500 Movies of Summer

This has been an incredible summer for me on the movie front; thanks to the website Ain't It Cool News and its Chicago correspondent, I have seen three movies for free, and I won a fourth, but due to family stuff, I had to miss it. In addition to that, someone invited me to see a movie that she had won free tickets to. Finally, although the final movie wasn't free, it does make the list due to the circumstances under which I saw it.

Every now and then, Capone, the Chicago correspondent for AICN holds contests for free screenings in Chicago. He asks questions related to the films and the people with the best answers get tickets. Through that site, I have seen Up, Moon, and Public Enemies (that one was even introduced by its director, Michael Mann) for free. For example, the question for Up asked us to talk about an adventure we wanted to have as a kid. I was able to see Land of the Lost for free when someone offered me a ticket to it after winning a pair from a radio station. And I went to a screening of (500) Days of Summer when it premiered at a Chicago film festival. It wasn't free, but for $25 per ticket, I saw that movie, and incredible short film called The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon, which were introduced by their directors and lead actors, a Q&A session with the directors and stars afterwards, tickets to an open bar after party at Bon V, and possibly the greatest goodie bag I've ever received.

I have already covered Up, so I would skip to the next movie I saw, Land of the Lost. However, that film is not up to the standards of the worlds I talk about here (I'll explain my feelings about Will Ferrell in the next post), so instead, I will talk about a great Will Ferrell movie, Stranger Than Fiction. I will then talk about the other movies I've seen, and I am hoping that a friend of mine and fellow blogger (she writes Adventures of a Grad Student in the Kitchen) will do a guest post. I won tickets to a movie called Humpday through AICN, but I had to give them away when I learned of some family plans. It was a bit of a fortuituous coincidence for the friend who got them because she is from Seattle, and Humpday was filmed there (it uses an actual Seattle-based event as the basis for its story).

Up next: Death and taxes...