Literature in Film Blog #3

In my entire High School career I feel that To Kill a Mocking Bird was one of the best books I ever read. The film itself captures the book similarly.

Enough good things can't be said about this movie. I don't think there is any other racial injustice movie or discriminatory based movie that you may be able to compare to "To Kill a Mockingbird". This movie puts you in a feeling where you are able to sympathize with people who are being discriminated against, and along with that people who fought for those people. One of the parts that actually gets to me is when Atticus is exiting the court room and Reverend says to Scout that he needs to "stand up your father is passing".

Gregory Peck is one of the best actors of all time. The role that he has played in this movie was one of the best roles he has ever done and he was does an amazing job at it in my opinion.

Literature in Film Blog #2

Precious 

Personally, I love drama movies because it allows me to feel what's going on in the movie. I was disappointed at the way the movie ended because I wanted to know how Precious would really be living her life without her mother in her life and 2 kids. I feel like the mother got what she deserved. You know the saying, "you never know what you have until it's gone". And basically what the mother did was took advantage of the fact that she had a daughter to take care of. When they were in that meeting at the end of the movie, I feel like if Precious went home with her mom, everything would have went back to the way it was. Precious did not do anything to deserve the abuse she received from her mother and I really felt sympathy for her all throughout the movie. Precious was a strong character because even though she struggled at home and school, she still managed to find a way to make herself happy and not let anything turn her down. This movie shows that even though someone struggles so much in their life and they don't have much they can still make it somewhere.

Literature in Film Blog #1

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Personally I did not like this movie at all, and I did not think it was funny. This is mostly because there was way too many action and I'm never into action movies like that.  

I feel like there was hardly even a plot itself. King Arthur of Camelot looks for the knight so that he can join him, and after so many accidents he and his knights (in which they barely provide context for) go on a mission to bring back the Holy Grail for God. If the Python God really does exist, why couldn't he bring the Holy Grail back by himself? It seems that the writers of this movie couldn't make the plot work and it isn't good enough in order to prove a change in a character. Also, the idea of trying to find Holy Grail is not completely followed throughout the movie which lead to a bunch of scenes that was irrelevant to the plot. 

Blog #12

"My Papa’s Waltz”

Theodore Roethke

When I first read the title of the poem I immediately thought that this poem was about someone speaking over their dad. When I read the poem that is exactly what it sounded like, the lines of the poem insist to me that the speaker's dad makes the whole family unhappy. In the third stanza of the poem, the speaker says "The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle", and this tells that the father is in a way abusive to their family also. The first line of the poem that reads "The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy" immediately shows that the father has been drinking.  It also insists that since the boy was a young child, he had to deal with an alcoholic father.  He confesses that "such a waltzing was not easy" and that he "hung on like death". At the same time, there was a moment of resistance and there was also surrender. The boy had to just take in the smell of his father's breath. The poem uses a simile, "like death", to make an implication that he thought this father's wild actions would never come to an end and this was something he had to deal with for a while.

 At a young age, he realized that it was no easy feat having to deal with an alcoholic. “Could make a small boy dizzy” may imply the persona’s noteworthy strength, but it is also suggestive of the boy’s respect and fear for his father’s patriarchy.

Blog #11

On Being Brought from Africa to America

By Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley describes in her poem the positives sides of being an American slave. The surprising thing is that she is not complaining about her life as a slave woman because of the fact that she was able to get closer to being in the religion of Christianity. 

At first reading this title I thought that she would be the person that is complaining because she has to work for the whites. Throughout the poem Wheatley explains that her beliefs has changed drastically after she came to America and she realized how badly Africans were treated when they were not in Africa. She explains in the poem that because she is now in Christianity she understands that she can pray so that sins can go away and she is reminding the white people that minorities can also be with her when she goes to heaven.

The word that is used best in this poem is "Benighted". What the word literally means is that you are in a state of darkness or night or that you are overtaken by darkness or night. Phillis Wheatley uses this word to explain that she is a African American female and she also uses it to explain what is going in her life at the current moment. She uses the phrase "mercy  brought me" to explain how she was kidnapped and the title of the poem indicates this also. She also indicates that she forgives anybody who put her in this certain situation. Even though she was a slave, in her poem she states the fact she is still a slave and that African are not originally born enslaved but instead they have equal right just as any other person does.   

Blog #10

John Donne, “Death, be not proud” 

When I read this title for the first time I thought that it meant that the speaker in this poem is speaking directly to death as if it were a person and at some point in the poem, the speaker will mock death.

To paraphrase the poem, it is basically saying:

Hey Death, don't be so prideful, even though you are known to be powerful and dreadful, you're not because of all the life you took away from people

will never really be gone, but you can't kill me either

What you really are is a long lost rest

death itself is amusing and it will always be

you can take the lives of people we care for

but that's only if you provide them with a good rest and trip to somewhere else

men, kings, chance and fate will always overpower you

your friends are no good, they are just desperate

other things can put men at rest way better than death can

but after death, which is a short rest, comes eternal life

there will be no more death, and it will die.

The theme of this poem is that simply no one should fear death because death is weak and it dies in the afterlife. When you go back to the title of this poem, you see that it is titled "Death, be not proud". When I go back and reflect on the poem, I realize how the speaker is really talking to death as if it was a person, basically saying to death that it should not be proud of what it is doing to people making people die. The speaker is also telling death that it should not be proud because killing people is pointless because there will be an afterlife anyway.

Blog Post #5

Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” 

TPCASTT:

Title: The first thing that came to my mind when reading this title is that this poem is about some sort of memory, the speaker is going to talk about something or someone who is very important to them. It indicates that there were so many Sundays like this one and that this memory is not just one thing that happened in a lifetime but its a typical Sunday through the speaker's childhood. 

Paraphrase: In the first stanza, the speaker is talking about how his father used to do sacrifices for his family and he regrets that no one ever thanked him but sometimes his father used to be angry and they would all be scared.

 The speaker remembers all the sacrifices his father made for him. The speaker remembers a moment of his childhood and gives its power, for the purpose of the poem's meaning is determined by the differences between what the boy knew back then and what the man who is the father know now.

The second word that is in the first line, "too", shows that actions have occurred in which the father on days such as Sundays to help his family out. In the first stanza I can see that the father gets up to heat up the house before the rest of the family gets up. The very last line in the first stanza is one of the first examples that displays the poem's theme which is "No one ever thanked him." This poem indicates the them that love does not always appear in a friendly and warm form.

I like this poem because it tells a story and I like poems that tell stories because it gives the poem a meaning to it.