Stage 1 Sace English Studies Text Preferences

STAGE 1 SACE ENGLISH STUDIES TEXT PREFERENCES List your PREFERENCES for these film texts below: 1ST FILM CHOICES Student name: 2ND and 3rd PLOT: An IRS auditor Stranger than Fiction … takes a great premise and runs with it, neither wasting opportunities nor going off on tangents. It features strong work from both the main and supporting actors, and manages seamlessly to incorporate both humor and poignancy. I was (tax man) has his life expecting Stranger than Fiction to be funny; I had not anticipated it to be as touching as it is. Director Marc Forster and interrupted by the P

screenwriter Zach Helm reveal great affection for their characters, and this is apparent in every frame of the finished picture. R

sound of a personal E

Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is a member of the anonymous masses – an IRS agent whose daily routine is dominated by numbers, F narrator who knows his not words or human interaction. For him, every day is like every other; for twelve years, he has lived a life of solitude. Then comes E R

every thought, feeling a mysterious Wednesday when Harold begins to hear a voice. Although he doesn’t realize it at the time, this is not the voice of god E and action, including N

or fate, but of author Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), and she’s narrating Harold’s experiences. At first, he thinks his toothbrush or C

when and where he will tie is talking to him, but then he figures out what’s going on: he’s the main character in someone else’s book. Kay’s voice is an E die. (2007) annoyance until she mentions that, little does he know, his death is around the corner. This forces Harold to seek help. A : Genre: Comedy, psychiatrist (Linda Hunt) thinks he needs to be medicated. A literary professor (Dustin Hoffman) gives him different advice. Drama, Romance Although not believing Harold’s tale, he advises the tax man to figure out whether he’s in a comedy or a tragedy. Initial signs point Running Time: 105 to the latter. min. Meanwhile, Harold’s job takes him to a bakery to audit Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the baker. She explains to him why she Rating: M didn’t pay her taxes, showers him with insults, then does everything possible to make his job tough. Harold responds by staring at her breasts, stumbling over his words, and generally making an ass out of himself. Meanwhile, the voice keeps making Director: Marc Forster observations Harold is uncomfortable with. Eventually, Ana takes pity on Harold and bakes him some cookies. In the words of one Writer: Zach Helm of cinema’s immortal characters, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Now, Harold has something to live for, which Cast: Will Ferrell, means it’s imperative for him to locate the omnipotent force that is directing his actions. Maggie Gyllenhaal, A movie review by James Berardinell Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson, Tony Hale STAGE 1 SACE ENGLISH STUDIES TEXT PREFERENCES P

PLOT: When his The surface of Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko (2001) is so peculiar, clever, and entertaining (creepy giant bunnies, falling airplane R engines, time travel, Patrick Swayze) that it's almost possible to overlook what truly sets it apart, especially from its many fellow E bedroom is destroyed F teen films – that all these trappings are in the service of a serious, uncompromising portrait of its deeply disturbed, mentally ill title E by an object fallen from character. This is a film glutted with pop-cultural references (its set in '80s suburban America) and flashy cinematic touches, but R E

the sky, an imaginative Donnie's crippling pain and confusion cut through it all, giving weight to Kelly's good ideas and rendering the bad ones N teenager makes the C

insignificant. E acquaintance of an The engine driving the plot is, in this case, literally just that: the story's set in motion by a detached airplane engine that plunges : imaginary friend, Frank, into Donnie's bedroom in the middle of the night. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal), the middle child in a conservative middle class family, a six-foot rabbit who survives this freak event only because he happens, on this particular night, to be sleeping not in his bedroom but on the local golf- predicts the end of the course, a decision suggested to him by the man-sized, nightmarish bunny who comes to him in visions. For an encore, this world. (2001) nefarious rabbit, having thus established his prophetic powers, informs Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 Genre: Drama, minutes, and 12 seconds. Donnie Darko is a busy film, full of supporting characters, suburban comedy, and '80s music (there are Mystery, Sci-Fi even a couple quasi-dance numbers thrown in), but its basic shape is very simple: a countdown to this end-date, a march towards what is either a time-bending, sci-fi conclusion or the disintegration of Donnie's mind, or both. As a result, the film, even at its most Running Time: 113 whimsical, has a creepy, almost unbearably intensity, a sense of impending doom. min. Donnie Darko has a cumulative power because it doesn't soft-pedal its subject, or neuter it by trying too hard to please the audience Rating: M it acknowledges that the confusion and unhappiness we all feel in adolescence don't always get worked through, that they are Director: Richard Kelly something very real and potentially very damaging. It translates its hero's pain into vivid, exhilarating genre material, but without Writer: Richard Kelly robbing it of its dark gravity. Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Teen schizophrenia: Donnie Darko by Jared Rapfogel, July 2002 (Senses of Cinema) Jena Malone, Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Patrick Swayze, Drew Barrymore STAGE 1 SACE ENGLISH STUDIES TEXT PREFERENCES P

