Mar 10th – Day of the Strange Movie

Still on a high from the great weekend and anticipation of my fantastic Spring Break coming, concentrating in class was difficult until…we finally got our midterms back in civ. I was most nervous about this one since it was the hardest and I felt like I guessed on the majority of it. Olvido started talking about how we overall did pretty good, but not great. And I asked “Is it bad?” and she stopped, turned to me and said “actually, you did perfect”…what?! I don’t understand. She said, no there were only two people in between her class and Carlos’ class for this class that did perfect and I was the one in her class. I looked at her dumbfounded and said “Are you serious? Is this a joke?” and she said “No!” my friends laughed at me because I still didn’t believe her. And she said that she was serious and she was surprised too because I’m always joking in class and have my laptop but I must have studied hard because she thought I would do well but not perfect. Kary, Olivia and Elise turned around and gave me the I hate you look. Geez, I’m still stunned…I even look through my exam for notes or anything. Not one, all complete marks with a 100 and a smiley face at the end. Awesome! Then in my film class we watched a movie called the Bad Education; which is a movie by the same director that did Volver. It has to be one of the darkest movies other than Miracle Alley (which btw there was no miracle to be found in that movie at all) and I’ve seen quite a random assortment of foreign films from several countries. It was about a homosexual man who owns a film company and the man that was his first love comes in with a script about his life (the man, not the company owner). The man he is in love with has had a very dark life where as a boy he was an altar boy and the priest would molest him and make him have sex. I also think he was castrated because he was the highest soprano in the choir…the translation was a little strange. And in boarding school is where he met the film company owner. They were each other’s first love until the priest caught them in the bathroom together. The boy was kicked out of the school and not castrated if he promised to the priest that nothing happened and he was still faithful to him. Then it fast forwards to when he is working as a burlesque drag queen and uses all his money for coke. That’s where he, without knowing until later, meets his school love again and gets him drunk until he passes out and rapes him. Then finding out it was his school love, the film company owner, leaves love letters. The company owner decides to do the film and wants to rekindle with his old love but he has no interest, he just wants to make money for drugs. Well then it turns out that it’s the twin brother that gave the script of his twin’s life and led the company owner on. The money was to get away and to make it big in films and not for drugs for his brother. He killed his brother by giving him an overdose of heroine and tried to cover it up until the owner found out. The priest from their childhood came to the company owner and told him what happened and how they killed his love because they were getting tired of him and were falling in love. So the owner threw the brother out and that’s pretty much the synopsis of the movie. At the end of it, the entire class was just flabbergasted…not because of issues with homosexuality (thank goodness because I was worried about my friends being more conservative than they realized) but because the movie was just so out there and dark. That’s when Grant said “man, I feel great about life after the mood that movie put me in!” which made the class burst into laughter. Good thing. After class, I went back to my host home, ate dinner, and worked on figuring out what to pack for Rome this weekend.