movies that I watched in film class

In order to fulfill a few credits for my degree, I decided to broaden my horizons by taking FILM 301, aka Film History. I thought it would be super awesome and easy - you just get to watch fun movies, right? Half-true. Some of the movies really are interesting...but man, people used to watch some boring movies! Here are 12 films that I watched in film class that were actually interesting.

Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) 
Director: Georges Méliès
Year: 1902
Fun fact: One of the first films ever made. Also, Georges Méliès is the grandfather of the girl in Hugo, which tells a bit about his career.

True Heart Susie 
Director: D.W. Griffith
Year: 1919
Fun fact: All the individual film panes were dyed by hand.

Battleship Potemkin
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Year: 1925
Fun fact: The scene of the baby carriage falling down the stairs was reproduced in The Untouchables.

Metropolis
Director: Fritz Lang
Year: 1927
Fun fact: This is reportedly one of Hitler's favorite films. The robot was the inspiration for Star Wars' C-3P0. And footage was used in the music video for "Radio Ga Ga" by Queen.

Un chien andalou
Director: Luis Buñuel
Year: 1930
Fun fact: Luis Buñuel was besties with Frederico García Lorca (poet) and Salvador Dalí (artist), who was a collaborator (hence why it is so weird).

Strangers on a Train
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Year: 1951
Fun fact: Alfred Hitchcock is most famous for directing the movie Psycho.

The Spirit of the Beehive
Director: Victor Erice
Year: 1973
Fun fact: A Spanish film that compares Frankenstein to the Republicans of the Spanish Civil War (spoiler: they lost and Francisco Franco became the authoritarian dictator). One of my favorites.

3 Women
Director: Robert Altman
Year: 1977
Fun fact: Another one of my favorites, featuring Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall (both from Texas). The story is based on a dream Robert Altman had.

Chunking Express
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Year: 1994
Fun fact: This film was propelled by Quentin Tarantino to be screened in the US, so you know it has to be really awesome.

¡Y tú mamá, también! (And Your Mother, Too!)
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Year: 2001
Fun fact: This is probably the most explicit film you will ever watch. You've been warned. Also, Alfonso Cuarón directed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. ALSO, he's besties with Guillermo del Toro.

Hands on a Hardbody
Director: S. R. Bindler
Year: 1997
Fun fact: This was a real contest held in Longview, Texas every year up until 2005 when a contestant committed suicide after losing. It's now a Broadway musical.

Now, Forager
Director: Jason Courtland
Year: 2012
Fun fact: I actually watched this as an extra credit film for the class, but I really liked it. It's a story (not a documentary) that deals with mushroom foragers. Jason Courtland plays the male protagonist.

Now that FILM 301 is over, I feel like my film horizons have been broadened, and I now know the difference between French Impressionism and Post-Modernism, although I don't know how this will help me in life. AND, after believing all semester that I was going to make a C in the class...I made a B. :) If you're interested in taking this class, I highly suggest it, although it is quite a time commitment!

Much love,
Sydney

harlem shake

First, Happy Valentine's Day! Whether you're single or in a relationship, I hope your day is filled with love, hearts, chocolate, flowers, the colors pink, red, and white, and more chocolate. But enough about that.

Since y'all are freakin' obsessed with my cute puppies post...

If you don't know what the Harlem Shake is by now, you're doing it wrong. But just in case...it's a weird YouTube trend that's going around. Basically, each video starts off with a lone dancer surrounded by people doing everyday things. While the others are sitting or talking, the lone dancer dances. Alone. Right. So that continues for about half the video (all of them are 30 seconds), and the music gradually builds. You know something is coming. You can feel it. Suddenly, the bass drops, and in the next scene, chaos ensues. All the normal people are wearing weird costumes and doing strange flailing dances and it looks like a nuclear crazy bomb went off and made all these people lose it. But some of the things these people do are literally hysterical - people humping walls, rolling on the ground in sleeping bags, acting like chimps on tables. It's ridiculous.

So for some reason, my fellow Aggies have ALL decided to recreate their own versions of this video. It started as a few friends doing it in their apartment, but now, every organization on campus is seemingly making a Harlem Shake video. When I was at work, a huge group of people, including baseball players and Yell Leaders, were recreating the video. I don't know what's with all this Harlem Shake fever, but I'm not disappointed - these videos are funny.

So now, friends, I invite you to unofficially vote for your favorite Harlem Shake remake. Note: these are just A&M recreations - there are too many other ones out there for us to vote between ALL of them.

Contestant #1: MAC Edition

Contestant #2: CS Edition

Contestant #3: SAIL Edition

Contestant #4 - Texas A&M Edition

Contestant #5 - Hullabaloo with 2 Edition

Contestant #6 - 5 for Yell Edition (the one I witnessed)

Wanna get involved in a Harlem Shake of your own? A big group of Aggies are getting together on February 24th at Kyle Field for an epic Harlem Shake (details here). If you go to A&M, you should totally come and participate!

Which Harlem Shake video is the best?

Voting ends next Thursday, and the winner gets...a nice comment on their video saying they won my poll. Yay them. Hope these videos make your day just a little bit more hysterical (especially if you're moping around because you're single on Valentine's Day. Stop it).

Much love,
Sydney

book club

So I stumbled upon a blog through Pinterest called Your Sorority Sister, devoted to all things sorority-related. Naturally, I became hooked in about 5.7 seconds. The blog talks about all kinds of things relevant to my life, but one thing that caught my eye was the Your Sorority Sister Book Club. This is a brand-new, online book club specifically for sorority women who want to do…what people in book clubs do, I guess: read and talk about the books.

I’ve been trying to get back into reading real books rather than just magazines and online articles (The Holiday, anyone?) for a while now, and was off to a good start with The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and the two books following). But although I planned on reading three books over break, I haven’t even cracked one…

Despite my lack of motivation to do anything but lie in bed all day, I really do want to get back into reading for fun (ironically, when I’m supposed to be studying and reading for torture). So I went ahead and signed up for the Book Club through goodreads.com. The first book on the list is Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks, which sounds pretty good, especially since the movie is coming out soon and it’s a typical Carolina-set love story (Nicholas Sparks should really travel around a bit, maybe set a book in Tokyo or somewhere…besides the Carolinas).

Oh please, it doesn't look bad at all! 

I really think that reading books is a lost art. For one, people aren’t reading books anymore; they’re reading ebooks, which are not the same thing. Second, Borders freaking closed – I LOVED that place! Third, attention spans are so short these days. I can barely focus on chugging out blog posts, let alone do anything else. However, Amazon and Barnes & Noble seem to still be doing well, so I won’t worry…yet.

I encourage all of you to sign up for this Book Club. C’mon, it’s one book a month, and sorority girls are choosing them, so it’s not like they’re going to be extremely boring. It will be a fun way to meet and share ideas with other sorority women and who knows, you may even begin to read more often!

Also, please be sure to follow my blog in the right hand column so you can be updated when I post new stuff! 

Happy Reading!

Much Love,

Sydney