Through The Looking Glass

This site claims that it can tell you. You upload a photo of your face (full-front only) and it gives you matches. (It does not seem to work in Firefox, but is fine with IE.)

I entered four different pictures and got the following results:

• Vanessa Mae, Ryoko Hirosue, Sandra Bullock

• Vanessa Mae, Ryoko Hirosue, Juliette Binoche
• Ryoko Hirosue, Audrey Hepburn, Athena Chu
• Ryoko Hirosue, Whoopie Goldberg, Jamie Lee Curtis

This girl appeared on all 4 lists:

Anyone notice anything suspiciously Asian about her? Vanessa Mae might be Asian as well, and Athena Chu appears to be. Whoopie Goldberg is, um, black.

None of them has facial structure anything like mine as far as I can tell.

Oh well. It was kinda interesting, anyway.

By the way, if anyone had signed up for the mailing list you would have received a very amusing email about this entry.

Link found on Redsaid.

I have never seen Citizen Kane.

But I won’t have to say that for long! A copy of the DVD just arrived from Mommy, along with a guidebook to the Southwest.

If CK is even half as good as Touch of Evil, I will love it. (And if nothing else, I will not have to pretend that Chuck Heston is a fucking Mexican.)

In other news, I’ve added a mailing list feature. If you wish to avoid the annoyance of refreshing my blog hourly to see if I’ve updated, enter your email address in the form to the right. I can’t promise that I’ll send a notification promptly, but I’ll certainly try.

Emily is blogging for charity. I’d like to sponsor her but have no idea how I’ll come up with any money for it, so I thought I’d pass the word along in case any of you, dear readers, have money in your pocket that you are just waiting to give to charity. Or maybe just some money that isn’t already dog-eared for necessities. Her site has a link to Project-Blog, the site that’s putting the whole thing together, where you can sign up to sponsor and/or to blog.

The mail lady just rang to tell me I had a package. I ran downstairs and fetched the Amazon box. I figured, one week till my birthday, I should be good and not open it.

Fuck that!

The lovely and generous Jason (aka Thunderstrike) sent me The Elements of Style, Streetwise Los Angeles (a map for my datebook) and EQUILIBRIUM! I am such a happy little kitten.

On Saturday I went over to Meghan’s house and fell truly, madly, deeply in love with a lost little puppy she’d brought home. If I didn’t think it would get us kicked out of our building, I would have taken her home with me, expense of a dog be damned. As it is, I am seriously wondering if there’s any way I could talk the building manager into making an exception to the No Pets clause in our lease. But I don’t think Will wants the responsibility of a dog until we can get a house (and a second income), and I hardly fault him for that. (Pictures of my beloved are here.) To complicate matters, Meg found a sign put up by the owner, but the damn woman has a full voice mailbox. PLEASE! If my dog was lost, I would not be more than two inches from the phone until she was found. Of course, I would also have her spayed, tagged, and microchipped. And not on a piece-of-crap, falling apart leash that she could break when I left her tied up in the yard, which of course I would never do. Ooh, I am so upset right now.

In lighter news, we had a mummy triple feature yesterday. We watched The Mummy, most of The Mummy Returns (we stopped it to go over to Jenn’s for dinner), and Bubba Ho-Tep. Great stuff! Tonight I expect we will watch the latter with commentary.

And in completely irrelevant news, I made very good hummus yesterday.

The following movies didn’t quite make the cut for the Top 25, but are still most worthy of a mention. As before, in alphabetical order, but this time without commentary. And I managed to have only one tie, which I think everyone will agree is a perfectly reasonable tie.

1. Aliens
2. Amelie
3. Bladerunner
4. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
5. Bringing Up Baby
6. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
7. Chinatown
8. Hellboy
9. Jane Eyre (1944)
10. Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter
11. LA Confidential
12. The Mummy (1999)
13. Muriel’s Wedding
14. Near Dark
15. The Princess Bride
16. Psycho Beach Party
17. Rebecca
18. Rushmore
19. Silverado
20. Say Anything…
21. [tie] Star Wars: A New Hope
21. [tie] Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
22. Switch Back
23. That Thing You Do!
24. The Thin Man
25. Zulu

And I can’t finish this entry without at least mentioning Dogs in Space, which doesn’t make the list but holds a very dear place in my heart.

How the hell did you guys do this? It’s hard. I decided, after coming up with 22 movies and knowing that I wasn’t done yet, to make a Top 25 list. Then I cheated. What’s funny is that the list is in alphabetical order, but the ties really would be ties.

Movies shot as one movie count as one movie no matter how they were released.

These are all movies that I consider good and that I am fond of. A lot of movies belong in one of those categories, but this list is only movies that fit in both.

Directors are listed mainly because some of the movies are only one of several versions and I’d hate for anyone to think that I meant Jan de Bont’s trainwreck or Gene Kelly as D’Artagnan (though I do love that version) or, GOD FORBID, Keifer Sutherland as Athos. Besides, I knew almost all of them without looking them up, and I’m a show-off.

Without further ado:

1. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert dir. Stephan Elliot
Dude. It’s a musical (sort of) about drag queens in the Australian outback. Even if it was awful, I’d probably love it (as long as Patrick Swayze wasn’t in it). But it isn’t awful. It’s touching, funny, and a damn tight picture.

2. The Big Sleep dir. Howard Hawks
I prefer the unreleased 1945 cut of the movie, available on the DVD. However, even the 1946 version provides one of the most entertaining detective stories ever committed to film. And even though Bogart was not the ideal Phillip Marlowe, he was damn good in the role.

