24 Frames Per Second

"Oh for goodness sake, get down off that crucifix.  Someone needs the wood."
- Felicia, Priscilla: Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliot, 1994)

Yep, that's right - it's Thursday night screening time!

And that was our film... in all honesty, I came to this screening having no ungodly idea what the film was about; my advisor told me that the musical lover portion of the grad group was presenting Priscilla: Queen of the Desert and I was like, "Oh, cool.  It's probably a musical."  I look it up and all I pay attention to is the part that says it's a musical and I just ignored the rest and came to the screening with only that knowledge.  ... Yeah, um, nobody told me it was about dragqueens. XD  It was a fun film, though, quite hilarious.  But prepare yourselves for it, 'cause I've already almost made Merle's head explode by mentioning this... so I'll try to give this slowly.

Hugo Weaving.

Is in it.

...



As a dragqueen.

...



I'm going to give you some time to take that in.







... You ready yet?
Well if you need more time, just minimise this 'cause I'm moving on.

We also watched a bunch of Busby Berkeley musical numbers, which was mygod freaky.  Not 'cause it was avant-garde or abstract or anything, but... if you don't know what his stuff's like, there's a lot of freaky imagery in it such as human fountains, human caterpillars, human rowboats, human flowers, etc. etc. etc., and when you know it's all humans that's where the freaky comes in.  Very cool nonetheless.

Well the rest of my week has been insanely, insanely busy.  Not in the essay-writing or assignment-doing kind of way (I finished the Haneke essay last Saturday), but in the all-this-stuff-I'm-doing-in-the-week kind of way.  Monday marked the return of the European Cinema screenings (yay!) and what we watched was for our exploration of the "Kitchen Sink" Realism movement, which was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning starring  none other than Albert Finney.  Admittedly the only real exposure I've had to the guy is... Scrooge, so seeing him in his debut role ten years prior to a film where he was made up to look like a 70-year-old man was definitely out of the ordinary for me.  But I very much liked the film, Finney did a marvelous job and it had that usual lighthearted Britishness that makes British films so enjoyable.  Not to mention that the story was well put together and the aesthetics were interesting etc., but this is European Cinema, we're exposed to nothing but the good stuff, those comments were a given XP

That same day I had a Canadian Cinema screening where we watched Double Happiness starring Sandra Oh.  I've only seen her in Last Night besides this, so it was nice to get more exposure of her... and I really liked this movie!  Yet another "multicultural family in Canada" situation, but far less confusing and starring a dynamic female character with lots of witty humour and awkward romance that's unconventional yet realistic.  ... It was awesome!  That's all I can really say about it.  Go and see it if you can!  You might have to be in Canada to do so but go and see it!

Wednesday reintroduced me to my Film Directors/Auteurs class where we have finally left the not-so-wonderful world of Michael Haneke and have now entered the noticeably-closer-to-wonderful world of Michael Winterbottom.  Though we weren't watching one of his best films as a start, it (Welcome to Sarajevo) was aesthetically more conventional, had a strange contrast of manslaughter and happy pop music, and had much more relatable characters.  It wasn't a perfect film by any means, but it was by far more pleasant to watch than Haneke's stuff, even if Haneke is probably a much better filmmaker skillwise.

Now Tuesday.  Ohhhh my god Tuesday.  To make a long story containing quite a few personal details short, I was casually invited to a Vinyl Night at a pub - which admittedly is an environment I'm almost completely alien to - which at first seemed to go nowhere 'cause my inviter hadn't showed up, but the moment I decide I'd been waiting long enough and just left the place... who shows up by my inviter XD  And we both head back and the rest of the night is full of lovely records, gigantic beer glasses (not drunk by either of us mind you), and insane arguments/complaints/jokes/discussions.  The walking back home part was probably the least pleasant of the evening (or night rather - that was about midnight or so) 'cause the buses were no longer running so the journey was considerably longer than normal and my legs sure as hell noticed, but still one of the highlights of my university life.

Besides that, my week has been full of tests.  That's not near as interesting to talk about.

I'm heading to T.O. this weekend to see a long-running friend of mine with Ry which will involve a trip to the ROM and dressing up for dinner and taking the subway and taking the streetcar.  I'm way, way too excited about the transit.  In my eyes subways pwn buses any day XD

So that's my news for this week.  Probably won't be saying anything else till at least this Sunday.  I'm off to giant-city-land now.  Take care everybody!

My very first LJ entry... EVER.  So please bear with me if I end up, like blowing up a tracking device or something in the process of figuring out how to do all this.

But as usual with me, this is a meme.  Which is totally Merle's fault.  Of course.

(To clarify for everyone with the book titles - bold is books I've read.  Italics are books I've only read/heard parts/excerpts/abridged versions of.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible 
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (and it's AWESOME :D)
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis (um, isn't this part of the Chronicles of Narnia series?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en français)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Full credit: 11  Partial credit: 13. Wow am I not a literary person.
Tell you what.  Somebody get me a cinematic list.  My credit will be HUGE.

1. What was the last thing you put in your mouth?
Um, uh, spaghetti XD

2. Where was your Facebook profile picture taken?
In my room... not my residence room, my, actual room.

3. Can you play Guitar Hero?
Apparently I'm pretty damn good for a beginner :P

4. Name someone who made you laugh today?
James Rolfe, Linkara, Merle, Ry, and ohwaitthat'sit.

5. How late did you stay up last night and why?
11:00pm.  Because I was genuinely tired.  Isn't that abnormal XD

6. If you could move somewhere else, would you?
-Ish.

7. Ever been kissed under fireworks?
... *goes to sit in a corner*

8. Which of your friends lives closest to you on FaceBook?
Oh, I'd say my sister.  You know, seeing as I have easy access to her a couple of doors across the common area XD

9. Do you believe ex's can be friends?
GodIhopeso.

10. How do you feel about Dr Pepper?
Ew >_>

11. When was the last time you cried really hard?
... DoIhavetoanswerthis?