Matt Elliott’s Online

Favourite Movies, a Retrospective

My favourite movie right now is Magnolia (1999). For those who haven’t seen it, it is a 3 hour long movie with Tom Cruise where everyone yells and screams and cries a lot. At one point the whole cast breaks into song. It ends with a rainstorm.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is in it also. He sums up my feelings on the movie pretty well: “I think ‘Magnolia’ is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. And if anyone disagrees with me, I’ll fight them to the death.”

In any case, it has been my favourite movie for over a decade now! That is really impressive and shows consistency and gumption.

Other movies that once held my “Favourite Movie Ever” title include:

• Chasing Amy

Last Action Hero

• Quick Change
• The Secret of Nimh
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
• Network
• Home Alone
• Rookie of the Year
• Gross Point Blank

That’s a weird list!

Quidditch, anyone?

So Dalhousie University, with is kind of the university I went to – but not in the sense that I graduated from there or applied there or, really, liked it all that much (it is complicated) — has a big advertising campaign going in Toronto right now. I saw this subway ad on the Bloor-Danforth subway line. Sorry for the crappy picture: I was doing my best to NOT make it look like I was trying to take covert pictures of those two dudes across from me.

“Quidditch, anyone?” the ad says. And then there are people dressed like Harry Potter. What the fuck, Dalhousie. You have a medical school. You’re one of the bigger universities in Canada. You’re part of the entirely fictional Canadian Ivy League. (Sometimes.) And you decide to spend money advertising the fact that there’s some club on campus that plays Quidditch? A fictional sport from Harry Potter? Can these kids even fly on their broomsticks? Or do they just run around with the stick between their legs making wooshing sounds?

Because the wooshing sounds would just push me right over the edge.

Blast from the Past: Michael Moore trolling

I usually consider myself above “internet trolling” but I made a single exception back when Michael Moore’s film Sicko (imdb was released). Knowing how much internet attention his previous two films received for their “lies”, I put together a List of Lies and Untruths in Michael Moore’s Sicko, after watching a pre-release screener version of the movie.

I don’t really love Michael Moore films or anything (except Canadian Bacon a little bit) but I hate the people who always crawl out of the woodwork after every one of his movies and pretend like they have all sorts of knowledge as to what constitutes a ‘documentary’.

Anyway, it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever written on the internet if only because the reaction in the comments section was hilarious, and it still gets comments fairly regularly. (It’s a first-page google hit for “Lies in Sicko”.)