Reason
and Rhetoric:
Bickering
for Humanity
As part of LBST120 Core Course On-Line, students will watch seven feature
films. All are great films, award winners, great acting, faculty favorites. The primary focus of the films is how persuasive
arguments are constructed, flow, and resolve. Rhetoric is classically the first Liberal Art. The secondary theme is modern
scientific debate- evolution, genes, cosmology. (Liberal arts have outgrown rhetoric, grammar, logic, arithmetic, geometry,
music, and astronomy.)
LBST120
in an on-line course. Students must borrow, buy, or rent these films. I will screen the films on-campus for students and course
visitors if requested on Wednesdays. Popcorn and dinner are welcome.
My notes on each film are posted here.
Rick Rayfield, Instructor
Inherit
the Wind(1960) 128 mins.
Courtroom
giants Darrow vs Bryan.
Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gene Kelly .
Great
book, great play, great film.
Evolution on trial while the country watches.
Twelve Angry Men (1957) 96 mins
Ordinary citizens on a jury.
Henry Fonda and all-star cast directed by Sidney Lumet.
Everybody who sees this film gets pulled in,
and everyone is moved. What is justice?
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) 108 mins
Family persuasion AA Katharine Hepburn,
Spencer Tracy, Sidney
Portier
Interracial love disrupts a well-educated liberal family.
Lion in WInter (1968) 135
mins
Royal family bickering AA Katharine Hepburn,
Peter O’Toole are King and queen with razor tongues
arguing over which son should succeed.
Proof (2004) 99
mins
Campus furor on sanity & genius Gyneth Paltrow
Jake
Gyllenham Anthony Hopkins
A mathematical proof needs checking and an author.
Rivetting.
Copenhagen(2002) 117 mins
Nobel physicists argue the universe Tony Award winner
by Michael
Frayn, Brilliant playwright (Noises Off)
imagines with
clarity two geniuses and rivals,
Bohr and Heisenberg, arguing atomic politics and
subatomic rules.
Gattaca (1997) 106 mins
Evidence of what is human in genetically twisted future
Ethan
Hawke wants to be an astronaut,
but his hippie parents did not get their genes cleaned.
