Month: January 2020

La La Land (2016)

A few years ago I remember this movie was all the talk and it was all anyone was talking about.  With 14 Oscar nominations and 6 wins, the movie was very successful and it turned into one of those movies that I always said I would watch but never really put in the time to do. This week I was free and decided that it was the day to finally watch it.  

My favorite YouTuber who I have mentioned on this blog before, Best Dressed (aka Ashley) was a film major at UCLA and made a video about her favorite movies and she included La La Land on her list.  Because of this, I kind of prioritized this movie on my personal list of movies to watch. 

I have heard from a lot of people that La La Land is a Hollywood movie basically applauding Hollywood and quite frankly, yes it was.  The story follows Mia, an aspiring actress, and Sebastian, a jazz musician, as they work towards their career goals and form a relationship.  

In high school, we could pick majors and mine was visual arts so I will say that I really appreciate a movie with great visual elements and I really think that La La Land did a good job in this category.  I found this movie to have a really strong and pleasing aesthetic. The setting to the costumes I honestly thought was amazing. Even Emma Stone’s red hair I thought fit the aesthetic really well. I love the use of bright colors throughout the movie. It managed to be really colorful but not overly bright and obnoxious.  It still looked very elegant. I really enjoyed the old Hollywood look that they successfully were able to achieve.  

If I am being completely honest, I thought the plot was okay.  I didn’t feel very invested in the characters or story in general.  For me, I didn’t find it amazing or super interesting to follow. I don’t really know what else to say about it in that regard.  I did find the ending to be pleasing and realistic in a sense. I liked how they didn’t have to push the romance and I also thought Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have good chemistry together and seemed as real as a fake couple could be. 

Overall I found that the film was very well made, the actors did a good job and the aesthetic was beautiful but it lacked in the plot itself in my opinion.  It was worth it to watch but it also didn’t have that much impact on me at all. I didn’t really like how it was a movie about Hollywood giving itself a high five but I still enjoyed the old Hollywood appearance of the film.  I would give it a 6.5/10 but I blame much of its points of how well made it was and how it looked. If it was plot alone I would probably give it a much lower score, maybe a 4.5-5/10.

Images used:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzgxOWVlN2ItMDZlNC00MjFhLTgwYTUtZWRmOTkwZjU5MWY2L2ltYWdlL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDQzMDg4Nzk@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,694,1000_AL_.jpg

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiE5NmfoK7nAhWIgnIEHV9yC4IQjRx6BAgBEAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsuperprimefilms.com%2F1514%2Fwatch-the-first-trailer-for-damien-chazelles-la-la-land%2F&psig=AOvVaw0o6-JQ2eh9XCWI-csvOiXS&ust=1580574238996756 

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjqs4jZoK7nAhUZlXIEHbWICAgQjRx6BAgBEAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fseattlescreenscene.com%2F2016%2F12%2F07%2Fla-la-land-damien-chazelle-2016%2F&psig=AOvVaw0o6-JQ2eh9XCWI-csvOiXS&ust=1580574238996756

How Our Diets Affect the Enviroment

With the rise of veganism in popular culture, I have heard over and over again that there is a huge environmental impact of eating meat and animal products in general.  I have heard that it can take hundreds of gallons to produce just one hamburger. When I heard that I thought it was crazy. Now, I had always heard this from those vegan YouTubers like Freelee the Banana girl so despite it being correct, when looking into it more, it isn’t just meat that can also be harmful to the environment. Many fruits and vegetables can also be just as harmful or even worse. Now, this doesn’t go for all of them, but some of our favorites may be doing more harm than good.  

Bananas, for instance, are not always the greatest for our planet.  While growing the fruit isn’t the problem, transporting them produces a lot of pollution.  According to a Global Citizen article, the average banana travels over 5,000 miles.  

While meat gets a bad rap for using up water, so do avocados and almonds.  It takes over a gallon to produce just one almond. 500 gallons of water to produce just 2 pounds of avocados.  Not only that but avocados are a single crop, meaning that they are grown on the same land over and over again. This causes issues because the plant depletes the land and soil of nutrients, therefore they are more likely to get diseases, which increases the number of pesticides used.

