David’s Ramblings

I went and got a job.

Last week was finals week, which is perhaps the worst time of any college student’s life next to cleaning day for their dorm room. Some students spend countless hours studying for their finals. The rest of us tell our parents we are while actually playing video games and trying to forget that we have those pesky things called tests.

I, for one, wasn’t extremely worried about my finals week. I had four classes this semester. Of those, one class had the final a week early, and one allowed us to drop the final grade if we were okay with our other test grades in the class. That left me with only two tests. One of those tests was Japanese, which past performance indicated would be very easy. So, I was in fact left with only one real test Ñ Proofs.

In case you have been lucky enough to be spared of my complaints about this test before, I’m going to let you know right here: Proofs class is like having a limb cut off and being forced to eat it, or worse. However, the first few days of the week were finals free for me, which left me with plenty of time to study for that impending doom of a test. Ha, just kidding. I played Counter-Strike for hours on end.

Tuesday night, the night before my Japanese final, I really did mean to get just a tiny bit of studying done for the Japanese test. I even put together a bit of a study guide (you can download that here if you’re curious, though I don’t know why you would or why I uploaded it for you). However, that study plan changed when the power went out around 8 PM and didn’t come back on. Nothing better than a power outage to make a bunch of teenage guys run around screaming like little school girls.

So, in place of actual studying, I just walked into my Japanese class the next morning, used the five minutes beforehand to check my study guide, and aced the test. Wednesday night and Thursday wasn’t a great time for getting any studying done (nor any ÒstudyingÓ), since we actually spent the whole time moving our (read Tom’s) junk out of our room. Not that we really wanted to study for that test anyway. It was bad enough to have to take the test, why bother straining ourselves beforehand trying to understand it?

We woke up the next morning a bit early so that I could take a drug test for my future employer. The lady doing it was quite pleasant considering she carries urine around in her bag all day. We decided on the way home to get some IHOP to help us pass the Proofs test. I’m sure a good breakfast was much more effective than actually studying.

Unfortunately, as much as we tried to delay it, the hour of reckoning did eventually approach and we took our death march toward the Proofs classroom. After walking in, assumed the position and let the Proofs test have its way with us. After two hours of that, I decided I couldn’t take any more and gave up. The test was about as awful as I suspected. I was quite glad I hadn’t prolonged the torture by studying for it beforehand.

After getting out of our dorm room that night, the week was finally over and I took a short respite at Tom’s grandmother’s house before being picked up for my father for my next adventure Ñ my summer job.

I saw Silent Hill the other night with my roommate. For those of you that didn’t know, it’s a video game movie. And for those of you who realize that video game movie is equivalent to crappy movie: I’ve got news for you – you’re wrong. I think this is perhaps the first big Hollywood movie based on a video game that was actually worth the ticket price.

Silent Hill is a story about a little girl who has very vivid dreams and sleepwalking issues. They’re constantly getting worse, and her parents can’t really do anything about it. Sometimes she talks about Silent Hill in her sleep, and sometimes she ends up wandering off into dangerous situations involving cliffs or highways.

Since she can’t ever remember these occurrences when she wakes up, her mother, Rose, decides that perhaps the best thing to do is to find Silent Hill and take her there so little Sharon can remember. They figure it might have something to do with her birth parents, as Sharon is adopted. As is often the case in horror movies, this turns out to be a very dumb idea.

Rose and Sharon head into Silent Hill, and crash trying to avoid hitting a child crossing the street. When Rose wakes up, Sharon has once again disappeared. Rose tries to find her daughter in what seems to be a completely abandoned town. Occasionally she sees a girl darting around town, and she tries to catch her. After following what she hopes to be her daughters footsteps down a dark alley, sirens go off and she finds that Silent Hill is pretty much (in the literal sense) hell when that happens (with really awesome CG transition from foggy, ash covered Silent Hill to metallic, rusted, burning Silent Hill).

To go on would – of course – ruin the story, but the surprising thing about this movie is that there’s actually a story to ruin. Most video game movies are so horribly lacking on storyline I didn’t expect this one to be much more than a thinly veiled attempt to show lots of monsters killing things. Yet I was pleasantly surprised to find myself completely drawn into the very well written story that is very psychologically deep (almost as good as Donnie Darko).

For other important things in movies, soundtrack and acting, the movie was not at all lacking. The soundtrack was completely haunting and my roommate and I want to find it for sale somewhere so we can buy it. I thought the acting was very well done. The father character probably didn’t have a strong enough role for most people to fully connect to him.

I think the critics don’t give it enough credit because there’s a very healthy amount of nightmarish violence and gore, or because they’re unable to fully understand what is going on in the movie. This is the best video game movie ever made. My roommate and I both hope the DVD version has the full length cut, which was rumored at 3 hours+. This movie will definitely become part of our collection. 4.7Ï€ out of 900º.