Posts

Showing posts from December, 2015

Trumbo vs. Spotlight

Image
Maybe I should pretend to write this blog post as a compare/contrast paper as I've requested that my students do. One of the habits they have that I fight to break is the sentence that stretches on and on until you understand that they are trying meet the word count so that they can call it quits. Title: Two movies based on factual occurrences that happened. First off, both oaf these movies, Trumbo  and Spotlight , have one word titles which are Trumbo and Spotlight . Both are about topics in society today that we care about. Both feature actors and are set in a specific time period not in the one of today. Trumbo , for example, is set in a time period known as The Cold War, or McCarthyism or Reaganomics. The second movie, Spotlight , is not about what it sounds like it should be about. For example, it is not about Mariah Carey or someone else on the stage where bright lights can be found. It too is set in a time period that is not the one we are in currently at this time, the

Preparing for the force to awaken

Image
I remember that when the original movie that came out in 1977, I liked Luke Skywalker the best. He was the good farm boy, with sky blue eyes and a cleft chin. He was the innocent, the one who was orphaned, the one with the quest. Han Solo, I thought at age 8, was too conceited, mean, and old. I identified with Luke, because he was in love with the Princess and she didn't seem to even notice him (much like Rawl Brown in my third grade class). Han Solo bossed him around and was unreliable, a rebel who had a giant teddy bear sidekick and a sneer. However, by the time The Empire Strikes Back c ame out in 1980, I had aged considerably (age 12) and so saw both Luke and Han differently. The actor, by this time, had been in a car accident, which aged his face and took away his boyishness. I actually don't remember much about the movie, except that the love story between Han and Leia was more of a focus and I was at an age where swooning kisses seemed like the only thing I ever wanted