From Dusk Till Dawn- A film in three acts

A film I am familiar with that has three distinct acts is From Dusk Till Dawn. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, the film follows 2 brothers who robbed a bank and are trying to make their way across the border to Mexico to meet up with a guy who said he'd hide them there. Most of the movie acts as a setup for the final climax in the third act, and the 2 acts leading up to it each add to the buildup in their own way.

Act one serves as an exposition and intro to the characters we care about in this movie. We are introduced to the two main characters, brothers Seth and Richie Gecko (George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino, respectively) when an officer finds them in a store and they kill him and the store clerk in a gunfight. The film then reveals that they have a hostage from the bank they robbed. Through this hostage (and her ensuing rape and murder) the audience learns that Richie is quite unstable and is something of a responsibility for seth. Seth and Richie then see an RV that they could use to get across the border, and we are introduced to 3 other main characters- Jacob, an old pastor, his son Scott and his daughter Kate. The deal they make is the first real turning point of the movie: if Jacob gets Seth and Richie across the border to Mexico, they don't kill him and his kids. They take the RV to a border checkpoint, where the audience is treated to the first climax of the movie when they almost get caught. Act 1 ends with them arriving at the Titty Twister strip club, where they are to meet the guy whose gonna hide them at dawn (its night time at this point) and where the rest of the movie takes place.


Act 2 begins with the crew immediately encountering obstacles in the way of reaching their goal (which is waiting in the strip club for Seth and Richie's guy). The bouncer won't let them in and violence between him, Seth, and Richie ensues. Another obstacle occurs right when they finally get in the club when the bartender also attempts to make them leave, saying that the club is only for bikers and truckers. Luckily, Jacob's RV license says he's a trucker, so the bartender allows them to stay and the second obstacle is defeated. The setup for the films climax then begins when Salma Hayek's stripper character makes her appearance and begins a long dance. During the dance, the bouncer who the Gecko's attacked is still pissed about their altercation earlier and gathers a crew of bikers to take them on. Act 2 culminates with them fighting again and Richie getting stabbed in the hand. The blood causes Salma Hayek's character to attack him and reveal her true self: she is a vampire. We've reached the end of act two and the midpoint of the movie.


Act 3 is almost entirely comprised of violent, bloody chaos as our main characters and a couple of other strip club patrons find out the hard way that every employee of the Titty Twister is in fact a vampire. The buildup to the final climax of the film includes Richie being transformed into a vampire and Seth killing him, and the surviving humans gathering tools necessary to kill vampires (stakes, holy water, etc.). Once prepared for the fight, the film climaxes with Jacob being turned into a vampire and making his kids promise to kill him when he does, Scott hesitating at killing his father and being turned into a vampire himself (not before killing his father though), and Kate quickly killing her brother to avoid meeting the same fate as him. When the final battle is over, Seth and Kate are the only remaining survivors. The denouement occurs when they finally leave the strip club and it is in fact dawn outside. Seth meets his contact and convinces him to take less than the agreed share because of everything he went through, and the film ends with a zoomed out shot of the Titty Twister, which turned out to be the top of an Aztec temple.

Sitcoms

The most interesting and enjoyable part of sitcoms is the lengths they go to to make every stand-alone episode accessible to anyone. For me, that starts with the laugh track they're set to. There's just something about laughing along with other people that makes the humor so much easier to digest for the audience (me). If I'm watching TV by myself, I'd rather watch an episode of 2 and a half men than, say, Arrested Development. Which show is funnier? Probably Arrested Development, but I'd have an easier time laughing along with 50 other people at Charlie Sheen having a one night stand with yet another stripper. It's the same reason I love watching comedies in theaters with a big group of people instead of on my laptop in an airplane. Sitcoms make watching feel like being part of a group experience, and that everyone is enjoying the jokes with you. 

Beyond the laugh tracks, there's the perfect mixture of episodic arcs that allow a single episode to stand alone, with little earmarks here and there that develop over time and reward a dedicated audience for keeping up with every episode. Even better, these little developments also give an audience watching a random rerun a sense of place in the overall scope of the show. If I'm watching an Everybody Loves Raymond rerun on TBS, I get everything I could ask for from a TV in 30 minutes. I get to laugh with my laugh track friends at Ray make an ass of himself confronting a 6 year old he thinks is bullying his kid, but in the end reconcile and make up for his mistakes. At the same time, I subtly notice that Robert and Amy are married in this episode, so this must be from one of the later seasons (probably 7). I get a reward for something I didn't even do (keep up with the show regularly).

