Category: movies

7 fun musical movies (that are not necessarily movies that are musicals)

Here’s a list of some great musically-oriented movies. Not musicals, necessarily. (Where I define a musical as “a movie or play where the characters up and sing a bunch of their lines, and dance around randomly in a way that has nothing to do with the plot.”) So, not musical movies, but music movies, I guess. These are about singing and playing music. (I’ll get around to the dancing later.) (Not that I’ll be doing any dancing. Or at least not that I’m willing to share. But I will make a list.)

7 fun musical (though not musical) movies

  1. This is Spinal Tap (1984)
    This movie goes up to 11. Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer totally rock in this heavy metal mockumentary. Okay, the music is bad. Deliberately bad. (With song titles like “Lick my love pump.”) In spite of the bad music, this early Rob Reiner-directed movie is lots of fun. And you just gotta love the Stonehenge scene.
  2. The Commitments (1991)
    A group of unemployed, underemployed and otherwise down-on-their-luck Dubliners put together a band to sing soul. The music is great, the story is entertaining, and the music is great. Plus, the music is great. (It’s actually a fun and funny movie, too.) Features an excellent, talented, but largely little-known cast. Maria Doyle Kennedy sings an excellent cover of Aretha’s “I Never Loved a Man.”
  3. Bob Roberts (1992)
    This movie is possibly more scary than fun. Not scary in a blood-and-guts nail-biting edge-of-your-seat sort of way. Scary in a too-close-too-home political sort of way. Tim Robbins plays a liberal-bashing manipulative politician. Who sings.
  4. Little Voice (1998)
    Jane Horrocks (perhaps best known as Ab Fab‘s Bubble) can sing like others like no other. Borrowing the songs (and voices) of such folks as Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey and Marilyn Monroe, Jane Horrocks lights up the movie with her incredible range and talent. (Michael Caine also plays a memorable role as a skeezy talent scout.)
  5. O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000)
    Bluegrass music is one of the stars of this Coen brothers film. The other stars, George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, play escaped convicts in the 1930’s deep south. Among the other adventures on their odyssey, they record an old-time song that becomes a radio hit.
  6. A Mighty Wind (2003)
    The brilliant minds and faces of Best In Show, Spinal Tap and Waiting For Guffman get together again. The amazing Christopher Guest directs. This time, the mockumentary is about folk singers. The music is fun, the dialog (improvised, mind you) is funnier. (“There was abuse in my family, but it was mostly musical in nature.”)

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This post is being warbled, crooned, chirped, yodeled and otherwise sung for the 3rd //engtech group writing project. Earplugs not included.

dances with cheese

Yes, it’s cheese week here at collecting tokens. Because I apparently just can’t get enough cheese.¹

Anyhow, inspired in part by the pants game (wherein a word in a known quotation, expression or title is replaced by the word pants) and in part by a post² I came across on adding the word cheese to movie titles, I offer up my own list of movie titles. (I got all these movie titles, or at least a previous version of them from the AFI’s 100 years 100 movies page. So these are high quality films that I’m making a cheese mockery of.)

Classics of Cheese Cinema

  • From Cheese to Eternity (1953)
    Passion. Betrayal. Cheese.
  • Bonnie and Cheese (1967)
    Partners in crime, partners in cheese.
  • Apocalypse Cheese (1979)
    A dark and dangerous mission of cheese.
  • A Streetcar Named Cheese (1951)
    Glimpse the cheesy underbelly of New Orleans.
  • Rebel Without a Cheese (1955)
    Trouble’s coming. And it’s bringing crackers.
  • Wuthering Cheese (1939)
    A haunting tale of star-crossed young cheese lovers.
  • Gone with the Cheese (1939)
    An epic saga of love, war and cheese.
  • The Wizard of Cheese (1939)
    If ever a wonderful wiz there was…wait, would that be the CheeseWiz?
  • It’s a Wonderful Cheese (1946)
    A sentimental film that shows a glimpse of a world without cheese.
  • 2001: A Cheese Odyssey (1968)
    The awe and mystery of a cheese unlike any other.
  • Raiders of the Lost Cheese (1981)
    When they find it, they really don’t want to smell it.
  • The Silence of the Cheese (1991)
    Is the cheese quiet now, Clarice?

