Video Games

This weekend my roommate brought home  Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and our dorm suddenly became nothing but the sounds of guns and explosions and our crazy determination to "win stars" so we could move further in the game. I grew up with two brothers so video game shenanigans like this is nothing new to me, however I had never been sucked into a game like this before. Maybe it was the Coronas mixed in with the game play but I really really enjoyed playing this game. As far as the story goes it was something far different than what I had seen before. I've watched my younger brother play many different war games before, but none of them had ever taken place on american soil before. In one level of this game you are driving through an everyday american superb and there are Russian paratroopers falling out of the sky. It was really surreal to me to see this and I found it interesting that they challenged the norm of American wars always being on American soil.

Asterios Polyp

Asterios Polyp is a graphic novel about professor of architecture in Ithaca New York. He is haunted by his still born identical twin, he goes through a bad marriage, and goes to the middle of nowhere to work as a mechanic after his apartment burned up because it got struck by lightning. His story is a sad but interesting and humorous one. During the discussion about the book today, it was brought up that more emphasis was put on the medium rather than the message. While the story was nothing new or revolutionary I still enjoyed it and the way the artist chose to illustrate what was it. I believe that the simple story complemented the elaborate use of illustration techniques that he used. He had different bubbles, type, and style of art for each character, and when the couple would get into a fight their specific artistic style would become more apparent and harsh. Overall I really enjoyed the novel; I found it really fun to read and will definitely do it again.

Media and the Body

While discussing media and the body in class today one thing that came to my mind was how different cultures have different notions of what the ideal woman body is. Looking at any western magazine today it is apparent that the ideal woman is on the verge of being unhealthy and has a body type that is drastically different from the average woman. Even different groups or cliques within the west have different ideas of what a woman should look like or should wear. Sometimes a culture's idea of what is beautiful can be so distorted and unnatural that women actually alter there bodies. In ancient China they believed that having small feet was attractive so at a very young age females would bind their feet so that they would not grow to their natural size. In more recent European history women wore corsets which would damage their vital organs just to accentuate the smallness of their waste. It is strange to me that although we are all humans we have different views as to what the ideal woman should look like; it seems like something that should be universal, but is not.

Player One by Douglas Coupland

In Player One we watch the end of the world from the cocktail lounge of an airport in Toronto. The novel switches between the points of view of 4 different characters. Luke is a pastor who has gotten tired of his old life and decided to steal all of the churches money and run away; he is now questioning everything that he previously believed in life. Rachel an extremely intelligent young woman who has a disorder where she cannot differentiate faces; she has come to the bar to try find someone to have a child with. Rick is a bartender who is recently overcoming an alcohol addiction; he is so desperate to get his life turned around that he gives an enormous sum of money to a tv self help guy.  Karen works as a receptionist at a psychiatric office and has come to the bar to meet a guy she has been talking to on an internet chat room.

In the beginning I was having trouble becoming interested in the book. Everyone is sitting in the bar before anything starts going wrong and the conversations were difficult to stay awake through. The fact that everyone's story is overlapping and a lot of stuff is repeated four times didn't help of course. There were things about the 4 overlapping story lines that I enjoyed very much; being able to observe how differently separate people were interpreting the same events was really interesting and sometimes even humorous (Rick and Rachel's interaction for example).

Tarkovsky

This week I watched three Tarkovsky films; The Mirror, Solaris, and Ivan's Childhood.  The first I watched was The Mirror; this movie had me pretty well confused from the very beginning. There was no apparent plot or order. It jumped around to different points in several different time lines. Outside of the story ( if there was one ), it was filmed beautifully. I especially enjoyed the way he filmed the outdoors and how he was able to capture the beauty of a landscape. We also see this in the beginning of Solaris when he films a pond. He'll focus on one thing for such a long time it almost puts you into a trance. While there were a few time where I got lost in Solaris I enjoyed the story quite a bit. It is rare to see a story in movies that is completely unfamiliar. The last film I watched was Ivan's childhood. This one was the closest to "normal" film. It had a very clear story line and had action, drama, romance, and history. Overall Tarkovsky had a very distinct style or auteurship. His shots were usually very long and slow moving, and very beautiful; I always felt as if I was viewing a piece of art. His writing ( he wrote all three films ) was mostly abstract, and involved a lot of thinking. We talked in class about whether or not a director can really be seen in the same light as an author. I definitely think they can. Especially in the case of Tarkovsky where he wrote the screenplays for the movies; he was literally the author of these movies.

