Separated at Birth

Everyone knows that Hayley Mills' Sharon was separated from Hayley Mills' Susan in the 1961 version of Parent Trap. What everyone doesn't know is that both were separated from a young Mick Jagger. Photo credits from here, here, and here.

Trailers

I saw three movies in the last couple weeks, which has been a thrill. And for the most part, I liked them all. People are trashing Indiana Jones, but I really enjoyed it minus the last 30 minutes. I forgot how much I love going to the movies. But I'm here to talk about the trailers, including 1) the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 2) Australia, and 3) American Teen. Bonus) Dark Knight.

1) This movie looks so creepy and sad and awesome, I can't wait. I was really excited for Youth without Youth and therefore sad to hear that it was bad. And then I never saw it. But here it is again with better costumes, some of my favorite stars (hi Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton. Wish I were ginger like you two!), and hopefully better execution. Plus it seems to have a touch of Time Traveler's Wife in it. The only thing I'll say is that I wish they had not given up all the magic in the trailer. Chronologically, it seems to touch on every moment in his aging and visually it gives up what I have to imagine are the most stunning images of aged youth. 2) I haven't seen Moulin Rouge or Romeo and Juliet in its entirety so I can just hope that I love the cheesy melodrama without worrying about what came before. Plus I think Nathaniel has rubbed off on me. 3) This guy is set in Warsaw, IN, so of course I'm in already. But that said, it looks really amazing. From the few clips I saw, it seems to capture all the angles of high school: over-wrought relationships, class issues, excessive expectations for 17 year olds, self-consciousness, etc, etc. But it still looks fun, which I think it quite a coup given the list I just gave. Bonus) I've of course seen the Dark Knight trailer already, but I still can't wait and I love watching Stephan's building blow up.

Boarding School

Like many dorky young women, I really wanted to attend boarding school when I was a kid. Not really, probably, since I was scared to be too far from home, but there's that boarding school mystique. I think I was mainly attracted to the idea of creating fictive families and communities that kids rather than adults controlled. That said, a lot of the fiction about it deals with how hard it is to deal with the social dynamics of cruel peers 24/7. Sometimes in murderous ways. Here is my favorite boarding school fiction. Am I forgetting anything good?

1) Harry Potter books and movies. This is what I was hoping for as a kid: a side of the genre that focuses more on kids doing their own thing without too many adults around to interfere.

2) Hex. Hex is the Psycho of television. It's really fun, really daring, and at the very end it gets a little wacked--can't we just cut out the psychiatrist from Psycho and the last half season from Hex? Nonetheless, I loved it. It's kind of murderous.

3) Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is still one of my all time favorite books. I don't know how I romanticized boarding school at all given this book. Young girls die, everyone's cold and underfed, it's cruelly authoritarian, and you get left there by yourself over Xmas. And your only friend left after your other friend dies leaves to get married and you never hear from her again.

4) Picnic at Hanging Rock. Somehow, thirty years after this was made, I still thought this was a true story, so I'm pretty disappointed to discover it is not. The Blair Witch of the seventies, plus boarding school, and crazy aboriginal shit, and some bizarre lesbian undertones. A really great movie.

5) Center Stage and Suspira. Sometimes being a dancer is a free ticket to boarding school. Then it's just an issue of whether you become anorexic or get murdered.

6) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I kind of hate Stephen Daedulus but I put up with him because of Leopold Bloom.

7) Toy Soldiers. South Park spoofed this recently to hilarious effect. Rudy, aka Sean Astin, is at a boarding school that gets taken over by terrorists. I can't remember why, but they use all the skills they honed playing pranks and avoiding adult supervision to defeat the terrorists from the inside. Good times.

8) X-Men. And another utopic boarding school, this time for kids who don't function in their own families and boarding school becomes more of a metaphor for fictive family than experimental community. I love X-men.

Desert Island Top 10

Nogoodforme did a fun post on 10 things they'd bring to a desert island. Their categories vary a bit and I just chose the ones I felt like using:

1. Record: First Love, Last Rites soundtrack by Shudder to Think
2. Food: salt and vinegar chips. That's the silliest thing ever. I would get super dehydrated.
3. Clothing: My gray Ruehl hoodie, one of my Target tank tops with an owl, FCUK jeans Stephan's mom got me (sailor style, or as my aunt calls them, drive-in pants. For easy access! Gross!)
4. Beach reading: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut though it's really hard not to bring Jane Eyre.
5. Favorite lip balm: this new lemon creme stuff I bought at CO Bigelow. It's really tasty.
6. Movies: Days of Heaven, Ghostbusters (stolen from Liz), and Shadow of a Doubt
7. Beauty item: hydrocortisone cream and some tweezers. How big a dork does this make me?
8. Drink: Fresca. And something to Irish it up once in a while.
9. Rainy day entertainment: I'm stealing Kat from nogoodforme's answer: Animal Crossing on Nintendo DS. I cannot wait for Animal Crossing Wii. When will it come out?
10. Writing implement: a composition book and a .3 ballpoint pen. Or maybe a .5. But a really fine point ball point pen.

