January 30 [sic]
The good news is that Stanford presents real feature film prints on campus, not long after they come out in normal theaters. (I repeatedly have to remember that this place is Stanford. I was just asking myself “How do they get studios to send them prints?” But duh, they just call and say they’re Stanford.)
The bad news is hat it’s he worst movie going experience I’ve ever had. Before the film starts, people wad up newspapers and throw them. I got hit in the back of the end 3 times in a row. (Granted, I was the only one in the front row — but still!) I pretended not to notice.
Then, when the film starts, the kids just ignore it and keep taking, except for the few that toss their backpacks up into the light of the projector. Several minutes in, they apparently notice the film has started, and quiet down, but they continually make collective jeers throughout the movie.
And it’s not just the students. Last time, the presenters didn’t bother to test the print (Napoleon Dynamite) and, as a result, never noticed they’d somehow gotten a version without any dialog, just background noise and music. (I guess they meant to send it to a dubbing station or something? Why else would you make a print like that?)
They ended up having to get back the DVD they’d just raffled off and played that instead, with the accompanying tinny sound and small screen (it wasn’t even widescreen!). Not that the sound is very good normally — it’s pumped up way too loud and you lose all subtlety.
Still, you don’t have to bike into town. (Actually, they only seem to show old movies in town. To see a real film, you have to take 3 busses to get to Mountain View—or so I hear, I’ve never actually bothered, despite my love of film. With theater quality so spotty, I think I’ll stick with DVDs and my laptop.)
January 31
From Buffy, I was led to believe that college psych 1 was something more akin to psychiatry training. (It’s not just Buffy, I’ve since noticed all sorts of other people make this assumption, and still others refer to “Psych 1” as the place where you learn to diagnose psuedopsychiatric problems like “projection”.) It’s not. Not at all.
Instead, it’s an odd hodgepodge of bizarre experiments which don’t really add up to much of use. It also doesn’t help that it’s taught at a second grade level. (For the lecture on the brain, they divided the audience up into the various sections of the brain with paper streamers and had each section shout out their name.)
posted March 26, 2005 04:28 PM (Education) (3 comments) #