Final Portfolio

http://allisenglishportfolio.weebly.com/

Oops!

http://allisenglishportfolio.weebly.com/
forgot to post my website when it was done for the midterm...so here it is on my blog as the midterm portfolio. The final portfolio will be up next Sunday!

The Notebook Movie Review

        Young love seems to be popping up everywhere these days. Teenagers throughout the world are trying to follow in the footsteps of the new romantic movie, “The Notebook”, made from Nicholas Sparks’ best-selling novel.

       The movie starts out with music playing in the background, showing a lake with an elderly woman looking out over it. We later find out that is an elderly woman who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Her husband, Noah Calhoun, reads the story of their love to her every day in hopes that one day she will remember him. He never gives up hope, no matter how many people tell him that it will never work.

      This is every teenager’s fantasy. When a girl hears how Noah feels about Allie, she feels that she wants that kind of love. Who doesn’t? Is what everyone would think. Though most find it unrealistic, some keep the high hopes of finding this kind of love and being with their boyfriend or girlfriend forever.

    Since the movie has been out for a while now, there has been multiple premieres on television, forcing teenagers to see the movie. They are pulled in by the idea that they will find this kind of love, making other love seem unreal. The movie is just a romantic fantasy that people get caught up in.

    The movie is told in flashbacks from Noah reading to Allie. They show the older Noah reading to the older Allie, and then it flashes back to where the two first met, until they got married. Their children are shown visiting them, but Allie does not know that they are her children, as she has Alzheimer’s.

    Gena Rowland’s, who plays Allie, looks much too alive of a person to be playing someone with this disease. When a person develops Alzheimer’s, they usually lose a lot of weight and look very depressed. Gena Rowland’s looks healthy and has her makeup done throughout the movie. Although it is just a movie, that is another element that makes the movie less realistic and more of a fantasy. Most people wish that their loved ones who had/have Alzheimer’s disease look that good, but they don’t.

    The two elderly people sugarcoat the truth of being old. They both are particularly positive, and though Noah cries when Allie forgets who he is, his character looks happy otherwise. Allie seems to forget who Noah is, which, don’t get me wrong, is very sad, but there are other things you forget when you have Alzheimer’s. This includes eating, walking, and talking. Allie can do all of these. If she was early into the disease, then maybe it would be more realistic, but it’s not.

   The romantic drama, directed by Nick Cassavetes is very well produced in the way of being a fantasy. All of the scenery is amazing, and the places that the couple is shown are old-fashioned and romantic. The photography is perfect. It adds an extra fantasy element to the movie.

   She is a rich girl caught up in loving someone who is setting her free from her very complicated life that is scheduled by her controlling parents. They disobey her parents by keeping their relationship alive, which then turns downhill when Allie has to move away in the fall for school. Her mother throws away all of the letters that Noah writes for her, forcing Allie to forget about him. Anyone could guess that this would happen.

    Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, who play the roles of Noah and Allie, are, with no doubt, amazing actors and actresses. They are the perfect two to play the roles of the young couple in love. From their facial expressions to the way they sound when they talk is perfect. The two even look good together.

   Rachel McAdams dressed as an olden-day girl is perfect. She is a cliché of what people dressed like and did their hair like if they were of the higher class in the olden-days. Gosling, also, looks like an olden day man who is of the working class. The way he is scruffy and wears beat up clothes is the perfect portrayal of someone who lived back then and worked in a mine, which he does.
   The movie sets standards for girls everywhere on what love should be like. It makes them believe that every relationship is supposed to be like this, and if it’s not then it isn’t a real life relationship. Being a book is one thing, because not everybody reads all of the time, but a lot of people watch movies and their minds are forced to believe that what happens in movies is what happens in real life.

    Noah and Allie fight a couple times in the movie, but about ten seconds after they are made up or thinking about each other and missing one another. This puts the thought in people’s heads that relationships are all rainbows and butterflies but no rain. This is not true.

    Though they did a very great job in putting the movie together, like most other movies it is not a reality; it is a fantasy that we all wish we could live.

