You know what to do.

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TIME: NAME:

8 =
8:20 =
8:40 =
9 =
9:20 = glenn almond
9:40 = Katie Bronzini
10 = Phil Mauss
10:20 = Kyle Fagan
10:40 = Bryan Torell
11 = Ann Thompson
11:20 = Kristina Carr
11:40 = Danielle de Leon
12 = Joseph Macniak
12:20 = Stephen Anspach
12:40 = Sharolyn Cerney
1 = Connor Mills
1:20 = Marzella Harris
1:40 = Jennifer
2 = C.J.
2:20 = Rachel
2:40 =
3 =
3:20 =
3:40 =
4 =
4:20 =
4:40 =
5 =

and comment

Etc., etc.

You know the drill. If you don’t, refer to yesterday’s post.

Then post one 150 word comment here. What do you like best about this paper? What stands out most in your mind? What are the strongest parts of the argument? Are there any ideas or strategies you’d like to use in your own paper?

Step 2: Choose a quote from the source that you might want to use in your final paper. Record it in your journal. Then, spend five minutes “talking back” to the quote. Pretend you are having a conversation with the author. What would you say to him or her about that quote?

Step 3: Choose a quote from the source that you disagree with. Record it in your journal, then spend five minutes “talking back” to the author in the same manner as Step 2.

Step 4: Now, “talk back” to the source as a whole. What questions would you ask the author if you were having a conversation with him or her? What points would you challenge? If the source is not about your movie specifically, how could the author use your movie as an example?

Once you’ve done the exercise above, condense your best points into your 250 word blog post for tonight.

Ever seen Twin Peaks? Blue Velvet? The Straight Story? They were all directed by David Lynch, one of Hollywood’s weirdest camera geeks. He’s notorious for incorporating shots like this one, when the camera pans left and then pushes into the bathroom and down the sink- so famous, in fact, that Coen Brothers fans call this part of Barton Fink the Lynchian shot.

The Coen Brothers don’t do this. Usually their references to other films come in the form of the “O.P.E., P.O.E.” scrawled on the back of the bathroom door in Raising Arizona (you Kubrick fans among us probably spotted that and thought of the code in Dr. Strangelove). They refer to films they like, but they don’t copy another director’s style. Why did they do it here?

After this point in the movie (after the camera goes down the drain) everything changes in Barton Fink. Barton wakes up to find his lover murdered in his bed beside him. Detectives show up claiming his only friend in the hotel is a serial killer. Charlie gives Barton a box that we’re pretty sure contains his lover’s head. And then Charlie burns the hotel down. It’s almost a completely different movie.

I’ve been playing around with the idea that Barton Fink is a sonnet, and I think if I try and apply the framework of the sonnet literally, then this would be the ‘volta’ – the portion of the sonnet in which the speaker turns away from the theme he or she has established to re-interpret it. The strange Lynchian shot is the volta. This means, perhaps, that I can use other strange shots to represent other aspects of the sonnet. Maybe shots that look alike can stand in the place of rhymes?

As the title of this post promises, that link just above is a sample paper to give you a better idea of what I want for Friday. You don’t have to format it exactly as I have, but I do want to see three articles, reviews, or webpostings about your movie summarized AND I want to see the bibliographical citation (in this sample, the bibliographical citation is bolded).

Use Noodlebib to format your bibliographical citations.

Link to subject/verb agreement quiz

BRCs is a phrase from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73″, and the use of it as the title of the main character’s play in Barton Fink caught my eye because it’s got to be a colossal Coen-style joke on Barton. All through the movie, Barton drones on and on about his desire to write plays “of, for, and about the common man,” and this play in no exception; fishmongers living in a tenement building in Brooklyn send their young son out to take on the world. Barton seems oblivious to the fact that his title is pretentious if not downright puzzling. I know from my undergraduate Shakespeare class that sonnets in the sixteenth century were written and circulated among the court elite to curry favor, so even in the context in which the poem was written it was not of, by, or for anything connected to the common man. Also, (again, from the old Shakespeare class) that particular phrase is usually interpreted as a reference to the monasteries that were seized by Henry 8th during the Reformation and were standing empty during Shakespeare’s time, making it harder to imagine why Barton thinks this is a good title for the first play he writes for his populist movement.

Right now, my best guess is that Barton Fink has more in common with “Sonnet 73″ than is apparent on the surface. I’m playing with the idea that the movie is a cinematic version of the sonnet, postmodernist-style.