IT’S SUMMER VACATION!
That means that all the movies I have on loan from the library and my collection of personal favorites can come out from under the TV cabinet!
That’s right, I literally hid them so I wouldn’t be distracted by them while studying.
Wow, Random Factoid #300. Is this Sparta?
As I struggled to find something momentous for this milestone factoid, I kept coming back to the movie “300” and how it has become particularly iconic with people my age.
But alas, I was relatively unriveted. I’m like that; I usually don’t click in with a lot of the movies that guys my age love. And that’s about all I can come up with in finals mode. Sorry; I’ll be in full force for 3 months starting tomorrow!
All of a sudden, I’m obsessed with the music from “Chicago” again.
I admitted back in Random Factoid #240 that I became hooked on the music back in 2002 after hearing a few bars on TV. But now it’s like 2002 all over again. Every time a song comes up on shuffle, I stay on the track and listen. Now, I have the movie on hold at the library and the music is coming close to “Top 25 Most Played” numbers on my computer and iPod.
Favorite song of the “First ‘Chicago’ Revival” is Queen Latifah’s “When You’re Good To Mama.” Boy, she can sing that song.
I’ve got a lot of soundtracks in my iTunes library, and I won’t try to hide it. What I haven’t revealed yet is that I buy a whole lot of songs because I hear them in the trailer of a movie. I’ll hear a tune and Google it to find out what the song is called. Click, click, it’s in my library.
Here are some of the songs that are now proudly stored in Marshall’s iTunes library thanks to movie trailers.
“Help Yourself” by Sad Brad Smith, trailer for “Up in the Air”
“You’ve Got Me Wrapped Around Your Little Finger” by Beth Rowley, trailer for “An Education”
“Photograph” by Ringo Starr, trailer for “Funny People”
“The Beginning is the End is the Beginning” by Smashing Pumpkins, trailer for “Watchmen”
“Wild is the Wind” by Nina Simone, trailer for “Revolutionary Road”
“Rock Me Sexy Jesus” by The Ralph Sall Experience, trailer for “Hamlet 2”
“Paper Planes” by M.I.A., trailer for “Pineapple Express”
“Iron Man” by Black Sabbath, trailer for “Iron Man”
“Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)” by Jay-Z, trailer for “American Gangster”
And probably countless others than I can’t remember.
It’s funny what a little commercialism can do to you.
I got the soundtrack for “An Education” a few months ago, and I absolutely love it. However, one of the songs I always skipped was the theme to “A Summer Place” by Percy Faith. It’s a nice sounding song, I was just never in much of a mood to listen to it.
However, now the song is lovely background music to a Toyota commercial:
And I suddenly really like the song. I’ve stopped and listened to it when it has come on shuffle in my car. Amazing, right? Just a little television commercial…
I guess I can stop with these veiled references to the movie screening I went to on Saturday morning. It was for “Shrek Forever After,” if you hadn’t already figured that out.
Before the screening, I remembered something lying in the bottom of the costume chest at my house. There were Shrek ears (similar to the ones in the picture) that can be worn like a headband. They are incredibly festive, and I have whipped them out every once in a while since 2001. Yes, I have kept these ears since the release of the first “Shrek” movie.
I wore them to the screening, and no one noticed. I was very disappointed.
(To be fair, they gave out some new pairs as prizes. So I can only hope that was one of the main reasons.)
Yesterday, in my history class, we played a game based on guessing themes from movies. The tunes ranged all the way from “Gone with the Wind” to “Avatar.”
My group got 29/40 (73%) but that still wasn’t enough to be top dog in my section (31/40) or in all the classes (34/40).
Here are some of the themes that slipped us up – AKA I didn’t know them:
“Ben Hur”
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s”
“The Bridge on the River Kwai”
“Out of Africa”
Shamefully, I missed the themes of four movies I had seen – “Batman,” “Forrest Gump,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” and “The Terminator.”
This factoid inspired by Ross v Ross’ post (and new series) “RvReprieve.” The writers consider granting unfairly trashed movies a second chance. They started with “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” a movie which star Shia LaBeouf has publicly condemned.
However, I didn’t exactly read the post well enough before I started writing the factoid. I assumed they were just talking about movies that they had decided to give a second chance.
Wrong.
But nevertheless, I still want to make my factoid today about giving movies a second chance. Often times, when I don’t feel the love that others feel for a certain movie, I’ll give it a second watch. Sometimes I still hate it. But others, I wind up finding something that I hadn’t discovered before.
