NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Dandan i pandaretas! Na'fanpalangpang!

For my CM 102 class or Beginners Chamorro Language 2, I've been experimenting with different assignments. I heard last year about a Navajo Star Wars, or the project to translate Star Wars into the Navajo language. For me, somehow who thinks that everything should be translated into Chamorro and is hoping to create a lexicon for playing 'Magic: The Gathering" in Chamorro, taking such an iconic nerdy movie and translating it into a native language is the height of awesome. I decided to incorporate something on a much smaller scale into my class.    Each student had to pick five minutes from a different movie and translate that portion into Chamorro. I told them to make sure that the segment wouldn't be too difficult for them to translate, because certain genres like sci-fi for example, might be a bit difficult for a lowly 102 student to translate effectively. They had to then record themselves or others reading the scene in Chamorro and then dub it into the film i

INTERVIEW FROM FILM SCHOOL REJECTS: At the start of Doug Liman’s  Edge of Tomorrow   our hero, Lt. Col. Bill Cage ( Tom Cruise ), is a coward. He’s more than ready to runaway from a fight he knows he’s not equipped for. That’s not the kind of hero we expect from a blockbuster, but it’s the type of subversive choice we should expect from screenwriter  Christopher McQuarrie , who had a hand in bring Hiroshi Sakurazak’s graphic novel,  All You Need Is Kill , to the big screen. A protagonist unwilling to help save the world isn’t the only fresh idea in  Edge of Tomorrow . Even when Cage becomes a fierce soldier, he’s still no match for the bad-ass helicopter-blade-wielding Rita Vrastaski   ( Emily Blunt ). She is the hero of this movie. Vrastaski drives the story. Cruise, once again playing a role a lot of movie stars would pass on, consistently pushed for his co-star to be this film’s true hero. Cruise and McQuarrie’s creative partnership is built on risky choices. Valkyr

During the month of March, my phone rings more than usual. It is Chamorro Month, and so every government agency, school, organization and most businesses look for some way to honor this month and display their support for Chamorro language and culture. Considering how Chamorro culture was stripped of much of its value after World War II because of a rush to Americanize; the renewed interest in protecting and promoting Chamorro culture is a very good thing. When I ask my students at UOG, what their culture is, or what their cultures are, I always receive interesting responses. For some students, they feel like they are very cultural because they know certain practices, such as fishing, weaving, dancing or can speak the language. For most however, they feel like they don’t know their culture or don’t have it. They see the ways their parents or grandparents are and see them as having so much culture, and they see themselves as having little to nothing. For some

A Dark Knight in Aurora, A Dark Day for America... By Tom Magstadt The basic outlines of the “dark knight” massacre in Aurora, Colorado, are now well known.  A 24-year-old medical school dropout named James Egan Holmes acting alone opened fire with an assault rifle in a crowded theater, killing 12 people and wounding 59. A lot of good the Department of Homeland Security did in Aurora that night as “The Dark Knight” was emerging from his booby-trapped spider hole.  There’s plenty of obvious irony in the subtitle of that damned movie:  “The Dark Knight Rises.”  Irony is one thing; tragedy leaves an altogether different taste in one’s mouth.   A bitter taste like poison-laced lemon peels. Living in Colorado, when I heard the first news stories on the BBC within minutes of the shootings, I thought of a high school, another massacre, and a lone shooter.   Columbine.   So, of course, did people all over the world from Copenhagen to Cairo, from Toronto to Toky

I just came home from watching The Dark Knight . I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were parts though that I felt were rushed. Where it seemed that a scene had been stripped to its bare minimum in order to keep things flowing and moving. So characters end up talking to each other in ways which are way too concise and compact, its as if (even if they are good actors) they nonetheless appear like robots speaking one after another. Its always a hurried mixture of surreality and unreality watching this sort of thing, because of the way it unintentionally might reveal that in our own lives, when we speak in ways which are perfectly witty, perfectly timed, is there some sort of matrix at work as well? Editing our lives to create that illusion of discourse moving smoothly along? Other than this sort of thing, which is understandable, since they were struggling to squeeze as many story elements from as many different Batman storylines as possible, and somehow make all of them fit into 2 1/2 hours.

Several months ago, when the American presidential campaigns were just beginning I remember an incredible excitement about Ron Paul and his impossible bid for the Presidency. As a shallow sort of figure, as a mere symbol, I admit though he was fun to watch. First off, he was the only Republican who was anti-war, and this made the early debates alot more interesting than they should have been. I mean, so often I found myself feeling monumentally stupid to even be caring about these early debates since the actual election was more than a year away, and the ways in which these campaigns are reported nowadays, everything is recorded and analyzed, but then quickly forgotten. Its surreal how the immense amount of reporting on these campaigns can actually reduce not just how much we care about them, but how much we can readily remember. Its as if the sheer amount of reporting combined with the knowledge of how incredibly far away the election is can lead to a cynical deluge. The constant bre

For those familiar with my work (I'm sure there are a few of you) as well as those who frequent my blog ramblings, you know how important movies are to my analysis and rants. Alot of times they lighten the mood, other times they can help illustrate a densely theoretical point. Most of the time its just because I want to be a punk. After giving a presentation at a conference where I used several films to make theoretical points, which to most people probably didn't make sense (such as Weekend at Bernie's and images of fallen soldiers), someone asked me what theory of film interpretation I'm using when I analyze films. I thought about that for a moment, because I'd never really thought about it before. I don't really know any film interpretation styles, having never taken any film classes, but always just made shit up about movies, or used stuff from other disciplines to analyze. One thing that passed through my mind was saying Zizekian style (lana, ti ya-hu est