Teen movies are the best movies

The title pretty much says it all!

In case you missed them, you can check out Sweeney and Lor's takes on teen movies too.

Also, one of these days, Youtube will give me a screenshot option that DOESN'T suck. But, in the words of Aragorn, it is not this day. Sigh...

K xx

Top ten movies

The other day, the lovely Gina (and yes, I will eventually get to the point in my trip where I stay with Gina and all kinds of awesomeness happens) joined in a blog hop featuring people's top ten movies. Due to pesky timezones and whatnot, I wasn't able to join in the blog hop (stupid timezones...), but I wanted to give you guys a countdown of my top ten movies anyway. BECAUSE OF REASONS.

First of all, I'm going to give out a couple of honourable mentions. These are movies that I love, but if I had to take ten movies with me to a desert island (which apparently comes with a TV and a DVD player and a power source...), these wouldn't QUITE make the cut.

Honourable mentions:
- Bridget Jones' Diary
- The Mummy
- Hot Fuzz
- Back to the Future

So, now to my top ten. And I'm going to copy Gina and include my favourite quote from each one as well.

10. Dirty Dancing
I knew every song from this movie years before I'd even seen it, thanks to the soundtrack being one of about four cassettes on high rotation in my mum's car when I was little. This movie is equal parts Strictly Ballroom, Romeo and Juliet, and The Breakfast Club. Or something...

Favourite quote: "I carried a watermelon."

9. The Count of Monte Cristo
Sure, it's a dramatic deviation from the original text, but it's definitely for the best. I love every second of it. Plus? RICHARD HARRIS.

Favourite quote: "Why not just kill them? I'll do it! I'll run up to Paris, bam, bam, bam, bam, I'm back before week's end, we spend the treasure. How is this a bad plan??"

8. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

I'm aware that most people's favourite Indy movie is Raiders of the Lost Ark. And that is a pretty phenomenal movie. But the addition of Sean Connery to the cast and Petra to the settings puts Last Crusade ahead for me. 

Favourite quote: "Water?" "No thank you, sir. No. Fish make love in it."

7. Mean Girls
There's pretty much a Mean Girls quote for every single occasion. And I'm fairly certain that every woman on the face of the earth can relate to it in some way or another. Tina Fey is a freaking genius, yo.

Favourite quote: "That's why her hair's so big. It's full of secrets."

6. The Princess Bride
If you don't love this movie, I don't think we can be friends any more. Between Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Andre the Giant and Billy Crystal, it's complete and utter genius.

Favourite quote: "INCONTHEIVABLE!!!" "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

5. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Yes, I'll admit it. I have an irrational soft spot for 80s movies and teen movies. Combine the two of them and you get this piece of cinematic genius. Everything about it is perfect.

Favourite quote: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

4. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
The original and the best. I loves me pretty much anything set on a sailing ship (hmm, maybe I should break out the boxset of Hornblower over Easter!!), and - as Little Miss A could tell you while rolling her eyes - I have a small obsession with pirates. Combine those two things with Johnny Depp, and you have pure genius.

Favourite quote: "I can't bring this ship into Tortuga all on me onesies, savvy?"

3. Jurassic Park
Like you weren't expecting this to be on the list. I have a plastic velociraptor named Clever Girl, for crying out loud! I will admit, when ten year old Kirsti first saw this movie, she spent about 90% of it hiding behind the sofa in terror. But I love it a little bit more with every subsequent rewatch. And you can bet your sweet ass I'll be seeing this in 3D for the 20th anniversary next month. And yes - Clever Girl will be coming with me.

Favourite quote: "Now, eventually you do plan to have dinosaurs on your, on your dinosaur tour, right? Hello?" "I really hate that man."

2. Love Actually
As much as ridiculous nonsense like Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve has tried to replicate this, all others have failed miserably. Love Actually is phenomenal, and Christmas isn't Christmas without it. Perfect casting, perfect stories, perfect overlap.

Favourite quote: "Hello, David. I mean "sir". Shit, I can't believe I've just said that. And now I've gone and said "shit" - twice. I'm so sorry, sir." "It's fine, it's fine. You could've said "fuck," and then we'd have been in real trouble.""Thank you, sir. I did have an awful premonition that I was gonna fuck up on the first day. Oh, piss it!"

1. The Avengers

I honestly don't know when it happened, but somewhere in the past ten months or so, this slipped quietly into number one as my absolute favourite movie. The combination of Joss Whedon, quiet possibly the most perfect cast ever assembled, a sass-filled script, the combination of humour and seriousness, and the culmination of SO MANY MARVEL MOVIES all tying together into one? Flawless.

Favourite quote: Okay. I can't limit myself to one here. Ready? 