    • —————
    ¹It has occurred to me that I must consider cheese to be a funny word. Much like pants, squid, banana, duck and monkey. However, I don’t see any mention of cheese on the Wikipedia inherently funny word article.

    ²Really, I promise to stop this daily linking to Words for My Enjoyment. What’s funny is that I first came across the blog via my takehome final, as mentioned previously, but then found it again totally inadvertantly and coincidentally while doing a google search for “cheese” and “movies”. (Did I mention that there’s aren’t too many cheese movies?) It was almost as if it was written in the cheese…Wait, “Written on the Cheese.” I think that’s a movie, too.

    extra cheese

    You know what really cheeses me off? When I finish a list and realize I’ve forgotten something.

    It’s like going to the grocery store to buy bread, eggs and milk, and then remembering I need cheese too as I’m driving on my way there, but I figure I’ll wait to add it to my list, since it would be hazardous to write while driving, even if it is only one word, and then when I get there, going into this trance as I wander the aisles with my shopping cart, and wondering what it means that supermarkets now play music that was actually popular when I was in high school, and feeling up the melons and squeezing the toilet paper, then browsing the cereal aisle and feeling nostalgic for the days of my youth when lucky charms were an exotic unattainable bowl of cereal at the end of the rainbow because my mother insisted on having us eat healthy cereals like wheat chex and when I finally tried them, they really weren’t that thrilling, and resisting the urge to buy cookies and redi-whip and donuts, and before you know it, I’ve filled up the cart and then I head home with my bags of groceries, and after I put away my bread and my milk and my pint of organic blackberry sorbet, which seemed like a healthier choice than the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, but screw it, I bought that too, and bananas and maple syrup and zucchini and oatmeal and frozen peas, and then find a crumpled up paper in my pocket, and it’s my grocery list with its three measly items (bread, eggs and milk) scribbled on it, and realize that I’ve forgotten the eggs, and (crap!) I also forgot to get more cheese.

    You know what I’m saying?

    Anyhow, I realized that I left off some key pieces of cheese from yesterday’s cheeseful bounty. Such as:

    1. Richard Cheese, a musician who, along with his band Lounge Against the Machine, provides cheesy lounge music reinterpretations of so many your favorite contemporary songs. Also in the music category is the band The String Cheese Incident. Then there’s the apparently sadly now-defunct Cheese Patrol, a

      yearly homage to all the songs that people vociferously hate but secretly know all the words to. These are the songs we grew up with; overorchestrated. overwrought, oversynthed, over the top.

    2. Somehow I also managed to leave off the appearance of the cheese guy in the Buffy episode “Restless“, as well as a few other cheesy references. And in my research I came across this brilliant essay “An Analysis of Cheese as Metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Apparently, the layers of cheese in the Buffy series run far deeper than I’d realized.
    3. For more on cheese philosophy, you can check out this essay “on the non-existence of cheese.” Is there proof of the existence of cheese in the universe? Perhaps not.
    4. Then there’s the Cheese Burglar. But I’m not really a big fan of the cult of which he is a member. So instead I offer this cartoon mouse classic, The Cheese Burglar (1946). (You can even see it on YouTube. Though I admit to not having watched anything close to the whole 7 minutes.)
    5. I actually like the animation of this (shorter) shortThe Cheese Trap better, which features a cg version of the board game Mouse Trap, one of my childhood favorites.
    6. Do you hanker for a hunka cheese? Do you remember this rather creepy cartoon psa from the 70s? You might also be interested in the hunk-hankerers guest appearance on the Family Guy.
    7. Yesterday’s cheese did not include much in the way of cheese activities for those of you with too much time and not enough cheese on your hands. Options include: a quiz to let you know what kind of cheese you are. (There’s also a similar-veined one-step cheese “comparator,” but the reviews are not stellar.)
    8. There’s even an experiment with cheese that you can perform at home on your own. (However, the author does recommend exercising caution if you are lactose tolerant.) (And no, my dear seester, this is not the same cheese experiment you tried with me that one time when we were little. I’ll write about that later.)
    9. Most thrillingly, you can actually watch cheese *live* online. That’s right, you can watch watch cheddar cheese aging. Not only is it just as exciting as it sounds, it is also apparently the cool thing to do. (If you don’t have the months to spare to see the change in progress, you can also check out this time-lapse video encapsulating 3 months of the cheese-aging process.)
    10. And even though I offered it up yesterday, no cheese list would be complete without The Cheese Shop sketch. This time, I serve it up in its youtubiful glory:

