Johnny English Reborn: Imperative Forms

This is a really funny movie with a lot of scenes that can be used in the classroom. This funny one is wonderful for imperative forms.


I. Before watching the segment, put the words in the right order in order to make imperative sentences:

1. her / shut / up

2. up / lock / it

3. that / maintain / tone

4. confrontation / keep / avoid / eye-contact / and

5. table / go / the / stand / to / up / and / coffee

6. your / pocket / go / your / to / right

7. act / just / natural

8. trigger / pull / the

9. fire / hold / your

10. lose / don't him


II. Watch the segment now and check your answers.


















III. Make a list with instructions for your partner to perform. Try to use make the scene as close as possible to the one you have just seen. If you prefer, you may make the scene completely different from the original one, but you must use imperative forms to give your instructions.

S1: Drink the magic potion and does whatever he is told.

S2: Gives the instructions/commands







Answer key:



Shut her up

lock it up

maintain that tone

avoid confrontation and keep eye-contact

 stand up and go to the coffee table

go to your right pocket

just act natural

pull the trigger

hold your fire

don't lose him

Shelf Life: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

I have a fondness for Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and did a brief review of it  at Movie Mezzanine for my weekly recommendation. Weighed down by some integral flaws, sure, but the film is nevertheless a giddy display of imagination from an artist who knows that the fakeness of CGI cannot ever be fully hidden and thus can offer bold new visual treats by embracing its falsity.For that and its surprisingly touching tribute to the late Heath Ledger, it belongs closer to the top of Gilliam's films than the bottom.

Head over to Movie Mezzanine and check out my piece.

Netflix Instant Picks 2/15/13—2/21/13

It's that of week again where Corey and I post our favorite picks for Netflix Instant. This week, I celebrate finally getting the chance to watch the Comedy Bang Bang show, big up my favorite PTA movie and remind myself to finally watch Me and Orson Welles before it drops off streaming.

Check out our full post at Movie Mezzanine.

Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958)

Over at Movie Mezzanine, I wrote some thoughts about Anthony Mann's stirring 1958 masterpiece, Man of the West, starring a perfectly cast Gary Cooper as a man whose attempts to leave behind a life of crime will only bring him back from whence he came. It is a harrowing film, one of the bleakest in a viciously bleak filmography, a vision of violence as a self-perpetuating cycle that consumes all who fall in it and offers escape only in a bloody death. One of the greatest Westerns of all time.

My full piece is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

Something Old, Something New: Déjà Vu / Resident Evil: Retribution

More belated links. At Movie Mezzanine, I compare two great Vulgar Auteurist pieces, Tony Scott's Déjà Vu and Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil: Retribution. Check it out.

Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz, 2013)

Raúl Ruiz's final completed feature (another is being finished by his widow) is as cryptic as the few other Ruiz films I've seen, with a host of modernist references to obscure literature and music at every turn. Yet the sense of playfulness and mourning that informs the whole feature needs no familiarity with the director. Taking Beethoven to the cinema, following ghosts as they peer in on each other, Ruiz finds sad but hilarious ways to handle his impending death. And he films it all with immaculate precision, his constantly shifting but always pristine mise-en-scène enriched to deliberately artificial degree by his use of DV. Admittedly a neophyte when it comes to the late Chilean director, I nevertheless have adored what little I've seen of his, and I suspect I might treasure Night Across the Street even more with subsequent viewings and a deeper immersion into such a tantalizing filmography. If nothing else, it's a hell of a swan song.

My full piece is up at Spectrum Culture.

Megamind: Adversative Conjunctions

This is one of my favorite animated movies. Megamind is a lovely villain, with an incredible background story. I used this scene to practice the use of adversative conjunctions in a contextualized manner.

 I. Watch the segment and decide if the sentences below refer to Evil (Megamind) or Mr. Goody Two-Shoes. Write (M) if it is about Megamind or (G) if it about Mr. Goody.



