Today I’m a hipster, a filmhipster to be exactly, reviewing Phil Spector starring Al Pacino and Helen Mirren. Head on over to the blog that my friend Chris is running and check it out. You should as there are pictures of Al Pacino wearing big wigs!
As featured on… Filmhipster
The Company You Keep (2012)
Surprises are the cherries on top of the cake of life (or something else if you don’t like cherries). They can brighten up your day because they show that the one giving them has taken the time to think about you and therefore are so cherished. They are the little moments you would like to have all the time and as a movie watcher I enjoy it when a movie is able to surprise me. I make sure movies are able to do that to read as little about them as possible and not watching trailers and for this movie, The Company You Keep I knew nothing. I knew Robert Redford and Shia LeBeouf were in it because they were on the cover, but as I was watching I was treated to one nice surprise after the other.
Robert Redford not only stars, but also has directed this movie (which is his 9th one) and has been able to get an amazing list of actors and actresses together to appear in this movie. Scene after scene I was thrilled to see another well-known actor play a role (some smaller than others) and this kept happening all through the movie. Susan Sarandon, Anna Kendrick, Stanley Tucci and Richard Jenkins are just a few examples, but there are many more. It’s a funny thing, but seeing familiar faces can really add to your enjoyment of a movie. Of course it is the reason why some actors get payed so much, because the general audience likes to see them and buys tickets. If you walk into a party and you don’t know anyone you won’t be as comfortable as when people you have seen before are present. As you know I watch all type of movies, also ones not starring well-known actors, but with this movie it was a joy to be surprised by the appearance of those actors/actresses. Continue reading
The Monday Question: Process!
Another Monday which of course means that is time to answer a new and fresh Monday Question. This week I am wondering about your creative process when it comes to your blog. What does your workflow look like? How do you come up with new ideas?
As you know I have a couple of fixed posts (currently on Monday and Friday). Those are posts I can create well in advance (if time allows of course) and for the Monday Question I try to have an evergrowing list of questions ready which I hope you will find interesting to think about. The “Many Faces of…” posts take quite a bit of time preparing, since I will have to go through a complete list of movies an actor or actress has been in and find pictures related to them. Then I have to properly cut them to make sure that the final collage looks good. I must admit that I would love to add the titles of the movie underneath each picture, but I simply do not have the time to do so. On the other days I have my reviews (at least 3 per week) and as you can see on the righthand side, I’ll let you know which ones you will be able to expect. I watch more movies than I review, so I will pick the ones which I think are interesting to write (or warn) about. For those upcoming reviews I will already find the pictures I want to use, format them and put them in a draft. So when do I prepare the actual reviews? My aim is always to prepare everything for the whole week on Sunday evening. This takes a whole evening, but at the end of the evening everything for the week will be ready and scheduled. This means that during the week I have time to spend on other things (reading and commenting on other blogs).
As for developing new ideas they usually come to me quite easily, but I don’t always act on them and give them time to develop. This goes for blogathons, but also new series. This gives time to perfect the idea and change things you initially thought were a good.
What’s your creative process when it comes to blogging?
Vote for the next “The Many Faces of…” post
Last week a lot of votes were cast for “The Many Faces of…” post, so I decided to give you another opportunity to vote for this week’s actor or actress. As you can imagine making these posts takes quite a while, so you will see two of last week’s choices return and a new one added. Let me know who you want to see this coming Friday.
The Many Faces of… Jim Carrey
This past weekend I decided to try something new in regards to these posts and I’m happy to see you have been voting a lot for your favorite actor or actress to appear this week. Most votes count and Jim Carrey was the clear winner with over 47% of the votes.
