Life is...

So....

Life....

Yeah....

....

Life is.... what? 

That right there is THE hardest question that I have even tried to figure out. When you're young life is... Simple. When you're a teen life is... Dramatic. When you're a young adult life is... complicated. When you're an adult you think life is... easy. As you get older you seem to come across a few things. 

Life is.... not what you think, Life is... not you always wanted, Life is.... not what it appears to be. 

Now before you freak and think that I am some depressed girl letting her angst out behind a computer keyboard. I am not. I am not jumping off the deep end, I am not saying that the world sucks, and this is not some crazy cry for help. 

What I am trying to say is Life is... Now.

 I am 23, worked at the same place for the last 7 years, spent four year getting a two year degree, failed a whole semesters worth of classes earlier this year, retaking those same classes again. Home life is currently a total wreck with no hope on really changing anytime soon, and I have no means to move out on my own, AND have no idea what I am going to do after I graduate.

Life in the now is really all I have... currently Life in the now.... Sucks.

Now I am not saying this because I am going to do anything rash.. I am saying it because until today I did not realize just tonight how much I was just going through the motions of life. 

I knew that I was not fully here but I did not realize how much I checked out just so I could survive through some temporary stuff. I have no idea when in the last year that I stopped putting my heart into things. I have no idea when I stopped caring as much as I did. I know that this was gradual, that I didn't just wake up one day and say "I give up I don't care". 

Funny thing is I learned how much I stopped by doing something I always do.... Watch NCIS: New Orleans. King said something that was my "Wake up call" if you will he said "Don't let a bad situation define who you are". 

It's funny how something that simple can sum up a whole mess of a year. This year has been bad for me. Losing people I love, incorporating new people, work drama, home drama, failing school, transitions at work, looking for a way out and not seeming to find one. 

It's like Marilyn Monroe said "sometimes good things fall apart so better think can come together".

Things are not going to get better right away but I believe that they will soon. 

I turn 24 next week and it's already looking better than 23... simply because.... 23 will not be the year that defines the rest of my life.

Best Picture of 1927/1928: Wings

I will have to say that I was really wary of watching this film. I love old movies, I love the artistry, however, I have not exposed myself to a whole lot of Silent Films in my movie watching experience.

I am glad that I did decide to do this challenge because it's going to make me watch movies that I might not otherwise watch. Wings  being one of them. 

Now in the title I know that it says that it was the best picture of two different years. Well when the first few years of the Academy Awards they did it by non-calendar year. So, the first few of these movie are not going to be for one year. Also, in the first few years of the Academy Awards they only allowed five films to be nominated. We are used to there being ten nominated films because the rules were changed in 2009 to have between five to ten movies nominated.

But I digress.

Wings was produced by Paramount, Main producer was Lucien Hubbard, and was release August  12, 1927. The film had a 2 Million Dollar budget, and that was money in 1927 equivalent to about 26 Million Dollars today. It is one of two silents films to win the Best Picture Award (the other surprisingly is The Artist which was released in 2011). The film also won Best Effects, Engineering Effects at the Academy Awards that same year. The Effects were done by Roy Pomeroy. The film was thought to be lost until 2012 when it was found, restored, and redistributed for a limited time in the movies. In 1997 it was officially put into the National Film Registry for being the first film to win Best Picture.

Wings was in contest for Best Picture agaistn Howard Hughes's The Racket (1928) also with Paramount, and William Fox's Seventh Heaven (1927) from Fox.

The Movie is about two young men, who are in love with the same woman, going off to fight in World War I. The stars of the film are Clara Bow, who plays Mary Preston a young girl infatuated with a Jack Powell. Charles "Buddy" Rogers plays Jack Powell he is the "boy next door turn war hero" of our story. He thinks he is love with a girl named Sylvia, Jobyna Ralston, but in reality he is in love with the idea of her. It takes the whole film for him to realize where his heart really lies. Jack starts off hating another young man from him hometown, reason is because this young man is in love with Sylvia too. This wealthy, and handsome, character is named David Armstrong who is played by Richard Arlen. The plot of this movie is how these two men form a true friendship, despite them loving the same girl, during the struggles and tragedies of the war.

Once you see the film you quickly see why this film won best effects. The Director, William A. Wellman, wanted to make a movie about the war as realistic as possible. This is the film in which all war movies would be compared to. This was the film that changed how action sequences were shot to begin with. A lot of thought and preparation was put into the film. During this time when films were shot in about two months, this film took nine months to shoot. Wellman wanted everything to be as realistic as possible. Since he was an aviation pilot in World War I himself, it was something that he was passionate about. He wanted part of the film to be shot up close in the cockpit of the aircraft.He had the actors trained to fly a plane and then he mounted a camera on the plane for the close up shots.

He only needed to have one of his stars trained. Along with Wellman, Richard Arlen also fought in World War I and was also an aviation pilot. So, when you watch and think that the effects of them flying look very realistic for the time period it was made, that is because it is realistic. When they are up there flying around and acting in front of the camera they really are!

As visually stunning as the film is there are some who did not care for the film that much. One of them was star Clara Bow. She says "Wings is... a man's picture and I'm just the whipped cream on top of the pie". She believed this because the film was rewritten so Paramount could put her in the film, because she was the number one box office draw with Paramount at the time. Despite some of the negative reviews the movie ran for an astonishing 63 weeks before it was moved to second run theaters. Seeing that some movies today are beginning to be pulled after the required two week screening contacted by movie theaters (Jem and the Holograms anyone?) and this film lasted a year before it got to a bigger audience. I would have to say that that is an overwhelming success! 

Since I have not seen the other two movies that were nominated that year, I can not whole heatedly say I would agree with The Academy or not. However, watching this film and all the accomplishments it has had and the work put into it I can see why it was nominated. The film to me was visually stunning and slightly scandalous. It was one of the first films to show brief nudity. I was shocked to see this because most of the films that I have seen were under The Motion Picture Production Code, which prohibited nudity. However, with further research I leaned that censorship  was trying to be enforced during this time is was wildly ignored. The very strict Motion Picture Production Code would not be really enforced until 1934. It will be interesting to see what Hollywood was "getting away with" in these first few films before that code was enforced.

This movie is not going to be very high on my "must see" list but it do believe it will be on of my most memorable for the visual effect and the innovation of war films.

With all of that being said 1 down 86 to go!

You're Doing Fine Oklahoma!

So it has been a while since I have updated but I started back to school so fun stuff is out the window but I wanted to add this update because I felt like I needed to.

Now if I haven't already stated this, but really I shouldn't because It's kinnda obvious, but I am not a writer. I am just a girl who likes movies and wants to record her own thoughts. If there is anyone out there who is actually reading my inner nerd then welcome to what I call the hope post.

For whatever reason that last few weeks I have been in a bad slump. Like I have no energy to do anything. Like I don't want to hang out with friends, I don't want to go to work (I really do love my job so for me this is weird), and I don't want to do anything really. I have never been diagnosed with depression but how I imagine what it feels like this would be it. Since I don't want to proclaim that I am depressed I am just going to call it my slump.

However, I feel like I see a way out of the slump. I think that I need to do is just make myself do things. I know that sounds weird but it's the truth. If I get myself to do some things that I don't want to do I start to feel better. The reason that I am saying all of this is because today I was really excited about doing something but it kinnda feel apart...

One of my all time favorite movies is the Classic Rogers and Hammerstein hit Oklahoma. Now, if you are a fan of the movie the title of this post makes a little more sense. Anyhow, I found out a few weeks ago that They were doing a 60th anniversary theater release of the movie in a few cities that the city I live in was one of them. However, it was not in the normal theater that they do this kind of stuff in and it wasn't really advertised. Truly if I did not catch the post of facebook I would have totally missed it.

Well, I buy the tickets and my excitement to see this movie gets interrupted, I got some bad news. No one died or anything but it just was not good news.  So, my excited movie watching experience turned into a good movie watching experience we this slight constant worrying in the back of my mind.

However, leave it to movies to give you the very thing that you need to hear right when you need to hear it.

See as much as I love the movie I haven't seen it in almost a year and a half. So some of the finer lessons that come from this movie I don't remember. In the movie Laurie is the girl of Curley's dreams. They have a really playful relationship that I really love! Toward the middle of the movie Laurie turns to her Aunt Eller and asks her why do things need to change. She wants everything to stay the exact same that it is right now. Well, before the bad phone call came that is what I wanted everything was good and I wanted it to stay that way. How the movies go it didn't stay that same for very long. Laurie marries Curley, Judd tries to kill them, and Curley ends up accidentally killing Judd and all of this happens on the wedding day. While they are taking Judd to the Dr. (before he died) Laurie and Aunt Eller start to talking. Laurie asks why did this have to happen? Why do bad things have to happen to happen at all? Aunt Eller then says something that I really needed to hear.

She tells her goes something like this. That you can't account for bad things to happen. What you can do is look at all the good on one side and the bad on the other and say "well ok" to the both of them. I was shocked that really that's the way to look at life. That things are going to happen and after they do that only thing that you can do it look at everything and go ok that happened what now.

Life is really just rolling with the punches and make some choices. Not making choices and rolling with the punches. Right now everything is kinnda sucks. However, I know that this is not going to last forever and I will be ok. I just have to look at both good and bad and find the balance.