Mr. Goody Two Shoes (G)

Evil - Megamind (M)


















1. Landed in the White House ( )
    Landed in a the Metro City Prison for the Gifted ( )

2. Was adopted by the presidential family ( )
     Was adopted by the prisoners ( )

3. Had life handed to him on a silver platter ( )
    Was taught the difference between right and wrong by the prisoners ( )

4. Had the power of flight, invulnerability and and great hair ( )
    Had his amazing intellect. ( )

5. Had already amassed an a gigantic army of soft-headed groupies ( )
    Was given an opportunity to better himself. ( )

6. Is sent to quiet time in the corner. ( )
    Receives all the praise, adulation. ( )

7. Was destined to be a super villain. ( )
    Was destined to be Megamind's rival. ( )


II. Connect both sentences with one of the adversity conjunctions below. Mind punctuation. Try not to repeat the conjunctions.

BUT / HOWEVER / IN CONTRAST / WHILE / WHEREAS / ON THE OTHER HAND / THOUGH (FINAL POSITION)

Ex: Goody landed on the White House whereas Megamind landed on the Metro State Prison for the Gifted.
or
Whereas Megamind landed on the Metro State Prison for the Gifted, Goody landed on the White House.

2. ___________________________________
3.___________________________________
4. ___________________________________
5. ___________________________________
6. ___________________________________
7. ___________________________________

WORKSHEET

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - MEGAMIND



Answer key:

I.

1. Landed in the White House (G)
    Landed in a the Metro City Prison for the Gifted (M)

2. Was adopted by the presidential family (G)
     Was adopted by the prisoners (M)

3. Had life handed to him on a silver platter (G)
    Was taught the difference between right and wrong by the prisoners (M)

4. Had the power of flight, invulnerability and and great hair (G)
    Had his amazing intellect. (M)

5. Had already amassed an a gigantic army of soft-headed groupies (G)
    Was given an opportunity to better himself. (M)

6. Is sent to quiet time in the corner. (M)
    Receives all the praise, adulation. (G)

7. Was destined to be a super villain (M)
    Was destined to be Megamind's rival (G)

II. Answers will vary.

Criminally Underrated: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

I wrote about the weakest (but still delightful) Neveldine/Taylor feature to date, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance for Spectrum Culture's Criminally Underrated series. After vastly overrating The Dark Knight Rises last year and even cooling on my more muted enjoyment of The Avengers, Ghost Rider 2 feels like the best of last year's crop of comic book films (close second: Dredd), and its ingenuity impresses me where the increasing severity of the tentpole super flicks is becoming more facile and stylistically dull.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Netflix Instant Picks 2/1/13—2/7/13 and 2/8/13—

Since I forgot to link to last week's Netflix picks, I'll just post links for that one and the one that went up this morning.

Netflix picks 2/1/13—2/7/13

Netflix picks 2/8/13—2/14/13

Oscar-Nominated Shorts

I have capsule reviews for each of the animated and live-action shorts nominated for this year's Oscars at Spectrum Culture. They are mostly a wan bunch, lacking the spark of the best short-form artistry and in some cases feeling like mere fragments where a good short feels as if it contains the world. Even so, a few here and there piqued my curiosity, and some even entertained me.

The post with capsules is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Trash (Paul Morrissey, 1970)

Man, I've got to get better about updating this place with links. My review for Paul Morrissey's excellent, transgressive Trash (my first Blindspot entry of the year) has been up for some time at Movie Mezzanine, but I forgot to link to it here. Suffice to say, it's a brilliant, blistering film that also finds an empathy through its actors that the camera otherwise would not communicate. Highly recommended.

My full piece is up at Movie Mezzanine.

27 Dresses: Present Perfect

Romantic comedies are not my cup of tea, but they are wonderful sources of activities. 27 dresses is no exception. This scene is great for practicing the present perfect tense.

