Friday, July 13, 2012

Favorites A to X - Part Nine "R-X"

Pardon the marathon finish...I'm about to have a delightfully busy, relatively computer-free week.

Alas, no entries for poor lonely "Q" 

R

Movies 
Raiders of the Lost Ark - Have it memorized.  Seriously, I can mouth the words along with the characters.

Return of the King - yeah, it may have six endings, but after nine-plus hours of film making you can get away with it. 

Return to Me - This is my favorite David Duchovny role, and if that seems like a underwhelming thing for me to say see the TV entry under "X"

Roman Holiday - I really do love Audrey Hepburn, but so often I feel like she was kind of poorly matched in terms of co-stars.  This movie is an exception.  I so love watching her and Gregory Peck wander around Rome. 

Books 
Rapunzel's Revenge (Shannon Hale) - Normally, I'm not a fan of graphic novels.  I don't even own a Superman graphic novel, and I own this one.  Really, Rapunzel in a mythical wild west, that's a good idea.

TV
Remington Steele - In junior high my dream car was a white convertible VW Rabbit.  This is not a coincidence.

S

Movies 
Serenity - The reason I watched Firefly, oh and Tracy and I noticed that both Mal and Han Solo both have striped pants and routinely wear a holstered gun and a jacket.  Is this a coincidence?  I don't think so.

Star Wars - Han is my favorite character, Chewie is my second, and the Millennium Falcon is third.

Superman - Of course.

Books 
The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis) - the most spiritually enlightening book I've read that falls outside the LDS canon, and it's funny. 


The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett) - Just downloaded this book FOR FREE to my phone.  The world is a beautiful place sometimes.

Seer of Sevenwaters (Juliet Marillier) - This is, partially, a book about a giant shape-shifting sea monster, and yet I related to it on a very personal level.  You have to love an author who can manage that. 

TV
Sherlock - This is somewhere between a television show, a series of hour and a half movies, and a mini-series.  Honestly I'm not sure what the format is, and one of the six episodes, from my moral framework is relatively unwatchable.  However, I still found this BBC update of Sherlock Holmes to have everything the recent movies lacked.  This is definitely a textbook case of "how to update a classic."

Star Trek The Next Generation - In my opinion, quality wise, this is the best of the Trek universe.  Well, at least once Riker grows a beard and Tasha Yar dies (the first may be a coincidence, the second unfortunately, not so much).  And really Captain Picard is so entirely awesome.

Star Trek Voyager - having just said that I think Next Generation is the highest in quality, I have to say that for sheer entertainment value I like Voyager the best.  Maybe because it's the only one of the series in which I had a crush (at the time) on three different characters at any given time.  And don't worry Tracy knows this, and hopefully is confident that he has no competition, fictional or otherwise.

T

Movies 
To Kill a Mockingbird - I love my Dad, but if I could also be adopted by a fictional character, Atticus Finch would be in the running. 

The Two Towers - as I've said before, my favorite Lord of the Rings movie. 

Books 
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (Judy Blume) - this book is about having an annoying but lovable little brother.  I had three :-)  No wonder I loved it. 


To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) - the magic of such an deep and layered story told convincingly from a child's point-of-view is brilliance. 


A Town Like Alice (Nevil Shute) - Apparently, in looking at this list, I'm a sucker for heartwarming World War II fiction with a romantic bent.  And this book has AUSTRALIA in it, yeah, I kind of think the guy wrote it just for me :-)

Twilight (Stephenie Meyer) - call it a guilty pleasure, a flavor of the month, or just a symptom of my general obsession with the Pacific Northwest, but I couldn't honestly leave it off the list.


W

Books
Wee Free Men (Terry Pratchett) - An brainy-tough-little girl witch and a brawling, drinking band of tiny Scottish-inspired men?  Yeah, it's awesome. 


Wildwood Dancing (Juliet Marillier) - a lovely version of the "12 Dancing Princesses" fairy-tale in a great Eastern European setting.

Winter Sea (Susanna Kearsley) - It's an interesting thing about time travel-ish novels, I tend to either love them or hate them.  I really enjoy Susanna Kearsley's books and I think Winter Sea is the best of them.


X

Movies 
X-Files Fight the Future - If I hadn't seen the movie, I wouldn't have watched the show.

X-Men - This movie, in part, helped inspire the current series of books I'm writing and introduced me to the awesomeness of Wolverine.

TV
X-Files - It seems appropriate to end with X-Files.  It's the most truly geeky I EVER got over a television show, at least in my adult years.  I even dressed up as Scully for Halloween once.

No comments: