Mind Reader

Logline: Will Alden, a young telepath labeled as a schizophrenic, uses his ability to track down a psychopathic killer with the ability to control his victims' minds and must stay on his toes in order to bring down this most dangerous enemy.

Treatment: Will Alden first discovered his ability when he was 8 years old in the company of a therapist who grows to become his closest friend. The therapist's name was Jarrod Conway. One day Will catches him in the lobby and they talk about the unexplained deaths on the news. Jarrod appears lost in thought. The next time Will visits him, he is in a coma in the hospital. He fell ill randomly on a walk home and was discovered the next morning. After searching through his office Will discovers an entry in Jarrod's notebook. The entry hints that the deaths on the news were murders by another telepath. Will picks up where Jarrod left off and visits the morgue with his father. The man at the morgue, Kane, seems suspicious and after focusing on his thoughts, Will is intent on bringing him to testify for what he did. Will enlists the support of a friend from school to watch his back. They follow Kane's car to his house the next day. She calls the police to report a kidnapping and they break into Kane's house. They follow him down to his basement and are discovered. Kane has a gun on his desk and tries to control Will. Will goes crumples on the floor and begins to go into a seizure trying to resist control. His friend grabs the gun and aims it at Kane. Kane forces her to drop it and approaches her stepping around Will. He begins to choke her. Will then focuses his mind on Kane and tries to control him. Will stands up and sees Kane on the floor with his hands behind his head. Will instantly runs and ties him up with zip ties from his pocket. Police sirens are heard outside.

Our Lives Matter Logline

Elyse O'Bannon an impassioned advocate for racial equality, affronted by the growing popularity of racism in our time, forms Booker T Washington HSPVA's first Black Student Union and speaks out against the injustice, while a xenophobic titan, Donald Trump, continues his warpath and she finds that the only way to make a difference is to act.

Our Lives Matter

Treatment: My documentary, done in an expository format, will display the reactions of students at Booker T. Washington High School to police brutality, current headlines, and the state of the racial gap in an attempt to change the tide back towards the equality that Dubois, Martin Luther King Jr, and Malolm X hoped to achieve. The leader and founder of the Black Student Union here at Booker T and future leader in Equal Rights, Elyse O'Bannon shows her background in the movement and her purpose for starting the Black Student Union at this school in Dallas, Texas. Her story is interesting because, having an attorney mentality similar to her father, she does not call on her fellow classmates to protest but instead offers opportunities to have peaceful, if heated, discussions about the state of the black community. She feels personally responsible for these students, for these parents' children, and does not want anyone of them to become a victim of these frightening headlines. This is not to say that she can't raise hell about the recent abuses in our society.

Logline: Watch "Our Lives Matter" to see how Elyse O'Bannon and her Union of high-school students go about tackling racial inequality in America.

The Gift Shop's Knick Knacks

            This week, I watched the documentary "Exit Through The Gift Shop" directed by Banksy. This film followed the experiences of Thierry Guetta, a amateur filmmaker who stumbled upon the brand new world of street art. Street art, or graffiti as it’s more commonly known, is a form of unsanctioned visual artwork that is created in public locations. For instance, one example of street art from the movie was when Banksy and his team bent a phone booth in half, smashed a pick ax into it, and painted around the pick ax in red to make it look like the phone booth was bleeding.

           The movie opened with different shots of street artists painting walls and escaping police with "The Streets are Ours" by Richard Hawley playing in the background. At the end of the movie, this song plays again alongside photos of major street artists and their current situations. From the beginning to the end of the movie, even after you Exit Through The Gift Shop that was Thierry Guetta's art show, street artists still own the streets and not commercialism.

            The uncomfortable way that the movie ended highlighting Thierry's instant success as a commercial street artist bothered me. As a person who sees artists every day work hard to deliver a certain message to their audience, it bothered me that Thierry, a person who didn't have a background actually making street art, was able to employ workers to give him the same success as Banksy, a world renowned avant-garde street artist. Thierry put no real meaning behind his work whereas every piece of art that Banksy did, like the painting on the Israeli-Palestinian dividing wall and the blowup Guantanamo Bay fugitive at Disneyland and the literal elephant in the room at his first public show, all had some deeper meaning that could be derived from it. However, that was the intent, so “Job well done, movie.”

