also American. This story is not an ancient sacred text, so the story’s function(s) is to entertain and to make money.
...nizes the fish because, just like the fish, people fight daily battles to survive in life. This humanization of the fish enables the speaker to relate and respect him, and therefore, ultimately leads to his release.
One might say we are presented with two fish stories in looking at Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, a marlin in the former and a whale in the latter. However, both of these animals are symbolic of the struggle their hunters face to find dignity and meaning in the face of a nihilistic universe in Hemingway and a fatalistic one in Melville. While both men will be unable to conquer the forces of the universe against them, neither will either man be conquered by them because of their refusal to yield to these insurmountable forces. However, Santiago gains a measure of peace and understanding about existence from his struggles, while Ahab leaves the world as he found it without any greater insight.