ENG 103 Research Paper

Jose R. Mejia

Dr. Luke Vasileiou

English 103

November 13, 2010

Breakfast at Tiffany’s & The Real New York City during early 1960‘s.

       Movies are screenplays that take us away from what is really going on in the real world. That’s one of the mayor main reasons why we like to watch them, they have nothing to do with reality and we like anything that makes us forget any problems or disasters that are happening at the present time like the bad economy or natural disasters. Movies make us dream of possibilities, they make us imagine something fictional, they make us believe that we’re part of them and they make us want to be one of the actors. We wouldn’t appreciate or enjoy a movie that makes us confront what’s really going on in the real world, because we are going through it physically and mentally and it would be worst for us to have to deal with it while watching a movie. Movies make us dream and believe of utopian and dystopian places they do this in a way that they make the viewers want to be part of this places or stories. We go to the movies to relax and have a good time not to face reality but to get away from it, at least for 2 hours the minimum. We want to see things we have never seen before in our lives and sometimes we want to live a life that isn’t ours. Many times we watch movies to look into the future and have an idea of what it’s going to be like and many movies help us to deal with some personal problems. Movies are just a great way to escape and dream that you’re somebody else and living a different life than the one you’re living right now. They’re never real unless it’s a biography or an event that made history. Movies make us look ahead and imagine great things and make us feel great a lot of them don’t show what is really going on in the present time. ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’- 1961 directed by Blake Edwards it’s a great example when it comes to movies making their viewers escape from reality into an Idealism world.

       “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” it’s a movie that takes place in New York City during the early 1960’s. More specific it takes place in the island of Manhattan known as the big Apple and the city that never sleeps. This movie is about a young writer named Paul “Fred” Varjak who falls in love with a socialite from Manhattan Holly Golightly who loves fashion and rich guys (Breakfast). In this movie New York City is portrait as this place where being a socialite and living the good life is everything New York City is all about. They focus more in the perspective or point of view of the life of a socialite around the early 1960’s. Holly is always making parties in her house invited the most popular people from Manhattan, trying to keep a good image, stay popular and get married to a rich socialite gentleman. For this rich people who didn’t have anything to worry about it seems like they’re lives are not complicated because somehow they’re rich, popular and well know in the City. None of the characters from the movie ever mention being worried about anything and this shows how blinded and selfish they are which makes us the viewer believe that socialites in New York City are really like this. What this movie really did was to idealize NYC, I believe it idealize The City because throughout the whole screening they don’t really show anything else outside the point of view of a rich socialite around the early 1960’s. They don’t show the real problems that people in New York City were going through in the early 1960’s instead they just show a bunch of rich people partying and trying to find love and just living the good life. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is more like a fictional version of Manhattan because probably many people out there in the world believe that this is how the life of a socialite in NYC really is, or probably by watching this movie they can think that NYC is a wonderful city free of poverty, stress and problems which is not New York City is never a wonder land it’s a big city and millions of people live in it and this means it’s always facing some problems.
      

      
      
                                                    Works Cited


1- (Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Dir. Blake Edwards. Perfs. Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard.                                Jurow-Shepherd Productions, 1961)

Blog 13: Minority Report response

 As we can see In "Minority Report" people live in an Utopian world where they completely got rid of murder by looking into the future and locking down those people who are destined to commit the murder way before they commit the act. They believe they live in this perfect society but they're wrong. They're wrong because life is about living the present not a lot of good things will come to you if you know things that might happen way ahead of time.

 It sounds really good to being able to look into the future and protect the humanity but not knowing whats going to happen next its what makes life worth living. It's like watching a suspense movie, the suspense makes you want to know more and more about what's going to happen next. It wouldn't be excited anymore to live a life where you know whats going to happen the day after tomorrow.

  After they knew who was going to commit the murder act they would look for them and lock them down. Why would they do this? instead of warning that person of what they know and tell them not to do it and just have them on lock down but in their own houses. Humanity isn't perfect and I believe we should just live life and whatever happens... happens. We should be able to have our own privacy and beliefs we're not all the same and we can't make this humanity better than what it is already.

MOMI activity

 While on our trip to the Museum Of the Moving Image I realized that the movie industry is full of history. Every single thing has its own history. How the recording cameras went from white and black to color. How the television went from heavy and huge boxes to what we have now. I also noticed how in this industry there's a lot of hidden secrets and how they use a lot of fake things and make them look like they're alive. It was a great experience I learned a lot of things from this trip.

Blog 12: Outline of Major Research Essay

"Breakfast at Tiffanys and the real New York City"

1- Introduction
"Movies make us scape from reality"

2- Breakfast at Tiffanys.
"How they portray NYC"

3- The real NYC in 1961

4-Compare both side "the Movie" and the "Real New york city"

5-Conclusion

Blog:10

      According to George J. Annas in his essay (The man In the Moon) he tells his readers that “The new ideal human, the genetically engineered ‘superior’ human, will almost certainly come to represent ‘the other.’ If history is a guide, either the normal humans will view the ‘better’ humans as the other and seek to control or destroy them, or vice versa” (236). I believe that he’s right and everybody in this world can relate to this statement. Everybody no matter how important that person it is by other people he might considered to be ‘The other’. For example in the world we live in now one big problem that has been going on for decades is when immigrants are put down by people because they come from other countries and they think they should go back to their own native countries. Immigrants are considered to be 'The others' when it comes to immigration and this shouldn’t be like that because we're all humans and it doesn’t matter where we're from. In Gattaca the invalids are known to be the other and for the invalids the perfect created humans are the others. This is what Annas is trying to show us. He's trying to let us know that you might consider a group of people like to be the other but for them you too might be the other.

