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Wednesday, July 30, 2008

film "shutter"(2008)

Shutter (2008 film)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Directed by
Masayuki Ochiai
Produced by
Doug DavisonTakashige IchiseRoy LeeSonny Mallhi
Written by
Luke Dawson
Starring
Joshua JacksonRachael Taylor
Music by
Nathan Barr
Distributed by
20th Century Fox
Release date(s)
March 21, 2008. Australia May 15, 2008[1]
Running time
1 hr 25 min
Country
United States
Language
English
Official website
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile
Shutter is a 2008 remake of the 2004 Thai film of the same name. The remake was directed by Masayuki Ochiai, and was released on March 21, 2008.[2].

Ben and his new wife Jane leave New York for Tokyo, Japan, where Ben has a job as a photographer. They start to find mysterious lights in their photos. Ben's assistant takes them to her boyfriend, who says that the lights are spirits and then finding a mysterious presence stalking them. They then go to a psychic, Murase; however, Ben refuses to translate what Murase says.
Later on Jane decides to visit the office building in the photo. When she gets there, she goes to the floor where the light has gathered, and takes pictures in the empty office. She encounters the spirit, and learns that the girl's name was Megumi Tanaka and that Ben knew her. When she confronts Ben about it, he admits that he and Megumi were once involved in a relationship, but that she was very obsessive and clingy. Jane is upset with Ben and decides they need to find Megumi.
They go to Megumi's home, only to find her decayed body; she had committed suicide. Meanwhile, Ben's friends, Adam and Bruno, are killed by Megumi. Adam's eye is torn out while shooting pictures; Bruno commits suicide. Finally, Ben is attacked by the ghost of Megumi. Jane in desperation yells, "He didn't love you!" Megumi stops, leaving Ben alive.
After Megumi's cremation Ben and Jane return to New York, thinking it's all over. However, Jane finds some recent photos in an envelope which still show Megumi. She then finds more photos showing Ben, Adam, and Bruno forcing themselves on Megumi. Realizing that Megumi was trying to warn her, Jane leaves.
Angered, Ben begins photographing the apartment looking for Megumi, but finds Megumi sitting on his shoulders. In an effort to rid himself of her, he electrocutes himself. He is rendered completely catatonic and sent to a mental institution. The last scene is a reflection of the glass from the door, showing Megumi still with him.

[edit] Critical reception
The film was not screened for critics, often an indication that the studio feels it will receive poor reviews, but also common among horror films in general, which stride away from a younger audience that does not tend to abide by reviews as much as other demographics.
The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 7% of critics gave the film positive reviews based on 51 reviews, and Top Critics has a 10% rating based on 10 reviews.[3] Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 37 out of 100, based on 12 reviews.[4]

[edit] DVD release
Shutter was released on DVD July 15, 2008 and the unrated edition will include commentary, Featurettes, deleted scenes and an alternate ending.
The theatrical version will be sold as well.

[edit] Box office performance
The film was released March 21, 2008 in the United States and Canada and grossed $10.4 million in 2,753 theaters its opening weekend, ranking #3 at the box office.[5] As of June 19, 2008, it has grossed a total of $43.7 million worldwide — $25.9 million in the United States and Canada and $17.8 million in other territories.[6]

[edit] References
^ Shutter - Village Cinemas
^ Thai horror remake Shutter gets release date, Film Junk; retrieved 2007-12-01
^ "Shutter Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved on 2008-06-27.
^ "Shutter (2008): Reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved on 2008-05-12.
^ "Shutter (2008) - Weekend Box Office Results". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved on 2008-05-12.
^ "Shutter (2008)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved on 2008-05-11.

comedy

Comedy

Comedy
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To meet Wikipedia's quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup because it is in a list format that may be better presented using prose.You can help by converting this section to prose, if appropriate. Editing help is available. (April 2008)
Comedy has a popular meaning (any discourse generally intended to amuse, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy). This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was remarkably influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters.[1]
The theatrical genre can be simply described as a dramatic performance which pits two societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye famously depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old" (The Anatomy of Criticism, 1957), but this dichotomy is seldom described as an entirely satisfactory explanation.
A later view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes; in this sense, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse to ruses which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter (Marteinson, 2006).
Much comedy contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations, but there are many recognized genres of comedy. Satire and political satire use ironic comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of humor.
Parody borrows the form of some popular genre, artwork, or text but uses certain ironic changes to critique that form from within (though not necessarily in a condemning way). Screwball comedy derives its humor largely from bizarre, surprising (and improbable) situations or characters. Black comedy is defined by dark humor that makes light of so called dark or evil elements in human nature. Similarly scatological humor, sexual humor, and race humor create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comedic ways.
A comedy of manners typically takes as its subject a particular part of society (usually upper class society) and uses humor to parody or satirize the behavior and mannerisms of its members. Romantic comedy is a popular genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms, and focuses on the foibles of those who are falling in love.
Etymology
The word "comedy" is derived from the Classical Greek κωμῳδία, which is a compound either of κῶμος (revel) or κώμη (village) and ᾠδή (singing): it is possible that κῶμος itself is derived from κώμη, and originally meant a village revel. The adjective "comic" (Greek κωμικός), which strictly means that which relates to comedy is, in modern usage, generally confined to the sense of "laughter-provoking".[2] Of this, the word came into modern usage through the Latin comoedia and Italian commedia and has, over time, passed through various shades of meaning.[3]
Greeks and Romans confined the word "comedy" to descriptions of stage-plays with happy endings. In the middle ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings and a lighter tone. In this sense Dante used the term in the title of his poem, La Divina Commedia. As time progressed, the word came more and more to be associated with any sort of performance intended to cause laughter.[3]

