What wasn't said

I'm very disappointed with Bryn Mawr's time limits for classes.  I thought our discussion of Adaptation was an important one to have since we compared the movie to the book and talked about what the movie was about and it's value etc.  However, I was so disappointed with what was not said - or rather what there wasn't time for.  OK, we can't agree on if Adaptation was a good/poor representation/purposeful-non-representation of The Orchid Thief.  Fine.  I guess I thought we could take the film at face value at least - meaning what the movie in of itself does and how it reflects the messages in The Orchid Thief.  I guess the example that stands out to me the most is that Charlie kept saying he wanted to show people that flowers were pretty.  In the movie, Charlie "writes in" a scene that didn't happen in The Orchid Thief.  When John is leading Orlean to see the ghost and John is lost, he gets very frustrated.  John says (something along the lines of), "People are always leeching off me.  Get your own passion!  Stupid bitch."  When Orlean sees the ghost orchid, she says, "It's just a flower."  She couldn't adopt anyone's passion or fascination with orchids because it wasn't hers.  This scene parallels Charlie's inability to make a movie that 'shows people that flowers are pretty.'  This is precisely because even if he had made a movie that exhibited flowers, he would not have succeeded.  He would not be able to force his audience adopt an appreciation for flowers.

There were other spots in the film that I thought were worth mentioning.  This post is long so I'll stop here.

Anne kept asking questions and I had answers, but somehow I didn't say them.  I'm trying to break my habit of interrupting.  Here was my favorite question.

Q: How is your learning different when you read a book compared to when you watch a movie?

A: Learning from these two medias is so different to me - maybe because of social normalcy.  When I read a book, I learn throughout the book.  I think about the characters and what certain actions and events mean.  I put down the book and I feel for the characters as we learn more about them.  It hurts me when people say "oh yeah I read that in a day"  How could they have absorbed and enjoyed everything that makes up a novel in one day?  When I find a quote I like I read it over and over and I think about how it has qualified how I have felt at certain moments throughout my life.  I don't skip over it and keep reading.

I'm an odd movie watcher - the oddest movie watcher I have ever met, in fact.  This is basically because I have strong unrealistic reactions to movies.  If it is sad, I don't cry - I'm histerical.  My sister says I look like one of those cartoon characters that cries with tears leaping from their faces.  If a movie is an action film, which are most often mysteries, I'm obsessed with piecing together every single piece of evidence until I know the entire solution.  And so on. So, how I learn from movies: First of all, when I watch a movie, people don't let me talk to them or rewatch a scene that I particularly like until we finish the movie.  I can't walk away from the movie in the middle of it and analyze it.  Most of this is because of social normalcies.  Therefore, most of my learning during the movie is at the end, because the movie is too fast for me to pick up on all the delicacies of the characters' personalities.  Only when I watch it again and again do I get a similar experience to reading a book.  

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