Sunday, May 27, 2012

2000: The Real World: San Carlos


Date of Creation: 2000

Synopsis: As the robot will tell you in the beginning, This is the story of 7 people picked by math TV to live in a house and have their lives taped. There is no script, everything you see is real. The Real World: San Carlos.

A Brief History: Completing the trifecta of class projects for classes I was not enrolled in, this was a final project for a Calculus class. The goal was to create a video that illustrated how you might apply calculus in real life.

Everyone really took their characters in stride; Josh Hauser as Bubba was particularly inspired, but I was most impressed by James Milam as Sid. Playing the asshole is always fun. Unless he really was just an asshole, in which case, great casting. I believe that Matt Wall, as Patch, may hold the world record for "Number of Musical Numbers performed about derivatives and functions in a single video." Ankit Patel as Abraham Washington has perhaps my favorite line ever, "My forefathers died for that flag!"

This movie really had everything: masochism, blatant racism, xenophobia, dwarves. You really have to watch it tongue in cheek, otherwise you'll just think we were horrible, horrible people.

I particularly liked the Planet of the Apes tribute.

Critical Analysis: Even though the introductions take up over 1/3rd of the actual movie, I actually still enjoyed them quite a bit. We still hadn't figured out how to make a movie that wasn't just a bunch of montages connected by a fade out, so it's kind of lacking in flow, but overall, it's not nearly as bad as I was expecting.

2 comments:

  1. Wanted to clarify a few key points to this masterpiece. First, this was how we spent our senior year spring break. The whole thing was "written," shot, and edited in that time because our group was full of procrastinators. Second, the reason the intro credits take up so much of the movie is because there was actually a 15 minute time limit on these videos but we got our teacher to agree that opening credits wouldn't count towards that 15 minutes. That's also why there's no calculus in it until that point. Thirdly, some random thoughts:

    Bubba, Hauser's character, was based on this character Mrs. Sonnenschein would do in class who supposedly worked at a box factory and he talked pretty much like how Josh talked in the movie.

    Jake actually built that website he's looking at about taking over the world (which I thought was incredible in 2000).

    One of the songs I sing about ripples in a pond was quoted exactly as it appeared in our textbook.

    This thing is racist as shit.

    The Gartner brothers actually make appearances in this thing. Dan's got his back to the camera in the scene filmed at Hardee's. Jason Lee is putting an arm around his shoulders. Nick's eyes are in the credits and he also provided the voice for Mary Francis.

    This is the crowning achievement on my film career and could not have happened without Nick and Dan staying up late, partitioning the hard drive on their computer so we could edit it digitally, and help making this the first calculus video in the history of St. Charles West High School to receive an A+. Thanks for posting!

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  2. Ha ha ha. Awesome. Thanks for posting, Matt.

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