Blog Portfolio B

The Blog Portfolio is potentially one of the smartest innovations in High School English. I cannot begin to comprehend the number of students that envy the luxuries we take for granted. Our blogs are our platform, a forum for us to share our opinions, where we can be ourselves. In the literaturemachine, you must bring your best ideas to the plate, and let your views loose for the student population to read. Hate it or love it, your ideas and beliefs will be recognized, either through praise or through condemnation.

Below are a number of posts representing my personal thoughts on certain topics. Some of these topics have been initiated through the HL English class, while others have been posted based on my own personal interests. I encourage you to read them, and post whatever comes to mind. Whatever your opinion, feel free to share it.

“We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.”

George Bernard Shaw (Irish Literary Critic, Playwright, & Essayist)

Coverage: These are the required blog entries for Blog Portfolio #2

How Individual Are You?

The Next Step Forward: Discontinuing the Production of Barbie Dolls

A Proposed Solution

To What Extent Will You Live Up to Good Morals?

Love: A Temporary Madness

McCarthy….A Feature Film? Really?

Depth: These are the blog posts where I felt I went far and beyond. I thought about these topics, doing outside research and talking about the issues at hand with my peers. (Some of the posts contain their reactions).

The Road: The Movie

Cannibalism. Just No.

Interaction: This blog post was initiated due to another student’s blog post. I had a certain view on cannibalism that differed from one of my peers. Therefore, I wrote this blog post, which goes into depth about my particular view and the reasons behind my point of view.

Cannibalism. Just No.

Discussions: As expected, some of my posts incited a number of differences on certain issues. Therefore, debate ensued and in some cases, conclusions were made. It was rewarding to see comments on my blog; I felt that people were clear when presenting their opinions and ready to share and discuss their ideas.

In “To What Extent Will You Live Up to Good Morals?“, Rohit and I discuss the effect of morality in The Road. Particularly the morality of the father. Ravi and Justin add to this discussion.

In “A Proposed Solution“, Mr. Clinton analyzes and explains the definition of beauty. Shannen and I debate the function and role of beauty in society, and Molly adds on to our debate.

In ” McCarthy….A Feature Length Film? Really? “, Diksha comments on my take of the film adaptation of The Road. Diksha mentions the element of minimalism, an aspect of the movie that I touched upon in my post.

Xenoblogging: I felt that one of my strengths as a blogger was my ability to post detailed responses and questions to people’s blog posts. I made sure to follow up on their responses, and contribute to the entire online classroom community.

i.       Shannen’s Blog (comment grande)

ii.      Diksha’s Blog (comment grande)

iii.   Naoise’s Blog (link gracious)

iv.   Jonathan’s Blog (comment primo)

v.     Alice’s Blog (comment primo)

vi.   Molly’s Blog (link gracious)

Wildcard: Very rarely are students given the opportunity to share their views on any topic on such a grand scale. With this in mind, it is tough to decide on exactly what to write about. You think about your audience, your tastes, and how to merge the two so that you can appeal to both. The wildcard in this blog portfolio did not incite as many comments as the previous blog portfolio’s did. This was probably due to the fact that post was about the NBA, a fairly narrow topic. Nevertheless, the objective of the wildcard is not to draw comments, but a chance for me to develop as a writer and person. The wildcard was simply a post by me, for me.

NBA Karma Kriminals: The Miami Heat

Extra Credit: The Road Movie Review was an extra credit assignment.

The Road: The Movie

The Road Movie Review: A Respectable Movie Adaptation

I don’t consider myself to be much of a moviegoer, but I couldn’t help but realize that the post-apocalyptic genre has really caught on these past few years. The post-apocalyptic genre has been presented in many different forms:

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)—–Teenager/Young Adult

WALL-E (2008)—Kids

9 (2009)—-Kids

The Road (2009)—-Adult

2012 (2009)—-Teenager/Young Adult

The Road (2009)—-Adult

The Book of Eli (2010)—Young Adult/Adult

Being an 11 year old in 2004, I was aware of and watched these movies. To be honest, all the films are relatively similar; the only difference is that some of the films have more violence and profanity than the others.

With The Road in particular, the movie was an adaptation of a novel. Typically, movie adaptations of books don’t turn out to be very successful. However The Road fared well, winning “Best Cinematography” and being nominated for “Best Actor, Best Performance by a Younger Actor, Best Screenplay, and Best Art/Production Design” at award ceremonies like the BAFTA awards, San Diego Film Critics Society Awards, and the Venice Film Festival.

I believe the reason The Road was so successful was due to its simplistic writing style. The vocabulary was fairly basic and the writing flowed like prose; “like poetry”, as Komali explained in her IOP. The Road was an easy read, yet it evoked graphic images in reader’s minds. These traits are largely due to Cormac McCarthy’s expressive writing style. The Road’s simplistic writing style allowed director John Hillcoat to expand and interpret The Road in his own fashion, and then transfer his ideas to the movie screen.

