Phoning it in again!

Hey, everybody! I've got essentially two projects due for the same class this week, so head on over to Jim's Favorites for a holiday entry!

The Best of the Worst

Last week was incredibly busy (the second week of November always is), so I didn't get a chance to update and thank everybody who voted for American Safari: University Campus. All of us at Mercer 99 appreciate your support. To be totally honest, I don't think we'll get first prize, as there were other films with much larger groups of people voting (we're talking many times larger than our group), and there were others that, in my opinion, deserve to win more than we do. One of my personal favorites is A Great Fall from the folks at Ithaca College, about Humpty Dumpty's struggles in modern America. However I do think we will get a spot in the top 25.

There is an interesting mix of videos in the Insomnia gallery. There are several mediocre films sprinkled here and there with a few works of excellence. These movies were drowning an ocean of phenomenally bad ones. The majority of the films I watched made me think, "I didn't pay to watch this, but somehow I still want my money back."

After a watching a few student films, it became easy to identify which ones would be bad before they even played. All one has to do is read the film description. If it has the word, "allegory," "metaphor," "symbolism," "social commentary," or something similar, odds are ten to one it's awful. I am convinced that the movies in the Insomnia gallery are the sole reason student films have a bad reputation.

There are two truly terrible films that stand out to me, and I wanted to link to them here. Sadly, my conscience got the best of me. No matter bad some of the movies are, people still worked really hard on them (well, some of them), and I don't want to risk hurting anyone's feelings. Instead, I'd like to give you colorful descriptions of them, completely unfettered by the fact that I'm competing against them. I've changed the titles so as not to hurt feelings or incur lawsuits. So, without further ado,

"The Best of the Worst"
An Even-Handed Review of Some Films in the Insomnia Film Gallery

Flower Show - The scene begins with a farmer planting and watering four seeds. Just four. I'm guessing that's all he could afford this season. Soon the seeds grow into flowers, except, wait, they're not flowers; they're people dressed in green scrubs with tissue paper on their heads! The soundtrack, a woman singing, "DA da da da da da da DA da da da da," plays in the background. She doesn't stop for two minutes, when she starts humming. Anyway, the farmer comes out and checks the flower-people, picking one and chopping it up to make a salad. Another flower sees the farmer eating the salad and uproots himself in order to escape, trying to rescue the other flowers as well. The farmer attacks the flower, pulling off a glove (I guess flowers wear gloves now), revealing a bloody/dirty hand. I couldn't really tell if it was blood or dirt. So the flower guy get knocked out and wakes up tied to a chair in a pit or something, and starts tearing off his costume. The farmer attacks, and-get this-the flower vaporizes him! All that's left of the guy is his overalls, which start moving around and end up on the flower dude. The end.
I give this movie one stinky sock out of five. It gets cool points for the moving overalls, as well as the award for most painful soundtrack.

Other reviews:
"Amazing!!! Very interesting and deep without extra fluff."
-Linda

"Great film - the visuals are excellent, the concept is innovative, and the background music is my favorite part of the film."
-Amanda

Our Very First Movie - According to the description, this is a symbolic film about Buddhism (which they misspelled), Marxism, and meditation. They also used the "learning method," meaning they made it up as it went along, and used a bunch of film terms incorrectly in their description. In other words, this team's members were full of themselves and didn't know how to write a narrative. It begins with a man in a tuxedo with a red rope handing from his left shoulder. His inner monologue states some philosophical stuff that, upon analysis, really doesn't mean anything. I think the writer just likes big words. Suddenly he's on a park bench. He gets up, and the film fast-forwards as he stabs the air-wait, now there's tree there-with a knife, because he just likes to carry it around and stab stuff. He tries to cut off a twig, and we assume he succeeds, because suddenly he's back on the park bench, except now the twig is a pencil! He's carving it with the knife, because everyone knows Marxists are too good for pencil sharpeners. Next he's back at the tree again, this time stabbing it with the pencil. I'm guessing he has some sort of grudge against this tree. The pencil breaks and falls to the ground, which is somehow surprising to this man. He decides to bury the pencil stub, and faster than you can say, "abra cadabra," it turns into a pumpkin! Next, he's inside a building, examining a one of those twisty pens very closely, since he apparently has never seen one before. He moves the pen as if he's about to write something on the air, when suddenly he's transported to an empty classroom, where her draws and asterisk on his wrist. Finally, we hit the title card. At a minute and forty seconds. In a three-minute film. So once the title finishes playing, he's suddenly in yet another room (this happens a lot; it must be disorienting for him), to put the pencil, the twisty pen, and another pen in a bird cage. Somehow they all morph into a single sharpie, which he uses to draw lines under his eyes. Then he draws lines under another guy's eyes. Suddenly they're both in some park - or rooftop - or something (I dunno, it's a place made of concrete with some lights), lying down on benches. There are a total of eight, two in each corner of the, um, place they're in. The film changes from real time to fast motion as the men move from corner to corner, eventually walking up to a big silvery modern art sculpture in the center. They touch it and-here's the best part-turn into BLUE AND GREEN ENERGY BALLS! The screen fades to white and the film comes to an abrupt end. Thank goodness.
This film gets three minutes of my life that I'll never get back.

