“Why are they calling her fat? Did they just call her fat? That’s ridiculous. Is this supposed to be a joke? She’s rail-thin.”
“She’s gaunt. This doesn’t make any sense.”
On Anne Hathaway: “I like her, but there was no reason to give her that Oscar.” [My mother: “She was wonderful. She sang that song so expressively.”] “She ruined that song.”
“There’s no coffee in any of those coffee cups. Look, you can tell by the way she’s holding it. It’s just an empty cup.”
“Who is that? No, the other one. The one with the red hair; I’ve seen her in something.” [It was Emily Blunt]
“Stanley Tucci is the greatest.”
On my mother’s inability to see Anne Hathaway’s resemblance to a young Liza Minnelli: “Do you really not see it?” [Mom: “Her face is shaped completely different.”] “It’s in the eyes! Look at her eyes!”
“There. Again. Did you see that? No coffee in those cups.”
[At this point we paused the movie because a little girl walking by the front of the house had started trying to throw a football through our basketball hoop. She made it on her third try. It was wonderful.]
“Why’d she throw that steak away? She should have eaten that steak. I know she was angry, but it was a perfectly good steak.”
“She should have told him she slept with that other guy.” [Mom, doing her best Ross from Friends: “They were on a break!”] That doesn’t count. It wasn’t made very clear, the terms of their break, before she went to Paris.”
“Oh, she’s going to throw her cell phone in the fountain. Symbol of liberation.” [She did] “She threw it in the fountain!” [Mom: “Stop patting yourself on the back, John, you’re going to hurt your arm.”] “Well, she did.”
“What was so great about that? All she did was smile in the limousine. That wasn’t so great.”
“That was the stupidest thing I ever saw. She was rail-thin, and her clothes didn’t change a bit from beginning to end. They kept calling her fat, which was absurd, and she was mean to her boyfriend, and should have told him she slept with the other guy. And there was no coffee in any of those coffee cups. Let’s go to the back room; I’ll read you all another chapter of Pilgrim’s Progress.”
Reader, we did.
Tags: anne hathaway, anne hathaway does look like liza minnelli, dads, john ortberg, movies, stray observations
Can I move in with your parents?
1) When is the group movie night at your dad’s house? I will bring popcorn.
2) This reminds me of when my dad heard that song “Hey Leonardo (She Likes Me For Me)” by Blessid Union of Souls and was horribly offended that they would refer to Cindy Crawford as fat. He pulled the car over and gave a lecture to my sister and me about how fucked up the media is, and how the world’s expectations of female beauty were unattainable and sick. And that is how I got to teach my dad about the term “P.H.A.T.”
That’s so adorable.
It’s a little horrifying, thinking about how much that song meant to me as a young’n.
I need to pay more attention to coffee cups in movies, is what I’m gathering.
And in TV. They’re never full. And now that’s all you’ll notice.
(Except Lucy Liu. She is the only one perfect enough to make cups seem full. That’s 75% of the reason is watch Elementary.)
Reminds me of how all I ever notice now is that TV characters NEVER close the front door behind them when they enter a house. Even on crime shows. COME ON THE BAD GUY COULD WALTZ RIGHT IN AFTER YOU. And what about your energy bill?! Sigh.
You should watch The Room – every entrance and exit is lovingly acknowledged by both the camera and the characters. Everyone closes the door. Just watch The Room, anyway, it’s marvelous.
Also acknowledged: how their doors are never locked.
You’re mean. Let’s be friends. (Because you’re a woman.)
Or they leave faucets running! It makes me so anxious I can’t focus on the plot.
Uggghhhh this makes me crazy. CLOSE THE GODDAMN DOOR. IT IS NOT THAT HARD.Two seconds, then you can continue with your argument/searching/making out.
My other TV/movie thing is expecting people to crash because they are not paying attention while driving.
One time boyfriend and I were watching a drive and talk scene and yelled “WATCH THE ROAD” at the TV at the same time.
I go insane with this when I watch Revenge. (Why do I still watch Revenge?) The whole damn point of the show is that she & her buddy are plotting – get this – REVENGE on their neighbors, and their homes are replete with secret cubbies and techno-spy-gear and giant bright red markers labeled ‘REVENGE PEN’ and so forth, yet every two seconds their enemies are breezing in & out of their unlocked houses or lurking outside their vast uncurtained windows.
My boyfriend is working on a theory that a long running in joke in tv and movies is that if someone says, “can I fix you a drink?” the scene includes acceptance of the drink and then the person will find a reason to leave without drinking any of the drink/only one sip.
Once you start to notice this, it’s pretty much everywhere.
