Cultural Event #5

12 Years a Slave is a movie I've been wanting to see since I first heard about it. It's the story of a freed slave who gets forced into slavery by mistake. As the title suggests, the man was in slavery for 12 years. In those 12 years, he bounced from owner to owner and witnessed the horrors of slavery. The performances from the entire cast were phenomenal. The camera work itself was pretty amazing. Some shots linger on action for a bit and, right before you kinda irritated at the time the camera focuses on one shot, something happens that makes you glad the camera stayed for that long.

This movie is not for weak of heart as it doesn't hold back in showing some of the more brutal aspects of slavery and that's what I have to applaud it for. For almost a century, movies have taken slavery and romanticized it. It showed that slaves weren't being beaten and were almost seen as equals. Gone with the Wind is one of the worst offenders of this and people have thought that's how slavery really was. This film doesn't hold back. Sure, there are the stereotypes of these types of films like the good-heated slave owner who treats who slaves right and the brutal slave owner who breaks slaves, but they are shown in a way that makes you believe that, no matter how good your intentions are, owning slaves doesn't make you a good person. Unlike films like The Passion of the Christ where the violence can be kinda off putting, the violence in 12 Years a Slave doesn't turn you off. Though it makes you feel every shot from a whip, it's how the characters deal with those types of moments that makes you more emotionally invested. Unlike Jesus, this stuff didn't happen just to one person, this happened to many people on a daily basis and was a lot worse than what was depicted on screen.

This is one of those films that most will watch once and then never watch it again for a long time. When someone asked me how it was compared to Roots, I said Roots was a Disney movie compared to this one and I don't mean that as a bad thing. 12 Years a Slave is an important movie because it reminds us of the hell slaves went through and it forces us to look at an extremely dark period in our history.

Cultural Event #4

            The final day of the festival was a chance to see a film I wanted to see the first night, but missed it. It’s called Backyard. It dealt with different people from different states dealing with gas extraction around their homes. One of the things I liked about this movie was that these were different people with different stories. No story is really the same outside of them dealing with the industry of gas extraction. The other thing is, when you hear these peoples’ stories, they never mention the name of the company that’s doing these things. It shows that the name of the company isn’t the important thing; it’s the problem in general. The filmmaker could’ve easily put a face on the problem, but they chose to stick to the issue and I admired that.

Cultural Event #3

        On the 3^rd night of the festival, I was only able to see one film, Yellow Fever. It dealt with Uranium mining near the Navajo reservation in the southwestern United States. It follows Tina Garnanez, a member of the reservation, as she travels around the western United States learning about the good and bad of nuclear power.

         

        US started mining after World War II. I was glad that Tina actually researched the problem by going around and learning about Uranium mining and nuclear power in general. I felt, unlike the other films I had seen up to this point, this movie wasn't as preachy as the other ones. It was actually more in the middle of the road once Tina started going around investigating the pros and cons. Ultimately, she was against the mining, but it was refreshing to see someone who is against something to actually go out and find some good things about something they are clearly against. 

It was a very good study of Uranium mining and the effects it has had on the Navajo people since the

Cultural Event #2

The 2^nd night of the festival I saw 2 films that were part of the night’s theme,

Frack Night. The first film was called FrackNation.It deals with a journalist who dives into the issue of fracking. The interesting thing about this film is that it is a pro-fracking film. The journalist beings questioning several anti-fracking people when it seems that they are suppressing true facts that could be harmful to their cause. This film felt like a breath of fresh air for me, since most documentaries always seem  to focus on the negative side of an issue and tell us "THIS IS BAD. DON'T SUPPORT THIS!" This film actually looked at some of the positives (however few there are) of fracking and how it would affect our lives. 

            The other film I saw was Dear Governor Cuomo. This film was about the Governor of New York lifting a ban on fracking in the state. In protest, musicians, scientists, actors and other staged a concert/protest in Albany. There was music and stories’ being told of how much fracking has affected people around the country. While I got the point of the film and commend the effort, I felt the movie was actually too long. I like concert films, but it felt like the film put too much on the songs from the concerts themselves and not the message the protestors were trying to get across. When you watch someone perform a song, you listen to the whole song. I got bored with the songs after a while and almost turned out. If the songs were cut down a bit, I would’ve liked this movie a lot more, but I got bored listening to these songs all the way through. I wanted to watch a movie, not watch a concert.

Cultural Event #1

A majority of my cultural events surrounded around the American Conservation Film Festival. What sets these different days apart is that the films I went to had some sort of theme attached to it.

One of the few films I was able to watch the first night was called Monsters, It had to do with a woman trying to shut down coal-burning plants in Chicago. These plants had killed several people over the years because of various life-threatening diseases that these people had gotten. The main character herself had lived near these plants since she was 9. We discover that she was diagnosed with cancer because of the plants. The film spans several years as she tried to shut down these plants.

It wasn't a very long movie, but it was a good eye opener to what the long term effect these coal-burning plants can have on a community. Seeing this woman and others around her try to get these plants shut down seemed very heroic and it was interesting to see them not give up after various failed attempts

Capstone Experiences

It's been over a week since my final Capstone presentation and it still feels weird that's it's over already. It feels like yesterday that I came up with the idea to continue my radio talk show. I dreaded the final presentation knowing that people might not like my project. While I didn't think it was as good as I wanted it to be, people still really liked it. They laughed at the parts where I wanted them to laugh and they were entertained by it. I guess I set out to do what I wanted to do. I like to make people laugh and this proved I can make people laugh even when I thought the effort wasn't as good as it should've been (my fault more than anybodies). Still, it was an experience that was fun and educational. 

Game Design Blog #4

I want to use this edition to go more in depth about the violence in video games and the people who play them. Let's look at one of the first video games, Pong. Some may say that it is one of the first violent video games. You must be asking "how is this a violent video game?" Well, just look at it. You hit a little "ball" around and try to score. On top of that, what happens if someone you know gets upset that they lose? I remember when I was a kid and I lost I didn't take it very well. Now think if that someone had a mental illness or was on drugs that made them paranoid or have violent tendencies. How would those people react when they lost?

The point I'm trying to make is maybe it's not the video game itself that makes us have these violent urges, but what goes on in our minds. If someone who is known to have violent outbursts at the drop of a hat, a video game may set them off, but their history shows that there was a problem long before the video game set him off.

To sum up, I think we should look more at someone's mental health when it comes to a violent act rather than putting all the blame on a single thing because it's easy to do. Yes, you could put some of the blame on violent video games, but putting it all on video games is a cop out. If you look back at the Columbine shootings, the shooters played Doom, a violent video game. They even came up with their sick fantasy of shooting up the school on there. But to put all blame on Doom because of what happened is not the solution. The boys who shot up Columbine had a history of mental illness that was known about, but not enough was done to help them. Other cases like the Virginia Tech and Washington Navy Yard shootings follow these same patterns. The shooter(s) had histories of mental illness that weren't taken care of properly.

Placing blame on video games for these problems is quickly becoming a lame excuse for these things happening. This reminds me of when films and books were used as scapegoats for someone committing violent acts. It must be the cool thing to do for everybody, but the people who suffer from playing the games.