Week 9: The Auteur Theory

This week you are to watch three movies by a particular director and to write a 500 word response discussing how the three works you chose exhibit common themes or other elements that are attributes assigned to the personality of the director as an author of the works.  (Or, alternatively, you could argue they are not an auteur or that the term "auteur" should not be applied in the critical discussion of film.)

 On Sofia Coppola's work:

I watched the following four of Sofia Coppola's films for which she is also best known for: Lost in Translation (2003), The Virgin Suicides (1999), Somehwhere (2010), and Marie Antoinette (2006). I felt that Lost in Translation, Somewhere, and Marie Antoinette shared the most similar qualities that someone could definitely tell came from the same director. As I was watching I felt as though i kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing ever did. That's because Sofia Coppola chooses to showcase and focus on the true-ness and mundane aspects of life, as opposed to only the interesting or exciting, which is not commonly shown in films. I believe this quality is specific to Coppola's directing throughout these films. 

Lost in Translation

This was the first of four of Coppola's films that I watched. I immediately understood the title of the film from watching the first scene where a japanese commercial director is trying to direct Bob Harris. His discomfort of being in a foreign country is palpable. He seems so jaded and bored of his movie star life that he barely makes an effort to try and understand the director. Sofia Coppola uses long drawn out scenes of moments that seem to last forever to heighten the feeling of mundane moments of life.

Somewhere

Somewhere was definitely not like any movie i've seen before but after watching other Coppola films I was able to understand it a little more. It shares the same elements with Lost in Translation of life being what it is and not candy coated or edited to just show the good parts. Like Lost in Translation, Somewhere focuses on a jaded actor and the in-between moments of his life that are not always glitz and glam like most people like to believe. My favorite scene is the long drawn-out and uncomfortable scene of the actor getting a mask made of his face.

Marie Antoinette

 In Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola puts the viewer in the Queen's shoes. From the beginning you can see the excitement and confusion in Marie Antoinette as she grows to become the Queen of France and later on hated by her people . She has all the luxuries a girl could want with the exception of a few things. 

Overall, Sofia Coppola's films share a common theme: "the grass is not always greener on the other side". She showcases the lives of people who are rich and famous and puts them under a microscope. She gives the viewer a chance to see the not-so-glamourous aspects of the glamorous lifestyle that everyone seems to want to have. 

Week 6: Howl

Writing Assignment: Write a blog post that considers what are the defining characteristics of your generation. Discuss a few specific works that in your opinion give "voice" to the outlooks and attitudes shared by your generation.

Our Generation. The Millenials. The Digital Age. What defines our Generation? Technology?
Faster than any generation before technology has risen at such a great speed that we have the ability to transfer and share knowledge and information with anyone around the world within seconds. Books, newspapers, and anything analogue are becoming obsolete. We no longer need to store as much information in our brains as before. Why learn math equations when a computer can do it for us at such a faster rate? Why memorize streets and route directions when a GPS can do it for us? Why memorize anything when we can just ask a machine a question and get back millions of answers? Why do anything when we have the technology to do it for us? We "aint got time fo' dat". We're constantly being plagued with new information and technology that we can't keep up with most of the time. We live behind screens and interact at an impersonal level. Face-to-face human interaction is becoming less of a thing. Should we accept and adapt to these technological advances?
I made a video to represent my struggles with a technological world overtaking the natural world that i feel so connected to:

https://vimeo.com/77989382

Statement: In Today's society we live in two worlds: the natural world and the artificial mechanical world. Oftentimes the line between the two becomes blurred as we willingly and sometimes unknowingly cross borders. The video focuses on our personal struggle with embracing and fighting technology.

Week 5: Girl In Landscape

Writing Assignment: For this week's blog posting please write a 350-500 word review of the novel focusing not on whether you liked the book or not, or whether you thought it was good or bad, but rather on a description of the experience of reading the book and what you think are the most defining aspects of the novel.

Even though I was only able to ready 2/3 of the book the experience of reading Girl In Landscape was very fulfilling for me. I've always been interested in Sci-Fi novels so it would only make sense that I was immediately drawn in to the book from the beginning.
It was interesting to start off in the world as I know it now set into the future from a coming-of-age girl's point of view. It felt very relatable in the sense that I live in a very fast advancing technological age where some of the concepts and ideas seemed pretty plausible for the future to come. The novel really pulled me in when Pella and her family went to visit the beach and had to wear sun-blocking cones around their bodies because of the depleted ozone layer. Or how the rest of the continent had a feeling of being made entirely of buildings and concrete except for the little section of beach that remained at the edge. I can also relate with Pella when she moves to an entirely new world and feels alienated. To me that symbolizes the coming-of-age into adulthood. I can relate to being in a place in my life where nothing seems familiar or makes sense and all I can do is watch, learn, try to understand how the world around me works and try to get by day by day. That's what it seemed like for pella when she found her ability to turn into the household deer. She becomes a voyeur in a new world trying to make sense of all the strange things happening around her.
I know it says not to write about whether or not I liked it or not but I did enjoy reading it and will definitely read the remaining chapters when I get the chance!

