a++ would smuggle into space again

I am looking for movies that are:

* historical/mythical hero stories,
* that you enjoyed,
* about people who are not white men.

My current list is Elizabeth, Mulan (Disney and new version), maybe the Prince of Egypt I guess?, and Mongol. Mongol is so, so baller, you guys. SO BALLER. If you have not seen it, please rent it, so you will understand why I just want to get MARRY ME, BORTE tattooed on my face in block lettering. Does anyone know what the end credit music is?

I wrote fic! This is always a surprise to me. Both at the kink meme and both decidedly unkinky -- Kirk/Bones, in the Academy, with a fire alarm at two in the morning; Uhura/Gaila, in the Academy, with unexpected musical numbers.

I love the kink meme so much. Enormous and sprawling and enthusiastic and awesome. I love seeing the feral fans who have just started making journals and they're all called spockluver09 or yelchinpwr or enterprising or whatever, and Keenser is the stud of Starfleet, and there are RPers and anonjournals and ten freaking parts.

Last night I saw In the Loop, which I emphatically recommend to everyone in the world. It's a British film which is best described (by the NYTimes) as Spinal Tap meets the West Wing, and it stars Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker, who's apparently a character from a sitcom (just when I think I know something about British television, siiiiigh) who I can only describe as Rahm Emanuel's love child by Frankie Boyle. (VERY STRONG LANGUAGE.) I'm going to have to airmail him a proposal immediately. It is obviously based on the war in Iraq and yet there is a line about David Cameron being prime minister, so it all becomes very chilling and terrifying instead of just unrelentingly hilarious. Go see it!

I've drafted this entry a ton of times, actually, both before I got my computer (that would be last week) and after. It is surprisingly difficult to make a post on LJ once you've stopped. Which is not to say that I want Elaine who turned out to be when I last checked in a Republican and a parapsychologist I have not had thoughts to share with the larger internet; I have. Largely these thoughts have been, "Where is the Dr. Horrible/Captain Hammer wallsex fic?" but I am assured by the union that these thoughts are still qualified to receive all the benefits, mostly the benefit of lots and lots of doubt.

So, a thirty second update on my life: working at a media review site, where my review of I Kissed a Girl has finally gone live. It is about five lines long and heavily edited, but it exists! Now I am published in two venues, the other being the paper that has also finally gone live about access to mammograms in underprivileged communities. Yes, I call this "published" in my head. It is the technical term for the state of existence.

The Hulk was terrible and hilarious. The Fall was beautiful and, yes, scary to the Orientalist sensibility, but by and large worth the moments of "please, stop saving the small white child, ex-slave." (Catinca Unkaru is my new favorite actress.) Glory was hysterically funny if you watched it for Matthew Broderick and actually good if you watched it for Denzel Washington or Jupiter. Sex in the City: yes, I saw it, and that is all the commentary it deserves. Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog reminds me that Joss Whedon is my second favorite lyricist. I have seen more movies, but I have forgotten them.

I am still alive. No, I haven't been talking to anyone who isn't actively in town (which briefly and gloriously included pushingmetaphor), but that doesn't mean I don't love you all!

So, this weekend was a little slice of amazing. In which I:

1. had a Passover Seder in a hotel room with my family -- and it was fabulous, by the way, and I have leftovers right now in my dorm room, and the hotel room smelled like shank bone the whole time we were there, after which we

2. watched Live Free or Die Hard, which was ridiculously awesome, and -- yes -- did have the world's best car chase in it. And also Justin Long, with whom I am more than a little in love (my parents call him, mysteriously, "your boyfriend that nerd kid from Galaxy Quest." Why Alan Rickman, who is also in Galaxy Quest, didn't live in their memory this way I will never know.) Then the next day we

3. went to Wicked. Two subpoints on this one:
a) Where is the femslash? I want the good stuff! I will review this play for you in comments if you'd like, but do not want to clutter an uncut post.
b) Distressingly, I have a crush on the Wizard.

4. saw the New Pornographers and Okkervil River.
a) Okkervil River: I am the only person who thinks that this is what the Decemberists look like to people who do not love them, but honestly, A Stone eta: here is like really early Colin, and I wish the musicianship all round was a little tighter and also that Will Sheff did not feel so sorry for himself. But I think a lot of you, especially those of you who are bandslash folks, will enjoy this band if you do not already! If anyone has good covers of their songs, I would also enjoy hearing them, because I like "Ends With a Fall" and "A Stone" and that one about Marie and even "Westfall" but I cannot listen to Will Sheff too much.
b) THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS DO NOT NEED DAN BEJAR OR NEKO CASE TO ROCK. Patter-free concert. Very efficient rocking. I went with an a cappella groupmate; we do Bleeding Heart Show, so when they performed it we jumped up and down and harmonized the shit out of that song. So much fun.

5. Saw the first two eps of season four of Who, both of which I enjoyed, ridiculous and Rusty-problematic though they were. Am not looking forward to ep three from the reviews I've seen but am really, really fond of Donna. Really really fond.

Tonight I have to:

1. write a whole paper.

Spring break was pretty epic, even if it didn't include hundreds of girls with neither shirts nor inhibitions, or in fact much sunlight. I toured the East Coast -- 'toured' here being my own delicate euphemism for 'pathetically wandered, going from dorm floor to dorm floor like an orphan, begging parents for scraps of food and their triple-A numbers for discounts' -- to see pushingmetaphor, sandanzuki, ariastar, polaris_starz, evil_overlords. This would be their chronological order and not the order of their importance, of course, although Sares gets the Congressional Medal of Putting Up With My Shit, I think, because Sares was the only one who had to pick me up from Newark. Or, in fact, pick me up at all.

Anyway, as much as I'd love to discourse on New Jersey, Northampton, and MIT, I don't think y'all came here for an architectural discussion, nor are you likely to be particularly interested in my rising allergy to even the mention of the word suburb. (Seriously, who invented those things? The fifties are over. Move away.) So I'll keep this more or less brief so, so long, do I have verbal diarrhea or something?, and limited to things of pressing importance, primarily ( GETTYSBURG THE MOVIE. )

So that was Sares' house. From there I went over to Smith to see Aria, who also wins little prizes for hosting me even though she spent the vast majority of the time on a dead sprint to the bathroom with the stomach bug that wouldn't die. Massachusetts, while beautiful in its own right, is mostly fun for me because I am a very bad dilettante baseball fan but I do get enthusiasm about the Sport and America's Pasttime and all that jazz, and apparently being in MA in the spring is kind of like being inside the opening chords of the 1812 overture. (No, there were no cannons as I left.)

But, seriously, poor Aria. I attacked her with so many vids by the author of the fantastic Origin Stories, giandujakiss. Her James Bond vid "Der Kommissar" is pretty much the only thing that could have made watching Licence to Kill any better -- which is my segue into the next section: did you know that Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright call Timothy Dalton "the Daltinator?" No? Then you ought to watch the ( Hot Fuzz Director's Commentary. )

And because there's no good place in this post for this, I'm just going to put this out there: funniest thing in my life right now. I met the Scottish girl and she is a lovely person who usually you can, in fact, understand.

There are so many other things I wanted to talk about but that's all I can fit into the text box, so. Thank you to all of my wonderful hosts, and to newredshoes, whose DVD is totally on its way back to Chicago right now in the mail I'm so sorry don't kill me.

It's been a ridiculous week. (Couple of weeks.) I keep drafting this post and deleting it, because it sounds stupid and itemized, so fuck it, y'all are getting the rough draft. (Isaac-down-the-hall told me quite seriously that I "sure use the f-word a lot", but that's okay because I'm "passionate." That makes two people. I -- I blame fascism.)

( what I done did my first week of classes )

Okay. I think that covers most of the details. I'm going to go do more homework now.

Things That Confuse Me:

1. Why the movie Eragon was made.

2. Why the movie Eragon was made so very badly.

3. Why Jeremy Irons was, nonetheless, an extremely hot cross between Jack Sparrow and Obi-Wan in it.

4. On a semirelated note, why Flushed Away contains such attractive protagonists, despite them being rats.

5. Why most of these happened.

6. OH OH OH. On the Golden Age sci-fi note, why The Last Mimzy is being made but without any credits to Mimsy Were the Borogroves. (Scroll down and read all of the posts; it's a wonderful story. Anna especially must.)

7. Where the New Year's Party will actually be.

8. Why Aria is in my house and the universe has not yet exploded.

Sundries.

