¡Sarah!

I apparently haven't LJed about it since 2010, but rest assured that Amadeus, the not-a-biopic about Mozart and his fellow composer Salieri, remains one of my most very favourite movies. I've seen the movie (in both theatrical and director's cuts) a kajillion times, but I'm much less familiar with the play it's based on. I had read it and I had watched an amateur production that I found on YouTube, but (now to the point of this entry) it wasn't until last night that I finally got to see it live! Some thoughts:

( We are both poisoned, Amadeus. I with you: you with me. )

I've done this before but I'm doing it again!

1. Pick fifteen movies you know/like/love. (I'm only doing eleven because I'm having issues thinking of movies I didn't use before!)
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie. (lol, I never do this. Everyone can guess!!)
5. No Googling/using IMDb search functions.

( guess guess guess )

Edit: ( answers answers answers )

SPEAKING OF MOVIES, the theatre I work at is currently in the middle of its BUSIEST WEEKEND IN FIVE YEARS. Today alone we sold SIX THOUSAND TICKETS, when on an average Saturday we usually hover around four thousand.

SIX THOUSAND TICKETS.

brb passing out from exhaustion. If it doesn't slow down tomorrow, I don't even. Thanks, SMeyer. DDDD:

(Meanwhile, our New Moon-less partner theatre downtown sold like five hundred. HAHAHAHAHA wut)

Yay, I got interviewed again!! :D This time the questions are from frauleinfrog. ( News travels fast in Vienna. )

In other news, tomorrow I am going to This Is It for the second time in three days, and a Twilight t-shirt party for the second time in eight days. ahahaha, my life this week is so ridiculous but I love it. FANDOM ALL OVER THE PLACE!! xD Hopefully I can fit some studying in here somewhere. D:

So if I start making a list of all the books I read in 2009, do you think I'll actually get through the year without forgetting I was making it?

LET'S FIND OUT!!

1. The Girls in the Back of the Class, LouAnne Johnson
I don't think I read anything in January besides travel guides, so the book I finished today gets to be first on the list. It's the sequel to the book that became the movie Dangerous Minds - basically a fictionalized (though I'm not sure to what extent) account of one of the years the author spent teaching English in a California high school for underprivileged kids. Despite the author's insistance that she would pay more attention to her female students this time, I feel like the title doesn't fit the book; most of the stories still focus on the guys. Because their stories are more exciting? (Two of them get shot at, for example. D: ) My other complaint is that the author spends like four pages describing her and a student's attempts to kill a spider, and I thought that was rather unnecessary. Other than that, it was a really interesting book (and a surprisingly quick read) covering a bunch of different issues. I'd like to read the prequel if I come across it (haha, I came across this one just browsing the shelves in the public library), although I don't think I'll actively seek it out, at least not until my pile of books to read has considerably shrunk. D:

Starting around the middle of last summer, I started keeping track of the books I read using Facebook's Visual Bookshelf application, although I fudged that list a bit more than I intend to fudge this one. ^^; If anyone cares, ( the books I read legitimately last year include ... )

From when I started to read up until about eighth grade (when the time I spent on the Internet began to go from an okay amount to Way Too Much), I basically read a book a day. While I don't feel a need to go back to that, I'm definitely happy that my attempts to read books for fun again seem to be working! :D

Off to Toronto tomorrow for zoo and interviewy goodness! To everyone who has wished me good luck, my nerves and I thank you. <3 I even very unexpectedly received a good luck phone call today from someone who is famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page, although if I were to actually tell you who he is I guarantee you'd be even less impressed than you are now. xD

Anyway, I've just finished watching Amadeus which was an even better distraction from my nerves than I had hoped! And since athena_crikey's most recent entry is a fangirly entry, I have found the courage so that mine will be, too. xD

Query: is Salieri an unreliable narrator??

Believe it or not, I had never considered this idea before today. Here are my three main reasons as to why perhaps he is:

1) I noticed this a long while ago and never thought much of it because it's not that uncommon in fiction, but there are a fair number of scenes that Salieri didn't witness and couldn't have heard about that are still included in this movie, and so, we assume, in the story as he tells it to the priest. Basically, everything that happens in the Mozarts' home during the times when Lorl isn't working there, Salieri has no way of knowing about.

2) Wolfie says he'll sleep and then they'll start work on the Lacrimosa. They never do get to work on it, but nevertheless it plays in its entirety over the funeral scene. Is this the movie trying again to push the idea that Wolfie's music was all already finished in his head? Or is this a hint that Salieri has been lying to us a little bit? (hahaha of course when talking about this movie I always ignore historical fact. Yesterday I finished reading Piero Melograni's biography of Mozart and wow, there's actually way more factual issues with the Requiem arc of Amadeus than I realized! I mean obviously the entire movie is fictionalized and I totally accept that, but still I find it really interesting to compare it with what we believe actually happened.)

