Starting to Talk about Movies

We begin to talk about movies this week, an activity that can help us improve our spoken English in so many ways. There are literally thousands of things that we can say about any given film. What elements will this course focus on?

First, we have begun to learn the basic terms in English for talking about movies and film in general. What are "genre," "setting," "plot" and "the climax"? How do we construct grammatically correct sentences that ask and answer basic questions about a movie? Last week's Movie Language Handout and Movie Riddles game gave us the tools to do just that. (These links are also provided in the sidebar on the left.)

Keep these class handouts in your notebook because you will be referring to them thoughout the semester each time we study a new film.

A main objective of this course is to be able to summarize a movie's plot or part of it. That brings me to our second area of focus: To practice retelling what happens in an individual movie scene. This activity involves describing characters' actions and what happens as a result. It requires that we have a good command of verb tenses and that we be able to remember what happens, when it happens and why it happens.

We begin to practice the art of summarizing this week with the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1991), a classic action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg.

This opening scene contains 13 nonstop minutes of mystery, terror, pursuit, close calls and gruesome deaths. Of the three characters we see in the opening minutes of the film, only one is alive at the end of Scene 1--our hero, of course. By then, he's met his arch-enemy and rival and has come face-to-face with the one creature he fears: snakes.

Click here to view and/or download the class worksheet for Scene 1 of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which also contains our homework assignment for Thursday.

You see, I like doing things, not reading about them.
―Indiana Jones to a co-worker, in 1917 Petrograd