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The movie “Hotel Rwanda” was profoundly disturbing. Having institutionalised the ethnic distinction between Tutsi and Hutu based on skin colour, height, and width of noses, the Belgian colonists in the 1930s gave the minority Tutsi (lighter, taller) greater power and opportunities than the majority Hutu (darker, shorter). Years later, the jealousies boiled over into the [...]

What a great movie! It was brilliantly filmed (you know it is a real photographer behind the lens when the light is superb – shots are taken at dawn and dusk, there is lovely backlighting and some superb angles, like the shots of the Zeros coming in above the woman hanging out her washing – [...]

Review: 2-part CD-ROM Analyzing Teaching is based on videos of classroom experiences. The format is quite nice since it is all on the CD-ROM: the videos, the introductions and even a reflective journal which can be printed from the application. There are 4 different lessons analysed on the CD-ROM: 3rd Grade Language 7th Grade English [...]

It was good to see Titanic again – it is a great movie. Once again we see the amazing folly of man – and the over-importance men place on size and power. (I liked the scene where Rose comments to the Captain that Freud would have enjoyed analysing their emphasis on size and one of [...]

Good animation, good story, good movie. Very James Bond-ish, with rocket launching facilities hidden in a tropical island and all. Recommended for its range of issues – gender roles, teenage angst, competitiveness, tall poppy syndrome, family, (human) monsters can be created, putting vulnerable people down, etc. Oh, and seeing it in digital format was awesome. [...]

Visit to a Motivated Classroom is a US production by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. It is a 30 minute video with supplementary Viewer’s Guide. The lesson is on pre-calculus mathematics – sine and cosine rules, to be specific. The title caught my eye, since the lack of student motivation seems to be [...]

Feeling that I needed a dose of nostalgia, we watched The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” yesterday. When I first watched it (in my pre-teen days) it was when Beatlemania was in full flight – and they could have produced a terrible movie about the Beatles and we would have loved it. Well, they did [...]

We caught “The Polar Express” with Tom Hanks playing a multitude of roles. The CGI (computer graphics imaging) is very interesting. They developed a new technique for the movie – “Performance Capture” – where real actors wore a device which allowed 72 motion cameras to detect tiny facial movements and store the huge amount of [...]