• Saw Superman Returns with the brother two days ago Liked it, to my horror, even Superman. Liked Lex Luthor more. Thought it was misogynistic (juuuuust a tad), but hey, it's comics. Deeply yearning for a JLA movie or at least a World's Finest movie. Come on, people! Superman/Batman! Brandon Routh and Christian Bale, the world's cleanest-cut OTP! I will make a small concession and settle for Apollo/Midnighter...
  
  
• The storycircle_rp logs continue to progress, slowly but surely, along the road to completion. evil_overlords was over yesterday (much with the rejoicing) and we finished the mass dinner date, and starting writing more Roderick + Lady Consort. She ... has decided to pretend to be a decent human being, because that's terribly amusing. i continue to be disturbed that she lives in my head. Also, a gratuitous Radmyr and Roderick flashback. To the Days Before Everything Went Hideously Wrong. It says something about Roderick's life that we have to go back something like five years to approach that state.
  
  
• Been reading milliways_bar in what I laughingly call my free time; I remain amused at the thoughts that are provoked by this, such as "Damn, does Mal mean Kaylee is literally turning into an angel or just that she's had lots of good sex?" and "Hmm, Sunny Baudelaire sounds like baby Kitty Pryde, which makes a lot of sense," and "Bernard Wrangle looks astonishingly good fighting Voldemort's armies of doom with a ninja turtle by his side." I'm sure the M'waysers on my flist are rolling their eyes fondly at me and going, "Yes, of course," but, but, shut up.
  
  
• freeformchick rocks, for lo, she has updated the urbanfantasy, and Bad Things are happening to Thomas Rasiah, and even if that makes Juilliard do a little happy dance in the back of my head, I am on tenterhooks. Go friend and read.
  
  
• I did spectacularly miss meeting up with capiberry and cafe_fiend, and when I say spectacularly I mean I fucked it up to a degree that is truly hilarious, were you not either of them, or me. I mean, I missed them by a good two hours. Details are not forthcoming, because they intimately involve location and MUNI and things like that, but I am still kicking myself. And now cafe_fiend is in Scotland and I'm pining like a wilting flower. Luckily capiberry remains! (Although it's quite possible she will never wish to speak to me again. I mean, I wouldn't. I would want to kill me with sticks instead. Um. *goes to fumble for her phone number*)
  

Highlights of this weekend (v. long)

DRAMA TEACHER, ON TUESDAY: So, who's doing tech this Saturday?
EMMA: Ooh! Me!
ARIA: I'm coming over!
EMMA: I know!
(AND NOW: *she ded from squee*)
FOOD BANK, ON WEDNESDAY: We need volunteers this Saturday liek whoa.
EMMA: ... shit.

( wherein Les Miserables is updated, Aria is v. amusing, and I sleep not at all )

Emma's Reaction To The First Twenty Minutes of The Road to El Dorado, pretty much verbatim:

Interior Monologue: "Oh my god. Oh my god. ahahahahahahadiceahahahswordsloquaciousohmygodthisissheerbrilliancewhee. ... how did I not pick up on the slashy subtext how is that even humanly possible oh dear lord Tulio is so adorable and --"

Exterior Monologue: *strangled squeaks*

Emma's Brother: *continues obliviously watching*

Interior Monologue: "Look! Lookitlookitthey'reswordfighting. --He just charmed a battlehorse and Miguel is all AHAH! and then there are plans! And and and "And that's your plan, is it?" "Well, I like it!" AHAHA THEY ARE ALDEN AND JUILLIARD. LOOKATHIMFLIRTINGWITHEVERYBODY. MIGUEL IS JUILLIARD. IS IS IS. AHAHAHAHA. omgz--"

Exterior Monologue: "OHMYGODTHEYARESOALDENANDJUILLIARD."

Emma's Brother: "...Who?"

Exterior Monologue: "...Aheh."

Interior Monologue: "...Aheh. Shit. -- OOH SHINY..."

Rinse and repeat.

Will watch the rest on Thursday; regrettably, shall have no access to either computer or phone for the next day, as yay! Caitlin! And yay! Caitlin's birthday! And woe, no calling of the Sares or of the poor, stood-up Aria.

Speaking of Caitlin's birthday. Shit. I haven't finished the Snarry limerick.

...does anyone have a rhyme for "Severus?"