They start today

I think it may be easier to plan for a whole series of classes rather than just one. Yesterday I finished working out what the overview of the series of classes will look like, but I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do tonight.

This is what it looks like:
6 classes, each focusing on a different theme
1. Women in Movies: When Harry Met Sally, Shakespeare in Love, You've Got Mail, Alien, Sleepless in Seattle, Hercules, Aladdin
2. Teen Screen: Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Risky Business, Stand by Me, Scream, X Men I, II, Wayne's World
3. Race in Movies: Scarface, Lion King, Monster's Ball, Amistad
4. Violence: Natural Born Killers, Pulp Fiction, Matrix, Fight Club
5. Religion: Little Buddha, The Mission, Contact
6. The Alien/Other in film: X Men I, II;

Each of the six themes has titles of films beside them. Those are the films that the participants can choose from. One other factor in planning this is availability of the films in rental shops. Since We cannot watch the films in class, the best we can do is to watch them for homework. That means that people either have to already own the films or they have to rent them and watch them. Another bug is that the films have names that I know in English, but I don't know the Japanese. One I can remember as an example is "Karate Kid." That gets changed into "Best Kid" in Japan, pronounced [besuto kiddo]. Some titles have little or no relationship with their originals. Last time I ran this class, I went to the video rental shop looking for a film for which I only had the original title. I don't even remember which one now. I couldn't find it on the shelf, so I asked the clerk for help. He looked on the computer and said they didn't have it. I said that they had to have it. I knew they had it. It was so big they HAD to have it, but no one knew the title. They went and got this great huge book with loads of movies reviewed. The film was in there, along with both titles. They checked with the Japanese title, and sure enough, it was on the shelf.

Still don't know what I'm going to do tonight. Better get to work.