Tag Archives: movies

Grey Skies, Silver Screens

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January and February are often grey and cold here in Utah, but thankfully I often find myself warm and cozy in a movie theater during these winter months. First, the Sundance Film Festival comes to town [I was lucky enough to see four movies this year!] and then before you know it, it’s Oscar season.

This year was no exception and in honor of the Oscars two nights ago I made a few prints to represent the best picture nominees. I wish I could say I have a print for all of them, but I ran out of time before the ceremony. Personally my top two best picture nominees recommendations are LaLa Land and Hidden Figures. Both are movies with a lot of heart that I can’t wait to watch again. I also really loved the selection of live shorts nominated this year.

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Arrival

Arrival is the story of linguistics professor Louise Banks is tasked with interpreting the language of the apparent alien visitors [pictured above, although in the movie it is always black]. It reminded me of Interstellar in the best way possible.

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La La Land

If you haven’t heard of this movie, I’m not sure what’s happening and I’m worried about you. Please go watch it. Emma Stone’s character, Mia, makes this logo for Ryan Gosling’s character, Sebastian, who wants to open a Jazz club.

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Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures is the story of a team of African-American women mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the US space program. This print was inspired by one of my favorite quotes from the movie. Katherine says this after someone implies they are surprised NASA would let women work there.

“I will have you know, I was the first negro female student at West Virginia university graduate school. On any given day, I analyze the binomial levels air displacement, friction and velocity. And compute over ten thousand calculations by cosine, square root and lately analytic geometry. By hand. There are twenty, bright, highly capable negro women in the west computing group, and we’re proud to be doing our part for the country. So yes, they let women do some things at NASA, Mr. Johnson. And it’s not because we wear skirts. It’s because we wear glasses. Have a good day.”

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Hacksaw Ridge

Hacksaw Ridge is the true story of WWII American Army Medic, Desmond T. Doss, who served during the Battle of Okinawa, refuses to kill people, and becomes the first man in American history to receive the Medal of Honor without firing a shot.

Currently: reading Maybe In Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid. It’s basically a “choose your own adventure” paperback for grownups, which has been really fun.

You Have to! It’s Christmas!

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Yikes. Has it really been over a month?

Ok, ok, I could give you excuses [Getting my wisdom teeth out, DIYing my apartment for Christmas, family visiting, LIFE!] ….or I could give you a nice list. List it is. You see lately I’ve been taking refuge in the most likely of places: Netflix. There is nothing better to help me unwind then a gripping, well written TV show or an overly dramatic preposterous made for TV movie.

Recently I have discovered the genre of Christmas Romantic Comedies and, whoa, can we say gold mine [It even inspired a game for some good Valentine’s Day Rom Com fun later next year]? In addition to all the antics of your normal rom com you get a dose of holiday cheer which makes things infinitely more zany and simultaneously heart warming. It’s fun to guess how they are going to take those classic tropes and make them Christmas-y (I just love doing this in general).

Movie people like to put a lot of pressure on Christmas. I personally love in Christmas movies of all kinds where they give you a grand speech to do things simply because it’s Christmas [Because truth and love and virtue only apply on holidays and expire once new years hits.]. You HAVE to tell the truth. It’s Christmas! Confess your love. It’s Christmas! Tolerate this annoying person. It’s Christmas! Buy me a sandwich. It’s Christmas!

So without further ado here is my ranking of Cheesy Christmas love movies** (On Netflix Instant) for your viewing pleasure:

*Keep in mind these are not the best Christmas love movies or even made for TV love stories. These are my rankings of the made for tv (or similarly devised) Christmas love movies that I’ve watched in the month of December. This is a very narrow genre. Within two lines of the first descriptions you should know if these shenanigans are for you.

