Reflection on "To Kill a Mockingbird"

To Kill a Mockingbird was honestly such a great movie. Although the music and the black and white picture threw me off, the context of the movie was great.

To Kill a Mockingbird definitely portrayed the state of the society during that time period. The Civil Rights Movement was occurring at that time which led to a lot of the conflicts that were taking place in the movie. The Civil Rights Movement was a time where people fought for human freedom and the urge to extend the rights of full citizenship to individuals regardless of the color of their skin or gender. The film definitely portrayed this push for human rights and shows how the film was inspired by what was going on during the time period.

The racial prejudice that erupted in the film made me mad. I never actually read the novel before watching the film, but as I watched the film I knew the conflict was between blacks not having equal rights and whites taking advantage of the blacks. I loved the fact that there was one particular character who stood out from
the world of prejudice and tried to make a difference in society. He disobeyed what his people wanted and made his own path to a brighter future.

The overall concept of this film definitely made me think about life in a brighter light. A person doesn't always have to follow in the footsteps of others. For example, the black man who was accused never did anything wrong, he was just trying to help out and be generous. Unfortunately, he got blamed for doing the right thing. I believe that's also another important concept in the world: doing the right thing for others although it may be characterized as something wrong. It's important to make a difference in society and to take that first step to change what is potentially bad in the world.

The conflict between whites and blacks in the film represent what has happened in the past and how the world has come to grow. Although there are still many cases of conflicts with whites and blacks, we can still see how the world changed and prospered from the past.

However, in today's society, it seems like the past repeats itself. Taking a look at the riots in Baltimore, prejudice between interracial couples, and many other things that has happened since the history of the Civil Rights Movement, we still feel as though racial prejudice still erupts in today's world. Like the white man
who disobeyed what everyone else believed and decided to take the step to make a change, every individual in today's society could potentially do the same thing and help these race riots and prejudice stop today.

Reflection on "Precious"

Before Bavaro actually told us we were going to watch this movie in AP, I already watched half of it when it first came out. This is actually one of my favorite movies and I'm glad I got to watch the ending of it.

Anyway, this movie definitely spoke to me in various ways. I love the fact that the film revolved around a low class teenager, with two kids, an abusive mother, a long series of brutality throughout her life, but also that Precious had a life full of positivity and spontaneous dreams. Although the ending sucked, it definitely shows how someone who grew up from nothing can actually make it in life.

A lot of people in and around Philadelphia live the same type of life: underclass, abuse, rape, and hardships. It's what a person does that makes or breaks them and this film definitely showed that through the character of Precious. Another aspect of the movie which really made me come to love the film was the fact that the main character, Precious, wasn't a skinny white girl, but instead a black woman with meat on her bones. Most movies nowadays portray the main character as someone who is beautiful or at least has the "potential" to be beautiful. The fact that Precious never judged herself or lowered her self esteem based on her weight was awesome to me. You got to see her grow as an individual internally instead of externally.

Another reason why this movie hit me so hard was the idea of having big dreams. Throughout the movie, Precious has this dream to become a superstar and have guys all on her: to be rich and famous and to have more attention from people. What you notice that doesn't change is her own appearance. Precious wants to change her lifestyle, not the way she looks. In society today, I believe that is the complete opposite. Rather then having bigger dreams then changing ones' appearance, most people today don't make the extra effort to turn their lives around.

If the producer of this movie didn't add the "dreams" theme of the entire movie, I believe the movie would have no purpose. By the ending, you see one of Precious's dreams come true: the ability to move on with her life and be independent. Although her biggest dream doesn't come true, you can tell that that is her next step. I think that's key to life: have the ability to make your dreams come true, but strive for even bigger ones no matter how far out of reach they may seem to be.

Reflection on "Rebel"

I decided to write my reflection on the film created by Anthony called, "Rebel". Not only did I think this was a great film, I also caught a lot of significant criticisms in the film. The whole plot of rebellious teenagers and what society views them as was the main topic of this film. I thought it was unique to capture the minds of these destructive teens and see how they challenge themselves on an everyday basis. The main character showed how family influences could affect a young adult's mind and how they portray that in their everyday behavior. I thought there was a strong connection between external forces being shown through the actions of ones internal self.

Literally the best part of this film was Steinberg. The way he acted is literally the same way he acts in person and it was great. Steinberg portrayed someone who also had a destructive behavior but tried to make himself realize that. When him and the main character got into a fight, it was kind of strange seeing an actual adult throw themselves upon someone much older then them. It reminded me of an abusive relationship mainly because in abusive relationships the person will act out in violence but then try to get the other person to forgive them for what they did, which is exactly what Steinberg did.

The film definitely defined the power of people. One being that of abusive relationships and how that influences who a person is. The main character's actions were a direct result of how his mother and father acted towards him. You could also see the power of people through the girl character whose boyfriend tried telling her what to do and who to stay away from.

