30 Day Movie Challenge - Day 28

So close. I might have to go back and finish that long-abandoned music meme if I actually manage to finish this off by Thursday...

Day 28 - Movie with the best soundtrack

If I hadn't used it for a previous entry, I might have put The Matrix soundtrack up for this entry. However, though I did immediately request a copy of that soundtrack from my sister (who had the edited for content version, bleh-yech), the only soundtrack I've ever bought immediately after walking out of the movie was the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack.

Damn, but that Violent Femmes song was addictive. "Blister in the Sun" plays over the ending credits and it's absolutely fucking irresistible. I walked out of the theater and bought an overpriced CD from Barnes and Noble because I wasn't going to be able to get home without it. My mom came to pick us up (omg, I was une bebe, I needed rides home when this came out!!) and I unwrapped the disc and popped it into what was, at the time, still a novelty to me: the CD player in the car. "Blister in the Sun" kicked off the record, and we were off, never to look back.

Absolutely every song on this album is fun, though I cannot separate them from the scenes in the movie over which they played. Particularly hard to divorce from the scene in which it's featured? "Mirror in the Bathroom" by The English Beat, which features the line "Mirror in the bathroom, recompense/ for all my crimes of self defense" while John Cusack stabs another hitman in the neck with a pen. I mean, that is just never not going to be what I think of when I hear that song

I think is the best of all possible worlds with a movie soundtrack--kicky fun tracks that are well used within the movie. Special kudos to the excellent placement of both "I Can See Clearly Now" and "Live and Let Die," movie! I still love every track off of this, so it's definitely stood the test of time. And, since a lot of these songs were purposefully chosen to be from ten years or more before the setting of the movie (1996), the songs themselves have already done at least that much or more. Full soundtrack listing is here at Amazon, if you're interested. Well worth a purchase. The second volume isn't as good, but it's still extremely listenable.

Other runners-up I considered: The Wedding Singer, Forrest Gump, The Crow. All of those are excellent soundtracks, ranging from golden oldies to early-nineties rock, which is pretty much the last time I stopped thinking music was actually good. (Still like post-1990s music, but good? Eh.)

Previous entries:
Day 01
Day 02
Day 03 - 06
Day 07
Day 08
Day 09
Day 10
Day 11-13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17-19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23-26
Day 27

Suuuuure I can juggle two memes at once...

Let's see, how long ago did I leave off with this one? Only, um, five months or so? That's not too bad. Where was I?


Day 01 - A favorite song
Day 02 - A song that makes you happy
Day 03 - A song that makes you sad
Day 04 - A song that reminds you of someone
Day 05 - A song that reminds you of somewhere
Day 06 - A song that reminds you of a certain event
Day 07 - A song that you can dance to
Day 08 - A song that makes you fall asleep
Day 09 - A song from your favorite band
Day 10 - A song no one would expect you to love

But...it's country. I swear, I can put up with rap a lot better than I can country. Mostly, I think it's the unnecessary twanging of country. This song is a particularly egregious example of that exact thing that drives me up the wall, but I quite adore it. Perhaps it's the grrrrl power of it? I don't know. I think I got this free from iTunes' weekly download, and it came up on one or another of my regular I'm-too-lazy-to-make-a-goddamned-playlist runs through my iPod's contents on shuffle. And I didn't skip it instantly upon that first "AAAAHVE." (It's "I've," for Chrissakes, country music!) So perhaps this song doesn't surprise some of you all, but it sure as hell surprised me.

Also surprising: I like just about every song off the Burlesque soundtrack. That's perhaps not the most surprising thing, since I have been known to like a Christina Aguilera song here or there. The Surprise: I kinda love Xtina's utterly unnecessarily sampling of Marilyn Manson's "Beautiful People" in her song of the same title. It's kicky and a little silly, but I never loved the original so much that I'm averse to her playing with it. Give it a listen. If nothing else, it's just a little jam that you will probably forget one minute after it's over. Maybe you'll actually like it. If you can overlook how every song off of Burlesque's soundtrack mentions "Burlesque," there are actually quite a few equally fun songs on that whole soundtrack.