    say cheese

    swiss_cheese.jpgYou might think you need to go to the grocery store to find cheese, but I have found cheese in a variety of unexpected places: books, movies, music and more. (And yes, it can get messy. Let me tell you, camembert is not something you want to find in an unexpected place.) I’ve come across so much cheese that there’s far too much for just me. So, I offer up to you this delectable platter of assorted cheesy goodness. Get your crackers ready.

    1. “The Big Cheese”: an expression meaning “the top banana” or “the head honcho.” (Please note that the “head cheese” means something totally different.) Here’s something I did not now about the origins of the expression “big cheese“:

      This use of the word probably derived not from the word cheese, but from the Persian or Hindi word chiz, meaning a thing.

    2. Little Miss Muffet This nursery rhyme girl not only sits on her tuffet, but she eats her curds and whey. That’s cottage cheese, my friend.
    3. “The Cheese Alarm,” a song by Robyn Hitchcock. This is a song of many cheeses:

      Roquefort and grueyere and slippery Brie
      All of these cheeses they happen to me

    4. “the cheese stands alone“: a line from the song “The Farmer in the Dell”. The title of I am the Cheese, a young adult book by Robert Cormier, and also a movie based on the same, references this line of the song, and the loneliness of being cheese.
    5. Cheese has long been used as a bait in mousetraps, and is especially good for trying to catch cartoon mice. Recently, this cheesy bait concept has been extended to motivating office workers with the book Who Moved My Cheese. This irritating-looking parable appears to have spawned a slew of cheese parody books, at least three of which are entitled “Who Cut the Cheese?”
    6. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by the illustrious Lane Smith. This picture book features, among other things less cheese-oriented, a cheesy reinterpration of the gingerbread man fairy tale. Catch it if you can.
    7. “Cheeses of the World Series“: Jefferson Mint’s series of hand-painted collector’s plates featuring the cheeses of the world. Available only as an extra on the Austin Powers DVD. This is funniest deleted scene I can remember. It’s part of the overview that Number Two (Robert Wagner) gives of the activities of Virtucon, the “legitmate face” of Dr. Evil’s evil empire.
    8. Wallace and Gromit, Grand Day Out. Wallace loves cheese. Enough to go to the moon for it. And as we all know, the moon is made of cheese. (The other W&G features also feature some cheese, at least I know that The Wrong Trousers, and A Close Shave do. I have yet to see The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, but I would be sorely disappointed if it was cheese-free.)
    9. You know, there just aren’t enough movies featuring cheese. Paul Davidson, whose blog I found while doing my takehome final, offers a solution to this perennial problem by suggesting “ten movies whose plotlines would change by simply adding the word cheese to their titles.” An excellent proposition. (cf. “A Touch of Evil Cheese” and “Stand by Me Cheese”)
    10. The Cheese Shop sketch. In the land of the cheese, this sketch reigns supreme. John Cheese, I mean, Cleese and Michael Palin perform this legendary Monty Python gem. Hey, I was just making a joke about the John Cheese thing, but check out this slice of trivia from the John Cleese Wikipedia entry:

      John Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England to Reginald Francis Cleese and Muriel Cross. His family’s surname was previously “Cheese”, but his father, an insurance salesman, changed his surname to “Cleese” upon joining the army in 1915.

      Anyhow, the Cheese Shop Sketch features 43 kinds of cheeses. Well, the names of 43 kinds of cheeses. Whether you’re looking for Cheddar, Brie, Wensleydale or Venezuelan Beaver Cheese, you will find no better place not to buy it.

    another high school movie?

    I’m trying to do actual work here (I have a big assigment due on Monday), but John just sent me a link to this trailer (which he saw on Pharyngula). What with my recent attention to high school movies and associated terminology, I felt I should share.

    10 Things I Hate About Commandments:

    my favorite movie quotes

    I like movies. And I like to quote things. I like to make lists. (I also like to enter //engtech group writing projects, and this latest one asks for posts about movies.) So here’s a list of movies I like to quote, and quotes from those movies.