917/774 to go

I've read 84 of 1001 books to read before you die. Not that impressive, though not awful.
Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
Atonement – Ian McEwan
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
Contact – Carl Sagan
The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
The Shining – Stephen King
Sula – Toni Morrison
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
The Magus – John Fowles
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
nvisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Passing – Nella Larsen
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ulysses – James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Emma – Jane Austen
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
Candide – Voltaire
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
Roderick Random – Tobias George Smollett
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
Metamorphoses – Ovid

216 of 1001 movies. Better, though not great. Both lists via kottke. I'm about even on the movies with kottke, though I kick his butt with the fiction.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)
Metropolis (1927)
An Andalusian Dog (1928)
Blackmail (1929)
Frankenstein (1931)
City Lights (1931)
The Public Enemy (1931)
Scarface: The Shame Of A Nation (1932)
It Happened One Night (1934)
The Thin Man (1934)
The 39 Steps (1935)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Jezebel (1938)
Stagecoach (1939)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Gone With the Wind (1939)
His Girl Friday (1940)
Rebecca (1940)
Fantasia (1940)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Pinocchio (1940)
Citizen Kane (1941)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Dumbo (1941)
Now, Voyager (1942)
Cat People (1942)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
The Seventh Victim (1943)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
To Have and Have Not (1944)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Beauty and the Beast (1946)
Notorious (1946)
Rope (1948)
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
From Here to Eternity (1953)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
Rear Window (1954)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Vertigo (1958)
North by Northwest (1959)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Black Orpheus (1959)
Psycho (1960)
La Jetee (1961)
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
West Side Story (1961)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Birds (1963)
The Haunting (1963)
Goldfinger (1964)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
My Fair Lady (1964)
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
The Sound of Music (1965)
The Graduate (1967)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
M*A*S*H (1970)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Harold and Maude (1971)
The French Connection (1971)
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)
The Sting (1973)
Badlands (1973)
American Graffiti (1973)
Sleeper (1973)
Young Frankenstein (1974)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Jaws (1975)
Carrie (1976)
Network (1976)
Star Wars (1977)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Annie Hall (1977)
Suspiria (1977)
Grease (1978)
Days of Heaven (1978)
Alien (1979)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
The Jerk (1979)
The Muppet Movie (1979)
Manhattan (1979)
Mad Max (1979)
The Shining (1980)
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
The Elephant Man (1980)
Airplane! (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1981)
E.T.: The Extra-Terestrial (1982)
Blade Runner (1982)
The Evil Dead (1982)
Diner (1982)
A Christmas Story (1983)
El Norte (1983)
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
Amadeus (1984)
The Terminator (1984)
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Ghostbusters (1984)
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Come and See (1985)
Back to the Future (1985)
Manhunter (1986)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
She’s Gotta Have It (1986)
Aliens (1986)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
A Room with a View (1986)
Platoon (1986)
Top Gun (1986)
Raising Arizona (1987)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)
The Princess Bride (1987)
Bull Durham (1988)
Akira (1988)
The Naked Gun (1988)
Big (1988)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Rain Man (1988)
Batman (1989)
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Roger & Me (1989)
Glory (1989)
Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989)
Say Anything (1989)
Goodfellas (1990)
Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
Dances with Wolves (1990)
Pretty Woman (1990)
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Groundhog Day (1993)
Philadelphia (1993)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Schindler’s List (1993)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Clerks (1994)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
The Lion King (1994)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Chungking Express (1994)
Crumb (1994)
Heavenly Creatures (1994)
Babe (1995)
Toy Story (1995)
Strange Days (1995)
Braveheart (1995)
Clueless (1995)
Seven (1995)
Dead Man (1995)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Fargo (1996)
Independence Day (1996)
Secrets and Lies (1996)
The English Patient (1996)
Trainspotting (1996)
Scream (1996)
Deconstructing Harry (1997)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
Princess Mononoke (1997)
The Ice Storm (1997)
Open Your Eyes (1997)
Titanic (1997)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Buffalo 66 (1998)
Run Lola Run (1998)
Rushmore (1998)
Pi (1998)
Happiness (1998)
Ring (1998)
There’s Something About Mary (1998)
Magnolia (1999)
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
All About My Mother (1999)
Three Kings (1999)
Fight Club (1999)
Being John Malkovich (1999)
American Beauty (1999)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Matrix (1999)
In the Mood for Love (2000)
Gladiator (2000)
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Amores Perros (2000)
Meet the Parents (2000)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Memento (2000)
Dancer in the Dark (2000)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
Amelie (2001)
What Time Is It There? (2001)
Spirited Away (2001)
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

