Category: Media Studies

All About My Mother – Synopsis – Analysis

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Synopsis: 

Manuela, a single mother living in Madrid sees her only son, Esteban, die in a car crash as he runs to request an autograph from Huma, a theatre actress he idolises. In her grief, Manuela travels to Barcelona to find Esteban’s father, a transvestite named Lola who does not know that they had a child. In Barcelona, Manuela is reunited with her friend, Agrado, and meets a young nun, Rosa, who is pregnant with Lola’s child. Manuela gets a job as an assistant to Huma, the actress her son admired. When Rosa discovers she is HIV positive Manuela gives up her job to nurse her and on Rosa’s death adopts her son. At Rosa’s funeral Manuela meets Lola and introduces him to his second son, also named Esteban. Despite contracting HIV at birth Esteban Jr. is free from the virus at the end of the film. 

Analysis: 

All About My Mother is an Almodóvar film. This is not simply a director’s . . . Read More

Daybreak (1933 Movie) – Summary – Analysis

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Summary: 

Unable to pay the local taxes imposed by the warlord, Lingling and her fiancé, Zhang Jin, leave their hometown, a fishing village, for the big city Shanghai, where their cousin and her husband live. The four of them work at the same factory. Unfortunately, Zhang is soon fired and has to start to work on the sea. Meanwhile, Lingling is raped at a dinner party hosted by her young boss at the factory. When the girl pointlessly wanders around afterwards, she gets abducted and ends up being sold to a brothel. Two years later, having endured the painful life of prostitution, Lingling turns into a skillful and street-smart social flower. Zhang returns back to Shanghai as a revolutionary. The two meet at Lingling’s apartment, without knowing that a secret agent chasing Zhang has followed them there. In order to help Zhang escape, Lingling gets arrested and is sentenced to death. When they are about to execute her at daybreak, the girl keeps . . . Read More

The Third Man (Movie) – Summary – Analysis

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Summary: 

Based on a story by Graham Greene, it charts the post-Second World War moral and material decay of Western Europe via the adventures of a naive American writer, Holly Martins, who goes to Vienna in search of his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles on magnificent form). At first told that he is dead, Martins is then disturbed to discover that Lime is alive and stands accused of being involved in black market drug-dealing, indirectly causing the death and suffering of hundreds of people, and hiding out in the Russian sector of the rubble-strewn city. Eventually Martins finds him but the story does not end easily for any of the characters involved. Such a simple tale and yet somehow The Third Man has succeeded in becoming one of the greatest British films of all time, with one of the most famous and memorable scenes in all cinema. 

Analysis: 

The Third Man has become an indisputable classic . . . Read More

Thelma and Louise – Summary – Analysis

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Summary: 

Thelma is a neglected housewife who ditches her bullying husband to spend a weekend fishing with her friend Louise, a hash-house waitress who drives an impeccably maintained 1966 Thunderbird convertible. A quick stop at a bar leads to trouble when Thelma is accosted by a local man. Louise shoots the guy. The two women flee, believing that Thelma’s drunken behaviour on the dance floor will make their sexual assault claim untenable. The rest of the films follows their panicked dash across the backroads of the southwest attempting to flee law, order and patriarchy. 

Analysis: 

Released in 1991, Thelma and Louise cost MGM a modest $16.5 million and was a rather unlikely bet for a mainstream Hollywood film. Callie Khouri’s first screenplay was prompted by dissatisfaction with the way women were portrayed in Hollywood film: 

“I wanted to . . . Read More

Milk of Sorrow – Summary – Analysis

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Summary: 

The film portrays the life of Fausta (Magaly Solier), a young woman whose family has moved from the Andes to Manchay, one of the pueblos jovenes or shantytowns which has emerged on the outskirts of Lima. Fausta grieves for the loss of her mother, Perpetua (Bárbara Lazón), who dies in the story’s opening sequences. But Fausta is already grief-stricken before this loss, her emotions paralysed and her interest in life diminished as a result of being born during the turmoil which saw conflict between the Peruvian military and the terrorist group Shining Path. The film’s Spanish title refers to a syndrome in which Andean mothers who suffered from physical violation during the unrest gave birth to children believed to be without a soul. The syndrome suggests that the horror of rape and torture was conveyed to foetuses in the womb and then to infants through mother’s milk contaminated by trauma and shock. Thus, Fausta, whose father was . . . Read More

