The journal for this week for Film Studies is to write about feminism again. But based on a different film. An animation in 2004, The Incredibles from Pixar Animation studios has blended in the concept of feminism in the making of this film, feminism in this film uses the way of the male gaze. The male gaze is to view the world from a masculine point of view, presenting female characters as an object to bring pleasure to the male characters.



The male gaze is presented in three perspectives, first is that of a person behind the camera, the second one was characters within the representation or film itself, the last one was the view as a spectator of the film. The male gaze often brings the audience into the perspective of a heterosexual man, the woman is typically displayed in two types of level, one as an erotic object for both of the characters in the movie and also the audience watching the film.

The first feminist representative is Violet, the teenage girl with the force field power is shy, obedient and lack of self-confidence. Her attitude apparently reflects her power in one way and another, given that it is not well explained to the audience. With the power of invisible or stealth, it makes her shy to the society. Her force field power on the other side explains that she is low on self-esteem. Edna Mode, the fashion designer for superheroes, she is an example of strong women. She has no superpowers, but a strong attitude, she is always very confident at the things she is doing. Edna is a very talented woman, having to design the suits for superheroes with the finest materials possible she's smart on inventing materials that helps superheroes. One of the groups of woman she belongs to is the elitist, the top of the best in this society.



Helen, also know as Elastic girl, she is an example of a good wife, being a mother of three. Just like Violet, her powers reflects her personality very much. Having elasticity makes her a flexible housewife, she do several things and handle her kid's fight. She is also strong and protective, this makes her family oriented. Helen can put her own happiness aside to investigate her husband when her husband acts suspiciously when he came back home. Most of all, she is a dominant and independent woman that knows best at strategizing things for the whole family. Kari, the babysitter for the Incredibles family has played a small part in the movie, but she demonstrated a very fine example of feminist, she is those kinds of woman that thinks she can handle everything but fails at it. She is talkative, which makes her only knows how to talk but doesn't do it. Mirage is the white hair girl that works for Syndrome, she is a kind of femme fatale, using her sexuality as an advantage to reach her goals. For example, she lures all the superheroes into the trap and helped Syndrome to wipe their existence.


At the end of the day, feminism wants the female population to make choices and be confident with it. It has produced strong messages in films that make girls stronger than they used to be, telling them they can be whoever they want as long as they believe in themselves. Overall, the movie brilliantly demonstrates the concept of feminism, and has show the world how woman should be.

This week I am writing about Italian Neorealism with this Italian film called Bicycle Thieves (1948), directed by Vittorio De Sica. This film has won a number of awards because it is very different other Italian films in that era, after the World War 2. While other countries like France are still struggling to recovery from the war, Italy surrendered early and has a faster recovery and more resource for filmmaking.

The plot of the movie is a father, Antonio together with his son, Bruno on a quest to find Antonio's bicycle. Bicycle at that age of time is a luxury to everyone, making the character
having to find it desperately. The bicycle was traded with items, and with this bicycle, Antonio can get a decent job to raise his family. Unfortunately, while he was doing the job he newly got, a thief came by and drove it away from him, his struggle begins here. The next day he started traveling around with his son to search for it, they found the thief, but there are not enough evidence. This is how I could summarize the whole movie.



Moving on, let's talk about Italian Neorealism. This type of film generally is a duplication of reality, using movies to recreate real life situations. What different from ordinary movies is that most movies are not true, a movie that is based off an event will have it's own point of view, meaning it is only using someone's interpretation that does not define reality. The idea of this type of film movement is to use mise-en-scene and shots to adapt into film storytelling. For example, having a long take can make the audience focus more than the character, a shot that has a character standing in the middle of a large scenery shot, the audience would look at the scenery after the character. This can help make the movie bring out a more immersive experience. A great example is when Antonio and his son were walking in the city, the camera took a long take to show the details of the city, having the sense of they are in a city filled with people but not themselves only.

Suggested by Cesare Zarattini, this method is a new type of approach in Italian cinema in 1942. Neorealism has got in touch with the current society instead of a movie with portrayals of perfection like a society filled with handsome, beautiful and rich characters. This has attracted a lot of other filmmakers from other countries to use this method, spreading this method to the world. What is so different from ordinary films is that this approach does not use plots because a well-planned movie is very fake, the use of real life people as actors is also another fact that this method is unique. This is because professional actors have taken training in acting, giving out a fake structure, while ordinary people will have a more realistic reactions to the situation given.

