I got an email or two over the weekend wondering about my lack of posting – and speculating that I was working on my thesis. Just so that things are clear, it’s when I am working on my thesis that I post the most!
I’ll probably stop blogging altogether once the thesis is turned in. just kidding.
On the thesis front, I re-enrolled at Art Center today, because you have to be enrolled the term you graduate. I feel pretty good about my first 28 pages – thank you Tiff! and thank you Ellen! I hope to have the thing turned in to the printer on Monday (!!!)
Instead, I was doing things like watching movies, hanging with my honey, and having dinner with friends and family, oh and cooking up a storm with Maya (more on that later…)
We watched 300, which was pretty dang good for a violent war movie based on a graphic novel. Chad says it is doing crazy well at the box office (although all those numbers sound huge to me); it’s already made 70 million. Chad says that might be a record for highest-grossing R-rated movie on it’s first weekend. It is also getting very high ratings at imdb: 8.3/10.0. Chad gives it an A-, but I give it a B+, simply there were so many decapitations and severed limbs. (Plus I was very angry and distracted by the idiotic parents who brought their seven and eight-year-old kids in the theater. Good grief!)
If this movie continues to do so well, the director Zack Synder will really have his way with his next major comic book-to-screen adaptation. The art direction was terrific – the entire movie was filmed against a green backdrop – which means that there was a surreal and wildly dramatic feel to the cinematography (is that the right word?)
It is the story of 300 of Sparta’s finest warriors under the leadership of King Leonidas going to battle against the enormous battalion of Xerxes. I found the pre-story of how Spartans trained young Leonidas with brutal and unrelenting challenges fascinating. I’m not saying that I believe in knocking Bella around physically, but I do think some mental (and physical) toughening up is an important part of adolescence. (I’m talking about getting her to ride the school bus, not throwing her out in the desert to kill her first wolf…)
We also watched Tsotsi on DVD, the one that won Best Foreign Picture last year. I gave it a B+ as well (imdb 7.5/10.0). This film was slightly violent as it followed a gang leader in Johannesburg over the course of a week, but the pace was mellow and there is a very sweet baby involved!
