Table of contents for No. 90 in Screen Education

La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016) is most famous at least for the near future, if not forever – for its defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory Oscars loss, a moment of such off-script surprise and drama that it turned the 89th Academy Awards into something resembling a sports movie, with plucky underdog Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) triumphing in unbelievable, at-the-buzzer fashion. Having won five BAFTAs, seven Golden Globes and – earlier that night – six Academy Awards, La La Land was fully expected to win the Oscars’ climactic prize, Best Picture. But in an upset made infamous by an all-time gaffe – the wrong envelope handed to presenters, the wrong film title read out, the wrong winners coming on stage – it lost, only after its makers had started delivering acceptance speeches. The film…

From one perspective, the financial success of the new Planet of the Apes trilogy – from Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011) through Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014) to War for the Planet of the Apes (Reeves, 2017) – doesn’t come as a surprise. After all, you’ve got recognisable intellectual property, big budgets and plenty of action: the kind of formula that makes for big bucks at the box office. Yet the fact that the Apes trilogy raked in over US $1.5 billion dollars worldwide belies the uniqueness of the series. It’s not just that the Planet of the Apes brand was hardly rock-solid after the original film (Franklin J Schaffner, 1968) was followed by an ignominious string of sequels and…

‘What’s wrong with you?’ It’s rare that a person asking this question is looking for anything resembling a friendly response, and even rarer that they should receive it. However, the seven guests in You Can’t Ask That’s ‘Facial Difference’ episode take the callous start to their interview with a smile. It’s easy to imagine that each of them has come across this question countless times before – if not in words, then certainly in the curious stares of strangers. Their answers are patient, open and intimate as they explain potentially life-threatening and often debilitatingly painful medical conditions, benign birth defects and devastating accidents. Elly, who was born with only one eye and one ear, and Carly, whose body’s lack of a certain protein severely affects her skin and hair, stress…

Watching visual media in the classroom has long been a running joke in representations of education: the hungover teacher popping a video on to keep the class quiet while hiding at the back of the room with their head in the rubbish ; an -history documentary droning background while kids carve their initials into their desks and play games on their computers. Films in the classroom were the fallback of substitute teachers, end-of-career snoozers and student-teachers who had been out drinking the night before. Videos were seen as babysitters between the hours of nine and three for people who could not, or would not, do their jobs properly. As teachers in today’s classrooms, however, we know that the reality of using films as texts is very different from this outdated…

Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s most well known plays – it continues to be studied in countless English classrooms and remains a frequent pop-culture reference point. It has also been the subject of many big-screen adaptations, including one made by cinema pioneer J Stuart Blackton in 1908; a lush 1936 production directed by George Cukor, featuring mature-aged stars Norma Shearer (thirty-four) and Leslie Howard (forty-three); and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 production, renowned for its countercultural vibe, lush music and teenage leads. In the VHS years, Zeffirelli’s romantic Renaissance-styled Romeo and Juliet became the go-to classroom resource for teachers struggling to connect students with the rhythms of Shakespearean language and draw them into the dysfunctional world of the Montagues and the Capulets. That is, until the release of Baz Luhrmann’s…

The earliest images of robots on the big and small screen were usually only vaguely humanoid; while they had something approximating a body, they were undeniably mechanical in nature. From The Jetsons’ Rosie the android maid (voiced by Jean Vander Pyl) to Lost in Space’s mononymous Robot (played by Bob May and voiced by Dick Tufeld), children’s TV versions of sci-fi robots were often benign, clunky creatures; the portrayals of their relationship with their human masters, however, suggested a desire on our part for our futuristic companions to have at least an approximation of intelligence and personality. The human need to communicate is perhaps the genesis of artificial intelligence (AI) as we see it most often depicted on screen now: the capacity to look, feel and speak like us makes…

Using film in the classroom is a concept that is really not new and shiny anymore. These days, popular films and movie clips make their way into classrooms on a regular basis, and have even made frequent appearances in my classes. My experience as a middle years English teacher attests to this notion: I worked to include film clips into discussions of plot, and observed my colleagues drawing on films for instructional purposes in other disciplines. My undergraduate composition students also lend support to this fact; as one of them said to me last semester, ‘Can we just watch a movie today like we did in high school?’ Yes, you can, I answered to myself – but we will do more than just watch. Contained in the words of this…

