From Streetcars To Spaceships

Movies, TV shows, etc. to teach with

A lot of us have talked in recent years about movies and such that are good enough at presenting some historical period, techology or concept that they could be used as real teaching means. Something that a student could watch and come away with a pretty real hope that the viewer(s) would come away withsome basic competency in something that we've counted on schools.
Ideally, one would pair such viewings with instruction by a live human. But I'm only interested here in the ones that YOU think could do well enough on their own. This list is very heavy on war movies. I am more than ready to see that balance shift. This list is also almost entirely Anglo-American. There, too I am more than eager to see films added to balance that out.

We live in a time when many of us are losing our faith in schools. And where there is more respect both for learning after leaving school and for those who are not able to be in one regularly enough to learn in the ways that our society has taken for granted.

These are, educationally speaking, desert island movies. And let me say again, these are not to be held to the high typical standard of our brilliant circle. The acid test is does this piece combine entertainment value (call it watchability) with content well enough that viewers come away better informed than they would have been otherwise in some way that noticeably brings them towards being capable and competent citizens?

Please list them here and hopefully as I go I'll incorporate some or all suggestions in the body of the post. I'm HOPING that eventually your contributions will far outweigh my few feeble ones.

Obviously TED Talks have a special place here. In my opinion most documentaries don't. These days all too many of them are so seduced by the drive for a tidy narrative that they actually HURT understanding by forcing a clean, simple narrative, with Good Guys and Bad Guys. And then people like us have to deal with people who think "I know all about that. I saw the Discovery Channel Special." And that usually means that they're utterly incompetent to judge anything related to it at all.

That having been said, let me start:

 

CONCEPTUAL SOPHISTICATION

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Absurdity is one of the defining tells of a nimble mind. Here's a dose.

 

The Princess Bride

 As far as I'm concerned, this movie stands alone as a brisk, watchable, funny, and remarkably high-speed tutorial in quite a lot of the key tools of critical thinking. The untrustworthy narrator. Ambiguity of language. The smooth, confident, and in some ways sincerely concerned sociopath who can sound so authoritative if you don't pay attention.

Yeah, it's funny, it's goofy. So are many films. But I know of no other movie that seems to have stimulated so much self-examination about clear thinking. And done it in such an easy to remember way. 

HISTORY 

The Middle Ages 

The Lion In Winter

Not only for history of the period but on politics. Trust nobody. Even those you tryst with. Especially those you tryst with. Watch your ass. Plan. Prepare.

Robin and Marion
Companion piece to TLIW, if only for the additional exposure to a world where indoor heating is a joke, and other aspects of daily circumstances of the period among the "nobles", not to mention how little and how much that could mean. 

 

Elizabethan Era

Elizabeth I and II

Not perfect but it will sure as hell put names and faces and personalities to all those names and dates in the textbook. Five hours of this and, if done with any standard written teaching tools the whole period becomes and stays more real.

 

And let me take this chance to say that, by contrast, The Tudors is toxic shit in gold leaf and fancy perfume. It is worse than sometimes innaccurate, though it is that. It is fundamentally misleading about who these people were and why they did what they did. As part of a class where a teacher and ample written materials can counter the idiocies? Then, yes, go to, go to. Otherwise? Keep it away.

 

Shakespeare In Love

No, it's not perfectly accurate or trying to be. But it drops you into a world that is fundamentally different in more ways than a superficial gloss will notice. Rule of Law? Yeah, right. Torture as day to day thing? Of course. Being a spy for the crown? It's a contract job. Plenty of people have done it at some point or other.

1700's

Master and Commander

Beautifully shot, rigorously researched, solidly acted. And might just entice the viewer to check out the many, many books in this wonderful and potentially enriching series.

 

Victorian Era

Topsy Turvy

The life and world(s?) of Gilbert & Sullivan. Again we're seeing England through its performers. And a very different England it is. Wealthy. Smug. Extraordinarily capable and sometimes absurdly blind. And by this time thoroughly, profoundly mercantile, from street urchins to titled aristocrats.

Edwardian Era

Raise The Red Lantern
So historical. Such an ancient world of stone walls and inherited fiefdoms. All struggling to maintain control in a time of record players and modern eyeglasses and steam locomotives. Don't think that the existence of those things plays no role in the nature of rebellions this movie shows.

 

The Thirties and Forties

Brother, Where Art Though? with Matewan

Yes, the first is a film built of metaphors and poetry. But it's also an affecting and detailed portrait of a world and a time that don't get the attention they deserve. And both of them, while making myth of details, show a place and a set of values that was absolutely real.

Mephisto with Cabaret
Pre-Nazi Germany. Both focus on the arts scene but both give plenty of elegant and earthy details of the rest. Seen together they add emotionally resonant context to all those seemingly impossible parts of that world.

Saving Private Ryan

World War II combat. By people who can't get shot two dozen times and merely grunt in manly fashion and be back jumping freight trains by a week later. Detailed. Specific. A true ensemble cast. And a portrait of a time and a place and series of decisions that continue to matter now.

 

The Fifties and Sixties

The Apartment

Mad Men is cute and all but this is a much less prettified view of those days of the man in the grey flannel suit.

 

Thirteen Days

Not perfect but it lays out the circumstances, the players, and many of the dynamics of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the surrounding Cold War.

 

The Space Race

Apollo 13
Well, duh. 

 

Modern Life

(This is more useful than some of you might think. Remember how many kids still have never been to any place with more than two hundred thousand people. Or, even worse, have only gone for a weekend visit or passed through the bus station and have no fucking clue and think that they know all about what cities mean. Or, for that matter, deep country.)

 

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Mortgage scams, megacatering. Urban sprawl. Gender stereotyping. Yeah, this one's a damn good start. I suspect that it could also be a superb teachable moment for the weakness of rule of law in many modern Asian cities.

 

Half Baked

Just about everybody disses this movie. But ya know what? It's a superb overview on living in the city on no fucking money. Screwing around and scraping by. The kinds of lives that hundreds of millions live every day and the media and schools almost never portray sympathetically. Go ahead, laugh.But you just might learn something.

 

The Ice Storm

Our world since the late 1800's has been largely under the thumb of a certain kind of upper middle class, suburbs-living, educated, ambitious class of people who truly are, in their ways, cosmopolitan and intelligent, largely and quite intentionally out of self-interest. This film does a sympathetic but, in the end, largely unforgiving job of showing their world.

 

Tampopo with Taxing Woman, followed by Diva and Mona Lisa

We start with two films about Japan in the eighties. Both by the same director, with related feels and perspectives. But showing very different worlds. Then films about the grimy undergrounds of England and France in the same general times.
All four beautifully made, with the kind of writing, acting, and visual production to can get even an audience that doesn't know these times or places emotionally connected to what they are seeing. And coming away with a collected view of rough lives lived under different terms than the ones that we're used to.

Osama

Life in Afghanistan through the eyes of (mostly) reasonable (by the standards of their context) people trying to create functioning lives in an implacably dysfunctional context. 

POLITICS

They Live

It's just a joke, right? I don't bloody think so.

 

Training Day

Again, this movie shows the kinds of lives that are all too rarely shown well from, more or less, the inside. This movie exaggerates. But not all that much. And I suspect that for the right social studies teacher it provides easily a dozen superb teachable moments. And for once the cool bad guys come away looking like the shitty-ass scumbags that they are and DON'T get away with it. But nobody gets away clean. Good lesson, that.

 

The West Wing
Many of you will squee with glee at this. Some will rage with loathing. Whatever you think of its politics, it lays out congressional procedure and a hell of a lot more of the operational side of modern American politics. Most people find the pretty people and crisp writing makes it easy to watch so getting two or three hours in is pretty easy and that's enough to cover a hell of a lot of ground.

 

WHERE DO WE GO NOW?

A.I.

I know that it's got sappy elements and a soft soap ending. But this is a troubled and troubling world shown here. And the more time passes the more impressive I realize that portrayal to be.

Silent Running

Not fun, not glamourous, all too possible. Important to discuss.

 

Good education can be found in more places all the time.

With all the negative things I have to say about mass media in general, you might think that I want all of us to hide in forest caves with no more than a quill pen and a few sheets of paper. T'ain't so. Occasionally I'll get wind of something coming out of the market-directed media that I find not only admirable, but useful. More specifically, I am convinced that we get closer every day to being able to build small, world class educational institutions simply from a building body of works. Works that can serve as superb tools for learning that depend neither on equally superb teachers to be effective nor on conventional textbooks or course-length curricula.

Seems to me that the new documentary about Allan Ginsberg's Howl is an excellent example. As this NY Times article lays out, this movie is itself (according to the author), not only literary criticism, but a solid introduction to what literary criticism is. Even, to some extent, to what it means to be a writer and to write well. Seems to me that a well-built five page teacher's guide to using this film should enable any basically competent teacher to get most kids over the age of twelve up to speed on these dynamics in six or seven hours of class time, including time to see the movie twice. In, let us remember, a way tied to enough emotionally rich stimulation to be considerably easier to retain than most pedagogy manages.

