Day 61

Two lists.
I know I owed this post two different lists. Actually, one list, which is a list of ten movies. The other is a list that continued today, also with ten titles in it.

The first list is Top Ten Favorite Movies. I know people who have a Top Ten of their favorite films, and I never made one. I knew I had the first three placed and other three that needed places, and then that meant another four. But it's not a top ten of a specific year or actor or something like that. It's just in general.

1. Chicago - I love the whole thing. The costumes, music, acting, Oscar wins, the songs; all of it. One of the major reasons I love it is because it won Best Picture at the Oscars, even though I didn't see the ceremony it won for.
2. 2012 - I am so glad I saw this. It's thrilling, adventurous, John Cusack's performance is great, and I love the Adam Lambert song at the end, "Tim for Miracles". It's really worth seeing.
3. A Lot Like Love - This is a good dramedy. Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet have chemistry and it has it's funny parts, sad parts, touching moments, and it's really good writing. A man and woman who don't seem good for each other at the start grow closer and closer through the span of 6 1/2 years.
4. Juno - my 2nd favorite Best Original Screenplay winning Oscar. Ellen Page is hilarious, it has a good cast, good writing, and touching moments. It's another good dramedy.
5. Little Miss Sunshine - my 1st favorite Best Original Screenplay winning Oscar. Also a good cast and funny and sad at the same time. And it has it's touching moments, and Alan Arkin's Oscar-winning performance is well-performed and well-deserved. He did a really good job.
6. Love Actually - Two of my favorite performances are Liam Neeson's and Emma Thompson's. Neeson plays a man who lost his wife and now seeing his 10-year-old son start to fall in love with another girl. And Thompson plays a woman who suspects her husband is having an affair with another and younger woman. I like all the performances, but those two are the best. It's a very funny movie with sad, touching moments, and it reminds me a lot of Christmas. I love Christmas.
7. Sleepless in Seattle - This is another "good writing" film. Meg Ryan was a romantic comedy queen when this came out and her performance, as well as Tom Hanks', are really good. I love the writing of two people who are perfect for each other but on entire different sides of the country and just want to meet each other.
8. The Devil Wears Prada - You have to admit, I can't make a top ten list without a Meryl Streep movie. My dad does not like her and he says that Kramer vs. Kramer, was not only his first Streep film in general, but also the first Streep film where he decided he doesn't like Meryl Streep. But this one is all about fashion and New York City, and networking with big-name designers. I can also see why Streep got an Oscar nomination.
9. Julie & Julia - My first blog (not blog post, but blog in general) is all about Julie Powell. I loved her book and based my blog on it and then got to see this. And of course, Meryl Streep is hilarious in it, and Amy Adams did a good job playing a struggling writer and blogger who had a plan, but with a quriky and kind of unreliable, but still respectful husband.
10. Easy A - Now it just came out, and I've seen these movies more than once, but I thought that this was the perfect teen comedy since Mean Girls. It's hilarious, newcommer Emma Stone was great, and I hope it even gets an Oscar nomintion for one of the Screenplay categories. It is a loose reference to "The Scarlet Letter", but also partly original in some ways. But I loved this and bragged about it after I saw it. I even saw it when passing by a movie theater and thought "What the hell. It starts in fifteen minutes, I don't have to meet Ken until five" and loved it.

Some trivial facts:
While Oscar winner Diablo Cody who wrote Juno says that she based it partly off of her friend's pregnancy, Julie & Julia is the only biographical movie on this list.
Chicago is the only film on this list that it's my next one.
Sleepless in Seattle is the only 1990's released film on this list. The next released one was Chicago in 2002.

My next list is Oscar-winning Best Picture films I've seen. But without a "Top..." added to it as I'm not listing one movie over another. They may be listed in alphabetical order, but I'm listing them from the top of my head as I alphabetize them. And even with the 82 movies that have been award Best Picture, I've only seen ten. Also, I haven't seen any of these before they won the Academy Award. It was all after they won.

Amadeus
American Beauty (as of last weekend)
Chicago (of course)
Forrest Gump (as of today)
Million Dollar Baby
My Fair Lady (about a month and a half ago)
Rain Man
Shakespeare in Love (another favorite)
The Sound of Music (sometime this summer, though I knew all the songs and lyrics, just not the movie)
West Side Story (another favorite)

But I do have a list of movies "to see". I'll post that list some other time because now I have to update it.