Ying xiong (2002)

This is a review with some critical elements by Mark R. Leeper at OptOnline.net. Hero turns out to be one of the most expensive films made in China as china tries to expand its influence worldwide. The author talks about the use of colors in the movie, which are dull sometimes and sometimes very contrasting with the actors wearing bright clothes compared to the surrounding. We can see that in the scene when Moon fights with Snow (both wearing red) in a yellowish green set (the color of the leaves). The following quote very much sums up the plot 0f the movie:

"HERO combines the fantasized martial arts of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN

DRAGON with some of the same history from the under-rated THE EMPEROR

AND THE ASSASSIN. It has neither the rousing adventure of CROUCHING

TIGER nor the historical epic sweep of THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN.

But the visual style of production designers Huo Ting Xiao and Yi Zhen

Zhou and cinematographer Christopher Doyle makes this one of the most

beautiful films that has been seen on American screens in quite a while."

One thing that was also noticed in the film is the lack of blood which the author believes is due to sensitivity of the audience in China. It is somewhat unrealistic that just a few drops of blood are seen when the fighting sequences are very intense. I believe one more thing that is missing in the film is fire. In the hollywood, we see that fire does play a role either through guns / bombs in action movies or flying arrows / burning villages in historical villages. I was surprised that the Qin soldiers weren't shown burning the villages of their enemies or using arrows of fire, like in Kingdom of Heaven, when China supposedly invented gun powder.

Qin dynasty in "Hero"

This link is from Minnesota State University and it provides a background of information about the Qin dynasty in the quote below:

"The Qin came to power in 221 B.C. They were one of the western states that existed during the Warring States Period. They conquered the other Warring States, unifying China for the first time. Their leader named himself the First Emperor, or Shi huangdi, thus beginning the tradition of having emperors for rulers. The Qin, while not the most culturally advanced of the Warring States was militarily the strongest. They utilized many new technologies in warfare, especially cavalry. The Qin are sometimes called the Ch'in, which is probably where the name China originated."

The article and the quote above can explain some of the reasons why the director might be interested in making a movie like Hero. There is historical data that this dynasty was the first recorded dynasty to rule almost all of today's China; the name China might have also originated from a name for Qin call "Ch'in'!

We also see the massive army of the Qin dynasty when Jet Li is at the temple and the army attacks the temple. We see they are using new ways of launching arrows using devices unlike traditional war movies where the archers only can manually fire arrows.

There is another link at the bottom which also provides excellent information about the major dynasties of China to date.

http://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/history/qin/

Zhang Yimou as a director

The link is from International Movie Database and provides the filmography for director Zhang Yimou. We know him as a director of "Hero", but he has directed other movies as well. One of the major themes of "Hero" was drama as the movie went through a plot. The movie has Jet Li narrate a story which has elements of fantasy and war in it. This is not like "Three Kings" where the drama was unfolding right when the action was happening.

It seems that the theme of drama defines this director. All of his movies have a sophisticated plot interwined with war, comedy, or romance. It seems that this director pays a lot of attention to a traditional plot. You can find more about his movies by reading movies of each of his movies on the website.

In the Combat Zone

This article is written by Marylin Young for "Radical History Review" in winter of 2003. The article can easily be accessed from UIC workstation. Non-UIC workstations need some kind of authorization.
The article gives us an interesting look in the place when it quotes George Clooney's special forces friend says that he really didn't know what he did there (kuwait). The main idea is that americans have liberated Kuwait. This is the reason the friend of this soldier replies, "Do you want to occupy Iraq", and "do Vietnam all over again".

The vietnam syndrome (no clear victory) and the media image is a big part of this article. It quotes Rove for the War on Terror saying that hollywood should play a role in declaring that "The war is against terrorism, not Islam... a fight against evil than disagreement between nations". This meeting provides a background to the powerful influence of media on our minds. The article mentions that madia blunders were blamed for the loss of the vietnam war. This is why you see in the quotes above that the army doesn't want to repeat "vietnam again". The power of media is shown in the film when George Clooney and his band of soldiers make the reporter go in circles than tell they plan to steal kuwaiti gold. Of course, stealing would hurt the "liberator" image of the army. But they don't hesitate to use the reporter when they are saving those iraqi refugees and moving them across to Iran at the checkpoint against army orders. These soldiers used the media to their advantage as due to the reporter's reporting on them, these soldiers get off easy because of their "heroic actions" in saving Iraqi civilians from saddam's murderous army.

