1st Draft on 2001 Film Review

Landyn Waugh

Professor Evans

English 103

3 December 2009

?Title?

2001: A Space Odyssey is a Stanley Kubrick film that was released in 1968. The film is about a space mission to Jupiter in which things go wrong once the very intelligent computer turns against the crew and it decides that the crew is destroying the mission.

Overall, I was very confused with the entire point of the movie. It seemed like there may have been multiple messages that the movie was trying to portray but I was lost in trying to figure out the main message.

The movie starts out with the “Dawn of Man” sequence in which apes are portrayed as the first ‘man’. A monolith appears over night and the apes are fearful of it. The movie later progresses to when the evolved human is now on the moon. Again the monolith makes an appearance but this time the humans are not fearful, instead they are filled with curiosity and excitement. I would interpret the monolith as something that aliens had planted to watch the evolution of our species. I am, however, still confused on what role the monolith really had in the movie. Later during the movie the space crew is on a mission to Jupiter. There are 5 human crewmembers and then a sixth member that is a computer. The computer is one of the most intelligent computers in the world. The computer can simulate human emotions and it has never once had the slightest malfunction. The computer is a HAL 9000, which is referred to as HAL throughout the movie. To sum up the end of the movie, HAL takes over the spacecraft but HAL is eventually destroyed by one of the crewmembers, Dave.

The spacecraft does make it to Jupiter but the confusing part comes when Dave is sent into a very white room. I was completely lost at this point because it seemed like Dave had traveled either forward or backward in time and then suddenly appeared in this room. There was another man in the house but I am unsure of who it was to represent. The man in the house dies and then a child is born.

That was what I initially thought about the movie the first two times I watched it. I watched a flash show of the explanation of the movie on the website www.kubrick2001.com. I then watched the movie for a third time and then things finally began to make sense.

I understand now that the message that Kubrick was trying to make was that without tools humans would not have evolved and with too much tools we may just see our death. This was a very clever message but to me it was much too hard to understand without really thinking in-depth. However, it may have made more sense to someone living back in the late 60’s. That is because back in the late 60’s no man had ever stepped foot on the moon, therefore it seemed like landing on the moon would be much too advanced for our own good.

Overall I did like the movie once I was able to understand what was going on. To me, without knowing the message behind a film is kind of like not knowing why one must eat, what’s the point? Once I understood the message I was able to enjoy the movie and what it stood for. I thought the movie was very well produced and the graphics were fantastic for being such an old film. However, many times throughout the movie the repetitive music and/or breathing became annoying. I would recommend this movie to friends only if they first watched the show about the meaning otherwise the movie is really not worth your time.

Commercial Finished

We are completely finished with our commercial now and it is uploaded to YouTube. Here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3SHe_0CvwQ. We were not able to blur out the faces like we wanted to but it still looks ok.

Commercial Progress

So far we have been making pretty good progress on our commercial that we are making. The commercial is about the dangers of drinking too much. Just yesterday we shot all the clips for the commercial at Tori's friends house. With that done all that we must work on is the editing of the video so that it all runs together smoothly and we will be adding facts about deaths and drinking throughout the commercial. We do, however, have a slight problem and was wondering if anyone would know where we could, or if we could, use Final Cut (a mac video editing software) here on campus? We need it because we were planning on blurring out faces in the video but iMovie '09 is not able to do it. If anyone knows how that would be great if you could let us know!

"Designed" Text

Today's reading was from the Norton's Field Guide to Writing with Readings pages 453-484. The reading covered print text, spoken text, and electronic text. This was a very good reading for this week because it relates to the upcoming project that we will be doing which is either making a commercial or making a website. It helps us know how to "design" the text or spoken words so that people will be attracted to read or listen to what you have to say. This is a very important part of both making a commercial and making a website. Also it tells us how to use visuals along with the text or spoken words so that people better understand the message.

In spoken text we must structure our words very well so people understand better and we must speak clearly. The part about speaking clearly is very important because if you don't speak clearly then you could be misunderstood or tuned out because you are not pronouncing your words clearly. This could be a huge turn off for your audience.

Overall, this reading contributed a lot to the knowledge of how to write and speak professionally. It will also help me in our project that is coming up so that we can write effectively for the audience.

Begin with the End in Mind

Today's reading was from Chapters 28 and 29 in The Norton Field Guide to Writing With Readings pages 239-249, 250-254. The reading talked about how we could write our beginning and ending paragraphs and how to clarify to our readers what we are trying to say in our writings and how to transition smoothly between paragraphs.

I honestly did not know that there are so many ways to write a beginning and a ending paragraph! I always knew that you needed to attract the reader and give some background info but I did not know you could define key terms or start with a story. All of this provided me with good information about how to start off a successful beginning paragraph.

The second part of the reading was about end paragraphs. Who knew that you could actually have two end paragraphs! One to summarize the subject and the other to give your own opinion on the topic.

The last part of the reading was about transition sentences, thesis sentence, and topic sentences. This gave me a lot of insight on how I need to be specific with what the topic is so that the reader is not left guessing what I am trying to say. Also the thesis sentence is one of the most important parts of the writing because without it the reader would not know what the objective of the story or essay is.

Helping organize our Writings

Today's reading was about causes and effects, classifying and dividing, and comparing and contrasting. The readings were meant to help us with our writing that we are working on this week. It helps us organize our writing so that we concentrate on one thing at a time. The causes and effects section talked about how we are not to be sure that a cause is a direct effect of something but instead we should think that it may be a reason for the effect. The classifying and dividing section talked about how we need to specify the class of whatever we are analyzing and not to leave it at a broad class. The comparing and contrasting section told us how we can use visuals and text together to analyze things and how they go together.

How To: Analyze

In today's reading we read about how to read and analyze text. This was a very helpful reading for the fact that we are going to be writing a paper that analyzes text so this gave me some insight on how to correctly analyze a text.

So the reading said that we are to write down our initial reactions to a text after reading it, whether the reaction is good or bad. This helps us to know what we believe about this topic of text and it helps us know how we feel about what is being said. Next it told us to play the doubt and believe game. This game is where you write about why you would agree with everything the author says and why you would disagree with everything. This forces us to think on both sides of the issue of text. Then we are encouraged to write down what the text says in our own words and what the text does to the reader. Such as does it make the reader feel angry, excited, make them think? We are also told to look at patterns in the authors writing and try to find a recurring theme that is present. Next we have to analyze the argument and find out if the reasoning behind the authors argument is legitimate and if it has good evidence to back it up.

Overall this reading was very helpful to me as I prepare to start my own text analyzation. It also provided the reader, me, with very useful examples about each of the sections it talked about.

Rhetorical What??

Today's reading covered how to analyze text and it also showed us what rhetorical analysis writing looked like. We read multiple stories that were very descriptive and analytical of something or someone.

I thought the reading was very intriguing because, for the most part, the authors wrote about both sides of the analysis so that they would not show their true opinions on the topic. This gave me, the reader, a much more unbiased look at the subject than say in persuasive writings. At first I was unsure what rhetorical analysis meant but after reading the stories and the description of how to analyze text I now know that it means to pick apart a text to give it a better meaning to the reader and to explain the point of the text. I enjoyed reading the stories especially the first reading by Dennis Noe, Parallel Worlds: The Surprising Similarities (and Differences) of Country-and-Western and Rap. This story went in-depth and looked at the words of both C&W and rap music and compared how similar they were. Noe explained how generally C&W is looked at in a more family-friendly way but he goes on to show that both C&W and rap are similarly close in how they portray violence in their music.

The third reading was also a very interesting one too. It was Pulpit Talk by Beverly Moss. This reading was a description of how in African-American churches the preacher would talk in "black" and that this was the best way to communicate to the other black members of the church. I thought it was very interesting how the preacher would talk and all the audience would talk back to him during his sermon. That is much different than how my church does its sermons. Normally no one speaks during church service so I found it interesting to hear that most African-American churches are never quite during the sermon.

The other readings were good too but for some reason I found it hard to read Seeing as Believing: The Paintings of Judith Belzer by Peter Stiglin. This story was hard for me to understand but maybe I just wasn't the authors target audience. Changing the Face of Poverty: Nonprofits and the Problem of Representation by Diana George was a very good description of how nonprofit organizations that fight poverty exploit our emotions with words and sad images.

For the Love of Reading

The five literacy narratives that we had to read were all unique in there own way but at the same time they all were alike. They all were somewhat alike in the fact that all the stories had a theme of something that the author loved to do. Almost all the stories were related because the authors had a love for reading and writing. They all strived to learn to read and write even if they were poorly taught.

I thought the readings were excellent and very fun to read. I especially liked the writing by Malcolm X because it was cool to see that people in prison would be so "hungry" to read. Most people take reading and writing for granted but most of these authors were very thankful to be able to read. Another reading I enjoyed was "Mother Tongue". This reading was fun to read because it shows that when you speak and write you do not need to use fancy words to impress people but rather you should speak in a way that they will understand completely, that way you communicate the best.

You may say "Who cares about reading and writing?". Well, for a few of the authors of these stories, reading and writing saved their lives, like the author of "Learning to Read", Frederick Douglass. Being able to read and write helped him be able to understand what abolition meant and that he could run away from a life of slavery to a life of freedom.

This reading will definitely make me realize how lucky I am to be able to read and write and how useful it can be to me.

Who's the Audience??

This reading talked about the types of purposes, audiences, stances, genres, and mediums, and the relation that they all have between each other. The author did an excellent job in giving examples of each piece of topic.

I thought the reading was very useful in the way that it showed how all those situations were related to one another. For example, it was interesting to know that the type of medium you use can depend heavily on the audience and your purpose. Like how you would not ask a girl out through one of your friends. You would normally do it by face to face interaction or possibly by phone. Also, the audience is a huge part of your writing. Without knowing your audience it is difficult to produce good writing. You also write differently depending on what type of audience you are addressing. As the book puts it, "...You likely alter what you say depending on whether you are speaking to a boss, an instructor, a parent, or a good friend...". The audience does matter! The quote means a lot to the reading because it combines what your purpose will be, what your stance is, the genre, and the medium.

You may wonder why the audience is so crucial? Well, if your audience is the President of the United States and you are addressing an issue to him, do you think he will listen to you if you are talking to him nervously and quite? No. You need to speak loud and clear and be assertive so that he will listen.