Dramaturgically Speaking

    The   Star Wars  franchise holds a very special place in my heart. One of my earliest memories is seeing   Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace   in theaters with my grandpa at the tender age of two. I was captivated by each installment I watched in the franchise in the following years. While in today's age of CGI, AI-augmented reality, skillful editing, and VFX software, the practical and computer-generated effects used in 1974 may seem cheesy or corny compared to  Avatar   or   The Lord of The Rings.  It's important to note that without   Star Wars , George Lucas, and Lucasfilm, many of the techniques used in these future films may not have been discovered or implemented.  Star Wars   was a significant turning point for special effects and the science fiction genre through cutting-edge special effects, incredible fictional world-building, and revolutionary sound design.        In th...

In my previous post about the film "Fresh," the topic of organic vs non-organic food is heavily discussed. Many proponents of non-organic produce push the cheaper cost and higher efficiency in debates on whether organic food is feasible. In "Fresh," we learned that medium-scaled organic farms are more profitable than industrialized mass farming schemes but do lead to higher prices for organic products for consumers. In this post, I decided to share this delightfully funny comic that touches precisely on this economic debate over the high cost of organic foods. In the comic, a farmer tells his cow he is only switching his farm from dairy to organic crops. Atop a tractor in a field, the cow looks incredulously at the farmer as he says, "You'll have to work a lot harder to earn your keep." The joke of the comic works on two levels: on the one hand, it plays into the fact that organic farms and organic produce cost more for consumers. The farmer plays into...

As the holidays are upon us, there seems to be a particular jingle in the air. The sound of yule-tide logs burning, Christmas carolers caroling, and hot cocoa warmly being sipped only gets better for me with a good old musical on. My family has a traditional "List" of holiday movies to watch from the end of Thanksgiving until Christmas Day. One of my favorites we watch, and the film I've picked to dissect in this post, is The Sound of Music . Not traditionally a "holiday" movie, the film is a favorite of my grandparents and thus ended up in our Holiday List each year. Americans have been consumers of musicals long before the days of Julie Andrews. Being one of the genre's progenitors, the United States has birthed many great musicals in her day. From  Hello, Dolly!  To  Hamilton , these musicals have soared to immense heights of popularity. They weave storytelling, music, and dance while immersing audiences in a live performance that emotionally excites them...

In my English 101 class, we are covering "Topics in Food" for our final essay of the semester. In preparing to write our last essay, we were tasked with watching the film "Fresh" by Ana Sofia Joanes as an introduction. In the film, "Fresh", director Ana Sofia Joanes shows multiple perspectives of farmers within the food industry as well as economists, professors, and industry professionals advocating for a more sustainable food industry. Watching this film really opened my eyes to how large scale of a problem our industrialized agriculture sector has become.  In the film, we are shown multiple perspectives in the food industry. The first is of Joel Salatin, a sustainable farmer who advocates for an organic, natural way of raising livestock. We see Joel allowing his pigs and other livestock to roam free before we cut to the second perspective in the short film, Mr. and Mrs. Fox, who are industrial chicken farmers. Against the Fox's advocating the increa...