Sad Truth or Funny Fiction? (Part 2)

Here's a simple question with a not-so-simple answer. If American Movie was a spoof - if it was a fake documentary comedy - how would your reaction to the film be changed? And if This Is Spinal Tap was a real documentry, how would your reaction to that film be changed?

" This goes to eleven! "

Sad Truth or Funny Fiction? (Part 1)

When you told me you'd like to study a comedy this semester, I decided we should do two: American Movie and This Is Spinal Tap. I thought we could cover more ground that way. When we're done with the unit, you can say you saw (1) a documentary, (2) a parody, (3) a dark comedy, and (4) a straight comedy. So that's one reason why we're watching Tap.

There's another reason. There's one simple rule about parody that most recent parodies miss completely, and I'd like you to learn the rule. Ready? Here is comes...

The more similar a parody is to its source material,
the funnier it is.

That's it. That's the secret. And that's the reason why so many parodies are just...not...funny. For example:

Do you think this movie...

...actually looks like this movie?

And do you think this movie...

...looks anything like this movie?

You can tell just from the posters that the filmmakers have absolutely no idea what they're doing. If you want to make a funny horror movie, then you have to make a movie that actually looks like a horror movie! Or a superhero movie! Or a disaster movie! Or a romance! Or a...whatever!

Check out this next bunch. Can you guess which is NOT the parody?

Exactly. In fact, I'm not so sure they all aren't parodies. One more time.  Can you tell which of the following is the 21st century parody, and which are the 1970s originals?

You can barely tell. That's because the filmmakers understood the foundation of what they were making fun of; they weren't simply taking cheap shots at the most obvious aspects of their satiric target.

This is why I think This Is Spinal Tap is so successful. I think it looks, sounds, and feels like a real documentary. So, do you agree? Give some support to your response. Pick some moments from the film that either feel very real, or not real at all. Compare it to moments of American Movie in terms of realism and tone.

Also, can you think of any other parodies that support my rule? In other words, can you think of any parodies that work because that look and feel like their source material, and can you think of any that fail because they don't? Hey, can you think of any that break my rule? That I'd be interested in hearing about!

Independent Viewing Project Criteria

Here are the criteria for your Independent Viewing Project. Remember, you have one of these due per grading quarter. Any you hand in after that will be extra credit. You may only hand in one per week, and you may not use any film that you have seen prior to this class. There are a wide variety of films on the list, so be sure to select one that is appropriate for you. If you need any help selecting a film, see your instructor. Click on the images to enlarge.

American Movie - Tragic Comedy or Comedic Tragedy?

This will probably be your last formal writing assingment for the quarter, so make it good. It's worth 50 points.

Task
In a one-to-two page essay, answer the following question:

Is American Movie a tragic comedy or a comedic tragedy?

Format
This is a formal essay, so beware of grammar, punctuation, tense, language usage, spelling, etc. It all counts.

Content
You're going to want to do a few things in your essay. You'll want to have a thesis stating your central claim - basically answering affirmative or negative to the question. You'll want to define your terms. Just what is a tragedy and a comedy? (The previoud blog entry should be very helpful.) You'll want to support your response with evidence from the film. You might want to address elements of the opposing side of your arguments. What counter arguments might someone who disagrees with you address? Address them yourself.  Be sure to consider the entire movie when crafting your response. Was the last day's viewing sadder than the first and second? Maybe. Does that instanly make it a tragedy? How does one even determine if the ending is sad or not? Mark is still pretty pittiful, but he completes his filmand makes good on all of his promises. So think about it.

If you'd like to review parts of the film, it will be available in the IMC at the front desk. You can check it out for a period and view it in the AV lab in the back of the IMC. If you have any questions, please ask.

Final Exam

Here's a definition of auteur from Wikipedia:

The term auteur (French for author) is used to describe film directors (or, more rarely, producers, or writers) who are considered to have a distinctive, recognizable style, because they (a) repeatedly return to the same subject matter, (b) habitually address a particular psychological or moral theme, (c) employ a recurring visual and aesthetic style, or (d) demonstrate any combination of the above. In theory, an auteur's films are identifiable regardless of their genre. The term was first applied in its cinematic sense in François Truffaut's 1954 essay "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema."

