Never Let Me Go

 

Keira Knightley has such a talent for making me like her characters less every time.  I didn’t like this book when I first read it my sophomore year, I didn’t like it the time I read it my junior year, and I suppose I still don’t find its meaning, but the movie was aesthetically pleasing.  I always feel so horridly pretentious when I feel like I would very much love to live in a pretty world as the characters do, completely disregarding the actuality of their situations (um, you know, the fact that they’re all meant to die before they’re thirty, and all).  Whoever was in charge of costume design is a genius and I’d like to hang out with them one afternoon or two.

Congratulations to Andrew Garfield for his face, and his ability to dress himself in real life as he does in this film.

Penelope

One of my favorite feelings is going to Target or Albertson’s and finding an old movie that I used to rent relentlessly from the corner Blockbuster I used to live by, but had now forgotten about, on sale for six or five dollars.  See, a few days ago I thought I was walking into Albertson’s for raspberry extract.  I actually came out with raspberry extract, a tin of Altoids, and Penelope, for five dollars!  When I saw it, I couldn’t believe it!  I hadn’t seen that movie in years, yet I still listed it as my favorite everywhere it required me to fill my favorite movies for.  I bought it because I had to.

I first saw the movie when my dad took my sister, Sabrina, and I for a “daddy date”, where we went to dinner, and then saw Penelope at the theatre.  I am totally making a “:3: face as I type this, but I remember coming home from that “date” and getting a nervous panic attack because I was feeling feelings I had never felt before, and then, after I anxiously told my mom, I realized I was just developing a severe crush on James McAvoy.  And so my love for him began.

Penelope is about a girl (Christina Ricci) who was born with a curse—she has a snout.  For some reason that I am happy to report was beyond me even the first time I saw this movie and thought was the ultimate, perfect movie: everyone finds this incredibly horrid (mostly her mother), so the parents fake her death and hide her away, only revealing her to rich “blue bloods” who can marry her to break the curse.  A reporter and a rich mama’s boy have already seen Penelope, but nobody believes them, so they hire Max Campion (James McAvoy) to secretly take a picture of her if and when she reveals herself to him.

While not Oscar material, this is one of the only films that gives me legitimate “fuzzies” and warm feelings.  There are a bunch of close-ups of James McAvoy’s face, pretty clothes, Christina Ricci’s perfect face—ahem—and Reese Witherspoon.  I’ve picked out your favorite film and you haven’t even seen it yet.  (Unless you have, then please, let’s fangirl about it together?!)

Sixteen Candles

I love 80’s films as much as the next girl, and what not, but I have yet to find what it is that links them all together that makes them so addictive.  Is it that most of the people who list them on Facebook include all John Hughes movies?  Is it because they feature the “brat pack”?  Is it the fact that they’re grainy-looking and ohmygod, this makes them so cool?

Now, we’ve all seen this movie, right?  Sam (Molly Ringwald) turns sixteen and everybody forgets and nobody wishes her a happy birthday, and she’s disappointed that this is the biggest birthday of her lifelong career and her life is over and this geek (Anthony Michael Hall) won’t stop following her so she gives him her panties and then she gets kissed by a guy (I’m pretty sure this is the only movie he was ever in so I won’t even bother) she’s only exchanged, like, one single conversation with.

I think it’s just a curiosity factor, where everything seems so different than how it is now, and it makes me wonder how I’d be, being a high-school student in the 80’s.  There’s a scene in this movie (the “Have you ever done it?” screencap) where Molly Ringwald’s character, Sam, is filling out a “sex questionnaire”in class and she’s meant to pass it to someone else to fill out, as well.  If this were a movie set for today, Sam would most likely be mindlessly staring at her computer and then posting it on Facebook (for certain people to see, I guess, considering I’d like to imagine Sam’s got certain boundaries).  Then Sam rides the bus and goes home—and I hated myself once I caught myself thinking “Well, now what’s she gonna do?”…  as if there was nothing else to do back then, since there were no computers!  To be fair, I don’t think I can imagine Sam reading a book, she’s way too mad at the world for that.  Can’t imagine her dancing to music, either, she’d see her reflection in a mirror and hate her body or something.  Also, the fact that a TV isn’t really turned on in this movie for a long visible amount of time made me temporarily forget TVs existed.  Basically, Sam does nothing except sit in a corner and think about Jake Ryan (and this includes romantic variations for every other teenager).

This train of thought depressed* me, though.  Why couldn’t I imagine a society without phones or social networking or reality TV?  Did this mean that our own present society is a cruel cruel reminder that we, in general, suck, or that I need to get my crap together and start believing that the world is not an actual black pit that vomits worthless cases of nothing that will result in nothing because nothing?

I vote the latter.  But that’s a cool experiment.  I saw a recent presentation where a man encouraged people to try something new for 30 days, something we’ve always wanted to try.  I think it’d be interesting to attempt going a whole month without the unnecessary side of the internet (Blogger.com, you know I love you, baby, but there are other things I love more than you, I’m sorry).

And for the record, I am part of the annoying club of people that has yet to be named that has always liked the guy that just gets forgotten in the end.  Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club (my God, he was wearing Ray Bans and a green sweater and worrying about Bender damaging school property, the sex appeal), Jon Cryer’s Duckie in Pretty in Pink, and Cameron Frye in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Really.  All of these people, forgotten, just left alone, when I was just sitting here the entire time, admiring and loving them all from afar.

* I think it’s just all of these movies soundtracks, man, something about eighties pop and rock that just gives me heavy boots.