On the dark side of this film approach, it did not do so well in Italy, except for the rest of world. The other cinemas love it, and slowly the cinemas in India, Hong Kong, and Japan started using it. Italy did not do well because the society doesn't want to be reminded of the past tragedy, even the Italian government does not favor this kind of filming method. It praises contemporary social realism, which is unconditionally emphasizing the ordinaries of the current time. This movie was made in between the post-war rebuild of Italy which is in 1945 until 1949, it uses one type of filming style to make it as grainy as possible to emphasize on the sufferings of the characters. This melodrama which sent out the message of how sad people in Italy at that time is to unite the people in the end of the day.

Verdict - This movie has a very realistic storyline that brings out together with real life events in the past, the use of Italian neorealism in this movie has brilliantly enhanced the hardship of the characters and make it feel more like an event than a plotted movie. Overall, I really like the movie.

This week, I will be writing about Dark City (1998) and I will link it to French Impressionist cinema. The reason I wrote this is for the Film Studies (UJMB2083) assignment.



Dark City, 
was a drama and thriller film about a man named John Murdoch. Waking up in a hotel with a dead body and found himself being wanted for a series of murder, John has could not remember any of it, except the Shell Beach postcard he got in his pocket. He then found himself chase by a group of strange bald men in suits that people call the Strangers. The strangers is the one group that controls the whole city, they are these alien creatures that shuffle people's memory letting them have other people's memory and forget everything including daytime. The movie is about John finding ways to remember his past, together with the scientist that helped the aliens, it is his job to save the people in Dark City and defeat the aliens that captured them. The film features mostly dark scenes as the city does not have daytime.

French Impressionist, 
it is also called the first Avant-Grande or narrative Avant-Grande, the term was commonly applied to a group of French filmmakers in 1920s. The periodization of this film movement is split into 3 periods of time, Pictoralism (1918) which is films that manipulated trough camerawork, mise-en-scene, and optical devices, Montage (1923) which is the popular use of rhythmic and fast-paced editing, and the last period which is Diffusion (1926), other stylistic and formal modes started to appear in films.

David Bordwell's family resemblance model,
which is to indicate films that used the French Impressionist method.
That include Camerawork, Mise-en-scene, Optical devices, and Characteristic editing patterns.

Camerawork includes camera distance which is close up, camera angle which is high or low, and camera movement. Mise-en-scene includes the lighting, the decorations and the arrangement or movement of figures in space.


Dark City is a French Impressionist film.
As we can see, there are several elements that support this statement. The clever use of low key lights in this dark visual film has carried out high contrast visuals that then created the effect and sense of mystery to the audience. For example, when John was talking to the doctor that was lying down on the floor because John just used his powers to pushed him, it sent out a feeling of John is feeling nervous and confused when talking to the doctor. Also, when the Strangers' hideout were even darker, there is only a feel lighting on the walls, the ceiling, and the floor, it creates a mysterious and horror mood to the place and the characters in the hideout. Moving on, there are many shots with high and low camera angles, for example when John saw the Shell Beach sign and the camera immediately turned up to show the height of the sign. Also, when the moment the Strangers was talking, the camera angle is very low and far to show how enormous the hideout and amount of the group of people are. The mise-en-scene used are gothic and stylized, giving the feeling of uneasy to the audience, there is also many shots that use single source lighting, which enhanced the ambiance of the scenes in this film.

(550 words)

This week our lecturer let us write about any movie. So, I'm choosing one of my favourite movie Her (2013) directed by Spike Jonze. I am choosing this because it was one of the most mind bottling postmodern movies. Despite there is no specific aspect of how we need to write our weekly journal, I will be talking about the messages carried out by this movie, and how it is going to relate to the society in the coming future.



Plot

If you are not familiar with this movie, I will talk about the overall plot of this movie. So it starts off with a man named Theodore who writes love letters for people as his job. His life was so plain, have a few friends and he is going to get divorced by his wife. One night he stumbled upon an introduction booth of a new operating system, this new operating system is like no other, it is the world's first artificial intelligence operating system. And after he set it up, he meets with an artificial intelligence female voice called Samantha. And the story goes on when Samantha evolves and the whole story goes complicated.



