Something Awful begins this Friday with The Top Ten Top Ten Lists. [thanks, W]
Movies. Back in January, I listed my top 2 movies I've seen in a theater in the past year. I have since seen 2 more movies, and liked them (Kill Bill Vol. 2 and Hellboy), so what better time to list my current Top 10 Favorite Movies. These are by no means the best movies of all time, just 10 that I happen to really like.
- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980, George Lucas) I will always have a soft spot for this movie because my boyfriend and I went to see it on our first date. But it's also the best of the Star Wars movies.
- High Fidelity (2000, Stephen Frears) The ultimate music geek movie (or movie for girls who liked John Cusack and grew up to marry music geeks--see #4).
- Coffy (1973, Jack Hill) Pam Grier! Kicks butt! I was torn between this and Foxy Brown. Foxy Brown has the line, "Well I got a black belt in barstools!" but I think Coffy is a little less sadistic.
- Iron Monkey (1993, Yuen Woo-ping) This is the kung fu movie I show to people who don't think they like kung fu movies. It's a heart-warming story, the action is great, Miss Orchid is a strong female character, and it doesn't have that making-love-in-the-desert interlude that bogs down Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
- My Neighbor Totoro (1988, Hayao Miyazaki) This narrowly beat out Spirited Away on my list, mainly because Totoro is a giant cuddly owl/bear creature, and because the little girl Mei is completely and utterly insane.
- Shaolin Soccer (2001, Stephen Chow) Learn why kung fu is great and how it can help you parallel park and defeat Team Evil in soccer tournaments! Looks like Miramax might finally let US audiences see this movie, too.
- Say Anything (1989, Cameron Crowe) "I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen." All right, this is an 80's teen movie, but if you were a teenage girl in the 80's, I dare you to deny falling for John Cusack, standing outside the girl's window holding a boom box playing "In Your Eyes".
- Peking Opera Blues (1986, Tsui Hark) Quite possibly one of the best movies of all time, I think it's got a little something for everyone.
- Harold and Maude (1971, Hal Ashby) Perhaps the greatest love story ever told. Also a great black comedy. The first movie I ever bought.
- The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001, Takashi Miike) It's singing. It's dancing. It's claymation. It's like The Sound of Music, only with more dead bodies. It's...Miike? Yes! This is a remake of the Korean movie The Quiet Family, which is also good.
4-29-04: of capitalism and librarians
Usually I try to save seemingly random blog entries for Fridays, but my personal goal for this week is to have a Top [insert number here] List of [insert something here] on Friday. I haven't had a list in a long time.
Goodbye Communism, Hello Capitalism. Businessman buys rights to East German emblem. [via commons-blog]
Here's your chance to shape that librarian image we all can't stop talking about. Someone is looking for librarians-turned-filmmakers. I was reading a bio of Sergio Corbucci last night (on the Django DVD) and it says he received a degree in economics and then took an abrupt turn into a film career. If anyone figures out how to make an abrupt turn from being a librarian into making kick-ass movies, please let me know.
And speaking of librarian images... There are many days when I wish I had a "I'm a librarian, bitch!" t-shirt. Actually, I think I would spend oodles of money at CafePress if everything weren't white. 'Tho I see the Lipstick Librarian has a pink t-shirt and a yellow messenger bag, which is a start.
I've been meaning to create a BitPass account and read Scott McCloud's 25-cent comic, The Right Number, for a while now, and I finally got around to it. It was well worth the $.25 -- and, well, if you follow Cory Doctorow's thinking on the subject, it was even worth $3.00 if I don't find anything else worthwhile to spend my prepaid BitPass card on. (But I'm sure I will at least spend another $.25 to read part 2 of TRN.) Cory isn't the only one who is skeptical about micropayments, but I was happy with my first transaction and would do it again. Of course, I'm no economist, but I do think it has to be easy for people to make small, fast payments electronically for e-commerce to really take over. In fact, I'm working on a story along these lines...but that's all I'll say about that for now.
The only real problem I have with this is a problem Cory brings up also -- you don't actually get to keep anything. You're just leasing it. Whether you can ever access it again is completely out of your control. And that brings up a whole lot of other issues -- for example, content providers can very easily just make content disappear. Goodbye, historical record. Goodbye, collecting. This really sucks for people like me who have less than perfect memories. And people who like to collect stuff.
I was just commenting to a friend the other day that part of the fun of Kill Bill comes not from watching the movie itself, but from discovering all the connections to other movies. Then I discovered The Quentin Tarantino Archives' Guide to Movies that Inspired Kill Bill (via Boing Boing). It's a pretty hefty list, and it's not even exhaustive. Where, for instance, is Coffy, the 1973 Blaxploitation revenge flick starring Pam Grier, which Uma Thurman mentions as an influence on the development of The Bride's character? But nit-picking takes all the fun out of it. If it were just about finding all the references, only movie geeks would enjoy it, and I'm by no means a movie geek! My personal movie collection consists almost entirely of anime and Blaxploitation, plus Say Anything and Harold and Maude.
It's a shame that so many of these movies are only available in truly craptacular versions or not at all...
I'm not endorsing Jesse Ventura for anything; I don't know if I would vote for him if he did run for President. But I've heard him speak and seen him wrestle, and I've got a heck of a lot of respect for him. He's not afraid to speak his mind, he sticks to his principles, and yet he was still elected governor of Minnesota and invited to Harvard as a visiting professor. The L.A. Times reports he is considering a bid for President in 2008. (Registration required, but I'll post a link that doesn't require you to surrender personal information if I can find one.)
4-14-04: Grab the nearest book
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
"A homicide detective endures." Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon
Usually the nearest book is Learning the vi Editor, but I just happened this morning to remember that I had several bags of paperbacks in a drawer in my office that I put there when I was moving to a new apartment back in August. I grabbed Homicide and put it in my bag for reading on the bus. [via Tangognat]
4-9-04: it's Australian for RAWK!
Kingblind takes us down under with OZ Rock 101. I've found music from Australia and New Zealand to be very interesting--perhaps the continent's isolation does have something to do with it. Even the more mainstream acts. In the US, I just can't imagine someone like Kylie Minogue singing duets with someone like Nick Cave--but in Australia, it happens! (Murder Ballads by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) All Music Guide has decent introductions to both Aussie Rock and New Zealand Rock.
4-6-04: PowerPoint Pledge of Allegiance
Two great tastes that go great together! Or something. The Pledge of Allegiance: The PowerPoint version. [via The Shifted Librarian]
Patrick Neighly explains why he's working in comics right now:
There's nothing stopping you from putting a book together, and the punk DIY aesthetic in the industry is really appealing. My self-published books look very professional because I'm obsessed with that sort of thing, but I really admire the fact that doing the legwork oneself is worn as a badge in comics. In the proper book world you'd be shut out from the start. (Ninth Art)
If you're feeling creative, but not quite up to producing a comic book, why not design your own librarian? (PDF) [via librarian.net]
All content on this website, unless otherwise noted, was created by Tara Murray and is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
