Run Lola Run - Movement

In a film with "run" in the title it is assumed that there will be lots of movement throughout and Run Lola Run does not defy that theory. Clearly, this film offers up a lot for discussion.

Two scenes stood out to me. The first scene, though fairly minor, lets the viewer know just how Manni’s world is beginning to unravel. During Lola’s first run, Manni is on the phone in the phone booth and things are clearly not going to plan. The camera pans from left to right from behind the booth to the side. It stops briefly for him to finish his call. It’s a medium-length shot with a wide-angle lens. Manni is obviously upset with the situation and time is running out. As he turns and exits the phone booth the camera pans quickly and smoothly with him slightly more than halfway around the booth. Other than being a nice effect, the camera panning is very disorienting and dizzying. The camera comes to a stop only when the blind woman takes a hold of Manni’s hand (she is Manni’s Tiresias). This type of panning is very unnatural to the human eye. In real life, the human eye has a tendency to skip through a scene and pick up important visual cues along the way. The motion of the camera indicates just how far Manni’s situation is spiraling out of control.

The other scene(s) is when Lola is in her father’s office. Prior to Lola entering the office the camera is very steady. After she enters the camera is clearly handheld and it shows just how agitated Lola is. She’s out of breath, sweaty, and talking rapidly. In contrast, her father is the complete opposite. In the second run, both she and her father are agitated.

Throughout the film the camera movements vary. Even during Lola’s running scenes, some shots are handheld and very close to the action; other shots use a dolly, while others are far away from the action.

Hot Fuzz - Dramatization

Dramatization in film is much more than recorded theater. The language of stage and screen is fundamentally different from one another. There are more techniques available to film than theater. One must consider time, space, and location, settings and décor, and costumes and makeup.

Hot Fuzz does not seem to have much time elapse during the film. It’s conceivable that the timeframe of the story ranges from a few weeks to no more than a year. A key indicator of that is when Sgt. Angel goes to arrest Simon Skinner on the suspicion of murder; the dates of the murders are within a span of four days. Also, Sgt. Angel doesn’t know when Danny’s birthday is. One would figure that partners would know each other’s birthdays within a short time of working together. There are only a few flashbacks, most of which are when Sgt. Angel is revealing what he thinks is going on in the village. There are various uses of space in the film, with various types of shots. For instance in the scene just before Leslie Tiller’s murder there’s an establishing shot (though not a very wide shot) of her horticulture shop. The next is a quick, fairly close-up shot of Sgt. Angel’s notebook that is placed on the dash. Then there are a few over-the-shoulder shots of Angel and Tiller and during that the quick conversation, and the foreshadowing line, “I was just about to pop off.” That line is followed immediately by a quick close-up of her pruning shears. The subsequent monologue of Tiller’s helps blow open Angel’s theory of what is going on in Sandford. The scene is made more tense by the gradual zoom of the lens, as opposed to tracking, to both Angel and Tiller. Everything happens within the proscenium arch of her shop. The only thing hidden in the scene is the hooded figure as Angel goes outside to get his notebook. The audience has no clue how the figure appears.

While one might be able to ascertain what is going on the film without the language, there would be lots of comedy missed and some clues as to what is really going on in the film. There are many lines that foreshadow events in the film. Martin Blower’s, “We haven’t got long,” Simon Skinner’s, “He’ll be in bits tomorrow,” Rev. Shooter’s, “Tim, you’re number’s up,” and Tiller’s, “I was just about to pop off.”

While the storyline of Hot Fuzz could translate to the theater, the film as it is would be very difficult to be adapted for the stage. The movie contains many locations which are tied to the characters and would require many set changes. The action sequences in the film would more than likely get lost on the stage. The scale of the shootout towards the end might be hard to recreate, not to mention the car chases. 

Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg did extensive research into the making of Hot Fuzz. They watched countless movies and added many action movie clichés. They surveyed police officers in the UK about what was lacking in police films. One of the most common answers was the total lack of paperwork seen in movies (Wright and Pegg, Hot Fuzz). There are various nods to that throughout Hot Fuzz. Transitions between scenes are aggressively cut while you can see characters writing.

Hot Fuzz was almost entirely shot on location. Wells, Somerset, Edgar Wright’s home town, was converted to Sandford, Glouchestershire. Almost all of the sets in the film were in the buildings in and around Wells. Most of the sets convey the small town/village feel of Sandford. Wells Cathedral was painted out of much of the film to make the town of Sandford a “village.” Early shots were filmed at Hendon Police College, where London’s Metropolitan Police are officially trained. Models were used for the explosions at George Merchant’s mansion and the Sandford police station.

The costumes in the film are realistic to the period. So, realistic in fact that Pegg and Nick Frost were actually believed to be real police officers. Also, Paul Freeman (Rev. Shooter) was thought to be a real priest. Makeup in the film is natural and realistic. There is nothing that appears out of the ordinary.

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[1] (Wright and Pegg, Hot Fuzz)

No Country for Old Men - Sound

Sound in No Country for Old Men is purely diegetic. There is no music in the film except for the mariachi band playing as Llewellyn wakes up on a set of steps. The lack of sound really puts the viewer into the movie. All of the diegetic sound seems heightened. All sounds are very clear, simplified, yet heightened since there is no soundtrack. That lack of sound adds much more suspense to the film. You can hear every footstep, every grain of dust being crushed under boots.

While the dialogue in the film isn’t exactly sparse, it is certainly functional. All characters besides Chigurh speak with the typical West Texas drawl. Most of the language in the film is how one might expect rural Texas to sound like – “at the gettin’ place,” “…all swole up,” “I don’t wanna get into some kind of jackpot here.” Chigurh has an accent that is hard to place. It’s easy to say it’s Spanish because of Javier Bardem, but as far as the character goes, it’s still hard to place.

The only narration is at the beginning of the film by Sheriff Bell. It sets up the movie perfectly in the sense of the meaning of the title. Sheriff Bell goes on to compare the times of him never carrying a gun to a boy killing a 14-year-old girl because he had always planned on killing someone. He is caught in the middle of the cat-and-mouse game Moss and Chigurh are playing. Though Bell is always a step behind both men, and doesn’t quite understand what has happened to in the world, he is the only “good” character. Moss, despite deciding to take water to a dying man in the desert, is the same side of the coin as Chigurh. Every decision he makes winds up putting his family at risk and causing his and his wife’s death. Chigurh has a sense of morals and fate to him, though clearly misguided.

If there were no dialogue in the film I think it’s fairly clear that Moss wants a better life for him and his wife. He says he’s retired and lives in a double-wide with his wife, so two million dollars would be a nice future for them both. Most of the film is him fighting for survival. From the outset of the film, Chigurh is clearly evil incarnate. We might not know immediately that he is after the money, but that becomes very clear a short time into the film. We might lose his wayward sense of morals and fate with his conversations with the gas station worker, but that only complicates his character. While we might not understand his lack of understanding with today’s society, we know that Sheriff Bell is one of the only characters in the film that’s trying to put a stop to the violence.

Hot Fuzz - Ideology

Movies can serve multiple purposes. Obviously, they can be aesthetically pleasing. They can bring amazing visuals and sound to the screen. Another, often overlooked aspect of film is the ideology. Ideologies can be neutral, implicit or explicit. Neutral ideologies emphasize on entertainment values. Implicit ideologies represent conflicting value systems (good guy vs. bad guy), but the “moral of the story” isn’t spelled out. Explicit ideologies aim to persuade the viewer (Giannetti 405).   

From the start of the film, there isn’t much to go on to tell who the good vs. bad guys are. As the film goes on there are hints here and there, but nothing that jumps out at you. Looking back after watching the film one might wonder how one missed certain clues. The film takes on the “not everything is as it seems” motif and completely twists the cause of “the greater good. (…the greater good).”

The main actors (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) are friends that have worked together on various projects. Other actors such as Jim Broadbent (Inspector Butterman) had asked to be in one of Pegg’s and Edgar Wright’s films and his part was specifically written for him. Edward Woodward (Tom Weaver) was cast to fill a role similar to a role he played in The Wicker Man. 

Wright relied heavily on mise-en-scene, mostly for foreshadowing, whether it was placing a costume dummy with no head in a shot just before the murders of Eve Draper and Martin Blower, the village-of-the-year plaques in Inspector Butterman’s office, or Bernard Cooper’s sword (which is seen much later) above the fireplace at Sgt. Angel’s entrance to the Swan Hotel. In some of the scenes, notably after Angel incapacitates one of the NWAs goons, Wright had all of the sound dropped out of the scene to add the element of surprise when PC Butterman enters Angel’s room. The only time the dialect comes to the forefront is during a scene in which Sgt. Angel, PC’s Butterman and Walker go to “the country” to talk to a resident. Arthur Webley has a thick English accent, which needs to be translated by PC Bob Walker, then needs to be translated by PC Butterman, who then translates it for Sgt. Angel. Of course, that’s not to say that American audiences, in particular my mother, didn’t have trouble understanding most of the film due to the English accents.

