Let' think about this blog

Hold on for a bit as i get meta here and write what I think about writing my thoughts of things on a blog.

     "Let's think about thinking about things."-Me, when I was thinking of what gimmick 

to go with for the blog.

      The main idea for this blog was to be like a critic and try to have some fun with analyzing what i had to discuss from class. I have to say, it ended being funner than i expected, but it still runs with the "since i was told to do it, I'm not going to enjoy it" syndrome, but hey, that telling me to do it made me start, and actually enjoy myself a bit, here I am writing my 10th blog post, I don't think I will write many more, but I can say I like those that are already written. After 10 blog posts around 300 to 600 words each, I can say I am still as lost and entertained by this as when I started.

     When I started I had no idea how a blog should be written, but I did know one thing,   I knew what I liked, and what I would read, so I decided I would write and make my blog just that.  It worked for me, talking about things I had seen as reviews and how I felt towards them, this didn't start as well but after a few posts, maybe because i had gotten a bit used to this, or because I was tired when writing the posts, but I began to write with a more honest(and sarcastic) tone which gave more life to my posts.  I think what i enjoyed most of my post was the final thoughts, and those have always been that, honest thoughts.  An example of this is my favorite post: Let's think about the 60's , It's informational about what the movie is, but it is shown in a sarcastic and possibly angry tone with how they were presented.  It show's my real reaction towards some aspects I wanted to point out, which in a blog, I can.

     This was what differed from here and my journal.  In my journal I organized thoughts by sprawling every little thing on paper with no thinking.  It was just a jumbled mess of words and whining with no purpose except being, but here I get to share my thoughts, when they're better organized, and that's what made this experience easier, and better for me.  The one thing I did not enjoy having to do in the blog experience was to comment on every of my groups blog posts, and I couldn't just comment it had to be some weird way of commenting (brought to you by Peter Elbow) because I don't necessarily have a consistent thought about everything, maybe i just liked a line or liked the post in general, I still need to comment something and this opens up vague comments most of the people are probably going to ignore because in the end, we all know it's for the grade and if someone actually cares about something they comment its going to get shrugged off "Oh hey look, everyone in my group commented, good"  it makes it lack the purpose it originally had, which is sad because I liked the idea of commenting, but not to those extremes of in every post, in a certain way, I felt like it took away personality which is what makes this great.

Final thoughts: 9/10 even though i don't think this will change my way of writing in the future, maybe I could write here from time to time.  If you wanna try doing this, go ahead, i don't think you're going to regret it if you do it freely.

Let's think about Trifles

"Well, women are used to worrying over trifles."

     Trifles, something simple, something that doesn't matter... like the fact that the case you're investigating is a homicide not suicide.

     Trifles is the story of an investigation of what seems like a suicide by a farmer and how the police investigate it.  Well, that's what it seems like at first, but after a while the attention shifts to the women that were with them, and it shows them conducting their own investigation.  At one point one of the men says the line that i wrote at the beginning of the post, and then you know they, the men, are going to be the ones worrying over "trifles".  The women find out by observing knitting patterns and remembering how the people involved in the case were, that it was actually a murder and that the farmer's wife had been practicing a noose knot with her yarn, this is proved when they see her bird tied to a tiny noose.  At the end, what still baffles me a bit is that the women didn't share what they had learned, personally i would like to prove those that think i don't matter wrong, but that wasn't their mindset.

     This story is great.  We see how men ignore women and they just get back without even letting them know it.  They found out all the details of a case they just decided was a suicide.  I'm not sure what else to say about it.  I enjoyed it but just once, it didn't have much of a reread feeling.  The story was ok, a bit predictable but its nice.  I wish we could see consequences to them keeping the info.

Final Thoughts:  Anyone that hasn't read it. should read it, I am sorry to spoil the good parts, but i didn't give any important information of the story. 6/10 wont read again.

Let's think about the 60's part 2

     Let's talk about the main plots of the 60's movie, the three Herlihy kids, well, two of these join into one story, so the Herlihy family.

    This is the story of a beautiful perfect white picket fence family with two boys and a girl, the oldest is about to get  scholarship and what can go wrong.  Well, a lot, depending on your beliefs.  The oldest son Brian lost his scholarship and decided to join the marines without knowing what it was (he says he thought it was more football, showing how little the people knew about the war), the middle child Michael starts going into movements and peace keeping, and the youngest, Katie, accepts everyone and she got pregnant and her dad threw a hissy fit and she couldn't handle it and left.

    What are we left with?  A PTSD Brian, always drinking and smoking.  A Michael looking for a better future but looking at the girl from his past.  Katie as a mother, ran away from home and raising little Rainbow in a "could be worse" scenario.

    Here we see the main source of discrimination at what seems like the core, the family.  Most of these problems can be tuned to one source, their father,  Brian felt like he needed to prove himself and since the father had been in the marines, he also joined to make him proud, Michael's problem at a point was he had to leave home because of his different opinions that clashed with his conservative father, and poor Katie had to leave because how her dad made her feel at her weakest points.  We see how conservatives of these times were okay with the war and against change, they couldn't even accept some of their loved ones because of these beliefs.

   But something that happens at the end shows how we progressed.  The fact that change is possible, and acceptance is key.

Final thoughts:  I want to get more into the characters but i think it is better to watch it, if you haven't give it a try.  Also: obvious love interest is obvious, but that wasn't the point of the story, it was showing this period, and it did so.

Let's think about the 60's

     A more accurate name for this would be Let's think about how racism is shown in "the 60's" mini series... but that's too long so i think the name it has goes better.

      I watched the 60's mini series (or movie, I'm still not sure which is it, it didn't seem episodic) and I was supposed to be watching it to see how these times were and see discrimination.  In class we've been having discrimination as a main theme for a while now, and when i watched this movie thinking it would be heavy with racism i actually ended up feeling underwhelmed.

     This feeling was probably brought by these misconceptions i had:

a) The story was only about discrimination.
b) or the main story points were going to be about racism.

I found a paper about the 60's online that i read before writing here to get some perspective but one of the line's threw me off, and I'll explain why.

"The movie takes place in many different areas starring two main families; a very suburban, white family who were excepting of blacks, and a very positive black family trying to push black rights in Mississippi. The movie portrayed many historical events while also including the families and how the two were intertwined."

    Although this movie does present these two families, at some point all the attention shifted from one family to the other ( I'm going to let you guess to which.).  I can't tell if it's because the 60's didn't have enough black movement on the second half of the decade or if they had to cut out those plot points in the movie because of the emotional story about the three white kids. These kids showed their types of  discrimination and gave a view to the 60's, but i feel like the black movement could have been presented better.

    That being said, what was shown of the black movement was great.  I loved how they portrayed the dancing scene with Katie accepting them and later on the peaceful movements moving Michael and making him see this world of civil right movements (wait are the other kids in these scenes too?)

    One of my favorite scenes is when Emmet has strayed from the path his father, a Priest, that had lead the march at Birmingham,  had made for him to help all of the African Americans move forward.  In this scene he sees how 1 act can be the destruction of everything that they had worked for and cause the death of the father he loved.  It is very emotional and it show's the viewer how important every little act is or could be.

Final thoughts:  I think the civil right movements and the moments with the African American family could have done without the other plots intertwining, i don't know if they did it because they didn't want two separate stories or because there is still racism in the industry, but it was done.  Apart from that, great music, great most of everything really, it was a good watch, 7/10 would watch again. Maybe.