HopkinsCinemAddicts

Superhumanity: The Human Characters of The Avengers

WARNING: SPOILERS

 

                After 4 years of setup, The Avengers has finally become a reality. Thankfully, it has lived up to its expectations, as it had the potential to be one of the biggest disappointments in cinema history. However, while it is filled with big explosions and thrilling action, it succeeds not through its thrills, but through the humanity of its characters.

                Superheroes represent the pinnacle of humankind. They are able to do things that people can only dream of doing, and they operate in a world of black and white. We love to go to the theatre or read comic books in order to imagine how awesome it would be to fight off evil invading aliens or a maniacal super villain. The Avengers gives us this escape, but each of the main characters is also a deeply flawed person in addition to an epic superhero.

                The majority of the film focuses on the team having troubles coming together in order to face their common foe. Each of their personalities forces them away from each other. Tony Stark overcompensates for his ego and drives everyone around him away with his pompousness, Bruce Banner struggles with his severe anger problems, and Steve Rogers is dealing with being a man who has lost touch with the modern world. Each of these problems is extended into the fantastical realm, such as Bruce Banner turning into a giant rage monster when he gets angry or Steve Rogers having been frozen in ice for several years, but they all resonate clearly with the audience. We like these people because we can relate to their problems, not because they can jump over buildings.

                The one member of the team that stands outside this pattern, and as such is a less effective character, is Thor. While he has to deal with the fact that the villain is his brother, he speaks in Elizabethan era English and feels less human than the rest. He is a god and as such exists on a different level than the other characters. In the end, he ends up getting less screen time as he is simply less interesting than the other characters.

                The humanity of the characters is truly brought to the forefront when, in classic Joss Whedon fashion, the most human of the characters is killed off. This death does not happen to one of the superheroic members of the team, but instead to Agent Colson, their completely human friend. He dies trying to protect Thor from his brother, but in the end proves mostly ineffective. His death provides a truly emotional moment for the audience. For those who have been watching these films since Iron Man, Colson has been a constant presence who helped to bring these characters together. However, even for those who have only seen The Avengers his earlier scene in which he starts to gush to Captain America about how he has collected all of his trading cards endears him to the audience. He represents us as we get excited about these characters. He looks up to them just as we do. His death allows the Avengers to move past their own personal issue and unite in their common grief.

                All of these human emotions pay off in the very last scene of the film. After the credits are done rolling, we are treated to a two minute long scene of these superheroes, still in costume, eating shawarma in a grungy New York restaurant. This moment is the most human moment in the film. No one does anything fantastic. No one says anything to each other. They simply sit there and eat, allowing themselves to relax after the stressful day they have had. This relaxation is a sentiment that everyone can relate to. Sometimes we just need to sit back and eat some food. It’s a refreshing thought to know that superheroes need to eat too. 

 

The Trials and Tribulations of Being a Son on FX's Justified

The father-son relationship is, in some ways, the most important male relationship in existence. While it is ostensibly a nurturing bond, it is also inherently competitive. Fathers want to raise their sons to follow in their footsteps, but in doing so they make themselves obsolete. This past season of Justified mines this relationship in order to take its characters in new directions which are familiar, but also novel.

                This theme seems in retrospect to be an obvious one for the show to tackle, as Raylan Givens, the main character of the show, has had extremely troubled relations with his criminal father in the past. It was obvious that some form of conflict would eventually pop up between them. However, instead of taking the obvious path of bringing them together in a head on conflict, the show ended up taking the theme in a much more subtle route. Raylan and Arlo, his father, are almost never on screen together for the entire season until the very end. Instead, the theme of father and son is explored through the villain before being cast upon the more obvious subjects.

                Robert Quarles, the villain of the season, does not, upon first glance, seem to have anything to do with the theme of fathers and sons. As a fast talking drug lord come down from Detroit to tame the wilds of the Kentucky oxy trade, he seemed to embody the expansionist, a theme which is common in many Westerns. However, as the season goes on, the viewer learns that every action that he performs comes from his relationship with his father figures. He attempts to make his adopted father proud by earning money and influence through the drug trade, while at the same time reenacting the terrible things that his biological father did to him on gay men that he kidnaps and tortures throughout the season. Quarles never outgrows the shadow of either of his fathers, and ends up crashing and burning because of it. Even as he is being chased by the Marshall service through the hills of Kentucky, his first priority is to call the head of the Detroit mob, his adopted father, and say that he wants to come home.

