The Public Enemy (1931)

The Public Enemy (altered to Enemies of the Public in the UK) is a 1931 American Pre-Code Crime film directed by William A. Wellman. The film follows the life of a young man's life in the criminal underworld in prohibition-era urban American.

The film was selected in 1988 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Starring: James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods, Joan Blondell, Donald Cook, Leslie Fenton, Beryl Mercer, Robert Emmett O'Connor, Murray Kinnell, Mae Clarke, Frank Coghlan Jr., Frankie Darro, Snitz Edwards, Douglas Gerrard, Robert Homans, Eddie Kane, Mia Marvin, Sam McDaniel, Helen Parrish, Lee Phelps, Russ Powell, Purnell Pratt and Lucille Ward.

The screenplay: The screenplay is based on a novel written by two former street thugs, John Bright and Kubec Glasmon, who are said to had witnessed some of Al Capone's murderous gang rivalries in Chicago. The novel was not published and was titled Beer and Blood

Cinematography: Devereaux Jennings

Editing: Ed McCormick

- The editing, like in most black and white films, was subtle and smooth. The jump cuts and fades from one scene to a next were brilliantly done. So well, in fact, that I often didn't notice. It played out like a well written book might.

Costume: Costume design by Edward Stevenson and Wardrobe department Earl Luick

- The costumes used were a collection of fashionable and regular clothes from the 1917s. The main attention to costume was to the main characters where you judge their lifestyle instantly by the way they are dressed. Firstly, as children, they were wearing worn and tattered clothing, and with the way they spoke and presented themselves told of the middle or lower class upbringing. This was later enhanced by who they hung out with, knew and their family home.
The costumes remain around this state until the character's statuses change and they go 'up in the world', earning money, however illegally it's done, and buying finer clothes whilst hanging around a different class of people.

Visual effects:

Acting performance:

Sound design: David Mendoza

Production design: A lot of the characters shown in the film were based on actual people. Edward Woods was originally cast in the lead until the director decided James Cagney would be more effective and switched the two actors, there was also another reason for the switch and that was because of the sound technology used, it was superior to what had been used in earlier films and made it no longer imperative to have an actor in the lead who had impeccable enunciation. James Cagney was seen as uncouth compared to Edward Woods which helped to target the working class audiences during the Great Depression.

Within the scene where Mike Powers punches his brother Tom, the director privately took Donald Cook aside and explained his desire for authenticity in the reaction and asked the actor to really hit James Cagney. Donald Cook agreed and did as he had been asked, perhaps a little too well, and hit James Cagney so hard that he actually broke one of James Cagney's teeth. In spite of this, James Cagney stayed in character and played the rest of the scene. Another incident well documented was the fact that live ammunition was used in the scene where Tom Powers ducks around a corner of a building to take cover from machine gun fire; the use of live ammunition was common practice at that time. The bullets struck the wall of the building at the position where James Cagney's head had been just a moment prior.

The one thing that remains in my mind from the entire film, is not what most people would pick themselves which would most probably be the grape fruit scene, as it is famous and often talked about. What got stuck in my mind and had me questioning everything the film had shown and was about, was the ending. The ending is so sudden, so shocking, that it both astonished and enraged me. Is Tom dead? What does his death prove or accomplish? Why was his body taken to his mother's house, what does that signify? Was it a statement? Was it meant to give a message? Was the message to the family or to the audience? What will his brother do? The emotions shown on his brother's face when the body was returned, were of panic, sadness, anger, revenge and lastly defeat. 

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Kind Hearts and Coronets is a 1949 British Black Comedy film directed by Robert Hamer that is loosely based on the 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman. The title comes from Tennyson's 1842 poem Lady Clara Vere de Vere: "Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood."

The American abertation was censored. The dialogue between Louis and Sibella was altered to downplay the adultery between them somewhat; derogatory lines about the Reverend were taken out; and in the nursery rhyme "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe", the word sailor replaced the word nigger. Ten seconds was added to the ending, showing Louis' memoirs being discovered before he could get them; which is implied in the original film in any case. 

