Quote from: conorsean on June 13, 2011, 12:11:20 PM

Personally I thought 'Remember the Titans' was a TERRIBLE movie.

It took every cliche from every single underdog movie ever written and cranked up the cheesiness to levels I'd never witnessed before. Truly two of the most wasted hours I've ever spent. If the kids are anything like the ones I teach they'll be asleep within half an hour.

Dumb and dumber would be good though...

Everyone is entitled to have their own opinions about movies, but Remember the Titans is not a terrible movie. I like Dumb and Dumber (hilarious on all fronts) but I don't see why you would show that in a class. I don't know what you would want the students to learn from it...unless the objective of the class was to give them a pure two hour break. Which is fine...as long as that's what you're going for.

Remember the Titans is by no means a masterpiece, but in the best way that Disney could for PG-13 rating, it does a pretty good job showing some important aspects of American society (american football, american history, american race relations). I once tried doing a diversity in America lesson with my kids and they were asleep in 5 minutes. I don't blame them, doing a ppt on a lesson like that isn't interesting at all. Therefore, this was my solution--so that I could teach them something with substance but not put them to sleep. That's all I'm saying.

There's loads of lessons that you can make from Dumb and Dumber. Or just about any movie, as in a language class the subject matter is irrelevant as long as it has some relevant dialogue to the kind of language you want to teach. In my classes the aim is to teach the English language, it's not my job to teach them about overcoming racism in 20th century America. Dumb and Dumber engages the children. Therefore when you ask questions about it their hands will shoot up and they are begging to use English. That's all I want. They are there to learn English, not the culture of one single English speaking country.

I work at a girls middle school.
I showed School of Rock at our end-of-after-school-class party, and they thought parts of it were funny, but seemed bored when nothing interesting was happening. I think it was hard for them to understand some parts, because they probably don't know about the bands or musical movements Jack Black references all the time. Other than a few not-so-bad words and one scene where two characters are drinking beer, it was totally appropriate.
They absolutely LOVED The Princess Diaries, as did I when I was that age. It has a lot of funny moments. I showed it during two days when the teachers told me I didn't have to prepare a real lesson, and I had students in other classes bugging me weeks later to watch 'the princess movie.' If you teach middle school or high school girls, they will adore that movie!

just thought i would mention to all of those using Pirate Bay to..obtain...movies. Be careful. The site has been flagged and a lot of people are receiving warnings. Not sure if you are safer in Korea or not but maybe try a different torrent site. Cheers!

On another note i have showed both Wall-E and Ratatouille in my middle school classes. I think Wall-E worked much better but Ratatouille was ok too. For Highschool i might try the new Star Trek, many of the students said they have not seen it yet!

A Korean teacher at my school showed Madagascar, and the 8-year-olds seemed to like it. I personally would play whatever movie you choose with a slower speed, like 90% speed (I know VLC player does this). At normal speeds sometimes even I think they talk to fast!

They are there to learn English, not the culture of one single English speaking country.

I think we are here to teach more then just English! I agree that we are not here to teach the culture of one single English speaking country but we are definitely here to teach our students about "English/Western" culture. They are not in class simply to learn English but also to learn form us about our culture. This is my opinion take it or leave it, but i do feel when we show movies in class they should be learning more than just the language.

I know you think you are here to teach more than English. You're not alone. I see waygookers on here who think they should teach elementary kids about the holocaust, gay pride, racial taboos, sexism and a whole other bunch of subjects which are usually more about the teacher's agenda and less about the children's. But the Korean Government could not give a monkey's toss about you telling their students about your preconceived notions of how you think the world works

Teaching aspects of culture is only acceptable if it is part of a target language objective and the topics should be as generic, non-political, non-religious and as non-controversial as possible. Stick to those principles and by all means have a lesson on the 4th July, Hallowe'en or St Patrick's Day. Otherwise, save any personal crusades for an internet blog.

