Showing posts with label LITERATURE. Show all posts

Friday, October 7, 2016

The Birth Of A Nation

The Birth of a Nation’ hits theaters

Lapacazo Sandoval | 10/6/2016, 11:02 a.m.

"Birth of a Nation" FOX Searchlight

Veteran cinematographer Elliot Davis should be nominated and win several awards this season for his stunning visuals in Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation.”
Shot over 27 fast-moving days on location, in Savannah, Ga., edited by Steven Rosenblum (“Braveheart”) and with composition by Henry Jackman (“Captain Phillips”), this cinematography could help land a Best Picture nomination come Oscar season.
“The Birth of a Nation” is based on historical events, set against the antebellum South. It’s about the life of Nat Turner (Nate Parker), a literate slave and preacher whose financially strained owner Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer) accepts an offer to use Turner’s preaching to subdue unruly slaves. As he witnesses many atrocities—against himself, his wife Cherry (Aja Naomi King) and fellow slaves—Turner orchestrates an uprising in the hopes of leading his people to freedom.
That uprising and the cry for freedom was bloody on both sides, and the ever present Christian Bible is held close by those beating hearts.
In many ways “The Birth of a Nation,” which opens wide Oct. 7, is a Christian film that is pulsating with the faithful values that have marked the history of the religion. The Christian faith was spread using violence and intimation, and sure, the word “love” was tossed about, but after the butchery of those who opposed this new road to salvation.
“An eye for an eye,” which comes from Matthew 5:38, has been used to incite revenge, which is usually painted with more violence. Political candidate and poor money manager Donald Trump, who filed for bankruptcy four times, recently used an “eye for an eye” in an April 14, 2016, interview.
The full verse in the King James version states, “You have heard that it has been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, that you resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue you at the law, and take away your coat, let him have your cloak also. And whosoever shall compel you to go a mile, go with him two. Give to him that asks you, and from him that would borrow of you turn not away.”
Nate Parker, the film’s director, writer, producer and star, in press materials, suggested that the audience should leave theaters asking, “When injustice knocks at our own front door, are we going to counter it with everything we have?”
Notice the imagery from Fox Searchlight that is peppered throughout the city. Nat Turner/Nate Parker’s head is in a noose, made from an American flag, which rings with truth but has a double whammy in the imagery. From the P.O.V. of a white supremacist that image is fetching.
“The Birth of a Nation” will open in approximately 2,000 theaters, just when a world is watching the killing of unarmed Black people by police and every time an execution is viewed, the powers are saying, “We do what we want and

Sunday, September 25, 2016

BILL NUNN DIES AT 63

Movies

Bill Nunn, Who Played Radio Raheem in ‘Do the Right Thing,’ Dies at 63

By LIAM STACKSEPT. 24, 2016

Bill Nunn at a 25th anniversary screening of the movie “Do the Right Thing” in 2014. Credit Craig Barritt/Getty Images

Bill Nunn, a versatile actor best known for playing the role of Radio Raheem, the boombox-toting neighborhood philosopher killed by police officers in Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing,” died on Saturday in Pittsburgh. He was 63.

His death was announced on social media by Mr. Lee. His wife, Donna, told The Associated Press that Mr. Nunn had cancer.

The first major acting role for Mr. Nunn, the son of a well-known professional football scout, was in the 1988 film “School Daze,” also written and directed by Mr. Lee. The next year brought the critically acclaimed “Do the Right Thing,” in which he played the iconic Radio Raheem, who carries a boombox blaring Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” through the streets of the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn on the hottest day of summer.

Radio Raheem sits at the moral heart of the film, delivering a soliloquy directly to the camera on the ceaseless contest between love and hate, symbolized by the four-finger rings he wears on each hand. The character’s choking death at the hands of police officers in front of a crowd of his neighbors incites the film’s wrenching final scenes.

Do the Right Thing (6/10) Movie CLIP - LOVE and HATE (1989) HD Video by Movieclips

Mr. Nunn became a popular character actor after “Do the Right Thing” and appeared in a variety of films, including “New Jack City,” “Sister Act” and the “Spider-Man” trilogy by the director Sam Raimi. In 2004 he appeared in a Broadway revival of “Raisin in the Sun” as Bobo, alongside Audra McDonald, Phylicia Rashad and Sean Combs.

But it was his performance as Radio Raheem that allowed him to make his greatest mark, Mr. Nunn said in an interview with ABC News to mark the 25th anniversary of the film’s release.

He was a frequent collaborator of Mr. Lee and also appeared in his films “Mo’ Better Blues” and “He Got Game.” Mr. Lee referred to him on Saturday as "my dear friend, my dear Morehouse brother.” They both attended Morehouse College in Atlanta.

