Free Choice?

In our discussions of free market and free choice, I couldn't get a sense of what people thought about our free choice. Do we have free choice? or is our choice/ market actually limited by factors out of our control? Things like huge media conglomerates and bias news stations, etc. I really would like to see how people perceive this other than me.

I think that we do have free choice, we just don't have a completely free market. Like I just said the market, or our choices, are limited or changed by things beyond our control. So although we can choose, the choice you want in particular may not always be available.

Adult Cartoons

I have always thought that it was very interesting that there are cartoons for adults. Typically when you think of a cartoon it is very childish, very fun, it is not meant for adults, and no serious topics are usually involved. Well in the case of South Park, Family Guy, and The Simpsons that is not the case. These cartoons are made for adults, their subject matter includes political, entertainment, and current events humor, things that children would simply not comprehend. I remember watching the Simpsons when I was younger (8-10) and not understanding 75% of the humor, now I understand everything, and think it's hilarious. What I find interesting about this phenomenon is that the chosen medium for this political satire is a cartoon. A fun way to represent current events, politics, and other news to adults.

High School

I really loved this weeks screening, High School. Mostly I enjoyed it simply because I haven't seen anything like it before. I generally enjoy watching documentaries because along with being entertaining they are also educational. With the typical documentary however, you have a narrator or a host, who is a constant subject in the documentary, and they go around and interview or explore things pertaining to the subject of the documentary. Here however we simply see what we see, there are no explanations, there is no narration, you see what goes on in a high school in the sixties throughout a school day. I thought it was very interesting to watch this "raw footage" that was only edited to flow from one scene to the next. What I found most intriguing is how when each scene starts you are sitting there trying to figure out whats going on in front of you. Then from common experience you understand that this is a kid who got sent to the principles office for skipping detention, or that your in Home Ed class... I thought it was really cool and interesting as a sort of moving photograph.

Mockumentaries

Reading about documentaries I thought about mockumentaries, where the documentary style is used to show fictitious events. Thinking about it further, my favorite movie **sarcasm** Paranormal Activity, is technically a mockumentary, because it is a horror movie shot in a documentary style which is most of the thrill factor. The sense that this actually happened to a couple, and they actually filmed themselves. A great movie which used the mockumentary style is Borat, where Sacha Baron Cohen used the fictitious character Borat, to go around and shoot a "documentary" including various interviews, and activities around America. By doing this he exposed a lot of the true American culture, and stereotypes that are not typically shown in movie theaters.

Paranormal Bullsh*t!!!

Ok so this post is a long time coming.... I saw this movie (Paranormal Activity) about two or three weeks ago now. As I have said before I am not much of a fan of horror movies at all. The ONLY reason I went to this movie was because I was with my girlfriend and her friend, and her friend really wanted to see it because he heard it was REALLY scary. Whipping out my handy dandy iphone I hopped on Flixster to check out the ratings and reviews for this horror movie. Things like "scariest movie I have EVER seen" and "I was almost crying in the theater" came up, with a rating of about 80% from the critics, which is a very good rating considering that I've watched movies that were rated much lower and loved them. However I did find one review which said something along the lines of "This is stupid, I laughed throughout most of the movie, and this is such a rip off because it only cost them about 11000$ to make with one camera and two unknown actors." Ignoring this review I thought that was just a bad apple, and decided if this movie is really supposed to be THAT good I'll go watch it, and see for myself what's so scary. To make a long story short, the movie sucked, I ended up being THAT guy who laughed throughout the whole movie, and walked out of the theatre pissed off.

Although thinking about it further for 11k and a single camera with two unknown actors the movie does a halfway decent job of doing what it's aimed to do which is keep the viewer on the edge of their seat. But mostly if your a 13 year old girl.... all in all I HATE this movie, just as much if not more than I hate the other barf-o-licous flick Cloverfield. Any thoughts?

American Movie

HAHAHA! American Movie was quite the documentary. My first thoughts after the first ten minutes of this movie were "what the $%*& is this?" but after watching for a little longer, I realized that this is real, this is not a high end documentary all cut and beautified to be more interesting than it actually is. It is the honest story of a struggling film maker with a dream. By the middle of the movie I was really rooting for Mark, although I thought him and his friends were dumb rednecks, he had a passion and a goal, and he would have given up everything just to see it come to life. This movie shows a lot of good life lessons. I learned for instance that as long as your determined and persistent, nothing will stop you from accomplishing your goals, man.... :)