Movie Analyze

 
In a nutshell
For this assignment I want you to watch one of the movies listed below and read “Why
Everyone in an Enterprise Can and Should Be a Leader” by Knowledge@Wharton. Then I
want you to craft a five page essay that ties together the article, the movie, and this
unit of the course. The overall goal of this assignment is to show that you can apply theory from
this unit to practice. (You may include elements from other units to help contextualize theories
from this unit, but my goal is to assess your mastery of the unit learning objectives in this
assignment)
As I mentioned in the guidelines for assignments 2 and 3, as you choose your movies, for
one of the selections, I want you to choose a movie with a protagonist of the opposite sex,
or one that features a protagonist of a different sexuality, race, or ethnicity. Thus, for the
three interaction analysis assignments, two may be of leaders “like you” and one must be of
a leader who is of the opposite sex, or culturally different in some way from you. You may
not debrief the same movie more than one time.
The specific objectives are for you to:
• recognize elements of leadership and followership in action
• identify the elements of communication in the movie that transact leadership in groups
and organizations
• demonstrate an understanding of organizational culture
• analyze what are the most salient elements of leadership pertaining to this unit
represented in the movie
• draw on your knowledge base to make sense of a series of interactions pertaining to
leadership
• synthesize the required text, additional reading, and elements of the movie to show
that you can debrief leadership encounters in a meaningful way using concepts raised
in this unit.
As you debrief the movie bear in mind
• you may focus on one or more characters
• you may focus on one or more situations/encounters
• you may compare and contrast characters/situations
• you may evaluate communication and or behaviors in context
• you can take whatever approach you think will demonstrate the knowledge gained
from this unit exemplified in one or more communication encounters
I want to explore as many ways to reach students as I can – to present learning opportunities
that will maximize the possibility that course material will seem “real” – relevant, vibrant,
exciting, and infinitely worth pursuing in your quest to become a more theoretically grounded, reflexive, and competent leader. Since many of the students in this class have limited
experience of leadership in
organizations, I am offering a type of mediated ethnography to create “a level playing field”
so that inexperienced students have appropriate material to draw on to craft their essays.

Movies
You can obtain these movies from libraries, rental stores, Netflix, or a venue of your choice.
Synopsis text from IMDb.com
Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)
Invictus (2009)
The Founding of a Republic 2009)
Read article from the Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/thethoughts-of-chairman-mao-starring-jackie-chan-and-jet-li-1783408.html
As China prepares to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic, a new
blockbuster tells the story of its founding. Naturally, the nation’s biggest movie stars took part,
as Clifford Coonan reports from Beijing.
There has never been a movie quite like Jiangguo Daye. The blockbuster features nearly 200
of China’s top movie stars, including action heroes Jackie Chan and Jet Li plus a host of
directors, comedy stars and even journalists. There is Zhang Ziyi of Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, Stephen Chow of Kung Fu Hustle, and Hong Kong heartthrob Andy Lau. Imagine a
Hollywood film featuring the entire celebrity audience at the Oscars and you get the idea.
But The Founding of a Republic – the title in English – is not just an A-list extravaganza. It is a
stirring propaganda epic, a tale of how 60 years ago, when Chairman Mao’s scruffy band of
revolutionary warriors overcame Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Kuomintang in the civil war to
establish the world’s most enduring Communist revolution.
Nine to five (1980)