Illegal Aliens-Tomas E. Avila

Aliens

Alien is a Sci-Fi film from 1986 directed by James Cameron. This film was made with a budget of 18.5 million dollars and featured Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, Michael Biehn as Corporal Dwayne Hicks,Paul Reiser as Carter J. Burke, Lance Henriksen as Bishop, and more. This movie is about a crew going to investigate what they believe is an SOS call, unfortunately it wasn't at all and the crew find it out the hard way when they leave the ship to investigate and end up in a cave. What this cave had was a "face hugger", a face hugger is an alien that latches on to the head and cant be removed without killing whoever has the alien on them. When latched onto the head they plant a baby alien in the persons stomach. This happened to a crew member who was outside of the ship and don't know this information until its too late. At first they think he is choking because he is spasing out on the table, but then a baby alien pops out of his stomach which kills him instantly. The rest of the movie the alien picks members off one by one until there is only one(and a cat). Sigourney Weaver (Ellen Ripley) manages to activate the ships self destruct and runs to an escape pod. Once the ship detonates she realizes that the Alien is with her in the pod so she puts on a space suit, shoots the alien with a grappling hook gun, and opens the pod door. The alien dies after she activates the thrusters on the ship.

Beast of a Bad Movie By: Tomas Avila

 

DON'T WATCH

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a 2011 movie about a little girl named "Hushpuppy" who is just trying to live in an off the grid land nicknamed "the bathtub."  It is on this land where people celebrate multiple holidays and believe in living quiet lives where they hunt, fish, and Cultivate [?  Why is cultivate capitalized?] as the ice caps melt bring water levels to rise and storms to break out. In my opinion the beginning of the movie is great it shows you their little world and how they live, but as it went on I realized how unlikable Hushpuppy is a character. She is psychotic in my opinion, and it is justified [what is justified?] to most because as the main character it portraits her as a deep thinker who does everything for her mother (which it is never explained how she disappeared.) Throughout the movie I was cringing on how terrible the writing is it always started off with something corny like "My momma" or "I dream," but she does wild things like blowing up the wall separating the bathtub and the normal people. The rest of the characters in my opinion were great, you can tell they are stressed and tired towards the end. I liked how beautiful the shots were and the scenery is nice. the location being the bathtub is probably my favorite thing because it shows kind of an apocalyptic/struggling society where the people build their own houses and do things on their own.

Alien: Damyia Jackson

I honestly didn’t even watch the beginning of the movie Alien but from the middle to the end I was watching it and I was kind of confused at first. After a little while I got what was going on in the movie but I wasn’t really interested in what was going on. When I finally understood what was going on they were getting back on the ship and the girl was saying not to. When they were up there the guy started acting weird and saying things that they re guy wouldn’t normally say so the girl got suspicious. I kinda figured that he wasn’t himself when this was happening because the name of the movie is Alien and they went down to the moon where the saw an alien ship. Basically the movie was foreshadowing this part, but watching it you find out he is an alien when he tries to stop the lady from leaving and she fights him off and he starts to malfunction and fall apart. It was very crazy the way that it happened, that’s something that I wouldn’t just suspect to happen especially from the way I saw the movie going. The person or people that made this movie had a really good way of having the element of surprise because they definitely surprised me with the end. I would give this movie a 3 out of 5 on my scale just because of the good elements that they added and I would watch another movie from this person.  

Beasts of the Southern Wild by: Anthony Ruggiero

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a 2012 drama/fantasy about a young girl named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) who goes to search for her long-lost mother when her father; Wink (Dwight Henry) falls ill.

The movie takes place in the Bathtub, a place that is cut off from the rest of the world. Wink is preparing his young daughter Hushpuppy for the end of the world. Life in the Bathtub seems both resilient and celebratory. Hushpuppy goes to school where her no non-sense teacher teaches on global warming, ecological shifts and how the Bathtub will go extinct. One day Hushpuppy's father comes home sick and starts yelling at her. She ends up locking herself in her home, and it catches on fire [is this accurate?  Or does she purposely set it afire?] because she left something cooking on the stove. While Wink is sick massive ice caps melt and massive storms brew. Waters start to rise and people start to head for higher ground. Wink and Hushpuppy try to save people until Wink starts coughing up blood and asks to be taken to the only place he has ever called home. Hushpuppy doesn't want to see her dad die so she travels across the water on a boat towards a light she believes is her mother. She soon finds out that she can't stop her father from dying and goes back to see him. Hushpuppy ends up having one final dinner of fried gator with her father. She also returns with her friends and family and they parade while water laps at their feet.

In my opinion Beasts of the Southern Wild was a fantastic film and I really want to see the play it adapted from "Juicy and Delicious".

Drug Culture- Winter's Bone-Victoria Romprey

Winter's Bone Dir. Debra Granik

Feat. Jennifer Lawrence (Ree Dolly), John Hawkes (Teardrop), Dale Dickey (Merab), Garret Dillahunt (Sheriff Baskin), & Lauren Sweetser (Gail).

A 17-year-old girl, Ree Dolly, forcefully given the job of keeping what remains of her family together. Taking place in the Missouri Ozark mountains, this movie shows the world of young Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), whose daddy is an unseen meth cook and whose mother is a freakshow because of it. Ree is only a teenager, but after her father's disappearance she's already the family's main provider, and she struggles with that title feeding many deer and squirrels to her two siblings and barely available mother.  Not only is she a caretaker for [of] her siblings, but she is also a role model to her much younger brother and sister, being the only person they have around to aspire to be like.