William Goldwyn Nunn III was born in 1953 in Pittsburgh. His father was Bill Nunn, a scout for the Pittsburgh Steelers who helped build a football powerhouse in the 1970s by recruiting from the often-overlooked football programs at historically black colleges and universities. He died in 2014.

Mr. Lee memorialized Mr. Nunn in a series of social media posts on Saturday, sharing the text of his “Do the Right Thing” soliloquy as well as pictures of him as Radio Raheem.

Friday, January 16, 2015

Reverend Feel Good-Play

Comedy Play Rev Feel Good at All Nations PSL Blvd.

From: LAVERNE WILLIAMS williams241@juno.com

Sent: Thu, May 01, 2014 08:44 AM

Download All

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Artist Reception for Photographic Memorial Service

from the Village of Agogo, Ghana, Africa

Thursday, May 15^th, 2014; 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Port St. Lucie Civic Center (Walton Rd. & U.S. Hwy 1)

(Exhibit available to view through to July 10^th, 2014)

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Christian Cultural Cathedral

A great place to send your child if you are in Port Saint Lucie Florida. They have learning classes for grades 4 and below, great school trips and a dynamic environment. Please call 772-607-2628 for more information. Your child will thank you.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Monday, December 8, 2014

Star Wars-The Force Awakens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erLk59H86ww&feature=player_embedded

*click on above link for trailer.

MY COMMENTS***************************************************************

One of the first major movies that I enjoyed as a child was Star Wars. I loved science fiction and this and Star trek were the kings of sci-fi. I was fully entertained and could not wait to get more. This was over 30 years ago and I still find myself hooked on both series, in movies and in television. Now finally there will be a start of a new series of movies to be started next year. I am a little saddened that George Lucas, the creator, has sold his idea to Disney, but I hope that there will be no loss in story telling and excitement.

This story of the continuing adventures of Luke Skywalker, his father Anakin, OB1 Kenobi and all the favorite characters will, I am sure, continue on through the years. Connecting to History, Sociology, and Literature, our disciplines, this enjoyable tale is lasting and has brought happiness to me and millions of people. I hope that Disney keeps the Star Wars franchise well and does not fail to live up to the expectations of fans. I already know certain characters such as Lando Calrissian, played by Billie Dee Williams is not in the next installments, which is a shame. he, in many situations would be a great addition to the cast. They could even bring back OB1 Kenobi as a spirit figure, since they have done this before. Keeping with the first six movies they can virtually do anything to keep the fans happy. I hope they continue this trend.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Chris Bliss Comedy is Translation

http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_bliss_comedy_is_translation

Will an "<b>Inquiry</b> Letter" Find You a Job?

MY COMMENTS****************************************************************

A very good TED talk by Chris Bliss concerning two major points. One is the fact that much of our literature from translations holds more depth and input from other countries and that comedy can be used fro many purposes and reasonings. Comedy has communication is one of the points he brings our by showing pictures from Tina Fey from Saturday Night Live impersonation Sarah Palin and also mentions John Stewart from The Daily Show. He, in his explanation of elements that strengthen Literature, Critical Thinking and Logic, add well to our disciplines learned in Foundations of Inquiry.
He brings out a "there is more here than a joke" aspect and adds to the material. Certain things can be explained in a way that brings out more than there is.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

To Be Takei

To Be Takei

MY COMMENTS**********************************************************

I have loved Star Trek as well as Star Wars for years and after seeing the new footage of the soon to be released "Star Wars: The Force Awakens", due out next December I see my old Star Trek icon, George Takei, who is promoting his new movie documentary called "To Be Takei".

It is an interesting journey that his life has taken him. From being a young boy in American Concentration camps in the 1940's during World War Two to being an actor to being a fighter for equal rights for gays, he has really been around. The movie focuses on almost all aspects of his life, friends, cast members and politics. I think that it is a must see for all, even if you have met him and shook his hand as I have. His immpeccible speaking abilities have first drawn me in and

Monday, December 1, 2014

Star Wars

John Boyega, star of ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens,' responds to 'black stormtrooper' tweets: ‘Get used to it’

The British actor takes to Instagram amid criticism about a black man wearing the uniform of the saga's legendary villains in the new trailer for 'Episode VII'

BY Gersh Kuntzman

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Published: Sunday, November 30, 2014, 10:41 PM

Updated: Monday, December 1, 2014, 10:04 AM

John Boyega created a true disturbance in the Force with his appearance in a stormtrooper costume in the new “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” trailer.

