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Journal #13

Ruby Sparks

This movie gave an interesting take on the ideal lover and how having the ideal person may never be enough. Ruby Sparks follows the story of an author who is struggling to write a novel and takes the advice from his therapist, Calvin uses an old manual typewriter to create a red haired woman named Ruby Sparks where it seems like he’s just dreaming about her, but then she appears in reality making Calvin go crazy deciphering if Ruby Sparks was real or not. Her actions and feelings are dictated by whatever Calvin writes and it reminds me of topics we discussed in class on about the male gaze, and sexual objectification of women. The way Calvin altered Ruby Sparks to accommodate her needs and even made her speak in French for his brothers amusement, and making her unhealthily obsessed with him because he did not want her to leave him. This movie enforces the nature of heterosexual relationships and how a man should do one thing like provide, while the woman does another like be obsessed with him and stay at home. In the reading “Adaptation, Fidelity, and Gendered Discourses”, Shelley Cobb, the reading discuses gender in adaptation, and fidelity. The reading says that, “the general popular discourse, showing how fidelity employs a metaphor of heterosexual love and marriage to maintain gendered language and hierarchies”. Ruby Sparks engages on the discourse Cobb talks about how the normalces of western culture and the power relations in gender and relationships. Calvin had the power to control Ruby and it still did not work to his favor. The film Ruby Sparks opens up the idea of power in heteronormative relationships in a both literal and figurative sense with the controlling of a woman.

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Journal #12

After (2019)

After is a movie based off a Harry Styles fan fiction written on the social writing App that was popular in the mid 2000s where fanfiction was a popular thing to read. Written by Anna Todd After became a five-book series after being posted on Wattpad and is now a major motion picture with 3 movies. After watching the movie it was surprising to find out that it had 3 movies and that I was actually interested in watching all of them. I knew that the story was a wattpad fanfic at first and I was definitely a fanfiction reader in middle school when Wattpad and fanfiction was popular so the popularity for this movie and franchise makes sense to me. Discussing adaptations and transmedia story telling in class the article, Hannah Chambers, “Everything You Need to Know About ‘After,’ the Movie Based on Harry Styles Fan Fiction,” Cosmopolitan (April 4, 2019), talks about how After shares similarities with 50 Shades of Grey, “After takes place in Seattle, which Anna said was intentional. Both also feature an obsessive relationship between a woman who begins the story as a virgin and a man still haunted by his childhood”. The stepping stones of ideas, fandoms, and other stories and movies that help form a new story for viewers are already fans of the originals to enjoy a completely new franchise. In class we talked about the intensity of fandoms and the pleasure of escapism that these franchises provide. The effectiveness of adaptations and the mass story telling of these worlds specifically fan fiction is the fantasy that fans and readers can place themselves in the position of the main character and enjoy the story.

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Journal #11

The Sweet Hereafter

The Sweet Hereafter is based on the 1991 novel following the story events leading up to and following a school bus accident that kills 14 children in a small town. The people of the smalltown lives change when a big-city lawyer, Mitchell Stephens tries to sign them up for a class-action lawsuit. A surviving teenager named Nicole regains her strength and dignity and, by telling a lie, reunites the community. After watching the film and thinking back to the discussions we had about transmedia story telling and the adaptation from book to film. Watching the Sweet Herefater and learning that it was a book first makes me think about all the features and details that may have been missed from the book. In the reading, Michael Focault, “ What is an Author?”, Focault describes the work of an author and what it means to have an author work published and seen through the eyes of transmedia, “is everything he wrote and said, everything he left behind, to be included in his work? This problem is both theoretical and practical. If we wish to publish the complete works —------ where do we draw the line? Certainly, everything must be published, but can we agree on what 'everything' means?” (Focault 302). Throughout this course a lot of the movies we watched were told through the lens of transmedia storytelling and previous storytelling where stories are told numerous times deviating from the original plot. The Sweet Hereafter does a good job of storytelling and keeping the pace but I wonder if theres more that the viewer may be missing from the original or the focal points that were in the original but got lost in translation through the means of transitioning to film.