Lolita: rough draft

 Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita has become an incredibly popular and controversial book over the years. The controversy is due to the sensitive content and the point of view that it chosen to deal with that content. If you were to hear about a book written on the subject of pedophilia you would obviously assume that it was done with a very negative attitude towards the subject, or at the very least, an unbiased informative point of view. Nabokov does not care what you were expecting. He ignores all of those assumptions you would anticipate from society; he chose to narrate from the point of view from a pedophile which contradicts everything you expect as a reader.

Reading this book leads to many contradictions. During Lolita the reader experiences many different responses to what they have just encoutered; you really enjoy the beautiful writing and the humor that pops up every now and then, but you hate the story and the things happening in the book. When we hear about the context of this book happening in the world we are, of course, disgusted, and it is easy and understandable to hate the person responsible and hate everything about the situation. Nabokov gives you a funny guy who had a ill experience as a child and wasn't able to recover properly. He takes a very trustworthy character slot of narrator, a position we are inclined to automatically trust as we get close for the next few hundred pages,  and fills it with someone we want to hate in every way and certainly don't want to trust.


 Another contradiction is the strange fact that you continually find yourself questioning whether Humbert is telling us the truth. In the beginning, although already noticing the lack of moral fiber, you trust that everything you are being told is the truth; after all if Humbert is willing to tell you anything about his obsession with "nymphets" at all why would he lie about the details or about other things? Although it is out natural inclination to trust that the narrator is telling the truth, on the very first page Humbert says, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the...." Right there on the very first page he has just referred to the reader as a jury; this completely throws you off on whether or not you can trust anything he is saying. By turning you into a jury member he has turned you into someone he wants to sway towards a certain verdict; someone he may want to deceive. Through out the book Humbert tell you about several convenient deaths. The first time when Humbert tells us how he went looking for his first wife after she left him for a taxi driver and finds out she has died in child birth was not too strange. But whenever you add on the other deaths such as the most convenient, Lolita's mother just after she discovers his obsession, you begin to question whether all of these deaths are really accidental. Are you, the jury, really getting the whole true story?

Jackie Brown: remake

Reading Jackie Brown was awesome. I've read a screenplay only once before and didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I did this one. This movie was made perfectly the first time; so if I was so bold as to change it, it would not be for the better. It would be a medium that wouldn't be taken too seriously. Maybe a cheap cartoon like Recess or Hey Arnold where all the problems of the real world are condensed into a school yard except I want it to stay live action.

So, the big crime guy Ordell who was selling guns for big money in the original story is now a bully trading sleazy comic books for candy. The two cops are now hallway patrols out to catch the bully. The main character Jackie brown will be your average joe kid not good but not especially bad, and her older accomplice who helps her get all the loot in the end (Max Cherry) will be an old man janitor who's kind and willing to bend the rules to help a kid out.

For music I'm thinking Something a little more serious to contrast the setting and give a sort of humor. Like some serious rap, something ridiculous for the setting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhevz_g57dU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5rRZdiu1UE   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXZ3yUZTlrA

The Day of the Locust

This book was definitly different from your average read. It didn't follow the same structure that stories usually do where there is an obvious progression of events with a problem and a resolution at the end. With the exeption of a few scenes that I really enjoyed, the set up of the novel made me uncomfortable. Nothing really moved or porgressed; you just watched the characters in different scenes living thier miserable lives and nothing gets better. When I turned the last page and realized I was at the end of the book I kept flipping the page back and forth feeling I must have missed something because a story dosn't end like that.

Mr. Steiling described the book as a painting; your not looking at it as a story that progresses but rather something that sits there unchanging for you to observe as a whole. Hearing this actually made me a lot more comfortable with the story. Maybe because this is a form of observation that I am comfortable with even though it is not usually in the medium of text.

