Master 2

Friday, 20 November 2009

Farewell with great expectations!!

My dearest students,

I intend to have a virtual closure to this project, but you shouldn't understand this as saying goodbye!

I am happy to see that most of you had wonderful posts here.

I myself got pressed by time and did not contribute the way I wanted.
However this space was yours much more than mine, and my role here was mediate your participation.
It worked quite well!

Your selection of films was fantastic I like many of them and those I haven't seen yet were already in my must-see list.
The forms of arts you've mentioned were varied and reflected a very critic perspective of everyday issues in our lives, such as ads, music, and games.
Clarisse's and Julia's posts about sports discuss the most relevant aspects related to its practice: it helps gathering people as well as keeping them healthy and fit. It is very democratic!! There are options to EVERYONE!

I am a dreamer, and as a dreamer I always have huge expectations!
I know that your lives will go on and I hope you have loads of things to do, but...
I'll be around here posting things every now and then, hoping that you come and visit our space.
I'd like to ask you two more things:
1. Write a short post about your plans for the future, particularly in terms of English.
2. Whenever you're online doing something else, just come around, check my posts and leave another one or a comment, or at least a "Hi".

Hope to see you around once in a while,

Janine

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

Entertainment Art

I would write about cinema, but I change my mind and decided to write about other kind of art in my opinion as a fan: The creation of games and famous characters.

Electronic games (or video games), attracts people of different ages all around the world.
Since the first game created, the teams responsible for development of games has been seeking to improve each year, to make the best game possible with the technology available in games, create new characters that sometimes are so successful that become symbols of their companies (who ever heard about Mario? And Sonic?) and develop successful games like The Sims, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter.

The game market is so large that companies which develop games gain millions in sales, sponsorship and even doing contests where people 'addicted' to play,compete in various games trying to get the title of best player and earn a high cash value.The growth of this type of art, estimulated the expansion of a market oriented parallel to serve the young consumers of these games, as various brands of magazines specialized in evaluating how to play certain games, TV shows and documentaries talking exclusively from the world of games and their news, and employees who are paid to play! They do tests in the office 'having fun at work' on the games to pass to consumers what they thought about a game.

Creativity is the secret for the success, that´s the reason for the existance of games of all imaginable kinds. Games of all sports, games based on movies, based on cartoons, on personalities and in most cases, based simply on the creativity of the development team, that create action/horror games as the successful series of Resident Evil or a game completely fairytale as the Zelda series. There are also games that give rise to films such as Tomb Raider and Resident Evil

I love games, on the computer, the platform (video game), the arcade (fliperama) or at phone. The objective is always have fun. I´m putting the link to a video showing parts of the game Resident Evil 4, where you can see quality and particularly the competence of the designers of this game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEhtIqZ36jk

Film Review

I will finally post here and I decided to start writing about a strange movie that I saw last weekend: Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It was adapted from Broadway and is directed by Tim Burton (the exotic director of Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish and the new version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory).

Johnny Depp is Benjamin Barker, a barber who after being exiled unfairly for 15 years in Australia, returns to London under the name of Sweeney Todd and with a new look, in order to get revenge of the judge Turpin who caused his exile and was responsible for the death of his wife Lucy and adopted her daughter Johana. He returns to work at his old shop, which became the Mr.Lovett´s restaurant (played by Helena Boham Carter, Tim Burton´s wife), a woman who falls in love with Todd and form an alliance with him: Upstairs, Sweeney would kill his customers with his razors silver while downstairs, she would use the victims' flesh as filling for their pies. Everything goes perfectly for them until the day Todd gets his revenge on Turpin. Ironically, on this day that he should be happy, he ends up having the worst day of his life because of a terrible discovery…

The film, despite the dark and gothic side (typical of Burton's films), the countless deaths and the massive amount of blood, can be sad but also funny, with several scenes of black humor, musical moments and a surprised final with a message. Sweeney Todd is a great movie, very well written, well played and deserved to receive the award for best art direction. I recommend.

Greenland - breath taking

View more presentations from Andrei Catalin Semen.

Sports - page 129.

Sports used to be the main way of keeping in touch and relaxing with friends. And it still is, sometimes, although it is not as it used to, mostly because nowadays people don't have much time to "waste" with this kind of stuff, and also because technology improved, and people have so much more options and things to do than then.

Even when people do sports, they prefer to go to a gym an do it quickly than play something with other people. They do this not to have fun or to relax. They just do it because they want to get each time thinner, such as their idols.

Nowadays, there are many kinds of sports, and almost all of them have great personalities, and those people can do a enormous influency all over the world, because we all see them as idols, and we admire them. So, lots of kids wanna be as their favourite soccer player or their favourite swimmer.

