Yet another Film Class

Hello Kitty and one of my classmates were sweet enough to email me the syllabus for another film class that was to be held on Wednesday night. That gave me a choice between taking Topics in Cultural Studies (which has no exams but the readings seem pretty heavy!) and Asian International Cinema (which has a closed book exam but the primary texts are films and not novels!).

The choice was a no brainer especially when Monday's class is quite demanding. We are her first graduate class and methinks she has not realised that for some of the part-time students, what she's asking from us (a two-page write-up each week on our readings on top of a research essay, class presentation and an exam!!!) is quite demanding and daunting. But I don't have a choice as I am constrained by my schedule.

Last night's class however was a great surprise. I first wondered if I had signed up for the wrong class as the students who were attending the class did not look like graduate students. They had dyed hair, wore street clothes, spoke in a somewhat easily excitable and artsy way and the dga was their youthful looks. I thought that it might have been a 4000 class being offered in the evening instead of it being a 5000 class. It turned out that it was indeed a 5000 module but those students I saw, were Theatre Studies Honours Year students.

The next surprise was our lecturer. She was extremely young and I might just even place her as as my age or even younger than me! Her inexperience came through very quickly when she started to do the typical young, insecure teacher thing: use powerpoint slides with a lot of information which was essentially circling around the same points. The module also did not seem to be grounded by any theoretical framework which made the course seemed a little less rigorous that it should be.

Yet taking into consideration my workload this year, I thought I should try to go a little easy. As it is, I am not coping with work demands and my studies have taken a slight beating. When I last checked IVLE yesterday, someone from the Monday's class has already posted his one-page, single-spaced, insightful thoughts about Freud and Beyond the Pleasure Principle! Me? I am still trying to figure out how exactly do I get hold of the readings!!!! I could not understand her course outline (imagine that!) and it doesn't help that Hello Kitty has not made up her mind whether she would take that class or not and so I couldn't leech on her! Argggh!

Oh well. Anyways ... the following are the films I have to watch for my Wed class. They are more palatable?? mainstream?? than my previous modules and you are all most welcome to join me in watching movies at my place should there be a show you wanna catch. :) I trust that doppy would also get the dvds of titles that we do not already own!

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Seminar 2
Adaptations and Appropriations:
Bride and Prejudice (Gurindar Chadha, 2004)

Seminar 3
National cinema:
Joint Security Area (Park Chan-wook, 2000)

Seminar 4
Conventions and Remakes: The National and the International
Ringu / The Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998)
The Ring(Gore Verbinski, 2002)

Seminar 5
Inter-Asian remakes:
Xun Qiang / The Missing Gun (Chuan Lu, 2002)
PTU (Johnny To, 2003)

Seminar 6
Translating Brotherhood (Hong Kong):
Die Xue Shuang Xiong / The Killer (John Woo, 1989) or
Ying Xiong Ben Se/A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986)

Seminar 7
Translating Brotherhood (Hollywood):
Face/Off (John Woo, 1997)

Seminar 8
Research project presentation

Seminar 9
The National and the Transnational:
Ying Xiong / Hero (Zhang Yi Mou, 2002)

Seminar 10
Asia in/as imagination:
Shen Hua / The Myth (Stanley Tong, 2005) [hopefully replacing it with Crouching Tigers, Hidden Dragons]

Seminar 11
One Asia?:
Memoirs of a Geisha (Rob Marshall, 2005)