Notes

This is the end of what we can in this undergrad class. The rest is "deep" theory with the postmodern twist (POV, Film600 and other my strange notes on film).

...

The New American Cinema by Jon Lewis; Duke University Press, 1998

movies and pop-culture

wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_movie : A film genre in which the action takes places during a journey.

Road movies traditionally end in one of four ways:

* having met with triumph at their ultimate destination, the protagonist(s) return home, wiser for their experiences.
* at the end of the journey, the protagonist(s) find a new home at their destination.
* the journey continues endlessly. In such cases, the last shot of the film is almost always the driver's point of view of a lonely highway at night.
* having realised that, as a result of their journey, they can never go home, the protagonists either choose death or are killed.

samples :
Duel, Easy Rider, Vanishing Point, The Long Long Trailer, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Just Like the Son, Natural Born Killers, Rain Man, Thelma and Louise, Elizabethtown, Wild at Heart, Little Miss Sunshine, Dutch, Y tu mamá también, Rat Race, Larger Than Life, The Hitcher, The Cannonball Run, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, Transamerica, Children of Men, National Lampoon's Vacation, Fandango and Road Trip, and A Goofy Movie...

... INTO the WILD (case study):

The Call of the Wild is a novel by American writer Jack London. The plot concerns a previously domesticated and even somewhat pampered dog named Buck whose primordial instincts return after a series of events finds him serving as a sled dog in the treacherous, frigid Yukon during the days of the 19th century Gold Rushes.

Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is one of London's most read books and it is generally considered one of his best. Because the protagonist is a dog, it is sometimes classified as a juvenile novel, suitable for children, but it is dark in tone and contains numerous scenes of cruelty and violence.

... 'The Call of the Wild' retraces the travels of Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old “aesthetic voyager” who starved to death in the Alaska wilderness in 1992. Over the course of his journey, through thirty U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and Mexico, filmmaker Ron Lamothe encounters an entire cast of McCandless-inspired characters—some who knew Chris, some who didn’t, some who respect him, others who disparage him, all of whom become part of a larger non-fiction mosaic. Ironically, he also keeps running into Sean Penn, who’s making a Hollywood version of the McCandless story at the same time this documentary is being shot. In Alaska, following in McCandless’s footsteps all the way to the abandoned bus where he died some fifteen years ago, the film uncovers never-before-seen evidence that sheds new light on the case, and directly contradicts both best-selling author Jon Krakauer’s ('Into the Wild') interpretation of McCandless’s death and that of Sean Penn’s docudrama (to be released by Paramount Vantage in September 2007). Throughout, the documentary explores a variety of subjects and themes emanating from the McCandless story: Generation-X versus Gen-Y and the Baby Boomers; wilderness and the American imagination; youthful rites of passage versus mid-life realities; the changing American cultural landscape, from fringe USA to hitchhiking in the 21st century; and the independent documentary versus the Hollywood machine.

Forms: Documentary
Genres: Independent

for test:

Dog Day Afternoon 2 of 20

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