Movie Reviews

One thing that excites me about something that has happened in class is that I feel like I've had a success with an assignment I came up with, but I also feel like I can improve the way the assignment works the second time around. Basically, I had students begin by writing movie reviews for a movie of their own choosing. We had looked at a movie review for The Crucible earlier in the semester to figure out possible structural features of a movie review. After reading the first few chapters of Catcher in the Rye, I had students write a movie review about the same movie, but this time from the perspective of Holden Caulfield, the narrator and main character of the book. We looked closely at tone, diction, and the use of slang among other things to prepare for writing in his point of view. The results were pretty impressive. The majority of the movie reviews sounded both believable and original. One of my favorites was a review of Casino Royale, the new James Bond movie. Boy, was that a good movie review. He was both complaining about how James Bond was some phony British spy, but in the review he also admitted how James Bond was pretty handsome. That was a subtle little thing that Holden does in the text that I was glad a student picked up on.

The biggest thing about these movie reviews was that they were so much fun to read. I've procrastinated in actually grading them, but I've read through all of them already just for enjoyment, and have read a few others several times. They kill me.

If I were to do this again, I'd really want to work the Internet into the equation, but I'm not sure what would be the best place to organize all of these movie reviews. Blogs do not necessarily seem like the ideal format for these movie reviews unless it were an ongoing process throughout the year. It's possible that I could have students return to these movie reviews later in the year, writing from the perspectives of other important characters from our readings such as George or Lennie from Of Mice and Men. If I stick to just using the reviews for Catcher in the Rye, though, I'm thinking I would want to have students sign up for some sort of free message board/forum. I've only looked around briefly for nice message board/forum setups where I could have students post their movie reviews for their classmates to read and respond to. I haven't exactly fallen in love with any message board formats just yet. (Let me know if you have any good links I should check out.)

Using a message board as the arena for these movie reviews would allow students to take a little more pride in their movie reviews and also make more realizations about the way Holden writes, speaks, and thinks. A number of students in the class are still reluctant to volunteer to share their own writing in class, so using the forum approach would allow students to avoid any extra anxiety. It would probably also save a little class time. I'm thinking we could go to the computer lab once to register for the forum and begin writing rough drafts of their movie reviews and another time to post their reviews and begin responding to each other's reviews. I would probably assign each student to respond to a specific movie review and let them choose at least two other reviews to respond to in order to avoid some posts from not getting any replies. The message board would be accessible to students while they are at home as well, so they could have time to read as many movie reviews as many times as they wish. These movie reviews were a lot of fun. I really recommend doing something like this for Catcher in the Rye because it plays such a large role in the novel, but I suppose this assignment could work with any first-person novel or with characters who have a memorable way of speaking. I'm excited to try to work this technological aspect into this activity the next time around.