10/3/18

Today's lesson focused around the two 'I Will Be Able To's for our class which were: support a well written theme with objective evidence and, evaluate how an artist’s cinematic and literary choices of craft yield narrative consequence. Additionally River's stated two reminders that your first Be Reel Blog has to be posted by October 18 and also to bring in your summer reading book tomorrow (10/4). After these announcements, Rivers opened the class up with a discussion about the differences between theme(s) and topic(s) and reviewed what we went over yesterday. After this, the class was broken into groups to choose one of the themes that we had posted yesterday on the Google Classroom and to then find examples from No Country for Old Men that support that theme. After the whole class had shared the theme(s) they picked, and the evidence to support it, we analyzed an excerpt from A.O. Scott who is a Film Critic for the New York Times. Our task was to break down what he had said and put it into our own words. Scott's article claims essentially that, "Adaptations are best when filmmakers make their own material with the source, rather than copy what has already been given to them to adapt". We then finished the class with a breakdown of Scott's claims in the article and a short introduction to the Intertextuality Essay that we will be working on tomorrow. Although it might not seem applicable, the lesson from today's class can be directly related to real life. The main lesson that should be taken from today's class is that in order to have a good theme, you need to have equally good claims and supporting evidence. This goes for almost any aspect of writing, arguing, or even communicating in general; you need to have good evidence or reasoning to back up your theme/claim. You can see this technique even on TV or in a movie theater when watching a crime or mystery movie/show where reasoning and evidence is built up throughout the movie in order to come to a final point or conclusion. Another aspect of class that comes through into real life is that in order to have a good film adaption of a novel, the director needs to not be strictly bound to the actual story and should deviate from what is written so that it is an original and creative work. This can be seen in many movies that were based off of a book or novel. One famous example is The Shining, written by Stephen King and adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick, where Stephen King was very mad about Stanley ruining what he had done/built up in his book but Kubrick went on and deviated from what King had written. Now, The Shining is not only a incredibly famous book, but also a cult classic thriller movie with thousands of fans.