Month: June 2014

Three sentence movie reviews: Twilight Zone the movie.

This was a complete 80s movie from the kind of odd muppet-like things, to the Nazi themed segment to the creepy kid stuff.  It did have Nancy Cartwright (voice of Bart Simpson etc.) onscreen as well as many recognizable stars.  I was down with the Creedence sing along and the Nazi segment and the rest was kind of eh.

Cost:  free from library
Where watched: at home with Matt.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/1983/twilight_zone_the_movie.html
I love when the posters have visble folds in them.

I’m all for rules and regulations, but can’t this be done electronically?

In the past few months rules in the health care and mortgage industry have kicked in and now we get a monthly statement from HomeStreet Bank telling us about our mortgage which is auto deducted.  Plus, after every appointment at Kaiser (I go once weekly for UV therapy for psoriasis) I receive a mailing telling me how much UV therapy supposedly costs.
I have an entire electronic thing set up at Kaiser so I don’t have to get these types of things, so why don’t they come via that?  And HomeStreet, it would be great to opt in to something like that for the mortgage notification.

Introducing: The Ruby Oliver Film Festival

Those of you who are regular readers know that I love movies.  And you also know that I despair because so many movies are BOY movies and, while enjoyable to me, I long for more GIRL movies.  I plan to watch a goodly amount of movies this summer.  But what movies to watch?  A lot of films-to-watch lists are full of very vital and weighty flicks, mostly featuring men doing men things.  I’m not looking for that right now, I want fun. Interesting.  Movies women like.

Enter Ruby Oliver.  She’s not a real person, but a character in a series of very funny YA novels by E. Lockheart.  They all seem to have the same name, but if you are looking for the first one, it’s called The Boyfriend List. When the series begins, Ruby Oliver is a sophomore at a private school in Seattle and she has just lost her boyfriend, all of her friends, and is having panic attacks.  Ruby Oliver’s tale of how she recovers from all that (and more) is told in a breezy style that includes perhaps my favorite thing in the book world:  footnotes.

Ruby Oliver also loves movies.  So in her amusing and digressive footnotes, she often makes lists of movies on one topic or another.  I have seen many of these movies, but not all of them.  A-ha!  A bolt of inspiration.  My next movie project will be to go through all her lists, spanning footnotes in four books, and watch the ones I haven’t seen.

Here’s my list, copied word-for-word from the novels.  Stay tuned for reviews.  And check out Ruby Oliver.  She’s worth your time.

Titles in bold have not yet been watched.  When movies repeat, I chose to bold them again.

Note that most of these lists titles contain spoilers.

Book 1 
The Boyfriend List

Movies where the couples hate each other half the time:
10 Things I Hate About You
One Fine Day
When Harry Met Sally
You’ve Got Mail
Intolerable Cruelty
The African Queen
Addicted to Love
Bringing Up Baby
The Goodbye Girl
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
As Good as it Gets
French Kiss
Groundhog Day
A Life Less Ordinary
///
Movies where after breaking up, it turns out the man actually loves the woman madly and can’t exist without her:
Pretty Woman
An Officer and a Gentleman
Bridget Jones’s Diary
The Truth About Cats & Dogs
Reality Bites
Jerry Maguire
Persuasion
High Fidelity
Say Anything
Plus:
Notting Hill
Grease
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Runaway Bride
(only the woman comes back to the man.)
///
Movies where the apparently hopeless dorky guy who’s been there all along eventually gets the girl:
The Wedding Singer
Dumb and Dumber
When Harry Met Sally
There’s Something About Mary
Beauty and the Beast
While You Were Sleeping
Revenge of the Nerds
Lots of Woody Allen movies
//
(bonus content from questions at the end of book one) 
E. Lockheart’s all-time top ten movie list:
Gregory’s Girl
Repo Man
Annie Hall
Grease
His Girl Friday
Bringing Up Baby
Cabaret
Moulin Rouge
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Singin’ in the Rain
Book 2 
The Boy Book

Pod-robot.  A person with no feelings or memory, but otherwise indistinguishable from a regular human.  Possibly an alien life-form; possibly a robot.  See:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The Puppet Masters
Westworld
The Terminator Movies
The Stepford Wives (either version)
Solaris (either version)
Village of the Damned.
(There are also lots of touchy-feely movies where the faux humans develop emotions, like
Bicentennial Man
I, Robot
A.I: Artificial Intelligence.)

