Beneatha's Moment In The Sun

Hello and welcome to the last AP for my Humanities course, Drama. This is the last Action Project of my sophomore year. I am very excited to close this chapter of my academic career and move on to new things next year. In this year I explored many themes that all were centered around storytelling in some way. From the most literal way of creating my own creation story to writing our own short play. I was very challenged to make my writing better this year. That was very exciting to me because I  love to write. In this AP we were called to become a chorus for the play A Raisin In The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. In Greek theater, a chorus is a group of actors who comment on something that is happening in the main action of the play. They do this by singing, dancing, or reciting a chant. In our version of the chorus we are calling out good, bad and educational parts of the characters actions in the scene of our choosing. Please Enjoy.





Script


 



Music Credit: BenSound Romantic Jazz

Excerpts taken from A Raisin In The Sun

Stand by My Review | A Culturalist Film Review of Stand by Me

Hello and welcome to my final Action Project for the class Ollywood. In this AP I reviewed the film Stand by Me with a culturalist lense. A culturalist looks at the importance of culture in a film and how that affects its viewers. In this final unit, we have been discussing post-production elements like editing, musical score, and foley artist work. You will hear more about those elements and how I rated them in stand by me. There is some language in the sound clips that could be considered offensive. Listener discretion is advised.



Transcript
 Be advised. This film review contains sound clips from the film with vulgar language. You've been warned.

 The movie stand by me is a film based off the book The Body by Stephen King and directed by Rob Reiner. This is a culturalist film review done by Tymony.
Stand by me is a cult classic and many who watch it say they related and found themselves within the movie.I, however, did not. But let's talk about the film's’ impact before we get into my cultural gripes and misgivings. The film contains a ragtag gang of white kids from a small town all of which have some type of domestic issues at home which gives them the perfect excuse to be able to disappear for two days with no worry.

We open the film with an older Gordie portrayed by Wil Wheaton reading a newspaper with a rather disturbing headline. He begins narrating and we see the group smoking cigarettes and being extremely foul-mouthed. We are now introduced to Christopher portrayed by River Phoenix, Vern portrayed by Jerry O'Connell and Teddy portrayed by Corey Feldman. Vern tells the gang that he overheard his older brother and friend talking about a dead kid that they had found in the woods. This is where our adventure begins.

 A piece of the film that I think really had an impact on the boys watching this film when it came out in 1987 was the fact that each of the boys were brought to tears at one part. They were shown crying but were never made fun of for it, instead, they were comforted by their friends which were really refreshing to see in a late 80’s boys film I use quotations. The acting in this movie is so incredibly well done especially by the children actors. You can forget the teens and adults in the movie, none of their characters stuck out and they blended all together. But the work done by these 12-year-olds was really nothing to shake a stick at The scene where Christopher tells Gordie that he deserves smarter and better friends than him. I found the maturity in Christopher's character sort of off-putting at first but when you tie it into his character's background, it makes sense and gives him depth.

 The film uses no CGI which makes sense for the type of film and also the time it was made. However, one endearing yet disgusting scene makes me chuckle and this is the scene where Gordie tells the story of an overweight boy and how he gets revenge on the town. There is vomit… a lot of it. But it is quite obviously coming from a hidden hose and not the actors. This scene also is very intentional in not having any filters over it so you know that it is a story, not a dream. While also having a brighter look highlighting it from the other real-life scenes. music.

The score was made up of songs that you would hear on the radio in 1959 from rockin' robbin to Yakkety Yak this film really puts you in the 50s groove. Ending it all with the films namesake stand by me. The film used effective sound effects to the point that you wouldn’t even realize they are there. Thank the foley artist Rick Ash for that! Now, would this film hold up if it came out in 2019? No. There is no cultural diversity in this film and in today's world that is the first thing people look for in a film. Also the constant use of the r-word, this would not make it very far.

 Truly I think we do need something like this in today's world but to be able to make a move like it did in the 80’s we’d have to see more diversity. By saying that I am not saying the legitimacy of the film is lesser what I am saying is that this movie played to the narrative as whiteness being the default. In a 2019 remake, we would have to see something that a-lines with what Americans see not necessarily what they are comfortable seeing. A remake would also take a revolutionary stance if it included people of color. Since you don’t see many boys of color insensitive, harmless and playful roles. So is Stand by me a good film? Yes! A film I would keep in my repertoire? no. but don’t let my opinion keep you from watching this great film. It's one to watch actively though constantly giving you a reason to feel weird about getting older and experiencing grief.

All sound clips from the film Stand By Me Rob Reiner 1986
Bazelon, Emily. "White People Are Noticing Something New: Their Own Whiteness" nytimes.com
The New York Times Company, 13 June 2018. Web
15 Jan 2019

Questioning Energies and Identities

Hello and welcome to unit 1 of Who Am I is a humanities class where we discussed philosophers like Plato and Socrates who I talk about in my podcast.




Script
My name is Tymony and I’m an activist, I’m a feminist, I’m a female, and I’m a person of color. Those are my identities and I’ve come to question my identities with questions like...

Do I have a reason an activist for my community? I have privilege, I am privileged
I’m middle-class, from morgan park and I attend a private school on the north side

But I’m black

Do I have a reason to be afraid of the police because I’m Female-bodied and Identifying, but so was Sandra Bland. I love being black and I assume the best of all black people.
But should I? What if the jail pipeline is fake and “we” are really just destined for violence.
Is the pay gap real? Is modern day feminism even necessary?

Who even am I?

Am I asking myself these questions because the shadowy darkness of my dream-like existence finally being pierced by the light of reality? Wait, let me explain. In Plato’s Allegory of the cave, he (basically) claims that the so-called reality we are experiencing isn’t the true reality but in fact, is a “warped perception” of it. What I take from this is that while we all might not be experiencing a quote on quote true reality we are experiencing what we believe is reality.

What we believe. What I believe. I have really had to do some introspection lately simply because I’m entering a new chapter in life and my past beliefs don’t match my current life. Plain and simple straight out and to the point I didn’t really know what I believed in until recently, when everything in my life finally felt like it had fallen into place, but then fell right back out of it not long after I had gotten comfortable in my space.

A lot of what I believe in spiritually come from my mother and Grandmother as they’ve always believed in the Christian god but never forced me to. However often when I was in crisis my mother did stress how important it is to be “grounded” by a higher power. I feel like it was the same for my grandmother just not those words. She would say that my words affect how everything thing would turn out and of course, 13 year old me did not want to hear that “in the long run all things work out for good”. I wanted to hear that everything would work out how I wanted when I wanted. Of course, I’ve realized that this is not necessarily how things work I’ve learned that (at least in my reality) that my energy attracts what I want or what I need.

I’ve questioned this a lot as well because what about the outside world the world that currently progresses even when I am not conscious of it. The world that has an easy way to stop killing people but refuses to give it up because it’s a hobby for some people. I’ve questioned If my energy and my words control what happens in my world then why do bad things happen, why is the world unfair if I control my reality, why does history exist if I didn’t exist when it was occurring, why is there a whole preset world that I have just randomly spawned in as a female person of color who identifies as such and is a feminist and activist in America. I’m purposefully leaving you with no answers to these questions as I don’t have them and probably never will have these answers. However, I will leave you with this, when the time comes for your reality to be forcefully punctured by the true reality or the truth will you react willingly or violently.