There is an especially egregious example of this in Arrested Development where Michael and Lindsey are talking in the office by the elevator and they are both barely touching the cups, and still pretending to drink out of them.
I hate that shit.
Besides Season 7 and April, this is the only thing that bugs me about Gilmore Girls. The to-go cups are always empty!
PERHAPS AN ATTIC SHALL I SEEK
This is amazing. My dad also loves to point out the coffee cup thing, and always has his iPad open to IMDB so that he can look up other movies that familiar-looking actors have been in.
oh god i can’t watch anything without doing this. watching old episodes of shows like SVU/House/other procedural is so jarring when you recognize half the one off characters
What does Jack Gleeson have to do with Nellie Oleson?
Does he also do the running narrative speculating on what they might have been in while he waits for the page to load? Y’know, just in case we need an answer right now, not in thirty seconds.
A few friends and I have had an ongoing Name-that-Canadian-Character-Actor game for the past few years. We’re super-competitive about it. You have to be the first person to call out that you recognize them and you get points (but the points don’t really matter) for knowing their real name and dredging up details about what else they were on without checking IMDB. Needless to say we love Vancouver-filmed-scifi shows. I am currently winning due to my extensive knowledge of Matt Frewer’s and Peter WIngfield’s careers.
After seeing my sister in a HS production of…something I cannot remember what, she asked me what I thought and I lectured her on how if the people on stage are holding coffee mugs it is really important that they believe there is liquid in those mugs and they hold them accordingly. (I am maybe not the most supportive big sister.)
Your dad’s right – Stanley Tucci IS the greatest.
CAME DOWN HERE TO SAY THIS. My parents and I often talk about Stanley Tucci’s greatness. My dad particularly enjoyed him in “Julie and Julia”.
Also uniquely excellent in Easy A.
…I just spent several minutes trying to pick the most representative gif but I cannot, they are all excellent.
That’s what I came down here to say.
I recently scandalized my mother by admitting my longstanding crush on Stanley Tucci. “But he’s older than your father!” I REGRET NOTHING.
HA add me to the chorus of people who also came down here to echo this exact same sentence.
Stanley Tucci is almost always the best part of any movie he is in, and is strangely, intensely crush-able (I also grew up with a lot of Italian-American men of a similar type, so I think that helps too?) I also regret nothing.
Much as I love Cher, Stanley Tucci is the very best part of that timeless classic, Burlesque.
Mid-conversation with my mom on the phone, she told she was eating pie and then said, “Oh, I hate these commercials for horny men.”
me: “what?”
mom: “the horny men in the commercials, for like Cialis. It makes me so uncomfortable. I can’t even eat during these commercials.”
me: *dying*
mom: “hugpunch, you can’t put that on Facebook. Don’t put that on Facebook.”
And reader, since it was Mother’s Day, I didn’t.
I don’t think my mother has had a single conversation with me in the last five years that didn’t end with the statement “DON’T PUT THAT ON FACEBOOK!”
My dad likes to say, “I better not see this on Youtube!” about stories he tells me, because he has a very vague grasp on what Youtube is.
I love that, not knowing what YouTube is, he will clearly never see anything on YouTube even if you were to put something on it, yet he still feels the need to threaten. OH, DADS.
My mom does not understand or want to understand social media, so she mostly refers to it as something that us kids do. “I hope your sister said happy birthday to you in whatever way you do that now.”
I made my dad watch Inception, and about halfway through he turns to me and says “Ialdagorth, I’m not buying it”. And I said “Dad, there’s nothing to buy – it’s a movie, it’s not real” and he just shakes his head slowly and says “I KNOW that, but…I’m just not buying it” and then he went to try and fix my sink.
I want to be friends with your dad.
Perfect! 1000% Excellent Dad Behavior.
Oh man, I knew my parents would like “Inception” but would hate it if they just watched it on their own. So we watched it together and I paused it approximately every ten minutes and explained it and then at the end they were like, “That movie was great!” and I just lay limp and triumphant on the couch.
YES! That’s how it needs to be done. I am proud of you.
I should have tried this.
Oddly he had no issues whatsoever with Hot Fuzz, and I was proud.
Honestly, he’s happy just to watch CMT and the Weather Channel, on into the night forever.
Of course he had no issues whatsoever with Hot Fuzz, because it is awesome.
I felt much the same way about Inception.
My dad and I saw Inception together in the theater, and before it started I bought him a large Pepsi, per his request. This being America, and a large Pepsi being approximate one-fifth the liquid capacity of the Caspian Sea, my dad was soon taken with an intense need to go pee. Sadly, the bargain he struck with himself, that he would excuse himself to the bathroom “as soon as that van hits the water,” did not play out as expected. He hates Inception now, but to this day I think it’s at least 70% bitterness about that Pepsi and the ever slower-motion of a van almost, but not quite, hitting the damn water.
