For years Hollywood has been exaggerating the real story to create a popular movie that is appealing and interesting to audiences and makes them $$$. That glimpse of perfection that Hollywood movies portray is appealing to audiences because it creates a sense of false hope and that everything's okay. A great example of the fabrication and exaggeration of Hollywood movies is Thirteen Days.
The movie Thirteen Days is an inaccurate depiction of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The role of Kenneth O’Donnell (the movie’s in his point of view), is inflated. O’Donnell did not play a significant role. According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr O’Donnell, “had nothing to do with the Cuban missile crisis.” People suspect that the reason behind the inflation of O’Donnell’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis may have been that his son Kevin was bankrolling a buyout of Beacon Entertainment which made the movie. Others say that the reason O’Donnell’s character’s role was significant in the movie was because he was an “everyman”, someone average that was on the inside that the audience could relate to. The filmmakers showed us O’Donnell’s family life and that he went to church, so I can see how they’re trying to portray him as an “everyman” but it’s strange because he’s someone who's in the president’s inner circle. How can we relate to someone who can control the fate of our world? A completely exaggerated and fictional scene from the movie was when O’Donnell called the Navy pilot about to go on a low-altitude flight over Cuba, and told him to lie about getting shot if he did get shot because otherwise the US would go to war with the Soviet Union. The concealment of sensitive information like this is illegal and that scene was absolutely fictional. These are only some of the edits that filmmakers have made to add appeal and dramatize what happened in October of 1962. Although changes to the storyline may not seem like a big deal, they risk influencing the history of the Cold War that gets handed down to the next generation. For someone who knows nothing about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days puts these exaggerated and fabricated events ideas into your head. The audience will not know which events are accurate and which aren’t leading them to believe the story that you give them. Eventually as the story is passed down through the years, the original story will have been lost because one exaggerated story will build upon another. Here are three tips to avoid being suckered into Hollywood Dramatization: 1. Know your history Read some articles prior to the viewing of the movie. Educate yourself about the historical event that occurred and while watching the movie compare and contrast the movie to what actually happened. It’s like watching the movie version of your favorite book comparing the two and screaming when they change something because it was already so perfect (not always like that in history though unfortunately history can be a little bland….). 2. Take a minute and think….Could this actually have happened? Often times all it takes is a little common sense to figure out if the events that occur in a movie actually happened because they’re so exaggerated. 3. Go with the flow
Sometimes just going along with the storyline the movie offers and letting it entertain you isn’t a bad idea as long as you’re aware that you shouldn’t believe everything you seen in movies:)
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Everytime we created a new script, we presented it with blocking to the whole class. The first few times we got up in the front of the class––I was pretty nervous. I was scared of messing up my lines, not having a script that met the set standards, and group members forgetting the blocking. Each time we presented my worries went away and slowly I started trusting my team and more importantly myself. I started gaining more confidence and losing the sense of nervousness I would get in the previous times that I had presented. I feel much more confident after the experience that I gained with presenting throughout this project, the skills and tricks I learned when it comes to presenting are surely something that I can take with me into the professional world. All this given, I believe that the most growth I had throughout the course of this project within the five school wide learning outcomes was in Oral Communication. I became more confident, started trusting myself and my group, and learned how to handle last minute situations when they’re thrown at you. Here are some tips to ensure success when it comes to presenting!: 1. Don’t stress about the mess Don’t stress yourself out by thinking of everything that could go wrong. Keep yourself calm and assure yourself that it’ll all be okay. Think about everything that could go right and about all the time and effort you put into making sure it’ll go perfectly. 2. Fake it till you make it Faking your way to success is the way to go. By imitating confidence and competence, your behavior adapts and eventually you’ll adopt those qualities. 3. Practice makes perfect No one was born perfect. Perfection requires repetition and practicing over and over again until you get it right. It helps you work out all the kinks and make sure everyone is on the same page and knows what to say. By following these tips that I learned during Theater of War, you can lead yourself to a less stressful and more successful presentation! Good luck:) In Design and Computer Science, we were given the task of teaching the whole class our topic, Error Detection and then making a display explaining it for a local Makers Faire. Error detection is the detection of errors in transmitted data. The receiving computer needs to check that the data coming into it has not been corrupted by any electrical interference. The recognition of corrupted data is called error detection while the reconstruction of corrupted data is called error correction. The bits (instructions computers are given using 0’s and 1’s) are put into imaginary rows and columns, and by adding parity bits (a bit added to the end of a string of binary code to ensure that the total number of bits is either even or odd) to each row and column, we can detect if an error has occurred and where. Here is a visual to better explain what I’m talking about: To make this concept simpler and an engaging teaching lesson, my group and I decided to do a magic trick with the class. We cut out 36 identical 2-sided hearts, one side was red and the other side was white
2. Then, we added an extra row and column of the hearts (making the red side of the hearts either even in every column and row) telling the audience that we were “making it a little harder” 3. Then we asked that same student to flip a card over while the “magician” was turned around and the “magician” would try to figure out which card was the one the student flipped over. Since one of the hearts was going to be flipped over, the row and column containing an odd amount of red hearts would be the heart that was flipped over because all the other rows and columns had an even amount of red hearts. After teaching Error Detection, my group and I created a display to teach Error Detection at a local Makers Faire. The finished product turned out really well. If I was to do this project again I wish that we could have more time because it was rushed and I know that my group and I could have done much more had we had more time. We were going to do string art inside of all the letters spelling out error detection but we did not have enough time. Also it was supposed to be a 6x6 grid of the hearts but we ran out of hot glue sticks on the very last day and if we had another day we could have gotten more and finished our display. It turned out very well though and I’m happy with the finished product!
Joke: Q: What do you call this: “Pieces of nine, pieces of nine”? A: A parroty error. |
AuthorHibah Shafi is a Senior at New Technology High School. Archives
May 2019
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