Your task? 1. Research and study an auteur of your choice.  2. Compose a written report.  3. Share your findings with the class in a 15-20 minute presentation.

Part 1 - Research
You'll want to collect a variety of sources to educate yourself on your director. These sources can include books, print interviews, video interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, journals, websites, etc. Just be sure that each of your sources are reliable. (Note: Wikipedia is a good source to find further sources. Look to see at the bottom of the entry where the Wikipedia author got his or her source, and check it out for yourself.) Be sure to use the IMC's access to old newspaper and periodical articles, found here. Another resource you might find helpful is the special features on the DVDs of the director's movies. You might find helpful interviews or commentaries.

Part 2 - Composition
Your written report should contain the following components:

1. a brief biography with significant childhood or educational moments (Why and how did this person become a filmmaker?)
2. professional history, including significant films, awards, honors (What has he or she done?)
3. central aesthetic, thematic, stylistic approaches (What makes this director's films special?)
4. a review of a significant film from the auteur (What movie did you watch, and what did you think of it?)

You must cite all of the sources you use! Include cited quotations and a list your cited works in MLA format. If you have any quesitons regarding correct citation, please check with your teacher, the TLC, or a librarian.

Part 3 - Presentation
Your presentation should include an abreviated version of your report. In addition, you should show at least one short clip from the movie you viewed (less than 3 minutes) and comment on the clip(s). A visual aid would probably be helpful. Consider using a PowerPoint presentation or a handout.

Here's a list of auteurs from which you can choose. The list is by no means complete. If you have one you'd like to write about who is not on the list, please okay it with me first. Be sure that you can find ample research on your selection. If you can't, try another. Wikipedia will probably give you a good idea of what each on the list has done, so that might be a good place to start looking just to pick. If you still don't know whom to pick, takl with your instructor. When you select one, let everyone know who you've chosen by posting your name and the director's name in the comments section of this entry. It's first come, first served, no repeats - so act fast.

• Akira Kurosawa
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Billy Wilder
• Brad Bird
• Brian DePalma
• Buster Keaton
• Cecil B. DeMille
• Charlie Chaplin
• Clint Eastwood
• D.W. Griffith
• David Cronenberg
• David Fincher
• Don Siegel
• Ed Wood
• Federico Fellini
• Francis Ford Coppola
• Francois Truffaut
• Frank Capra
• Fritz Lang
• George Romero
• George Roy Hill
• Guy Maddin
• Hayao Miyazaki
• Howard Hawks
• Ingmar Bergman
• James Cameron
• James Whale
• Joel and Ethan Cohen
• John Carpenter
• John Ford
• John Frankenheimer
• John Huston
• Johnnie To
• Kathryn Bigelow
• Katsuhiro Ōtomo
• Martin Scorsese
• Mel Brooks
• Michael Curtiz
• Michel Mann
• Mike Nichols
• Milos Forman
• Oliver Stone
• Orson Welles
• Quentin Tarantino
• Raoul Walsh
• Ridley Scott
• Robert Altman
• Robert Rodriguez
• Robert Zemeckis
• Roger Corman
• Roman Polanski
• Ron Howard
• Sam Peckinpah
• Sergei Eisenstein
• Sergio Leone
• Sidney Lumet
• Sophia Coppola
• Spike Lee
• Stanley Kubrick
• Steven Soderbergh
• Steven Spielberg
• Sydney Pollack
• Terry Gilliam
• Tim Burton
• Victor Fleming
• Walt Disney
• Walter Hill
• Werner Herzog
• William Wyler
• Winsor McCay
• Woody Allen
• Yimou Zhang

As always, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask

Defining Tragedy and Comedy

These two masks symbolize "the theater," they symbolize "drama." They are the facew of comedy and tragedy, two sides of the same coin. Comedy and tragedy can, at times, be pretty easy to differentiate from one another.

This character is tragic.

This one is comedic.