                This theme is greatly enhanced through the performance of Neil McDonough. He plays Quarles as a cheerful smiling villain who is as funny as he is scary. He cracks jokes as he kills people, and is always polite. However, as the season goes on, it becomes more apparent that McDonough plays the character as an overgrown child. He constantly tries to show off his sleeve holster like a child with a new toy, and he struggles to be seen as better than his “father’s” biological son. All of this is done with the emotional openness of a child showing the stunted development of this man.

This issue of father and son drives Raylan as well. Timothy Oliphant plays Raylan as a very emotionally closed character as opposed to Quarles’s childlike openness. He constantly denies that he has any issues with his father, and does everything he can to ignore the issue at hand. However, Raylan’s drive to show his father that they have nothing in common is the baseline for everything that he does.

All of the troubles he has with his father come to a head in the season finale in which we are treated to a scene in which Arlo attempts to tell Raylan that he is proud of him. The scene is touching, especially owing to Timothy Oliphant’s performance as Raylan tries to pretend that he doesn’t care, but cannot stop himself from feeling glad that his father is finally acknowledging him. This only serves to set the viewer up for the crushing final moments of the season in which Raylan realizes that Arlo has killed a friend of his, thinking it was Raylan, in order to protect his adopted “son.” This realization that he has truly lost his father breaks Raylan in a way that the viewer has never seen. He isn’t angry or vengeful. He just seems defeated. His father has a new son, and he has been left with no one.

                Justified has always been about fathers and sons, even from the very beginning, but never before has it been such a central element to the plot. By exploring this tenuous male relationship, the show is able to explore the depths of its characters and bring them to their knees. It can be said that those who know us best can hurt us most, and that statement is never truer than in this past season.

Much thanks to Creative Commons and the public domain images used. Creative Commons in no way endoreses any opinions expressed in this blog. Any opinions, views, or ideas are soley of the poster.

 

 

Let the Dark Knight be Dark: Maturity in Batman: The Animated Series

When one looks for quality television, one rarely looks as children’s animation. Often times it is derivative, uninspiring, and all around annoying. However, when the truly great shows come around, the realization is made that children are capable of handling more mature subjects without being remarkably traumatized in the slightest. One of the true greats in the aspect was the early 90s cartoon, Batman: The Animated Series. A superhero cartoon seems to be a strange place to be talking about mature content. Superheroes are the bread and butter of Saturday morning entertainment, but Batman decided to step away from the traditional method of children’s cartooning and try something different. Instead of simple “kid-friendly” villains, the show was able to mine its source material and use villains that were willing to kill an entire city just because they wanted to. This dark material should, according to many sensibilities, be extremely offsetting to kids. Instead, the show is able to find a happy medium which isn’t super violent, but at the same time won’t pull its punches when it comes to mature topics. One of the best examples of this phenomenon comes when dealing with the character of Two-Face. He is an established enough villain that the show could have easily had him simply appear and no one would think twice about it. However, the show takes the viewer through the entire emotional journey of his creation. The audience is introduced to the character of Harvey Dent, Gotham’s district attorney and best friend to the protagonist, in the first episode, and he is a recurring character throughout the series. This means that when an explosion goes off, horrifically maiming his face and cracking his personality in two, the audience is deeply invested in his character. This kind of deep emotional connection followed by such a traumatic experience gets the audience involved, but for many, it is too disturbing for children. By including it anyway, Batman proves that kids aren’t stupid when it comes to their entertainment. The show was very popular in its day and many kids watched this episode. There were no widespread reports of kids becoming traumatized by this event. Instead, they were able to take the emotional journey with the main character of losing his best friend and feeling guilty every time they have to cross paths. In short, Batman: The Animated Series didn’t try to create programming for kids. They simply tried to make the best animated show they could, but didn’t try to dumb it down for children. Instead, they expected kids to understand what was going on, and for the most part they were successful. While not every episode is as emotionally charged as the Two-Face origin, the show asks viewers, both child and adult to rise to the occasion so that the show can best the best it can possibly be.

