ChocolateBunnyMovieClub: 12 more

"The Chocolatebunnymovieclub" is what me and my sister Julia call it when we watch movies together + eat chocolate bunnies (correction: I eat them). These movies are either iconic ones or ones that we really want to watch the other suffer through. In the previous summary, we ticked off 14. Now we've finished 12 more: 
 
* Fried Green Tomatoes: Post #6
* Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Post #7

* White Christmas
I'd have liked more snow/Christmas and less dancing. I'm very fond of musicals, just not the bits where they dance silently for five minutes straight..

* Roman Holiday
Initially, I did have some problems with the ending (which I now realize is perfect) + the way Gregory Peck's character used Ann's innocence to his advantage (= me having a hard time wanting them to end up together). But I loved it anyways - even more than Julia, I think.

* Psycho
We both loved this. Norman Bates was surprisingly easy to empathize with; he was such a likable, vulnerable character.

* Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Initially it was very funny, but gradually that faded.. it sort of got less funny and less eventful the closer to the ending we got. 

* Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Mostly this just felt very surreal, which I had a hard time with. It did have it's moments where I laughed out loud but not enough to make me like it. Julia felt differently though..

* Con Air
We both felt that this was bad. It's not the first time I watch it, but it was the first time I felt this way. John Cusack's character, for example: what was his purpose? He just kept running across the airfield, getting knocked down over and over again.

* Schindler's List
I'm glad I watched it, because I hadn't before, but I won't do it again. I felt the tears building up like a wave until I was struck with an explosive cry-attack that left even me stunned. I literally went: "Can you pause it, cause I'm gonna cry now?" and then exploded into tears.

Some nights she puts salt in my water, other nights she pulls the chair out from under me.. One day, I'll poison her fruit! #snowwhitestyle

Did not finish/missed it:

* Mad Max: Fury Road 
I wasn't feeling good, so Julia watched it with the rest of the family instead. I don't think she was that big of a fan..

* The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (DNF)
Was it aesthetically pleasing? Yes. Was it a gripping story with attention-grabbing characters? No. Did it bore us to no end? Yes.

* The Great Dictator (DNF)
I remembered it being funnier, but that might have been because I used to exclusively watch those parts. It wasn't bad, just much more serious than we'd anticipated (or wanted).

Oh, how time flies! I'm glad we're watching these movies together now, while I'm young enough to stay awake during most of them. From the left: My sister Hanna, my little brother Stefan and Julia.

Elin and Julia watch the classics.. sort of #7

Movie: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Status: Neither of us have seen it before, but I know my friend Hanna likes it.   
Favorite scene: The dialog in the end!
Times we pause it: Maybe just the once, when our brother joins us. He has a spooky tendency to enter the living room just as a movie's about to end.. (happens more often than not)

Initially, our mama's very skeptical. She doesn't want to watch a classic - and certainly not a violent action film. As it turns out to be neither of those things, she stays and watches it with us. When it's over, I ask them to rate the movie by holding up fingers for the camera. They unanimously give it two out of five and I agree.

See - I felt that the best part of the movie was the relationship between Butch and Sundance. The movie itself felt very long and uneventful (a cloud of dust is only threatening for a short period of time, unless it actually proves fatal). After a while it also gets frustrating to watch them rob everything they can think of, seemingly without reason. It's like when someone's painting and you just watch them slowly paint themselves into a corner.. (haha, when has that ever happened?) They have enough, why do they continue? I need a reason. I need a motive. I need an explanation. I need answers. I need.. to stop taking it so seriously? definitely. 

 -30 degrees C outside, +30 degrees inside.

Elin and Julia watch the classics.. sort of: #6

Movie: Fried Green Tomatoes
Status: Elin's seen it maybe once, in her early teens. Julia's never seen it.
Favorite scene: Anything involving Evelyn..    
Times we pause it: None.

It's a dark and quite chilly evening in my parents' living room. My sister and I discuss which movie to watch. Our mother joins the conversation and opts for something fluffy, romantic and fast-paced. Naturally, that makes us decide on Fried Green Tomatoes instead (i.e the opposite of what she wants). Our father joins us then. He's building a fire and doesn't really plan on staying long, but is hooked and watches the entire movie with us. Fifteen minutes in, my mother is asleep on my lap.

