The End

Adaptation
Well, there you have it: the last class of the summer semester. And what a great class it was! We went around the room and each student talked about his or her final paper for a few minutes. Either they'd given the matter a lot of thought or they were amazingly adept at improvising. It was so interesting to hear what they had to say about the films and books they'd chosen as their topics, about what they'd learned in the course of writing their papers, and about what they'd learned concerning the adaptation process specifically. More than one student said that he or she had begun the semester assuming that the literary source is always better than the film adapted from it and now realized that sometimes the movie is better. I'm going to miss these students.

Discussion Topics

Adaptation

1) Would you recommend the fairy tale version of The Little Mermaid (the one in your text) for children?
2) What's going on with the ending of the fairy tale?
3) Was watching the film different for you, in the context of the literary version?
4) Did you notice anything in the movie this time that you hadn't noticed before? Did you feel any differently about the movie?
5) What is the movie about -- its main theme?
6) What is the fairy tale about?

The Gold Rush

The Gold Rush is a great example of just how important film restoration is. I'd seen this Charlie Chaplin silent masterpiece a few times, but I don't think I ever really saw it until this week, when I watched a newly restored print at Enzian theater. Of course the film looks better than it has since it opened in 1925, but there was something else going on, something a little mysterious. The themes were somehow clearer, the characters more vivid, the performances richer (especially Chaplin's amazing one) and the connections among the various scenes stronger.  I've always loved parts of this film, including the famous scene in which a starving Charlie eats a shoe (twirling the laces like spaghetti) and the also-famous scene in which he sticks forks into two dinner rolls and makes them dance. Now I finally get why it's considered one of his finest.

Discussion Topics

Adaptation

On July 30, our last class meeting, each student will have about five minutes to tell the class about his or her final paper, covering these points:
1) The film & text combination selected for the paper
2) The paper's theme
3) Why this material and this theme were chosen
4) Something, small or profound, learned in the course of researching and writing the paper
5) BONUS (optional): A random, general observation about films that are adapted from texts.

Lanewatch

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker's British movie critic, has struck yet again with his review of The Dark Knight Rises. As you may recall, Lane is temperamentally incapable of writing anything of length without referring to at least one of the 10 items on his Anglo-centric checklist: Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, 007, royalty, Harry Potter, Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie, Sherlock Holmes and something European (non-British, often French). His average seems to be about three of these references per article, and he's right on target in his latest effort. He references 007, royalty (the musical piece "Pavane for a Dead Princess") and something European (Ravel, the composer of that piece). Just for fun, he throws in a mention of Hitchcock and calls Bruce Wayne's living quarters a "castle." Clearly, the boy can't help it.

Volare

"Volare" is a lovely, romantic Italian song that was wildly popular in this country in the 1950s and early '60s. Dean Martin had a hit with it and practically every old-school pop singer, Italian-American or not, sang some version of it. In fact, it was so overused that for a while it became something of a joke. Woody Allen's latest movie, To Rome With Love, which is set in Italy, opens and closes with "Volare." I suspect Allen chose it both because it's a beautiful song and because it once had been a joke. I saw To Rome With Love in a smallish, pretty full theater, and as the song began at the start of the movie, most of the people in the audience spontaneously sang along. I know that sounds unlikely, but they really did. How hilarious, right? (It reminded me of how funny and refreshing it was to hear Dean Martin's version of "That's Amore," long after the song's heyday, at the start of Moonstruck in 1987.) BTW, To Rome With Love, which tells four or five mostly unrelated Rome-set stories, is a lot of fun in a facetious sort of way. The subject of the film is our collective fantasies.

Condition Critical

Early in her long, positive and rather pompous review of The Dark Knight Rises, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times makes a point of saying that Imax "is the way to see the film." Then she goes on to say nothing whatsoever about what Imax adds to the experience and, in fact, very little about any of the film's visual qualities. She does mention, in a vague sort of way, that director Christopher Nolan "continues to refine his cinematic technique" and that the action in the new film is "more visually coherent" than in the earlier films of the series, but that's about it. Oh, yes: she does use the word "visceral." Twice.