A Bronx Tale, Goodfellas, The Godfather

Compare and Contrast- Although all three are italian mob movies, there are significant differences.  Unlike A Bronx Tale and Goodfellas, The Godfather is primarily about family.  Its all about mob wars between different families where the story surrounds the Corleone family.  By blood relation you are automatically assumed to have a role in the mob.  The only complete trust is between family members.  A Bronx Tale is about a specific mob in that neighborhood.  Everyone in the neighborhood, no matter how young, recognizes the members of the mob.  Different from the other two films, has a side that concentrates on a main character not in anyway involved in the mob.  Robert De Niro's character strongly disapproves in his son C's relationship with the head of the mob.  He tries to influence him that a man who works hard and earns money through a job is a real man, not one who steals and kills.  The film Goodfellas is more about the friendships within a mob.  Jimmy, Henry, and Tommy form a close bond and stick together.  It also deals with drugs very strongly in the storyline.  A similarity of the three that stood out the most to me (other then the obvious of all being italian) was that if someone in the mob didnt trust you, you dont have a chance of living.  People were killed off like it was nothing if they were suspicious in any way.  Other similarities are the loyalty, fear, and power that comes with the mob.

Stereotyping- The stereotyping the the films is very evident.  They are all very stereotypical huge, italian family.  Stereotyping is most obvious in A Bronx  Tale where C cant be friends with or date a black girl.  The African Americans are the opposite of C and his friends who also live on the opposite sides of town.  It also stresses how all Italians are completely loyal to their family.  Also in Goodfellas, Tommy is the stereotypical angry italian who curses every three seconds.  If he gets the tiniest bit angry, he'll start a brawl or just shoot and kill you for making a disrespectful remark.

The True Story of Goodfellas- Goodfellas is the true story based on the novel Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi.  The author is a crime reporter who tells the story of Henry Hill's life.  The film very closely follows the true events in the book except for a few minor changes and some names have changed.  Every event happened and took place in that time period as depicted in the film.

Citizen Kane

The extremely young Orson Wells co-wrote, directed, and starred in the landmark film Citizen Kane.  It is the essence of film noir and is often mentioned as one of the greatest films ever made, although it has been negatively reviewed by a few critics.  This film is all about technique.  One scene where the camera pulls back from Kane as a child playing in the snow to inside the house where his mother is talking is truly incredible.  Another example is as Kane becomes older and more distant from his wife, the dining room table becomes longer, further separating the two.  At one point the wife is even reading the rival newspaper.  The film revolves around Charles Foster Kane's last dying word, "Rosebud".  No one seems to know what it means regardless how well they knew him during his life.  Thompson is the reporter who digs into Kane's life trying to find the meaning of his dying word.  Throughout the movie, his face is covered in dark lighting.  The men conclude that they will never find out the meaning of the word, but it doesnt matter because one word will not explain a man's life.  The film ends with the camera pulling back to a "No Trespassing" sign.

Vertigo

The last movie in the Hitchcock unit was the 1958 film Vertigo.  From the very beginning of the film we see how James Stewart's character John, or Scottie, developed his fear of heights.  His acrophobia (as well as the title) seemed irrelevant until the scene where "Madeleine" is running up the stairs of the bell tower determined to throw herself off committing suicide.  He runs up after her, but his vertigo stops him dead and is forced to watch her jump.  If it wasnt for this, he would have saw that it was entirely fake and the real Madeleine was already dead but made to appear as a suicide.  The Madeleine he knew was another woman playing a role in a twisted plot to cover up a murder.  Hitchcock manages to successfully accomplish keeping the suspense in all of his films to make them all memorable.

Notorious

Alicia Huberman becomes an undercover agent who has fallen for the government agent Devlin, played by Cary Grant.  He has also fallen for her but when he has to put her into another man's arms he covers his true feelings but acting cold toward her.  She marries a German Nazi in order to spy on the group of Nazis.  Her new husband soon catches onto her true motive for marrying him after she finds her investigating the wine cellar with Devlin.  Honestly, the mother seemed more evil than the Nazis.  She is the one who poisons Alicia day after day with the intent of killing her while controlling her son.  Devlin realizes that they have caught onto her being a spy so he rescues her from her death bed leaving Alexander to his Nazi buddies.

Shadow of a Doubt

Uncle Charlie and Charlie probably have the most uncomfortable close family relationship ive ever seen in a film.  She seemed to have an awkward crush on him and watching their conversation and body language felt almost romantic at times.  She was captivated by his sophisticated attitude and loves the fact shes named after him.  Even though Charlie looks up to her uncle she cant help but feel something is not right with him when he starts acting strangely.  When detectives are closely watching him because he is suspected to be a murderer, she tries to protect him even though she knows the truth about him.  It actually came as a shock to me that he attempted to kill his niece on several occasions.

The Birds

What Hitchcock does in most of his films which I love is he takes something we do and see in an average every day life and turns it into something terrifying.  He made people scared to take showers, made you think twice about your neighbors, and think what if there were murderers at your dinner party hiding a body in a chest.  The Birds is no different.  The reason he gave no concluding explanation to why the birds viciously attacked people was he said that in giving a reason, he would be turning his film into science fiction.  This film is supposed to be very real and make you question what if something that seems harmless that is always around you suddenly became deadly.  Hitchcock wants the audience to consider that this could happen giving his film that frightening element, (or at least for back then, now its a little more laughable then scary).  Having very little music, the sound is extremely important.  The sounds of the birds needs to be realistic and give the audience chills.

American Graffiti

This film is largely about a group of teens from the 60's just hanging out on an average summer night.  They cruise around in their cars starting street races and fights and picking up girls.  There is no one story line, just a bunch of characters doing their own thing.  No clear objective or goal is in mind for these kids, other then Curt who is still debating on leaving for college.  The music is a huge aspect of the film.  From the rock and roll music coming from the car stereo to the jukebox in restaurants the music gives a complete realism to the scenes.  I personally am not too familiar with the time period, so at first I thought they actually had a destination through all that driving.  Further into the film I realized that just aimlessly cruising around with no destination was their idea of something to do letting the night and people they run into control the events.