Your dad is right. The problem with Inception is that it glosses over the exposition that would help to believe the technology of “shared dreaming”. ‘The military developed it so that soldiers can practice without actually harming each other’. OK. So not only can they telepathetically get in each others’ heads, but the premise also depends on dreams taking place in concrete, logical, chronological, and plausible environments? Anyone who remembers a real dream would have trouble “buying” Inception. It doesn’t suspend disbelief properly.
John Ortberg: Charming the Internet since 2014.
This is a little off topic but I gotta say I love it so much when you address me as Reader. “Reader, we did.” I always feel like we’re in a secret club and a phrase like that is the password.
This kind of makes me want to see that movie just so I can imagine this conversation happening.
“Let’s go to the back room; I’ll read you all another chapter of Pilgrim’s Progress.”
I love this last bit. It’s so Little Women.
Your dad is 3000% correct.
One distinguishing factor about watching a movie or TV show with my Dad, is that he always has to make his fake spoiler joke “is this right before EVERYONE DIES??” Sometimes he does this just passing through the TV room. He never misses a chance.
Better than my father-in-law, who once walked in at the last thirty minutes of a very, very long, very serious movie and asked, “Have they cut off [so-and-so’s] head off yet?” NO THEY HAD NOT.
“Why’d she throw that steak away? She should have eaten that steak. I know she was angry, but it was a perfectly good steak.”
Your dad and I might be the same person (which would make me instantly about 2000x awesomer).
And she throws the plate in the trash as well! What was she, raised by wolves?
If there is not currently a “Dads watch movies” series on here there should be, because that was delightful.
Choice quotes from my father’s viewing of all three Lord of the Rings movies:
“Why would they give the Ring to a child? Children running around on flaming mountains, this is ridiculous.” [he thought Frodo was supposed to be a kid]
“So the white lady [Arwen] is sad because that dirty guy [Aragorn] is leaving? That’s stupid, she’s magic or something, she doesn’t need him.”
“This is dumb. The bad guys get dragons and trolls and shit and all the good guys get are horses. They’d never win in real life.”
“Is that dwarf a paraplegic? Is that why they keep throwing him?”
My mother watching Lord of the Rings:
“That’s supposed to be the fastest horse in the world? He’s picking his knees up way too high.”
“Of course she falls in love with him. They’re all blond; they need some exogamy in there.”
“It’s ridiculous to introduce gunpowder with weaponry like this, but I see why they had to do it; sieges are actually very hard to break. You just sit there and pick ’em off; one guy at an arrowslit can shoot all kinds of people and it’s damn hard to get him, and gravity can do a lot –” “Mama, this is a movie theater.”
your mother sounds DELIGHTFUL
I love the idea of quadriplegism (??) being a justification for literally hurling someone at your enemies. 100% going to use that in the future.
I AM WHEEZING FROM LAUGHTER AT YOUR DAD’S DWARF COMMENT
I think you should make your Dad watch all of the “Chick Flick Canon.” I’m not entirely sure what is in all of it, but I know it must exist.
Yes, but only the middling-to-poor end of the spectrum, for maximum exasperation:
13 Going on 30
27 Dresses
Failure to Launch
Pretty Woman
Runaway Bride
My Best Friend’s Wedding
Never Been Kissed
While You Were Sleeping
Miss Congeniality
Sleepless in Seattle
You’ve Got Mail
Kate and Leopold
City of Angels
American Sweethearts
Must Love Dogs
That’s got to be enough to amuse us and make Mr. Ortberg want to end it all, right?
Don’t forget the American classic, How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days.
WELL?? What happened next in Pilgrim’s Progress? I await further additions to the #john ortberg tag.
Christian had just left the House of the Interpreter and was talking to the dudes who had climbed in over the gate! Those gate-climbing dudes, man, they would not listen to reason.
The empty coffee cup things bothers me, too, Mallory’s Dad! It’s like they think we’re stupid. STOP PATRONIZING US, PROPS DIRECTORS.
Also, I was the Token Asian Extra in a horrible independent film once (I did it to meet Colin Firth…whole other story), and the coffee cup I carried in my one and only scene HAD ACTUAL COFFEE IN IT, SO THERE.
[Did you get to meet Colin Firth???]
I DID! He’s a gentleman. I should write about it for The Toast. 😉
YES YOU SHOULD NOW PLEASE
Ahem.
(please.)
I work props in theatre and to avoid liquids onstage (and to keep using the same cups) I just glue a couple pebbles inside the bottom of the cup. Gives it weight. Yes, Hollywood, you can steal that tip…
Hey, I do props too! I’ve never worked a show where they didn’t actually have to see the edibles, though. But even if I did I’d never send an actor out with an empty cup.
