Shutter Island is a film I probably should have prepared myself for before watching. From start to finish the film itself and the story of our protagonist Teddy is an enigma. The film starts from a weird point in time which already makes me as the viewer slightly un-eased. From what we can gather Teddy is sent to go and investigate a missing persons case on an island that houses a mental institution. The more we go into the movie and explore “Teddy” the truth becomes more and more jaded, fuzzy, and hard to grasp on to. 

What Teddy’s military background says about him is that he feels responsible for things that are completely and entirely out of his control. He wants to be able to save everyone and do everything and that is part of his mental trauma. The fact that he could not save his own children from his wife after several warnings and red flags had such a toll on him that he started to refer to himself as Teddy instead of Andrew Laeddis. He has created a fiction that has become so real to him, that the most extreme measures are taken to try to fix him and cure his illness. 

At the end of the film we think he is cured and expects this reality that he killed his wife, and he no longer is this Teddy Daniels. Just when we think everything is going to turn out fine for him, he believes Chuck, is still his partner and not the doctor who had left on vacation, and this dialogue follows:

Teddy Daniels : You know, this place makes me wonder.

Chuck Aule : Yeah, what’s that, boss?

Teddy Daniels : Which would be worse – to live as a monster? Or to die as a good man?

He clearly still feels guilty and is going to take the lobotomy instead of living a normal life with the guilty conscious.

Inglourious Basterds has been one of my favorite titles from this list of movies we’ve watched so far this semester. Brad Pitt’s Italian accent might need some work, but it’s made up for his role as Aldo the Apache. A gung ho, scalp taking, Nazi killing American with Patriotism running through his veins. The whole premise of the  movie is set around a Nazi occupied as stated in the opening of chapter. This is quite long which is why I feel Tarantino did this. I also don’t know what intentional although it probably was, he makes fun of Americans through the whole movie not being bilingual, or multi-lingual. They can only speak English, and are constantly reminded of that by many of the characters in the film. Donny (Bear Jew) is definitely from Boston with his wicked accent.

The movie comes full circle to Shoshana, the girl who escaped from the Jew Hunter in the opening scene. She runs the theater that her aunt and uncle left her when a heroic German Soldier is fallen in love with her. He changed the premiere of Nations’ Pride to a smaller theater. Her theater and now the Fuhrer himself will be in attendance to see the re-enactment of that brave soldier and what he did for the Nazis. Now there are two separate parties trying to kill Hitler and they will both be in attendance at this premiere. However, they don’t know about each other costing them each other’s lives. 

Attention to detail is very importsnat in this film especilly if you are a high commanding Nazi officer. When we lost Stiggler and Wiki I felt sad, because Tarintino was able to make us have a connection to these characters, and made us not want to see them die.There is no violence spared in this film as when the Jew Bear beats the officer of 250 burning Nazis in Kino this film quickly ran up my favorites list. 

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and touches on a lot of different aspects of life. As much of a problem that police brutality is today it was during the 1980’s as well. The movie has predominantly all black leads except for John Turturro and Danny Aiello as the Italian family and owner of Sal’s Famous Pizza. The part of the movie where they are chanting HOWARD BEACH when BoomBox was unjustly choked to death by a cop, began to make me think. My dad grew up in Brooklyn and Carnarcie, and Queens, and he told me this story about a man who was run down by the mob because he did not belong in Howard Beach.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Michael_Griffith.Howard Beach is an extremely racist area even today, and I’ve had to come to terms with that some people are really affected from the area they are brought up in. That man was Micheal Griffith; a victim of racism. The rest of the movie is dedicated to other victims of racist acts, police brutality, and other sorts of unjustifiable violence.  The end of the movie shows that violence is not the answer to solve all problems. Including quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X, I began to realize the true message of this movie. The way that Buggin Out approached problems resulted in more and more violence that did not need to happen, but when Mookie’s sister talks to him, and she says if he expended all of that energy into something more productive, she was right. Martin Lawrence’s character is a very typical member of that crew, he’s like a instigator. Someone that tries to make trouble for no reason. I understood this movie. I felt like Mookie. Mookie does not get caught up in the shit until he is too fed up. BoomBox told him the world is his, but he’s the worst off. He does what he needs to do but is called not a man by his baby momma. Da Mayor was the best character because  you never truly know someone and the things they’ve gone through and you just can’t assume the worst of them.

The 400 Blows is a new type of film for us. It’s completely in French, and the protagonist and main character is a child. The whole movie revolves around his life, his friends and family. What really appealed to me though was the fact that it was coming of age. Coming of age movies have a really special place for me, because of some things I’ve gone through. Seeing kids being kids and doing dumb kid things, reminds me that I shouldn’t have wished everyday when I was younger that I wanted to grow up faster. Just running around with your friend when you’re supposed to be in class, or having the teacher rag on you for reasons you can’t seem to comprehend, and going home and actually talking to your parents about the day you had, and recovering advice. All things our protagonist goes through. The problems in this movie are juvenile and as serious all at the same time. They seem so big to children, but so small to an adult, but you if you really step back and see what’s going on there’s a much larger underlying problem at hand. I really like how the movie ends because of the significance of the ocean and what it means to me. To me the ocean means freedom and the ability to explore. When things got rough dealing with growing I would always run away to the beach to be alone, and just think. Also the ocean for me represents destruction but that’s another story. The fact that Antoine went through all that he did while growing up is very relatable and we just have to sympathize with him because we’ve all been. We might not understand him, but he understands himself. The freeze frame of him at the water was in my opinion the best way to end the movie.

