Good Night & Good Luck (Movie Review)

Good Night & Good Luck (Movie Review)

Although my concept of mass media producer was not broken by the movie "Good Night & Good Luck", I was deeply impressed by some certain scenes; although they are just several words or even no words, the power of the pressure of mass media producer from the movie deepened my respect for them...

The first strong impact for me is the sentence the reporter said everytime at the end of the news report, "Good Night and Good Luck!" Although it is such simple words, they overwhemingly had a strong impact on me. I have seen news report so many times, no matter in China or in US. However, what I have been seeing from the eyes of those reporters is nothing but professional, which is a good thing by the way. But this is the first time I saw such an encourageous eyesight which was far away beyond the eyesight of professional. After all, I can understand that he said so many critical jusgements and anouncements, and not one time. Of course, it needs tons of courages to do that in front of the lense, but the way that he showed his stubborn surprised me. Basically, most reporters are following what others are saying of the news, but he didn't. He espressed his own unique idea freely to the public, breaking the traditional way of reporting news, which is a big process of the mass media industry. I can say that, the reason that the United States of America has so much freedom for people's expressions of ideas and opinions is all based on those dedicated mass media producers like Edward.

The second scene that surprised me is that one of the reporter commited suicide because of the drawbacks of his career. I am not sure, but I do want to say that it's kind of satire that he killed himself because of what newspaper said about his report. As the same mass media working staff, but the only different means of mass media; one is newspaper and the other is television. One department could kill the other department. I can figure out nothing except the strong impact of mass media on people. At the same time, I also feel that the working staff who want to survive in this field must have incredibly strong forbearance and resistance. Without these competency, it seems getting out of the way is just the time problem: sooner or later.

I know the difficulties of working for mass media, and the movie did deepen this thought and I also hope every staff working in this field can get to their goals like Edward. Finally, to all the working staff, including my mass media professor, "Good night, and good luck!"

Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman was born February 15, 1948, in Sweden. While in Poland, his father Vladek Spiegelman and mother Anja were detained in the Polish ghettos reserved for Jews, and later taken to concentration camps. They both survived, but not without sustaining permanent mental and emotional damage, which was the main reason Spiegelman started his most famous comic series: Maus, which discussed about the holocaust of Nazi. Spiegelman took refuge in the light-hearted world of comics as a young boy, which directly caused him to become a cartoonist at an early age.
In 1965, Spiegelman enrolled at Harpur College (now the State University of New York) in Binghamton, New York. While at Harpur, Spiegelman contributed comics to his college newspaper and published work in other magazines. The young artist shocked everyone around him by saying and doing whatever came to mind. At his age of 22 in a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York, he realized that it was a common behavior for a child of a holocaust survivor--imitating the parent's experience in the camps in an unconscious effort to understand the damaged individual's perspective.
In 1978, Spiegelman hoped "to tell his father's story, his own story, and a universal story of the Holocaust." He conducted an extensive series of interviews with his father to learn about the Holocaust experiences that his parents had endured. Sadly, Spiegelman's father died four years before the book Maus I: My Father Bleeds History was published, and never got to see the respect that his son's efforts had earned. In 1991, Maus: a Survivor’s Tale II: and Here My Troubles Began was released. It continued the story, touching on the horrors of living in concentration camps.
The 2004 Contemporary Authors Online stated that "Maus I and Maus II allow us as readers to go outside ourselves and to look objectively at ourselves and at otherwise unspeakable events." Although critics varied in their response to Maus's outlook, they whole-heartedly agreed that Spiegelman had managed to produce an innovative and stirring work of art.


Resources Citing

"Art Spiegelman." Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement, Vol. 25. Thomson Gale, 2005. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2008. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC

The Escaping Fairy

The Escaping Fairy

I am a fairy from a fairy kingdom far far away from the so-called “world”. The life in the kingdom is good; I don’t have to worry what to eat and where to sleep. This is the life other fairies call “heaven”, which is supposed to be a place where there is only happiness and satisfaction. However, I could hear screaming and yelling full of pains and tortures from the place far far away every night after I went to sleep. I told someone else about the annoying voice and they just asked me to stop joking, “There is no screaming and yelling full of pains at all!” They laughed at me as response. I argued with them time after time and day after day but no one listened to me at all, and some of them even thought I was crazy. Finally, I could not stand them anymore and I went to the palace of the king and told him about these happening. He had not said anything until I decided to leave. “Sweet heart,” he called me, “that’s the noise from your heart.” I turned back, seeing him smiling at me peacefully. I became angrier and I decided to go to the place where the screaming was coming from. After I just stepped out of the palace, the king called me again, “Kid, do think about it. You have to pay for what you did.” I was completely angry because of the attitudes that everyone held towards me and I decided to fly out of heaven at once. But the second I left heaven, my white wings that I was so proud of, were gone and my body suddenly became so heavy that it fell directly downwards beyond my control. While my body kept falling down and I did not know what happened, the king’s voice appeared in my head again, “Kid, later you have to pay for what you did. You will never go back to being fairy from a stone until someone in the world finds you and recognizes that you are actually a fairy.” Bump!!! I fell down on the ground filled with weeds and wild grass—I became a stone—a stone fairy…