Welcome...and initial guidelines...

This blog will be used in the spring of 2008 by 80+ students at Drexel University to investigate the effects of Iraq on culture and the reverse. Our goal will be to better understand why the US is in Iraq, and to question whether literature can help us on this journey.

Weekly plans and other materials will always be posted in Vista, not this blog. So go to Bb Vista to get the discussion prompts and other instructions.

I intend this blog to manage our discussions and track our collective investigation.

You should have received an email from me inviting you to become a contributor to this blog. The email was sent Monday afternoon to your official Drexel email address.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Magnolia

Paul Thomas Anderson both wrote and directed the feature film Magnolia It intertwined around nine major characters into something like a three hour movie that you won't lose attention too. It's hard to believe but not many films can keep your attention for so long and continually build up like it does. The cinematography is the best I've seen in a movie to this day and helps the movie be as successful as it is. The underlying theme of these 9 interwoven stories is that weird stuff does happen. That real life events are ironically more 'out there' and unbelievable than what most people tend to see in movies and TV. Ever watch a movie and say something like "psh! that would never happen in real life." chances are something even weirder already has. For example in the graphic novel and recently released movie 300, the boy enters "manhood" after he goes into the wilderness to kill a wolf. In reality the "rite of passage" for young spartan boys was to sneak out and kill a slave without anyone knowing who did it. If that was in the movie people would be like "WTF?" but instead Frank Miller wrote something more believable and less morally wrong.

All this got me thinking is about the stories i hear all the time about things that go on in Iraq. Like when a famous person is not only killed while serving his country but he is supposedly killed by friendly fire. It's stranger than fiction... it's real life.

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