Kylefagan's Blog

The Thesis

kylefagan — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:16:36 +0000

My thesis will be how peer pressure is affecting highschooler’s.

Teens are always looking for some way to fit in to be in the “cool” crowd. So they will give into any kind of pressure to be portrayed as cool. They will also do things that are against their personal morals of what is rite and what is wrong.

Some teens don’t know any better that the stuff that they are doing is really that bad. I mean sure I am a teen and this sounds like I am now trying to bail them out but how are we supposed to know any better when the entertainment industry is just throwing all of the half naked girls singing and the the big macho guys that are rapping about putting girls in their place and all of the drugs they have done. It is surprising to me that our culture isn’t even more messed up and we haven’t had more shootings in school.

Then I realize that I can’t just blame it all on the entertainment industry. We have to take some responsibility. For parents sure it is easy to say just don’t buy it for your kids, but I was once one of those kids and it is a lot easier just to buy it for the kid and not having to listen to the constant bombardment of pleads so they would be able to get that game or listen to that music.

But all in all the amount of peer pressure isn’t getting more and more it is just that the things that getting pressured are more and more dangerous.

switching it up

kylefagan — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:33:42 +0000

Ok so i was going to do my 8 page paper on “Role Models”, but due to the fact that there is pretty much no information on this movie that would be of any help. Plus it is 8 pages i decided to switch my movie to “Fast Times at Ridgemont high”, and my focusing question is going to be the peer presure that we go through from our peers and the effects of it. Now if you haven’t seen this movie here is a quick summery. It takes place in the 70s and is all about a school in California and follows a select few characters that have to deal with stuff that almost all highschoolers have to deal with. The peer presure of drugs; the presure to be in a sexual relationship, or to just have sex; and then of course the whole job situation. This movie really captures the effects that highschool has on teens and also the major peer presure that goes on. Cameron Crowe was the author of the book that this movie was based on. The way that he came up with all of these senarios that he wrote about was that he posed as a highschool senior for a year and then wrote about everything that he saw there. So all of these characters are based off of actuall people, with different names of course. Once i found out that these were all real events i found it really interesting and decided that this would be way easier to write 8 pages on, especially since I just got out of highschool and had a lot of these same pressures.

Scene it

kylefagan — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:20:25 +0000

A scene that really helps me with finding the theme to this movie is toward the end of the movie. After Wheeler and Danny both get kicked out of sterdy wings. Wheeler for taking Ronnie to a party and then forgetting about him as he got his fr-eek on with a girl that he met in the line for the bathroom and then Danny for just totally going off on Augi’s parents after he got him kicked out of L.A.I.R and augi’s parents thought it would be good for him to finally make some new friends. Although Danny had come to the realization that Augi should be able to live his life any way that he wanted to. Well anyways they are leaving the attorneys office after talking with the attorney and being told that there case is looking pretty bad and they are in the elevator-they begin to fight and argue and at the end Wheeler says “you just lost the one friend that you had in your life”. After this it cuts to both of them each at their own house and they realize that they want to continue being the “Bigs” of the kids who they never wanted to be matched up with in the first place. Well they realize that even though they are both very diffent they are each others best friend and then at the end of the movie they become friends again. Just like if you were to look there is one of your friends who at one point were your worst enemy. At least I know a few of mine were.

Friends what are they good for?

kylefagan — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:17:24 +0000

To take a deeper look at Role Models you have to take a deeper look at the characters who are in the movie, and there personalities. You have Wheeler, the fun loving guy who has no problem being a slacker. He works as a mascot at an energy drink sales place and has a tiny apartment but he has no problem with his life in fact he says in the movie “I could do this the rest of my life”. Then you have his co-worker who wants something different with his life doesn’t want to stay in the place that he is at for the rest of his life. Throughout this movie you can see these two drifting apart then at the end they become best friends. This caused me to think of my own friends and how they affected my life with their personalities. My best friend Zach was at one point the most anoying person to me then as we continued on through school we realized that even though we are so different our personalities go good togeth and now we are always hanging out and doing fun things. That is how it was with most of my friends and this movie made me realize that you can’t just hang out with people who are just like you you have to switch it up sometimes because one type of person is just no fun. Like Zach said “You can’t just have one friend. That would be the same as only drinking one kind of coolaid you have to switch it up sometimes. Stop only drinking the grape because the lemon flavor is just as good.”

