Currently watching, yo!

Phu! I'm finally done with my exam and the aftermath of it (i.e stress-related anxiety). Just in time for the first (and probably only) heatwave this summer! This does not mean I watch less movies, however, just that I watch them at night:

* Castle, season 2 (starting season 3 very soon)
* The Man from U.N.C.L.E (in the cinema tomorrow)
* Schindler's List (a Chocolatebunnymovieclub pick.. I'm NOT excited!)
* The Bodyguard/Primal Fear/Max Payne  - I'm sort of halfway through all of them..

R.I.P brain

I'm taking a course in classical mythology this summer. Why did I choose this? WHY? It's about equal parts interesting/frustrating/like reading Tolkien. Don't tell me Hesiod, Homer, Herodotus, Hera, Hermes, Hades, Hephaestus, Hector, Harmonia and Heracles couldn't just as easily be characters from The Lord of the Rings?! How am I supposed to memorize this?  

I'm taking the test on Friday. When I'm done with it, I'm: 1) Sleeping for a week 2) never again reading anything that requires me to learn the names in both English AND Swedish and 3) never ever watching the movie Troy. EVER.

Ambition for: August

Even though I might have developed an allergy to grass this summer, I'm thankful for it! So much so, that I'm determined to go swimming at least once before it gets too cold. It's a little unclear how catching a cold will help pay homage to this summer but I just want one swim outside really, so I'm going with it. Here are some other things I want to do/watch this month:

* Watch Funny Face
* Finish my summer course
* Pick raspberries, cloudberries, blueberries and bake something using rhubarbs
* Rewatch season two of Elementary
* Celebrate my 31th birthday
* Watch something starring Gregory Peck
* Spend at least one day by the sea
* Take the canoe out on a stream somewhere
* Watch Crossroads (2002) with my mom and Julia
* Clean out my parents' garage
* Cook with more variation
* Watch Paper Towns in the cinema

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