Brittany Murphy, 1977-2009

My favorite Brittany Murphy movie does not happen to be Clueless.

Yes, she was cute in Clueless, and I did love that movie. She was sweet, and a bit tart, playing Tai, the new girl in town who joins the Beverly Hills' under aged in crowd. It wasn't even Happy Feet, though I did watch that film just this past Saturday, much to the dismay of the (male) guests who wanted us ladies to go watch it in the garage so they could watch a football game inside. (Like we were going to pick watching players smash into each other over cute, singing penguins.) Murphy certainly had way more screen/voice time in those vehicles, but my favorite film featuring her happens to be Drop Dead Gorgeous. This movie is horrible in the most gleeful way, poking fun of beauty pageants, small towns, and trying to escape said town, be it via winning a sparkly crown, joining a hockey team, or going to prison. Murphy plays Lisa Swenson, a goofy, giggly necessary after thought younger child. She cheese it up beside future big movie stars Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards and Amy Adams, explaining of her parents, “You know they only had me because Peter needed a kidney.”

I won't print up here what she yelled at her father at the end of the film. That's because I like having a job.

From Pages to Screen ... issue one: X-MEN

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the X-MEN in 1963, debuting in The X-MEN #1, published by Marvel Comics Group. This "uncanny" team brought together mutants, or homo superiors, each with special powers controlled by their x-factor gene. They were considered to be beings of a higher evolution, yet feared and hated by humans for their freakish abilities. They must fight both human military and a brotherhood of evil mutants vying to control earth. This is still a popular and ongoing series in the graphic novel section of the library, collection titles available at http://www.saclibrary.org/.

This comicbook series was popularized on the big screen, starting in 2000, with a wildly successful trilogy; X-men, X2: X-men United, and X3: The Last Stand. The movie franchise features the primary characters of the graphic novels, and attracted some of hollywoods A-List Stars. They are available on the library catalog as well.
Hugh Jackman personified Wolverine with grittiness and humor, Famke Janssen and James Marsden brought good looks, chemistry, and athleticism to the Cyclops and Jean Grey coupling, and Halle Berry broke even more barriers playing the first african american female superhero. Patrick Stewart seemed born to play the enigmatic Professor X.

Though the X-Men look has changed throughout the years, and the movie versions slightly bent the written X-men mythology, both comic and movie versions are considered classics of the genre. Catch up with Five Decades of X-men!

Making the holidays a little bit merrier

Just because it’s the holidays and the writers are on strike doesn’t mean you should get stuck watching horrible made for TV movies. As if the typical mother-on-the-run features weren’t bad enough, this time of year there are only two themes to choose from. You can watch a woman dump her rich fiancée in favor of an average widowed father of an angelically adorable child, who would never do anything horrible like wait until the last minute to tell you their class project requires a homemade replica of a California mission. Or you can watch a career woman go back in time, trade her affluence for her broke blue-collar boyfriend, and raise children in a “modest” home with a kitchen bigger than Rhode Island and enough granite, hardwood and crown molding to open a home improvement store.

Or you can borrow a really good movie from the library.

If you like time travel films (but not Craftsman homes), Déjà Vu is a great pick. Denzel Washington plays AFT agent Doug Carlin, a man set out to determine who blew up a crowded ferry in New Orleans. He soon discovers the key to solving the mystery lies in a murder victim played by Paula Patton. Patton is relatively new, but you might have seen her a few million times in the Lost Without You video---she’s married to singer Robin Thicke.

Other good titles include the Back to the Future series, The Best Years of Our Lives, Bringing Up Baby, The Princess Bride, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, and Dr. Strangelove, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

These aren’t holiday films, but these are great movies. This time of year is stressful enough without being stuck watching the woman who used to be on The Young and the Restless play the love interest of the man from General Hospital and Melrose Place. So live a little and borrow a few movies from the library. They’re enjoyable; unlike cable and satellite, they’re free; and you’ll only cry from laughter or enjoyment, not because you just wasted forty minutes of the last two hours watching fabric softner commercials.

Tabin, YS Librarian