"A film by Ross McElwee could be made by no other. Since his hilarious autobiographical breakthrough, Sherman's March, the profound artist-philosopher has been using his own life as a springboard to examine humankind's biggest issues, and tiniest. McElwee makes movies the way life might, ideally, be lived," said one writer for “Entertainment Weekly.” I completely DISAGREE with this critic. We all watched it, or should I say we all fought off sleep in order to stay awake and observe “Sherman’s March.” I just don’t understand how this critic could find this documentary hilarious.

Jamaica Kincaid is a great novel and short story writer. She writes about her personal life experiences, and she even builds on those experiences to make her works fictional. Her story “Lucy,” which we have all read in class, is a fictional tale. But I personally think that she wrote “Lucy” as an autobiography, just with more juicy details. Her background history matches extremely close to Lucy’s background in the novel.

Once again, I feel the need to talk about William Wordsworth. Many of us have just read the “Lucy Gray” poems, and that’s it. My guess: Not many people in our English class know the background to Wordsworth and why he may have written these sets of poems. Plus, there is just a lot of interesting things that happened to William Wordsworth before the “Lucy” poems. To start of, the man was born in 1770 and died in 1850 (he died at the age of 80, which was very old for that time period).

At the beginning of the semester we learned about William Wordsworth, who was a Romantic poet during the 18th century. We learned of Wordsworth because we read the “Lucy Gray” poems. Before Wordsworth wrote these Lucy poems however, he wrote a first edition poetry book titled “Lyrical Ballads.” Having had the pleasure to read some of his first edition poetry my senior year of high school, I remember a specific poem that stood out in my memory and touched my heart. “We Are Seven” is a lyrical poem that Wordsworth wrote in the 1790’s.

After watching a segment from Michael Moore’s TV show “The Awful Truth,” I find myself once again troubled by this man. I first noticed that his show was not serious, as it should be considering he wants to be taken seriously, but in fact was like a sit-com or stand-up comedy. And of course, he always has to attack someone, because Michael Moore could never be the bad guy himself. Bill Clinton is the first target, which lets the class know that this episode is from the nineties. Bill Clinton wanted to make a better health care for America, but apparently he never got around to it.

Today in class we finished watching “Life and Debt,” a documentary directed by Stephanie Black. After finishing the documentary and thinking everything over, I am still alarmed by the situation in Jamaica. I’m starting to realize that documentaries seem to have two effects on me. They either cause boredom or excitement. There really doesn’t seem to be a middle reaction for me. “Life and Debt” stirred up some emotional feelings for me, and they were stronger than I expected. I never realized that Jamaica had such a struggling economy.

For the group presentations held on Wednesday March 26, my group was assigned the introduction part of Frank Tomasulo’s “The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema.” After giving the presentation, I still feel the need to write about this essay. The purpose of this essay was to refocus the discussion about the film “Triumph of the Will.” This discussion should be evoked by the text of the film, which is actually more important than it seems. Tomasulo wrote that during the elections of the 1930’s, Hitler gained most of his support from the lower class.

Timothy Treadwell, the star of the documentary “Grizzly Man” was probably one of the craziest men I have ever had the chance to observe. He was also a brave man. I know I personally would never go live with Alaskan black bears for thirteen summers in a row. But I guess in order to do such a task for so many years, a person most be some what mentally unstable. But Treadwell did what he loved, and I guess that’s all the matters. I don’t blame him one bit, because he died doing what he loved. For people to criticize him for this is wrong.

I did my second paper on the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. It’s a documentary written and produced by the famous Michael Moore. In short, basic terms, Moore is trying to convince the public to be against George Bush in this documentary. He brings up old records that are supposed to be classified, testimonials from congress people, and shocking statistics. He uses emotions, such as shock, disbelief, pain, and sadness, to evoke negative feelings from his audience.

After watching “Triumph of the Will” I felt the need to write about it. I knew Hitler was supposed to be a great manipulator, but I could never really picture how great of a speaker he was. If I hadn’t known any better, I probably would have jumped on the band wagon with Hitler. He was so persuasive, so suave and clever. His words were spoken with such meaning and persuasion behind them. And in just a couple of years, he would be known as one of the world’s most destructive leaders. During the free-write in class, I described how Hitler was such a confident leader.