Covers I would Do.

On a walk I rediscovered the massive amount of James Taylor music on my iPod, which got me thinking about the music I listened to as a very young child when my mom would play me oldies songs in the car on the way to school, and virtually all of which I still love passionately. And like the amateur singer I am, I started to imagine which songs I'd cover, and how I'd do them, if I went to do an entire album of favourites a la Mandy Moore. To make things interesting, I restricted myself to stuff that my Mom played for me during those childhood years, limit to one or two songs per artist, and to try as hard as I could to stay away from the most famous songs of the artist (with several exceptions). And so for the pure indulgence of my ego, here is the song list for my own personal Covers album, if I could do it:

1. Save the Country (Laura Nyro)
2. Pleasant Valley Sunday (Carole King)
3. Urge for Going (Joni Mitchell)
4. Flowers are Red (Harry Chapin)
5. Desperado (The Eagles)
6. Won't Hold You Back (Toto)
7. Fire and Rain (James Taylor)
8. Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard (Paul Simon)
9. I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You) (Aretha Franklin)
10. Got To Get You Into My Life (The Beatles)
11. Don't Stop (Fleetwood Mac)
12. Your Mother Should Know (The Beatles)
13. God Only Knows (The Beach Boys)

14. Soldiers (James Taylor) [Hidden Track]

So yeah. I'm going to spend the next several days listening to nothing but oldies, I think. Which will put me in a fantastic mood!

My mother would hate me for today's sins.

So I should be going outside and enjoying the beautiful sunshine just like my mom has nagged me to do for the past twenty years, but I'm not; I spent all morning in bed and after that playing Prince of Persia. I'm on a break now, not just because guilt is nibbling at my soul, but also because the game has gotten so frustrating that I'm considering breaking the controller. It's still fucking fantastic, and the romantic bits throw me back into the heart-pounding days of my fangirl youth so that I grin foolishly every time the Prince and Farah look at each other funny. But at the scene I'm at now, they take away your ability to rewind time in exchange for a fucking sweet sword that can pretty much kill anything. Except that then you go to a platforming sequence that requires perfect fucking accuracy and you can't undo your mistakes. Arrggh.

Speaking of the Prince and Farrah, one of the only things that annoy me about this game is the graphics, which were perfectly fantastic for 2003, but look like, well, this:
However, close to the end of the game there are two cutscenes that contain graphics that are about twenty billion times better than the rest of the game, which amused me greatly. Perhaps not so coincidentally, these are also both the major crisis of the game and the most romantic sequence (so far); in the former we are introduced to the ultimate villian, and in the latter the Prince and Farrah go swimming mostly nude. Which, again, causes the fangirl in me to coo. God help me to resist writing a fanfic, and instead just let me play the game again about three more times.

Right. Sunshine. I should do that. Also grocery shopping.

The Movies You Should Watch Today.

This list is completely arbitrary, mostly inspired by the soundtrack music on iTunes that keeps popping up today while I'm chilling out and not cleaning my room. But I love recommending movies, even if it is to the thankless faceless internet and nobody reads this.

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

If I had to choose one film to take with me to a desert island, this would be the one. Out of all the films I've watched, and all the things I love about movies, this one is the one that still surprises me, shocks me, and makes me cry every single time I watch it. Jim Carrey defies all expectations to play the boring and passive Joel, who finds out that his wild girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet, in the role she should have won her first Oscar for) has had him erased from her memory. He decides to also go through with the procedure too, but as he travels back through each memory, he begins to rediscover the earlier passion he shared with Clementine. From deep within his brain, Joel attempts to escape the process in an effort to grasp just one last whisp of the girl he loves.
Brilliantly written, gorgeously directed using only old-fashioned camera tricks--no green screens--and frighteningly well acted, Eternal Sunshine is my example of perfect filmmaking. It's absolutely guranteed you'll have to watch it twice, because you won't understand everything the first time, but the second time is better anyway. Eternal Sunshine proves that filmmaking can be smart, detailed and intricately artistic, and still tell a highly entertaining story.

