Macbeth

I studied Macbeth in English this year, and I have a couple of thoughts now.

 

1.      Letting other people rule you can lead to mistakes you will regret for the rest of your life. Macbeth was very reluctant to go through with the murder of his king. It was mainly his wife’s influence that drove Macbeth into the deed, but he cannot be entirely innocent. Despite all his hesitations Macbeth caved to his wife and allowed her to convince him into the murder. We all choose how much influence others hold over us.

 

2.      Sometimes you just have to trust people, but that doesn’t mean go into it blindly. Duncan the king trusted the Thane of Cawdor completely, Cawdor turned out to be a traitor. All the same Duncan trusted Macbeth and all the other characters, even though the Macbeths end up murdering him I think Duncan was one of the happier characters of the plot.
      Macbeth is a little too trusting as well. Macbeth puts complete trust in the prophecy of the witches, three people he knows nothing about, which eventually leads to his death.
       Banquo on the other hand is suspicious of the witches and Macbeth but he never acts on his suspicions.
       Malcolm, I think, is the smartest character in the plot, at least on the issue of trust. Malcolm doesn’t trust Macduff immediately but once convinced however Malcolm commits to trust by taking Macduff into his confidence.

 

3.      Crazy is an overused word these days. “Everyone has a mental disorder” they say, ‘I’m crazy and It’s cool’ we say jokingly to our friends. Then you read Macbeth there are some genuinely crazy people there. By the end of the play your thinking ‘Macbeth is a NUTCASE, he is literally crazy, not a little teenager/young adult crazy, not crazy busy, actually mentally insane. It’s subtle but it’s sad. We watch the fall of a respected man into murder and finally madness and we walk away with the feeling that it could have been us, it could still be us. My mom thinks that it takes a certain level of insanity to take someone else’s life, I think I agree.

In closing I walked away from Macbeth wondering if the sanctity of human life is as sacred as we want it to be. I walked away wondering how I would handle taking a life. I walked away wondering how much to trust people. I walk away from Macbeth with the conviction that there are some lines that cannot be crossed and other lines that are not as solid as I would like them to be.

 

Quest For Camelot

I watched this movie with my siblings so much when I was little. We loved it, then we watched it yesterday; lets just say the magic has worn off. Before I go any farther, be it established that I like Quest for Camelot. If nothing else we just laugh at the lameness of it.

Okay, now we’ll get to the review part of this post. The villain is quite mad which is always amusing and the songs are mostly good, although a few seem severely out of place. The plot is decent, if underdeveloped, and there are a couple of great lines. However, the makers didn’t really seem to put much time into perfecting the animation (We noticed the bad animation even when we were little). Plot, conflict, and character interaction are sub par as well. Suffice it to say there are some glaring mechanical errors. It’s hard to tell what age group this movie is geared  towards as well. The lack of character development and generally limping conflict point to a very young audience, while some of the half attempted themes and the scariness of the villain point to an older one.

In my opinion then, "Quest for Camelot" isn't a bad movie, if you are prepared to give your skeptical side a rest, if you aren't then prepare to be dumbfounded at why they bothered to make this film at all.

In conclusion then, I wouldn’t recommend this movie unless your in the mood to either poke fun at a badly made video, or to watch a decently scary villain strut around an otherwise lame group of characters. 

Or if you are like me you can just watch it for the songs. :)

A Stopmotion Movie

I downloaded a free stopmotion program a few days ago called JellyCam

This is the animation I made. It was kind of spur of the moment so the plot is't great :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H_4TvfH9Xw&feature=plcp

Wire Rings

I was looking for something to do today so I looked up wire rings. I made these;

 

This one's just some copper wire scraps from the ring below, I wrapped one piece twice around my finger and wrapped one end over the other to secure it. I had a shorter peice as well so I wrapped it around too.

This one I made first and used a shell fragment I picked up on a beach in Greece the other day.

 

Here's the link to the tutorial I found. I modified it slightly as you can see.

 

http://www.ehow.com/how_4826269_make-wire-rings.html

 

Try to make the ring a bit bigger than you want it to allow for the wrapped wire. I didn't so the ring doesn't fit as well as I'd like it too.

 

Cheerio!

 

MJM