Extra Credit Movie Review. From Mike Lohre

 I have a movie that is up for review.

It is about the activist and graffiti artist Banksy and the title is Exit Through the Giftshop.  You can find it both on Netflix and Vimeo I believe.  The film is filmmaker Thierry Guetta's project to chronicle the underground world of street art.  His investigation takes a fascinating twist when he meets stencil artist Banksy.

The assignment: 

1> Take active notes, and you will turn in or send me a scan of your active listening as part of your points for this extra credit.  
2> Do outside research for terms and definitions needed to better understand the movie, the director, or a specific theme in the movie.  Include at least one outside source in your review.
3> Write a 2-3 page review of the movie.   Use MLA style.
4> Send me the finished review and your active reading notes at mikelohre@gmail.com  


Depending on the quality and coherence of your review, I will add from 1 to 3 percent to your OVERALL grade for the class.  This is usually engouh to bump you up one grade level (for example from a B- to a B or from a C+ to a B-.  

Have fun and good luck! 

This is due to me at mikelohre@gmail.com before midnight on Tuesday, April 28.

Journal Eight: from Ian

Part One:

Its hard to put into words everything you have learned since starting the non-fiction chapter, because each story is different and teaches you different methods of writing. I have learned that it is best to know exactly what voice you are trying to write in because that can effect the quality of the piece. Like if you are writing in first-person you then have to make sure that all of the other elements of your story all add up, my short story became a casualty of that. The readers have to be completely aware of what message or point is trying to get made in the story, and my story did none of that. Most of the pieces in this chapter are Narratives, but there is one that looks so out of place and has some kid of effect on the reader. The El Toro Rojo piece by Dinty W. Moore stood out right away because of the length, I like stories that get right to the point, in other words I am still a lazy reader, but I am working on it. Never the less after I read the story I realized that it was one of the most brief, yet entertaining stories. First thing I noticed was the title, even though I failed Spanish in high school I understood the title "The Red Bull", and immediately I know it is a story about matadors and how they have the red flag thingy and that's what I like about the story, I don't want to have to dig to find out what the underlying theme of a story is, I want it right in the title. The second thing that stood out about this piece was the author, not that I knew anything about him (I'm assuming), but his name. What kind of name is Dinty, and what could that possibly be short for? I like how it adds intrigue to the piece and a real sense of mystery to the piece, is this guy (?) Spanish? Or is he just observing something like this happening as a tourist from the outside.

Part Two: The essay i chose is out of the Harvard Review, which from the sound of the magazine it sounds like something about it would be worth reading. I have never really looked online for essays like this because i am always just scrounging the internet looking for the next thing to read. I will admit that i do not have the attention span of a normal person like say someone who doesn't use social media.

http://harvardreview.fas.harvard.edu/?q=features/fiction/my-family-recalls-cookout-circa-1989

This is a story that makes you go way back, to remember a time when things were not as good as they are today, and you are able to laugh about the stories that you have been able to tell along the way.  The story summed up is of a family reminiscing about a memorable family barbecue, which took place in 1989, awkward year it seems. What i've learned from this piece is that you always have to be able to look back at the bad times and just remember, theres always something better waiting for you along the way. That is a very powerful tool in writing because it can take us to different times and places.

Megan Wittkopf's Journal 8

Part one:  what I have learned so fair from our Writing Short Creative Nonfiction is that we need five things to make the story:

1) Personal presence: we want to reveal a great deal about ourselves and format it like a memoir.
2) Self-Discovery and Self-Exploration: even in our essays we can learn as we go and become more reflective.
3) Allow for Flexability of form and take a literary approach: we need to borrow techniques from poetry and fiction.
4) Veracity: It needs to be a real experience and reliably factual
5) Blurs boundaries between genres: We need to be able to imagine and see what is written underneath your story.

You also need to remember your 5 R's: real life, reflection, research, reading, and riting when beginning your short creative nonfiction. It all sounds like a bunch of rules but if your being honest and writing about a real experience and we are able to follow and picture your scenes you've mastered the idea!

