Movie Meme

How sad is my day when getting "tagged" by Mariko for this movie meme is the absolute best thing that happened to me all day long? Answer: Very sad.

THE MOVIE MEME
1. The Last movie you went to see in a theater: I saw House of Flying Daggers on Saturday. Wes and I were trying to see Sideways but it was sold out. Flying Daggers was good. It's very pretty but it doesn't hold a candle to Zhang Yimou's better films like Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triad, Ju Dou or Hero. Maybe it's just that Ziyi Zhang doesn't hold a candle to Gong Li in my book.

2. The last movie you watched at home: The Politician's Wife on Wednesday (okay, it's a mini-series). I was disappointed with this. I adore Juliet Stevenson (Truly Madly Deeply, anyone?) but this story was just too darned predictable. And then there were some really disturbing sexual elements to it that I was not expecting that didn't fit in (for me) with the rest of the story.

3. How many movies do you own? Once you add in all the kids' movies we probably own 75-100. Eeek!

4. What was the last movie you bought? I bought Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for my six year old last weekend. And then, because it was on sale, I got Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets too.

5. Got Netflix (or a similar service?) Netflix baby! I have a mind-boggling 413 movies in my queue right now.

What are the next three movies in your queue?
Little Big Man, Deadwood: Season 1: Disc 1, From the Earth to the Moon: Episodes 1-4

6. List five movies you adore/mean a lot to you:
Annie Hall: My favorite film of all time. I mentioned this at Purlygirls two weeks and got a bunch of people saying stuff like, "Oh, I *hate* Woody Allen." What? I don't get it. But then, I'm a Jewish New Yorker. Woody Allen is the culture I grew up in. This is the funniest, sweetest, most inventive romantic comedy ever.

Auntie Mame (Please do not confuse this with Mame starring Lucille Ball): Rosalind Russell, how I love your sass and style. It's not the holidays without it.

Goodfellas: I saw this with my dad on vacation in Florida almost 14 years ago and I still get goosebumps thinking about it. I find it so mesmerizing. The performances, the camera movement, the cinematography, the direction...oooo, it just gives me chills.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Best damned script ever. William Goldman was a genius. (He's not dead, he's just not a genius anymore).

Singin' in the Rain: I had this on tape when I was a kid and watched it over and over and over. I thought it was just a musical. Now as an adult I appreciate it on so many other levels. Holds a warm place in my heart along with another great Stanley Donan film, Charade (Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, what's not to love?)

It's so hard to only list five. I could go on and on.

7. Name your guilty pleasure movie (or genre): Some Kind of Wonderful. One day when I was 16 or 17 I had to go see my father's divorce attorney. My parents custody battle over me was heating up--a lot--and I wanted to have my say in it. My dad pulled me out of school early to go see the attorney. Afterwards we decided to see a movie. But we couldn't agree on one. I was a teenage girl and he wasn't. So we went to two movies. First we saw Some Kind of Wonderful then we saw Radio Days. There were a lot of similarities to the stories told in Radio Days to my dad's life. The film culminates on New Year's Eve 1943, the night my father was born. As all the party revellers run up to the roof top to ring in the new year, snow starts to gently fall. My dad leaned over to me and said, "It didn't snow that night."

8. I'm passing this on to three of my favorite knitting friends.
Marti, Molly and Jill.