MYST Post #4 Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Nothing beats a classic like this, where a well known high school kid known as Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) pretends to be very ill so he could have the day off and go an adventure to the city of Chicago. Along with Ferris there are his two other companions that join him and ditch school  faking illnesses and pretending to give a fake call to the dean about a grandparent passing away. The two people are Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck) who is Ferris's long time best friend and Sloan Peterson (Mia Sara) who is Ferris's girlfriend and lover. As they plan this smart way of faking everything, they have a dean who keeps tabs on Ferris just because of who he is as a student and he ditched a lot the last quarter for senior year. So the devious Dean Ed Rooney ( Jeffrey Jones) is on a mission to try and catch Ferris so he can keep the boy from screwing up what he wants the school to be like and also have him repeat another year, and to keep people from not having everyone following Ferris's style. Meanwhile, Ferris's sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) plays along with Ferris being sick and she pretends to yell  at her parents because she never gets a chance to stay home even if her eyes were bleeding. After the guys get away with ditching the school even though they were absent , they go to Chicago to enjoy one of the best day offs from high school anybody could ask for.  But on the bad side that causes Dean Rooney to be suspicious and is doing business off campus, which obviously is to hunt down Ferris and screw his chances of making it to college and destroy his day off.

There were a lot of great scenes in the movie especially when they are in the city and they are at the Chicago art museum. The camera shots and angles shown in this scene really do a lot of interacting between object and human. As Ferris and Sloan went to a different part of the museum to talk, Cameron stands right in front of a very famous work of art, that catches his attention, because he looks at a boy with his mom which reminds him how his dad is a jerk and does not care about anything except for the old school Ferrari, that Ferris and the crew end up taking and there is not a single mile put on that car. The camera switching from Cameron to the boy in the painting shows some sort of connection between the two and that gives you clues that could symbolize who Cameron was as a boy and it really got me thinking about the scene after it was over with and what its significance was.

A lot of the camerawork during the film did a lot of close up shots on people and there were times where Jeanie was in her house and Rooney tried to sneak to catch Ferris being fake sick. The camera went back and forth showing that two were sneaking up on each other closer and closer. Up until they both tried to scare each other, and Rooney jumped out and scared Jeanie cause she had an reaction to kick him in the face and they did a repeat on the kick to show it was a knockout. There were other times where they have the camera directly below them, like when they were in the sears tower at the top and the three stood on the railing and put their heads on the windows looking down. The camera looked at  Ferris and the other two when they were looking as far down as possible and then the camera would be on the opposite side looking down just like the three did, giving a perspective of what it looks like looking down on the sears tower.

Overall I give this movie a 10/10 just because I personally think of it as one of my favorite movies and planning to ditch the school like that would totally be a professional way of doing it. Knowing people at a school at central, I do not think there are too many people that would have the guts to do something like these guys did. If it causes the Dean to go on a secret  out of school duty then I give respect to Ferris for pulling something off like that. This link at the end is one of my favorite scenes from the movies with Cameron and Ferris arguing about one picking up the other.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ZMU6UyXdPMs                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Formal Film Study Spielberg films of the 80s

The three of these films are similar and different in many ways. A similarity between all three is the color and the way the camera makes the screen look. It makes you feel that the movies were made about 25-30 years ago. Each of the films were set during different periods in history. The three films were the Color Purple, E.T., and Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark. Each film goes at a pretty fast pace, as the storytelling for each film gives you a unique understanding of what Spielberg goes for when trying to bring a message to the people. He thinks outside the box especially with these films and the special effects used in E.T. and Indiana Jones were definitely movie ideas made in the 80s. Each of these films belong in Hollywood and the reason being that some of the scenes like in E.T. with the flying bikes, will give you a clue that obviously this stuff cannot happen in real life and that Spielberg thought outside the box. He has an imagination that not many directors are capable of, meaning that not many directors could come up with similar types of movies like he did.

Spielberg is all about the action and adventure through movies, while he also has movies with a lot of sad but true storytelling like in the Color Purple. All the technology he uses are really a lot of special effects especially in E.T. and Indiana Jones, and both movies have a lot of action/adventure, but different types of adventures. Elliot has an alien like creature he finds in his backyard and has an adventure experiencing what it is like to be with a non-human that can talk. Indiana goes to find the ark of the convenant before the Nazis get a hold of it and dominate everybody in their way of taking over the world. For the most part there isn't much in the way of culture being significant throughout these movies, like the Color Purple takes place in Georgia during the early 20th century, and this time you have a black man owning his own piece of land and takes the spot of the white man and beats up his black women, which in this time and place seems way out of line. It gives you a taste of the later part of 19th century to the start of the 20th. For the most part these films do not have much in the way of government being involved except in ET, when undercover FEDS came into the house and try to see what it is about these aliens that make them so unique, and so these people try to take Elliot away from ET when they do a procedure, but doing that caused ET to die for a few minutes during the movie, until Elliot comes back to see him in what it seems to be a freezer tank and wakes up saying phone home.

