Lady Bird (2017)
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Beanie Feldstein, Timothée Chalamet, and Larry Letts.
Director: Greta Gerwig
Lady Bird is a 17 year old teenager living through her last year of high school in Sacramento, California. The film shows her going through the small but hard stresses of highschool with her friends, the relationship with her mother, and boy problems.
Lady Bird is Greta Gerwig’s debut as a writer-director, and it couldn’t have gone any better. The coming of age movie is like an autobiographical movie for her. Gerwig also grew up in Sacramento, dreaming of going to college in New York, which makes the movie all the more realistic.
The tone is set right from the beginning scene of the movie, which opens up with the dynamic relationship between Lady Bird and her mother. They are returning home after visiting some colleges and seemed to have enjoyed their time together, until Lady Bird mentions wanting to get out of California and experience culture. She then ends up jumping out of the car, and breaking her arm. Her arm cast represents her last years in high school as it goes through some of her first with her, and when she has her first breakup her cast also gets taken off. There are a lot of little details like this that I think makes the movie so much more interesting.
There are also many small scenes about her parents financial struggles. It’s almost like multiple movies in one. Gerwig does this so brilliantly with every character. They are all so well developed that you want to watch a movie about each of them. Gerwig somehow fits this all in an hour and a half.
This works so well because of the cinematography. Most of the scenes are quite short and sort of choppy, but they still flow perfectly together because of the transitions. One scene that I think shows this perfectly is when the family is all together for Christmas, then transitions to Lady Bird filling out her school applications and handing them in, while a countdown plays out in the background which transitions into a new years scene. Another scene where the music starts off a little dark when Lady Bird’s mom finds out she applied to for Columbia without telling her. This helps you understand how much her mom did not want her to apply thereir. The music transitions into a more cheery tone while the scene also transitions throughout Lady Bird’s summer where she starts a couple jobs, and finally gets her drivers license.
The cinematography, editing, and music makes the movie seem like its actually from the early 2000’s because of the orangey tone and slight grain. There’s one party scene where “Cry Me A River” by Justin Timberlake plays, and you almost feel transported into the scene.
The dialogue is very realistic and normal, sometimes the characters will have little mistakes and pauses when they are talking, which is normal, unlike most movies where everyone speaks perfectly. I really enjoyed the ending of the movie.
Lady Bird is such a relatable and realistic movie from all of the elements such as the dialogue, characters, music and sound. All of the characters are very well developed which helps you relate to at least one character. I think that’s what makes the movie so good because anyone can watch it and enjoy it. The story itself is very relatable as you watch Lady Bird go through her last year of high school, which most people have or are eventually going to experience. The love hate relationship is so powerful between Ronan and Metcalf it literally seems real. Many people can relate to it, especially from their teenage years. All of these aspects made the movie so enjoyable.
In the last summative assignment we had to research a job in writing. I then had to use the knowledge that I learnt from my research to create a slideshow. The slideshow was used to help teach a peer about the key elements of the career. The career I chose was film reviewer in journalism. I think this piece may have been one of my best ones because i really enjoyed the project.
I chose to do my final piece for film review as i’m very interested in pop culture and felt that I may do better writing for a career that I was actually interested in. I’ve also always enjoyed journalism and actually considered taking it in my post-secondary studies. I enjoy movies, and watching award shows like the oscars, so it made sense to me to choose this career. The movie I chose to write about was Lady Bird, which was nominated for 5 oscars, as well as many other nominations and wins at other award shows. I had also watched Lady Bird once before so I knew that I really enjoyed the movie, and remembered some important things about it in order to write a review. An important step to writing a movie review is to watch the movie a second time a take notes of it.
My research for this project helped me learn more about film reviewing. I didn’t really think that much work went into them. Knowing the key steps to writing a movie review helped me develop it better than if i had wrote it without knowing. This assignment challenged me with my writing task as I had never written a film review before. Even though film reviews are not the most difficult thing in the world to write, it was a little challenging for my first time.
Throughout this whole course I learnt many great elements to help me write, from poetry, stories, how to self and peer edit, how to create a fully developed plot and characters. All of these lessons greatly impacted my writing and helped me learn so much more about writing that I may have never learnt if I hadn’t taken this course. These cycles also made me realize what kind of writings I enjoy and don’t enjoy writing.
The peer edits I got from peers helped me realize what parts of my writing needed more work. This helped me become a better writer as I learnt from my mistakes, and learnt how to develop stories better.
