Emperor's Club

Okay, now that I've watched the movie I'll try to tackle Number One's question. Still not quite sure what was meant by "subtext"...but two subtle things that came through were the idea of parental influence vs. educational influence and (as my more well-read hubbie pointed out) classicism vs. materialism. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit and whole-heartedly agree that our current culture of the ends justifying the means has lost quite a bit of its classical foundation. Of course, David and I are in the middle of an elective Western Civ course that focuses on Greco-Roman influence, so I'm biased. As to the first Vs. I think that in many ways the movie showed that no matter how influencial a teacher may try to be, parental heritage has a way of winning out, for good or for bad. This movie touched me in a personal way, because it seems like Sedgwick Bell had an eriee similarity to pretty much every important male in my life, especially my brother (who I don't think ever learned the importance of character) and my husband (who, luckily, has, but most likely only because of the grace of God). And I found I related much to him as well, so there but for the grace of God go I (literally).

Anyways, the whole thing dovetailed nicely with much of the research David and I have been doing for his fiction series, which has consisted of very throughly studying the life and times of Julius Caesar. So we had a tremendous amount of fun trying to answer the test questions ourselves and I think I did fairly well, given my still limited knowledge. (Thank you Colleen McCullough for making studying Caeser fun! And thank you Hugh Hewitt for mentioning her books in "In, but Not Of"!)

Ok, I really, really need sleep, but felt a need to post since I actually had something of substance to say.