In 2011, the film was digital restored and re-released in selected British cinemas.

Starring: Dennis Price, Valerie Hobson, Joan Greenwood, Alec Guinness, Audrey Fildes, Miles Malleson, Clive Morton, John Penrose, Cecil Ramage, Hugh Griffith, John Salew, Eric Messiter, Lyn Evans, Barbara Leake, Peggy Ann Clifford, Anne Valery and Arthur Lowe.

The screenplay: The screenplay was written by Robert Hamer and John Dighton

Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe

Editing: Peter Tanner

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The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) - Own Time Viewing

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is a 1976 Universal Studio Sherlock Holmes film which is directed by Herbert Ross and written by Nicholas Meyer. It is based on Meyer's 1974 novel with the same name. The plot of the film is that Dr. Watson finds out that Sherlock Holmes has become delusional as a result of his addiction to cocaine. He therefore arranges for Holmes to journey to Vienna to be treated by none other than Sigmund Freud. However, during the course of his treatment, Holmes becomes embroiled in investigating a kidnapping case with international implications, as Freud unravels and then finally uncovers a large personal secret suppressed in Holmes' subconscious.

Starring: Nicol Williamson, Robert Duvall, Alan Arkin, Georgia Brown, Samantha Eggar, Charles Gray, Jeremy Kemp, Joel Grey, Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave.

The screenplay:

Cinematography: Oswald Morris

Editing: Chris Barnes

Costume:

Visual effects:

Acting performance:

Sound design: Stephen Sondheim wrote the song for the film, "The Madame's Song" but that was later recorded as "I Never Do Anything Twice" on the Side By Side By Sondheim cast recording.

Production design: The Production Designer was James Bond veteran Ken Adam. The film was made at Pinewood Studios with location shots in the UK and Austria, including the Austrian National Library. The tennis match/duel between Freud and Von Leinsdorf was filmed on one of the historic real tennis courts at the Queen's Club in West Kensingtion, London.

Opening Night (1977)

Opening Night is an American drama film written and directed by John Cassavetes. The film is about a Broadway actress named Myrtle Gordon as she rehearses for her latest play, which is about a woman who is unable to admit that she is ageing. She then witnesses the death of a very obsessive, adoring young fan and begins to confront the personal and professional turmoils the she faces in her own life.

Apparently Pedro Almodóvar repeats the film's accident scene in his own film All About My Mother as the centre of the dramatic conflict.

John Cassavetes struggled to distribute Opening Night in America as a number of preview screenings had negative effects. It opening on December 25th, 1977, at the Fox Wilshire Theatre in Los Angeles where it was played to almost empty rooms and closed in February, having never been commercially shown elsewhere. Screenings in New York in March were also ignored and disliked. The film was only picked in 1991, two years after Cassavetes' death, by an American distributor. 

It was then entered into the 28th Berlin International Film Festival where Gena Rowlands, who played lead, won the Silver Bear for Best Actress.

Film critic Dan Schneider wrote about the film's narrative structure:

"Many critics have taken this film to be a portrait of an alcoholic...But this is wrong, for alcohol isn’t her problem - nor is her chain smoking. They are merely diversions from whatever thing is really compelling her to her own destruction, and much to Cassavetes’ credit, as a storyteller, he never lets us find out exactly what's wrong with Myrtle, and despite her coming through in the end, there's no reason to expect that she has really resolved anything of consequence. This sort of end without resolution links Cassavetes directly with the more daring European directors of the recent past, who were comfortable in not revealing everything to an audience, and forcing their viewers to cogitate, even if it hurts."

The screenplay:

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Life of Pi (2012) - Own Time Viewing

Life of Pi is an adventure drama film directed by Ang Lee and based on a novel of the same name by Yann Martel and the adapted screenplay by David Magee. The film, the story, moves around a boy named Piscine Molitor aka Pi who survives a shipwreck where his family dies, and is stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker in the Pacific Ocean.

