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Directories
The Movie Meme
Taken from Blythe Spirit, leave a comment if you do it too, I’d love to see what everyone else answers.
Name a movie you have seen more than 10 times
There’s actually a lot of these, but I’ve probably watched “Dave” more times than any other movie.
Name a movie you’ve seen multiple times in the theater
The Matrix, Aliens
Name an actor who would make you more inclined to see a movie
William H. Macy, Emma Thompson, and Clive Owen (cause he’s #1 on my hottie list, not particularly for his great acting skills)
Name an actor who would make you less likely to see a movie
I gotta agree with Blythe here: Will Ferrell and Leonardo DiCaprio, and I’ll add Helena Bonham-Carter, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise to the mix (since he lost his mind, at least),
Name a movie you can and do quote from
There are so very, very many, as any long time reader of my blog can attest to. (Just to embarrass them, I’ll let you know that both my brothers used to be able to recite the entire Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie by heart - the 1990 one, not the 2007 one)
Name a movie musical in which you know all of the lyrics to all of the songs
Grease is the one, baby! I apparently drove my family crazy listening to the soundtrack over and over and over as a kid.
Name a movie you have been known to sing along with
Dave, where he comes home at the beginning singing the Oklahoma song, and I can no longer sing the proper words to Hail to the Chief anymore (Hail to the Chief, he’s the one we all say hail to, we all say hail cause he keeps himself so clean…)
Name a movie you would recommend everyone see
Psycho, It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, Godfather I & II
Name a movie you own
There’s just so many… uh… how ‘bout Rashomon.
Name an actor who launched his/her entertainment career in another medium but who has surprised you with his/her acting chops
Mr. Marky Mark Wahlberg (and his three nipples, I call them the Funky Bunch)
Have you ever seen a movie in a drive-in?
Nopes.
Ever made out in a movie?
Again, nopes.
Name a movie you keep meaning to see but you just haven’t gotten around to yet
Sunset Boulevard, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy
Ever walked out of a movie?
I don’t think so, but I almost walked out of Fahrenheit 9/11. I figured if I wanted to condemn it, I had to watch the whole thing, so I stayed.
Name a movie that made you cry in the theater
I was sobbing hard through much of Brokeback Mountain.
Popcorn?
Occasionally.
How often do you go to the movies?
Not too often anymore.
What’s the last movie you saw in the theater?
Dreamgirls
What’s your favorite/preferred genre of movie?
It totally depends on my mood. Most people are surprised at how eclectic my DVD collection is.
What’s the first movie you remember seeing in the theater?
The first movie my parents took me to was Alien cause they couldn’t get a babysitter. I was four years old and traumatized. I wasn’t able to watch it again until I was 18.
What movie do you wish you had never seen?
I don’t think I really regret seeing any movie. I usually watch most stuff once it hits television. Oh wait, maybe Caligula or Clockwork Orange. Perhaps Hostel as well, I just can’t stomach gratuitous violence as entertainment.
What is the weirdest movie you enjoyed?
Hmmm, that’s a hard one cause I haven’t really enjoyed most of the REALLY weird movies I’ve seen (like Island of Lost Children or Pi). Maybe that would be Dark City.
What is the scariest movie you’ve seen?
At the time, Alien or Nightmare on Elm Street, now I guess I would say The Exorcist.
What is the funniest film you have ever seen?
I guess that would be Dave.
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One last product to go
Closer to home than I thought
We’ve been back for a few days now, and I will post about our vacation soon, but upon returning, I heard some news that, while not really bad (well, in some sense), has shaken me up a bit.
So there is this guy Luke that I went to high school with. We rode the bus together (and believe me, it was a long bus ride from Oakton to Alexandria and back during rush hour). At fourteen, I went on my first date with him (to some movie, I don’t even remember which one anymore). At my sixteenth birthday party, he gave me my first kiss. If we hadn’t gotten in an argument shortly beforehand, we would have gone to prom together senior year. He’s the guy I went clubbing with in Adams Morgen on Thanksgiving breaks home from college. He’s the guy I rang in 1999 with at one of those fancy schmancy D.C. New Years Eve parties. He is the only high school friend who came to visit after my dad passed away in 2001 (but in Vicky’s defense, she was out of town and did call - Update: and I’ve been corrected, Vicky and Stacy did visit after the ash interment and Vicky at least attended the ceremony - strange how memory works, or doesn’t, in this case…). He’s the guy I’d always run into shopping at Target on those few occasions when I was out wearing sweatpants and no make up (you girls know what I’m talking about).
And if he hadn’t been in Lynchburg taking the MCATs on Monday, April 16, he would have been in Jocelyn Couture-Nowak’s French class in Room 211 of Norris Hall when Cho Seung-Hui entered the room and opened fire, killing Professor Couture-Nowak and half his fellow French students, leaving only one woman uninjured. He spoke to the Boston Herald about losing a very good friend:
In an exclusive interview with the Herald, a devastated Virginia Tech student yesterday told of how he miraculously missed the French-class massacre that tragically took the life of his best friend and seatmate, Saugus sophomore Ross Alameddine… (read more)
See ya later, alligator!
