In the spotlight: July

Elementary
I've been reluctant to finish the third season because I didn't like the way it seemed to be headed but after about the 12th episode or so, it turned around (for the better) and I just flew through the rest of it. I then started watching season one again, which is the best season in my opinion (I've already watched it once this year, in March). What I love most about this show is how intensely Jonny Lee Miller's Sherlock feels things. He's not some emotionless sociopath or a trickster that never seems to be affected by the things that happen. No, his feelings are raw and real and that makes it easy to understand why he turned to drugs in the first place; his mind is as much of a burden as it is a gift.

The Heat 
Dear Melissa McCarthy, 

I'm more and more blown away by you with every movie I watch.

Best Wishes,
Elin

Terminator Genisys
For me, this was all about Sarah Connor. I didn't like her that much before - either she was the epitome of helplessness or over-the-top angry and unreasonable. Emilia Clarke's Sarah on the other hand is tough and self-sufficient but also caring and reachable.

A Knight's Tale
The pacing is great, you really want to poke the villain in the eye yet it's not depressing and dark - what more can you ask for? 

Roman Holiday
Oh, this was excellent! Extremely frustrating for me to watch, but excellent.


I was also able to check these off from my challenging 2015 list this month:

A movie that scares you: Event Horizon
A movie set in the future: Terminator Genisys
A movie that made you cry hard: The Green Mile
A movie with a number in the title: Third Star
A book-to-movie adaptation: Luftslottet som sprängdes
A movie set in a foreign country: Roman Holiday

Tired thoughts

I'm usually not opposed to watching long movies. In the case of  Luftslottet som sprängdes (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest), however, I very intensely feel like I want the 2 hours and 16 minutes I spent watching it back. Right now, if possible.

The one where Cotton Ball lives

I've just spent the past two hours with Cotton Ball, Alan Poe and Sardini on board the Con Air.

At least that was what Julia thought their names were, when I asked.

We both agreed that not being able to remember even the main character's name, is a sure sign that you don't care about anyone or anything that happens in the movie.

And maybe rightly so? Just take Vince Larkin for example:

That man mostly ran back and forth across an airfield and got knocked down a bunch of times.

Caring stops rather quickly, to say the least.

(We never stopped caring about Cotton Ball though and luckily he made it.)

Con Air

ChocolateBunnyMovieClub 2.0

Since we've finished 14 movies from our original ChocolateBunnyMovieClub list, we've gone ahead and updated it a bit. This is what we want to watch together, in the near future: 

Movies - new to both of us:

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Die Hard
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Enter the Dragon
From Here to Eternity
Heat
Indiana Jones (one of them - we haven't seen any)
Mad Max: Fury Road
Mary Poppins
Psycho
Roman Holiday
Taxi Driver
The Godfather
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Producers (any of Mel Brooks's movies besides Robin Hood: Men In Tights, really)
The Wolf Man (1941)
Vertigo

Movies - new to one of us:

A Fish Called Wanda
Con Air
Eight Legged Freaks
Jaws
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Pulp Fiction
Schindler's List  

Movies that we're rewatching:

The Jungle Book

ChocolateBunnyMovieClub: The progress

Earlier this year, my sister Julia and I decided to start watching movies together. For once they would be ones that we'd decided on in advance. Ones that were iconic or that we really wanted to watch the other suffer through. So far, we've ticked off 14 movies from our ever growing list: 

* Léon: Post #1 
* The Shawshank Redemption: Post #2 
* Shutter Island: Post #3 
* Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation: Post #4
* Event Horizon: Post #5

* American Beauty: We watched it because I was in a Kevin Spacey-period + I'd been a long time since I saw it and Julia had never seen it. It was much better than I remembered. 

* Pay It Forward: Again, because of Kevin Spacey. Plus Julia wanted to re-watch it and so did I. It was better than we remembered.

* The Green Mile: Julia really wanted to watch this. I already had, many times, but somehow I had repressed how sad it was and so I surprised myself by crying for 60% of the film. Julia cried once. In the end.
 
* The Matrix: Our brother wanted us to see it + I'd always wanted to. Neither of us liked it very much - not because it was a bad film at all, but because it wasn't our type of film. 

* The Princess Bride: I'd heard so many good things about this and I wasn't disappointed. It didn't wow me though, mostly because I'd expected it to be funnier.   

* Third Star: This is the movie that has impacted me the most, in a very "I cried for 20 minutes"-kind of way. I knew this and was obviously not that excited to watch this with Julia. She, on the other hand, wanted to watch it because of that very reason.

 This perfectly illustrates our relationship

Summer-y of things currently watched..

* A woman and her bunny hang out in her parents garden. The sun is shining and the mosquitoes are annoying. Evidently they're having fun because the woman's reading and the bunny's making ecstatic, twirly jumps. They stay outside until the first raindrops fall, 20 minutes later (because obviously that's what the mosquitoes were trying to convey with their relentless attacks). Safe and dry inside, the woman and her sisters decide to socialize in front of The Princess Bride and A Knight's Tale, aided by chips and watermelon. All is well. 

* A woman and her sisters + her favorite (/only) niece go searching for a flee market. It's the middle of the week and, as usual this summer, it looks like it's about to rain. They do get a little lost on the way (the woman could have been a more attentive map reader, I suppose) but find their way eventually. After fleemarketing, they head for the city where the woman FINALLY buys herself a shoe rack and the sisters buy baby stuff. In the evening the woman + her sister Sara goes to the cinema to watch Terminator Genisys. Afterwards, the woman returns home (extremely tired), and then stubbornly assembles her shoe rack. The end!

