She’s Alive!
// April 26th, 2009 // 7 Comments » // Academic, Personal
Has it been two months, really, two months since my last post?! Goodness gracious. I just finished two weeks of exams and am done the first year of university! It flew by so fast it’s unbelievable. Seems like only yesterday I was a timid freshman stepping into frosh and looking at the older kids with a certain fear in my eyes.
I know a lot of you have disappeared off the charts due to RL and whatever, but come back, always come back to blogging. Because of my UBC blog, I introduced at least three of my friends to blogging already. I tell them it’s therapeutic and it absolutely is.
My plan for this summer is to take classes in the morning and work at UBC in the afternoon. 16 hours of Chinese and 19 hours of work, plus another 8 hours on the weekends. Not bad I’d say.
QOTW: What’s your summer plan like?
Popularity: 9% [?]
I’ll start off Friday Flicks with Freedom Writers, starring Hilary Swank. It was such a simple story with a very predictable plotline (in fact, I’ve noticed that most of the discs I went through in the last week and a half were “feel-good” movies) yet I enjoyed it tremendously. It’s about these ghetto kids in high school nobody cares about until their new English teacher came along. Ms. Gruwell introduces the class to Anne Frank and gets them to write their own diaries about their lives, at the same time battling a stubborn and prejudiced education system and problems in her personal life. The kids’ acting were surprisingly heartfelt. I love how they learn to overcome their obstacles as a group and unite together to face their difficulties.
I just finished watching Step Up a few minutes ago, which falls in pretty much the same genre as Take the Lead. The latter was a lot more appealing, mainly because I’m such a big fan of ballroom dancing. Take the Lead is about a ballroom teacher who tries to help a bunch of kids in detention in a nearby school through dance lessons. The choreography is amazingly done and Antonio Banderas (who plays Pierre Dulaine, the teacher) has a mesmerizing accent. And who can forget that sexy Argentine Tango dance between Pierre and Morgan?
Step Up lacked much of the chemistry as seen in Take the Lead. The story tells how a “good kid gone astray” meets a dancer at the school where he’s doing community service work and the two team up for a senior piece. Seems like Hollywood’s running out of story ideas. The mold for these kind of stories seem to be 1) kids from two polar worlds are forced together 2) upbeat music plays while they have a great time 3) romance starts 4) some obstacle comes up 5) they get through it and be happily ever after.
After weeks of waiting, I finally saw Pirates of the Caribbean: at World’s End. For some reason, PotC has always been the movie I hated while watching it, only to realize it’s geniusness upon further reflection. I’m completely hopeless at understanding accents so I end up oblivious to most of the plot twists and turns. Johnny Depp pulls off another stunning performance. Orlando Bloom sort of faltered in this one, just a bit. Keira Knightley rose to her challenge magnificently - I was so happy when she became a pirate lord! There are two ship scenes that were quite memorable: the flipping of the ship for the sunrise and the final battle in the whirlpool. If only I didn’t have to keep checking Wikipedia to understand everything…