4. 12 Dates of Christmas

The basics: For some reason I cannot fathom, two people: Kate [Amy Smart] and Miles [Saved by the Bell alum Mark-Paul Gosselaar], agree to a blind date on Christmas Eve. It (of course) does not go quite as planned or renew anyone’s faith in humanity, so when Kate wakes up she has to do it again! And again! Until she get’s it right. It’s a Christmas-y groundhog day if you will.

Despite shaking your head through the first few “dates” at Kate’s utter clueless-ness and self destructive behavior during the beginning of the movie you can actually relate to her. You start to feel better once she starts getting her act together and not acting like a crazy person. Although her accomplishments are not always quite what you’d expect from someone given the instant replay option (I can bake and decorate Christmas cookies now!).

3. Holiday in Handcuffs

The Basics: Melissa Joan Hart [Trudie]needs a man to impress her family. The successful and good looking Mario Lopez [David] [Another Saved by the Bell alum!] walks in. So naturally she decides to solve her problems by kidnapping the handsome stranger. Antics ensue.

Despite hate-HATE-hating Melissa’s hair (Perm gone terribly wrong) for the first half of the movie you get into the story and can’t help but wonder where they are taking the dynamic between these two. I mean are we rooting for Stockholm Syndrome? Is that ok? Oh wait my moral dilemma has vacated my head due to that unintentional smolder Mario Lopez just threw at the camera.

2. Desperately Seeking Santa

The Basics: Jennifer, a focused, dare we say cold hearted, marketing exec, needs profits to go up at the South Boston Mall so she devises a genius plan to have a Sexy Santa contest. What she doesn’t anticipate is her verbal sparring matches and utter contempt for one of the contestants. But Sexy Santa turns out to have a sexy heart! Ok, that was weak. But you get it! He’s adorable and actually a really good guy.

There’s also evil corporate entities, danger of foreclosure…and boy band dance moves? Yup, you heard right. Seriously though, this would have been a great follow up movie for Justin Timberlake after Model Behavior.

1. A Christmas Kiss

The Basics: Wendy has an amazing kiss in a freak elevator incident…only to discover the man is actually her boss’s boyfriend. And he doesn’t recognize her because she was dressed up for a fancy party!! Oh did I mention that her boss is a crazy, vain, demanding person bent on getting engaged??  [DRAMA]

I know what you’re thinking: This is just a non high school version of the  Cinderella story. Well it is, but I like it anyway. Side note: Hillary Duff would’ve been great in this role.

Here’s why you’ll want to watch this one:

  • Sassy friends. So there is one girl who babbles on about fate and destiny while sighing romantically, but there is also that great sassy friend (This girl who’s an Grey’s Anatomy intern right now) who tells it like it is with classic sitcom-y attitude. Even better than her little quips is her good friend advice speech at the end where she says things that I would actually tell my friends. Well done.
  • Rich people problems. I love seeing rich people habits in movies. The boss in this movie is priceless. Oh remember St. Barts? Oops I ruined my Monolo Blahniks! GET ME A CROISSANT.
  • Brendan Fehr. Do I need to explain this? He’s that handsome former teen alien we all love. Or that charming young fellow on Bones if you are too old/young to be acquainted with the other worldy drama that was Roswell.
  • Makeover! These writers learned from the life of Laney Boggs that you can transform a girl simply by removing her glasses and getting rid of that unfashionable ponytail. Except for instead of tweasing her eyebrows to finish it off in this movie they drown her in glitter (It’s the holidays after all).

My caveat with this movie is if it was that easy to get handsome strangers to fall in love with you girls would be sabotaging elevators left and right. All the tired of excessive PDA people would be forced to take the stairs everywhere. Of course, everything else in all of these movies is completely realistic and one of these meet cutes will probably be the way I meet my husband.

Up Next: All She Wants for Christmas. According to the Netflix summary this Christmas Rom Com centers around a woman who works as an “efficiency expert at the local Christmas ornament company.” An ORNAMENT company. How could should not find love in time for Christmas??? Still I’m willing to invest 1 hour and 34 minutes to find out.

