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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – End of Movie

As promised, students, here’s the ending of the movie version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Keep in mind that your worksheets on the novel are due Friday — this is nonnegotiable.

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Robots attack Montevideo

The short video below, was created by Fede Alvarez in Uruguay. It has become such a big hit on YouTube that the director has signed a deal with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures to develop and direct an original genre project.

Dead Poets Society Review Questions

1. In the space below, create a Venn diagram to compare and contrast Welton Academy with your school.

2. What, if anything, is missing from the boys’ education at Welton? What do you feel is overemphasised?

3. Look at Keating’s first two lessons. Why are the boys so readily on-side with Keating? Is this believable? Who leads their cause? Why? (Consider the kinds of lessons the boys are used to).

4. Outline Keating’s philosophy of life.

5. At the first re-convening of the Dead Poets Society Neil reads a Tennyson poem that ends with the line: “To strive, to seek and not to yield.”
Explain how these words prove to be ironic as far as Neil is concerned.

6. Contrast Charlie’s action near the end of the film (when the boys are pressured to betray Keating and each other) with those of Knox and Todd.

7. What is the point of the following exchange between Cameron and Mr Nolan in the final scene of the film?

Cameron: …we’ve covered the romantics, and some of the chapters on post-civil war literature.
Nolan: What about the realists?
Cameron: I believe we skipped most of that, Sir.

8. Complete these sentences in a way that sums up for you the theme of this film:
(a) This film is about…
(b) The film-maker’s view is that people should…
(c) He believes that people can… And that people should not…

9. To what extent is this influence (Keating’s) on adolescents dangerous? (Remember Keating’s admonition to Charlie / Nuanda about being stupid?)

10. What justifications can you find for the repressive attitude of the school towards its pupils?

11. How much parental involvement is healthy in a child or teen’s life?

12. Have you ever felt pressure from your parents? Explain.

13. In your opinion, why isn’t something done to save Keating’s job?

14. In an essay of at least two paragraphs (separate sheet), answer the following questions: What are the three most important functions of a high school education? How well do you think Buena Park High School fulfils these purposes?

List of Poems Used in Dead Poets Society

The title of the movie comes from T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent.

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”

Here are the poems in order of appearance.

• To the Virgins, Make Much of Time – Robert Herrick
• Ode 1.11 – Horace
• O Captain My Captain – Walt Whitman
• O Me! O Life! – Walt Whitman
• Excerpt from Walden [not a poem] – Henry David Thoreau
• The Prophet – Abraham Cowley
• Excerpt from Ulysses – Alfred Lord Tennyson
• The Ballad of William Bloat – Raymond Calvert
• The Congo – Vachel Lindsay
• Song of Myself, Section 52 – Walt Whitman
• The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost
• Sonnet XVIII – William Shakespeare
• She Walks In Beauty – Lord Byron
• Song of Myself XVI – Walt Whitman
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream – William Shakespeare

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Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Shelly Duvall talks with Dennis Christopher during the filming of Bernice Bobs Her Hair in Nov. 6, 1975.

The following is from the Vintage book The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

The idea for “Bernice bobs Her Hair” originated in a ten-page letter (circa 1916) that Fitzgerald wrote to his sister Annabel when he was nineteen and she fourteen. He instructed her in great detail in the areas of “Conversation,” “Poise,” and “Dress and Personality” as to how she could become a social success. The story that gew out of this letter was written in January 1920, and it was originally a ten-thousand-word story called “Barbara Bobs Her Hair.” After four magazines rejected it, Fitzgerald shortened it to seven thousand words, altered its climax (making it in his words “snappy), and Ober sold it for $500 to The Saturday Evening Post with its new title, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Written in the same month as “The Camel’s Back,” the story was published in the May 1, 1920, issue and was Fitzgerald’s fourth contribution to the magazine. Bernice fits in to the category of what Fitzgerald called the “wonderful kid,” a young woman of about sixteen who is on her way toward free-spiritedness and liberation, the variety of flapper that Bernice has become by the time of the story’s unexpected turn. With her last gesture in the story Bernice signals her independence from the social hypocrisy of her cousin’s world, though ironically it is the precise world into which Fitzgerald had earlier given his sister the rules of entry. Fitzgerald included “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” in Flappers and Philosophers.

New song from Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova

A couple of months have passed since the “Once” duo of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova won Oscars for their song “Falling Slowly” from John Carney’s independent hit of last summer. Now they have a brand-new track for another movie, which again is a bittersweet boy-meets-girl foreign movie.

The song is called “One More Word” and it’s from the independent Israeli movie “Strangers“, which was well received at Sundance in January. From what I’ve read the film goes for the docu-style urbanity of Once, but with an original twist: an Israeli Romeo meets a Palestinian Juliet. My understanding is that the duo recorded the song in Prague two weeks before the Academy Awards.

Hear it here:

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