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Journal #10

The Fall

The Fall (Tarsem Singh, US/India, 2006) tells the story of a bedridden patient in a hospital who befriends a fellow patient, who is a little girl and shares a fantastic tale of heroes, myths, and villains on a desert island. The film switches between the fiction of the storytelling, and the reality of the patients being in the hospital by having the patients incorporated into the fictional storytelling. Roy the paralyzed stunt performer, tells Alexandria, whose house was devastated by the war, the girl’s imagination visualizes the story. While Roy is being quite friendly, he tries to earn Alexandria’s loyalty to get her to steal morphine pills for him so that he could end his life. The film plays with the fact that Roy and Alexandria share an emotional connection and share a romance when the storytelling is happening. Throughout this class, there has been a discussion of pedophilia, the male gaze, and women who are generally young as the main character. This film also falls into the fictional genre that has been relevant themes in the other films we have watched. It was difficult to identify what genre this film falls under. There were numerous genres like fantasy, adventure, drama, and comedy incorporated into the movie making it that more unique.  In the reading by Thomas Leitch, “The Adapter as Auteur,” it discusses the directors' adaptation of a film and how, “a series of nongenre films marked by thematic affinities and ever-lengthening intervals in between, became identified with individual craftsmanship.” I would definitely classify The Fall as a nongenre film with cinematic elements that are identified with the directors and cinematographers' vision. This colorful film gives escapism, comedy, and adventure to help distract the viewer and the little girl but also the pain that reality can be.

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Journal #9

Twilight

As an avid twilight long-term fan, I absolutely love this movie and will always defend it. Even though the franchise gets a lot of hate and I can see why, I still think Twilight is a well-made franchise, and a cultural phenomenon that will was monumental in its time. Twilight ( Catherine Hardwick, 2008) is the first movie in the franchise and was released around the time were fictional book series were being transformed into movies, like Hunger Games and Divergent. Transmedia storytelling was very popular for these books and generated a variety of audiences. Twilight started out as fanfiction, then a book series, then book to film franchise. Twilight released around the time fanfiction, fictional teen genre was popular and was received greatly by viewers. In the reading “The New Old Face of a Genre: The Franchise Teen Film as Industry Strategy,” Nelson, the author discusses the topis how franchises have been greatly teen focused and most of the time not relatable to what teens are really going through. “These high-concept, big-budget films feature teen protagonists, but, because of their scale and prominence, it’s as though Hollywood has abandoned the familiar teen film format. In doing so, the coming-of-age tales of personal growth are merging with epic heroic journeys, expanding traditional understandings of the genre.” (127).  The teen genre has become a hero's journey, a dystopian or supernatural world to still appeal to the youth by portraying the characters as teenagers but having them do not so teenage things. The coming-of-age teen genre starts to fade when the teens are saving the world from evil. Even though a lot of the teen genre films aren’t realistic it still has an appeal to the youth demographic and be very entertaining. These fictional stories provide the escapism and entertainment people want and these stories profit off the fandom of the popular fictional books. Twilight plays with the fairytale & horror genre because of the idolized vampire and wolf and even more so because it is a love triangle. It falls under many genres such as romance because of how the story is told and also from the fact it was fanfiction at first. Fanfiction is very romanticized no matter how bogus the character, or situation is. Twilight and other movies related to the genre generated an intense following of lovers of the franchise and die-hard fans (like myself) to help keep the story alive. As discussed in class, transmedia storytelling is relevant because of the fans that support it. The film is told for the fans.