He was born on January 17, 1962 in Newmarket, Canada. When growing up his father lost his job and he, together with his family lived out of a van. At age 15 he stopped school and started working as a janitor. He later attended various schools, but never finished high school. He started doing impersonations, but wasn’t having much succes with them. When his parents finally had a house again he returned to the stage and started getting paid for his performances. He started touring with Rodney Dangerfield and performed in Las Vegas. He finally moved to Los Angeles where he also did stand up work. He tried to get a job at Saturday Night Live, but wasn’t selected. He did start appearing in movies in 1983 like Rubberface and Copper Mountain. He landed a leading role in the TV show The Duck Factory, which was unfortunately cancelled. He kept appearing in various shows and movies and thanks to his role in Earth Girls Are Easy got a recurring role in the TV show In Living Color. He managed to land a leading role in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (a movie he partly rewrote) and immediately became a star. He has since starred in many comedies including Dumb and Dumber, Liar Liar, The Mask and Bruce Almighty. He also played various serious roles in movies like The Majestic, The Number 23 and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Continue reading
Ip Man (2008)
The way you discover a new movie can set some expectations about it. If I see a lot of positive scores for a movie I expect that I will also like it, which doesn’t always happen of course. If close friends suggest a movie you assume you will absolutely love it, because they know your tastes (of course it doesn’t always work if your taste in movies is very different). This movie got suggested by me by a friend who does have the same taste in movies, so I was looking forward to it. I quite like martial arts movies, so going into this blindly I didn’t know this movie was semi-biograhical, telling the story about the man who would be Bruce Lee’s teacher. The movie also happens to be in the IMDB top 250, so I was surprised I had not seen it yet (since I’ve worked through most of the list). Continue reading
Iron Man 3 (2013)
The reason I really enjoyed the first Iron Man movie was not because of the fact that a comic book character was coming to the big screen. I don’t read comics, so to me it’s just another action movie. Iron Man could be any other character as long as the story keeps me entertained. No, the reason I really enjoyed the first Iron Man movie was mainly because the actor playing him, Robert Downey Jr. He brought so much humour to the role, of this rich guy feeling superior and able to back it up that it wasn’t difficult to root for Tony Stark. Because of that I really looked forward to Iron Man 2. It was a movie that ended up disappointing me, because the character seemed different, there weren’t as much wisecracks and the movie felt overly long. The Avengers brought everything back I was expecting from the character, which made me confident that Iron Man 3 would be a better movie than the sequel. The question is if that’s the case. Continue reading
As featured on…Filmguide Dublin
As you know I’m a big fan of documentaries and recently Dean from Filmguide Dublin asked me if I’d be interested in sharing my top 5 documentaries. Of course I was more than up for it and my choices, as well as his can be found over here.
The Monday Question: Keeping up!
I have been blogging for a couple of years now and during those years I have discovered many great blogs. As a blogger I think it is very important to read and comment at other blogs. I think it is one of the fun things about blogging, that sense of community and talking to likeminded people. There is one problem though: the total amount of blogs I’m following. I have not counted them, but I would not be surprised if there are at least 40 or 50 I subscribe to. The reason I started subscribing was because it was impossible to start visiting all the blogs, especially if some were not updated. Subscribing offered me a way to receive every new blog post through mail and read and respond on the ones I like.
If you follow so many blogs however there is a very big flow of emails hitting your inbox and it is normal to get 20 to 30 mails per day, which I do try to keep up with, but I started feeling like I’m always falling behind with a full inbox staring me in the face. A couple of weeks ago I decided to change my reading behaviour and set up some filters on my Gmail. Every mail from each blog is now automatically tagged and stored and archived, so I can read all the new blog posts from one specific blog and my inbox stays as good as empty. Although I still get the same amount of mails I do not see them immediately. The advantage of that is that I do not feel as pressured to read each and every mail as they enter my mailbox. To keep up I select a couple of those archived folders and work through all the mails from that blogger. I really prefer this way of reading new blogposts now even if it means I’m sometimes late to respond.
So I’m wondering how you do it and if there are maybe some other efficient ways to read other blogs you might use:
How do you keep up with reading and responding to all the blogs you follow?