The screenplay: The screenplay was by David Magee and was adapted by the 2001 novel of the same name by Yann Martel.

Cinematography:

Editing:

Costume: 

Visual effects: The lead in visual effects company is Rhythm & Hues Studies (R&H). Artist Abdul Rahman said that, "the special thing about Life of Pi is that it was the first time we did something called remote rendering, where we engaged our cloud infrastructure in Taiwan called CAVE (Cloud Animation and Visual Effects)." The Supervisor of R&H VFX Bill Westenhofer said that Ang Lee "knew we had done the lion in the first Narnia movie. He asked, 'Does a digital character look more or less real in 3D?' We looked at each other and thought that was it pretty good question."

Other visual effects studios that worked on the film included MPC, yU+co, Buf, Crazy Horse Effects, Look Effects, Christov Effects, Lola VFX, Reliance Mediaworks, and Sterep D.

- The effects were quite spectacular. The CGI Tiger, Ocean and the lights were most enthralling, and I believe it was best to include such wondrous and imaginative effects because it goes well with the 'storytelling' that is going on in the film. Though it is never stated and left up to the viewers to believe if it was the real story or not, it was still a story and within stories without other people spectating, anything can happen or something can be made more poetic or morphed a certain way by the mind or arrogance. When you remember something, it changes, whether you notice or not, you never remember something exactly the same each time, something always differs. The added beautification to what could be a horrific and terrible story, really draws people in. Whenever something has more meaning and many layers that are hidden behind words or objects, it flares interest, creativity and drive to find out more in the audience.

Acting performance: 3,000 young men auditioned for the lead and in October 2012 Ang Lee chose to cast Surai Sharma, a student of 17 and an acting newcomer. Once he had the role, Surai Sharma was put through training in ocean survival, yoga and meditation. After two months Gérard Depardieu was cast to play the role of the Chef, Irrfan Khan to play the adult Pi and Adil Hussain to play Pi's father. Tobey Maguire would have played "a reporter" but Ang Lee cut him from the film and reshot them with Rafe Spall in a role that was referred later as the Writer.

- The acting was fantastic. The actor Surai Sharma, who played the lead role of the young Pi, was brilliant, the work, training and thought that went into the character was really seen on screen. I really felt for the character, empathised and worried, and couldn't wait for it to all turn out well.

Sound design: The music was composed by Mychael Danna, who wrote the music to Ang Lee's film The Ice Storm and Ride with the Devil.

- The sound was a great highlight of the film, it was wonderfully edited, merged and attached to the right scenes, creating the perfect atmosphere. As the film is very fantastical, the music mimicked this brilliantly. 

Production design:

This film is, in my opinion, fascinating and fantastic! Not only is the plot, the story, enthralling, but the acting performance and the special effects really added to the atmosphere. 

The story can also be taken two ways and at the end it leaves the audience wondering which one is the actual truth. It also shows that when given a choice between brutality with humans and brutality animals, we take it better if it were with animals because we can just excuse it as nature. 

Late Spring (1949)

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O, Brother: Where Art Thou? (2000)

O, Brother: Where Art Thou? is a 2000 Comedy film written, produced, edited and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. The film is set in 1937 within rural Mississippi during the Great Depression and follows the story loosely based on Homer's Odyssey. The title of the film is reference to the 1941 film Sullivan's Travels where the protagonist wants to direct a film about the Great Depression called O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Starring: George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, John Turturro, Chris Thomas King, John Goodman, Holly Hunter, Charles Durning, Daniel von Bargen, Wayne Duvall, Ray McKinnon, Michael Badalucco, Stephen Root and Lee Weaver. 

The screenplay: Joel and Ethan Coen

Cinematography: Roger Deakins

Editing: Roderick Jaynes and Tricia Cooke

Costume: 

Visual effects:

Acting performance:

Sound design: Noted producer and musician T-Bone Burnett worked with the Coens when the script was still being worked on, and the soundtrack was recorded before filming commenced. The music was originally conceived as a major component of the film and not just as a background to support.

