Think about when you feel pressure. How do you react? What are you thinking? In this piece, entitled “It’s Crunch Time,” I will visually show, from the perspective of the speaker/ athlete/ student, what pressure is, where it comes from, what it feels like, and how it affects us.
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Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is not one of those movies that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Without much dialogue, the film did not win me over in the same way that, say, Raging Bull did. Because of all the gaps in conversation between characters, the cinematographers of Lost in Translation had to progress the film in other ways. The cinematographers did this brilliantly as they used settings to speak for the characters. For example, towards the beginning of the film, Bob is shown towering above a group of Asians inside an elevator. This image depicted Bob as the lonely man he was and it did so without any dialogue. I understood that Charlotte was somewhat of a loner from one of the opening scenes when she simply gazed out over her hotel window’s view of Japan.
What I liked most about this film was the way the cinematographers made both of the main characters lonely, sure, but more importantly, so likeable. Even though both had their problems, both were people that any viewer would want to be friends with. They won me over with their senses of humor, never obnoxious and flamboyant, but dry and innocent. Although both were married to other people, I was pulling for them to leave behind their lonely lives in order to be together. This brings me to another point. What did Bob whisper to Charlotte at the end? I loved how the director left me hanging. Maybe they did end up together? We can never know for sure.
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The Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter is very different from many of today’s documentaries. Using a style known as Cinéma vérité, where there is no voiceover but where the camera angles, audio, and editing, as a unit, form the filmmaker’s opinion, the Maysles Brothers bored me to sleep with Gimme Shelter.
There were some things I liked about this style of documentary, however. Because the Stones were obviously very comfortable with the filming crew, Gimme Shelter really provided the audience an up-close encounter with the Stones. As a result, I felt like I “knew” the Stones much better than I did before. The scenes where we saw Mic watching the tape of his concerts was a very nice touch as they helped provide me with an understanding of the man off the stage. I must admit, this documentary was real. Usually that’s what I want in a documentary.
But in this documentary, “real” bored me to sleep. Whereas in highly regarded documentaries of recent times like Jesus Camp, King of Kong, Born into the Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids, and Hell House, the film crews often interviewed their characters with specific questions, Gimme Shelter was too real for me because the crews never talked to Mic Jagger. As a result, I didn’t get to hear enough of the Stone’s opinions. But I definitely heard enough of their music as the movie used full songs throughout. This made the documentary even more boring.
After watching Gimme Shelter, I’m beginning to realize that a good documentary needs things to be staged every once in a while. There needs to be some sort of interaction between the crew and the real life thing they are recording. If there isn’t, the documentary just becomes simple footage with some editing and audio thrown in. That just doesn’t excite me.
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Raging Bull is not a movie about boxing. It is a movie which uses the boxing ring as merely a setting to better expose Jake LaMotta for what he is: a stubborn, aggressive, and insecure man.
Raging Bull is a film about Jake LaMotta and Jake LaMotta only. As a result, Scorsese faced a challenge in keeping the audience enthralled with this frail character. But as we have seen in some of his recent movies such as The Departed, no one can captivate an audience quite like Scorsese. The movie jumps around in time, at first starting after Jake’s boxing career, then progressing through it, before ending with Jake’s post-boxing demise. The audience was never tricked, however, as throughout, at every moment in time we see LaMotta, we see his problems. The use of irony in the film was brilliant as well as Scorsese was able to depict the most unstoppable fighter in the world as someone who had more problems than you or I. With this irony, Raging Bull comments on the vanity of human glory. Regardless of how much success one can have in the ring or in the public spotlight, the money or the fame is never enough. They can never be enough to satisfy you, but as we see with LaMotta, they can come to own you.
So that’s why Raging Bull is now one of my favorite films of all time.
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