...In 1946 French film critics analysed the films produced in the United States during the war, and drew attention to a new mood of cynicism and dark pessimism that has penetrated into the American cinema. As Paul Schrader noted: ‘french cinephiles soon realized that it was only the beginning: with the first post-war years lighting in Hollywood films was getting darker, characters – more vicious, intonation - more hopeless, and the plots were getting increasingly fatalistic overtones’ (1972: 53). Never before have filmmakers dared to express such a harsh and unflattering view of the American life. The name ‘film noir’ was introduced by Nino Frank in his article for L’Ecran français on 28 August, 1946. He particularly emphasises The Maltese Falcon...
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...The responsibility for the identity crisis among Native Americans lays on the Hollywood. It has assigned an abundant amount of unrealistic stereotypes to Native Americans, which are the reason that Native Americans don't know who they really are. Today, Native Americans struggle to fit into the mold of behavior and appearance that Hollywood has constructed for them. In “Smoke Signals”,a screenplay by Sherman Alexie, and later a film by Chris Eyre, two youths, Victor and Thomas, must journey to Phoenix Arizona to retrieve the ashes of Arnold, the father of Victor who left him and his mother years earlier. The journey of these two young men is, in a way, a metaphor for the identity search. Though “Smoke Signals” is a road movie, as claimed by...
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...popular novels it was made into a Hollywood film five times. It tells the tales of the “noble savages” and the “bloodthirsty savages” (10) giving life to these beliefs each time it was remade. Cooper contributed abundantly to the extreme stereotypes of the Indians. Kilpatrick stated that Cooper “threw into the same melting pot a number of tribes and cultures” (4) conclusively personifying the image of the savages. One of the ideas that was introduced in the nineteenth century was nationalism, the function of nationalism is to impose its will on others. One of the largest personify nationalist ideas was westward expansion or Manifest destiny. The concept of “Manifest destiny” (7) is the idea that it is God’s will to expand West, subsequently it was the right of Americans to do so. This would set forth the Indian Removal Act of 1830; the removal of India to the west into reservations. Consequently thousands of Native Americans would die along the way due to exhaustion, exposure to harsh weather and hunger. The images that were created centuries before were coming to life in movies and documentaries evidently becoming the only truth that the public would know. Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods would justifiably reinforced this genocide. Bird fortified the perception that Native Americans were brutal dirty barbarous people, and a proper course of action was needed.Kilpatrick wrote “Bird had little sympathy for Indians and provided his hero… with a solution to the Indian...
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...question of honour or “doing the right thing” for the seven gunfighters. They all have divergent, mostly selfish reasons for taking up the job, but eventually come to appreciate each other, if not the villagers they are defending. The Magnificent Seven is thus also a representative of another subtle shift in Hollywood westerns that was related to the broadening of American military involvement in the Third World in 1950s{\cf. \Slotkin 1992@485} – in addition to the traditional western fare that relied on...
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...Film Noir and Romance: It’s No Fairy Tale Baby Film Noir may not seem like a very romantic subject considering how many of the couples in the films are eventually lead into their death or a prison term. There are some romantic aspects to these type of cinema. Even if a couple does have a tragic end, there is always some sort of romance in the middle. It could be lust or love, but it is usually there. While all Film Noir never ends as fairy tale, an audience can look at most of the films and see how love, or lust, can drive people to do despicable acts of crime. Before describing how romance and the many varying types of love appear in Film Noir, it is important to understand the different gender roles each character plays. The male protagonist paired with a femme fatale is the usual leading roles in a Film Noir, but that isn’t a hard set rule. Men can play the male victim, damaged men, a private eye, a psychopath, or a homme fatal, (Spicer 85). Women can also play a variety of roles such as the nurturer, the good-bad girl, the female victim, or a femme fatale, (Spicer 90). Male victims can be a protagonist who just gets trapped in the web of lies weaved by a beautiful woman, a femme fatale. The damaged man is usually a veteran who has a hard time adjusting to society after war or a police officer who loses control. After seeing so much violence it is hard for some men to see the world as a happy place. These men are usually paired with a nurturing female character. A private...
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...is essentially patriarchic. Mulvey argues that the popularity of Hollywood films is determined and reinforced by preexisting social patterns which have shaped the fascinated subject. Mulvey's analysis in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" combines semiotic methodology of cinematic means of expression with psychoanalytic analysis of desire structures and the formation of subjectivity. The semiotic end of Mulvey's analysis enables the deciphering of how films produce the meanings they produce, while the psychoanalytic side of the article provides the link between the cinematic text and the viewer and explains his fascination through the way cinematic representations interact with his (culturally determined) subconscious. Mulvey's main argument in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" is that Hollywood narrative films use women in order to provide a pleasurable visual experience for men. The narrative film structures its gaze as masculine. The woman is always the object of the reifying gaze, not the bearer of it (this has something reminiscent of John Berger's "Ways of Seeing") The cinematic gaze is always produced a masculine both by means of the identification produced with the male hero and through the use of the camera. Mulvey identifies two manners in which Hollywood cinema produces pleasure, manners which arise from different mental mechanisms. The first involves the objectification of the image, and the second one the identification with it. Both...