sort of the same

kylefagan — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:23:47 +0000

All directors like to do some things the same in all of their movies. The Coen brother’s were involved with two that i just watched Raising Arizona and O Brother Where Art Thou. In this movie they are sort of a like. In Raising Arizona H.I the main character spends a bit of time in prison and when he finally gets out and gets a house two of his prison buddies come to visit him after they break out. In O Brother the whole plot is these three guys who break out of the prison farm and try to get a treasure that was supposed to be from an armored truck robbing that went bad. Now is it just a coincidence that in both movies it is three jail convics that in Raising Arizona two of them had just broken out of jail and in O’ Brother all three had broken out of jail. Also their plans were to go and rob a bank or go and find the treasure from a bank, and that in both movies banks were actually robbed by the three convics. Also in both these movie the main characters were trying to keep the “Family Unit” as H.I. refered to it as together. Also when the two brothers in Raising Arizona broke out the first thing they did was to do there hair with hairstyling products. Then throughout the movie of O’ Brother the main character would worry more about his hair than his safety. These are just some of the coincidences between these movies.

psychographic? I think so

kylefagan — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:22:04 +0000

When watching Raising Arizona I didn’t think it was any more than a comedic film that made fun of the redneck type of lifestyles. Then after reading the Andrew Moss essay and how in depth he goes, also ruining the movie by convincing me it was a dream, I believe that is is a psychograchical movie. It really brings out the traits of many types of people. With Ed you have the law abiding police officer who was twice decorated, falling in love with an outlaw. Then when they get married and find out that Ed is barren because her insides are “a rocky place, where his seed could find no purchase” she turns into one of the people that she so often told to turn to the right as she snapped there mug shots. She went down hill not caring about her look or the place that she lived. Ultimately she gave in and instucted her husband to steal a baby from the Arizona’s.

Then there is H.I., who we learn at the beginning has a problem with the law. Falls for the officer, Ed, who would take his mug shot everytime he got in trouble and had to go back to prisson. Throughout the movie he is trying to find himself and turn from his troubled past. All the while his past, Leonard Smalls the bounty hunter, was trying to find him and in my opinion take him back to the dark side. So as we can see through just those two characters they are falling rite in line with their own personality traits and at the same time changing.

Fear lives in all of us

kylefagan — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:23:34 +0000

Is Leonard Smalls (the bounty hunter) a figment of the characters imagination or is he real. From what I have watched and from my perspective the Leonard Smalls is a figment of the imagination of the characters who he appears to. I came to the conclusion he wasn’t real in the first scene that we meet him because as he is riding down the road the dandy-lion caught on fire when he passed by. I think that he is their fears because when H.I. Mcdonaugh sees him at first he is in his dream and he is coming to find him and the baby, which is what i thought was his fear of being caught and the baby being taken away from him. His fear also could have been that his two buddies from jail were going be tracked down by the cops and then they would find little Nathan Arizona and put him and Ed in jail and give Nathan back to his parents.

Then there was the visiting of Leonard Smalls to Nathan Arizona the funiture salesman. Nathans greatest fear in my opinion was having to give out to much money but at the same time never seeing his little boy ever again. Leonard Smalls brought to live that fear when he said he would sell him on the black market. That fight scene repressented facing our fears and then realizing the right way and that the parents that H.I and Ed took Nathan from had fears of their own.

Hello world!

kylefagan — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:09:38 +0000

Hello to whoever is going to read this.

My name is Kyle and I am writing this for my english 101 class. I am 18 years old and am now a freshman at pierce community college. It has been fun for the few quarters that i have been attending and so much different than my highschool. I went to a small private school in des moines washington that had 32 kid in my graduating class and a total of 140 kids total from 9th through 12th grade. I work at papa murphy’s take and bake, and no we do not bake the pizza’s for you, which should be a given by the name, but we do still get people who get mad and occasionaly throw the pizzas back at you. Ok so it only happened once but that is one time to much. When I’m not working I like to hang out with my friends. My close group of friends are pretty much all of my class from highschool. We are the group of people that just enjoy life and enjoy to make people laugh. We make little short videos in our free time and this summer my friend Zach Wood (A.K.A Z-Dizzle) are going to make a rap about our time at Evergreen Lutheran. We also really enjoy just hanging out making a pizza and then watch some movies. Actually we just watch the same movies every time. We watch Super Bad, Step Brothers, Role models, and Troy. But at the moment it is just me and Andrew hanging out because everyone else is off at college in other states, or they went and joined the armed forces.

So that is pretty much it you don’t have to ready any more because I am just going to be writing a lot of random stuff to waist your time because this is what we did as freshman to our english teacher because he was oblivious to the world and never caught on. Yes i did get an A in his class by doing this.