Public and Professional Writing Final Project: Hypertextual Document

Nightslayers: The Cast

Review by BloggerReviews

Sam Raimi's new blockbuster Nightslayers made a record profit at the box office, taking the critics by storm. With that in mind, let's take a look at the (mostly) stellar cast he selected.

Matt Damon, of Jason Bourne fame, returned from a year-long absence to play a single father of two who is forced to take arms against the zombie masses to save the lives of his children. He gives a heartwrenching performance when his character is forced to shoot his daughter after she's bitten, but delivers shot after shot of action packed heroism as well. As shown in his previous films, this type of action is definitely right up his alley.

Now picture Jason Bourne fighting zombies. With kids. Alongside Charlize Theron.

Charlize Theron, well known for many films including Italian Job, Monster, Hancock, and Aeon Flux, stars in Nightslayers as a sharp-witted waitress who manages to survive an attack in her apartment. She teams up with Damon's character and together they fight their way through the encroaching masses, shotguns blasting and chainsaws revving. And we know Charlize Theron can fight.

The surprising cast member was Kristen Stewart, whose vapid stares landed her the role in the Twilight movies. Once we saw her part, however, we were not at all upset. She plays Jamie, a younger waitress, and the first character casualty of the film. She gets bitten while Theron's character is helping her escape, and we get to watch the vacant stare and constant head bobbing get blown to pieces by Theron's shotgun. Vengeance perhaps?

I apologize for the torture there, but now you can just imagine it getting blown into tiny little smithereens by the epic badassness of Charlize Theron wielding a double-barrel shotgun.

All in all, we here at BloggerReviews gave the movie a solid 5 stars. We don't do that often, but come on, if watching Matt Damon and Charlize Theron kill zombies isn't good enough, we also get to see them blow up Kristen Stewart.

All kidding aside, she is starring in a new movie, Snow White and the Huntsman (also alongside Charlize Theron), and we're taking it as her last chance to prove she has some talent. We've got high hopes for the movie, and you'll see its review here as soon as it comes out.

Stealing for School!

Final Project for Public and Professional Writing: Hyperlink Document

Nightslayers Sets the Bar for Zombie Cult Flicks:

Dilan Humphrys

When most of us see the trailer for a zombie, vampire, or wizard movie nowadays, we shrug our shoulders and shake it off as another pop culture fan favorite. Soon they are blown out of the water by the movies that go on to win Academy awards and gain worldwide recognition. However this movie raised some eyebrows as soon as the trailer was released in the summer of last year. Slated for a winter opening, the movie was delayed due to production issues and over one hundred extra hours of editing. This flick underwent a surgical procedure that even the Jackson family couldn’t afford. But it was worth it. Late spring brought Nightslayers to the forefront of the box office as it grossed just under $1,640,000,000 earning it the number one spot for the year.

For a zombie movie to make it like this, everyone involved had to have done everything right. Matt Damon’s splendid return to the big screen after a yearlong absence stars him in the role of Kurt Donovan, a struggling single father of two who gets caught up in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Charlize Theron stars alongside Damon in her biggest role since The Italian Job as a waitress at a local restaurant whose quick wits and never-say-die attitude help her escape an attack in her own apartment. She later unites to help keep Donovan and his family alive as they are seemingly the only uninfected humans left in their small Massachusetts town. This movie, though action packed and full of thrills, is not without heartbreak when younger waitress Jamie, played by Kristen Stewart, is infected and turned into one of The Masses, the name for the collective group of zombies. These fast, terrifying, and ultimately deadly creatures kill without a second thought, thus forcing Damon’s character to kill his own daughter with a shotgun blast to the head.

As skeptics looked on for the B movie aspects to this film, others flocked to see what everyone has dubbed “the best zombie film in history” and “what George Romero envisioned zombies would be”. As the film gains more and more praise each day, most of the credit must be given to Sam Raimi, who has directed this, his first blockbuster since Spider-Man 3.

“We all worked really hard to put this thing together. I oversaw this project from the earliest of stages whether it was the writing or casting. It needed to be perfect and it was by the end. It is something we are all very proud of.” Raimi said on the red carpet at the premiere in April. When asked what was next for him and whether or not he had plans to return to the Spider-Man franchise that gained him critical acclaim back in 2002, he responded by saying, “Well the way things are going with this one I might not have to…”

Later that week it was announced that Raimi sold the rights to his Marvel superhero trilogy. Paramount Pictures has begun the search for a new director for the fourth installment, slated for release in summer 2012.

A New Face

Originally, this blog was for my short stories literature class during my first semester of college. It has served its purpose as such, but I can't bear to part with such a terrific name. Therefore, this is going to be my new blog for drabbles, philosophical thoughts, and any random musings that pour out of my head. I'm planning on keeping my fiction on my fiction blog--gipsyfingers.blogspot.com--but this will be my nonfiction works. Not all of it will be formal...I imagine most of the posts will be nothing more than strings of thoughts that pour out of my head. I don't know how often I'm going to update, or when, but I'm determined to keep this particular blog alive.

Wish me luck!

The Power of Names

When reading "Thirst" and "In The Penal Colony," the first thing I noticed was the lack of names given to the main characters. In "Thirst," the commander and his wife remain nameless, while in "Penal Colony," the officer, the explorer, the convict, and the soldier are unnamed. At first glance, this seems trivial, a pointless point, yet when you look deeper, it is what makes the story a universal study on human character, instead of just a story.

