Monday 11 November 2013

POST 8 : Your choice of a Film or Series dealing with the notion of 'Power'


'Assault on wall street' 
a movie by Uwe Boll




          " Assault on Wall Street " is a movie by Uwe Boll made in 2013. This movie is about a blue-collar new yorker called Jim Baxford who lives with his wife, Rosie Baxford, in a standard district of New York. Because of Rosie's illness, Jim decided to put all their savings in stock exchange and the man who is in charge of his money tells him that he would made 10 per cent of benefice every month but suddenly the economy crashes so as Jim lost all his money. Rosie thought that she was a burden for Jim so she killed herself, she commited a suicide. Jim lost everything, including his family. He is so angered that he decided to kill all the man who are implicated in what happened to him, he follows his needs of revenge. 

This movie deals with the notion of power and more specificly with the economical power and how people are dependent of money. Also it shows who are responsible of the crisis because, saving the personal life of Jim which is fictitious, all the characters implicated in the economy and working in Wall Street in the movie are real people who are really implicated in the crisis. We learn in this movie that all the money is invented, as long as stock exchange exist, money is moving from one place to another one but when the stock exchange crashes when there is no longer money to give, people lose everything they had. Banks are the culprits of the crisis because they invent money. Let's take the exemple of a loan. You ask for a certain sum of money to buy a house and banks give it to you and you have to pay it off with some interest. But if you can't pay off your debt, what symbolize it is your house so your bank will take it as a garanty but the money as billets you will never saw it because it does not exist. This is only one example of the economic power in our society.

I really like this movie because the message which is transmited is true and more important, it is a current issue and we do not all know why is there a crisis or who is responsible and all that. But it stills be a Hollywood production which is always full of action but the message is important so we have to forget about the production and only focus on the message. 

  





Tuesday 5 November 2013

POST 7 : THE NOTION OF POWER AS EXEMPLIFIED IN BRIAN DE PALMA'S REDACTED MOVIE

Redacted, a movie by 
Brian de Palma









Redacted is a movie written and directed by Brian de Plama in 2007. It deals with the Irak war and its consequences. It relates the story of a group of american soldiers and their differents point of view. This movie is based on real events and it's filming as if an american soldier was filming with his own camera wich makes the story more intense for the viewer. During the Irak war, the censorship is omnipresent and the film shows what was hidden during years. The extreme violence and the horrible things that the american soldiers did make us realize that americans abused their power in Irak and they did terrible things to the iraki specially by raping women and killing inocent people. This movie is related with the notion of power beacause of the censorship and the control of the media. Also, the military power because United-States tok advantage on their powerful army.

Synopsis (IMDb): 

This film is about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers with shocking images that will leave some viewers in tears.

Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it spares the audience no brutality to get its message across.

Made in a deliberately episodic form, Redacted tells various stories about the war in Iraq, ostensibly from different viewpoints. One film portion by a French filmmaker tells the story of U.S. soldiers watching over checkpoints. In another episode, a superior soldier makes a casual mistake dealing with garbage that was set out in a road and is blown to bits. It's all leading to the pivotal rape and murder of the pretty girl who is discovered by the soldiers on a raid of an Iraqi house in order to find evidence. One night, the drunken and mostly morally lost U.S. soldiers discuss going back for the "skank" whom they saw in the house they raided. One soldier straps a camera to his helmet, and the footage of the girl's rape is secured.

The rest of the film mostly deals with measures taken by the army against the criminals. A final scene has a soldier from the criminals' unit confessing to his friends a war story that he will never forget: the plundering and murder of the Iraqi girl.


Review (All Movie Guide):


In the years following the start of the second Iraq war, numerous filmmakers tried to grapple with the thorny issues at play there. But few made quite so clinical an approach as Brian De Palma in Redacted. Since many of those films were considered misfires, a different approach might not be such abad thingDe Palma presents an array of media -- a French documentary, an al-Qaeda website, a blog by a soldier's wife -- as if stockpiling evidence for a trial designed to determine some kind of universal truth. The story's backbone is the amateur footage shot by a soldier named Angel (Izzy Diaz), who hopes to parlay his observations into acceptance at film school after returning home. Through this we meet the five central characters. All of this is fictitious, of course, leaving Redacted in the category of "fictional documentary." The results can feel simplistic and on the nose, but that's partly intentional. De Palma's scenario is constructed specifically to have an every-soldier feel to it, dealing primarily with the brutal rape of an Iraqi teenager and the killing of her family. In this way, De Palmaindicts all American soldiers in all wars (accusations of such behavior ran rampant in Vietnam), and even the very mentality engendered by invasions and occupations, regardless of who's doing the invading/occupying. Nor does he let the locals off the hook, intimating that they look the other way when roadside bombs kill American soldiers. De Palma's serious purpose doesn't mean he's overcome by sobriety, however. Some of the camaraderie among soldiers is disturbing, but some is downright funny. In all, the cast of unknowns convinces us they're real grunts just caught up in a cycle far bigger than they are, one that has repeated down through the decades, where no one is really innocent.