I've seen the future. It's not pretty.

( Trigger Warning. )

I'm so appalled. Just when you thought anti-choicers couldn't sink any lower. I also vow never to let the term "pro-life" pass anyone's lips in front of me without correcting them. Because if this doesn't prove--as the restrictions and bullshit hoops have before it--that anti-choicers haven't got one iota of concern for life, nothing will. And I will bring it up. Constantly. To remind anti-choicers. You stand on the side of these people.

Slow day

I should be studying for my test tomorrow what with all this free time at work. Instead, I read things. In less trigger-warning-ly dangerous news than my last post, there's been another study showing the ineffectiveness of calorie counts at restaurants. It was already suggested by a previous study that the posted calorie counts don't change adult eating habits, and now they've shown it doesn't change children's eating habits either. Hardly surprising. You'd need to start educating kids younger and more thoroughly about calorie counts before you could expect them to apply knowledge to facts and make a dietary change. Odds are also good that kids whose parents don't care about calories won't have any chance to learn by example and abstain from a 1000-calorie kids meal. (Especially not if there are toys they want in them.)

I still am a tad baffled by this result. I find that the calorie counts work on me quite well. Alas, in New York, I tend not to frequent places that would have a chain large enough to meet the minimum that requires posting. So I'm sure I'm eating a shit-ton more calories than I need when I order Indian food or pick up a chicken gyro at the carts here. At least I've managed to cut back on quantity such that I'm only eating half the Indian I order and the last time I tried to get a whole gyro platter, I didn't eat for the better part of eighteen hours afterwards. But, yeah, if I go into a McDonald's ::shudder:: I will probably get the smaller fry because, hey 200 less calories and I still get enough fries. I've even switched over my meal of choice from one chicken type to another at Wendy's because of that.

I suppose I could see how someone looking at the 600+ calories that a medium french fries would set you back would then go, "What the hell, it's only 200 more for a large." I happen not to work that way. Point of fact, though I'm lazier than ever about cooking, (I swear I will work on that), I've actually been turned off entirely by fast food. Still love their french fries on occasion, but I've finally hit that part of adulthood I never thought I'd reach where I look at my options--McDonald's or starving--and, in all seriousness, opt for starving. If you'd have told me that as a chicken nugget fiend of a kid, I might have hit you.

Your business plan: please to be explaining?

If Netflix has a bunch of these on streaming already, how can having these titles on streaming make Hulu Plus worth $8/month?

And not to join in with the wouldn't-see-a-movie-with-subtitles-if-it-were-a-porno crowd, but those titles hardly appeal. Also, if, indeed, Robocop is on this Criterion collection, why do you need to stream it? You should own it already, like any civilized person of taste who was ever exposed to 1980s ultraviolent movies. Du-uh.

I'm not really knocking Hulu. Their free service does all right by me. I'm still so many, many episodes behind things, though, that I haven't made use of them much lately. (The closer I get to grad school application deadline time, the further behind I'll get, I should imagine.) I just don't see the advantage to paying them money to still be bombarded with ads. Much as I like Netflix, I'm beginning to lose patience with their rental-only copies that skip all the special features but leave on all the ads that play--unskippable most of the time--at the start of the DVD. I fail to see why I should add Hulu Plus, with its ads and its fee, to that aggravation.

Music meme-ing!

