At UAT we have the opportunity to take what are called Special Interest Topics classes. These classes can cover a very wide range of topics from literature to industry specific interests. I'm fairly certain I spoke about my Game Of Thrones class from one of my past semesters and that was a blast. The class I'm taking this semester is Crime Literature, where we started by studying the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Though the class is titled "Crime Literature" though, we don't just tackle the literature involved. Instead we're essentially seeing how the genre as a whole has evolved over time so we are looking at things like the more contemporary Sherlock Holmes in comparison to the Holmes literature. In some respects the two are very similar, though in others they could almost seem like completely different worlds.
Recently we starting looking at more films in the genre of Crime Fiction. I recently had the pleasure of watching Sunset Boulevard. It's honestly never a movie that I would have ever watched on my own but now I'm really glad I did. It's a movie about an aging silent film start named Norma Desmond who has sat secluded in her mansion for more than 20+ years. Joe Gillis, arguably the main character, is a down on his luck script writer for Hollywood. His car is about to be repossessed and he's in fact on the run from repossession agents when his car gets a flat and he's forced to pull into the driveway of the mansion. Believing the home to be abandoned at first, he plans to lay low there for a bit but is surprised to find Norma still lives there and from there the story unfolds. It's an older movie, that uses light brilliantly to help convey the mood of the story. It's one of those movies that is still regularly referenced in various forms of entertainment, and I would highly encourage anyone with the time to watch it.
