Wednesday 21 April 2010

Word synopsis of the whole plot – summarise you whole film what it’s about?
Chase
A film about a brutal killer who is racing against the clock to capture the only witness of a horrific killing of a helpless woman he slaughtered late one night. It’s a game of cat and mouse as lily Mathews continues to elude capture and tries to solve the dreadful crime. Lilly finds herself in a series of life changing events as the course of like take it turn for the worse. Without the support of the police to back her up, she takes the law into her own hands, risking her own life to bring this unknown killer justice. As lily gets closer to discovering the truth behind the murder killer (Robert Clarke) gets dangerously close to discovering her. Lily becomes subject to his brutality and suffers the same fate as the innocent first victim. It’s not until she is found, that the authorities realise that lily’s supposed claims of the murderer were true. Clarke Is eventually captured and put on trail for the death of two innocent young girls.
Planning
Discussions of target audience – who do you, think the genre is aimed at? Think about age and gender. Write one hundred and fifty words which summarises your thoughts on the audience for crime films.

The target audience for crime genres usually is usually teenagers to adults but more so males are the wider viewers if crime movies. The reason I think crime movies are made for more male viewers is because they often contain several scenes of violence and explosive scenes. The typical stereotype movie for a female viewer is often love story films and romance. Women are more unlikely to view films at the Cinerama with scenes containing violence, bloody scenes and crime. There is too much violence in a crime movie for young children to witness, also a lot of elderly people wouldn’t like to view at crime at cinemas due to death and violent scenes. Therefore I thin k that the main audience for a crime film is mainly aimed towards teenagers and the older generation, more so males.

Monday 19 April 2010



Compared to the crime movies this is a totally different type of movie. You can tell this because there no guns portrayed, no violence, no anger just a happy couple in the sunset, which suggests its going to be a chick flick.

The gun indicates violence, but the two leading actors have a history of comedy movies therefore this would indicate to the audience that this will be a crime comedy movie. The joke at the top ‘big cops, small town, moderate violence’ also indicates that this is a crime comedy movie. The crime comedy movie views the typical fat cop which indicates clumsiness and more comedy humour. The background indicates that this film is set in a city. This may be acuity where a lot of trouble is caused and many people live. This may be the base of many different stereotypes.


The images of the gun shows that this is a code of a crime film and it’s not something you would see in a comedy film. The fact that they are pointing at beach other indicates violence. The cover shows that the film is set in a city, therefore a place which is more likely to witness crime and have guns. The bullet holes may symbolise death and more violence. The blue flames indicate explosions leading towards more violence.
History of crime films
The crime film has none—or rather, it has so many that it is impossible to give a straightforward account of the genre's development without getting lost in innumerable byways as different crime formulas arise, evolve, compete, mutate, and cross-pollinate. Crime films arise from a radical ambivalence toward the romance of crime. That romance gave heroic detectives like Sherlock Holmes—burlesqued onscreen as early as 1900 or 1903 (the exact date is uncertain), in the thirty-second Sherlock Holmes Baffled —a matchless opportunity to make the life of the mind melodramatic and glamorous, and it made silent criminals like Phantoms (Phantoms and four sequels, France, 1913–1914) and Bull Weed (Underworld, 1927) both villain and hero. The arrival of synchronized sound in 1927 and the Great Depression in 1929 created an enormous appetite for escapist entertainment and a form of mass entertainment, the talkies, capable of reaching even the simplest audiences, including the millions of lower-class immigrants who had flocked to America. The great gangster films of the 1930s and the long series of detective films that flourished alongside them, their detectives now increasingly ethnic ( Charlie Chan Carries On , 1931, and forty-one sequels; Think Fast, Mr. Moto , 1937, and seven sequels; Mr. Wong, Detective , 1938, and four sequels), were nominally based on novels. But crime films did not seek anything like the literary cachet of establishment culture until the rise of film noir —atmospheric tales of heroes most often doomed by passion—named and analyzed by French journalists but produced in America throughout the decade beginning in 1944.
Post-war crime films, whatever formula they adopted, were shaped in America by cultural anxiety about the nuclear bomb (Kiss Me Deadly, 1955) and the nuclear family (The Desperate Hours, 1955). The decline of film noir after Touch of Evil (1958) was offset by a notable series of crime comedies at England's Ealing Studios (such as The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951) and a masterly series of psychological thrillers directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train, 1951; Rear Window, 1954; Vertigo, 1958; North by Northwest, 1959; Psycho, 1960). The 1960s was the decade of the international spy hero James Bond, who headlined history's most lucrative movie franchise in a long series beginning with Dr. No (1962). But it was left to a quartet of ironic valentines to retro genres, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Chinatown (1974), to reinvent the crime film for a hip young audience. The replacement of the 1930 Production Code by the 1969 ratings system allowed niche films to be successfully marketed even if they were as graphically violent as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990) or as bleak in their view of American politics as The Parallax View (1974) or JFK (1991). The closing years of the century, marked by a heightened public fear of crime, a fascination with the public-justice system, and a deep ambivalence toward lawyers, allowed a thousand poisoned flowers to bloom around the globe, from the sociological sweep of the British television miniseries Traffic (1989), remade and softened for American audiences as Traffic (2000), to the ritualistic Hong Kong crime films of John Woo ( Die due shooing Xing [The Killer], 1989) and Johnny To ( Dung fang seam hap [The Heroic Trio], 1993) and their American progeny ( Pulp Fiction , 1994), to the steamy eroticism of the all-American Basic Instinct (1992) and its direct-to-video cousins. Perhaps the most distinctive new strain in the genre has been the deadpan crime comedy of Joel (b. 1954) and Ethan (b. 1957) Cone, whose films, from Blood Simple (1985) to The Ladykillers (2004), left some viewers laughing and others bewildered or disgusted.
Conventions of a crime film (mind map)

In a crime movie the Protagonist (good guy) will usually pay a big price (thriller).
In a lot of crime movies the sound and editing play a big part in the film, as this can be done with quick cuts and camera angle changes, music that gives tension and builds up in the film when appropriate.
Again Lighting, especially the use of shadow to lead up to action adds a good setting to a crime film. Mirrors are also conventions of crime/thriller movies, such as looking up and seeing something behind you. It usually sees the good guy take on the bad guy. Usually have the police are the good side.
Guns and other high tech weaponry are commonly used. Also sources such a knifes, and general harmful weapons
They allow audiences to indulge two logically incompatible desires: the desire to enter a criminal world most of them would take pains to avoid in real life, and the desire to walk away from that world with none of its traumatic or fatal consequences. Whether they focus on criminals, convicts, avengers, detectives, police officers, attorneys, or victims, crime films depend on a nearly universal fear of crime and an equally strong attraction to the criminal world. They play on a powerful desire for a modern-day version of the catharsis that Aristotle contended should evoke and purge pity and terror. Crime films from every nation help establish that nation's identity even as criminals seem to be trying their hardest to undermine it.