i'm kael's ghost

Written and directed by Luc Besson , this generation's most brilliant and prolific action movie creator, The Fifth Element is this superb little piece of filmmaking that some how manages to hold up over the years. The quick summary: A cabbie, a priest, a radio show host, and a beautiful alien woman race to save the world. An evil power, a greedy businessman, and some ugly aliens try to stop them. Dramatic adventures ensue. This movie is an amalgamation of all the sci-fi that came before it; Barbarella  (There are whacky costumes galore!), Blade Runner  Flying police cars? Yup. Asian noodles? Sure.), Star Wars  (SO MANY stolen ship designs.), and Total Recall  (nearly identical vision of future transportation.) with a little Roger Rabbit , Brazil , and   Toys on the side. In fact, I think you'd be harder pressed to find a movie NOT  represented in The Fifth Element than for me to continue trying to list ones that definitely are. It's also a mix of...

There are terms that always seem to come up when talking about films: director, actor, plot, theme, score, etc. These terms are all self-explanatory; no one ever asks, ‘what’s a director?’ However, there are other terms that are equally common but less clear: genre, sub-genre, auteur, oeuvre, etc. These terms are more abstract then ‘director’ or ‘actor.’ It is entirely likely that someone will ask, ‘what is genre, anyway?’ This question specifically is what I will be answering with this paper. The answer to the question ‘what is genre,’ is multi-layered: genre is a means of classification. Genre is a means of communication. Genre is a means of understanding films. Genre is a means of relating to films. To one person all movies rated “PG” are a genre – possibly one also known as “children’s movies” – while to another all movies with similar topics treated in similar ways are a genre: i.e. movies dealing with frontier life depicted in a nostalgic manner are a genre often kn...

Head's up kiddies - this blog post will contain SPOILERS about  Prometheus . If you don't want to read them - turn back now. I feel like people are really struggling with Prometheus mostly because of misaligned expectations: this movie IS NOT  Alien . It's not even  Aliens . Is Prometheus related to Alien? Absolutely. It takes place in the same universe that Alien does. (Same planets, same species of beings, etc.) But is it a prequel to Alien? Only in the loosest sense of the word. The events in Prometheus take place prior to the events in Alien. They also partially explain how the events of Alien came to be. Prometheus is not an action movie (like Aliens) and it's not a psychological thriller / horror movie (like Alien.) It's much quieter than either of those things; much more subtle. Prometheus is an exploration of the human condition. It questions what it is to be human. It questions our understandings and ideas about where we come from. It questions w...