A Well Deserved Tribute to One of Cinema's Unsung Heroes

            For my article this week, I would like to pay a belated tribute to a man who was lost to us early this year. This man is responsible for many classic moments in cinema, and it can be said without exaggeration, that he changed the face of movies in a significant way. I speak, of course, of the late great Bob Anderson. “Who is this Bob Anderson?” you ask, “Why have I never heard of him?” Bob Anderson was the sword master for many of cinema’s classic fights. Beginning in 1953, he choreographed everything from Moonraker to The Lord of the Rings to the Princess Bride duel that I mentioned in my last article. His most famous moment, however came when he stepped into the shoes of one of the great classic villains, Darth Vader.

            Bob Anderson was the choreographer for all of the original Star Wars fights. Every single lightsaber swing bore his signature. While David Prowse played the body of Vader through most of the series, Anderson stepped in for the lightsaber duels in both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Both of these fights were extremely grueling, especially in the Vader costume, so it made more sense to put Anderson in the suit because he was more skilled with the weapon.

            If you watch the fight from A New Hope and compare it to the fights in either of the two later films, you can see the difference in body language between the two actors. The original fight is quite blocky with both performers slightly unsure of their body movements. While it works in the scene as Obi-Wan Kenobi is quite old at this point and Darth Vader is, for all intensive purposes, a robot, when compared with later scenes it stands out as being stocky and uncoordinated.

            In comparison, the lightsaber fight in The Empire Strikes Back benefits from Bob Anderson’s technique. Instead of the blocky and stiff style that Vader was using in A New Hope, he switches to a much more fluid one handed style. He keeps the blade inside of his body line for the most part and allows Luke Skywalker to expend his energy in wild attacks. Only after seeing that Luke has tired himself out does Vader go on the attack. Many of his successful techniques come from small wrist movements which allow him to control the other blade, disarming Skywalker in the beginning of the fight and ultimately performing a literal disarm at the end. All of these moves are executed with an ease of movement that lets the viewer know that Vader is the superior swordsman. Without Anderson’s expertise with the weapon or his ease of movement, the story could have easily become muddied, and the fight would not have stood the test of time nearly as well.

            Bob Anderson was one of the many unsung heroes in Hollywood. Without these men and women, the movies that we know and love would never get made, and yet they don’t receive even half of the publicity that the actors and the directors receive. They do it for the love of their craft and nothing else. So here’s to you Bob Anderson! May the force be with you!

 Much thanks to Creative Commons and the public domain images used. Creative Commons in no way endoreses any opinions expressed in this blog. Any opinions, views, or ideas are soley of the poster.

The Role of the Storyteller in The Princess Bride

Rob Reiner’s 1987 film The Princess Bride has remained a favorite throughout the years. It is a tale of dashing swordfights, monsters, and true love. It is able to place itself head and shoulders above the rest because of its emphasis on the nature of stories and storytelling.

                The film is framed in terms of a story being told from an old man to his grandson. Immediately, the film sets up the idea of passing stories and mythology along to the younger generation. This concept is the basis for the oral tradition that ruled over so many tribes of the past. Before they had a written language, the only way to pass down stories was for the elders to tell them to the younger generations. Though the grandfather is using a book to tell the story, he is still the latest in this long line of storytellers.

                The characters within the story itself are also ruled by the stories they tell. For example, the character of Inigo Montoya lives to get revenge on the man who killed his father.  However, the audience does not see these events. Instead, they hear it told as a story from Inigo himself. By giving the audience the information in this manner, Inigo is created as a man whose whole life is driven by a story. Everything that he does throughout the entire film is preempted by the story that he tells Wesley.

                Wesley also exists through the story of the Dread Pirate Roberts. His reputation is based off of the exploits of the men who came before him. The name is what carries the power, not anything that he has personally done. In this way, he has to become the story instead of being able to tell his own story. Even when he returns and finds his true love, he needs to pass the title on to someone else. He is drawn to continue the story even though his role is over. When he does decide to pass on the role, it is implied that the title will fall on Inigo, a man who is no longer driven by his own story and must now find another.