Blog 9: Hero (REVISED)

       How do we really know if some of the things we watch on TV are real? That was one of the many doubts that the movie “Hero” left me in my mind. We should be very careful choose very wisely when it come to Television programs and where we get our information’s from because some of them are suppose to tell us the truth and sometimes they aren’t really honest. Sometimes they just give us false rumors and tell us lies and tend to leave some good information out, because they might think that is better if we don’t know the real deal. The movie “Hero” directed by Stephen Frears get this major point across by letting whoever watch this movie that we shouldn’t trust in everything we see or hear on T.V, because sometimes the things they say aren’t 100% true.

       In the movie Bernie Laplante committed the heroic act by saving many of the people from a plane that crashed and it was about to bust in flames while he was on his way to pick up his son. After committing this act he left the crash scene really fast and he didn’t stood there long enough to get his recognition for saving some of this people’s lives. Bernie told his close friend John Bubber about what happened last night and how he saved many people from a plane crash. We then see all over the news that they’re searching for Bernie to give him a million dollars for being a hero. Bernie is sent to jail and isn’t able to go and get recognized as the hero and this is when John decides to still Bernie’s identity.

     John is believed to be the hero during the whole movie but he really is not the one. The news channels didn’t know about this until the end of the movie when they really find out that Bernie was the famous and mysterious man who they’ve being looking for best known as “The hero”. After finding this tout the news channels prefer to keep this as a secret between them. They never tell the people who are watching their news the truth because they don’t want to loose their viewers trust and they don’t want to look bad because they have a good reputation. They made this guy John Bubber to be recognized as a hero and many people loved him and they already gave him a million dollars because they think he was the one who saved the people from the plane crash. How bad will they look if they now tell their viewers they have been wrong all this time? Telling their viewers the truth will mean major disaster to the news company and they would loose most of their viewers and their rankings will go lower and lower, and they will loose a lot of money in this process. To them is better to hide the truth than to tell who the real hero is. That’s why Bernie tells his son at the end not to believe in everything he see on T.V.

      Next time you turn on you’re T.V just know that whatever they’re informing you about might not be an hundred percent real to you. The media is many times is hiding things away from us the viewers. They lie because they know that at the end of the day we’ll end up believing them and we believe In most of the things they inform us about because they’re known as to always telling us facts and not lies. The media is like a secret society like the NASA . Only them know the real side of the story and I don’t understand why they believe is good to just feed us false rumors sometimes and hide us from the truth.

Blog 9: Hero

   The media lies and hides so many information from us “the viewers” and this makes me very dissapointed at the fact that people give the media their trust and a lot of the times they lie to us or give us false information. The movie “Hero” directed by Stephen Frears get the point across that we shouldn’t trust in the media and that we shouldn’t believe everything we see on T.V.

  At the end of “Hero” the media finds out who was the real person who comitted the heroic act (Bernie Laplante) and that they have been promoting the wrong guy (John Bubber) all this time. They decide to stay quiet about this and just keep on pretending that John Bubber commited the heroic  act, because this means lossing the trsut of their viewers. This makes me ask myself, “Are we being lied to right now by the media?” and “Have we ever been lied to by the media?”. Unfortunally we have been lied to by the media. Not only once nor twice, We’ve been lied to by them plenty of times and we most of the time end up buying everythign they tell us.

  One really big lie that I’ve spoken about before is Manifest Destiny during the 19^th century. The media had a lot to do with helping this lie spread all around America in news papers and even drawings. For the one who may not know about Manifest destiny, this was a huge lied made up by the government just so they could expand America they wanted to rule the world. They ended up telling the people who lived in America that God was the one who told them to expand America.

  Many gossip magazines lie to their readers with false story about celebrities. For example The other day I was reading about a Gossip magazine making up that Cher was going to be playing cat women in the batman movie. She later on cleared up this false rumors. It’s sad that the media does things like this to us isntead of telling us the true stories and whats really happening.  Not only is magazines that be lying because there’s a bunch of gossip websites out there that be witing false ruosrs about celebrities just so they could get more viewers.

 I myself don’t own a T.V because I’ve always know that the media lies to us. Who doesn’t lie? I preffer to stay away from all of their false rumors and hiden lies and live my own life. They will keep on lying and I don’t think they’ll never stop. They have us under control and we’re are too hypnotized by their lies for us to see that. Hopefully one day this will be over and they’ll decide to change their ways and let us know whats really going on so we could prepare ourselves if we need to. I remember my mom advicing me that is always better to tell the truth because one lie can bring 10 more lies.

  So next time you turn on you’re T.V just know that they’re not being  an hundred percent real to you and that the media is always hiding things away from the viewers. They lied because they know we believe them and we believe that they should really know whats going on and they wouldn’t lie to us. The media is like a secrect society like the NASA . Only them knbow the real side of the story and I don’t understand why they believe is good to just feed us false rumors sometimes and hide us from the truth.