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Journal #8

After watching Kubrick’s 1962 version of Lolita and now watching Lyne’s (1997) version, this one made me more uncomfortable and almost made me consider not finishing the movie. Lyne’s (1997) “Lolita” was more explicit, raunchy, and disturbing, because of the nudity of a 12-year-old child and the sex scenes that would happen between Dolores and Quilty. While looking at the promotional images for Lolita and knowing how the actress who played Lolita was only 15 posing with a man 30 years her age I would assume that they are trying to portray a romantic relationship between an adult and a child. The images of just Dolores are risque as she exposes her legs and wears red lipstick, they are trying to describe the Lolita, the promiscuous little girl. The 1997 Lolita was a remake of Kubrick and pushed more explicit scenes in the movie to relate more to the book. It seemed like the 1997 remake was trying to challenge the original. Leitch stated how “Since most remakes attempt to supersede their originals for all but a marginal audience watching them for their historical value, remakes typically threaten the economic viability of their original”. Leitch describes how remakes try to make “new versions of old movies” even though it's telling the same story but with more explicit scenes relating to Lolita. In the lecture, the teacher stated how “the idea it's giving something Kubrick couldn’t give you” and that is the reason for an explicit remake. The remake gave me more reactions because of the explicitly but I still felt the same way about the story. In response to the discussion questions, the male gaze is present in both films by how the men in the film talk about Lolita and her looks and how she's so young making her more appealing to them. The main difference between the two is how Quilty developed his fetishization and the more explicit scenes in the 1997 version. The Lolita role and depiction in both films still portrayed the young girls as more advanced and “in control” but still a child. After watching both films I still cannot get over the fact that there are movies explicitly made about a grown man involved with a young child. 

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Journal # 7

Lolita (Stanley Kubrick) The movie Lolita (Stanley Kubrick 1962) follows a story of a grown man infatuated with a young child named Lolita. Throughout the film, it seemed like Lolita had the upperhand on Humpert, with the way the dynamic is set up I would think it was Humpert, but Lolita had him where she wanted. The movie portrayed Lolita as an experienced girl and hinting at the fact that she has partaken in relations with older men. Throughout the film, Lolita would constantly lie, act careless, and be rude to her mom. In class, we talked about  Laura Mulvey’s “Visual pleasure & Narrative Cinema” (1975) and Popularizing the “Nymphet”: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) & Lionel Trilling (1958) and how in classical Hollywood films, women are typically on display, Mulvey states. In class, we talked about the male gaze in the film Lolita and how certain camera angels fragments, tilts, and pans over the female body deliberately fostering sexual objectification.  We go into detail about the reading of Mulvey and how women are seen as “objects, rather than the possessors, of the gaze because the control of the camera (and thus the gaze) was usually in the hands of heterosexual males: producers, directors, and spectators”.  Lolita has a lot to do with the male gaze and the objectification and fetishization of young women. Even though the film depicted her to be more experienced and knowledgeable than her own mother and most women her age it still showed how young she truly was. The film portrayed her as the lolita, as this precociously seductive girl, but also as a child who is enrolled in school and wants to participate in her school play. It was hard watching something like this but interesting to see the male gaze in perspective.

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Journal #6

Tale Of a Vampire

Tale of a Vampire pays homage to the poem written by Edgar Allen Poe, “Annabel Lee”. The translation of Annabel Lee to Tale of a Vampire has the concepts of love, mortality, and the supernatural. The poem talks about the young girl, and how their love was stronger even in death, Poe exclaims how fated he and Annabel Lee were to be and how their love transcends death and time. The Tale of a Vampire has the same concept with the main character being a vampire who never dies and also the love he has for Anne that reminds him of a past lover, a love that has never died. The film brings up that Anne may be the reincarnation of his past lover, and Edgar recites the poem Annabel Lee alluding to himself and Virginia his lover in the past. The Adaptation to literature to film, like Annabel Lee to Tale of a Vampire share similarities in themes but differences in storytelling. In the reading, D. Cartmell & I. Whelehan, Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema (2010), the author states, “ Adaptation is an area of cross-fertilization” (13). Both film and the poem share the same story but from a different perspective while keeping the sequence of themes that made the original so compelling in the first place. This is the beauty of adaptations.

