Teaching Satire on PB Wiki

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Teaching Satire

Critical analysis of film -- American Gangster

Above is the trailer to American Gangster... I will analyze the trailer as a representation of the film, which I did see.

I'd like to analyze this film from a critical discourse perspective, specifically the perspective of race... and then from an audience perspective. I am assuming you've seen the film, and if you haven't you may want to pass and return, once you have...

We'll start with an audience perspective. Three things I look for in a film that I am paying full price for at the theater: 1. Bigness... If I am seeing this film at the theater, something about this film should need to be big. Big sound, sweeping landscapes, action. Quiet dramas, and chick flicks do not need to be viewed on the big screen. 2. Good acting / script. I don't like to have my intelligence insulted by films with bad acting or cheesy scripts. Some comedies get exempted from this rule... but I am looking for some quality, otherwise it can wait for dvd viewing. 3. thought provoking ideas. despite genre, there should be something about this film that I could take away to think further about or discuss with someone else. If I come out of a movie, and there is nothing to really say, I will feel like I've wasted money...

On to the movie at hand:

Bigness: This movie was big in its cast... with both Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe as Best Actor Oscar winners, a soundtrack with latest rappers like Jay Z, and a volatile and sometimes violent setting. 1968, Harlem, based on true story. 2. Acting was great in this film. Crowe plays an intelligent and honest, but kind of dumpy Jersey cop. Washington is a totally polished, yet subtle and rising drug lord. 3. Thought provoking. There are a lot of trains of discussion one could take on this movie. It was very well done, and the social, racial implications are very interesting... as well as a historical piece... I'll talk more about those things below. So, as far as audience is concerned, I found this to be a film that stands to my criticism.

more to come...

Adult cartoon presentation

Here's the link to the adult cartoon presentation:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ddf65hks_7444tb

the best band ever...

So, click for the link to my class presentation.

Here's the band website: www.theframes.ie

Here is the link to my youtube playlist... because the embeddable player wasn't doing sound.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=2217C3D2E508A628

In the link above, there are two Frames videos and a Rocketboom episode on pandora radio.

5 gum

For my analysis of filming techniques, I am using Wrigley's 5 Gum ad - rain.

In a 47 second clip, there are 28 cuts, so an average of less than a half second per shot. The ad begins with the taps of buttons and a low whirring sound, which builds as clips of an observation deck and various buttons and knobs are pressed and turned, a bass beat starts as a man walks into a raised pool of silver marbles and eventually lies down in them. The beat continues and the marbles begin to roll off the pool and over the man. One of the last cuts is off the man's mesmerized face as he lies in the marbles and listens to the beat. Eventually it clips to a slide that says "That's the spearmint tingle of 5 gum." The lighting of both the clips of the observations deck and the pool is largely dark and mysterious with dim lighting. The technical gizmos juxtaposed with the spare trappings of the room with the pool of marbles offers a sort of contrast of complex and simple, but is consistently a cold, metallic, distant feeling. The serious looks on the observers faces, and slow movements of the man walking into the pool combined with all the fast cuts create a feeling of anticipation and mystery as you are unsure of where the shots will take you next. There are a lot of shots of close ups of hands which creates a sense of proximity without intimacy. The man in the pool is only wearing shorts, so the imagery of skin as an organic substance with the metallic marbles makes you imagine a cool sensation.

The shots are mostly close ups and head/shoulders shots, but there are a couple views of the large auditorium area from far away that give a sense of place to the close ups. Overall, the audience is unsure of what will happen, like the scientists, but the positioning is definitely with the man in the pool. The shots where you can see the faces of the scientists are largely behind glass, whereas you see the hands, body, face of the man in the pool close up and for longer periods of time than the scientists. Overall, you are impressed with the abstractly cool feel of the place created, and you have a tendency to imagine what it would feel like to lie in a pool of metal marbles while listening to bass beats... and that the mindlessness of that might be desirable compared with whatever you might be doing. You probably should get some 5 gum, you are hypnotized and you are going to buy it right now. 5 packs probably.

