I have a really weird history with films– born in the late 80s, you’d think I would’ve grown watching loads of 90s kids stuff, but I actually grew up with a lot of Silly Symphonies (which were released in the 30s) and loads of Disney 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s stuff, plus a lot of more grown up 80s movies. Poltergeist, The Thing, The Fly and The Stuff were particularly scary stuff (and I’m pretty sure I was scared of yogurt or white stuff at some point).
I don’t ever remember buying any original VHS tape, except for the rare birthday gift of a Disney’s Sing-Along Songs chapter or that X-Men tape I have. My first DVDs buys were Coyote Ugly, She’s All That and Loser — you can’t blame me. I was a 15-year-old girl. The collection grew bigger, and possibly exploded during my years abroad. I’m nearing my 500th movie.
THEY ALL COME TO ME. First, Bjork, then the BackStreet Boys, Miyavi and (bonus for) Big Bang. Now it’s JeA’s turn. Maybe you don’t know, JeA is my BEG bias.
After much deliberation with a friend, we decided to crash the Lunafly concert for JeA, just to get a glimpse of her.
I really can’t remember exactly when I started out the Top Flicks About Chicks list on MUBI, but it must have been around the same time I wrote how Chick Flicks was a doomed genre in regards of critics. So it might be almost 4 years… and I’ve finally reached 300 titles in the list!!!
A Chick Flick should center on little girls, girls, young women and women… as students, as neighbors, as friends, as daughters, as granddaughters, as sisters, as mothers, as lovers. They are simply women. With that alone, we can tell all sort of other stories that have little to do with romantic comedies.
The purpose of the list, of course, was to encompass an array of female character — not only in the binary sense, since the list also includes men/boys who identify as women/girls… and viceversa — of various cultural, ethnic, social backgrounds. Not favoring one genre over the other, not valuing dramas over comedies… just simple stories about different women.
Though I’m sure the list could be longer, that’s 300 feature length films out of the 2896 (counting shorts) currently rated on the site- that’s roughly 10% so I suppose the list could expand to up to 500 or maybe 1000 once I reach 5000 or 10000 rated films on the site.
1. Treeless Mountain 2. Welcome to the Dollhouse 3. Juliana 4. Labyrinth 5. Fuckin’ Amal 6. Mirrormask 7. Gun Hill Road 8. Pariah 9. Bend it like Beckham 10. Swing Girls 11. The Land of the Deaf 12. Sunny 13. Whip It 14. Stoker 15. Maria Full of Grace 16. Breaking the Waves 17. My Marlon and Brando 18. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days 19. Dil Bole Hadippa! 20. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 21. Kotoko 22. Violeta Went to Heaven 23. Skin 24. Raise the Red Lantern 25. Incendies
I picked 25 of the 300 films to illustrate some of the variety (I hope it’s AS varied as I intend the list to be), though I ran out of picks and couldn’t include any of the ‘older’ female characters. If I could pick 5 more, they’d be: Lemon Tree, Frozen River, Late Bloomers, Mother, For 80 Days.
Except for that 3-year break MTV took off the Breakthrough Music Video category, they had continued giving away the prize — which had been given to the likes of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham — until 2010, when they officially removed the category.
For the other two years, you know I’m probably partial to SunnyHill [1], but I’ll go with Salyu’s Tadano Tomodachi [1] concept because it’s much more a production concept than a music video concept. For 2012, despite its serious hard-hitting concept [1], I would have to go with Graham Coxon’s What’ll It Take [MV] due to its imaginative execution using fan footage.
I ran into two really cool posts on Mika Ninagawa- one sort of talking about her work — mentioning her style and her work with the likes of Shiina Ringo, Bjork and- of course, Anna Tsuchiya — and the other a quite rare (and insightful) interview in English.
I’ve been kind of dying to see Helter Skelter. I haven’t even checked if there are subtitles available yet.
I guess people can’t stand true stars because they are so different, they’d rather watch some stupid proxies they can sympathize with.
I guess we do live in the era of the dying movie star. :\
Over the years there has been some outstanding whiteboard marker illustration videos, like Drive: The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us [1], Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, or variations like James & Amy’s Electric Fence [MV] (drawn by James Cooper).
Spanish artist Pablo Morales de los Rios takes a look at the history of music and lays it out all on the table.
Bjork’s Facebook account has just shared a photo of teeny tiny baby Bjork, which is utterly adorable. Also goes to show us that Bjork has hardly changed at all.
