- Messages
- 6,365
- Rating
This is one of my absolute favorite movies of all time. And one of the most inspiring. At least to me anyway. I'll watch it, wait a year or more, then get an urge to watch it again, but wonder if I'm still gonna like it after all this time, but it passes with a 100% each time and still holds up super well even now.
In a bit of fairness, a lot of this movie is just indulging in fantasy. No, it's not realistic that only five people are able to both pay for and completely restore an utterly decrepit and broken down mental hospital in a few weeks or even a few months. Plus pay for all the utilities to the building. No, it's not realistic that Bartleby Gaines gets rejected from a stock standard state college. (They'll take damn near anyone with a pulse, and even if they somehow didn't take him, there's always the community colleges.) No, it's not realistic that so many people would hear of the South Harmon Institute of Technology, or at least, not as fast as that.
But this movie is not about the pure intellect. It's about your passion. Your creativity. Your fantasy, if you will. What do YOU want to do? What gets you going and how do you want to learn about it? A long time ago, that was actually what college was. A bunch of smart people getting together and doing the intellectual equivalent of fucking around. Ironically, S.H.I.T. sticks more to the ACTUAL traditions of what college was than what the more traditional and prestigious Harmon College purports.
Time for a history lesson, my fellow assholes.
Back in Italy during the ye olde times of the 1400s, very usually, higher education was controlled by strict religious institutions. People who wished to become clergy, ministers, and etc. would go to these religious institutions like Oxford, and any education not of a religious nature was treated as inferior although such subjects were still taught, and books on such were also available. Also in the 1400s were certain other Renaissance academies which were much more informal groups, and they began to rediscover this older idea called Humanism thought up in roughly around 5th century BC Greece. Humanism instead taught the importance of the individual, an individual's progression, and their agency. The importance of the one over the many.
Unfortunately though, the members of these Renaissance academies got a little too confident as they spread out and talked about their findings to others, and because they talked about stuff the Church didn't like, some were arrested on charges of irreligion, immorality, and conspiracy against the Pope. Nevertheless, it was because of this general rediscovery that we have the US Constitution, and most importantly, the Bill of Rights. Now, Humanism isn't perfect. In my opinion, it's a little bit too fluffy alone and needs a bit of realism and rigidity in order to truly make it something much greater than what it is just by itself. But that's a discussion for another time. Coming back to Accepted, this movie is actually re-exposing both the power of informal education and also the centuries old Humanist ideas and movements that came before.
Heh, this movie actually made me want to start uploading videos again because fuck it, I want to. Although, if I do, they're going to be a lot more informal. The forums will have my much more structured thoughts. And with that, I'll just close with a quote from the man himself.
In a bit of fairness, a lot of this movie is just indulging in fantasy. No, it's not realistic that only five people are able to both pay for and completely restore an utterly decrepit and broken down mental hospital in a few weeks or even a few months. Plus pay for all the utilities to the building. No, it's not realistic that Bartleby Gaines gets rejected from a stock standard state college. (They'll take damn near anyone with a pulse, and even if they somehow didn't take him, there's always the community colleges.) No, it's not realistic that so many people would hear of the South Harmon Institute of Technology, or at least, not as fast as that.
But this movie is not about the pure intellect. It's about your passion. Your creativity. Your fantasy, if you will. What do YOU want to do? What gets you going and how do you want to learn about it? A long time ago, that was actually what college was. A bunch of smart people getting together and doing the intellectual equivalent of fucking around. Ironically, S.H.I.T. sticks more to the ACTUAL traditions of what college was than what the more traditional and prestigious Harmon College purports.
Time for a history lesson, my fellow assholes.
Back in Italy during the ye olde times of the 1400s, very usually, higher education was controlled by strict religious institutions. People who wished to become clergy, ministers, and etc. would go to these religious institutions like Oxford, and any education not of a religious nature was treated as inferior although such subjects were still taught, and books on such were also available. Also in the 1400s were certain other Renaissance academies which were much more informal groups, and they began to rediscover this older idea called Humanism thought up in roughly around 5th century BC Greece. Humanism instead taught the importance of the individual, an individual's progression, and their agency. The importance of the one over the many.
Unfortunately though, the members of these Renaissance academies got a little too confident as they spread out and talked about their findings to others, and because they talked about stuff the Church didn't like, some were arrested on charges of irreligion, immorality, and conspiracy against the Pope. Nevertheless, it was because of this general rediscovery that we have the US Constitution, and most importantly, the Bill of Rights. Now, Humanism isn't perfect. In my opinion, it's a little bit too fluffy alone and needs a bit of realism and rigidity in order to truly make it something much greater than what it is just by itself. But that's a discussion for another time. Coming back to Accepted, this movie is actually re-exposing both the power of informal education and also the centuries old Humanist ideas and movements that came before.
Heh, this movie actually made me want to start uploading videos again because fuck it, I want to. Although, if I do, they're going to be a lot more informal. The forums will have my much more structured thoughts. And with that, I'll just close with a quote from the man himself.
Bartleby Gaines said:
