Styling

I got an email yesterday from Rachel over at The Girl with the White Parasol informing me that I had been tagged for a Stylish Blogger Award. The rules are that I have to give with seven "stylish" facts about myself and tag seven more bloggers.

Lately, I've been sprucing up my style, as witnessed in this picture from this past weekend, so what the hell, eh?

Rachel kept to movie facts about herself, so I'll follow suit (mostly).

1.) The first movie I can remember seeing in a theater was Disney's The Aristocats. I don't remember liking it--it was a LONG time ago--but I wound up not liking it on subsequent viewings. I don't count it as one of the movies that made me into a movie fan, but it counts as a milestone, I guess.

2.) The movie that turned me into a fan of horror movies was the 1950s version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which I saw when I was ten years old. This was hardly the first horror movie I had ever seen--far from it. My brothers and I used to watch all of the old Universal horror movies every Saturday afternoon on an independent station out of Denver and Godzilla movies were a staple on television when I was a kid. I had even started staying up late to watch the Hammer movies and Corman Poe flicks on late-night television. I was a big kid. That stuff didn't scare me! But The Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Oh, nelly! That movie brought the lumber. I didn't think much about the subtexts of the film back then. At ten, I hadn't even heard the word "subtext." All I knew was that the Pods got you while you slept and undermined every institution that little kids rely on to make their world safe. At a primal level, it's a film designed to scare the living crap out of children.

3.) My favorite Orson Welles movie is NOT Citizen Kane. Don't get me wrong: I love Kane. It's probably Welles's best film. His best movie is Touch of Evil. My favorite, however, is Chimes at Midnight. It doesn't make any sense unless you take into account my Bardolotry. I'm a Shakespeare junkie. Sometimes, it's not the quality of the movie that endears it to us. This is why I generally don't make lists.

4.) My screen name on Blogger is Dr. Morbius. It's taken from Forbidden Planet, obviously. I've been using Forbidden Planet imagery online for over a decade now. If I had been thinking about it, I would have used "Altaira Morbius" for a screen name, but I was secretive about my gender identity when I set up this blog. The runner up for the title of this blog was "Saturn in Retrograde," which is from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I chose not to use that because I never intended to focus solely on horror movies.

5.) I named myself after Edith Scob's character in Eyes Without a Face. I added an "n" to it so that it would have the same number of letters as the name my parents gave me. I kept my surname.

6.) I would like to make a Friday the 13th sequel. This might surprise people, because I have no real use for the Friday the 13th movies. In my Friday the 13th sequel, a reporter would come to the town of Crystal Lake to investigate the various massacres that have periodically erupted in the outlying area. She would discover that these massacres are cyclical, and happen every thirty years or so, though the frequency of them has been on the increase since 1980. Together with the town sheriff, she would discover that Jason is the herald of that which dwells in the lake, a sleeping god that is rousing in its slumber. At the end of the movie, it would wake, and Jason's victims would rise from the lake with it. The movie would end with our heroes barricaded in a cabin as the world is snuffed out. Cheery, eh?

7.) I used to tell people that my favorite director is David Cronenberg. I don't actually have a favorite these days. Not that I fell out of love with Cronenberg. Rather, I fell in love with film as a whole. Also, I'm not much of an auteurist these days. I do have a small list of directors to whom I grant first night privilege, though. Meaning, I will try to see their movies the first night they open, or, barring that, at the earliest opportunity. Cronenberg is still on that list. Other still-working directors on that list include Martin Scorsese, Bong Joon-Ho, Hsiao-hsien Hou, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, David Lynch, and Wong Kar Wai. I'm a sucker for Asian movies, it seems.

The hard part of this is tagging people, I guess. I hate tagging people unawares, because it seems like a chain letter. So if you wind up tagged, don't feel any obligation to participate or even acknowledge this silliness.

So...

Tenebrous Kate at Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire,
J. Luis Rivera at W-Movies
Bob Turnbull at Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind
Mykal at Radiation Cinema
DeAnna at Kalyx Film Blog
and
Jenn at Cavalcade of Perversion

Tag, you're it.