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Journal #5

The Company of Wolves

While watching The Company of  Wolves (1984) by Neil Jordan, I noticed the different storytelling of the story of little red riding hood. This film has an overlapping of the fairytale and horror genre while using the original story of little red riding hood, and visually having a man transform into a wolf in a gruesome way. In class, we discussed how the two overlap often and how fairytales can be somewhat dark. A Fairytale more often than not has a young female protagonist like Rosaleen, where she lives in a small town where her grandma tells her fables of wolfmen that are somewhat true. Horror comes into play when there is the visual of men shedding their skin to turn into a wolf, the supernatural, and the sexual deviance of a young girl being interested in a grown man she just met in the woods. Dark romance plays into the Company of Wolves and can rewrite gender roles by centering women. In the reading “Between the Paws of the Tender Wolf: Authorship, Adaptation, and Audience,” Angela Carter: New Critical Readings, the author states how The Company of Wolves, “‘one of the rare films of the horror genre that chose a female character as its main subject, and displayed a genuine concern for a  woman’s problems from a  decidedly feminist perspective”. The reading describes the themes of sexual identity, gender, and dark romance, combining the metamorphosis of the wolf’s transformation and blood to sexuality and “contrasting an assertive female protagonist with images of male abjection, as well as masculine power and violence.” The Company of Wolves has all these aspects, making the story of little red riding hood more complex.

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Journal # 4

Snow White and The Huntsman

Some of the main topics we discussed in class were fairy tales and ideology while correlating to the film that was assigned Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) which gives a twist on the story of Snow White. Snow White and the Huntsman has an all star cast with Kristen Stewart from Twilight and Chris Hemsworth from Thor along with Charlize Theron as the main cast. Throughout the film it gives a twist on making the female lead, Snow White, the hero, while making the evil stepmother the strong and powerful ruler of the kingdom, instead of a crazy old witch. We talked about the didactic messages in femininity specifically in Snow White with the girl heroine and evil stepmother but also how these feminine characters were the ones that had the most power opposed to the original story of Snow White, where she sings to animals and falls down alot. Snow White and the Huntsman tries to give the female characters in the story a heroic almost masculine feel to them like making the step mother/ queen (Charlize Theron), always angry but powerful, having that anger fuel her power, never showing vulnerability, and having Snow White (Kristen Stewart), literally fight in battle and armor to defeat the queen. There are always new twists and adaptations with the original disney fairy tales and it mostly is a feminist rewirite like Snow White and the Huntsman who try to make the female led roles the most strong. We talked about the reading and the different tellings of Sleeping beauty and how it being told differently can give a whole new perspective on the story, when Sleeping Beauty has a fear of sleeping because of the trauma that was inflicted on her while she was sleep, “I must not sleep for while I'm asleep I'm ninety and think I'm dying. Death rattles in my throat like a marble.”. Like the Snow White and The Huntsman the different storytelling gives a another story on Snow White.

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Journal #3 Let the Right One In

Journal #3

Let the Right One In directed by Tomas Alfredson tells the story of a 12 year old boy, Oskar, who is bullied and neglected by his parents and meets a young vampire, Eli, that is around his age, or looks that way and how Eli changes the course of his life. Oskara and Eli become close and soon Oskar is wrapped up in Eli’s dark unfortunate world. In class we discussed how the horror, body, and space genre affect this film. Hollywood has an obsession with youth and it pertains to vampires in creating them to be young, most likely a teen, who never ages but is also beautiful, powerful, elegant, and rich, all things Eli are not. Fantasy and Horror genres are more geared toward teens and those having great physical ability along with high social class, like other vampire related films, like Twilight or Interview With A Vampire. We discussed further about Eli’s gender and how the film and the book describes how Eli was castrated before actually being turned into a vampire making their gender more diverse physically and figuratively. Since Eli was presented so young, and feminine it made her appear more weak than what a vampire should be. Throughout the film Eli was taken care of by an older man to gather her food and was housed in a lower class estate, sleeping in a bathtub or on the floor. Eli wasn’t desirable, or beautiful, or high class, and Eli mostly hid her abilities around Oskar trying not to frighten him even though he might've found it impressive since he wanted power over his bullies. In Battis, “Supernatural Youth”, the author states, “child  heroes  can  be  invested  with  both  a  significant  and  a vulnerable core of power, an energy that is also secret, unpredictable, and sometimes even melancholic”. A quote that accurately describes Eli in how she has to keep what they are a secret but having an appetite that makes them unpredictable. Eli’s situation is very melancholic since they cannot age and will forever have to hide in the dark. This film shows how gruesome and unfortunate being a glamourized monster can be if someone is too young, too poor, and always vulnerable.