[edit] History
In ancient Greece, comedy seems to have originated in bawdy and ribald songs or recitations apropos of fertility festivals or gatherings, or also in making fun at other people or stereotypes.[2] Aristotle, in his Poetics, states that comedy originated in Phallic songs and the light treatment of the otherwise base and ugly. He also adds that the origins of comedy are obscure because it was not treated seriously from its inception.[4]
The phenomena connected with laughter and that which provokes it have been carefully investigated by psychologists. They agreed the predominating characteristics are incongruity or contrast in the object, and shock or emotional seizure on the part of the subject. It has also been held that the feeling of superiority is an essential, if not the essential, factor: thus Thomas Hobbes speaks of laughter as a "sudden glory." Modern investigators have paid much attention to the origin both of laughter and of smiling, as well as the development of the "play instinct" and its emotional expression.

Film

FILM
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Movie)
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This article is about motion pictures. For other uses, see Film (disambiguation).
"Movie" redirects here. For other uses, see Movie (disambiguation).
"Moving picture" redirects here. For other uses, see Moving Pictures.

Film is a term that encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or special effects.
Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment and a powerful method for educating — or indoctrinating — citizens. The visual elements of cinema gives motion pictures a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions by using dubbing or subtitles that translate the dialogue.
Traditional films are made up of a series of individual images called frames. When these images are shown rapidly in succession, a viewer has the illusion that motion is occurring. The viewer cannot see the flickering between frames due to an effect known as persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. Viewers perceive motion due to a psychological effect called beta movement.
The origin of the name "film" comes from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) had historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion picture, including picture, picture show, photo-play, flick, and moHistory
Main article: History of film
In the 1860s, mechanisms for producing artificially created, two-dimensional images in motion were demonstrated with devices such as the zoetrope and the praxinoscope. These machines were outgrowths of simple optical devices (such as magic lanterns) and would display sequences of still pictures at sufficient speed for the images on the pictures to appear to be moving, a phenomenon called persistence of vision. Naturally the images needed to be carefully designed to achieve the desired effect, and the underlying principle became the basis for the development of film animation.

A frame from Roundhay Garden Scene, the world's earliest film, by Louis Le Prince, 1888
With the development of celluloid film for still photography, it became possible to directly capture objects in motion in real time. Early versions of the technology sometimes required a person to look into a viewing machine to see the pictures which were separate paper prints attached to a drum turned by a handcrank. The pictures were shown at a variable speed of about 5 to 10 pictures per second, depending on how rapidly the crank was turned. Some of these machines were coin operated. By the 1880s the development of the motion picture camera allowed the individual component images to be captured and stored on a single reel, and led quickly to the development of a motion picture projector to shine light through the processed and printed film and magnify these "moving picture shows" onto a screen for an entire audience. These reels, so exhibited, came to be known as "motion pictures". Early motion pictures were static shots that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques.
Ignoring Dickson's early sound experiments (1894), commercial motion pictures were purely visual art through the late 19th century, but these innovative silent films had gained a hold on the public imagination. Around the turn of the twentieth century, films began developing a narrative structure by stringing scenes together to tell narratives. The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots of varying sizes and angles. Other techniques such as camera movement were realized as effective ways to portray a story on film. Rather than leave the audience in silence, theater owners would hire a pianist or organist or a full orchestra to play music fitting the mood of the film at any given moment. By the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music for this purpose, with complete film scores being composed for major productions.

A shot from Georges Méliès Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902), an early narrative film.
The rise of European cinema was interrupted by the breakout of World War I while the film industry in United States flourished with the rise of Hollywood. However in the 1920s, European filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang, along with American innovator D. W. Griffith and the contributions of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and others, continued to advance the medium. In the 1920s, new technology allowed filmmakers to attach to each film a soundtrack of speech, music and sound effects synchronized with the action on the screen. These sound films were initially distinguished by calling them "talking pictures", or talkies.
The next major step in the development of cinema was the introduction of so-called "natural" color. While the addition of sound quickly eclipsed silent film and theater musicians, color was adopted more gradually as methods evolved making it more practical and cost effective to produce "natural color" films. The public was relatively indifferent to color photography as opposed to black-and-white,[citation needed] but as color processes improved and became as affordable as black-and-white film, more and more movies were filmed in color after the end of World War II, as the industry in America came to view color as essential to attracting audiences in its competition with television, which remained a black-and-white medium until the mid-1960s. By the end of the 1960s, color had become the norm for film makers.
Since the decline of the studio system in the 1960s, the succeeding decades saw changes in the production and style of film. New Hollywood, French New Wave and the rise of film school educated independent filmmakers were all part of the changes the medium experienced in the latter half of the 20th century. Digital technology has been the driving force in change throughout the 1990s and into the 21st centurst commonly, movie. Additional terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the cinema, and the movies.

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