Day: February 27, 2020

This game is available across all platforms, it was released in 2016 after a prototype caught a significant amount of attention. You can still play the prototype on their official website ( https://superhotgame.com/play-prototype/ ). The game is set on what seems to be a game within another reality, a reality where this game is illegal but you somehow got your hands on it. It is a first person shooter game that messes with observed time, where time only moves when you move. The objective level by level is to not die, but to also kill all the red-beings. However, the overall objective of the game is unclear until you are fully immersed in Super Hot. The games starts with little to no plot, but quickly changes as the player is more and more immersed. The player is constantly being flashed certain words and images guiding and illuminating the player through the plot. Here is the trailer to the game, followed by the full game play. And if you have the time and money, play this game, it is the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years.

For my analysis, I would like analyze the documentary, The Pharmacist.

The Pharmacist portrays a negative viewpoint of the prescription drug OxyContin as well as the drug trade in the world around us. The narrator, Dan Schneider, is a pharmacist and didn’t notice the dangers people were being exposed to by being prescribed OxyContin until his son was murdered in a drug-related shooting in New Orleans. Dan Schneider works throughout the whole documentary to prove how dangerous OxyContin is, while working with the FBI as well as the medical board of doctors.

The Pharmacist shows the audience how dangerous the drug world is, especially with OxyContin and how easy it is to open up a ‘pill mill’, which is a clinic ran by doctors who distribute prescription medication to anyone who is willing to pay. The documentary uses interviews of people involved to convince the audience of this perspective.

https://www.netflix.com/search?q=the%20pharmacist&jbv=81002576&jbp=0&jbr=0

A game that is famous as a game that can run on almost anything is one of the first truly violent video games. 

Depicting a lone man fighting against hordes and hordes of demons with the sole goal to survive and and kill all the demons. 

This game (and the remakes) get a huge amount of flak because of the demonic imagery and the death metal used in the games. That being said why do they get flak when the whole goal of the game is to exterminate the entirety of the demon horde. Ages have passed with mutliple sources/writers/storytellers have tried to explain how demons are pushed back religiously. Why can’t wanton violence be the answer?

The piece I would like to explore is the 2010 film by Director Christopher Nolan, Inception. Inception has a number of factors that make it worth spending time digging deeper into. When Inception was released it was a film that raised the bar when it came to CGI and pushed boundaries of what filmmakers could create.

Christopher Nolan is a director that has been apart of many movies that at first glance look to be simply amazing works of art, however, after a deeper investigation, I believe Nolan reveals himself to be an extraordinary storyteller and truly explores what makes humans who we are. Nolan uses his incredible stories and eye-catching filmmaking to bring in the viewers, and a story like Inception takes advantage of that and explores something much more powerful than simply explosions and gunfights.

The topics I want to explore are what makes movies like this so attractive to us. Movies that leave us in suspense and perhaps even leave to wonder after the film has ended. There is something truly unique in a story-teller that can leave a viewer to think about their work after it has ended. Perhaps there is something in Inception that makes us think about ourselves and our lives.

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Spiderman: Far From Home, the latest version of movies about the classic superhero Spiderman, follows Peter Parker on his school field trip to Europe. He is enjoying his time off of school and superhero duties until his vacation is interrupted by Nick Fury, who recruits him for a mission to help “uncover the mystery of elemental creature attacks”. 

I’ve decided to discuss this film because I appreciate the way that it integrates animation with live action. The internal consistency of Marvel films in general makes it difficult for viewers to believe that Marvel characters aren’t real, but there was something different about this movie that made everything seem even more realistic than usual. With this, I think that it will be interesting to further study the aspects of realism in the film as it reflects fictional ideas in a realistic manner.

For my first persuasive media analysis, I would like to discuss the revolutionary found-footage horror film, The Blair Witch Project (1999). The film follows three student filmmakers on a trek through the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland as they search for the titular Blair Witch, a local legend said to haunt the region. While fictional, the story is presented as a documentary; it utilizes largely unscripted dialogue and amateur handheld camera techniques to create an almost mundane sense of authenticity. In addition to the film’s improvisational production style, a large part of what made it so interesting to me was its marketing, which primarily took place on the internet. Prior to its release, fabricated police reports and news interviews were posted to The Blair Witch Project’s official website; this caused quite the stir on the web, as people began to argue over whether or not the film was a piece of fiction.  

To extend the illusion even further, missing persons flyers for the three central characters were distributed to audiences at screenings, as the filmmakers prompted viewers to come forward with any information they might have on the students’ disappearance. In my analysis, I would like to examine the stylistic choices made by the directors of The Blair Witch Project, as well as the tactics utilized in its advertisement campaign, both of which contributed heavily to the film’s eerie faux-realism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceuyDibhjX4

The artifact I would like to study further for my PMA1 is Parasite.  Parasite captured my interest because it is a very complex movie with many layers, details, and meanings. The movie is about how class inequality and shows how the wealthy can parasitic and the poor’s struggle for survival.  The rich are parasitic because they feed off the labor of the poor and in the movie, the working-class families feeds off the rich by infiltrating their house and using their resources. Different events make class inequality more prominent as depicted in a flood scene. For the rich, the flood was a mere inconvenience, but for the poor, the flood destroyed their homes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtxrau3arh4

 I would like the elements of cinematography we talked about in class. The editing, setting, and props–of this scene in particular–juxtaposes the two families.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knSGTacpb14

The sound in this scene is perfect because it builds up to a moment where the poor family has completed infiltrated the rich family’s home.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egieAUXfc7Y

For my persuasive media analysis, I would like to take a look at Narcos: Mexico. Narcos: Mexico is a series on Netflix that tells the story of the DEA intervention of the Sinaloa drug cartel in the 1980s. We follow Kiki Camarena and his role in the following of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and his cartel. I chose this because it is a historical fiction. Two of the theme that we discussed during class was realism and narrative. Narcos: Mexico heavily relies on the realism of the show that allows the audience to believe what they see, all the meanwhile creating a narrative throughout each episode. This invites the audience to see through the eyes of the DEA agents and their point of view, which invites analysis for the overall theme and rhetoric. As a Mexican-American and my parents being fully Mexican, I am interested in analyzing this media because of the stories I heard from my parents, stating whether the show was valid or not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoDrQ8JktVg

For my first PMA assignment, I’d like to analyze an episode from the popular anthology series, Black Mirror, specifically the 2nd episode, Fifteen Million Merits. Black Mirror is an anthology series about theoretical situations having to do with technology in the near future, and many of these episodes pose questions or presents a specific view about how far technology can and should go and the effects of said technology on the human psyche. This episode presents an exaggerated setting where all “normal” people are seen as numbers that endlessly consume content and are forced to be advertised to whilst riding these bikes to earn merits in order to buy upgrades and other sorts of things to make their life better. This episode provides satirical views on mass capitalism/advertising as well as providing commentary on social class.One of the main things the episode argues is that most consumers are complacent and will just allow companies to feed them any content or advertise anything to them just enough to please them and make them come back for more.

Bedtime Stories, starring Adam Sandler, is one of the many classic comedy fantasy films that toy into both reality and fiction. Bedtime Stories is a film that I have chosen to discuss because it inhibits several attributes used in film such as mise en scene and realism. The plot revolves around Skeeter (Adam Sandler) and his niece and nephew, when he tells bedtime stories and comes to a surprise when these fairytales come to life. My interpretation of the movie focuses on how the film was put together through the fictional scenes when telling the stories and how the “coming to life” aspect resembled reality. What captured my interest the most is the fact that the bedtime stories Sandler tells reflects the “realism” aspect that we’ve discussed, of representing real-life situations in his life in both a fictional and real way. In this analysis, I’d also like to discuss the way this film compliments mise en scene. As mentioned in class, mise en scene can be reflected in film fiction, where each element in a scene has been carefully placed in each shot. The fairytale scenes in this film present this idea as all aspects such as costumes, characters, and settings play an essential role to make the movie target its key theme and audience. This film encompasses a rhetorical facet being that the fictional and realistic scenes compliment one another and showcasing qualities and situations true to life. Below is a short clip showing an example of the realistic tendency utilized in this film.

https://youtu.be/BGVNHGe40gs