The main character Sgt. Nicholas Angel would appear to be at the center of the political spectrum. His no-nonsense, extremely professional attitude would indicate that the law is the law and that is the rule to follow and isn’t swayed to the right or the left.

Religion plays no role in the film, despite one of the minor characters being a priest. All the characters are English, so there aren’t any “ethnic” values in the film. Everything is recognizable as “Western.” No characters appear to be gay. Women aren’t portrayed poorly; there just aren’t any strong female roles. Joyce Cooper is probably the strongest female in the film. She’s the owner of The Swan Hotel where Sgt. Angel stays and leads the NWA meetings. PC Doris Thatcher, the only female officer, is a woman that “has been around the station a few times.” Every time Mary Porter is on screen, she shares the scene with her husband.

In a word, the genre of Hot Fuzz is hard to pin down. IMDB has it listed as a comedy and it is. It’s just much more than that. One can’t go more than a few seconds without some kind of gag (visual or audible). It definitely holds true to the “comedy” label. It’s also a buddy-cop film. Sgt. Angel is a no-nonsense, by-the-book Sergeant and his new partner, Danny Butterman, is more of a wannabe action film cop. It also plays as a mystery. Obviously, there are crimes being committed, but in this renowned village what or who is responsible? As the film goes along, we come to know that there are sinister forces at work. It can also be considered an action film. Both Wright and Pegg watched an extensive amount of action films and used Roger Ebert’s book of movie cliché’s to add to this film. There isn’t much action in the first half of the film, but we get shootouts, explosions, and car chases in the second half.

Because of the differing genres of the film, the tone differs throughout the film as well. When the film is obviously a comedy, most of the lighting is light and bright. When the storyline turns more serious and mysterious the lighting gets moodier and darker, especially in the scene when Sgt. Angel confronts the NWA at the castle.

The tone doesn’t necessarily reinforce nor mock the characters. Some of the comedy in the film comes from the fact that Sgt. Angel is so no-nonsense and the rest of the Sandford police squad seems to be winging it.

The hypothesis set forth by Carney is an intriguing one. In 2015, we are seeing more social calls to action which are rejecting some of the thought processes of the past. Carney goes on, “The final resolution of the gunfight, after the chase scene, taking place in a scale model of the town, squarely places the characters of Pegg and Timothy Dalton – the latter practically being an emissary of older action films – as two giants, representing opposite ideologies, the progressive and the regressive, fighting over the very soul of the town (Carney).”

Hot Fuzz - Movement

Movement is often given very little consideration by filmgoers and critics as a medium of communication. Often times, a film might have more complex choreography than a ballet. Movement seems to get pushed aside as a side effect of the film (Giannetti 96).

There are several ways Wright used the camera to emphasize motion. At the beginning of the film when we are introduced to Sgt. Angel, there are close up, mid-length, and long-shots. Some shots move laterally with the movement and some move in on Angel. There’s quick shot of Angel driving and the camera is placed in the car. The whole sequence is cut quickly and shows the pace of his training as an officer. The camera’s movements in that particular sequence are filmed at normal speed and, for the most part, are choppy, more than likely handheld.

There is a minimal amount of movement in the beginning of the film. During Sgt. Angel’s first day in Sandford he goes out for a jog. Earlier in the film it was established the Angel is an accomplished runner, holding the Met record for the 100m dash. The camera moves with Angel as he runs through the village of Sandford. It’s clear from the way Angel is running and the camera work that he is jogging and not running. The shots include a close-up of his feet, a few trailing shots, and reverse shots. All the mid-shots once Angel gets into the village square appear to be handheld and create a slight bobbing that simulates running.

In the scene where Angel chases the shoplifter in the grocery store, initially the shot is handheld as the come running out of the store running left to right across the screen. The shot is not very stable and is choppy. The horizontal nature of the running creates a sense of speed. Subsequent shots are shot from low and in front of the actors. We can see Angel and the shoplifter in the same frame. As the scene plows on a wide range of shots are used, most of which are very choppy and emphasize the speed of the chase.

Like many other aspects of a film, movement isn’t just something that happens. The director has numerous ways to show motion. Movement goes from “what” happens to “how” things happen.