Everyday I'm Shuffling

Finally a movie I have not seen yet! Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle really played with every level on my emotional scale. I mean there was laughter, there was anger, there was sadness. I couldn't deal with all the feels. I really enjoyed with how Townsend portrayed the stereotypes he saw in media and in Hollywood through comedy. I'll admit, being white I wasn't sure if it was okay for me to be laughing at some of the jokes that Townsend was making. But I think that is why this film works, these jokes are supposed to make you question and think and with comedy you're seeing how absurd these stereotypes are and you're breaking them down with laughter.

In the reading Ellen Seiter notes, for example, "that Brechtian aesthetics has encouraged arguments "that the deliberate use of stereotypes may be preferable" to the supposedly neutral style that pretends to an absence of stereotypes. In this scenario, the deliberate use of stereotypes triggers audience recognition of the directors strategy and adds to an appropriate response." (pg. 12) Townsend is throwing you into the deep end with his bombardment of the stereotypes Black actors face in a media filled with predominately white people. This in your face attitude works because it makes you laugh. There's no room to question what Townsend is doing because it's comedy. There is no way this film could be considered racist or prejudice because Townsend foregrounds the stereotypes leaving the audience able to watch the film in its entirety in no doubt as to how Townsend intends us to read the images he has put onto the screen. These stereotypes aren't be jammed down our throats to the point where we're rolling our eyes. Townsend used comedy to keep the audience engaged and to show that these stereotypes are very real and absurd and they should be laughed at because of how absurd they are.  

All though I laughed a lot in this film its ending still made me really upset. As someone who is moving to LA in the fall to follow my dreams I had real hope for Bobby Taylor to achieve his dream, but then the age old question comes into play of how much are you willing to compromise to obtain your dream. I took what both Bobby's Uncle and Grandma said to be valid points and I still don't know what the best choice was for Bobby to do. Yes, the film Bobby was in was super stereotypical of what black people are portrayed in films, but it was his first acting job. You have to get your foot in the door somehow. And after time maybe he would be getting the roles that Eddie Murphy was getting back then. But is compromise good when it is portraying your entire race in a negative light? Was it good for Bobby to get everything he loved to go work a shitty Post Office job? I don't know what the right choice was, but I guess both was would have lead to a sad ending. I guess I'll just have to watch Zombie Pimps to get my spirits up.

Viet-God-Damn-nam

As we all know the Vietnam War was one of the greatest military failures in United States history. We went blindly into a country with our big bad America image thinking we would help to liberate a country from the evils of communism! Well guess again America. It turns out we were wrong, so very, very wrong. The war went on for a decade killing thousands of Vietnamese civilians and United States Soldiers only for us to leave the country with our tail in between are legs. It was a smack in the face to our country and our military.

With the negative opinion for the War in Vietnam we of course have American propaganda to bolster support for a war the majority of American's disagreed with.  In Lawrence Lichty and Raymond Carroll's essay Fragments of War: Oliver Stone's Platoon they discuss the films of John Wayne's The Green Berets and The Boys in C Company as being two such films to come out about the Vietnam war that tried to show the lighter side to the war, by adding their own spins on it. Lichty and Raymond describe these films as, "Many Hollywood combat films begin with the training of a single unit and follow it into battle. American troops are depicted as heroic; the enemy fanatical. Our men are portrayed as reluctant soldiers more interested in the girl back home, their families, and baseball than they are in international politics." These same tropes can be seen in both the films mentioned in the article, especially the John Wayne film, and this was not what the American public wanted to see which is why they were given such bad reviews.

No one wanted to see s sugar coated film about Vietnam, especially when the war was still going on and you could see more horrific events on the nightly news then on the silver screen. This is why Oliver Stone's Platoon was such a refreshing change of pace for those who lived through and experienced the Vietnam. Stone was in the Vietnam war, he experienced what this war was really like and you can see that in his film. In Platoon there are still the same tropes as the cookie cutter films before it, like the girl back home, but those tropes are crushed when they fat Pvt. who talked about his girl back home died in the next fire fight. The men in Elias' group of men are shown smoking marijuana to escape the real hell they were living in. Soldiers are raping, pillaging, and murdering innocent civilians. There's soldiers cutting ears off for trophies, men wounding themselves to get a free ride home, and even instances of soldiers hiding instead of fighting to survive in a war that everyone thought was pointless.