I. Talk to a partner:


1. Have you ever had insomnia? How often does it happen?


2. What do you do when you just can't sleep?


3. What makes you lose your sleep?


4. When you can't sleep, do you insist on trying to sleep or do you get up and do something else until you fall asleep?



II. Look at the activities below. Check the ones you usually do when you have a hard time to fall asleep.


1. ( ) read a magazine

2. ( ) read a book

3. ( ) use the computer

4. ( ) moisturize your hands with cream

5. ( ) work out

6. ( ) clean the stove

7. ( ) speak to yourself out loud

8. ( ) talk to your sister (or someone else)

9. ( ) dance

10. ( ) eat


III. Watch the movie segment and check what the main character has done during her insomnia.


IV. Now write sentence in the present perfect tense saying what she has (not) done during the whole night.


Ex:


1. She has read a magazine.

2. She hasn't read a book.


Answer key:

III. Don't check 2, 9, 10


WORKSHEET

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - 27 DRESSES

Palette Cleansers: Canyon Passage

I debut a new feature this week at Movie Mezzanine that elaborates on the use of color in a film in establishing mood, character, narrative, themes, and the like. The feature will be called Palette Cleansers, because puns. Anyway, our first selection is Jacques Tourneur's superb, somewhat neglected Canyon Passage, his first Western and first color film. The film has many qualities worthy of recommendation, from its sparse storytelling that belies a dense plot of character relationships and racial politics to the terrific performances it gets from its cast (especially Dana Andrews, who gives one of his finest here). What stands out most, though, is Tourneur's use of color, every bit as subtle but showy as his shadow work and capable of deftly delineating the multiple leaps in perspective and POV. The handful of stills featured are only a fraction of the aesthetically beautiful but meaningful shots in the film.

My full piece is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

Yossi (Eytan Fox, 2013)

Yossi starts so powerfully that the frustratingly stiff, unvarying approach of its camera makes the eventual slog all the more disappointing. In reconnecting with the older, flabbier and unhappier protagonist of his Yossi & Jagger, Fox instantly establishes a sense of quiet agony through his lead's soft expressions and hollowed eyes. But as Yossi inches toward self-liberation, the camera telegraphs his eventual retreats, robbing moments of suspense and, more importantly, the emotional connection of this man's dreams of acceptance and honesty of self.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Netflix Instant Picks 1/25/13—1/31/13

Apologies for the lateness of this post, but last Friday's Netflix picks can be found at Movie Mezzanine. For this installment, I promote the birthday of one of the great American independents, the densest work of another, and a crackerjack new French thriller that made my honorable mentions for 2012.

My full post is up at Movie Mezzanine.

Home on the Range: There + to Be

Animated movies are just great. This one is not an exception. I used this scene with beginners, practicing the use of THERE TO BE with farm animals and food items. I hope you like it.

I. Watch the segment. Read the items below and check the ones you managed to see during the scene.

( )  a black cow


( )  chickens

( ) chicks

( ) bananas

( ) apples

( ) a goat

( ) corn

( ) a dog

( ) a duck

( )  bees

( ) grapes

( )  pigs

( )   a rooster

( ) eggs

( )  a brown cow

III. Now write sentences about the items in exercise A, using There is (isn't) or There are (aren't). Remember that you may use Any and Some in your sentences


Ex: There is a black cow.
      There are some chickens

WORKSHEET


MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - HOME ON THE RANGE

Answer key:

You won't see bananas, a dog, and grapes

The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992)

This is my unforgivably late Blind Spots entry for last November. December's pick, Feuillade's Judex, will likely not receive a write-up until next month. However, this month's scheduled Blind Spots piece will appear on time.

The Long Day Closes opens like a classic movie, with the credits appearing before the picture instead of after and playing over a styled image. In this case, it is a still life of some flowers off to the left as credits appear in flowing cursive in the right two-thirds of the screen. When the movie proper begins, it is to the 20th Century Fox fanfare blared over a brick wall with a plaque announcing the film’s setting on Kensington Street. The juxtaposition deftly pre-summarizes the film, in which the still life recreations of postwar Liverpool are enlivened by the joys of cinema that not only give its child protagonist some kind of escape in a dreary community but are internalized and re-emitted to make that world livable.

The boy in question is Bud, an unassuming chap whom Davies regularly places directly in the center of the frame, surrounding him with symmetrical arrangements of people and objects. The dank, dirty brick walls of this industrial port town lend the film shades of neo-realism, but as with the more brutally forthright Distant Voices, Still Lives, such mise-en-scène adds a lyrical, formal quality to what might have been kitchen-sink aesthetics. The falsity of the image is blatant, but that also informs so much of the film’s deeply felt approach to memory.

Where so many films use a child’s perspective as an “out” for narrative and thematic responsibility, an excuse for perpetuating immature and facile understandings of the complexity of life by rooting them in immature characters, Davies’ semi-autobiographical reminiscence actually attempts to root the film’s aesthetic qualities in that same perspective. Instead reveling in “realistic” visions of horror and struggle while sidestepping their more complex implications, Davies reflects Bud’s cinematic escape fantasies into even the most straightforward frame. Flourishes of camera movement and vividly classical lighting setups serve not only as glimpses into a child’s compartmentalization of the traumas of restrictive British life but as signifiers of the subjective nature of memory, which exaggerates both the fond and not-so-fond events of one’s life.

As the movie lacks any real narrative, what sticks in the mind most are the moments in themselves. The imposing vastness of the Catholic church where Bud is dragged is made terrifyingly small in an intense sequence where the imposed guilt of Catholicism manifests itself via the Christ carved into the church’s crucifix becomes flesh once more before Bud’s terrified eyes. (As a vision of the lingering immediacy of Catholic dogma on the malleable mind and spirit of a child, this section recalls a similar sequence made more recently in the “God” episode of Louie.) At school, Bud finds ways to tune out bullying peers and abusive teachers, such as in one beautiful scene where Davies spotlights the boy (in center-frame, natch) and fades out the rest of the class into near-darkness as Bud daydreams a great ship rolling on the waves of the sea. Davies cuts to this ship, then back to Bud as ocean spray dots his face, dissolving the sudden leap in space and time in such a way that the stately compositions become as thrilling as the most acrobatic camerawork seen elsewhere. Of course, there are also moments that linger in the memory for their extreme banality, such as a static medium-long shot of boys lining up for a lice check, the sort of thing that not even the wildest imagination could make fantastical.

The word “impressionable” tends to be used only in a negative context, as in susceptible to whatever ills a socially conservative (or liberal) activist sees in pop culture. Yet Davies’ presents Bud’s impressionability to the films he sees with fondness and nostalgia. The beam that isolates Bud in the aforementioned classroom shot is soon matched by the projector beam flicking above his balcony seat at the theater, and it is important to note that, until the last shot of the film, Davies never privileges the audience with what Bud watches when he goes to the movies. Instead, the sounds of familiar music and dialogue filter through the audio track as Bud, like any cinephile, cannot help but think of his favorite movies in everyday life. For all the film’s stylistic beauty, nothing captures its approach to the movies and memory like a shot of a young couple whose conversation is replaced by dialogue from Meet Me in St. Louis, their spied-upon young love taking on decidedly cinematic overtones as their bashful, natural chat becomes florid romance capped by an opaque stained glass door closing on them, silhouetting their faces as they move in to each other. In a flash, real life and Minnelli are one and the same, and the joys of both are deepened in new and exciting ways.

Something Old, Something New: The End of Evangelion / It's Such a Beautiful Day

I watched Don Hertzfeldt's masterpiece and Hideaki Anno's nihilistic OAV within days of each other, and I could not help but be drawn by each. Not simply for their respective demonstrations of avant-garde, uncompromising animation, but for the cosmic sense imparted through mental illness in each. They are great films, among the greatest works of modern animation, and I jumped at the chance to write more about either.

My full piece is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

Graveyard of Honor (Takashi Miike, 2002)

For this week's Shelf Life piece at Movie Mezzanine, I took a look at the Takashi Miike film that, more than the few others I've seen, makes me want to really explore his vast filmography. A stylish but muted yakuza thriller, Graveyard of Honor leaves the criminal element choking equally on its own blood and hypocrisy as they bring into their fold someone who shows just how absurd their codes of honor really are. One of the best gangster films ever. My full piece is up now.

Something Old, Something New: The Last Temptation of Christ / Lincoln

I knew I'd forgotten to link to something this week. Last Monday, my second Something Old, Something New piece went up, this time on the similarities that link Lincoln with another subversive, empathetic portrait of an abstracted icon, The Last Temptation of Christ. I'm quite happy with this piece, so I hope you read it. It can be found at Movie Mezzanine here.