Class started off pretty slow today; I will blame that on the fact that I made today's PowerPoint last December and I've started doing them in a different style since then. But, everybody woke up once we starting talking about sports movies and horror movies and genre and cultural narrative and all that good stuff.
I love talking about cultural narratives.
We watched this trailer for the movie A Knight's Tale, which is sort of a movie about jousting and knights, but really, it's a sports movie. An underdog, who starts out as nobody, trains really hard, overcomes obstacles, meets a final big challenge, almost loses, but wins in the end (and gets the girl). Here's the trailer:
We also watched the trailer for Coach Carter, a movie I haven't seen but someone in class mentioned. Actually, from the synopsis on IMDB it looks like a sports movie that also follows the "inspirational teacher" narrative (see: Dangerous Minds among many, many others).
We got into the beginning of a really interesting conversation about the horror genre that I would *love* to continue later. Here is an interesting article about some of the feminist response to horror that I started to bring up.
Also, we watched the video for "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails (directed by Mark Romanek). I didn't plan to show this today but things just kind of went in that direction. (I own it on DVD, the resolution is way better than youtube...) Here it is: beware, if you haven't seen it, the song is very sexually explicit. No one actually has sex or commits an act of violence in the video, but somehow it gives people that impression. I wonder how that works?
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