Sarah Jett Rayburn, Ph.D. Candidate "Everyone wants to know the whole truth but no one possesses it."

1a. I believe that Ben Affleck more similarly uses the techniques that Michael Lewis uses in The Blind Side. Both Ben and Michael use pathos in the same way. They show an innocent child in a broken home with a drugged up mother with no real father in sight who just wants to be loved. In both cases you automatically feel bad for Michael Oher and little Amanda and wish for them to have a better life. Ben and Lewis also both use imagery in a similar way telling storys about how bad the kids childhoods were. In Gone Baby Gone Lionel tells a story about when Amanda was left in a car and was burnt all over. This was similar to when Lewis depicts the times when Michael slept on the streets or in a car stacked on top of his brothers and sisters. If The Blind Side was to become a movie, I believe that Ben Affleck should direct it since they use such similar strategies. I think he would stick closely to the messages the book sent and would all in all make a great film.
2a. Watching a movie without picture and only a soundtrack would be far more limiting than watching the film muted with captions. There are too many things that you just can’t understand without images. During the film Do the Right Thing, often times you could see fights through windows and the rising of the heat. These things set the tone for the movie, and without seeing them, you wouldn’t even know that they’d happened. Without picture you would also miss other major scenes all together. The scene where the picture of Martin Luther King shaking hands with Malcolm X inside the burning building is an extremely symbolic scene to the movie as a whole, and since there is no words said about it, you wouldn’t even know it happened.
3a. In the movie Gone Baby Gone, I think the argument that is being made is wither or not taking the law into your hands to do what you think is right, is the right thing or not. When Patrick is in the crack house and sees the child molester with the bloody underwear and the dead kid, Patrick takes the law into his own hands and kills the child molester even though he poses no real threat to him and is defenseless. In the film, you understand why he killed him because you feel so bad for the kid because they show you these horrific pictures and pathos appeals. After he kills him though, Patrick feels regret for what he did and is no longer sure if what he did was the right thing. Later in the film this argument comes up again with Morgan Freeman’s character. We find out that Freeman has taken the law into his own hands and has stolen the kid from the broken home and placed it into his loving family. This time we have pathos for the other side of the argument. You see how happy the child is at this new home and you know how bad the child had it in her old home, so you start to think that the child should stay and that taking the law into your hands is ok. The film never really states wither taking the law into your own hands is right or not. Freeman is turned in, however you realize Amanda’s mom hasn’t really changed. The film gives you reasons for why each side is better, but ultimately the film lets you decide what the right thing is. The audience for this movie could be anyone of age. The movie is extremely thought provoking, and I think anyone could get something out of it.
4b. The defining moment in Do the Right was when the picture of Martin Luther King shaking hands with Malcolm X was placed inside the burning building. This picture showed two people with different ideas getting along. It caused you to think about their ideas for solving racial conflict and which was the right way to solve them. In Gone Baby Gone the defining moment was when Patrick turns Freeman in for stealing the kid. This moment causes us to think about wither or not it was right to take things into our own hands if it would better someone’s life.