Part 1 Super 8” Written and Directed and co-produced by J.J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg
J.J. Abrams is a master at grabbing your attention. In this science fiction thriller a group of young teenagers get caught up in events that are not of this world. The film is set in the 1979 in a small town in Ohio. The movie opens at the wake of the main character's’ mother who died in a steel mill accident. This leaves a father to raise his young son alone, the son, Joe Lamb is left with a locket as a memento to remember his mother and he carries it with him and holds it as a charm in times of stress. Four months after the death of Joe’s mother it is the start of summer vacation. Joe and his friends are working on a zombie movie to enter into an international film competition. They need a leading lady so one of the boys convinces a pretty girl on the last day of school to help them complete the movie. The girl, Alice happens to be the one that Joe has had a long standing crush on, reluctantly volunteers. Alice, Joe and the rest of the boys sneak out at night to the local train station at midnight to film a crucial scene in the movie. While practicing and getting ready to shot a scene a train can be heard approaching. They decide it would be cool to have the oncoming train in the film so they start filming.
The train crashes because their biology teacher rams his truck into the train. Barely escaping death the kids find the Teacher half alive and he tells them to run or they will be killed. As the kids leave the wrecked train they gather their equipment and leave just as the military arrives. Everything is fine for a short while, but odd things start to happen around town. When they develop the film they can see that an alien creature escaped from the train. It turns out that the teacher had worked on studying the alien that crash landed on our planet twenty years early and derailed the train to try to free it from its prolonged captivity by our government. Through a series of events the group of misfit kids end up aiding the not so nice alien to escape the government, rebuild its ship, and leave the planet. In the process Joe and Alice find love and Joe finds a way to let go of his mother and move forward in his life, with only a few casualties to the government soldiers and the local populous. The main purpose of this film is defiantly to keep the audience entertained with outstanding visual effects mixed with excitement created by a series of near death experience for the young main characters. The Story line gives us a moral problem to consider. Is it okay to keep a sentient alien captive so that we can research it? The quick and obvious quick answer is reflected in the middle school tendency to solve the world’s problems and they come to the conclusion that it is not okay. The Military sees it differently; they want to keep the creature captive to study because it has violent tendencies that might mean they are a threat to human existence. In a movie that is supposed to capture the imagination of middle level kids, the kid’s point of view wins out. Even though the alien is not a nice cuddly lost alien, but is aggressive, large, violent, and deadly the students see past that to the moral imperative and in the end help the alien leave and escape back to where it came from. Hopefully this advanced alien race does not see our planet as a place that needs to be cleansed of human existence.
Part 2 Having grown up in the time period that the movie is set it had extra entertainment value for me. It accurate caught the feel and look of the late seventies. The premise of making a Super 8 film brought me back to my own childhood of playing with cameras and making and setting up scenes to capture on film. The added ambition of the highly intelligent adolescents who are trying to win an international film competition adds that dreaming component to what kids that age often fantasize about. Those endless summer days when kids sit around and say what if or wouldn’t it be cool if we did this, these kids took that daydreaming a step further and said we can do this. We can win that international competition. The end of the film does not leave you hanging and shows you the well put together completed zombie film that they entered in the competition. So this film has elements that entertain and keep the attention of an adult and a middle/ high school audience.
Troubling is the depiction of gender roles in the group of young people. The males take charge of running all the equipment for filming and being in charge reinforcing gender roles. It is the girl that ends up needing to be saved from the alien, this leads to the budding romance with her Knight in shining armor, Joe. The girl is portrayed a something to be coveted by the boys as she puts on a stellar performance for the camera. Being the lone girl in the group she is painted as a bad girl breaking the ranks of good girl status. She borrows the family car and drives without a license to transport the boys, as if only a “bad” girl would chose to hang out with a bunch of guys. The guys in the group all play to the stereotype that those athletic boys with lots of male prowess would not be working on an intellectual project of making a film over the summer. The stereotypes also extend to the public image of geeky adolescent boys that don’t seem to fit in. You have Joe the main character trying to overcome his immature stature and win the tall blonde beautiful girls heart as if trying to overcome his lack of reaching his delayed growth spurt. The making of the other boys in the group as purposely unattractive bunch of stereotyped fringed adolescents. There is the leading man in the film who has gained his man height without his man muscle. With him is the overweight smart kid with obvious facial acne that is the brains behind the film. You also have the boy with long hair in desperate need of braces. It’s as if J.J. Abrams walked into a middle school and found all the boys with some sort of typical adolescent male problem.
