They Don't Make 'em Like They Used To

i miss the 80s.
sure i wasn't around for most of them; heck, what i'm about to talk about was done four years before my birth. but i digress...
you know what i like best about the 80s? movies. and do you know why? because movies were good. no over the top special effects that are completely redundant (you know who you are), no leeching off popular trends and other pinnacles of cinematographic achievement (again, you know who you are), no requirement for racial or sexual diversity for the sole purpose of not wanting to offend anyone, and most of all, movies in the 80s understood movies in the 80s.
what i mean is that those movies took themselves seriously and understood how a movie was supposed to make a person feel. the best example is pacing; nobody uses pacing anymore: everything is flashy, obvious or in-your-face.
i want to look at John Carpenter's The Thing.
this movie is about a bunch of dudes (yep, no women!) living in a research base in Antarctica who encounter a hostile alien entity.
Side note: if The Thing was made today, it'd have the creature killing people off one by one in the darkened corridors and kennels playing with shadow in such a way that the horrors of a dog's face splitting open would still achieve a 14A rating. in this movie, the overtly masculine and well built, clean shaven hero would defeat the horrible foe and totally bone the non-existent female character. this would be a terrible movie.
thank god (internet) that The Thing was filmed in 1982. the first time the creature is revealed to the audience, every single person in the research base is witness. they then discover after killing the creature, that it has the ability to imitate life forms. the movie then turns the characters against their fellow man for fear of infection and murder, and peoples true natures are revealved.
mutations make more appearences, but not in such a way that says "hey, look what we can do!"
holy shit i just figured it out!
lately, movies are suffering from David Blane syndrome. they distract you until they can pull the twist and amaze you, only to have the majority of people pull back and realize that it's actually not a very good trick. uver-used computer graphics snap their fingers at you off to the side to distract you from the lack of plot and when they take your watch off after you pulled the queen of hearts out of the rabbit, the climax dissapoints at best.
good lord that was not very well thought out.
i'm going to stop blogging now.

Please Do Not Hold My Hand

This is the drawing that caused all the ruckus in the back row and resulting instructor-fit; rant to follow:

I go to college, give them my money so I can learn more things. But what do I really get?
Babied, apparently.
I understand that a first year geology class is aimed for students that are more or less out of high school, but a post secondary institution is a place where people choose to be in order to further their education. I expect to actually be lectured. I suppose that's why they call it one.
I do not fucking expect the "professor" to have a fit because a few students neglected to print off the half notes from the site and fill the rest in.
Yeah, my GEOL prof makes fill in the blank notes for students to print off, bring to class and gleefully fill them in.
The last time I saw this sort of teaching was when I was in grade six.
She wants a class discussion? Fine - if it was fucking philosophy. This is geology. Earth Sciences. You're a fucking teacher; god damn teach something rather than try to be our friend.
It seems that failing to fill in her blanks (I'll have to save that innuendo for another occasion) left her feeling unappreciated 'cause it takes so much time to do and oooohhh she only does it for the students.
Jesus get-over-it Christ, GET OVER IT. This is the real world. Please do not hold my hand.
Apparently I ruined the class.
I can't say I'm not a little pleased with myself.

Oh yeah! The doot is 'cause we watched a video called "Landslides: Gravity Kills" and one American school's landslide evacuation plan was to get all the kids in buses and drive faster than the landslide. Yeah.