If I met Colin firth while holding a cup of coffee I would hold it for the rest of my life – because how else will he remember me?!?!
“how else will he remember me?!?!”
This is why I send him “Happy Firthday” cards every year on the day we met (April 22). He never sends me one, but I know he’s busy.
Royalist 17th-century-enthusiast trolldads read Pseudodoxia Epidemica to their family instead.
Net fluxing my way though “house” and it’s all Bad Coffee Cup Foolery. None of the actors can make it look like something’s in the cup.
This dumb common error grates on me the same way that Weightless Luggage does, in movies. Put A Brick In It.
I love everyone in this bar/article/comment section. I am cackling aloud in the middle of the library computer lab during finals season (waiting for motherly approval of the terse memo I’m sending to my fuckup professor so I decided to catch up on the Toast). Perfect end to this terrible fucking semester.
The little girl with the football story is the sprinkles on the sundae of this tale
I always found that “The Devil Wears Prada” worked much better for me if I viewed it as a sympathetic portrait of a gutsy, determined woman at the peak of her career who struggles, more than anything, to find a single competent assistant who can just perform their fucking job duties.
I just clutched my chest in delight at this.
Y’all have read the fanfic where Anne Hathaway is a space botanist swept off her feet by not-so-secret space pirate Meryl Streep, right? Because I am the little friend of all the world, here it is in case you’ve been deprived: http://archiveofourown.org/works/750438
My dad recently watched Mean Girls for the first time, and was on the phone with me for about 10 minutes of it. He got very excited at one point because he does, in fact, love Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
I've also left, but I still have a soft spot for ye olde downtown DURty, and an even softer spot for the couple of weeks when the whole city was basically singing Colin Firth's name at the top of its tobacco-filled lungs, so I gush about it any time anyone mentions it (so far . . . uh, this makes one time.)
The Indy did a rundown of why they think a film full of talented actors and written by a Pulitzer winning writer totally tanked. Note: no fingers were pointed at Token Asian Extras nor at coffee cups, so your ability to wait, not pee your pants and convincingly hold a coffee cup while simultaneously staring wistfully at the Firth has been appreciated by not only me, but by film critics and dads everywhere. 🙂
http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/durham-stars-in-…
Toast Dads Watching Movies:
I have only seen my dad cry 3 times in my life and once was at the end of Whale Rider. The others were at funerals.
What does Jack Gleeson have to do with Nellie Oleson?
Those friends and that dude were the wooooooooooooorst.
This is wonderful. High-five to your dad for the repeated line about the coffee cups. And high-five to that little girl. Third try!
Surprised he didn’t complain about Anne Hathaway’s “conversion” to seeing fashion as important. She had strong ideas about fashion being shallow, frivoulous, and silly, then Meryl points out that the blue sweater that Anne got from the bargain bin is the same shade from a successful fashion campaign a few years earlier. That shade of blue has been in the color spectrum for billions of years and the fashionistas didn’t invent it, and they didn’t invent the technical knowledge to reproduce the color for textiles of mass consumption. But a fashion campaign popularizing the shade to the point that low-end retailers were using it years later was the revelation, the ephiphany, the Eureka moment that made Anne realize that the fashion industry wasn’t totally bogus? That’s when she decided to pour her soul into the industry? Disbelief not suspended.
Wasn’t the epiphany the bit where Stanley Tucci gave her the lecture about how other women would give their right arm to work there, and she ‘merely deigned’ and whinged and derided the industry instead of taking advantage of the opportunity and giving it her all? I thought she responded to the ‘cerulean’ lecture with a kind of ‘all these people are crazy and scary’ expression, not an epiphany. It’s been awhile since I watched it, though.
That said, Meryl Streep’s character did have a point, and it wasn’t that the fashion industry did a wonderful thing by inventing or popularising a colour per se. It was that fashion is important because it’s inescapable; we’re all part of it and influenced by it, whether we think of ourselves as fashion-conscious or not, and it can be empowering and/or sobering to learn about where our society’s idea of ‘normal’ clothes come from. (After all, ‘I don’t care what I wear’ yoga pants and a T-shirt would have been unthinkable garb for most of history; and even if you don’t follow current catwalk trends, you’re unlikely to obliviously wander down the street in an Anglo-Saxon kirtle or an 1860s hoopskirted dress.)
for the series:
mean girls
bridesmaids
TITANIC
10 things i hate about you
any/all brat pack movies
the sweetest thing
any pride & prejudice
melancholia (yup)
basically lots of chic flics and randomly throw in something :dark:
brb going to rewatch all of these and fail out of school