Anything that draws a middle school teacher like myself into the world of young adolescence, fictitious or not, gives insight into the struggles our students can face. In this movie it is the everyday lives not the aliens that illustrate the problems that these students face, the problems and concerns that students have during a regular day are part of who they are but are not seen in the classroom. The student struggling with the loss of a parent, the girl struggling with a poor and non ideal home life, the large out of place not very handsome bright boy trying to find a place to fit in, the boy that is old by his age but young in height and build, and the list goes on. The struggle is real for these kids and is mostly overlooked by adults. Time separates us from those adolescent years, and we lose touch with our younger selves as we take on more and more responsibility. To be more compassionate to our students struggles it might help to remember what it was like to be that underdeveloped, non athletic, and non macho boy living among others perceived as meeting society's standards.
The film The Princess Diaries follows the life of a frizzy haired, lanky teenage girl who is trying get by day by day in her school. Mia Thermopolis has a close (equally quirky) friend named Lily. The two of them try to navigate their adolescent years, dealing with crushes and social awkwardness in the lunchroom. Mia is the daughter to a single mom. She lives in San Francisco in an art studio with her and they have a close relationship, although at times Mia feels like she isn’t understood by her mother. Within minutes of the start of the movie, Mia discovers that her estranged father has passed away and was actually the prince of the country of Genovia. Mia is the next in line to the throne! Mia is completely overwhelmed by this news. She is trying to navigate the halls of her school without being made fun of, how will she rule a country? There is also a level of frustration because even though she struggles socially in school, she doesn’t necessarily want to give up her friends and typical teenager experiences to leave for Genovia. The majority of the film follows Mia as she receives “Princess training” classes by the Queen (Julie Andrews) of Genovia. After her training is complete, Mia promises her family that she will decide whether she wants to follow in her father’s footsteps. As a Disney film, the main purpose of the film is to entertain their young, female audience. When I was in middle school I remember watching this over and over again as I wished my life could suddenly change and be given the opportunity to be a princess or have a secret past. Mia Thermopolis is also a very relatable character to young girls because she feels invisible. She feels invisible even when she finds out she is a princess. This resonates with young adolescents because there are strong feelings of isolation, invisibility and not fitting in. According to Nakkula, “because so much is in flux in adolescence,
the question, “Who am I?” is asked with great passion and urgency. It is not a stretch to claim that forming the core of the identity is the pivotal task of adolescence…” (10). Mia is not only trying to identify who she is within the constructs of her home and school, but now she must decide who she is on a global scale. While the film contains a quirky protagonist and keeps the audience’s attention through playful scenes, it unfortunately falls into the gender norm trap that many Disney films seem to do. Mia must decide whether she wants to continue to be a misfit or princess, instead of highlighting her strong academic skills at her well-to-do private school. The film assumes that princess is the next best step for a girl who isn’t popular and this could be her ticket to success. There is also a message sent to young girls during the “makeover” scene. When Mia finds out she is a princess, she doesn’t quite “look” like a princess so she goes through a series of makeovers, including a waxing of her eyebrows and tanning! It is not until she changes who she is that a boy starts to see her and she is worthy of the Queen’s time to be trained into a princess. This sends strong message to girls that you must change who you are in order to be recognized, reinforcing the theory of foreclosed identity, and “...expectations from others are accepted without question and then rigidly maintained regarding of selling or relationship” (Nakkula 29). Mia accepts the princess makeover and training, even though it makes her uncomfortable. She eventually has a breakdown towards the end of the film because she can no longer maintain the identity and is confused as to what role she is assuming. As a middle level educator this film reminded me the pressures our students are facing to assume a role in order to claim some sort of identity. Just like Mia Thermopolis, our students are looking for ways to create identity and answer the question, “who am I?” without making waves and losing friends in the process. This film also showed me an extra layer of pressure that girls face during this age. They are physically changing and feel just like Mia did, but society is telling them they must look a certain way in order to be deemed worthy and important. My recommendation for this film would be to watch in with a young adolescent and use it as a conversation starter for a bigger conversation on identity. If we discuss with girls about what happened to Mia and align it to what they might be feeling, it could be a powerful tool. I would recommend watching this film and coupling it with a reading or film showing a young adolescence being successful in their social circles without having to change, perhaps watching or reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
Here goes...
