ROMEO AND JULIET: LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

A) COMPARE THE SCENE OF ROMEO AND JULIET'S FIRST KISS IN THE FOLLOWING MOVIE ADAPTATION OF THE PLAY  

1) ROMEO AND JULIET (Franco Zeffirelli, 1968)

BELLE - A MOVIE & A TRUE STORY FROM THE 18th CENTURY

Belle: The mixed race daughter of a Royal Navy Admiral is raised by her aristocratic great-uncle in 18th century England.

THE HARD TASK OF GROWING UP - INTERACTING WITH ADULTS

Watch the two videos below and compare the adults you see interact with teenagers to the adult figures we found in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Saroyan's The Human Comedy. 

ROMEO & JULIET - CHARACTERS, PLOT & ACTIVITIES

8 worksheets, 5 videos to work on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. 

WONDER, YOU CAN'T BLEND IN WHEN YOU WERE BORN TO STAND OUT

It was published in 2012 and since then over 5 million people have read it.  Anyone who's read #1 New York Times bestseller WONDER by R. J. Palacio has fallen in love with Auggie (August) Pullman, an ordinary boy with an extraordinary face.  A movie based on the book is coming soon starring Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson and Jacob Tremblay. 

WATCHING THE RAILWAY MAN

War is no game. War leaves a mark. Eric Lomax, like many other surviving soldiers,  lived haunted by his war memories all his life through, as if war never actually ended in his mind and his heart. The Railway Man, based on Lomax’s autobiography,  came out in September 2014  here in Italy as “Le due vie del destino”, but it had opened theatrically on New Year’s Day in the UK and, in the US,   in April 2014.

Eric Lomax (30 May 1919 - 8 October 2012) was one of thousands of Allied prisoners of war forced to work on the construction of the Thai/Burma railway during WW2. Fate wanted he, a train and railway enthusiast, to be part of the army of enslaved prisoners the Japanese employed for their ambitious plan. His experiences, after the secret radio he built to bring news and hope to his mates was discovered, the inhuman tortures he was subjected to,  and which left  him traumatised and shut off from the world, are the main interest of this movie. Water-boarding and savage beating didn’t make Lomax surrender or lose his will to live. Years later, with his life still affected by that huge amount of suffering and consequent hatred, he met Patti (Nicole Kidman), a beautiful woman, on a train and fell in love. Once they get married  and Patti becomes acquainted with Eric’s nightmares and terrifyingly weird moments, she  is determined to rid him of his demons.

One day they discover  that the young Japanese officer who tortured him is still alive and Eric decides that it is time to meet him again.

MODULE 3. DRUMS OF WAR

MODULE 3.  DRUMS OF WAR 

AT THE CINEMA - MACBETH

 "... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  

It came out on the 5th this month and,  at last, I came to see it this morning. It's the latest film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth. I saw it at the cinema with 4scA, one of my classes. 

It is a great movie: dark, gloomy, violent, impressive. It was not my first Macbeth, of course, but it was certainly an outstanding one. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard are giant actors and I expected them to be remarkable  as the two protagonists.  But they were beyond perfection. As Macbeth was doomed to be king and Lady Macbeth his Queen, Fassbender and Cotillard were born to embody these two icon figures.  They were not simply remarkable but incredibly intense, impeccable in their renditions. 

GO ON READING THIS  REVIEW AT MY FLY HIGH BLOG!

THE IMITATION GAME: ALAN TURING, CREATOR OF MODERN COMPUTING

"Sometimes it's the very people who no one imagines anything of 

who do the things no one can imagine"

Alan Turing was a prodigy endowed with incredible stubborness and will power. He succeeded in an apparently impossible enterprise saving thousands of lives during WWII: he invented a machine to decrytp  Enigma, the Germans' secret code, thus boycotting many of their deadly attacks on Britain. He saved all those lives  thanks to his ingenious intuition, algorithms and computing being almost a game to him . He contributed to change the outcomes of a horrifying war,  designing his machine which could compute thousands of figures at a speed a human mind could have never achieved, neither the most brilliant. He is now considered one of the fathers of computer science and a war hero. 

MODULE 2. PARENTS & CHILDREN

Module 2. Parents & Children

LOVE DESPITE WAR - TESTAMENT OF YOUTH AND SUITE FRANCAISE

1. Testament of Youth  

Testament of Youth is a British drama film,  released in the UK in January 2015, which is based on the First World War memoir of the same name written by Vera Brittain.

At the beginning of the book, Vera Brittain describes how she originally intended to write of her experiences as a novel but was unable to achieve the necessary objective distance from her subject. She then tried to publish her original diary from the war years but with all names fictionalised. This too proved unworkable. Finally she decided to write her own personal story, putting her own experiences in the wider historic and social context: an autobiographical memoir with documents (letters and poems written by the protagonists) and intellectual digressions.

