In the Woody Allen and Douglas McGrath 1995 film, Bullets over Broadway, fictional playwright David Shayne (John Cusack) is on par with fictional playwright turned screenwriter Barton Fink (John Turturro) in the Coen brothers’ 1991 film of the same name, Barton Fink. Each character is conflicted by the stereotypical questions that face all authors, such [...]
Senior Seminar Midterm Regurgitation
Mary Robinson’s “London Summer Morning” is a cheap rip-off of Swift’s “A Description of The Morning”; she gives us a list of London sights and sounds – but without the satirical bite.”
– [Fictional] Professor Larry Hunt
In Mary Robinson’s poem “London Summer Morning” (1800) and Jonathan Swift’s “A Description of The Morning” (1709), [...]
Moving into “Chapter 5: Acting” of Barsam’s Looking at Movies, it’s interesting to learn about the ways in which acting techniques have evolved in relation to increasing capabilities of technology. Moving from theater to silent film, to camera with sound, to sound separate from the camera has provided increased actor/audience intimacy and morphed into more [...]
In John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love, James Lapine’s Impromptu and Brian Gilbert’s Wilde, the audience is left to believe certain conventions about the life of writers. There is often a love interest, one that inspires passion and thus story (or, as in the case of Oscar Wilde, self awareness), yet this passion tends to reside [...]
The ways in which we, as an audience, assign meaning to film is fascinating. In some ways we have unwittingly learned alongside Hollywood’s developing experimentation. Of course, another way to spin it is that Hollywood has studied natural behavior long enough to categorize and name the filming processes that invoke certain audience perceptions and reactions. I [...]
In Brian Gilbert’s Wilde, Oscar Wilde (Stephen Fry) says of the male escorts he meets through Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas (Jude Law), “Such flowers never could grow in the harsh light of day.” This comment is more than a simple scripted line. It is the basis for much of the film’s mis-en-scene. For the filmmakers, [...]
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