Heathers

This weekend, while browsing Youtube, I discovered that someone has posted the movie "Heathers" in 12 parts. I had been wanting to see this movie since I heard about it probably years ago on VH1's "I Love the 80s". Given that it was a Sunday on a three-day weekend, I thought, "Why not?" I loaded the first part of the twelve and started watching.

I was completely enthralled from beginning to end, despite the grainy, 80s film and the bizarre, morbid events that happened every ten minutes. The basic plot of the movie is that there is a girl named Veronica Sawyer and she basically abandoned her other friends to be with the Heathers, the late 80s "Mean Girls" of Westerberg High School. She meets a new guy at school named JD and he's a little... off. Within the first twenty minutes, JD pulls a gun out of his pocket and shoots blanks at two guys giving him a hard time in the cafeteria. But this doesn't faze Veronica (or the Heathers, to be honest). Apparently, pretending to shoot someone with a real gun was sexy in the 80s. Now, they'd just be derranged.

But as events in the movie progress, there are real deaths that are passed off as suicides until Veronica decides she's had enough. She's not getting what she wants out of the deaths of these people, she just feels horribly guilty. But JD can't get enough of these murderous thrills. The movie is intense because it keeps you wondering who's going to die next. It's a murder mystery that isn't really a mystery at all. You know who did it but no one besides the two main characters know. It's like your own little movie-long secret.

The climax of the movie is as intense as it is surprising. All I can say is that this movie would never be made these days. With fake school shootings, teenagers committing mass murder, suicide scandals, raging language and bombings, "Heathers" crosses boundary after boundary until you feel like you are watching something utterly taboo. It's a rollercoaster ride of murder, suspense and twists and turns.

What I really liked about this movie, though, is that despite all the morbidity and copious amounts of death, there was no real gore. Even in the climax of the movie, there is minimal amounts of blood and gross things you would find in movies nowadays. This is probably one of the reasons that a movie as sick and twisted as "Heathers" found a place on my favorites movies of all time.


Here's a trailer. It's a really weird trailer. I'd Google another one if I were you.

August Rush

Yesterday afternoon, I settled down into the basement with my parents to watch a movie. My brothers were out and about, playing with the neighborhood kids and so what do we decide to watch? August Rush, an amazing movie rated PG.

The basic storylines of this movie is that a kid named Evan Taylor who runs away from a boy's home and ends up in New York (it is where the music leads him). He meets a kid named Arthur and a man named Wizard (and other, name-less characters) and discovers he has a huge musical talent. There is also the story of his parents, Lyla and Louis, who meet one night while both escaping a party and they fall in love and make a baby. In the present, while Evan (their son) is in NYC, they are in Chicago and San Francisco, unaware of the whereabouts of the other, being sad and not musical anymore, until Lyla decides she wants to find her son after news from her father and Louis wants to find Lyla after reuniting with people from his old band.

There are many moments in this movie that makes you want to yell and scream at the characters and their circumstances because they are SO CLOSE to the truth and yet so far. But there are many sweet moments, many cute moments and many heart-wrenching moments. If you happen to have a heart, you might want a box of tissues. But, as you can predict from the PG rating, everything is happy at the end. But instead of having a cliche vocal-realization moment or a cheesy epilogue, the film has a very classy finish with an unspoken acknowledgment between Lyla, Louis and Evan.

But because this movie is basically half-a-musical, there are many songs to be had. And they are amazing! Some of things Evan/August does with the guitar is magical and many of the vocal performances are terrific. The cello parts with Lyla are also incredible. I don't know of Freddie Highmore (Evan/August), Keri Russell (Lyla) and Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Louis) actually did their instrumenal or vocal performances, but if so, they are outstanding. (I personally don't doubt Meyers' performance, but I doubt that Freddie Highmore is truly a musical prodigy and that Keri Russell has been a life-long cellist, but it's a vague possiblity.)

On the Road

After a month and a half of on-again, off-again reading, I have finally finished On the Road by Jack Kerouac. This book had been idolized, raved about and put on a pedestal so it felt like I was joining some kind of cult just by reading it.

But reading a book that was basically legendary, I found it left a lot to be desired. I had really high expectations when I began on page one and those expectations were not fulfilled. The narrations were too jumpy and there was a profound lack of detail. It was something that worked in fellow Beat-Generation author William S Burroughs's Junky but only left me wishing there was more substance in On the Road.

Once I started reading On the Road in class or at home, it was fun to read. It was entertaining to emerse myself in Kerouac and his friends' lives (as he used pseudonyms for each character). But it was hard to find the motivation to sit down and read the book (which is completely the opposite for Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest which I am reading now).

One thing unrelated to the novel itself but I find really interesting is that Neal Cassady is featured as Dean Moriarty in On the Road and now I am reading One Flew... and Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady totally hung out together in the sixties. So the two books that took my interest and that I am reading one after the other have a pop-culture legend to link the two.

AP Psych video links

We Like Psychology
--A clever song about various and some very RANDOM aspects of psychology.
Psych School Musical Parts 1-7
--Tons of great, catchy songs to help you remember related terms of psychology.
Psychology Tutorials and Demonstrations
--Helpful demonstrations of informative experiments to help students remember lessons of more technical aspects of the chapters.

Chapter 3: Nature and Nurture of Behavior
Nature versus Nurture
--A really short, animated cartoon about nature and nuture.
nature vs. nurture
--An informed look at the nature vs nurture debate.
The Science of Sexual Orientation; CBS News
-Interesting video about a study of twins that develop difference gender identities and sexual orientations, which fuels the nature vs nurture debate.

Chapter 7: States of Consciousness
Sleep Disorders
--Homemade psychology video about 4-5 different sleep disorders.
Drugs
--Vague video about the effects of various consciousness-altering drugs.
Dream Symbols
--Fun site for the "decoding" of dreams.
Dreams and Consciousness Links
--Links to various dream sites - where I found the Symbols page.

Chapter 8: Learning
Classical Conditioning
--Good animated, voiced-over video that gives the basics on classical conditioning.
Skinner box
--A recorded example of a Skinner box
Bobo Doll experiment
--Video of the Bobo Doll experiment

Chapter 10: Thinking and Language
Language - Psychology
--Homemade demonstrations of thinking with and without language
Psychology and Language
--Can animals think? Gorilla matches nonsense symbols to words!
Miley Cyrus, JabbawockeeZ and Psychology
--Entertaining video (without the first minute or so) about thinking/expressing thoughts without words.
Prototypes and Heuristics - Psych School Musical (Part 1)
--Fun video set to a High School Musical song that discusses prototypes and heuristics.

Chapter 12: Motivation
Aspects of Motivation in Office Space - Psych 4024
--Fun video giving examples of motivation from the movie "Office Space."
Psych Project - Motivation and Gender Roles
--Analyzes commercials to find the gender roles as well as motivational parts of psychology buried within them.
Maslow's Pyramid
--Homemade video showing the layers of Maslow's Pyramid (heirarchy of needs).

Chapter 14: Personality
Cluster A personality disorders in "The Wizard of Oz"
--Fun, memorable video showing various personality disorders through characters in the Wizard of Oz

Chapter 16: Therapy
Anxiety Treatment: Psychotherapy
--A video demonstrating one type of therapy, best suited for one of the most common disorders: anxiety.

Chapter 18: Social Psychology
social psychology project
--Social psychology demonstrated by strangers' reactions to a "madwoman" roaming the streets.
Social Psychology - Psych School Musical (Part 7)
--Another memorable Psych School Musical production, this time the song is from the Little Mermaid.
Social Psychology Experiment
--How many people will switch doors when the see the "Men" and "Women" signs on the door to a school building?

Gloomy Sunday

On a mix that one of my friends made me a couple of weeks ago, there was a song called "Gloomy Sunday." Before looking at the artist, I thought that it would be some sort of indie-emo song that would be melancholy and pretty to listen to. Instead, I got a hit song from 1941 by Billie Holiday that is called, when not by name, "The Hungarian Suicide Song."

The song has been produced by countless artists since the 1930s. The Holiday version has a beautiful, sad orchestration behind the simplistic vocals. It flows gently from phrase to phrase but there is a definite sense of sentimentality and sadness in the tones of the instruments and with Holiday's soulful interpretation of the lyrics.

Since the song was released, there have been many urban legends regarding suicide rates. It was rumored that many radio networks banned the song from the airwaves beacuse, when played, suicide rates spiked. More legends can be found at the song's Wikipedia page.

