Comment on Khairil Azhar Blog (www.khazar723.blogspot.com)

hello there...Well, maybe the movie is about love but honestly khairil, I don't really understand what the movie was all about. But after reading your blog i finally had a clearer picture in my mind of the movie. Perhaps later you could update me with the info's about the movie. Hope that you still remember it though!

Comment on Marlisa Blog (www.marlisa-edu3217.blogspot.com)

Hi there...Yup I agreed with what you said about evaluating others without hurting them. Some people they are sensitive with our remarks and comments. Perhaps because they view us as friend. Friends should not say bad comments to other friends. But the truth is, we just want to best for our friends. I myself also enjoys evaluating my colleagues in their simulated teaching as I enjoy they evaluate mine. Personally, I think I would learn better as I also received a personal thought from my friends about the way of my teaching. Thanks a lot dear friends for your comments.

April 2, 2008 6:54 PM

Comment on Eunice Blog (www.isnice2046.blogspot.com)

hello dear...hey that's interesting.You actaully did help out with TESL 6 performance!Well, believe me when I said that you didn't miss anything when you didn't go to watch Passion. It was boring and all of us suffered there!Perhaps later in the future you will get a better chance to watch a better play than Passion. Sorry Joe Hafsham, but your play was boring!

April 2, 2008 6:17 PM

Comment on Agnes Blog (www.joinesz.blogspot.com)

I agree with what Agnes said about the play. Passion was not as passionate as the title suggest! I had to admit that the dancers and their dance steps were good but apart from that, I don't fell like suggesting others to watch the play. Perhaps it was me who could not appreciate plays but this is not my first time watching plays!I have been exposed to watch plays since I was in secondary school. Passion is some sort of a musical play without any dialogues, just dance moves that conveys the meaning.

Review on Passion

I was really looking forward when I get to know that the whole class is going for a play at KLPac. I have never been there before. Yes I enjoyed plays very much but I usually go to Actor’s Studio, Istana Budaya and the one at Dewan Bahasa. KLPac was a new experience and I was really looking forward into it. I was told that we are going to watch a play by Joe Hafsham called Passion. Then things started to change. A friend of mine told me that the play was some sort of musical play and it was boring. Well, I took my chance and go ahead to watch it. Guess what? I regretted watching it! The play was basically about a guy who loves to say “Life is so strange” because he fall for a lesbian and a bisexual girl. The events that happened in his life change his perceptions of life itself. Perhaps the plot of the play is interesting but it was not well performed. Dance moves without any dialogues make it hard for me to understand the play. No doubt that the moves were great and the props and lighting were good but still I couldn’t understand the play well. Anyway, thanks to my colleagues who tried to hard to explain the whole play to me.

A Steetcar Named Desire

Watching the movie A Streetcar Named Desire is just as almost reading the text itself. There were not much different from the play and the movie. The movie is much similar to the play. It evolves around the character of Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalsi and Mitch Mitchell. I didn’t have a hard time understanding the movie. In fact, the movie helps my understanding of the text better. Yes I have read the text before I watched the movie and after watching the movie; I felt that I really like the play. The story is something that is common in our society but somehow people rather not to talk about it. Maybe they feel that it is not important or perhaps it is just something small that we didn’t need to pay much attention to it. The portrayal of the characters especially Blanche Dubois makes me think that what she experience is something that we should not ignore.

Review on "As You Like It"

First of all, I thought the last movie that we are going to watch for the semester is “The Streetcar Named Desire”. But somehow when Yuen Thien told the class that there is another movie that needs to be watch, I was quite surprised. Honestly, I think the movies were quite dull. After all, it’s literature! The movies that we have watched were not acted out by Brad Pitt! “As You Like It” was the last movie that I watched. This Shakespeare adaptation was a blur to me. I felt asleep halfway and I need lots of catching up to do to understand the movie. But to my surprised, most of my classmates didn’t understand the movie also. That was not a big surprised. I was busy discussing with Agnes what the movie was all about and who the hero was. First we thought the hero was the Negro man, but the real hero was the man with the long beard. Well, we are not sure if that is the real hero up until today. Personally, I think the language that was used in the movie makes all of us did not understand the whole movie well. Yes, I was a modern movie but yet the dialogue was the Shakespearean dialogue with lots of thou and art. Perhaps we would understand better if we pay full attention to the movie when it was screen rather than guessing and discussing what the movie was all about!

Shakespeare Wallah

Shakespeare Wallah was the first movie that I watch during my drama class this semester. It was an adaptation from a Shakespeare play. My first impression was uh oh I think this is going to be a boring movie but I was wrong. It turns out to be interesting. It was a movie about cross-cultural beliefs. The hero, a Hindustani falls for two girls; one is an Indian actress who’s very cheeky and matured. The second girl was Liz, also an actress whose characteristic differs from Manjula, the Indian girl. I really like the movie because it shows how cultures and beliefs do play an important role in our daily lives, even when we are making the decision to find the right person to spend our lifetime with.

Pygmalion

When I first watch this movie, I really like it. it was a movie about a flower girl whose from the lower class society who transform herself to mingle with the upper class society. Liza, the flower girl seems to challenge Henry Higgins, s professor to teach her how to speak standard English and how to become a lady. Henry took the challenge and did manage to teach her everything that she asks for. Through the process of teaching Liza, Henry grows fond of her and eventually falls for her. Luckily, Liza seems to love him back. As for me, the important message of the story is that when you learn a language, is does not mean you only learn the language. It also mean you learn the culture of the language. As we can see in the movie, Liza feels awkward and out of place when she visited her old neighbourhood. Now that she is a lady, she feels that she doesn’t belong there anymore.

