Colby Leary

 

Life of Brian

 

Summary:

    I watched the movie Life of Brian directed by Terry Jones that was released on August 17, of 1979. This was a 100% a comedy movie with a lot of jokes that were about the Monty Python and Odyssey and a lot of history in general that you have to know somewhat about to understand most of the jokes. My history knowledge is not that good so I did have trouble throughout the movie understanding certain parts that were going on. Also which I thought that was a little weird and different is that most of the cast was male dominant. So that means that even some of the female parts were played by male actors that just added in more comedy to it. For the more serious parts of females in the scene were actually played by a female actor. One of the things that I took note for the camera angles is, there is a lot of fighting that goes on in this movie. During these fight scenes there were either a lot of close ups or a shot of the whole scene that is going on. The reason that they did this is not to make the fighting more interesting but to actually hide the fighting. A lot of the fighting that I saw from an actors point of view was fake fighting. So what they did for these scenes is a close up so you just see the faces or shoulder up so you don’t actually see what’s going on, or just a far shot of the whole scene where you just see a whole group of people pretending to fight when they aren’t. Also another thing that I noticed is that the sound effects in this are really bad and easily not a noticeable sound. For example when a guard was going to lightly back hand a prisoner there was a big slapping sound when it happened like the guard slammed him across the face. Also when a sound effect would happen like this, the camera would put more focus on the characters reaction instead of what is acting going on. Another thing that I thought was pretty funny and something I wasn’t expecting to happen is they starting using some animation like Star Wars. One point in the movie a guy fell off a tower but then the starship caught him and brought him out into space where a fight was happening. In the end I thought that all aspects filming and acting that I have learned in both cinema and drama, is not done well in this movie, but the thing is that this movie is such funny movie and jock that it makes the movie good the way they filmed it. But I think that if you have a decent history background anybody will love this movie just from the comedy aspect.