7x7, or You Like Me, You Really, Really Like Me

I'm kind of blocked right now (as if regular readers haven't noticed that my posting has fallen off the cliff this week). I've been working on reviews of Murnau's City Girl and the new horror movie, Kill List, and I'm not liking either of them. Frankly, I struggled with writing about A Separation, too, so it's not anything unique to either of these movies. So instead, I'll respond to a meme. Rachel over at The Girl with the White Parasol tagged me for a 7x7 Award. I've been slow to respond, which is ungracious. I hope she'll forgive me.

Anyway, here's the award:

And here's the rules:

• Tell everyone something that no one else knows about


• Link to one of my posts that I personally think best fits the following categories: Most Beautiful Piece, Most Helpful Piece, Most Popular Piece, Most Controversial Piece, Most Surprisingly Successful Piece, Most Underrated Piece, and Most Pride-worthy Piece


• Pass this award on to seven other bloggers

So. Something about me that no one else knows about?

I choose my cosmetics by what they smell like. Or, rather, by what they don't smell like. I hate the smell of perfumes and cosmetics and deodorants, so I go out of my way to choose things that have no odor whatsover, or, failing that, odors that are as unobtrusive as possible. This tends to influence my choice of romantic partners, too. A guy who comes up to me reeking of cologne? Sorry, Charlie, but no. (I'm totally down with that meme that suggests that Axe Body Spray was invented so that women could smell a douchebag coming a mile away). Perfume, the very few times I've ever worn it, makes me light headed. None for me, thanks. Oddly enough, my longtime partner claims that the biggest change in me since I abandoned my old life has been a change in what I smell like. Apparently, I smell faintly of baby powder these days, which suggests that my deodorant has more odor than I realized. Hrm.

Now on to the linking:

My Most Beautiful Piece. That's easy. It's the post I did on Blood on the Moon and Out of the Past for last year's Film Noir blogathon. Lots of frame grabs like this one:

If we're talking about my most beautifully written post...well that's a different kind of animal. At a guess, it's either my review of Poetry or my review of The Scar. It's hard to judge my own writing sometimes. All I see are flaws.

My "Most Helpful Piece". This is tough. I hope it's one of my posts on transgender cinema, which I find to be woefully misrepresented by cisgender film critics. Purely on the basis of the comments, I think my analysis of Transamerica is probably the most helpful of these.

My "Most Popular Piece," as I noted a couple of days ago, is my review of Metropolis. It's not even close. My most inexplicably popular post is my review of the 1998 version of The Avengers. I have my suspicions about that one.

My "Most Controversial Piece?" Hell if I know. I don't generate a lot of heat in my comments. I had hoped that my most controversial piece would be my review of The Tree of Life, but that turned out not to be the case. Y'all are too polite.

My "Most Surprisingly Successful Piece?" That one is easy. I've gotten hits on my review of Massacre at Central High every day since last November. I don't understand its popularity. The search keywords are no help because there's no real pattern there.

My "Most Underrated Piece?" I don't know. I have a bunch of posts that have less than ten pageviews. Some of them surprise even me. My review of the Coen's A Serious Man, for instance, has seven hits right now. That's the one that surprises me most because I was getting moderately decent traffic when I posted it. I wish more people had read my review of Lucky Star and Dry Summer (which currently has five hits), too, because that's a post where I evangelize for obscure movies that I wish people would see. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of posts clustered in this region of my analytics reports.

"My "Most Prideworthy Post?" That's hard, too. My post on Stagecoach, I think, or possibly my post on the original Conan the Barbarian. You can usually tell when I open the top of my head and let everything pour out of it, which happened with these two.

And now for the next victims:

All Things Perfect and Poisonous: DeAnna is one of my dearest friends, and I REALLY miss seeing movies with her now that she lives in Seattle. I temper this with my insane jealousy at her current access to films. She's a smart, discerning viewer, and I love reading what she writes.

W-Cinema: J. Luis Rivera is another longtime friend, though one I've only known online until last year. I mostly know him as a horror blogger and fan, but his blog has wide-reaching interests. He writes a lot better in English than I do in Spanish, too. That's for sure.

I had an interesting conversation with Andrew Wyatt over at Gateway Cinephiles when he was in town for the True/False Film Festival. He basically told me that he deliberately wrote in a way that he didn't enjoy reading himself. That strikes me as odd, but it landed him a paying gig, so there's that. He doesn't update his personal film blog as often as he should, unfortunately, but he writes well when he does.

I don't comment at Cavalcade of Perversions nearly as often as I should. It's a blog that feeds my need for all things lowbrow. I hope Jenn will forgive me for not saying hi more often, or for tagging her in this post.

Pussy Goes Grrr has one of the best blog titles I've ever seen. Fortunately, Andreas and Ashley keep up a pretty high standard of quality in their posts, too, whether they're reviewing movies or sex toys (which they don't do enough of). One of my favorite destinations on the movie webs.

Mykal over at Radiation Cinema is a frequent commenter here and friend of the blog. He hasn't posted anything since last year. This is a situation that should not stand. So I'll tag him in the hopes that it prompts him. His blog is essential reading for fans of science fiction movies.

Finally, my old friend, Lee Price, has an awesome blog called 21 Essays, in which he writes 21 posts on each given topic. He doesn't always post about movies, but when he does, they're essential reading. His recent series on King Kong is superb.

Also: If I've tagged you here, don't feel the need to participate. The last thing I want to do is load my friends with obligations, so it won't hurt my feelings.

Now back to wrestling with actual content...