Reflection paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 20

Reflection paper - Essay Example I assumed complete responsibility to come up to their expectations and prove myself before other students in general and those who were willing to replace me in that post in particular. As the editor of the college magazine, I was responsible to ensure that all content was free of plagiarism and was original, that the events and facts being reported were factual, to eliminate any kind of bias in the information, to structure the college magazine with respect to its content and make it organized, to make the features aesthetically appealing for the students and the readers, and keep track of the quality of the magazine as a whole with a view to improving in every successive edition. Understanding my responsibilities and taking care of all these things, I remained very conscious and mentally fully awake while editing the college magazine. One job that I loathed was the one in which I was employed by the police and was involved in different kinds of social services including working directly with the community and dealing with their complaints. This job was so loathsome because people came up to me with so petty complaints and expected me to assist them with overturning the accused parties. They did not understand much that my job was just to take notes and serve as a link between them and the police. I more served as a platform through which they could raise their concerns and have them conveyed to the police. My editing skills formally gained in the college helped me organize the work in this job too, but the main problem was the attitude of the complainants as well as the sorts of complaints they filed. For example, one man came to me and asked me to file a case against his neighbor because his cat had eaten one of his chicks, and even before the case could be filed or any legal proceedings could be made, he said t hat he would have nothing less than $30,000 as a compensation for this loss. Similarly, every single

Star Image of Helen Mirren Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Star Image of Helen Mirren - Essay Example This analysis will concentrate on two specific points in Helen Mirren's career. First, her arrival on the scene at the height of the sexual revolution and how sexuality became a major part of her star image, and second, her recent renaissance as a sexual object near the end of her career. It is thus only partly ironic that Helen Mirren was recently voted the world's sexiest OAP; she is surely the oldest woman to pose naked on the front of the normally staid Radio Times. From youthful, bohemian sexuality in her early films and theatre roles onto a more mature, developed and confident seductiveness in films such as The Long Good Friday, Mirren has succeeded in being "sexual" without seeming to lose her identity as an autonomous female. Helen Mirren came to prominence at the height of the sexual revolution in the mid 1960's She auditioned for the National Youth Theatre at the eight of eighteen (in 1963) and at the age of twenty was already starring at the Old Vic Theatre. Her early roles reflected a sexuality that was perhaps beyond what most might expect of a young woman of her age. Thus she played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra in 1965 for the National Youth Theatre and then Cressida in Trolius and Cressida for the Royal Shakespeare Company, followed by Lady Macbeth for the same company in a famous production directed by Trevor Nunn. Two early film roles exemplified the mixture of a fire-like and yet vulnerable sexuality. The left still below is from Age of Consent (1969), while the right one is from O Lucky Man, along side Malcolm McDowell : - While it is perhaps very difficult to extrapolate from a film still to the actual experience of watching a film, and thus considering the screen presence which makes a "star", these stills hint at the fact that Mirren has never been a traditional "sex object" along the lines of Marilyn Monroe, Bridget Bardot or Sophia Loren. She looks, to be frank, simply too intelligent to be pigeon-holed into such a one-dimensional identity. A popular entertainment website describes her as "perhaps the ultimate thinking man's sex symbol. . . " (starpulse, 2007). On its surface this might appear to be a rather superficial interpretation of the actress, but on closer inspection it brings us to the heart of Mirren's unique star quality. Even when she was gaining a reputation as a something of a sex-pot through regularly removing her clothes both on stage and in films during the 1970's, it seems clear that Mirren was careful never to be associated merely with eroticism and thus to be exposed in a gratu itous manner for the voyeuristic pleasure of the audience. The sexuality in her films is nearly always an integral part of the plot rather than merely a chance for the director to show off Mirren's rather obvious sex-appeal. For example, in The Long Good Friday she turns from the classic, almost clichd figure of the subservient gangster wife into a fearless avenger who uses sexual encounters as a source of revenge. Mirren is the controlling subject of her sex scenes rather than the controlled object. She is thus the opposite of the kind of