3. Black Hawk Down dir. Ridley Scott
The quintessential war movie.

4. Charade dir. Stanley Donen
It’s a thriller AND a romantic comedy! And it doesn’t suck!

5. The Devil’s Backbone dir. Guillermo del Toro
This chilling, lovely ghost story is first and foremost a coming-of-age story. Every frame is gorgeous.

6. Dodgeball: A TRUE Underdog Story dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber
This movie knocked BASEketball off the list. If you know me, you know how much I love BASEketball.

7. Down By Law dir. Jim Jarmusch
I love Jim Jarmusch. I also think he is very weird and I might not want to sit next to him at the bar. While Dead Man, Mystery Train and Ghost Dog are all excellent movies, my love for Down By Law just runs a little bit deeper.

8. Equilibrium dir. Kurt Wimmer
Holy crap! This is the single most kick ass movie ever made. For one thing, it takes place in a distopian future that kind of makes sense. For another, it has gun-kata. And if that doesn’t convince you, it stars Christian Bale. Trust me on this one.

9. Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn dir. Sam Raimi
The first time I watched this movie, I had to rewind three times because the Evil Hand scene made me fall on the floor and miss stuff.

10. [tie] Farewell, My Concubine dir. Kaige Chen
I’m not 100% positive whether this movie belongs on the list. I haven’t seen it in nearly ten years because it made me too emotional the first (and only) three times I watched it. Strikingly beautiful. Very sad.

10. [tie] The Haunting dir. Robert Wise
The limitations of the time period (1963) may be what made this movie as good as it is. No special effects worth mentioning, just hand-gripping terror.

11. Lonesome Dove dir. Simon Wincer
I’m cheating a little bit with this one – it’s a six-hour mini-series. But fuck it, it’s also my favorite western of all time.

12. The Lord of the Rings dir. Peter Jackson
If I have to explain this one, you aren’t paying attention. (That isn’t to say, dear readers, that you have to like it; just that I think everyone can understand at least in part why it is so beloved.)

13. Love and a .45 dir. C.M. Talkington
This one is sort of a sentimental favorite. But I do think it’s a pretty great example of a crime spree movie. And it has Dinosaur Bob.

14. The Man Who Would Be King dir. John Huston
Words cannot express how much I love this movie, so I am not going to try.

15. Notorious dir. Alfred Hitchcock
My only complaint about Notorious is that I don’t like the way Ingrid Bergman plays drunk. But that is hardly reason enough to dislike the movie with the greatest ending of any movie I have ever seen. And the rest isn’t exactly shabby. Plus, Hitchcock famously dodged the “Hayes” Code in the kissing scene (but don’t worry, it isn’t a Kissing Movie).

16. Once Upon a Time in the West dir. Sergio Leone
For me, this movie falls more on the side of good than favorite, though I liked it a lot. But it would make the list for the opening sequence alone.

17. Paper Moon dir. Peter Bogdanovich
This movie is pretty much the definition of charisma and charm. It’s sort of a buddy movie, except the buddies are a con man and a little girl.

18. Raiders of the Lost Ark dir. Steven Spielberg
OK, Spielberg, you cutting-me-off-in-traffic, walky-talky bastard. I give you this one.

19. Ravenous dir. Antonia Bird
Man vs Man. Man vs. Nature. Man vs Self. All in one excellent movie. With cannibalism. (Almost as good as Cannibal! The Musical.)

20. Secondhand Lions dir. Tim McCanlies
I did NOT expect to love this movie. I wasn’t even sure I’d like it. But oh, man.

21. Singin’ in the Rain dir. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
Look, this movie is too long and the “modern” ballet in the middle is pointless and annoying. But it is not only a life-long favorite of mine, it is also fascinating historically. It was written around the songs. It pokes fun at itself and Hollywood relentlessly.

22. The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers dir. Richard Lester
First of all, Oliver Reed can buckle my swash any day. Or, you know, he could if he wasn’t dead. The first movie makes a plot of simple intrigue; the second has one of the best monologues ever in film. And they both have swashbuckling!

23. Touch of Evil dir. Orson Welles
If you can get over the fact that Chuck Heston plays a Mexican, and the bad guys “shoot up” marijuana, this movie is perfect.

24. Waking Ned Devine dir. Kirk Jones
When I walked out of the theater after seeing this movie, I felt more delighted to be alive than I had ever felt or have ever felt since. This is a heartwarming, feel-good movie, in the purest sense.

25. [tie] The Wizard of Oz dir. Victor Flemming et al
This movie should be such a gigantic mess, but instead it is pretty much the classic movie.

25. [tie] X2: X-Men United dir. Bryan Singer
I didn’t think that comic book movies got any better than X-Men. I was mistaken.

So, Dodgeball is close to $50 million ($48,670,000 to be exact). That means that it took in almost 2/3 of its opening weekend gross during the week. Fucking amazing.

And now back to your regularly scheduled blog (my movie list[s] coming v. soon).

Uwe Boll responds to the nay-sayers of his movie, the “very big success” House of the Dead.

First of all if you really see the move on screen or DVD you will recognize that the CINEMASCOPE look of the movie and the sound are absolutly A LIST and not one percent less quality as RESIDENT EVIL or UNDERWORLD.

Better than Underworld? Well, thank god for that.

I think his poor grasp of English is really quite charming.

NEW INFO (and I use the term “info” v. loosely): “House of Ze Dead”

(Click for larger images.)