1975 Movie: Mischief In Manhattan

The plot of our movie is about 3 brothers and 1 sister all living in Manhattan. The two older brothers, played by DeNiro and Walken, run their own restaurant while the youngest brother, played by Hoffman, is living a life of crime. The two older brothers used to be involded in tha mafia and organized crime but they decided to stop and to make a decent living. They do not agree with their younger brother's lifestyle because they know where that road can lead, so they don't have much contact with him. Their sister is adored by all brothers and she is the mediator between them. One day the younger brother steals a lot of money from the mob boss and is in a heap of trouble. He runs to his older brothers and begs for help, but they want no part of it. The mob, while searching for the youngest brother, kills the sister. This breaks the heart of all brothers so the older brothers decide to help the younger brother and hunt down mob members.

The style is dark and gritty. We are making a gangster/crime drama, so it has to have these components. This works for the cast and crew because DeNiro and Walken are used to making these type of movies. Same with the director, Scorsese. He is used to making crime dramas and movies dealing with family issues.

The studio we are using is Warner Brothers as our distributor and our producer. They make a lot of crime dramas, including Mean Streets with DeNiro and Scorsese. This helps because it is the same style of film so therefore the actors and the directors will feel comfortable with this studio. This is going to be a high budget movie because Warner Brothers now trusts Scorsese.
For our cast we are using Robert DeNiro, Chritopher Walken, Dustin Hoffman, and Lynda Carter. We chose DeNiro as our lead role because he is a gritty actor that is used to playing in crime movies. We chose Hoffman because he portrayed an innocent man in Mrs. Robinson so we hope that he portrays a young, irresponsible character in this movie as well. Our director is Martin Scorsese because he makes these types of films. Our focus is cinematography so we went with cinematographer Gordon Willis. He is famous for doing the Godfather films and we wanted that same dark, gritty look. He likes to keep his characters in the dark, and that's what we want.

We went for the popular R rating at the time because we wanted to push the envelope, like most 70s films were, when it came to violence, sex, and language. We couldn't make a gritty film unless we went with this rating. We were aiming for a more mature audience so we could tell a gritty story.

Since our group bounced off ideas and didn't have many disagreements, the only thing I would have done differently was instead of hiring a star actress, such as Lynda Carter, for such a small role, I would have hired a star male lead to play the mob boss.

MYST #1: 007 Skyfall (Q2) 4.5 out of 5

I recently saw the most recent James Bond movie, Skyfall, and I thought it was fantastic. I may have some bias because I am a big fan of the Daniel Craig Bond movies. But besides that, I thought it was great. I thought the plot was very intriguing. James Bond is getting old and people don't think he still has it in him to be a 007 agent. It also brings in the fact that M, played by Judi Dench, has some past ghosts that come back to haunt her. Throughout the movie, we also find out who James Bond really is and how his past has affected him. The villain Silva is played by Javier Bardem and he did terrific. Javier Bardem portrayed his character as a psychopath which he did really well. I truly believed that he was insane. It reminded me of his character in No Country For Old Men.        

The Daniel Craig Bond movies is one of my favorite series, except Quantam of Solace. Casino Royale, in my opinion, was the best Bond movie, until now. Director Sam Mendes portrayed his vision of a Bond movie very well. He is best known for American Beauty and this is a drastic change, but he did it well.

Now I touch on the technical side of the movie. I thought the camera work was very interesting. Nowadays, we see a lot of action scenes in movies very shaky because the cinematographer want's to make it seem "real." It's refreshing to see a movie where the camera is still and you can see every move. This is different from the other Bond films. The lighting and the color of certain scenes such as when Bond is in China, it reminded me of Mission Impossible. The lights had a very high contrast. I liked it. But throughout the movie it had a dark theme, because it wanted you to feel how Bond felt. There were a lot of extreme long shots to show all of the scenery. Overall I thought this was the best Bond Film I have seen. I give it a 4.5 out of 5.