Joaquin Jaime's Journal

When I was driving home for the break this past weekend, I had many things on my mind. The main thing on my mind was how much work had to be done when I get back and what work I had for specific classes. That put me in a real stressed out mood when I was driving home. When I am making the two and a half hour drive to Fresno I like to be in a chill-ass mood. For whatever reason when I am on the road, I like to set the cruise control at 80, and just relax and think about what is in store for me when I arrive home and think about what my friends and I will be doing. Here is a play list of songs that I recalled listening to when I was on the road.

1. Beach Boys - Kokomo
2. Blink 182 - I miss you
3. Bob Marley - No women no cry
4. Bob Marley - Three little birds
5. Bob Marley - Stir it up
6. Dave Mathews - Satellite
7. Dispatch - The general
8. Dispatch - Two coins
9. Dispatch - Flying horses
10. Marvin Gaye - Let’s get it on
11. OAR - Night shift
12. OAR - Hey girl
13. Eagles - Hotel California
14. Pearl Jam - Better man
15. Red hot chili peppers - Scar tissue
16. Red hot chili peppers - By the way
17. Red hot chili peppers - The Zephyr song
18. Sublime - Santeria
19. Sublime - Badfish
20. Sublime - 40 oz. To freedom
21. Sublime - Rivers of Babylon

I really wanted to review the Ocean 11 films; however, I felt that there were too many reviews on that movie. The film that I decided to review was “Father of the Bride.” The original was made in 1950 and was then remade in 1991. When watching the two films, there was not as big of a difference between the two as I had originally thought, but they were different. I figured that because there was forty years between them, they would be drastically different. The way that they talk in the original was something that I noticed right off the bat. The daughter calls her dad, “Pops” as opposed to calling him “daddy” or dad in the remake. Her dad calls her “kitten” which seemed to be an old nick-name for your daughter to me. Some of the jokes that they make are pathetic and I do not think today people would ever laugh at some of those jokes. The jokes in the remake were just so much funnier. The one that I liked best is when the daughter and her fiancée are leaving her house after he just met her parents. George Banks says, “…and don’t forget to fasten your condom.” The expressions on their faces are priceless. Stanley Banks in the original was a wealthy lawyer and in the remake, George Banks was the head of a shoe factory, although they never said his actual title.

In the original film, the movie starts out by the father, Stanley Banks played by Spencer Tracy, reminiscing on the wedding that has happened. He is relaxed in a chair with garbage all over the floor because the reception after the wedding was held at his home. He then goes on to tell the story of what has happened over a period of about three months. In the remake in 1991, the movie starts out in the same way.

There were some scenes that were pretty close to the remake. One scene was when the Banks’ go to the in-laws house to meet them. You can tell that Stanley was uncomfortable to be in the house of the in-laws. If you remember in the remake, George Banks played by Steve Martin, could not believe the size of the house that they lived in. When George had to use the restroom, he started going through their personal things and just snooping around the house. The second scene was when the daughter wants to call off the wedding. Kay Banks played by Elizabeth Taylor, got into a fight with her fiancée Buckley Dunston played by Don Taylor. The two got into a fight about a week before the wedding. Buckley then comes over and apologizes and the two are happy again. In the remake, the fight is over a blender that Bryan McCkenzie played by George Newbern, bought Annie Banks played by Kimberly Williams as a wedding gift. Although I have to say that is a horrible gift, throwing the wedding off for it is uncalled for. The scenes of holding the reception at their home are almost identical in the movies. Not once did the daughter get to see her dad at the reception because he was so busy with trying to make everything perfect. It was total chaos in the house as people were all over the house saying hi to the newlyweds. She then calls the house as the two are leaving for their honeymoon to say thank you and I love you to her dad.

The one thing that I noticed had the biggest similarities in both movies was the father’s reaction to the prices and the way everyone else was spending his money. In both movies, he reacted to everything by how expensive this wedding was costing him. He reacted from the caterer prices to the wedding gown price as well as everything in between. I guess he was just being a typical dad, because at the end of both movies, it looks like he has never been happier to see his daughter so cheerful. You never get the impression that money was ever an issue.

I think that if you every felt like watching this movie, I would suggest that you see the remake. I enjoyed the movie a lot more than I did the original. The original just seemed too outdated for me to enjoy.

My on the media segment was titled, “The Persuaders.” There was a documentary that aired earlier in the week on PBS also titled this. The documentary is about how so much of the right word is vital when trying to sell a product. It mentions how much of the same techniques are used on people when trying to select a president. The documentary goes in depth how new technology makes it available for market researchers to find with pinpoint accuracy, the absolute perfect words to motivate any prospective customer.

In the documentary, Frontline visits Acxiom, which is the largest data mining company in the world. Data mining is where huge farms of computers hold secretive information about almost every adult in America. Data mining has the power to predict your personal acts of behavior going on such factors as your age, income and shopping habits. The sole purpose of Acxiom is to give their clients the most efficient way to focus in on what messages are going to appeal best to individual customers.