Soy milk is often seen as an alternative to drinking regular cow milk, but it is also one of the major contributors to deforestation, which also negatively affects the levels of greenhouse gases. 

So how can we change our eating habits to better help our planet? It kinda seems like you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t.  So many foods that are advertised as more environmentally friendly aren’t as good as it seems. While going vegetarian or vegan can help, meat isn’t always the issue.  Chicken and pork are actually really good substitutes for eating red meat, which seems to be the most dangerous to our planet. For our fruits and veggies, eating locally sourced foods is always best.  To cause the least amount of harm and to avoid pollution, eating from local farms is significantly better for our environment.

This I Believe Rough Draft

I am a procrastinator. I’ll be the first to admit it.  Now the longer I live, the more I also become comfortable with living with my procrastinator identity, which has become a dangerous territory.  It spread like a virus, starting off with chores and schoolwork, now I can’t think of something that I don’t regularly put off. I procrastinate in basically every aspect of my life, which is a horrible method of living (I would not recommend).  I fill my life with casual stress every day just because I cannot take deadlines seriously. 

I’ve always been one and I’ve actually tried to fix it, many, many times. Whenever I think I am about to beat the system, my brain finds a new way to procrastinate. You see, my brain sees me trying to fix this flaw as a challenge and so far I always lose and the procrastinator inside me always wins. 

Part of the issue is that when I sit down to finally do all the stuff I had been putting off or even future things that aren’t important now but will be in the future, I find that I don’t have the ability to focus on anything.  My stress eats me up and leaves me with very little done and even less time. I’m not going to lie, this happens way too often.  

While goals with deadlines fill me with stress, goals without them always never get done. We have all been there, there is something that you want to do but eh, it can wait until a better time… but that time never comes. 

In high school, it came up that, one of my friends, who had significantly better grades than me, never struggled that much with procrastinating. I was very confused, as I would say procrastination is probably my biggest challenge and not to exaggerate, but ruins my life every day. She kept going and just said when she has to do something she shuts everything out and just does it. I tried to take this advice and incorporate it into my life. Well… much easier said than done… But ! after many attempts, I made progress. It doesn’t always work but I’ve learned how to control stress and get through the challenges every day that pileup.  

I believe in just doing it.  Hearing every excuse in the world to not do something and telling yourself to suck it up and focus on something else for a while.  I learned to trust myself. If I need to do something and I am telling myself to do it, I learned to stop making comments about why it sounds unexciting and trusting that I know that there is a benefit.  I believe in doing 

A few years ago, my dad and I decided to learn to snowboard. The first day sucked but as I learned to balance myself, I relied on only being able to lean one way.  It was okay at first while I was still getting the hang of things, but the longer I went the longer I went without being able to turn a certain way and the scarier it got.  I would always say that on the next run did work on it but run after run the days would go by and I still didn’t know how to turn properly. I remember one run in particular I fell and I was watching others pass by, all being able to turn and I grew furious at myself. I had been wasting so much time just waiting to hopefully get better but not doing anything about it.  I told myself that I had enough and no matter how much I was struggling I had to keep trying to turn correctly. Yes, I didn’t do that well, but by the end of the day, I could do it. I realized it took me significantly longer waiting to learn than actually learning. 

I believe in telling yourself to get up and go, that tomorrow is no different from today and not making any excuses for myself.  While I do believe I will be a procrastinator forever, I know that if it is something I really want, I will look at myself in the mirror and tell myself to just do it.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

During holidays if my family doesn’t have any plans, we usually go see a movie.  This Christmas Eve we decided to go see the latest Star Wars movie, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.   Every year we have gone to see each of the new movies when they come out.  