In the future I hope to use the knowledge that I learnt from all of these learning cycles to make my future writing projects better. I now know how to self edit more efficiently which will definitely come in handy. Maybe i’ll end up writing film reviews on my free time, so that I can remember why I enjoyed a movie so much, or even why I hated one.
Thanks so much Ms. O’Callaghan for being such a great teacher in this course. You really helped me learn so many elements of writing in such a fun way!
This cycle taught me more of the key elements of writing non-fiction, fiction, heroic stories, and storytelling in general. I already knew a lot about the heroic cycle from past classes in high school, but it helped going through it again in more detail.
I chose my fourth writing prompt for the summative assignment as I felt like i created a stronger character in that prompt compared to my other writing prompts.
I learnt how to make a more realistic character from these lessons, and I think the activity where we had to fill out a chart and describe a character really helped with that, Usually when i’m writing I struggle with making a realistic character, even though it is my favourite part. Now I’ll take using a chart into consideration when making other characters in the future.
I think I definitely could have done better with developing my pieces if I had gotten mor4e advice from peers. But, I did go over my prompt multiple times and actually changed it up quite a bit from the first draft. This did help me be more harsh on myself, to be able to change it up.
It was the night of June 20, 2012. Shawn was sitting at his desk piled with homework tapping his pens on the desk. He couldn’t stop thinking of melodies in his head, making it almost impossible for him to focus on studying for his english exam in two days. He had been teaching himself how to play guitar from youtube videos, quickly learning songs from his favourite artists like John Mayer.
He grabbed his dad’s old camcorder, setting it up on a stack of his textbooks. He grabbed his cheap guitar and sat down at his desk. He took a couple takes to make it perfect. He made his own twist to “Summer Time Sadness” by Lana Del Rey, with his boyish voice. He decided to post the cover that night. He exhaustedly checked his phone after the video was uploaded, and saw that it was almost 2:00 in the morning. Shawn decided to go to sleep in his small humid bedroom, from the heat of the summer night.
Shawn awoke to his phone blaring with a flood of notifications. He anxiously checked his phone to see what all the commotion was about, even though at the back of his mind he knew it was about the cover. He was nervous that all of the comments were going to be mean, but they surprisingly werent. The video had already gained 500 views overnight, shocking him as he thought he wouldn’t get any.
“Shawn! Do you want anything to eat before you go to school?” Asked his mom from the kitchen.
“No thanks mom.” He replied.
He had lost his appetite from the excitement and anxiety from the video. He got ready for school in a hurry, with anticipation to show his friends what had happened. Shawn raced down the stairs into the kitchen, and out the door.
“Love you mom, see you later!” He blurted out.
“Love you to sweetie, have a good day!” She replied.
He got to school and found his friends sitting at their usual spot, under the maple tree in the front lawn.
“Guys, I finally posted a cover last night, and guess how many views it got over night?” He asked.
“I don’t know, like 50?” Brian questioned.
“No, it got 500, now it’s almost up to 600!
“Holy crap, that’s a lot for overnight!”
“I know, it’s crazy!”
The bell rang to get to class, and the group of boys dispersed to get to their home room classes.
Shawn got stopped in his tracks by Harry, the grade twelve. He was taller than Shawn about 6 foot 3, as he still had some more growing to do. Harry was colossal and muscular, as he enjoyed playing sports.
“Hey Shawn, nice video, you sounded like a twelve year old girl” Harry laughed,
“Shut up Harry, I just want to get to class” He replied,
“You know your voice isn’t going to be as good once you actually hit puberty, so i doubt you’ll ever become famous” Harry informed.
“I really don’t care about that, i just posted it for fun!” Shawn exclaimed.
Harry shoved him into a sturdy loacker, making a huge crash. Mr. Klein, the english teacher, swiftly rushed out of his classroom.
“Boys settle down, and get to class!” He demanded,
“But he pushed me!”
“But he pushed me” Harry silently mocked.
“Thats it go to the office!”
“Oh come on!”
Throughout this learning cycle, I learned a lot more about poetry than what I had known before. I learnt about found poems, figurative language, sound and structure, and spoken word poetry. I did not know that some of these types of poetry were actually a thing, so I definitely learned more about the different styles of poetry. I chose to do the second writing prompt for my summative assignment as the prompt was to look at a picture and write a poem or a paragraph describing the picture. I chose this one as it was the one I was the most comfortable with.
What I learned from this learning cycle helped me better understand poetry and all of the different ways you can write poetry. I never knew of found poems, and I found them quite interesting. The peer evaluation also helped a lot during this learning cycle as it helped think of new ideas in my poetry.
