Under Your Spell, Ink on paper. Drew this while watching Drive.
We’re well into February, but here’s a list of my favorite films of the past year anyway. There are a bunch of movies I sadly haven’t seen yet, like Martha Marcy May Marlene, Young Adult, and A Dangerous Method, and ones that are so unbelievably awful I wish I could unsee. Like Midnight in Paris.
Here are the ones that made the cut:
Drive
Just watched this one last night. Wish I’d seen it on the big screen. The brutality, the filters, the elevator kiss, the music. Ryan Gosling just keeps getting better and better. Carey Mulligan is so quietly wonderful – she offers one my favorite moments; she lightly touches her lips just after he leaves her apartment for the first time. That subtle, tiny detail says so much. One of the best movies I’ve seen all year.
Jane Eyre
Brilliant acting. After seeing this, I could watch Mia Wasikowska in anything. She is amazing.
Bridesmaids
I love that Melissa McCarthy is finally being recognized for the hilarious comedian that she is (she was Gilmore Girls‘ Sookie after all), but Kristen Wiig killed it. She had me at penis impersonation. And then she tugged my heart strings.
Beginners
Mike Mills + Ewan McGregor + Christopher Plummer + Mélanie Laurent = beautiful, tender and funny. Ewan McGregor totally surprised me.
The Descendants
Great story, great characters. I like seeing George Clooney play a regular dude. Bonus points for all the Kauai love.
Cedar Rapids
I like Ed Helms, and I like Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Melancholia
I’m going to ignore all the inane crap LVT said. He made a harrowing, breathtaking film. Kinda felt like I was holding a ViewMaster, looking at a tragic, panoramic oil painting, slide by slide. Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg are stunning.
Crazy, Stupid, Love.
It was pretty damn funny, I might have cried a little, I can’t help rooting for Steve Carell, and I’m equally smitten with Emma Stone and Gosling’s abs. I really loved this one.
Shame
Hands down the most disturbing movie I saw all year, and I wanted to hate it. I couldn’t shake it for days, weeks maybe. But, as difficult as it was to watch – and it’s definitely not for the faint, it became harder and harder to hate.
Sometimes we forget that humans are animals. If we’re hurting so deeply that there is no way to talk about it, maybe there’s no way to evolve past the pain. Maybe there’s no place for that pain to go but back from where it came.
Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan gave such haunting performances. The line that stuck with me most is spoken by Mulligan’s character:
“We’re not bad people, we just come from a bad place.”
So excited – the rest of my winter reading arrived! Man, I love memoirs. And yeah, the ones I read tend toward the harrowing and tragic, but there is also resilience and hope. So there! :)
I read Lidia Yuknavitch’s amazing amazing amazingThe Chronology of Water last week, but I read it on Dan’s Kindle. I needed to get my wrinkly hands on the real, tangible book so I can pore through the prose more easily and cozily. I have to say, even though I’m all for the convenience & immediacy e-book readers offer, I am a lover of art objects.
Nothing beats curling up on the couch with a book: leafing through its pages, the smell of the paper, the sound of the page curl, turning it over in your hands to study the cover and read about the author, the respite you reach with each new chapter – a white expanse with floating words – a moment to breathe, to contemplate the words you just read.
Maybe it’s akin to the difference between owning the print of a beautiful piece of artwork and owning the original. You can see the texture in a print, but you can’t feel it. You can’t smell the paint. You can’t see light react to it.
Sure, I’m never going to own a handwritten book by my favorite author. Or a typed version. Or an original manuscript file. But a book is an entity. A thing in the world. Pages of words you can hold in your hand. Pages you can flag with your thumb, pages with margins you can fill with your own handwritten notes. Pages you can flip to by memory, just by spending time with the weight of the book.
I’m romanticizing, I know… Anyways! Here’s my winter reading list:
One of the best things about winter is all the glorious couch potatoing! My latest TV addictions are Portlandia and Revenge.
Fred Armisen & Carrie Brownstein are so obnoxious and difficult to watch in Portlandia, but they leave me in stitches. So smart, stupid, and weird all at once.
Ever since Everwood ended, I’ve missed seeing Emily VanCamp on the small screen. Thankfully she’s back with Revenge, going head-to-head with Madeleine Stowe, making for some good old-fashioned, unabashedly soapy, delicious drama.
Captivated by Birdy’s Bon Iver cover. Such a beautiful, wise-beyond-her-years voice. I think she was 14 when she first recorded this. I love that she still wears braces.
Ughs, the roof won. Or maybe the roof eased up, and the draws won. I jumped on Air Ride Equipped six times this weekend, and kept getting killed by pump and terrible clipping. Continue reading →
So excited to head to Kentucky with Chaz, Arielle, Sharon & Joe tonight. This is the last weekend of the season to climb at The Red. I planned to go a couple weeks ago, but got hit with the flu.
I would love to send Air Ride Equipped in Muir Valley. Last trip, first time leading, I got shut down at the roof, which is silly because usually I don’t have too much trouble pulling roofs. Well, this weekend, the roof is going down.
When Dan and I got engaged, we knew for sure that we wanted a simple but sweet ceremony, followed by a lively little party – and we didn’t want to stress out planning any of it!
We searched high & low for a venue in Chicago, but nothing felt quite right. Then Dan remembered a boutique hotel in Portland – he’d stayed there during a work trip and he thought it might be just what we were looking for. So we flew to Portland in January, loved it (in spite of the terrible weather), booked it, and everything else fell into place.
We married on the rooftop of The Nines hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. The Nines was the perfect venue because it gave us city ambiance, open air, our own private little corner rooftop, amazing Asian cuisine, and gorgeous rooms. And, thank goodness for August, Portland gave us & our guests great weather, a beautiful (and pleasantly weird) city to explore, and awesome buzzed-about bars & restaurants (for food nerds like us, this was a huge bonus).
1. He drools.
2. He talks wildly with his hands.
3. He says weirdly sweet things like, “I like the way your teeth fit in your mouth,” and “Your hair has the sheen of a thoroughbred’s mane.”
4. He always smells good.
5. 99% of the time, he’s got food hiding out on his face.
6. When he’s in awe of something he says it’s, “bazooka.”
7. He loves food as much as I do.
8. He calls Mr. Deuce his best friend.
9. He calls me, “Sweets.”
10. He’s altogether kind, compassionate, silly, irreverent, bold, caring, hilarious, smart, ridiculous, fun, strong, loving and lives life with infectious energy and love.
here’s one of the “maybe five” videos i’ve watched this past year. i’m currently cruising through Metronomy’s ouvre, and my ears are thanking me for it.
i almost never watch music videos. i’ve maybe watched five this past year? but i jumped head first into the Lykke Li fan parade a few months ago, so i had to break my video-time-suck rule and watch her video for, “Sadness is a Blessing.” the song just so happens to be my favorite one from her latest album, Wounded Rhymes. i don’t know what it is about long-locked female artists who thrash & flail around while singing melancholic songs, but gosh, they make me swoon.
