Emma Watson is apparently NOT done with acting.

[Andrew NDB]

Originally Posted by drgon78

She is cute and loved her in the Harry Potter movies, too bad she never found too much else that would be memorable movie roles.

I thought she was pretty good in "Colonia," from 2015. Which is... jeeze, already 6 years ago.



She also starred with Boyega and Tom Hanks in "The Circle" a little bit ago (the evil Facebook movie). Great story premise but... pretty forgettable movie.

Again, for me... and it's not her fault. She just has one of those faces and frames where -- and being front and center in the Potter films obviously doesn't help -- she looks like a perennial adolescent. It's hard to take her super seriously in "serious" adult roles.

[Prowler]

Leo, Andrew and ssjup:

I barely remember any of the HP movies anymore. I went to see the 5th movie at the cinema and didn't like it much. Then again, I was already 16 by then, so I guess I had outgrown HP by then.

I did like the 2nd movie, but I was a very young kid still. Who knows of I'd still like it these days.

I've never actually read the books, so I can't comment on them.

[CyberCubed]

It's kind of ironic the whole Harry Potter craze from the early 2000's is now 15 years old and the young teens of today know nothing of it. I mean I was already 18-20 by the time these books started coming out so I was already "out of the target audience" but I remember how HUGE it was. Like even people who almost never read books were reading it, there was no way to escape from it.

And now today's teens were born a decade late from it and don't seem to care about it much. It's really funny how the passage of time works, like each generation has their own "hot popular franchise of books/tv/movies" and the previous ones just become "retro" or outdated.

Like god, what do the young teens of today even like these days? I honestly have no idea.

[Andrew NDB]

Originally Posted by CyberCubed

Like god, what do the young teens of today even like these days? I honestly have no idea.

Activism and racism, as best as I can gauge. Which seems to be the same thing to a lot of them.

[Prowler]

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

Activism and racism, as best as I can gauge. Which seems to be the same thing to a lot of them.

There were already some rather political teens when I was in HS, but they were in the minority. In fact, I remember being rather tough having a serious conversion in HS that wasn't about homework or a test. Vast majority of my classmates only cared about discussing football, relationships, alcohol, weed and the popular TV shows, movies and musicians. Most didn't have any strong political positions and didn't even bother voting in the first elections they were eligible to vote for.

And the ones who cared about politics only seemed to be parroting what their parents said at home. That and there was always that edgy kid or two who read Hitler's life story or something and decided to go through a nazi phase.

Social media at the time was this website called hi5 where teens shared their photos and that's it. It wasn't anything like Facebook or twitter.

[Andrew NDB]

Originally Posted by Prowler

There were already some rather political teens when I was in HS, but they were in the minority. In fact, I remember being rather tough having a serious conversion in HS that wasn't about homework or a test. Vast majority of my classmates only cared about discussing football, relationships, alcohol, weed and the popular TV shows, movies and musicians. Most didn't have any strong political positions and didn't even bother voting in the first elections they were eligible to vote for.

And the ones who cared about politics only seemed to be parroting what their parents said at home. That and there was always that edgy kid or two who read Hitler's life story or something and decided to go through a nazi phase.

Social media at the time was this website called hi5 where teens shared their photos and that's it. It wasn't anything like Facebook or twitter.

Yeah. That's about the high school I remember.

[Prowler]

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

Yeah. That's about the high school I remember.

And you're about a decade older than me afaik. I was born in 1990, so it's not like my HS days were THAT long ago. I mean, Youtube debuted when I was in 10th grade!

Things sure changed fast in just a few years.

I think the fact Facebook and other social networks have been used by politicians and media outlets who share their clickbaity stuff and exploit the algorithms has contributed to all the sociopolitical concerns of modern day teens. Plus, people spend more time online than ever these days. When I was a teenager, you were still considered a geek with no life if you admitted to spend the weekend in front of your computer at home. The "cool kids" didn't do that.

[Leo656]

I knew a few kids (including a few cousins) who were pretty outspokenly Liberal, mostly because their parents were Conservative. It was more about rebellion that a sincere caring/understanding towards the issues that matter.

Go figure, almost all of them flipped to being Republicans once they had kids. Especially the girls. My one cousin voted against Bush in 2004, because "war bad, m'kay", but then after she had a daughter she ended up voting for Trump twice. Once you actually have a family of your own, you magically end up caring more about "traditional values" than letting someone with a penis share a bathroom with your daughter, or making sure that people who don't work get a living stipend while you work your ass off to barely scrape by and provide for your kids. Shocking.