3) Man you guys, I have seen this movie so many times and I still don't know what to make of the ending. (By which I mean the very end, when we're back in the asylum and Salieri has taken it upon himself to absolve everyone he sees.) Maybe it's just me, I dunno, but I'm always so confused by it. But to fit in with my hypothesis of Salieri the unreliable narrator, maybe the ending is supposed to clue us in that he's crazier than we would have previously thought? And so maybe we can't believe a word he's said and maybe nothing he claims happened actually did? ... ?

And now I am totally reading through all these old e-mails I wrote to the_wykydtron like two years ago that are filled with analytical brilliance about Salieri's motivations (SPOILER WARNING FOR THE DIRECTOR'S CUT lulz if anybody cares): ( Read more... )

And although it's only midnight, I guess I should get some sleep ... I've been trying pretty well in vain to adjust to a much better schedule, considering the interviews on Tuesday start at six a.m. our time ... D:

Longer letter later~! :D

Edit a day later: ( Read more... )

The rules as written by some anonymous online soul:

1. Pick fifteen of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
5. No using Google/IMDb search or other search functions.

I definitely interpreted them more like: pick fifteen movies you like well enough and post a quote from each, whether or not the quote could be found on IMDb. (haha I'm a rebel.)

I apologize in advance, guys -- in my attempt to prevent this little game from becoming too easy, I think I may have made it too difficult. D: But ... I have faith in you!!! x);;

~

01. "Now you know how it feels to be just like everybody else. Isn't it just peachy?"

02. "You're like the thief who isn't the least bit sorry he stole, but is terribly, terribly sorry he's going to jail."

03. "There's no Hell? Everyone ends up here?"

04. "Because You are unjust. Unfair. Unkind."

05. "You're not dying, you just can't think of anything good to do."

06. "Belay that belay that!"

07. "Well, to be honest, I've never been so scared. But at least I have a husband."

08. "I taught you how to fight but I never taught you why to fight."

09. "Well of course we talk. Don't everybody?"

10. "Whoops! I hit the wrong target!"

11. "Don't mess wit' me. I'm the Stair Master. I've mastered the stairs. I wish I had a step right here, right now, I'd step all over it."

12. "We just thought maybe you were made of something stronger."

13. "Now it isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because, after all, in moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you, but -- well, there haven't been any quiet moments."

14. "There are children here somewhere. I can smell them."

15. "Is that really what my hair looks like from the back?"

This entry stolen from natz099, although I think she cheated less than I did. XD

"Are you a book lover? A video game fan? A TV freak? A movie aficionado? Put your mind to the test, and list some of your favorite fictional characters - one for each letter of the alphabet."

A - Atreyu (The Neverending Story)
B - Benes, Elaine (Seinfeld)
C - Colberto, Esteban (The Colbert Report) (with apologies to Stanzi, who would otherwise be my "C")
D - Davy Jones (either of Pirates of the Caribbean or of The Monkees - shut up, he's fictional if I say he is!!)
E - Edward Elric (Fullmetal Alchemist)
F - Folken Fanel (Tenkuu no Escaflowne)
G - Granger, Hermione (Harry Potter)
H - Hector (The Iliad)
I - Icarus (Disney's Hercules)
J - Jesse Katsopolis (Full House) (sorry, Captain Sparrow, but it's no contest, really)
K - Kramer, Cosmo (Seinfeld)
L - Lucy Ricardo (I Love Lucy)
M - Mozenrath (Aladdin)
N - Norrington, James (Pirates of the Caribbean)
O - Oenone (haha, I dunno, what is she from? is she in Metamorphoses or am I misremembering?)
P - Puddy, David (Seinfeld)
Q - Queen, The Evil (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)
R - Rick O'Connell (The Mummy)
S - Shiori (After Life)
T - Turner, Will (Pirates of the Caribbean)
U - Urchin (The Little Mermaid) (it's actually been yeeeeeeeeeeeeears since I saw an episode with him in it, but when I was little he was totally my Saturday morning hero, hahahaha)
V - Van Fanel (Tenkuu no Escaflowne)
W - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Amadeus)
X - Xerxes (Aladdin) (man I have no idea, "X" is hard)
Y - Yuuya Asou (GALS!) (haha, "Y" is hard)
Z - Zoolander, Derek (Zoolander) (haha I can't think of anyone else! XD; )

The idea of this post totally amuses me, so like it or not I am doing it. XD You know how sometimes you'll get little pieces of a movie or a TV show stuck in your head, and you cannot for the life of you remember what you know it from, and it drives you all to pieces and when you finally do figure it out it's the most obvious thing ever? Yeah. I find it really interesting, because usually I feel like the scene is going to turn out to be from something new and exciting, but it never is, and so I always end up a little bit disappointed. But here are three pieces of scenes I've had stuck in my head at one point or another. How well do you know how my brain works? Can you figure these out? XD XD

1) athena_crikey might remember this one, it's from early high school or something, hahaha. One day I had the phrase "You're lying!" stuck in my head, in a really angry man's voice. I knew it was from an important emotional scene, and I knew it was from a relatively recent animated movie, and for the longest time I thought it was Tarzan. But it wasn't, ( it was ... )

2) This one bothered me for an entire bus ride home even though I kept guessing the movie it was from and then discarding that guess. A scene between two characters, both men, one of them cripplingly old and the other very young. The younger one does something that totally amazes the older one, but the praise he gives is really sort of adorable, like, "That's marvellous! Oh, that's charming!" The older character is sitting in a rocking chair and they are in a little gray room, and it's live action. ( It was ... )

3) This one bothered me for about twenty minutes last night, but considering how obvious it seems now, I think even twenty minutes is too long. A male character is sitting and looking depressed. A female character walks up behind him and says, "I'm sorry," in a soft, sort of saddened voice. The male character shrugs it off, saying something like "don't worry," even though it's something pretty bad that's happened to him. (The scenario I had come up with was that he had been convinced someone would be somewhere and they had gone back to find that someone only to be disappointed. This made me think it was Mulan, like if Mulan apologized to Shang after they discovered his father had died, but nope.) Then the next scene begins with a loud sound effect. I kept picturing this on an airship and so I kept thinking it had to be Escaflowne, but even though I couldn't decide if this scene was animated or not, I knew it was in English. After I remembered the rest of the male character's line, I realized that ( it was ... )

Watch this entry get zero comments. XD hahahaha! That's cool; I'm down with that. XD

(When I see this Aladdin icon out of the corner of my eye, I keep thinking it's an icon of Rika in 3nin Matsuri. Hahahaha, as if the reddish parts were the wig? Hahaha, yes.)

So on Tuesday night I was flipping through the channels and my favourite movie Amadeus was on Bravo again. Nothing terribly unusual but always a pleasant surprise, hehe. :) And so I watched it and was happy.

And then last night I was flipping through the channels again (during the Word, my least favourite part of Colbert Report, hahaha burn). And so I get to the CBC. And who is on my screen but Iseya, talking about whether there is a heaven or a hell.

Basically what I am trying to say is that my favourite movie After Life was on TV last night, and when I realized it I basically nearly fainted. Because oh man, talk about a movie I never ever expected to see on TV! Because it is foreign and it put the majority of my eleventh grade Japanese class to sleep. But there it was, presented as a part of CBC's "International Movie Night," haha. (Though I noticed they cut out that one minute of black screen. Which cracks me up. I would cut it out too, if I was showing this on TV.)

(One thing I don't get, though, is why Amadeus got a PG stuck in the corner of the screen and After Life got a 14A. Because I have no idea what there is in After Life that would bump it up even past a G. There is so much worse stuff in Amadeus than in After Life, even when it's not the Director's Cut, and I am just so confused.)

My two favourite movies being on TV one night after the other is pretty awesome, right?? XD Hahaha. So I was thinking it would be super hilarious if my favourite movie Aladdin was on tonight, but I didn't watch as much TV tonight and anyway it probably wasn't. :P

( I always pronounce 'Aladdin' like it's pronounced in that episode 'My Fair Aladdin' but I don't think anyone ever gets it. )

And here is an announcement that actually has to do with real life and not a whit with TV: I have decided to give in and just let my ear piercings grow over. Today I tried to put earrings in, to sort of save the piercings (stupid tactic I know), but then decided I was just not interested in forcing them through again. Well, that's a lie -- the right piercing is still just fine and dandy. WHY DO THEY COVER OVER AT DIFFERENT SPEEDS AUGH I WOULD BE SO MUCH HAPPIER IF THEY WERE THE SAME. But anyway I haven't worn earrings since grad and it's ridiculous to think I'll just randomly start and it's ridiculous to think "augh but I spent thirteen dollars on these when I was ten" because that's just ridiculous. And augh I wish the marks would disappear, I don't want to look like I have pierced ears and not have pierced ears ... aaaaaaaugh well whatever.

So Athena, if you want some free earrings, let me know ... :P