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JSONAction Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie
My scavengings from Eric Lichtenfeld's book
Keywords | Text | Date | ID |
|---|---|---|---|
| Film: Action Movies / Body / Spirituality / Technology / Violence / To Read | Rikke Schubart identifies two themes in action films -- 'passion' and 'acceleration' the 'passion' axis draws on Rene Girard's "sacrifice plot," "in which societies sacrifice scapegoats to avoid social crises" (Lichtenfeld's summary) "a hero is marginalized, chosen to handle a crisis, sacrificed, and finally, resurrected" (30) the 'acceleration' axis contains things like "kinetic energy ... explosions, pure speed, the hard body, invulnerability, invincibility, impenetrability" Lichtenfeld expands this to include "the destruction visited upon cars, buildings, and other such objects" Rikke Schubart regards The Terminator as a film in which the theme of "acceleration" separates from its traditional pair ("passion"): "It tore itself away and became a theme in its own right." the Schubart article appears in Routledge's Violence and American Cinema (2001) | 08/24/07 | 8614 |
| Film: Action Movies / Timeline | 1967 Bonnie and Clyde a "New Hollywood" milestone featuring "staccato editing, slow motion, overbearing sound, and gore" "[It] helped end the Production Code and ushered in the less restrictive Motion Picture Association of America" see also 1971's Billy Jack, Shaft, and The French Connection and (especially) Dirty Harry, "the action film's first true archetype" | 08/24/07 | 8615 |
| Film / Genre / To Read | Todd Berliner's "genre-breakers" and "genre-benders" Lichtenfeld's summary: "genre-breakers ... use the [genre] conventions to attack the genre ideologically" and genre-benders "distend their genres just enough to mislead audiences who have been prepared for a familiar, generically proscribed outcome" see Berliner's "Genre Film as Booby Trap" in Cinema Journal 40, no. 3 (2001) | 08/24/07 | 8616 |
| Film: Action Movies / Genre | the action film "comprises different trends"; it is "a synthesis of other genres" (Lichtenfeld) (the Western, the noir, the police procedural, combat film, science fiction) "It is ... an extrapolation of the most essential narrative elements from *all* of the pre-existing action-oriented genres" (Richard Slotkin, in Foreword) | 08/24/07 | 8617 |
| Film: Action Movies / Crime / Power / Violence | Eric Lichtenfeld's distinction between the action film and the police procedural: "In the action film, investigative procedure is second to the genre's real concern: not the investigation of crime, but rather the obliteration of criminals." | 08/24/07 | 8618 |
| Film: Action Movie | Joel Silver 's "whammy theory" = one major sequence per reel | 08/24/07 | 8619 |
| Film: Action Movies / To See / To Do | the "home invasion" film John Berry's He Ran All the Way (1951) William Wyler's The Desperate Hours (1955) influences on John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13? see also: Panic Room? Straw Dogs? Funny Games? The new "Them"? You've got half the makings of a Facets film class here | 08/24/07 | 8620 |
| Film / Industrial Age / Architecture / Myth: Orpheus | Jackson DeGovia (production designer on Red Dawn, Die Hard, and Speed): "Designers like industrial settings because they're massive, they're masculine, and they light well. Switch engines and steel presses; they're the ultimate toys for boys. [Industrial settings] have lots of places to hide, lots of levels. You can be very free there." Also: "The industrial interior is not about human beings. These are the waste products of society. The [industrial setting] has the mystique of the lair, of abandonment. It is Orpheus-into-the-underworld, where evil comes from." | 08/31/07 | 8613 |
| Film: Action Movies / Ritual / Body / Technology | Eric Lichtenfeld comments upon the "practically ceremonial" montages in Rambo, Cobra, and Commando "What is ritualized is the body ... the body and weapons ... or weapons and actual rituals" "The montage is in itself a ritual" | 09/01/07 | 8649 |
| Film: Action Films | villains, in the action film, are the figures that "take pleasure in transgression" (Lichtenfeld, 85) see Commando's Matrix character, or Dirty Harry's Scorpio, or many others | 09/01/07 | 8650 |
