Spotlight On: Ewan McGregor

This is a spotlight that is way overdue! I can't believe I haven't done a spotlight on Ewan McGregor already! I have had a major crush on him ever since I saw Moulin Rouge when I was around eleven years old. He is an amazing actor who can do a whole variety of roles. He has done comedy, drama, musicals, romance, war movies, and has even played a jedi. He also happens to be one of the most gorgeous human beings on the face of the Earth. He just has a smile that makes you happy and a beautiful pair of blue eyes. Here are some of my favorites of the movies he has been in.

Trainspotting

Here McGregor plays a heroin addict named Renton who spends the movie trying to get clean only to get back on the junk again. There are a lot of really disturbing scenes in this movie that really show how degrading and horrible being an addict is. We see Renton digging through a disgusting toilet filled with shit looking for his drugs, and one of the most disturbing scenes in the movie is a nightmare sequence when he is detoxing at his parents' house.


Emma

Emma is my absolute favorite Jane Austen novel, so it is really cool that McGregor has played one of her characters. He plays Frank Churchill, who ends up being kind of a douche. He is someone that Emma crushes on for a while, but we eventually find out that the whole time he was engaged to Jane Fairfax. He ends up making Mr. Knightley very jealous because he thinks that Emma is falling for him.


A Life Less Ordinary

I just watched this movie for the first time today, and I thought it was kind of odd. It is a romantic comedy, but there were parts that were pretty disturbing. It is about a guy who kidnaps his former bosses daughter because he lost his job. The girl doesn't really care that she has been kidnapped and even helps him out. Also, there are two angels who are trying to get the two of them to fall in love. What I mean by disturbing is that there is a part where one of the angels makes Ewan dig his own grave and tells him he is going to shoot him. It was horrifying! This was an odd movie, but it does have some cute scenes.


Velvet Goldmine

Curt Wild! I love this movie so much! Ewan plays Curt Wild, a rock star who is based on Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. Ewan is just sexy as hell in this movie! This has a lot of great actors in it like Christian Bale, Toni Collette, and Jonathon Rhys Meyers, but my absolute favorite character is Ewan McGregor as Curt Wild.



Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Say what you will about the Star Wars prequels, but Ewan McGregor was a great young Obi Wan. They give him some pretty cheesy dialogue in the second two films, but I love him in this one. He is probably the best looking jedi ever and was a part of one of the best lightsaber battles in any of the Star Wars films!



Moulin Rouge

I do not think that it is possible to watch this movie and not fall madly in love with Ewan McGregor as Christian. Here he plays a young writer who falls in love with a courtesan. It starts out wonderful, but he has to deal with the fact that she has to sleep with The Duke. Basically this whole movie makes me cry, but one of the most heartbreaking scenes is when Satine is forced to tell Christian that she doesn't love him to save his life. This whole movie is just heartbreaking! It probably wouldn't be so bad if Ewan wasn't so damn perfect in this movie! He is just beautiful and his singing voice is amazing...I just love this movie and him in it so much! Just listening to him sing Come What May makes me want to cry...



Big Fish

One of the rare Tim Burton movies that doesn't feature Johnny Depp. Here McGregor plays Edward Bloom a man who may or may not have had a bunch of extraordinary things happen in his life. McGregor plays him from his teen years to around middle age. There are so many great scenes in this movie, and one of my favorites is the scene at the circus when he first sees his future wife...


The Island

This is a really cool science fiction movie where McGregor and Scarlett Johansson play people who believe they are in an underground shelter for survivors of a horrible apocalypse, but they eventually find out that they are really clones who were made so that their organs could be used to help the people they are clones of. Both this movie and the movie Never Let Me Go are examples of moral issues with cloning. Even though clones are made not born naturally, they are still people.



I Love You Phillip Morris

When I first saw the trailer for this movie I thought that it looked stupid, but I'm really glad that I ended up watching it. Ewan is just so sweet and adorable as Phillip Morris, a man who falls in love while in prison. Every time his character talks in this movie you just want to give him a big hug.



Beginners

This was a super cute movie. Ewan plays a man whose 75 year old father comes out to him as gay. This films is also about a relationship he starts with a pretty actress he meets after his dad dies. This movie was just charming! It is a movie that can put you in a good mood even while making you a little sad.



Haywire

Some good looking men in this movie! It not only has Ewan, but also Channing Tatum AND Michael Fassbender! That alone was worth the movie ticket prices!


Upcoming: He has two movies coming out in the near future that I really want to see. The first is Salmon Fishing in the Yemen with Emily Blunt. If it were anyone else I probably wouldn't want to see it because I really don't care about fishing, but since it has Ewan it'll probably be good. I also want to see Perfect Sense, which he is in with Eva Green. I think that that movie looks really interesting.

My 16 Favorite Teen Movies

This is my list of my favorite movies centered around teenagers. In order to prevent this list from being rediculously long, I have excluded horror movies and musicals, so this is basically a list of my favorite teen comedies. Here goes...

16. Ferris Bueller's Day Off

"Ferris Bueller, you're my hero."




15. She's All That

I watched this movie dozens of times in my preteen years and, along with basically every other girl in the country, I had a huge crush on Freddie Prinze Jr. Weird artsy girl Laney Boggs gets made over by cool guy Prinze Jr. so that he can win a bet by making her prom queen. So, he falls in love with her (of course) and she eventually finds out and blah blah blah...happy ending.



14. Bring It On

Another movie that I watched a billion times, Bring It On was HUGE when it first came out. I remember that tons of girl at my school used to quote this movie all the time, and made girls want to be cheerleaders even though my school never really had any (and still doesn't.)



13. Weird Science

Not only did I love this movie when I was a kid, but I actually used to watch the TV show that was based on this movie as well. While I do think the whole Frankenstein-esque storyline is great, the main reason to watch this movie is for the scenes with Chet.



12. All I Wanna Do

"Up your ziggy with a wa-wa brush!" This is a movie that I would watch whenever it was on TV. I actually haven't seen it in forever, but I really want to now because I remember that this used to be one of my favorite movies. I loved all of the girls in the cast, and it actually made me wish that I went to an all girls school.





11. Jawbreaker

Looking back, this is kind of an odd movie for an elementary school age girl to love, but this was one of my favorites back in the day. Rose McGowan as Courtney Shane was always my favorite.



10. Say Anything...

Such a cute movie!!! I love John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler and Ione Skye as Diane Court, the girl of his dreams. I also really love Lili Taylor as his songwriter friend. "Joe LIES...when he cries..." What this movie is best known for is definitely the boombox scene.



9. Juno

I love the movie Hard Candy, and I also read Diablo Cody's book, so I was already a fan of Cody and Ellen Page before I saw this movie. I remember being really excited for this to come out, and I was not disappointed. I loved the cast and the soundtrack, and I remember laughing really hard when I saw this in theatres.



8. Pretty In Pink

Growing up in my house, I saw a lot of John Hughes movies. One that I always loved was Pretty In Pink. Even though I think that Molly Ringwald is a total whiny whiner in this movie, I always loved Annie Potts as her punker friend, and Jon Cryer as Duckie.



7. Superbad

Apparently the script for this movie was written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg when they were only thirteen years old. I never would have guessed that because this is one of the funniest movies to come out in the new millenium. This movie is actually really funny to listen to with the commentary, especially when they start talking about this one bad review that someone have the movie.




6. 10 Things I Hate About You

This modern day version of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew was my favorite movie after it first came out. I LOVED Julia Stiles as Catarina Stratford, as well as Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cameron, and Heath Ledger as Patrick Verona. I even had the soundtrack to this movie, and I listened to it all the time.



5. The Breakfast Club

The Breakfast Club is my favorite of the John Hughes/ Brat Pack movies. It is basically just a movie about five people stuck in a room together, but it is, in my opinion, one of the best movies from the 80s.



4. Mean Girls

"That's so fetch!" Even though I have never been a big Lindsay Lohan fan, I love this movie! Tina Fey's script is great, and this movie has some of the best dialogue! Its also the movie that helped make stars out of Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried.



3. Ghost World

This movie is based on my favorite graphic novel Ghost World by Daniel Clowes. I love Enid and Rebecca's somewhat codependant friendship, and this movie shows how friends can grow apart after high school.



2. Clueless

I've probably seen this movie a million times, and it just keeps getting better. I knew that this was a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma, but I didn't realize how close it was to the actual story until I read the book. It's actually a pretty faithful adaptation considering that it is set in Beverly Hills in the 90s.




1. Heathers

"Lick it up, baby. Lick. It. Up." Heathers is my all-time favorite teen movie. It features Winona Ryder, who I have always been a huge fan of, as Veronica, girl who hangs out with the Heathers. They are pretty much like the Plastics from Mean Girls except a lot bitchier. This movie is both dark and hilarious, and is a lot different from most teen comedies.

Spotlight On: Laurence Olivier

This week's spotlight is on Sir Laurence Olivier, a man who is often considered to be one of the greatest actors of all time, and certainly one of the greatest Shakespearean actors. While I do love him in his Shakespeare roles, I love him even more in the other types of films that he is done. In his younger years he played a lot of literary romantic heroes, and in his older years he played some great villains. He has worked with some of my favorite directors, like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, and has also appeared in film adaptations of some of my favorite books. As a bonus, in his younger days, he was also incredibly handsome... Here are some of my favorite films/ roles of his.