A lot of the music in the film is contemporary folk music, including that of Virginia Bluegrass singer Ralph Stanley. For this the film received positive reviews and the American folk music soundtrack won a Grammy for Album of the Year in 2001. The original band soon became popular afterwards and the country and folk musicians who were dubbed into the film, such as John Hartford, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Chris Sharp and others, joined together to perform the music from the film in a Down from the Mountain concert tour which was filmed for TV and DVD.

The music selection also includes religious music which include Primitive Baptist and traditional African-American gospel, notably the Fairfield Four, an a cappella quartet that dates back to 1921, appearing in the soundtrack and as gravediggers towards the end of the film.

Production design: The idea for the film was spontaneous and work on the script began way before the start of production in December 1997 and was half-written by May 1998. Joel Coen said in an interview in 2000 that he came to Phoenix to offer the lead role to Clooney in which Clooney agreed immediately without reading the script, staring that he liked even the least successful Coen's films. One of the most notable features of the film is its use of digital colour correction to give the film a sepia-tinted look. Cinematographer Roger Deakins said that "Ethan and Joel favoured a dry, dusty Delta look with golden sunsets. They wanted it to look like an old hand-tinted picture, with the intensity of colour dictated by the scene and natural skin tones that were all shades of the rainbow."

While real-life politics were taken and used in the film, there are obvious differences between the characters in the film and historical political figures. 

Before Sunset (2004)

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Before Sunrise (1995)

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Persepolis (2007)

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Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

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Punch Drunk Love (2002)

Punch-Drunk Love is a romantic comedy-drama film that was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The story of the film follows a character, Barry Egan, who owns a company marketing novelty items. Barry lives a very lonely life and is very easily enraged. After ringing a phone sex line, things begin to take a downward spiral and the film follows his journey as he tries to rid himself of the scandal as well as start a romantic relationship with a woman.

Starring: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Luis Guzman and Robert Smigel

The Screenplay:

Cinematography: Robert Elswit

Editing: Leslie Jones

Costume:

Visual effects:

Acting performance:

Sound design: The score/soundtrack was composed by Jon Brion. Apparently, Jon Brion created the compositions during the filming rather than after, during which he would experiment with tones and sounds, making note of what Paul Thomas Anderson responded to. The music also features the use of a harmonium, that was used within the film itself.

- My opinion on the sounds/music used is not overly positive. In many scenes of the film the music was too overbearing, so much so that I could not hear the dialogue and therefore spent most of my viewing time trying to ignore the background music, which made it so that I did not take much note of what instruments were used of if they aided the film in anyway. From what I remember, I believe the music did not fit well with the film or any of the scenes.

The overlaid sounds effects were fine in some cases and really added to the scenes they were placed to, but again, the volume of them really seemed to drown out a lot of the film and made it headache inducing to watch.

Production design:

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Requiem for a Dream is an American drama film which was directed by Darren Aronofsky and based from a novel with the same name by Hubert Selby, Jr. The story, the film, follows four characters through their world of addiction, delusion, imprisonment, desperation and subsequently the harsh reality that follows as they battle a drug addiction in one form or another.

Darren Aronofsky uses a montage of quick fire shots throughout (often termed a hip hop montage). Apparently while a normal 100 minute film has 600 to 700 cuts, this film has more than 2,000. As it says on Wikipedia:

"Split-screen is used extensively, along with extremely tight closeups. Long tracking shots (including those shot with an apparatus strapping a camera to an actor, called the Snorricam) and time-lapse photography are also prominent stylistic devices.

In order to portray the shift from the objective, community-based narrative to the subjective, isolated state of the characters' perspectives, Aronofsky alternates between extreme closeups and extreme distance from the action and intercuts reality with a character's fantasy. Aronofsky aims to subjectivize emotion, and the effect of his stylistic choices is personalization rather than alienation.