- "I am Loki, of Asgard, and I am burdened with glorious purpose." 

- "I was having 12% of a moment."

- "Phil? Uh, his first name is 'Agent'."

- "Hulk? Smash."

- "You and I remember Budapest very differently."

- "I got red in my ledger. I'd like to wipe it out."

- "Doth your mother know you wearest her drapes?"

- "Puny god."

- "You people are so petty...and tiny."

- "It seems to be powered by some sort of electricity!"

So. What's in your top ten?

K xx

Movie Monday: Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Okay, first of all? You should all stop by tomorrow, because Deidre and I had a super exciting, supersized Dessert Day over the weekend and the results will be up!

Secondly, this is probably going to be a little lighter on pictures than my Movie Monday posts usually are, because I STILL have crappy, insanely slow internet. How slow, you ask? Well, I tried to download 8MB of anti-virus updates the other day, and after it took 30 minutes to download 300KB, I gave up. So yeah. It's slow.

ANYWAY...

Source

If you're a child of the 80s, you've probably seen this movie a thousand times. If, by some tragic miracle, you haven't, I insist that you go and watch it IMMEDIATELY.

Reasons why Ferris Bueller's Day Off is awesome:
1. Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller. He. Is. Phenomenal.

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2. Alan Ruck as Cameron Frye. As much as I love Ferris, I think Cameron Frye is my favourite thing in this movie. And Alan Ruck is absolutely brilliant, even if he was 29(!) when he was cast.
3. The parade scene. Made even more awesome by the fact that it's a Steuben Parade, exactly like the one Sara and I saw in New York last year. Except that the one we saw didn't feature Matthew Broderick singing "Danke Schoen" on a parade float. Shame...
4. Jennifer Grey as Jeanie Bueller. You probably know her best as Baby from Dirty Dancing. I actually love her more in this as Ferris' sarcastic and slightly bitter "How come everything goes HIS way?" sister.

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5. Chicago. It's as much a star of this movie as any of the cast.
6. Mr Rooney. He's an epic douche who gets what's coming to him.
7. Ferris playing "Blue Danube" on his keyboard (which, I might add, takes 5" floppy discs!) in coughing and vomiting sound effects.
8. Grace, Mr Rooney's assistant. She's HILARIOUS.
9. Crashing the Ferrari.
10. A spectacular cameo by Charlie Sheen, in which he basically plays his future self.

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11. The hilariously awful 80s hair and fashions.
12. The scene where they lean against the glass of Sears Tower and stare down at the streets below.
13. The restaurant maitre d'.
14. The scene where Cameron's sitting in his car, debating whether to go and pick Ferris up.
15. Ferris interacting directly with the camera.
16. Mr Rooney snooping around Ferris' house, and everything going horribly wrong.
17. The whole of downtown Chicago spontaneously dancing to "Twist and Shout". Gotta love the Beatles.
18. The entire scene at the Art Institute of Chicago.

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19. Jeanie coming home to find Mr Rooney in the house. Brilliant.
20. Ferris racing to beat his parents home.
21. Throwing the baseball at the stereo to switch it off.
22. It's a John Hughes movie. They were all pretty spectacular.
23. Ferris convincing various freshmen over the phone that he's dying.
24. "Save Ferris" on the town water tower.
25. Cameron pretending to be Sloane's father on the phone to Mr Rooney.

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Plus, the following quotes:
- "Ferris Bueller, you're my hero."
- "What'd I do?" "You killed the car..."
- "Look, this... This is not a phoney phone call. There is an intruder, male, Caucasian, possibly armed, certainly weird, IN MY HOUSE. Yeah, my...my...my name is Bueller. Yeah, it's real nice that you hope my brother's feeling better, but I'm in danger, okay?? I am very cute, I am very alone, and I am very protective of my body. I do not want it violated or killed, alright?? I NEED HELP! SPEAKA DA ENGLISH?????"
- "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
- "May I speak to Abe Froman, the sausage king of Chicago?"
- "What's the score?" "Nothing-nothing" "Who's winning?"
- "How could I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?"
- "You're not dying. You just can't think of anything good to do."
- "Oh, he's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavours last night. I guess it's pretty serious."
- "Bueller... Bueller... Bueller... Bueller..."
- "Pardon my French, but Cameron is so tight that if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you'd have a diamond."
- "I didn't hit you. I lightly slapped you."
- "I am not gonna sit on my ass as the events that affect me unfold to determine the course of my life."
- "He doesn't feel well." "Yeah, right. Dry that one out, you could use it to fertilise the lawn."
- "If you're not over here in fifteen minutes, you can find a new best friend." "You've been saying that since the fifth grade."
- "[sings] When Cameron was in Egypt's land/Let my Cameron gooooooooo"
- "Hey batter batter batter batter batter SWING batter."
- "Ladies and gentlemen, you are such a wonderful crowd, we'd like to play a little tune for you. It's one of my personal favourites, and I'd like to dedicate it to a young man who doesn't think he's seen anything good today - Cameron Frye, this one's for you."
- "Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus. I'd still have to bum rides off people."
- "The key to faking out the parents is the clammy hands. It's a good non-specific symptom; I'm a big believer in it. A lot of people will tell you a good phony fever is a dead lock, but, uh... you get a nervous mother, you could wind up in a doctor's office. That's worse than school. You fake a stomach cramp, and when you're bent over, moaning and wailing, you lick your palms. It's a little childish and stupid, but then so is high school."

