Books:
16. Running With Scissors- Augusten Burroughs. I already read his other books while waiting to get this book, but it was the most bizarre of all his stories. He lives for a few years with this crazy crooked "Psychologist". Hilarity ensues. It makes watching the movie much easier to follow anyway.
17. Paranoid Parenting.
Frank Furedi thinks we shouldn't turn our personal parenting styles into activist crusades and that it doesn't really matter if a baby is nursed or bottle-fed, if they spend time with their own parents or are at day cares or even orphanages. Everyone will be fine, get over it. Not surprisingly, he feels the same way about the
environment.Now I am not an over-protective parent in the least and I hate those holier than thou people who think that their child would die without them, but I take decisions seriously and I do feel that parents influence their children for the better or worse, or both and I don't think that reading labels on food and walking your second grader to school a few blocks is being hysterical.
Anyway, that's just about the worst debate to get into, so I'll drop it right now.
18. Waiting for Godot. Samuel Beckett. I read this in French in college and one of my favorite lines ever is from this book:
ESTRAGON: I can't take it anymore!
VLADIMIR: That's what you think!
19. Death Blossoms. Mumia Abu Jamal. This is his second book and it's mostly essays on religion and society and how we treat each other and guilt and innocence and what not. Foreward by Cornel West may have been the best part, though.
20. The Coldest Winter Ever. Sister Souljah. I don't usually read fiction, but I was curious after hearing somebody talk about it and I got totally sucked into it and finnished all 400 some pages in 3 days. It was a fun read with lots of lessons about loyalty and materialism and worth to be learned, I wish she would have spent more time on the actual "Sister Souljah " character, though...
Movies:
40/41.
Disturbia/ Rear Window. I watched Rear Window, the 1954 Hitchcock original after having seen the remake, Disturbia. They were both really really good. The difference was that in the modern day version, there is a lot more comedy, Aaron Yoo is really unexpectedly funny, and there is the gore that today's audience has come to expect.
42.
The 5th Element-
Milla Jovovich and Bruce Willis in a silly futuristic save the world from the aliens movie that I'd definetly watch again if it came on cable tv. But I love Milla so I'm pretty forgiving.
43.
The Million Dollar Hotel. Really awesome movie about a semi-retarded guy and a murder in a Los Angeles hotel for transient wierdos. Milla rocks retro sweaters and is the object of affection to the semi-retard. A beautiful love story. Bono is credited as one of the writers and has some somgs in it too.
44.
Just Friends. I was babysitting and that's what was on their tv. I got caught up in it because Ryan Reynolds was actually really funny in it. And the girl who I was watching had the whole thing memorized. This is not my kind of movie and for the record I'm not going to recommend it.
45.
Ma Mere. OH MY GOD this was horrible! Probably worse than that Edie Sedgewick movie. This teen age boy falls in love with his mentally ill absentee mother and all sorts of skinny-boobless-naked frenchness ensues. Waaaay too graphic, plus why do the french always think we are going to be interested in incest? And wierd nude scenes? It was like Betty Blue gone horribly wrong. Isabelle Hupert was in I Heart Huckabees. She excels at wierd nude scenes, apparently. I saw it on either the IFC channel or the Sundance Channel.
46.
Sherry Baby. Hit way too close to home. Except I would be playing the brothers wife and I see myself as not as controlling and interfering (although from the point of view of Sherry- as played by crackwhore in our story, it may really look like that), and also, there isn't any molesting father in our story to explain the behaviour.
Even the crashing the birthday party and making it all about her and trying to run away to Florida with the kid and turning around after the kid pees her pants was pretty much our experiences with the long lost addict mother. I have a love-hate relationship with Maggie Gylenhaal, but I think I liked her in this.