Iraq and Desert Storm aftermath

The documentaries / interviews etc come from sources like the BBC and are pooled into the PBS website under the section of Fronline. The section I chose "voices in the storm" is especially interesting as it recounts eye witnesses accounts of the failed kurd uprising and the road to basra (became the "highway of death" for the iraqi soldiers). The information provided on this website is very diverse but I chose this section as it illustrates some real life events in Desert Storm like the failed uprising though the uprisings we see in the film are in southern shiite iraq. We also saw dead corpses of iraqi troops in the desert which showed the intensity and devastation of the US's aerial bombing leading up to the Ground War.

Director David O. Russell

The site answers.com provides excellent bibliographical and filmographical information about Director David O. Russell. If we looked in depth at this director, we find out that he mainly makes thoughtful comedy films like Flirting With Disaster and I ♥ Huckabees. He also was part of the team that brought the satirical movie called Anchorman: The Legend of Burgundy.

The only war movies that he has done are the Three Kings (1999) and the recent Soldiers Pay (2004). Ironically, both movies are about the Iraq War which are different from other movies in the war genre. I think David Russell is trying to make a statement as he shows the human side of the war unlike many movies in the war genre which are about explosion filled scenes and letting the good guys (the US military) winning against the bad guys. I believe that he is trying to tell us that wars are not a game, but a real life event that personally affect the lives of everyone who is involved - be it the victim or the soldier armed with that M16.

Quentin Tarantino Talks with Charlie Rose

This is an actual interview of Quentin Tarantino interviewed by Charlie Rose on his show. The Charlie Rose show broadcasts on WYCC (channel 20) on public access television. In this interview, the director talks about himself and what makes a "tarantino script".

The Tarantino Style

This is a clip from youtube but it is an excellent film as it depicts the style of tarantino using his film like:

"Reservoir Dogs" (1992),
"Pulp Fiction" (1994),
"Jackie Brown" (1997),
"Kill Bill volume 1" (2003) and
"Kill Bill vol. 2" (2004).

The good thing about this film clip is that you can see some parallels about the themes in tarantino's work. For example, in one scene from "Pulp Fiction", we have samuel jackson and travolta looking at the money in the trunk while it compares that to another scene in another tarantino film. The theme might be that there is greed associated with crime which has its implications in tarantino's films. The common themes help us perform an auteur analysis of tarantino's work.

Events around Pulp Fiction

The movie "Pulp Fiction" was release in 1994. This is the same time that the infamous OJ Simpson trial was taking place in California. The extent to which people were interested in this criminal investigation and trial can be judged from the following quote,

"Although the 1995 criminal trial of O. J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman has been called "a great trash novel come to life," no one can deny the pull it had on the American public. If the early reports of the murder of the wife of the ex-football-star-turned-sports-announcer hadn't caught people's full attention, Simpson's surreal Bronco ride on the day of his arrest certainly did--ninety-five million television viewers witnessed the slow police chase live. The 133 days of televised courtroom testimony turned countless viewers into Simpson trial junkies. Even foreign leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Boris Yeltsin eagerly gossiped about the trial. When Yeltsin stepped off his plane to meet President Clinton, the first question he asked was, "Do you think O. J. did it?" When, at 10 a.m. PST on October 3, Judge Ito's clerk read the jury's verdict of "Not Guilty," 91% of all persons viewing television were glued to the unfolding scene in the Los Angeles courtroom."

The movie pulp fiction also deals with crime like the Boss who supposedly killed a guy who massage his wife (Uma Thurman's) feet. But I think the other debate that raged because of the OJ Simpson trial was about race. There are claims that the trial had been tainted by race. If we look closely in the case of Pulp Fiction, we see there are racial overtones that Tarantino has carefully built into the movie. One scene in particular happened when the boss and the boxer (bruce willis) end up in a store in a sequence. The door has the confederate flag on it. But the thing to note in there is the store owner (and his police buddy) sexually assault the boss (a black) but leave alone the character of Bruce Willis. I think what Tarantino might be trying to accomplish by this is to show us that there still are racial barriers that exist between different groups even after all these years.

The author of the website is Douglas O. Linder from the Univ of Missouri - Kansas School of Law.

