Compare And Contrast Two Films (Movie Review Sample)

Name
Professor
Institution
14 October 2013
Compare and Contrast Two Movies
In the movie, ‘The Terrorizers', the plot has its focus on the unstable relationships of three different couples. There is the young male photographer and his girlfriend, a delinquent Eurasian girl Wang her boyfriend, a doctor, and his wife. The photographer is obsessed with his hobby such that he forgets his girlfriend in an attempt to chase after Wang An after incidentally snapping a picture of her escaping a crime scene. Wang collaborates with her boyfriend to commit a number of conspiracy frauds on random people including the doctor Li Lizhong and his wife Zhu Youfeng a novelist. The two are struggling to maintain their relationship amidst re-unions with past lovers and attempts to manage their jobs. Set in Taipei, the three interwoven threads of relationships portray life in the modern city life with its expectations and realities.
Yet another portmanteau film set in Taiwan City is ‘The Sandwich Man', made during the 1980s that gives a glimpse of the economic hardships during the 60s. Full of Taiwanese dialogues, it is about Horace Quilby who in an attempt to feed his family takes on a job as a sandwich-board advertising man. As a walking billboard, he gets to tour London and its many streets and in the process meets many outrageous and interesting characters who leave an impact in his life. Some of them include two salesmen who are in the business of selling pressure cookers that are unsafe and eventually have to face up to the consequences of their acts. There is also squatter family going through a lot of suffering but in the end is entertained with jubilation when an involvement in a road accident promises them compensation payment.
A recurrent theme in ‘The Terrorizers' is absenteeism, the continuous absence of things. It is evident from the movie that a concurrent message of the absence of fathers, politically and socially, is illustrated throughout the script. Politically there is the absence of leaders. The photographer also develops the theme in a number of ways, he in the first place desserts his family and girlfriend as his job engulfs his time and devotion. He similarly turns the apartment into a darkroom hence denying him the time reality as he creates his own world. A teenage girl whom he accommodates temporarily at a particular point asks him how he is able to differentiate between day and night. The movie gives a brief moment of revelation when there is a differentiation between darkness and light. ‘The terrorizers' is able to capture the logic and meaning of the dream world through the protagonists who are but individuals suspended in time. The relationships featured are also used to further illustrate the desperate situation in the intertwined lives. The doctor is preoccupied with his promotion and job and seems to have forgotten all about the wife who longs for a more romantic connection with her husband. This misunderstanding drives them to infidelity. Wang's father is similarly a protagonist of the theme of absenteeism as her mother is left to deal with her rebellious daughter and is forced to lock her up in the house.
This comedy, ‘The Sandwich man' on the other hand explores a set of themes including irony, stereotypes, and freedom. Horace has the time to go around the city as he explores all of its famous sights and ways. Most of the characters are stereotypes and are all fixed on certain images or places. It is only Horace who seems to be exempted from the bunch as he is able to mingle and understand the people. Michael is evidently one of the less famous individuals and very little of the absurd form of aesthetics is explored. The comedy in the film is however more of an anthology of comedy than of pure comedy. Every new character that Horace meets represents different comedy types since there is farce, verbal encount...