QUESTIONS - WRITING FINAL

UNIT 6, Question 2: A good example happened very recently, which is the aftermath of the final victory of the Montreal Canadians over the Pittsburgh Penguins. The festivities quickly collapsed into chaos when troublemakers broke into stores, stealing whatever they could. This is usually a crowd behavior; two or three people start the riot, and many others follow. In the future, the stores in downtown Montreal will have to enforce their security measures on hockey nights at the Bell Center.

UNIT 7, Question 3: I really depends on the type of illness or injury. Nevertheless, I usually like quick statements because, most of the time, it relieves the stress. What you think can be a major illness can turn out to be ultimately very minor, and I prefer when my first hypothesis turns out to be wrong. I rarely get very ill, but I'm always afraid of it happening. It is a relief to hear the doctor say: "it's nothing, really".

FINAL WRITING EXAM 10% - ESSAY

ESSAY – CINEMA : ART OR ENTERTAINMENT?

Cinema is probably the most widespread art form in the world today. Since my childhood it has always been my passion, and I always saw it more as an art form, an opportunity for artists to visually explore themes, ideas and feelings. Unfortunately, with the gigantic control Hollywood has on today’s audiences, such art cinema, or auteur cinema, has only limited importance. They have their place in film festivals, between critics and film aficionados around the world, but not in the mainstream field, not with the average moviegoer. College students, especially, tend to be more attracted toward Hollywood blockbusters rather than have the curiosity to seek out independent or foreign-language films. Our survey is intended to see if college students do indeed take cinema more as entertainment value rather than art, and to see if adults think the opposite.

We asked the same number of questions to college students and adults about different matters concerning our main question. The results indeed proved our hypothesis : adults do see more the cinema more as an art form than college students. For example, they were asked if they often went to see foreign-language films. Only 20% of the college students answered yes, whereas half of the adults claimed to often go see foreign-language films. This topic can be verified very easily in a daily conversation; ask any college student about Avatar or the latest Harry Potter film, and he will probably tell you he has seen it. Now ask the same person about the last Palme d’Or winner The White Ribbon, a black-and-white psychiological study by austrian master filmmaker Michael Haneke, or about A Prophet, the french crime epic that won 9 Cesar Awards this winter, and you will be lucky if this person has even ever heard of these films. The survey also showed us that college students prefer to go to the movies accompanied by friends, are basically drawn to see a particular film because of a friend’s recommendation or the appeal of the advertising, and were not interested in auteur cinema as much as in Hollywood productions.

If our hypothesis was indeed confirmed, I think it is mainly due to the fact that college students have only limited knowledge of art cinema, not because they are ignorant or deficient. Hollywood is such an important and influential business that it overshadows about anything else going on in the film business. Major studios have for principal goal to make money. They don’t have to promote what may be the greatest cinema on the planet, but simply to produce what is most bankable : formula-based, star-filled, crowd-pleasing genre films with easy appeal. If college students don’t want to be challenged when they go to the movies, maybe it is beacuse they simply haven’t learned how to.

Cinema is directly related to historical periods; back in the late sixties and early seventies, when anti-establishment conduct became the norm, young people were searching for thought provocation in the movies. It was a time when the cerebral filmmaking of Jean-Luc Godard was popular, and when american cinema, at time time strongly influenced by the Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave, took an enormous breath of fresh air with fierce works from filmmakers like Dennis Hopper, John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese. Today’s youth does not necessarily wants to be this provoked, and adults, when growing older, become more curious about culture. That is why, in my opinion, adults see the cinema more as an art form that college students.

LEL Assignment #2

Courses chosen: "Grammar Practice 1" and "Synonym and Antonym Practice"

GRAMMAR PRACTICE 1

1 - Interest Level: This grammar practice was a bit tedious to go through (it made me remember me the endless sequences of grammar numbers I had to do in High School), but it was nonetheless an helping exercise. Not having practiced this kind of exercises in the last months, I was surprised to find how helping they can sometimes be. Its numbers mainly consisted of basic grammar elements - mostly punctuation, verbs and the use of capital letters.

2 - Difficulty: I didn't think the test was really difficult while actually doing it, altough I realized I obtained a rather poor result at the end. It was not a very hard exercise in itself, but you have to be really careful to each questuion. I missed a lot of questions concerning punctuation, maybe because I wasn't paying enough attention. These questions require full concentration. A lot of them were thoroughly tricky. Also, some questions (though not many) were poorly constructed in my opinion.

3 - What did I learn: I didn't learn anything new, but it was indeed helping in making me realize that I often need exercises like this to refresh my memory. The mastery of a language comes with practice, and this is a type of exercise that needs to be done monthly, in my humble opinion.

