Portrait
of
a
film
student archetype.
Media Analysis
I have been media-obsessed since I was a kid. When I was 9, I’d spend hours writing biographies for my favorite actors and directors in Hollywood on my family’s desktop computer. In high school, I helped start a Filmmaking Club and filmed my first short film. I had always thought I wanted to be a director, until I went to college for Media & Cinema Studies and learned about Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” in a mass communications class during my fall quarter. Suddenly, I was learning about media and cultural theorists who were speaking what might’ve as well been a foreign language; I wanted nothing more than to decode it. I felt most in my element dissecting film, media and popular culture with classmates who were just as excited as I was. Something that was once such a solitude hobby and quiet passion turned into something I got a degree in. I have weaved my foundation of media theory into everything I do and how I navigate the world, my art and my career.
Defeatism is the Enemy in Eternals (2021)
"Zhao makes it bluntly apparent that it was never just about “heroes” saving a planet, but about the nuance of evolution, of moral ambiguity, of free will and conscience. The Eternals aren’t heroes, they are another creation of both tool and weapon."
Read more here.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019): Crafting Memory Through Witnessing
“This film has many themes, whether it is the subtle tease of yearning for someone you cannot be with, or a woman’s freedom and lack thereof to choose. It is also about the construct of memory: the moments we attach to the people we love as a way to continue loving them.”
Read more here.
Parasite (2019) in WigWag Mag
“I am skeptical of what others believe is truth because I have seen the way people destroy the plans they write down on paper. They shout these values proudly, and when they come alive, they lose their self in the ideology; reality vanishes and becomes dangerous. The problem with an obsession to cure humanity without seeing what caused the illness, and instead, either blaming it on masses or on an unnamed “system of power,” is that the purpose is lost in translation. On each side, there is a man who is hungry.”
Read more here.
Apokolips War (2020) and Counterproductive Nihilism in DC Animation
“In a real world that is littered with perpetual hopelessness, grief, and violence, if we don’t have stories that strive to make a better fictional world, then what will motivate us to fight for a better real world?”
Read more here.