The Dollys live in a beaten down cabin in an a trashed community. It is by no means much, but it is enough, although  they may not have it much longer [awkward construction]. After the town sheriff played by Garret Dillahunt shows up to announce that Ree's daddy put his kids home up as bail after his last drug bust, Ree is faced with one of the hardest challenges of her life. Her father has vanished, and if he doesn't show up for an upcoming court date, the Dollys will spend the rest of their winter in the woods as bait for the animals lurking amongst the trees.  “I'll find him,” Ree says.  This sentence sets the future plot of this story.

This is not an average story of a seventeen year old girl, with myself the exact same age as Ree, I can honestly say that I have not experienced most of the things she does throughout Winter’s Bone.  Ree Dolly is such a compelling survivor that you are bound to be at the edge of your seat while watching Winter's Bone from her beginning stages of taking care of her siblings, to an ending heart-wrenching finale that makes you want to help a family you don't even know. I would recommend A Winter’s Bone to anyone that is in search of a creepily heartwarming mystery unlike any others.

Crooklyn- Victoria Romprey

Crooklyn Dir. Spike Lee

Zelda Harris (Troy), Delroy Lindo (Woody), Alfre Woodard (Carolyn), Calton Williams (Clinton)

Universal Pictures, 1994.

The film Crooklyn takes place in New York, and follows one summer in the life of the Carmichaels, an African-American family living in 1970s. Delroy Lindo, and Alfre Woodard are a struggling married couple. He works as a struggling musician trying to support his family in the only way he knows how, and she an overworked school teacher bringing in the main meat of the families income. They do their best to keep up with their five children, while they raise them in an energetic and characterized neighborhood. Spike Lee directs with flair and the film is filled with specific details that compensate for the true values that communities in this time period, and place, shared.

The movie overall is a coming of age mainly based around the only daughter in a home of 5 (write out numbers up through ten) children. She struggles with many things including, body positivity, bullying, learning to understand financial stability, loss of a parent, peer pressure, and learning how to now be a main caretaker to her younger and older siblings. You would think that her mother's death would be a large part of the movie, but the way that it is portrayed by Lee, looks upon it as a simple step of life. This seems to be a trend throughout the movie, many of the dramatic momentous occasions are perceived to be as simple everyday finds. This can be both a negative and positive for my outlook on the movie, on one hand it may be hard to follow, and people may not understand the true depth of what has happened. But also, it shows a perspective on life that proves that people move forward when things happen.

Spike Lee's Crooklyn

Crooklyn Dir. Spike Lee

Feat. Zelda Harris (Troy), Alfre Woodard (Carolyn), Delroy Lindo (Woody), Spike Lee (Snuffy)

Universal Pictures, 1994

What is immediately different about Crooklyn, which seems to be shot in the same area as Lee’s Do The Right Thing, is the tone of joyous innocence of these times. There are no serious racial conflicts, crimes or tensions depicted. Sure the kids get into a fair share of mischief with friends and tease other neighbors, but what more do you expect of kids? They do, however, inhabit a world mostly of fun and good times. In the past, director Spike Lee has held black politics, black on black racism and interracial sex under a microscope, but don't look for that in this film. In fact, don't even look for plot. That's not to say Crooklyn is a bad movie. I personally feel that Crooklyn is a wonderful little gem that doesn't need a plot because it's a pictorial of real life. If there is some semblance of a plot, it's the films 10-year-old heroine, Troy (Zelda Harris) and her experiences growing up in Brooklyn during the early '70s with four brothers. Troy's father (Delroy Lindo) is an unemployed jazz musician and her mother (Alfre Woodard) is a homemaker who's gone back to work as a teacher in order to provide for her family. Dad is a quiet, loving man, but Mom tempers her love with outbursts of shouting, spanking and strict adherence to her rules. This reminds me of my upbringing in which my mother played the "bad guy". She was the enforcer while my father was laid back and cut us a lot of slack.

In one scene, Woodard wakes the kids in the middle of the night, when she comes home to find that they didn't clean the kitchen as she instructed.The kids still have it pretty good. It's a carefree life filled with days of hopscotch, jumprope and stickball. A time when parents didn't have to worry about their kids being killed by drug dealers of gang members. This movie basically just takes the viewer back to a simpler time, which is different for me especially because I never lived in a neighborhood this lively and compressed. We live in a completely different time now and it's crazy to think that about 40 years ago life was completely different. No matter where you grew up, most adults who have siblings, can relate to this family. The fights, the carrying on and squealing to Mom and Dad about each other and the bonding together when tragedy strikes, is very familiar. The movie also demonstrates Lee's skill. The middle of the film gets a bit odd when the Troy visit relatives in the South. Here Lee shows, in an interesting and humorous way, the distorted world of middle class suburbs. The scenes are shot with thin, elongated figures and give the movie a different feel.

Lee accents the film perfectly with dozens of popular ‘70s rhythm and blues tunes by Stevie Wonder, the Jackson Five and others. Delroy Lindo and Alfre Woodard portray caring, struggling parents in a most realistic manner. Young newcomer Zelda Harris is a remarkable talent who tugs on viewers’ heartstrings as Troy. This heart-warming film proves to many that Lee is a very personal filmmaker while it tells the tale of a loving African American family and displays Black Love. This is a film everyone should watch and actually pay attention to atleast once. It'll be worth it. Spike Lee took his time with this one.