It's an extreme oversimplification, but there IS some truth to the idea that "If you're young and not a liberal, you don't have a heart, but if you're older and not conservative, you don't have a brain." The older you get, and the more time you spend in the Really-Real World, you start to understand that "empathy" simply makes for bad policy, and the reason "Status Quo" exists is that it's because what keeps the majority of people safe, healthy, and prosperous. Which does not translate to "oppression", it simply is "What's best for the majority", which is what's supposed to be important.
------------------

As for Harry Potter, I honestly never gave a sh*t but it was more like "Whatever it takes to get kids to read." Of course, then they made a bunch of movies and shot that idea all to hell. I'unno, no interest, it's fine if people like it. If I never bothered with it by now I doubt I'll ever read the books or watch the movies. I'm not "against" them in any way, there's just nothing in it that compels me to actually experience it.

My wife watched the newer one just because it had Johnny Depp in it, and she has this compulsive obsession with seeing everything he's in, so I was worried that now she'd wanna get into Harry Potter, but she doesn't; she just cares about Johnny Depp. I didn't see it, though; sounded dumb.

I'm weird, I'm either like 110% into something or 0%, with no middle ground.

[Prowler]

My aunt gave me one of the Harry Potter books for one of my birthdays. I think it was my 11th? Forgot which book... cuz I never read it.

Tbh I didn't like reading when I was a kid unless it was comics. And then school turned me off even more from reading novels. It wasn't until i finished HS that I began enjoying it, since now I was picking my own books and reading them at my own pace instead of being pressured by teachers to overanalyse them. No, "the curtains were blue" doesn't mean the author was saying something deep and vague for readers to guess, sensei. It simply meant the curtains were ****ing blue

Funny thing is, as an adult I've noticed most people don't seem to read much or at all. "oh I haven't read a book since HS/University" is something I hear/see often. While, when I was a teenager, I felt like one of the rare cases of someone who didn't read books except when school forced me to.

I don't blame a lot of kids and young people for not feeling any motivation to read books. Visual mediums are a lot more appealing to their eyes and school also makes a lot of people hate reading because a lot of the classics people have to go through in school are boring.

I'm no teacher or educator, so I can't give any concrete advice to encourage more kids to read, but it seems like parents and teachers could use a different kind of approach?

[frank_one]

I always thought Harry Potter was something for young girls. Even before the first movie came out I remember spotting girls reading it on the train more than once.

[Prowler]

Originally Posted by frank_one

I always thought Harry Potter was something for young girls. Even before the first movie came out I remember spotting girls reading it on the train more than once.

It definitely seems to have a very large female fandom.

Once I entered my teens, Harry Potter became less cool among boys, now that you mention it.

Dudes eventually became bigger fans of Lord of the Rings.

[Leo656]

Tough call. I always liked reading and I even liked most of what we read in school. Hated Shakespeare, though; I once had a teacher take points off of a paper because I had the audacity to write that he was "arguably one of the greatest writers of all time" as part of the introduction. I was just trying to be diplomatic. She was like "No, 'arguably' nothing, he WAS one of the greatest writers of all time, period." And I was like, "Well, to be honest I said 'arguably' because *I* personally don't feel that way, even though I'm aware that you and others disagree with that opinion. But the very fact that people like me disagree that he was so great means that it IS an opinion, and NOT a fact. And so I really don't think you can take points off for that." But she did anyway. She also later failed me for the year by a single point - against school policy - and sent me to Summer School to make up the credit for that class. I mentioned that whole deal with the paper to my Summer School teacher as well as my next-year Language Arts teacher, and they agreed that she was an idiot and a pretty bad teacher all-around. Not JUST for that, there were a lot of reasons. But that was a pretty bold example of her nonsense.

She also gave me poor marks on a book report because she didn't care for the subject matter. She said that biographies were acceptable, so I did my paper on a really incredible Guns N Roses biography by a guy named Danny Sugerman; it was more than just a simple history of the band, I mean the guy cited stuff like Nietzsche and various myths and folklore in his analysis of the individuals in the band and their personal and professional history, what compelled them to certain behaviors... really fascinating stuff. Still one of the best biographies I've ever read, and almost certainly the deepest. The guy Sugerman is a seriously acclaimed biographer. I'd already read the book three or four times by then so I used it for my book report since I knew I would nail it, and I wrote this giant five or six-page paper on it. BUT, she gave it a mediocre grade (I know for an almost certain fact that I put more work into that paper than anyone else in the class did) because she didn't like the band itself. Her reasoning for the grade made it pretty clear to me that she probably didn't even read the paper. She was a really lousy teacher.