There were a lot of scenes in each of the 3 movies that really got my attention especially at the end of Indiana Jones when the Nazis are about to release the spirits of the convenant and gain power to rule the world. Indiana tells Marion Ravenwood who is played by Karen Allen, to close her eyes or the power of the ark will destroy them both. When they close their eyes you see ghosts start flying all over the place which shows a lot of visual effects that Spielberg uses in a very small amount of films. This was something you did not see much of in movies, because the ark's power was too much for the Nazis that it killed everyone who looked into the light and caused them to melt and explode and die. Also when E.T. leaves for his planet and says goodbye to Elliot by using his finger that glows and says I'll be right here and points at Elliot head, saying he will be in his thoughts. That shot was taken from a side angle and it  shows how powerful that scene was with the eye-to-eye contact and Elliot's emotions start getting to him.

Spielberg is known for making a lot of people like his movies, since he goes for topics that not many people think would be worth making for a movie, but when his films come out, they end up being box office hits and earning academy award honors. The music in his films are all memorable and everybody is somehow familiar with the music being played. You hear many of the songs used in his films, no matter where you go people know the theme songs like for Jaws, Jurassic Park, E.T., and Indiana Jones. His films are legendary and everywhere you go people know Stephen Spielberg, to me he changed the style of cinema and movies more than any other person involved in the industry. He brought a totally different style of film that made a lot of people talk about those films 20 years later today.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-10-15/entertainment/9910200025_1_movie-reviews-star-film/5

This was a critics opinion about the movie E.T. and it shows that the same stuff I talked about and he knew what Spielberg was trying to get across. Movies like these make you feel like a kid again, and bringing childhood memories of something like an alien and turning him into a kind and friendly alien, makes these films so much better .  Not only E.T. but the other two films definitely got my attention and a double thumbs up just because these films were so different from other movies during that same decade in the 80s.  Spielberg made more of an impact in the 80s for films more than anybody else.

MYST Post # 3: The Animal House

   A movie like no other in the 70s that shows just how crazy the frat life can really be, especially since the film takes place in 1962 and clearly this type of party going on was very unusual at Faber College in Pennsylvania. Universal pictures and National Lampoon were the studio and magazine that talked a lot about Animal House and other movies very similar. This movie starred actors such as the late John Belushi, Tim Matheson, Tom Hulce, and Donald Sutherland. The movie was directed by John Landis who also was the director of The Blues Brothers, which included John Belushi as one of the two brothers. This movie reminds of a few movies that were not exactly in the same period as this movie was, but they are under The National Lampoon title and they too, filmed about partying in the frats and lakehouses. Movies such as American Pie and Van Wilder, were released in theatres in the early 2000s. This surprised me to see that there were not too many movies during the 70's where most of the movie is about the dean and the other frat house right next door to Omega Theta Pi, which considerably is the best frat on campus and long time haters of John "Bluto" Blutarsky( Belushi) and his fraternity Delta Tau Chi. Since Dean Vernon Wermer has Bluto's frat on double secret probation for all the trouble they caused , it still does not stop the guys from having more fun getting drunk and having a toga party with Otis Day and The Knights. This film shows you just how out of control college can really get if all you do is party.

The style that John Landis goes for, is that escapist entertainment for those during the 70s to familiarize those from that era just how crazy and fun college can be, but at the same time should be taken seriously. The message he goes for, is that when your at college your free to basically almost do anything you want, as long as you keep the trouble all inside and not on the campus streets. The films itself moves at a much slower pace then I expected , since it really shows in little segments, how many different things can make these college kids look like a bunch of party animals and troublemakers. The part where the editing was very effective, was when they had the toga party, and Otis Day and The Knights, came to perform "Shout" at Delta Tau Chi, and the scene where they dance really got my attention just because it showed a little bit of what the music was like during that time and that kind of dancing they did was something you would only see at a frat like this one.

The scene that really was the icing on the cake was at the end when Faber College had their homecoming parade in downtown. They had these parade floats used for the walk through town. This scene happens right when all of the members of Delta Tau Chi get expelled off campus because of all the trouble they caused and plus their poor grades which were the worst in Faber's history. So to get back at Dean Wermer and Omega, they set up a scheme to get Wermer screwed over and fired, and hopefully for Bluto and the boys, another chance to finish the semester and graduate. All hell breaks lose right after Stork, a member of Delta Tau, comes into the parade and takes over the directors spot for the band. Right after he takes the band down a different path, smoke fills the streets and people start going crazy and chaos happens in town, but not in a bad way like a war, but more of something that some crazy college kids would do to get redemption. They take a car and have it under a parade float and drive it into the main bleachers where The dean and mayor were sitting to watch the parade. The guys end up getting another chance, but to say the least, not many people would get away with something as crazy as this. Overall I give the movie a 7 out of 10, since the movie had a lot of scenes I enjoyed seeing since I'm young, wild, and free like these guys.