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.