...The focus of this critique is on the film Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, and Vincent Cassel. A movie about a young woman’s consuming desire for perfection as a ballerina in the role of a lifetime. Throughout this film the mise-en-scene was raw and grainy with diverse camera angles that gave an out of control feel that added to the instability within the scenes. As the film progresses the viewer becomes increasingly unsure of the reality that the Nina character is experiencing. The tight quarters of the sets, apart from the practice room, emphasized and helped to showcase the pressure at the studio and the controlling atmosphere at home. The editing in this film was linear and showed the gradual and increasing mental instability of Nina. At times it was difficult to know where in her mental decline she was at and what she was experiencing versus what was only in her mind. Had the film been edited in a nonlinear fashion it would have added a tremendous amount of confusion for the viewer and destroyed the continuity of her experiences and gradual mental deterioration. Sound is effectively used in scenes depicting the reality of particular events. The harsh sounds of the cutting and clipping of Nina’s fingernails sounded like the snapping of small bones. The sound of grinding the bottoms of the ballet slippers in the resin box, the scraping, scratching sound of the knife slicing the bottoms of the shoes were...
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...Film Critique: STEALTH Cheri Adams ENG225 Instructor: Matthew Norsworthy May 15, 2011 Film Critique: Stealth Stealth was made in 2005 and is presented by Columbia Pictures, directed by Rob Cohen, Produced by Mike Medavoy. The Executive Producer was Arnold Messer. The movie starts out with wording and music, similar to Star Wars, giving the prologue of the movie. I feel that the Director’s vision is that he is trying to warn us about what the future is capable of happening, if we put “brains” in computers. In this thesis I will be telling you about the movie so you will be able to understand what is happening. I will also be telling you who is in the movie and what their roles are, the style and directing of the movie. I will also Critique the film regarding the flaws that was done, the editing to the style and the acting. The Original music was done by BT. Music plays throughout the movie; the colors are neutral at the beginning of the movie with certain key items showing full color, in one scene a United States flag is flying on a building. Dean Semler does the Cinematography’s work. His work includes Secretariat (2010) and Mad Max: Fury Road (pre-production) (2012). Stephen Rivhin did the film editing. His most recent work was Avatar (2009), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006). Making a movie is a genuinely collaborative effort...
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...Scorsese’s Personal Redemption through Perfection: The Raging Bull For almost thirty years Martin Scorsese’s overwhelming film Raging Bull has withstood the test of time, and as the films’ title character Jake La Motta defiantly tells Sugar Ray Robinson in defeat “You never got me down,” so the film and perhaps Scorsese himself can never be knocked down. The director himself attributed Raging Bull to saving his life and career. The film is as turbulent in its direction as it is in Robert De Niro’s extreme method acting, which set the bar higher for all actors. As rattling and real as taking a punch to the face, not only the acting, which has been discussed in every possible light, but the directing, the editing and the cinematography have become a hallmark and template of what a truly powerful film can be. Raging Bull was going to be Martin Scorsese’s final film, his goodbye to Hollywood. Shaken by asthma and depression, and finally derailed by a massive cocaine addiction and overdose, the acclaimed director had no desire to do a sports film or anything like it. Robert De Niro had been pushing La Motta’s biography on him for years, never with any returned interest. After his overdose however, De Niro continued to insist he take up the film, finally convincing the great director on the premise the work would save his life and in the end save his career. Scorsese has also said the gritty tone of the film, and its final theme of alienation redemption for the dark soul, or lack...
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...States | |Language |English | |Genre |Romance, fantasy, young-adult fiction | |Publisher |Little, Brown and Company | |Published |2005–2008 | |Media type |Print | Twilight is a series of four vampire-themed fantasy romance novels by American author Stephenie Meyer. It charts a period in the life of Isabella "Bella" Swan, a teenage girl who moves to Forks, Washington, and falls in love with a 104-year-old vampire named Edward Cullen. The series is told primarily from Bella's point of view, with the epilogue of Eclipse and Part II of Breaking Dawn being told from the viewpoint of character Jacob Black, a werewolf. The unpublished Midnight Sun is a retelling of the first book, Twilight, from Edward Cullen's point of view. The...
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...alternative filmsMainstream films can best be defined as commercial films that are made by major entertainment studios or companies that are owned by international media conglomerates. Because of better financing, these films can afford more expensive actors, wide releases, and are sold at popular retail stores. This has become known as the studio system. Films made by major studios or companies that are not owned by a media conglomerate but are distributed by a company owned by a media conglomerate (see Lucasfilm) are also considered to be mainstream and are often referred to as mainstream independent films. Companies that are completely independent, such as Lionsgate, also produce mainstream films, from a cultural standpoint, but independent of the studio system. The alternative to mainstream films are sub genre films that appeal to a certain audience, such as African American films. Low budget films, art films, and experimental films are often the starting point for entertainers who wish to enter into the mainstream circuit or a sub genre circuit. Mainstream films are targeted for all cultures and audiences, with the dominating culture and audience being the primary marketing focus, while sub genre films are marketed towards only one specific culture and audience. Mainstream films often recruit talent from all film genres and backgrounds. Alternative media are media (newspapers, radio, television, magazines, movies, Internet, etc.) which provide alternative information to the...
