Bolstered by an impactful score and stern black-and-white images, The Fever and the Fret is a low-budget art-house drama whose viewing can become utterly painful due to its heavy story. However, I found it completely engrossing as we keep crossing the thin line that separates the real from the surreal. Cath Gulick’s debut feature centers on the Bronx dweller Eleanor Mendoza (Adelina Amosco), a depressive 14-year-old student of Asian descent with two large birthmarks on her face, who is a constant victim of bullying at school. Her grandmother (Shirley Cuyugan O'Brien), with whom she lives with, has to remind her every morning about going to school, a very difficult step to the teenager, who prefers to work at the restaurant of her cousin Alex (Rod Rodriquez) for three or four dollars an hour than have to confront her obnoxious colleagues. Is Alex who supports her, and the pressure of still being a virgin impels her to …show more content…
Her grandmother frequently sees her work as a representation of the outer space. Contrasting with the rest of the film, these oneiric sequences are presented in color and always begin with two mountains placed next to each other with the sky filling the remaining spots of the frame. The inclusion of gracious gestural movements oppose to the affliction of laboring alone, whereas the sight of a newborn evolves to the happiness of having a child in her arms. The power of the mind brings pictorial tranquil landscapes where the water is abundant. In her dreams, she also enjoys the company of a look-alike, who exhibits identical strange birthmarks as she does. This fantastic Malick-ish complexity is exciting, mirroring much of Eleanor’s desires but also the lack of her self-esteem. They are the sad consequence of a lamentable emotional desolation that, persisting for years, is driving her dangerously close to
This film captures this class distinction without subduing the atmosphere through the use of a variety of cinematic devices. “A good film is not a bag of cinematic devices but the embodiment, through devices, of a vision, an underlying theme” (Barnett, 274). The audience can see this theme of the realities of the oppression, poverty and despair of this time period through the use of the things mentioned, but also through the character development that is driven by the character’s hopelessness. Each of the characters associated with the lower class is motivated by the conditions, which are viewed through the cinematic devices mentioned above: color, spherical lenses, long shots, and high angle shots. Sources Cited:.
Truman Capote, and his book In Cold Blood has a tone of tragic and mellow on pages 134-135. These pages we read carefully and analyzed, the two pages have these two sentences that pop out and things make sense. The pages are injected with irony and confusion. Completely contradicting himself, Capote writes about the crime that has happened and the loveable moments in the café.
“Irony trumps everything”. Thomas C. Foster made this argument in “How to Read Literature like a Professor”, explaining that when an author uses irony in their literary work, standard conventions on interpreting themes are temporarily disregarded (Foster 252). This effect on the reader allows for a different interpretation of the text to occur because the novel's events are contradictory to what one expects. The proficient use of irony in the novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” by Margaret Atwood to show the inner desires of Offred, Serena Joy, and the Commander.
Rose Mary is a selfish woman and decides not to go to school some mornings because she does not feel up to it. Jeannette takes the initiative in making sure that her mother is prepared for school each morning because she knows how much her family needs money. Even though Rose Mary starts to go to school every day, she does not do her job properly and thus the family suffers financially again. When Maureen’s birthday approaches, Jeannette takes it upon herself to find a gift for her because she does not think their parents will be able to provide her with one. Jeannette says, “at times I felt like I was failing Maureen, like I wasn’t keeping my promise that I’d protect her - the promise I’d made to her when I held her on the way home from the hospital after she’d been born. I couldn’t get her what she needed most- hot
This film features Jodie Foster as Nell, a young woman who lives the first thirty years of her life in a remote cabin in the isolated beauty of North Carolina's Smoky Mountains. Once she is discovered by the outer world, she is forced to conform to a civilized young woman. Her linguistics skills are very undeveloped; she is very underdeveloped emotionally, socially, morally, and intellectually. However, she has very well developed physical and motor skills because she has been forced to take care of herself. Nell's underdevelopment begins in her prenatal period and sprouts out into a series of problems there. The isolated environment which she lives in and lack of intellectual stimulation is a significant factor in her underdevelopment as well.
Edna’s move into the Pigeon House is symbolic as well as physical because it “added to her to her strength and expansion as an individual”. This implies that Edna is striving towards her independence away from Mr. Pontiellier and her kids, and a deep sought into her life. This represents in the development of her self-awareness that Edna is no longer concerned of about the content of “feed upon opinion when her own soul had invited her.” In hence, Edna is no longer in care of others’ lives and what they think of Edna, that she only wants to focus on her own.