The Road had very few characters, and the general plot was fairly simplistic. There would be no cases of viewers complaining, “they left my favorite part out of the movie!” or, “I had always thought the character was taller and more handsome than that. The movie didn’t really make sense to me.” Cormac McCarthy’s writing style enabled The Road to be both a successful book and movie.

If anything, the movie took off where the novel stopped in terms of descriptive expansion. The movie put our imagination to real life. Let’s face it, what’s more interesting, reading about trees crashing to the ground, or seeing trees tumbling to the ground and hearing the cracking of the tree, the screams of the son, and the loud, crushing boom once the tree hits the ground?  Especially with a post-apocalyptic novel, a movie adaptation can bring to life the unprecedented disasters with the myriad of special effects present in our movie industry. A post-apocalyptic movie will probably have a greater affect on the viewer, regardless if the viewer prefers books or movies, simply based on the nature of a post-apocalyptic scenario.

Not all books are suitable for adaptation to a film medium; however, the movie captures the bleak hopelessness and solidarity with its large panoramic scenes of the father and son walking through a burnt and desolate world. The two-hour duration was not adequate, because a two-hour movie simply cannot capture the scope of the vast sense of emptiness and grey that McCarthy depicts in the novel. However, a post-apocalyptic movie simply cannot be longer than 2 hours; The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 are clear examples of elongated post-apocalyptic movie failures.

The Road movie adaptation had the potential to be a disaster. However, what saved The Road from failure was the fact that it wasn’t overkill. Yes, it was clear that the environment of The Road was terrible and that the father and son had to deal with dire circumstances, but Hillcoat did not over do it. For example, cannibal scenes were cut out from the film. Numerous cannibal scenes would have surely lessened the impact of the film, and would simply be redundant. Additionally, the scene of the gutted infant on a spit was cut as well. If all these vulgar scenes were added to the movie, the flood of gore would overplay the morality and love connections, themes, and symbols between the father and son. The movie would become a senseless post-apocalyptic horror flick, with no meaning or moral. There would be no art to the film, and the lessons learned on the father and son’s journey upon the road would be lost.

C'mon McCarthy…A Movie? But you seemed so different on Oprah.

During the interview between the Wall Street Journal and Cormac McCarthy, the Wall Street Journal asks McCarthy if he had any hesitations about seeing his novel, The Road, being adapted into a movie. McCarthy replied that he felt confident in the producer’s capabilities and trusted his agent to find someone who would make a respectable adaptation.

Generally, books that are made into movies turn out to be failures. This is because readers have already created images and perceptions of the characters and the narrator’s descriptions of scenery within the book. Then, when readers go out and see the movie, the adaptation is not synonymous with their picture.

Despite being an “obstinate loner”, as described in the New York Times article (http://theliteraturemachine.com/ib/files/2010/11/Cormac-McCarthys-Venemous-Fiction-New-York-Times-1992.pdf) McCarthy was comfortable with a movie being made about his book. I found this to be peculiar, especially for an individual as aged and traditional as McCarthy.

If McCarthy is supposedly not with the times, then why would he support the adaptation of his book? Surely it is not for the money. The New York Times stated, “McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. “We lived in total poverty,” says the second, Annie DeLisle, now a restaurateur in Florida. For nearly eight years they lived in a dairy barn outside Knoxville. “We were bathing in the lake,” she says with some nostalgia”.

Nor is it a case for McCarthy to increase his publicity by producing more works. When asked if the notion of aging and death increased his productivity, McCarthy replied, “I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

Clearly, McCarthy did not accept the adaptation of his novel for the conventional reasons. However, it only makes sense that McCarthy would do the unconventional, for he has that kind of personality.

To find out more, I read a screenwriting blog regarding the issue of the incentives that novelists have for accepting and allowing adaptations of their novels (http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/novelists-paid-adapations). Primarily, the incentive was financial gain.

I believe that McCarthy also allowed the adaptation of The Road in order to benefit financially, but not for himself. McCarthy relates his love for his son, John, to the deep bonded love between the father and son in The Road. McCarthy loves his 11-year old son so much, that he would do anything for him. The Road has this effect on fathers all over the world, instigating emotions that intensify their love for their children. One reader of The Road stated, “I started reading your book after dinner and I finished it 3:45 the next morning, and I got up and went upstairs and I got my kids up and I just sat there in the bed and held them”. McCarthy wants a better life for his son, because his son is his everything. Therefore, I believe the financial gains that he would receive from the movie caused him to allow an adaptation for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel.