Sunday, June 10, 2012

i give this two stars.

i feel like i'm having some sort of existential crisis.

all day long. ever since i got up. i've been thinking, what am i going to blog about today?


it's sunday. not much happens on sundays. last sunday was awesome because it was my birthday. i can always blog about my birthday like the self-centered person i undoubtedly am.

so then i was thinking, well i can just blog about my day. that'll be fun.

what i did today.

1. got up at jessica's at eight.
2. drove back to my house.
3. went back to sleep.
4. ate some food.
5. went to a grad party. ran into my second cousin once removed. because that happens all the time.
6. went swimming with alison.
7. went to a work meeting.
8. ate strawberry shortcake at my grandma's.
9. thought about blogging all day with this voice in my head going, you have to have this done by midnight!


i just checked my "what to blog about" folder from last summer.

maybe i've like, totally changed and become a new person? but just about nothing on that list applies to my life right now.

so i guess i'm going to kind of just spout stuff about how much i really love roger ebert.

if you don't know who roger ebert is, i will cry. when i was at ACCL and we had dinner at carol's, we walked to her house and i was telling my friend that i had a dream that i had coffee with roger ebert and it made me soooo happy, and my friend says, "who's roger ebert?"

oh, you know, only the most famous film critic in the country, if not the entire world.


i follow him on twitter, obviously. his tweets make me feel intelligent. plus i get his movie reviews early.

i also super admire his strength and courage; cancer left him without a voice (or a chin) and he's in his seventies or something, and every week, without fail, he publishes witty and fantastically on-the-spot reviews of movies.

i generally won't see a movie unless i read roger ebert's review of it. even if i do see it without his review, i will read it within the next week and compare.

so i guess this started when i realized that my list of movies that i want to see before 2013 was getting really long and i needed to write it down.

so i did.

here it is.


  1. Moonrise Kingdom.
  2. The Amazing Spider Man.
  3. The Dark Knight Rises.
  4. The Brothers Bloom.
  5. Blindness.
  6. The Avengers. Again. Because it rocked.
  7. Odd Thomas.
  8. Brave.
  9. The Darjeeling Limited.
  10. The Royal Tenenbaums. Because I fell asleep the first time.
  11. Pulp Fiction.
  12. Thor. Maybe. Probably not.
  13. Maybe Captain America. Since we’re on the subject of Thor.
  14. The Hobbit.
  15. The Descendants.
  16. Tree of Life.
seriously. the avengers. MUST. SEE. AGAIN.

right. some of these movies come out later. odd thomas happens to be my favorite book, and it comes out as a movie in october.

i am scared to death that they will ruin it. so scared. until your favorite book becomes a movie, you do not know cinematic terror.

so anyway. i'm going through this mark ruffalo phase that i mentioned earlier. this originally stemmed from me watching "the kids are all right" (which is fantastic. go see it. but not with your parents. it's awkward.) and he was the donor dad. and then suddenly the avengers is coming out and he's in that movie.

and then suddenly he's in like, five movies that i want to see. it's about this time i start thinking that he's hot. for an older dude.

so he's in the brothers bloom. and he's in blindness playing the doctor.

so i decide, well i've made this list, might as well read roger ebert's reviews of these movies. if i tweet about it, maybe he'll tweet me back. not likely. i've been trying for a while. i gave up on thomas gibson. BUT I GOT HEATHER HEADLEY.

anyway.

i start with the brothers bloom. two and a half stars, which is between "wait for the DVD" and "worth the matinee price." he likes the premise of the movie, but it gets a little too meandering and eventually a bit too confusing. 

my concensus: still going to watch it.

at the end, he makes a reference to the life aquatic.

me: OMG THE LIFE AQUATIC I LOVE THAT MOVIE I WANT TO MARRY WES ANDERSON THE JAGUAR SHARK YAY THIS IS SO GREAT.

(i talk like this in real life when i get excited. it's really fun for my relatives.)

so i read his review on that.

having seen the life aquatic on multiple occasions and loving it terrifically, i was pretty happy with his review. he pinpointed the loneliness of steve, the private humor of eleanor, and the bristliness of cate blanchett, and explained the awkward love triangle better than i could've. he described it as "whimsical". which it is. it's wes anderson.

so after that, i moved onto blindness. because i've been slogging though the book so i can watch this movie.

first line of the review.

"Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen."

this did not bode well.

i read on.

he absolutely hated it.

it was one of the most brutal reviews i've ever read, and he's had some pretty brutal reviews. he said that he left the theatre with his eyes and ears "feeling assaulted" and he was so unhappy that he'd had to sit through the entire movie, which is over two hours.

one and a half stars. i think he was being generous.

i wondered if he'd read the book. if he hasn't, he probably wouldn't like it.

hell, i'm not sure if i like it. 

even though i put a looooot of stock into what roger ebert says (it used to be that if he didn't like it, i wouldn't see it), i still think i'm going to watch blindness. no matter how terrible it is, i am slogging through the book so i can watch it, and i will be damned if i don't get to.

now this is my remaining question: when i post this link to twitter, do i tag roger ebert in the tweet?

the last time i did that with a band, they read my blog. it was so fantastic.

if roger ebert reads this, i think i will die of happiness. i admire that man so much. 

i'm at the point in the writing of this post that i realized that i just wrote it all about my newcoming obsession with mark ruffalo, my existing obsession with roger ebert, and movies.

i don't see movies all that often. honestly. it was a big deal that i saw the avengers. an even bigger deal that i saw the hunger games, and that was only because i read the book.

after i wrote that post about the hunger games, somebody said, "what do you think about the cinematography?"

i don't know anything about cinematography, honey. i don't know anything about movies.

which is why i have roger ebert.

yep, i think i'm going to tweet him. we'll see how that goes.

2 comments:

  1. Hey, movies are great. The Tree of Life is amazing. I wanna see The Brothers Bloom, too. You should also add Brick to your list, it's by the same director, Rian Johnson. His third movie, Looper, comes out in September and stars Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and is about time travel.

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