And yet another meme!

[aragarna]

All the cool kids are playing so let's do this. It took me some thinking, and I'm still not sure I didn't forget one big elephant I can't think of right now. I also tried to diversify things, and not turn this into a "in case you didn't know I'm a big George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh fan". And surprisingly, I'm realizing that despite seeing about 40 movies a year at the theater, you can't really understand everything about me just by the films I watch. Also, narrowing things to 10 is DIFFICULT.

Anyway, here it goes. Don't hesitate to ask me to elaborate - I'm really tempted to do it all right there, but it seems you're supposed to ask. ;-)

Everyone 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).


1 - O Brother, Where Are Thou? (by the Coen bros. 2000)

2 - Ocean's Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001)

3 - The Great Dictator, (Charlie Chaplin, 1940)

4 - Into the West (Mike Newell, 1992)

5 - Le Bossu (The Hunchback, Philippe de Broca, 1997) French Swatchbuckler film. Not to be confused with Disney's Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Not same thing at all!

6 - Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)

7 - Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011) French indie film about a little girl pretending to be a boy.

8 - Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, Pixar, 2008)

9 - Big Fish (Tim Burton, 2003)

10 - The Harry Potter franchise. (from 2001) "Mr Potter, our new celebrity..."

Bonus track: you can't pretend to really know me until we've talked about Batman & Robin, the best turkey ever!

Comments

[elrhiarhodan]

I loved Into the West... It's so beautiful and heartbreaking and of course GB was perfection in it.

Maybe rewatch it this weekend.

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

I saw this film with my school when I was 12 or 13. I think that's the first time ever a movie made me cry.

Also the first film I ever saw in original version. I barely spoke English at the time and the Irish accent doesn't help but I just loved how they pronounced Tir Na Nog.

Gabriel's performance was truly heartbreaking.
Though my crush only really started with The Man in the Iron Mask (I have a love/hate relationship with that film, because I hate it, but I was in love with d'Artagnan at the time). Then I kinda forgot about him until In Treatment, and there I fell hard.

Oh and do you remember when the boys go into a theater see a movie?
It's only years later, when I saw Back to the Future III that I realized which film it was! (and finally understood why the hell there was a strange car chased by indians LOL)

[sheenianni.livejournal.com]

Yay, I know a few of these... :D

So who are your favorite characters in HP? :P I used to be obsessed with the books (the obsession was then temporarily replaced by Star Wars and finally White Collar) but I have some mixed feelings about the movies ... I like them in general and some parts were utterly brilliant, but there are also things I still haven't forgiven them for.

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

Like any kid of my generation, I've read the books, though I was a little late to the game. I started reading it when I heard about the 4th coming out.

I really enjoyed the books and it was a big deal with all my friends. I'm not mega fan of the films, but I still feel like I'm the "Harry Potter generation" even if I was getting a little too old by the end of the film franchise I think. But I did put it there because I still feel that the franchise of my generation.


My favorite character in Snape. And it's mainly Alan Rickman's fault. I wasn't that interested by him in the books until I saw the first film. Really his appearance in the class room and the way he said "Mister Potter. Our. New. Celebrity" LOVED that.
Also, I find that he is one of the rare characters that is not all black or all white. He's complex and he's trying to redeem himself.
So, from then I was a fervent Snape defender. Of course, you can imagine how much tease I received at the end of the 6th book. All my friends were like "He's a baaaad guy!" And I was "no way, there has to be a reason." The wait for the last book was loooong!

I do have mixed feelings about the films, but at least the first 2, I was still in high school and I have great memories about going to see them with all my friends on the saturday afternoon following the release.
So it's a lot more what it means to me than anything to do with the movies themselves.

And my only big worry was what they would do with Snape's memories in the last one, and it was satisfying enough, if a little short. So, I was happy.

So, what about you? And what haven't you forgiven them for?

[sheenianni.livejournal.com]

I actually started pretty early with the books - it was before Book 3 came out and none of my friends knew them yet (though obviously that changed within a year or two). My parents bought me the english version of PoA when I was in a hospital after a car crash, so that was the first book I ever really read in that language...

Aaah, a Snape fan :D Lots of those around - and I totally agree it'S Alan Rickman's fault. I don't dislike movie!Snape and I always firmly believed that Snape was on Dumbledore's side (which lead to some hilarious conversations with my cousin after book six), but I was far from impressed with him in the books. Sure, he's a spy, that's admirable. But other than that, he's a bitter, vindictive man who holds grudges and verbally abuses the children under his care, and I'm still convinced that his so-called love for Lily - while strong - was also selfish and obsessive. I get that he has to act biased to keep his cover, but frankly, he's never given me a reason to think that he wanted anything else than to act nasty towards the whole world. On the good side, yes. But a nice man? Hell no.

(Sorry for a bit of a rant. I really like the "Snape redemption" arch in fanfiction when it's well-handled, but some fans portray him as "fluffy and misunderstood" and Snape is neither. Even his best version will always be a bit of a stiff bastard, and that's okay - nobody can expect from him to start offering candy and sing cheerful Christmas songs. Anyway.)

I have plenty of petty grievances with the movies and some bigger ones too, but for the main ones:

- I really disliked how they portrayed Molly Weasley on occasions. She has her flaws, her family is her life and she's very protective of them - but at times, the movies had made her into this riduculous caricature that just made me sad. I liked and respected Molly from the books even though I sometimes disagreed with her; I had a much harder time to feel the same for her in the movies.

