Movie #1 Done!

Remember my New Year's Goal to watch 15 movies I hadn't seen off the AFI Best 100 List? Well, I started in at the bottom and watched this:

And, much to my surprise, I really enjoyed it! I don't see what it's doing on a Top Film list, to be honest, but it was a great, fun, adventure, with a nice number of "jump in your seat" moments (though, to be honest, the one that startled me the most had nothing to do with the shark at all!), and a nicely-paced story. I'd been worrying about how on earth they could be on a boat looking for a shark for the length of an entire movie, but the set-up took a good portion of the film, and I enjoyed it too.

Not a bad start to my 15! Let's hope the next 14 are as enjoyable, though I have my doubts about a few... :-)

Oh, by the way, I found the most wonderful time-wasting movie site. It's called ICheckMovies, and it's basically a checklist of every top movie list ever made, including the AFI, Oscar winners, Roger Ebert and so on, as well as things like "top sequels" and "top horrors". Go. Play.

Another one gone

I just heard that Kathryn Grayson died yesterday, and I'm inexplicably sad. Now before you all go, "Kathryn who?", she was one of the big musical stars at MGM in the 1940s and 50s. She co-starred with people like Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Mario Lanza. She was in Showboat and Kiss Me Kate. I'm not exaggerating when I say she was one of the biggies.

And I didn't even like her.

I never was a big fan of the soprano leads in musicals, like Kathryn and Jane Powell. I found them a bit shrieky and I never liked the songs they chose for them. I'm much more of a jazzy, alto, Judy Garland-type lover (well, duh, if you know me at all). But I'm so SAD about Kathryn's death. You see, with her passing, we come ever closer to losing every last one of the great stars of my favourite film era of all time - the Golden Age of Hollywood. And THAT makes me want to cry.

As soon as I heard the news of Kathryn's passing, I went and dug out the list I made a few years ago of the big classic stars who are still alive. Maybe it's a bit of a depressing list, but I'm morbid that way, and anyway, I LIKE lists. I hadn't looked at it for some months, and I immediately had to delete Jennifer Jones, Jean Simmons and Karl Malden, as well as Kathryn. What saddened me is I didn't even know that Jean Simmons had died until a friend told me last week. I guess it just wasn't big enough news, which makes me even sadder.

I love old Hollywood. I adore it. And yes, I know these stars will live on through their films, and them being alive or dead really makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. But for me, it's like a piece of magic has disappeared off this earth.

Here is the list of those magic-makers who are still with us. Please let me know if I've forgotten someone, because I very likely have! And it would make me feel so much better if the list were longer.  The dates next to them are their dates of birth.

Luise Rainer (1910)
Tony Martin (1912)
Kirk Douglas (1916)
Olivia De Havilland (1916)
Joan Fontaine (1917)
Lena Horne (1917)
Ernest Borgnine (1917)
Celeste Holm (1917)
Maureen O' Hara (1920)
Mickey Rooney (1920)
Jane Russell (1921)
Deanna Durbin (1921)
Esther Williams (1921)
Doris Day (1922)
Eva Marie Saint (1924)
Lauren Bacall (1924)
Tony Curtis (1925)
Gloria DeHaven (1925)
Angela Lansbury (1925)
Farley Granger (1925)
Patricia Neal (1926)
Leslie Nielsen (1926)
Gina Lollobrigida (1927)
Sidney Poitier (1927)
Ann Blyth (1928)
Shirley Temple (1928)
Jane Powell (1929)
Tippi Hedren (1930)
Joanne Woodward (1930)
Rita Moreno (1931)
Debbie Reynolds (1932)
Peter O' Toole (1932)
Elizabeth Taylor (1932)
Omar Sharif (1932)
Kim Novak (1933)
Shirley Jones (1934)
Sophia Loren (1934)
Shirley Maclaine (1934)
Julie Andrews (1935)
Margaret O'Brien (1937)


Please tell me someone else is sad about how short this list is! And I can't even let BFF Ruby Slippers know, because she's on holiday in the bush, with no cellphone reception. :-(

Yours, sadly,
Ruby Slippers

The best Trash the Dress photo EVER.

