J MCBRIDE

This class is BORING. I love mvies and might be a cinema major as well, bt this teacher was sooooo bring. He sits at a desk with his mic and just blabs on an on an on, and puts the whole auditoium to sleep. The movies we watch are really good, but by the time he gets to them your asleep. Tons of people never go to class and his midterm and final are pretty hard and very discriptive. The books you read arn't that good and are way leftist. The class isn't very hard and the essays you write arn't graded that hard either, but the two exams hurt my grade enought to drop my "B" to a "C+". If you can avoid this teacher do it.

As a marketing and design and industry major, I took this class to get rid of a GE requirement and took it CR/NCR, and I made a mistake of staying in it, suffering for the semester for 3 hours. The teacher would lecture for about an hour before showing the film, show the film, and if there is time, he'll lecture more after the film and go on different tangents sometimes NOT relating to the film.

B- EXAMS Derived from his lectures (which tend to be dry, but sometimes packed with some VERY LIMITED interesting information on the "behind the scenes" stuff) and from the two textbooks he strongly suggests you read. One of these books is called "Movie Wars" and referenced the teacher as one of the un-biased reviewers in there (I think that's maybe why he added that to the required text) and the other one was about "Hitchcock" which I must admit, was quite interesting to get into Hitchcock's mind. Anyways, review his syllabus (some questions are derived from there as well if you don't have notes to study off of).

C+ LECTURES One word. Boring. He's a nice guy, but some people must learn to not speak in a monotonous voice. He's extremely knowledgable in the cinematic arena, he mingles with some prestigous people in the film industry, but it's just too dry. If only he incorporated some more humour to wake the class up.

B AVAILABILITY E-mail response takes around a few days. Haven't tried in-person office hour visits though.

B PERSONALITY Gotta give him credit for trying.

B- SPEAKING SKILLS Yah...

He's extremely organized, detail oriented with his syllabus (that would be equivalent to the bible...don't lose it). If you want to get rid of a GE requirement, take it cr/ncr.

TWO EXAMS: 1 Midterm, 1 Final TWO ESSAYS: 1 3 pages, 1 5 pages (exact...no range)

For the exams, try to skim over the book. Pay attention to names and dates and some cinematic terms he brings up in his lectures. It's hard to take notes, but try to not doze off in class. He will NOT let you keep the exams, although he does go over the answers to the midterm questions. Final is cumulative, around 90% new stuff, 10% old stuff.

For the essays, he doesn't look at content as much as grammatical errors, structure. I learned the hard way. When he says don't summarize, make sure you include a short short summary, don't exclude it all the way or else you get docked points. Then again, bring in examples from movies when writing the essay. Topic are practically almost the same, only difference is the length.

If you take this class, I wish you good luck. Don't say that I didn't warn you.

This is a pretty cool class to take especially if you're into movies and if you're a critic that has a lot to say. It's a big class though, more than 200, and you just watch movies each class, write about 3 papers and have a final. It's pretty straight foward to get an A just as long as you attend class and pay attention. that was my biggest weakness. But overall he's a cool teacher and I recommend it to anyone.