FILM ANALYSIS - THE CONJURING 2

Film

The Conjuring 2

The films opening scene starts with a wide angle shot of the old abandoned house supported by the narration of the main protagonist of the story.

The camera keeps on moving towards the inside of the house, so whilst the protagonist narrates us about the situation,the audience also gets to look around different shots of the house to grasp in the haunting environment of it. Throughout we can hear non digetic sounds of typical horror themed violin music playing in the background,which is very common in horror movies.

Shortly afterwards theres on old newspaper styled font text that reads Amityville,New York : 1976. The reason they chose this font is to give more of the old cultured 70's experience when digital fonts werent a thing. This gives us a suspension of disbelief since we know it is happening in another time period.

The next scene shows a camera guy walking down the stairs in a room full of 8 people gathered around in a circle around a table with candles lighted whilst the narrator tells us that the house is haunted and the church had called her for help.

With just this much information, the audience now knows what the narrators role in the story is.

There are a couple of fast cut scenes to make sure the camera work isnt dragged by too lengthy close ups and one take shots.

As the camera zooms in on the face of the protagonist, non digetic sound turns to digetic since the protagonist sitting in the scene speaks and tells others to gather around and close their eyes.

The lightning in that room is dim and dull to give a greyed out effect of mid 70's and everyones dressed in an old fashioned way. Most of the areas in the house are dark since there are a lot of dark rooms in horror movies.

She closes her eyes and the narration follows again explaining how a man had murdered his entire family in that very house and they hoped to discover if the killings had anything to do with something supernatural.

As the camera keeps focusing in on her face, it stops right when the camera is close enough to get a clear shot of her eyes as she opens it when she hears a gunshot and the camera starts to zoom out its way back.The room is now much more darker and all the other people present in that room are gone,which shows that the protagonist is now using her mind powers and all of this is going inside her head.

The next scene starts with a tilt shot gradually moving forward as the lady walks from an over the shoulder angle.Tilt shots are very common in horror movies, so is the shot that comes right after the tilt. This is a specific kind of shot taken from the darker area of the room which is used in horror movies to give an impression that someone is out there in the dark and watching the protagonist from there.

The expression on her face and her slow paced walk shows us that she is just as terriffied as she is curious to find out the truth.

In the next scene, as she climbs up the stairs with the camera set of top of them,she is hearing whispering voice that are telling her to stay away. We can see old and rotten frames hanging on the wall of two young brothers, which explains us two things, that this house has been abandoned for a long time and those brother pictured were the ones killed by their father.

She climbs up the stairs to a room that opens its door itself, another effect that is very common in horror movies. The sound effects of the door cracking are very prominent to give an extra thriller with the movie.

As the door opens we see a grown lady in her pale white night suit which looks very old fashioned, in a room with an old 70's TV set and a bed as the voices start whispering again,this time telling her to "Kill her".

Suddenly, theres a quick cut scene when the lady turns her face to give a horror effect to of an unexpected scare and she shouts towards the protagonist. She then instantly falls down on the bed,shot in the head by the air gun that the protagonist pretends to have in her hands.

The next scene shows the protagonist standing in front of the mirror, where her reflection is not of herself, but of the murderer who has the actual shotgun in his arms and moves exactly like a reflection of the protagonist.

She then walks in the other room and shoots both the kids too.

The next scene takes us back to the real world where she is still sitting with those people in the room downstairs with her eyes closed and suddenly realises what she experienced and how tormenting it was so she starts to freak out, however shes still in her mind having the same visions and when her husband seems to ask her what she sees,that turns into a whispering echoing sound in her own mind which gives us a different sound experience that shows us that she is still in contact with the real world.

Frightened and terrified, she sits down on the stair where theres a close up of the face to show the frightened expressions of hers.

FILM ANALYSIS- LAW ABIDING CITIZEN

The film starts by showing the protagonist and his family. They seem to be having dinner together and watching TV, which represents that they are a happy family. Looking at the house we can tell its a 21st Century working class environment. There is mostly natural light throughout the first couple of scenes. We can hear a slight traffic noise from outside but there are no clips of the outside world which might give the impression that this could happen to anyone. There are wearing normal everyday clothes. The wife is wearing an apron which shows that she is cooking and the husband is wearing a suit shirt which shows him as an everyday man with an office job. There is no extra make up to make the family look as normal as they can.

The director creates an upsetting enviroment in the next scene as there is  disruption of the story's state of equilibrium as some terrorists get in their home and vandalize the place and steal whatever they can.

The camera work suddenly changes,with now having a series of fast cut scenes with increase the amount of tension in a scene since there is so much going on and the hero is trying to shout as he is knocked down with a tape sticked onto his face. There is a close up shot that shows the emotional state of the hero as he is watching his family getting murdered in front of him. This makes the audience focus more towards the action and dont miss out on any detail. There are special sound effects added as the screams are echoed around to give a more painful effect on the scene.

The scene then cuts to the title of the film on a faded out black background with a sharp font,similar to the story of this movie.

CASE STUDY; THE IMITATION GAME

About the movie : The Imitation Game is a 2014 historical drama thriller film directed by Morten Tyldum, with a screenplay by Graham Moore loosely based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges (previously adapted as the stage play and BBC drama Breaking the Code). It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as real-life British cryptanalyst Alan Turing, who decrypted German intelligence codes for the British government during World War II.

Genre: Drama/ Thriller/ Historical

​Release Date: UK ; August 29, 2014
USA; November 28, 2014

 Production:  Before Cumberbatch joined the project, Warner Bros. bought the screenplay for a reported seven-figure sum because of Leonardo DiCaprio's interest in playing Turing.In the end, DiCaprio did not come on board and the rights of the script reverted to the screenwriter. Black Bear Pictures subsequently committed to finance the film for $14 million.Various directors were attached during development including Ron Howard and David Yates. In December 2012, it was announced that Headhunters director Morten Tyldum would helm the project, making the film his English-language directorial debut.

Bletchley Park, "the home of the codebreakers" where parts of the film were shot
Principal photography began on 15 September 2013 in Britain. Filming locations included Turing's former school, Sherborne, Bletchley Park, where Turing and his colleagues worked during the war, and Central Saint Martins campus on Southampton Row in London.Other locations included towns in England such as Nettlebed and Chesham (Buckinghamshire). Scenes were also filmed at Bicester Airfield and outside the Law Society building in Chancery Lane. Principal photography finished on 11 November 2013

Produced by: Nora Grossman
 Ido Ostrowsky
Teddy Schwarzman

Production Companies:  Black Bear Pictures (Owned by Teddy Schwarzman)
Bristol Automotive

Distribution Company: The Weinstein Company

Budget: $14 Million

Box Office: $233.6 Million

Critical Response:

On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 90%, based on 229 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "With an outstanding starring performance from Benedict Cumberbatch illuminating its fact-based story, The Imitation Game serves as an eminently well-made entry in the 'prestige biopic' genre."On Metacritic, the film has a score of 73 out of 100, based on 49 critics, indicating a generally favourable rating of review.The film received a grade of "A+" from market-research firm CinemaScore and was included in both the National Board of Review's and American Film Institute's "Top 10 Films of 2014"
Cumberbatch's performance was met with widespread acclaim from critics. TIME ranked Cumberbatch's portrayal number one in its Top 10 film performances of 2014, with the magazine's chief film critic Richard Corliss calling Cumberbatch's characterisation "the actor's oddest, fullest, most Cumberbatchian character yet... he doesn't play Turing so much as inhabit him, bravely and sympathetically but without mediation".Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times declared Turing "the role of Cumberbatch's career", while A.O. Scott of The New York Times stated that it is "one of the year's finest pieces of screen acting". Peter Travers of Rolling Stone asserted that the actor "gives an explosive, emotionally complex" portrayal. Critic Clayton Davis stated that it's a "performance for the ages ... proving he's one of the best actors working today

Film Review: By the NY Times

“The Imitation Game” is a highly conventional movie about a profoundly unusual man. This is not entirely a bad thing. Alan Turing’s tragically shortened life — he was 41 when he died in 1954 — is a complex and fascinating story, bristling with ideas and present-day implications, and it benefits from the streamlined structure and accessible presentation of modern prestige cinema. The science is not too difficult, the emotions are clear and emphatic, and the truth of history is respected just enough to make room for tidy and engrossing drama.

An Alan Turing biopic is, all in all, a very welcome thing. Chances are that you are reading this, as I am writing it, on a device that came into being partly as a result of papers Turing published in the 1930s exploring the possibility of what he called a “universal machine.” His decisive contribution to the breaking of the Nazi Enigma code gave the Allied forces an intelligence advantage that helped defeat Germany, though the extent of his wartime role was kept secret for many years. The secret of his homosexuality was revealed when he was arrested on indecency charges in 1952, caught up in a Cold War climate of homophobia and political paranoia and subjected to the pseudoscientific cruelty of the British judicial system.
All of this is a lot for a single movie to take in, and “The Imitation Game,” directed by Morten Tyldum from a script by Graham Moore, prunes and compresses a narrative laid out most comprehensively in Andrew Hodges’s scrupulous and enthralling 1983 biography. The film interweaves three decisive periods in Turing’s life, using his interrogation by a Manchester detective (Rory Kinnear) as a framing device. Turing tells the investigator — who thinks he is after a Soviet spy rather than a gay man — about what he did during the war. Later, there are flashbacks to Turing’s school days, where he discovered the joys of cryptography and fell in love with a slightly older boy named Christopher Morcom.

The adult Turing is played by Benedict Cumberbatch (his younger self is Alex Lawther), expanding his repertoire of socially awkward intellectual prodigies, real and fictional. What has made Mr. Cumberbatch so effective as Sherlock Holmes and Julian Assange — and what makes his Alan Turing one of the year’s finest pieces of screen acting — is his curious ability to suggest cold detachment and acute sensitivity at the same time. If he did not exist, 21st-century popular culture would have to invent him: a sentient robot, an empathetic space alien, a warm-blooded salamander with crazy sex appeal.
His Turing, whom the film seems to place somewhere on the autism spectrum, is as socially awkward as he is intellectually agile. He can perceive patterns invisible to others but also finds himself stranded in the desert of the literal. Jokes fly over his head, sarcasm does not register, and when one of his colleagues says, “We’re going to get some lunch,” Turing hears a trivial statement of fact rather than a friendly invitation.

Awards Won:

Satellite Award for Best Adapted Screenplay
Capri, Hollywood International Film Festival Award for Best Picture
Palm Springs International Film Festival Best Ensemble Cast award
Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay
GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film – Wide Release
Academy Award for Best Writing Adapted Screenplay
Empire Award for Best Thriller
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Other movies by Benedict Cucumberbatch:
 Doctor Strange
The Hobbit
Star Trek
Penguins Of Madagascar

The Weinstein Company:


The Weinstein Company  is an American mini-major film studio founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 2005 after they left Miramax Films, which they had co-founded in 1979. They retained ownership of Dimension Films. TWC is one of the largest mini-major film studios in North America.
Their highest grossing films are:
1    Django Unchained            2012      $162,805,434  
2    The King's Speech           2010       $138,797,449  
3    Silver Linings Playbook   2012   $132,092,958  
4    Inglourious Basterds        2009    $120,540,719  
5    The Butler                        2013     $116,632,095  
6    The Imitation Game         2014      $91,125,683  
7    Scary Movie 4                  2006     $90,710,620  
8    Paddington                      2015      $76,223,578  
9    1408                             2007          $71,985,628  
10    Halloween                    2007        $58,272,029