Not to go on a feminist rant, but I really enjoyed Rey as a female protagonist.  I feel as though she embodied an amazing role model to follow. While female leads are becoming increasingly popular, there are still negative associations that come with it.  A common complaint was, she may work hard, but she is highly sexualized. She may be brave, but she loses her femininity. Rey has accomplished what I think few stories have.  Rey, despite being pretty, was not valued based off her beauty. Her character was not supposed to only draw male viewers because of her sex appeal. Princess Leia’s character in the first trilogy, while being a fighter, was often sexualized (especially in episode V) and one of her characteristics was her beauty.  Rey’s love life is never discussed throughout the films and is never a plotline of the story. Her clothing remains to be actually very similar to Luke Skywalker’s costume in A New Hope.  I’ve seen many female characters sometimes not get sexualized but they lose their femininity.  Rey never seems to lose that. Her clothes are similar to Luke’s but they are fitted and modified to fit a female while still being able to accomplish everything that a male counterpart can.  In addition, she uses typical female characteristics as strengths as opposed to weaknesses. Throughout the entire film, she uses her force to heal rather than to fight or use violence. She approaches enemies with a helping hand and often is successful.  Rey proves that it is possible to be strong, be taken seriously by others without sacrificing femininity. 

I would overall rate the movie an 8/10. I blame the setup of the other movies in the trilogy for lowering the score.  Personally, I found the film to be really good, entertaining and high quality but I also think that much of the trilogy focused on the blockbuster factors.  I found that there were many setups for big fight scenes but the plotline that supports that plotline was somewhat weak compared to the original trilogy. One problem that I have is that so much media is being produced. There have been 5 movies and even a TV show in the past decade.  While there is a lot of content, I feel that a lot gets lost in that. The story is harder to follow and tends to not feel very important to follow. Each movie does not necessarily feel like an important piece of the story but rather, just something that happened. 

images: (in order of appearance)

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwieh7bx0ZfnAhUBq1kKHahiBRMQjRx6BAgBEAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.starwars.com%2Ffilms%2Fstar-wars-episode-ix-the-rise-of-skywalker&psig=AOvVaw2Reu8IKicBcOSYAnTd-2gE&ust=1579797241930795

https://imgix.bustle.com/uploads/image/2019/10/20/33437a08-1634-4729-bde2-94475f9d077a-screen-shot-2019-10-20-at-121324-pm.png?w=970&h=546&fit=crop&crop=faces&auto=format&q=70

https://boygeniusreport.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/star-wars-rise-of-skywalker.jpg?quality=98&strip=all&w=782

Civic Issues Blog Idea!

I want to talk about sustainability and climate change.  In the past year it came to a lot of people’s attention that our planet is not in a great state if we continue to live the way we do. Around March of last year, I went to a reservation with my friends and it was beautiful there BUT even in the middle of nowhere, plastic bottles and candy wrappers were scattered along the trail.  Empty Gatorade bottles and old soccer balls filled the river. I was disgusted at the treatment of our planet. I live next to Manhattan and while it is gross to see garbage on the streets, it fits in. Seeing such waste on the trails stood out to me because it just didn’t belong. The area was so innocent and people were just treating it with no respect. I remember getting really upset and since then I have been trying to make an effort to consider how much waste I produce and where it goes. I don’t have a specific focus yet on what I necessarily want to focus on within that.  I was thinking that I could discuss how people are attempting to help the planet and how that actually affects our society and environment. I’ve seen a lot of people protesting plastic by replacing it with glass instead, which does not help the environment at all because waste is waste. I’ve heard of recycling centers that don’t actually recycle what is given but instead dump it into the same pile that the trash goes into. Eating a vegetarian diet has been proven to use less water and crops than a diet incorporating meat. Despite this, many fruits and vegetables are not locally grown and due to how far away these crops are, actually cause more damage to the environment. I think that it is important to discuss not only what we are doing for the environment but also questioning if it actually makes a difference.

Passion Blog Idea for Second Semester

Welcome to my blog! I changed classes this semester to better fit my schedule so I am new. My name is Jade.  My passion blog for the first semester was a movie review blog. April of 2019 I realized that I had not seen many many classic films.  Often times I’d find myself in conversations not being able to engage in the conversation because people were talking about a movie that I had not seen.  I found that this was an issue and I was frustrated because there really is a simple solution. So I made a list on my phone filled with movies and television shows to watch.  Some were cult classics and others were just ones that friends have recommended. Spring break I watched about 4 movies but I lost momentum and I found that I was always procrastinating. At the beginning of last semester when I had to pick a passion I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to make myself watch a movie every week.   Since then I’ve watched 16 of those movies from the list but I’ve barely made a dent. Despite making the list, I did not limit myself to the list that I prepared in April. Some movies I just stumbled upon or some I watched nonvoluntarily with friends. Also some movies I would watch and not write posts about. The list was not a strict outline but just suggestions.  This semester I intend to continue the same passion blog. My film adventure will continue for a while. I have so many more movies on the list and the list continues to grow every day.  

As of right now, this is my list:

    •     ◦    Charlie’s Angels
    •     ◦    Big short
    •     ◦    To die for
    •     ◦    What’s eating Gilbert grape 
    •     ◦    Once upon a time in Hollywood
    •     ◦    Juno 
    •     ◦    It
    •     ◦    Mid90s
    •     ◦    10 things I hate about you
    •     ◦    St Elmo’s fire 
    •     ◦    fight club 
    •     ◦    Selena
    •     ◦    slumdog millionaire 
    •     ◦    A Clockwork orange 
    •     ◦    city of god
    •     ◦    Mulholland Drive
    •     ◦    Dirty dancy 
    •     ◦    Footloose
    •     ◦    Dr strange love
    •     ◦    lolita
    •     ◦    Sound of music
    •     ◦    Frida
    •     ◦    Full metal jacket
    •     ◦    Ladybird
    •     ◦    Reservoir dogs
    •     ◦    beautiful mind
    •     ◦    She’s all that 
    •     ◦    Bad moms 
    •     ◦    Pretty woman
    •     ◦    We have to talk about Kevin 
    •     ◦    Black snake moan 
    •     ◦    La La Land
    •     ◦    Moonlight
    •     ◦    Bring it On 
    •     ◦    To kill a mockingbird
    •     ◦    Perks of being a wallflower
    •     ◦    Wolf of wall street 
    •     ◦    Blade runner 
    •     ◦    Easy a 
    •     ◦    paper towns 
    •     ◦    Requiem for a dream 
    •     ◦    dazed and confused 
    •     ◦    lost in translation
    •     ◦    the inbetweeners 
    •     ◦    match point
    •     ◦    Schindler’s list 
    •     ◦    Mr. and Mrs. Smith
    •     ◦    Good Will Hunting
    •     ◦    Inglourious Basterds
    •     ◦    The Martian 
    •     ◦    The Secret Life of Walter Mitty 
    •     ◦    Forrest Gump
    •     ◦    American pie 
    •     ◦    The sandlot 
    •     ◦    Rocky
    •     ◦    Romeo + Juliet 
    •     ◦    Grand Budapest hotel
    •     ◦    Breakfast at Tiffany’s 
    •     ✓    Legends of the fall 
    •     ✓    When we first met 
    •     ✓    Pulp fiction 
    •     ✓    Napoleon Dynamite 
    •     ✓    Kill bill vol 1
    •     ✓    Kill bill vol 2
    •     ✓    Pretty in pink 
    •     ✓    Silver linings playbook
    •     ✓    Scott Pilgrim vs the world
    •     ✓    Friends with benefits 
    •     ✓      the perfect date
    •     ✓    Black swan 
    •     ✓    the last summer
    •     ✓    Bill and teds excellent adventure 
    •     ✓    Superbad
    •     ✓    500 days of summer

This semester I intend to also include television shows.  I want to prioritize films but I think television can also fit into the same category.  I sometimes can’t relate to conversations because I’ve never seen a show. Movies are much easier to accomplish because it only takes a max of 3 hours whereas a tv show can be months of commitment.

I feel like I have been repeating a lot of the same things so, in conclusion, I am going to continue my movie review blog! If there are any movie suggestions I would love to hear them. I am always looking for new films to include on my list.