Post 116

Ah, that delightful academic buzz. It's been so long since I felt it last; I've missed it dearly.

Today I took four finals between 2:00 and 5:00. Thanks to BYU's website, I can see scores and elapsed time. In 108 combined minutes, I answered 262 multiple-choice questions--and did fairly well for myself: 94%, 88%, 80%, and ??% (I got a 67.5% on it, but the curve in that course is so rigorous that I earned A's on both of the other tests I've taken for it, on with a one with a 70%, the other with a 68.8%, so I figure that this is at least a high B, possibly a low A if everyone else does poorly).

So, I feel pretty good right now. Maybe if I had really studied and cared, I coulda done better, but the oppressive boredom I've felt throughout this term has really crippled my study ethic, and if laziness earns me A's and B's, what do I really care anyway?

Anyway, I don't intend only to brag in this post; I'd actually like to do a brief movie review, so here I go:

Last night, I watched Big Fish. I love that movie. It's one I own and have seen a few times, but I haven't watched it since I got this blog, so I haven't officially reviewed it.

It's hard to say why I like this movie. Really, I don't have a single good reason to like it, but that makes me like it all the more. I've decided that, even though I have often said that I don't like long movies, I am not at all opposed to slow-moving movies--actually, I really like some of them.

The more I think about movies and try to review them, the more I realize that I'm pretty inconsistent in the reasons I like or dislike movies. For example, I've often said that I don't like the LOTR movie 'cuz they're so dang long, but Meet Joe Black is one of my favorites, and it's right at three-hours. I guess I just don't have the patience for speculative fiction--not that Meet Joe Black is especially realistic.

And so, at long last, I think that I have finally come to a solid justification for my distaste for speculative fiction; I don't think that it says much for me as an intellectual--or as a human being at all, really--but even the deepest oceans have their wading pools (not that I consider myself a metaphorical ocean in any regard).

I like movies that are easily accessible without being moralistic.

Glancing up at my shelf of movies, I think that this idea can be applied to each one, with the possible exception of the few comedies I own for the sake of having a chuckle every now and then.

My shelf of movies looks like this: Big Fish, Cast Away, Charade, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Freedom Writers, The Gods must Be Crazy I&II, Holiday (1938), Jakob the Liar, Maverick, Meet Joe Black, Mr. Holland's Opus, Stranger than Fiction, The Testaments, Toy Story 2, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-rabbit.

The Gods must Be Crazy I&II and Wallace & Gromit I acquired through strange circumstances and never watch and only hold on to because maybe they'll come in handy someday somehow and, besides that, to get rid of them would require more effort than the insignificant shelf space that their evictions would proffer is worth. The rest of the movies, however, I think are all meritorious, each in its own way.

I won't go through them all just now, but if there are any of the above that you haven't seen, I'd recommend any of them unilaterally (though with some hesitation regarding Eternal Sunshine because it is rated R, and I've only ever seen an edited version, so I really can't speak for what badness it may secretly contain).

And--I'm done. I dunno. I just suddenly got bored with this post, so it's over now. I assume that you give yourselves the liberty of ceasing from reading when I bore you; so I reserve the right to stop writing when I bore myself.