ENG 282 Spring 2016: Responses

After your names: how many credits you have and name of last film response I read.  The list of links before your scores are student responses I recommend you check out.

Dennis Stephens: Citizenfour

Dennis Stephens: The Intruder (L'intrus)

Jeana Thacker: '2001: A Space Odyssey

Colin Smallwood: The Battle of Algiers

Kara Olsen - "The Reality of The Diary of a Teenage Girl."

Kara Olsen - Experimentation Gone Good: Michael Almereyda's The Experimenter

Kimon Henderson: Dear White People

Kimon Henderson: Gomorrah

Kimon Henderson: Blade Runner

Kimon Henderson: Mauvais Sang

Tambu Chirwa - "Gomorrah: The Need to Be Equal and Succeed By All Means."

Tambu Chirwa - "Cultural Control in Blade Runner: Concepts and Images"

Shea Kreft: Mauvais Sang

Jeana Thacker: Gomorrah

Shea Kreft: Blade Runner

Colin Smallwood: The Royal Tenenbaums

Dennis Stephens: Full Metal Jacket

Kara Olsen: The Royal Tenenbaums

Kimon Henderson: The Royal Tenenbaums

Barbara Grossman: On the Selection and Placement of Anachronistic Top 40 Songs in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket

Colin Smallwood: Polytechnique

Kimon Henderson: Rashomon

Kimon Henderson: Force Majeure

Tambu Chirwa: Polytechnique

Barbara Grossman: Polytechnique

Barbara Grossman: Force Majeure

Josh Lundborg: Polytechnique

Shea Kreft: Force Majeure

Colin Smallwood: Force Majeure

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Kara Olsen (20 credits; The Diary of a Teenage Girl)

Dennis Stephens (6 credits; Citizenfour)

Colin Smallwood (9 Credits; The Intruder)

Shea Kreft (8 Credits; The Battle of Algiers)

Jeana Thacker (20 Credits; The Witch)

Barbara Grossman (10 Credits; The Royal Tenenbaums )

Tambu Chirwa (11 Credits: Carlos)

Kimon Henderson (11 Credits: The Intruder)

Theresa Oiler (2 Credits: Polytechnique)

Michael Benton

Clouds of Sils Maria (France/Switzerland/Germany: Olivier Assayas, 2014)

Remembering David Bowie 1947 - 2016

Wow, this hit me very hard. I've always been mystified how we can be left devastated by the death of someone we have never met. When I heard David Bowie as a kid I suddenly felt like there was someone who understood how secretly weird and strange I felt. I remember secretly staying up late at night to catch him on a late night rock show (Midnight something or other) and was amazed by his daring challenges to serious social strictures of the era (this was the late 70s). In particular there was a scene of him walking down the street in a urban area while singing and people of all types coming up to him.... some embracing him, some kissing him, some talking to him and walking alongside. It was just something I had never seen a man do in my social environment at that time. His challenge to us was not overly aggressive like the masculinity of that era and his music reminded me that there were other ways of being a person in this world. Throughout my life when there were moments that felt unbearable I would play his songs and for awhile I felt as if I wasn't alone. Words just can't communicate what his music meant to me

Spring 2016 ENG 102 Resources

Alexander, Elizabeth, Maya Angelou, and Arnold Rampersand. "W.E.B. Du Bois & the American Soul." On Being (January 7, 2016)

Benton, Michael Dean. Ethical Reasoning, Pt. 1 Dialogic Cinephilia (October 6, 2015)

The Captors (Season 2 of Serial from WBEZ Chicago: "In May 2014, a U.S. Special Operations team in a Black Hawk helicopter landed in the hills of Afghanistan. Waiting for them were more than a dozen Taliban fighters and a tall American, who looked pale and out of sorts: Bowe Bergdahl. Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier, had been a prisoner of the Taliban for nearly five years, and now he was going home. President Obama announced Bergdahl’s return in the Rose Garden, with the soldier's parents at his side. Bergdahl's hometown of Hailey, Idaho, planned a big celebration to welcome him back. But then, within days—within hours of his rescue, in fact—public reaction to his return flipped. People started saying Bergdahl shouldn’t be celebrated. Some of the soldiers from his unit called him a deserter, a traitor. They said he had deliberately walked off their small outpost in eastern Afghanistan and into hostile territory. Hailey canceled its celebration. The army launched an investigation. Finally, in March, the military charged Bergdahl with two crimes, one of which carries the possibility of a life sentence. Through all of this, Bergdahl has been quiet. He hasn’t spoken to the press or done any interviews on TV. He’s been like a ghost at the center of a raucous fight. Now, in Season Two, we get to hear what he has to say. For this season, Sarah Koenig teams up with filmmaker Mark Boal and Page 1 to find out why one idiosyncratic guy decided to walk away, into Afghanistan, and how the consequences of that decision have spun out wider and wider. It’s a story that has played out in unexpected ways from the start. And it’s a story that’s still going on."]