Review on Macbeth

In class Dr Edwin had taught us what is tragic flaw. Personally I think I do understand well what tragic flaw is. But Dr Edwin had insisted the whole class to watch Macbeth, as an example of a tragic flaw movie. Yes I have read Macbeth before but the experience of watching and reading is totally different. I was quite sleepy during the first half of the movie. To me, reading the play is far more interesting. Well, perhaps it is because of the unfamiliar actors and actresses. Things started to change when the plot of the movie is changing. When reading the play, we know that Macbeth die in the end. Watching the way Macbeth dies on the screen makes the play livelier. His tragic flaw was expressed greatly when the scene where they cut of his head was revealed. After watching this scene I did truly understand what tragic flaw means, falling from the highest, respected place in the society to the bottom where nobody notice you. That was happened to Macbeth, from a king to someone who is doomed to die.

Why Teiresias is a powerful seer

Teiresias was a priest of Zeus, and as a young man he encountered two snakes mating and hit them with a stick. He was then transformed into a woman.As a woman, Teiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including Manto. Tiresias's background was important, both for his prophecy and his experiences. Greek mythology contained other hermaphroditic figures (including Hermaphroditus), but Tiresias was fully male and then fully female. Also, prophecy was a gift given only to the priests and priestesses. Therefore, Teiresias offered Zeus and Hera evidence and gained the gift of male and female priestly prophecy.

As a seer, Teiresias was regarded as inerrant. In Greek literature, Teiresias's pronouncements are always gnomic but never wrong. He is generally extremely reluctant to offer his visions like most Oracles. Often when his name is attached to a mythic prophecy, it is introduced simply to supply a personality to the generic example of a seer. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Oedipus, the king of Thebes, calls upon Teiresias to aid in the investigation of the killing of the previous king Laios. At first, Teiresias refuses to give a direct answer and instead hints that the killer is someone Oedipus really does not wish to find. However, after being provoked to anger by Oedipus' accusation first that he has no foresight and then that Teiresias had had a hand in the murder, he reveals that in fact it was Oedipus himself who had committed the crime. Outraged, Oedipus throws him out of the palace, but then afterwards realises the truth. Thus, Teiresias was seen as a powerful seer because the downfall of the mighty Oedipus was seen by Teiresias.

Live Stage Performance

Watching a live stage performance is not something new to me. I was exposed to watching theatre since I was in secondary school. The first theatre that I watched is when I was in Form 3 in University of Science, Malaysia.

Watching a live stage performance differs from watching the movies or the television. To me, I enjoy watching theater more because the actions are live and there is no room for mistakes. In a television shows, you can make mistakes and the director can just simple cut and edit the faulty scene. Unfortunately, any directors of live stage performance won’t be able to do that. You can’t simple cut and edit a live performance!

Every time when you watch a live performance, even it is the same play, the sensational feeling and the perception of the play differs. This is because every time the actor and actresses are performing, the acting couldn’t be the same as it is a live performance. That is why to me, watching the live stage performance is much more interesting than watching movies because the feeling are real, and when there is a mistake or error in the performance, it is up to the actors and actresses to cover up their mistakes.

Perception of human's life

Human’s life is a cycle. In the “Four Ages of Man’, the poem explains how human’s life is actually a cycle that is predictable. We started out as a baby, pure and without any knowledge of anything about the world. Then when we became teenagers, we started to loose something. In the end, the poem states that “God shall wins’ which mean all of us will die eventually.

In the Sophocles’s riddle, it also stated about human’s growth. When you are a baby and still young, you will crawl. As you grow older, you will walk on your own feet. When it comes to the time when you are old, you will need to use a cane in order for you to walk properly.

Life’s Brief Candle also explains how man acts as an actor in this world and how the world is actually a big stage. Human’s life is just a cycle from the day that we were born. It is like a tunnel where the end of it the light that awaits us is Death itself.

Personally, I prefer he idea that was presented in the “Four Ages of Man”. Our life is very meaningful, even though we knew that one day God will win over us, we should not waste the life that He has given to us.

Reflectional on the Greek theatre

During the second class of the subject, I was introduced to the history of theatre. The handout that was given basically tells me more about what theater is all about.

In the first lesson, we were introduced to types of theatre, for example Greek theatre, Roman theatre, Medieval theatre and Restoration Drama. That was a lot of theatres. I didn’t know at first that theatres are divided into categories and era. What I know was theatre is just a theatre; a stage play performs by actors and actresses. I didn’t know that different types of theatres presenting different themes.

We also learned that in a tragedy theatre, it is just not tragedy; there are also a few types of tragedy. Apart from that, we were introduced to the dramatic and epic theatre, conventions of theatre and the stage characters. All of these things bring a different view and perception to the definition of theatre that I had in mind.

Before the class, I couldn’t imagine what I will earn about theatre in this drama class. Is it just reading and performing plays? Well, most likely I will need to read lots of plays and perhaps might need to perform one. It never occurs to my mind that drama is not just about reading the play. It is about understanding the whole play, including the stage directions and the performers.