By the end of the film, the enemy of the main character dies as a result to violence. I believe this was the resolution to the main character's problems but also the beginning of a more bigger purpose in the characters' life. Overall the film showed what can happen if external forces have power and influence over a persons life. A person could be the sweetest human being on the planet but if they come from a place that has given them negative influence their whole life, then that sweet human being can have a change in character.

The film was awesome overall. The sound, editing, music, plot, and lighting was great. I give Anthony props for this film!

Poem #8: Response to, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" by Herrick

Poem:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, 
    Old time is still a-flying : 
And this same flower that smiles to-day 
    To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, 
    The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run, 
    And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first, 
    When youth and blood are warmer ; 
But being spent, the worse, and worst 
    Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time, 
    And while ye may go marry : 
For having lost but once your prime 
    You may for ever tarry.

Response:

Going through the completed TPCASTT of this poem, the theme seems to be this idea of the beauty of youth, marrying young, and living life to the fullest. All three themes come full circle when representing this idea of youth and what it means to the speaker of the poem. In the poem, the author uses a variety of metaphors and personifications to interpret this message of seizing the day and not wasting any opportunities that may come someone's way. For example, the author states, "Gather ye rosebuds...dying" in the first stanza. This symbolization represents romance and sensuality. Considering the author uses a rose to depict the wasting of time indicates that the speaker is most likely speaking to someone he is romantically concerned with. The rose could also represent youth and freshness, like a new bloomed flower, which represents an opportunity that can still be seized. The author also uses personification in the first stanza that only a person can smile and not a flower. This depicts the image of the beauty of life. Although you may be beautiful and alive now, tomorrow can bring aging and growing up. 

In the second stanza, the sun is described as it moves across the sky during the day. Putting this into consideration, the sun is progressing across the sky into the horizon. This could mean the woman is closer to death each new day adding to this theme of seizing your opportunities as soon as you can. 

In the last stanza of the poem, the speaker urges all who are virgins to marry before it is too late. This portrays the religious aspect of the poem, convincing someone to seize the romantic opportunity by stating that they should marry. This implies that the speaker is speaking of the proper Christian way of pleasure and sexuality (it can only be experienced after marriage). 

Putting all of this connotation into consideration, it's easy to determine the theme of this poem to be this idea of marrying young, living life to the fullest, and not wasting your own youth when you have fantastic opportunities in front of you. The author also makes the speaker have a didactic tone of voice because he/she is trying to tell the readers to how to live their young lives before it's too late. 

Looking back at the title, the theme is confirmed. The title portrays the real feeling of seizing the day. The speaker reveals that time passing will only prevent women from seizing opportunities while they can. The title confirms the speaker's true intentions of the beauty of life and what may happen if one doesn't seize the day. 

Poem #7: Response to "The World Is Too Much With Us" by Wordsworth

Poem:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Response:

When reading the title of the poem and skimming through the poem the first time, I was actually misguided by what the poem was about. I thought the poem was about the failed loved of a relationship. However, when I completed the TPCASTT for the poem and read through the poem a second time, I realized that there was no connection to a positive relationship at all. My whole paraphrase section of my TPCASTT was completely off.

Throughout the poem, the author used words such as "sordid" or "creed" to demonstrate the heavy, dark feeling as the tone of the poem. From using first person as a point of view, Wordsworth was able to communicate his opinion of this idea of beauty destroyed and ignored in nature. By looking at the last two lines of the poem, "Have sight...horn", the author relates to allusions of three Gods: Proteas, Triton, and our God. Proteas and Triton have a unique significance of the sea and God represents mankind. Putting those together (the sea and mankind), as a reader I was able to realize the theme of this poem had to deal with nature.

This theme that humanity has lost its respect for nature represents a broader topic in society. Wordsworth implicates his own opinion but when looking at the lines of the poem, as a society, we read this poem and feel the need to conform to a different society.

"Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!" Wordsworth wants us to realize that the beauty of nature has been destructed. Looking at society today, we keep our hands glued to our phones. Society says, "why go out in the world and explore nature when we can explore it through our phones?" But, this poem says, "why not?" 

Beauty in nature is ignored by the ignorance of our generation. This theme not only references this but tries to make us realize what has happened to the world. We, as a society, are literally ignoring our own ignorance to the beauty of nature.

Poem #6: Response to "This Is Just To Say" by William Carlos Williams

Poem:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Response:

When I first read this poem, I realized how simple it was. As I finished reading the poem though, it seems to me that the poem is actually a written message on the refrigerator to someone. Overall, I believe the message of the poem is definitely giving into your temptations. 