              That is where the poetry behind the title "Exit Through The Gift Shop" came from. The idea is that the original street artists like Space Invader and Banksy represented something authentic and real, whereas Thierry was a more commercialized copy of all of the street artists that he'd witnessed. In other words, Thierry's cheap replications of other artists’ work is like the cheap replications of authentic works in a museum sold at the gift shop. The commercialization is meant to be disturbing to audiences. It's meant to bother us.

               It is hard to limit this documentary to one specific style because it had elements of a participatory documentary, an observational documentary, and an expository documentary. If one style must be chosen, then participatory would characterize the film best, because both the director, Banksy, and the cinematographer, Thierry, were shown in the footage and were heard interacting with all of the other street artists. One could very well argue the film was intended to persuade watchers to be wary of confusing commercially focused copycats with actual artists. Therefore, it is more expository. It’s hard to tell either way, but one thing is for sure this is a truly intriguing and unforgettable film.

Breathless Initial Opinions

Breathless is a French New Wave film directed by Jean-Luc Godard and written by Francois Truffaut. The film is about a French car thief who kills a cop, meets up with an American ex-lover who turns him in, and dies by a gunshot wound to the back. The film’s main character, Michel, is not very likable. He steals from his friends, treats the girl he loves poorly and he’s a murderer to boot. It may have been a mark of the era that the man was so misogynistic, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it. The scene where Michel is trying to get Patricia to sleep with him got stale very quickly.

However, it is clear that there is immense symbolism and artistry to be conveyed in some of the scenes. For example, when Patricia and Michel talk independently of each other without acknowledging what the other is saying, conveys symbolically the main conflict in their relationship; that is very clever.

The tempo of the music seemed to match the tone of the scene and may be stylistic attribute of French New Wave films. The breaking of the 180 line rule, though intentional, is confusing to the placement of things as an audience member. The shots that continued following a character when they went from one scene to another is much more effective than cutting to footage in a new scene because it gave a clear sense of the journey that an actual person would have to take to get from one place to another. The same thing is true with the overhead shots that followed a characters motion. Both were greatly appreciated.

Movie that Influenced Me

              A movie that influenced me was "The Wind Rises" by Hayao Miyazaki about Jiro Hirokoshi who built planes for Japan during World War Two. His dream as a child was to pilot planes to get the experience of flying. Unfortunately, because he did not have 20-20 vision, he was denied the chance to accomplish his dream. This setback did not stop him, however. In a dream, he saw Giovanni Battista Caproni, a famous aircraft designer from Italy, who inspired him to take his original dream and mold it to fit his abilities (to be an aircraft designer himself). 

              The film gave the Japanese perspective of World War 2. They felt inferior in the realm of technology to the rest of the modern world. The Germans, the Americans, and the Italians were all preparing for a war that they were not ready for. They were still building planes made of paper and wood! Metal technology was a luxury that they could barely afford. The people of Japan were poor and starving and afraid. The focus of the story, Jiro Hirokoshi felt for the people of Japan. He, in one scene in the film attempted to offer two children on the street some food because their mother couldn't return to feed them until after work. They, in response, ran away from Jiro out of fear.  When Jiro talked to his friend, Kiro Honjo (I think), he responded (paraphrasing by the way) "our very poor country is somehow paying us lots of money to build these planes" Jiro also mentioned in the film when a plane was flying barely too slow for fire fights, he recommended "we could remove the guns"(paraphrasing again).
               It was astounding though, how much the Japanese were suffering during this time. As an American citizen, I had always remembered the Japanese for their attack on Pearl Harbor, and seen them as the instigators of war. Now, I see that the threat of impending doom, both from the war and from starvation in many cases, forced the hand of Japan as a nation.