Splash Biography

Why do critics hate Transformers, but praise black-and-white movies like Casablanca or Charlie Chaplin’s silent comedies? In this class, we’ll talk about the essentials of film production that help us discuss why a movie is good or bad. From 3-act structure to the 3-point lighting system, we’ll go over both the storytelling and the visual techniques that go into making a great movie. We will use these technical details to analyze specific scenes from movies like Goodfellas, City Lights, and Dark City. Finally, we will see how critics like Roger Ebert, A.O. Scott, and Michael Phillips combine their observations and analysis in film reviews. "A movie is not good because it arrives at conclusions you share, or bad because it does not. A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it: about the way it considers its subject matter, and about how its real subject may be quite different from the one it seems to provide." - Roger Ebert