I watched Young Adult on Christmas Day and I did like it a lot. Charlize Theron’s performance is fantastic, which I expected. I didn’t expect, however, to see that it was shot in Minneapolis. Didn’t even know until I saw the credits that the movie was written by Minneapolis’ own Diablo Cody, so there you go.

As I said, it’s a good movie but the following trailer really doesn’t do it justice or even represent it accurately. While Young Adult does have it’s funny moments, it is actually quite depressing…but then aren’t all the good stories? Found at YouTube from YoungAdultMovie.

This looks like fun. Environment Minnesota is hosting a short film contest about what solar power can do for Minnesota. Cash prizes of up to $1500. [DETAILS.] Found at YouTube from EnvironmentMinnesota.

This film documents orphaned orangutans and elephants and the extraordinary people who rescue and raise them—saving endangered species one life at a time, with the obligatory Morgan Freeman as your narrator.

It starts this Friday at the IMAX Theater in Apple Valley. [DETAILS.] Found at YouTube from trailers.

Chorus Polaris and the Golden Valley Orchestra performed Wolfgang Amedeus Mozart’s masterpiece, the Requiem Mass in D Minor yesterday in Columbia Heights. It is one of my absolute favorite works of classical music. I didn’t get a chance to see the performance, but it did get me to thinking about this wonderful scene from the movei Amadeus in which Mozart’s arch-rival, Antonio Salieri, helps him write the Requiem on Mozart’s deathbed. If you haven’t seen the movie, definitely put it in your Netflix que.

This scene is remarkable for a whole host of reasons but I’ll just point out one: It effortlessly breaks down the component parts of a musical masterpiece and in doing so, helps you easily understand how a work of music works, how those elements work together. Found at YouTube from ChipsDubbo.

Love it! Some guy created a Star Wars bombing run through the mounds of snow from the sidewalk to the steps of his house. Found at YouTube from Hushabye.

I was catching up on MPR Midmorning podcasts recently and they were talking literature…can’t remember precisely what literature but that’s beside the point.

Some guy called in to complain that his high school lit teachers were always pushing books that were so depressing. If they’d assigned more uplifting stories, he argued, English classes might’ve been more interesting.

It sorta gave him the feeling that his teachers were trying to push some kind of agenda.

Yeah, that’s right, high school English teachers are secretly plotting to force depression on our children.

What the guy clearly never grasped was the fact that the vast majority of the really, really good stories are downers.

Think of all the literature you’ve read and list on one hand the uplifting stories and on the other the depressing stories. I’ve done this exercise many times (because I”ve made this argument many times) and the only uplifting example I can ever think of is E.M. Forster‘s A Room with a View, and that’s not even nearly his best work.

Ernest Hemingway–one of my favorite authors–was plagued by depression (and committed suicide himself), so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that his work reflects that tone. Yet though such masterpieces as The Sun Also Rises and Old Man And The Sea are decidedly not uplifting, I’ll take the insight they provide into the proverbial human condition any day of the week.

If you pay close attention to most Hollywood movies, you’ll notice that most of them have a happy ending tacked onto the end.

The hero comes back from seeming death.

The guy gets the girl.

Love is requited.

But those endings don’t feel right because they are not the natural ending of the story. All the good stories suck because they’re real, because they reflect life; and in real life, the hero often dies, the guy often doesn’t get the girl, and love remains unrequited.

Want to spice up your home videos to make friends and family pay more attention to your vacation footage? How ’bout adding a gunfight scene? And no gunfight scene is worthy of the name without realistic muzzle flares. Here’s how you do it. Found at YouTube from freddiew2.

Posted via web from David Erickson’s Posterous

via jojeda.posterous.com

Posted via web from David Erickson’s Posterous