Agenda
• Quiz
• Tropic Thunder
Discussion
• Future of Film
– Technology
– Financing/Productio
n
– Form/Content
• Final Exam Review
• Final Thoughts
Orienting Questions
• What’s the central conflict? What are the inciting
events and the climactic moments in the film?
• What are each characters’ motivations?
– Who do we identify with?
• What did you think, generally? Did you have a
different experience watching this in a film class?
• Who are the targets of satire in this film?
• Is this film trying to have it both ways, by making you laugh
at people with disabilities and laugh at Hollywood’s
treatment of people with disabilities at the same time?
• Also, what aspects of Hollywood are not satirized?
–
I.e., Orientalism
• Does the film assert its own set of values, or is it just
attacking other systems of belief?
– Does satire ever build up, or can it only tear down?
– Godard said that the New Wave directors had tried to storm
the castle, but found themselves trapped inside.
– David Foster Wallace said that irony and satire were the
language of prisoners who had come to love their cages.
– Jonathan Swift: “Satire is a kind of glass, wherein beholders
do generally discover everybody's face but their own.”
(1704).
• How does Tropic Thunder convey the idea that race,
masculinity, soldierliness, etc. are, at some level,
performances?
– Judith Butler: “Heterosexuality is always in the process of
imitating and approximating its own phantasmatic
idealization of itself—and failing. Precisely [because of
this], the project of heterosexual identity is propelled into
an endless repetition of itself.”
• How do the performances mesh with these (“real”
and “fictional”) actors’ celebrity personas?
• Other aspects of performance:
– Improvisational acting?
– Is Ben Stiller miscast? Did Downey Jr. deserve an Oscar
nomination?
• Jay Baruchel
– As Kevin Sandusky
• As “Brooklyn”
• Jack Black
– As Jeff Portnoy
• As “Fats”
• Robert Downey, Jr.
– As Kirk Lazarus
• As “Lincoln Osiris”
• Brandon T. Jackson
– As Alpa Chino
• As “Motown”
• Ben Stiller
– As Tugg Speedman
• As “Four Leaf”
Politics of
Representation
• Is it ever okay for an actor to
play a person of a different
race?
• Recent Controversies:
– Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club
– Non-Asian actors playing Asian
characters in Last Airbender,
Akira, etc.
– “Artie” in Glee
Tropic Thunder by the Numbers
• Production Budget:
– $92 million
– Salaries? Unclear.
• Gross Revenue:
– $110,416,702 (USA)
– $77,557,336 (Non-USA)
• Domestic Video Sales:
– $51,282,713
1. Production: Hollywood Conglomerate
• All the major film studios are owned by global corporations/conglomerates:
– Viacom/Paramount, Time Warner, Fox/News Corp, Sony, Disney,
Comcast/NBC
– Vertical integration returns: Studios buy megaplexes
– Horizontal integration across media markets: TV, DVD, Web.
– Diversification: Product Placement, Promotional Tie-ins, action figures, etc.
2. Technology: Digital Conversion
• Most theaters project a digital copy of the movie, even if the movie was
shot on film
• Most movies are still shot with film, but more and more directors are
switching to digital:
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_shot_in_digital
• "The fact that most films now are not presented in 35mm means that
the war is lost . . . Digital projections, that's just television in public. And
apparently the whole world is okay with television in public, but what I
knew as cinema is dead” – Quentin Tarantino at Cannes 2014
• Home Movie Market in 2013:
– Digital movie purchases rose 47% to $1.19 billion
– DVD and Blu-ray sales dropped 8% to $7.78 billion*
–
*http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304887104579306440621142958
3. Formal and Thematic Trends
• Influence of foreign box office on Hollywood filmmaking
– i.e. Comic book movies succeed b/c they’re not nationalist,
easy to sell abroad
• 3-D: Still Declining
– 39% of 2014 box office, down from 42% in 2013 and 53% in
2012.*
• Mavericks!
– “People who refuse to conform to the accepted way of
making movies” (517)
– Who’s out there doing cool stuff these days? How is it
different?
•
* http://www.deadline.com/2014/02/2014-box-office-will-be-hurt-by-diminishing-popularity-of-3d-movies-analyst/
End of the Term Wrap-Up
• Thoughts on the blog?
– Other assignments?
• Favorite Movie? Least favorite?
• Final Thoughts?
• Do the course evaluation!
• Three More Movies about Movies (on Netflix):
– The Act of Killing (2013)
– All About Eve (1950)
– Barton Fink (1991)
• Also: The Stories We Tell (2013)
• And: Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
• Three Movies Not About Movies (On Netflix):
–
–
–
–
Wake in Fright (1971)
Melancholia (2011)
The Sound of Noise (2010)
Also: TV
The Movie List
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
Man With A Movie Camera (1929)
Singing in the Rain (1952)
Peeping Tom (1960)
8½ (1963)
Perfumed Nightmare (1977)
Through the Olive Trees (1994)
The Watermelon Woman (1996)
Millennium Actress (2001)
Tropic Thunder (2008)
Formal Categories
• Cinematography
– Medium Shot/Long shot, Tracking, High Angle, Etc.
• Editing
– Shot, Match Cut, Dissolve, Etc.
• Mise-en-scene
– Blocking, Hard/Soft Lighting, Etc.
• Sound
– Onscreen/Offscreen, Diegetic/Nondiegetic, etc.
• Acting
– Naturalistic/Non-naturalistic, “Chameleon” actors, etc.
• Narrative
– Perspective, Characterization (Flat/Round Characters), etc.
• Genre
– Characteristics and examples of genres, etc.
Major Movements
• Soviet Montage
• Classical Hollywood Style (Continuity Editing,
Three-Act Structure, Etc.)
• Italian Neo-realism
• The (French) New Wave
• Third Cinema
• Iranian New Wave
• U.S. “Indie” cinema
Rundown of the History
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
How cinema began in the 1890s
The impact of synchronized sound in the late 1920s
How animation became a major part of the film industry
Modernism and early alternatives to Hollywood storytelling
The decline of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s
The rise of “New Waves” and auteur-driven cinema across
the globe
The impact of decolonization on global filmmaking
The rise of the Hollywood Blockbuster
The re-emergence of American independent cinema
Hollywood today (ch. 11)): Current production system,
transition to digital
Big Questions
• If someone were to ask you to explain the history of
the movies in just a few minutes, how would you do
it?
• Our screenings in class spanned almost one hundred
years (they also covered a large swath of the globe).
How has film form changed over the years? Did you
see patterns emerge about how different film styles
come to prominence? How do different film
movements respond to one another?
Big Questions
• The history of cinema is also a history of exclusion and
marginalization—of people of color, of women, of LGBT
people—that continues to this day (in this year’s Cannes
Film Festival, for example, only two of the 18 features
were directed by women). How do these exclusions affect
the kinds of films we see on screen? How can or should a
film studies class take account of these exclusions?
• Why movies about movies? What are some of the
different ways that writers and directors approach this
theme? Why are there so many movies about making
movies among the “best movies of all time” lists? What do
movies about movies tell us about ourselves, as viewers?