2. Moulin Rouge!

"This story is about a love." That's how Moulin Rouge! begins, and that's essentially what it is; a love story between a penniless writer and a courtesan. But it's also probably one of the weirdest love stories ever put to screen, not because of the characters, but because of the situation. Baz Luhrmann's world is all sparkle, colour, and anachronistic musical numbers--everything from Queen to The Sound of Music to Meat Loaf (!)--and it's overwhelming at first, but absolutely worth it. The first act is notoriously strange, and many people (including myself) are initially turned off by it, but stick with it; the love story, once it begins, recalls the sort of passion we all wish we've known. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman are both fantastic, and the film never loses the sense of gentle parody, which keeps it from being too silly and allows the villian to literally tent his fingers and snicker evilly and still hold dramatic tension. Give it a chance, because you really won't see anything like it again--oh, and the Elephant Love Medley is the strangest amalgamation of pop songs ever, but it WORKS, dammit.

3. Sunshine

I have this love affair with Danny Boyle right now; I honestly think he's one of the best directors of our time, and his massive range of films--the man who did Trainspotting and 28 Days Later just won several Oscars for a Bollywood-inspired underdog love story--shows me that he's got the balls to take on pretty much any genre that pleases him. This is a guy who has explored everything from children's movies to zombies, and Sunshine is his version of an action-adventure-space-thriller. 50 years into our future, the sun is dying, and a crew is in a spaceship going to deliver a massive nuclear bomb into the heart of the star in hopes of restarting it and saving all life on earth--except, of course, things go wrong and someone ends up sabotaging the mission. For a thriller, Sunshine ends up being exceptionally philosophical and psychological, focusing less on tired stereotypes being killed in various ways and more on the effects that such an important mission to the freakin SUN might have on the people who must accomplish it. You will either love or hate the last half of it--I personally loved it, but like I said, I'm biased--but I think it's one of the smarter action films you can find out there, and I have only good things to say about it.

Now, with that out there on the internet, I'm off to put on those films and clean things. Hooray!

Knitting complaints.

I'm sure that this will only serve to make me even more of an old fogey to all the young'uns out there, but I have to rant for a minute. I'm in the process of knitting this bag, which requires several mundane pieces made separately and then sewn together. And I just spent three days on one such boring--and HUGE--piece of knitting only to realize that it's exactly one stitch short. So rather than redo several days of work (and tear some of my hair out in the process due to frustration) I'm just gonna roll with it. Like many films, much of the erroneous stuff can be fixed in post-production. In this case, assembly.

Yes. I knit. It's awesome. Currently I'm making myself a new bag.

In better news, my back is immensely better! I have been without painkillers for two days, which is excellent, but only slightly balanced out by the fact that I feel horrible for having done nothing but sit on my ass for the past three days. Tomorrow, the job search continues.

Lower Back Fail? The Prince will fix it.

So, yes, I was helping my friend Trish move and I bent over to pick up a not-really-heavy chair and essentially killed my lower back. I've done nothing but lie around in various positions all day and wince/yelp in pain when it hurts, but it turns out I found a rather charming fix to take my mind off my epic back fail.

I have this horrifying habit of becoming utterly obsessed with things that have already had their heyday years before. I suppose some of it comes from my mom's repeated playing of oldies music when I was young, as well as my continued mission to see all the good old movies that were before my time, but it also extends to TV shows (see: Six Feet Under, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and, now, video games.

I have a summer mission, rather than a reading list, to become a gamer. I've always kinda loved video games, but had given up hope that I'd find a modern platformer game as fun as some of the old-school Mario stuff that used to be around. I even bought an N64, as well as Mario 64, in an effort to beat that game, but quickly lost interest. I follow both LRR (www.loadingreadyrun.com) and Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation, which talk about games a lot, and I've become convinced that I'm missing something really big, since I really only use my friend's Wii to rock out on Guitar Hero.

So. I've borrowed my brother's PS2 for the summer and finally found Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in a pawn shop on Johnson street. And it's motherfucking AWESOME. Holy crap. If you ever fuck up your back, spend a few hours playing a guy who can run on walls and turn back time, and things will seem a lot better. Yeah.

*turns around too quick* OUCH.