My Kid Could Have Written a Better Ending!
Have you ever walked out of the cinema and thought to yourself, “Man, I could have written a better ending than that. Hell, my kid could have written a better one”? I think we’ve all been there.
Well, thanks to a comment made by someone on my brother’s Facebook page, I found a site that does just that. It’s called “How It Should Have Ended.”
This would be a great activity for any class to practice past modals. One movie I would love to see on this site is Die Hard 4. God was that awful. An example of the preposterous situations in the movie is given in the pic above. If you’re not familiar with how this film assumed everyone in the audience was an idiot with it’s over-done action sequences and mindless techno-jargon see this Penny Arcade Comic and a hilarious IMDB discussion on “What I learned from Die Hard 4.”
You could teach things like:
The director really shouldn’t have let that annoying kid be in so many scenes.
You’d think that with a multi-million dollar budget they could at least have had some better CGI.
They should have done more research on computers. Last time I checked, it wasn’t possible for the entire Internet to crash.
Proposed Lesson Plan:
Pick a clip from the website of a movie you think most of your students have seen (you could also just show them the webpage and they could call out the films they are familiar with so you can get a good idea for this). Tell your students the movie you have in mind and then ask them to recap it.
Now ask them if they would change anything about the film if they had a chance, especially the ending.
Show the clip and have them compare their proposed changes to the website’s.
Draw their attention to the name of the website and discuss the language for a bit if necessary.
Put students into pairs and have them decide on a movie they have both seen that they think could’ve been better.
Students discuss what could or should have been different. They can write these ideas down if they wish.
Students can then rewrite the ending for the movie as to how they think it should’ve have gone. At this point it would be pretty unnatural to continue using past modals, so the writing would probably be better using normal tenses.
Students present their changed movies to the class and explain their reasoning, fielding any questions the audience might have.
Tags: movies, past modals, Should Have, writing
Lesson Ideas | turklis1 | 
May 28, 2010 10:00 am
2 Comments
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By Scott Jaworski, July 2, 2010 @ 12:51 am
I have to use two hands to count the number of times I have blown up a helicopter by launching a car into it. There are car ramps everywhere, you just have to look for them. I am surprised the need for this action hasn’t come up in your life on various occasions as well.
Die Hard 4 was a terrible movie if you tie yourself down to the confines of reality. I think you will find that most movies are terrible if you do this. Die Hard 4 is reminiscent of the Final Destination movies, where the story was just the glue for the action sequences. Nobody watches any of these movies to see a compelling story. They watch because they know they are going to see some cool shit like McClain taking down a harrier with his might and wit.
Anyway, just thought it was interesting you found this on my FB page and made a lesson plan out of it. See you soon!
By turklis1, July 2, 2010 @ 10:24 am
Dear brother, thank you for stopping by the page. I remember once watching you take down a large pizza with your might and wit. However, no one made a movie about it and you used your bare hands, which is probably cooler than a harrier jet.