Meaning of the Movie

Postmodern movies, they all have a meaning behind why the movie was created, what do they want people to understand. Nonetheless, Her the movie has a deep message within it, it shows how much a man would fall for someone or something even that it is not human. It lets us question what is the limit of love, and how much does it need to consider as love. From the movie, there are almost all the emotional interactions an ordinary couple would do, looking from the perspective of the man, he just wants to find someone to understands him, and Samantha is the right partner. Even if she is living on the internet, this does not stop them from loving. Maybe she was programmed to be that way, and he blindly falls for her knowing that they are two forms of organisms.

It also let us question the issue of being too technology dependent, at the extend that we no longer need physical interaction with other people to feel love. Are we going too far? Should we change some things to connect the human world back to how it was? Will it be safe for our human existance if this kind of relationship happens? These are the questions audiences will ask after watching the movie, I think it will have everyone waking up from this attachment of mobile phones and digital devices. Humans should have more interaction with the world, and the technology advancement should focus on other parts like curing diseaces and saving people.


Future representation

The movie does not show how the world would be in next twenty years I assumed, mainly because it focused on how the human-internet relationship was carried out. Most of the shots were focused on the man Theodore himself and not much on other characters, this puts the viewers in his shoes, letting us feel what he was feeling. Most of the scenes were softly filtered with warm color grading, to enhance the feeling of affection and how much he actually feels about love. The staging were simple, using locations with minimalistic design, usually how society perceived the future.


Impressions

I really like the way it blends sci-fi with romance, it wasn't the ordinary movie one could find, the way the film was shot are quite unique. I recommend people who like sci-fi movies and romance movies to watch, because this is quite a good movie.

(534 words, excluding First Impressions)

First Impressions
I rarely watched Japanese movies or anime, I think I could count on my ten fingers how many Japanese animated series I have completed in my lifetime. The first time I watched this film Spirited Away was in last semester, which our lecturer want us to complete an assignment based on it. The movie is quite a new thing to me because I don't understand how Japanese anime works.

Main Point, what I like and dislike
The Like: I think the biggest difference between American films and Japanese films are how the characters act, regardless of is the character a real person. I like the concept of putting this whole world of ghost in an abandon fun park, it transformed a dead place into a place of the dead. Over the time, places got forgotten, and where do they go? Places like this. I'm not describing the setting that the movie uses, I'm talking about the idea behind it. Imagine a place once visited by thousands of people, let's take Sunway Lagoon for example. No one would know what it would be like 50 years later, even if people forget about this place, it will still be there, there will still be a place like this, just not like now.

"Even if you forgot it, it would still be there."

The writer has this imagination of turning dead places alive. I like how they draw animated still backgrounds, in that time of creating the movie, skills like this is very hard to achieve. I almost suck me into the movie. I like how the filmmaker has drawn food in the movie, it looks very tempting to eat and also has good use of colors and line quality, bringing the food to life. This is what you cannot find in other films by foreign countries.

Almost, because there are parts that I dislike in this film: Things that does not make sense, I get it, it's an animated film, it's Japan, and it's for the audience from all ages, they need to make something creative. First things first, it's how her father treated her, let's say she stayed in the car like her father told her to, what would happen to both of them, the father and the mother, who is going to save them both. Let's also say that her father brings her into that place, why would they even go into an abandoned place, they wanted to move into their new house, who in this world would have the idea of let's bring my wife and my daughter into this spooky abandoned park? I don't know what's in his father's head. It's not that you are brave so you could go in, it's about the safety of other people, what if there are wild animals that kill? You'll never know. Hence, he is an irresponsible father that only cares about himself.

Verdict, will I recommend watching it?
Yes, in fact, every Japanese famous animated film is worth the watch. Each enriched with different moral value because it is in their culture, most films need to have a meaning behind it that encourages people to do good, inspire people to succeed in life. It's an old film, but it still looks amazing, the way the characters were drawn, the way of life in Japan even though it's hand drawn, it still demonstrated it clearly in the film.

"If you are a fan of American films, it's not your thing. If you like classics, then it's worth your time."

(519 words, excluding First Impressions)

What?

Comic Sans MS, commonly referred to as Comic Sans, is a sans-serif casual script typeface designed by Vincent Connare and released in 1994 by Microsoft Corporation. It is a casual, non-connecting script inspired by comic book lettering, intended for use in informal documents and educational materials.

The typeface's widespread use, often in situations for which it was not intended, has been criticized. 

Retrieved from Wikipedia,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Sans

Here are some examples, in case you don't know what talking me.




How to let your lecture reject your letter? Here's a comparison of Comic Sans and Times New Roman.

You see the difference? This is why your assignments or report has a font standard. Because what you're writing is FORMAL.



Conclusion,