Blog 16.

The movie that I am watching is called Trading Places. It stars Eddie Murphy and Dan Akroyd. The basic plot is two rich aristocrats make a bet over a dollar to see if a con-artist (Eddie Murphy) can run a company just like a snotty Investor (Dan Akroyd). The two test subjects had clearly no idea. Through several antics, and arguments, fights and nights in jail, The two eventually work together to bring down the bet makers.
The main setting throughout most of the movie is the eccentric Wall Street. There are a lot of things mentioned about the Stock Market as well. A person could learn a thing or two about it from this movie. The movie also shows the slums of New York during the 1980’s (Manhattan and Brooklyn). There are several scenes of the movie where characters are Incarcerated in jail. In the movie, the current season is Winter. It is in the month of December to be exact. The movie shows the cold and how undesirable it is. Also the hardships that people have to deal with. Christmas time was terrible for some. The movie also shows the kinds of people that live in this urban setting. There aren’t many citizens that were wealthy in New York City. They make the movie a lot more realistic this way. The movie also switches back between what the rich life looks like as well as the not so wealthy.
The viewer can see vast differences between the two. This movie also could work as a metaphor to break the boundaries of social class. It also seems as though the director wants the spectator to see how different everything is, and also probably have undertones or clues showing that people should be more generous or just not snobby. There are big happenings going on in the country and not just the city of New York. There were several lessons learned and was a very entertaining movie. It had its fair share of comedy as well as drama. This is a very great representation of New York City in the 1980s.

Blog 15: Minority Report Response

In the movie Minority Report, privacy really does not exist. The heightened security and the whole theory of Pre-Crime were made intentionally to help people and police to stop criminals before they would commit serious felonies. However, it leads to the invasion of privacy. In one scene from the movie, the police released spiders, which went into each and every single home in the apartment building. This is obviously a great invasion of privacy, to think that someone could be doing day to day activities where they would like to be private, such as taking a shower or sleeping they could even be doing personal business. Then here comes a robot spider going into my house via under my door and scanning my eyeball in an attempt to find a criminal on the loose. There's no privacy in that, if anything it seems pretty painful. Another example is the fact that damn near every facility that exists there are retinal scanners. There are a lot for just simple things such as advertisements, which personally state your name. But also it is a way for tracking people the police are looking for. On a simple train ride there are scanners for every single person that is on the train. The only sure fire way for someone to potentially get away with a serious crime is to get their eyeballs replaced and they would have to be out of public eye for the rest of their life. If someone has to go to the extremes of replacing their eyeballs with someone else's in order for them to be free from the scans and tracking then I think there is no such thing as safety anymore. There is two sides to every argument, therefore, I know some people would state it could easily catch a criminal that has done wrong. I would reply and say "To what extent" there seems to be no such thing as search warrants anymore. It also seems that the legendary bill of rights doesn’t exist at all anymore. Security and society really should not be this extreme. I would just rather see society and national security change very little. I would never want it to be the way minority report ends up as. I sincerely hope it does not turn out like this. If it does, then one can expect disorder and unhappy citizens. People would revolt eventually and not even the most high tech inventions can stop human will.

Special Activity: MOMI

Things i remember:
-The sound booth
-The multiple camera shots of the baseball game
-The sound editing discussion (titanic)
-The arcade
-All the props on the wall.

In the sound booth, the tour guide explained how voice overs worked. There was a computer attached to a microphone and we had to select certain scenes from the movies. Samantha, Victor and I had to recite lines from the movie Babe. It was a pretty simple process and it was a lot of fun.
The baseball game was very interesting. It showed the several cameras that that film the game. It seems as though everything is recorded. On the main screen, which shows whats being shown to the public, the camera angles are all shown. It seemed like a very complicated process.
The arcade seemed probably the most interesting part. There wasn't much explanation about it because we were pressed for time. However, there were a lot of vidoegame consoles there. They were all old, there were also arcade machines which had all the old games, next time i go, this would probably be the best spot for me.