Citizenfour (USA/Germany/UK: Laura Poitras, 2014: 114 mins) ["In January 2013, film-maker Laura Poitras received an encrypted e-mail from a stranger who called himself Citizen Four. In it, he offered her inside information about illegal wiretapping practices of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. Poitras had already been working for several years on a film about mass surveillance programs in the United States, and so in June 2013, she went to Hong Kong with her camera for the first meeting with the stranger, who identified himself as Edward Snowden. She was met there by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill. Several other meetings followed. Citizenfour is based on the recordings from these meetings. What follows is the largest confirmations of mass surveillance using official documents themselves, the world has never seen…"]

Force Majeure (Sweden/France/Denmark/Norway: Ruben Östlund, 2014: 118 mins)

Galibert-Laîné, Chloé. "Why Framing Matters in Movies." Keyframe (January 1, 2016)

Konnikova, Maria. "How Stories Deceive." The New Yorker (December 29, 2015)

Loewen, James W. "1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus." Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. The New Press, 2008: 29-65.

---. "Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-making." Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. The New Press, 2008: 9-28.

Pin-Fat, Veronique. "How Do We Begin to Think About the World." Global Politics: A New Introduction. 2nd. edition. Ed. by Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss. Routledge, 2014: 20-38.

Porriat, Elenore. "Oppressed Minority." (Posted on Youtube: February 5, 2014)

Rohde, Stephen. "Big Brother Is Watching You: Is America at Risk of Becoming Orwell’s Nightmare?" Los Angeles Review of Books (January 6, 2015)

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge, 1979.

Zero Dark Thirty (USA: Kathryn Bigelow, 2012: 157 mins)

Zinn, Howard. "A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present."  Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.

--. The Twentieth Century: A People's History Harper-Perennial, 2003 (audio version).

Election (Hong Kong: Johnnie To, 2005)

Election (Hong Kong: Johnnie To, 2005: 101 mins)

Bettinson, Gary. "Sounds of Hong Kong Cinema: Johnnie To, Milkyway Image, and the Sound Track." Jump Cut #55 (Fall 2013)

Heath, Roderick. "Election. Ferdy on Film (July 13, 2010)

Hendrix, Grady. "Milestones: Key Hong Kong Movies from 1996 to 2013." Film Comment (May/June 2014)

 López, Cristina Álvarez & Adrian Martin. "Video Essay: Two Takes on Strategy in Johnnie To’s Election." Notebook (December 19, 2015)

Miksic, Jesse. "Gritty February movie discussion: Johnnie To's Election." Benefit of the Doubt (February 11, 2010)

Spring 2016 Bluegrass Film Society

1/10: The Revenant (USA: Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015: 156 mins)

1/11:  I Can't Sleep (France/Germany/Switzerland: Claire Denis, 1994: 110 mins)

1/13: Velvet Goldmine (UK: Todd Haynes, 1998: 124 mins)

1/17: Carol (USA: Todd Haynes, 2015: 118 mins) 

1/24: The Room (Ireland/Canada: Lenny Abrahamson, 2015: 118 mins)

1/25: Phoenix (Germany/Poland: Christian Petzold, 2014: 98 mins)

1/27: L'Immortelle (France: Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1963: 101 mins)

1/31: Anomalisa (USA: Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman, 2015: 90 min

2/1: Branded to Kill (Japan: Seijun Suzuki, 1967: 91 mins)

2/3: Tangerine (USA: Sean Baker, 2015: 88 mins)

2/8: Song of the Sea (Ireland/Denmark/Belgium/Luxembourg/France: Tomm Moore, 2014: 93 mins)

2/10: Chi-Raq (USA: Spike Lee, 2015: 118 mins)

2/15: The Hunger (UK/USA: Tony Scott, 1983: 97 mins)

2/16: Hail, Caesar! (UK/USA: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2016: 106 mins)

2/17: The Forbidden Room (Canada: Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, 2015: 130 mins)

2/22: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (West Germany: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972: 125 mins)

2/24: The Witch (USA/UK/Canada/Brazil: Robert Eggers, 2015: 92 mins)

2/29: Son of Saul (Hungary: László Nemes, 2015: 107 mins)

3/2: French Blood (France: Disteme, 2015: 98 mins)

3/7: Clouds of Sils Maria (France/Germany/Switzerland: Olivier Assayas, 2014: 124 mins)

3/9: I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK (South Korea: Park Chan-Wook, 2006: 105 mins)

3/21: Possession (France/West Germany: Andrzej Zulawski, 1981: 124 mins)

3/23: The Assassin (Taiwan/China/Hong Kong/France: Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2015: 105 mins)

3/28:  A Bullet for the General (Italy: Damiano Damiani, 1966: 115 mins)

3/30: Memphis (USA: Tim Sutton, 2013: 75 mins)

4/4: Experimenter (USA: Michael Almereyda, 2015: 98 mins)

4/5: How to Survive a Plague (USA: David France, 2012: 110 mins)

4/6: The Diary of a Teenage Girl (USA: Marielle Heller, 2015: 102 mins)

4/11: Lady Snowblood (Japan: Toshiya Fujita, 1973: 97 mins)

4/13: The Tribe (Ukraine/Netherlands: Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, 2014: 126 mins)

4/18: The Important Thing Is to Love! (France/Italy/West Germany: Andrzej Zulawski, 1975: 109 mins)

4/20: The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (USA: Stanley Nelson, 2015: 115 mins)

4/27: Kill the Messenger (USA: Michael Cuesta, 2014: 112 mins)

5/2: Stroszek (West Germany: Werener Herzog, 1977: 115 mins)

5/4:  Why Don't You Play in Hell (Japan: Shion Sono, 2013: 129 mins)

ENG 282: 1900s

1902:

A Trip to the Moon (France: Georges Méliès, 1902: 13 mins)

Knudsen, Tyler. "A Trip to the Moon." What I Learned From Watching (Posted on YouTube: November 26, 2014)