The Maltese Falcon

I really enjoyed everything about this book. Its a classic detective novel and was just plain fun to read. We've been talking about how books relate to movies and how people have grown so accustomed to the way films work. While I was reading the book I actually pictured Humphry Bogart as the main character Sam Spade immediatly after I heard the characters description. Today in class I learned that there was actually a movie made from the novel and that Huphrey Bogart did actually play the Sam Spade. It kind of weirded me out how what I was seeing was exactly what I had pictured in my head; the way he looked, the way he spoke, and interacted with the different characters was all exactly the same.  

Some of the differences that I was able to notice in the movie where kind of disappointing. For example before the movie even actually begins it gives you the history of the falcon and lets you know exactly what it is; it even shows you an image of it. In the novel you aren't told what the falcon is until maybe halfway through the book and it sort of adds to the mystery or the anticipation. Also, although most of the detail described in the book shows up in the movie its only there for a second; you can't really take it in. In the novel you can really savor the descriptions and immerse yourself in the story.

The Complete Metropolis

While the Metropolis was far better than any other silent film that I have watched, I did have to watch it in parts because I was having trouble staying awake. I found it really fascinating how much acting has changed since the time of silent films. I suppose when there are not many words to express what is happening or what the characters are feeling then more exaggerated acting might be necessary.

I found the theme to be some what similar to The Hunger Games. There was a huge separation between the upper and lower classes, and although it did not happen in the hunger games I have a feeling that in the later  books revolution takes place much like it did in Metropolis. In both stories there was also the different ideologies in the different classes where the upper class seems solely concerned with luxury while the lower class is concerned with surviving.

The Hunger Games

When I read the back cover of The Hunger Games I immediately recalled several similar stories in movies, books, and even ancient history. The idea of people being pit against each other, fighting to the death, and the last man standing wins, has been used over and over. Despite how familiar the story was I still found myself really enjoying the book and always eager to find out what was going to crop up next. Outside the gladiatorial aspect of the book there were other appealing angles such as the different social classes, the relationship between Katniss and her family, and her odd and confusing "love" interests.

Through the different social classes the author portrays opposing ideologies. Some of which I even felt like I could relate to. Naturally I don't think it too likely that I will need to be fighting for my life by killing other people in a sick and twisted game any time soon, but I do relate to other parts. In Katniss's hometown all of her time is devoted to hunting and gathering food to keep her and her family alive. Until she reaches the much wealthier capitol Katniss does not show much concern for anything outside of surviving. The population of the capitol however seemed to be concerned with nothing but luxury.

When I think about my future I do now wonder how nice my car or home will be but rather if I will have them. I don't just worry about wether I will be able to get a well paying job or not in my chosen field of graphic design, but worry if I will be able to get a job at all.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

I wasn't expecting to enjoy the book because I have never enjoyed the movie very much, however I really liked the book. The overall tone was much darker than I was expecting so some of the scenes (like the tin man killing tigers and wolves, or the scarecrow twisting the necks of crows) caught me a little off guard, and I liked it. 

While it seems strange that the story was created for children, the ideology being passed down in the book are things that children are still taught today. For example it teaches the idea that admirable qualities such as courage and compassion are not things that we have to go look for but rather they are already found within us if we just recognize them. The lion, tin man, and scarecrow repeatedly show that they already posses the traits they are looking to acquire, but they are so worried about not having it that they can't see it.  It also teaches more obvious ideas; in particular that good always overcomes evil, friends are valuable and look after each other, and of course that there is no place like home.

The edition that I read had the original illustrations in them and I really enjoyed that. Because I have seen the movie I was worried that I wouldn't be able to help but picture the characters as they were in the film where I didn't enjoy them so much, however seeing the illustrations of the characters helped me to push the film versions out of my mind and I found the illustrated versions much more appealing (especially in the case of the lion). My favorite of all the illustrations was the depiction of the hammerheads. I really got a kick out of their clothes and expressions.