Rome's Pride

     This week I am reviewing To Kill a Mockingbird directed by  Robert Mulligan . It was produced by Alan J. Pakula  and was  released December 25, 1962. The cinematography was done by  Russell Harlan  and the musical score was written by Elmer Bernstein . To Kill a Mockingbird won three Academy Awards for Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Art Direction. It also won three Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor (Motion Picture Drama), Best Original Score (Motion Picture), and Best Film Promoting International Understanding (Award category was given from 1946-1964)     To Kill a Mockingbird follows Jean Finch (Mary Badham), nicknamed Scout, and her brother Jeremy, Jem, (Phillip Alford) for a couple years. Their father Atticus (Gregory Peck) is a lawyer in town. We see him with a case defending Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), an African American, against accusations of attacking and raping a white girl in ...

     This week I am reviewing Back to the Future  directed by Robert Zemeckis . It was produced by Bob Gale and Neil Canton and was  released July 3, 1985. The cinematography was done by  Dean Cundey  and the musical score was written by Alan Silvestri . The film won an Academy Award for Best Sound Editing .      Back to the Future is about teenager Marty McFly who is friends with an inventor Dr. Emmett Brown. Doc invents a time machine in a DeLorean using plutonium as an energy source that he tricked terrorists into giving him. As he is showing it off to Marty the terrorists arrive and attack them. Marty escapes in the DeLorean but ends up going back in time to when his parents first met. He unintentionally causes his mother to like him instead of his father so he has to put things right by getting them together. While he does this Doc of the past creates a way using lightning as a source to fuel the time machine to ta...

     This week I am reviewing Casablanca  directed by  Michael Curtiz . It was produced by  Hal B. Wallis and was  released nationally on January 23, 1943. The cinematography was done by  Arthur Edeson  and the musical score was written by Max Steiner . The film won three Academy Awards: Outstanding Motion Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing (Screenplay) . Casablanca follows the main character Rick (Humphrey Bogart) who owns a club in Casablanca. Many people that are fleeing the Nazis go through Casablanca and try to get papers in order to leave. Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) a woman that broke Rick’s heart in Paris comes in to the club with her husband Victor (Paul Henreid). We learn that she fell in love with Rick when she thought her husband died and left Rick at the train station waiting for her because she found out her husband was still alive. Rick then helps the couple flee to America by coming across two letters of transit and ...

       This week I am reviewing  Jaws ,  based on the novel of the same name by Peter Benchley,  directed by  Steven Spielberg . It was produced by  Zanuck/Brown Company and Universal Pictures and was  released June 20, 1975. The cinematography was done by Bill Butler  and the musical score was written by John Williams . The film won three Academy Awards for Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, and Best Sound. John Williams's score won a Grammy, a BAFTA Award for Best Film Music, an Oscar, and a Golden Globe Award. At the People's Choice Awards Jaws received Favorite Movie.       Martin (Roy Scheider) the local police chief of Amity Island discovers there is a great white shark lurking, terrorizing, and attacking swimmers in the ocean around the start of the town’s busiest beach season. Together with the help of Matt (Richard Dreyfuss), an oceanographer, and Quint (Robert Shaw), a fi...

         This week I am reviewing  Singin' in the Rain  directed by  Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen . It was produced by  Arthur Freed and was  released April 11, 1952. The cinematography was done by  Harold Rosson.  The musical score was written by Lennie Hayton and the songs in the film written by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed . Donald O'Connor received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy).       Singin’ in the Rain follows the character Don Lockwood ( Gene Kelly) who is a popular silent film star as the world transitions from silent films into talking pictures. His co-star Lina ( Jean Hagen) is seen in the public eye as his love interest when in reality he does not care for in any way. She also becomes a complication in the transitional process with her voice not being pleasing in the new films. Don meets Kathy ( Debbie Reynolds) as he is trying to escape fa...

     In this series of blog posts I will be giving my personal reviews on some classic films that I have chosen off of either the American Film Institute 's or the BBC 's top 100 Greatest American Films lists. Some of these were revolutionary to the film industry or are considered classics that go as far back as 1916 with the film Intolerance , a drama directed by D. W. Griffith, through 2011 with The Tree of Life , a drama fantasy directed by Terrence Malick. I will be giving some basic information on the film itself and a personal review. Some of these films I have seen before when I was younger but it has been a handful of years if not more while others I will be watching for the first time. I am very excited for this series to broaden my watched list of classics. I also put together some of the information on these films to be handed in for my Film and American Culture course I was taking.      The first film I am reviewing is  ...