It’s time to talk about movies! And, like last year, I’m just going to let my heart do the talking because, I mean, what am I going to do otherwise? Sit here and break down everything I saw using the basics I gleaned from two college film classes? B-O-R-I-N-G. So here’s what I loved at* the movies this year.
To be frank, I didn’t have high hopes for Iron Man 3. I love-love the first one and The Avengers was glorious, but Iron Man 2 was weak as hell and I couldn’t help but worry a reasonable amount. Iron Man’s not really my dude — I’m an X-Men girl to be quite honest, though I throw down for Black Widow and Hawkeye — but he’s got so much potential and knowing going in that they were pulling Extremis out was both exciting and nerve-wracking. So much potential for failure! Especially with a historically racist caricature of a villain making an appearance. It all turned out great though. I thought The Mandarin was particularly well-handled — especially because I love nothing more than to see fanboys cry about inaccuracy — and the Extremis was, well, it wasn’t great but it was good enough.
None of that really mattered in the end though because this movie had Pepper Potts. Pepper Potts being awesome and strong and vulnerable and human and kicking so much ass. Pepper Potts being a strong female character without being a Strong Female Character. Pepper Potts saving the day and the hero and herself. Pepper Potts being everything. We need more Pepper Potts-es. We need more characters on her level.
ParaNorman is smart, sweet, funny, and gorgeous. It’s got a ton of heart, strong characters, an openly gay character, zombies, super strong dialogue, depth, and an unexpected ending. It has things to say about being who you are even when it’s hard, family, friendship, and the importance of listening to other people and respecting their feelings. The animation is extraordinary and cool and though similar to the stop-motion that’s come before it, unlike anything you’ve really seen before. It’s not afraid to be kind of gross and it deals openly with death in a way that feels really important. It’s got a great setting, unbelievable set pieces, and the cutest little post-credits tag. It’s seriously wonderful.
We didn’t get to watch ParaNorman in theaters and I am still so bummed about it. What a wonderful story and experience. Unforgettable, really.
Watching The Heat in theaters was one of the best movie experiences we’ve had since we’ve been in North Dakota. Okay, wait, actually it was one of the worst because it was packed and a horrible monster woman sat next to Crystal and did her best to ruin the movie for her, but other than that is was genuinely delightful. There’s something really transcendent about being in a theater full of people watching a comedy and sharing that bright, long-winded communal laughter. It feels magical. And it’s particularly nice when it’s a movie fronted by two women that doesn’t make you feel bad for being a woman or fat or kind of a human disaster. Let me hug you, Paul Feig and Katie Dippold. Repeatedly. Please.
Melissa McCarthy is a gift and I feel like this was such a great showcase for her. Her timing is impeccable and her physicality is BANANAS. Sandra Bullock is great too, so good at being the straight-man and hitting the exact right tone at the exact right moment. And they’re both so good at reserved but tender emoting! Give me 100 more movies with them together.
The award for most punctuation in a movie title goes to… Just kidding. Well, no, I mean, that’s a lot of punctuation, but that’s not a real award. I guess I could make one, but it’s after midnight and I’m too tired to craft safely. Anyway, what For a Good Time, Call… really wins an award for is friendship. And laughter. And joy. And dogs named Zelda.
I had heard a little about this one on the internet and had mentioned it vaguely to Crystal, but I hadn’t felt any particular urge to run out and watch it, despite my intense and lasting love for Ari Graynor, but Crystal is super good at magically knowing exactly what I need when I need it and brought this home from the Redbox one weekend. What a gift!
It’s just a great, great story with really sweet, human characters who make mistakes and do their best to atone for them and are just generally trying to live their lives in a way that feels right to them. The development of Katie and Lauren’s friendship is so good and true and genuine that by the end you feel sort of agonized and sad that you haven’t lived the movie yourself. It’s hilariously funny and tender and kind and never makes you cringe with secondhand embarrassment, even when you’re sure that’s exactly what’s going to happen. It always knows exactly how long to hold the beat for a laugh and the emotional stuff never feels trite or simple. This one is not to be missed. Seriously.
