The Minutes-German Film (September 8th, 2004)
*Tasks Today*

-Collect Film Review Papers (For "La Femme Nikita")
-Discussed (in groups) Graded Film Review Papers
-Interpreted Graded Film Review Papers (10-15 Minutes)
-Engaged In Class Discussion about the Papers, Including:
-Mechanics of Paper
-Structure of Paper
Content of Paper
-Thematics of Paper
-Class had group Discussion about which paper earned which 
grade and why.
-Viewed Clips of both "La Femme Nikita" and "Point of No 
Return"
          -Analyzed Clips of both movies, and compared and contrasted 
differences and similarities.

 Class Highlights:

                  Discussion was excellent, going into the usage of the 
term "Hollywood" and all that it entails, and the differences in 
approaches, such as the instinctual and gritty approach to the art of 
violence in the first one, (with some students accenting the characters 
precious vulnerability), versus the videogame-esque herione of the 
American remake. In class, it was also discussed what made a good paper and what made a not-so-good paper.  An example of an excellent paper was paper number 2. Qualities of this paper were that it was well rounded, structured, easy-to-follow, topical and above all, written and citied with a clear understanding of subject matter(with a fine example of that being the way the author mentions the clothing of the characters in the original, and how they are changed in the remake.  It is clear that the way she states this, that this signifies an actual character change, and some would say a “breakdown” of the characters from the original into some other type of character for the remake.  The statement was worded in such a way, that the reader could easily interpret this idea from the sentence, an excellent use of tone.  However, on the not so good paper, the paper feels more like an essay written for a school paper movie review column, with it’s lack of engagement in answering the questions or making the points that educated and scholarly audiences want and need to know.  The one thing in my opinion that get the paper more grief than anything is that it does not focus on certain topics, explain them concisely and move on, (as the excellent paper two does).  This leaves the reader feeling as if they are listening to an assessment, but not being explained in detail why the author feels the way they do (which is due to poor paper organization and lack of knowledge of the subject matter).  Another thing that makes this paper bad is the comparisons to other action films, in particular “Aliens”.  While a small connection could be interpreted between “Aliens” and “Point of No Return”, mentioning James Cameron’s sci-fi epic would only be worthwhile if the author went into explicit detail of how the two films are connected, creating more work for themselves and the audience, and based on the prior arguments of this particular paper, the author needs to figure out how to explain the rest of it to the academic audience, before going off on tangents.