Movies

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I took the weekend off from posting, but now I'm back at work, and I've got another installment of the "ask me questions" meme. ms_scarletibis was rather non-committal in coming up with a question, but once I poked and prodded, she gave me the suggestion, "I vote fic related or movie interest. I know there are a lot you haven't seen, and I'm curious to know why that is." Well, I'll talk about fic in response to dragonflylady77's follow-up question, so we'll do movies now.

There's really not a good reason why I haven't seen most movies, except possibly that I was raised under a rock. My parents aren't big movie-watchers, so I wasn't exposed to the classics (or pretty much anything before I was born). I think I've seen just about every Disney movie ever made, but once I got older, I just didn't go to the movies that much. I've always had a ridiculously busy schedule (I was an overachiever in school, and did every extracurricular activity I could fit in), and as movie tickets have gotten more and more expensive, my motivation has been going down and down. I've had a subscription to Blockbuster online for the past year, so that has helped to expose me to more stuff, but I still rarely go to the movie theater.

I did just go to see Mamma Mia! (yes, the exclamation point is required, which tells you a lot about the show, I think), mostly because a friend of mine whom I haven't seen in a while called me up and asked if I wanted to go. Honestly, I wanted to see her more than I wanted to see the movie. Although I am self-admittedly a musical fanatic (c.f. recent Dr. Horrible obsession), I wasn't really all that enthused about this one. I saw it on Broadway right after it opened, and although it was a lot of fun, it's totally off the wall and silly, and I thought it would just end up being cheesy on screen. And it pretty much was, in a manic, feel-like-I-just-did-a-lot-of-drugs kind of way. In any case, I was again impressed by the singing voices of famous people (apparently, Meryl Streep has had opera training - who knew?), and awesomely, Amanda Seyfried from Veronica Mars was the daughter. I didn't even know she was in it until I was looking up show times and saw her in the ad, and had no idea she could sing. But holy crap, Pierce Brosnan got old, although Meryl Streep did a good job acting like she was 20 years younger than she actually is.

You wanna know what's super disturbing, though? The chorus. Seriously. I don't know, maybe it worked better on stage, but these random Greek people would pop up in the most inappropriate places to sing the chorus parts, and I kept looking at Christi and going, "OMG, that's creepy!"

Anyway... er, yeah. Like I said, I have Blockbuster online, so most of my movie-watching is on DVD. What I've seen recently:

• Charlie Wilson's War, which was good - and classic Aaron Sorkin - even though Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts bother me in that I have trouble seeing them as the characters; I just see Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.
• Bridge to Terabithia, because I absolutely loved the book as a kid. I was a little worried because of the advertising, which made the movie look completely different from what it was. I really don't know why they tried to sell it as this epic LOTR-esque fantasy when that's totally not what the book is like, and anyone who read the book thought, "Well, that's gonna suck," based on the commercials. But it's actually pretty true to the story, and the actors who played the kids were excellent.
• Friday Night Lights, because I love love LOVE the TV series, so I thought the movie would be just as good. Wrong. God, it was dull. And I didn't care about any of the characters the way I care about Coach Taylor and his team. All it did was make me want to watch my season 1 DVDs again.
• Sweeney Todd (told you I was a musical fanatic) - Sondheim and Johnny Depp? How could I resist? The music was good, but gah! Too much blood. Not one I'd want to see again. (Unlike Into the Woods, another Sondheim show, which I've seen an estimated 6,000 times.) It was interesting, though, to watch this right after Dr. Horrible - it's so obvious how much of an influence it had. Also, I did notice that, unlike the stars of Charlie Wilson's War, Johnny Depp completely disappears into every single role he does, which impresses me to no end.
  

Next in the queue: Vantage Point and Walk the Line.

If you have any movie recs, leave 'em in the comments. Just be aware that my queue has about 150 things in it, so it might be a while before I get to it, lol.

Comments

[ellan-vannin.livejournal.com]

My dad worked in Hollywood as a special effects guy for a few years and my mom did some voice-over and theater work when she lived in LA, so you can just imagine that I was "exposed" from a very early age to all sorts of movies! I remember watching with my dad one of J. Depp's very early movies and Dad saying, "Too bad that kid picked a name like 'Johnny'. He's gonna be a great actor one day, but nobody'll take him seriously." Um, yeah. Dad's not a prognosticator, but he knows his actors!

I'm a big fan of independent film and out-sized action blockbusters and a few things in between, but one movie I never get tired of watching is "His Girl Friday", an old b/w classic with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. It held (maybe holds?) the Guinness record for fastest dialog.

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LOL, it does seem a little weird to be calling him Johnny now that he's in his 40s.

I've never seen "His Girl Friday," but I will add it to the list. I'm an Aaron Sorkin fan, so I'm all about fast dialogue. :)