Women in "Detour"

It seems that women are treated and represented in not the best light during film noir. They always seem to be up to no good or just another punching bag. In the early scenes of Detour, the main character Al Roberts seems to treat his lady like she was a goddess. He listened to her every word and was willing to travel to L.A. just to get her back. When he met his friend, Charles Haskell, the viewer sees that Haskell thinks of them as toys more as actual people. He mentions throwing a girl out of the car while in motion because she started attacking him. He has the standard attitude of a man of the time. I could easily imagine him smacking a girl in the mouth with a .45 (Play It Again, Sam reference). 

When we meet Vera, the viewer gets a different representation of a woman. She's strong and very willful. She is out for herself and that's all. She's the boss and she makes sure that Al knows it. 

She is completely in control the entire time, up until she tries to steal the fortune from Charles Haskell Sr. This was the first time she really showed anything other than anger and ferocity. "You hurt my hand and I'm going to get even." She isn't as strong and you can see how desperate she has become for the fortune.  

Ultimately, women are represented as cruel, strong, and threatening. Vera is the only woman with a very strong role and she ends up dead after breaking under all the stress of the plan she was trying to hatch. 

Is "Freaks" a Horror Film?

I have spent most of my youth studying horror films. They vary from psychological thrillers to gory blood fests. Over the time, the genre of horror has changed quite a bit. While I was searching for the film, Freaks, I noticed that every title had horror in parenthesis. After watching the film, I can see why many people of the time considered it a horror film.

To conservative people of the 1930's, seeing real "freaks" could be extremely scary. If I'm not mistaken, this was the first time people that were really mentally and physically disabled were featured on the big screen. Many people of the time have never seen this before, so it could honestly be very jarring.

Since I am very desensitized to horror, this film didn't strike me as falling under that category. But, of someone that isn't exposed to something so strange and real, I can see where it would be "terrifying".

Slapstick Comedy

One of my favorite types of comedy is slapstick. As I was growing up, my father and I would watch Abbott and Costello movies and laugh at the back and forth dialogue and the classic scenes where Costello would see something and react in a very outrageous way such as in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Costello sees Dracula, goes running in the opposite direction, and runs right into Abbott.

There are some very similar scenes in Sherlock Jr. One that made me chuckle was the classic slip on the banana peel. He tried to coax his peer to walk across the banana peel and fall to lessen his chances with the lovely lady, but instead he accidentally walks on it and falls to the ground in a very comedic way. Another scene that I really enjoyed was when he falls asleep during the showing of the movie and his dream self waltzes onto the screen and into the movie. Each scene change would cause him to fall in some way and I thought it was very effective in this scene. Although the compilation of him falling was very amusing, I don't think it really added to the story any.

Overall, I think the stunts are fun and quite edgy for its time. Compared to the kind of comedy we see every day, this is very different and sadly I don't think most people would enjoy it. Not many films do slapstick these days since our society is so strongly focused on spoken words. I really enjoyed the film and found it to be amazingly done for its time.

Introduction

Hello! My name is Megan Hoard although my nickname is Bailey (it's a very complex story). I'm a third year Exploratory student at UC and I want to get into the EMED program. I decided to take this class because I really enjoy films and film classes and I like to open up to films I wouldn't normally watch. I'm a huge horror fanatic and a self-taught special effects makeup artist. I spent the last three Octobers working in a charity haunted house acting and turning people into monsters, but sadly had to leave after money became an issue and I've been a freelance makeup artist since. Last October I worked with some professional makeup artists in Indianapolis for the Zombie Run.

I spend too much time watching films on Netflix. My favorite directors are Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, and Guillermo Del Toro. This makes it easy for me to pick my favorite movies. The top three are The Shining, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and Pan's Labyrinth. As you can guess, horror is my favorite genre of film. It is the majority of films I will watch in my free time, but because of some film classes I have learned that I shouldn't judge a film by the genre or even the title. Films have become quite a large passion of mine. I have made some short films that I never thought were very good, but I continue to try and create in my spare time.