Rear Window is a movie with half it scenes and shots set in the ‘first person POV.’ L.B. Jeffries being confined to just a wheelchair has a lot to do with reason behind the ‘first person POV.’ Being cooped up in his house for six weeks straight with a broken leg has left his mind to wander, and become a “peeping tom,” hence that POV. Any chance he gets he is looking into someone else’s life, through his binoculars or his long lens. He even gives nicknames to the people he watches other than Thorwald, such as Ms. Lonely Heart, or Miss Torso. This is typical behaviour in voyeurism, keeping the scenarios of another person’s life impersonal. For some reason though, it was different for Thorwald. Jeffries watched him like a hawk, and had his mind start to run, shooting off as many possibilities as he could as to what happened to Mrs. Thorwald. The whole movie takes place across a long hot, summer week, the week that is supposed to Jeffries last in the cast, until his suspicions of Thorwald turn out to actually be true. I think that Mr. Thorwald was unhappy with his wife, and with the temperature getting so high, so were tempers, which led to wifes ultimate demise. 

In the beginning of the movie Jeffries was not sure if he was gonna stay together with Lisa. In fact he was ready to let her leave him. But as their imaginations run wild, and fiction turns into reality, Jeffries falls back in love with her. She scales across the side of Thorwald’s apartment; maybe to prove a point to Jeffries that she can go on those dangerous long and non-dainty trips with him, or maybe she herself was also so caught up in this murder mystery that happened across the courtyard. They end up together, a typical romance trope, now with two broken, and two people in a one person apartment. 

Sunset Boulevard should also be considered a horror movie. For our protagonist, Joe Gillis, the first half of the movie is certainly a nightmare that has come to life. Having met Ms. Desmond could be considered an unlucky coincidence, or does fate and destiny work in weird, cruel ways. From running from his bill collectors, to wearing mink, to being dead, Mr Gillis’ whole life had turned upside down. He was being held in a house with a delusional woman, a man who sheltered and enabled her ideas, and eventually lost his life in. That mansion on Sunset Blvd, became a movie set for Norma to unknowingly “star in” her final scene. That house had lost the touch it once had, but once Joe had started to come around it made the house change. It looked less dull, the pool got filled, and Norma had seemed the happiest she had been in a while. 

Max being her first husband, and agent/producer made them have a weird dynamic. He only wanted the best for her, but her days were over, and her mind seemed to be long far gone. Between her suicide attempts and copious amounts of wealth, she had the ability to disconnect from society, except for her old friends that were from the same as her. Joe could never connect with her truly and he had to leave just to “Hear someone laugh again.” He began to connect with Arties girl, when they wrote the Untitled Love Story. 

Seeing Norma so destroyed says alot about power and sexuality in Hollywood. She’s no longer beautiful just as C.B. DeMille’s assistant jokingly jabs at. She had her time in the spotlight, literally, when she went to go revisit the old studio. It made her think she could go back like nothing ever changed. I felt bad for her character honestly, and she also made me uncomfortable. I now know how Susan felt in Citizen Kane. He just kind of held her in a bubble just like Ms. Desmond did to Joe. Then she killed him, which was not cool.

Citizen Kane is not quite like any movie I’ve watched before. Not because it was in black and white, but it was trying to understand a man, that in my opinion made no sense at all. From letting his work to get in the way of love life, to thinking that women he loved, wanted to be something she was not; a singer. Charles Foster Kane is someone who can be misunderstood but never truly understood in my opinion 

The film starts with Mr. Kane holding a snow globe, and faintly saying the words “Rose bud,” as he perishes. Charles Foster Kane is from Colorado, a state known for its snow, explaining his longing for home with having a snow globe. As we go through the movie the lighting is used in a way that makes only the protagonist and the characters important to the protagonist, visually stand out to us. Like the reporter who’s trying to decipher these last words “Rose Bud,” we never see his face because he himself does not pertain to Charles Foster Kane Directly. We go through the movie with snippets from this man’s life where he constantly loses the ones he “loves.” 

All he ever wanted was to be loved but not by one singular person; by everyone. Charles Foster Kane was given away at an early age, and immediately acquired an immense amount of wealth. While actually having all this wealth he actually always lost money. He created a grand palace and never finished. He surrounded himself with all these materialistic items like statues and the world’s largest private zoo, but never had his “Rosebud.”

When on this retreat vacation with friends and his second life, a song is sung about true love never being obtained. On the same day his life left, and from then on he was alone. The mysterious words “Rosebud” symbolize true love something Charles Foster Kane could never obtain. He lost his one friend Jed, his first and second wife, his parents, and anyone else that meant anything to him. He died alone in an unfinished palace. In my opinion that is the worst way to go. With no one at all by your side. He had once said “If I didn’t have all this money, I probably would’ve been a great man.” Money does not make the man, the way he treats and helps others does. Charles Foster Kane said he had the public’s interest, “the slum child’s” interest in heart, but that did not seem to be the case in the end. Everyone hated him, and he even lost the election. Shielding himself in his giant palace was the only escape.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

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