Tesis / Thesis (1996 Movie): Summary & Analysis

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Summary: 

Film student Ángela is writing her thesis on violence in audiovisual media. At the university, she discovers the body of her thesis director, Prof. Figueroa, who died while watching a video that turns out to be a snuff film. The plot of this psychological thriller unfolds through Ángela’s research on the disappearance of a former classmate, tortured and murdered on tape. Unsure about whom to trust, Ángela is targeted as the next victim as she draws closer to exposing an underground ring of snuff films produced by a fellow student and professor. Set in the 1990s, the film engages a critique of violence in television and film, market forces producing audiovisual media, and voyeuristic desires of audiences, as well as the burgeoning practices of security camera vigilance in public spaces. 

Analysis:

Amenábar’s feature-length debut, a psychological thriller of the intrigue genre about . . . Read More

Taxi Driver (1976 Movie): Summary & Analysis

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Summary: 

Travis Bickle, seemingly a Vietnam War veteran, gets a job working as a taxi driver in New York City. As he drives around the city he increasingly feels himself to be surrounded by the worst of humanity but manages to find some sort of hope in Betsy, a worker for presidential hopeful, Senator Palatine. He becomes obsessed with her and tries to establish a relationship. When this doesn’t work out he seems to be tipped over the edge of sanity. He arms himself and sets out to assassinate Palatine. Thwarted in this, he then commits himself to ‘saving’ Iris, a child prostitute. He attacks the brothel where she ‘works’, killing three men in a brutal bloodbath. We move forward in time and find Travis has become a newspaper hero and has a letter from Iris’s parents thanking him for saving their daughter. 

Analysis: 

This film offers an intense portrayal of a man on the edge who spends . . . Read More

Twilight Samurai: Summary & Analysis

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Summary: 

In the nineteenth century at the end of Japan’s feudal age, widowed, low-ranking samurai Seibei Iguchi is an accountant at his regional lord’s storehouse, where he has been nicknamed ‘Twilight’ (Tasogare) because he refuses to socialise after working hours. Instead, he rushes home to care for his two daughters, Kayano (age ten) and Ito (age five), and his senile mother andto farm and do piecemeal jobsto pay debts. The sudden reappearance of Seibei’s childhood crush Tomoe, who has returned to her brother Iinuma Michinojo’s house to escape an abusive marriage, offers the potential for a love story. Seibei faces two obstacles: first, he challenges Tomoe’s alcoholic ex-husband, Toyotaro- Ko-da, to a duel, but uses a wooden practice sword to knock Ko-da unconscious rather than kill him. After winning respect for the swordsmanship he had tried to keep hidden, Seibei is ordered to assassinate an elderly samurai Zenemon Yogo who . . . Read More

Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song: Summary & Analysis

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Summary: 

Following an unfortunate run-in with the LAPD, resulting in the injury of two police officers, our eponymous hero (Van Peebles), a sexworker-turned-revolutionary, flees Los Angeles and makes his way to Mexico. Along Sweetback’s journey, we encounter a cross section of the city’s citizens, from storefront preachers to prostitutes and hippies. Lauded as the inspiration for blaxploitation films from the early seventies, Sweetback is responsible for introducing many conventions of the genre, including an empowered African American anti-hero, villainous white characters, urban settings, contemporary soundtracks, and a proactive stance on institutionalised racism. While the film’s many imitators would follow fairly conventional narrative structure, Sweetback’s experiences often take the form of a fever dream, as our hero makes his way across the city accompanied by self-conscious editing, handheld camera work, and a funky soundtrack . . . Read More

The Sweet Hereafter (1997 Movie): Summary & Analysis

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Summary: 

The Sweet Hereafter is a film about trauma. After a fatal bus crash that kills almost all of a town’s children, a lawyer tries to rouse some of the victims’ families to pursue a class action suit. The young girl, who is the sole child to survive the crash, and also a survivor of incest, tells a lie at the deposition that puts an end to the town’s greed and punishes her father for his crimes. 

Analysis: 

Atom Egoyan’s adaptation of Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter treats two tragedies: a bus crash in which all but one of a community’s school-age children plunge to their deaths in icy water, and incest. In North American cinema, films about trauma tend to make a spectacle of suffering through a focus on the immediacy of individual pain and loss. Egoyan’s understated film avoids spectacle and zooms out to look instead at how the representation of trauma shapes communities’ . . . Read More