    My favorite movies to quote (and quotes from those movies)

  • Best in Show (2000)
    A movie about dogs and dog owners. Well, really more about the people than the dogs. But there is a dog show. And you do see dogs in the movie. But the dogs don’t have so much to say, so I haven’t quoted them.

    • “We met at Starbucks. Not at the same Starbucks but we saw each other at different Starbucks across the street from each other.”
    • I’ve been know to confuse people by stating “we both like soup.” Here’s a bit more of the quotation, from an interview with a character describing her relationship with her husband:
      “We have so much in common, we both love soup and snow peas, we love the outdoors, and talking and not talking. We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about.”
  • Cold Comfort Farm (1995)
    One of my favorite movies. It’s got quite a few quotable bits, most of which involve a bit of performance.

    • “Everybody loves poetry” (Or, “evereh-bodeh loves poetreh”)
    • “I saw something nasty in the woodshed. Something nasty.”
    • “There’ll be no butter in hell!”
    • I also try to throw the word “scrattling” into conversations on occasion.
  • This is Spinal Tap (1984)
    The groundbreaking rock mockumentary, or mock rockumentary. Who hasn’t taken the opportunity to point out when something “goes up to eleven“? (Because, obviously, that’s one higher than ten.)

    Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and…
    Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
    Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
    Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it’s louder? Is it any louder?
    Nigel Tufnel: Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
    Marty DiBergi: I don’t know.
    Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
    Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
    Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
    Marty DiBergi: Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
    Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

  • “A Fistful of Yen” from Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)
    An Enter the Dragon parody of extraodinary magnitude.

    • “But it would be wrong” (This is from a scene when Loo is visited in his quarters by a scientist he has been sent to rescue. As he starts to explain his plans, she indicates that his room has been bugged, and points out a series of larger and larger “hidden” microphones. After he explains how their escape plans would be feasible, he says loudly into a nearby microphone “but it would be wrong.”)
    • “tough and ruthless” vs “rough and toothless” (From this line: “This is Buttkiss, Klahn’s bodyguard – he is tough and ruthless. This is Kwong, Klahn’s chauffeur – he is rough and toothless.”)

    (In case you’ve never seen “Fistful of Yen,” here’s a small taste that’s available on YouTube: the alarm scene.

  • The Princess Bride (1987)
    This is, without a doubt, my favorite movie to quote. (Also a great book to movie adaptation.) At one point, I could practically quote the whole thing. But I will spare you that, and just offer up a few choice bits. (If you’re itching for more, try the quotes listed on imdb. Or better yet, watch the movie.)

    • “Inconceivable.”
      “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
    • “Am I going mad, or did the word “think” escape your lips? You were not hired for your brains, you hippopotamic land mass.”
    • Here’s another handy insult to offer up: “you warthog-faced buffoon”
    • Then there’s the incomprehensible quote by Billy Crystal as Miracle Max, as he express excitement over his opportunity to exact revenge: “I’m gonna xxx”. Some have suggested “I’m gonna [lick the dalmatian]”
    • “Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.”
    • “Mawwiage. Mawwiage if what bwingv uf togevuh today… That bweffed awwangement, a dweam wifim a dweam.”
    • “liar! liar!”
      “Get back, witch.”
      “I’m not a witch, I’m your wife. But after what you just said, I’m not even sure I want to be that any more.”
    • And last, but not least, probably everybody’s favorite:
      “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

    • site statistics

    so blue

    Feeling a bit blue, folks? Well I’ve got blue folks for you. A whole list of blue folks. Some serious, some silly. Blue-skinned, blue-furred or just blue in the face. Some people, some people-like creatures. One sort of blob. Plus one god.

    A List of Blue Folks

    1. Smurfs. (By the way, I’m actually very disturbed by the Unicef Smurf commercial. Which is I guess the message they were going for.)

      smurf.jpggrouchy.jpg-ette.jpg

    2. Sesame Street offers Cookie Monster and Grover.

      3. tv_sesame_street_cookie_monster_interested.jpggrover.jpgbloo.png

    3. Then there’s the more contemporary Bloo from the cartoon Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.
    4. Blue Man Group. A group of men who are blue. Well, who paint themselves blue to perform some sort of performance. In the show Arrested Development, the character Tobias, a blue man who has aspirations to be a Blue Man, spends several episodes painted blue.