                These two story driven characters come together for the first time in a wide ranging and extremely cinematic duel. They range all over the terrain, each playing with the other. The nature of the film as a story allows this confrontation to play out in this manner. Real sword fighting is quite brutal, quick, and does not last nearly as long as the fight in the film. However, as both men are living through a story that does not necessarily involve the other, they are able to play and to enjoy what they are doing. Their excitement is shared through the screen by way of the grandfather telling the story of these two men dueling. In addition, this is all being told through the eye of the director and the screenwriter who want to thrill the audience with their story. All this layered storytelling comes together to form a cohesive whole, creating one of the great fairy tales of American cinema.

 

Why Don't the Bad Guys All Look Different From Me?: Subverting Sterotypes on Homeland

WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW

Showtime’s new series, Homeland, takes an enormous risk. In setting the show in the context of the contemporary War on Terror, the show could have easily ended up either completely jingoistic and/or incredibly racist. The topic of terrorism in this country is, at the moment, linked with the topic of racism towards Muslims. As Homeland seems to strive for realism, replacing Islamic radicals with a more politically correct villain would come off as hokey. The show instead attempts to subvert the viewer’s expectations creating a show that shows both sides of the conflict.

The show’s main conflict of a bipolar CIA agent, portrayed by Clare Danes, investigating a recently recovered POW, Nicholas Brody who is played by Damian Lewis, automatically removes some of the racial tension surrounding the issue by shifting the suspicion away from the Arabs and casting it onto a homespun white male. Damian Lewis is generally best known for playing Dick Winters in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, and generally gives off the impression of an upstanding American. By placing the doubt and paranoia of the War on Terror onto such an upstanding looking war hero, the show immediately throws the audience for a loop and causes them to question the way that they think about the terrorism issue.

One way that the show maintains the suspicion on Brody is by revealing that he is secretly a Muslim. This revelation draws on the slight culture of fear that permeates America especially once the question of potential terrorism is brought up. The fact that Brody worships Allah automatically draws the viewer to question his loyalty. However, the show points out the ridiculousness of this suspicion when Brody is finally confronted about this practice. He replies that he found religion while being tortured as a POW and that Islam was the only religion in the area. By pointing out that there is a perfectly viable reason for Brody to be a Muslim without it meaning that he is a terrorist, the show pulls the rug out from under the audience’s feet and makes them question what they have believed up until this point.

Once actual Middle Eastern terrorists are introduced, the show continues to make the viewer question what they believe about the racial identity of terrorism. A terrorist couple is introduced, a Middle Eastern man and a white woman. The makeup of this couple plays into the concept that different races are swooping in to corrupt the fair and innocent white women. Just by being shown this couple and being told that they are terrorists, the audience generally believes that the man is the diehard terrorist and that the woman has been talked into it. However, the show inverts the dynamic, and we find out that the woman is the true believer and the man is following her out of love. He is unnerved by the concept of violence and doesn’t truly believe in the cause, but wants to make his wife happy. This inversion subverts both general gender roles as well as racial stereotypes to create an atmosphere, much like reality, in which the characters cannot be judged immediately as they appear on screen.

The show gets a lot of mileage out of subverting the audience’s expectation. This allows them to create an extremely tense environment for the show in which no one can be trusted. The people who are supposed to look like terrorists are, in fact, just people, and the most destructive act on the show was committed by the US government in their hunt for terrorists. By playing with such a controversial topic, the show brings to light a lot of what we believe in this country and proves that much of it has no bearing on reality.

 

A Pleasant Halftime Surprise

                While most people who watched the Superbowl last Sunday were interested in the actual football game being played, a significant portion turned in just to watch the commercials. These ads are an annual tradition in which each company attempts to be the funniest or the weirdest in order to get their product stuck in the consumer’s mind. However, viewers this year were faced with a commercial unlike all the rest.  Chrysler released a commercial, which played during half-time, which went in a completely separate direction from all the rest.

Instead of showing babies in slingshots or the cast of Star Wars enjoying Superbowl commercials (my personal favorites out of the traditional ads), this ad, directed by David Gordon Green, instead took a much more serious angle as Clint Eastwood talked to the audience about the hard economic times facing the country and Detroit in particular. The ad asks that the American people stay strong and look towards the future instead of focusing on the downsides of the present, a sentiment that feels more at home in a political ad instead of a Superbowl commercial. The ad has many similarities to Ronald Reagan’s famous “It’s Morning in America” campaign, also delivered at a time of economic downturn.

The commercial is also remarkable in that the only time Chrysler is mentioned is at the very end when their name shows up on screen. The title of the company is never spoken, instead showing images of their cars and of normal people. By shooting the commercial in this manner, the ad feels much more universal and less like an advertisement. While most of the commercials are attempting to create so much product recognition that you can’t help but remember the name of the company, Chrysler instead decided to step back and allow the ad to speak before mentioning that they had made it. This style of advertisement is, in some ways, more interesting as it causes the viewer to pay more attention in order to figure out what the ad is for.

The ad itself is very risky if only for the costs involved. For just the airtime, Chrysler had to pay $12.3 million. That is in addition to the cost of actually making a commercial, a figure which the company has yet to release. Does this commercial merit the extreme expense that it took to make it? Will it cause enough of an upswing in sales to cover the cost? My gut points towards yes if only because it reminded people of their own domestic companies. While the other car companies may make fantastic products, buying from Chrysler supports the economy of the United States, not Germany or Japan. By having the commercial narrated by Clint Eastwood, an American icon, Chrysler was able to create an atmosphere of patriotism that can be very powerful in the proper hands. In addition, by creating a commercial that was the least commercial of all of them, Chrysler is being praised by many people around the country. This, in essence, gives them more advertising space as people talk about their ad more and more.

In the end, Chrysler was able to make a very inspiring ad at a time when no one was expecting it. They surprised everyone and created something that will be remembered long after the excitement over the Ferris Bueller commercial has passed. By tapping into the American people’s sense of comradeship, they have ingrained their name into the minds of everyone who was watching at the time, a record breaking 111.3 million people. Whether they have the best intentions for the ad or just financial ones, one has to be impressed by the artisanship and individuality that the ad represents.

 

Speed Freaks: The Car Chase as an Audience Fantasy

            Cars are cool. This mantra has been the focus of countless action pieces throughout cinema. Cars are cool, and the audience likes to see them go really fast. The car chase has a special place in cinema because it is, to an extent, the most relatable action scene in any action film. Most people have not ever been in a fight. Most people have never fired a gun. Certainly most people have never walked away calmly while things blew up behind them. However, most people know how to drive, and, as a corollary to that most people know what it feels like to drive fast. They have never been in a high speed chase, but they know the feeling of flying down the street. Thus, when a car chase is shown on screen, the audience is able to physically relate to the action shown on screen.

Bullitt, the 1968 thriller which contains one of the most famous car chases ever, works extensively on this principle. The chase begins very slowly with both contestants stopping at traffic lights, looking both ways before they go through intersections, and even remembering to put on a seatbelt before the exciting things start happening. The slow pace and attention to actual driving allows the audience to ground themselves in reality before the big chase starts. These are all things that the audience has done before. They know what it’s like to drive in a city. Steve McQueen’s car is almost definitely cooler than their car, but in the end it’s mostly the same thing.

Once the action starts, the sense that these men are driving through a city continues through the entire chase. From the very first moment where the hit men take off with squealing tires, Bullitt is stuck in the intersection as people won’t let him make the left turn. He misses turns and has to reverse in order to get back on track. He behaves like normal people do when they drive through a city; he’s just doing it at a much higher speed than the average person. The audience is able to recognize his behavior and thus they empathize with him through this action scene. Every driver knows the feeling of missing a turn or being stuck due to other drivers not allowing them to turn. These mistakes allow the audience to feel like the person driving the car could easily be them.

While the car chase strikes a familiar chord with the audience, it also serves to allow the audience to live out their fantasies and expand their horizons. As Bullitt speeds through the streets of San Francisco, he is launching off of the terraced hills that dominate the streets. This makes the chase more exciting as cars go flying through the air, as well as creating a situation that exists very specifically in San Francisco. People who have driven through the city know the feeling of going up and down the hills and know that they have to be careful in order to make sure that the car doesn’t go airborne or bottom out on the steep terraces. Bullitt is able to perform these dangerous stunts that the people in the theatre have only thought about doing but are too worried for their safety as well as the condition of their car. For those who have never driven in San Francisco, the film offers several point of view shots in order to immerse oneself in the experience of driving through the city. For either party, this car chase allows them to experience something that would only previously be possible in their minds.

The car chase as an awesome fantasy is used to great extent in the 1996 Michael Bay film, The Rock. Once again taking place in San Francisco, this car chase focuses less on immersing oneself in the car chase and heightening the common experience of the audience. Instead, it focuses on the fantastical elements of the Hollywood car chase and creates a situation that the audience wishes that driving was like.

The chase begins fantastically with the main participants, Goodspeed and Mason, encountering high end, really cool, cars right outside of the hotel in which they’ve been staying. The chase that follows is full of implausible incidents which serve to make the chase that much more exciting. The audience is treated to cars crashing through water bottles, other cars, and shop windows without seeming to get a scratch. Parked cars seem to be filled with c4 and nitroglycerin and explode into gigantic fireballs when the other cars crash into them. None of these elements can happen in a real car chase, but the audience accepts them as they make the chase even cooler. By departing from the real world, Bay is able to celebrate cinemas ability to look cool and move fast without the trappings and constraints of reality.

This chase also focuses much more on the participants as compared to the silent drivers of Bullitt. Mason seems full of one-liners as his humvee wreaks destruction on anything and everything that gets in his way. He doesn’t seem fazed as he drives away from several cop cars. Goodspeed, on the other hand, is much more nervous about what is going on. Though he performs death-defying stunts, he has to think about what he’s doing before he actually does it. Goodspeed represents the audience in this chase just as Bullitt did in his own film. Goodspeed is able to perform all of the cool driving stunts that the audience wishes they could while at the same time not being the typical testosterone fueled action hero. Goodspeed doesn’t own the cool car and he’s not technically a field agent. However, when the time comes to act, he is able to rise to the occasion. After the chase ends, the camera circles around Goodspeed as he delivers his final one-liner, cementing his role as cool even though he started out as a man completely out of his element. In his ascension from normal to cool, he has brought the audience with him as his position as the audience stand in has not changed.

The car chase is absolutely one of the most dynamic pieces in cinema. It often showcases cars that the audience wishes they could afford doing things that the audience wishes they could do. It showcases the ability of cinema to enhance reality in order to make things more exciting, and in that enhancement, it takes the audience along with it. But in the end, the reason that the car chase is so popular and enduring is one thing. They’re really cool.

 

Punches vs. Plot: Storytelling styles of Ong Bak and Ip Man

    In 2003 the film, Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior, was released to great acclaim. At first glance, the film should be resigned to the discount DVD bin. The plot is full of holes and borders on the ridiculous, the dialogue is contrived, and the acting is terrible. However, through the star of the film, Tony Jaa, it rises from being a laughably bad film to being a testament to the perfection of physical capability.

                Tony Jaa’s acting through the film can be described as bad at best.  This is only compounded by the script giving him little to work with and the plot of the film itself being ridiculous. However, the film succeeds on the choreography and execution of its action scenes. Tony Jaa is an exception physical performer, and all of the terrible acting that he does while not punching something goes away once the martial arts scenes begin. Instead, his body is able to tell a compelling story as he fights. For example, in his first real fight scene in the film, he is put up against increasingly difficult opponents in an underground arena. During the first fight, Ting, Jaa’s character, is able to defeat his opponent effortlessly. The only time that his opponent is able to touch him is through cheating.  However, the second fighter presents Ting with slight difficulty. Ting has difficulty hitting the opponent at first because his opponent is so quick. However, the viewer is able to follow Ting as he learns the man’s patterns of movement and is then able to counter them, leading to his victory. The last fighter proves to be an even more difficult match for Ting, as he subverts everything that Ting knows about fighting. Having been trained in a small village, Ting is unaccustomed to dirty fighting as was evidenced earlier in his fight against the first opponent. However, the last fighter does nothing but fight dirty, and thus the viewer watches Ting get hit with chairs, tables, plates, and even a refrigerator. It is only through struggling through the brutal assault that Ting is able to finally win. These series of fights shows Ting as a resilient character that is able to struggle through hardship in order to achieve victory. He learns from his previous mistakes and through this knowledge is able to defeat his opponent. This character building and storytelling is all done without dialogue, leaving the viewer to watch Jaa’s body language. While the script of the film leaves much to be desired, the story of a man persisting through adversity grabs the viewer’s attention.

                The 2008 film, Ip Man, takes a diametrically opposite approach to Ong Bak. In comparison to Ong Bak’s thin plot which only serves to support the martial arts, Ip Man, uses the martial arts to support the plot of the film. The fights still tell a story, but their story only serves to support the characterization and plot that has been established through the dialogue and interactions between characters.

                The titular character of Ip Man never seems terribly challenged in any of the fights through the film. He is established early on as the best martial artist in his village, and nothing in the film seeks to change that. At no point does the viewer feel any threat to Ip Man from any of the opponents he fights. Every blow that an enemy throws is either blocked or dodged. The ease that he wins his battles could easily become boring for the viewer as, without a struggle, there is nothing to invest in. However, the story that accompanies the fights causes the viewer to care about Ip Man as a person and thus care about what winning the fight means. In addition, while Ip Man starts off wealthy and happy, the invasion of the Japanese causes his life to spiral downward. He has to struggle in his daily life to feed his family. Thus the viewer’s thirst for struggle is satiated by the plot itself. Once Ip Man gets into a fight, the viewer has grown so attached to him and watched him struggle so much that when he succeeds with little effort the viewer is thrilled to see him succeed.

                Each fight in Ip Man has a different energy to it according to where it falls in the plot. The first fight in the film is a simple sparring match and thus the fight seems more playful and honorable. This is a very different energy than the final fight against the Japanese general. After watching the Japanese brutalize his friends and family, Ip Man savagely overwhelms his opponent with little mercy. The film uses fight scenes in a very similar way that musicals use songs. When the characters reach an emotional level that cannot be expressed in words, they fight. In this way, the fight scenes serve to reinforce the plot instead of the plot serving as a vehicle for fight scenes.

                The differences between the way fights are used in Ong Bak and the way they are used in Ip Man is reinforced by the fighting styles of the two main characters. Ting uses a very flashy version of Muay Thai which is full of flying elbows and knees. It seems that every other move he is launching himself through the air in order to brutally attack his opponent. This is reinforced by Tony Jaa’s amazing physical condition which allows him to perform stunts that most people require wires to do. This style of martial arts creates large flashy action sequences full of over the top movements.  Ip Man, on the other hand, uses a very reserved form of Wing Chun. He makes small moves and only expends the minimum required energy to block and strike his opponent. The action sequences created by this style are sharper, and serve to fulfill their purpose just like the movements of the hero.

                These two films showcase the two different sides of the martial arts genre. Ong Bak is a film that exists solely for the purpose of celebrating physical achievement. The film allows Tony Jaa to demonstrate his physical capabilities. The viewer is less concerned with the plot, but instead simply wants to see what ridiculous stunt Jaa will be able to pull off next. Ip Man instead creates a world in which fighting is normal, but makes it secondary to the film. Instead, it is the points in between the fight scenes that draw the viewer in with the fights scenes inserted in order to drive home a point. However, with all their differences, the two films still come down to the same basic concept. They focus on a man who must struggle against adversity in order to eventually overcome it. The protagonists are both skilled and flawed in their own ways. In the end, both films celebrate the physical prowess of the human body in a way that only the martial arts film can.

 

If You Go Far Enough West, You End Up in the East: Westerns From the Eastern Hemisphere

At first glance, John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005) and Kim Ji-woon’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008) seek to do the impossible. Both films are Westerns set in a different country. The Western genre is such a quintessentially American genre that taking it out of the West seems foolish. However, both films are able to take the themes and tropes of the Western and craft a new identity for the genre, each one specific to the country of origin.

The Proposition paints an especially bleak portrait of the Australian Outback. At first glance, the Outback seems very similar to the American West. Both are large expanses of desert, inhabited by a violent indigenous native group. However, the prospects that both landscapes offer could not be more different. The American West is often seen as the land of opportunity. The land is ripe for a new start as soon as it can be tamed. Times may be hard, but the benefit far outweighs the hardship. The Outback, however, is characterized as an unforgiving and violent wasteland. Every person that ventures out past the town limits is met with brutal, oftentimes random violence. Possibly the most definitive moment of the wasteland is an attack on Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce). Following a montage of Charlie in the desert, he awakens to find his horse dead before being impaled by a thrown spear. Only after being attacked to we see the Aborigines that have attacked him. As he stares at them, a shot is heard, and the head of one of the Aborigines explodes. By offering almost no lead in to the near death of a main character, as well as not showing the assailants until after the attack, Hillcoat portrays a landscape in which violence comes quickly for no reason. Had Charlie awoken thirty seconds later, he would have been killed in his sleep instead of seeing his attacker.  This concept is reinforced by having the attacker suffer a fatal attack from another unknown party, creating a setting in which even the natives are not safe.

The Outback of The Proposition is not one that can be tamed. Throughout the film, Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), having moved from England to Australia, is determined to bring order to the lawless wilds. In many ways, he is the quintessential Western hero, trying to bring civilization to the frontier. Unfortunately, he fails as each attempt at civilization is only met with more blood and killing. His struggle against the Outback is embodied in his home, which is set away from the rest of the town. Though it is surrounded by desert, his home is enclosed by a white picket fence. Throughout the film, there are many shots looking out at the Outback from the front porch of the house. The shots are framed so that the garden and fence are diminished against the vast and oppressive wilderness. This home is violated at the end of the film as Arthur Burns (Danny Huston), acting as the embodiment of the Outback, breaks into his very civilized Christmas dinner to beat him nearly to death and rape his wife. Stanley has utterly failed to bring order to the wilderness, instead allowing the wilderness to bring chaos into his home.

Kim Ji-Woon’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird sets a strikingly different tone than that of the Proposition. Instead of presenting a frontier that is uncivilizable, it presents a frontier that has almost been fully civilized. While the film has many shots of the expansive deserts of Manchuria, it does not provide any opposing force. Instead, it is the civilized people that create the antagonism in the film.

A large portion of this feeling of civilization comes from the crowded feeling of the setting. Many Western tropes are present through the film such as a train robbery, a gunfight through a frontier town, and a chase through the desert. However, all of these are full of color and people, leaving the impression of a crowded frontier. The train is packed full of people of all shapes and sizes, buildings of the town are tightly packed together as opposed to the spread out buildings of the American frontier town, and the chase through the desert involves two different bandit gangs, two individual parties, and the entire Japanese army. The tightly packed setting adds a frantic energy to the film that has more in common with a Hong-Kong action film than is does with the typical Western.

In addition, the color palate is extremely different than the American or Australian Westerns. In the American Western, the color palate tends to be bland with a lot of browns, blacks, and whites. Color is often reserved for women’s dresses, and even then, it tends to only be during celebrations that bright colors are worn. The Good, The Bad,The Weird, in contrast is full of bright colors. From settings covered in bright red paper lanterns to bandits dressed in purple fur coats, bright colors are plentiful in the film. The colors cause a sense of excitement in the viewer as well as building on the energy created through the crowded frame and exciting action sequences.

Both the feeling of civilization and the bright color palate draw from the traditions of Asian action films. The energy of The Good, The Bad, The Weird has just as much in common with a Hong Kong action film as it does with a Western. The frantic energy created by the crowded frame and the color is built upon using tropes from the action film and the martial arts film such as a character using a crane to soar above the town during a gun fight and being able to shoot a sniper through the scope. By combining elements from both genres, Ji-Woon is able to create a film that is definitively an Asian Western.

The Western has always been an influential genre throughout film history, not only in the United States but around the world. It recalls a wilder time in history, where civilization needed to struggle in order to proceed. While the setting is often uniquely American, the progress of civilization is a global story. While some films, like The Proposition, may view the struggle in a negative light while others, such as The Good, The Bad, The Weird seek to glorify it, the story is universal.