The film's distancing itself from empathy is furthered structurally by the use of intertitles (Summer, Fall, Winter), marking the temporal progress of addiction. The average scene length shortens as the film progresses (beginning around 90 seconds to two minutes) until the movie's climactic scenes, which are cut together very rapidly (many changes per second) and are accompanied by a score which increases in intensity accordingly. After the climax, there is a short period of serenity, during which idyllic dreams of what may have been are juxtaposed with portraits of the four shattered lives."

My opinion on the 'art' direction for this film is this: The quick, successions of images and the repetitive showing of scenes made it all very disorienting and naustating. I do not know if this was the goal of the film, to draw the audience into a sickening, spinning world that the characters live in, but I did not enjoy it. I came away with a headache and a large need to never see the film again. I thought the art direction for the film could have been a lot better to show the character's unfurling lives without making the viewer sick and irritated.

The sound quality, something I was told to take into consideration more than anything else, was deafening and added to the sickening feeling of the film. The booming, cacophony of sound and repetitive soundtrack was ghastly and made everything very claustrophobic. The soundtrack I found annoying and did not relate in any way shape or form with what was going on in the film, it clashed terribly with scenes that should have been sad, terrifying or dramatic.

The sound effects were, again, extremely loud. The creative way they mixed certain sounds for certain actions was interesting and awe-inspiring, although some sounds were stomachturning. For example, there is a scene where one of the characters, an elderly mother Sara Goldfarb (played by Ellen Burstyn), is taking pills, the passage of time between each pill being a few seconds where a close-up shot of the pill going into her mouth was shown a multiple of times and the sound linked with those many shots was very off-putting.

The Long Good Friday (1979)

The Long Good Friday is a British gangster film that was written by Barrie Keeffe and directed by John Mackenzie. It was completed in 1979 but was credited as a 1980 because of release delays. It was also voted at number 21 in the British Film Institute's list of the top 100 British films of the 20th century. The film follows the protagonist Harold Shand, played by Bob Hoskins, an old-fashioned 1960s style London gangster

Soundtrack: Composed by Francis Monkman

War of the Worlds (2005)

War of the Worlds is a remake of a 1953 film The War of the Worlds, which in turn was a film based off a novel by H. G. Wells of the same name.

The overall plot that remains in both films from the book is that aliens (martians) attack earth, many additions and edits have been made to the two films concerning the appearance on the aliens and where the story is viewed from.

The 2005 film which is directed by Steven Spielberg whilst written by Josh Friedman and David Koeep, is an adaptation of the novel that follows a man named Ray Ferrier, played by Tom Cruise, and his two children, played by Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin. The aliens that invade are similar to the ones H. G. Wells created as they drive strange tripod-like machines.

The screenplay:

Cinematography:

Editing:

Costume: Costume designer Joanna Johnston created sixty different versions of Ray Ferrier's, Tom Cruise's, leather jacket to show how worn and tattered it becomes from beginning and end. The one piece of Dakota Fanning's costume is quite important to Joanna Johnston and she said, "I wanted her to have something that made her feel safe, some little thing that she could sleep with and put over her face." Joanna notes. "That was the lavender horse purse. We tied it up on a ribbon and Dakota hung it on her body, so it was with her at all times."

Visual effects: Industrial Light & Magic was the main special effects company for the film. Steven Spielbreg was documented to have said, "This is the first film I really tackled using the computer to animate all the storyboards." Apparently he thought to look further into the technique after a long visit to his friend George Lucas. Computer-generated imagery shots and bluescreen were blended with miniature and live-action footage.

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Acting performance:

Sound design: John Williams composed the music score of the film and considered it "a very serious piece," which then had to add "necessary frightening atmosphere" with "propulsively rhythmic drive for the actions scenes." John Williams added 'scariness' by adding a female chorus with a crescendo resembling a shriek, which would apparently humanise the track and represent "victims that go out without saying an 'ouch'."
An album was released by Decca Records and it featured the films music and Morgan Freeman's opening and closing narration. There are also songs called "Little Deuce Coupe" and "Hushabye Mountain" that are featured within the film, the former sung by Tom Cruise and the latter by Dakota Fanning.

- The music and sound achieved a great deal in the film, it set the atmosphere and

Production design: