Abogenrief

In Bringing Out the Dead, Nicolas Cage plays Frank, a graveyard shift EMT technician in New York City in the early 1990s. In classic Scorsese style, the themes of masculinity, subcultural underground interaction, and fast paced film editing combine to form the frenetic basis of Frank's neo-noir lifestyle. The film is dark, urban, and also blackly comic, relying on strong masculine characters to provide energy and humor.

Overall, Bringing Out the Dead appears to be heavily influenced by film noir. Frank, the protagonist, is at the end of his rope in a rather solitary and stressful job and he often finds escape from the ghosts of his failures through alcohol. Patricia Arquette plays Mary, the femme fatale character and woman in distress Frank seeks to save. The film is uber-urban, set mainly in the nighttime ghettos and hustling districts of New York City, and the major events center around various city dwellers. Frank's adventures in life saving are highlighted by the colorful characters of City life, including prostitutes, drug addicts, homeless persons, insane persons, goth-punk death rockers and the ubiquitous 'Mr. O.,' the smelliest destitute to plague Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy Hospital. Frank is led by Mary into the narcotic underworld, and meets the proprietor of 'The Oasis,' a charismatic dealer with a passion for tropical fish and silk robes.

Many of the lighting techniques also serve to emphasize the urbanality of the surroundings, often combining music and fast paced editing. The darkness of the City night is contrasted with the searing halogen of the hospital, and the sunlight that creeps through the window at dawn mocks Frank's insomnia. Indeed, the movie ends at dawn, with Frank nodding off to sleep. This is very similar to the traditional horror movie ending at dawn when the nighttime monsters are relegated to their nocturnal lairs. Editing techniques are feverish and accelerate in pace as the movie progresses and Frank's hysteria mounts. Many of these sequences involve a montage of the flashing ambulance lights, 360-degree camera rotation, blurred traffic lights and shots of the crazed driver behind the wheel. My personal favorite scene is when Frank is going to answer a call, and the montage is set to R.E.M.'s What's the Frequency Kenneth.

Overall, most of the main characters are the male ambulance drivers/EMTs. These characters, Frank, Tom, Marcus and Larry, exude a kind of unquestioned masculinity, which they prove through various means such as violence, excessive flirting, and alcohol consumption. Tom is a violent, hair trigger macho who enjoys pummeling transients and minorities. Marcus is a smooth talking black man who chain smokes stogies and praises Jesus. Larry is an overweight everyman, wanting to start his own paramedic business. Frank is a Marlboro smoking altruistic cowboy with a drinking problem and insomnia. At some point, most of the characters engage in drinking (liquor) while on duty or at least in the ambulance. The characters names are also quite masculine, especially in contrast to Noel, a man who is a drug addict of ethnic descent that is never arguably fully a man.

Inherently, Scorsese's New York City is an urban jungle that will break any man who is not strong or tough enough.

While many audiences have been shocked, appalled, titillated and confused by the vulgarity of John Waters' Pink Flamingos, I argue here that the film portrays the campy banality of the carnal while discreetly displaying the interaction between social classes and its relation to the profane. It has been said that horror and pornography are inextricably linked in the realm of the carnal; the provocation of physical bodily reactions sets them apart from their more cerebral counterparts though not necessarily through mutual exclusion. As Carol Clover has dubbed the "body" genres, horror and pornography fuse to form the union of Pink Flamingos. The plot of the film pits Mr. and Mrs. Marvel, an enterprising bourgeoisie couple of questionable taste and sexuality, against Divine, a female drag queen and veteran of Waters' films, who lives in a pink trailer with her family and a herd of lawn ornaments. In the film, the Marvels are attempting to 'out-filth' Divine at her own game, arguably what Waters is trying to do with the film itself in the context of middle-aged middle-classed whiteamerican heterosexual patriarchal ideology inherent in the male-dominated/based financially privileged bias of the film industry.

Although the film flips the bird to standard notions of socially hegemonic class-based values, it remains trapped in its own flaxen net of privilege. Waters attempts to criticize and ridicule mainstream society through the over-the-top frequency of lewd and licentious situations but loses viewers in a sort of stimulation-apathy akin to being in a porn store for too long. The film comes off less as a critique of societal values and taboos than a self-indulgent stab at the avant-garde through smut, and this manifests itself in the failure of the Marvels to truly be the monarchs of filth. I argue that the failure of the Marvels to usurp Divine's title of filthiest person alive results from their social position relative to Divine and her kin. Divine's class is coded through her living situation (a trailer with no address), dress, hair, makeup, friends, eating habits, speech and incestuous relationship with her son, Crackers. These aspects are conspicuously low-class and conspicuously American. This is also well evidenced by a scene in which Divine struts down the park stairs, the veritable epitome of all that is not encompassed by the standard ideology of American principles, flanked by the old red-white and blue in the background. Indeed, it is surprising when we learn that the film is set on the East Coast and not in a southern backwater. On the other hand, the Marvels enjoy the luxury of an address (3900), conservative clothing, 'refined' dialect, lucrative businesses, servants and (arguably) mutual repression of their 'true' sexualities (she the bookish lesbian, he the flamboyant gay man) cloaked in the guise of holy matrimony. Ultimately, the bottom line here is that the Marvels are hindered in their aspirations to filth through their relative privilege. The Marvels can 'pass' in the everyday world, unlike Divine, and thus they can never achieve true 'filthiness' that those of lower socioeconomic status are forced to afford. When 'filth' is defined by the hegemony of white capitalist patriarchal upper-class heterosexual values, their aspirations to it are inherently negated. Thus, the Marvels never had any chance of taking the title from Divine because they are not fully able to transcend these boundaries.

Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding reflects the marriage of Indian tradition with modernization and globalization, which is represented in the film through the language, scenery, clothing, and music. These themes show that tradition and modernity are not mutually exclusive, and that indeed you cannot separate one from the other. Monsoon Wedding reflects the increasing westernization of Indian culture while at the same time stressing the vital importance of Indian tradition. Throughout the film, the characters use a mix of Hindi and English, often code switching within sentences. A good example of this is the scene where the women are trying on outfits for the wedding and the teenage girl says, "The blushing virgin look [in Hindi] really suits me [in English]." The Australian relative is another good example of the infusion of cultures. For example, when he is asked what he is doing by his uncle, he responds: "Just Chillin," to the disgust of his uncle. In the movie, the family lives in a relatively modern looking home, and they drive modern cars, but the fact that they are living in a third world metropolis is rendered by scenes depicting the bustling city of New Delhi. In addition, the reality of their geographical location is manifested through the black out scene in which the father quips "That's the problem with Delhi!" and they have to use a backup generator with a manual crank in order to get the lights back on. There is a wide array of clothing styles throughout the film that reflect the fusing of cultures and the retaining of tradition. Traditional Indian outfits were donned for the wedding ceremonies while more casual and westernized clothes were worn for everyday activities. Overall, the younger family members tended to wear more westernized clothing, while the parents and grandparents wore more traditional outfits. The exception to this, however, is Alice the maid who wore traditional Indian clothing. This is representative of the link between upward mobility and higher social status and the consumption of westernized goods.

Alice is an interesting character because she is portrayed as a shy, meek, and simple girl who is rather old-fashioned. This is evidenced in the scene where she is talking to the wedding coordinator, and he exclaims that she has a white name. When he tells her his name, which is Indian and quite long, he says that he shortened it to just two initials. Alice responds that his Indian name is a lovely one. Throughout the film, the music presents us with the modern and traditional aspects of Indian culture. During wedding ceremonies, traditional songs were played and sung, while pop music was often played by the younger family members at other times. The music was one of the most involving parts of the wedding ceremonies, and this was evidenced by the women's singing at the henna painting ritual. At the end of the film, the teenage girl does a dance to Indian pop music, and symbolically (and arguably physically) pulls her Australian love interest into her culture. Monsoon Wedding shows us that traditional Indian culture is not relegated to the past but alive and thriving in a new interpretation. The language, scenery, clothing and music all serve to render the message of the colorful infusion taking place in Indian society.