* L'AVVENTURA *

L'Avventura

L’Avventura is an example of a movie that has very little dialogue and virtually no music whatsoever and can still be considered one of the best mystery movies to this day. But to Michelangelo Antonioni, the director of the movie, there was no particular need for any additional music or excessive dialogue to heighten the movie’s climactic plot. All that was needed was the mystery depths of the movie and the exceptionally beautiful sceneries of Italy. This was the goal of Antonioni: to make a movie using solely the plot, the artistic landscapes, and the slow pace of the scenes.

Every scene in the movie has a story to it, a mystery of its own. If you will notice, none of the backgrounds the movie has ever gone out of focus, no matter how much is going on within the frame. Even in the scenes that zoom out to the landscape as the characters talks and walks away, you will see that the camera never loses its perspective and as every second pass, each artifact in the picture can easily be depicted. But why did Antonioni spend so much time and effort into perfecting this feature alone? At first I thought Antonioni was trying to plant subliminal messages into the movie, but this is too far-fetched of a conspiracy theory. Now I realize this was the result of his deep cinematography skills and a mastered pace of shooting.

Many will agree with me that the movie’s pace was slower than a snail’s and the plot was so obvious that it was excruciatingly long. But once the plot was taken into consideration, it seemed quite clear this had to be done to feed the audience with the suspense that all mystery movies have. An example of this theory is in one of the last shots of the movie, Sandro is walking around at the party looking for something he himself was unsure of. This scene stretched as long as five minutes. But in-between this long scene, the camera would cut back to Claudia who was desperately waiting for his return. As the scene continues, the audience will feel the suspense of the movie rising to a high climax because both the actors and the audience are unsure of what will happen next.

As a result of the non-excessive elements of a movie, the perfect sceneries, and the slow pace of the climax, you can see yourself why this movie is considered to be an exceptionally risky yet beautifully shot movie. Like many others, this has become one of my favorite classic movies of all time.

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* THE FOUND BOAT *

The Found Boat

Boys and girls are profoundly different in each aspect. One may like bikes and the other may dislike bikes solely because the other favors it. Even as men and women, there is a sex difference between the two in terms of attitudes and personalities. It is as though the system of perfect equilibrium between the two genders is nonexistence, and this story is an example of that theory. In The Found Boat, the relationship between the kids were constantly changing due to their uncertainty and the changing nature of the two.

When the kids found the boat in the flood, they did what any other youngster would do, take it in for experimentation. Once they took the boat in, they wagered to see if it was possible to get the boat to float in waters again. They worked together by fixing the holes, testing the durability, and even painting the boat to fit their taste. And when they were done and brought the boat back out to the flood, it floated flawlessly; their teamwork was accounted for their success.

But in each step of the process in building the boat and sailing on it afterwards was unpredictable. At times, they would agree with each others ideas and continue to follow the ideas that were brought up. Other times, they argued intensively with demeaning yet playful remarks. Once they did use the boat to ride on the flood, they reached the end of the path and stumbled upon an old broken down station. Inside here, they peacefully ate snacks and sandwiches, and played Truth-or-Dare. They both took turns asking questions and giving dares, and they all followed the rules of the games, even to the end. When they were given the final dare to take off all their clothes, everyone did so concordantly. But once the girls and boys got separated, the girls decided to ditch the boys and go on their own.

The girls and boys were always uncertain of how they felt with each other. At times they despise each other, at other times they enjoyed each others company. One thing is for sure, they both act the same way towards each other.

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* THE FAT GIRL *

The Fat Girl

The Fat Girl is a realistic story that many can relate to. The characters, especially Louise, have a lot of depth to them. What I found so appealing about the story is that Louise, the main character, had never lost her true identity. Even when she transformed into a slim and slender woman, her personality did not change her intricate character. Through thin and thin, Louise’s identity had always stayed the same even when she gained a new persona from her weight lost.

Louise’s weight problems started when she was only nine years old. At that young of an age, it is very hard to lose weight because the habit of over-eating is already forged into the body. Louise, like most people with weight problems, always felt insecure about themselves. These people would often rely on their metabolism to help them get into shape. But when they realize their metabolism is not high enough to withstand the amount of calories being inputted, it will all be too late. Louise’s mother, who only shows love to Louise if she is skinny, mentioned that Louise had her high metabolism, but Louise’s mother wasn’t aware of her daughter’s nasty habit of eating food in the dark. The food consumed her soul, entrapping her body into a cage of mistreatments, and it didn’t stop until she went to college and met Carrie, her savior.

