Critical Analysis of Brassed Off
We studied a 5 minute exert from the film Brassed off. Within this
there were many media techniques. And in such a short exert there was
a lot. The main characters are Phil and his wife Sandra. The scene
starts with Phil, a miner, being a clown at a childs party. He is not
very good and we can tell that it is not his main job and he is doing
it for the money. We then go to Sandra who cannot afford a few items
at the local shop and the cashier tells her to pay her back next year.
When giving her the receipt she hides a five pound note in it and
passes it on. With the money Phil earnt he went and bought a trombone.
When he returns home he sees his family fighting to keep the balifs
off their property. He confronts them and they tell him he needs to
pay his debt or they seize his property. He then tells them to wait
until the 21st when he will take the redundancy money the mine will
give him. The bailiffs are leaving and Phil tells them that if he
touches his kids again he will kill them, the bailiff punches Phil and
then leaves.
I looked at sound in more detail and after watching it a few times I
picked up on some. When Phil is punched he is still in his clown
clothes and as he is hit his red nose squeaks. As this happens you
can’t take Phil as a serious threat to the bailiffs, instead just a
clown. This shows him up even more in front of his own family who he
can no longer protect. When Sandra is in the shop the cashier tells
her that she is 60p short and the women behind tuts. Although only a
small sound this could mean a thousand words. The women behind looks
middle class she has her purse in her hand and it doesn’t look empty.
She is also wearing quite expensive clothes and has jewellery and make
In Chapter One she makes a start in Key West. In this chapter she learns a lot about low-wage-job applications. Each application she fills out has many multi choice questions and later on a urine test. She ends up waiting many days hearing nothing back and then applying for a job waitressing. She's hired and is paid $2.43 and hour plus tips.
Hatchet is a book about Brian Robeson, who recently has been going through a lot of trouble.
Imagine for a moment it is your big sister's 17th birthday. She is out with her friends celebrating, and your parents are at the mall with your little brother doing some last minute birthday shopping, leaving you home alone. You then hear a knock on the front door. When you getthere, nobody is there, just an anonymous note taped to the door that says Happy Birthday, along with a hundred dollar bill. You've been dying to get that new video game, and your sister will never know. You are faced with a tough decision, but not a very uncommon one. In both Fences, by August Wilson, and A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansbury, tough decisions have to be made about getting money from someone else's misfortune. But money's that important right?
adequate. Hickam did use good transitions between his main points. The speech did expand my
Gacy was well known member of his community who would even dress as a clown for children's
dislikes him. It can be said that he is not doing the best for his
The Crucible is the story about how Salem started the witch trials, written by Arthur Miller. The story says that the young girls were practicing witchcraft when the Rev. Parris found them. The town believed the girls that there was more witches in Salem and started to place blame on almost everyone. The main girl was in love with a farmer that she had committed adultery with, so she found a way to blame his wife of witchcraft from the start of the trials. The girls knew that known of the accused actually did witchcraft and as did the ones hang. The Crucible is filled with pride that hides the secrets of the town.
Jared Diamond's bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel (GG&S) is an attempt to explain why some parts of the world are currently powerful and prosperous while others are poor. Diamond is both a physiologist and a linguist who spends a good deal of his time living with hunter gathers in Papua New Guinea. As a researcher and as a human being, he is convinced that all people have the same potential. Hunter gatherers are just as intelligent, resourceful, and diligent as anybody else. Yet material "success" isn't equally distributed across the globe. Civilization sprung up in relatively few places and spread in a defined pattern. I should emphasize that Diamond doesn't equate material prosperity with well-being or virtue. He's just curious about the global distribution of bling bling.
The Scholar: I think that's more a function of sound wave vibration than anything else.
bars, in addition to a Marriot hotel, until she graduated from high school. Sometime after
McDonald, J., Teder-Salejarvi, W, & Hillyard, S. (2000). Involuntary orienting to sound improves visual perception. Nature, 407, 906-907.
In Jared Diamond’s excerpt from his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, he puts forward the historical narrative of how human evolution progresses at varying rates for different cultures due solely to the particular geographic region that people assimilate from. Diamond supports this thesis with specific evidence on the importance of food production, emphasizing that food is the main ingredient needed for a population to experience progress and growth, enabling that culture to expand around the world. I agree with Diamond’s dissertation and find it compelling due to his logical evidence and ethos on the topic.
As the camera zoom smoothly creeps in from the establishing wide we are exposed to a changing palette of noises from the surrounding environme...
in a month, and she cannot buy diapers for her baby. The clerk tells her that
He’s a young man, the clown, with white socks striped in black, and black suspenders over a white T-shirt. White face, red nose. His MO is to follow people and imitate their motion without their noticing, to the glee of the sizeable, ever-changing audience. We’re sitting here on the steps of the Museum, hot and sweaty, watching the show.