Book of Mormon Review
Preparation:
The Book of Mormon follows the story of two missionaries who are sent from Salt Lake City to preach in a remote Ugandan village. Written by Stone, Parker and Avenue Q’s co-creator Robert Lopez, the show is directed by Parker and Casey Nicholaw. The Broadway show won nine Tony awards last year.
Mormons are religious group of people related to Mormonism, which is a branch of Restoration Christianity. They want to restore the thoughts and beliefs of the early church. They serve the church most of the time. They believe in the Bible as well as the Book of Mormon, the third part of the Bible. According Joseph Smith he translated the phosphate and published it. He claims that angle Moroni directed him the work and told him to translate it, and that is how the Book of Mormon was created.
The musical, consists of acting, dancing and singing. A typical sections of a musical. The musical conveys the feelings and thoughts of characters thorough songs.
Review of Book of Mormon:
On the first of October, my fifth year and I went to Carré, Amsterdam to visit the musical the Book Of Mormon. The amazing actors, songs and storyline made me smile every single second. The Book of Mormon is about a group of Mormon boys who want to restore Mormonism. Two of them are sent to Uganda to convert the inhabitants to their beliefs. At first it seems like they won’t succeed, but in the end there was an amazing plot twist. Elder Cunningham, made the citizens in Uganda turn to their religion. However, in the end it turns out he told the Africans the wrong story. This may have been due to his chubby character, not knowing what he is doing. Therefor he told the Africans an unrealistic story which was made up. When his partner, Elder Price, found out he was very upset and angry, but later he realised that Elder Cunningham has done a good job. He realises that the most important part of Mormonism is not about telling the right story. It is about the fact that religion can help people.
The musical had so many amazing parts. I had listened to the songs the days before, so it was fun to sing along. I was actually very surprised by their dancing skills all of them were amazing dancer. The decoration was amazing as well, the setting was beautiful and how they did acting things throughout scenery changing was great. For example it was dark for some seconds and they had changed in other costumes. And the lighting was great as well, from disco to dimmed. Everything soothed the emotion of the characters everything was so well organised that it was so amazing to watch. The characters were very passionate about their role and they played it extremely well.
To conclude, this may have been the best musical I have been to. The Book of Mormon blowed me away with all the amazing things they did. They made me believe that I will never forget this evening.
Real Bad Arabs Documentary
Porky Pig cartoon “Ali-Baba Bound”. The Arabian characters in this Porky Pig cartoon are portrayed as dangerous people and people ‘should’ be scared of them. The Arabs are obviously portrayed as the bad Characters. This is an example of the representation, because the Arabs are treated unfairly and being stereotyped. Since not every Arab is dangerous, that is definitely not the case. In my opinion, I am not an Arab but a Moslim and I don’t consider my family and I dangerous and relatives don’t think of us that way. This concludes that the stereotyping of Arabs and Moslims can’t be relied on one group only. Therefor it is important the way someone portrays something should be done the right way otherwise the message may be read differently.
Real Bad Arabs Documentary: ‘True Lies’ (1994) which is about Harry Tasker who is a secret agent fighting against terrorism. He leads not an normal life, he actually has two life’s which his wife and daughter do not know of. According to Jack Shaheen, the documentary uses a lot of stereotypes portraying Arabs in a negative perspective. Therefor many American Arabs hated the documentary due to its negativity based on stereotypes.
In the movie the Arabs are the terrorists, the dangerous one. This is quite a common stereotype, people often consider Moslims are terrorist, thieves, criminals etc. Since this stereotype is dominating the surface of many Moslims we can’t get to see what is under their skin, who they really are. It is not fair for the Arabians who aren’t whatever the stereotype believes they are. They are also normal people who want to fight terrorism and other horrible activities happening in the world.
What could be cause of this stereotypes, might be their culture. Arabians are Moslims. Moslims are seen as people being very strict about their religion and willing to whatever it takes to please Allah. They would pray a lot during the day, but they could for example later place bombs or kill people. The contrast is quite large. Their way of living, willing to do whatever it takes to please Allah may be seen wrong by non-Moslim believers. This stereotype is also a common stereotype in this movie ‘True Lies’.
To conclude, the movie, ‘True Lies’, portrays Arabs as terrorists and criminals. It doesn’t depict the real identity of the Arabians. Furthermore, is the way of living and willing to do bad things for their religion, often seen as something negative.
Music video assignment
The music video assignment was about listening to songs at first and trying to figure out what the song is about. The next round was watching the music video and the last step was to watch the video again with the lyrics. The aim of this assignment is to see differences between the three assignments if there are differences and if I could figure out more with watching or reading the video and script.
The first video is: Float on, Modest Mouse:
Listening to the song without Lyrics nor visuals was quite hard. The articulation was not so understandable, it was difficult to follow what the singer was talking about. I knew it was something about sheep’s and the atmosphere was a bit upsetting, but I didn’t know what the singer wanted to express. The next round was watching the music video by its visuals. I saw sheep’s getting fed and later they were killed. I still didn’t know this for sure since the next was less understandable, better than the previous round though. The last round was watching and reading the lyrics. The lyrics were about sheep’s getting killed that was the aim of the song. Overall, my prediction weren’t that bad I thought the mood was upsetting and it actually was and the sheep’s getting killed was correct as well.
The second video: no title on the lyrics
We did exactly the same as the previous music video. At first only listening to the song I found it quite long and boring, but it was something about black people, nigga’s. Of course I thought about discrimination, but those were my prediction and not something I got from the video itself. The next round was watching the visuals. Which showed that the video was in black and white defines the discrimination part. I saw black people standing up but I still didn’t know why they did what they did. Finally, reading and watching the music video, which made clear that black people were done with the white people discriminating them for who they are, however the ending of the music video I didn’t completely get.
Sheep: killed. Nigga: discriminated and killed
Liza Saaed' Blog 