The Sky Is Gray

I weirdly enjoyed reading this story. The language was a little hard to get at first but overall, I think it really complemented the story. If it was written any other way, I don't think I would have gotten the same feeling and thoughts as I did while I was reading it. I genuinely felt bad for that family but I felt great admiration for the woman and the way that she believed that they had to work for everything and that nothing was free. I also thought the generosity of the old couple was very sweet too. Theres not too many people nowadays that would just invite a random woman and her son into their home and give them free food. This story also had a few points that I believed didn't have much relevance to the story. In my opinion, the title also doesn't have much relevance to the story other than the weather and the fact that during the story they stated the title in a thought once.

Tomorrow the movie

After both reading the short story and watching the film, I definitely liked watching the film better. I didn't like the story because to me it was all over the place and I couldn't follow it at all. The movie was a little better in the sense that I had a better idea of what was going on. I liked how the story started out in the end and then went back and explained in the middle then went back to the end to bring it all back together in perspective. I thought the language was humerous-- Fentry talked like an idiot. Since it was so old, the acting was so dramatic and that was also funny. The only thing that I really didn't like about the movie was that the middle was so drawn out! After they took the kid they showed him running in the field for like 5 minutes. If they would have cut some of those unnecessary parts of the movie out, I definitely would have enjoyed the movie more. The adaptation from the story to the movie wasn't bad. There wasn't too many things that were hugely different but it wasn't quite the same either.

Tomorrow

I did not like reading the story Tomorrow. I felt like it was really hard to follow along partly because I found it boring which made it hard for me to really pick up what was going on throughout the story. I also thought that it was hard to keep the characters straight. I didn't get the gist of what was going on until the very end, which made it hard for me to keep my attention on the story. After watching the beginning of the movie, it kind of put the story into more of a perspective for me. I did like the part of the movie we did watch today better than reading the story. I thought it was a little wierd and drawn out but on the other hand, it was interesting hearing all of the language and seeing the different customs that were practiced way back then when it was actually filmed. Both the story and the movie are not even near anything that you would find being filmed now, unless the movie was focused in older times.

Memento Movie

I really ended up liking this movie. It was really hard trying to follow along because it was so jumbled up and it was even harder watching it on different days split between our classes, which was unavoidable. In the beginning of the movie, I didn't really like it because I didn't understand why it was jumping around so much. When I connected the movie with the story and that the movie was moving backwards, I started piecing everything together and started to really enjoy the movie. It was a bit too violent for eight o'clock in the morning, but I liked being able to predict what I thought was going to happen or in this movie predicting what happened to make the previous scene happen (since it was going backwards). The only part that I didn't like was the end. I was disappointed in the way the movie ended-- I thought it would at least go back until his wife's death and when Lenny was talking to Teddy in the end, it raised a lot of questions for me about what actually happened which didn't get answered for me. I think that could also be attributed to the fact that the story went backward. I could have seen the answer to my questions but because we were moving backwards, by the time they got raised in the end I forgot the details to answer my own questions. Overall, I thought that the movie was a good one and I would watch it again.

Memento Mori

This short story was odd to say the least, but as I read it I found myself actually liking it. I liked the beginning of the story more than the end. I think this is because I felt like I understood the beginning more as I was reading it. When the story started getting into what I believe to be letters to the man he wrote to himself it really started to get confusing. There were some parts of the story that really came out of nowhere that I still have no clue of the significance they had to the story. Parts such as the tattoo and the hotel room really confused me. But I feel like that was the point. The man obviously had some kind of brain injury that caused memory loss or Alzheimer's or something that caused him to not remember anything. I think that in writing this story so randomly and crazy that the author was trying to convey a bit of what the character in the story was feeling. He woke up every day not knowing anything that had happened in his life for quite some time. It almost seemed like he would come in and out of conscious thought and as he came to he wouldn't know what the heck he was doing. Which is exactly what I felt while reading it. I never knew what to expect nor did I know how he got there or what he was doing.

The Killers from page to screen

After both reading the essay and watching the movies in Thursdays class, I feel like I definitely understand and appreciate the short story The Killers a lot more. When I had just read the short story I didn't follow it at all which really made me dislike the entire story. Then we watched the portions of the movies in class. Of the two we watched I prefered the older version better. I liked the simple way it was filmed and the way it almost perfectly followed the story. That really helped me to connect what I was confused about while reading and it also helped me understand what Hemingway really was trying to convey. I did not however like the second movie we watched. I don't like the fact that the second movie was called Ernest Hemingway's The Killers and didn't portray one bit of the story line. It seemed like the only similarities between the two movies was that there was two "killers" and that the person recieving the hit didn't fight at all.

I did like reading the essay. I felt like the essay was very detailed in telling what happened in each of the movies and their similarities and differences both with each other and to the actual story. Reading this essay really helped me to not only connect each of the the movies to the short story, but it also helped me to connect each of the movies to each other as well.

The Killers

While I was reading the short story The Killers, I was very confused. I didn't quite follow the dialogue very well at all. As I was reading I felt like it would jump from one character saying something to another then to another without letting the reader know. Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention while I was reading and maybe I just need to read it again to understand better. I think another thing that threw me off a bit with this story was the beginning. In the beginning, there wasn't much of an introduction setting the scene before they started jumping into the dialogue. At least for me, I think this story would have been a much better and a bit of an easier read had the author set the scene and explained the characters in the beginning better. Another thing that bothered me about this story was the nicknames and the way that the people in the story were addressed. As if I wasn't already confused enough, the author really threw me for a loop when he started calling Adams and George, "bright boy" and Sam, "the nigger". I just didn't see the point in it and thats what confused me. When I got to the middle of the story when they started talking about killing Ole' Anderson, the story got a little more interesting. I was able to follow it better after that. Through the end when Nick went and told Anderson that those men were going to kill him I was again a bit thrown off. I also don't understand how Anderson being a boxer or him not wanting to get out of his room tied into the story at all. I thought that the video on the blog of the people who remade this story was really kind of weird. I didn't think that it really followed the authors intended story line well. Overall I think the story was okay. I am used to reading autobiography books and self story books about things that really happened. I think that is a lot of the reason that I didn't follow this story like I would have liked. Maybe with more experience reading these types of stories, which I will be getting in this class, I can start to follow, understand and appreciate these stories more.