All about me.

You clicked on the link, so you evidently want to know a little more about...

ME

Tolkein Purist, Browncoat, Padrinophile and Movie Buff in training

The 30th of November - date of birth of one of cinema's greatest directors. But more about Ridley Scott later...also on that day, I was born an inconvenietly short time ago, a very long way away from Hollywood. She works under and alias to protect her true identity from hordes of angry Vertigo fans, and has yet to attain the age required to obtain a copy of Fight Club legally. But we're working on it.

A retired child genius, her hobbies include watching films, talking about films, reading books about films and talking about herself in the third person. She has gained notoriety as being the only one in her social circle who understands Donnie Darko and is sent for whenever someone gets confused. She has so far had the same conversation (accompanied by diagrams) about it at least ten times, most memorably at 2am at Berlin airport with a history teacher.

She still lives with her family of five (at least, it virtually counts as five seeing as Oscar Wilde's opinion is put forward twice as much as anybody else) in a town with a cinema which inspires positive mirth - four screens, each smaller than one of my friend's TV, with an average of 70 single-level seats in each room. It's like watching movies in a broom closet. And they only ever bring stuff she doesn't want to see across.

Her father likes the Lord of the Rings and Excalibur, and gets twitchy when movies get their physics or their history wrong. Especially fire arrows, as shown in this book. Her mother likes Top Gun and Dirty Dancing. Her particular area of expertise is the first half of most of the classics - up to the point when she falls asleep. Her sister likes Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom, and automatically dislikes anything she suggests. They have recently decided to move house (this decision took approximately 3 minutes; compare to the half hour it takes to settle on which film to watch)

She has far too many friends to keep track of, most of which despise films. Apart from one who loves Bend it like Beckham and Van Helsing. We're trying...She'll try and tell you her affection for Robert Redford is purely intellectual; don't believe her. It's a crush.

She doesn't believe in capital punishment. She does, however, believe in the Special Hell reserved for child molesters, film-spoiler-spreaders and people who talk at the theatre. Since a young age, she has suffered from a serious form of punctuationitus- leading to a very horrible overuse of hyphens and dot-dot-dots...Current hobbies include trying to beat the Woman's Under-20 Listening To The Same Song Over And Over Again Endurance Record, with Little Green Bag.

Her real name is Emily Rose (as in The Exorcism of), and she wishes she looked a bit more like a) Monica Belluci

b) Kate Bush

c) Clementine {can't-spell-the-Polishness} from Eternal Sunshine (though she did spend a long time telling people she was going to die her hair red/orange/blue

d) Marla Singer from Fight Club

d) Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction

(but in reality, take the lady Gelfling from Dark Crystal and throw Brad Pitt's brain from 12 Monkeys in)

Well that's enough of that, what about film?

To justify this ego prance, the point is this: I've been reviewing films for months and giving my opinion. OPINION. The sainted Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead is possibly one of the most detested movies in the house - it's kinda culty, and you probably won't like it. But I did. So here's the drill - if you seem to like the same sort of things in film as me, you'll probably agree with the reviews more often. It's only a theory...

1 The colour BROWN. My favourite films are the very BROWN Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the dark BROWN Godfather Part 1 and the dusty BROWN Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. And Signs. And Zulu. But they're not as BROWN, and we don't like to talk about that.

2 I like to see fantastic topics done in a realistic way (Signs!) or realistic topics done in a romanticised way (The Godfather, anyone?)

3 Sad or crushing endings. As Cecily says in The Importance of being Earnest, "I hate happy endings. They depress me so much."

4 I love BADDIES, or morally dubious people. The more shades of grey, the better.

5 Favourite subjects? Friendship. Betrayal. Gets me every time.

6 A good soundtrack can save a bad film. Lost Boys, Top Gun, Ghostbusters. Don't deny it! Those films would be nothing without their theme tune - at least, not half so good.

7 No genre films, please. Anything spanning more than one genre or conveniently falling into none at all suits me fine.

8 I like well-scripted, quirky sub-cult films which need one hell of a mind-warp. Like Twelve Monkeys or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

9 Non-clichedness. Especially pulling off a cliched plot. Like School of Rock.

Least favourite things in film

1 the "planetary alignment/meteor shower/eclipse only happen once a millenia and there happens to be one next week" twist.

2 The Sound of Music plot done anywhere but in The Sound of Music or School of Rock. The one where a repressed place becomes un-repressed thanks to our hero. Les Choristes, Mona Lisa Smile, gosh I'm sure I had more...it's overdone and DULL.

3 ...about as dull as the Bend it like Beckham plot, which I have never seen done well. Hero has a talent, but due to family cannot express it. But in the end, they accept him for who he is. Aw. Shucks. Woulda been a bad film had the parents been overjoyed straight away, eh? Or if they'd said no in the end anyway. In fact, that's a pretty stunning ending...Billy Elliot commits this sin, as do many other films.

4 non-documentary films with a point to make pretending to be fun. Like Girl in the Cafe, a really sweet little romcom which turned into a "lets guilt the G8 leaders into saving the world and have lots of speeches to make the audience feel bad". While I'm not averse to films handling weighty issues, if it feels like the propaganda's more important than the plot, if the whole thing seems to be a vehicle (and a powerful one at that...) for brainwashing the audience, naha....

5 Films should never be predictable. For example, calling your film My Big Fat Greek Wedding and making a poster of said film with a beautiful heroine in a wedding dress kinda made the first 9/10ths of the film irrelevent, as she stopped being ugly and found a fiancee. Guess what happens at the end, children?

6 Worse than that are predictable films which don't do anything new with the formula. In rom-coms, you virtually always know where it's going - so it's nice to make the journey as interesting as possible. Intolerable Cruelty, for example, even though you had a faint idea of what it was leading up to, how it was going to get there was another matter altogether...

7 I'm usually ok with violence in film (blood, love and rhetoric!) Perhaps it's because I view films as escapism. And I live in the dullest, safest place on earth. It's not like I want it to become more dangerous (well...only occasionally...), but escaping from mundane tedium just seems to lead there. Besides, it normally implies life-or-death situations, which leads to compelling drama! I generally have a pretty strong stomach for it, the big exception being fist fights. They always make me wince. I'm also no good with scary stuff. I've seen The Sixth Sense, and that's about it for me and horror. Never again.

8 To clarify - the two genres I can never stand are horror, and disaster films. Perhaps it's because they're so easily done? I mean, even the worst documentary about a crash can be gripping. And I hate rom coms.

9 Least favourite subjects? Marital difficulties (dull dull dull!)

Overall, I like stories over plots. Oscar Wilde is generally right about everything - I frequently settle on things, and then realise subconsciously I've agreed with him. He''s got a quote about art which I agree with entirely - to put it in movie terms - any protest film which makes you think "how unjust!", any war film which sets out to make you think "how dreadful", any romance which makes you think "how sweet" - is a bad film. To put it another way, I don't like one-trick movies. Take The Godfather. At no point is it telling you how to feel. It's just producing the tale and letting us settle on an emotion. So many films set out with the intention of causing a reaction -it's spoon feeding and I don't like it.