Beda April 6: Movies

Just now I was sitting here writing a paper on Soylent Green for my intro to film class (Stupidest class ever, the only reason I'm taking it is because I didn't want to pay to have my transcripts sent again, which is an annoying story so I won't get into that just know that it is the dumbest class and I now wish that I would have been able to just cough up the money to get out of it.) For this class all we have to do is write four reviews during the semester which should be ridiculously easy because he doesn’t care what we write about as long as we touch on five certain things and he doesn’t care how long the paper is, also he shows fifteen movies so we get plenty of movies to choose from. The trouble with this is that he shows fifteen movies thus giving me plenty of chances to blow off writing a paper because there are still a lot of chances. So I put off the writing to the last minute assuming that at some point he would show a movie that I didn’t hate and then I could write something positive about it. That strategy did sort of work, I waited and waited and then when I finally realized that we were running out of classes and I better get on with the review writing he showed the movie V for Vendetta which I sort of love so I managed to write a really nice review for it. Now he’s gone back to showing movies that I don’t care about and will never care about. We only have I think three more classes and I did have managed to do two and a half reviews (half because I just finished the one for Soylent Green but I haven’t actually turned it in.) but I still have to sit through the terrible movies.
This post is not going at all in the direction that I expected, does that ever happen to anyone else? (Random question, why does the grammar check on word always try to make me use semi colons?) Anyway I think I’ll just go with the subject at hand. It seems everyone who has ever taken a class from my film teacher agrees that he knows nothing about teaching and is probably one of the worst teachers on campus. He is very into his subject, he clearly loves movies but he knows nothing about teaching. I guess one semester all he did was show Alfred Hitchcock movies which I suppose could be informative but that’s really more an Intro to Hitchcock rather then an Intro to Film. This semester he’s showing all “futuristic” movies. I don’t count most of them as futuristic plus they are so insanely boring. I have to be honest, I don’t like old movies they just have so many issues with plot and cinematography and mostly they just look like messes to me so I don’t watch them if I can avoid them. (I will admit that there are some good ones I mean Wizard of Oz came out in 1939 I believe but give me Citizen Kane or Casablanca and I will pass. I have seen both of those movies and they are just boring.) As far as I can tell so far this semester we have only watched two movies made after 1985. I suppose that it is important for us to see the original versions of some of the movies that we are seeing but I don’t understand how a lot of these movies are really introducing us to film concepts.
The Following is a list of all of the movies we have watched so far:
2010
Planet of the Apes
The Time Machine
The Day the Earth Stood Still
War of the Worlds
Day After Tomorrow
V for Vendetta
Soylent Green
Blade Runner
The Thing From Another World

That is not in order or anything but just so you guys know I guess. We had to watch the original versions of all of these and mostly I was just bored or in the case of The Day After Tomorrow I was just terrified. (I have a fear of the earth turning against us and killing us all. The Happening also really freaks me out.) Something else I can’t quite figure out about this class is, he makes us watch these movies and then at the end of class when he gives his lecture, which I assume is supposed to tell us how the film relates to something we are supposed to be learning, he talks about either the director François Truffaut, Orson Wells, or the great deal you can get at the Redford Theater.
So yeah this class annoys me a lot but it’s only a couple more weeks and I’m done with it and hopefully I will never have to take another class with this teacher ever again.
Oh really quick, we had to watch Planet of the Apes and the only exposure I ever had to this movie before was in the movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. I must say I like Jay’s version of the movie much better then the actual movie. I kept hoping to see Jeff Anderson running around, or at the end I wanted Jay to show up and say the final line just like in Jay and Bob “Damn yous, damn yous all to hell.”