In the books, Human Comedy, Mama I Love You, and One Day in the Afternoon of the World William Saroyan uses the family theme. Saroyan makes the family the background in his books. He shows how the family has its good and bad times together, how it separates after arguments and how it comes back t...

The classic anti-war, anti-establishment, anti- (insert current debatable issue/action here) novel, Catch-22, follows the life of Yossarian, the main character, and his fellow Army Air Corps officers, stationed on an imaginary island off the coast of Italy, through a period during World War II. The...

Mr. Hulot=s Vacation (Tati, 1953) is a French comedy with a light touch. The film seems to exist in a time-warp of sorts, depicting a period when French and British tourists mingled on the beach at small resorts with little pretension to be big resorts. The technique of the film is observationa...

The novel, Catch-22, is a comedy about soldiers during World War II. However, this comic scenes and phrases are quite tragic when they are thought about, as most things related to war are, which makes this comedy completely absurd. The best way to represent this idea is through the character...

Throughout the course of history there have been events for which we are immensely proud of, and events that make us sick to our stomach. One such sickening time period was in the late 1930's and early 1940's during World War II when Nazi Germany strategically eliminated people of the Jewish faith...

In 1962, Stanley Kubrick made a satirical movie about a nuclear holocaust titled "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." Now, more than four decades later, Kubrick's film is an excellent example of human feelings during the early sixties. In fact, the movie c...

Walter Clark's short story, "the portable phonograph" is a descriptive tale. In his first three paragraphs, he describes a miserable, cold and harsh environment. The four characters that were described in this story were the only survivors of a brutal war. This story was written i...

The film industry has been greatly increasing over the years. Comedy, action, horror, love stories, etc. have been the basic themes in the movies shown today. Yet, like "Pearl Harbor", "The Patriot" or "Shindler's List", some films also are based on the historic...

In structure, most novels use a straight-line approach: the plot unfolds from beginning to end. Even stories that start in the middle often return to a point in the past, and then tell events from that time up to the present. Both Catch-22 and Charming Billy, however, differ. They do not use time...

MOTHER COURAGE: A LEGACY OF SURVIVAL Mother Courage is an unbraidable knot of contradictions: both fearless and feckless, wise and uneducable, maternally caring and emotionally aloof. A camp-following trader, she picks the bones of a war-withered economy to feed her fatherless children. Yet her ...

The forties are pretty well defined by World War II. US isolationism was shattered by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt guided the country on the homefront, Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded the troops in Europe. Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz led...

The forties are pretty well defined by World War II. US isolationism was shattered by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt guided the country on the homefront, Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded the troops in Europe. Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz led...

I think one of the most significant strengths of Casablanca, one of the few universally canonized films, is its simplicity. Adapted from a stage play that was never produced, it's not commonly known for its Great Cinematography, a term usually (and erroneously) applied only to movies with wide, exp...

Schindlers list, it is one of the many historical films, like Titanic which impressed audiences world wide. It received record gate reciepts throughout America and the rest of the world and undoubtly owes its success of particularly the western world in the horrific events concerning the treatment o...

A sword between two stones can turn out to be a problem. Two forces working against one another are the reasons for the dilemma. This predicament can be overcome, and the sword can be free if the two forces work with one another. An additional dilemma is deciding how these two forces are going...

Catch-22 The name of the novel I read is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. This novel's uniqueness makes it hard to classify but I would classify it as an anti-war novel. The main theme of the novel is one of hope and freedom from the barbaric grasp of war. Heller uses World War II as an almost ...

I thought the film was good. I thought that it was good because the humor in it is timeless. It was funny when it was made, it is funny now, it will still be funny in the future. The bad part about it was the editing. I thought it was a little on the long side and that some parts were dragged on. ...