sarah and tara, or movies and writing and me

I'm what you could call a default movie snob, scanning the news pages of IMDB first in a sort of self-defense from the culture around me, later as a means of reconnecting to it after moving away. I'm not a movie snob in the sense of "I only watch films that no one can understand (including me, then)" or "I only like films that no one can understand" (always making sure to call them films and not movies, of course). I'm more of a general, non-discriminating (to a point) movie watcher and daily reader of IMDB (allowing me to therefore know pretty much what's going on in that mystical place about thirty minutes from my house called Hollywood). I like IMDB because it summarizes news from all sorts of trade papers, so I don't have to go and find them myself (which I probably wouldn't do). I also then get a listing of celebrity birthdays, starting, of course, with the most "it" celebrity of the day, prompting me to look them up if I don't know who they are, one of their many ways of advertising without ads. I take the daily poll, scroll down and try the trivia and quotes questions (I've only once gotten them both right--edit 10/7: make that twice, although they were totally advertising Serenity today, so getting "Nathan Fillion" right wasn't too difficult, and the other was from "Much Ado About Nothing," which is Shakespeare, and all those IDs I had on my exams weren't for nothing :P), and then I look at the outside links at the bottom of the page.

This is the almost daily routine (they don't update on weekends) that led me to discover that the "King of Queens" taping I was supposed to go to was cancelled because Kevin James and his wife had a baby last Friday. This is also what led me to fun sites like the 30 Second Bunnies at Angry Alien and other relevant articles from the NY Times (their Critics' Notebook is pretty good) to Yahoo (which itself is a collection of news from other places).

One of today's articles (which, in retrospect, was probably yesterday's, seeing as how it has already been replaced with news of Katie Holmes's pregnancy) is a link to Sarah Bunting and Tara Ariano talking about Cameron Diaz. Now, the article in itself isn't all that enlightening--I'm not too much of a Cameron Diaz fan and could care less how spazzy she acts--but the manner in which they write is fun and engaging. It always helps to have someone to write off of, in a manner of speaking, and their rapport is commendable. Reading them almost reminds me of the glory days of Siskel and Ebert, if Siskel and Ebert were two women in their 30s (from what I gather) who watch way too many chick flicks and have an obsession with whether an actress is too pretty or not. That helps me relate to them more than to than S & E, if only because I have many of the same, uh, concerns they have (like is Kate Hudson ever going to manage to be famous?).

At the time of this posting, I've read through the archives of their articles on MSNBC and opened up their website, Television Without Pity, although I don't really watch TV anymore, so the articles there don't interest me as much. (Being an internet snob as well as a lower level movie snob, I find it badly organized and hard to navigate as well, which makes me even less likely to want to delve deeper than their front page.) Maybe it's because I fit right into their target audience (with my knowledge of the eighties boosted by my time in college), but I have this strange desire to read what they have to say, even though their articles get low ratings on MSNBC pretty much across the board(presumably by people who didn't like what they had to say about their favorite actor or actress, but maybe because they genuinely didn't like them).

There's more to it than just liking their commentary, though--I want to write like them. It makes me regret not liking writing for as long as I did (pretty much ever, until now). But I know that there were a number of things I didn't want to do if I couldn't devote time to them, and writing was one of them. Until now, I didn't have much time to write other than procrastinating a paper, and that affected my outside writing (like my blogging, or any desire to join the school paper in any school that I've attended). I saw writing as a means to an end, which isn't to say that I didn't use it for other things, but I always had too much school writing to do. It's only now that I can really explore what it is about writing that I enjoy (much like reading, in my previous post). I guess it's only now, after my hectic summer after college, that I can sit down and try to figure out what Life after college is for me.

Also, for the record, I tend to agree with Sarah, but a lot of times they act like one unit, each person expounding upon a different part of the reason why, say, Keanu Reeves allowed to keep making movies, but both agreeing that it's mainly because he's nice to look at.