Think of it this way. If the commander's was named Hank, and his wife Linda, then it would be a story about Hank and Linda, and how they would react in such circumstances. But because they are simply 'the commander' and 'the commander's wife,' this becomes a story about anyone. They could be anyone, you, a friend, anyone. How would a human react? Not Hank, not Linda, but any human being.

The same situation occurs in "Penal Colony," with the explorer, officer, and company. We have multiple character archetypes here, each sharing a completely different point of view. Again, because of the lack of names, this becomes not a "what would Jack do?" situation, but instead, a "What would you do? What would humanity do?" situation. When the explorer struggles with his conscience, it is not 'Rick' struggling, it's any human being. It could be you.

That's the beauty of this stories. They make you stop and think about what you would do in a similar situation. Not Rick, not Jack, not Linda--what would YOU do. And that is a difficult question to ponder. What would you do.

Formalist Theory

The formalist theory looks at works of literature based on craft, that is, how the story is put together. They look at things like character, plot, setting, and point of view to analyze the work. The main thought behind it is that everything, every word, comma, and apostrophe was used by choice, specifically put there by the author for a reason.

The first set of stories we had to analyze in this fashion were from France (as this is also our international stories unit). The first I quite enjoyed, "The Other Wife," by Colette, and "The Necklace," by Guy de Maupassant. Unfortunately for me, this blog is supposed to be on "The Necklace," as we discussed "The Other Wife" at length in class.

Let me say that I am not a fan of this story. I had to read it in my ninth grade English class as an explanation of irony, and while it is an incredible example of this, it's not a style of story I am fond of. I do not care for dramatic irony, as I feel that the problems it causes could easily be solved by simple common sense.

Anyway, "The Necklace" we are to discuss so "The Necklace" I shall talk about. I'm just going to focus on one part of it, to make this as painless as possible--the words, more importantly, the imagery. Maupassant uses a blend of juxtaposed words to cast a sharp distinction between Madame Loisel's real life, and her imagined. This shows the audience exactly how much she longs for riches, how much she craves it. Phrases like "She suffered endlessly...from the poorness of her house, from its mean walls, worn chairs, and ugly curtains. All these things...tormented and insulted her (The Necklace, page 1)," phrases like these show poor Madame's life.

Her imaginings, however, are filled with richness. Take this phrase, for example. "She imagined vast saloons hung with antique silks, exquisite pieces of furniture supporting priceless ornaments..." Even with this one small sentence, we are given access to Madame's mind, to her dreams, and they are truly wondrous.

If not for the words Maupassant chose, this distinction would not be so glaring, and the entire point of the story would be lost.

1990

1990s

Now we move into my decade. I was a 90s baby, although you wouldn't know it to look at my childhood (me being homeschooled and all), but I digress. We had three stories this time around, by Pam Houston, Lorrie Moore, and Carolyn Ferrell. We discussed the Lorrie Moore and Carolyn Ferrell stories at length in class, so I am going to focus this blog on the Pam Houston one, "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had."

Like the other stories of this decade, "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" focuses mainly on relationships. Not just romantic relationships, but all types--parent and child, husband and wife, woman and lover--many different kinds. It also deals with the topic of unrequited love, as all of the characters in the story are dealing with some form of it. The main character, Lucy, talks at length about the relationship with her parents, her father especially. There's a scene in particular where Lucy is talking about a car ride with her parents that illustrates this perfectly (pgs 783-784). She is driving, and gets pulled over. Her father proceeds to totally humiliate her in front of the officer.

Another scene, on page 781, explains her childhood. She describes 16 car accidents she was in with her parents, and how they would fight so much that a young neighbor girl took Lucy and refused to give her back, even when the police came with a warrant. There is something very strong about how it's written, something realistic, and when we look at Pam Houston's biography, we realize that it is realistic. Houston's life directly reflected what she wrote. Houston was in upwards of 15 car accidents with her drunken parents, and would be thrown from the car only to have her parents stand and fight while she cowered beside the wreckage. This is all illustrated in her story, all of it.

In my opinion, out of all the stories we read, this one demonstrates the import of biographical criticism the best.

1980s Part Two

1980s Part Two:


We had two stories to read for the latter half of the 1980s, "Janus," by Ann Beattie, and "The Way We Live Now," by Susan Sontag. They were both interesting, but very different.

"Janus" is the story of a woman and her bowl. Well, that's the the short version. The main character, Andrea, is a rather singular woman, a real estate agent, who has an obsessive relationship with this ceramic bowl that her lover had purchased for her at a flea market. And yet, if one looks closer, the bowl isn't just an object, nor is it the meaning of the story.

Ann Beattie wrote this story shortly after a divorce and remarriage. When she remarried, her stories changed, moving from the darker stories that anticipated her divorce to slightly more optimistic tales. "Janus" was written after her divorce, and is a story about a woman who lives an abnormal lifestyle, one that is not common to her time, yet she is satisfied.

This is compared to "The Way We Live Now," which also is about lifestyles, only this story is about lives that are affected by AIDS and HIV. Before I go any further, I must mention that Susan Sontag loved getting people riled up. Her stories focused on pressing social issues, and this story is no different. It doesn't just write about someone with HIV, it connects all the people involved. It writes, not from the point of view of the victim, but from a 3rd person omniscient point, showing the minds of everyone through dialogue, showing the backstabbing, the cattiness that goes on behind the scenes. It is a political statement, one designed to cause a commotion, and that is exactly what Sontag intended. A commotion.