I just wish it was mine!

It won't let me save it, but do yourself a favour and go see it here. Because, wow.

Dream Home

I think I might have found my dream house (or loft, in this case):

Look at the low-running bookcases! I want!

There is a little garden IN the kitchen! And the space! Divine.

I think this might be the most perfect bathroom ever. Be still my beating heart.

 

See the rest here.

in the hospital

So. Remember my last post, where Mr Ruby Slippers had a stomach bug and I was sitting on the computer in the middle of the night to avoid his possible vomit? Yeah...turns out, not so much a stomach bug. We went off to the doctor in the early morning, after the poor guy was unable to sleep because he was in so much pain. Many X-Rays and ultrasounds and even more $$$ later, it was discovered that he had a blockage in his intestine. And they had to operate. Twelve hours after I wrote that last post, he was being prepped for surgery.

I did NOT see that coming.

I was assured that he was never in any danger and that it was all pretty routine, but it was just so...hard. Hard seeing him lying there, barely able to move, with tubes down his nose and in his arm and up his...well, you know. Hard to drive to the hospital two or three times a day to see him. Hard to be strong for him when I just wanted to cry. And hard to carry on with work when all I wanted to do was curl up in bed and sleep. I never realised just how exhausting it is to have someone in hospital. I don't cope well with stress, I think.

Mr RS was released from hospital eight days after his operation. He hobbled around at home for a while, and he had his stitches out last Thursday. Now, aside from a painful and quite scary-looking scar, he's doing okay. And my mind is getting more or less back to normal. I felt quite hazy for a while there.

As for what caused the blockage, we still don't know. The surgeon said it was something he ate, something mostly fibrous, that hardened into a bezoar (and yes, I also immediately thought "ooh, those have magical properties!"). Unfortunately we didn't get to keep it :-)

Anyway, so that's where I've been for the last two weeks.

I'm going to leave you with a pretty picture I found on desiretoinspire.net:

 

It's a fairytale. LOVE it.

Middle of the night ramblings

So it's 1:30am and I'm here, writing. It's not unusual for me to be up this late - in fact, since I started working from home, I often find myself going to bed at 2am and waking up at 11. I'm sorry, I know you're all gasping in envy, but I seem to need 9 hours. It's what my body wants. If I get less, I just sit there craving a nap the whole afternoon. And I can work whenever I want, so why not sleep half the morning and do my work at night? Sounds reasonable to me!

Anyway, right now Mr RS is is the throes of a stomach bug of some sort - he seems particularly susceptible to them - and is lying groaning on the bed. I was keeping him company, until he suggested that he might need to vomit at some point, at which point I left the room at the speed of light. You might remember my intense fear of vomit. So now I don't know if he has - you know - or not. I much prefer stomach flu that only comes out the correct end. I won't be able to sleep if I think he might throw up. Which kind of ticks me off because I LOVE sleeping. No, I'm not pissed at my poor husband for being sick. I'm pissed at my own stupid phobia for making me unable to sleep in the suggested possible tentative chance of the presence of vomit.

Funnily enough, the cat vomit doesn't bother me. Well, that's because I don't believe Gollum know how to chew, because he always brings up a neat pile of unchewed cat pellets. They just look like damp new ones. So those I can pick up. Also, they smell like cat food, not like vomit. That's a big part of it.

So apparently this is just going to be a rambling, middle of the night post. Sorry. I'm bored. I don't feel like watching tv anymore, and nothing's happening on Twitter or Facebook in the middle of the night. My night. Actually, there is stuff going on on Twitter because it's still evening for the Americans. I'm just not in the mood. Maybe now would be a good time to go and read some of the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo in November. I haven't even looked at it since I finished it.

