Frequency

Frequency is a film about a police officer named John Sullivan who is down on his luck. His father, Frank, is dead, and he no longer has any zest for life. One night, after his girlfriend leaves him, he finds his father’s old police radio and turns it on. He begins messing with the signals, and somehow makes contact with his father exactly 30 years in the past, on the day before he died. Before the connection cuts out, John is able to shout out the circumstances that led to Frank's death. Frank is skeptical about the situation, and believes that he is being messed with, however, when the circumstances brought up in their conversation prove true, Frank believes and trusts John's words, escaping the fire to safety. Since John was able to warn Frank away from danger, his father's death never occurs. However, it is not without consequences. Since John and Frank were able to alter the past, life in which they know it suddenly changes. John's altered future is one in which his mother, in turn, has been murdered by a serial killer. Now John in the present and Frank in the past must communicate via radio to try to solve the mystery of the killer's identity and change the outcome again.

Frequency is one of my favorite films of all time. It is a great piece, built around a realistic and caring father/son relationship and ordinary characters who are trying to accomplish extraordinary things in order to change the past. The movie has a lot of heart and you really learn to care about the characters and worry about what will become of them. I also very much admire the uniqueness of the plot. It is both interesting to contemplate the complexity behind it, as well as to watch. It is a little slow to take off, but once it gets going, there starts to be action at every turn. It is definitely one of those movies that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

American Beauty

American Beauty is a film from 1999 that embodies the dysfunctional beauty of one family, and relates it to the overall American cultural experience. The main character, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), sees no point to his existence: he is in a trying relationship with his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening); he barely talks to his daughter Jane (Thora Birch); and he has been put under fire at work. After a series of occurrences in his life such as meeting his new neighbor Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) smoking some pot, and becoming captivated by Jane's high school classmate Angela (Mena Suvari), Lester undergoes a remarkable transformation and decides to stop being a conformist. He quits his job, much to the irritation of his wife, and begins to work at a Burger King.

There is a great deal of suspense in this story line of this film: we are give the ending right at the beginning: that Lester will be dead in a year's time. However, how and why this is the case isn't revealed until the very last minute. The movie tries to tell us that conforming to a lifestyle dictated by society leads to dysfunctionality. But finding freedom as illustrated in the film isn't exactly great either.

As the movie proceeds, each of the characters experience a transformation that breaks them out of their rut and enables them to advance to the next level of existence. Each transformation is characterized by the movement between living a routine life and living a dynamic life, where everything is uncertain. At the end, only Lester has found true freedom. Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper), the homophobic father of Ricky is left to confront his own issues; Jane and Ricky move away to become professional drug dealers; Carolyn's transformation leaves her alone; and there is nothing to fix Angela's insecurity.

Freaks & Geeks

Well yet again I watched another TV series. This week I decided to watch Freaks and Geeks. I had always heard how great this show was from many of my friends so I went ahead and watched it. I was pleasantly surprised at how good of a show it was. If you haven't watched this show already you can find it on Netflix. It stars many actors that we see today that have become very popular. Stars like James  Franco and Jason Segal are some of those actors.

This show took me down memory lane and back to high school. Even though it is a show made in 1999 based off of high school in the 80's, it is still completely relatable. The characters are hysterical and they play the perfect cast of high school misfits. They are nerdy and weird and quirky and they all have their own personalities.

I was really bummed to see that this show was only on for less than a season. The acting and the character development are fantastic and the show had a lot of potential. The show left off very open ended because it was only on episode 18 when it got canceled. Lots of potential, but I guess the rest is just left up to the imagination.

A new way of looking at films

I recently discovered a new tumblr, which is often dangerous to my productivity, but I've found this one particularly interesting as it offers an interesting new way of looking at films.  It is called moviebarcode, and it posts single images, or barcodes, representing the entire course of a movie.  These images are made up of a number of still frames, evenly distributed throughout the movie, which are then stretched upward so that only the main color information remains.  It offers a very nice, birds-eye view of the art direction and overall color tones and moods of a film.  There is also an index so that you can easily look up movies you are interested in.

O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000)

For example, this is the barcode from the 2000 film "O Brother, Where Art Thou".  This was the first film to be digitally color graded in order to make an artistic choice.  In this case, much of the footage was tweaked to make the landscapes look drier and more golden, to fit the setting of the Dust Bowl in the midwest.  This is easily apparent in the barcode, which is overwhelmingly gold and beige.  You can also see, right at the very beginning, how the film starts out in black and white, before the saturation is added back in to produce the color.

The Matrix (1999)

Here's another example: The Matrix.  Almost every scene in The Matrix has a distinctive green tint to it, which is easily apparent in this image.

Harry Potter: Complete Series (2001-2011)

This is one of my favorite examples, because it shows some of the applications that these images could have.  This is all eight Harry Potter movies, sequentially, which means we can see some interesting trends.  First of all, we can see that the mood of the series gets progressively darker, until the last installment is almost entirely black.  This visual trend clearly follows the tone of the films and the stories themselves.  It also shows the differences in the styles of the directors; for instance, Chris Columbus filmed the first ones primarily inside, which is shown by all the warm tones at the beginning of the image.  When directing the third installment, Alfonso Cuarón made the conscious decision to shift to a more outdoors, location based film, which is shown in the abrupt transition to blues and greens.

By looking at multiple films at once like this, we can observe patterns, similarities, and differences that are both interesting and useful.  Using these images could be an easy way to examine multiple films by broad categories such as genre or time period, which might expose some of the stereotypes or tropes that are used in different types of filmmaking.

Office Space

Saturday afternoon I made an amazing decision. I plugged an ethernet cable into the back of my blu-ray player. I now have streaming Netflix on my television. Win! My roommates and I have spent countless hours since then watching How I Met Your Mother and various movies. One of the movies that showed up in the "Recommended for Breanne"(or whatever that section is called) was Office Space.

Office Space is a comedy released in 1999 written and directed by Mike Judge. Office Space follows a group of dissatisfied coworkers at Initech who decide to rebel against their boss and the company. The main character, Peter (Ron Livingston), is miserable. He's also dating Anna at the beginning. Anna convinces him to see a hypnotherapist and the guy dies mid-session. This leaves Peter in a state where he's happy and doesn't care about anything. Like almost every other movie, there was a love story mixed in it. Peter ends up dating another girl, Joanna (played by Jennifer Aniston.) The humor is interesting and uses a lot of repetition in its jokes. Office Space uses stereotypes really well. They have the boss, the smiling receptionist, the weird guy, and a bunch of typically dissatisfied workers.

At the very beginning of the movie I wasn't sure that I was going to like it but a friend who was over told me to give it a few minutes. I'm glad I did because I found out that it was a pretty funny and enjoyable movie. Was it predictable? Yes. Did I like it any less because of that? No. If you haven't seen it and want to sit down, watch a movie, and laugh a little, I would recommend Office Space.