It Never Hurts To Try

Unless you break your arm :S. This weekend I went ice skating for the first time ever. I know right, I’m 19 and I’ve never gone ice skating. Well when I was 10 I went roller skating for the first time. I fell about 5 minutes in and broke my arm. I haven’t tried roller blading, roller skating, or ice skating since. I do however longboard but I guess they aren’t that similar. Thankfully this time around I didn’t break anything. Maybe balance comes with age.

This week is also spring break. This is a super late blog post because I felt like I didn’t have much to write about. Last week was just midterms (Systems) and nothing else. Nothing eventful or thought provoking happened, then I watched the Oscars on Sunday and wanted to watch some of the movies that were nominated. Yesterday, my roommate and I watched The Wolf of Wall Street and Her. I am not a movie or TV person but I greatly enjoyed both of these films.

While watching The* Wolf of Wall Street *I felt almost fully immersed me in the life of Jordan Belfort. I was reading some stuff about the film after I watched it and apparently some people thought it praised the lifestyle that was portrayed in the film. I think the film was presenting something and it was up to the viewer to decide if they personally would ever aspire to live such a life. Also even though the film is 3 hours long it really is the right length. I feel like some movies are too short and delve into something and don’t explain it or explore it well enough. It is fine to leave some mystery and suspense but bringing something up and then not alluding to it later on makes me feel like it didn’t even need to be in the movie in the first place.

Her is a really interesting movie about relationships. It made me ask myself what is love. The main character, Theodore, falls in love with with an artificial intelligence OS that calls itself Samantha. The first slightly major hurdle I had to get over to fully enjoy the movie was the fact that Samantha was basically a real person. AI now is nowhere near the level that AI in the movie is. Samantha wasn’t just code that was programmed to do things, she could learn and feel emotions just like a real person. The only reason she wasn’t a real person was that she had no body. This leads to some interesting situations as the movie goes on. I also found it very interesting how other characters in the movie responded to Theodore’s love of an AI. Some were completely OK with it, others shamed him for it. Honestly I would like to hear somebody’s opinion on the relationship in the movie from somebody who wasn’t OK with human AI love. I honestly don’t know how it would make somebody with a differing opinion would feel about it. I definitely want to watch this movie again with different people to gauge reactions.

So between last paragraph and this paragraph I read some reviews from people who hated the movie on IMDb and most of the arguments don’t seem that strong on why they hated the movie. Also it is hard to fully explain yourself through text. Honestly if anybody reading this didn’t like Her I would love to talk about the movie. Not to hate just to learn and see differing points of view.

The rest of this week will contain Gravity, 12 Years a Slave, and *American Hustle. *I have a Systems project due on Monday, I have some reading to catch up on, and also want to get Twixel out soon, hopefully by the end of Spring Break.