There is a paradox in this situation. Certain techniques have become more sophisticated and consumers have never been more resistant to marketing messages. However, advertising fills up almost every available open space. According to Bob Garfield, “You cannot walk down the street without being bombarded.”

Frontline looks into a new advertising technique called branded entertainment. Instead of marketing products around a television show, industry insiders think that the future will bring a trend of marketing and entertainment.

Persuasion industries are developing methods to reinforce a certain quality of personal closeness amongst Americans and certain brands they purchase. Consumers would like a connection with the brand, and the promise that a brand might give in its advertising. They go on to mention that the brands that are successful in this area, are going to be the ones to have the best profit opportunities.

Some brands have been more successful than others have, however, they all have one thing in common, they all use the same techniques. They will hire anthropologists, ethnographers, linguists and even make the stretch as far as brain researchers to see exactly what it is that we actually desire. My opinion is that if they are spending that much money on research, then they must be making a large enough profit where they can continue these types of studies.

I would think that the power of persuasion does work to a certain extent. My reason for believing this is because companies would not be going through so much trouble to find out what it is that we want if the numbers showed that they were wrong. I would think by now, if this these types of methods did not work, we would be hearing some other sort of extravagant way to find out that all important question, “what does the customer really want.” Then we would be tried to be persuaded in another way.

My on the media segment was titled “Polls Be Gone”. It is about how Arianna Huffington, a syndicated columnist, would like to see polls vanish all together. I have to agree with Huffington when she says that there is a minority of bored and lonely Americans who have nothing better to do than talk to strangers for no money. When Arianna Huffington talks about polling, what she means is, the type of polling that happens when people call your house and happen to interrupt your dinner, or just bother you when you don’t want to be bothered. Arianna also believes that the media and politicians are paying more attention to skewed results than they should be. She believed that it has a huge impact on fundraising, morale, and even more of a huge impact on volunteers putting those extra hours in helping their candidates. Adriana was asked what she would do as a solution to having inaccurate polls by having the wrong people polled and excluding some of the right people that should be polled. Huffington said that they are not going to end the addiction of politicians and the media to polls. The only thing that the people have control over is offering our opinion to the pollsters. Huffington goes on to say that it is ok to talk to pollsters socially; however, when they call your house and are interrupting your dinner to talk about this upcoming election or any other election in the future, is not something anyone should be bothered with. Huffington thinks that if they can bring down the response ratings, meaning answering your call and them giving you an answer, then pollsters will have to admit that their results are pretty meaningless.

I think why on the media is commenting on this story is because there is obviously an election coming up in a week. I think that they felt it was important for them to have an on the media story where they knew that there would be something that most people hated when election time came around. This leads me to why I think that on the media thought that this story was relevant to us.

I think why this story is relevant to us is because we are the ones that are going to be answering the phone when one of the pollsters calls our house. I know for a fact that when one of them call my house and ask me who I am voting for, I just say, “I’m not eighteen yet.” It is an easy way to get out of it, and they have never once asked me another question after I said that. So I agree with Arianna, in that we should not care when one of the pollsters calls our house asking for our opinion, simply for the fact that you can always just hang up on them.

Control Room is a documentary that was made by Jehane Noujaim. This documentary shows from both sides how propaganda works and how usually you can find the truth lying right between the middle of those stories. It is a documentary about Al-Jazeera, the Middle East news agency. It looks at views most Americans will not talk about, however, Noujaim mentions that refusing to look at perspectives different from one’s own, can lead to a denial of larger realities. Al-Jazeera started back in the Middle East in about 1996 and was the first independent news channel. Not too long after, it became the most popular news channel amongst Middle Easterners with over 40 millions Arab viewers.

Noujaim talks to several members of Al-Jazeera, including producer Deema Khatib. He says that he intends for his children to come to the states some day so that they can go to school. Another producer, Hassan Ibrahim, has very strong beliefs in American Imperialism. Something that I found interesting that he said was, “Eventually you’ll have to find a solution that doesn’t involve bombing someone into submission…democratize or I will shoot you.” When I thought about this quote in its most simple form, it seemed all to true.

The majority of this documentary takes place about 700 miles from Baghdad at Central Command. The documentary tracks Bush’s invasion through the collapse of Saddam Hussein. In the Al-Jazeera outlook, Noujaim recalls the Bush administration’s changing rationales for invading Iraq, using fear in the media to manipulate peoples public opinion, Jessica Lynch, a deck of playing cards that had Bush’s most wanted criminals working behind Saddam Hussein and the bombing deaths of not one, but three different Arab journalists happening all in the same day done by American planes. Noujaim also shows in this documentary Arabs acting in some wishful thinking on how the outcome of the war was going to be. What I found to be a little disturbing was when Noujaim talks about Al-Jazeera showing on TV graphic images of civilian casualties and American POWs. The part that I liked in her film is when Iraq finally goes down and you see the faces of all the people who work for Al-Jazeera completely shocked. They try to make their response go with what they had to expect was going to happen the entire time, and it came out with a bunch of long pauses and stuttering.

This was a documentary with controversial issues, but that is what the Iraq war has done in politics. I think that Noujaim did a good job in covering these issues and overall this was an interesting documentary to watch.