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Journal #2

I have never realized how some movies could have queer coding, or queer baiting as a central theme in the narration. Taking from the class and listening to the Podcast: Stephanie Bastek, “Superheroes Are So Gay!”, and having the interesting discussion in class looking at superhero movies or film and tv in general, I now pay closer attention to the queer baiting that may be represented in that show or movie. In class we discussed how queer baiting is exploitation of queer subtext and coding, honged on the promise of explicit queer representation, specifically targeting LGBTQ + consumers. We circled back to the marvel movie Captain America: the winter soldier and how there might have been some queer baiting with the dialogue between captain america, and the winter soldier since they were so close in the past. The discussion, assigned podcast, and reading opened my eyes to how Hollywood might deliberately queer bate, and queer code some of the beloved comic/marvel characters. While listening to the podcast “Superhereos Are So Gay!” I thought about how Ramzi Fawaz discusses “flexible gender” and relates it to the Fantastic Four, particularly the thing, or the member who got turned into a rock man, and how he became more vulnerable making people love him. “The thing doesn’t feel quite right in any body so his gender becomes fluid and unsusual” making it relatable to queer fans. In the reading “Introduction: Queer About Comics” by Scott and Fawaz one quote that stuck out to me is, “The status of comics as marginal literature and art, as well as the assumed immaturity of its audiences (associated with childhood or arrested adolescent fantasy), situates comics as an outsider medium that elicits attachments from perceived social delinquents, outcasts, and minorities”. It seems as if comics are trying to be more relatable to its audience by introducing queerness and fluidness to the characters but not specifically stating that the character is a certain sexuality leaving it open to interpretation. Discussing the difference in class and seeing how films could try to be queer representaion but instead come across as queer bating, is what seems to happen most of the time. There’s more queer bait in films and tv than representation, making a character have fluid or queer traits but not having them actaully be queer.

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Journal #1 Captain America: The Winter Soldier

After watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier and reading Stevens, “Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence”, and “Franchise/ Adaptation” by Parody, there is a connection in how real life events can inspire the stories that influence the popular films we love today. While we were discussing in class, comics are political texts. Captain America is the made up hero and national symbol that is supposed to be the noble, honest soldier, the very first avenger that represents justice and freedom. Captain America is made to represent what America should be. In Stevens, “Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence” states how Captain America became an idol for real life war events that happened in America, “In the 1980s, he reflected the Cold War morality and consumerism of the Reagan era. He became a superficial icon in the 1990s, a conflicted agent of the war on terror in 2002” (Stevens 3). The use of adaptation is made to re-vision Captain America and also through the use of transmedia, the franchise is combined with “familiarity and novelty” to appeal to everyone. The story of Captain America is told through the interlinking of fiction and realistic events and figures to give that balance of familiar events that has actually happened in America with the novelty of a superhero that embodies what America should be, or the ideal American soldier to save the day. Specifically looking at Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it uses real events like World war 2 to base its story off of and give a fantasy to the Winter Soldier assassin that challenges Captain America. As discussed in class, The Winter Soldier plays into the idea of the gray area instead of black and white like the first movie. Captain America questions who the enemy really is and distrusts the forces aided to him by america. Having the winter soldier being his old friend Captain challenges the idea of being the super noble soldier who fights for America and starts to think for himself.