| Film: Action Movies | Lethal Weapon (and 48 Hrs) are partaking in the "mismatched buddy tradition that dates back to early sound comedies" "In action movie partnerships, a hero will be assigned his opposite: if one is older or reserved, the other is young or brase (the Lethal Weapon series, the two Stakeout films, Tango & Cash, The Rookie, Bad Boys, The Rock); if one is a battle-hardened cop, the other is a starry-eyed tagalong (The Hard Way, Last Action Hero, Showtime); if one is black, the other is white (Magnum Force, the Lethal Weapons, Off Limits, The Last Boy Scout, Die Hard with a Vengeance, the two 48 Hrs. films, the 1986 Running Scared); if one is American, the other is Chinese (the Rush Hour films) or a Soviet (Red Heat); if one is human, the other is a machine (the Robocop series), an extra-terrestria (Alien Nation), or the undead (Dead Heat)." | 09/01/07 | 8651 |
| Film: Action Movies / War / Other | Many action movies (Rambo and Predator, most notably) appropriate the successful skills of the Viet Cong and attribute them to "American" heroes scholars like Michael Comber and Michael o'Brien hace noted that "Rambo resembles the Viet Cong in both his fighting strategies and in his opposition to American authority" | 09/12/07 | 9295 |
| Sexuality / Spirituality / Control | Eric Lichtenfeld quotes this intriguing passage from Susan Sontag (on Leni Riefenstahl): "[T]he fascist ideal ... is to transform sexual energy into a 'spiritual' force, for the benefit of the community." | 09/12/07 | 9307 |
| Film: Action Movies | Die Hard clones or progeny-- Toy Soldiers, The Taking of Beverly Hills, Passenger 57, Under Siege and Under Siege 2, Speed and Speed 2, Cliffhanger, Sudden Death, The Rock, Executive Decision, Con Air, Air Force One | 09/12/07 | 9319 |
| Film: Action Movies / Film: Westerns | Lichtenfeld compares Die Hard against High Noon-- not just in the emphasis on the final showdown, but also because "McTiernan [often] pushes McClane to the margins of the frame -- usually the left margin, as Fred Zinneman had framed Gary Cooper in High Noon ... McClane does not control the frame; it controls him." (164) | 09/12/07 | 9331 |
| Film: Action Film / Narrative | Larry Wachowski: "American filmmakers have gotten to the point where they just create their fights in the editing room. Those types of sequences are just designed for a visceral, flash-cut impact. Hong Kong action directors actually bring narrative arcs into the fights, and tell a little story within the fighting." | 09/12/07 | 9343 |
| Film: Action Movies / Violence / Editing | "As filmmakers top one another, and as the viewer's tolerance increases, filmmakers try to approximate physical sensation with technique that in the digital age, has become increasingly expressionistic. This technique may seem to make the action more intense, but really, it only widens the gulf between seeing an act depicted and sensing it on one's actual flesh." -Lichtenfeld, 277 | 09/13/07 | 9377 |
| Film / Narrative / Media / Corporations / Sport | cross-media / cross-platform promotions re Van Helsing: -- Universal launches "The Monster Legacy Collection" on DVD and a "Monster Legacy" clothing line [!] --monster-related attractions at Universal Studios Hollywood --monster-related attractions at Madame Toussaud's wax museum --a Van Helsing video game --a straight-to-DVD animated prequel --promotional partnerships with Carl's Jr., Toys R Us, and the American Red Cross [!] --promotional partnerships with TNT (a division of Time-Warner, and associated with the NBA [!] -- attempting to unify "the theme of the movie with the themes of our playoff coverage," according to Turner Entertainment drone Chris Eames) Not sure how much of this constitutes "storytelling" in any meaningful sense | 09/13/07 | 9400 |
| Film: Action Movies / Virus / Other | Lichtenfeld posits that the outfits in action-movie cinema "[insulate] their wearers from all that is pathological in a world obsessed with purity." Cobra, Commando, Blade | 09/13/07 | 9412 |
| Film: Action Movies / Violence | the action film's most basic tropes, according to Lichtenfeld: "sadism, masochism, martyrdom, vigilantism, vengeance, violent salvation, rescuing innocents, and the clash of the subhuman and the superhuman" these are distilled in Sin City | 09/13/07 | 9424 |
| Boredom / Attention | Anthony Lane, on Con Air: "There is nothing so boring in life, let alone in cinema, as the boredom of being excited all the time." | 09/13/07 | 9436 |
| Film: Action Movies / Ethics / Narrative | Lichtenfeld: "We can find an action film's conscience, or lack thereof, in how it treats [its] noncombatants, because here is how the filmmakers choose to present life and death as an abstract or pure value -- that is, as a value uncomplicated by considerations of story." | 09/13/07 | 9459 |