When it's over and we talk about it, I cry a little at the thought of people solely living on in our memories. That my future children won't know what my grandfather sounded like etc. My mother wakes up then, recites something about death and starts crying too. Julia's just sitting there, watching us in disbelief and laughing! Best movie night in quite some time..

Our hooked Papa and the fire he made

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

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)?

Elin and The Yeti watch the classics.. sort of: #4

Movies: Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Status: Neither of us have seen the first one. Elin's watched the second one once (in like 1998).
Favorite scenes: Any scene with Arnold, really. 
Times we pause them: Maybe 5 in total - mostly to discuss the time travel aspect..

These movies have great entertainment value and are both very well paced! But they are also very confusing - at least to us. After a few discussion breaks about the weirdness of it all, we decide to just roll with whatever it is that we don't understand. And so when the T-1000 (in the second film) turns into some sort of gecko-floor-robot, we just go with it. When he turns into a big metal blob? Again - we go with it (and then jokingly refer to him as "the blob" for the rest of the movie).   

I really liked the first film, mostly for the insta-love (you know - when someone loves "a lifetime's worth" in just a few hours? I'm a sucker for that) and Julia was definitely a bigger fan of the second one. I have to agree with her overall though because I think Arnold makes for a much better hero than villain and Edward Furlong is fantastic.

Here's proof of: 1) Julia's allusiveness (she's hereby renamed "The Yeti") 2) Our first real heat wave this summer (Yaay! Shorts!) and 3) The fact that we've been really responsible and watched the movies at night when you can't be outside anyways (because of about one million mosquitoes). 

Elin and Julia watch the classics.. sort of: #3

Movie: Shutter Island
Status: Elin's never seen it. Julia's seen it once.
Favorite scene: Teddy's first bad dream. 
Times we I pause it: About 10 because of all my newly formed theories that I needed to discuss. Julia may have been a little sick of me in the end..

We may not have been equally frightened at the beginning (I was fearing there'd be lots of jump scares) but I think we were both equally engrossed in the end! I may have tried to discuss the movie a little, during the time and we were both thankful that we watched it together because (knowing myself and my impatience) I would have jumped to the end to solve the puzzle if I'd seen it on my own.

It was really good! And that surprised me. Julia was also surprised, but more because it was "easier to understand the second time around", apparently. I didn't think I'd enjoy it quite as much as I did, because it did seem a little too.. scary for me (I'm very sensitive - Orphan's about the scariest movie I've ever seen). But it wasn't! And it made me think and Leonardo DiCaprio was amazing and the feels. Oh, the feels. 

Julia's excited face, my excited face and the living room.. where the exciting stuff happens.

Elin and Julia watch the classics.. sort of: #2

Movie: The Shawshank Redemption
Status: Julia's seen it once. Elin's never seen it.
Favorite scene: The river.
Times we pause it: Zero.

Julia wants to turn off all the lights because "she can see my reflection in the TV and she doesn't want to watch me". I delight in the fact that she can't turn them off by throwing a stuffed bunny at the light switch. As she gets up I open my chocolate bunny.

There is a certain added pressure when you watch a movie that's deemed to be "the best movie ever" (it says so on the cover) for the first time. Thankfully I loved it! I even re-watched the best scenes a few days later and got goose bumps. It might be a little long, but that's really the only negative thing about it.

The failed bunny toss.

Elin and Julia watch the classics.. sort of (aka the Chocolatebunnymovieclub) #1

Movie: Léon
Status: Elin's seen it about ten years ago. Julia's never seen it.
Favorite scene: The dress-up.
Times we pause it: At least three (because Mathilda)

We both fall in love with Léon. I want to take care of him because I feel he wouldn't kill if he knew all his options. And because people use him (Tony). Not sure I'd let him live with me though.. We both find Mathilda very provoking and she makes us have to take a few discussion breaks. Not because Léon is doing something inappropriate but because she's balancing between being a child and an adult. Maybe it's necessary, because Léon is more like a boy than a grown-up and he needs this in-between girl to push him, but it sure makes us uncomfortable!  

I try to take a picture of Julia, to document the moment she watched one of her new favorite movies. This is what happens: