From the Paper
"The films of Takeshi Kitano mimic American genre films in some respects but do so in a unique way, and his later films have developed more levels of meaning and layers of plot and character development that extend the nature of the genre in new directions. Kitano generally favors the crime drama, usually in stories about the Japanese crime groups known as the Yakuza and the police. Kitano himself plays the hero, who is usually a troubled policeman or gangster with a complex and dual involvement in family matters and violent crime at the same time. Kitano thus deals in contrasts, and his directorial style emphasizes and balances the competing interests of the main character as well as the ambiguities of modern society. This is evident in early films like Boiling Point (1990) and Violent Cop (1989), but Kitano makes such contrasts even more central ..."

Tags: JAPAN

From the Paper
"This paper is an examination of ethnic stereotypes in American films and the psychological impact that those stereotypes have on audiences of all ethnicities. Mainstream films perpetuate in-group perceptions about out-group members, both consciously and unconsciously, even when trying to be liberal-minded. By making specific casting decisions, filmmakers designate the ethnicity of characters that either reinforce the audience's opinions of the ethnicity represented or provide individual exceptions to the accepted stereotypes. Such representations can have a powerful effect on audiences of all races. Stereotypes in some form are almost impossible to avoid, whether they are examples of institutionalized racism (intentional or inadvertent) or attempts to counteract prejudice. Some of the most recent mainstream films demonstrate..."

From the Paper
"Feminist theorists often analyze society in terms of gender relations and specifically in terms of how issues of differential power affect gender relations. Society today asserts that men and women are equal, but this is not the case in practical terms. They may be treated equally under the law, but they are not treated equally in most respects. They simply do not have the same opportunities in the business world, for instance, and even gender relations are shaped more by what society decides is correct than by individual desires. The plight of women in society has been addressed by a number of feminist theorists as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft in the eighteenth century and Catherine MacKinnon and Carole Gilligan more recently. These issues have also been addressed in a number of films as well, and a film like American Beauty..."

From the Paper
"One key to Alfred Hitchcock's great success as a movie director is his ability to persuade the viewer to identify with the central characters of his films. Audience identification with the dangers experienced by characters in peril is the key to successful suspense. But Hitchcock sometimes convinced the audience to identify with characters whose fates did not provide the release that audiences usually feel when their hero saves her/himself (or is saved) from danger. In The Birds (1963) Melanie Daniels is all but destroyed by the unexplained attacks of wild birds and the film's ambiguous ending does not leave the spectator with much hope for her. In Psycho (1960), of course, "everything is done to encourage the spectator to identify with Marion Crane," just to see her spectacularly murdered only one third of the way through the movie (Wood 143). In both films.."

From the Paper
"Edward Said and others write about the issue of Orientalism, the way the East is represented and viewed by the West. The term "Orient" signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning and Western consciousness, and the Orient can be seen as a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West. Orientalism is the image of the "Orient" expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship and as seen in popular media during any given era. The way Orientalism is currently treated in the media suggests a number of villainous stereotypes and prevailing attitudes in the West regarding Arabs and others. The old idea of the Yellow Peril was used when Asians were seen as prime villains, while more recently it is the Arab that has become the target of choice."

From the Paper
"The setting of the forest plays a key role in creating the Gothic quality in the film "The Blair Witch Project" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story ?Young Goodman Brown.? In the forest, the characters in both works confront nocturnal landscapes and hallucinations, eerie voices, fires and haunted houses?conventional features of a Gothic work (Sedgwick). Far away from the familiar environment and civilization, these characters are plunged into a netherworld of existence. According to Walpole, in Gothic texts, "a god, or at least a ghost, [is] absolutely necessary to frighten us out of too much sense" (in Morris). In these two works, fear serves to be a powerful force that unleashes the suppressed and hidden emotions of the characters. Heather, Josh and Michael, the protagonists of the film, erupt in anger towards one another as they discover..."

From the Paper
"The cable television movie Romero tells the true story of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, a church leader who at first was reluctant to become embroiled in the political battles of his time but who eventually became a leader in the search for justice for the lower classes in that country, a role that would lead to his death at the hands of the military. The film raises a number of difficult ethical issues, and one of the key ones relates to an argument that has been taking place in South America in particular for some time over the importance of and value of liberation theology, or revolution through the intercession of Catholic church leaders.
This issue is not a simple one, though it might seem so on the surface. Even in a democratic nation like the United States, the political involvement of clergy from any denomination or..."

Tags: LATIN, AMERICA

From the Paper
"In the late 1930s a sub-genre developed in the American film. The so-called screwball comedies were different from the comedies that had gone before, and to some extent it is a sub-genre that has persisted. The definition of a screwball comedy is not as definite as that for, say, a Western or a Horror film, and whether a given work fits this sub-genre is always arguable. Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) is an accepted classic in the genre, while Rob Reiner's Harry Met Sally (1989) is not so clearly an echo of the original group of films so classified.

The original screwball comedies were made in the era between the onset of the Depression and the end of World War II. Ed Sikov offers a definition of screwball comedy that emphasizes the sexual relationships involved, with madcap comedy surrounding the onset and development of romance. Usually, he says, the,,,"

From the Paper
"The genre of crime fiction in American literature and film covers a wide variety of styles and subgenres, but certain elements can be identified as being especially identified with American crime fiction. The private detective or private eye is the character most associated with American crime fiction, and as the private detective developed, he was part of a larger form known as the hardboiled school which referred to an attitude of toughness and cynicism that might be expressed by a policeman or lawyer as well as a private detective, though the private detective is the primary embodiment of the hardboiled school. Many of these novels and films use the private detective himself as the filter through which the rest of the story is told, either because he (and they were overwhelmingly male until recently) tells the story in the first-person or as narrator or because he..."

From the Paper
"Race and the divide between the races is either the subject or the subtext in many films. The theory of the creation of "the Other" as delineated by Bell Hooks applies to these works and helps illuminate how they handle the issue of race. Hooks's analysis will serve as the critical perspective to be applied to a film overtly about racial tensions and how they develop, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.

Hooks notes how race is used not merely to discriminate against one group or another but to make that group discriminate against itself:

Though systems of domination, imperialism, colonialism, racism, actively coerce black folks to internalize negative perceptions of blackness, to be self-hating, and many of us succumb, blacks who imitate whites..."

From the Paper
"Most of Billy Wilder's films have a strong aura of cynicism manifested in the actions of the characters and the development of the themes. Witness for the Prosecution (1958) is atypical in some ways--it is more isolated in time and place than most of Wilder's films because it is a courtroom drama which keeps largely to one setting. Its protagonist is every bit as cynical in his way as the heroes of other Wilder films, such as Double Indemnity (1944) or Sunset Boulevard (1950), and, like those other characters, he is ultimately duped by his own cynical nature. Like many Wilder characters, in fact, the barrister Sir Wilfrid alternates between being an effective practitioner of his particular profession and an observer who is presented with a vision of the actions of someone even more cynical and manipulative than he."

From the Paper
"The film Blade Runner (1982) makes deliberate use of the 1940s film style known as film noir, a name given to the approach by French film critics who saw in American movies an emerging social, psychological, and stylistic point of view after World War II. The use of the style in Blade Runner brings two different generic sensibilities into conflict: the science fiction film which looks to the future, and the film noir which finds meaning in the dark and decaying urban world of the 1940s. Director Ridley Scott deliberately plays the two styles against one another, with the high-tech world of the future shown not as a brave new world of progress and light but as an extension of the urban decay of today, a theme highlighted by the stylistic link to films of the past."

From the Paper
"The Godfather was the highest-grossing film of 1972, while Dirty Harry was a major success the year before. Both films can be defined loosely as being in the crime genre, but their generic differences are considerable. The Godfather is in the tradition of the gangster film, though it melds this with a traditional family drama, while Dirty Harry is a police drama that owes as much to television as to earlier movies for much of its structure and theme. The Godfather was directed by Francis Ford Coppola in his first major studio feature, while Dirty Harry was directed by Don Siegel, a veteran with many films to his credit by the time he directed this one. The way the two filmmakers approach their material is quite different, and yet in one respect they are similar--both filmmakers respond to the socio-historical forces of their time and embody some aspect of those forces in their.."

From the Paper
"The purpose of this research is to examine Wall Street, a film directed by Oliver Stone, with reference to the narrative paradigm theory described by Walter R. Fisher. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal elements of Fisher's explanation of the narrative paradigm as a strategy for decision and action, and then to discuss Wall Street in light of Fisher's theory, as well as with reference to the film's function vis-?-vis more general sociological perspective, in a manner that points in the direction of the manner in which the film as narrative might provide, as Fisher suggests, "a rationale for decision and action" in the business world.

Fisher's elaboration of what he terms the narrative paradigm is meant to give an account of the efficacy of persuasive moral argument in the context of literary and dramatic patterns of..."

From the Paper
" The film of Casablanca has had major audience appeal since the time it was first released, and indeed it was something of a surprise hit when it first came to the screen. The appeal in 1942 was likely to be somewhat different than the appeal of the film today given that the societal concerns of the time were different, and the film does indeed reflect many of these concerns in its plot, the interactions of its characters, and the society it depicts. Casablanca is very much a document of its age and reflects much of the history of the late 1930s leading to the war that was then waging in 1942.

The society depicted in the film is exotic not only because of its setting in Casablanca in North Africa but also because of the mixture of nationalities brought together in an artificial manner in this time and place. This is artificial because it is.."