Philadelphia

Philadelphia is the third and final movie that our group chose to watch for our director assignment on Jonathan Demme. While this movie's genre/plot was not very similar to either of the last two movies that I've seen, there were some cinematographic elements that I found very similar in both movies.

One thing that I noticed Demme did a lot of in this movie was showing characters at different angles. For example he would always show Joe's face (Denzel Wacshington) at a higher angle making him look like he is confident in himself, while on the other hand Andrew was often shot from a higher angle showing his defeat from his illness, AIDS. One really good example of this was when Andrew is in the court room and is starting to get very ill. He eventually gets up and collapses in front of the whole court, the entire time his face was shown from a high angle all the way through the very end while he's lying on the floor with the people in the room trying to save him. Another example of the angles that Demme uses include whenever he would show the lawyers from the big law firm that he was suing. Whenever they would show them it would always be at a low angle, followed by a high angle shot of Andrew. This really made it look like he was helpless and would be unable to win the trial against such a powerful law firm.

Another really interesting thing I noticed Demme did later in the movie (around 1hr40 in ) was the scene after Andrew collapsed in the court room and following the scene of him looking like he was about to die in the hospital. This scene starts in the court room from behind the back of Joe (Andrews attorney) looking forward to the judge and witness. The camera then either did a tracking shot/pan shot from behind joe's head all around the back of the courtroom going behind the heads of all the lawyers there. During the whole shot we are listening to the witness speaking while not knowing whether or not Andrew is even alive or present at the trial. Even though in the end this isn't that important to the plot, I won't say what happens next to not spoil the movie for anyone reading this. But the shot that he used at this time was really a interesting way to build some suspense/questions as to what had exactly happened to Andrew.

In the end I went into this movie thinking that it was simply going to be another boring good lawyer vs. bad lawyers case that I really wouldn't be able to enjoy and simply wanting to watch it to get this blog done, but have since then realized that I really liked this movie and it points out some very strong "social commentary" issues about AIDS and being gay that are realistic issues in today's society. This movie was less about the action and suspense of a trial but rather an example of some of the un-justices that we still face in our society and how people need to keep fighting for what they believe in. I have also come to realize, after seeing two movies by the same director with D-Washington in them, that he is a very believable actor that just does a really good job of playing his role.