Thursday, 14 February 2013
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.
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:
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.
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."
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
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