❮❮prevnext❯❯

I was thinking about that Amélie movie like/dislikes thing, a clever little way of painting characters it used. I remember seeing a blog entry playing off of it years ago...I decided to start by looking up what the original ones were:

Amélie's father, Raphaël Poulain doesn't like

• peeing next to somebody else.
• noticing people laughing at his sandals .
• coming out of the water with his swimming suit sticking to his body

Raphaël Poulain likes

• to tear big pieces of wallpaper off the walls
• to line up his shoes and polish them with great care
• to empty his toolbox, clean it thoroughly, and, finally, put everything away carefully.

Amélie's mother, Amandine Fouet, doesn't like

• to have her fingers all wrinkled by hot water.
• when somebody she doesn't like touches her,
• to have the marks of the sheets on her cheek in the morning.

She likes

• the outfits of the ice-skaters on TV.
• to shine the flooring.
• to empty her handbag, clean it thoroughly, and, finally, putting everything away carefully.

Suzanne, the landlady, likes sportsmen who cry from disappointment.
She doesn't like it when a man is humiliated in front of his kid.
The tobacconist is Georgette, the hypochondriac. She doesn't like to hear "le fruit de vos entrailles est béni."
Gina, Amélie's colleague, granddaughter of a healer likes to crack her fingers.
Hipolito, the not-successful writer, likes is to see a bullfighter getting gored.
The only thing Joseph, Gina's jealous ex-lover likes is to pop the bubbles of plastic wrappings.
She likes the sound of Philomène's cat's bowl with water on the floor.
As for the cat, he likes to listen to children's stories.

Amélie likes:

• to turn around in the dark movie theater to see the faces of the people around.
• to spot the little detail nobody will ever see
• putting her hand in a bag of seeds,
• piercing the crust of crème brûlée with the tip of a spoon.
• Play at ducks and drakes on the Saint-Martin-canal.

Amélie dislikes:

• when the driver in the movie doesn't watch the road.

So, I got to thinking about some of my likes and dislikes. At the risk of being excessively corny or trite:

Kirk dislikes:

• books where the book title and the author name are repeated at the top of every page rather than the chapter or story title
• The feel of sitting on a toilet seat when one's backside is still wet from the shower
• when television actors have subtly changed their postures between consecutive shots

Kirk likes:

• reclining in the car in silence at night after arriving home and turning off the car and the radio
• the smell inside freezers at the supermarket
• peeling off band-aids

(UPDATE 2019: I also really like letting people know their brake-light is out...)

I suppose those weren't as "character-revealing" as the originals... more frank and useful ones would be something along the lines of "likes women wearing stretchy tanktops" "likes writing small perl scripts and macros to automate repetitive tasks" "dislikes PC laptops that won't wake up from suspend for like a solid minute so you press the damn power button and it ends up going right back into hibernate as soon as it wakes up" "dislikes traffic jams".

But still, it's a nice exercise, and tougher than it might seem. Anyone want to give it a try, at least two gripes, two small pleasures?