Inception

So, I watched 2010's Inception with my beloved brothers. We had all meant to watch it over the summer, but we just never got around to it (when you live 45 minutes from the closest movie theaters, you don't get to go as often as you'd like). So it finally came out on DVD and we watched it while eating brownies and trying to remember all the places we'd seen parodies of it so we could watch them afterwards (I still haven't looked those up). It was directed (and written and produced) by Christopher Nolan and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Juno

The other night I watched Juno with my brother while Dad was at work. Juno came out in 2007, was directed by Jason Reitman and stars Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman.

Amadeus

Last night I watched Amadeus, a 1984 movie directed by Milos Forman and starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, and Elizabeth Berridge. This movie is an historically inaccurate portrayal of the lives of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, one of Mozart's contemporaries. It's really a very pretty movie and the score is entirely music composed by Mozart and Salieri (Salieri, while not as famous as Mozart, still has his work performed today, so he's not bad).

The Ref

Yesterday was Saint Lucia's Day, which is something my family has never paid attention to before, but we still celebrated last night by watch The Ref. This makes sense because, while The Ref is a Christmas movie, they still mention St. Lucia and wear the candle crown. The Ref is a 1994 movie directed by Ted Demme and starring Denis Leary, Kevin Spacey, and Judy Davis.

Some Like it Hot

After watching Psycho (Norman Bates is watching me sleep...), I deserved to watch something light hearted. So after watching the very short A Trip to the Moon (a part of film history), Dad went to the video rental place down town and grabbed the 1959 movie Some Like it Hot, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe. He grabbed this because he knows that I like romantic comedies and cross dressing. It also meets his film history criteria. So everyone wins, yay!

Psycho

I have agreed to let my father try to teach me about film history. According to him, if I want to be serious about film, then there are several movies that I have to be, at the very least, aware of. In order to be aware of them, I must actually watch them, which is how I ended up watching Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 movie Psycho, starring Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Janet Leigh.

Enchanted

When left to my own devices, the movies I tend to watch are romances, comedies, science fiction/fantasy, or a mix of the three. So, naturally, when looking through the DVDs we have in the house for something to watch, I went to Enchanted, a movie I really like. It's got romance, it's got comedy, and with magic, dragons, and dimension hopping, it's totally a fantasy. As an added bonus, it's got singing and dancing, two other things that I really enjoy.

A Declaration of Intent

I am an undergraduate college student majoring in English with a minor in Cinema and Media Studies. I am deeply in love with movies, tv shows, and other forms of visual media. Movies are awesome. I am thinking, after I get my degree, of going to graduate school for film and getting a Masters degree, or perhaps even a PhD, in film analysis.

The way I figure it, getting that degree would involve watching and writing about a lot of films. So I thought to myself "Why not start now?" I have DVDs, I can just start taking what little knowledge I have now and applying it to actual movies. I'll only get good at it if I practice.

And then I thought I'd put it online, because there's no way that could end in tears. Actually, it's going online as an incentive to actually do it, but tears are still a possibility. Everything is more fun when it's shared, though.

Full disclosure: I am only partly through my film minor. I am not even kind of a professional. I only just learned a bunch of fun terms like diegetic and mise-en-scène, and there are probably a bunch of terms I don't even know exist. This is a strictly amateur endeavor, because I think it will be fun. If I were really awesome, I wouldn't have left my film text book in my dorm room when I went home for winter break.

I'm sure I'll manage anyway.