Film review: Picnic at Hanging Rock

This past year I have grown to love movies to an extend that one of my top visited webpages is imdb, and my "to-watch" list is just too long. Watching less anime and more movies and english-language series has been a weird transition also... 

Don´t worry though! I still watch anime, and I am still interested in it all, I just feel a personal growth over the past year, stemming from moving out on my own for the first time, I am sure haha ^^

I wanted to reccomend a nice movie for all of you to check out because sometimes you just need to watch a good movie that makes you feel calm and makes you think. Being it the nice aesthetics, music, scenery or just actors that attracted me to the movie in the first place differs very much from movie to movie. This one might be old, but I would definitely reccomend giving it a watch!

 Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) 

 

I wanted to write about this movie because I am rather obsessed by the urban-legend storyline connected with it. It is about an all-girls boarding school in Victoria, Australia, called Applegate hall, and their picnic-outing on st. Valentines day in the year 1900 by the foot of a hill called Hanging Rock. The movie starts with the girls getting ready in the morning of the picnic, reading eachothers St. Valentines day letters and fawning over their muslin dresses. These scenes are truly beautiful. Once they leave the school ,in a chariot that carries all of them in one go, they chat merrily about their excursion all the way up to their destination place, which is the nearby hilled area known as Hanging Rock. There they eat cake, and toast for St. Valentine, and have a lovely time in the serene woodland scenery, with delightful classical music setting the perfect feeling. 

The teachers soon find out all their clocks have stopped, making it hard to find out when they need to go back again for the promised dinner in the evening, with the headmistress. Soon three of the senior girls decide to wander up to the hillside for some school-related research,  accompanied by one of the younger girls. They promise to only be gone for a short while. They begin feeling weird as they wander through the lower passages of the mountain side, and the youngest girl begins to feel frightend. Suddenly the three elder ones wander off into the mountain, leaving the youngest one behind, screaming. She runs away in share terror of their strange behaviour. And since then... the girls dissapear, never to be found again! 

 

 

 

 

This is a movie based on a novel that came out in 1967 (that I am currently reading!) written by the Australian author Joan Lindsay, who claims that it might either be reality or fiction. Since then there have been countless amounts of people researching the story, trying to find proof for the existence of the people involved, and the school in discussion. One thing is for certain, Hanging Rock has always been a mystical place that people seem to connect weird happenings to! 

The rest of the movie, after the dissaperance of the girls, is about the struggle of the people left behind and their suffering. The scenes are very dream-like and the music combined with the sceneries makes for a very delirious sort of feeling to it. No wonder this has been deemed perhaps the first popular cult-movie from Australia! A must see! 

I hope you enjoyed this entry,

please comment below!

+ romanticing summer : nostalgia feelings +

I thought I write a little entry about my general status and life at the moment, for those interested.

If you are following my instagram, you might notice that that is where I post most often. 

I have this tendency to forget about this blog, or feel like my life is to event-less to write about.

But who says there is a rule to what you can and can´t write about? It is my blog after all, and my goal was to create a space for me to express myself, and talk about things that inspire me and that hopefully will inspire you! 

 This summer I had about one month of freetime, and a couple of weeks, before I started my summer-job at the same library I´ve been working at every summer for the past 3 years.

It felt strange, being back in my hometown after having lived in Oslo for about a year now! I am actually working at the local tourist-information this year, since our local town is very small and the library doubles as a tourist-information. I felt really eager to promote my homeplace to the tourists this year, and my mom says it´s because I´ve been away for so long. You get a different view of things when you return after having been away. It´s probably good for my social anxiety as well... I feel happy when I can help people get good experiences when they visit here ^^

When it comes to my personal health, I have become lost in a deep rift of bad-selfconfidence, which basically renders me into a pattern of dressing in the same clothes over and over (having them be oversized and boring) and trying to stick out as little as possible... This is a part of my disorder, and it always becomes worse when I am really sick... 

Another reason for not posting pictures of myself is because of that. 

So! I wanted to summarise some events over the past few weeks/months,
all presented to you by some of my recent instagram-posts:

 

When I came home, one of the first things I did was this jigsaw puzzle, featuring flower fairies, and 1000 pieces in total! It went remarkably fast, as I downloaded the Audible app from Amazon, and listened to exciting audiobooks while doing it ^^! I would reccomend this to everyone, very calming and it makes you feel pretty accomplished finishing a jigsaw puzzle with this many pieces 

 

 

My oldest sister came home from South-Africa this summer! She had these white fabric shoes, that she didn´t really use, and as we can use the same kind of shoes, she told me I could borrow them for the summer! I of course was very happy, as I only had shoes with ties on them, and these were so easy to wear since I could just slip them on. Later on, she actually told me I could have them if I wanted, and that she originally bought them to draw on them, but never got around to it! That was my idea also, so I ended up with this cute little egg-design that says "tamago tomodachi" in japanese, meaning "egg friend" haha ^^

 

When I was down in Oslo, I desperatly wanted proper drawing-things and as quality can be sort of pricy, I actually asked my parents for a favour, helping me get a new artbook and some good drawing pens.... The nice thing was that they actually said yes, so after coming home for summer vacation, I started my brand new 240 page A4 size drawing-book/sketch-book, determined to make every page count ^^ This was a hair-study I did that I was quite happy with!

Another page in my drawing-book, showing off my brand new OC that still lacks a name... if you have a good idea, please let me know ^^ hehe

 

(don´t mind my oversized outfit)... And that brings me up until last weekend. My family, at that moment my next-oldest sister and her boyfriend were joining us, and my oldest sister had gone back to South Africa, took me with them on a trip to another island, about 5-6 hours by car from our own island to join in on the 50th anniversary of an old family-friend of ours. This consisted of driving in a 5-person car that was quite heated due to the weather and having it be completely full.... We slept in a small camping-hut that we rented on a local camping-place in the area, and because I´m a light-sleeper, I could hardly close an eye the day before leaving, and almost not at all on the night we spent there, as my roomates were a bit ... ehm... nosiy in their sleep.... 

BUT it was a lovely experience through and through! I haven´t gone on a trip like that with my family since my childhood... there was no connection to internet anywhere and everything was just nature, clouds, wind and sun, grass and ocean *sigh*

Just look at the beautiful sunset on the night we stayed there!

 

And lastly, I wanted to mention that I went to a wedding this week! The first ever wedding I´ve attended, being able to remember it! My family says I was at a wedding when I was about 3 or something, but I only have vague memories from it, so this was basically a new experience for me!

Me, my mom and my dad arrived rather late, as all of us had work to attend to before being able to go. My sister and her boyfriend however, are still on vacation, so they could go directly and experienced the whole seremony. 

I was a bit scared of going because of just having finished that trip with everyone, and it´s really stressfull for me having social events scheduled to go to...( needless to say, I became sick afterwards... brain overload) I had a hard time finding anything I could wear that wouldn´t be revealing at all, and ended up with a white, foot-long maxi summerdress, with some pink details!

 

 

So yeah, decided to brake the "don´t wear a white dress in a wedding"-rule on my first wedding-attendance! Well, it wasn´t a very big deal, since they were the kids of family-friends we´ve known since before I was born ^^ hehe

And that pretty much is the things I wanted to mention up until now.

Other than these events and my current summer job, I haven´t been doing very interesting things this summer. Spending a lot of time outside in nature, climbing the local hills and mountains, working my way through interesting looking movies from all kinds of categories, and preferably around the 80s. Playing some games, and also drawing a bit ofcourse! 

It is now 31 days until I leave for Japan!

 

 and I must admit I am quite eager to get back into business! This is by far the longest summer-vacation I´ve ever had, being a university student, it´s about 3 months! 

I want to write an entry about some of the movies I´ve seen lately, so I might do that in a not too distant future ^^ stay tuned! I hope you enjoyed this entry!