Yesterday in class I taught about villains. I gave AFI's definition of a villain and their top 20 villains of all time. At first I was just going to go over the ones they knew - the Wicked Witch from Wizard of Oz, the Evil Queen from Snow White, Jaws, maybe Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader, the Alien (my personal favorite). I was going to talk about why they're such an effective villain and how they play the part.
But when I skipped over Norman Bates they all cried foul. Who is Norman Bates? They all wanted to know.
So I slowed down and went through the list one by one and they were enraptured. I've never seen this class so interested in story elements as I did when I told them about the bad guys.
I ended up doing my one minute version of 2001, making them all giggle with my impression of Hal. A student who saw Fatal Attraction gave us all his summary of the plot which included the line "The bitch messed with his car. You believe that? Bitch just won't leave that nigga alone!" I felt like it was the best plot summary I'd ever heard.
I listened to them argue about whether or not the shark from Jaws was awesome or lame. It got pretty heated.
And when I got to Annie Wilkes from Misery, I had them. As soon as I described the way she took a sledge hammer to his knees, they all asked me to point out which movie on the list that was again so they could all go out and get it.
I had only made one class set of the sheet so I could take it up and use it with my other class, but I had to go make new copies because so many of my students wanted to keep it to know what movies those were that I talked about.
So it turned out to be a pretty cool day.