Such was the case when I rewatched “Michael Clayton,” a 2007 Best Picture nominee. I’ll save the specifics for a later post, but know that I think it’s never a bad idea to give movies a second watch.
A weird “out-of-body”-esque experience happened at the screening I attended on Saturday morning. When I entered the theater, all the lights were on. I could see the exact color that the walls were painted. Really, I could see everything. It felt weird to be so … illuminated.
Anyone else had the same experience? It could just be me, but I think it’s strange. It’s like seeing a turtle without its shell.
I went to a free screening yesterday morning at 9:30 A.M. Yes, that early. I was in line by 8:15, thank you for asking.
But that’s not what this factoid is about. It is about the crazy concession purchases that were happening at 9:00 in the morning. I saw people with hot dogs, nachos, and all sorts of lunch foods.
I was shocked! People eat breakfast at 9:00 and here these people have moved on to lunch. My general rule is not to have popcorn until after lunch. Drinks are always OK; pretzels don’t really have a rule of thumb. Buncha Crunch, my sweet snack, always wait until after lunch.
Anyone else have any concession “rules” or timeframes?
Watched “Requiem for a Dream” last night – wow. Not going out and doing any drugs anytime soon. Talk about a movie that tests your ability to stomach a movie.
I pride myself on being a fairly tolerant moviegoer. I can sit through most movies that most people can’t stomach. Most horror movies don’t disturb me, mainly because they are too far-fetched to have any impact. I can barely watch movies like “Requiem for a Dream” or “Precious” because I can’t fall back on thinking that it’s not real. The fact is, people do face drug addictions or abuse.
However, there are some movies that I won’t subject myself to watching. Mainly, “Antichrist.”
Curse you “Fight Club.”
You were a great movie, but you have forever changed the way I watch movies in the theater. Thanks to your sequence on the “cigarette burns” that projectionists put on film to remind them to change the reels at strategic amounts of time, I can never watch a movie without using them to judge how much time has gone by.
Which also means I can judge about how much time is left. And I hate being conscious of time while watching a movie, although I often force myself into being in such a state.
“Funny People” ruined “The Great Gatsby” for me.
We’ve been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless novel that criticizes all things wealthy and eastern in my English class these past few weeks. When we started reading, I happened to recall a friend’s conversation I overheard a few weeks after the movie’s release talking about a few very striking parallels. The only part of the discussion I specifically remembered was that they thought it was clever that Judd Apatow named a character in the movie Daisy after the love interest in Fitzgerald’s book.
So, while reading “The Great Gatsby,” I kept thinking in my mind that this book would be like “Funny People” just set eight decades earlier. While there are a great deal of similarities between the two, they exist mainly in the first part of the novel. The second half takes its own course.
But since this conversation was in my mind, I had a sort of preconceived notion that it would end like “Funny People” ended. A part of my mind had trouble wrapping around the ending of “Gatsby” because of that.
I guess thanks to Fitzgerald for writing a novel so great that Judd Apatow would want to incorporate it into one of his movies. But I can’t really blame Apatow for taking his own creative license with the movie.
Frank Mengarelli, the “Pompous Film Snob“, tagged me in one of these seemingly endless memes. This one is about the Criterion Collection DVDs. The point of the thread is to find out who has the most of these very special DVDs.
How many do I have? One.
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
To be honest, I don’t buy many DVDs nowadays. And the Criterion Collection focuses on older movies, which I’m more prone to rent.
I saw “Casablanca” for the first time (yes, I know that’s shocking) a few weeks ago and ogled at how many quotable lines there are. I knew, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and “at least we’ll always have Paris.” But I had no idea it was the origin of “this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” or “round up the usual suspects.” Not to mention that the movie is the reason for Warner Bros. theme song on their logo and the inspiration for the title “Play It Again, Sam.” (Fun fact: no one ever says the words “play it again, Sam” in the movie. It’s always a variation.)
I thought about it, and movies are quoted so often that we say certain lines enough to forget that they came from a movie at all. A more modern example is “Mean Girls” for me. I had been rattling off “she doesn’t even go here!” and “you go, Glen Coco!” for months on end – and I had seen the movie!
I think it’s a testament to the writers if their movie has the staying power to be quoted. I don’t know if we’ll be quoting “Mean Girls” in 70 years, but surely some phrases are going to enter our average conversational phrase book. I wouldn’t count out “why so serious?” from “The Dark Knight” for one of them.
Marshall and the Movies 
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