Several critics have noted the cathartic process by which she deals with her grief at the loss of young men close to her - her brother Edward Brittain, her fiancé Roland Leighton, her friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow - in the writing.

The narrative begins with Vera's plans to enter the University of Oxford and her romance with Roland Leighton, a friend of her brother Edward. Both were commissioned as officers early in World War I, and both were subsequently killed, as were several other members of their social circle.

SUMMER ACTIVITIES 2 - DO YOU REMEMBER BILLY ELLIOT?

Most people have seen the 2000 movie Billy Elliot, the moving story of a boy from a working-class family who becomes a ballet dancer. It starred a young British actor called Jamie Bell. Jamie is still a successful actor today. The only difference is that he is now a man.

Here's Jamie Bell  as Billy Elliot in the 2000 movie

Here is Jamie Bell as Abraham Woodhull in his latest TV series,  "TURN, Washington's Spies"

TASK 1 - Listen to an article about Jamie Bell and complete the first task in this worksheet TASK 2 - Reading comprehension (Task 1 & 2 Worksheet) CLIPS FROM THE MOVIE - Clip 1  Clip 2  Clip 3 Clip 4  Clip 5  Clip 6 Clip 7 Clip 8 
Clip 9  Clip 10  Clip 11 Clip 12   Finale 
Billy Elliot is now a global stage sensation, a musical with Elton John's music 

DIVERGENT FROM THE BOOK TO THE MOVIE - READING & WATCHING

Let's improve our English with a book and a movie: Divergent by Veronica Roth and its adaptation for the big screen starring Shailene Woodley and Theo James.

Task 1. Reading comprehension: Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 and answer the questions

Excerpt + questions

Task 2. Listening comprehension: Watch the trailer and fill in the gaps

Transcript - Fill in the gaps exercise

MOVIE PROJECT - ANITA B. BY ROBERTO FAENZA

Anita B. is the new movie directed by Roberto Faenza starring Eline Powell, Robert Sheehan, Antonio Cupo, Andrea Osvart, Nico Mirallegro, Moni Ovadia. We are going to see it at the cinema on the international Holocaust Remembrance Day (27th January). 

REBELLIOUS YOUTH - DEAD POETS SOCIETY (1989)

Carpe Diem: Seize the day. This is the lesson John Keating, an unorthodox teacher at an all-male prep school in New England, wants to convey to his impressionable students. Keating is an alumnus of the school, Welton Academy, and hopes to make his students as curious and iconoclastic as he was (as is). Keating encourages them to "suck the marrow out of life," pursue their dreams, and find their voice. He does so with unusual teaching methods, such as tearing pages from textbooks, kicking soccer balls while shouting poetry, and standing on desks to gain a different perspective. These approaches are frowned upon by the administrators at conservative Welton, whose creed is "Tradition, Honor, Discipline, and Excellence."

ANONYMOUS - WAS SHAKESPEARE A FRAUD?

READ THE ARTICLE + WATCH THE VIDEOS AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS IN THE WORKSHEET HERE

Scholars and intellectuals have argued the subject for centuries. Was William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, the “true” writer who penned the scope of work attributed to him? Or, was the name “Shakespeare” merely a cloaked facade to shield the identity of the works’ authentic author? Have we all been “played”?

Those who believe William Shakespeare did not pen the work are called Anti-Stratfordians; these scholars believe that Shakespeare’s “life doesn’t link up to his work.” They hold that only an aristocrat would have been able to pen such articulate and elevated prose.

Anti-Stratfordian scholars that hold to the “Oxfordian Theory of Shakespeare Authorship” believe that we’ve been “played” by a very talented, stealth Elizabethan courtier named Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. These specific scholars call themselves “Oxfordians.”

Oxfordians maintain that Edward de Vere’s biographical life matches that of the author of Shakespeare’s canon (at least more so than the biography of William Shakespeare of Stratford).

SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III IN MOVIES - VIDEO COMPARISON

While historians and historical fiction writers have re-discovered and re-written what people for centuries have thought of Richard III, the only image we have on stage and in films is the one we inherited from Shakespeare.

"The history of the world, like letters without poetry, flowers without perfume, or thought without imagination, would be a dry matter indeed without its legends, and many of these, though scorned by proof a hundred times, seem worth preserving for their own familiar sakes". (from the preamble of Richard III 1955)

On Imdb you can find a detailed list of all the filmed works dedicated to or  focusing on Richard III,  and including even those movies just featuring him as a minor character. But, except for The Black Arrow (adaptation of R. L. Stevenson's historical novel in which young Richard of Gloucester helps the protagonist Richard - Dick - Shelton), in all of them we have him portrayed as the wicked villain. 

VIRGINIA WOOLF IN THE MOVIE "THE HOURS" - CLIPS

Virginia Woolf became a complex, fascinating character in Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS (1999). When the movie was released in 2002, the role of Virginia ,  interpreted by Nicole Kidman,  brought to the Australian actress the Oscar as Best Actress.

Here are two clips from that movie