Friday, November 13, 2009

6. The Truman Show

I did a bit research about our oral presentation film, "The Truman Show" for using in our slideshow. I found some interesting information and wanted to share.

-In the town Truman lives, every street name refers to a real actor or actresses name. Lancaster Square and Barrymore Road are two of these.

-Truman's Sailboat is called "Santa Maria", which is also the name of Cristopher Colombus's ship.

-Before Jim Carrey got the role, Gary Oldman (he had played James Gordon in The Dark Knight) was thought as Truman.

-According to New York Times, after watching the film, lots of people in the USA had "Truman Syndrome", which refers to the delusion of being watched. (2008)

http://www.funtrivia.com/en/Movies/Truman-Show-The-9416.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120382/

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

5. 7 Weeks

This is my second time taking this class. The biggest difference between these two is the encouragement factor I obviously feel in this term. We also had blogs last year but noone seemed to care that much, especially Sonja's interest on us made me feel responsible doing the assignments, which is really helpful. In last 7 weeks, I feel like I learned lots of things which I will need in the rest of my academic life. Writing an academic essay was one of the biggest issues I had diffuculties in, but I understood almost all the system within the links we are suggested to look at and other helpful documents in sucourse.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

4. Catherine Leroy


I read the story of the war-photographer Catherine Leroy and got impressed. She was a passionate photojournalist who decided to direct her life towards that ideal and left school at the age of 21 and went to the Vietnam War with a one-way-ticket. She documented the scenes of the war for years and had been called as "the photographer makes men jelaous", won numerous awards including the "Robert Capa Gold Medal". She was also the first woman who won that award. By the way, Robert Capa is the famous war-photographer, who is also the artist of the photograph "Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, Cerro Muriano, Córdoba front, Spain." (The war photograph which we had discussed in the class).


Leroy then directed a film called "Operation Last Patrol.", which is about the Vietnam War. She died in 2006 and I think she lived a very meaningful life, which is full of effort of making people aware of something.
The photograph above is one of her most famous photographs, Corpsman in Anguish.


3. Person vs Fame


In my process essay, I had written about a man called Sinisa Savija, who committed suicide after he had been voted off in a reality show. Now I learned that he is not the only one dying because of a reality show and 7 deaths has occured in 13 years. Scott Amedure is one of them, who was murdered by his friend Jon Schmitz. Amedure confesses that he is attracted to his friend Schmitz in "The Jenny Jones Show" and tells more about his feelings within Jenny Jones's insistence. After a few days, Schmitz gets bored about the jokes made by his other friends about being gay and murders Scott Amedure.


After the murder, Amedure's family sues Jenny Jones and she gets accused of provoking the murder. It is really pathetic to use people's feelings in case of having a little more rating and any amount of money cannot be compared to the worth of a human beings life.