Other reviews:

"can I get my 3 minutes back....??? time was wasted."
-Aurelio

"dumb"
-Steven

Halloween in the 21st Century

Halloween has come and gone, and it had me thinking about something that's been bothering me more and more over the years: Halloween keeps getting less fun, in a process I like to call, "Lame-ification."

There seems to be a growing segment of the population that is trying to slowly starve the spirit of Halloween until it finally begs for death, as that would be much less cruel than what it's currently going through, all in the name of "safety". I think this group is made up of people who:

A.) Believe every urban legend about poisoned candy and razor blades they hear.
B.) Hate children.
C.) Never were children.
D.) Are just tired of buying big bags of Halloween candy twice a year (everyone inevitably eats the first bag themselves)

I'd like to explain this theory in a segment I like to call:

The Top 4 Reasons Halloween is Becoming Lame

1. Light bulbs for Jack O'Lanterns.
One of those things that shouldn't bug me, but does anyway. Part of me says, "Well, they are safer than open flames," but then the sane part of me says, "What the @%# is wrong with you? Those 'open flames' are inside GOURDS! Gourds that are probably 80% WATER!" I read on a Halloween safety website that if you do use candles, keep your Jack O'Lantern far away from where trick-or-treaters might walk, so as to prevent loose parts of costumes from blowing into the flame. I'd like to explain how asinine this idea is. The average Jack O'Lantern looks like this:

There are only two ways a costume can blow inside the gourd and catch fire. This first is if the entire costume is made of loose yarn long enough to get through the holes and to the candle. The second is if your Jack O'Lantern looks like this:

One of the things I like about having a candle inside a pumpkin is that the flickering flame really seems to bring the whole setup to life. When the candle shines brightly, maybe it's happy, but when the wind blows and it gets dark inside, perhaps it's sad, or giving a Halloween warning of doom. DOOOOM! Little color-changing LEDs just look...artificial.

2. Trick-or-Treating curfews
This doesn't apply everywhere, but I remember when I lived in the Chicago suburbs about ten years ago, the local neighborhoods set a curfew for trick-or-treating (I think it was sometime around 8:30 pm, right around sunset. Remember that the time changes were different back then). My brother and I actually got turned down at one house. The woman at the door said, very coldly, "No. Trick-or-Treating is over."

Back between the ages of 4 and 11, it was a family rule that we didn't start trick-or-treating until sunset. Why? Because it's scarier! That's what used to be so much fun! But I guess those concerned parents don't want their kids running around after dark in those oh-so-dangerous suburbs. Why are they letting their kids out by themselves anyway?! That's right, I'm actually siding with the safety nuts on that issue! If these dumb parents would just go out with their kids on Halloween, you wouldn't get over five million results on a Google search for, "Halloween safety tips."

3. "Healthy alternatives" to candy
I've heard many different ideas for combating obesity, and this one is probably the worst. Suggested replacements for candy I've seen include: cereal, raisins, pencil toppers, loose change, and fake money. I'm really not kidding with the last one, somebody out there thought it was a good idea to hand out fake money as a Halloween treat. Just when I thought it didn't get any worse than pennies, it did. Listen, if you want to give out raisins or fake money to Trick-or-Treaters, maybe you ought to just leave a few cartons of eggs outside your door with a note saying, "Go for it!" That'll at least save you the trouble of getting up every time the doorbell rings.

4. Reflective Tape.
I should really hope I don't have to explain this, but here goes. Reflective tape is very useful for construction workers and law enforcement officials. One day, some neurotic soccer mom thought to herself, "Hey! Since my kids are incapable of using sidewalks, I'll slap some orange tape to their Halloween costumes so they don't get run over by people who drive like...well, me! There's no way it'll make my kids look totally dorky!"

Please, if there are any parents reading this, don't ever make your kids wear reflective tape on Halloween. I promise they'd much rather get their legs broken by a drunk driver than get caught dead by a classmate wearing that shiny stuff.

So that's my two cents on Halloween in the 21st century. Time to get started on something absurd to write about next week. Maybe the "Environmental Media Awards." Have you seen that commercial? I honestly think Ryan Seacrest have never been a bigger jerk.