4 - My result: 26/40 (65%) - Not entirely satisfying. I did the exercise a second time, and got 35/40 (88%), a much more worthy result.

5 - Course rating: 8/10 - A standard but essential course, that needs to be taken seriously and more often.

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SYNONYM AND ANTONYM PRACTICE

1 - Interest Level: I always enjoyed synonym and antonym exercises, mostly because they often teach me new words, or valid the meaning of words I was unsure about. I have always been pretty good at it, and it didn't change with this test.

2 - Difficulty Level: I don not think this was a very difficult course, at least for me. While I had a lot of facility doing it, I strongly recommend it to people having mild difficulty with the meaning of words and their synonyms/antonyms. If there is a difficult or unknown word, you can always get a thesaurus and a dictionnary after the test to learn the meaning of the word and its different uses. I even learned some new words with this exercises, like abate, distort and pungent. I finally do think it was a bit too easy for my taste, though.

3 - What I learned: I learned a couple of new words, including the ones mentioned above. Overall, this exercise taught me four or five new words but nothing else new in general.

4 - My result: 100% in the synonym part and 80% in the antonym part.

5 - Course rating: 7/10 - An easy but pleasant course who will be of great help to those having difficulty with antonyms and synonyms, or to anybody who wants to learn new words.

Mid-term writing test - #3

Since decades now, many visionary filmmakers have tried to upgrade the scale and realism of special effects in fantasy or science-fiction movies. James Cameron (The Terminator, Avatar), Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) or George Lucas (Star Wars) are among this class of visually ambitious film directors, but one of the better examples of recent years is with no doubt Peter Jackson. His rendition of the J.R.R. Tolkien "Lord of the Rings saga" and the reinvention of the "King Kong" story are both narratively and technically amazing achievements. As these movies showed, Peter Jackson is one of the modern masters of fantasy and special effects.

First of all, "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy is now undeniably a landmark in the history of special effects. Its complex technology helped to develop later films, such as "Avatar", in terms of perfprmance capture realism. Cameron didn't reinvent the wheel; he simply embelished it. Jackson started to work on this trilogy fifteen years ago, in 1995, when visual effects where still far less advanced than the ones we see today. The first part of the trilogy exceeded any possible expectations concerning its visual power and audacity, and made a major step forward in this domain of film. The effects employed are still highly consistent today, and are going to be for a long time. Tolkien's literary universe is a vast one, and Jackson and his crew achieved the impossible by transposing that complexity on the screen. That accomplishment is due to the great storytelling aspects of the film, but also because of its groundbreaking visual and sound techniques. They were seeking for more than standard summer fare. And they suceeded royally.

After the revolution of the "Lord of the Rings" saga, Jackson came up with an even bigger and riskier project: a remake of "King Kong". The 1933 version is by itself a highlight in the history of special effects, and is one of the first films that was using them in the majority of its frames. One could almost say the same about Jackson's highly upgraded version, which used computer-generated imagery and performance-capture technology more convincingly than any other film of its time. King Kong was played by Andrew Serkis (who also played Gollum in "LOTR"), who made the ape's movements as authentic and realistic as they could have been. This requires a strong physical presence from the actor and visually persuasive computer techniques. With the three "LOTR" films and his updated take on "King Kong", Peter Jackson easily deserves the title of one of the most visually inventive filmmakers of all time, a cinematic magician who astonishes the audience with great flair and facility.

"The Hurt Locker" - Building character through action (my review of the film)

"The Hurt Locker" from 58-year-old veteran action director Kathryn Bigelow ("Strange Days", "Point Blank") is a stunning and heart-pounding new film about american soldiers at war. Altough it has a specific setting, which is Iraq in 2004, it is not about a particular war or moment in time; it is about the men who fight that war, no more, no less.

Since its wide opening this summer, "The Hurt Locker" was highly praised by most movie critics around the world. According to calculations made by the film-buff website "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?", it is currently ranked as the thirteenth best-reviewed film of the new century. However, it did not find an audience in a blockbuster-crowded summer, with megaproductions from "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" to "G.I. Joe", the new "Harry Potter" entry and "The Hangover". One may hope it will find the audience it deserves on DVD and Blu-Ray, because it is without a doubt the most exciting film that came out this summer, a masterful exercise in revealing character through action.

Jeremy Renner stars as Sgt. William James, a cocky and arrogant bomb disarmer with little respect for the authority of Sgt. Sanborn (Played by a surprisingly strong Anthony Mackie). The first half-hour mostly consists of scenes of him at work, constructed with meticulous precision of the different critical situations and the methods he employs to solve them. We gradually get to know this character with these scenes, not with informative dialogue but in the depiction of his behavior in the fire of action. At work, James is passionate, in the zone. His job consumes him. His superior severely criticizes his peculiar and often deliberately dangerous procedures, but after all, who is he to question a true professional's way of doing his job? This level of tension between the two characters is maintained throughout the film, and only adds up to the strong psychological foreground of a seemingly two-dimensional story.

The suspense in most of the film's key scenes therefore gains in intensity. These are flesh-and-blood characters we quickly come to identify with and care about. Bigelow films them in a way that we, the audience, can know, at any given time, where one is, how he is related to the other ones in and out of the frame, and what is at stake. Time and space elements have to be established with exactness and clarity in order to make an action/suspense situation work as realistically as possible, and that is what Bigelow is doing here. The audience does not have to figure out what is going on; everything is crystal clear. Shots can last a certain time here without cutting right away to the next and thus get room to breathe. Nothing is overemphasised with music or distracting camera tricks. Barry Ackroy's photography is lean and efficient. Everything suddenly becomes all too real, and you quickly realize as a spectator that you are in the hands of a true maestro of genre filmmaking, a focused and intuitive director who knows how to make an audience's blood curdle while so many Hollywood filmmakers have forgotten how to.

"The Hurt Locker" was written by Mark Boal, who was himself a war correspondant in Iraq a couple of years ago. He is also the man responsible for the screenplay of the 2007 Paul Haggis film "In the Valley of Elah", a perhaps more ambitious but far less convincing film about a grieving father searching for his military son gone missing just after his return from duty. If Bigelow's craftsmanship remains undoubted, some are still skeptical about the script's purpose or relevance, or the film's histerically enthusiastic critical response it received. I have to admit myself that I am still surprised (though positively) about its massive critical acclaim and major oscar consideration because it remains, in my humble opinion, nothing more than a skillfully made and uncommonly breathtaking action film. It is as much - and unapologetically so - a genre piece such as Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 white-knuckle thrillride "The Wages of Fear" (a film I find very similar to "The Hurt Locker"), or a profane potboiler with class like "The Departed" (which also unexpectedly ended up winning four academy awards). I bet Kathryn Bigelow would have fallen of her chair a year ago knowing she would get a best directing oscar nomination for this film.

Its opening statement, "War is a Drug", pretty much sums up what the film is about, and altough simple, remains highly effective. "The Hurt Locker" is definately worth seeing for the Hitchcockian sense of suspense on display and the excellent performances from Renner and Mackie. While I could not call it a masterpiece, I don't think the director's intention was to make one, and that's also one of the film's greatest strenghts; its lack of pretension. Bigelow and her team set out to make a film about men, men at war, men at work in all its sheer intensity and fierceness, ended up making a very good one, and ultimately succeeded entirely on these terms.

3.5 Stars (out of 4)

THE HURT LOCKER - 2 reviews compared

First Review: Rotten Tomatoes - Top Critics - "Chicago Sun-Times" - Roger Ebert - 4/4 (Very positive review: Ebert ranked "The Hurt Locker" number two in his list of the greatest films of the decade.)

- Throroughly well-written; easy to understand while never overly simple, always interesting
- No condescention or pretention towards the reader or the reviewed film
- Praises director Kathryn Bigelow and lead actor Jeremy Renner
- Meticulous description of the main character and his psychology
- No spoilers whatsoever; Ebert doesn't reveal any key moments or describe any situation. He is concentrating on the character.
- Praises the film's storytelling and pure suspense


Second Review: Rotten Tomatoes - Top Critics - "New York Post" - Kyle Smith - 2.5/4 (Mixed review: Kyle Smith is one of the few professionnal newspaper critics who did not praise "The Hurt Locker".)

- Shorter review than Ebert's
- Also agrees about the level of tension that Bigelow infuses in some scenes of the film
- Refers to some terms that might have the uninitiated scratching their heads (John Ford and Howard Hawks might not be known of all, or terms like "Dunder Miffilin)
- Criticizes the film for its lack of plausibility
- Doesn't refer to the actors' performances
- Refers to Bigelow in a more personal way in evoking her manly side
- Describes some situations; finds them pointless

LEARNING EXPRESS LIBRARY A - Feb. 26

Due: February 26

I - Title
1. Interest level
2. Difficulty level
3. Three things I learned
4. My score
5. Course Rating (?/10)

2. Title
1. Interest level
2. Difficulty level
3. Three things I learned
4. My score
5. Course Rating (?/10)