Star Wars/via YouTubeJohn Boyega created a true disturbance in the Force with his appearance in a stormtrooper costume in the new “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” trailer.

Is he on the dark side...or the light?
A black actor who created a disturbance in the Force after he donned the uniform of an Imperial stormtrooper in a much-anticipated “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” trailer has told curious fans to
“get used to it.”

Many fans took to the internet after the trailer was posted online on Friday — with some criticizing director J.J. Abrams for casting a black actor to portray a stormtrooper.
But actor John Boyega responded cheekily on Instagram, saying a bit sarcastically, “Thank you for all the love and support! The fan mail...has added to my joy!”

Actor John Boyega appears briefly in the new trailer for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” wearing a stormtrooper costume.

Anthony Harvey/Getty ImagesActor John Boyega appears briefly in the new trailer for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” wearing a stormtrooper costume. Enlarge

John Boyega/via InstagramBoyega took to Instagram after some fans criticized the makers of “Star Wars” for using a black actor as a stormtrooper. Enlarge

Actor John Boyega appears briefly in the new trailer for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” wearing a stormtrooper costume. He later took to Instagram after some fans criticized the makers of “Star Wars” for using a black actor as a stormtrooper.

He then added, “To whom it may concern...Get used to it. :)”
It is, of course, unclear if Boyega’s character is one of the Empire’s soldiers or merely wearing the stormtrooper uniform — as heroes Luke Skywalker and Han Solo did in the original “Star Wars” film when they infiltrated the Death Star to free Princess Leia.
The “Episode VII” trailer, which also features a new villain with a menacing three-bladed lightsaber, has been viewed more than 40 million times since Friday.

MY COMMENTS************************************************************

This is the movie that sent me into science fiction years ago. The Star Wars saga. I had always loved Star Trek but this was different and unique. Lots of action, suspense and aliens. I loved it. I am happy that it continues on even though its creator George Lucas sold it to Disney, which I do not like so much. They are trying to buy everything child oriented and mass market it. It takes away from the originality of the subject.

Of course I will still see how they handle it. The younger generation will not know about much of the original movies and their hugely popular affect on culture and the youth of the time. Sociology definitely takes the cake as the discipline that is attached to this subject. Its release date is next year but it might be worth the wait.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Damon Horowitz-Philosophy In Prison

MY COMMENTS******************************************************************

I believe that this video shows the mistakes one can make in life. One single wrong decision and bam, you are on a wrong course to a bad place. This Tony that Damon Horowitz speaks of is in prison for shooting a gang member and is getting a visit from Damon who is there speaking to inmates about Philosophy.

Tony is not altogether lost. he does complete a paper on the subject of Philosophy, which connects to our list of disciplines in the way we think. Tony now begins to question many of the things in his life and through his report shows that he is knowledgeable and has a free mind, even though his body is in prison.

......shows that he is knowledgeable and has a free mind

Of course, Tony must pay for what he has done. It is a shame that he learns certain things "on the inside" rather than on his own. I do get the feeling that he will be a "one timer" and that his experiences will lead to him being released and living a better life. One bad decision in robbing a gang member after he supposedly robbed him will lead him and many others to more thought and contemplation. If he had this additional skill earlier he would not have been in trouble or would have been able to disassociate with the bad things in his life.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Literature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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This article is about the art of written work. For the card game, see Literature (card game). For the literature referring to technical publications, see Scholarly literature.

The Classic of Rites (Chinese: 禮記; pinyin: Lǐjì), an ancient Chinese text. Certain definitions of literature have taken it to include all written work.

Literature, in its broadest sense, is any written work; etymologically the term derives from Latin literatura/litteratura "writing formed with letters", although some definitions include spoken or sung texts. More restrictively, it is writing that possesses literary merit, and language that foregrounds literariness, as opposed to ordinary language. Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction and whether it is poetry or prose; it can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story or drama; and works are often categorised according to historical periods or their adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).
Taken to mean only written works, literature was first produced by some of the world's earliest civilizations—those of Ancient Egypt and Sumeria—as early as the 4th millennium BC; taken to include spoken or sung texts, it originated even earlier, and some of the first written works may have been based on an already-existing oral tradition. As urban cultures and societies developed, there was a proliferation in the forms of literature. Developments in print technology allowed for literature to be distributed and experienced on an unprecedented scale, which has culminated in the twenty-first century in electronic literature.

