So its been a couple months since I last wrote on here, a lot of thats been because I haven’t had my comp. I was using my aspire one for my net needs for a while until I could afford to build my new tower. But since I got my promotion at work I was able to afford it a lot sooner than what I originally thought I was going too, AND I’m gonna be able to afford dual monitors on this one, AND I won’t have to pay for them really as I’m planning on getting 2 of the 20inch acer lcd’s that best buy is gonna have on sale for black friday. At 80 bucks a pop I couldn’t resist, and since I’m getting my sprint rebate for 150, its really like I’m getting them for free. I did get the tower built though, and had a fairly decent setup for the money I spent I think. Quad core amd @ 2.9ghz, 4gb ddr2, decent board and a mid range ati that overclocks fairly well. The thing flies in multitasking apps, running rhapsody while transferring a file, while writing a paper on google docs is nothing to this thing. It was running a virus scan and a spyware scan at the same time the other day and I didn’t even notice because the cpu percentage never went about 8…..damn.Speaking of google Docs….I had never really given much thought to the suite until I used it the other day. While I don’t think it can be a serious contender against office, for someone like me its perfectly capable of most if not all of my needs. For basic tasks that your able to access anywhere, its awesome. For now at least, I’m gonna go without installing office and see if I ever need something that docs cant give me, but right now I don’t see anything right out I’d be missing that much. Plus win7 is pretty quick at the moment and stable as all hell on the new rig, so why bloat it with older MS software?
I did get a chance to watch a couple of movies this weekend that were both entertaining and thought provoking at the same time, although not directly in the way they were meaning to be. The first was I love you beth cooper……ya know your basic geek goes after girl type……while it wasn’t that entertaining in the wow I have to go out and buy that right now way, it was interesting in the way that I personally related to it. In middle school and high school for the most part I was that guy in the movie, the geek who couldn’t even get the girl he was infatuated with to even remember his name let alone talk to him. While its hard to believe I was ever as bad as him, as most movie geeks are over exaggerated enough as it is, I felt for the guy.
The second was a movie called away we go. Its a movie about an unmarried couple who end up getting pregnant, and then travel across the country in looking for the right place to live and raise their daughter. The cast of the movie was your basic mid level tv actors but what was really good about it was the story’s that their friends and family had along the way. They were at times funny and at others they were heart wrenching, but they were always just as equally interesting. I think the most relevant point in the film was when the lead female role turns to her male counterpart and asks him a question in these words, “are we fuck up’s?”.
It wasn’t the question that got me, it was the feelings and general doubt that resonated from her voice as she said it. They were 34, and she talked about how all of there friends were married with nice houses and beautiful kids already and they didn’t have any of that yet, as if they got left behind when everyone else decided to move on with there lives. I can relate to the sentiment of feeling abandoned when you watch all of your friends leave on their own journey’s on different paths than your own, watching them get married and start families when you haven’t done anything like that yet. So in that respect the movie very much hit home.
In another way it made me think about the direction that many of the movies I find myself drawn too anymore are heading too. There’s no doubt that screenplays are being written by younger crowds now and I can’t help but think that it shows just how disenfranchised my generation is that there’s no longer the classic love story, or the classic super hero story……only shades of gray. Watchmen for all intensive purposes was a super hero movie……but it was nothing like the classic good vs evil story’s from growing up. You never see the good guy get the girl he’s always wanted anymore, he almost always realizes what he’s always had in his best friend. And you see movies like away we go……or Elizabethtown that tell a story, but in the same respect get you to look at your own life and examine it over and over to see if you can relate to the characters on the screen. Does this mean that were trying to live through our favorite characters? I think not, more so that its just my generation of film makers coming into there own.
Don’t get me wrong, just because the guy doesn’t get the girl in the most overly written love story doesn’t mean they aren’t showing the romance in our modern day. Were a much more emotional and free spirited population now, much more than I would say we ever were. Its okay to question things now, to wonder if the family with the white picket fence is really whats best for you in the end. Its okay to question your decisions in your life, and the films today are the epitome of that movement. The film makers are simply going through the same thing, writing it down similar to what I’m doing right now, and putting it to a much more emotional and thought provoking visual. One thats not so direct to say “Hey, Look at Me! I’m Trying TO make you reconsider Your Life!”, but leave the option open if your own psyche allows your mind to wander that way.
Warhol once made a movie in the same arena. He kept a single camera on a building for 18 straight hours, nothing happened in the entire film until the last 10 minutes when the sun had finely set and all of a sudden all the lights in this tall giant building came on. Reviews of the movie ranged from pointless, to poetic, to genius….all different paths based on our own psyche……….are all of our movies made by Warhol these days?…..one can only wish.