A Small, Good Thing short film
I found out this short film now, right after the test. I think this is an amazing film and reflects, of course, Carver's creation.
It takes almost all elements from the novel (it, of course music and there are little differences, plus the ending is different, but I think that that is part of the creation process. But in overal , it follows the same structure as in the Carver's story). I could actually feel the same emotions as when I read it. As some know when we commented about A Small, Good Thing, I could feel the suffering of the characters since I had health problems two years ago. From one of a sudden, I had a huge pain in my stomach and needed to go to the urgency treatments. It took a while to the doctors to finally discover I had ulcers and they opened up the stomach "walls" letting the gastric acids burn my organs -in the mean time they did the testing, I had such a bad time and pain killers couldn't do much. Finally went to surgery and it all worked out perfectly.
But still, my parent's faces were awful. I could see their stress and desperation just with looking at them. The same way these parents feel in A Small, Good Thing.
Turning back into the short film, the benefits of watching it is that you could see the desparation (actually see unlike the story in which you need to just picture it in your mind). You can see how in this seventy-minute film the emotions of the characters change during the plot. The end, as in novel, is also well performed.
I recomend this film for all of you to apply it in your classes if you would like to talk about Carver. I think this is a great material to work in classes. There are a bunch of things you can make your students do (maybe this is not directly related but still, I wated to point it out).
I hope you enjoy it and make comments about it.
I'd like to comment about the story. Ann Weiss in "A small, good thing" represents, for me, the lost of power over something you cannot control. Typically when you think you have everything under control, you have everything you ever wanted, the house, the car, the husband or wife, the children, but all of those things are so fragile, that you can lose them in the blink of an eye, or in a hit of a car :/ . So I think that Carver wanted to portray the image of a normal mother who does the normal stuff, suddenly is faced when something unexpected that changes her life.
ResponderBorrarI can appreciate what you say Diego. It would be wrong to say that I always put my self in the shoes of others, but of course there are moments in which someone else's situation in an object of reflection to yours, or even imagining what you life would be if you were in that situation makes you actually grasp the pain and suffering of another person. When the miners were under the ground, for instance, I remember being in my house watching the telly. At first, you feel schock, everyone does. But besides having possitive thoughts, the situation wasn't beyond what it was: it was occuring miles away to people I had never met. Days passed and there were no good news. While I was going for a bite, I found y father crying in a corner of the kitchen, silently. This is very unusual, as I have seen my father cry three times in my life, and just remembering it makes me feel a bit emotional. He is a miner himself, and the idea of imagining himself being undergrown trapped was an overwhelming feeling he couldn't bare any longer, so he burst into tears. I too was able to feel that, feeling the idea of having my father down there. I lived the following days in a completely different way, wishing they could be saved for something else other than sympathy. The moment in the story where this is described is very short, but I think has a strong emotion behind it, which makes you wonder after having read it still.
ResponderBorrar