Evaluations

Evaluating something is basically your opinion about a certain subject. After reading pages 102-118 in "How to Write Anything" I've learned easy ways on how to evaluate things. This will be helpful when writing my fourth essay, because we have to look at different "reviews" which are just evaluations of the different movies/albums. We, also, have to write our own review on a movie or album of our choice. This information will be helpful in forming my opinion about the movie of my choice, which is "The Notebook". I believe that I am constantly evaluating things, I just don't write those things down all of the time!

Rhetorical Analysis

The article assigned for reading on the subject of 'Rhetorical Analysis' taught me alot. Before reading this I had heard of the word rhetorical but never really searched to find out what it meant. I've written quite a few rhetorical analysis', but I didn't know that they were called that at the time. I learned that a rhetorical analysis is what you write about a something. It is your opinion on someone else's work/ideas, and it is supposed to be persuasive. I guess there are things in this world that I do that I just don't know the names of. I must have written over a dozen papers like this in highschool, but the teachers just didn't call them that.

Presentation of 'The Scientific Method'

As a person I consider myself very shy. I always have been. Presenting to me is like jumping out of an airplane for most people...not even joking. When people get ready to jump out of an airplane their heart races, they hope that it'll go well, but most have doubts that something bad could happen. That's exactly how I feel when I get ready to do a presentation and there's no way for me to stop it. I don't know why it happens, but it always does. Always. I try to calm myself down in my head but I can't. Once I get up there everything is blury and I forget everything that I am supposed to know. When my group had to present the scientific method I wasn't completely freaking out at first, but once we got up there I wanted to run out of the room. I can't tell you why but presenting is probably one of the only things that I get really nervous about. I never get nervous on tests or at interviews or when I have a big paper due, just when I present! Oh well, it's over now!

Revising

Revising is important. The article "Revision" by Anne Doyle explains the different reasons for revision and how to revise. I don't always like to revise because once I get my paper finally done, I'm tempted to press print and take the paper and put it away in my backpack and not think about it again until after it gets graded. However, I never really do that because I've found that whenever I do, I end up making stupid mistakes that would've taken me two seconds to fix, such as a simple spelling error or a grammar error. Growing up my teachers stressed that it was important to revise. Most of them would make us hand in several drafts as homework assignments and, also, when we passed the final paper in pass in the drafts with the final, counting them towards your final paper grade. That got me into the habit of revising. Now, I always change my papers. Sometimes I end up rewriting the whole thing because I decide I'm not getting my point across well enough and I don't know how else to fix it so I just re-do the whole thing. The article just re-emphasized all the things that I was taught throughout my elementary/highschool years of school.

A Twisted World

This article was pretty funny. Honestly, I agree with everything they say. If we had celebrities run our country I'm pretty sure that all of that stuff would happen. For example, if someone like Lil Wayne was running our country weed would be sold at every store that there is and marajuana would definatly be legalized. He's in jail for it right now(and some other things), but no one would be put in jail for it. It would be something people thought was like going to school and had a good job...like if someone smoked weed it would be looked apon as if they were a great person. I like the sarcasm in the writing too. It keeps me interested and makes me laugh(:

Response to Examples

When watching these examples the one that stuck out to me the most was Jrapp's video about music and how it changed his life. As he made more friends by performing, I, also did while doing gymnastics. I liked the way he made his video. There were a lot of good effects and he used a good choice of songs. They made the video more entertaining. His essay was well written and got his point across, too.

Essay 1

For my essay project I though that I would make a scrapbook of pictures that show different moves that I had to learn in order to compete in gymnastics competitions. I started doing gymnastics in fourth grade and to me, then, there were simple things like cart-wheels, handstands, foreward and backward rolls. When I started competing in sixth grade I was required to know a much greater variety of terms for the four events I competed in(bars, beam, floor, vault). For my scrapbook I would make four different sections(one for each event), and write the names of different moves in order from first learned to last learned. There were also different phrases that the coaches would say to us in order for us to learn to do things better during practices that i'll include.