Whaddya Look at? Re-reading the gangster genre

This movie is talking about the "Godfather" but I think it is relevent since my movie Pulp Fiction is also a gangster crime drama. The article goes character by character of the Sopranos and sees how it all fits in the crime gangster genre that, in this case, Godfather belongs in. The article is written by Martha Nochimson who studies the gangster genre in Hollywood. The article is linked from the JSTOR database available through the UIC library.

The following quote from the beginning of the article very nicely tries to sum up the gangster genre:
"Perceived as hypermasculine fare, the gangster picture is generally understood to be popular because of its explosive virility and its close connection to reality. Yet despite these entrenched truisms, hindsight and the progeny that have been spawned by the early masterpieces of the genre suggest that the situation is more complex."

Dictionary of film terms

The website is a link to the Filmsite's Film Terms Glossary were used, with permission and with some modification, as the basis for the Independent Film Channel's (IFC) Film School Multimedia Glossary (IFC's Film School Glossary), created by students for students so that they could learn terms used in the filmmaking industry by actually seeing video clips of those terms "in action."

The film terms range from describing the film and film types to the different camera angles that are used when making any movie.

Pulp Fiction

The author is Dr. Alan A. Stone who is the Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry in the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Medicine, Harvard University. He has talked about the violence and other plot angles of the movie that affect us psychologically. The article talks about the view that movies like Pulp Fiction are thought to be promoting violence by arguing that the movie is not just about violence but has a plot structure of its own. Basically, Tarantino's movies have much more deeper meaning than what is being perceived by many people.

This below quote is one of the most important quotes in the article. It gives us an idea as to how this name of "Pulp Fiction" might have come about;

"The title "Pulp Fiction" refers, of course, to the pop literary genre of the hard-nosed private investigator, which peaked in the 1930s and 1940s with the work of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. Newsstands of their era bulged with monthly pulp fiction magazines that vied for the reader's attention with stories that began luridly on the cover and jumped to the back. Tarantino echoes this structure in his film, which opens with one short story, then breaks to two others."

The link is from the AccessMyLibrary website which you can access using your UIC library card or your local public library card. Alternatively, you can also register at their site for free access.

Pulp Fiction

The film initiates with two small-time thieves, Honey Bunny and Pumpkin, who spontaneously decide to hold up a restaurant. The film then shifts to the story of Jules and Vincent, who hit men for the well known and feared Marsellus Wallace, who is caught up in a deal gone wrong with struggling boxer Butch Coolidge.

The movie shows that tarantino is a genius. His idea of using narrative based action instead of things going in chronological order has since been copied by famous movies like Memento. But the biggest art of Tarantino is how he was able to let his character's evolve over the course of the film even though there were four different stories in the film, all connected to each other in different ways.

I think this quote best sums it up,

Back to the dialogue. It is the driving force of the film,

complementing the plot and allowing its characters to grow on us in

ways we never imagined they would. It's the way in which the dialogue

is deliberated that varies from most other examples of deliberation. ...

There are different levels of dialogue -- plot-driven, and realistic

-- but all dialogue is in service of its plot, just as all of what we

say to our friends or family has a deeper meaning and will no doubt

relate to the matter at hand. All dialogue relates to a larger scheme,

and so does the dialogue in "Pulp Fiction."

This is a link to the critical review:
http://us.imdb.com/Reviews/374/37494

Kingdom of Heaven

This movie was about a central character bailian (played by Orlando Bloom), who was a small blacksmith and worked to become a knight after his father took him to Jerusalem. He became a hero to the christians as saladin's army was marching on to jerusalem. He lost the ultimate battle but was able to win the hearts of his fellow citizens in Jerusalem.

I think the following quote best summarizes the character of Bailian;
"As he did in GLADIATOR, Scott explores the theme of a man who chooses his fate, instead of accepting the fate given to him at birth."
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809719782/details

I think this is a good movie as we can analyze the movie using at least three of the corrigan's six approaches to film. The first approach I can take is historical. as the plot of the movie revolving around the Crusades has been written about in the western and middle eastern societies. There can be a debate here because the movie shows more of a european thinking of the crusades. The formalist approach will be good as well because not many can argue that the movie does have very good battle scenes. The director, Ridley Scott, lives up to his acclaim to deliver a good movie. You can get a glimpse of it in the trailer of the movie. We can also do a genre analysis and see how this movie fits into the genre of epic action movies.