I don't think I can deal with it if anyone hates this movie. So I shall instead ask you who your favourite character is and what your favourite scene is. Aaaaaaaand...GO!

K xx

New York - the "Ooooh, random parade!" edition

Bright and early(ish) the next morning, I set off for the subway to meet Sara at the American Museum of Natural History. Kat had decided that she was museumed out after Washington (and fair enough too. If I didn't love the Met so much, I probably would have gone shopping as well!!), so I had to navigate on my own. Given my unfailing ability to always go one block in the wrong direction despite having a map in my hands, I was somewhat concerned that I'd end up in Queens with no idea how I'd gotten there or how to get back. This was a particular concern when I got to 42nd Street and the signs for the A line trains just said "Uptown" and "Downtown". Thankfully, I saw a billboard for The Simpsons, which reminded me of "The school yard's up and the shopping mall's down", which led me to remember the ACTUAL song from On the Town - "The Bronx is up and the Battery's down". Hurrah - navigation courtesy of Broadway songs! #officiallyagenius (Also? Uptown Girl is of NO use in this situation...)

Thanks, Gene, Frank and Jules. Also, source.

Anyway. I made it to the museum and found Sara without any problems. It was sliiiiiiightly before opening, and there was a crowd of people waiting. Sara was completely horrified that I made her queue for a museum. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Ahem. The museum was fun - I got to be all "Ooooooh, Jake Gyllenhaal was here in The Day After Tomorrow!!" (except apparently not because I just looked up the filming locations on IMDb and this wasn't one of them. SAD FACE) and "Wow, that dead thing is really REALLY happy about being dead!" 

"Being dead is AWESOME!!"

See?

After we finished at the Natural History Museum, we decided to walk across Central Park. This led my brain to go "OH GOD, THERE'S GOING TO BE A MANGLED DEAD BODY IN HERE SOMEWHERE AND IT'LL BE GROSS AND I'LL BE TRAUMATISED. OR THERE'LL BE A CRAZY RAPIST. ARGH ARGH ARGH ARGH ARGH. I WONDER IF MY TRAVEL INSURANCE COVERS TRAUMA COUNSELLING..." What? No, I'm sure it has nothing whatsoever to do with my television watching in Chicago. Why do you ask?

"In New York City, sexually based offences are considered especially heinous." Also, source

Ahem. Needless to say, we made it through Central Park without even the slightest incident, although Sara found the Diana Ross Playground highly entertaining (Yes, THAT Diana Ross. I checked). When we got to the other side of the park, we intended to go straight to the Met for more museuming. But when we reached 5th Avenue, we stumbled across this:

WHAT

THE

FUCK

The annual German-American Steuben Parade. From my very half hearted detailed research on Wikipedia, it's pretty much just a parade of "Yay, we have German ancestry!" I have no idea where John Denver comes into it:

SERIOUSLY...

Despite being in completely the wrong city, I was fully expecting Ferris Bueller to turn up on a parade float singing Danke Schoen... 

After marvelling at the craziness for a while, we headed up to the Met, where we got horribly distracted by a cupcake truck. 

NOM.

Mmmm, cupcakes. Mine was the Cup o' Joe, and it was pretty damned good. (Also, has anyone been to New York and had one of their savoury cupcakes? Because I was too chicken to try one. Plus, chocolate always wins.) We watched the parade for a while longer before heading into the Met. Shortly thereafter, we both hit a dose of museum fatigue and so basically spent our time playing my "What would I take home?" game, only adapted to focus on the weirdest or dumbest or ugliest things in each room. 

The Nile, personified. Um, sure?

Pretty sure this belongs in a Hogwarts bathroom

Awesome hair and a case of crazy eyes. What's not to love?

This is a NOSE RING.

Hee hee, tiny crazy kitty!

Ridonkulous turban

Does this ruff make my head look small?

Yet another male baby wearing a weird hat. And playing with a lamb. As you do...

This dude has a seriously gross hairy mole on his left cheek.