This WAS Vietnam told through the eyes of someone who was actually there. Oliver Stone saw these events in real life and he showed the world through his film to tell the tale of what these men went through. The men that America deemed unwantable, worthless, or criminals. These men fought for something they didn't believe in, but what the American government told them to believe in. Platoon is real Vietnam and it is why it kicked the ass of all other Vietnam films before. This was the real story, not a John Wayne embellished piece of American propaganda.

"Get Away From Her You Bitch!"

James Cameron's Aliens is one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time. There's spaceships, kick ass Space Marines, Androids, acid blood killer Aliens, and of course the most bad ass of them all, Ripley. I find it very interesting that in a huge portion of James Cameron's films he has a strong female action heroine lead character. Ripley in Aliens, Sarah Conner in Terminator II: Judgement Day, Zoe Saldana in Avatar, and even Rose in Titanic makes it to the end after all of the male characters are killed off. It's interesting to see James Cameron use so many strong female leads in an industry that tends to look down on female action stars. In Aliens I don't see Ripley so much as an action hero, but more a kick ass mother. This is where I have a problem comparing Ripley, or Fembo, to Rambo because they are two different characters in my mind.

In the Director's Cut of Alien there is a scene that shows that because Ripley was in hyper sleep for 57 years her daughter that she was trying to get home to in Alien dies of old age. This sets up an important precedent for the rest of the film and why Ripley acts the way that she does. You have a mother who lost her whole world and she will never get it back because her daughter is dead. She missed all the years of being a mother and it hits her hard. She lives in a shitty space apartment, working a shitty job, and in my mind it looks as though she is just waiting to die. But of course things aren't that simple and Ripley in fact ends up back on planet LV-47 where she encounters the one thing that took away her whole world, the Xenomorph! So first we see a tale of a mother's revenge to get those who took everything from her. She doesn't necessarily take charge in doing so, but she sends the Marine's in to do the job. Then Newt comes into the equation.

When Ripley meets Newt for the first time she is dirty, terrified, and alone. Her mother and rest of her family had been killed off by the Xenomorphs much like Ripley's daughter was loosely because of cause and effect. Ripley goes after Newt and she hugs her until Newt stops struggling and accepts Ripley. A new mother daughter relationship is born! Ripley is now back in mother mode and she will do anything to protect Newt from being harmed like she couldn't do with her real daughter. Ripley is being a mother and mother's will do anything to protect their children like go into a Xenomorph hive den with loads of face huger eggs to rescue that said child from almost certain death. This is why I find the end fight with Queen Xenomorph to be so interesting. In class I listened to a lot of arguments between whether or not the Queen Xenomorph was actual being a mother or was it all just for plot sake. For me I absolutely feel that what Cameron was going for was to show that the Queen and Ripley were both similar beings, they were both mothers who didn't want to see harm come to their "children". That is why the Queen backs her soldiers off to let Ripley go because she didn't want to see her baby eggs get lit up like the 4th of July. I don't think it was a trap, I think it was just two mothers with a common interest. To protect their young. Of course that's not how it works out and Ripley torches the eggs which I'm not going to lie makes me feel bad for the Queen with her screeches of agony as she sees her offspring murdered right in front of her. But a mother's got to do what she needs to do to protect her young and in any world it always comes down to survival of the fittest.

Ripley does bring more to the table for mother's than most do so I can see where there is that correlation of being the action hero. Like the reading states, "Ripley had more in common with the usual male action her than the typical screaming woman was well noted by the press. in a feature article lauding Aliens as the summer's megahit, Time magazine reported that "in action pictures, women are supposed to swoon or retreat to a safe corner while the male lead protects them and defends Western Civilization as we know it. In Aliens, it is the guys who are all out of action at the climax and Ripley who is in a death duel with evil." (pg. 58) I do love that at the end of the film that it is just mother vs. mother. All the men are dead, hicks is passed out in the spaceship, and even Bishop gets torn apart. You don't see many female battles at the end of an action film and it is always refreshing to see when it happens and can be taken seriously.

Blue Velvet

As a film student David lynch is one of the great film makers of all time. He ranks up there with the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Jean Luc Godard. He pushes the boundaries of film making by making his films some of the weirdest things ever to be put up on the silver screen. I mean you don't even have to watch 5 minutes before realizing that Blue Velvet is going to be a bumpy ride and your out a seat belt.

One of my favorite things about this film was the postmodernism style used by Lynch to play with the time period you were actually in in the film. On the outside Lumberton is the perfect all American town. Some of the first images you see in the film are the smiling fireman on the 1950's style truck with the spotted dog, the cross guard waving skipping children across the street, and the WHITE picket fence with the RED roses and the bright, sunny BLUE sky. RED WHIT AND BLUE! AMERICA! Lynch shows us all this picture perfect 50's esq. town where it seems as though the American dream is alive and well, but then the film takes a drastic turn and the man tending his lawn in suburbia collapses in pain as a little toddler giggles up to him, super creepy. Then we have the push into the grass which shows the beetles crawling all over one another and the sounds of them moving carries over into the next scene making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. This is Lynch postmodernism at full swing. Lynch shows us this perfect 50's looking American small town with American values and the American Dream,  but underneath the perfect is the truth. There is a dark, ugliness to this place called Lumberton and this way of thinking about a perfect America. Lynch is showing us his skeptical interpretations of the culture and philosophy at this time period.

The reading goes in depth with Lynch using the artifice of the 1950's to screw with his audience's heads. "... closer scrutiny reveals that things are not what they seem. The slick, picture-perfect surface of the American Dream in icons that are as one dimensional as Hollywood movie sets, Lynch begins to weave a thread of ambiguity through the tightly woven web of America's self understanding." The idea of the American dream is just a mask from preventing others to truly see what America really is, a dark place. Look at the town of Lumbertown and Dorthy's apartment building. Much like the shots previous in the film the town and buildings look normal or almost too perfect, but upon a closer look into Dorthy's apartment we seem the elevator is busted, there are flickering lights, and her apartment is very unsettling. It feels fake and unsettling like the forced ideal of the American Dream. The rooms color scheme doesn't make sense, where everything is laid out in the room makes zero sense, and it's dark and ominous. Like we were discussing in class it feels like we are looking at a painting or a set in a sitcom on late night television.

The ambiguity is not only in the town, but also with its residents. Look at Jeffrey for example. He is by all accounts a boy scout in superman proportion. He's a college lad who comes home to help his sick dad out at the local small town hardware store. He is at first glimpse a perfect individual, but then like Lynch does we get a closer look at Jeffrey much like the lawn in the beginning with the beetles there is something dark underneath. After Jeffrey discovers the ear he changes and you see his true nature. "With these incidents, Lynch propels the viewer into the menacing, nightmarish underworld of Lumberton which coexists with the world of white picket fences." He goes from a good proper boy to a pervert watching Dorthy change because he wants to solve some sick mystery he has no right to solve. This leads him into a world that is terrifyingly strange, but he likes it, he craves it. That is why he keeps coming back for more of Dorthy, why he hits her when she asks, why after Frank kidnaps him and makes out with him listening to Candy Colored Clown he just rolls with it because like the small town he has a darkness hidden inside him that is kept from the real world. The same goes for almost every other character in the film.

I really enjoyed this film and I absolutely loved what Lynch created in order to take a look at the falsity of what we as American's think is the golden age of our country. The idea of the American Dream and the happy small town is a lie because underneath there is always a darkness we don't see. And also this may be my new favorite film quote of all time so thank you David Lynch.