We’ve actually been finished with this course for a while now but I only recently realized that I never did write my usual post summarizing my experience with it. So here it is and just for the record it is taught by professor Scott Higgins of Wesleyan University.
Continue reading The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color
It is said that sometimes a new idea takes Hollywood by storm and so you see a whole bunch of movies sharing similar themes being released at around the same time. Enemy isn’t a Hollywood film since it’s a Canadian-Spanish production. But it is still hard to otherwise explain why The Double and Enemy, two very similar films, were both released in 2013.
Every single person on the Internet has watched that one scene from this film that provided the material for thousands of parody videos. Comparatively few people have watched the film itself in its entirety. Yet it really is a highly regarded work. It was nominated for the Oscars in the Best Foreign Film category in 2005 and is included in many lists of best films, such as various versions of the famous 1000 Films to See Before You Die checklist.
In line with our new interest in cinema, we’ve signed up for another Coursera course called Marriage and the Movies: A History. I suspect that with its focus on marriage it will be more of a sociology class than a movie class but nonetheless we’ll try sticking with it. This means a whole new round of really old movies to watch, starting with this selection from the silent era.
Being a film directed by David Fincher, not to mention one of the most prominent releases of 2014, Gone Girl was always a film that I knew I had to watch. But what really piqued my curiosity was how Broken Forum members reported it as being one of the most misogynistic films they’d ever seen. Last year was a pretty eventful one for gender issues in the United States. It was the year in which Elliot Rodger killed six people and wounded fourteen others in a women-hating killing spree. It was the year that Gamergate got started. It was the year that rape on university campuses entered the national spotlight, culminating in the Rolling Stone debacle on the matter. For all of these reasons, releasing Gone Girl in 2014 seems like very poor timing.
Man Facing Southeast is a film that I would never have heard about in the ordinary course of things. It’s an Argentine movie by Eliseo Subiela with some science-fiction overtones that was one of the recommendations from a Broken Forum member when I asked about interesting South American films.
Vertigo is the first Alfred Hitchcock film to be covered in this blog since I’ve started seriously writing about movies. In general, I’ve watched embarrassingly few of his films. Like everyone else, I’ve watched Psycho ages ago but don’t have a clear memory of it. I’ve also watched The Birds a few years back and that’s it. That means I have a lot of catching up to do.