Blog Entry Assignment #6

The movie I want to discuss a couple scenes from is Silence of the Lambs. In some respects this is my favorite movie ever.

The first scene of interest to me is when Agent Starling visits the mental institution to meet Hannibal Lecter for the first time. Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwlh9uJrQl4

The scene starts with a medium shot as Dr. Chilton is explaining Lecter's history to Clarice. It stays at a medium distance as more information is gathered. Then, as the 2 descend down the stairs to the maximum security wing of the hospital, the camera begins to zoom in on them. The audience is subtly tipped off by this that the story is about to turn from informational to very interesting. Sure enough, from seconds 20-24 in the video above, it cuts to an extreme close up of Dr. Chitlin's face, and we learn for the first time just how evil Hannibal Lecter is, and how calm and calculating he is even when relieving female orderlies of certain facial features. I love this scene because if it weren't for the changes in camera positions, the feel of the scene wouldn't be nearly as chilling. Instead of Dr. Chitlin's unchanging tone of voice during a story of attempted cannibalism feeling off, the extreme close-up creates the first spine chilling scene in the film. Then, just to make the audience feel a touch more off balance, the camera immediately cuts back to a medium shot of the two and Dr. Chitlin moves them along as if he didn't just talk about Lecter eating a woman's face. 30 seconds, three shots, and all of the sudden the audience anticipation for meeting Lecter for the first time is ten times higher.

The second scene is Lecter's escape, which I could only find here http://www.tvokay.com/redir4.php?l=aHR0cDovL3d3dy50dWRvdS5jb20vdi90dVdNSWRIVjhwVQ==

The shots I love in this scene are right as the police bust into the gym where Lecter was being held and discover his handiwork. We get a closeup of the door before they open it, and see a silhouette resembling a bird or something of that nature. When they finally burst in and a medium shot captures six of them pointing their weapons and preparing for Lecter to pop out and attack them, we get a close up as the captain's face to see how horrified he is by what he saw. The scene cuts straight to another close up of what we saw as a silhouette throught the window: a police officer cut up and strapped to the cage. Slowly, the camera zooms out to show how the light shines through him, and we finally see what the significance of his body's positioning is: the moths, and how they represent the rebirth the serial killer is attempting to achieve.

Blog entry assignment #5 (technically)

The main aspect of the studio system that particularly interests me is the "assembly line" attitude that was applied to the movies of old Hollywood. The making of movies were viewed through a completely different paradigm back then. It's pretty strange in our current time to think that studio heads looked at a movie not as the drawn out and creative process that it is today, with actors calling the shots and directors having they're nitpicky ways. It seems to me that when it was time to crank out movies, studio heads looked at their actors/directors/writers/etc. not as people, but as pieces of the puzzle that was the finished movie. This interests me because I think of how I would look at a movie today if Hollywood operated under that same system.

To illustrate my point, think of how different the film Casablanca would have been if Jack Warner didn't have such a heavy hand in the process. What if it was more like today, and Michael Curtiz and one or two screenwriters were calling all the shots creatively? No telling whether it would have been better or worse, but it would have been a very different movie. It most likely would not have been the mish-mash of genre's that has helped elevate it to the level of "all-time greats" status. It probably would've been a very good movie regardless, and would've still made money behind the star power of Humphery bogart, but it would have also stuck to one straightforward genre, with all of the other potential genre's serving as a mere backdrop (for example, a love story during World War II). Even though I don't like how controlling the studio heads of yore were (or how they treated their talent like machines instead of people), I like how they took matters into their own hands and squeezed greatness out of their people instead of just kinda letting it happen on their own time.


Since I've already used a specific example from old Hollywood to make a point, I'll take an example from today's world for this final paragraph. Think of how different the movie Avatar would have been if Hollywood still worked the way it did 70 years ago. First and foremost, it wouldn't have taken over a decade for that movie to be made. We would have seen it in 1999. No new and improved 3D technology to make it sweet, and we would've watched it through those crappy cardboard glasses. And $300 million on the budget with no stars? Scratch that. See ya Sam Worthington. We're throwing Mel Gibson, Will Smith, Cameron Diaz, Ian McKellan, and Martin Lawrence (for diverse comic relief) in this. It wouldn't be "James Cameron's Avatar" anymore either. Instead, we've got Brett Ratner (of Rush Hour and Mariah Carey music videos fame), and he's the messenger boy for Rupert Murdoch, whose really running the show for this picture. Now we have a very different movie. The poster would look more like this:











Without the super special effects, this movie would basically be Braveheart 2: On A Different Planet.