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...1. DETAILED MARKETING MIX 1.1 PRODUCT Design • Aerodynamic designing for smoother handling at high speed • Sporty seating posture with convenient grip for superior performance • Visor mounted collapsible rear view mirrors • Like most other sport models Hero MotoCorp has dropped the kick start for Karizma ZMR. Variety Karizma ZMR is offered in four colours • Panther Black Metallic • Vibrant Orange • Blazing Red • Sporty White Features • F1 engine with Fuel injection • Digital display • Maintenance free battery • Real time Mileage Indicator • Tube less tyres Brand Name The brand name comes from Karizma R as the bike is the line extension of the same. Warranties It comes with a 5yrs or 70,000 km warranty (whichever happens first, from the date of purchase). After Sale Service The company has 5800+ sale and service points all across India to service the customer. With the purchase of bike customer gets 3 free services. 1.2 PRICE Customer segment is the premium youth segment in the age group of 18 to 25. The product is a premium offering in the motorcycle segment, which makes it an eligible contender for value based pricing. However, cost effectiveness has also been kept in mind while competitively pricing the product to make it economical in the sports bike segment. Karizma ZMR has been consciously priced at 1.03 lakhs (ex- showroom price) against the competitor Yamaha, which is priced...
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...couple of days that I began to figure out how completely at odds with the movie I saw was the one she--and those critics--had seen. The more I thought about it, the more I could see that these were no idiosyncratic subjective responses. Rather, our differences were bound up with Spike Lee's mix of styles of representation, which my sister and I responded to selectively and from very different perspectives. While Lee's representation of the Italians was moving and meaningful to her, she could find nothing in his portrayal of the black community that would provide for the same feelings. For, I came to see, while Lee uses to elaborate his white characters methods and narrative and cinematic techniques that have been broadly popularized by Hollywood and are familiar to just about every American, he uses traditionally black methods to generate his black scene--broader than just "characterization" because it extends to a representation of a diverse totality of a black community, with importance lying more in complex relationships and the material conditions that...
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...In Joan Didion’s, The White Album, Didion allows us to see a snapshot of the late 60’s as she sees it. A reporter trying to exploit American culture, she interviews and observes many famous people who may have been the faces of that time period. Media was becoming more prevalent, and so was the importance of celebrity status. The American people began striving to live “glorious” lives to mimic celebraties, and idolizing stars whom in public may seem to be great people, but behind closed doors have lives filled with controversy and corruption. One piece of her essay that shows this is when she watches a band named The Doors rehearse. She said that they were a rock and roll band, but just from the words that she used to describe them, the reader...
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...My Hero I didn’t meet him before, I saw him on TV only, but he gave me a deep impression in my heart. I still remember his stiff fist, his strong body muscles, and his roar. Everyone call him Bruce Lee, the man who carries forward the Chinese Kung Fu to the hold world, and he was the greatest martial artist in 20th century. He had extraordinary accomplishment, he had inordinate passion, and he influenced the main world of martial art. Bruce Lee had extraordinary accomplishment. Nearly 30 years after his death, he was elected to the American time magazine “One of the 21st century iconic figure”, he along with Princess Diana and US president John f Kennedy. His first movie “The Big Boss” has broke the box office records in Hong Kong with over 230million us dollars in 1971, and he was the first in the world of Chinese martial arts promoter that led the Hong Kong movie out of Asia in the meanwhile. (Richer) After few years, he spent all of effort to develop his film career, and he became the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce honors Bruce with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. However, in 2000, US government announced the release of "Bruce Lee's 60th anniversary commemorative stamps," he was the first Chinese person can got this glory, and this was the second Marilyn Monroe and 007 third place award of the artists (Yu). Lee attracted major attention from famous people who wanted to master Kung Fu; among his famous students were celebrities such as Joe Lewis...
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...International Journal of Communication 6 (2012), 2609–2627 1932–8036/20120005 Mapping the Nation and Security in Global Space: A Comparative Study of Danish, Egyptian, and U.S. Action-Adventure Fans KARIN GWINN WILKINS1 University of Texas at Austin This article explores how being an action-adventure fan resonates with articulations of national identity, attitudes toward other nations, and fear of global terrorism in the United States, Denmark, and Egypt. Action-adventure film relies on global Hollywood production, yet the reception of this genre works quite differently in the cultural contexts of communities and affinities of fans. Being an action-adventure fan appears to bear a close relationship with a tendency to exhibit fear of global terrorism and to conceptualize Americans as heroes, particularly among U.S. audiences. Danish and U.S. fans seem more likely to want to cast Egyptian characters as villains than their non-fan counterparts, whereas Egyptian fans prefer Danish characters to be villains. Limited characterizations in this genre inspire and reinforce the imagined scenarios of fans in which American heroes are justified in crucifying foreign villains. Keywords: action-adventure, political attitudes, United States, Denmark, Egypt This work explores how action-adventure fans based in Egypt, the United States, and Denmark map their own and others’ nations and fear of terrorism through their engagement with action-adventure film. Research on the potential...
