Also note
(Late answers will receive 0 points. so get them in early); due dates for postings are on the class schedule.

After you put up your posting, you have a couple of days to respond to items on the board; come back often to see what new items appear that you can respond to. Read what everybody has to say about the discussion topic and respond to any or all of them (you need to put at least one substantive response if you are trying for a "C" and at least three if you are trying for a "B" or an "A" on the board), and feel free to respond to responses :)

Remember, discussion points will be assigned according to the thoughtfulness of your answers, not by whether they are "right" or not, since sometimes there is no "right" answer.

However, and this is a bit tricky, you will not get points for unsupported opinions, beliefs, notions, feelings. All of your ideas and claims must be supported with actual examples and by the material in the readings. Quote from the readings and describe actual scenes from the films whenever possible. This serves two purposes: it illustrates your ideas; it also shows that you have read and understood the assigned readings.

Short, "I agree" or "that was great" or "well I think" statements are not going to earn many response points. Responses need to be substantive, to actually extend the ideas of the discussion to earn full points.

With all of that in mind, after you have read the material in Lecture 1, consider the following (these are sort of ice-breaker / introduction questions; there is no pressure to be "deep" this week):

Lecture One considered the cliche, "The book is always better than the movie." However, that's not always the case. After briefly introducing yourself, discuss any one of the topics below:

  1. Giving specific details (not just likes and dislikes) describe a book, play, poem, story that was made into a movie. If the movie was horribly misguided; if it left off key elements that were central to the story; if it butchered the original, explain how and what the differences suggested (for example, was casting Tom Cruise as Lestat in Interview with a Vampire done solely to bring in huge box office dollars at the expense of key story elements)?

  2. Giving specifi details (again, not just likes and dislikes), describe a movie that was clearly superior to the written version. Or if it was not necessarily better, how did it take the original material and change it significantly to make an exceptional film that captured the ideas and tone of the original while creating a new experience? Looking ahead to the Sci-fi genre later in the course, I make some comparisons/contrasts between Arthur C. Clarke's novel and Stanley Kubrik's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The works are wildly different, but they both succeed in different ways; both play to the strengths of the different media used.

  3. Giving very specific examples from the work, discuss a film or a book that is so distinctively filmic (or literary) that it would be difficult to imagine it being successfully translated into the other form. For example, a movie like James Cameron's Avatar is so drenched in visual effects that it might make a successful Halo-like X-Box game, but converting it into a successful novel would take away the audio-visual experience that attracted repeat audiences.