Can you  figure out the rest?

Sometimes it's not so easy to tell the difference between the two.

Your task: As a class, define "tragedy" and define "comedy".

Now, this is step one of a two-part process. The better you do here, the better you'll do on part two. Feel free to snowball off of your classmates' ideas and be sure to discuss what parts of their definitions work and don't work. By the end of the comment page, you as a class should have a prety good working defiintion of both comedy and tragedy.

Note: We're not defining sad and happy, so don't over simplify your answers. Get specific, and choose your words carefully. Use whatever resources you like, just be sure to cite them in your comments. Also, to get this right, you'll likely want to comment several times to help your classmates refine the two definitions.

Good luck!

American Movie - Any Thoughts?

Here are two articles about American Movie.  The first is an interview with Mark Borchardt and Mike Shank given right about the time the movie came out - in 2000. The second is a review of the film around the same time. Read them both. I have a question for you at the end.

Arts: Film: The loser who made Milwaukee famous

Mark Borchardt was an obsessive, alcoholic, no-hoper, wannabe film director. Then someone made a documentary about him.

Fiona Morrow. The Independent. London (UK): Jun 23, 2000. pg. 1 Copyright Newspaper Publishing Plc Jun 23, 2000

There isn't much we don't already know about the American Dream: it's been served up by Hollywood since the moguls discovered California. Yet despite all candy-coated make-believe, it has retained its currency; there are still millions of Americans daring to dream the impossible dream. Mark Borchardt is one of them. An intelligent guy from a Milwaukee backwater, Borchardt has fancied himself as a film-maker since he was a kid with a Super 8 camera.

Brought up on low expectations, he took the factory jobs, cleaned the crematorium, delivered newspapers, married the wrong girl, had three kids, split up and wound up back at mom and dad's place, all the time imagining his movie.

The early films were typical teenage boy stuff: quick horror flicks with titles such as The More the Scarier, and The More The Scarier III. His friends had nothing better to do, so everyone helped out. The same friends were happy to muck in when he began his first serious short film Coven, and started talking about his feature film, Northwestern. Director Chris Smith met Borchardt at a film festival and, intrigued by the enthusiastic self-promotion on display, asked if he might follow the progress of Northwestern in a documentary. Borchardt agreed, and four years later, American Movie won the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance festival.

It isn't hard to see why. Borchardt is the perfect documentary subject: an obsessive, passionate, borderline psychotic alcoholic. He is also very articulate, knows his movies and is apparently capable of persuading almost anyone to do almost anything.

His family and friends are worth the ticket too: Uncle Bill, the ancient coot, plenty rich, but living in a trailer; mom, extra, sometime camera operator; Kenny, the jailbird associate producer; and Mike Shank, Borchardt's brain-dead best friend and the other star of the show. If you haven't already worked it out, I should point out that American Movie is hilarious.

Still, I was slightly apprehensive about interviewing Borchardt and Shank. I knew from the film that Borchardt could be extremely belligerent. But it was Shank who really worried me. Shank, the one- time drug user and alcoholic, has wound up with a fried brain. What the hell were we going to talk about?

I concentrate on Borchardt. He's been drinking all day, but is obviously on a high from the press attention. American Movie has played well in the States, and his telephone has been ringing with job offers and potential investors for months. His short film Coven has sold nearly 3,000 copies via the American Movie website, and, bizarrely, talk show host, David Letterman has made him the Late Show's political correspondent. Not bad for a kid from Menomenee Falls, Milwaukee.

I begin with the obvious opener: Did he ever imagine the documentary would lead to all this?

"Not at all," he replies. "You don't set yourself up for the fall. I knew something would come of it, but I didn't anticipate this, sitting here, in London, being interviewed. Cool man". He speaks in a very particular, skewed vernacular. The delivery is intense and small talk is not his thing. But has all this media attention distracted him from his dream to make Northwestern?

