Darkness and Brightness

[mlc5948]

I am so happy to chat with you. You are so kind.Through chatting with you, I gain a lot. You tell me that confidence is really important. We not only communicate the films but also talk about our lives our hobbies. We have many same hobbies. We like hot-pot, milk tea! I feel like we know each other before! It's relaxing and fun to talk to you! We always have many topics to chat! You give me a sense of familiarity! I am so lucky to meet you!

Yes, it is! I love messaging you and it's very interesting exchanging ideas, culture, and questions. I hope we can continue to learn through our experiences and discussions to better ourselves and the people around us. I'm very satisfied with this cultural exchange and being able to understand a different perspective and learn about another culture that's outside of my native land. Thank you for spending so much time with me! I'll be re-reading your essay again soon and replying about any finding I may have whether suggestions or small details later thank you again!

[1848800785]

Hu Yi
We have watched two movies --- And the Spring Comes and Mona Lisa Smile. Here we focus on the colours and the specific ways of telling stories and setting scenes in them.
If someone comes to the word "spring", he will often be reminded of the new beginning of lives, the warm weather and some other beautiful things. And the word "spring" is usually related to the word "green". However, And the Spring Comes cannot give the audience such warm feelings. Sadly, if there is one word which can describe the colour of this movie, that should be "grey". Grey represents "boring", "lifeless" and even "hopeless", while green refers to "interesting", "lively" and "hopeful". Those bitter and sad stories are all "grey"; especially the breaks of the characters' dreams are "grey". The characters' moods are also "grey". Though the spring comes, those poor people only have the grey future.
While And the Spring Comes is not giving its audience some warm feelings, this movie cannot be faulted for realism. Instead of encouraging people to realize their dreams blindly, And the Spring Comes uses the harsh reality to alert people. There is no fault on someone who wants to realize his dream, but if this he cannot recognize that what surroundings he has and what he is not good at, his efforts will just be futile. In the movie, Wang CaiLing does sing opera well, but she doesn't recognize that it is impossible for her to work in Beijing at all because that there are too many people who are also talents in this area. Another character, Huang SiBao, who always wants to attend a famous art school, has never realized that he is not a gifted painter. He just insists that he is talented and will finally get the admission to his ideal school. Though the environment that they are living in is not friendly to people who work in art, if any of those characters who live a bitter life in the movie can estimate the situation with a clear head, maybe they will not experience such bitterness later in their life.
Different from And the Spring Comes, Mona Lisa Smile gives the audience some other feelings.
Compared with the grey in the And the Spring Comes, the color of Mona Lisa Smile is fresh and elegant and lively and tonal, although the film is full of women's independence and decadent ideas of the struggle, the film is full of people strive forward with the youthful vitality breath, the background setting of the film is fifty years ago, the life style in the film let people strongly feel clearly the sort of immortal spirit, making people see the surge of emotion surge. For example, the maple leaves on the campus of women's college float in the clear sky and fall on the path of the campus, which is full of classical romantic atmosphere, which is very suitable for the emotional atmosphere to be created in the film.
In contrast to the reality of And the Spring Comes, the Mona Lisa Smile is summed up in one word: romantic. The romance comes from the restored atmosphere of a 1950s women's college, from every exquisite scene, from the elaborate costumes of the characters, and from the "romantic" ending of each character.
Betty, who has an unhappy marriage, finally decides to divorce and catches an opportunity to further her education. Another student Joan follows her heart and chooses to be with her loved ones and to devote to her family. And teacher Catherine also goes to the more liberal Europe to pursue her dream! At the end of the movie, the girls ride bikes to see miss Katherine off. Now they are all smiling. The scene of them riding bikes is like they are riding into the future with hope!
Both of the films told about the difficulty of pursuing dreams, And the Spring Comes reveales the difficulty of pursuing dreams in a more realistic way，while Mona Lisa Smile gives us the hope to pursue dreams.

[mlc5948]

Hu Yi

Different movies have different colours. Different movies will also tell people things in different ways. Here we will take the Chinese movie And the Spring Comes and the American movie Mona Lisa Smile as our examples.

