She's Alive! Alive!

Reel One: The class discovers James Whale's classic (and one of the rare sequels that knocks the original out of the water) Bride of Frankenstein. Humor, pathos, villainy, the "Other" as more human than the humans, even a pitchfork-wielding mob - is there anything this movie doesn't have? We had a good discussion following the screening (helped, no doubt, by the fact that Bride is only 75 minutes long) and we marveled at the fact that this is one of the strange movies in which the title character isn't on screen all that much (under 10 minutes, actually). Bride may be about her, but it's not really her story. To round out the experience, we watched a brief clip (with the Gene Hackman hermit - check it out here) of the parody Young Frankenstein.

All in all, a good night. The class is beginning to click and is watching with more critical eyes than they may have had at the start of everything. Case in point - a very nice discussion about the prevalence of triangles in the film - both the physical shape (Gothic! Everything points up!) and character grouping, which is constantly shifting as the film's tension ratchets upward (see? More with the pointing).

Reel Two: Some Canadian continues to rally her friends to re-watch Buffy and write about the episodes. This week, things are getting good with the inclusion of "Halloween" as we learn that Giles isn't all tweed-and-tea and Buffy's fervent wish to "just be a normal girl" is granted (sort of) with results that edge towards the disastrous.

Next week - in class, we look at how film reflects fears by viewing Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Buffy's life gets more complicated by discovering that adults don't have all the answers and, in fact, raise plenty of the questions. And also raise demons.

Flying Cars and a Double Dose of the Slayer

My film class started the actual "watching of the flickering pictures" this week. I chose Metropolis as the starting point for the class, which focuses on science fiction. I'm waiting to hear from the students - was silent film too much of a change for them? Did the "Delsarte Technique" acting style put them off? What did they think of the effects? Of the storyline? These are all questions I hope to have answered in a few days.

As for me, I was stunned by how the film holds up. So very many science fiction concepts can trace their first cinematic appearance to Metropolis - the dystopian city divided sharply into have/have not (one student commented, "So where's the middle?" Exactly), the "machine-man" (the term "Robot" had been coined a few years earlier in R.U.R. by Czech playwright Karel Capek, but it hadn't become widespread), an odd little house that's bigger inside and outside, even flying cars (and they were cars! OK, they look a lot like ultralights, but the idea is there). Women don't come off too well in the film - saint or whore; really no middle ground there - but you can't have everything in late 1920s Germany.

Over at the Great Buffy Re-Watch, I missed posting the second half of last week, which centers on the Season 1 finale "Prophecy Girl," an episode I simply adore. So I have two links there this week - end of Season 1 here, and beginning of Season 2 (Spike! Spike!) here.

And over in my class, we continue exploring created humans and mad scientists next week with Bride of Frankenstein. Neither corpses nor popcorn will be provided. And no, you may not bring your own.

So You're a Slayer - Just How Scary Are Your Nightmares?

It's Week 4 of the Great Buffy Re-Watch and it's so big, it's split into two posts! (Actually, there are two writers for this week.)

Great stuff here! After all, if you're the Slayer and (as such) you're the thing that scary things are scared of, just exactly how bone-shakingly scary are the things you're scared of going to be? That's one of the issues that gets explored in "Nightmares" and we learn some very interesting things about our Scoobies. (Hint: Willow has rather severe stage fright!)

Also covered in this first half of this week's post is "Out of Sight, Out of Mind." Or something like that - it's one of those episodes that has different names depending on your source. Seems even the network couldn't make up its mind. Regardless of the title, most of us remember some times in our tour of hell known in polite society as high school during which we felt invisible. Sunnydale being situated on a Hellmouth means that's not just a metaphor.

This week's post is brought to you by David Kociemba, the editor of Watcher Junior, a peer-reviewed online journal for undergraduate scholarship on the Whedonverses. If that's an area of interest for you, they're currently accepting submissions. Click here for details.

We're nearly through Season 1 - it was only a half-season in length, after all. (Remember, BtVS began as a mid-season replacement, so the first season wasn't a full 22-episode run.) Coming up in a day or two is the finale of Season 1 - "Prophecy Girl." I won't spoil for anyone who's watching for the first time, but I can say this - "Prophecy Girl" is where I moved from liking this show to starting to love it just a little. You might feel the same way.

Watch and find out!

Buffy Re-Watch!

As we continue working our way through Season 1 with "Angel," "I Robot, You Jane," and "The Puppet Show" (scary ventriloquist dummies - always a guaranteed crowd-pleaser!), we also get to enjoy the thoughtful commentary of the very observant, dryly funny and in no way reminiscent of Giles, Matthew Pateman. I've known him for a number of years now and his commentary never fails to make me go "hmmm." (He also has a tendency to make me metaphorically smack my forehead and say, "Of course! Why didn't I see that before?" Not a bad thing in a critic. That he also manages to be funny while doing all of this - there's your superplus. Click here and you'll see what I mean.) Anyway, this is his week.

Season 1 was a while back and Pateman points out that some of the references (especially to technology) don't hold up well in a contemporary context. Then again, texts need to be met on the ground on which they were created - Jane Eyre didn't have a cell phone, either.

In these three episodes, Jenny and Giles begin to circle their mutual attraction. Under duress, Xander, Willow, and Buffy perform at a school talent show (stay for the credits!). And - oh, yeah - the mysterious, brooding, somewhat-older-than-Buffy Angel (played by a very young David Boreanaz - that bit about vampires not aging is a total lie) turns out to be a vampire who has been around long enough to have read the first edition of Jude the Obscure when it was hot off the presses. Well, what relationship doesn't have its quirks?

Technological Wonders!

My college wants very much to increase the level of proficiency amongst the faculty, so for the last two years, thanks to a grant that will last three more years, we've had a "FIT group." The cutesy acronym stands for something like "Faculty Instructional Technology" and being chosen for the group means a shower of tech goodies to incorporate into the classroom, including this year's prize, the iPad. I'm part of the current group and I must admit that, at first, I thought the iPad was a cool toy, but I didn't really see the application of it to the classroom.

I'll admit I was wrong.

I've been pointed toward (and discovered some on my own) some very useful, practical uses for the iPad, and here's one for my film class - the film study app. This will link you to literally hundreds of public domain movies - to be fair, many of them are what we would politely term "obscure" and more than a few seem to just be bad, but bad movies can be very good teaching tools! (And some of them are classics in the good way.)

Using this app, you can watch films in a variety of genres - cartoons, film noir, science fiction (our focus), Westerns, romance, etc. You can pause the film whenever you like and choose from a wide number of tags to mark examples of editing techniques, the use of sound, various shots and angles, and many others. All this and it's free!

What a country!