I think Liferower   taught me the most about creative nonfiction. Rebecca McClanahan had three elements to her story: working out, her families heart problems, and her abortion. She did have one major scene, using the rowing machine at the gym. This is the place where she was remembering these themes. McClanahan uses a organized tactic by using individual blocks to separate her train of thoughts. Rebecca pulls us into her story at the part when the girl is comparing herself to the digital woman on the screen and mentioning how "she does not get tired" and how she needed to train her heart to make it stronger (this makes us wonder what she's been through? and why does it need to be stronger?". I personally love the line, "The heart is controlled by two opposing bundles of nerves, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic." This makes me think about her being the heart (the person in the rowboat) and the two bundles of nerves are the rowing paddles on either side of her. She needs to be like the digital woman and never tire or take an extra second between rows because she needs to be strong for herself (heart). This woman is afraid to be alone, failure, confidence "The yoga master assumes the lion pose, crouched and ready. She bares her teeth, lifts her mane into the air", and afraid of depression, "you are alone and your life is a rented room.". The end of the essay taught me that ending your story strong is very important. I love the way Rebecca McClanahan ended Liferower. The last yoga pose described how the woman was actually feeling, broken, by assuming the child position, helpless, shoulders down, knees folded to belly, hands and feet at rest, ears open to the slightest sound. The music was similar to a heartbeat "a two part harmony" reminding her to train her heart to be strong.

Part Two:

https://www.creativenonfiction.org/online-reading/man-tracks

The magazine is a creative nonfiction magazine that sells for $10. Their recent issue was about memoirs. You may also submit your essays to them but they must fit the subject they are asking for.  I read an essay Man On The Tracks written by Erika Anderson. This story is about a man who steps on a train track and the writer describes the possible thoughts going through everyone's head, eventually 3 men pull the man off the tracks but they don't say anything to him and just walk away. The man yelled train but the narrator said he was not allowed on the train and that he was confused because the man seemed fine (not high, drunk, or sad). The narrator talks about how he told everyone about the experience and all the responses were insensitive to the man on the tracks. In the end no one was concerned for the man on the tracks but for some reason was concerned about the person who witnessed it. I think Anderson is taking a stab at society because we don't really think about the strangers. We are often selfish of our emotions. The narrator should've helped the man, but debated helping because he could barely hold his groceries. The 3 men who pulled him from the tracks just walked away and left the man there. Everyone is wrapped up in their own business, no one really cared for the man!

Journal 8 from Dana

Last year, I started to get seriously into creative nonfiction. I remember reading Whatever It Takes by Paul Tough and The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, among other books, and what surprised me was how professional the tones of those two specific books tended to be in spite of their form. They shifted between being in scene, giving a narrative account of a time from the author's perspective while they were interacting with their subject, to giving hard, solid facts about their subjects. I wasn't used to that. I had thought all nonfiction was essentially a list of facts that were smashed together into the introduction-body-conclusion format. Impersonal. I had wondered if the books I were reading were strange, because besides the New Yorker, my only experience with creative nonfiction was dry, flavorless school texts. I didn't know that creative nonfiction was a bridge between storytelling and teaching.

What I've learned from the creative nonfiction chapter so far is that an essay doesn't have to be dry and impersonal to be quality. While I wasn't a fan of Montaigne, his essays really drove home the idea that the introduction-body-conclusion format wasn't the only way to go. "Someone, I have forgotten who, having won a naval battle, cut off the thumbs of all of his vanquished enemies, to render them incapable of fighting and of handling the oar." Someone? Who knows who! He could have been reporting on his time's equivalent of an urban legend. That reminds me of the "My name means..." piece I wrote for the fiction section of this class, which in hindsight is really more creative nonfiction. "I had read in my encyclopedia that a man named Dana won then Nobel Prize for literature which I cannot confirm the truth of day..."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/the-price-of-a-life

The New Yorker, in the coming years, may become the last bastion of investigative journalism. There's no shortage of quality, and readers often complain that the amount of time it takes to read and digest one copy, the next one comes out. I don't like to pick and choose what I read out of it, myself, but there are so many hours in the day and an unending supply of things to read! The essay breaches the topic of exoneration by talking about a specific case of John Restivo being wrongfully convicted and then freed. Then, it starts talking about the damage of being imprisoned and then exonerated. It reaches out from Restivo's case to talk about more specific facts and information, then reaches out to give a little scene at one point of an office dedicated to exonerating the wrongly convicted.