A founding work of African cinema that depicts a young Senegalese woman’s unhappy life as a maid in France, Black Girl is an angry denunciation of colonial exploitation and appropriation. As CRISTINA ÁLVAREZ LÓPEZ argues, it is also a moving and poetic film in its own right – one that, half a century on, is only now starting to receive the appreciation it deserves. Considering both its artistic achievement and its crucial role in the history of African cinema, Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966) is still an undervalued film. The obvious reason for this is that, until quite recently, it has not been readily available internationally. But there is a more general factor: the difficulty that Third World cinema faces in competing with films from culturally…

In its first moments following its opening credit sequence, Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) reveals its resounding thematic essence. It is a film about the unspeakable, and the inability to speak, expressed either as miscommunication or lie. That is both its narrative crux and something embedded in its screenplay, in and beneath the dialogue. This torment of the unspeakable is foreshadowed in the film’s opening, after Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) and her husband, George (Richard Burton) – likely named for George and Martha Washington, the earliest president and first lady of the United States of America1 – arrive home after a party, expecting the arrival of Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis). ‘What a dump!’ Martha exclaims, mimicking Bette Davis, but neither she nor her husband can…

Imagine (or remember) your first day at a new school. You don’t know anyone. You don’t know your teachers. You don’t even know where the bathroom is. How do you feel? Now imagine that you look different to everyone else. And that the reason you haven’t been to school before is that you have spent your life in and out of hospital, having operation after operation. Some of them were to save your life. Some of them were to make your life that little bit easier. And some of them were to make you look a bit more ordinary. Now, how do you feel? Wonder (Stephen Chbosky, 2017), based on the book by RJ Palacio, is about a ten-year-old boy named August, or ‘Auggie’, Pullman (Jacob Tremblay), who has been…

On 20 September 1973, an estimated 90 million people watched as Billie Jean King prevailed in a winner-takes-all tennis match against 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, who was once ranked as the top male tennis player in the world.1 Though King walked away from the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ with the US$100,000 prize, she had played for so much more. With Riggs, a self-proclaimed male chauvinist, disparaging the skills of female tennis players and degrading women more broadly at every opportunity, King took the court at the Houston Astrodome to win respect for female athletes and the codes they were competing in.2 With her victory, she inspired countless women – athletes or otherwise – around the world. Battle of the Sexes (Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris, 2017) dramatises the events surrounding what…

The year 2017 saw women’s rights gain unprecedented attention in certain areas, most notably with the #MeToo campaign, which dominated headlines and social-media feeds in the wake of dozens of allegations of sexual assault being made against heavyweight Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Women around the world told their stories of abuse at the hands of men, and alleged perpetrators were outed in Hollywood and beyond. Not only that, but there were real consequences for these alleged abusers, particularly in Hollywood, which saw powerful men lose their jobs, their roles and their careers. The so-called Weinstein effect shows no signs of slowing in 2018. The first of January saw the founding of Time’s Up, a movement against sexual harassment that is supported and funded by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. The…

BEEPOPULATE http://beepopulate.com Cost: free Developed by Mango Concept, this educational mobile game is a fun and charming platform for teaching students about the imperative role that bees play in our environment and our lives. Did you know that bees are responsible for pollinating a third of everything humans consume? Or that bees are disappearing at an alarming rate due to a combination of parasites, viruses and pesticides? These are just some of the interesting and important facts learned while playing the game. Available for free download on iOS and Android devices, BeePopulate would be a great addition to middle and upper primary school classrooms if students are learning about biology, the ecosystem or sustainability. The game’s premise is to design and maintain a garden for bees to pollinate. Students can…

Inside Llewyn Davis (The Coen brothers, 2013) is a story told in a circle. It begins, moves forward, before looping back around into itself. Its beginning is its end and its end is its beginning. Even a road trip – that straightest of narratives – is circular: a round trip there and back; a circle within a circle. Inside Llewyn Davis is circular, like an album. Like a vinyl record on the turntable, it spins round and round, seemingly travelling somewhere yet going nowhere. It plays like an album because the film is full of songs: songs that – like those best tunes, on the best LPs – grow more profound with each play, that suffer not from repetition, that only add meaning with subsequent spins. We meet the titular…