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...Samuel Au Th 5-6 pm Film Response #3 The Dragon Has Not Fallen In Olympus Has Fallen, Hollywood attempts again at an action-packed, thriller prolepsis of a terrorist attack on the White House (Olympus). Bullet torned and blasted by explosives and rockets, the remnants of the White House provides a provocative reaction that quickly turns into a war for glory to reestablished America’s power and the superiority of its military power. Patriotism becomes justified killing of the North Korean terrorists as represented by the stereotypical Asian villains created by the social construct of race through mediums such as the media to perpetuate ideas and use facets of militarism such as war to instill these ideas and further reinstitute power and superiority of whites. The marginalization of Asian roles in militaristic movies allows for a profitable scapegoating of minorities. As seen in the gender roles of Asian men, the male Korean terrorists were prevalent, vicious, and needed to be exterminated, similar to Hollywood’s Rambo who slaughters many Vietnamese enemies in an act of justice and valor to protect one’s country. On the other hand, female Asian roles reflected Suzy Wong influences of a sexualized and submissive underling of the antagonist. But, the prevalence of Asian men in the movie, serves to out shadow the power of female roles of Asian (Dragon Lady – powerful and manipulative) to lesser roles of passiveness and controllability: the character serves no further...
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...Revolution when he rose up against the regime of Porfirio Diaz. Madero came to power but was then overthrown and killed. Victoriano Huerta then took power. Villa was the leader of one of the armies that fought against Huerta's regime. Villa and the other leaders were able to overthrow Huerta and to set up the semi-democratic system that is still in place in Mexico today, it has become much more democratic in the last 12 years. Pancho Villa then was famous because he was one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution. Villa's Robin Hood story began after he established himself and his bandit followers in the sierras in 1900. Officially, the years 1900-09 are "unaccounted for," but it was during this period that he became a legendary hero to the poor for skillfully evading the Porfiriato's oppressive rurales. In 1910 Villa and his men came down from the hills to join Fransisco l Madero’s revolutionary forces, therefore making an historical transition from ‘bandidos’ to ‘revolucionarios’. The compelling figure was able to recruit an army of thousands, including a substantial number of Americans, some of whom were made captains in the División del Norte. Pancho even created one squadron made up entirely of Americans under the leadership of Captain Tracey Richardson, a man who apparently fought with many different insurgent armies around the world at that time. Following Madero's short-lived victory and assassination, Villa remained in command of his División del Norte army...
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...I. Background Information Wag the Dog is a hilarious new satire movie directed by Barry Levinson. Ironic with the genre of the film as a comedy, it carries a serious and an eye-opening message about the relationship between politics and mass-market entertainment. This is one of Levinson's best films, and the screenplay, co-penned by noted writer David Mamet along with Hilary Henkin, is brilliantly on-target. The story begins with presentation of the premise which is the president of the United States is accused of having sex with a teen aged girl who belongs to an organization similar to the girl scouts and the election is less than two weeks away. A brief encounter with a Firefly Girl becomes public knowledge, and now his 17% lead is about to go downhill. The president's opponents get wind of the story and use it to their advantage. Thus, this led the president's Public Relations team to take action regarding the crisis. Winifred Ames played by Anne Heche, one of the President's top aides, calls in spin doctor extraordinary, Conrad Bream (Robert De Niro). Conrad goes to work immediately, thinking of the best way how to turn away the public's attention from the Firefly Girl issue. He came out with the idea to create another bigger issue for the public to think about and over power the bad publicity caused by the sex scandal. "Change the story, change the lead" is his motto, so he decides to manufacture a small, cost-effective war against Albania, which he euphemistically refers...
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...before finding Debbie. Throughout the movie we learn as viewers that Ethan is a racist man and shows no respect towards Native Americans. We also find out that even though he has devoted five years of his life searching for Debbie, his plan is to murder her simply because he would rather see her dead than living as an Indian. John Wayne plays the role of Ethan Edwards in the film The Searchers and his character is a Western hero, but not a typical Western hero. Ethan is a hate-driven, racist outlaw and a loner with no wife or children. In the beginning of the film Ethan rides up to his brother’s home and has no explanation of where he has been or what he has been doing. He does whatever he wants and doesn’t care to let anyone know. Ethan also shows some anti-social behaviors during the funeral scene. While everyone is mourning the deaths of Ethan’s brother Aaron and his family, Ethan is eager to begin the hunt for the Native Americans. He ends the funeral by saying “Put an amen to it. There’s no more time for praying. Amen”. Ethan is not a typical Western hero because instead of doing things for other people, most of his actions are for himself. The search is to find Debbie, but Ethan’s main concern is killing the Comanche. When he finally finds Debbie he is ready to kill her because he hates Indians so much that he would rather see her dead than living as one. Going from a man on a quest to find his niece Debbie, he turned into...
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