The Use of Color in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”
You know what’s a fantastic movie?
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Not just because it’s a ridiculously awesome musical, but because of the COLORS.
Near the middle of the movie the seven brothers (well, the six that aren’t married yet), now tamed by Millie, go to a barn raisin’ in town. Ladies and gentlemen, Team Rainbow:
I think I first saw this movie when I was eight or something, and I always remembered the barn raisin’ and the dancin’ that happened before it. I remembered it because of the colors.
If six backwoodsmen dressed as the visible spectrum wasn’t enough, you’ve got the ladies as well, seen here dancing with their boring monochromatic boyfriends.
By the way, pardon my crappy screencaps; the easiest way I could get these pics was by renting the movie on iTunes and using ScreenHunter to somewhat haphazardly get these shots.
Anyway.
The dancing sequence (perhaps one of the coolest of all time) has some pretty hot color-on-color action.
Three primaries with two primaries and a secondary.
Primary, secondary, and pink with two primaries and a secondary.
And again, but with a different male primary.
The Roy G. Biv brothers battle for the women!
I love this ending shot. None of the color pairs match. The next time you’ll see them all this happy is months after they’ve kidnapped all the women and have forced an avalanche between the lady-folk and themselves and the rest of the town.
Go watch this movie, seriously. It rocks.
NaNoWriMo: T-minus 30 days
WOO!
The only good thing about October is that there are only 31 (30 now) days left until NaNo starts. Seriously. Every October for like the past three years has blown heavy metal chunks for me. Screw you, October.
I don’t have a definite plot in place. Actually, I do. I have like five definite plots in place. I just have to choose which one to implement. I’m leaning strongly towards the road trip/religious undertones one, but I might genre ditch and go for a more sci-fi story, just to annoy myself and try to work within a genre of which I’m not a big fan.
Who knows? I didn’t know where I was going with things last year, but I finally got an idea on paper that I’d had in my head for awhile.
Anyway.
Today was probably the last sunny day of the year up here, so I took the opportunity to test out the accuracy of the pedometer feature on the new Nano by comparing it to a regular old pedometer.
Not too big of a discrepancy, considering I spent like an hour of those three hours wandering around in Safeway. I think the Nano is more sensitive to “wandering” steps (as opposed to the more deliberate “get out of my way, I’m faster than you” steps) than the pedometer, hence the difference. I’d also trust the Nano’s calorie counter thingy more, since you can actually set your weight, something you can’t do on the pedometer.
And yes, it took me three hours to go ~11,000 steps. Like I said, Safeway, plus the whole “maybe I’ll stop and wait for the bus, ‘cause I have no damn idea where I am” ordeal when I couldn’t find the store I was looking for.
OH YEAH, and this:
I found this movie via Netflix and was going to watch it in its entirety tonight, but this song from the opening sequence totally ruined that, ‘cause I had to go find it, download it, and listen to it on repeat for about three hours. Apparently the movie is like Inception, but better.
Today’s song: Mediational Field by Susumu Hirasawa
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is like a bad drug trip
I have honestly not watched this movie since I was about seven. It’s SO FREAKING FUNNY. I think I laughed hard enough to give myself a nosebleed when I get up tomorrow morning (this has happened several times before).
Snow White: “We’ll clean the house and surprise them! Then maybe they’ll let me stay!”
Yeah, that’ll do it. Though I must admit, as a kid I freaking LOVED the cleaning scene. There’s just something about synchronized cleaning, I guess.
Side note: no animated animal labor laws were violated in the making of this movie.
And Doc’s great. He really reminds me of someone, but I can’t think of the person. And Bashful’s adorable, but GRUMPY HAS NO TIME FOR HIS NONSENSE!
Snow White totally mocks Grumpy when she firsts meets him. “OOOOOOOOH, you must be GWUMPY!”
They jab at each other through almost the whole thing. If this were a romantic comedy today, they’d be making out at the end of the movie.
Also, why are they so afraid in the beginning? There are seven of them and they have pickaxes.
Happy: “What is it?”
Doc: “It’s a girl!”
Happy: “She’s waking up!”
Sneezy: “What’ll we do?!”
Doc: “HIDE!”
Hahaha, it’s like a frat house the morning after a BAD party.
Also:
Doc: “You might be cold and wet when you’re done, but you gotta admit, it’s good clean fun.”
I think scrubbing Dopey’s butt was what he was referring to here.
Or this.
“GET THE SOAP.”
I love you, Doc.
Happy can really move his hips, but Doc’s the lady’s man.
More perversion:
The scene in which they’re chasing the queen is pretty epic. You don’t want to make Happy angry. And does her death ring of “Wile E. Coyote” to anyone else aside from me (she’s on a cliff, tries to push a boulder onto the little gang, and the cliff on which she’s standing gets split from the mountain and the boulder falls after her)?
Random side note: after Disney’s first few movies, notice how black hair is almost strictly reserved for villains.
Also, one of you needs to tell Rebeca that it’s very hard sitting straight-faced in front of 200 students proctoring an exam when you’ve got “SCREW THE VAGINA, I HAVE A VAGINA!” going through your head.
Today’s song: We Used to be Friends by The Dandy Warhols
Question: who should watch Watchmen?
Answer: everyone should!
For those of you who haven’t read the novel/watched the movie and intend to at some point, spoilers abound in this blog, so I would skip it if you don’t want things ruined.
