Single Film Essay

Classic Review – Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)

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INTRODUCTION

In 1991, dozens of happy accidents converged into one of the greatest thrillers of all time:  The Silence of the Lambs.  It is the most recent film to win Academy Awards in all five of the major categories (both leading actors, screenplay, director, and best picture).  As that distinction may suggest, practically every aspect of the film boasts superlatives.  The performances are exceptional.  Ted Tally’s adaption of the screenplay structures the film with the familiar beats of the hero’s journey, but provides enough twists to keep us on edge.  Jonathan Demme’s direction shows restraint and courage, and produces moments rife with tension, many of which do not exist on the page.  The characters, technical work, and writing all cooperate towards a single goal:  championing a theme of female strength and intellect in a world dominated by men, and the courage that it takes to confront true evil.

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Dishonesty Doesn’t Pay in Stanley Kubrick’s Innovative Noir “The Killing”

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Stanley Kubrick described his heist film The Killing as his, “first mature work”, and the film boasts many of the director’s eventual hallmarks.  Techniques that appear in Kubrick’s later masterpieces can be seen in a nascent form throughout the film, as if Kubrick is exploring the possibilities of his own voice and style.  Specifically, The Killing purposely confuses the viewer through keen story structure choices and twists on the heist genre.  The result is a disorientation that forwards a theme that trickery, thievery, and crime – even those which are meticulously planned, are doomed to failure.

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The Enchanting “Spirited Away” is Miyazaki’s Greatest Animated Film

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Today, words are exceedingly lightweight.  You can say whatever you like because words are as substantive as foam to us.  That’s no more than a reflection of how empty our reality has become.  And yet even now, the truth is that words are power.  It’s just that we’re meaninglessly drowning in a sea of powerless, vacuous words.

-Hayao Miyazaki, 1999 – Director’s notes for Spirited Away

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How to Improve “Suicide Squad”: Reduce Character Count and Add Zombies

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So, Suicide Squad is a flaming heap of garbage, but how do we fix it?  That’s the focus of this piece.  I have a more standard review of the film as a companion piece to this, which is linked above, but in the meantime I decided to present this piece as a reasonable means to improve upon the film.  Suffice to say, this post will contain spoilers for the film beyond what is normal for a review, as I have to discuss intricate plot details.  So, if you’re sensitive to spoilers, you’ve been sufficiently warned.  If you’re still game, what follows will be my humble proposal for how one could avoid the pitfalls that befell Suicide Squad and ultimately arrive at an overall superior film.

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How To Develop Theme: The Perversion of Sex in “Alien”

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INTRODUCTION

Sexual interpretations of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) abound, but few tie the overt sexuality of the film to its professed objective, which is to be scary.  Alien is a horror film (specifically, a slasher; Ridley Scott excitedly explained the film to his cast as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in space).  So then, why the sexual imagery and themes?  Sex can be scary.  Even when consensual and enjoyable, it can adopt an air of fear, anxiety, and discomfort.  Scott’s brilliance with Alien and its sexually-charged themes lay in the way it transitions from our quaint hang-ups with sex to the terrifying violence inherent in the act of rape.  Visual symbolism in the film initially reminds us of both male and female sexual anatomy, but transitions piecewise into the aggressive sexuality of the rapist.  As the film proceeds, the male aspects of the sex begin to dominate until the unbridled Xenomorph literally rapes its final victim.  These sexual characteristics serves to disturb the audience in two fashions:  first by suggesting the anxiety and the scariness of the sexual organs and sex itself, and second by perverting sex into a primal violence and forcing the audience to experience it firsthand.

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“The Silence of the Lambs” Script Analysis: Scene-by-Scene Breakdown

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Over the last week, GoIntoTheStory.com has been walking through a script analysis of The Silence of the Lambs based on a scene-by-scene breakdown that I wrote.  I have decided to re-produce that breakdown in its entirety here, and provide a link to the rest of the script analysis near the end of this piece.  The goal here is to summarize the entire script scene by scene, which will make further analyses easier.  Enjoy!

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Criterion Blogathon – Roman Polanski’s “Macbeth” (1971)

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Roman Polanski opens his film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth with an establishing shot composed of equal parts cold, light blue sky and dour, grey beach. The beach begins to fill the screen as a gnarled stick starts scratching out a circle in the sand. Thus Polanski introduces his version of the witches: one of the weird sisters places a noose in the hole, another places a severed forearm grasping a dagger, and the three bury these items in the sand. The final witch then pours a vial of blood on the sand, and the three chant: “Fair is foul and foul is fair, / Hover through the fog and filthy air.” Polanski begins the scene with this couplet (it traditionally closes the scene), and completely fabricates the weird sisters’ grisly rites. This is Polanski’s vision – a grim and visceral portrayal of The Scottish Play, fully realized on the big screen:

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