have spent much time watching movies the past few days. fight club, the virgin suicides, rainbow brite, donnie darko. all good films in their own right. and also am reading the phantom tollbooth, which is so very clever and such good fun to read! i have the phantom of the opera and breakfast club waiting to be watched and in good company is in the process of downloading. now if i had to write papers on all these things it would prove useful but as i am not, it is really 'a waste of my time'.

ah well. good movies are such wonderful things. the virgin suicides had a nice feel to it, it was nice watching it visually portrayed after having read the book but unfortunately the book is really much better. kirsten dunst was a good lux and josh hartnett wasn't half bad as trip fontaine. fight club is deeply disturbing and unsettling - but for that purpose it is a good movie. my jaw really dropped when i realized it was about split personality. everything seemed to fit, and then it was just so clever. there were many moments where there were little nuggets of clarity - about his addiction to support groups, it was said, 'because that's the only time people actually listen instead of just waiting for their turn to talk'. really worth watching and i hear the book is even more intense so i really must read it. donnie darko. gosh that movie left me with a very bewildered and confused aftertaste because i know there's so much more to it i didn't see. someone has got to explain that movie to me. i only half understood it - maybe even less than half. i liked the references to The Last Unicorn and The Destructors though, and the whole theory about how sometimes the ones we put in asylums are the only people sane enough to be so acutely aware of their surroundings. mmm must finish reading Alice in Wonderland and maybe start on Wizard of Oz, is all very interesting stuff.

and, jake gyllenhal! i've always liked him even though i hadn't watched him before because i think he has this intense soulful feel to him hardly any other hollywood actors have and watching his performance in donnie darko has made me a fan. he's a must-watch. as you can tell, i am quite an art flick junkie. i think i could spend vast amounts of time just watching and watching all these movies and then thinking about them and raving about them.

on to other equally enlightening things. this past week i've felt so very happy to be a lit student because of various happenings. did an essay for whitby on sunday and in doing so was made to study an extract of theatre more closely and it just made me think how much i love theatre and how many plays i do so want to watch! started off the week with a lesson by whitby where we covered a passage from cider with rosie by laurie lee. the amount of truth and meaning he found in all those simple words just amazed me. and it reminded me of how beautiful literature is - that one puts all these words together to convey the very depths of their soul and there's so so so very much to be found in them! i don't know how to describe it. it's just awesome. i'm running out of superlatives. and then doing caretaker by harold pinter. at first i didn't like it, but now i'm really beginning to enjoy it. it's pure mastery, pinter is. and studying it really makes me see human nature more clearly and how even the simple seemingly harmless things we do reflect how we always want to be control, always playing these power games with each other - it's very ugly, i must say, but it just really opens up my eyes to everything. sometimes i think we're so very scary because after being exposed to such knowledge while other people aren't - we know so much more about them than they wish we'd know. since doing lit seriously in sec three i've developed a habit of analysing the people around me quite incessantly and i'm sure many other people do that but sometimes i feel like i've pried into their deep dark secrets by seeing all these hidden meanings in their words and actions they wish no one else knew. and silence is scary - and we all just keep silent even though there are things we know and so people don't think we know, but actually, i know. the way i act as though i'm following what you say and giving in, doesn't always reflect what i think about the person - that's why people tend to think i'm a pushover ... but i simply prefer to keep quiet about what i know. but then, i'm not always right about people and i know that. the spectrum of human emotion is infinite.

mmm do i sound messed up? talking to nat last night, i really told her about how jc life is pretty much screwed up and everything feels like a construct but we just all go through with it anyway. in a way it's quite sad because i know what appears to be is not actually reality and it doesn't mean anything but sometimes that's life and you've just got to deal with it. people are dysfunctional, but at the same time there's so much other beauty to be found - i just haven't found much of it in jc life but that doesn't mean i have lost hope that i will find it somewhere someday.

and i wish, i wish i could hone my analytical skills so much so that i could see all this richness in what i'm reading because when we read with whitby, i realize that when i read, i see less than half of what the writer really means to say and i'd appreciate it so much better if i could REALLY READ. gosh. there are some lit lessons i really remember, and i suppose to the teachers they'd just be another lesson helping us with our work, but to me they've made an impression on me forever. a lot of ms ma's lessons - the whole time we did Julius Caesar, when we started on The Destructors and The Machine Stops, when we covered Daddy by Sylvia Plath, when we did a lesson on Ted Hughes' Thought Fox on the UK trip. and last year, Ms Champagne's lesson about existentialism and philosophies. This year, Whitby's lesson on Cider with Rosie. these are lessons i will never forget and it is these bright sparks in my career as a lit student that sometimes makes me want to be a teacher and help other students feel this way about lit and have something they'll always hold on to about truth and beauty and human expression. but i know that at this stage, my ideas about teaching aren't serious because i just can't imagine willingly becoming part of the MOE's enslaved society.

ah, these teachers, i suppose on teacher's day i will write notes to them and tell them about this because it would be so nice if we all told each other that, yes, you seemingly ordinary person, yes, you have innate powers in you that enable you to touch the lives of others so very deeply.

+ posted by M @ 5:31 PM