Things I enjoyed:
- I don’t think I’ve ever been so impressed with opening credits as I was in this movie. I loved the way they went over the whole history of the Minutemen and the masked heroes while rolling the opening credits to Bob Dylan’s The Times They are a Changin’ (very appropriate choice of music, too).
- Rorschach. They did a wonderful job with his character.
- Matching the style to the style in the novel. BEAUTIFUL. That is the only word for it. If you saw any of the previews that featured a scene of Archie (Nite Owl’s ship) rising out of the water, that scene looked EXACTLY like it did in the novel. And so did like 97% of the rest of the movie.
- The story. Even though they had to change the ending in order to prevent the movie from running like 5 hours long, they still did an excellent job.
Things that could have been better:
- The sex scene. It’s like five minutes too long—which means that there’s an at least five minute long sex scene. But hey, it’s Hollywood, so I was kind of expecting it.
- Laurie’s hair. The fact that it looked SO MUCH like a wig ALL THE TIME was really distracting, but that might just be me.
- The costumes. Laurie’s costume was a bit too Spandexy, Veidt’s costume a bit too Batman-esque, everything generally too dark. I know that royal purple and gold neck bands don’t really work with Hollywood style, but I would have liked it if the costumes were more like the scenery and stuck closer to the novel.
- One piece of cut dialogue. In the novel, at the end, after Veidt averts the attention from nuclear war by killing millions of people, he and John talk for a minute and Veidt asks John if he’d done the right thing. This little bit of dialogue was missing in the movie, which was really disappointing, ‘cause I thought it made Veidt a much more believable, human character.
Yay. Go see it.
“The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars” (or, “Salvador Dali Takes a Film Class”)
This is quite possibly the WEIRDEST movie in the world. In the universe. I must share this trip with you, so this is the general summary (I’d warn for spoilers, but…well…):
So this is apparently set awhile after the original The Brave Little Toaster, and Rob and Christine have had a baby (Robbie, of course). One night, an old Hearing Aid gets out of the junk drawer and it is discovered by Toaster that he is communicating to someone in space. The old gang of appliances decides to watch him the next night, but they fall asleep and wake up just in time to see Robbie, in a bubble, float off to Mars under a big beam of light.
(Let’s stop for a minute. The little kid, IN A BUBBLE, goes to Mars. Keep in mind that this has all been masterminded by a HEARING AID.
Okay, got that?
It gets weirder.)
They consult a computer that gives them the magic formula for space flight: a microwave, popcorn, a laundry basket, and the Ceiling Fan. Alert NASA! In space, they sing a rousing song about floating with a bunch of balloons (it’s worth mentioning again that they’re in SPACE here, where appliances still can sing, balloons don’t pop, and gravity is doin’ fine) before crashing on Mars.
(At about this point I ponder taking some acid to see if that would make this movie make sense.)
Now on Mars, the appliances meet a group of military toasters (never thought I’d use those two words in such close conjunction) as well as a Christmas angel named Tinselina (why she has a name and everything else is just Toaster, Blankie, or Mr. Coffee is a mystery). They learn that the Supreme Commander (a refrigerator, of course) is plotting to blow up the earth—such a COLD and HEARTLESS leader! Toaster, however, with his spunky personality and knack for coming up with musical numbers off the top of his head, wins an election against the fridge and becomes the new Supreme Commander.
Following this, there’s some really weird reunion between two Hearing Aids, an “oh crap, we FORGOT TO DEACTIVATE THE EARTH-BOUND DEATH ROCKET moment,” and a sacrifice of material (a.k.a. clothes) from Christmas Angel (if the other appliances don’t get unique names, neither does she) to get them back home.
And, of course, a happy ending. Robbie’s first word is, appropriately, “Toaster,” and life goes on for the talking appliances.
You all seriously need to see this. Weirdest damn movie ever.
God, if I had a kid and its first word was “toaster,” I’d probably shoot myself. Of course, my first word was “tick-tock,” so I probably shouldn’t be talking. Maybe when I was real young I had a similar adventure…”The Brave Old Grandfather Clock Goes to Alpha Centauri” or something.
Adventures in Boise: Day 4
We didn’t do squat for the first half of the day today. Really. We just hung around the hotel room going, “what should we do now?”
But then the day improved because we went to dinner with Matt and his mom. Then I went back to their house and Matt and I watched “The Butterfly Effect,” a movie I hadn’t seen before. Holy crap, that movie will stay with me a long time. I recommend it.
It was a very good night.
Matt, I shall miss you until band camp! Not too long, now!
Waiter! There’s a Hard Rock in my Cafe!
HOLY CRAP IT’S FINALS WEEK AND AFTER THIS I’LL BE A JUNIOR!
Ahem.
Finals finished today: statistics and psychology. I think I did okay on them—but I can never be sure. I either win or I fail. No in between.
Anyways, I’m glad they’re over; they were my hard ones. Now all I have left is biology (the bad: it’s cumulative and long) and Core (the bad: it’s Core).
Ah, yes! Matt and I went to see Spiderman 3 tonight. Not too horribly bad, I’d say…they threw in a bit of existentialism there at the end and I was happy about that. Three out of five stars? Maybe? I’m no movie critic.
I’m writing rather strangely tonight. Could it perchance be the fact that summer is nearly here and I’ll still be taking classes for the next month or so?
I say yes.
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