The Product

I finally decided what my final product will be. Rather than writing a separate essay for each director I'm instead going to write one large paper that talks about each of the directors. Also instead of breaking up the paper by directors, I'll instead have chapters on certain techniques, themes, characters, etc., and then how each director uses all of these things in their films. I wish I could have decided on this sooner because I practically wasted all of last week writing a rough draft on Kubrick. I definitely have some catching up to do if I want to stay on schedule. Since the entire thing will be one large paper, I'm going to need to watch every film before I start to write it. My goal is to finish all the movies I need to watch by May 1st. I counted it up and I have 29 more essential films to watch.

Over the weekend, I was able to watch Quentin Tarantino's classic crime tale Pulp Fiction (which is my absolute favorite movie) and the Christopher Nolan psychological thriller Memento (another one of my favorites). Having already seen both of these movies multiple times, my notes for these films were much more in depth and just all around better compared to films that I took notes on for the first viewing. It makes me wish I had the time to watch each movie two or even three times, but that's not entirely doable, even if I was just studying two directors. I feel a lot of these movies (especially Pulp Fiction) I could base my entire project on. While watching I just kept thinking that I could write like an entire 20 page paper on just this film. While as a person himself, I think Tarantino is a (for lack of a better word) douchey, white trash, asshole; there's no denying he is a genius filmmaker. He catches a lot of flak from critics and moviegoers alike because of his supposed "film theft". Whereas, I don't think Tarantino steals shots and scenes from other films, he pays homage to them. He takes his favorite movies and incorporates the best parts of them into his movies. I would argue Tarantino is the epitome of a modern day auteur.