Professor Shushtari is a really great professor and you can definitely tell he is passionate about the subject. I'm a psychology major, so this class was an elective for me and I knew absolutely nothing about the subject coming in. However, I found it super interesting! Although the course material is easy, the workload is not light. The course consists of two papers (midterm and final), a few "buried treasure" questions, and a course reader quiz. On top of that, you have to watch quite a few movies (some better than others). None of assignments were difficult, but they were kind of time-consuming. I wouldn't really recommend this course if you don't like to write, as it is a large portion of your grade. I consider myself a decent writer, so this wasn't a huge problem for me, but I did find some of the assignments and papers to be tedious. I also know other people in my class were unhappy with their grades (sometimes the TA's could be tough graders). However, I definitely recommend this class if you have an interest in film and want a professor that is passionate about the subject!

Easy class. But I went in wanting to know the difference between good and bad acting and I didn't. He just showed us clips from his favorite movies and talked about it briefly. Just very general descriptions of the acting, whereas for the papers he would make us go into specific detail about what the actor did to portray an emotion, etc. etc. Like I said easy class, but also it's super weird that it is a theater class and not a film class. We learn nothing about theater and it's not like acting is exclusive to theater.

Easy upper division class + GPA booster. I only had to invest a little bit of my time for this course as the graded materials are pretty light. No participation required and average/light grading materials [1 course reader quiz, 4 easy quizzes that have pre-given questions +3 days to turn it in, 1 essays (2pg) & Midterm + Final (3-4pg)]. Btw the midterm and the final are also essays that are 3-4 pages long so not that much work :) TA's deduct small points for grammar, commas, and other tedious things but generally you will receive a high score even with these small deductions. I ended up with ~95% for my overall grade so if you do your work, this course will def reward you!