Assignment: ORGANIZED CRIME FILM REVIEW
This assignment is designed for you to learn how to analyze a film from a criminological perspective, and to more fully understand the activities of organized crime groups and the views about organized crime that commercial filmmakers use in attracting an audience. In making such films writers and directors represent what they understand about organized crime based on real events, explanatory concepts and the known customs and rituals of organized crime groups. There are two components to this assignment, a criminological analysis, and grounded description.
CRIMINOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
Since organized crime is generally assumed to emerge from social conditions and change due to social forces (as presented in the readings from the early part of the course), this assignment asks you to review an organized crime film based on some aspects of organized crime and/or its control. What concepts or theories are implicitly or explicitly used in the film? You should refer to my essay on Goodfellas as the model of how to do this. You should provide you views as to how these themes are presented by the filmmaker. In cases where these themes are missing, your task will be to offer your interpretation of the director's perspective on the emergence of organized crime.
GROUNDED DESCRIPTION
A grounded description refers to the task of describing the activities of the criminals and criminal justice system official within the framework of law, theory, current trends in crime and deviant behavior. Here you must describe the criminal activity in the film, and comment on it with reference to criminological concepts or data that we have covered in the course. For example, in a scene on drug trafficking, you would write a commentary on the relevant laws and policies on drugs or major drug rackets, or refer to the essay on drug trafficking by Eastern European mobsters. Your course book and previous courses in criminology should be all you need to develop you ideas, but this may require information not available in these texts, and you should use Google Scholar to develop these insights.
HOW TO PROCEED
Begin your paper with a brief overview of the story, listing the major characters and the action that takes place in the film -- about one page at the most. After reading this, someone who has not seen the film would clearly know what the film is about, the major players and events in the film, and how it ends.
Next, the main body of the paper, about two pages, will address the issue of the organization of criminal activity, demographic variables and your grounded description. How you choose to present this material is up to you, just remember to be very clear, precisely define terms, and accurately describe the activities in the film with reference to accepted criminological analyses. Your objective is to show knowledge about organized crime and show the ability to place is in the larger context of criminological insight into organized crime.
You need not write a detailed summary. However, feel free to discuss the existential meaning of the film or comment on any personal breakthrough the assignment has offered.
Response should be about four typed pages, although there is no requirement on the length. You are given very broad latitude in the film you can select, however, I suggest you choose one that is readily amenable to analysis of this sort.
Attachment:- sets of list of films.rar