Currently: knitting my little heart out. Christmas is near and I had this silly idea to make things (I’m actually quite on track. Knock on wood).

Sundance 2012

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One of the perks of living in Utah during January (especially for a non-winter sport person like myself) is the Sundance film festival. The festival takes place in Park City which means you usually have to battle some snow once you’re there (although they also show movies in Salt Lake City and other surrounding areas). I’ve gone a few times before but I’ve only hung out on main street (you can see pictures from my visit last year here). I’d never gone to see a Sundance film or even spotted a random celebrity.This year I got more involved.

Sundance Look Again Poster

Sundance Look Again Poster

Emily and I found out the festival releases extra tickets for movies each day. You just have to go to the main box office (thankfully located in Salt Lake, not Park City) and line up at 8 am. It’s first come first serve. We looked at the films showing that weekend and picked one that looked like it had potential (no one, of course, has seen these films; they aren’t even rated so you just have to look at the description and pick one). When we got to the box office we were shocked to see the line was already out the door. We got lucky. When it was our turn there were just three tickets left for the movie we wanted to see, Celeste and Jesse Forever!

We also managed to get tickets to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s HitRecord event. This event was an interactive theater experience. I loved it. The theme of the night was independent/independence. Audience members tweeted their definitions of what independence means on a personal, social, and individual level, as well as what makes a film independent or indie. He pulled a few people on stage and asked them to explain their tweets (If you aren’t familiar with twitter he tracked the tweets by having everyone use the hashtag #hitrecordeccles). This also lead to a conversation about the definition of a hipster , during which we found out that Joseph Gordon-Levitt does not consider himself a hipster and hates it when people call him one (His definition of a hipster was something along the lines of someone who acts like they are creative, but don’t actually produce anything). He also showed a variety of short films and projects people had created through HitRecord. One that we all loved was strawberry bootlaces (you can watch it, in all its adorableness, here). He also read a few stories from the Tiny Book of Tiny Stories and asked a few people to read them aloud. In case you are wondering just what a tiny story is, here is one of the stories that was read at the show:

“The physician’s wife was told that an apple a day kept the doctor away.
Each evening she would eat two apples (just to be safe).
But much to her dismay, her husband still kept coming home.”

–Tiny Story, Doctor’s Wife

All of us at HitRecord !! This picture is actually from my friend Emily's site, Movies and Mayhem (You can click the pic to visit her blog).

Parker Posey also participated in the show. She was amazing. I loved listening to her. It was especially interesting to hear the Indie Queen’s perspective on the definition of an indie film (I can’t embed the video but you can see my recording of it on my HitRecord page, here). She also, along with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, did a reading from Tom Sawyer.

JGL ended the night by singing two songs, Baby Mine and Hey Jude. I can’t get my recordings to upload properly right now, but once I do I’ll update this post.

The whole point of the show was to participate in (and record) the creative process. We were asked to record everything and then post it on the HitRecord website. Sadly I forgot my camera, but I grabbed a few grainy pics and recordings on my phone. While the picture is terrible (I think I was too excited because every video I did was very jumpy), the sound quality actually came out all right, so I’m still going to upload some. The next step is to create something of my own to post on HitRecord.

I loved this event and actually participating in Sundance this year. Now that I’ve got the system worked out hopefully my future Sundance experiences will be just as exciting :) I thought I’d end this post by adding a few photos I took during the HitRecord event.

The Eccles Theater, waiting for HitRecord to start

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

It's Joseph Gordon-Levitt! I realize to you it may seem like a white blur wearing a skinny tie, so just take my word for it. He was there.

One of the short films shown that night was a sing along about freedom of the press/ transparency. After we watched Joseph Gordon-Levitt invited people to come on stage and sing along. This was the crowd that ran up. Getting volunteers was no problem, getting them to leave was another issues. Poor JGL had fan girls all over him, haha.

Currently: trying to motivate myself to work on my writing!