The Parallax View is confusing, yet enticing. The plot is easy to understand, but the film’s subject matter is hard to keep up with. Viewers are introduced to Joseph Brady (played by Warren Beatty). Brady is an ambitious journalist that decides to investigate a senator’s assassination. This decision however, leads to complicated scenarios of conspiracies which involve multinational corporations behind every event in the world headlines. What is interesting though, is that the film somewhat relates to Captain America: Winter Soldier.

Captain America: Winter Soldier is a Marvel movie that involves battles of Liberty with historic events, but done from a fictional approach. The Parallax View focuses on terms of battling for Liberty as well, but in real-life situations. How both these movies compare is the start of the conflict. Both start off with an assassination of a major superior. Captain America: Winter Soldier is set off with fictional action, and The Parallax View is set off with real-life situations.

The paranoid feel of Captain America: Winter Soldier is like a war movie, but the sense of paranoia with the concepts of superheroes added. The main character Captain America (Chris Evans) has some horrid memories of being in the war. The sense of filming plays into this as his flashbacks are faded in white and gray. With the paranoia side of The Parallax View, it is more of the main character giving into his emotions and making disaster choices as a result of his actions. Evans has many war traumas, and Beatty has many people and lots of press trying to grab his attention, but not for anything positive. The filmmakers choose to use the same paranoid approach in 2014 to grab viewer’s attention so there can be excitement.

The similarities with the plots of both movies are conspiracies that turn into disasters. When this happens, situations do not calm down. There is rising action. The conspiracy in Captain America: Winter Soldier is that the main character is trying to adjust to the present time period. He is primarily from the generation of World War I. Now with conflicts from the past coming into the present, the conspiracy is that the main character struggles to figure out what to fix. That becomes a disaster because the enemy from his time period somehow made his way into the present as well, and now he has a puzzle to put together to try and salvage the conflict. In The Parallax View, an assassination takes place and the journalist becomes hooked on the issue. This makes him read much into the situation, which potentially puts his life on the line. This becomes a disaster because people believe that what he is writing is not the truth. This makes many people despise him, and want to potentially harm him. The rising action is similarly constructed in both films.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a crime film with structure. There is an issue that happens and different people have different roles in the crime scenario. Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) decides to tell on his friends to avoid jail time. When he does this, though, his mob friends have family with lives on the line. The criminals, however, are depicted to seem as if they are normal people who have lives, but on the outside world, they have demons out to haunt them based on their judgment in the crime world. This film is detailed in how every character plays a role in this small town of criminals.

Director Peter Yates opens the film with a quiet tone of a character walking to his car. The silence in the film infers shady behavior. That is the tone where I find the suspicion and suspense to take place. That mellow tone leaves audience to be ready for a film with situations that can be disturbing, yet enticing. Later on, the movie brings us to a bar where the mob hang out. The cinematography of the bar is shaded black with some red. That cinematic concept sets the tone for suspense.

The film’s attitude on characters appears to be unreliable. The unreliability of characters later sums up to how everyone in the crime is involved. The film views the main character Eddie Coyle as someone who may be facing jail time for numerous offenses. He is a small time gangster in Boston. Coyle is stressed in curiosity on terms if he is going to be doing jail time or not. We realize his stress as he says, “I done the time and I stood up but I can’t take no more chances.” The relevance of this quote is that Coyle does not want to suffer because he knows he will not be in a pleasant place based on his actions. Especially since he has been there before.

Yates chooses to present the film in a quiet tone to be a different mob movie. Whereas other mob films like Shaft, Scarface, and The Godfather contain tons of shooting and violence. The Friends of Eddie Coyle has some of that, but has more of the conversations and people being held hostage play the suspense in the movie. Instead of frequent shooting of guns and violence, there are talks of guns in the movie. Guns are distributed illegally. When the deals are taking place, the conversations among the topic is relevant, sadistic, and calculated. The negativity of this aspect is shown in the quote where Jackie Brown (Steven Keats) says, “I’ve got more than five machine guns, and the rest are gonna be pointed at YOU.” This moment defines disturbing situations on terms of conversation instead of action.

The film may make viewers think that Coyle is the focus of the film. He is a big deal, but he is not the main focus. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a title that does not refer much to Coyle, but refers to the people he is snitching on. Also the word “friends” infers that these people can be normal people who live an everyday life. Based on their judgment, though, their enemies are going to come back to make their lives harder.

The filmmakers chose to present The Friends of Eddie Coyle in these manners is because they did not want to make a typical mafia movie. What I mean by this is a film where the focus would only be violence, coarse language, and suggestive content. An example is the movie Shaft. The goal of Shaft was to be harsh and vulgar, which was common for 1970s mafia movies. This caused The Friends of Eddie Coyle to stand out then, because this was a completely different type of mafia movie.

Three and a half stars.

Shaft is a 1971 film starring Richard Roundtree. The film is about John Shaft, a private eye who is hired by a crime lord to find and retrieve his kidnapped daughter. The film illustrates many racial tensions as Shaft attempts to complete his mission. In addition to dealing with kidnappers, Shaft also has to deal with the racism he encounters. The character Shaft helped to change the equation of typical police films and served as a heroic icon for African-American audiences.

Shaft changes the equation of the typical police film of the 1960s because it shows the corruption that existed in that time period. Prior to the 1970s, most cop movies focused on actors that were white. Black characters were often the sidekicks or underlings that worked at the desk. Shaft focused on a black cop. Shaft is gritty, smart, and sarcastic. He is popular with the ladies, but confrontational with the police force. Shaft is hired because he has connections to the projects and he can do things that the authorities cannot. He exposes that being trustworthy of black people seemed risky to the authorities. Shaft succeeds in the face of corruption by structuring his combat.

The film serves as important for African-Americans because of the culture that is illustrated in Shaft. The film gears on struggles related to their culture. The struggles include money, drug-dealing, ransom, and the dangers of the projects. The character Shaft is the key to the film’s depiction of the African-American culture. His rebelliousness, negativity, and violent behavior depicts the importance of the society that African-Americans have lived through. As he walks through the streets and gets denied by a cab driver (he gets denied because he is black), audiences realize the harsh society that African-Americans had to put up with. As Shaft is already self-centered, viewers are able to notice his aggravation with his life. Whites in the film are shown to be absent minded. This is a twist because generally blacks would be shown as the absent minded people during that time period.

Shaft was relevant for the time period because in today’s society, Shaft would not be considered controversial. This is not much of a big deal because society has progressed. Back then, Shaft was made during the Civil Rights Movement. Therefore, when audiences view Shaft, they are taken back to the time period. Shaft was the break through film at the time. It is hard for some to believe that Shaft was a hit back then. This is because it was one of the first movies where someone who is African-American is the lead and given authority.