LO1 Analysis of short films

The Fly (2008)

https://youtu.be/16ymmfya3i8

The fly is about an uptight getaway driver waiting outside a bank whilst his team mates go and rob it. He has three nerve shredding minutes to get through before they return, all he has to dot is focus but instead this goes completely wrong as a little annoying fly enters his car and starts tormenting him which causes him to start breaking things whilst trying to kill it. By the end of it the fly manages to win and makes the getaway driver screw his car up and hurt himself. The genre is an action comedy/crime.

The film can be applied towards Todorov's theory as shown here:

Equilibrium - Theres a bank robbery going on and the main character is a getaway driver 

Disruption - The fly comes along and starts annoying him, he then realises e can't cope with the fly being there 

Restored order - The Getaway driver tries the kill the fly 

New equilibrium - The thugs have been caught trying to rob the bank as there is no car and you can hear the sirens of the police

As well as Todorov, Strauss's theory can also be applied because there is defiantly binary opposition between the man and the fly as the fly remains passive and calm whereas the man is angry and really frustrated and the irony is that humans are the one who are supposed to be intelligent but has being acting more stupid than the fly as if the fly knew what it was doing

Talking about camera movements because its all mainly shot around the same place their are a lot of precise shot compositions, simple camera movements  such as over the shoulder shots, close up shots and extreme close up shots.  close up shots and extreme close up shots. The camera is mainly still at the start if the movie because the fly is not bothering him as much but as the getaway driver gets more frustrated by the fly throughout the movie the camera starts cutting a lot more and changing different shot types more frequently, this is used to further emphasise the mans annoyance.

Some examples of Mese-en-scene is the man is seen chewing on a tooth pick and later on in the film the fly makes him Pearce the tooth pick through his lip, this also further emphasises how annoyed he is. As well as that the colour palette of the whole movie is full with neutral colours that almost emphasise how miserable his life is and how low of a point he in is in his life by letting himself get annoyed by a fly that much.You can also see this through the way the way he physically looks because of his dark grungy outfit and his 5 o’clock shadow and messy hair which could link to him being fed up and tired of his life. During the end shot as well when we see the robbers come out of the bank their masks are all bloody which shows their violence.

The film also uses diegetic  and none-diegetic sounds. A good example of diegetic sounds are the fly that keeps making a buzzing noise around the mans car and a good use of none-diegetic sound is the screams and gunshots that come out of the bank as its being robbed which shows how ruthless these criminals are.

As well as that the film also takes advantage the conventions of a comedy film which consist of humorously exaggerating the situations the man is in for example when the tooth pick goes through his lip or when the man hits his steering wheel and the airbag hit him in his face. There are usually two sides of comedy where there’s dark comedy where someone gets emotionally or physically hurt for the pleasure of others and usually ends with a disappointment for the character like it did in The Fly or one where its the completes opposite in which the antagonist is the one making the jokes and ends with them getting a happy ending.

From my point of view I think this film is teaching the spectator to not stress about the minor things in life as overthinking never leads to a goof outcome and always leads to disaster as shown in a more extreme way in ‘The Fly’.