The "Four" Meme
When you're tagged for a meme, it's bad form not to respond, though I'm not sure I have much to add here that I haven't already flapped my jaws about on this blog. Ah well, here goes:Four jobs you've had in your life: College professor, bathroom janitor, hotline counselor, corporate receptionist
Four movies you could watch over and over: The Piano, When Harry Met Sally..., Aliens, Morvern Callar
Four places you've lived: Most recently, before now: Ithaca, NY; Cambridge, MA; Fairfax, VA; Hanau, Germany
Four TV shows you love to watch: The Oscars, the Golden Globes, Good Morning America the day the Oscar nominations are announced, and Once & Again before the creeps canceled it
Four places you've been on vacation: These were more visits or day-trips than vacations, but: Paris, Switzerland, Italy, Prague
Four websites you visit daily: IMDb, Bloglines, The Film Experience, mainlymovies
Four of your favorite foods: Pink and bloody hamburgers, Ethiopian anything, Italian anything, and a recent discovery, Häagen-Dazs Coffee-flavored ice cream (which – actually – hold on just a sec...)
Four places you'd rather be right now: With Derek in NYC; with Nathaniel and Gabriel at the Landmark Sunshine; with the grads of the Cornell English Dept. at a big ol' dance party throwdown; with Joan Allen, shooting the breeze, catching up on Xmas shopping, or just doing whatever (I'd so leave it up to you, Joan)
Four bloggers you're tagging: Fecundmellow, Ann, lylee, Girish
Labels: Blog Buddies
posted by NicksFlickPicks at 6:02 PM
5 Comments:
i love it when i get tagged.
i'll post mine next week.
So with you on both Morvern Callar and Harry Met Sally.
Haven't seen the other two since they opened, but I should.
Just discovered your site, and will be a regular visitor. Intrigued by your fondness for _Morvern Callar_. Why doesn't Samantha Morton at least TRY a West of Scotland accent? I guess I shouldn't have liked the novel so much first...
Welcome, Andrew!
Re: Morton in MC—I'm actually glad she doesn't attempt the action. Two of my favorite things about the movie are how oddly transient Morvern is, and how the film refuses to specify how much of her decisions and her personality (so far as we come to experience them) have been shaped by the immediate context of the suicide. That Morvern clearly hails from somewhere else, dropping in on Lana's grandmother without a whisper about her own family or their whereabouts, adds to her mystique, I think.
I'm at the point with this movie where I almost don't want to read the novel, ever. I would hate to know more about Morvern than I do. (Though if I write about the film, as I plan to, I guess I might be stuck.)
Thanks for the reply, Nick. I do understand your attachment to the film -- and Morton _was_ a good choice for the role, conveying a sense of emotional numbness very powerfully. I guess I liked the novel first, and have an emotional attachment to the West of Scotland (my sister lives there), so Morton's Morvern's so clearly being from elsewhere bothered me -- because part of the novel's power is that Morvern ISN'T from somewhere else. I think I need to see it again (especially as I'm teaching the novel this semester - like you, I'm a relatively new 'professor', although we don't call them that here...).
I think I've discovered your site at the worst possible moment - simply because I'm tempted to spend hours catching up on ALL your posts (insightful, witty, well written), and have far too much else to do! I've just found one on _In My Country_, and as a South African (unintentionally an expat) who found Antjie Krog's _Country of My Skull_ by turns infuriatingly self-indulgent, ethically troubling, and devastatingly moving, I've been putting off seeing the film... Hearing that Binoche's unconvincing Afrikaans accent sounded like sticky Gouda didn't help. (It appears I have a previously undiagnosed obsession with accent accuracy, perhaps a marker of my own cultural displacement....)
I've ordered _Red Dust_ on DVD for the departmental library, and mean to watch it soon, and I saw another TRC movie, _Forgiveness_ (a B-) at a film festival in South Africa last year. When I've caught up with the viewing, we can compare notes!
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