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgyZjbzS18A - trailer
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lXnnU2sxgfgzt1rbvUqFsit0wf3gyhJjfY1HP4vWLxM/edit?usp=sharing - review
Part 1
ReplyDeleteSuper 8”
Written and Directed and co-produced by J.J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg
J.J. Abrams is a master at grabbing your attention. In this science fiction thriller a group of young teenagers get caught up in events that are not of this world. The film is set in the 1979 in a small town in Ohio. The movie opens at the wake of the main character's’ mother who died in a steel mill accident. This leaves a father to raise his young son alone, the son, Joe Lamb is left with a locket as a memento to remember his mother and he carries it with him and holds it as a charm in times of stress. Four months after the death of Joe’s mother it is the start of summer vacation. Joe and his friends are working on a zombie movie to enter into an international film competition. They need a leading lady so one of the boys convinces a pretty girl on the last day of school to help them complete the movie. The girl, Alice happens to be the one that Joe has had a long standing crush on, reluctantly volunteers. Alice, Joe and the rest of the boys sneak out at night to the local train station at midnight to film a crucial scene in the movie. While practicing and getting ready to shot a scene a train can be heard approaching. They decide it would be cool to have the oncoming train in the film so they start filming.
The train crashes because their biology teacher rams his truck into the train. Barely escaping death the kids find the Teacher half alive and he tells them to run or they will be killed. As the kids leave the wrecked train they gather their equipment and leave just as the military arrives. Everything is fine for a short while, but odd things start to happen around town. When they develop the film they can see that an alien creature escaped from the train. It turns out that the teacher had worked on studying the alien that crash landed on our planet twenty years early and derailed the train to try to free it from its prolonged captivity by our government. Through a series of events the group of misfit kids end up aiding the not so nice alien to escape the government, rebuild its ship, and leave the planet. In the process Joe and Alice find love and Joe finds a way to let go of his mother and move forward in his life, with only a few casualties to the government soldiers and the local populous.
The main purpose of this film is defiantly to keep the audience entertained with outstanding visual effects mixed with excitement created by a series of near death experience for the young main characters. The Story line gives us a moral problem to consider. Is it okay to keep a sentient alien captive so that we can research it? The quick and obvious quick answer is reflected in the middle school tendency to solve the world’s problems and they come to the conclusion that it is not okay. The Military sees it differently; they want to keep the creature captive to study because it has violent tendencies that might mean they are a threat to human existence. In a movie that is supposed to capture the imagination of middle level kids, the kid’s point of view wins out. Even though the alien is not a nice cuddly lost alien, but is aggressive, large, violent, and deadly the students see past that to the moral imperative and in the end help the alien leave and escape back to where it came from. Hopefully this advanced alien race does not see our planet as a place that needs to be cleansed of human existence.
Part 2
ReplyDeleteHaving grown up in the time period that the movie is set it had extra entertainment value for me. It accurate caught the feel and look of the late seventies. The premise of making a Super 8 film brought me back to my own childhood of playing with cameras and making and setting up scenes to capture on film. The added ambition of the highly intelligent adolescents who are trying to win an international film competition adds that dreaming component to what kids that age often fantasize about. Those endless summer days when kids sit around and say what if or wouldn’t it be cool if we did this, these kids took that daydreaming a step further and said we can do this. We can win that international competition. The end of the film does not leave you hanging and shows you the well put together completed zombie film that they entered in the competition. So this film has elements that entertain and keep the attention of an adult and a middle/ high school audience.
Troubling is the depiction of gender roles in the group of young people. The males take charge of running all the equipment for filming and being in charge reinforcing gender roles. It is the girl that ends up needing to be saved from the alien, this leads to the budding romance with her Knight in shining armor, Joe. The girl is portrayed a something to be coveted by the boys as she puts on a stellar performance for the camera. Being the lone girl in the group she is painted as a bad girl breaking the ranks of good girl status. She borrows the family car and drives without a license to transport the boys, as if only a “bad” girl would chose to hang out with a bunch of guys. The guys in the group all play to the stereotype that those athletic boys with lots of male prowess would not be working on an intellectual project of making a film over the summer. The stereotypes also extend to the public image of geeky adolescent boys that don’t seem to fit in. You have Joe the main character trying to overcome his immature stature and win the tall blonde beautiful girls heart as if trying to overcome his lack of reaching his delayed growth spurt. The making of the other boys in the group as purposely unattractive bunch of stereotyped fringed adolescents. There is the leading man in the film who has gained his man height without his man muscle. With him is the overweight smart kid with obvious facial acne that is the brains behind the film. You also have the boy with long hair in desperate need of braces. It’s as if J.J. Abrams walked into a middle school and found all the boys with some sort of typical adolescent male problem.
Anything that draws a middle school teacher like myself into the world of young adolescence, fictitious or not, gives insight into the struggles our students can face. In this movie it is the everyday lives not the aliens that illustrate the problems that these students face, the problems and concerns that students have during a regular day are part of who they are but are not seen in the classroom. The student struggling with the loss of a parent, the girl struggling with a poor and non ideal home life, the large out of place not very handsome bright boy trying to find a place to fit in, the boy that is old by his age but young in height and build, and the list goes on. The struggle is real for these kids and is mostly overlooked by adults. Time separates us from those adolescent years, and we lose touch with our younger selves as we take on more and more responsibility. To be more compassionate to our students struggles it might help to remember what it was like to be that underdeveloped, non athletic, and non macho boy living among others perceived as meeting society's standards.
http://youtu.be/bqt9L4fIExA
ReplyDeletehttp://123movies.ru/film/the-bad-news-bears-9071/
ReplyDeleteThe Original Bad News Bears
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe Princess Diaries (Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrews) 2001.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc9JCzZJmfM
The film The Princess Diaries follows the life of a frizzy haired, lanky teenage girl who is trying get by day by day in her school. Mia Thermopolis has a close (equally quirky) friend named Lily. The two of them try to navigate their adolescent years, dealing with crushes and social awkwardness in the lunchroom. Mia is the daughter to a single mom. She lives in San Francisco in an art studio with her and they have a close relationship, although at times Mia feels like she isn’t understood by her mother. Within minutes of the start of the movie, Mia discovers that her estranged father has passed away and was actually the prince of the country of Genovia. Mia is the next in line to the throne! Mia is completely overwhelmed by this news. She is trying to navigate the halls of her school without being made fun of, how will she rule a country? There is also a level of frustration because even though she struggles socially in school, she doesn’t necessarily want to give up her friends and typical teenager experiences to leave for Genovia. The majority of the film follows Mia as she receives “Princess training” classes by the Queen (Julie Andrews) of Genovia. After her training is complete, Mia promises her family that she will decide whether she wants to follow in her father’s footsteps.
DeleteAs a Disney film, the main purpose of the film is to entertain their young, female audience. When I was in middle school I remember watching this over and over again as I wished my life could suddenly change and be given the opportunity to be a princess or have a secret past. Mia Thermopolis is also a very relatable character to young girls because she feels invisible. She feels invisible even when she finds out she is a princess. This resonates with young adolescents because there are strong feelings of isolation, invisibility and not fitting in. According to Nakkula, “because so much is in flux in adolescence,
the question, “Who am I?” is asked with great passion and urgency. It is not a stretch to claim that forming the core of the identity is the pivotal task of adolescence…” (10). Mia is not only trying to identify who she is within the constructs of her home and school, but now she must decide who she is on a global scale.
DeleteWhile the film contains a quirky protagonist and keeps the audience’s attention through playful scenes, it unfortunately falls into the gender norm trap that many Disney films seem to do. Mia must decide whether she wants to continue to be a misfit or princess, instead of highlighting her strong academic skills at her well-to-do private school. The film assumes that princess is the next best step for a girl who isn’t popular and this could be her ticket to success. There is also a message sent to young girls during the “makeover” scene. When Mia finds out she is a princess, she doesn’t quite “look” like a princess so she goes through a series of makeovers, including a waxing of her eyebrows and tanning! It is not until she changes who she is that a boy starts to see her and she is worthy of the Queen’s time to be trained into a princess. This sends strong message to girls that you must change who you are in order to be recognized, reinforcing the theory of foreclosed identity, and “...expectations from others are accepted without question and then rigidly maintained regarding of selling or relationship” (Nakkula 29). Mia accepts the princess makeover and training, even though it makes her uncomfortable. She eventually has a breakdown towards the end of the film because she can no longer maintain the identity and is confused as to what role she is assuming.
As a middle level educator this film reminded me the pressures our students are facing to assume a role in order to claim some sort of identity. Just like Mia Thermopolis, our students are looking for ways to create identity and answer the question, “who am I?” without making waves and losing friends in the process. This film also showed me an extra layer of pressure that girls face during this age. They are physically changing and feel just like Mia did, but society is telling them they must look a certain way in order to be deemed worthy and important.
My recommendation for this film would be to watch in with a young adolescent and use it as a conversation starter for a bigger conversation on identity. If we discuss with girls about what happened to Mia and align it to what they might be feeling, it could be a powerful tool. I would recommend watching this film and coupling it with a reading or film showing a young adolescence being successful in their social circles without having to change, perhaps watching or reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
Inside Out
ReplyDeletehttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1DhD7A9iI1k93Ha7Pw129FR5Xdfbw8Tuk9ZmzzA_ykdM/edit?usp=sharing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MC3XuMvsDI