*Excuse me while I go read a 50000 word novel. I'll be right back.*

Movie Lists

Ha, so I've already broken one of my New Year goals - which was to post on here at LEAST once a week. Oops. Anyway, I thought I'd expand a bit more on some of my goals, and the first one that caught my eye was the one about watching 15 of the 40 AFI Top 100 movies I haven't seen. When I told Mr Ruby Slippers about this, he said it was a pointless endeavour, because "top" lists of anything are usually stupid, and influenced only by what the makers think people should think. Or something. Still, I think it's worth seeing some of them, especially the ones that are considered "important" films. Also, I like to see films just so that I can truthfully be able to say "I thought that was the most incredibly overrated film of all time" (*cough*BarryLyndon*cough) instead of, "Oh...I haven't seen that yet." But then, I am a movie person. :-)

So I thought I'd make a list of the fifteen films I intend to watch this year, and then I can cross them off publically on here as I watch them. That might motivate me a bit. :-)

For interest's sake, here is the full AFI list (the recent 2007 version). Everything I HAVEN'T seen is in red.

1. "Citizen Kane," 1941.
2. "The Godfather," 1972.
3. "Casablanca," 1942.
4. "Raging Bull," 1980.
5. "Singin' in the Rain," 1952.
6. "Gone With the Wind," 1939.
7. "Lawrence of Arabia," 1962.
8. "Schindler's List," 1993.
9. "Vertigo," 1958.
10. "The Wizard of Oz," 1939.
11. "City Lights," 1931.
12. "The Searchers," 1956.
13. "Star Wars," 1977.
14. "Psycho," 1960.
15. "2001: A Space Odyssey," 1968.
16. "Sunset Blvd.", 1950.
17. "The Graduate," 1967.
18. "The General," 1927.
19. "On the Waterfront," 1954.
20. "It's a Wonderful Life," 1946.
21. "Chinatown," 1974.
22. "Some Like It Hot," 1959.
23. "The Grapes of Wrath," 1940.
24. "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," 1982.
25. "To Kill a Mockingbird," 1962.
26. "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," 1939.
27. "High Noon," 1952.
28. "All About Eve," 1950.
29. "Double Indemnity," 1944.
30. "Apocalypse Now," 1979.
31. "The Maltese Falcon," 1941.
32. "The Godfather Part II," 1974.
33. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," 1975.
34. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," 1937.
35. "Annie Hall," 1977.
36. "The Bridge on the River Kwai," 1957.
37. "The Best Years of Our Lives," 1946.
38. "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," 1948.
39. "Dr. Strangelove," 1964.
40. "The Sound of Music," 1965.
41. "King Kong," 1933.
42. "Bonnie and Clyde," 1967.
43. "Midnight Cowboy," 1969.
44. "The Philadelphia Story," 1940.
45. "Shane," 1953.
46. "It Happened One Night," 1934.
47. "A Streetcar Named Desire," 1951.
48. "Rear Window," 1954.
49. "Intolerance," 1916.
50. "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," 2001.
51. "West Side Story," 1961.
52. "Taxi Driver," 1976.
53. "The Deer Hunter," 1978.
54. "M-A-S-H," 1970.
55. "North by Northwest," 1959.
56. "Jaws," 1975.
57. "Rocky," 1976.
58. "The Gold Rush," 1925.
59. "Nashville," 1975.
60. "Duck Soup," 1933.
61. "Sullivan's Travels," 1941.
62. "American Graffiti," 1973.
63. "Cabaret," 1972.
64. "Network," 1976.
65. "The African Queen," 1951.
66. "Raiders of the Lost Ark," 1981.
67. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", 1966.
68. "Unforgiven," 1992.
69. "Tootsie," 1982.
70. "A Clockwork Orange," 1971.
71. "Saving Private Ryan," 1998.
72. "The Shawshank Redemption," 1994.
73. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," 1969.
74. "The Silence of the Lambs," 1991.
75. "In the Heat of the Night," 1967.
76. "Forrest Gump," 1994.
77. "All the President's Men," 1976.
78. "Modern Times," 1936.
79. "The Wild Bunch," 1969.
80. "The Apartment, 1960.
81. "Spartacus," 1960.
82. "Sunrise," 1927.
83. "Titanic," 1997.
84. "Easy Rider," 1969.
85. "A Night at the Opera," 1935.
86. "Platoon," 1986.
87. "12 Angry Men," 1957.
88. "Bringing Up Baby," 1938.
89. "The Sixth Sense," 1999.
90. "Swing Time," 1936.
91. "Sophie's Choice," 1982.
92. "Goodfellas," 1990.
93. "The French Connection," 1971.
94. "Pulp Fiction," 1994.
95. "The Last Picture Show," 1971.
96. "Do the Right Thing," 1989.
97. "Blade Runner," 1982.
98. "Yankee Doodle Dandy," 1942.
99. "Toy Story," 1995.
100. "Ben-Hur," 1959.


