Final blog post

OK, remember the deal -- you're watching a film from one of these directors: The Coen Brothers, Mira Nair, or Wes Anderson. We're not going to get to all of The Royal Tenenbaums in class, so if you want to watch that one, go for it.

As far was what you're supposed to do with your blog post, this post should give you some idea. Read at least the first section, through the photo of the old-school cyclist taken by Jacques Henri Lartigue.

Thinks to take note of: 1) the link to the review of Rushmore by David Edelstein. Note how Dessem, the author of the post, puts the review into context, setting up the debate over Wes Anderson that many people have had with friends or inside their heads; 2) the stills taken from the film that -- and here's the important part -- aren't just there as window dressing. The images illustrate points the writer makes in the text. Note, for example, how Dessem refers to the image of the French Club shot, mentioning how the horizontal line at the bottom of the frame is actually distorted by the wide-angle lens. The intersection of Dessem's text and his employment of Anderson's image help make for an interesting insight into the director's visual style; 3) related to the previous point, he makes some observations about how Rushmore relates to Anderson's work as a whole.

So to review: 1) find an interesting review/essay/article online about your film or the director's work as a whole. Link to it and discuss its relevance; 2) Find an image (could be a still image like in this post, or could be a YouTube clip if you can find the right one) and put it in your blog post, making sure it relates specifically to your discussion of the film/director's work as a whole: 3) make sure that you tie the film you watched to the director's other films -- it could be in terms of characters, dialogue, theme, cinematography, music, etc.

Good luck! Have some fun with this -- remember, you're not bound to essay-style writing here.

Almost forgot -- as far as finding the right images to use, it's likely you'll have to go beyond looking on the internet. For the most part, it's just publicity photos out there. So you'll probably have to use your computer's DVD player and capture images that way. If you don't know how to use it, fear not -- here's where the internet comes in. Just do a Google search on "video frame capture" and whatever your DVD player software is called. Or use the "help" function of your DVD player software. Somehow, you should be able to figure it out. If nothing's working, let me know.

Do your Coen Brothers blog post ... friend-o

First of all, I wanted to say thanks to everyone for two days of very illuminating discussion on No Country for Old Men. Many of you brought up observations and ideas that I had never thought of or hadn't been able to express properly. In case you haven't had enough discussion of the film, I'll point you to a few other places: Here is Jim Emerson's blog -- Emerson, a film critic and editor of Roger Ebert's website, has written extensively on the film and went frame-by-frame through it with an audience at the Conference of World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado recently. Secondly, here's one of the few repositories of intelligent discussion on the Internet Movie Database. Normally, these boards are cluttered with the Commenters of the Damned, but someone has been nice enough to sift through all the garbage and compile a thread that includes insightful discussion for some of the most frequently asked questions about the film. I highly suggest checking these out -- if not now, hopefully later when you're not No Countried-out.