The Untouchables: Prepositions

This classic is full of very interesting scenes to practice grammar. The director, Brian de Palma, is one of my favorite movie makers, because the way he uses the camera provides us, teachers, with plenty of material for our classes. This scene, for example, shows the same apartment several times and there is little language used, so it is a must for beginners. It is always very difficult to find movie scenes for beginners, so this one is precious. I used it to practice house and decoration vocabulary and prepositions as well.


Watch the movie segment for the first time and decide in which room of the apartment the objects below are located. Write the words below next to the object in exercise A.






KITCHEN (K) - BATHROOM (B) - DINING ROOM (D) - CORRIDOR (C)

A.


1. white curtains:

2. transparent curtains:

3. a white oven:

4. a mirror:

5. a sink:

6. a picture:

7. a large table:

8. some jars:

9. a dishtowel:



Answer key: 1.B, 2. K/D, 3. K, 4 . B, 5. B, 6. D/C, 7. D, 8. D, 9. K



B. Watch the segment again and then complete the blanks with one of these prepositions:


ON - IN - OVER - UNDER - THROUGH - AT - BEHIND - IN THE MIDDLE OF - BETWEEN


1. He keeps a bottle of whiskey ______ the white oven.


2. The mirror is ___________ the bathroom wall.


3. The mirror is ______ the sink.


4. There are some cookie jars ________ the dining room shelf.


5. There are some stairs _________ the kitchen door.


6. There is a dishtowel hanging _____ the kitchen wall.


7. The intruder is looking ________ the window glass.


8. The owner of the house lives _________ the first floor. He lives _______ Racine Avenue. His apartment is __________ 1634 Racine Avenue, Chicago.


9. There is a table and chairs _________ the dining room.


10. The men see each other _________ the corridor.



1. in, 2. on, 3. over, 4. on, 5. behind, 6. on, 7. through, 8. on / on / at, 9. in the middle of / in, 10. in

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MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - THE UNTOUCHABLES

Life, and Nothing More... (Abbas Kiarostami, 1992)

Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's Home? was a watershed release, exposing the director to the world and establishing him as a critical and festival favorite to this day. That film's simplicity and profundity, rooted in objective realism but also deepened by subjective camerawork, exists as if outside time. Not until I watched Life, and Nothing More... did I even realize that there are no cars in the 1987 film, no indication that the world in which the film unfolds has any trapping of modernity. This 1992 "sequel," on the other hand, opens with the grind of urban bustle. Kiarostami places his camera inside a toll booth in front of the operator so that the audience only sees the man's hand taking money and handing back tickets. The drivers all ask if the highway is open, and the loud din of emergency vehicles belies his calming assurances that it is. Compared to the muted bustle of children's voices that ushered in the tranquil fable of Where Is the Friend's Home?, Life, and Nothing More... feels harsh and grating.

When Kiarostami's camera jumps from the toll booth into the car of one of the drivers who passes through, the director soon clarifies this new sense of tension. The man driving the car (Farhad Kheradmand) is, effectively, Kiarostami himself, and he is returning to Koker in the wake of a devastating earthquake to try to find the local children who appeared in Where Is the Friend's Home? Accompanied by his young son, the director travels heavily damaged roads to reach the location of his breakthrough film, the beautiful, rustic buildings that made that movie such a gently labyrinthine journey now reduced to rubble. If Where is the Friend's Home? subsumed its conflicts of generations and duty into a benign, lilting trek, the cacophony of sirens, heavy-lifting equipment, and crying babies that drowns Life, and Nothing More...'s soundtrack reminds the viewer how real and mortal the setting for that film was.

Much of this film mirrors the structure of Where Is the Friend's Home? The first stretch of the movie shows the director simply trying to find his way to Koker and Poshteh, the two regions where he shot the predecessor, constantly redirected by road closures in the same way that Ahmad's simple attempt to return his friend's notebook became hopelessly entangled. The director even uses a poster of Where Is the Friend's Home? with the young actor's face on it to try to track him down. Nevertheless, Kiarostami does not simply repeat the other film for self-reflexive giggles but to complicate and even critique the previous film's themes and attitudes. In Where Is the Friend's Home?, the boy's journey is constantly inhibited by the indifference of adults to his conviction. People prove similarly unhelpful in this film, but their silence and distraction now stems from their fresh agony over the loss of possessions and loved ones. One old woman even responds to the director's question with the death count of her family, so absorbed in her grief that anything can bring it spilling out of her. One comes away from the first Koker film under the impression that elders have grown so jaded they cannot even recognize when a child lives up to the standards and values they themselves preach. This film, however, takes the time to show how much can weigh on an adult's mind, tacitly cautioning against quick judgments. (It also deflates the critical view those of us who do not in Iran might take of the elders' behavior in Where Is the Friend's Home? being an indictment of Iranian society and conditioning. This expansion of personal scope reveals a universality to the grown-ups' actions, not only in this film but its predecessor.)

But if the film deepens Where Is the Friend's Home? through tragedy, it also compounds the sense of human warmth and resilience that characterized Ahmad's driven quest. As Kiarostami surveys the heartbreaking damage done by the Manjil-Rudbar quake, he also finds people persevering in the face of utter catastrophe. An old man, Mr. Ruhi, helps the director and Puya reach their destination in exchange for a ride, and his meditative but good-natured thoughts recall the similar helpfulness and joviality of the carpenter who aids Ahmad. Discussing film with the director, Mr. Ruhi gracefully says, "Well, to continue being alive is also an art. I suppose it's the most sublime art of all." Embodying that sensibility is a young couple the filmmaker meets who lost dozens of relatives between them but elected to get married as they planned. The groom-to-be tells the director of all the ways they cobbled together a ceremony out of what little they could scrap and paste together, to the filmmaker's gentle humor and unmistakable admiration. "We thought that we should hurry to set up a home," the young man explains. "The ones who died hadn't expected that. We should go on living and raise a family. Perhaps we will die in the next earthquake."

Such observations are no less didactic than the bedtime story morals of the film's predecessor, but the broader focus and the newfound metatextuality manage to not lose the impact of reality (or verisimilitude) in its self-reflexive touches. The director's boy, in contrast to the child protagonist of the previous Koker film, is a tag-along, but he brings the same sense of real empathy and perseverance that Ahmad did. His ostensibly insensitive conversations, carried on with the bluntness befitting a child, also unlock believable, crucial connections with those still stunned by the devastation. One of the most believable, realistic aspects of this or any Kiarostami film is the notion that something as innocuous as kids' undaunted enthusiasm for soccer is not only a welcome relief to the pain around them but a vital means of slowly overcoming it. Sometimes, even Kiarostami's distancing analysis can fold back into the intimacy of the film's more neorealist stretches. The finale, in which the director is helped by a previously ignored hitchhiker and then returns the favor, could almost be a critique of his own role as the director and a reminder not to lose sight of the real world around him even as so much of the film serves to undermine his connection with that world by proving its falsity. From a delicate fable, Kiarostami expands into a serious (but never self-serious) meditation on the power and limits of art, and he still had one more extrapolation to go.

All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

Pedro Almodóvar's films are so stuffed with irony that even the sympathetic streak underneath his wild transgression can sometimes seem a front for even darker impulses underneath. In All About My Mother, the director so thoroughly blurs camp, tastelessness and wrenching drama that it should be the most insoluble of all his movies. On the contrary, however, this is by some measure his most openly loving film, a tribute to the roles women play in art and life that deepens and softens the black comic exaggeration of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The women here are no less melodramatic or filled with presence, but Almodóvar's affection is plain even without the lovely dedication he makes at the end.

The opening shots, of tilts and tracks over medical equipment giving a few final, artificial breaths to the doomed, do not so much set a tone for the film as get Almodóvar's usual darkness out of his system. Whatever one might want to read into the machinery falsely keeping flesh alive or a broader cold machination underneath the red-blooded melodrama to come soon dissolves as nothing more than a setup for a swift emotional payoff: these shots merely establish the initial setting of Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a nurse in Madrid in charge of overseeing organ transplants. Almodóvar establishes her here so that when her teenage writer son, Esteban, dies on his birthday chasing an actress' autograph, he can immediately place her in the position she had to place so many others, of being sorry for he rloss but needing to act fast. I did say this wasn't the usual Almodóvar black comedy, right?

Yes indeed, for as the rest of the film settles into Manuela's search for closure and meaning, from which one of the director's most graceful visions emerges. This is as true in the early stages of Manuela's grief—in which she literally follows her son's heart in its new host to be close to him—as when the mother heads into strange territory and links up with her old transsexual friend Agrado (Antonia San Juan), two actresses, and a nun, Rosa (Penélope Cruz), pregnant by Manuela's her AIDS-stricken, transvestite, former lover (Toni Cánto). This carnival of unorthodox types is treated not with scorn or derision but the same care and love that Manuela receives as a devastated mom. 

The characters' lives entwine, as do their roles. Manuela, the real mother who has suffered a loss, forms an instant bond with Huma (Marisa Paredes), the actress for whom her son died, as the actress who plays Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire acts out a surrogate maternal care for the troupe's Stella, Nina (Candela Peña), a drug addict and Huma's lover. Before the actress even figures out who Manuela is, the two communicate such a strong, unspoken understanding that they set out together on the streets of Barcelona to look for Nina. Later, when Nina disappears yet again, Manuela acts as her understudy, the real mother helping the stage mother and then pretending to be a mother to play Stella. By fluidly moving through these cubby holes of sexual and parental identity, Manuela breaks out of confining roles that weigh on them all, including the men living as women. Agrado feels body image pressure, remarking that she must keep her figure as she guiltily enjoys Manuela's cooking. Later, she explains why she has not yet had her penis removed by way of the absurd specificity of her profession's demands. "The clients like us pneumatic and well-hung," she says, referencing both her avalanche of surgeries and the part of her original anatomy she must retain despite all appearances to the contrary.

All this madness stacks on top of each other with Almodóvar's typical use of color-saturated frames and telenovela emoting, yet I can think of no other film in his canon that offers so many moments of humanity for his characters. Agrado leads a frank, vulgar discussion of sex among the women as Huma sits with her regal, actorly countenance in seeming disapproval. But when the subject turns to oral sex, she suddenly breaks in with the statement, "It's been ages since I sucked a cock," which she says with the sort of wistfulness normally reserved for the want of a favorite meal not had since adolescence. Rosa has a moment of searing melodramatic heartbreak: on her way to the hospital to give birth, Rosa sees her Alzheimer's-stricken father and his dog. The dog recognizes her, the father does not. A total diversion of a scene, this interlude nevertheless devastates for the detached, unknowing pleasantries the father offers to the woman as he calls his dog, as well as the daughter's willingness to play along, knowing full well a correction would be instantly forgotten. But among these moments of humor and sorrow, there is also triumph, especially when Agrado makes up for a canceled performance of the acting troupe by launching into a spontaneous one-woman show. She admits to her various surgeries before a quickly enraptured crowd and mines her confessions for self-effacing humor and empowerment to raucous hoots and applause.

The various maternal and sexual roles of the women suggest that Almodóvar views gender as a social construct with defined behavior patterns. This would also explain why he does not hesitate to include Agrado and Manuela's transvestite ex-lover, Lola (Toni Cantó) among the film's women. Lola does not appear until the final act of the movie, yet Almodóvar invests much of the ending warmth and sadness in the character. Dying of AIDS, Lola only wants to live long enough to see the son he made with Rosa and is stunned with grief when he learns of the son he never got to meet. Ironically, Lola, the only outwardly male character in the film, is the one who seems most wronged, doomed by disease and denied something for his sexual identity. Yet Lola also helps bring about the hope of the movie, inadvertently naming his second child after his first and implanting the notion of rebirth and a stronger generation, literalized through heightened biological immunity but suggestive of a better tomorrow. That optimism is as touching as Almodóvar's fond, sweeping dedication of the film to his favorite actresses, to all women, and to all men who become women. Such a tribute is almost to be expecting from this, Almodóvar's most giving film.

Where is the Friend's Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)

Where Is the Friend's Home? announces the intimacy of its focus from its opening shot, held on a door in close-up as the credits roll. The sound of children chattering and the unlatched door being blown ajar and closed again by the wind comprises all the action of the shot, until a shadow appears upon the door and footsteps near. The approaching person is the schoolteacher, reentering the classroom to scold his unruly wards. By focusing so intently on, effectively, nothing, Abbas Kiarostami makes the teacher's emergence that much more frightening, subtly aligning the audience's feelings toward the man with those of the children he harangues. One poor boy in particular, Mohammed Reza Nematzadeh, receives such a tongue-lashing for doing his homework on loose-leaf rather than in his assigned notebook that his thunderstruck terror filters through the camera and nearly turns the calmly filmed scene into a horror film.

Kiarostami stays in a childlike perspective for the remainder of the movie. Adults never appear in full close-up, the way a kid processes a grown-up, and the even larger world around them can be as scary as it is wondrous and inviting. The world takes on these contradictory properties to an even greater extent for Ahmad, a classmate of Nematzadeh's who discovers he accidentally took his friend's notebook home with him. Aware that his hapless buddy faces expulsion if he enters class the next day without that book, Ahmad decides to return it. But with Nematzadeh in the town of Poshteh and Ahmad stuck in Koker, he needs some help getting there, help almost always denied him.

The chief conflict in the warm, gentle flow of Where Is the Friend's Home? concerns the friction between Ahmad's earnestness and sense of personal duty and his elders' indifference. Relatives and strangers all talk about the values children need to be taught, but they get so lost in their narcissistic interpretation of what true responsibility and duty are that they utterly fail to notice how much Ahmad exhibits the values nominally taught to kids. The boy's grandfather opines that kids should be beaten regularly to instill discipline, even if they have done nothing wrong. The mother offers an even blunter response to her son's act of kindness, assuming he merely wants to get out of doing his own homework and finally shouting, "Obey!" This outburst, yelled early into the film, crystallizes Kiarostami's commentary on the disconnect between morality and what is taught as such in school (which is, after all, a socializing institution as much as an educational one).

Yet even as Kiarostami portrays the world as a harsh place, he infuses Ahmad's journey with a lyrical quality that constantly finds the warmth and humanity in people. Whenever Ahmad finds himself stymied by an indifferent adult, he runs into a child who proves far more understanding and helpful, creating a network of social interdependence that offsets the self-centered narcissism of the grown-ups. And not even all the elders are bad; as night falls on the increasingly desperate child, Ahmad finally receives assistance from an old man. Ironically, the gentleman's age makes him as much a hindrance as help, yet his willingness to engage with the kid makes their wandering through labyrinthine streets at night even more dreamlike and fantastical. Rather than appear as a token of enduring empathy, the old man acts as a playful guide, drawing out the already laborious walk around Iran's countryside even as he brings it to an amusing anticlimax.

No one could deny that Where Is the Friend's Home? is a message movie. Its clearly drawn lines between callous, conditioned adults and their innocent, moral progeny show the director at his most didactic. Yet even this fable has its nuance and grace, from the grandfather's friend who gently asks Socratic questions that undermine his old pal's irascible pro-beating stance to the way the camera sometimes drifts off to follow the adults exclusively, momentarily forgetting the aesthetic and narrative arc simply to dwell with these other people. Most unorthodox of all is the ambiguity that hangs over this otherwise simple tale of generational conflict, the question of whether the elders who react with such apathy, even hostility, to Ahmad's quest were once as pure as he, and whether Ahmad and his friends will grow into jaded, "socially acceptable" adults too. Nothing underscores the complexity Kiarostami brings to the project like its ending, which amusing suggests that the final action Ahmad takes is at once a transgression and the most moral, even the most reasonable choice he could have made.

The Time Traveler's Wife: 2nd Conditional

I had very little expectations about this movie, but it is amazingly pleasant and creative. The whole idea is very interesting and the gripping beginning is just great. I used two scenes from the movie to have students practice the 2nd conditional in an imaginative, contextualized way.

I. Work with a friend. Write down your answers to the questions:

1. Would you like to time travel? Why (not)?

I ______________________ because ______________________.

2. What would the consequences of time travel be?

If people could time travel, _________________________________.

3. Would you change anything about your past?

If I could change anything about my past, I _________________ .

4. What about history? Would you change anything? What would you do to change it?

If I could change anything in history, I ___________________-.

II. Watch the 1st segment and talk to a friend about the questions that follow.

1. What happened in the segment?

2. Why did he decide to go back in time to talk to himself as a child?

3. What do you think will happen next?

III. Watch the 2nd segment now. Then answer the questions. Write down your answers and use the 2nd conditional.

1. If you could go back in time, would you choose the person you wanted to marry and make her love you? Why (not)?

If I ______________________, I ______________________

2. Would you do what he did if you were the main character of the movie? Why (not)?

If I ______________________, I _______________________

3. Would life be better or worse if people could travel in time? Why?

If people __________________, _________________________

IV. Rank the periods that, If you could time travel, you would visit first, second, or never. Justify your answer.

1. Prehistoric Age

2. 0 BC - Jesus Christ era

3. 1800's

4. A few years ago

5. The 60's

6. 20 years in the future

7. 100 years in the future.

8. 500 years in the future.

9. Choose a time period.

V. Prepare a speech to share with the rest of the class. Follow the model below. Make sure you use the 2nd conditional.

I I could time travel across , first I ______________________________ because ____________. Second, I _____________________ because ____________, and finally I _____________________ because _____________. However, I _____________ (never) because_______________.



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Insomnia (1997) vs. Insomnia (2002)

With The Dark Knight Rises in theaters, what better time to examine the film that, after Memento, proved to Warner Bros thatChristopher Nolan could handle a larger budget and an A-list cast. In remaking a sly, subversive Norwegian neo-noir, Nolan offered a glimpse into the good and bad he would bring to spectacle cinema over the next decade. True to his hard-to-summarize nature, Nolan at once simplifies the psychological and moral miasma of the original while adding various touches that make his more streamlined, narrative-centric version more ambitious an overview of guilt. I know of no one else who can simplify his way into some form of depth, which may be why I cannot dismiss Nolan as I think I should. Nevertheless, I prefer the rawer, harsher original.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Runaway Slave (Pritchett Cotten, 2012)

I tried my best to actually address Runaway Slave, a loathsome new piece of sub-Michael Moore agitprop, rather than simply foam at the mouth. I cannot say to what degree I succeeded. To even list the logical fallacies present in this oversimplification of disproportionate poverty, crime, etc. among black Americans as a failure of the Democratic Party and welfare would stretch well beyond my 1,000-word limit. And for a movie that goes so far out of its way to assure conservatives that they are not racist, its techniques sure are offensive, from the way it sinisterly frames any leftists black speaker to the repeated refrain of black teenagers with their pants sagging (because that has what to do with anything?). Easily the most reprehensible film I've seen this year.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.