Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

References

Barsam, Richard, and Dave Monahan. Looking At Movies: An Introduction to Film. 4th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Dir. George Roy Hill Prod. John Foreman. 20th Century Fox, 1969.

Blade Runner (1982)

Blade Runner[i] follows Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, an ex-cop and Blade Runner, tasked with hunting down four fugitive replicants. Replicants are bio-engineered androids designed to imitate humans and perform work such as manual labor, entertainment, and even combat, which makes the Blade Runner's job of "retiring" them a particularly difficult situation to handle.

The year is 2019 (almost there!) and the city of Los Angeles is a sprawling urban megaplex packed full of tall skyscrapers, flashing fires, and endless lights, so it’s not very different from Los Angeles today (2 points for easy jokes).

 Screenshot from the movie, or snapshot taken yesterday? You decide.[ii]

The production values[iii] behind Los Angeles 2019 are beautifully dark. The night sky is lit up with the “natural” lighting emanating from the only source, the futuristic cityscape below, effectively acting as a flood light. The more intimate scenes are filled with low-key lighting, making high contrast between lights and dark. All of these lighting tropes are a clear indicator of Blade Runner’s film noir roots.

Furthering the connection between Blade Runner and that particular genre is the main plot following a rugged detective struggling to solve the case in the gritty world of the urban streets. The scale between Deckard and the gigantic looming towers plastered with advertisements creates a sense of being trapped, crowded, and watched; this is constantly reinforced through the dense crowds of people who flock the street shops and dark neighborhoods Deckard investigates.

Another great example of lighting and set design in the movie comes when Sebastian (William Sanderson) leads Pris (Daryl Hannah) to his apartment. The building is abandoned by all except Sebastian and the robotic friends he engineered; the dilapidated staircase and exterior hallways are lit up solely by the roving spotlights creeping in through windows and holes in the wall. Sebastian’s apartment is littered with toys and other mechanical things, all covered in dust and cobwebs, which reinforces Sebastian’s character as an eccentric inventor.

On the subject of Pris, the makeup she applies after being allowed into Sebastian’s apartment is haunting. The combination of her short blonde hair puffed up around her head, pale white face, and black eye shadow creates an image of a clown. This makes sense, since she was designed to act as an entertainer and is an excellent acrobat; this makeup helps her hide among the toys when Deckard comes to investigate the apartment later in the film.

 

Not freaky at all[iv]

I was surprised to find out that it was Edward James Olmos who played Detective Gaff, the man who initially brought Deckard to the police station and who always made little origami sculptures. I didn’t recognize Olmos, although really the only familiarity I have with him are the few episodes of Battlestar Galactica I’ve seen. This type of role Olmos fills in this movie is a supporting one, but given the length of his career at this point, I would not hesitate from calling it a cameo as well.

20 years later, and he still looks basically the same[v]

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[i] Blade Runner Dir. Ridley Scott Prod. Michael Deeley. Warner Bros. 1982

[ii] http://www.bandejadeplata.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Blade.Runner.-vista-area-ciudad.jpg

[iii] Barsam, Richard, and Dave Monahan. Looking At Movies: An Introduction to Film. 4^th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print

[iv] http://www.devo.com/bladerunner/sector/7/pics/pris_hiding.jpeg

[v] http://www.prophouse2000.com/gaff6.jpg & http://thetimewarriors.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/edwardjamesolmosbsgsequels-thumb-500x332-47370.jpg

Groundhog Day (1993)

Groundhog Day follows arrogant weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) as he reports on the Groundhog Day festivities and is subsequently stuck in a time loop, repeating the day over and over again. Phil is the only person who is aware of the time loop, and uses it as an opportunity to do whatever he wants. Eventually, he realizes that the time loop offers him more than just freedom to act as he pleases, but also acts as a platform to stage personal growth on.


First off, the mise-en-scène: The city of Punxsutawney is blanketed in snow and buzzing with foot traffic as people are bustling to and fro the various groundhog day attractions. We're talking your basic small town feeling, where everyone knows each other. The wardrobe utilized in the movie is also totally 90's. Obviously at the time the wardrobe was designed to reflect the then modern world, but viewed today, the wardrobe clearly defines the movie as taking place in the 90's; one look at Andie MacDowell's large hair is enough to give flashbacks to another time. The props also keep the movie grounded in the 90's: Phil makes a call from a payphone at the beginning of the movie; Larry's camera is huge and unwieldy. Once again, the choice of props at the time was made to be as "current" as possible, but twenty years later they shoehorn the movie into a clear time frame.

Repetition was obviously at the core of the movie. "I Got You Babe" by Sonny & Cher is the audience's cue that Phil's day has started over again, waking him in time to hear the radio DJs chatter incessantly about Groundhog Day. One well framed sequence involves Phil being repeatedly woken by his alarm, only to instantly remove the sound through increasingly severe attempts as the toll of the repetition begins to wear on him. First he sort of slams the button to turn the alarm off, the next day he smashes the alarm with a clenched fist, and on the next he picks up the clock and smashes it into the ground, representing his growing frustration with the time loop.

The duration of the story is much harder to pin down. When it comes to the plot duration, there's the initial scene in the Pittsburgh newsroom used to define both Phil's arrogant nature and Rita's sweet, more relaxed demeanor. Where duration gets tricky though is once the day starts to repeat itself. At that point, the plot duration lasts for only that one day, but in terms of story duration, is much longer. Phil himself states that it took months to learn how to properly throw playing cards. From this, we can extrapolate that the story duration of Phil's experience in the time loop covers several years at least, as there are multiple activities like ice sculpting and piano playing that would also require several months, if not years, to master. We must also take into account the numerous suicide attempts Phil makes; the audience is only presented a few choice ones, but in a later conversation with Rita Phil lists many other methods of suicide that he has attempted, adding multiple more days to the story duration, but ultimately still only occurring on the same day of the plot duration.

References

Barsam, Richard, and Dave Monahan. Looking At Movies: An Introduction to Film. 4th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print.

Groundhog Day Dir. Harold Ramis Prod. Harold Ramis & Trevor Albert. Columbia Pictures, 1993.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

From the very beginning, O Brother, Where Art Thou? blurs the line between realism and antirealism, and straddles it throughout the rest of the run time. This is reinforced by the sepia-tinted color scheme which makes everything appear washed out; already an artificial image of Depression-era Mississippi is born. Obviously reality was not sepia tone back in the 1930s, our brains just work such that after so much exposure to the films and photography of the era with natural sepia tint that the washed out coloration primes thoughts of the era when viewed in a modern context (a useful trick for instantaneously transporting your audience from one time and space to another).

O Brother follows three chain gang members, Everett, Pete, and Delmar, and picks up right as the trio escape from their captivity and hightail it out on the railways. Abetting their initial escape is a blind old man who says he works  for “no man” and has “no name” but provides them with a prophecy directly linked to the trio’s extant goal of finding the fortune Everett left buried by his house prior to his incarceration. Just one of the many references scattered throughout the film to Homer’s Odyssey, the blind old man relaying a prophecy is the first driving example of antirealism in the film. 

He predicts that they will find a treasure, but not the one they seek, and see many great things including a cow on a roof. It might not seem so spectacular, but the absurdity of the image itself is enough waver our acceptance of reality. Everett himself, easily the most level-headed of the bunch, tries to explain the man’s prophecy as a psychic manifestation that compensates for the man’s loss of vision. Already our characters have accepted the fantastical.

The rest of the movie can be summed as a series of random encounters as the trio journeys through the Mississippi countryside to reach the buried treasure before it becomes lost forever in an impending flood. Working within a deadline of only a few days, the trio’s path is constantly being impeded by law enforcement and other colorful characters scattered along the highways, towns, and backwoods that Everett, Pete, and Delmar trek through. Americana and folklore are incorporated into the narrative and are treated as normal, once again blurring the line between realism and antirealism.

Religion is referenced frequently throughout the movie: our heroes run into a congregation of Baptists along a river and Pete and Delmar get baptized; they have a rough run-in with a travelling bible salesman; and are being pursued by the devil himself, embodied as the sunglasses-wearing sheriff tasked with tracking the escaped trio down. The sheriff is only shown a few times over the course of the movie, but he is always portrayed as an ominous threat with fire reflecting in his eyes. 

Tommy, the travelling guitarist that the trio meets, explains in a casual manner that he sold his soul to the devil for guitar skills, and in describing the devil, lists of the various defining characteristics of the sheriff. Once again, all this is taken at face value, making the reality of their situation more fantastical through the incorporation of religious icons.

By the end of the film, the prophecy of the blind man has come true: our trio sees the cow on the grainhouse roof and they find the treasure, even though it was the one they did not seek. Everett found the wrong ring to win back his wife for good, and the audience is left with a shot of the blind man conveniently rolling past, reminding us of the prediction he made earlier. O Brother expertly blends the real and the imaginary into a compelling story of an odyssey in the normal world.

References

Barsam, Richard, and Dave Monahan. Looking At Movies: An Introduction to Film. 4th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print.

All images screencapped from DVD copy of:

O Brother, Where Art Thou? Dir. Joel Coen. Prod. Ethan Coen. Universal Pictures, 2000.

Intro Time

I decided I would start fresh, instead of trying to twist the old blog that I kept last quarter to fit my needs here. As the name of the blog states, movies don't grow on trees. They are finely crafted pieces of culture with a very deliberate design; there is nothing organic about it (well, there can be, with documentaries and such, but those are still manipulated through editing). Through my work here I hope I can show how those parts we take for granted in a movie as being automatic are actually intentionally planned.