Long hair

Huey P. Long, the writer and speaker of the “Every Man a King” speech, was the governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and a United States Senator from 1932 until 1935 when he was unfortunately assassinated a month after announcing his run for the United States 1936 Presidential Election. When Huey Long made his Every Man a King speech on NBC radio waves in 1934 the United States was enduring the biggest financial crisis in its history after the Wall Street crash in 1929 which caused the Great…

the life of Elisa Allen, house wife and gardener. The story tells of Elisa’s experience with a traveling tinkerer who aims to earn a bit of money repairing their pots and pans. While the interaction with the man does not last long, it awakens something in Elisa that she had long put to bed. Steinbeck masterfully captures the suppressive life of an American wife in the 1930’s with realistic style. The story beings on a hazy December day with Elisa tending to her chrysanthemums, the story’s…

“Movement, change and flux are the only constants in the city.” A delightfully poignant movie revolving around urban alienation of its citizens living in Hong Kong, it is easy for its audience to get absorbed in the flurry of images created by Christopher Doyle’s shaky handheld cameras, William Chang’s fast-paced editing, and Wong Kar Wai’s signature ‘smudge-motion’ techniques in the film Chungking Express. These cinematographic images created from such, as if to vertiginously disorient its…

Love is a motivation for people to fight, defend, and mature for. Lucius Apuleius' myth, Cupid and Psyche, tells the story of the strength and determination of the mortal needed to regain a lost love. Francesca Lia Block's modern retelling, Psyche's Dark Night, emphasizes the many issues that affect relationships and explores the pain that accompanies dating. The retelling offers a new look into love and whether or not it is worth all the pain that accompanies it. The updated setting and…

Contextualizing the shot from 1:49:03 to 1:49:09, Marty is seeing this new Biff for the first time, while George making sure that Biff doesn’t “con” him and puts two coats of wax on the car. As the shot begins, Biff is in the middle ground in an extreme long shot; the camera seems to be elevated above where Biff stands, at maybe a normal shoulder level. After being yelled at, Biff comes around from the car with his hands up and flailing up and down as he profusely apologizes to George,…

On the surface, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) is a horror film that uses a mythical monster to torture an already broken family. It presents the creature as a monster that one could picture originating from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Kent introduces the idea of the Babadook monster through a twisted children’s pop-up book. In keeping with the tropes of the horror film genre, the book appears on Samuels Vanek’s (Noah Wiseman) shelf from an unknown place. When Amelia Vanek (Essie Davis) tries to…

Not all Medals are made of Metal An icy and bitter mist surrounded me. The sun had secreted behind piles of looming clouds, while droplets of water dispensed from the sky. The track bore a vast expanse of puddles, and runners plunged their way through them. I was sitting in the dewy grass underneath the canopy of our tent. Rain trickled down the stadium steps as I heard the booming announcer eagerly bellow, “Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the 2016 State Track and Field Meet.” My heart began to…

In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film, Vertigo, certain shots have a certain compositional symmetry and balance to them that helps draw our attention, as viewers, to individual characters, namely that of Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton, portrayed by Kim Novak (because she has these two roles, I will be referring to her actual name when making reference to her). Various balanced shots in the film use Novak as a literally dividing figure, creating a down-the-line symmetry. By looking at these shots one by…

John Steinbeck’s short story, “The Chrysanthemums,” establishes an explicitly ironic and dismal tone towards female empowerment in society through the contradictory characterization of Elisa and her duality as both a strong, independent woman, and a wife who is constantly being socially oppressed by the world around her. Steinbeck reinforces this idea through constant, selective detailing of the environment surrounding Elisa, and the inclusion of symbolic visual imagery throughout the text.…

In my opinion, the author has done a great job by using simplicity of a drawing to represent a really difficult situation that a nation couldn’t solve. Moreover, he used all different kinds of rhetorical keys to attract more people and show a long message within a short cartoon. However, as many possibilities as there are to view the cartoon, the tragedy will always be looked at with sad emotions to all…