"Oh absolutely, but along with that distraction has come women and money and that's so great, too, man. The heart grows and yearns and says you've really got to make the film you want to make, so just by natural momentum, you come back to it. Of course this has been distracting - you have all the money in the world to drink - but this fall I start shooting." When I ask Borchardt if he has he managed to finance Northwestern on the back of American Movie, the strength of his personality comes to the fore. His reply is delivered like a steam train, barely stopping to draw breath.

"The money for Northwestern means nothing, because money can't make a good script. It hit me all of a sudden: I'm gonna raise $70- 100,000 on my own and shoot the film. I've had plenty of legitimate offers and I never responded to any of them, because this is a personal film and I don't want no dude putting in money and then turning around and saying, `by the way can my girlfriend be in it?', or any of that crap. It's just going to be me, waking up one morning this fall, grabbing a cup of coffee, picking up the camera and a tripod and taking off down some lonely rural road."

It sounds hopelessly romantic, but Borchardt is completely wrapped up in the mythology of the film-maker as great artist. He doesn't want to be the next Quentin Tarantino. He wants to make cinema "like Kubrick and Fellini, Godard and Polanski. American Movie has absolutely nothing to do with my work. It has exposed me to Letterman, people from Hollywood and New York sending me scripts and flying me out to auditions and all that crap. But remember, you're responsible for your own push-ups, your own sit-ups and your own daily writing, man. It's completely free and comes from your own self- discipline. Celebrity is to screw as many women as possible and to pay for good beer, that's all that's worth". The film paints him as something of a procrastinator, did he recognise himself on screen?

"Yep. This drunk dude walking around. But I also saw a talented, determined person in a set of circumstances that don't usually allow for those things to occur. I don't know what other people are thinking and I don't care. I'm after my American Dream and I'm starting to live it."

We talk about movies for a while - how much Borchardt hates them, particularly when he's on a drinking streak as he has been all year - when, out of nowhere, Shank pipes up. "Mark likes anything with black girls in it. I've never met anyone in my whole life who likes black girls as much as Mark. All day, like 50 times a day he's going, `Man, there's another black girl.' When he looks for magazines he purposefully picks out the ones with black girls in them." This is revelation is delivered in dead-pan monotone, and leaves me floundering. Luckily Borchardt rises to the bait.

"Well dude, of course I'm gonna take what I like. Do you arbitrarily take out magazines?"

Shank: "For Christmas I bought him a calendar, but I should have got him this Playboy Women of Colour. I think next year you can be expecting that."

Borchardt: "Oh, that would be totally cool dude, definitely."

I'm staring at two men dressed like the boys you ignored at school - Iron Maiden T-shirts, too much hair - talking about porn as if it they were discussing their favourite cereal. I manage to stop goldfishing long enough to ask Shank if he felt at all exploited by his portrayal in American Movie.

"If you ask me I was accurately portrayed and I'd rather have the audience response it gets - the laughter and all that. I'm just a guy with a brain. I got a friend at AA who was shooting $2,700 of cocaine into the base of his skull everyday and they had to cut out a third of his brain, and he functions more normally than I do.

The success of American Movie has inevitably changed Borchardt's life: he's been offered a part in Todd Solodnz's next film. "I'm considering it as a job opportunity, but I won't go if Mark can't come with me." So, Hollywood looms for both of them?

Borchardt: "I've gotta do some stuff out there, and there's some weird, great stuff happening, but I would never take it seriously. I'm not going to be corrupted. I'd like to screw a bunch of chicks, but I'm not gonna get sucked in." The American Dream lives on all right.

Movie Review; 'American Movie'

Turns Camera on Indie Filmmaker

 
Kevin Thomas. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Nov 12, 1999. pg. 18
 
(Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 1999 all Rights reserved)
 
Chris Smith's "American Movie," which took the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at Sundance this year, is sure to draw lots of laughs. Here's this small-town Wisconsin guy, Mark Borchardt, trying to make a movie on a shoestring with the help of some pals, in particular his spacey, shaggy musician friend Mike Schank, while coaxing money out of his frail, bleary 82-year-old uncle Bill Borchardt. These people say and do goofy things from time to time, and they all sound like the people in "Fargo."
 