* A woman and her youngest cousin Lina hang out for two days. They talk for hours about religion, play Mario Kart and Yoshi's Woolly World, feed some ducks and eat some ice cream. Being only 14 means Lina's got far more energy than the woman and so, after the woman's helped her cousin catch her train, she collapses in front of Friends while making a conscious effort to stay awake past 10 PM. She succeeds! 

I'm living the high life..

When I woke up this morning, I felt like someone had sucker punched me between my eyes.

And then stuffed my nose with cotton balls. 
If it was the five hours of sleep I got or the fact that I cried on and off during about 60% of The Green Mile, that caused it? I don't know. 
My eyelids does look bee stung though, so I'm gonna go with the latter alternative..
I even tried a hair of the dog this morning and described certain scenes to my sister Hanna while she breastfed, but all it took was talking about Mouseville for me to tear up again.
If this is what a hangover feels like, I'm glad I don't drink!

The Green Mile

Unpopular opinions, yo

A popular movie that you didn't like:

Pretty Woman
I can't stress enough how much I hate this movie. How can ANYONE think it's romantic that Edward buys a prostitute? Even if they eventually fall in love, there are still too many disturbing scenes where he has sex with her while having paid for it (the piano scene for example). Plus I feel like Edward's just another stereotypical "bad boy" with lots of money, a hole in his heart and commitment issues.

The Wizard of Oz
I had quite high expectations for this - firstly because it's a classic and secondly because it's quite innovative given that it's made in 1939 (I think I read somewhere that they created the tornado using a sock?). It felt too long, however, without much happening plus the songs are more "I sing when I could talk" than anything else and I'm not a fan of those types of musicals.

Se7en:
Again, this was a case of too high expectations for me. I think the reason I didn't like it was the lack of real suspense - you never got to see the victims before they were killed and that made it hard to root for the villain to get caught. Also, I didn't much care for either Brad Pitt's or Morgan Freeman's characters.

I don't think it's unpopular to hate snow, but I felt it was fitting since I dislike this image about as much as the movies above..

A popular character that you do not like:

Leonard Hofstadter (TBBT)
He's such a love/hate character for me.. (my hate post and love post)

Edward Cullen & Jacob Black (Twilight)
When talking about these two - I feel it's fitting to sum up my feelings about them using this (slightly modified) quote: "I want to fong you, until your insides are out, your outsides are in, your entrails will become your extrails I will w-rip... all the p... ung. Pain, lots of pain."

Again, I'm about as excited for this to become a reality as I am for the 105th Pirates of the Caribbean-movie..

A popular director that you just cannot get into:

Quentin Tarantino
It's not that I dislike his style at all, I'm just not overcome with the desire to watch all his movies/sing his praises like I feel most people are.


A popular show or movie that you have no interest in watching:
Breaking Bad, Dexter, Game of Thrones
Both BB and Dexter are types of shows that (like Tarantino's movies) are too grim for me. I want lots of light in the things I watch! As for Game of Thrones, I just have a hard time with loosing characters and bad guys winning..

Elin and Julia watch the classics.. sort of: #5

Movie: Event Horizon
Status: Julia only wants to see it because it scared Elin half to death when she was 13 and watched it with her MUCH tougher friend..
Favorite scene: Bah! Like there is one? How about the scenes with the creepy child or all the intestines or Baby Bear's impromptu space walk (without a suit)?
Times we pause it: Once, when Elin prolongs the agony by going to the bathroom for about 15 minutes..

This whole evening started off with Julia spiking my water with salt. Really - that should have been my first clue! After the water prank + her subsequent 5 minute laugh attack, we started on what I can only describe as my road to nightmares-about-aliens-with-their-feet-chopped-off.
I really can't tell if this movie was good or not. Mostly because I have almost nothing to compare it too but also because I was too busy hiding behind my stuffed hippo for the majority of it.

Julia didn't like it that much and actually had the nerve to call it tame/a walk in the park etc. Either she's hiding her fear extremely well OR I'm about as equipped for watching horror as I am for riding horses (i.e very VERY.. unequipped)?

Ambition for: July

July's usually the warmest month here in Sweden, but it doesn't really look that promising this year. There are things I'm gonna do however, regardless of the weather (am I rhyming unintentionally?):

* Celebrate my sister Hanna's 28th birthday (19/7)
* Go and see an outdoor play (4/7)
* Camp with my siblings (if we manage to find two rain-free days..)
* Finish my summer course at the university (at least the majority of it, since I take the exam in August)
* Go swimming (yeah, right!)
* Eat my weight in strawberries and cherries
* Listen to Mr. Big
* Unlock my bakery in Cooking Fever  I did, and then removed it, because I became too addicted..
* Play Mario Kart
* Help my mom and dad organize their storage properly
* Finish my library books before the 27th
* Sunbathe without dying from mosquitoes/pollen I'm gonna count 1 day for twenty minutes as a success!

Subsequently, my movie ambitions are quite modest this month:

* Body of Proof, season 2 (nope - they removed it from Viaplay.se)
* Elementary, season 3
* Paper Towns
* Terminator 5

If I'm able, I'd REALLY like to train this little dragon to walk on a leash too! Her current state of obedience is reduced to freaking out and then bolting into the nearest bush. Edit: Have to find and buy an escape proof harness first!