The Wizard By Daniel Mendelsohn

The Wizard

Daniel Mendelsohn

March 25, 2010 Issue

The Wizard by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books

www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/mar/25/

Avatar

a film directed by James Cameron

MGM/Photofest

Dorothy and her friends on their way to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, 1939

"But of course, when you see Avatar, what overwhelms you is what the technology accomplishes—not only the battles and robots, to be fair, but all the other marvelous stuff, the often overwhelmingly beautiful images of a place that exists somewhere over the rainbow. "

All this would be well and good enough, in its ecofable, Pocahontas -esque way, but for the fact that Cameron is the wrong man to be making a film celebrating the virtues of pre- technological societies. As, indeed, he has no intention of doing here. For as the admiring scientists—led by a chain-smoking, tough-talking woman called Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver (the chain-smoking is an in-joke: Ripley had the same bad habit)—protest to the trigger-happy Marines, Na’vi civilization is in fact technologically sophisticated: by means of a pistil-tipped appendage, wittily described by Crain as a kind of USB cable, which plugs into similar appendages on both plants and animals, they can commune not only with other creatures but with what constitutes a planet-wide version of a technology with which we today are very preoccupied. “Don’t you get it?” an exasperated Dr. Augustine shouts at the corporate and military yahoos who clearly intend to blow all the Na’vi to kingdom come. “It’s a network—a global network!”

Dr. Augustine goes on to describe how, by means of the pistil-thing, the Na’vi can upload and download memories, information, and so forth—and can even communicate with their dead. One such upload to Eywa herself, transmitted through the Tree of Souls by Jake’s avatar, will, in the end, help lead the Na’vi and their furry friends to victory over the human exploiters. (This, of course, is the Dances with Wolves paradigm.)
In its confused treatment of that favorite Cameron preoccupation—the relationship between the natural and the technological worlds—the film, for all its richly imagined and dazzlingly depicted beauties, runs into deep and revealing trouble. As we know by now, Cameron’s real attraction, as a writer and a director, has always been for the technologies that turn humans into superhumans. However “primitive” they have seemed to some critics, the Na’vi—with their uniformly superb, sleekly blue-gleaming physiques, their weirdly infallible surefootedness, their organic connector cables, their ability to upload and download consciousness itself—are the ultimate expression of his career-long striving to make flesh mechanical. The problem here is not a patronizingly clichéd representation of an ostensibly primitive people; the problem is the movie’s intellectually incoherent portrayal of its fictional heroes as both admirably precivilized and admirably hypercivilized, as atechnological and highly technologized. Avatar ‘s desire to have its anthropological cake and eat it too suggests something deeply unself-aware and disturbingly unresolved within Cameron himself.
And how not? He is, after all, a Hollywood giant who insists on seeing himself as a regular Joe—a man with what he called, in the New Yorker interview, a “blue-collar sensibility”; more to the point, he is a director whose hugely successful mass entertainments cost hundreds of millions of dollars obligingly provided by deep-pocketed corporations—a “company” man, whether he knows it or not. And these shows depend for their effects—none more than Avatar—on the most sophisticated technologies available, even as that director tells himself that the technology that is the sine qua non of his technique isn’t as important as people think; that, in fact, what makes Avatar special is the “human interest” story, particularly the love story between Jake and Neytiri:

Too much is being said about the technology of this film. Quite frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass how a film is made. It’s an emotional story. It’s a love story. They’re not expecting that. The sci-fi/fantasy fans see the trailer and they think, Cool—battles, robots. What you really need to get to is, Oh, it’s that [a love story], too.

But of course, when you see Avatar, what overwhelms you is what the technology accomplishes—not only the battles and robots, to be fair, but all the other marvelous stuff, the often overwhelmingly beautiful images of a place that exists somewhere over the rainbow.

MY COMMENTS***************************************************************

I liked this article by Daniel Mendelsohn very much. It encompassed many of the movies that I have watched over many years. He was able to go into many for the things that I did not even see or think about when many of James Cameron's films came out. Especially the mentioning of "The Terminator" films.

Of course I did note the "aggressor verses the natives" plotline, which we all have seen many times before. But the writes Mendelsohn also mentions how critics brought up things such as that, rather than bring up the special effects, the technology and many more images and underlying elements of James Cameron films.

One of the underlying features was a man wanting or becoming like a machine aspect which was brought up. This I did not see or think about, even though in "Terminator 2" it was brought up. The young John Connor emulating the cyborg that protects him was something I thought was cute but did not see into it. Being a science fiction fan, I took that at face value and did not look into it other than being the back plot to the main storyline.

There are always scenes or scripts written that deal with a variety of issues in movies and books. That is a given. I need to pay more attention to why it is being done, and what meaning these things have in our society, in my life, and its meaning in general.. Of course, I am there to enjoys the movie as well. So I must check things out a little more before leaving the theatre. It is always good to learn a little something.