Blog #11: Famous Folks

This is our second to last entry!  Your last post will be due on Thursday the 8th.

Earlier this week, I overheard a group of students talking about celebrity crushes, which inspired me to write this blog.  When I was younger, I had a ton of famous crushes (from Jonathan Taylor Thomas to Leonardo DiCaprio), but these days, I can only come up with three.

 

First, I am rather fond of Ryan Gosling.  He is gorgeous (GORGEOUS!).  I remember seeing him in random movies and tv shows like Young Hercules in the late 90s, The Believer (2001), and The United States of Leland (2003).  Of course, his big break came in 2004 with the tearjerker The Notebook--a movie that a few of you have mentioned in your entries this semester.

Since then, he has been nominated for quite a few major awards--due to Blue Valentine, Half Nelson, and Lars and the Real Girl (unfortunately, I haven't seen any of these)--and he recently starred in Drive and Crazy, Stupid, Love, both of which are excellent.

Second, there's 40 year old, Scottish actor Ewan McGregor.   Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001) is one of his more famous movies (he sings!).  

  

 

But, before he was in Moulin Rouge or the new, terrible Star Wars movies, he was in many lesser-known flicks.  I used to go to the local movie store and rent any VHS that had him in it, such as Shallow Grave (1994), The Pillow Book (1996), Nightwatch+The Serpent’s Kiss+A Life Less Ordinary (1997), and Eye of the Beholder (1999).

  

His most famous pre-Moulin Rouge work is definitely Trainspotting (1996).  This movie is about "a group of heroin addicts in a late 1980s economically depressed area of [Scotland] and their passage through life."

 

 

He was also in a film called Velvet Goldmine in 1998, where he had some rather steamy scenes with both Christian Bale and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.  Velvet Goldmine is about "a pop star based mainly on David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust," and it takes place "in Britain during the days of glam rock in the early 1970s."

 

In 2004, McGregor and his good friend Charley Boorman made a documentary television series called Long Way Round where they rode their motorcycles on a 19,000 mile trip; they started in London, headed through Europe and Asia, flew to Alaska, and then continued by road across North America to New York.  Three years later, they released a second series called Long Way Down where they rode from Scotland, through Europe and Africa, to Cape Town.  Both trips took three months a piece.

 

My final celebrity crush is Matt Smith.  Who?  Well… Doctor Who (total nerd joke!).  I have only seen Smith as the eleventh incarnation of the Doctor on the long-running BBC hit Doctor Who, but I love him.  He proves that charm and personality can win out over looks any day.

  

So, who are some of your celebrity crushes? :)

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