- Similarly, I hated what they occasionally did with Ron. Like the scene in Book 2 - Ron goes to the Forbidden Forrest to "follow the spiders" despite his rather bad phobia because he thinks it might help Hagrid (and also so that Harry won't go alone). If that's not bravery, I don't know what is, but the movie just made him into a laughing stock. Ron has plenty of issues (mostly to do with insecurity/jealousy) and he is far from perfect, but the way he was sometimes used as a comic relief... I didn't like it.

-And they did the same thing to Neville, too - some of my most favorite moments are those that show how much he has grown from that scared, insecure clumsy kid into a confident young man who stands against Death-Eaters and Bellatrix at the Ministry, leads the Resistance with Ginny and Luna and finally destroys Voldemort's last Horcrux in a last stand of defiance and bravery while not knowing that Harry is actually alive. None of it came across in movies 5, 6 and 7.

As for my favorite characters... I like Neville and Ron obviously :D , also Ginny, Luna, Tonks, Lupin, Sirius (despite his numerous flaws), Hagrid... the whole Weasley family really. Oh, and Moody (real one, not fake one). I love to hate Bellatrix, but that has much more to do with movies than books, I think. I don't like the canon version of Draco (not in books, not in movies), but I do like fanfic with smart complex Slytherins (don't even have to ge on the "good side", it's enough if their agenda is more than "make Potter's life difficult and proclaim our superiority over Mudbloods"). Then again, a good fanfic can make me temporarily like almost any character - probably with the exception of Umbridge.

(And comment has grown super-long. Oh dear.)

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

oh wow that's a lot of thoughts you've given to it. I agree with most of what you said, about film vs. books.
I haven't read any fanfics (I'm not into HP enough anymore for that) but I have to say that the pairings there kind of baffle me...

I don't totally agree about Snape though I do agree he's not a nice guy, but I also think he isn't that much of a bad guy either. He made poor choices of friends but he paid a high price for reporting a prophecy...

Anyway, my main complain about the films is that lots of things don't make sense to people who haven't read the books.
And I still think, in books like in movies, that the bad guys tend to be too caricatural.

[sheenianni.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Harry Potter fanfic is... interesting, I think would be the politically correct phase :D It's not that there aren't good stories - there's plenty - but they're buried in a sea of fics that are bad our outright horrible. And the pairings... yeah. Um. Like, why the hell are there more Harry/Voldemort stories than Harry/Ginny stories??? I don't have a problem with slash, but the guy murdered Harry's parents, tried to kill Harry, he's a mass murderer, he's about fifty years older often leading to some seriously creepy paedophilia... and Death-Eaters are just misunderstood, Dumbledore is EVIL and the Weasleys are monsters and Harry is pregnant with little Voldemort babies and they live happily ever after, but first and Ginny and Hermione and Luna all rape Harry because he wants to have Voldemort babies and Bumbledore says it's evil. Ahem...okay???

Then there's plenty of Harry/Draco, Harry/Snape and Harry/Lucius stories (a small friction is good.... most are just really bizzare). Draco/Ginny and Draco/Hermione are extremely popular (because Ron is a stupid moron while Draco and Hermione have "chemistry") and so is Hermione/Snape (not really my favorite, but it can actually sort of work in the AU versions that take place one or two decades in the future).

As you can see, I was really obsessed with the books and fandom a few years back :D

Sometimes I'm still amazed by how amazing the WC fandom is... so many quality works and intelligent people.

I guess I'd feel more sympathetic towards Snape if we at least saw more of his redemption arch... if he tried to rebuild his life after Voldemort's fall, find something meaningful and fulfilling besides spying and carrying a torch for Lily. Part of the problem is that the books are almost exclusively from Harry's POV, so we don't really get to see that side of Snape even if it was there. But what we do see is a bully and a miserable teacher and a man stil lliving in the past. Though I don't deny that Snape's story is tragic... he had a shitty childhood, then became a half-blood in Slytherin where the only way to earn respect was to fight back, the Marauders didn't help (however mutual that animosity was) and then he joined Voldemort to finally belong, only to discover that his "Master" was a madman and iadvertently causing the death of the woman he loved.

Ahd I agree that the movies don't make much sense at times without knowing the books.

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

Oh god that sounds even worse than I thought.
Harry/Sirius also disturb me. And beyond the fact that I don't see any reason to pair most of those people, the fact that this is pedophilia is really disturbing. I'm guessing those writers must be very young, but I'm not sure this is healthy to have such fantasy...

[sheenianni.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

I've read a book 6 AU with Harry/Tonks and I was okay with that, even though it wouldn't technically be legal, but the age gap isn't that big and in some ways, Harry is already pretty mature at sixteen. But while I really like Harry-Sirius in a "surrogate family" sort of way, pairing them requires some serious changes like time-travel - and even then, I just can't imagine dating someone who I used to view as a father figure. Ewww.

(And speaking of paedophilia/time travel... I LOVE well-written time-travel stories, but imagine the situation when mentally thirty-something years old Harry comes back to the past to his second year and then all but jumps Ginny, who is eleven years old and not even in puberty yet, because she's "his true love"? UGH.)

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

WOT?! uhhhh /o\

[sheenianni.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. Sometimes they're even "married", because they're soulmates and the "soul bond" snaps into place "because of the time travel".
(And then there are the stories where Draco is a Veela and Harry has to sleep with him because Malfoy has gone "into heat" and otherwise he'll die...)

((And I'll stop infesting your journal with all these "wonderful" plots. Have fun exploring them yourself if you ever feel masochistic or very adventurous :D ))