Movies Make Me Happy (that alliteration was awesome until I had to put in an indirect object... is that even the correct part of speech?)

I love to be entertained. I know everyone loves to be entertained, and to entertain for that matter, which I also love to do. (<- sentence structure at it's best) But I really love quality entertainment. Movies, television, theatre, sometimes concerts, and reading, and anything else really.

I always say my two favorite things are reading and watching (movies, tv, shows, etc.). But the thing is, books have been around for thousands of years and movies have only been around for 100 or so. It's much easier for me to cover my bases and see all the best movies then it is to read all the best books. I have read a lot of great books and I plan to read many more, but with films it's just easier to find a reliable source to tell you which ones are the important ones to see.

For example, go to the American Film Institute's website and they have lists upon lists of the best American movies. I know there are good movies in other countries too, but if we are being honest here, when it comes to film, we Americans know what we're doing... it's actually one of the few areas where we know what we are doing.

And then there's literature. And I love books more than almost anything, but they've been around for thousands of years and some of the best of them are written in languages I can't and never will understand. Life's short, and even though I've spent and will in the future spend a great deal of time reading, I'm never going to have read nearly as many books as I need to in order to be well versed in literature. Movies on the other hand, I already know much more about them than most people my own age. And due to websites like Netflix my knowledge is only growing and I continue to watch more and more good movies.

I've been debating on my approach on how to watch movies though. I've just been random up until now, watching what I want when I want to. But if I really want to understand what I'm seeing, I really should watch things more chronologically. I was thinking of looking at AFI's 100 years, 100 movies list and starting from 100 and working my way up to one, but that's in order of quality, deemed by the voters, so I don't think it's really appropriate. Then I was thinking of just going through Academy Award winners, but then you miss the first ten or twenty years of really good movies. This is all so confusing.

So up to this point I've been going through a lot of phases. I'll obsess over a particular actor, decade, genre, or whatever. And I'm enjoying myself. That's why on this lovely, foggy, freezing Saturday, (after taking the extremely easy PSAT that I probably aced [I hope]) I have been lying at home watching movies. While all my friends are out having fun and being teenager-y I've been home. Partially because I wasn't invited to go out with any of them, but on the other hand, I'm enjoying myself. Maybe tonight I'll do some of my homework. Maybe I won't. I should. But that doesn't mean much.

I don't need friends to have fun. As long as I have my Netflix subscription and my personal library of 300+ books, I can be entertained in my own room for hours upon end. Facebook helps too.

Happy birthday to Oscar Wilde, Eugene O'Neill, Angela Lansbury, Suzanne Somers, Tim Robbins, and John Mayer.