I’m off for a week of fun. First on the itinerary is a quick stop in Leipzig to chill with Rita for a bit, then on to Berlin, which I miss terribly. Saturday looks to be a jam packed day of visiting, including meeting up with a bunch of my Berlin blogger pals (oddly enough, they’re the folks with the blogs starting with “B” in my blogroll). Maybe we’ll have time to squeeze in an OV movie on Sunday and perhaps even hit the Egyptian Museum, which I never managed to get to up till now. Monday means lunch with B. in Dresden and then on to four days of luxury and relaxation galore in beautiful (and hopefully sunny) Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic (maybe I should go check the weather report before packing).
See you in a week!
Photos of Tech
Vicky H., a Blacksburg resident and my friend of 17 years, takes a walk on the Va Tech campus and includes some very sad and touching images of the mourning.
Thoughts on Va Tech and gun control
According to a Reuters FactBox on Guns and gun ownership in the US, there are approximately 640 million guns in the world, 200 million, or 1/3, of which are in the United States, in 34% of households.
I’d originally planned a long tirade on creating tougher gun control laws. I had graphs in here, statistics from the Bureau of Justice, and data from recent studies done by the Harvard University School of Public Health and the University of Chicago, but then I realized it wouldn’t make any difference.
This issue is just like any other controversial issue. No matter how much evidence I put up here, there will be some Fox News or NRA sponsored study to put up against it. I’m not going to change anyone’s mind.
I’ve thought a lot about the tragedy at Va Tech the last few days (it’s hard not too, with even the German media providing almost constant coverage). I’ve been to Va Tech several times. I know I’ve been in West AJ (the dorm where the first two killings took place), and I think I was even in Norris Hall for a conference. For me at least, I have too many other associations for this to really change how I think of Tech, but I can see that much of the rest of the nation will now know of Blacksburg and Tech the same way I know of Columbine.
We have a family friend who is a student at Tech now, he is the little brother of a childhood friend of my brother Christopher. He was at my brother Christian’s wedding last July and has become a very personable, handsome, young man. I sent emails to both my brothers asking if they’d had any news, but I haven’t heard back yet if he is okay. (Update: I’ve heard back and the young man is studying abroad in Australia this semester, thank goodness he’s okay).
I have to wonder if the people who think that guns make America safer have spent much time in other developed countries. I could walk through any city in Germany (and probably most of Europe) in the middle of the night and not have any fear for my life. When I lived in Richmond, the big drunken college dare was to stand for five minutes in the middle of the night on the street corner with the most drive-by shootings in the US. I regularly heard gunshots from the dorm and the house I lived at while attending VCU. I would call campus security to drive me from the Math department to my house that was three blocks away if it was after 10pm. And I didn’t think too much of the situation. It was normal life.
I was watching one of those emigrant shows that have become so popular here in Germany, it must have been several months ago now. In it, the couple had moved to an ordinary East Coast American city, to an area that greatly resembled a typical neighborhood in Arlington or Alexandria (I think it was in New Jersey, but I can’t remember anymore). They were completely freaked out by the neighborhood. When watching the show, I thought, “These people are ridiculous! What’s wrong with them??? That neighborhood is fine!” On a very limited budget, they moved to a gated apartment complex in order to feel safe. But thinking about it over the last few days, I’ve realized, that’s how Europeans view America. While I know that their neighborhood was probably fine, it was probably much less safe than most anywhere they’d ever been in their lives.
The German newscasters ask over and over, why are Americans so attached to their guns? Rainer likens it to the German issue of speed limits on the Autobahn. Despite all the statistics showing that lives would be saved by putting controls on both, some Americans equate guns with freedom, just as some Germans equate no speed limits with freedom.
I was quite saddened this morning when one of the British newscasters on CNN International segued from the Va Tech story to the story of the assassination of the mayor of Nagasaki by saying, “And now we go from a country used to gun violence to a nation with almost no experience of it…” I wonder if things will ever change. Will this be the push the nation needs to enact stiffer gun control laws? Or will this be forgotten as yesterday’s news as soon as the next celebrity says something stupid?
And while the mass killings at Tech are tragic, to put it into a little perspective, 166 people were killed in a series of attacks in Baghdad today. That’s five times more families grieving and suffering. What are we doing Mr. Bush?
Tragedy in Virginia
Due to being sick, I hadn’t turned on the TV once today, so I didn’t hear about the shooting until a short time ago when Rainer returned home from work and told me (in case you didn’t hear either, Gunman Kills 32 at Virginia Tech In Deadliest Shooting in U.S. History). It’s really shocking. I’m not sure at all what to say. The alleged shooter is from Centerville, Virginia, about fifteen minutes from where I grew up. Most of my high school friends attended Virginia Tech. Maybe I will let two of them tell you about it…
From Vicky, who was in Montana getting ready to fly home to the Virginia Tech area when she found out, here are her Thoughts From the Plane: Virginia Tech Shooting:
My heart breaks in many directions. I contemplate what it’s like for the parents who sent their bright children off to study to have them killed so callously. I can’t imagine the difficulty the survivors and just the overall student population will have returning to class. And I mourn for the perception of our beautiful town.
Stacy, a current grad student of Va Tech, is disturbed by Fox News’s choice of community spokesman in his post Think of The Children!:
Some people always have a lot of word though, and so it goes. This guy from Leesburg, with no special qualification and whose daughter was on campus but apparently nowhere near the combat zone, has stood forth for an entire Fox News article to discuss his solemn conclusion that President Steger and Chief Flinchum should both be fired.
Finally, the Washington Post coverage of the shootings.
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