Chroniclers of the independent filmmaking scene, however, may not be so easily amused. We know all too well that the world has an abundance of Mark Borchardts, and the likelihood of any of them getting anywhere is no better than winning the lottery.
 
Even so, although overly long at 107 minutes, "American Movie" is an incisive, largely absorbing work and a far more mature effort than Smith's "American Job," which sent the message, intentionally or otherwise, that menial jobs are beneath young white males.
 
Never condescending to Borchardt, a tall, lean 30-year-old with a goatee, long hair and outsize glasses, Smith assumes a detached stance at the start and sticks to it. In doing so, he invites us to see Borchardt as an archetypal all-American individualist determined to pursue the American Dream in an era of lowered expectations.
 
For years Borchardt has been working intermittently on "Northwestern," which he describes as about a bunch of guys "drinkin', drinkin', drinkin' "--and which sounds more than a little autobiographical. Early on in "American Movie," Borchardt is forced to abandon the project once again, for the usual reason, a lack of funds. Instead, he resumes work on a supernatural horror thriller, "Coven," shooting in 16 millimeter. Even if he succeeds in completing it, it will have taken him three years to do so. That Borchardt's hero is "Night of the Living Dead's" George Romero is evident in glimpses we get of "Coven." ("Coven" screens tonight and next Friday night at the Nuart at 12:15 a.m., accompanied by 1981's "The Howling.")
 
To his credit, Borchardt, who began making movies at 14, is a resourceful, knowledgeable craftsman; he knows what he wants and how to get it. He's strong-willed, hard-working and focused. He's chronically deep in debt and in a precarious position in a looming custody struggle with his ex-girlfriend over their children. He supports himself delivering papers and working as a cemetery maintenance man. He's a motor-mouth who can be pretty wearying but has an open, affable quality that makes you hope he somehow miraculously beats the odds and enjoys some measure of success.
 
His Swedish-born mother is supportive, and her estranged husband, Mark's father, wishes his son well but is understandably dubious. Even more so is one of Mark's brothers, who says he thinks Mark would be better off working in a factory and wonders who would want to see "Coven" anyway.
 
At one point Mark pauses to consider that here he is, 30 years old, and having to clean up a filthy restroom at the cemetery. The question he needs to ask himself is how he would feel about still doing it at 40.

 
Mr. Cowlin here. You know what? I just erased my initial question. It was about the two above articles. But you know what? I don't care. I love this movie so much, I just don't want to disect it right now. So forget it. Here's the question I really want to hear you answer: What's your favorite part and why?

Night of the Hunter - Review by Ebert

I've posted a review of The Night of the Hunter by film critic Roger Ebert. He wrote it for his on-going Great Movies series. Read through it. I've got some questions for you after.

"The Night of the Hunter"

Roger Ebert - film critic

Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter'' (1955) is one of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many ``great movies'' are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are realistic, but ``Night of the Hunter'' is an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. People don't know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists.

Yet what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness. Yes, the movie takes place in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town looks as artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family's house with its strange angles inside and out looks too small to live in, and the river becomes a set so obviously artificial it could have been built for a completely stylized studio film like "Kwaidan" (1964).

Everybody knows the Mitchum character, the sinister "Reverend'' Harry Powell. Even those who haven't seen the movie have heard about the knuckles of his two hands, and how one has the letters H-A-T-E tattooed on them, and the other the letters L-O-V-E. Bruce Springsteen drew on those images in his song "Cautious Man'':

"On his right hand Billy'd tattooed the word "love'' and on his left hand was the word "fear'' And in which hand he held his fate was never clear''

Many movie lovers know by heart the Reverend's famous explanation to the wide-eyed boy ("Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?'') And the scene where the Reverend stands at the top of the stairs and calls down to the boy and his sister has become the model for a hundred other horror scenes.

But does this familiarity give "The Night of the Hunter'' the recognition it deserves? I don't think so because those famous trademarks distract from its real accomplishment. It is one of the most frightening of movies, with one of the most unforgettable of villains, and on both of those scores it holds up as well after four decades as I expect "The Silence of the Lambs" to do many years from now.

