POST 7:WITNESS - A DOCUMENTARY ON THE AMISH WAY OF LIFE

Here is a worksheet about the amish way of life and the way it is illustrated in the movie Witness.

POST 6: WITNESS - A Peter Weir movie (1985) - TWO MAIN CHARACTERS

Here is Rachel's portrait in the link below:

Rachel Lapp's Portrait in the movie Witness

Free post!

This video is a parody of Sh*t Girls Say (you can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-yLGIH7W9Y) . Sh*t Girls Say is a funny video that makes fun of what girls do or say everyday. In the video we can see a man, dressed like a girl, wearing a wig and make up, completerly disguised as a girl, wich makes the video even more funny. After the success of these videos, people starting doing a lot of parodies: Sh*t Black Girls Say, Sh*t Girls Say to Gay Guys, etc... But my favorite one is Sh*t Fashion Girls Say. It is my favorite first of all because I feel a little concerned about it since I love fashion and I consider myself a little bit like a fashion girl. In this video, the man who imitates the fashion girl is called P'trique, he is a fat blond guy with a beard and tinny blue eyes and he is very funny because he imitates girls very well, especially fashion girls. By the way he talks and acts, we can guess he frequents a lot those kind of girls because he may work in fashion. This humor is very american, so you may not understand all of it if you are not american or if you don't understand the american humor in general. Also, you may understand the "jokes" even better if you are a "fashion girl" or if you know one very well. I love the way he dresses, even though he is just a man dressed for a funny video, and also, i love the way he sees the fashion world. He talks about some of my favorite shows, all of them are about fashion, for exemple Gossip Girl and Sex and the City and uses expressions like "Chic" "Totes Amaze" (wich means "totally amazing) or "Obsessed!" which doesn't really mean anything for regular people but for fashion girls, it does. Of course, we see him (or her) shopping, and talking about fashion, obviously, and criticizing a lot of things, wich is very common to fashion girls. We can also relate this video with the idea of progress because we can see the video takes place today because he is always on the phone, or tweeting, talking about twitter and facebook and his iPhone. He -or she- is very obsessed with the way he looks. He asks for a "non fat latte" for example, and asks every five minutes "do I look okay?".
The end is very funny, because he talks about his eventual bangs during the whole video, and when he finally gets them, he says "Oh my god I hate my bangs!" wich is very ironic.

POST 5: FILMMAKING TECHNIQUES

 

Barton Fink: this movie is about a tortured playwright who takes a chance at Hollywood but finds himself in difficult situations such as horrible places to stay, alcoholic idol, lack of inspiration, a very exhuberant boss... 

Joel & Ethan Coen: the Coen brothers are very known american film makers who made epic movies like The Big Lebowsky or No Country For Old Man

John Turturro is an american actor who plays in a lot of the Coen brother's movie like The Big Lebowski and O Brother. He is also a film director and a writer.

John Goodman is an american acotr who also appears in a lot of the Coen brother's movie with John Turturro such as The Big Lebowski, O Brother and Raising Arizona. He is also a voice artist and he gave his voice to the character Sully in Monster Inc from Pixar.

POST 4: The Idea of Progress in Witness, a movie released in 1985

This video is the trailer of a movie called Witness, released in 1985.

This movie is a thriller, and it tells the story of an amish family who gets involved in a murder case because a little boy was apparently a witness to this murder. In the trailer we can see the little boy and his mother who are "protected" and followed by a police officer, played by Harrison Ford. Obviously it is a movie with a lot of action, because we see in the trailer scenes were people get shot, or scream, and the family running away with the police officer. Also, I guess it is also a love story because at the end of the trailer, the amish mother and the police officer kiss, and we hear a woman saying that people are "talking about them". I think it is the typical Hollywood action movie with a little love story in it to make even more interesting and not that violent because it still is about a homicide. I also would love to see it because it is kind of an old movie (1985) and old thrillers are the best, I love to watch them with my parents. Also, I love Harrison Ford and I think he would be an excellent police officer in that kind of movie because he is well known for his roles in action movies.

POST 3: INDIVIDUAL WORK ON 'THE IDEA OF PROGRESS' : The Google Glass.

This video is the official presentation of the Google Glass. It is in fact a sort of add for the Google Glasses, wich are glasses designed by Google. But actually, theese are not regular glasses. They are "intelligent" glasses that work like a phone. On this video, we can see a man who wakes up (we never see his face, actually we watch the whole video through his eyes, wich means, through the glasses, because he is wearing the glasses), and starts the day like a normal person: he drinks his coffee, eats a sandwich, and make plans for the day... But the way he makes plans is completely unknown and surprising, and crazy for somebody who doesn't kow what the video is about: he answers messages and take notes... on his glasses! Just by talking, the glasses are interacting like a phone, because of a mini camera on the side of the glasses.

These glasses are in fact "internet glasses": they are designed so that whatever the person who has the glasses on needs to know, if asks it, the glasses will give him the answer, just like if he was using his computer or his phone, but the difference is, the user doesn't even need to do anything, just to talk.211

This innovation is a revolution for the world; after the T.V, the computer, the internets, and the smartphones, each of them a big step for man in the world of new technologies, but every time for smaller objects, here comes the smart glasses: these glasses are not only a computer that you put on your eyes, it also represents, maybe, the end of the "homed geek" because you can use them anywhere and at any moment, even while you are walking... 

I think that anybody who sees this video wil first think "no, that can't be possible, it's to perfect, it's what humans were trying to create for hundreds of years, so it has to have a problem", but when you look back and realize ten years ago, nobody even had smartphones, you think "oh, then maybe it is possible". The world may go to fast for some people but progress is one great thing that today, we are happy to have and to use in our lives.