I really loved Pacific Rim and I loved it even more than I expected to. I love these characters — all of them — and their flaws and scars and unrelenting drive to fight back against a seemingly insurmountable force. The Earth opens up and births a bunch of enormous — brain-shatteringly huge — Godzilla-ass monsters from space and these people lose the people they love to these monsters, lose their world to them, and instead of curling up in a ball and praying for a quick death, they fight. They fight and they fight and they fight until they no longer have the blood to drive them. It’s seriously glorious. Had we been in California, I think I’d have easily topped my record for in-theater viewings+effortlessly.
The movie’s funny and fast and tongue-in-cheek without ever falling on the eye-roll-y side of campy. It’s huge, like, way huge on a scale that is hard to really get your head around — though Del Toro does a phenomenal job of creating scale for the universe — and it’s flirtation and sexy without ever being exploitative. It’s romantic without ever being explicitly so! Watching a movie where there is clearly love of all kinds between the male-female leads where it doesn’t end on a kiss? Straight-up revolutionary. No joke. It’s got great secondary and tertiary characters, unbelievable set design, and great pacing. Seriously, there is never a moment where it needs to move faster or slower, never an extraneous second. I could’ve watched 100 more hours of it, to be frank.
Dude, there are 250 foot tall robots punching even bigger lizard monsters in the face. Do you really, honestly need more than that? Of course not, but you get it all anyway.
*: Because we moved to the middle of nowhere and the only decent — and boy am I using that pretty loosely there — theater is two hours away these aren’t all strictly things we saw at the movies or that even came out this year. They are all, however, things I watched for the first time in 2013. So there’s that.
+: I saw The Avengers eight times. It was a thing.
From Amazon: “I’ve left some clues for you. If you want them, turn the page. If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please.†So begins the latest whirlwind romance from the New York Times bestselling authors of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Lily has left a red notebook full of challenges on a favorite bookstore shelf, waiting for just the right guy to come along and accept its dares. But is Dash that right guy? Or are Dash and Lily only destined to trade dares, dreams, and desires in the notebook they pass back and forth at locations across New York? Could their in-person selves possibly connect as well as their notebook versions? Or will they be a comic mismatch of disastrous proportions?
From Amazon: The weather outside is frightful, but these stories are delightful! When a huge blizzard (that doesn’t show signs of stopping) hits, Gracetown is completely snowed in. But even though it’s cold outside, things are heating up inside, proving that the holiday season is magical when it comes to love. In three wonderfully (and hilariously!) interconnected tales, YA stars John Green, Lauren Myracle, and Maureen Johnson create a must-have collection that captures all the spirit of the holiday season.
I picked Let It Snow and Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares because I was looking for something fun and wintery and holiday-ish and they seemed to fit the bill and seem like a nice way to end the year!
So here’s the plan as always!
1. Read thebooks!
2. Post about it on the internet*
3. Link me to your post in the comments here
4. I’ll do a round-up post on NEXT MONTH 1st-ish and announce the next book
5. We can have a casual-ass comment party about the book
6. REPEAT
Your site, Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, even Twitter is fine! (Just Storify and link!) Whatever works for you!
This is a very casual, kick-back, low-expectations, low-effort deal! I just like the idea of reading the same book and then hearing what people think about it. That’s literally it. FUN, YES?! Good.
I’m pretty sure I’m going to keep up The Casual-Ass Internet Book Club next year, so if you have suggestions for the next book, shout ’em out! Especially if there are new releases you’re looking forward to, I’m terrible at being current. I’d appreciate if it was available on Kindle, but that’s the only requirement.
Share this with people if you do it! Tell me if you’re going to do it! Tell everyone!
*Even if you don’t get the book finished and posted about by the end of the month in which we’re reading it, do it and link me anyway! I will add it to the round-up post no matter how late it is and you know I always want to talk about things I’ve read!