The point of view and tone for this story helps relate to the theme. The narrative is in third person point of view with limited omniscient. This means that the reader is able to go inside the mind of the grandmother and know what she is thinking and feeling. The only ot...
As Leonard Cohen once said, “There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in”. Nothing in life is perfect, and people are not an exception. One of the most efficient ways to demonstrate a flaw is irony. Through the use of irony in The Crucible, Arthur Miller highlights man’s inevitable fallibility.
In Guy de Maupassant’s story, The Necklace, he utilizes situational irony in order to highlight the theme. He displays this irony in order to reveal several themes that can be observed in the story. One of the major themes in this short story is how appearances can be misleading.
One motif which reappears in the film is the power of nature, especially in relation to the individual. In fact, the film begins with a majestic shot of the Rocky Mountains showing its beauty and height. The beauty of nature and even friendliness of nature changes as the film develops. As the movie progresses the snow still seems white and pure, almost virgin like, but nature becomes an isolating force, not providing the family with a retreat from the pressures of modern life, but forcing the family to turn in on its dysfunctional and psychopathic self. Imprisoned by the snow and the tall mountains , the family seems weak and vulnerable.
The short story, “Roman Fever” illustrates the shocking relationship between two women, Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade, by a chance meeting in Rome. As the story opens the two women are sitting on the terrace of a Roman restaurant that has an astonishing view of the Colosseum and other Roman ruins. While the women sit in silence and enjoy the tranquil view from the terrace they notice their daughters down below running off to spend a romantic evening with two young men. This triggers Mrs. Slades memories of her and Mrs. Ansley’s quixotic adventures in Rome as young adults and their first encounter with “Roman fever”. Wharton uses the term Roman fever to illustrative the women’s past relationship that is embedded with destruction, jealously and deceit. Both women live their life privately consumed with Roman fever for twenty-five years, once these secretes are reveled an ironic twist will still hold a plague on the lives of these women.
Irony in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde The play The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde is full of irony. Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, the protagonists in the play, get themselves into a complicated situation called Bunburyism (as Algernon refers to it). They pretend to be someone that they are not to escape their daily lives. They lie to the women they admire, and eventually the truth is revealed.
One of the first things to come alive to me was the picture of the young girl or old woman, depending on the viewer’s perspective. I had seen this picture several times before but because the book first presented a picture more skewed toward the younger girl than the older woman, when I looked at the “dual” picture, the young girl was all I could see. I had to look at the picture more skewed to the old woman before I could retrain my eyes to see the old woman.
It has four distinct narrative voices, which are highlighted by each voice having a specific font. All of the children and their parents are given apparently simple voices. However, their voices in fact are extremely complex. Each voice explores each of the character's different feelings and traits. The most essential part of this story are the illustrations which are postmodern and surreal ones. In the illustrations the landscape are distorted, and the adults and children are portrayed like themes. The illustrations change to reflect the characters' attitude and the font of the text changes with each character to mirror to some degree their social status. The father and daughter, who are obviously from a poorer area, have slanted, messy, somewhat obtrusive text. The shades of color in the different characters' illustrations give a heavy impression. It surprises from the mother's standpoint, where everything seems to be regular and mundane. Nevertheless, once it shifts to the father's standpoint, the pictures become dark, dull, dirty, and more expressive. The little girl's viewpoint was very bright and animated, while in the little boy's viewpoint everything appeared bigger than him or distant. As for the picture in which the boy and girl were sitting on the bench, separated by the lamp post, in reality mirrors the way by which the two children perceive the world. As for the boy the world is dark and isolated, while the girl on the other hand perceive the world as a bright, happy place. the illustrations in Voices in the Park stimulate the readers to think deeply and to wonder about the contained details. For instance the fact that the father in the second voice has human hands, however he has not a human face challenges the reader to ask questions and to resolve the meaning of the story. Another example is an illustration shows a
Irony can often be found in many literary works. “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin is masterfully written full of irony. The characters of the short story, Mrs. Mallard, Josephine, Richards, Mr. Brently Mallard, and the doctors all find their way into Chopin’s ironic twists. Chopin embodies various ironies in “The Story of an Hour” through representations of verbal irony, dramatic irony, and situational irony.