///
Movies where a wild girl enchants and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary (but still attractive) man:
Along Came Polly
Something Wild
Pretty Woman
Addicted to Love
Bringing Up Baby
Chasing Amy
What’s Up, Doc?
Cabaret
The Seven Year Itch
Garden State
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Moulin Rouge
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
My Fair Lady
Funny Face
Annie Hall
Sleeper (okay, so Woody Allen is not attractive or ordinary, but still).
  
 Book 3 
The Treasure Map of Boys
Movies in which a makeover facilitates love:
Grease
Pretty Woman
Sabrina (both versions)
Working Girl
Clueless
The Breakfast Club
My Fair Lady
She’s All That
The Mirror Has Two Faces
Cinderella
Now, Voyager
Strictly Ballroom
Miss Congeniality
Moonstruck
The Princess Diaries
Never Been Kissed

///
Movie in which the woman dies and thereby helps the hero to realize his full manly potential in the world, only, of course, bad luck for her because she’s dead:
Moulin Rouge
Braveheart
City of Angles/Wings of Desire (same plot, different films)
Dangerous Liaisons
Sweeny Todd (well, he only thinks she’s dead and becomes a total psycho, but still)
A Walk to Remember
The Prestige
Casino Royale (the Daniel Craig one, not the Woody Allen one)
Harold and Maude
Love Story
Finding Neverland.

///
Movies in which the romantic heroine sports Birkenstocks:
none

///
Here’s a list we came up with, with help from the Internet. Movies that make prostitution seem like a glam job in which you might end up falling in love with a supercute and quality guy such as a young Christian Slater or Ewan McGregor:
Moulin Rouge
Pretty Woman
Trading Places
Milk Money
The Girl Next Door
Risky Business
Irma la Douce
From Here to Eternity
Klute
Memoirs of a Geisha
L.A. Confidential
Night Shift (1982)
True Romance

///

[Ruby and her friend Hutch have a documentary film festival]
We watched:
March of the Penguins
Super Size Me
Spellbound
American Movie
Mad Hot Ballroom
Grizzly Man
Hoop Dreams
Shut Up & Sing—and for Hutch
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster.  Which is about a retro-metal band in group therapy, if you can believe it.
Book 4
Real Live Boyfriends
Movies where a quality guy loves a girl and sticks with her even though she’s one or another kind of insane—maybe alcoholic, maybe addict, maybe psychotic or depressed:
Mad Love
When a Man Loves A Woman
Bed of Roses
Benny & Joon
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
50 First Dates
Almost Famous
Proof
Center Stage
The Hours
My Sassy Girl
What Dreams May Come
Rachel Getting Married
Forrest Gump (if you consider him a quality guy)
Betty Blue
But in real life, I think ti’s more likely the guy gets sick of the girl’s insane behavior and goes off with a nice normal person to live happily ever after.  And who can blame him?
///
Movies where the safe responsible guy is revealed as a jerk—thus freeing the heroine to leave him for someone more exciting:
Desperately Seeking Susan
The Wedding Singer
The Holiday
Legally Blond
Sliding Doors
French Kiss
Bring It On
Working Girl
Sex, Lies & Videotape
George of the Jungle
///
Movies where a brooding, even sulky guy seems like a good idea for a quality boyfriend:
Twilight
10 Things I Hate About You
Edward Scissorhands
Pump Up the Volume
Heathers (until the end)
The Breakfast Club
The Bourne Identity
Grosse Pointe Blank
Angel Eyes
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Beauty and the Beast
Reality Bites
Donnie Darko
Wuthering Heights
Good Will Hunting
The Piano
Rebecca
Rebel Without a Cause 

Kid thank you

So sweet.  This is from one of the K/1 classes.  My favorite is “she has her own style” which is a comment that another co-worker also got.  I laughed because the other co-worker has a very fun sense of style, while mine involves wearing the same thing every day of the week.  But to a K/1, I guess that counts as “own sense of style.”