I really, really loved Eleanor & Park. Any time I read a book that’s been hyped immensely I get real, real nervous about reading it. I like liking things that other people like, but that often ends up not being the case. I don’t think it’s necessarily that I’m obstinate — though I am, extremely — or that other people don’t like good things, it’s just that hype makes things into giant towering piles of bullshit. You know how that goes.
But Eleanor & Park was totally worth the risk or, rather, wasn’t really a risk at all since it was so, so, so incredibly good.
There are a lot of elements that come together to really make the book work: Park’s wonderful family that isn’t too perfect, Eleanor’s shitty family and her refusal to let their shittiness dictate her entire existence, the push-pull of foreignness and familiarity that comes with setting the story in the semi-recent past (at least for someone of my age, I imagine the effect is very different for those too young to have ever owned a cassette tape), the emphasis on music that never feels forced or braggy, the wonderfully, agonizingly slow romance of it, the emphasis on real, honest teen sexuality, punchy, interesting language that never gets too showy, and thoughtful, complex teenaged narrators that never feel anything other than real and truthful and fully-fleshed.
I don’t know how Rowell manages to do what she does in this book so well, but if her other novels manage even three-quarters of what this one does, she’s got to be a wizard of some kind.
I got so caught up in the storytelling and the experience of the book that I didn’t even highlight hardly anything and that’s generally a really good sign? I really, really loved the moment when Park took Eleanor’s hand for the first time because it was rendered so perfectly. “He wound the scarf around his fingers until her hand was hanging in the space between them. Then he slid the silk and his fingers into her open palm. And Eleanor disintegrated.” Me too, Eleanor, me too.
I also really loved Park gathering every AA battery he could find to bring to Eleanor for her Walkman. “He emptied all his handheld video games and Josh’s remote control cars, and called his grandma to tell her that all he wanted for his birthday in November was AA batteries.” I mean, is there any better show of devotion in that moment? Wonderful.
Anyway, if you can’t tell, I lovedthis one and I am so, so glad that I ignored that dumb part of me that wants to avoid things that lots of other people love. It turns out that sometimes — okay, maybe often — people are pretty smart. Or whatever.
The end of 2013 is upon us and just like last year I’ve decided to round-up some of my favorite pop culture experiences into Totally Top 5 lists for your perusal. Again, like last year, I’ve let my iTunes play counts do the talking and started with my top five jamz for the year. Here we go!
This song is a jam. It’s all energetic yelling and Patrick Stump’s wailing and it’s so, so good for screaming out your car windows when it’s, y’know, warm enough to have them rolled down. I always really like Fall Out Boy’s wordplay and this one’s got a couple of great bits. So good.
4. M.I.A., “Bad Girls”
The ultimate song for a car full of girls who are excited to be alive. I can’t even count the number of times someone pulled up next to me at a stop light and rolled up their window because I was blaring this so loud and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m not a badass, but this lets me fake it pretty god damn well.
Like everyone else on Earth this year, I could not avoid this song and, like the large majority of those same people, I embraced the hell out of it. This song is fun, it’s feel-good, and even if it’s overstayed its welcome a little, it was still one hell of a jam.
Katy Perry’s done and said some dumb stuff — though I think that is just part of the territory of being successful, mistakes are made — but it hasn’t slowed down the juggernaut that is her pop reign. This song is glorious and if you haven’t cried like at least twice while listening to it then I just don’t understand what you’re doing. I love this song so much that I’ve had dream arguments where I went to the mat defending it. That’s a jam.
When this came out in spring, I was utterly powerless against it and just left it on repeat for days at a time. I really kind of love her — appropriation issues aside, sigh — and this is just such a jam. Great beat, great chorus, and the perfect length for a pop hit. Jam and a half.
