Thursday, June 3, 2010

Lady Gaga


Lady Gaga to me is definitely a musical genius. I could argue for hours that she is the most creative and original artist out there right now which is why I can comfortably say, I've gone Gaga.
She is my favorite artist right now because she started out from scratch, because her music is fun and catchy and her style is astounding, unique and impossible to ignore.

Lady Gaga (whos real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) started out performing when she was a child to basically any audience who would watch her and eventually started doing shows up on the Lower East Side club scene dancing and singing her heart out in her home crafted outrageous outfits - which usually consisted of hot pants and a bikini top - while she struck a pose and lit cans of hairspray on fire while a disco ball lowered from the ceiling behind her.
At age 4 Gaga learned piano by ear. By age 13, she had written her first piano ballad. At 14, she played open mike nights at clubs At age 17, she became was one of 20 kids in the world to get early admission to Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She was signed by her 20th birthday and was writing songs for other artists (such as the Pussycat Dolls). If that isn't the fastest most deserving rise to fame ever, I don't know what is. This time line really blows my mind and only waters the seed of love I have for Lady Gaga.

(this is Lady Gaga before she was famous and blonde)

Lady Gaga's biggest hits include Pokerface, Just Dance, Love Games, Paparazzi, Bad Romance, Telephone and Alejandro. My personal favorites include Fancy Pants, Paper Gangster, Monster, Teeth, Speechless, Money Honey, Beautiful Dirty Rich, and Boys Boys Boys.
I like Lady Gaga's song Fancy Pants the most because of how silly it is. The song starts off by saying "This beat is so funny we made it with their money. Haha, hahahahaha, hahahaha" and in the background she's saying "fancy, fancy, youre so fancy." In my opinion this song is about poking fun at people with money who take themselves too seriously, and telling them to loosen up and "take off their fancy pants" . At one point, she says "Oh baby, don't be shy Fashion's got a lazy eye..." meaning that not everything about fashion is perfect. Gaga says this even though a huge part of her career is her sense of fashion. This leads me to believe that she really is out there for the truth and being honest and not just to be famous like most other singers.
Lady Gaga's lyrics is really what gets me about her. Because she tells her fans so much about her, we get to really know her and through her lyrics we can tell that she wrote them all because they are so quirky and original.


Whimsy : An odd or fanciful idea; the trait of acting unpredictably. Playfully odd behavior; An impulsive, illogical or capricious character.
All of the above describes Lady Gaga's style. She shows her style through her music, music videos and the clothes that she wears on a daily basis. This plays a very big part in why I like her so much because her style is something I really enjoy seeing in all forms of media and I know that she has a reputation to keep but with every new image of herself that she puts out there, she is laying herself on the line in front of us not knowing how we are going to react and yet she can pull it off, flawlessly.
Lady Gaga has said in past interviews that she knows how it is to feel unaccepted and weird and that her goal is to reach out to those who feel the same way and that she just wants those people to have someone they can relate to. I feel like she has already accomplished her goal and I am proof of that.
In Gaga's video for Paparazzi she is shown wearing a yellow unitard with black Mickey Mouse-like heads all over it and big, black round sunglasses that mimic the ears on her suit. This is an outfit that shows how creative and memorable Lady Gaga 's fashion can be however this is one of the more simple outfits of hers.
http://www.ladygaga.com/player/default.aspx?meid=4931




At the 2009 MTV music awards Gaga wore a red lace dress that covered her face a tall red crown on the top of her head. Lets just say she stood out.

In her Telephone music video Lady Gaga wore sunglasses with lit cigaretts imbedded in them. I have never seen anything like this before and it just blew my mind that nobody had come up with that yet.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Citizen Kane Review for Mr.Edwards

Citizen Kane
1941
Review By: Michelle General



While watching the movie Citizen Kane, I was able to create my own opinions.
At the beginning of this movie I thought it was just going to be another boring black and white film that provoked no thought, that ties all of the lose ends before the movie is over, ending in yet another painfully happy ending. One that makes me wish that time would just move seconds faster. The movie did not interest me at all until the scene where Charles Kane dies and his last word is a loud, and very uncalled for "Rosebud". Other than that one word being so unexpected, when Charles Kane says this word, the camera shows a shot of only his mouth which is not something I expected, nor is it something that you see in a lot of movies.
I also thought that this movie had very good cinematic scenes.
For example, in the very beginning of the movie, when Charles Kane dies and the glass snow globe rolls out of his cold, dead fingers and onto the ground, cracking the globe and releasing the water onto the floor, the camera angle focuses on the broken hole in the globe. While looking at the globe, we see a house-keeper walk into the room. The interesting thing about this shot is that the camera angle allows the audience look through the glass, across the room and at the frightened house keeper. This makes the scene a lot more interesting because of the peculiar angle of the camera. One would not be able to see that angle without physically laying on the ground and aiming their view towards the doorway of the room.
Another portion of the movie that made me appreciate the cinematic scenes was later on in the movie when Charles and his wife are sitting at a dinner table, discussing his newspaper. What makes this scene so interesting is that the viewer can clearly see that the conversation topic stays the same, but the days are going by. You can tell that the days are changing because the only thing that is different about each scene is that their clothes surroundings are changing. I thought this was a really good way of showing Charles and his wife’s relationship- which was slowly falling apart.
I thought that the story was interesting and different than other stories that I’ve seen.
The fact that Charles was being taken out of his snowy cabin-like home and told he was going to live with a man that he did not know and eventually become a very wealthy man, is not something I had ever seen before. So from that scene on I began to be interested in how and why this boy was going to become a rich man.
While watching this movie, I found that some points were actually genuinely funny and made me laugh.
For example, when Charles was moving his office into an already occupied Mr. Carter’s office, some movers were moving things into the room like a rug, a desk or a picture.
While Kane and Mr. Carter stand in the doorway of their office and discuss how Kane is intruding (still in a somewhat polite way), Kane’s movers are walking into the office through the two, physically interrupting Kane and Mr. Carter. In this scene you can see Carter becoming more and more frustrated towards the movers constant interruption. This was pretty funny.
The only thing that I did not like about this movie was that sometimes the scenes where people were just talking about an issue were hard to want to pay attention to because they were pretty boring. This lead me to become confused about the storyline and sometimes I got lost.
Also when the movie had a flashback or a flash forward of something, the flashback /forward was pretty long and I would sometimes forget about the actual storyline.
Overall, I actually enjoyed this movie and recommended it to my family (although I doubt they will actually watch it). This movie kind of changed my point of views on black and white films from being that all films that look like this are boring and frankly a waste of time, to somewhat enjoyable and interesting to watch. I do not think that this movie is the best movie of all time, but I think that it was so good for its generation that it actually impressed me despite all of the full color action packed movies I’ve watched.