Tuesday, August 22, 2006

A Movie-ing Experience

I have truly not meant to not blog, but real life caught me in a frenzy. Hospital stuff, nursing home stuff, trying to write through it all.

Decided to go for some cinematherapy a week or so ago and visited Blockbuster with a friend. Didn't end up getting anything. Was looking for something along the lines of The Last Picture Show or Suddenly, Last Summer No such luck. Lots of teen comedies, horror flicks, etc. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place, or maybe it was just a bad day. I would've settled for yet another viewing of The Lords of Flatbush

I love that movie. Love, love, love it. Love it so much I hunted down a tie in novel, and boy did the novel stink, but I loved visiting the characters and their world again. Love the scenes on the roof with Stallone and the pigeons. Love Henry Winkler's proto-Fonz (and still to this day think Happy Days would have done better, at least for me, sticking with the more dramatic focus of the first season; Chuck Cunningham, come home. All is forgiven.) Love the way Perry King guesses wrongly that Susan Blakely's character has "purple eyes." Love the diner booth and the kerfluffle over the clerk showing Stallone's fiancee a too-expensive ring. Love the misplaced apostrophe in the lettering on the jackets. I have stayed up late, risen early, and moved schedules around to watch it. Definetly a movie to own, and I will cherish it (when I find a copy) as much as I do my beloved copy of the Robin Wright Penn version of Moll Flanders.

DH is working the dinner shift tonight, so I will have ample time to pop in the DVD of Four Weddings and a Funeral (he is allergic to Hugh Grant movies, unless Hugh Grant dies in the war, and then it is automatically a good movie.)Yes, the funeral is one of my favorite scenes, as I am all about the angst. I like it that way. Would I want Four Funerals and a Wedding? Hmm, that might be a book idea for the future, but I'll take the movie as is. Though Love, Actually, is a close runner-up for favorite British comedy if only for the Bill Nighy factor. But I own Weddings. Though I have to share a squee over finding out his partner is actress Diana Quick, who played Julia in another all time favorite of mine, Brideshead Revisited.

No surprise that being a romance writer, I like love stories, and emphasis on characters. If it's got a British Isles setting and/or is set in a historical era, all the better. Remains of the Day is about my all time favorite. Though it doesn't have an HEA ending, and would have been completely ruined if it did (don't stone me!) it had a right ending. The last scene, of the now-middle aged lovers sitting on a bench, watching the street lights come on and talking about what remains of the day (and their lives, in subtext) tugs at my heart.

Not that I would leave a historical romance h/h sitting on the bench at the end of the book, but in the middle? Well, sure. But then they find a way to make it work. That would be something for sure.

Not that I want to leave

1 comment:

Marguerite Arotin said...

Hey Anna,
Thanks for the b-day wishes. Sounds like you've been having fun watching tons of great flicks lately ;-).
Hubby took me to see Dr. Zhivago because a local theater shows old movies during the summer. Now that's been a fave of mine because I first saw it on the first Valentine's Day I spent with my hubby. But there's something so incredible about seeing an epic movie like that on the big screen. My favorite scene has to go be when Lara, Yurie, and Lara's daughter leave Lara's home by sliegh and then enter the ice palace. I swear I held my breath during that scene. I would rewrite the ending though if I had my way because I wanted Lara and Yurie to end up together in the end. Ah well, I'm a romantic I suppose. If you've never seen the movie, Anna you have to rent it :-). Or I'll let you borrow my DVD ;-). Anyway, thanks again for the b-day wishes. I gotta run and take my new kindergartener to school :-).