Add to this such resources as the much-discussed M.I.T. online materials initiative and sites such as Khan Academy, and we're well on our way to considerably attenuating our dependence on conventional schooling or the arduous, not entirely accepted approaches to home and community schooling available now.

Every day we get a little closer. We just need to learn to use these new resources and spread the word of what we find.

No, Joss does NOT "need" for the network execs to give him another show.

So I see that there is yet another round of hubbub because Joss Whedon is being considered again to helm a television series. Part of me hopes that he gets it but part of me feels that J.W. just isn't up to the job of working within a network. We should know this by now. It seems to me that it's long past time that he lined up his own financing and became in charge of his own production or partnered with some kind of longer-term thinking person.

The man doesn't "need" network execs to wake up one morning and become different kinds of people with different pressures upon them or a different culture to be working within. He might as well be said to "need" to be ten years younger or six inches taller. Network television is what it is and it's time that we stopped being surprised every time it keeps not working out.

What's the classic definition of insanity? Doing the same thing and expecting *what* again?

Maybe he needs to turn to Felicia Day as a mentor instead of thinking that it's the other way around. Maybe he needs to put more oomf behind the production mechanism that made Dr. Horrible possible.

But one way or another, what he really "needs" is his own Desilu. His own United Artists. Capital, an executive team, and operational support that isn't under the control of Fox or Sony or any of the vast media conglomerates. They are what they are and no number of fan petitions and, let's face it, no amount of series profit will change that. Frankly, by the standards of those kinds of public companies, he's little people and they will never truly change to suit him.

Time for him to grow up and buy his own house. He needs to accept that he has less in common with J.J. Abrams than he does with Woody Allen for, for that matter. Shakespeare. So he needs to get busy building his Globe Theater.

Sooner he does, the better for all of us.

Consequences in Fiction, Part Two

So I see that yesterday's post has already drawn traffic searching on the phrase "burn notice". Good. Especially since the last straw for me had been having Sam, one of the lead characters, getting beaten and interrogated for three days (unless I'm misunderstanding the timeline in the episode) and, as soon as he's untied, standing up (after three days tied to a chair?!), running into combat, and, as soon as it's over, being casually dropped off at his place looking no more than a bit tired, with just a manly "thank you, brother".

Okay, now I've never been tortured, but I've gotta say that I think that almost three weeks tied to a bed in a burn ward gives me a little to say about this, especially since I kept flashing back to those weeks while I watched the torture scenes. And I can tell you now that after three days tied to a chair, frequently with his mouth duct-taped shut (which, by the way, in a hot, enclosed space like that would have almost certainly killed him right there), being beaten, interrogated, screamed at, and spending most of the rest of the time alone in that dark metal room, he wouldn't even be able to lift his arms or walk, let alone jump into manly action. And when they go out? I'm sorry, but just about anybody would have fucking well fallen over sobbing. Would he, maybe, in theory, wait for his buddy to drive away? Possibly. But one way or another he would be very, very fucked up indeed and a couple of smart guys like those, old pros as they're supposed to be, would have acknowledged that in no uncertain way.

So, just to let y'all know, that was the thing that inspired my previous post.

And, as it happens, my timing was good. Looks like Slashdot has a thread going right now about torture in fiction based on an expansion pack for WoW, and the article they link to turns out to be about just the same point as my previous post, about the stories that fiction tells about actions having consequences. Or not.

And you know what? I think that the article says these things damned well. So I'm done. Go read it. You'll be glad that you did.

The right wingers try yet again to be funny.

So I see that one of the Zuckers is fronting a new movie that they're presenting as a satire of Michael Moore. A few years from now I'll want to get together with some friends and a bootleg copy and try a drinking game. Drink every time you spot a strawman argument. We should all be stuporous by fifteen minutes in. I would suggest drinking every time beating somebody up is used "for laughs" but I don't like binge drinking.

In the meantime, what I'm waiting to see is how blatantly they jigger the ticket sales. How many ways will they "paper the room" and then claim that their movie is a popular success? How many corporate screenings? How many church-subsidized showings? How far will they go to try to make it look like their film is pulling 'em in by the millions?

I'm guessing that the attempts will be blatant, indeed. These are not people with a history of subtlety. And if their supporters could think their way out of a wet paper bag they wouldn't be supporters, would they?

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. The most important battlefield is the minds of children. If this movie pisses you off, respond by spending some time teaching a child critical thinking, ethics, and bravery. That's the best way to reduce the number of right wingers in the next generation.

-Rustin