Fire Over England

This was the first film that Olivier did with his (future) wife Vivien Leigh. It is said that it was during this film that they first fell in love and became the Brad and Angelina of their time. Here Olivier plays a British man who becomes a spy for Queen Elizabeth. While I didn't much care for this movie as a whole, I thought that Flora Robson was a great Elizabeth, and that the scenes with Larry and Viv were cute.



The Divorce of Lady X

I thought that it was funny to see Olivier in this kind of role, because you don't see him much in romantic comedies. This is the type of role that you would normally see Cary Grant in. Having said that, I thought that this movie was actually really funny, and made me wish that Larry would have done more roles like this. My favorite scene was when he was first talking to the man who he believed was Merle Oberon's husband. Whats really neat about this movie is that its the only color picture that I've seen with him when he was this young.



Wuthering Heights

Now onto my favorite film adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. I love love love this movie and have probably posted about it a million or so times already. Olivier is wonderful as Heathcliff, a man who goes from lovesick stable boy to revenge seeking aristocrat after the love of his life abandons him to marry a rich man. And even though the words are changed a little, he is my favorite actor to ever recite Heathcliff's "I cannot live without my life" speech.





Rebecca

In 1940, Olivier starred in one of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock films. He plays a rich man who is still haunted by the memory of his dead wife, even after remarrying.





Pride and Prejudice

In this adaptation of Jane Austen's famous novel, Olivier, of course, plays Mr. Darcy. Although I was disappointed in how they made Mr. Darcy's aunt seem like a good guy in this version, I do really like this movie. Oliver made a perfect Mr. Darcy.



That Hamilton Woman

Here is another film that paired Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who by this time was his wife. This movie was very gloomy and had an unhappy ending for both characters, but like Fire Over England, I loved all the scenes with the two of them together.



Henry V

Not my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, but Olivier is great as the title character. What's neat about this movie is that it starts out as an actual play in the film and then transitions into the film settings. This movie also has great use of Technicolor, so it all looks amazing!



Hamlet

Laurence Olivier is the only actor to ever win an Oscar for playing a Shakespearean role, and he did so for playing Hamlet. I thought that it was odd that this version didn't include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but to be honest, if I had never read Hamlet I wouldn't have even noticed. I thought that this was a great film adaptation of the famous plays, and one of Olivier's best performances.



The Prince and the Showgirl

This is a comedy that he did with the lovely Marilyn Monroe. There is actually a movie coming out sometime this year that is about Monroe while she works on this film. Monroe will be played by Michelle Williams, and Olivier will be played by Kenneth Branagh. I thought that Branaugh was an interesting choice because he has also done a bunch of Shakespearean films. I think that this is one of Monroe's best performances, and Olivier is great as the stuffy Regent who courts her.



Spartacus

I was so disappointed when I found out that my favorite scene in this movie doesn't have Olivier's actual voice. Something was wrong with the audio when they restored this scene to the movie, so they had his voice dubbed by Anthony Hopkins because Olivier had already passed away. I must say that Hopkins does a great job, though, because I had no idea the first time I watched it. If there wasn't the stupid Production Code at the time, then this could have been in the original cut of the film, and we could hear Olivier's actual voice in this scene.



Sleuth

I love this movie! It is so cool because it only has two actors, Olivier and Michael Caine, and they are both brilliant. What I really love about this movie is that I can't really decide which one is the bad guy. I kept switching back and forth between the two. Olivier really gets to show his vicious side when he makes Caine's character think that he is going to kill him. Love it!



Marathon Man

Olivier REALLY gets vicious in this film, where he plays a Nazi who tortures Dustin Hoffman with dental tools while asking "Is it safe?" I already hate going to the dentist, and after watching this movie, it just makes me even more nervous...



Clash of the Titans

Here Olivier plays Zeus, leader of all the gods. Even though the special effects are totally cheesy, I do have to admit that this movie is kind of a guilty pleasure for me.

Just Finished Reading: (catch-up edition)

The internet here wasn't working for a few weeks, which totally sucked. Thank the lord, however, because it magically started working again today. In the time that the internet has been broken I have read three different books. Instead of writing three separate blog posts about each different book, I have decided to combine them all into one big one, so here we go...

Pride and Prejudice

This is my second Austen book that I have read, but unlike Emma, I already knew pretty much everything that was going to happen. I have seen both the 1940 and the 2007 film versions of this novel, and really liked both of them. The book was definitely worth the read, however. I never thought that I would be a Jane Austen fan, but reading this and Emma really make me want to read her other novels.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

I actually bought this book for my little sisters for Christmas, but neither of them have read it yet. I decided to have a crack at it because its a book that I've always wanted to read. I ended up reading it all in one day (which is something that I never do.) What I love about this particular book is that it has really cool illustrations by Camille Rose Garcia. Every single one of her illustrations in the book is just awesome.

Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn

I've actually had this book since I was in high school, but never read it until now. It was a really interesting read, and it was cool reading about how she lived through a war and how she got started in show business. The entire time I was reading this it made me really want to watch Roman Holiday, Sabrina, and Breakfast at Tiffany's (because those are the movies of hers that I own...) and made me really want to rent The Children's Hour. One thing that did kind of bug me was that the author seemed to go on tangents about other actors, like Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly. I really like them, but I'm reading this to learn about Audrey, not them.

Spotlight On: Keira Knightley

This week's spotlight is on the lovely Keira Knightley. I have been huge fan of hers since I was like thirteen. I remember seeing her on a movie poster for Pirates of the Caribbean way before it came out and I just thought that she was gorgeous! Well, not only is she beautiful, but she is also a very talented actress, and one of my favorites working today. Here are some of my favorite films of hers that I have seen throughout the years.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

A lot of people don't know this, but one of Keira Knightley's first film roles was in the first Star Wars prequel. She played Sabe, the decoy for Natalie Portman's Queen Amidala. Apparently she was cast due to a strong resemblance to Portman. I really don't think that they look all that alike anymore, but when I saw this in theatres when I was nine, I couldn't tell the difference between when Portman was the queen and when Knightley was.



Princess of Thieves

When I was a kid I was a sucker for warrior girl movies, so I totally had this on VHS. In this film she plays Robin Hood's daughter. Interesting fact: Stephen Moyer from True Blood plays her love interest Price Philip. I actually did not know that until a few minutes ago when I was on IMDB. I haven't watched this movie in forever!



The Hole

In this movie, Knightley plays a popular high school girl who gets trapped in a bunker with three of her classmates. What is hilarious is that I actually own this movie. I remember I waited forever for it to come out on DVD in America because I really wanted to see it, so I just bought it. Its not the best movie in the world, but it's not terrible. Both Knightley and Thora Birch give good performances.



Doctor Zhivago

I actually saw this version before the one with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. I  recorded episode one off of the TV when it was on PBS and I would watch it all the time. I didn't see the second episode until a year or so ago when I got it from Netflix. I always loved Knightley as Lara, the pretty Russian girl who is seduced by an older man then falls for a married poet/ doctor.



Bend It Like Beckham

In this film, Knightley plays a soccer player who has dreams of moving to America to play professionally. One of the very few films where she isn't playing the pretty girl. I just think its funny that theres even a part where she is mistaken for a guy...



Pirates of the Caribbean

Now onto the movie that made her famous. I remember that I was beyond excited for this movie to come out. We got to the theatre so early that we had to wait in the hallway, because the previous showing was still going on. My favorite scene in the movie has always been the part when Barbossa shows Elizabeth Swann the curse...



Love Actually

In Love Actually, she plays a character who finds out that her new husband's best friend is in love with her. She is in one of my favorite scenes in the whole movie, which you can find HERE

King Arthur

Knightley has always been great in period films, and this one is no exception. This movie has Guinevere as a warrior woman, which you don't see very often. Not one of my favorite films of hers, but it does have its good parts.



Domino

In this films she plays Domino Harvey, who was a real model turned bounty hunter, but this film is very very loosly based on her life. What this films is probably the best remembered for is Keira's awesome short haircut.



Pride and Prejudice

This is the film that got Keira her Oscar nomination. It was well deserved, because she was perfect as Elizabeth Bennett in this adaptation of the Jane Austen classic. My favorite scene has to be the part where she rejects Mr. Darcy's proposal.



Atonement

My goodness, the green dress that she wears in this film is absolutely gorgeous!! In this film she plays Cecilia, a woman in love with the beautiful James McAvoy. Unfortunately, her little sister accuses her love of raping a guest at their house, so they are torn apart. I think that her and McAvoy have such great chemistry in this film, and that library scene is SEXY AS HELL!!!



The Duchess

I remember seeing this movie in theatres and just bawling my eyes out during the scene where she has to give away her baby. I don't remember if I've seen it since, but now I really want to rent it. She gets to wear some amazing costumes in this film.



Never Let Me Go

I love this movie so much. Here she plays a clone named Ruth who was made so they could harvest her organs. In the book she was a rather unlikable character, and I think that Knightley does a great job in this film.



Upcoming:
I am super excited to see her in the upcoming David Cronenberg film A Dangerous Method. It also features Viggo Mortensen and the handsome Michael Fassbender.

She is also going to be in a film called Seeking a Friend For the End of the World with Steve Carell that is coming out next year.