Lesson Overview 

Duck Soup Movie Questions (see my page on Movie Questions).  You can also see my first film that I showed in this class, The Return of Martin Guerre, for more reasoning on how and why I choose a specific movie.  In a nutshell there are two different types of questions - those in bold that the students answer while they are watching the movie (it keeps them focused and on track) and those questions in italics that the students answer for homework.  Each of the latter questions is a kind of mini-essay that requires them to use what they found in their reading of the novel, our discussions & group works, and their viewing of the movie.

Here are the instructions from the handout (found below) and the first question which is a bit different - students need to look for something during the entire showing of the film (which takes 2 days):

All Quiet on the Western Front is a classic anti-war novel.  It shows the reader the true horror and devastation of the war in order to turn them against it.  However, there is more than one way to skin a cat.  The two extra credit books, especially Catch-22, use satire as a way of diminishing war.  If you make something look so ridiculous and stupid, then perhaps people won't engage in it.  Like All Quiet, this movie was also banned by Hitler who saw it as a threat to his plans to mobilize the people for war.

Thoughts on the Lesson 

After we started showing Grand Illusion - I really missed seeing this very funny film with my students every year - but, it was offered as extra credit so a number of students still got the chance to see it.