1:15pm - Saturday: I checked Canvas on my second day off after a long week. I started reorganizing my personal Wix site to meet the requirements for this course. I’m in the middle of watching a movie. It’s called “Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream.” It’s a French movie in which the director, Frank Beauvais, provides narration over a montage of clips from over 400 films the director watched during a period of isolation following a break-up. I decided to start this assignment now, as I have work tomorrow at 1:30, and want to be able to finish gathering information for it beforehand.
2:10pm - Saturday: I opened Twitter while I was making myself some popcorn for another movie I want to watch (although I have yet to decide which one it’ll be). I see lots of memes and funny tweets about Olivia Wilde. She has been getting attacked online for being catty toward Florence Pugh, the star of her new movie, while pleading with Shia LaBeouf via video to return to his role in her film. One of the first tweets I see reads “We’re a couple days away from finding out Olivia Wilde served herself custody papers.” While this is funny to think about — Wilde was served custody papers while on stage at CinemaCon earlier this year — it’s speculative and probably untrue. Although I do find Wilde’s video that has been circulating for the past couple of days distasteful, I doubt she went so far as to serve herself custody papers while she was giving a presentation to an audience.
2:30pm - Saturday: I sat down with my sister to watch an old episode or two of Jeopardy on Pluto TV. There’s always some very strange ads on here. Lots of ads for something called Arizona Online Charter School. One of the contestants on Jeopardy said he gave up Facebook for lent.
3:30pm - Saturday: I scrolled on Twitter mindlessly. I saw a tweet from Page Six with an article link that said “Jennifer Garner ‘thrilled to get rid of her fourth child’ — Ben Affleck.” I clicked on the link out of curiosity, and scrolled to the fifth graf of the story, which read “‘I’m sure she’s thrilled to get rid of her fourth child’ said a source who knows both Affleck and Garner, referencing all the actress has done for her ex.” This tweet feels disingenuous when the actual quote is attributed to “a source who knows both Affleck and Garner” — which could really be anybody. Of course, this is coming from Page Six, which is notorious for salacious headlines and reporting based on gossip. I take everything they write with a grain of a salt — even if I find it entertaining, I know that it is most likely not accurate.
4:20pm - Saturday: I went on Twitter again and saw a tweet that read “Newt Gingrich made his wife who is limping and has a leg injury and a boot on her leg get his coffee this morning and deliver it to his driver side window” from an account with the handle @patriottakes. The tweet had a photo of someone who looks like Callista Gingrich with a boot on her right foot picking up coffee, while someone who somewhat looks like Newt sat in an Escalade. It’s hard to tell if these people are who the tweet says they are, so it could be false information. The tweet had over 13 thousand likes and nearly three thousand retweets when I viewed it, but I'm sure it's blown up even more since then.
6:30pm - Saturday: I went over to my friend’s house and we had some dinner and watched “Scarface” with Al Pacino. It was a pretty funny movie — albeit gruesome — mainly because of Pacino’s mannerisms and horrible accent and the ardent anti-communism that was written into the script. There were at least two or three times where Pacino’s character said he hated communism because “it’s always people telling you what to do.” This film was loosely based on the 1930 novel of the same name; there is also a 1932 film with the same name, based on the same novel. The novel pulls a lot of information from the life of Al Capone apparently, although because the novel focuses on the prohibition era, whereas the 1983 film focuses on the cocaine trade in Florida and South America, it’s hard to know how much of the original story Oliver Stone was trying to use for his screenplay.
I thought this movie was a fun watch, it portrays itself as a lightly fictionalized version of real life, especially with the intro rolling text that says something about out of 125,000 Cuban immigrants, about 25,000 had criminal backgrounds. There was also an early scene where thousands of Cubans immigrants were living in what looked like a government camp under a freeway. My friend and I found this scene in particular very jarring. The movie also established that Jimmy Carter was the current president at the beginning of the film, when Pacino’s character comes to Miami, meaning this early period in the film took place sometime in the late ‘70s or in the very early ‘80s. Some of these early elements in the film led my friend and I to question the reality of the situation as it pertained to Cuban immigrants in Miami at the time. I decided that, the next morning, I would try to find some answers to my questions. I particularly wanted to know more about Oliver Stone’s research for the screenplay.
11:30pm - Saturday: I got home from my friend's house and had the itch to watch another movie, so I decided to put on “To Catch a Thief,” a Hitchcock film with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in the leading roles. However, I started to feel drowsy about 20 minutes in, so I decided I’d finish it in the morning before I had to leave for work a little after noon.
10am - Sunday: I slept in this morning, as I have a busy week ahead of me and wanted to treat myself to some extra minutes of snoozing. This morning I turned “To Catch a Thief” back on as background noise for doing homework. I enjoy having movies on while I work, similar to how some people work while listening to music. I decided I would see if I could read some articles about how accurate “Scarface” is — but first, I had to scroll on Twitter for a minimum of 30 minutes.
One of the first tweets I saw was from a podcaster I follow, who tweeted “wait the hillary clinton contrapoints thing is real? lmao.” I was confused but intrigued by what this meant (Natalie Wynn, or ContraPoints, is a Youtuber who makes video essays about political philosophy, gender and capitalism, and Hillary Clinton is, well, Hillary Clinton) and decided to explore more by searching Twitter for their names. Apparently ContraPoints is one of many women who were interviewed by Clinton and her daughter Chelsea for a new show they have on Apple TV+. Some of the other women interviewed for the show include Kim Kardashian, Gloria Steinem, Goldie Hawn, Jane Goodall and Mariska Hargitay. The consensus from people I follow who have voiced their opinion on this revelation is that Twitter will undoubtedly become insufferable for at least a few days when the interview comes out. I think it will be funny to see what Clinton and ContraPoints talk about.
I decided to search on Google regarding the Cuban refugee tent city portrayed in "Scarface," and I found an article from the Washington Post dated Sept. 22, 1980, with the headline "For 750 Cuban Refugees, United States Is a Tent City Under the Expressway." It does seem like Oliver Stone was staying true to the times in his screenplay. I think that the fact that the film was released so soon after the events portrayed in it purportedly took place helped Stone in maintaining the realism of the plot. I think Stone is a very good director and writer, and I'm glad that at least this aspect of the film was not false or sensationalistic.
After sporadically writing down my media consumption habits, I realized that a lot of the people I follow on Twitter post memes that contain information that is often false. However, I think that many of these users are posting false information in a comedic way, not to purposefully spread misinformation. It doesn't take a lot of brainpower to determine that something is false in a lot of these tweets — the question instead becomes if one should retweet the sentiment or not. I almost always decide against spreading false information posted for comedic effect. I also realized how easy it is to spread misinformation in films that are billed as historical dramas. Specifics of a story can be drastically altered to increase tension or introduce a new plot point, and the audience oftentimes does not have specific information on what is true or untrue.
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