This is what the Google Glass looks like.

MADtv: "Date with a teacher"

'In the can'

'What a jip!

* The scene takes place in a restaurant which gradually turns into a classroom. The main characters are a woman teacher and a young man who could be her student. They are meeting on a blind date, which means that neither of them knew who they were going to meet after getting in touch on the Internet... We know for sure that they are respectively teacher and student because the woman gets more authoritarian as the relationship develops while the youngster behaves more and more like a chid/childishly.
(The scene takes place in a restaurant. The characters are a teacher and a young man who are on a date, we know that because at the beginning the woman says that she is a teacher and the man looks much more

younger than her, and during the video he acts like a pupil so we can guess he is a student)

* The jokes the woman makes are puns (or wordplay) for most of tem. Some of them:
- The boy tells her she must have a lot of PATIENCE; she answers "No, a doctor has patients, a teacher has pupils" it's a homonym joke because they are two words that sound the same, but are spelled diffrently and with different meanings.

- Then, to illustrate what homonyms are, she tells another pun, wich is: "i like everything but you butt."
- When the waiter arrives to take the order, he asks "Can i take your order?" and she explains that it's a mistake, he sould say may, so she says "It's very important to know the difference between can and may; otherwise, you career MAY end up in the CAN."

The other kind of "jokes" she makes are due to a funny situation, and most of the time it is funny because she starts acting like a teacher, and then the whole restaurent starts acting like a classroom full of pupil. For exemple:
- When the young man, her date, tries to read the word "florentine" while ordering, she says "Oh my, that is a tricky word... Go on, let it out!" like if he was a small pupil trying to read a difficult word in class. After that  she " Awwww very good!" and gives him a little star sticker like a reward for his "hard work". Then, she tries to give a star also to the waiter, who doesn't want it on his forehead, like the young man but just in his hand, and she answers "Okay, you can put it on you chart later" wich is what american pupils do at school.

- When the young man starts flirting with te woman at the table next to them, the teacher says "HEY, eyes up here mister!" pointing her eyes. It's funny because it has a double meaning: the first one is because he is "cheating" on her by flirting with another woman, the second one is because she says that to him like she would say that to a pupil cheating during a test.

* When she leaves the room, she says to the restaurant "Everyone, i'll be right back. Meanwhile, JOE is in charge." (Joe is the young man). But as soon as she leaves the room, Joe "spittballs" the woman he was flirting with, the waiter hits him and the head and when Joe gets up, the woman puts a fork and his chair so when he sits on it he screams. Everybody is laughing and yelling, and in fact, acting like children and making a mess like pupils in a classroom when the teacher is gone. Then, when the teacher comes she says "Okay everyone, heads on tables." and suddenly the whole mess stops, everybody calms down, put theyre arms and heads and the tables and make silence, while she says "I am very disapointed in the whole restaurant" like if she was talking to a classroom full a excited pupils.

* The "revenge" taken at the end by the teacher was by leaving with another man (the "nice student") instead of Joe, her date at firts, because he disrespected her by flirting with another woman while he was on a date with her and by not attending to his role while he was supposed to be in charge of the restaurant/"classroom".

This cartoon is also about blind date: there's a woman, Sarah, who is about to have her first blind date and she is thinking about it, because she is a little stressed. So she finally tells herself to give it a chance. Her blind date arrives, and the first question he asks is "Are your boobs real?". It's so rude she immediatly screams "CHECK PLEASE!" so she can pay and leave right away. The funny thing here is that right before taht she was telling herself to give it a chance but suddenly right after the man arrived she leaves. It's kind of a paradox.

Internets Anonymous

In this cartoon we can see two men, one sitting in front of his desk, using his computer, and the other one, standing up and looking at the first one. They are dressed in the same way (same shirt, blue trousers) so we can guess they are probably workmates and that they are at work, in the firm they work in. The man sitting on the left looks very pleased, self satisfied and shows that he is overjoyed. The man on the right though, seems worried, confused, puzzled.

The man on the right is saying to his workmate that he is going to "internets anonymous" which is probably an organization, like alcoholics anonymous, to kick an addiction, here, addiction to the internet. But he says that internets anonymous volunteers... Meet in a yahoo chatroom! This is an ironic cartoon, which satirizes the situation of internet addiction. So basically, the cartoonist means that this man is going to try to kick his habbit by using it, it's a paradox. We could say it is like if somebody was trying to quit drinking, and to do that, he would go in a bar and have a beer with the other alcoholic anonymous. The goal of the cartoonist is maybe to alert people to the fact that internet, when used too much, can be like a real addiction, a bad one, and that it can be as hard trying to quit it as trying to quit drinking or smoking.

In a way, I think this cartoon is representative of today's world because the internet is playing a bigger part in the world every day. People started to use it about 20 years ago, so it's kind of new, but already, everybody is a little addicted to it, because it's so easy to use. The internet helps do a lot of things like writing to people, meeting people, buying things, working, etc... a lot faster then before! Nowadays, most of the communication is mostly made through the internet.

I don't really feel concerned about this cartoon because even though I use internet a lot, and my phone is always in my pocket, I'm not completely addicted to it. I can live without it for days, and go out instead, have a social life... I don't need  the internet, but I like it a lot, and use it, like everyone else.

Internet addiction can be a real problem for some people, because when addicted a lot to the internet, you stop going out, stop socializing, you stop doing everything that a normal human being does, and you become like a vegetable. The internet can show you and teach you a lot, but if you use it too much and not in the right way you become stupid, like the man in the cartoon, who is not even aware of his addiction. Also, if only 20 years after the real beginning of the internet, everyone is so "addicted" to it already, what will it be in 10, 20, 50 years?

Pink is the new black.

Pink?