Because of the knowledge, I have learned from these writing prompts I can apply it to poetry I may have to write in other classes, and I can understand it more when I may have to read it as well.
Looking through old photographs, there is one that pulls me in.The old photo sits in my hand all withered and grey. So smooth and delicate, the photo holds so much beauty. The musty smell is overwhelming, taking over the whole room. Small, old and crowded.
The girl in the photo exudes a golden glow. It shines through the photo, illuminating the whole room. Old memories wash over me like a flood, drowning me in sorrow. The memories flash through my head like a slideshow. We were swiftly running through the green fields, powdered with freshly bloomed flowers. The sunlight beaming on her just like the photo. The birds were chirping sounding like a beautiful song. She spins around like a child on a carousel, in a light flowy dress as red as a rose. We would lay on the soft green grass as it tickled our toes. The heat of the fluorescent sun beating down on our young faces.
These happy memories stab my heart, sharp like a dagger. killing me softly, every time I look at these old nostalgic photos.
Remembering:
Throughout the cycle we learnt about writing as an art, a craft, and a vocation. Writing is an art because all writers create something different and usually original which makes it an art, it’s a craft because most of the time writers use an outline to create a piece and use archetypes to build their characters and plot of a story. Writing is a vocation for most authors as it can be their primary profit so they have to continue to write. We had to write four writing prompts written in different ways using the information we learnt for all of them. The first one was to write a piece using showing not telling were we had to expand on a vague sentence we were given and show a whole scene of what is happening rather than telling by using a lot of detail. The second one was using voice where we had to write about a topic using our own voice. The third was another voice one where we had to use our knowledge to write a piece as a different character that is not like your own voice. The last one was a persuasion topic where you had to write to separate pieces about the same topic, but in for two different audiences. I think my finished piece is a good example of my learning as I wrote in my voice using diction and used showing not telling to describe some parts of it.
Understanding:
This learning cycle helped me become a better writer as it challenged me to write in different ways that I wouldn’t have normally done. It challenged me in the showing not telling part as I really had to think and imagine how to describe things. I see how it fits the bigger picture of developing writer’s craft as the stuff I learnt has already helped me in developing my work more than I would usually develop my work.
Application:
I will use what i learned when writing projects for other classes to better develop my writing and make it the best I can.
Analysis:
I stuck to the deadlines for the tasks which definitely helped me get things done in time and not procrastinate.
Evaluation:
The learning from this cycle is important as it helped me explore different types of writing and bettered my writing. I think my participation in the learning was productive as I got everything done in time. I learnt that I need to work more on showing not telling as it can sometimes be hard for me to imagine so much detail. I think I have shown some growth in how I develop my tasks compared to previous tasks.
Creation:
I think I should maybe to some writing on my free time when I can to practice what I learnt from this learning cycle. My goals are to improve even more in my writing.
I need to improve on my showing not telling and the length of my pieces. My specific plans for improving this is to really go through my pieces multiple times a figure out the best ways to describe things.
I listen to music walking home from school, doing homework, and working out completely drowning out the noise around me almost all day every day, whenever I can, just like many other people. Almost everyone listens to music, if it’s on their phones, in the car, or even if it’s just playing around in shops. Even if you don’t listen to music all of the time you still hear most days from everything around you, in shows and movies, and from other people.
There are millions of different artists and plenty of different genres out there. The wide variety and selection is great because everyone can enjoy music as there is something different out there for everyone to like. Thinking about the wide assortment there is makes me feel tiny in this world full of people and things. I think the biggest factor that splits people’s favourite types of music is their age, because every generation had a different genre of music come out and become huge while they were young. I think my generation’s favourite music is usually from when they were teenagers, or other memorable times of their lives, as it brings them back to nostalgic times.
I love music because it helps me focus on tasks and also calms me down, like if I’m having an off day it helps quiet everything happening around me so I can focus and forget about everything. When listening to music, I can sometimes picture it in a movie as it just seems like it belongs in one because of the story it tells. Sometimes a song will make me feel like I am in a movie as it absorbs me into it. Sometimes while watching a movie there is a song playing in the background that just sounds so right and fits perfectly, which always feels so good.
The weirdest thing about music to me is that it can be so nostalgic and can make you travel back to your memories just from a single tune. I also love that right now in our society we have the ability to listen to all of the millions of songs and albums unlike any time before because of the internet and streaming services, like Spotify, and Apple Music. This astonishes me because their is so much music I have not listened to and probably never will, which is obviously fine because there’s no way I would like it all anyway.
Music is like the universal language to the world. Everyone listens to it no matter how different we all are because we all understand it.