I would say the TA you get will make or break this class. My TA was a very generous grader and pretty engaging during discussions. You do have to attend discussions as it is part of your participation grade. The assignments can be tedious as you have to do weekly journals (250 words) based on the week's lecture, 1 final paper (6 pgs), 1 midterm paper (open-book), and 1 final paper (open-book). But as long as you put in decent quality work, you will most likely get an A or even A+. Definitely recommend esp if you like musicals.

Holley is AMAZING! Definitely hang out at her office hours, she's great to bounce ideas off of. This is such a fun and interesting class, I learned so much. The discussions are so engaging and lively, and this was definitely my favorite class this quarter. I had a lot of fun writing the term paper too!

Honestly didn't know what I should expect coming into this class. Since it was asynchronous, every week we would have a movie to watch, a paper to read and lectures pertaining to that movie and other concepts. We would take about them in discussions and have to write about the/analyze the lecture content in a weekly journal entry. We had both a midterm and a final that were open-book and were week long as well as a paper to write on music from a movie of our choice. Personally, I did not watch a single movie since I have no patience whatsoever and didn't take any notes either, just listened to the lectures 2x speed and still managed to do fine. It can definitely feel like a chore if you have no interest in movies and/or music though. (+it is not easy to write a paper about music). I wouldn't takeout again but it wasn't too bad either.

NOTE: ACTUAL CLASS TAKEN: MH5

Holley somehow misses so many iconic rock and roll bands in the syllabus and lectures of this class. It is called HISTORY OF ROCK AND ROLL yet we have artists like Eminem, Queen Latifah, and Dixie Chicks on this syllabus. Not to mention the “KING OF POP” Michael Jackson. Somehow the King of Rock n Roll, Elvis, only has one song on the syllabus.
On the day entitled HEAVY METAL, she left out the so-called godfathers of Heavy Metal, Black Sabbath. Also she grossly misclassifies many rock and metal bands, almost so much it is offensive to a musician as myself.
The way she explains instruments and music is somewhat insulting to me, there was an observation once “the bass drum and snare drum sound different.” No way, that’s why they’re different drums.
I showed the syllabus to my guitar teacher, a distinguished longtime professor at Sonoma State University, and he was insulted by the music choice. How do you teach a class on rock and roll and not mention AC/DC he said, the greatest rock and roll band of all time. She forgot to mention the best selling hard rock album ever, Back in Black he said.
For hair/glam rock and metal, she forgets to mention Guns N Roses and Motley Crue? The two bands that define hair metal. In the LA Scene. How about Megadeth, Aerosmith (for funk), Journey, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Def Leppard, Pantera? Also, she said Randy Rhoads was from Sabbath; he was never in Sabbath. He founded Quiet Riot.
We focused so much on gay music and culture, but there is a class called LGBTQ Music and Culture. If that’s what I wanted to learn, I would’ve taken that class. Insulted that we didn’t cover actual rock for more than about 3 weeks of the quarter.
Overall I am very very very disappointed in the class. The description on CCLE is very misleading.

I loved this class! If you're at all interested in looking at films (and the music) more analytically, then this class is great. There's a weekly journal, some small assignments here and there, and a final paper which you're guided through throughout the quarter. At the end, the final is a pretty simple short answer kinda thing that shouldn't take more than a couple hours. The professor knows her stuff and she's very willing to talk and help!

TAKE THIS CLASS! We watched movies for homework, had interesting lectures, and I wrote my final on Ratatouille. I always looked forward to this class every week

Overall, a fun and easy GE to take. The lectures were interesting but weren't essential to attend. They did help answer the questions for the midterm. There were assigned readings, but you didn't really need to read them, only to use them to cite in your midterm.

Details
- Weekly journals (super short, just reflecting on what you learned in the past week)
- One midterm where we answered a few short questions on the material
- A final paper on the music in a movie of your choice
- A final assessment where we answered one long question

This class was such an easy GE and the prof was super chill. The lectures were boring but some of them were cool, a lot of it was the history of film and scores. Your grading is by the TAs but all of them are super lax (the average for our midterm was a 98). You have a weekly movie to watch, some readings each week, and a 250 word journal entry due each week. There's a midterm and final that are essay questions based on the films and readings that you have a whole week to do. You really only need to watch one movie during the first 5 weeks and one movie during the last 5 weeks that you can write about on the exams; some people I know didn't watch any and did perfectly fine. At the end of the quarter, there's a 5-6 page paper due on a film of your choice but you work on it throughout the whole quarter. Discussion sections are mandatory but we never stayed the whole 50 minutes and got out early often. TLDR; easy ge but can be boring at times