      5. bmg12_tn.jpgthe_tick.jpg

    5. The Tick. Mighty blue justice. A big blue superhero from the animated and live action TV shows.
    6. Various X-Men characters. The movies add one new blue mutant with each sequel. The first had Mystique, the second added Nightcrawler, and the third added Beast.

      m.jpgn.jpgb.jpg

    7. The Wee Free Men and other books by Terry Pratchett featuring the Nac Mac Feegle. Little blue people based loosely on the Picts of Scotland, who would paint their skin blue before battle. (See also Braveheart, which depicted blue face-painting that may or may not have been historically appropriate.)
    8. The Blue Fugates. An Appalachian family prone to methemoglobinemia, a medical condition causing the appearance of a bluish tinge to the skin. You can read more about them and other historical and mythical blue figures, like
    9. Blue Moovians. Ancient blue humanoids. Who knew?
    10. The Tuareg, a Berber ethnic group. Not actually blue, but

      The Tuareg are sometimes called the “Blue People” because the indigo pigment in the cloth of their traditional robes and turbans stained the wearer’s skin dark blue.

    11. The Hindu deity Krishna.* You can also learn more about why Krishna is colored blue.

      12. krishna.jpg

    *(Note: I hesitated to include Krishna in my list, even though he is so very blue, seeing as he is an actual god and all. I don’t want to be disrespectful. However, upon remembering that he is often depicted as a playful god, I hope that his inclusion in my playful list will not offend. (cf. This line from a story in Shri Shyam Katha: “Then the playful Lord Krishna said. ‘First you promise me and then I will ask for a boon'” (Note: I must share that the preceding quotation made me giggle, as my most recent encounter of the word boon was about something else.)))

    high school movies and clique taxonomies

    It’s no wonder I’ve been having traumatic high school flashbacks. In my class on Monday, there was an extended discussion of terms used to categorize cliques (and outcasts) at the various schools that people had attended. (Keep in mind, for most of the students in the class I’m taking, high school was fairly recent history.) This was all relating to our assigned reading, primarily a text by Penelope Eckert about an ethnographic study she’d done in an American high school. The Eckert text (the same one that had a sentence that made me laugh out loud) discusses the terms Jocks and Burnouts, terms used by the teenagers in the Detroit area suburban high school she studied.

    So the kids (yes, I’m freakin’ old) in the class were all relating the terms used in their schools. “We had jocks and greasers” or “we had preppies and townies”. Terms like “skaters” and “band kids” were bandied about. To be honest, I don’t remember all of what they said. I was too busy feeling old and having flashbacks to various movies that make reference to clique structure and terminology. Which is basically every American high school movie ever made.

    But lets go over some examples, with the terminology:

    1. The Breakfast Club (1985)
      This movie featured 5 students of differing categories: Jock, Princess, Criminal, Basket Case and Brain.
    2. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
      This quote about sums it up:

      Grace: Oh, he’s very popular Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads – they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.

    3. Heathers (1989)
      This movie has the exclusivity (and cruelty) of the popular clique taken to the extreme, with the 4 members (3 of whom are named Heather) called “The Heathers”.
    4. Clueless (1995)
      I don’t remember what terms this movie used explicitly, but I found this reference to the clique structure:

      On paper, Clueless would sound like just about any other high school comedy. It’s got the popular girls and the jocks, the dreamboats and the bitches, the stoners and the slackers.

    5. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
      One character gives a tour to another, a new kid at the high school, and explains the who’s-who of cliques:

      Over there you’ve got your basic beautiful people. Now listen. Unless they talk to you first, don’t bother.

      This movie went for somewhat exaggerated cliques, with Audio-video Geeks, Coffee People, White Rastas, Urban Cowboys and Future MBAs.

    That’s all I got for now. I’ll have to do more research into this issue at some point. (Translation: I’ll watch some high school movies.) I am on the lookout for new references on this subject matter. If anyone has any clique terminology to add, whether based on your own ethnographic studies, knowledge of the literature, or familiarity with bitchin’ high school movies, please let me know.