The rest of high school those kinds of classes went a lot better, though. We had better teachers who had more of a conversational teaching style that encouraged discussion and interpretation. Even stuff like Hamlet and Oedipus which I don't remember extremely well, I remember having fun with the material at the time. We'd basically be assigned a chapter or two each night and then the next day the class would be like a roundtable discussion on it. Most of the class grade was in participation, so if you didn't read the daily chapters you could still pass so long as you answered the test questions but you'd only get a really good grade if you kept up with the daily stuff and stayed engaged. If you just sat there and never talked, read the whole book the night before the test and answered most of the questions right, you might get a C- overall, but you were definitely better rewarded for actually keeping up and participating. And that approach seemed to help people stay engaged; if you didn't read the chapter the night before, you'd literally end up just sitting there doing nothing for 40 minutes while everyone else was having a conversation, and that's boring. So it was like "If you don't want to be bored, you have to participate, and to be able to participate you have to read the whopping ten or fifteen pages that were assigned the night before." You basically got back what you put in.

Our school district had a really strong Language Arts and reading and Creative Writing program, though; most of the kids who excelled at anything tended to excel in those areas more than others, and those teachers tended to have more rapport with the students than the math or science or history teachers did. I can safely say that it isn't like that everywhere.

A lot of writing is symbolism and metaphor, though, on either a micro or macro scale. More often than not those curtains actually are blue for a reason. Might not be a great big reason, but often it's for some reason. For people who write a lot, especially those who do it as their profession, anything that hits the page tends to have a layered or textured meaning. What I find is that people who are very literal-minded tend to struggle with that.

How we used to approach a lot of material was, oftentimes if there was some symbolic or metaphorical meaning in the author's work it was part of the lesson - and would usually not be some big secret but an oft-discussed statement of historical fact - and so after a reading, we'd first discuss each person's personal interpretation of what we'd just read; "What do YOU think is being represented, here?" And then after we'd all had a say - with the caveat being that there weren't any "wrong" answers since art is subjective and all that - we would THEN get to the part where the teacher would reveal, "Well, this is what the author, in their own words, said they were trying to express in that scene..." And that would lead into another conversation, and so on and so forth. The whole point was in looking at things at multiple layers, and how a thing can be interpreted in multiple ways and they could all be valid in theory even if there actually was one "correct" or preferred meaning.

This was all very different from how books were taught in middle school, where it was more "Read the chapter, answer questions like 'What did Jim say to Steve to make him mad? What did Steve do after that?'." Very dry, very strict, very literal and linear. I don't think you can teach reading books the same way you teach math. Literature is art, and all art needs to be a conversation. From what I've seen that's the approach that gets better results.

As far as getting kids to read, some people just plain hate to read but I think it helps to get to kids extremely early. My father always, always read to me as a kid from an extremely young age, and I had as many of those book-and-record/cassette tape sets as I did toys. I credit that kind of thing entirely with how I was able to read by the time I was four. I kinda think by the time they even start Kindergarten, if it's not something they've already been doing on their own it's going to be harder to get them to care. Schoolwork represents structure, something all kids hate even though they may understand it as being necessary. If schoolwork is their introduction to reading and writing - or drawing and painting, for that matter - then it's just "work" and they're going to resent it. If it's something they've already been doing for fun on their own before that, then the schoolwork aspect is more about getting better at it, rather than being forced to do something they wouldn't be doing otherwise.

[CyberCubed]

I never got into Harry Potter because I simply don't read "real books." I haven't opened up a book since english class in High School and college.

If you don't count comics, and I really only read TMNT comics, I haven't read a "real book" in about 15 years now. Probably around 2007ish I guess.

[Prowler]

Sure, symbolism and metaphors are common, and the main point of analysing such content is to see what answers each person can come up with, but the difference between a good and a bad teacher is really thin when it comes to that. A not so good teacher will just shut you down and believe their interpretation is the correct one. I've seen that happen.

As for the Shakespeare thing, yes, some teachers take it REALLY PERSONALLY if you're not a huge fan of their favourite author.

