there will be a fish

Anyone who feels like it should post their ten most CRUCIAL CRUCIAL CRUCIAL-ASS movies, like the movies that explain everything about yourselves in your current incarnations (not necessarily your ten favorite movies but the ten movies that you, as a person existing currently, feel would help people get to know you) (they can change later on obviously).

I kind of took this to mean films that were formative/watched a million times as a kid, or films that I currently can watch a million times and never get sick of.

1) Amélie
Just, ♥. All the ♥s

2) Casablanca
I find it physically impossible to hear someone say "but soon" and not add "...and for the rest of your life", because this movie has warped me. Also, Claude Rains is the best; he steals every scene he's in from Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. That's awesome. Most-quoted movie ever, and for a damn good reason.

3) Singin' In The Rain
This movie just makes me super happy. My discovery of OT3 fanfic just makes it better. :D

4) The Philadelphia Story
BANTER. And Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Cary Grant.

5) The Fugitive
I feel like this was always on TV when I was a kid. Innocent-man-falsely-accused trope, what what

6) GoldenEye
Shut up, Pierce Brosnan was my Bond growing up. I love the Craig films, but this is a great movie. Also always on TV growing up.

7) Die Hard
John McClane, y'all. This is my Christmas movie.

8) Shipwrecked
We used to have this one an old VHS tape with the commercials edited out; the tape perished after many many viewings. Just last year, I was delighted to discover it was on Amazon Instant for rental. It's actually held up pretty well, and my favorite character is still the girl stowaway who teaches the main character to read.

9) Brick
I fucking love this movie and everything it chooses to be, from the sound editing to Joseph Gordon Levitt's face to the script. Everything.

10) Star Wars
I'm counting the whole trilogy as one, shut up. We still have a VHS boxset of the ORIGINAL films, which I will never ever ever give up even though we no longer have a VCR until I can buy the unadulterated originals on disc. Which will probably not happen for years, but at least now there's a new hope thanks to Disney. I think I need to find a VCR now....

1. Zombie fic! I'm one of those folks firmly in the "everything is better with zombies" camp, so imagine my delight at running across these three ficlets. Especially because one involves Jeeves & Wooster, of all people, and another involves Holmes & Watson. My only regret is that they are not longer, but YAY ZOMBIES!

2. So apparently Lord Peter Wimsey kinda started life as an OC in unpublished fanfic. I find this hilarious. :D

3. Discovered: an online glossary of WWI slang. It's an Australian publication, so it skews toward that country's vocabulary, but there are lots of general/American/British terms as well. I've been amusing myself looking up bits of slang that Bertie Wooster uses, and comparing the meanings for words like "bung" and "old bean" and "biff." Also: WWI is apparently where "cooties" originally came from (see this page). Who knew?

4. I've been running into a lot of characters recently along the lines of this trope and this one, in such bizarrely different sources as the Temeraire series, Georgette Heyer's Devil's Cub, Lois McMaster Bujold's The Curse of Chalion – even James Bond, and a little bit of Jeeves, weirdly enough. It's been making me think about how pretty much all of my favorite fictional characters run along these lines: burdened with an superfluity of principles and a shortage of self-interest. (They tend get really battered along the way.) The rest tend to be rogues, thieves, con artists, and the morally-ambiguous-but-good-hearted types. I wonder what this says about me.

5. Did you know that Mark Twain forbid his autobiography from being published until 100 years after his death? I sure didn't. But apparently this is the year, and it finally will be published. Isn't that cool? Talk about outrunning death...

So, I wrote up this whole post about my week/the last few days, and then realized I didn't want to be that "Hi! How are you? Good? LET ME RAIN ON YOUR PARADE" person while everyone's having a happy holiday, so I private-locked it.

Anyway. Hi! How are you? Good? Great! Hey, you wanna talk about fandom? I'm having trouble accessing Yuletide, but that's okay. Let's see, what have I been up to recently? Well, I watched all of Generation Kill while packing, and it was fabulous. And then a couple of weeks ago, I saw all of Lie To Me! That was fun. I may go see Brendan Hines play on the 30th. I hooked my sister on Fringe while she was visiting. *insert evil laugh here* Hmm, what else...oh, I just watched two Bond movies -- On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever. Man, Diana Rigg is gorgeous. George Lazenby too, for that matter, but the man can't really deliver his lines; DR was acting circles around him (but still managing to do him favors). Tiffany Case (in DAF) really made a terrible Bond girl in comparison. Also that movie was in 1971; Doctor No was in 1962, which means Sean Connery went gray in less than a decade. He aged fast -- well, but fast.

Yeah. I dunno. I've been taking Nyquil...