Spring Semester 2010 Begins!

Filed Under Culture

Yesterday kicked off the start of Spring Semester at CSUN. It’s good to be back. I enjoyed having a few weeks off, but I found myself becoming bored and listless. I also discovered that I’d completely lost all sense of reason in my DVD rental habits. Last Friday, I checked out Rob Zombie’s “Halloween II” at 20/20 Video. Dig this: The flick wasn’t available at Cinephile, so I walked to the other video store in my neighborhood to check it out. I went to two video stores to find “Halloween II!” So how was the movie? Sucked.

Watching the film wasn’t a complete waste of my time, though. “Halloween II” is historically significant in that it literally defines the symbolic nature of white horses in movies. I’m serious. At the very beginning, there’s a title card that explains what a white horse represents — purity or some shit. I guess test audiences were left scratching their heads at the film’s more esoteric bits. At any rate, what’s important is that I learned something and then kind of forgot it again.

Equipped with my shaky knowledge of the significance of a white horse in movies, I headed up to Northridge last night after work. The pissing rain we’re having in Los Angeles let up long enough for me to commute to the CSUN campus in a little under an hour. It gave me enough time to head over to the campus library and glance over their DVD collection before class. They have the Tim McGraw version of “Flicka,” but Flicka’s brown, so I didn’t bother checking it out.

My Tuesday night course is about developing a screenplay that we’ll ultimately write in the fall. The workload, at a glance, looks to be insane. There are four books which are required reading. Our assignment this week is to have Aristotle’s “Poetics” read by next Tuesday. Pfft, what’s Aristotle know that Rob Zombie doesn’t? If he doesn’t mention horses at any point in the text, I’ll be very disappointed.

I have a fairly solid idea for a screenplay that I’m looking forward to fleshing out over the course of the semester. I think it’s commercial. I like that the course is geared towards writing a mainstream Hollywood movie. Of course, no film class would be complete without the student who fancies himself the next Jim Jarmusch or some equally insufferable arty-farty filmmaker. I wonder who will reveal himself to be that guy this semester. It sure as hell won’t be me. My shit’s got aliens in it.

I’m still looking for a place to shoehorn in a white horse, too.

-Brad Lohan

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