According to Wikipedia, the Holiday version of the song has an additional stanza. Dreaming, I was only dreaming/I wake and I find you asleep/In the deep of my heart here... This gives the song a dreamlike quality and takes away some of the heartbreaking quality of the Hungarian suicide song.

House of Leaves

Early this year, I basically consumed the book House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski. It was like nothing I'd ever read before, and for several reasons. First of all, there were three different storylines going on all at once. There were layers of stories upon layers of stories, which made it altogether entrancing. Somehow, each storyline was kept seperate so confusion was barely noticable.

Another reason was the gigantic and numerous footnotes. It was crazy how many footnotes there were in the whole thing. And sometimes, one footnote would run for pages. But the footnotes were like their own story, which made the stories blend closely even though they were totally different despite similar themes of chaos and insanity.

But the third reason was the typography of the book. Danielewski played with all sorts of text layouts, font changes and colors and all sorts of ways to keep the reader turning pages such as: footnotes that ran for pages as mirror-reflection text, pages with 1-10 words on a page to keep the suspense high and text that comes in designs to represent something from the story.

After finishing this book, I was hoping that I'd be able to find some sort of movie version of The Navidson Record. Everything in the novel made all documentation of the House seem eerily real, like something that could be transferred from pages to real life. It's a novel that would be stunning as a film, but there's no way to conquer something so conceptual as House of Leaves. It is something that must be kept as a book to be cherished that way by everyone dedicated enough to hack through the mystery of its pages.

The Gray Room

The walls have been painted gray and they are the flattest, smoothest walls. They cast no shadows and repel any shadow that dares come near. There is one light hanging from the gray ceiling. It is white and bright like a singular star. And on one gray wall hangs a clock, each hand spinning from number to number far too quickly to illustrate the true passage of time. After staring at it, the whole rooms seems to be spinning.

In the center of the room, there is one reclining chair. It is old, worn and tattered, showing the scars of war from years of exposure to the elements. In some places, cushion stuffing pops out like foam popcorn. In many places, threads and chunks of material stick up like harmless cactus needles. The chair is like a mirage in the desert: if you give in to the comfort it advertises, will it disappear?

Skin begins to crawl as the room spins faster and faster. The recliner begins to creak and rock with the rotations of the room. Eyes close but cannot block out the strange vision of the gray walls, the white light, the broken recliner, the spinning hands of the clock. Outside the room, there are the sounds of a world crashing apart. A world sounds like a crying baby, a falling tree, a roaring crowd, an angry ocean, when it falls apart.

Arms cover the ears, fingers clasp behind the bones of the spine, trying to block out the sounds of a world at its end. But the room keeps spinning and the sounds only grow louder to compensate for the muffling. One person, solitary, rocking back and forth, hunched over, barely able to breathe for the weight of the world prying its chest apart.

Then the room stops spinning and the world stops falling apart. A door appears in the opposite wall. It opens. A rush of warm, natural light floods in. Outside of the door are fields of flowers and butterflies, rolling hills and tall, green trees. Outside the clocks tick to the right rhythm, the world is quiet like a trickling stream and there is air and life and color.

Legs stretch to their full length and muscles move beneath the skin. Soon, the room is empty and the world outside has rediscovered its long-lost child.

Graduation Blues

Even though I'm not a senior (yet), I'm getting the graduation blues anyway. Let me explain.

When the 8h graders graduated middle school and went into the grown up world of high school, it was okay with all the 7th graders because we'd be joining them again in a year when we got to high school too. It was just a year of abandonment by our older friends before we all reunited into one big force again.

But now as high school comes to a close for the class of 2008, while they're all saying "Finally!" I'm saying, "... already?" These three years have flown by and I'm not ready to let a lot of people go. This is because I know that I won't be following them to the next stage in life like I did before. This is going to be the final and permanent seperation of the class of 2008 and the class of 2009.

After high school, members of the classes before us and the classes after us will disperse all across the state, even across the country. As I look through the end-of-the-year issue of the Torch at who is going where, it makes me sad that I know so many people and they're going somewhere I know I won't be going. In this category are the people electing to go to a state school and those who are going out of state for opportunities bigger and better than the ones they can find in Iowa.

And all this makes college more real in a way that I know that I really won't know most of the people I'll be learning next to once I graduate. But more than anything, it makes me sad to know that in only a week, there are people I won't see again except on Facebook or in remembering the good ol' times of high school (or the not so good ol' times, but memorable moments nonetheless).