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...THE B L A C K SWAN The HIGHLY I mpact IM of the PROBABLE Nassim Nicholas Taleb U.S.A. $26.95 Canada $34.95 is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpre dictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9 / 1 1 . For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. A BLACK SWAN Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate oppor tunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the "impossible." For years, Taleb has studied how we fool our selves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this reve latory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don't know. He offers...
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...of the Hollywood Studio System 195 The Studio System’s Golden Age 205 The Transformation of the Studio System 209 The Economics of the Movie Business 215 Popular Movies and Democracy In every generation, a film is made that changes the movie industry. In 1941, that film was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Welles produced, directed, wrote, and starred in the movie at age twenty-five, playing a newspaper magnate from a young man to old age. While the movie was not a commercial success initially (powerful newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose life was the inspiration for the movie, tried to suppress it), it was critically praised for its acting, story, and directing. Citizen Kane’s dramatic camera angles, striking film noir–style lighting, nonlinear storytelling, montages, and long deep-focus shots were considered technically innovative for the era. Over time, Citizen Kane became revered as a masterpiece, and in 1997 the American Film Institute named it the Greatest American Movie of All Time. “Citizen Kane is more than a great movie; it is a gathering of all the lessons of the emerging era of sound,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote.1 CHAPTER 6 ○ MOVIES 185 (c) Bedford/St. Martin's bedfordstmartins.com 1-457-62096-0 / 978-1-457-62096-6 MOVIES A generation later, the space epic Star Wars (1977) changed the culture of the movie industry. Star Wars, produced, written, and directed by George Lucas, departed from the personal filmmaking of the early 1970s and spawned...
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...debut. (Lionsgate) Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen is a new type of female action film icon, and moviegoers should be very excited about that, writes Lisa Schwarzbaum. As Catching Fire ignites on movie screens around the world, this is what we know about the 21st Century heroine called Katniss Everdeen: she is strong but also soft. She is brave but she has doubts. She is a phenomenal fictional creation, yet is real enough that moviegoers can draw inspiration from her values, her resourcefulness, and her very human inner conflicts. And she is played by Jennifer Lawrence, who appears not only to be handling her current duties as Hollywood’s finest model of well-adjusted millennial female stardom but doing so with charm. Everdeen and Lawrence: golden girls both. Personified in Lawrence’s lithe movements and cool, focused gaze, Katniss is a brave, resourceful and independent-minded fighter; but she is also a troubled and vulnerably guilt-ridden human being. Nina Jacobson, the producer of the Hunger Games film franchise, puts it this way: “She is a singular heroine in that the burden of survival weighs on her. She has a ton of survivor’s guilt. And she keeps surviving.” Girl on fire It is strange that behaving like a well-adjusted and responsible young woman counts as movie-star news – or that the popularity of a female lead character who is strong and feminine, brave even when scared, compassionate even when imperfect, and respectful even when breaking with tradition counts...
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...W.B. Yeats's "The Second Coming" W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" was written in 1919, just one year after WWI ended. The beginning of this poem reflects on how evil has taken over the minds of good Christians, and the world has turned into chaos. It is apparent that Yeats believes that a Second Coming is at hand, and he spends the last half of the poem discussing what that Second Coming could look like. Turning and turning in the widening gyre (line 1) Yeats imagines the world in a cyclical sphere known a gyre (shape of a cone). In Yeats' note on the text, he states that "the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction" (2036). Yeats believes that the two thousand years of Christianity will be coming to an end, and after a violent reversal a new age will take its place. The widening part of the gyre is supposed to connote anarchy, evil, and the loss of innocence. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; (2) The falconer in this analogy is most likely God (or Jesus), and the falcon is the follower (or devotee). Humanity can no longer hear the word of God, because it is drowned out by all of chaos of the widening gyre. A wild falcon can symbolize an unconverted Gentile; someone who has sinful thoughts, and does sinful things. A tame falcon (one who listens to the word of God) is a Christian convert. In the...
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...Abstract Brands rushed into social media, viewing social networks, video sharing, online communities, and microblogging sites as the panacea to diminishing returns for traditional brand building routes. But as more branding activity moves to the Web, marketers are confronted with the stark realization that social media was made for people, not for brands. In this article, we explore the emergent cultural landscape of open source branding, and identify marketing strategies directed at the hunt for consumer engagement on the People’s Web. These strategies present a paradox, for to gain coveted resonance, the brand must relinquish control. We discuss how Webbased power struggles between marketers and consumer brand authors challenge accepted branding truths and paradigms: where short-term brands can trump longterm icons; where marketing looks more like public relations; where brand building gives way to brand protection; and brand value is driven by risk, not returns. # 2011 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. All rights reserved. 1. The party crashers: Marketers and the Social Web Brands today claim hundreds of thousands of Facebook friends, Twitter followers, online community members, and YouTube fans; yet, it is a lonely, scary time to be a brand manager. Despite marketers’ desires to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to their advantage, a stark truth presents itself: the Web was created not to sell branded products, but to link people together in collective conversational...