There are actually quite a few on there that I really WANT to see, and I've just never got around to it. Why on earth haven't I seen Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, for goodness' sakes? Luckily I have a couple of movie-crazy friends, and I'm pretty sure they can hook me up with the ones I want to see, which are:

1) On The Waterfront (#19)  ~ it doesn't sound that interesting, and Marlon Brando always annoys the heck out of me, but it won a bunch of Oscars, including best picture, which means I can cross it off THAT list too. And it's supposed to be good. I might enjoy it.

2) Chinatown (#21) ~ I hear it's good, and it has Jack Nicholson in it, which usually takes a movie up a notch. Unfortunately it's directed by Roman Polanski, and I'm usually not a fan of his films. Still, I'll give it a go. The plot sounds good.

3) Duck Soup (#60) ~ I actually really want to see this one. I love the Marx Borthers. I just haven't been able to get hold of a copy.

4) Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid (#73) ~ Young, gorgeous Paul Newman and Robert Redford. In an adventure getaway caper. I'm there. And yes, I do already know how it ends.

5) The French Connection (#93) ~ A classic I keep seeing clips from everywhere. It looks like a good plot, so why not?

6) A Streetcar named Desire (#47) ~ I really have to watch this. It's just that I did the play at university, plus a bunch of other Tennessee Williams plays, and I really, really dislike his work. But bloody hell, if I sat through 'Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf' I can get through this.

7) The Bridge on the River Kwai (# 36)  ~ I've been meaning to watch this for ages. Secret? Ssshh. I already have a copy. I'm such a procrastinator.

8) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (#38) ~ Another one of those "it's famous, it looks good enough, it has quotable lines, why haven't I seen it?" movies.

9) Modern Times (#78) ~ I can watch Chaplin. In small doses, maybe, but he does have a quality about him. I enjoyed The Gold Rush, so I'm keen to see how this one turns out.

10) Bonnie and Clyde (#42) ~ Kind of middle of the road for me, but I reckon I'll enjoy it once it's there.

11) M*A*S*H (#54) ~ I'm starting to push it here as thing appeal to me less. It looks ok, though. And it can't be too bad if they made a soin-off TV show (that was how it went, right?)

12) Taxi Driver (#52) ~ I should TOTALLY have seen this. It just doesn't appeal to me. But I really should, and will!

13) City Lights (#11) ~ Ok, I can do two Chaplins.

14) Lawrence of Arabia (#7) ~ Sigh. It's high on the list, and it's famous....and stuff. I'll try.

15) Jaws (#56) ~ Hopefully this will now be too naff to scare me, which is why I've avoided it all my life. And it's famous, I should have seen it.


So...That's that. If I can make it through these 15 movies I'll probably never see any of the others, most of which I'm avoiding because I don't like the subject matter/plot (Raging Bull, Rocky, Do the Right Thing, Spartacus, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, Apocalypse Now, Nashville...) But hey, you never know.

In case you're interested, my picks for "WTF is this movie doing on any kind of Top List??" (that I've seen) are: The Godfather, The Last Picture Show, The Maltese Falcon, Snow White (being groundbreaking doesn't mean you're brilliant, IMO - in that case include Star Wars and Toy Story as well), Network, Raiders of the Lost Ark (it's fun, but it's Indiana Jones, for goodness' sakes!), and Blade Runner.

My picks for "hell to the YES for including this!" are: Singin' in the Rain, The Shawshank Redemption, Sunset Blvd, Bringing Up Baby, Some Like it Hot, It Happened One Night, All About Eve, The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, Forrest Gump and The Sixth Sense. And perhaps Swing Time, though I have to say that Top Hat would have been a better choice if they wanted a Fred & Ginger movie.

Did I mention I'm a film nut? Does anyone else make lists of movies to watch, or lists of movies they've seen?