This is great! I was thinking about showing a movie next week (the pointless week after final exams when the students don't want to learn... no, REFUSE to learn). They have been studying super hard, so this would be a nice break with a cultural exposure plus! I'll probably do Remember the Titans or Bend it Like Beckham. Here is a great site for Korean subs: http://www.cineast.co.kr/bbs/board.php? ... sd_caption

just open the movie file and the sub file together (ctrl + click them and right click "open with GOM player")

just thought i would mention to all of those using Pirate Bay to..obtain...movies. Be careful. The site has been flagged and a lot of people are receiving warnings. Not sure if you are safer in Korea or not but maybe try a different torrent site. Cheers!

What different torrent site do you recommend?

I want to show them something they probably haven't seen and thought Scott Pilgrim vs. The World might be good.  IT's PG13, had music, comedy, romance and fighting...and it has pop-up writing on the screen (that Koreans seem to love lol) and an element of video games too.  Surely that covers pretty much all bases for every possible school. 
I work at a Girls' High School but I think they'll like it.  I doubt many have seen it before. 

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/scott_pilgrims_vs_the_world/

http://youtu.be/O_RrNCqCIPE

Just doing some major “thinking out loud” here as I plan for next week.  This week the students at my high school have their semester finals.  My co-teacher and I will soon get around to discussing what we will do in class next week.

The last time we did this however, I was asked to come up with something fun / interesting / engaging on my own and took steps to prepare, only to find out at the last minute, in those last days of the semester, that the students were simply being allowed to watch a movie of their choice.  Fine, no problem.  Except I had been told to prepare and only at the last minute did my preparations prove to be unnecessary.  The students were burnt-out on school and did not want to have to engage their minds after a week of finals.  I was totally understanding and sympathetic, and I think my co-teacher was, too.  It was a relief to me as I did not feel my preparations were going to be particularly effective in engaging the students.

Fast forward to now:  my co-teacher says it is not "worthwhile” (to the students’ English language education, I assume) to just let them watch a movie, even in English.

I agree, although, in my own efforts to learn Spanish and German, watching movies from my culture (American) dubbed into THOSE languages WAS helpful for me in learning the languages better (listening comprehension, etc).  I do not consider it a completely worthless exercise, necessarily, to simply watch a movie in a foreign language  (with or without subtitles) although it certainly can be worthless for many students.
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Of course the situation here in Korea is quite different.  While Germany dubs and subtitles into German everything popular that comes out of American (and other) cultures, precious few Korean movies are dubbed into English.  So there are virtually no movies from their own culture that Korean students can listen to in English.  The only equivalents (that come close) seem to be Disney and Pixar animated stuff which have audio in both English and Korean as well as subtitles in both English and Korean (i.e. either language as an option in the audio and either language as an option in the subtitles).
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What I have found is a website that offers scripts for various movies:

 http://www.script-o-rama.com/

I don’t know if this is allowed, but I will try to include the script to the Pixar movie The Incredibles (which I am well-familiar with in both English and German).  To the extent that it’s “meaningless” to just let the students watch a movie in English, I take the position that it’s at least a step toward more engagement with the language to have the students get some exposure to the English script.
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One approach could be to have the students take turns reading 5-10 minutes worth of script and then we watch that portion of the movie together.  That would be tedious, going through the whole movie like that, but do-able.  We could pause to go over challenging vocabulary, grammar and structure, for clarity.

Another approach is to only use those portions of the script that are particularly entertaining, instead of the whole show.  In this case, I would use clips from various movies, such as Toy Story movies and others that are engaging and appealing.

Any ideas welcomed.

Thinking further...

I think from my students' perspective it would be ideal to use a recently-released movie.  Already on piratebay, Transformers 3 is available, along with the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

The challenge would now be finding the scripts, on-line.

I remember when Star Wars episode 2 was still a year and a half from being released, there was already a script available at supershadow.com, which proved to be the actual script used.  I wonder if there are already scripts available for recently-released movies.