Journal 8 from Maddie

Part One: Out the the three essays, I learned the most from Joyas Volardoras by Brian Doyle. Not only was it my favorite piece out of the ones we read, but I have never read anything else like it before. As students, we have all done research essays with facts and statistics, but Doyle showed us that facts and research really can be creatively done. Compared to Scott Russell Sander's essay News of the Wild, where all the factual information felt like knowledge he already possessed. More likely than not, Doyle did a large amount of fact-finding research to write his piece, "Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside." Never had I imagined someone could make facts about bacteria sound beautiful. Before this piece, I limited my creative nonfiction writing to subjects I was already knowledgeable about that required no research and mostly wrote about things that have happened in my own life. This is a style of creative nonfiction I would like to try. In the analysis of this piece, I learned another important piece of advice, and that is to put your strongest material first. Now, of course you need an attention-getter that's going to draw in a reader, but I have always believed if I put the best thing I have to say in the beginning, I will dry out by the end. Doyle followed this example, and it worked well for him. After telling us to "consider the hummingbird for a long moment", he jumps right in with all of these fantastic truths about the hummingbird. I do believe the first half of this essay is the strongest part.

Part Two: The magazine I chose is titled Sweet. I initially clicked it because of the interesting title, but I was greeted by beautiful photography that headed the website which made me stay. On the home page was a list of the essay and poetry writers that were published in the latest issue and the title of their work. Each listing was a link that would take you directly to their piece to read. I selected an essay by Chelsea Biondolillo titled Crazy, again, I was intrigued by the title. It was a genuinely honest essay about herself and how she never felt beautiful compared to her best friend. This piece really exemplifies one of the first qualities we learn from our textbook that personal essays should have, "The personal essay is conversational-often ironic, humorous, even "cheeky"-in tone." It was absolutely all of those things and was a lot of fun to read.

https://sweetlit.wordpress.com/issue-7-2/prose-chelsea-biondolillo/

Journal 8: Katie

Part 1:
From reading the creative non-fiction chapter I have learned how easily it can be for writers to make an opinion come across in a piece without overtly saying it. It comes out in the words they string together in their essay's. Brian Doyle, one can tell he is fascinated by hearts. He talks about hummingbird hearts, whale hearts, and human hearts in detail. He explains how magnificent they are without saying they are magnificent. He very directly points to his opinion in a way that is not misinterpreted by others. The story that has taught me the most about creative non-fiction would be Rebecca McClanahan in Liferower. She strung together many ideas seamlessly that made sense to me. I feel like  my mind jumps between thoughts much like the speaker's did in the story. It taught me that my pattern of thinking is a form of art that I was unaware previously. This can be seen in the lines "I pump my legs and pull the rope. In a large area beside the rowing machines, a yoga class begins. The instructor greets the sun, breathing in prana, the invisible life force: in through the nose, out through the mouth." While the whole time the speaker is thinking of the things happening around her, she is jumping from observation to observation with a flow that still ties together.

Part 2:
The essay I read: http://thenormalschool.com/mr-plimptons-revenge-by-dinty-w-moore/
 The story is in the little chat bubbles FYI.

The magazine I found it in was "The Normal School- A Literary Magazine". It publishes non-fiction, fiction and poetry on its site. I found the essay on the home page. They seem to have a new piece published everyday or about every other day. After more poking around on the site I have learned they publish bi-annually. It looks like the people who work there have a good sense of humor as well.

What I learned from the essay is that an essay does not have to look like a typical school essay. This writer used a map as a background and used it to help establish setting in their story. The writer also used text boxes/ thought bubbles to type in, which I found very light hearted and fun. The examples we read in the book seemed to more serious than this essay, so I appreciated seeing a less serious essay published.