CIN109 Film Journal: The Divergent Series: Insurgent

Film #2: The Divergent Series: Insurgent, 2015

  • I managed to dislike this film even more than the first one. There are some fantastic actors in this film, especially Kate Winslett, but the plot is terrible. The plot is such a ripoff of a ripoff of a ripoff of much better film series like The Hunger Games and Harry Potter. Also, now that I have seen it, every time a YA film calls someone special, or whatever, I will forever think of The Lego Movie.
  • I do have to praise how normal it is in this film's universe for women and people of color to be in power. The protagonist is just assumed to be as competent as any other character in the film without any, that I can recall, question of it. There is, however, some weirdness with age in this movie. In real life, some of the child/parent pairings are only a few years apart from each other. I am not naive to how Hollywood works, but c'mon.
  • As the Silver Screen Queens podcast notes, the ending of this film is so frustrating. I hate how they go to show what is outside the...city?...but then pan back for the swerve ending to the film. What is out there!?! Maybe show that? I know it is alluded to earlier, but actually seeing it would prove to be a much stronger ending. Generally, this film drags on in a lot of parts and ending by showing something outside would have been significantly better. 

CIN109 Film Journal: Ex Machina

For the American Cinema class I teach, I ask students to keep a film journal of recently watched movies. I decided to keep one as well in the spring. I will post the entries as times go on.

Film #1: Ex Machina, 2015

  • This was probably the best film I saw all summer. It took me awhile to really break down my thoughts on it, but then I realized that this film is arguably a long treatsie on how we, and especially men, are socialized to think about women and their agency.

  • I think a strong argument can be made that we are socialized to think of women as a form of, in a modern sense, manipulatable artificial intelligence. Women are often thought of as infantile, silly, and superficial. In my LIT208 class, we read a lot of essays about suffrage where men, and some women, argue against women voting (and being educated too) because they are not bright enough or "made" for it. Some even go as far as to say that women will just vote with their feelings and could be manipulated easily (men definitely never are though!).

  • But real women are not an AI that can be reprogrammed. A few years ago, I taught Ira Levin's novel The Stepford Wives in my LIT206 class. We had a fantastic discussion of the novel that was based around how society often, at the same time, puts women on pedestals but also thinks of them as manipulatable objects. The film adaptation of Levin's novel (the first one, not the more recent one) highlights this rather well. Alongside of this we had read some of Freud's writing about women's sexuality and his fear of women having agency. This film really shows those fears of agency quite well. The AI protagonist in this film is able to manipulate the men in the film because they think if they help her, they will get something out of it. She then uses them, leaves, and gets what she wants without them.

Worth Reading: Spring Break Edition

I spent a lot of time over spring break clearing out bookmarks and saved articles from Instapaper. Normally I post this list when I get to ten, but here are twenty articles worth reading: 

Honors College At RCBC

I have been a part of the honors program committee here at RCBC for the past two years or so to create an honors college. Not only have we opened up applications for the classes, but I can happily announce that I will be teaching the first ever honors section of Composition II in the fall. I am really looking forward to this opportunity and already have some ideas for how to proceed with the course and will post more about them in the summer. 

New Syllabus Policy: Revision

During the fall semester, I put together a student committee to update my revision policy, which really needed some work after becoming stale. After a few Skype sessions and brainstorming on a document, here is what they came up with with me:

I strongly believe one of the most important lessons I learned about writing was that quality work almost always entails rewriting, but also reflection on what lessons can be learned and implemented in future writing. In this class, in place of a straight paper revision, you will analyze the mistakes I noted in comments on your paper and write a response discussing the comments and how you would correct them in future writing. This means if you are not satisfied with your grade, you may submit a response (directions are below), shared to my school Google Drive (wwend@bcc.edu), within 3-5 days after I comment on your paper.

My expectation that for every mistake you are fixing, there is a brief paragraph discussing how to correct your work. I would consider directly citing our book readings (and the writing manual from ENG101) or your notes from class discussions in this response. Please do not cite random writing from the world wide web. There should be a second paragraph discussing specifically how you would fix it in your own essay as well.

If you are unsure what to write about, you can always schedule an appointment during office hours whether in person or electronic. Regardless, I would strongly suggest meeting with me to make sure you understand your grade and how to improve it.

Anywhere between one (1) to three (3) points can be added to your paper proportionally depending on the overall point total of the paper.
 
Of course, there are no revisions on term papers. Also, you may not use your revision to correct a plagiarized paper (see academic honesty policy below). Finally, revisions on your citation practice assignment do not count towards your revision. (Revised Fall 2015 by HC, DH, TC)

Books Read In 2015

  1. The Battle for Justice in Palestine by Ali Abunimah
  2. The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi
  3. Jennifer Government by Max Barry
  4. Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature by Jorge Luis Borges
  5. Borges at Eighty: Conversations by Jorge Luis Borges
  6. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
  7. The Darkling Child: The Defenders of Shannara by Terry Brooks
  8. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex by Judith Butler
  9. Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler
  10. Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday by Italo Calvino
  11. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  12. You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost): A Memoir by Felicia Day
  13. Replay: The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan
  14. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
  15. The Peripheral by William Gibson
  16. Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira Grant
  17. Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema by Boaz Hagin
  18. The Odyssey by Homer
  19. A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
  20. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan
  21. Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs
  22. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse
  23. The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror by Arun Kundnani
  24. Passing by Nella Larsen
  25. The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
  26. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor
  27. The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the US-Iran Divide by Christopher Petherick
  28. The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov
  29. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 1 by James Roberts
  30. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 2 by James Roberts
  31. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 3 by James Roberts
  32. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 4 by James Roberts
  33. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 5 by James Roberts
  34. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 6 by James Roberts
  35. The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero
  36. The Oxford Shakespeare: Othello: The Moor of Venice (The Oxford Shakespeare) by William Shakespeare
  37. The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker
  38. Against Interpretation: And Other Essays by Susan Sontag
  39. Automate This: How Algorithms Took Over Our Markets, Our Jobs, and the World by Christopher Steiner
  40. The Epic Struggle for the Internet of Things by Bruce Sterling
  41. Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson
  42. The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women by Jessica Valenti
  43. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin