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Showing posts from December, 2020

Westerns: the genre that fell in on itself

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 Westerns were the most popular genre in America in the 50's and 60's but unlike other genres have never been able to make a real comeback and there are a few reasons for that but I have a theory in real life the "western era" was a relatively short period of time only lasting around 30 years which leads to western productions whether intentional or not sometimes looking uninspired or copied because unlike with other genres say first world war films westerns almost always had the same story track even making certain actors famous for mainly playing western roles like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood combined they have made 162 westerns this causes a big problem if a genre which for decades has been dominated by very similar story threads and actors when people want something different there isn't alot of places to go. obviously writers still went different places with westerns but there was mixed success too different poo western too similar unoriginal.  Next there i

Societies fear as representations in film

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 This is a fairly big subject firstly because fear is different for different countries in the U.K. there isn't a shared fear that a polar bear may maul us which may be the case for towns inside the arctic circle secondly because fear changes over time so representative examples from the 50s aren't likely to match ones from the 90s. Often it takes at least a little while for these fears to manifest in film because it usually needs some sort of catalyst or time for it to be worth showing it in film so that it shows as more than just an irrational fear  This is Tetsuo: the iron man this is a Japanese film which represents fears in 1980-1990s Japan during this time Japan started to become a competitor in electronics bringing lots of money into the economy. The film follows the titular Tetsuo as he is cursed to become a being of Iron the fear of many in Japan in that time was that this technology would begin to trample over their rich history and culture. The film quite literally s

Character survival in franchises

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 character survival in franchises is a difficult thing to manage because kill too many characters your film loses its heart kill too few and all danger shown on screen is moot because no-one is gonna die. Star Wars was fairly good with this for a period of time because main characters died yoda, uncle ben, darth Vader, the emperor, han solo frozen in carbonite then killed in no.7 the entire Jedi order dying off in episode 3 while not entirely balanced main characters died so danger was always there until episode 8 this is where things started to go wrong Han had already been killed in a horrible betrayal that was solid that was good but then starting in episode 8 they began wiping the slate killing Luke, leia, wiping c3po's memory bringing back the dead emperor, snoke, Finn gets brutally hit with a lightsabre in episode 7 in 8 he is magically better there are other smaller examples but those to me seem the most egregious but then it was clear in an instant what they were doing they