TV crushes

TV crushes I'm too embarrassed to have pictures of on the blog: the guy who plays Keamy on Lost. I feel like he should be a Battlestar guy. Sayid is also super hot on the show, but not in stills. And Brian Austin Green from the Sarah Connor Chronicles. This one is annoying because I was cool enough at 11 to be immune the first time that BAG was hot, during the 90210 years.

And to cap it all off, a crush Stephan and I share, to make me feel less guilty about having a post about crushes:

Natural Disasters

It's devastating to see an earthquake following the cyclone.

Brainy Ladies with Style

This first image is from Shorpy. The second is from University of Chicago's Special Collections digital database. What do you think the women in the second image are doing? It's so odd, but presumably hilarious judging by everyone's reactions. I love both.

Russia

Some links to the good, the bad, and the ugly in Russia.

My Favorite Al-l-isons

Actresses:
Ally Sheedy
Alyson Hannigan
Allison Janney

Characters:
Amy Locane in Cry-Baby
Ally Sheedy in Breakfast Club
Allison MacKenzie in Peyton Place
Alison in Elvis Costello's Alison
Allison in the Pixies' Allison
Allison in Gordon Lightfoot's Poor Little Allison
Allison Road in The Gin Blossom's Allison Road
Jane Curtain in Kate and Allie
Alison in Christopher Pike's Chain Letter

Blogs:
http://alilovescurtis.blogspot.com/
http://www.unruly-things.blogspot.com/
http://www.allisonwrote.blogspot.com/

Celebrity Sightings 5 plus 3

A few days ago, Claire on Loobylu did a post about six celebrity sightings she'd had. I love celebrity sightings. Here are 5 of mine, and three from my friends and family.

5. Jim Thome, JO, Rick Smits, Dale Davis. It's kind of easy to see sports celebrities. They have to live where you live no matter how awesome they are. That's where their teams are. These are ones I've seen.
4. Jerrod the Subway guy. Jerrod went to my high school, and his brother was in my brother's class. So he was at my brother's high school graduation ceremony at Hinkel Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. A hushed whisper spread across the room: "Jerrod the Subway guy is here!" My grandma was pretty psyched.
3. Vince Vaughn. Stephan is a location scout so this might not count, but I saw Vince Vaughn at the wrap party for Fred Claus.
2. Michelle Obama. I met Michelle Obama in fall of 2003, so Obama was still a rising star in Illinois rather than, you know, a probable presidential candidate. The best part though, is that I met her at a Lesbian Ball. Take from that what you will. Actually, probably don't. This is apparently what the wives of ambitious young politicians do. They go to all the balls in town.
1. George Wendt. This is my favorite celebrity sighting of all time. When Stephan graduated from college, his soon-to-be-stepdad got a room at the Drake Hotel. So between the graduation ceremony and dinner, Stephan, the stepdad, his mom, his brother, his dad, his dad's boyfriend Francois, and I went back to their hotel room to kill some time. We were all heading back out for dinner, straggling along the hallway. The stepdad darted back from the elevator lobby to tell us that guy from tv was at the elevators. And I turned the corner, and there was George Wendt standing there. My mouth must have gaped open, because he smiled slightly and the elevator door opened, and he stepped in. Francois somehow had made his way to that end of the elevator chamber by the time the elevator was closing. And as the doors started to close, he yelled to Stephan’s brother, "think fast", and hurled a complimentary Drake orange across the room. I always hope that George Wendt saw that orange flying across the room. George Wendt is one of my favorite celebrities anyway because Cheers was awesome, and he kicked ass on the Weakest Link.

1. My dad got hit on by Janice Dickensen at the airport.
2. Freddy Rodriguez has ridden around in the backseat of Stephan's subaru.
3. One of my brother's best friends from high school almost ran over Peyton Manning. Apparently she was not paying attention to where she was going in a Bazbeaux parking lot, looked up and Petyon Manning was standing there frozen like a deer in headlights right in front of her car. It's such a bad sign that Peyton panics when something large and fast is coming at him.