You might think that tons of free time would have enabled me to update here a lot more. However, I don't really have much to say about watching five or six movies a day for weeks at a time. So here are the highlights:
Finishing the Semester (Grades mediocre, aligning appropriately to my effort compared to my classmates)
Puzzles! (More specifically, all-nighter puzzle dedication with my sister)
Handball! (Trying to squeeze every game possible in while back home)
Movies! (Machine Gun Preacher, I Am Number Four, Princess and the Frog, Silence of the Lambs, Coraline, The Illusionist, Warrior's Way, Friends with Benefits, Real Steel, Tangled, Equilibrium, The Grandmaster, Thanks for Sharing, Fergully, Benny and Joon, Braveheart, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Hitman, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Willow, Wall-E, As Good as it Gets, Stand Up Guys, Sunshine, Book of Eli, Hesher, Easy A, How to Train Your Dragon, Sucker Punch, Bronson, Rango, Quest for Camelot, Brave, Yes We're Open, Inglourious, Basterds, The Waking Life, Warrior, The Wolverine, The A Team, The Dark Knight Rises, Kick-Ass 2, Man of Steel, and a few more foreign ones/ones I can't remember)
Handball! (Playing with my dad! And doing well!)
Great Food! (Three for three on restaurants while my parents were in town)
Seeing Sarah S! (Quilt delivery successful, food sharing as well (pickled herring, even))
Longer things:
One day I started off with Silence of the Lambs, as it was early afternoon and I knew I didn't want to watch it late at night in case it was scary. It turned out to not be that scary, but I wanted something different anyway. I had heard Sunshine was a good movie. It's description was basically "astronauts have to nuke the sun to save earth." I was skeptical, but hey, it's science fiction, so I gave it a shot. It turned out to be the most intense psychological thriller/scary/head-wrenching movie I have seen in a while. That was hardly what I was expecting when I sat down for a movie called Sunshine with the aforementioned description. Good movie, just way to intense for me at that point. So I looked for something else to fit the bill. I found a recent movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and gave that a watch. Turns out, that movie (Hesher) was pretty out-there too (more on that later). In a last-ditch effort, I turned to another source. My friend on Facebook had recently raved about a TV show called Helix, which has recently started on the SyFy channel. I found the first episode and gave it a go. Whoops! Turns out that these generic names are really just disguises they put over crazy death-filled insanity. Helix, it turns out (in case, like me, you didn't read anything about it and are just about to watch it based on a friend's recommendation), is about a mutated virus-thing that has broken out at a research facility (either intentionally or unintentionally), causes people to either turn to bloody mush, or makes them crazy infect-other-people-at-all-cost-machines with weird abilities. So people are dying, sabotaging, turning on each other, and getting attacked by zombie-like coworkers for the entire thing, and I'm just left shaking my head at the choices I've made.
I was really happy with how this weekend went. My dad and I beat a decent local doubles team after dropping the first game, and we actually wound up giving Andy Nett and his dad a decent go of it in our match against them. We were leading 16-15 in the second game, but my serve let me down a bit and they played well (as always) to put us away. We still got more points off them than any other team, though! They won their finals match 21-7, 21-10 (or 11). So I'm considering our debut a success.
Movie notes for movies I hadn't seen before:
Best movie I watched: Warrior
This movie was moving, full of action, complex, and well-acted. Pretty much aces in my book (though my book has always been partial to guys beating each other up). Sunshine was also really good, but it just messed with me too much to rank it as highly as this one.
Weirdest: Hesher
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a weird old-ish guy, Natalie Portman plays a generic, (nondescript, mundane) grocery store worker, and a little kid's life gets temporarily really weird as a result. JGL (as his friends probably never call him) vandalizes his way through most situations (with no consequences), Natalie Portman never looks attractive, and Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute) nails the role of uncaring widower, and the movie just sort of moves along.
Worst: Brave
This wasn't the absolute worst as far as quality was concerned (I stopped watching a couple others, whereas I finished this one), but it was the one that under-performed the most. It looked like it could be decent, and it just wasn't. Maybe if at any point I had known that the movie was actually about a girl's mom transforming into a bear, and not about something interesting, I wouldn't have been so let down.
In an interesting turn of events, I am playing frisbee tomorrow. More on that after it happens.
I was thinking about not writing much about some thoughts/conversations I've had recently. Beating a dead horse, at all that. But I've been mulling it over ever since my last entry, so stay tuned I suppose in case the draft of a post I've started ever actually materializes...
When I was watching the new Superman movie, the only thing I thought stood out was that in one scene, when Zod grabs him and swings him around, the path Superman takes when released is an outward spiral instead of a straight line. This bothered me an inordinate amount. To the point that, because the rest of the movie was so blah, all I recall when thinking back on it is that mistake.
Digging into my phone for topics:
My professor was explaining the guidelines for taking our exams and telling us we couldn't use the internet. One student started to ask if they could use an app to write, then hesitated, backed up, and asked "wait, do you know what the cloud is?" The professor got the funniest offended look on his face, the class laughed uproariously, and he nodded. The student finished her question. The professor responded, saying, "No, that should be fine, but if you're going to use your computer, I would say you shouldn't have to open what's called a browser, (you know what that is?) for any reason." It was fantastic.
I'm just stalling right now. Nadal is being taken to a tiebreaker by a Japanese guy in the first set, and my internet at my apartment is unreliable, so I'm obviously stuck here indefinitely. Very sad...
Okay, okay, I'll get on with my studying (depressing that it starts before school does...)
Thanks for reading!
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