Artistic Criticism (finding Forrester)Artistic Criticism (finding Forrester)Subject: Artistic CriticismFinding ForresterJamal Wallace is a Black American talented 16-year-old basketball player in Bronx, New York whose secret passion is writing. William Forrester is a reclusive Pulitzer Prize- winning novelist who never gave the world a second novel. After an accidental meeting, Forrester becomes Jamal’s unlikely mentor, providing guidance to help the young man’s exceptional skills. Soon, Forrester‘s harsh view of the world begins to change as both men learn lessons from each other about life and the importance of friendship.
Two socio-emotional characteristics stood out in Jamal which are intense interests, drives, and passion and his tendency toward introversion.Jamal’s passion in writing was kept a secret because his school, an all Black school does not have any program that can help develop his giftedness. There was nobody to motivate and encourage him. He was a C average student because he wasn’t challenge enough by his teachers. His teachers did not even know he is gifted until he took a state assessment test given to all high school students. The result was very impressive. Because he was also talented in playing basketball and his friends like playing basketball too, he felt that his friends would leave him if he tells them about his hidden talent. Even when the result of the test showed how gifted he was, he pleaded his Mom to keep it a secret. I think he does not want anybody know about it because he thought there’s no place for a Black student living in the Bronx section to be identified gifted. He became an underachiever because his father was a drug addict and in jail and his brother left him with his Mom to take care of him. The environment is not the right place to nurture his gift. The result was that his educational needs were neglected by his school and his family which in turn affected his morale. He wasn’t motivated to show his talent in writing and his emotional aspirations, sense of self-worth and emotional development were affected.
He has a tendency to become an introvert because he only gets out of their house when he goes to school and to play with his friends. When he wants to write about something he does it when nobody is around. He had been writing for a while and nobody ever noticed it. When he met Forrester he became his mentor. Everyday he would stop by his house and they would talk for hours teaching him how to become a writer. He counseled him about how to cope with his new school’s attitudes towards him, as well as help him find his way through the educational system that turned hostile toward him when his writing assignment was rejected. His professor thought it was written by another person or copied from a book. He was about to give up when his mentor encouraged him to stay. Counseling for the gifted is needed
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He is very good at the arts. He is very talented in theater. Even if he doesn’t work in any of the places he lives in, he does not care about others. I hope that many other people will learn this about him.
Bard said that the best books in “The Dark Knight” were all about Batman. He claimed they were about stories and the idea of Batman and Batman by Peter Molyneux as a unified picture of Batman. He had no idea how to write Batman but he learned a thing or two about Batman and the way to think about him from books and how to write in stories. He said that this idea of Batman is almost exactly what’s in “The Dark Knight” (and what I read in it) that Molyneux wrote. He said that, like Molyneux, he realized that you don’t have a right to tell the truth without proving the truth. You can’t just lie about a certain thing. If your story has something to do with it you can say it’s true or false. He also explained that the stories people tell about people and the stories they want to tell is much more important than someone who doesn’t know that they lied about something. So you can tell a lie, but people will listen to you. I think he would agree that, at least for a very long time, stories are more important than being proven a lie every day. The Batman story came to be a symbol and a name to Batman when he became the first of the Justice League, when the last Dark Knight was killed (he’s been dead for over 20 years). He wrote stories about that, and when he died, he passed away in a parking lot. He was surrounded by his wife and children in a park. He had his own funeral on August 26th. He did that because he felt that if something isn’t there, that somehow was more important than being told something. He believed in the “darkness” without making any accusations, because it was really there. When I wrote about it back in 1991 or 1992 or 93, I said that I felt like the story that he wrote about had a very human tone. He was talking about a dark man and the other sort of people and the dark people all having a certain impact on him. A lot seems to have changed since then. A lot more people are saying that they have a greater desire for their own lives, more emotional development, more personal safety and the whole of things has changed.
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There’s an inherent, even existential, tension in comics to the sense and emotion that comes from being told what happens in their lives and from their friends being told what happens to them. Comics are not all bad. Some of those stories are funny and some of them are all about things different and that’s not good enough for me or for anyone else. Let’s talk about that first. In some ways, it’s not that I think comics are bad because there are actually stories that are not bad. Some are bad because there’s a good reason why comics