Week Three: How Illustrations Change the Act of Reading

Writing Assignment: Please write a blog post of some 350 words that discusses the question of how the act of reading changes when the text is comprised of both words and pictures. Please give specific examples to support your observations.

Obviously the act of reading changes when the text is comprised of both words and pictures. When an author uses only text the reader's imagination is left to run wild depending on whether the author wants the reader to imagine everything for themselves or if they want to provide a clear image by using textual descriptions of what they're imagining. When an author provides image along with text they leave little to no room for the reader's imagination because they are observing what the author has provided for them. As a kid and visual learner i preferred to read books with a happy medium; enough text to imagine the story for myself and a few pictures to help understand what the author sees themselves like in Lewis Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This works especially well for kids when they don't exactly understand what is being described. Even though I'm a visual person, I don't mind listening to text and having no images like in a radio play or having a movie on but just listening to it. I feel like i can focus and imagine better by listening than reading text on a page. However, it's a different story when there's image but no text, like in a silent film. I can obviously see what's happening, but with no text to back it up my imagination is freer to interpret all the aspects of the story. 

Week Two: The Great Gatsby as a Literary Work

Writing Assignment: Write a 350-500 word blog post discussing why, in your view, The Great Gatsby is a literary work.

In order to answer the question of whether or not The Great Gatsby is a literary work I had to question what exactly defines a literary work. The broadest definition I found is anything expressed in letters of the alphabet. Other definitions define a literary work as any body of work from a societies culture as well as any creative work that is deemed to have artistic value. But who gets to decide if a work has enough artistic value or not? I suppose it’s up to the reader to decide. As a reader of The Great Gatsby I believe that it has enough artistic qualities, such as a stylized storyline and plot as well as identifiable characters, to qualify as a literary work. The Great Gatsby allowed me to take a glimpse back at the culture of the roaring 20’s in a high-class society and into the lives and events of various characters. The content and language Fitzgerald used is very rich and stylized and helps to create a sense of what the American Dream at the time meant to the people of that era. That really allowed me to get a feel of the time Fitzgerald and the characters he created lived in.

Week One: The Wizard of Oz & The Hunger Games

Write a blog post (350-500 wds) that discusses the proposition that the Hunger Games is like the Wizard of Oz. Consider the question whether or not all American fairy tales are like the Wizard of Oz.

The Wizard of Oz is very familiar to me as I have seen it a hundred times growing up but the Hunger Games is not as I have not read or seen, aside from the short clip we watched in class, any part of the story or film. Pulling from the little information I got from the clip I had a hard time comparing the two stories together. I found myself comparing the Hunger Games to the Japanese film Battle Royale instead, which to me has much more comparable aspects, especially the theme, than with the Wizard of Oz. That’s not to say that Oz and Hunger Games share no similarities at all. Both of the stories feature a prominent female protagonist who are taken from the comfort of their home and thrown into an unfamiliar and possibly dangerous land, which is a common theme that happens to many characters in many American fairy tales, e.g. Alice in Alice in Wonderland, Wendy in Peter Pan, and Christopher Robin in the World of Winnie the Pooh. As for the question of whether or not all American Fairy tales are like the Wizard of Oz I cannot answer as I have not read all American Fairy tales, but through my observations I can say that a good amount of them share similar themes and other literary aspects which make them comparable in a certain light.


Assumptions:
I always tend to stick to the age-old assumption that the book is (usually) better than the film. I had not read the Wizard of Oz book before and assumed it would be pretty similar to the film, seeing as it has been such a popular film through time. That's hardly the case when it comes to adaptations though and not to my surprise found they were actually pretty different. 

How is my situation as a reader defined?:
I grew up on viewing film and images more than reading books which truly is a shame in my opinion. I enjoy reading usually only if it's something i'm truly interested in, which sadly is rare, and which I think is worth my time to fully immerse myself in. And i tend to get really impatient with the lengths of books especially if they tend to drag on in certain parts as I have a decreasingly short attention span (probably due to today's information overload from all of the notifications being hurled at me every three seconds from various social platforms). It tends to be easier and quicker to watch a film than to read the book which really isn't any fun when the two can be so different.