Another thing that rubbed me the wrong way was the elitism of some teachers when it came to comic books when I was a kid. I remember around 5th grade our history teacher asking us if we read anything on Easter break and I said I read Tintin, one of the most famous European comic book series of all time and loved by millions of people. And she just scoffed and dismissed it as if I was some ignorant hack. Telling a 10 year old kid that he's stupid or ignorant for liking comic books isn't gonna make him feel any better and make him warm up to the idea of reading novels. She could have been more tactful and use a different approach to convince me novels can be great too. I'd have gotten her point and would actually have picked up one faster.

Also, a funny story, I was discussing Kafkas Metamorphosis with someone a few years ago and we were wondering why he decided to write such book. He said "maybe he thought writing about a guy turning into a cockroach would be funny"

[ssjup81]

Originally Posted by Prowler

Leo, Andrew and ssjup:

I barely remember any of the HP movies anymore. I went to see the 5th movie at the cinema and didn't like it much. Then again, I was already 16 by then, so I guess I had outgrown HP by then.

I did like the 2nd movie, but I was a very young kid still. Who knows of I'd still like it these days.

I've never actually read the books, so I can't comment on them.

By the time the first movie came out, the first four books were out and I'd read them by that time. I don't recall much about the fifth movie. I remember the book more, though. Don't remember how I felt about it. I was born in 1981 and I liked the HP stuff. lol My mother as well. One day we would like to go to Universal to the HP land stuff. I went to the one in Osaka, but couldn't fully enjoy it. I did get a Butterbeer and a wand, though.

I liked the second movie, and like I mentioned, it had its issues, but it was tolerable. IMO, the first two movies seemed to get the characters close to right. They screwed up Ron's character the most, though compared to the other two, which was shown in those first two, but movie 3 just really screwed it up...Hermione too.

[Leo656]

Yeah, that dizzy broad I was talking about was a big "What do you think this was about? Well, you're wrong" type of person. She did that a LOT.

Better teachers would take an "incorrect" analysis, and turn it into a conversation about How/Why someone could interpret the material that way. "Okay, that's not specifically what the author's intent was, but that's very interesting in itself. What made you come to that conclusion?" We spent just as much time on the "personal meaning" of the literature as the "official" meaning.

I had one really good teacher, it was his first year, and as a younger guy he often tried to engage the students by drawing parallels to pop culture and things we might recognize, like movies, music, comics to an extent, and so on. He was a huge Metallica fan, so we had a lot of fun in that class. We did a whole section on Transcendentalism at one point, and as a homework assignment he asked us to cite at least one song in popular music that dealt with those themes, "getting back to nature", rejecting materialism, being one with the earth and so on. So I did my entire assignment on "Of Wolf And Man". I was the first person to raise my hand to read their paper, and he was like "Okay, I kinda know what you're gonna say already, so I wanna save yours for a bit because I'm sure it's gonna be great, so let's hear from someone else first." So the girl next to me went, and she literally said "I wrote 'None, because there aren't any'." And the guy almost literally blew a fuse. That was her entire "paper", that one sentence. He's like "You didn't even try," and she's like "People don't write songs about stuff like sitting around in the freaking woods!"

The little vein in the guy's temple was throbbing, so I raised my hand again and he's like "Okay, yeah, I kinda think I need you to redeem my faith in this class after that last answer." So I gave this long, in-depth analysis of Metallica's "Of Wolf and Man" and all the Transcendentalist themes in it, and he's like "See, THAT is what I'm talking about! I knew as soon as I gave the assignment that you were gonna come back with exactly that. To a lesser extent, I also would have accepted 'Wherever I May Roam', but yeah, 'Of Wolf and Man' is a perfect, perfect example of everything we've been studying here. Great job."

The girl next to me rolled her eyes, and was like "Well, I listen to rap music." Me and the teacher kinda looked at each other, he just shrugged and was like "Well... there ya go, I guess." That chick was SO mad. It was awesome.

[CylonsKlingonsDaleksOhMy]

Originally Posted by Prowler

Also, a funny story, I was discussing Kafkas Metamorphosis with someone a few years ago and we were wondering why he decided to write such book. He said "maybe he thought writing about a guy turning into a cockroach would be funny"

Peter Laird must have really loved him some Kafkas.

[Prowler]

Fun story, Leo.

Originally Posted by CylonsKlingonsDaleksOhMy

Peter Laird must have really loved him some Kafkas.

Let's not go there

[ranger_scout]

So much for her retirement.

Emma Watson isn't retiring from acting — despite what you may have heard online

[Shark_Blade]

She needs to be in the MCU.