Ah, the illusion of control

It’s summer!  And that means I have things to do at work.  So I’ve put things in order and have goals for all the weeks I’ve worked.  Nicole, from First Unitarian introduced me to this planning method. It’s great for when you have specific tasks to do over a set amount of time, not all of which are date specific. My summer tasks mostly just need to get done, and some can’t start before I finish others, so this system works fabulously for me.  Whatever doesn’t get done in a given week gets moved down to the next week.  The trick is to keep July 21-25 from getting to full of too many un-done post-it notes.
Another way to do this is to use index cards instead of post-its.  Then you can save the index cards, make notes on the backs, and throw them in a folder to retrieve for the next summer.

Another stunning generalization that takes my breath away.

“Jared Padgett’s extended family knew him as a happy, chatty person who was quick to hug, full of love and had a goal in life, unlike many teenagers.”
Um.  Most all of the teenagers I’ve encountered have goals.  I myself had goals for my life when I was a teenager.  Most of them weren’t really realistic and didn’t come to pass, but that doesn’t meant I didn’t have them.  How about giving the upcoming adults some credit?

Three sentence movie reviews: Night Moves

This is a lot more talk-y than the other Kelly Reichardt film I watched, but by Hollywood movie standards–and especially in comparison to the last movie I watched–it’s nearly silent.  Which is okay, because that gives you a lot of time to think about what’s happening on screen.  It builds tension like crazy, especially for how laid back it was, and the acting is fan-tabulous.*

Cost:  $5.00, possibly $6.00.
Where watched:  Hollywood Theater.  Which is right on the 75 bus line.  I need to go here more.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2014/night_moves.html

*Mmmmm.  Peter Sarsgaard, why did you never become famous for your hunky good looks?  Probably better that you didn’t, since your acting is so spot-on.  Also Jesse Eisenberg is his usual wonder and it’s always nice to see Alia Shawkat.

Postcard from Belarus

Lyudmila sends me her greetings from Belarus which, according to her is, “an oasis in the heart of Europe.  Not by chance is it called ‘blue-eyed.'”
I just looked on a map to see where Belarus is [postcrossing: improving my shoddy geographical sense one postcard at a time] and I have to quibble with that “heart of Europe” statement.  Of course, that’s because I came of age where Europe ended at the border of the USSR which is, of course, no more.  So in that old mental map, Belarus is very much outside the heart of Europe. Then I looked up a map of Europe and got a EU one.  Even in that map, Belarus is on the very edge and not in Europe (because it’s not an EU member state).  So perhaps that saying is asperational.  I know those former USSR republics mostly didn’t want to be members of said Soviet Empire.
Anyway, Lyudmila is 41 and has a husband and two sons–teenagers.  She says, “I am happy with my family.”

Three sentence movie reviews: 22 Jump Street

The chuckling continues in this continuation of the sequel to the remake of the 80s television franchise.*  Hill and Tatum provide similar-type laughs with Hill cracking me up when he realizes the unfortunate family connection of a romantic interest.  However, the actress Jillian Bell stole every scene she was in, and had me gasping with laughter at one point, making her the find of the movie.

Cost: $2.00 (due to gift card being exhausted, leaving me with a small balance**)
Where watched: Regal Lloyd 10.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2014/twenty_two_jump_street.html

*The credits are very funny to and seem to indicate this is the end of the road for this particular incarnation of the franchise.
**However, I did pay something like $4.50 for a small popcorn which I managed to spill twice before I began eating it.  Aside from being a slob, looking at $2.00 worth of popcorn sitting on the theater floor is no fun.