Everyone falls to temptation once in their lives. For instance, you might eat that cake you have been dieting without, but, your temptations become urges to actually eat the cake. However, that is not the only theme I caught in the poem. As I dug more deeper into the poem, I caught allusions to Adam and Eve. Like Adam and Eve who ate the forbidden fruit, the speaker of the poem took plums without asking. It's weird linking this allusion to the poem because the poem is quite simple, but it's the allusion that makes this poem seem more complex. The poem is quite ironic too. When we look at poems, we often look for meanings and start to think complex. However, for this poem, there really is no way to think complex and maybe that was the author's purpose all along. I looked up who William Carlos Williams is and it states, "Often domestic in focus and "remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects," Williams's poetry is also characteristically honest: "There is no optimistic blindness in Williams," wrote Randall Jarrell, "though there is a fresh gaiety, a stubborn or invincible joyousness." When I looked at this review on the author, the word "honest" struck me the most. "This Is Just To Say" is blatantly honest and kind of funny also. When we look at the tone of the poem, we also get the tone of the author or the author's personality. William Carlos Williams is a sarcastic and truthful man (maybe that's why he didn't blame someone else for eating the plums).

In my TPCASTT I wrote that the speaker seems to sound like he/she doesn't care about eating the plums but wants the person who was saving them to forgive him/her. On the other hand, the author seems to think the idea of stealing someone else's breakfast is quite funny and something to laugh about (which is the personality of the author after all). The author also doesn't use diction to get his poem to form a reaction of the reader. The poem is quite simple and gets its' point across. 

Ending this blog post, the themes I came up with were forgiveness(maybe), resistance, urges, giving into temptations, and influences from external forces. Giving into temptations is a huge part of life and often characterizes who a person is. When we look at who the author is, giving into temptations is something to laugh about, almost as though the author and speaker of the poem live a carefree way of life. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that although people always characterize giving into temptations as a bad thing, maybe that isn't always the case. 

Poem #5: Response to "The Youngest Daughter" by Cathy Song

Poem:

The sky has been dark

for many years.

My skin has become as damp

and pale as rice paper

and feels the way

mother’s used to before the drying sun   

parched it out there in the fields.

Lately, when I touch my eyelids,

my hands react as if

I had just touched something

hot enough to burn.

My skin, aspirin colored,   

tingles with migraine. Mother

has been massaging the left side of my face   

especially in the evenings   

when the pain flares up.

This morning

her breathing was graveled,

her voice gruff with affection   

when I wheeled her into the bath.   

She was in a good humor,

making jokes about her great breasts,   

floating in the milky water

like two walruses,

flaccid and whiskered around the nipples.   

I scrubbed them with a sour taste   

in my mouth, thinking:

six children and an old man

have sucked from these brown nipples.

I was almost tender

when I came to the blue bruises

that freckle her body,

places where she has been injecting insulin   

for thirty years. I soaped her slowly,

she sighed deeply, her eyes closed.

It seems it has always

been like this: the two of us

in this sunless room,

the splashing of the bathwater.

In the afternoons

when she has rested,

she prepares our ritual of tea and rice,   

garnished with a shred of gingered fish,

a slice of pickled turnip,

a token for my white body.   

We eat in the familiar silence.

She knows I am not to be trusted,   

even now planning my escape.   

As I toast to her health

with the tea she has poured,

a thousand cranes curtain the window,

fly up in a sudden breeze.

Response:

As soon I started reading this poem, the first idea that popped into my head was this idea of sickness and what comes with old age. The three theme topics that came into my mind were youth, growing old, and dependency. Through the details the author uses, it's easy to see that the mother is very sick and has been sick for many years, "I was almost tender when I came to the blue bruises that freckle her body, places where she has been injecting insulin for thirty years". The author also distributes a lot of imagery which helps us capture the setting of the entire poem and this also helps to tell us the tone and mood of the poem: sympathetic and almost relaxing and comforting. It's quite odd to note that the mood of the entire poem seems to be comforting because the mother is suffering through a sickness. However, when we look through the eyes of first person(the narrator), we don't actually know how the mother is feeling through all of this. Is she relaxed just like the daughter or is she discomforted by the idea that her daughter has to take care of her because she cannot take care of herself?

I noted that we, as readers, don't know where the other five other children went as the mother nursed six children total. However, we do know that the daughter taking care of the mother now is the youngest daughter, hence the title. By the end of the poem, the narrator mentions, "She knows I am not to be trusted, even now planning my escape". Maybe the youngest daughter was the only one not able to move on with her life yet because she was the only one left to take care of her mother. 

Overall, I feel as though the theme of this entire poem has to deal with the idea that the mother has turned out to be the "young one" because she is incapable of taking care of herself. The mother represents this dependency she has on her youngest daughter and it foreshadows her ultimate fate of death when her daughter has to "escape". When we put this into consideration, "The Youngest Daughter" represents the growth of a young adult preparing for adulthood whereas the mother represents what happens when a person grows old and their youth is taken from them.