Parody of an Ad

So, we're on the way out of a staff meeting convo about classroom management. We have largely decided that success often becomes about entertainment, since you can't actually force inner change on students, and it's hard to intrinsically motivate students to learn things that they aren't interested in or won't move them towards their goals. A colleague says, "It is basically just about building a better mouse trap." Or, in other words, if we can trick them into thinking we're giving them something useful, then we can get them. He was being sarcastic, but it was a phrase I hadn't heard before... I guess it is somewhat common in business circles as "If you can build a better mouse trap, they will beat a path to your door." It turns out the original quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door." The big question: What if you don't actually need a mouse trap? What if the mouse doesn't actually need cheese? So, much of marketing and ads isn't about promoting things that meet needs, but about creating needs alongside products to fill them.

I chose to apply this idea to education, but in the ways education gets manipulated by the government as a sort of business idea. We are looking for a certain product, so we offer certain rewards. The poster that I manipulated is from the American Competitiveness Initiative. Check out the link below for the Information from the Department of Education and the whole report. The Initiative was introduced in the President's 2006 State of the Union address. (Where else would we get the word "competitiveness.")
http://www.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/competitiveness/index.html

This is the cover of the 17 page initiative that offers college money to students if they take extra math and science classes. The report is full of the same old research about how we are getting beat by other countries with smart kids... About how China is producing half of the future scientists of the world (or something like that) This is all well and good. I am all about kids getting free money for school, but the sentiment from the original poster smacks of the old space race promotions... except denying that the real reason we are pushing "competitiveness" is for the purposes of defensive (and more honestly) offensive military technologies. If we were to just spend less on these technologies, how much more fundage would be available to put right into education, instead of having to let it trickle down... What if kids could then take not only higher mathematics, and sciences, but vocational classes? What if we could provide a wider variety of intrinsically motivating choices in all academic areas?

...they'd beat a path to our door.

Insomnia Film Festival 2007

So, two weekends ago, I met four of my senior art students to discuss the next 24 hours over Saturday's breakfast... We were preparing to create an entry for Apple's Insomnia Film Festival, and hoping to win Macbook Pros and Final Cut software.

...24 hours later, we had a 3 minute film and a lot more knowledge of Final Cut and the do's and don'ts of short films.

What follows is a copy of the film, which you can rate on apple's website for the festival until November 9th.

http://edcommunity.apple.com/insomnia_fall07/contest.php

Web based curriculum

For anyone that is interested, I wanted to put a link to a blog that I started for a previous class. The blog is mostly reflections about using internet based curriculum. I realize that is of a slightly different vein from v-casting, but may be of interest to some...

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/wond0013/wonpet/

Also, I created a website that goes through the projects that I did with my class and has more links...

http://wonpet.googlepages.com

Rocketing along...

So, in looking for video blogs that I would read on a regular basis, I have had mixed results. Rocketboom is a satirical news daily that is entertaining and mildly informative. It reminds me of a high school teacher's "News of the Weird" portion of current events. I like the accent of the anchor, Joanne, and I like the option to click into links that tell more about the stories that are zipping past. My browser opens the link in a new tab, allowing me to continue hearing the audio portion of the newscast, while potentially getting more in depth information on a topic that strikes my fancy.



Another vlog I found that I'd like to go back to is called Chasing Windmills. I added this to my subscription list and then I realized that this is no longer being published as of like 8 months ago. This was a common problem. I would look for vlogs logged in directories and they would be interesting, but after subscribing I would realize that they weren't active anymore. A second problem being when the links no longer have video files in them, so that you can't even go back and watch the old posts. Anyway, Chasing Windmills was sort of an artsy weekly drama, filmed by people that appeared to know what they were doing, and including characters that reappeared and developed over time. Another point of interest, was that the locale was the Minneapolis area, so many familiar places show up like the Walker Art Center, etc. Also notable is that the creators of Chasing Windmills used Blogger as their platform.

The audience for both series is probably a 20 to 30 something age group, likely urban in either location or background. The Chasing Windmills group used classic cinema technique, whereas the Rocketboom posts were a combination of traditional news clips of anchor slash news, with addition of sound effects, humor, and a much quicker rate of frame changeover.