Joshua Michael Stern is a relatively new director in the world of feature films, with Swing Vote being his most current film, he is also known for movies such as Neverwas and The Amityville Horror. He comes from a family who comes from directors and show business creators, his grandfather, Jules Green, was the original executive producer of The Tonight Show, his grandmother was a studio executive and discovered British talent and brought it to America (Stern, Richman).
Swing Vote takes place in election time in a small town of Texico, New Mexico, where we are introduced to the main character, played by Kevin Costner, Bud. He is a recently let-off slob with a very proactive daughter, Molly, who runs the household. On Election day Molly tries to convince Bud to go vote, but Bud responds by stating that one vote never mattered. Molly illegally votes for her father, but while she is getting ready to select her candidates, the power gets cut, and her vote counted, as a blank vote. Election night comes down to one state, New Mexico, one county, and more importantly, one vote, Bud's. The candidates and the media come to Texico and persuade and prod Bud, with each campaign manager straying from the candidates' beliefs to get Bud's vote (Swing Vote).
Swing Vote shows an extreme amount of questionable political behavior and happenings, so much that could never be possible, such as an election actually coming down to one vote, and the Republicans and Democrats literally switching beliefs, but the movie shows the extremes that candidates go through to get elected. When political campaigns take off, there is no stopping the onslaught of ads, promises, mud-slinging, and sometimes flat out lies that arise when these candidates, and mor...
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Swing Vote. Dir. Joshua Michael Stern. Perf. Kevin Costner. Tombstone Pictures. 2008. DVD.
Renowned author Charles Dickens once wrote, “it was the best of times and the worst of times” (Tale of Two Cities). An all to true statement when one looks at the current American political situation, but author and journalist Jonathan Rauch endeavors to analyze the current political climate and explain how it became what it is today. In his article ‘How American Politics went Insane’, Rauch dissects the 2016 election and events leading up to the final vote to understand how politics went sideways. Rauch begins by offering a hypothetical scenario that depicts an extreme disintegration of American politics and its political institutions and parties.
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It is very common among the United States’ political sphere to rely heavily on T.V. commercials during election season; this is after all the most effective way to spread a message to millions of voters in order to gain their support. The presidential election of 2008 was not the exception; candidates and interest groups spent 2.6 billion dollars on advertising that year from which 2 billion were used exclusively for broadcast television (Seelye 2008.) Although the effectiveness of these advertisements is relatively small compared to the money spent on them (Liasson 2012), it is important for American voters to think critically about the information and arguments presented by these ads. An analysis of the rhetoric in four of the political campaign commercials of the 2008 presidential election reveals the different informal fallacies utilized to gain support for one of the candidates or misguide the public about the opposing candidate.
This movie is about David and Jennifer, who live in Southern America in the ‘90s which was said to be a liberal state, are sent from reality to a TV show ‘Pleasantville’ in 1950s. From reality looking through this TV show, Pleasantville looks like an ideal place for people to live in, but getting a closer look and being part of this world you actually realize that it is very different from what is shown on TV. After David and Jennifer arriving to Pleasantville, they become colorless, everything there is either black, white or gray. People then expose their conservative lifestyles with suppression of sexuality, discrimination and restrictive of personal liberty and imagination. In Pleasantville, people assume that there is no outside world other
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Have you seen any of the recent campaign advertisements that have been published by the 2016 presidential candidates? Presidential candidates are known for campaigning through different media outlets, such as television advertisements, social media, and their party rallies. In these advertisements, the candidates bash their opponents and try to show you why you should vote for them, and why you should not vote for their opponent. Hillary Clinton’s advertisements have really stood out to me and have been able to grab my attention. Particularly the “Role Models” video, which displays young children watching Donald Trump make discriminatory and offensive comments on the television screen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign advertisement effectively gets
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Although there were many concepts that were present within the movie, I choose to focus on two that I thought to be most important. The first is the realistic conflict theory. Our textbook defines this as, “the view that prejudice...
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