I unfortunately wasn't hungry enough to eat everything (I missed out on a lot of the desserts), but everything I tasted was really good. I was so impressed with everyone's hard work! It really made it feel like Thanksgiving - so many of us crammed into the boys' apartment, tons of food, lots of talking & laughter, singing holiday tunes.. all around good cheer and merriment. :)
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| So much food! |
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| Chelsea's plate with a sampling of everything! |
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| Desserts! |
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| Cake artfully decorated with fruit turkeys by the San Rocco girls :) |
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| Charlotte, Nick, me, Chelsea, & Andrew S. |
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| All the boys looking dapper in their waiter outfits - I mean concert attire. :) |
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| Lilian, me, & Korinne |
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| Julianna, Elizabeth, Nikki, me, & Cathlin |
Sunday morning, guess what I woke up to: SNOW!! And not just a light dusting either; there had to have been like an inch of snow settled on roofs and on top of cars and railings and whatnot. I do have to admit that I was pretty excited when I first realized why it was bright outside the window despite the lack of sunlight, and I immediately bolted out of bed to look outside and take some pictures. It was beautiful to look at, but I definitely am still not fond of how cold it is out there, so I got my pictures and then climbed back into bed with a plan to stay in my pjs and work on my Music paper all day.
The snow fell pretty steadily until early afternoon. By evening time it had turned to slush on the roads and streets, and my classmates that had been out said it was slippery, but I managed to get out just to get myself some take-out for dinner from Duchessa, and then it was back to paper-writing. I'm basically the world's slowest paper-writer, because I'm still not done. Probably 4/5 of the way through.
Today (Monday) was our last excursion to the Turin Film Festival for our Cinema class, which was pretty awesome. We watched three movies: Soulboy, White Irish Drinkers, and for the third we could pick from three options - I watched one called Ang Ninanais, which was by a Filipino director. The first two were really well done and seemed more like theatrical films rather than independent films, which was impressive. I particularly enjoyed the second one, which is kind of funny because that one was optional for us to watch. The guy who played the military colonel guy in Avatar was in it as the protagonist's dad, which was kind of cool, haha. It was about a guy in Brooklyn who has artistic talent, but has a bunch of family crap going on - alcoholic dad, brother stealing, drama drama. It was just really engaging and dramatic - I even cried at one point, I got so attached to the characters and just got really into the storyline. The only thing I didn't like about this one was that the camera was slightly unsteady, which made me kind of dizzy and even nauseous throughout the film, but apparently I was the only one really affected by it. The first film was about the Northern Soul style of dancing, which was pretty cool too & had kind of a cliche storyline about the guy falling for the wrong girl, getting in trouble, & then figuring out that he should be with the girl who's been crushing on him all along in the end.
The third one was disappointing; I will admit I was biased in my choice since the film was from the Philippines, but the other two options were either a horror film (no thanks) or one about the relationship between Bill Clinton (played by Dennis Quaid, what?! Weird.) and Tony Blair (politics aren't really of interest to me). The synopsis from the TFF website for the Philippine film said something about a mermaid (although overall their summary didn't really make sense), so I was under the impression that it would be kind of a fantasy story or something, which sounded really cool to me.
What it actually was was very amateur camera work (wayy shakier than the other one, obviously handheld; also, I felt like he was trying too hard to be artistic, b/c there were numerous shots framing nothing in particular, and the focus kept going in and out of blurriness, so that was a headache) with a very vague storyline. I think it was some kind of historic legend, but I (nor any of the others who watched it with me) really understood it. Whatever semblence of a story there was was told primarily through text - literally, black screen with paragraph blocks of white lettering - and then a series of seemingly inconsequential scenes. They reminded me of the Lumiere films we've been discussing in our Cinema class actually; our project is to imitate them because they were kind of the dawn of cinematography: all we have to do is take our cameras, set it somewhere, record real life for 60 seconds, and that's it. No actors, no movement of the camera or change of focus, nothing. So imagine that + shakiness + periodic blocks of text for two hours. Not very engaging, I'm sad to say. It was kind of more what I expected from an independent film in a film festival, but after the first two movies, my standards were kind of raised, I guess.
The only positive thing I have to say about this film is that it was cool to hear bits of it in Tagalog and be able to understand what I was hearing and then compare it to the English subtitles. The only bits in Tagalog were the narration, while the actual dialogue was in a dialect I didn't recognize or understand. I really wanted to like this film, but I just didn't. I actually fell asleep for a bit b/c I just couldn't handle the unsteadiness so I shut my eyes, haha. I did feel bad, though, because about half the audience walked out over the course of the movie, and then most everyone else left, including us (we had to meet up with everyone else & get on the bus back to Alba), right at the end before the director and presenters got up for closing remarks or Q&A, so there were only like 5 people left at that point. But hey, what can ya do, right? Overall, I really enjoyed today though. It was definitely much better than sitting in our classroom in uncomfortable desk chairs watching long Italian movies with subtitles, haha.
Welp, that's all for now. Time to sleep & then be productive tomorrow :P
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