My Media Summer

My Media Summer

Films

During the summer I spent a large portion of it abroad spending a total of six weeks in California and touring Israel. During this time, you would expect me to spend my hours outside experiencing new cultures and escaping the chills of the English weather. For a large part of my time in Israel, that's exactly what I did. However, due to the frequency of my visits in California, I spent a large amount of my time indoors enjoying the expanded amount of film and television on American Netflix in comparison to English Netflix that I am so used to. This, and the combination of films that I had access to from some unsavoury websites, I was ale to be exposed to a huge amount of media including all nine Wes Anderson movies.

Moonrise Kingdom was the film that I most enjoyed with Grand Hotel Budapest at a close second. However all of his movies could easily be described as meticulously crafted awkward family fables. A constant filming technique that I found in Wes Anderson's films was large use of whip-pans and symmetrical shots. Symmetrical shots, in particular, I have found are used a lot in Indie films (the genre closest to Wes Anderson's films) such as Napoleon Dynamite. Within a lot of these films I noticed that there was more subtle comedy which was a nice change of pace from big Hollywood comedies such as The Hangover Trilogy (2009-2013) or Keeping Up With The Joneses (2017). Although I do find these movies occasionally funny, during my summer holiday I realised that there was an abundance of them and that I wanted a change of pace.

Television

Of course, during my summer holiday, I watched a large amount of television as well as film. My viewing was mainly directed at series such as The Office (US) and Cobra Kai. The Office I watched was a remake of the English version for American audiences and is at first shown to be filmed in a "mockumentary" style complete with shaky camera work, poor lighting, eye contact with the camera, and interviews with the characters mainly about what they were thinking about other characters and how that would affect the story.  However, as the series continues and gains popularity, I began to realise that this style was quickly abandoned with only the interviews with the characters being kept as it helped the storytelling of various episodes. Despite this, in its ninth and final season, The Office continues with its documentary (to the characters, mockumentary to the viewers) style . Overall I would say that the series was incredibly well written thus making it incredibly funny. I completed the 25 minute per episode 22 episode per 9 season series in three weeks.

Cobra Kai was a YouTube Red series that I was skeptical of watching at first because I figured "It's YouTube Red. In other words Not Netflix" when it came to its original series and movies. However after seeing that it had 100% rating on rotten tomatoes and was rated 8.9 on imdb, I realised that I had to watch it. The show was released quite recently (with 40 minutes per 10 episodes) and it has been said that a second season has been produced and will be released soon. Cora Kai follows present day Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and Daniel Larusso (Ralph Macchio), the stars of the Karate Kid franchise, as old grudges come again with both Lawrence and Larusso staring as co protagonist and antagonist causing the viewer to constantly change who they are rooting for in this series. The narrative, for this reason, is great however the dialogue is flat and whenever the show wants to be funny, it falls flat on its face. I do have to say that the choreography in the fight scenes in the series are amazing especially compared to the original Karate Kid films in the 80's. A similar comparison for me is how the lightsaber choreography in the Prequel Star Wars trilogy was much better than the choreography in the original. It went from two guys waving lightsabers around to three guys doing backflips every 10 seconds. Huge Upgrade.