Rashomon first impressions

The film had a lot to say about human morals. I liked the concept behind the plot, but I grew to strongly dislike the way the director filmed it. It seemed like the camera would just sit on a character's face for three minutes longer than it had to. Unfortunately, this slowed down the movie way too much for me.  The viewers spend about four-fifths of the film trying to find out the truth of who killed the husband. There was a lot of hysterical laughing and crying, which came off as fake at some points. But at other times there was absolutely no emotion. Maybe this has something to do with the "lost faith in humanity" bit. I thought that finding justice would be the main message of the film.
But the characters did a fairly good job explaining why they thought what they thought. And they successfully conveyed that it's not about what happened in the past; it's about changing the second we know we have done something wrong. That is why the ending, when the man adopts the baby, was so rewarding. I suffered through the film but finally reached an ending that was conclusive. The man says, "I don't understand my own soul," which sets him apart. Even the priest is not as introspective as he. This movie is about understanding one's soul and knowing enough to change it, which was what I though the wife was trying to get at when she told the two men to fight over her.

12 Angry Men

The climax of the play is right before the end when the 8th juror says to the 3rd, "It's not your boy. He's someone else."  Everything stops in that moment.  The 3rd  juror thinks that he knows every kid in society;  he thinks they are all the same rotten, disrespectful, violent human beings like his son may have been.  All of his prior notions and prejudices fall away in that one second. The view of children shifts as the jurors' votes shift. Juror #10 thought that kids were born liars. He even tries to insult the foreman by saying, "Stop being a kid, will you?" The pig-headed 3rd juror spits insults too: "What are you, the kid's lawyer or something?", as if it were a crime to defend a child. But Juror #8 refuses to blindly believe all the "facts" presented in the case. He doesn't try to force his opinion on anyone, but rather he simply points out the flaws in their arguments. As Juror 11 points out, "Facts may be colored by the personalities of the people that present them." That is exactly what I think Jurors 3, 4 and 10 were trying to do. But the 8th juror was able to appeal to the 3rd's humanity and reconcile his past. We never find out who really killed the father, but that is not what's important in this play. This play is about children being caught in tough positions and having a group of peers see with an objective eye what he really has gone through.  

Ebert Review/Post-initial analysis

"Nature is always deeply embedded in Malick’s films. It occupies the stage and then humans edge tentatively onto it, uncertain of their roles.....They are nudged here and there by events which they confuse with their destinies."
Holly confuses Kit with what her destiny should be. Kit is essentially homeless and finds himself gravitating towards homes through the film. He starts by burning Holly's house. Then he decides to build a new treehouse home for just him and kit, a place where the happy couple can start a life together. But as they keep running into trouble they start taking over other people's homes- Cato's, the mansion- until he finally returns to his car, his only safe place, and forces Holly to live there with him  and that's when their relationship starts to fall apart. At first, Kit is a victim of society, forced to live among the emotional trash that other people have discarded. Then the idea of nature comes up; Holly's fish gets sick living in the house and she is unsettled about "setting it free" to die outside. Nature, in this case, is a release from the world of the home.
Ebert's review says, "Malick’s direct inspiration was the story of Charles Starkweather, the “Mad Dog Killer,”." So in this case, Kit is the same as Holly's father. The dog is the one thing Holly is closest with and her father takes it away to teach her a lesson. Kit thinks that he can profit from making his coworker eat the dead dog. Similarly, he thinks he can find some identity by taking Holly away from her home, in a way "killing her dog". The home has now lost its love and emotionality; Kit thinks love and emotion can be traded like loose change. In the end, Kit never finds love; he gains a fan base because of the newspapers, but he gets executed just like Holly's dog while she receives probation.

MK vs. Badlands

Firstly, both movies are concerned with a young couple discovering where their love for each other fits into society's framework. Sam and Susie, although a little younger, know what their love means to each other, and they could care less whether or not anyone approves of it. Kit and Holly are a little different despite putting themselves in the same position. Kit pretends to not care what anyone thinks, but in the end he is visibly proud that the police officers have dubbed him a "James Dean character." Holly has no backbone and doesn't like getting walked all over by Kit and his plans, but her pleading  fall on ignorant ears. She embodies a weak female; when she does speak up, she doesn't follow through with her actions. This allows Kit to twist and spin her around in any direction he wants, whereas Susie would have never let Sam get away with that. But in both films the couples are escaping society because they see that their love cannot survive within the confines of society. In MK, the children are seen as the "chosen ones." Similarly, Kit and Holly become celebrities, chosen out of society to be put on a pedestal. Sam and Susie don't seek fame like Kit does, but all four characters are in a constant struggle of either respecting their partner or respecting society's authorities. 

Paper 1: Close Reading

The creators of The Adventures of Huck Finn, The Night of the Hunter, and Moonrise Kingdom are all interested in the story of authority in their given time periods. They use other stories (Moses, Noah, Shakespeare plays, Susie's fantasy books) as allegories to explain their individual film's story/ viewpoint on what authority has done to their characters. We see stories within stories to explain what people should do to handle the corrupt authority that has infested their daily lives. Were the 1930's corrupt? Can making up stories about the past and future teach the same lesson? In all three works the main point is that God is the only that knows everything; no other authority can be 100 percent right. Huck, Sam and Susie, and Jon are all caught in the midst of figuring this out. The point of stories is to remind us of the morals that society's authority has been trying to erase by transplanting characters into different times and retelling different stories through their eyes. 

       

Some examples: 

MK: kids are the "chosen ones" that have the knowledge of NOT knowing all of the rules that authority has laid out for them (authority shifts at end to where kids now realize what rules are good and which ones are bad--police, parents; family is not the only authority/ they can be wrong too; they fully understand the sacrament of marriage, whereas the adult questions their full understanding, Susie steals library books because the authority told her she cannot read too many at once; Anderson makes us look at Moses as a man that was separated from his society's rules that has corrupted the earth to follow God's authority, Adam&Eve in paradise listening to the serpent's wrong authority

HUCK: He makes up stories! Huck's name is constantly changing, he makes up who he is, who his family is (Jim is his sick Dad, Grangerfords &Shepardsons); Huck runs away from blood relatives to pick another family (family of one shared thought), he makes up his own characters because he wants a different story from the one Civil War-thinking society tells him (like King and Duke do too); Twain makes us look at Moses as an example of someone that rebelled against society's authority to follow God's (led Israelites out of Egypt). Jim 

NOTH: Powell symbolizes how corrupt authority can push people to do bad things (Ben Harper to steal and kill, Powell to kill, male jobs like hangmen); Jon and Pearl run away from the corrupt authority of a fake preacher to a woman that doesn't put her faith in society's authority but in God's; We look at Jesus's birth when three kings escape authority to see the Messiah, and Moses who is sent out of future bondage by his mother, Miss Cooper tells us in the first scene to "beware of false prophets in sheep's clothing"

other ideas:

-you can understand your life by looking at other people's stories/ can find strength by seeing how others handle similar situations in stories

-twisting stories into different interpretations is how a society's authority can corrupt the true morals  (Jim view on Moses vs. Huck's)

-reading fantasy books (The Girl from Jupiter; Disappearance of the 6th Grade) has more benefits than reading non-fiction books (Coping with the Very Troubled Child)