Why Kick Butt Female Book Charcters Are So Needed In Our Society

by Grace

Authors are starting to create more kickbutt female characters in their books. Why? Well I think there are alot of reasons why. One is because we need kick butt females characters in our books for teenage girls. And the reason why is because the female celebrities in our world are teaching young girls to be helpless to act stupid to let boys use them to their advantage. And the woman in our society think that is the right answer but IT IS NOT THE RIGHT ANSWER AT ALL.

Women in general are better then that. They deserve to be treating with respect they deserve to be equal to men. And some women in our society are realizing that and that’s why authors are making the main characters in books as kick butt females. And the teenage girls who read these kinds of  books are more likely to become that type of woman in those heroine books.

Anyways one book example for a heroine book is the Hunger Games Trilogy.  The Hunger Games Trilogy’s main character is a sixteen year old  kick butt female called Katniss Everdeen.  

Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sisters place Primrose Everdeen in the Annual “hunger games.“

What if Katniss didn’t take the place of  Primrose Everdeen in the Annual Hunger Games? Then the story wouldn’t be about Katniss Everdeen it would be about her little sister Primrose Everdeen. The Author put that event in the story so Katniss can be the main character. That’s how the Author made the story about Katniss Everdeen by Katniss taking her younger sister’s place in the Annual hunger games.

And that is the beginning of how Katniss started to become her heroine self. Through the call to adventure, taking her sister’s place in the Annual Hunger Games. Through all of the Hunger Games Trilogy she is very brave and courageous. At the end of the book one Katniss is one of the last survivors among the teenagers in the Hunger Games. Katniss is the definition of a heroine book character.

How Close Reading Applies to Cinema

by Edoardo Tarkovsky

In talking about close reading, we have thoroughly talked about writing and “voice”, the unique style that a writer can have. A truly competent writer has a grasp on precision of language; he can manipulate words at his disposal to make a reader feel a certain way. This is the work of an artist. In class, we talked about how much a writer can convey to a reader simply through the length of his sentences. There is a certain flow that an effective writer can bring to a paragraph. Writing is like its own language that can be interpreted and analyzed in countless ways.

The same is true of film. We can apply close reading to movies as much as we can to writing. In class, we watched the iconic crop duster scene from Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest. We saw how much could be conveyed with just simply the length of each shot. In this scene, the cuts between the shots happen faster and faster as the climax approaches. As these cuts happen, the tension in the audience is built up; its effect is that it makes our hearts race increasingly as the speed of the cuts gets faster. This is just one example of close reading a scene in film.

The films of any great director are packed with different forms of cinematography and editing that conveys different feelings. Many times, the average audience overlooks these complexities in film. This is evident when I watch a film with a non-cinemaphile friend, and ask them what they liked or disliked about it. Usually, the answer is centered around the story and plot of the film we just watched, rather than what makes it viscerally or visually interesting. Usually, after a discussion of story and plot with this non-cinemaphile friend, I’ll ask them, “So what did you think about the film’s cinematography?” The answer I get is almost always, “Oh, I don’t pay attention to that.”

I think this is an interesting phenomenon. Many people who watch a film and enjoy it will not be able to explain what it is that made it effective as a film. This is the same thing as people who don’t have a taste for the use of language in writing. Close reading in these two forms of media, in this sense, is very similar.

This is what close reading is really all about. It is about analyzing texts and being a smart reader.  This exact same idea can be applied perfectly to cinema, just as much so as to reading. This is important because the authenticity of film as an art form has always been questioned; it is often thought of as a lesser form of art than other, more “sophisticated” mediums. A closer reading shows that film can be as sophisticated as English literature. The crop duster scene in North by Northwest is only a very small example of what film does with audiences.

I guess the goal with writing about close reading for me is to open up a world of reading to the uninitiated that they’ve never seen before. As one who highly values film and cinematography, I see the potential in close reading film. The general public can watch movies so much more differently than they do right now.

The Princess Diaries Book 1 vs The Princess Diaries Movie

By: Dee

I’ve seen the movie The Princess Diaries many times. I haven’t read the book until now. I know that books and movies are different, but I don’t understand why they changed so many details for this movie.

Yes, there are similarities too. The main character’s name, which is Mia Thermopolis (Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldi), does not change. Her best friend Lilly Moscovitz stays the same. Mia lives with her single mother. Mia goes from this average teenage girl who might not be the most attractive or popular girl in her school to becoming a princess.

Despite the similarities, there are also many differences. For example, in the story, Mia lives in New York with her mother. In the film, she lives in San Francisco. Mia was 14 years old in the book. They decided Mia could be 15 and be learning how to drive. In the book, the father is the one who reaches out to Mia about how she is the heir to Genovia. The father dies in the movie. Her grandmother or grandmère, who she called grandma in the movie, was known as the Dowager Princess of Genovia. That was also disregarded, and she was known as the Queen. There are many more differences that I was confused about.

I personally enjoyed the book more than the movie for a few reasons. First, I don’t love Anne Hathaway as an actress and I don’t think she really portrayed Mia Thermopolis. Secondly, I don’t see a reason to change the plot of a story when it was already pretty good.