In college, Carrie displayed a series of trust and acceptance to Louise’s beastly habit of eating in the dark; so when Carrie proposed Louise to go on a diet for her own sake, Louise didn’t turn down the offer. Soon enough when Louise lost all the weight she pledged to lose, not only have she forgotten what it was like to be obese, she had also gain a new personality. This new personality that developed overtime from her new body was also a cause from doing things she never could when she was fat. She could then fit into a new line of slim clothes, talk to her mother more comfortably, and have more friends.

All of these new things were overwhelming for Louise, but soon she realized that her true identity could not have been forgotten. She have longed for fatty foods, and with Carrie gone, the inspiration for staying healthy was no longer there. Her new personality came to a halt and she became her old enjoyable self again.

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* MADAME ZILENSKY AND THE KING OF FINLAND *

Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland

There are many people who lie in this world. As a humane society, we grew up to believe that lying is a wrong doing and anyone that lies is not worthy of being trusted with later on. Although, there are people in this world who still insist on lying even when the outcome may not be in any way rewarding. Society considers these people to be below reasoning; it’s these people that ruin the trustful world of today. Yet oddly, there are those who accept those that lies. When one lies to another, the trust is lost and all that is left to do is either reject their lies or accept them.

Madame Zilensky, who was a composer and a pedagogue, was not well known but had an impressive reputation from her works. Mr. Brooks, the music department at Ryder College, hired Madame Zilensky to teach at the school he was working at. As time went on, they would talk and eat together at the college. Mr. Brooks was always fascinated by the stories Madame Zilensky told to him. The stories were all very exciting with different people and social events. They were so amazing that they almost had something wrong with the stories, and soon Mr. Brooks found out what it was.

Then Madame Zilensky told Mr. Brooks about the time she met the King of Finland, and instantly he found out what was agitating him all along. The words that came out of Madame Zilensky’s mouths were all lies. With little researching, he found out that there is no King of Finland, and scheduled a meeting with her to discuss this matter. He confronted her about the lies and deceptions, but she insisted she did see the King of Finland. And after a rigorous battle of getting Madame Zilensky to admit she’s a liar, he soon realized that she had no intentions of lying, because it seemed to be her nature to lie. Then Mr. Brooks gave up chasing her ill-witted self and decided to go along with the act.

Madame Zilensky lied because she might not have a choice. She may have grown up with lying people around her, or she was raised up to lie. Some people can lie without a moment’s hesitation, and others may lie without a second-thought. And in this world we lie in, we can only either accept them or reject them.

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Captain Scott

Captain Robert Falcon Scott was born on June 6th, 1868 in Stoke Damerel, England. He was a Royal Naval officer and Antarctic explorer. During the “Race to the South Pole” Scott came in second and on his way back to their base, he and his four companions died due to the rough terrain in the South Pole.

In 1901, Scott commanded the National Antarctic Expedition through many adventures. The major achievement of the expedition was an exploration of the Ross Sea. During the Terra Nova expedition (1910-1913), when Scott and his party members decided to head home after a year spent undertaking science work, they began to slow deteriorate in the unpredictable and rough terrain of the cold weather. Slowly, each member started to weaken and die due to miscalculations, injuries, frostbite, malnutrition and exhaustion.

Scott died on March 29th, 1912 on the Ross Ice Shelf and was found in a tent containing two more bodies including Scott. Rock samples of the experiments they were working on were found near the corpses. Diaries were also found near the bodies; these diaries spoke of their last moments in the dying winter.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Scott

Billy Holiday

Billie Holiday, born as Eleanora Fagan, was born on April 7th 1915 in Baltimore, Maryland. She was an American singer known for the difficult times in her life and her singing voice. Holiday is considered to have one of the greatest emotive jazz voices of all time.

Holiday had a horrible life throughout a life; she admitted to using hard drugs in the 1940s. She married a trombonist Jimmy Monroe in 1941, and also took up with trumpeter Joe Guy, her drug dealer. In 1947, she split with Guy and divorced Monroe, and was also sentenced to jail for eight months due to drugs.

By the 1950s, Holiday’s relentless abuse to herself with drug abuse, drinking, and other abusive actions gave her voice a more swell and coarsen her voice. Holiday is considered to be a prime example of a artist with a bittersweet ending.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Holiday

Around the World in Eighty Days

Around the World in Eighty Days is a adventure novel that was first published in 1873 by a French writer Jules Verne. In the story, two men made a bet that they can circle around the world in 80 days on a £20,000.

This book was written around the difficult times of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Jules Verne was having a series of unfortunate events when he was writing this book: he enrolled as a coastguard, had money difficulties, recently his father died, and also witnessed a public execution. Despite all these events, Verne was very excited about his work on this new book he was writing, Around the World in Eighty Days, which came across his mind one day in a café while reading a newspaper.

A film adaptation was made into movie directed by Frank Coraci in 2004 with Jackie Chan, Steve Coorage, and Natalie Denise Sperl.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_80_Days