The story, somewhat rearranged: In a prison cell, Harry Powell discovers the secret of a condemned man (Peter Graves), who has hidden $10,000 somewhere around his house. After being released from prison, Powell seeks out the man's widow, Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), and two children, John (Billy Chapin) and the owl-faced Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). They know where the money is, but don't trust the ``preacher.'' But their mother buys his con game and marries him, leading to a tortured wedding night inside a high-gabled bedroom that looks a cross between a chapel and a crypt.

Soon Willa Harper is dead, seen in an incredible shot at the wheel of a car at the bottom of the river, her hair drifting with the seaweed. And soon the children are fleeing down the dream-river in a small boat, while the Preacher follows them implacably on the shore; this beautifully stylized sequence uses the logic of nightmares, in which no matter how fast one runs, the slow step of the pursuer keeps the pace. The children are finally taken in by a Bible-fearing old lady (Lillian Gish), who would seem to be helpless to defend them against the single-minded murderer, but is as unyielding as her faith.

The shot of Winters at the bottom of the river is one of several remarkable images in the movie, which was photographed in black and white by Stanley Cortez, who shot Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons," and once observed he was "always chosen to shoot weird things.'' He shot few weirder than here, where one frightening composition shows a street lamp casting Mitchum's terrifying shadow on the walls of the children's bedroom. The basement sequence combines terror and humor, as when the Preacher tries to chase the children up the stairs, only to trip, fall, recover, lunge and catch his fingers in the door. And the masterful nighttime river sequence uses giant foregrounds of natural details, like frogs and spider webs, to underline a kind of biblical progression as the children drift to eventual safety.

The screenplay, based on a novel by Davis Grubb, is credited to James Agee, one of the icons of American film writing and criticism, then in the final throes of alcoholism. Laughton's widow, Elsa Lanchester, is adamant in her autobiography: ``Charles finally had very little respect for Agee. And he hated the script, but he was inspired by his hatred.'' She quotes the film's producer, Paul Gregory: ``. . . the script that was produced on the screen is no more James Agee's . . . than I'm Marlene Dietrich.''

Who wrote the final draft? Perhaps Laughton had a hand. Lanchester and Laughton both remembered that Mitchum was invaluable as a help in working with the two children, whom Laughton could not stand. But the final film is all Laughton's, especially the dreamy, Bible-evoking final sequence, with Lillian Gish presiding over events like an avenging elderly angel.

Robert Mitchum is one of the great icons of the second half-century of cinema. Despite his sometimes scandalous off-screen reputation, despite his genial willingness to sign on to half-baked projects, he made a group of films that led David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, to ask, ``How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies?'' And answer: ``Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.'' ``The Night of the Hunter,'' he observes, represents ``the only time in his career that Mitchum acted outside himself,'' by which he means there is little of the Mitchum persona in the Preacher.

Mitchum is uncannily right for the role, with his long face, his gravel voice, and the silky tones of a snake-oil salesman. And Shelly Winters, all jitters and repressed sexual hysteria, is somehow convincing as she falls so prematurely into, and out of, his arms. The supporting actors are like a chattering gallery of Norman Rockwell archetypes, their lives centered on bake sales, soda fountains and gossip. The children, especially the little girl, look more odd than lovable, which helps the film move away from realism and into stylized nightmare. And Lillian Gish and Stanley Cortez quite deliberately, I think, composed that great shot of her which looks like nothing so much as Whistler's mother holding a shotgun.

Charles Laughton showed here that he had an original eye, and a taste for material that stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it, the public rejected it, and the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum picture (``Not as a Stranger'') it wanted to promote instead. But nobody who has seen "The Night of the Hunter'' has forgotten it, or Mitchum's voice coiling down those basement stairs: "Chillll . . . dren?''

As you probably noticed, I highlighted a few of Ebert's passages in pink. I'd like you to pick one or two and comment on it - do you agree or disagree? Why or why not? As always, please give support for you claims. And feel free to comment on the responses of others.

Also, are there any passages that I did not hightlight with which you severly agree or disagree?