As per usual, my favourite thing at the Met was the Temple of Dendur, due almost entirely to a dim dark memory of a "Sesame Street Goes to the Met" special that I saw a millionty years ago that no one else has ever heard of and that I kind of think I made up. (HOLY CRAP - Youtube tells me I didn't!! It was called "Don't Eat the Pictures", except that I remember them actually getting sucked back into Ancient Egypt when they went to the Temple of Dendur... Apparently they just met a kid from Ancient Egypt instead. Boooooooooo...)

AnyrandomsegueaboutSesameStreet, we finished up at the Met and headed to the nearest subway station. Which was basically opposite a Williams Sonoma. Sara practically had to drag me down to the subway station kicking and screaming. Which was probably for the best, because not only can I not afford anything in there, but it wouldn't have fitted in my suitcase! The subway ride back to the hotel was extra squishy and not particularly enjoyable. I'd told Paulie to swing by our hotel room at 5.30, so of course we were late getting back and Kat got to spend 15 minutes hanging out with some guy she'd spent 5 minutes talking to the night before. (Sorry Kat!!)

After watching several episodes of Beyond Scared Straight with horrified expressions on our faces, we headed downstairs to ask if there was a good Mexican restaurant nearby. And being New York, home to anything you could pretty much ever want (seriously, there's an Australian bar there. That sells actual Australian beer, and not Foster's!), there was one a couple of blocks away. First thing on the agenda? Cocktails. And being America, they were ridiculously sized. 

Photo courtesy of Paulie, who had a camera that could fit in his pocket...

MMMMMM, DAIQUIRI. 

Kat then had some kind of salad that arrived in a bowl made of a giant fried tortilla. It was pretty awesome. Like an enormous nacho. My chimichanga, while delicious, wasn't nearly as exciting... SAD FACE.

Next up: 30 Rock, I brave Central Park again, and a busboy who I'm convinced was a robot...

K xx

Ferris Bueller, you're my hero

I don't know about you guys, but when I think of Chicago, there are a couple of things that immediately spring to mind:
1. While You Were Sleeping.
2. The Blues Brothers.
3. Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Given that, I had high hopes for adventures while I was here. And Chicago, you delivered in fine form. Okay, so I didn't exactly ride a parade float down Dearborn Street, but it's been pretty damned memorable. Thursday was filled with jetlag, shopping and spontaneous computer purchasing. On Friday, I had every intention of going to the Art Institute. I decided I was going to walk around the lake to get there. And by the time I pulled out the map to check which street I needed, I was a couple of blocks past it. So I figured I'd go to the Field Museum. Only then I got to the museum campus and went "Oooooh, aquarium!!". So I wound up going there instead #decisionmakinggenius

The aquarium was pretty fun though. There were poison dart frogs and everything.

See?

Friday night was when things really got interesting. Because it was the pre-20SB Summit cocktail party at the Crimson Lounge of the Sax Hotel. So I got tarted dressed up and walked over there (which was when the pavement ate the heel of my shoe). I was anticipating all kinds of awkward standing around, seeing as I'm not the type to go and introduce myself to people. But it was all avoided thanks to Helena, who saw me standing there like the introvert I am and rescued me from myself. (Thanks lovely!!)

The party itself was fun - there were Viking hats and free booze and photo booths and all manner of good things. But the bestest part of all was that I FIIIIIIIIIIIIINALLY got to meet Lor and Sweeney and Penny. #OMGSOEXCITING An entire packet of Tim Tams *may* have been consumed.

The real story, though, started after the party. Penny and I were staaaaaarving, so we wandered around looking for food. Then the following conversation happened:
Sweeney: What time is it?
Lor: I think about 9.30?
Random possibly homeless dude walking down the street: Actually, it's almost 10.00, ladies!
All of us: Um, thanks.
Random possibly homeless dude walking down the street: So, what time do the panties come off?
Me: *snorts*
Lor and Sweeney: *horror*
Penny: How about NEVER O'CLOCK!!
Bouncer guy standing nearby: Did he REALLY just say that?!?!

Shortly thereafter, hysterical laughter set in. It was only made worse by the bouncer at the bar we tried to go to insisting that he wouldn't let us in until he'd fed us each a piece of the Mrs. Field's icecream sandwich cookie thing he was eating. There's a SMALL possibility that we threw Sweeney to the wolves and insisted that he feed her the piece of cookie sandwich thing and just hand pieces of it to the rest of us. I like to think of it as America delivering her with all the batshit craziness it possibly could before she leaves for Paris this week. So Sweeney, we were purely doing our part to make the weekend as memorable as possible! ;)

Sadly, my flight to Denver is about to board, so the rest of the weekend's insanity will have to wait until another time. Still, I think Ferris Bueller would be proud. Don't you?

K xx