PLOT: A teenage loner There’s a scene in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet that takes visual shorthand to new heights: a shot of the hero’s family TV set, it R purports to be footage from a ‘40s film noir thriller. In crisp black-and-white, we see a hand holding a gun and a shadowy figure E pushes his way into the F who appears to mount a set of stairs. You could waste a lot of time trying to find out which movie it’s from, but in all likelihood, it E underworld of a high doesn’t exist. With one fake shot, Lynch is capturing the essence of the entire film: how crime, threat and menace actually titillate R E

school crime ring to us. Whose hand is it? Whose gun? Where is it going and why? This teasing fragment tells us a lot about the nature of entertainment N investigate the C

and our rapacious appetite for thrillers, cop flicks and trashy whodunnits. E disappearance of his With Brick, first-time director Rian Johnson appears to have taken that one observation, then stretched it, twisted it and salted it to : ex-girlfriend. (2005) create one of the most original and entertaining movies of the year so far. You might (hard)boil it down to The Outsiders as Genre: Drama, scripted by classic pulp writers Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain or, most obviously, Raymond Chandler. But more simply, Brick Suspense/Thriller understands the beauty of an honest mystery, elegantly mounting a series of clues — with twists and red herrings along the way — Running Time: 119 before weaving it all together for a mind-reeling climax. min. Be warned, though: it does take some time for the film to settle, because Brick has one major gimmick in its grasp. Though shot in Rating: M lustrous colour and filmed in the wide-open, sunny suburbs of San Clemente in California, Johnson’s high-school teens converse in Director: Rian Johnson a lingo that owes more to tough-guy private dick Sam Spade than the Valley-speak of Clueless and American Pie. Cops are “bulls”, Writer: Rian Johnson drug addicts “dose” themselves and “duck soup” is pretty hard-to-see slang for “easy pickings”. It’s not always convincing, and the mostly unknown cast sometimes struggle with it, but Brick sticks with its convictions, and after a good 20 minutes, all the jive talk Cast: Joseph Gordon- sifts into the background. Levitt, Nora Zehetner, EMPIRE UK Damon Wise 2005 Noah Fleiss, Matt O’Leary, Noah Segan, Meagan Good, Emilie de Ravin, Lukas Haas

List your PREFERENCES for these prose texts below: PROSE CHOICES 1ST 2ND and 3rd STAGE 1 SACE ENGLISH STUDIES TEXT PREFERENCES Everybody who is anybody is seen at Jay Gatsby’s glittering parties. Day The Great Gatsby

and night his mansion on West Egg P

buzzes with bright young things R

by F. Scott Fitzgerald E

drinking, dancing and debating his F

There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls E

mysterious character. For Gatsby – R

young, handsome, fabulously rich – came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the E afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his N

always seems alone in the crowd, C

watching and waiting, although no beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. E : one knows what for. Beneath the On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in shimmering surface of his life he is the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all hiding a secret: a silent longing that trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and can never be fulfilled. And soon this scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. destructive obsession will force his world to unravel. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York – every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was brilliantly captures both the pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb. disillusion of post-war 1920’s ‘A classic, perhaps the America and the moral failure of a At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough supreme American novel.’ society obsessed with wealth and coloured lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with John Carey, Sunday Times, status. But he does more than render glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs Books of the Century the essence of a particular time and and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked place, for in chronicling Gatsby’s with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to tragic pursuit of his dream, Fitzgerald know one from another.… recreates the universal conflict between illusion and reality. STAGE 1 SACE ENGLISH STUDIES TEXT PREFERENCES P

The simplest way to describe this R

book is as a collection of short stories E TheThe ThingsThings TheyThey CarriedCarried F

about American soldiers fighting the E by Tim O’Brien R

Vietnam War – both abroad and at E

home, as well as during and after the First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian N C

war. But just like war itself, and that College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them E war in particular, nothing is ever folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his : quite that simple… foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and Its author Tim O’Brien, for example, spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White is not unlike the character called Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been “Tim” that he created for the book, there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly as both author and character carry chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at the stories of similarly experienced Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about lives. O’Brien not only shares the same name as his protagonist but her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she also a similar biographical never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed ten ounces. They background. Readers should note were signed “Love, Martha,” but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did that although the actual and fictional not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his O’Briens have some experiences in rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then ‘Even as we are influenced common, The Things They Carried is at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin. by ancient myths such as a work of fiction and not a non-fiction The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near- The Iliad, where war is autobiography. This distinction is extolled and the valorous central to understanding the novel. necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wrist watches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, warrior praised, modern chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Novel? Well, yes, because although novels such as Tim O’Brien’s payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water… you can read each ‘story’ separately, The Things They Carried they all involve “Tim” as protagonist, challenge those very and taken together they provide an notions.’ Jan Matney incredibly authentic account of what it must have been like to fight in that war. STAGE 1 SACE ENGLISH STUDIES TEXT PREFERENCES P

Streetwise George and his big, R E

childlike friend Lennie are drifters, F searching for work in the fields and Of Mice and Men E R

valleys of California. They have by John Steinbeck E N

nothing except the clothes on their A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and C back, and a hope that one day they’ll E green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before : find a place of their own and live the American dream. But dreams come reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and at a price. Gentle giant Lennie rocky Gabilan mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees – willows fresh and green with doesn’t know his own strength, and every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter’s flooding; and sycamores with when they find work at a ranch he mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees gets into trouble with the boss’s the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come daughter-in-law. Trouble so bad that out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of even his protector George may not ‘coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that be able to save him . . . come to drink in the dark. One of American literature’s all-time There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path beaten hard by boys coming down classic books, the story of George from the ranches to swim in the deep pool, and beaten hard by tramps who come wearily down from the and his slow-minded friend Lennie highway in the evening to jungle-up near water. In front of the low horizontal limb of a giant sycamore ‘a grand little book, for all its has touched the hearts of ultimate melodrama.’ Ralph generations since Steinbeck wrote it there is an ash pile made by many fires; the limb is worn smooth by men who have sat on it. Thompson New York Times in 1937. Through a simple story, Steinbeck painted the American dream in realistic colours as powerful today as they must have been in 1930’s California.