OPENING ANALYSIS

American Psycho and how it unboxes corporate conformity

Title:

The font is sans serif, showcasing the corporate-like, minimalistic aesthetic, coupling with the light gradient grey. The blood drip signifies a horror, blood filled movie, yet its texture and shape is rendered very stylized, sharp, condensed and simplified to show modern view of the blood illustration.

Main title:

Consistent font, bolded at Psycho to emphasize the more important phase of the compound noun. Blood stain, similar to the blood drop, is aestheticized and romanticized into a reflective, romantic, intriguing shape.

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Establishing shot:

Medium shot of a fancy, upper echelon restaurant scene - showing the wealthiness and poshness of the setting.

The restaurant scene consists of medium shot jumping to close up, illustrating the cramped, tightly packed environment. The continuous talking of the waiters, the customers and cuts to intricate dishes means to overstimulate the audience, and showing off the exclusiveness of the event.

Strawberry and Meringue:

Callback to the opening title, with strawberry representing the blood stain and meringue for the white and grey background, illustrating the innocence and formality.

The contrast in color and saturation calls notice to the absurd killing activity in such a nice, formal setting.

Character introduction:

Characters are introduced through mis-en-scene, as well as their interaction and conversation.

The way they are dressed in proper, double vested suits, popped up collar and slick back hair shows the similarity and importance of keeping an image with their colleagues.

The topic at hand of this table of corporate men is bruising off of their working life, fame and validation from upper managers. The bruteness and narcissistic undertone exemplifies that need of conformity, yet reward personal achievement.

Cards on deck:

The subtlety of showing off and fighting for dominance comes from all businessmen wanting to split the bills and putting their cards onto the table.

The identical ranking of their cards also shows the conformity and similarity in company culture.

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The font of Marriage story is a simple, plain and homely sans serif, signifying this story is as heart-touchingly simple and relatable as the font is. The simply black screen and white title while fading out into 1st person narration illustrates the closeness and intimacy that the audience is getting, from the two characters pouring their heart and soul out.

What I love about Nicole:

What I love about Nicole is Charlie listing out the reasons why Nicole is such a good partner, wife and mom. The non-diegetic melodic, soft and wispy background music, harmonizes with Charlie's sentimental voice to play up a very heartful, romantic passage for Nicole.

Soft lighting, leaning on natural light and warm tone color is used to illustrate the natural, everyday-like setting of the movie, as well as allowing the audience to soften, lose their guard and sympathize with the characters.

Constant closeup and extreme close up tells us that the movie is more about the reaction and interaction of each character, than actual plot point to progress the story forward.

What I love about Charlie:

What I love about Charlie follows the same format, and this can be seen through the visual callback from both Nicole and Charlie being in the theater stage, dim lighting and expressed extreme emotion; or through the monopoly scene.

Tracking shot using handheld devices bridges the gap between the watcher and the characters, as it emulates how our eyes would naturally focus on, rather than being fixed in a crane. This helps with imagine we're there with the characters, watching their every step of the way, and hence being more intimate.

Yet, the transitional background music gets louder and louder, signalling something was not right.

Couple therapy

The diegetic ruffling sound of paper cuts back to the real time setting. This tonal change is noted by the brighter, more artificial lighting, with white light undertone than yellow or orange. The uncomfortable, unnatural fixed camera position, alongside with wider shot type, juxtaposes with the first 2 settings, making us disassociate from the coziness and familiarity of this family, but acknowledging that they are going through problems.

Narration-based monologue vs. conversation-based dialogue further exacerbate this binary opposition.

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Indent and iconic font:

The stylized Star Wars font is no where short of established American culture. This is modernized, unique take on bubble text, in addition to the disruption of harsh, hard straight lines with intentional concave corners, and continuity of characters that lines with S. This font can be seen as structured yet freeing, retro yet modernized, serious yet playful, a sequel that both takes itself seriously but not enough.

Music:

Motivational battle music, consistent throughout the opening. The music got more intense and theatrical as the heat of battle caught on, but lowered down as the characters spoke. The action sequence and special effect tries to match with the flow of the music.

Orchestral music is a big convention in the sci-fi genre, peaked with the Star Wars sequel as they greatly use extensive, original ensembles for their part.

Settings:

Futuristic space battle with large command ships hosted for hundreds and thousands of smaller battle ships. Civilization and parties in distrust and conflicts of interest, as they had grown in different directions. This difference and readiness for wars can be seen in props and mechanical design of each battleship:

Anakin’s: Small, compact, highly mobile and flexible. Shaped like a bullet with intached, short wings for better sliding and gliding, moving in between larger ships
Vulture drone: can be used as crawling means or transformed into flying drones to counteract Anakin’s ship. Can be attached to larger ships → the direct juxtaposition and opposition in sides within a war, by designing ships that directly restrain each other.

- Black out space overlooking colonies and metallic domes underneath. Domes are reflective with sunlight and light from explosion

Special effects:

Essential in sci-fi genre. Early 2000s special effects are not as convincing as nowadays, but overall create a very realistic and immersive experience. There was an abundance of SFX in unexpected compositions that caught the audience off guard, such as a fireball flying over the left side of the battleship and through the shoulder of the audience. Adds to fighting sequence and color gradient of the scene

Camera movement:

Mobile camera with tracking shots of the main battleship allows the audience to be as and with the scene, just as us gliding right behind alongside Anakin in the flow of battle. Constant zoom in and out to mess with the perspectives and closing/opening on the frame, as emphasizing on the overall setting/explosion/larger ships or on the main characters’ action and conversation.
A glimpse of POV shot from inside Anakin’s battleship

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A quiet place

Establishing shot is an extreme wide shot to encapsulate the general environment of the town, which was a seemingly ordinary town with livable atmospher
However, mise en scen quickly allured us to the post apocalyptic setting of the movie, with the empty town and grocery store, functioning traffic light and missing people board act as visual cues that the movie is taken not long after the tragedy hits. The mise en scene provides footnote of information for the audience, as making up for the lack of sound and dialogue.
As the family leaves the grocery store, there is another wide shot to pan out the empty environment. Ultimately, it shows how miniscule and isolated the family is from the environment, yet they are fully emerged and responsive in it.

Cold open: – there are no titles, no ‘meta data’, as the audience is expected to figure out the premise of the movie on their own, while having a more innovative take on it. Thus. the audience is thrown into action and building up enigma that only them can answer to continue watching.
Creative blocking: While ultilizing tracking shot of the smallest child walking out to the street is prevalent. There were camera moving pass the wall collumn, and the car, showing more dynamic and environmental information, while keeping the continuity edit.

That is a very interesting technique that I hope to apply in my coursework soon

Character: The opening was short, but greatly exemplified its characters well, and having the binary opposition between action of the dad and the mom of the family (by not giving the child his toy and comfort him), show insight of their role in the family for more to come.