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...Business Horizons (2011) 54, 193—207 www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor The uninvited brand Susan Fournier a,*, Jill Avery b a b Boston University School of Management, 595 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, U.S.A. Simmons School of Management, 300 The Fenway, M-336, Boston, MA 02115, U.S.A. KEYWORDS Branding; Brand management; Social media; Web 2.0; Co-creation Abstract Brands rushed into social media, viewing social networks, video sharing, online communities, and microblogging sites as the panacea to diminishing returns for traditional brand building routes. But as more branding activity moves to the Web, marketers are confronted with the stark realization that social media was made for people, not for brands. In this article, we explore the emergent cultural landscape of open source branding, and identify marketing strategies directed at the hunt for consumer engagement on the People’s Web. These strategies present a paradox, for to gain coveted resonance, the brand must relinquish control. We discuss how Webbased power struggles between marketers and consumer brand authors challenge accepted branding truths and paradigms: where short-term brands can trump longterm icons; where marketing looks more like public relations; where brand building gives way to brand protection; and brand value is driven by risk, not returns. # 2011 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. All rights reserved. 1. The party crashers: Marketers and the Social Web Brands...
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...Instructor’s Manual and Test Bank to accompany A First Look at Communication Theory Sixth Edition Em Griffin Wheaton College prepared by Glen McClish San Diego State University and Emily J. Langan Wheaton College Published by McGrawHill, an imprint of The McGrawHill Companies, Inc., 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. Copyright Ó 2006, 2003, 2000, 1997, 1994, 1991 by The McGrawHill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. The contents, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in print form solely for classroom use with A First Look At Communication Theory provided such reproductions bear copyright notice, but may not be reproduced in any other form or for any other purpose without the prior written consent of The McGrawHill Companies, Inc., including, but not limited to, in any network or other electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance learning. PREFACE Rationale We agreed to produce the instructor’s manual for the sixth edition of A First Look at Communication Theory because it’s a first-rate book and because we enjoy talking and writing about pedagogy. Yet when we recall the discussions we’ve had with colleagues about instructor’s manuals over the years, two unnerving comments stick with us: “I don’t find them much help”; and (even worse) “I never look at them.” And, if the truth be told, we were often the people making such points! With these statements in mind, we have done some serious soul-searching about the texts that so many teachers—ourselves...
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...NORTH AMERICAN FICTION BRIEF INTRODUCTION: Before starting our study of American Fiction we must understand what American Literature is in itself and which pieces of writing we can include within this label. It is believed that when a piece is written in North America, more precisely in the USA, it would automatically be given this epithet. But it should be taken into account that this idea is quite broad and doesn’t reflect the real essence of the term. However, there is also another definition that gathers this essence: American Literature is the one that represents the Americanism, the singularity of the USA philosophy and culture. This way, instead of focusing on who the author is, it is focused on the content of the writing. In that which concerns Fiction, the following documents are the ones considered as narrative: Speeches Letters Short Stories Essays Political Documents Sermons Novels Diaries 1 FIRST LITERARY EXPRESSIONS The first documents in which the idea of Americanism is very present are the Sermons. They respond to the strict Protestantism settled in the New Continent after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans in the Mayflower (1620) and the Arabella (1630). They established a theocratic community whose main and only point of reference was the Bible. That is why the idea of the ‘city upon a hill’ is still very present in American mentality. As we all know...
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...Social Change and Modernity Edited By Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford © 1992 The Regents of the University of California INTRODUCTION Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser Haferkamp is grateful to Angelika Schade for her fruitful comments and her helpful assistance in editing this volume and to Geoff Hunter for translating the first German version of parts of the Introduction; Smelser has profited from the research assistance and critical analyses given by Joppke. 1. Social Change and Modernity Those who organized the conference on which this volume is based—including the editors— decided to use the terms "social change" and "modernity" as the organizing concepts for this project. Because these terms enjoy wide usage in contemporary sociology and are general and inclusive, they seem preferable to more specific terms such as "evolution" "progress," "differentiation," or even "development," many of which evoke more specific mechanisms, processes, and directions of change. Likewise, we have excluded historically specific terms such as "late capitalism" and "industrial society" even though these concepts figure prominently in many of the contributions to this volume. The conference strategy called for a general statement of a metaframework for the study of social change within which a variety of more specific theories could be identified. 2. Theories of Social Change Change is such an evident feature of...
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...Copyright Salman Rushdie, 1988 All rights reserved VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York 10010, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd. Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190, Wairau Road, Auckland ro, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Published in 1989 by Viking Penguin Inc. For Marianne Contents I The Angel Gibreel II Mahound III Ellowen Deeowen IV Ayesha V A City Visible but Unseen VI Return to Jahilia VII The Angel Azraeel VIII The Parting of the Arabian Seas IX A Wonderful Lamp Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is . . . without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon. Daniel Defoe, _The History of the Devil_ I The Angel Gibreel "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again...
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