Because of that, they receive millions and millions to do publicities and marketing to every sort of items. And as people see the people they want to be like using that thing, they also want to buy the thing, and sometimes they don't even need them.

Media and television are always showing new standarts of beauty and fashion, and as people see they are different of them, they start to feel bad about theirselves and want to change their body, in order to get like what they think is beautiful, they go to the fitness centres.

Sport is so popular because it can unite the world. And it can also change people's life.

Monday, 16 November 2009

I've gotta feeling...

Hey guys! I'm posting my composition about sport, from page 129.

The feeling brought by sport

There is a growing tendency today of worrying about health and keeping fit. It is true that the cases of overweight have never been so many, however it is also true that our beauty standards are different from the ones we had before. Just by taking a look in a painting from the Renaissance we can notice that by that time man appreciated chubby woman. And you don’t even need to go that far: the pin-up girls from the 1920’s were a lot curvy. Nevertheless, today the girls that appear in TV and magazines have zero fat, just muscles. And the girls from fashion runways… sometimes just the bones! Having said that, it’s easy to understand why is the pressure for having a perfect body so on nowadays.

In addiction to that, sport has been also recognized for its importance when it comes to health itself, once it was already proved by science that people who exercise regularly improve their life quality and tend to live better and longer, avoiding illnesses like heart attack, strokes and stress.
Sport can also be seen as a kind of entertainment, for people who practice it and even for those who enjoy watching others playing. Some sports can reach a high difficulty level, so people who are able to play them well are, in a way, worshiped. And today this phenomena has reached a great proportion. An common example are the cereal boxes from the United States: they don’t come with pictures of mathematic geniuses, TV presenters and not even popstars. Who appears there are sportsmen such as basketball and football players.

It doesn’t matter if it’s teamwork or individual achievement, the fact is that we are a lot influenced by sportspeople. The ability of swimming well or dealing well with a ball for many times beat other abilities like singing, and dancing in terms of popularity. Basketball players can become as famous as Hollywood actors. Handsome soccer players are as harassed as models. The key for their success if probably the fact that their activities are seen as more difficult and less glamorous than others like singing and acting. This way, people end up feeling closer to them.

The American politician Earl Warren had a very interesting quote: “I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people's accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man's failures”. Well, we can’t deny that sport has also its disappointments… But the difference from the other disappointments lies, for example, in things such as the following sentence, said by the supporters of a particular Brazilian soccer team: “The feeling can not stop”.

PS.: I am not a vasco supporter, let’s made it clear!!!!! Hahahha But my brother is a “sick” one, so I can’t help to get in touch with things like this. Anyway, I thought it was a good way to end the text… hahah

Friday, 13 November 2009

Pieces of art

Hey, guys!

Or girls, better saying... LOL!

I didn't have any doubts of my theme when Janine said we'd write about Art...

I really like movies, paintings and dancing, but nothing grabs my attention as much as music does.

And You guys are in a lucky day, 'cause I could stay ours talking about music, bands, styles, music culture and artists, but it's getting late and I'm too tired for that. So, I guess these few lines will have to be enough...

Music is good for everyone, every time, everywhere. No surprise they have soundtracks for the most different scenes about the most different people, in the most different situations. There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of songs that could express one's suffering for love, but there's always "that special one" that fits the details, and says everything you wish you said instead.

I can say I have my "moments"... A moment to cry and mourn for how unfair life can be sometimes, a moment to laugh and hang out with friends, a moment to feel, fall and think about love, a moment to criticize society and protest about what's happening to humanity, one to relax and feel culture in it's most pure and intuitive way, one to think about nothing at all, and many others. But what's more interesting about music is that it's flexible, it's elastic! Music can fit all the situations of life you can think about. It's just magic.

Thinking of that, I made a selection of songs that can fit some moments of our lives, but it'd be too many videos to one single post, so I thought it was better to put only the links to youtube.

( Before you start thinking I'm crazy not to put the most known songs, and before you start thinking it's too weird that you don't know many of these, let me make something clear: I have some problems with the "money maker" songs, and with the songs that are said to be great but have very poor musical and lyrics content... So, I'd rather listen to good - although quite unknown -selected music than to accept that everything is music and turn my ears into a bin from time to time...)

here it goes!

Song for very sad or nostalgic moments:

Greensleeves

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1RM0Lc0I9Y

Song for happy moments and night out with girlfriends:

Open toes- Katharine Mcphee

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0KUaL9X5Yo

Song for love deception and "elbow pain" (lol- the best ones are these, aren't they?):

Split screen sadness - John Mayer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPQa5IjGOgQ&feature=related

Song for happy in-love moments:

Better man - James Morrison