10. Season 2, “The One with the List” – The least appealing part of Friends for me, both upon initial airing and in the years of subsequent reruns, is the back and forth Ross and Rachel nonsense. It’s not that the romances on the show aren’t interesting — I love Monica and Chandler’s fumbling courtship because I’m not dead inside — it’s just that the friendships are so much more compelling. Ross and Rachel date, they don’t date, either way I don’t really care. Even if that wasn’t the emphasis of this ep, it’d still fall to the bottom of the list for not really being about Thanksgiving at all. If it weren’t for Monica’s mockolate scenes with Michael McKean the ep would hardly be worth watching at all.
9. Season 9, “The One with Rachel’s Other Sister” – You know how sitcoms love to introduce really irritating characters and then rally the comedic forces of their casts around pointing out just how annoying that character is? I hate that. Christina Applegate is great at what she was brought into do, but it just feels unbearable and uninspired. Great tender moments of friendship, a lot of great Chandler emotions, and the entire China plot make it very watchable despite its flaws.
8. Season 1, “The One Where Underdog Gets Away” – The one that started it all! The most impressive thing about this episode is that it was the ninth episode of Friends ever and the characters already feel fleshed and whole. Love Joey’s STD posters, Chandler’s Thanksgiving issues, and Phoebe’s general willowiness.
7. Season 3, “The One with the Football” – Monica and Ross’s sibling rivalry is an early delight and, as always, weird Geller traditions are a highlight. Phoebe’s enthusiasm is maybe my favorite part of the entire episode and Joey and Chandler’s competitiveness verges on just the right kind of meanness without being unbearable. A solid and very Thanksgiving-y entry.
6. Season 8, “The One with the Rumor” – Problematic gender, trans*, and fat hate issues aside, this one’s got a nice turn from Brad Pitt and some decently funny moments. Ross’s tender remembrance of the tryst he had with his high school librarian is particularly charming and well-played.
5. Season 6, “The One Where Ross Got High” – Mr. and Mrs. Geller make an appearance in one of the strongest and most laugh out loud of the bunch. Notable not just for Rachel’s beef and pea trifle, but also Monica and Ross selling each other’s secrets out to their parents in a shouting match followed by Christina Pickles’s pitch-perfect delivery of the ultimate mom monologue. Glorious.
4. Season 7, “The One Where Chandler Doesn’t Like Dogs” – Tons of great laugh out loud moments in this one including Matt LeBlanc’s hilariously delivered “Don’t do it!” (which also has a great blooper) and Ross’s dislike of ice cream. Jennifer Aniston’s dry delivery and perfect timing are also a delight. She’s often overlooked when people talk about the cast, but she’s killer and this is a particularly great example of her.
3. Season 10, “The One with the Late Thanksgiving” – A hilarious and heartwarming turn from the final season of the show, notable for Chandler and Monica receiving news that they’ve been chosen as adoptive parents. This is one of those trope-y sitcom episodes where everything kind of goes disastrous but it’s got a lot of great laughs including the dumb but delightful talking heads bit and the baby beauty pageant. The news of the adoption is particularly sweet, the kind of news you want surrounded by the people you love most.
2. Season 5, “The One with All the Thanksgivings” – Friends flashback episodes are well-loved for a reason and this one is no exception. Joey getting the turkey stuck on his head is funny enough, but escalated when Phoebe tries to disguise him from Monica with parsley. Pre-nose job Rachel is a favorite every time she shows up and Chandler and Ross’s thematic outfits are glorious. Another great turn from Christina Pickles and Elliott Gould rounds out a great ep.
1. Season 4, “The One with Chandler in a Box” – This ep is hands-down my favorite because it’s not only the one that makes me laugh the hardest and most consistently, but also because its driving force is really friendship. Chandler and Joey’s relationship is always a great source of comedy for the show and it doesn’t disappoint here. Matthew Perry’s not even visible for most of the episode and he’s still killer. Michael Vartan is particularly babely and charming and his awkward kiss on the balcony with Courtney Cox is flawlessly hilarious.
What’s your top ten? What are your other Thanksgiving faves? Are you rewatching The West Wing where President Bartlet calls the Butterball Turkey Line today too? Or are you just eating a whole bunch and staring at the dog show? Whatever you do, enjoy it and know that I am thankful for you!
