David O. Russell

Two other films that Russell has directed have been Soldiers Pay and I Heart Huckabees. A link to the IMDB page on the film is provided here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0423453/. This is a documentry that deals with life of American Soldiers, that being the tragic side. He displays how American Soldiers are underpaid and shows their lives, family and mental stability after dealing with war.

Wikipedia provides a synopses of the film I Heart Huckabees here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%E2%99%A5_Huckabees. This film has an existential theme, that being the human condition. Wikipedia explains that the main character, Albert, deals with two opposing views on life and ends up realizing that they are connected universally. I feel that this film probably deals with some overtones for subjectivity in so as far as ethics goes, and probably one in which Russell supports.

British youth subculture

In this article, the movie Trainspotting, British youth subculture is looked at through many different perspectives. The article explains the movie deals with the youth's situation and says:

The physical body, pop culture, genre categorization, moral judgment, individualism —all of these continually moved back and forth from extreme to extreme, reconfiguring themselves constantly in and around contemporary youth culture as the youth themselves struggled with them. In creating a movie of this experience, visual focus would not suffice; the movie producers, the characters of the film and the receiving audience needed an avenue along which to represent and understand the elements in flux.

The movie as makes use of how important noise is in this film as opposed to other British films. British filmstypically have the "sounds of scoiety" in the background like people talking and cars passing by, while Trainspotting uses the noise of a sort of "whooshing by" in important scenes taken by the fast pace of the British youth subculture. The article explains that the noises in the movie are also overexaggerated in doing things like opening a pop can or a bag of chips to emphasize this rapid pace. It is also done to show the there subculture renders mainstream society somewhat meaningless and trivial and is emphasized in one of the characters, Renton, by society not being part of his existence in that he is unemployed. This is also shown for their culture wanting to maintain some kind of individualism. The article ends its synopse on noise by saying, "The exaggeration of material objects’ noise serves a two-fold purpose: it highlights consumerism and the associated individualism of a capitalist, as well as separate youth culture".