Samantha Kelly Lit and Media

What is your reaction to what you just read? I thought Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, was very self-aware and intentional. From my understanding, it addresses the issue of current events and how it is presented to the public through media. The three characters; the bearded man, the pizza guy, and the surveyor all represent the general public and their want and need to be feed news that breaks the pattern of what they have been systematically presented with in the past. What connections did you make with the story? Discuss the elements of the week with which you were able to connect. News in the US, especially since the past presidential election, has been tainted with bias and false truths. News is supposed to be news; facts. It is our right as citizens of this country to be in tune and aware of the events affecting our county, but you feel like you cannot be dutiful in this right due to the corruption of the news and media. You never know what is true or just the medias p...

Sex trafficking prevention and rescue is a cause almost anyone could get behind. It is a heartbreaking topic that we all should be aware of. Our own town of Sarasota is unfortunately known as being a center of activity in sex trafficking. There are ways we all can help. From joining a group that assists in rescue and treatment to being aware of what to look for in being alert for possible victims, I hope we can all at least be aware and learn more about this issue. Rapha’s House is one group working to end the trafficking industry and help survivors. They state their mission is to, “end the trafficking and sexual exploitation of children through aftercare for survivors, prevention for the vulnerable, and awareness for all.” Rapha House is a Christian organization that strives to help all being held captive by the sex trade. Websites: Raphahouse.org National Human Trafficking Hotline: humantraffickinghotline.org Documentary: “Finding Home” is about three Cambodian wome...

Star Wars Costuming When it comes to costuming what is the first thing you think of? Cosplay, conventions, anime, crazy scico nerds who have no life? How about charity? I am a member of the Rebel Legion, an international Star Wars costuming group that focuses on charity. We visit hospitals, local community event, libraries, and sporting events among other events and spread the love of Star Wars. There is nothing much more beautiful than the face of a child who just had a visit from their favorite star Wars characters especially when they are constantly in and out of the hospital. If we help them forget their unfortunate situation for just a minute, is it worth everything! We never get paid and don’t want to get paid. We volunteer our time and devote our money to create our costumes. This community is dependant on social media. It is how we organize ourselves, help each other with costumes and reach out to the public. Below I organized most of the social media groups, websites, a...

The Medium is the Massage For all of the past readings I have utilized the audiobook versions. For this week’s reading, I did not have any preceding knowledge about the book and I did not read anything about the Medium is the Message before starting to listen. You can imagine my confusion when I hit play! It was an array of sounds, words and music with no tempo and no organization. At first I thought it was a short snippet of music or sound effects that accompanies the prologues of most audiobooks, but I soon realized that this was the extent of it. I obviously made a mistake in choosing the audiobook instead of physically reading a copy, but it gave me a unique experience. I could not make sense of anything in the chaos of sound coming out of my computer. After about a half an hour, I was starting to go crazy and turned it off. You don’t know what it was like to listen to the jumble of sound for as long as I did. It was sort of like when you are in a public place and there a...

Stranger Things Stranger Things is a Netflix original series. It has two seasons and the third season will come out in August. It is about a group of kids dealing with a mystery in their town. A classic coming of age story with a supernatural twist.   It takes place in the 1980s which only adds to the nostalgia of the work. The first season revolves around one of the boys disappearing and then a mysterious girl showing up in town. The group of friends, the mysterious girl, and some older teens in the town, the town sheriff, and the mom of the boy who disappeared all work to solve the mystery of what is going on in the town. The season really held my interest. I thought placing the series in the 80s made it even better. People have a deep connection to the 80s. This is something that I discussed in another blog post. The plot is a little confusing, but a lot makes sense at the end. The second season starts out with the mysterious girl missing and the boy who was found the ...

My Favorite Thing is Monsters I found this graphic novel very interesting and different. It was unique in style and content. I loved how the story was presented through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl. You were not sure if what was presented was real or if you were just seeing these events and characters through her eyes, the eyes of a young girl. The way a ten-year-old girl sees things is drastically different then the way most people do. But I loved this about the story. You knew that Karen’s life situation was less then secure and comfortable, but she never thought anything of it. You don’t see her complain about the trash in the city or that fact that her brother is not the best at times. To her all this is normal, it’s the way it has always been. Therefore, these things are presented to us in a way where we are expected to just accept them as normal. This again pulls you into her world. The book is designed to look like Karan’s journal. I think that was my favorite part abou...

Wes Anderson Wes Anderson is one of those directors that when you see his work, you know right away it is his. His work has a quirky style that blends the lines between reality and fiction. From Moonrise Kingdom, about the love story of two children, to The Darjeeling Limited, which is about three brothers on their quest to reunite their relationships, and The Life Aquatic, which is about a group of documentarist on a journey to revenge the death of a coworker, all of Wes Andersons movies portray his unique style that people love. Wes Anderson has a specific way he designs his shots. He uses mostly flat shots with one point perspective, unless another shot is needed. These shots are usually avoided in movies unless they are used in a specific strategic manner, but Wes uses them as a default. This gives his movies a very artificial look like the scenes are set in a play. This adds to the style of story he presents. Wes Anderson’s movies are mostly about realistic everyday even...

A New Hope When I read the screen play from A New Hope, the first movie in the original Star Wars trilogy. I was surprised at how simple it was. The dialogue seemed too simple. It really showed how much the abilities of the actors make or break a movie. I was also surprised by the lack of detail. I guess I expected it to show a lot more information on surroundings, but I suppose it was just meant to give the actors a little detail as they were learning their lines. While reading, I wondered how long the actors have to memorize the lines and if they do small chunks at a time or have to learn them all at once. I would be interested in comparing a movie screenplay to how it actually turns out on in the movie. I wonder how much they change the lines as they go along and how much the actors add to the lines. I enjoyed seeing the screenplay. I think it gave me a better feel for how hard everyone works to produce a movie.

Ready Player One There has been a lot of talk about virtual reality in the past few years. What was once thought to be impossible is now realized. Ready Player One may be more a sign of our future then just a fictional story from the past. I went to Disney the other day and tried out The Void. It’s a Star Wars VR experience. A friend and I were strapped in our vest and a headset and placed onto a closet sized room. They closed the door and all of a sudden we saw each other, but not as each other - we were both stormtroopers. K2SO showed up and told us to follow him through the door way. Knowing that the door was indeed not there before, I was very confused, but took the chance and walked through into a warehouse. You could reach out and touch things, pull levers, pushbuttons, shoot others, and even get shot yourself. It was one of the coolest experiences! We were taken through a multitude of rooms like a maze. You got to the point where you were so immersed, you forgot you wer...

Family can be a great source of joy and support, but when you do not have a good family by your side you can get easily lost. I have had the good fortune of growing up in a supportive household complete with both parents. This is often not the case. Your family is so important to the growth of young people. Sometimes children do not end up sharing the views and beliefs of their parents. After all, a person should believe what they do because they truly believe it, not because their parents tell them to. But, children often still want to please their parents even if they don’t share every view. I think this was at the center of the story in Marriage of a Thousand Lies . When Lucky and Krishna get married they see it as a way to please themselves and their families. I don’t really think it was a good way to solve their “problem.” Only pretending to agree with your family is not honest and it is not a way to have a good strong relationship. Maybe being honest with their families wou...

Cosmopolis is a window into the life of a young asset manager, Eric Packer. I have little in common with Eric, being a younger female from a totally different background. While I found the story of the life of Eric Parker sad and unfulfilling, it does prompt an interesting question. What is the meaning of anything? Eric was successful, young, good looking. He seemed to have everything anyone could every long for. It is the classic story. Character has everything they ever wanted, but still needs more. Why is this such a popular story plot? Because it’s a story we see in our own lives. We finally achieve our dreams and then what? Was that it? This can’t be it! You hear about Olympians working their whole lives for that gold medal, finally get it and then think now what. Their whole lives have centered around one thing and now that thing is no longer something to strive for. This is a phenomenon that happens to some extent in everyone life, but why? It’s because we put our hopes a...

My first introduction to the Wonder Woman franchise was the 2017 movie. I really did not have an interest in seeing the movie, not being a big super hero fan, until members of my family saw it and highly suggested it. I saw it and I loved it! It did not feel like a classic superhero movie. I came out of the movie really fired up and ready to take on some bad guys. Having such a love for this movie I never thought I would tell myself “I don’t think I can ever watch Wonder Woman again,” until after I read The Secret History of Wonder Woman .  I will say outright that I do not agree with most of Marston’s moral decisions, both professionally and within his household. To me his life was actually really sad. Marston’s life is very complex, as evidence by the fact we just read a whole book about it. I don’t want to seem like I am over simplifying an issue - I feel like I can write a whole book about my thoughts - but due the nature of a short blog post, but I will focus on Marston...

For someone who is a proud American, I have had very little exposure to westerns in any medium.  Reading True Grit was the first time, apart from the occasional Twilight Zone western themed episode, that I experience the genre. I really enjoyed this week’s reading a lot. I found the story and world building truly immersive, but in my opinion the most compelling aspect of the novel was the characters.  Mattie, Rooster and LaBoeuf. Each character was interesting in their own right but I found Mattie very relatable. Maybe it’s because I am a young woman, but I feel like we see a steadiness and self-confidence in this character that is relatable on all fronts. When push comes to shove would we all want to react like Maddie has? She knows what she wants and what she thinks is right and she does it even when a multitude of obstacles get in her way! So sure, so strong in herself. Writing the book from Mattie’s point of view, I think the author WANTED us to relate to...

              I have been a huge fan of the Keira Knightly, 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice for a long time now, but I never had the opportunity to read the original book. It was an interesting experience. It’s not often you watch the movie and then read the book. The movie seems to really honor the book, quoting the text sometimes word for word and having the same skeleton of scene structure. While the two mediums seem to be very similar, there was one thing that stood out to me as being outwardly different. You know was Darcy is thinking throughout the story.               In the 2005 movie, everything is solely from Elizabeth’s point of view; you never knowing for sure what Darcy is thinking. While I relate very much to the movie version of Elizabeth and enjoyed seeing the story through her filter, I felt like knowing what Darcy is thinking and seeing things from his side thro...

Hello Readers, When reading a work, it is very helpful and insightful to know the writer, their background, worldview, etc. Knowing just a little about the author can reveal underlying themes and story points in the work which you might not have realized otherwise. In this spirit, I will give you, the reader, a little insight into me as the writer of this blog.               I grew up in Maryland, north of Baltimore, with my parents and my two sisters. Like many of us, I drew a lot and always had my eyes on an artistic career, but I also was very involved in sports. I played soccer for most of my life and still play on the plaza with the soccer club now. When I got to high school I stopped playing soccer, mostly, and picked up rugby. Rugby was really my athletic focus in high school and when it came time to look at colleges, I was torn between a college with a rugby team and a bad art program or a school without rugby...

In  The Wife of Bath's Prologue  and  The Wife of Bath's Tale,  there is the underlying message that women want power over their men. During Chaucer’s time, the 1300’s, women were generally held in low esteem. This mindset even occurred in the church. The church, at this time in history, was very corrupt. They misinterpreted a multitude of scriptures to conform to their worldview, rather than having the scriptures form their worldview, like it is intended to do. This erroneous worldview is the fault of the readers, not the text. This was the truth that the Wife of Bath was after why she felt the pilgrimage was necessary; she longed for the truth.                 This oppressive worldview that was held by the majority molded the Wife of Bath into the sexually manipulative women that we read about. Having told she has little power being a woman, she ironically uses her feminine wiles to yield...