Day 01 - A favorite song
Day 02 - A song that makes you happy
Day 03 - A song that makes you sad
Day 04 - A song that reminds you of someone
Day 05 - A song that reminds you of somewhere
Day 06 - A song that reminds you of a certain event
Day 07 - A song that you can dance to
Day 08 - A song that makes you fall asleep
Day 09 - A song from your favorite band
Day 10 - A song no one would expect you to love
Day 11 - A song that describes you

Aside from the few grandiose statements in this song--about how great Agnetha's voice is--I find that it describes me pretty well, specifically where music is concerned. This being a music meme and all, I thought that was appropriate. I'm infinitely grateful to groups like ABBA who, thanks to my Dad putting them on near-constant rotation when I was young, instilled in me a real love of music. Not one lick of idea how to make music, mind you. (I remain unconvinced by the existence of "meter," much to the continual consternation of my more theory-strong musical friends.) Just a real sense of joy in music. It makes me happy.

Singing, moreover, gives me a lot of joy. Some of my fondest memories are of driving with friends and singing--feiran  and viridian especially, seeing as both love to sing and do so better than I. (I'm louder, not better!) Or with my family, like when we drove back from Japanese steakhouse for dinner celebrating my sister's graduation and we ALL busted out with ABBA, complete with the dance moves. (My mom was laughing so hard, she couldn't breathe.) I'm sick right now and can't hardly talk without getting a tickle in my throat, much less sing. And even if I could get through a single line without coughing, it would sound horrible. This is a major bummer.

30 Day Movie Challenge - Day 29

So close...sooooo close. Man, I should be studying. I just can't memorize this stuff any harder. It's all there. I know every flash card, by heart at this point. I've re-read my notes and the textbook more times than can possibly be necessary. I need to stop and not psych myself out, but I'm worried that the test will end being much harder than I'm thinking it could be, given the material.

Must meme to distract myself.

Day 29 - A movie that changed your opinion about something

I have carried a grudge against the Coen Brothers since No Country for Old Men won the goddamned Oscar for Best Picture. What a waste of a decent thriller that movie was. Don't mistake me--the first hour, hour-and-a-half of No Country was taut, exciting, and enjoyably bizarre.

The movie just should have ended forty minutes earlier than it did when [SPOILER]. If you've seen the movie, you know exactly what I mean. How it continued on after that happened is still something confusing for me. There's no [SPOILER]! How can you have more movie--fully a third or more of a movie!--without [SPOILER]? It just rambled on and on. I think I resented it because the build-up had, until that point, been absolutely first rate. Then [SPOILER] happened, and it went on, rambling and incoherent and plain stupid. It was even harder to take when everyone seemed to think it was genius filmmaking. Hipsters. Save me from hipsters.

So when True Grit started to get all this noise, I half wanted to hate it on principle. Surely, they'd fuck something up with this one, too. At the same time, everyone made it sound amazing, and the idea that this wasn't just going to be a sausage fest (I think there was one female character with lines in No Country) was appealing.

I...loved it. The end was a little abrupt and unnecessary in some ways, but this time the disappointment was limited to about five minutes (instead of forty), so I could ignore that. The performances were first rate, the story well assembled, and the characters all well worth spending time with, the precocious protagonist most of all. It was what I think a great western should be, with pathos, the conflict between the open and the closed west. The best tension to be found in westerns is in the contrast between those who live the life of the open lands, stretching out before them, unfettered with petty things like farmsteads or laws carving them up, and those who wish to bring civilization to that lawless space.

And there is no question but the civilizing force will win, which is why it's so funny to put the strength of that force, of the inevitability of time marching ever onward, into the tiny but determined body of Mattie Ross. It makes sense--the children are the future and all that--but she's an old maid at 14, a crusader beyond her years. Her forthrightness is a perfect counterpoint to the dissolution of age in the form of Rooster Cogburn. It's usually the other way around, with the old complaining about the wayward youth. I loved the juxtaposition. That, and what Matt Damon's character was about. (Humor, I think. He had to have just been there for comic relief.)

So, yeah, this changed my opinion about Coen Brothers movies. They don't all suck.

Previous days:
Day 01
Day 02
Day 03 - 06
Day 07
Day 08
Day 09
Day 10
Day 11-13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17-19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23-26
Day 27
Day 28