If someone comes to the word "spring", he will often be reminded of the new beginning of lives, the warm weather and some other beautiful things. And the word "spring" is usually related to the word "green". However, And the Spring Comes cannot give the audience such warm feelings. Sadly, if there is one word which can describe the colour of this movie, that should be "grey". Grey represents "boring", "lifeless" and even "hopeless", while green refers to "interesting", "lively" and "hopeful". Those bitter and sad stories are all "grey"; especially the breaks of the characters' dreams are "grey". The characters' moods are also "grey". Though the spring comes, those poor people only have the grey future.

While And the Spring Comes is not giving its audience some warm feelings, this movie cannot be faulted for realism. Instead of encouraging people to realize their dreams blindly, And the Spring Comes uses the harsh reality to alert people. There is no fault on someone who wants to realize his dream, but if this he cannot recognize that what surroundings he has and what he is not good at, his efforts will just be futile. In the movie, Wang CaiLing does sing opera well, but she doesn't recognize that it is impossible for her to work in Beijing at all because that there are too many people who are also talents in this area. Another character, Huang SiBao, who always wants to attend a famous art school, has never realized that he is not a gifted painter. He just insists that he is talented and will finally get the admission to his ideal school. Though the environment that they are living in is not friendly to people who work in art, if any of those characters who live a bitter life in the movie can estimate the situation with a clear head, maybe they will not experience such bitterness later in their life.

Different from And the Spring Comes, Mona Lisa Smile gives the audience some other feelings.

Compared with the grey in the And the Spring Comes, the color of the film is fresh and elegant and lively and tonal, although the movie is full of women's independence and decadent ideas of the struggle, but the film is full of people strive forward with the youthful vitality breath, although it was fifty years ago, life style, let people strongly feel clearly however the sort of immortal spirit, make people see the surge of emotion surge, deeply touched. The maple leaves on the campus of women's college float in the clear sky and fall on the path of the campus, which is full of classical romantic atmosphere, which is very suitable for the emotional atmosphere to be created in the film.

In contrast to the reality of And the Spring Comes, the Mona Lisa Smile is summed up in two words: romantic. The romance comes from the restored atmosphere of a 1950s women's college, from every exquisite scene, from the elaborate costumes of the characters, and from the "romantic" ending of each character.

Betty, who has an unhappy marriage, finally get a brave to divorce and an opportunity to further her education. Joan follows her heart and chooses to be with her loved ones and to devote to her family. And teacher Catherine also goes to the more liberal Europe to pursue her dream! At the end of the movie, the girls ride bikes to see miss Katherine off. Now they are all smiling. The scene of them riding bikes is like they are riding into the future with hope!

Both of the two films told about the difficulty of pursuing dreams, And the Spring Comes reveales the difficulty of pursuing dreams in a more realistic way. People finally have to yield to reality and return to ordinary life, while Mona Lisa Smile gives us the hope to pursue dreams.

I’m going to write out a few minor errors, your essay structure and the overall writing is fantastic so I wouldn’t worry to much about it. Although there are a few sentences that the fluency sounds a bit strange to me this can be seen within the first paragraph, “Though the spring comes, those poor people only have the grey future.” writing ‘thought the spring comes’ sounds a bit weird. I understand what you’re stating here but I would change it to, “Although when the spring season arrives, these poor people only have a grey future” or something along those lines. I’m not sure if you meant to have ‘spring comes’ within this sentence as a mention/ tribute to the film’s English translation of the title.

Also, I would let to add a suggestion about the second to last paragraph, “And teacher Catherine also goes to the more liberal Europe to pursue her dream!” When writing grammatically correct in English we usually don’t start a sentence with ‘and’, ‘but’, or ‘or.’ These words are known as conjunctions and they don’t lead the sentence as it’s improper and not grammatically correct as these words are meant to join two independent clauses together. Therefore, my suggestion here is to remove ‘and’ from the beginning of the sentence, whether this is from adding more words to the start of the sentence or just removing ‘and’ in general.

Finally, within the final paragraph, " And the Spring Comes reveales the difficulty" there is a spelling error that should be corrected. 'Reveales' should be 'reveals' as the plural form of reveal.

I hope these suggestions can assist you and inspire you to finalize your paper. Thank you for helping me with my own draft and talking with me throughout this activity. I look forward to learning and talking about our culture differences even after this activity.

[1848800785]

We think this experience is really meaningful. We have never got a chance of doing the same task with students in other countries before. By reading the essay written by the foreign students, we recognize that they have many opinions of the two movies we have watched different from ours. Their essay also helped us improve our English writing. If we could have more chances of communicating with foreign students, we would do better.