Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Another Movie List

This list has been going around the web logs I read for the last few days, so I finally took a look at it.

Jim Emerson, posting on Roger Ebert's movie site, listed the 102 Movies You Must See Before... Before what? He says "They're the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat 'movie-literate.'" So before you can talk credibly about movies.

I went over the list and sorted them into two, seen and not seen. On the seen list are movies I recall clearly, and movies I know I've seen but barely remember. On the unseen list, I'm pretty sure I've not seen one of these. Perhaps I'll have to make a project of checking them out (over the next few years). Then I can talk 'meaningfully' about the movies I've seen.

Seen




  1. "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) Stanley Kubrick

  2. "A Hard Day's Night" (1964) Richard Lester

  3. "A Star Is Born" (1954) George Cukor

  4. "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) Elia Kazan

  5. "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) Werner Herzog

  6. "Alien" (1979) Ridley Scott

  7. "Annie Hall" (1977) Woody Allen

  8. "Bambi" (1942) Disney

  9. "Blade Runner" (1982) Ridley Scott

  10. "Blowup" (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni

  11. "Blue Velvet" (1986) David Lynch

  12. "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) Arthur Penn

  13. "Bringing Up Baby" (1938) Howard Hawks

  14. "Carrie" (1975) Brian DePalma

  15. "Casablanca" (1942) Michael Curtiz

  16. "Chinatown" (1974) Roman Polanski

  17. "Citizen Kane" (1941) Orson Welles

  18. "Dirty Harry" (1971) Don Siegel

  19. "Do the Right Thing" (1989 Spike Lee

  20. "Dr. Strangelove" (1964) Stanley Kubrick

  21. "Duck Soup" (1933) Leo McCarey

  22. "E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) Steven Spielberg

  23. "Easy Rider" (1969) Dennis Hopper

  24. "Fargo" (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen

  25. "Frankenstein" (1931) James Whale

  26. "Gone With the Wind" (1939) Victor Fleming

  27. "GoodFellas" (1990) Martin Scorsese

  28. "Halloween" (1978) John Carpenter

  29. "Intolerance" (1916) D.W. Griffith

  30. "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) Frank Capra

  31. "Jaws" (1975) Steven Spielberg

  32. "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) David Lean

  33. "M" (1931) Fritz Lang

  34. "Mad Max 2" / "The Road Warrior" (1981) George Miller

  35. "Metropolis" (1926) Fritz Lang

  36. "Modern Times" (1936) Charles Chaplin

  37. "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam

  38. "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) George Romero

  39. "North by Northwest" (1959) Alfred Hitchcock

  40. "Nosferatu" (1922) F.W. Murnau

  41. "On the Waterfront" (1954) Elia Kazan

  42. "Psycho" (1960) Alfred Hitchcock

  43. "Pulp Fiction" (1994) Quentin Tarantino

  44. "Rashomon" (1950) Akira Kurosawa

  45. "Rear Window" (1954) Alfred Hitchcock

  46. "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) Nicholas Ray

  47. "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly

  48. "Some Like It Hot" (1959) Billy Wilder

  49. "Sunset Boulevard" (1950) Billy Wilder

  50. "Taxi Driver" (1976) Martin Scorsese

  51. "The Big Sleep" (1946) Howard Hawks

  52. "The Crying Game" (1992) Neil Jordan

  53. "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) Robert Wise

  54. "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) Irvin Kershner

  55. "The Exorcist" (1973) William Friedkin

  56. "The General" (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman

  57. "The Godfather," "The Godfather, Part II" (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola

  58. "The Graduate" (1967) Mike Nichols

  59. "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) John Huston

  60. "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) John Frankenheimer

  61. "The Night of the Hunter" (1955) Charles Laughton

  62. "The Seven Samurai" (1954) Akira Kurosawa

  63. "The Third Man" (1949) Carol Reed

  64. "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) John Huston

  65. "The Wild Bunch" (1969) Sam Peckinpah

  66. "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) Victor Fleming

  67. "Touch of Evil" (1958) Orson Welles

  68. "Vertigo" (1958) Alfred Hitchcock

  69. "West Side Story" (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise

  70. 2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) Stanley Kubrick

  71. "Double Indemnity" (1944) Billy Wilder

  72. "The Big Red One" (1980) Samuel Fuller

  73. "The Searchers" (1956) John Ford



Not Seen




  1. "8 1/2" (1963) Federico Fellini

  2. "All About Eve" (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz

  3. "Apocalypse Now" (1979) Francis Ford Coppola

  4. "Breathless" (1959 Jean-Luc Godard

  5. "Children of Paradise" / "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) Marcel Carne

  6. "Days of Heaven" (1978) Terence Malick

  7. "Fight Club" (1999) David Fincher

  8. "It's a Gift" (1934) Norman Z. McLeod

  9. "La Dolce Vita" (1960) Federico Fellini

  10. "Nashville" (1975) Robert Altman

  11. "Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968) Sergio Leone

  12. "Out of the Past" (1947) Jacques Tournier

  13. "Persona" (1966) Ingmar Bergman

  14. "Pink Flamingos" (1972) John Waters

  15. "Red River" (1948) Howard Hawks

  16. "Repulsion" (1965) Roman Polanski

  17. "Scarface" (1932) Howard Hawks

  18. "Schindler's List" (1993) Steven Spielberg

  19. "The 400 Blows" (1959) Francois Truffaut

  20. "The Battleship Potemkin" (1925) Sergei Eisenstein

  21. "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) William Wyler

  22. "The Bicycle Thief" (1949) Vittorio De Sica

  23. "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) Luis Bunuel

  24. "The Lady Eve" (1941) Preston Sturges

  25. "The Rules of the Game" (1939) Jean Renoir

  26. "The Scarlet Empress" (1934) Josef von Sternberg

  27. "Tokyo Story" (1953) Yasujiro Ozu

  28. "Trouble in Paradise" (1932) Ernst Lubitsch

  29. "Un Chien Andalou" (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali



Sunday, April 16, 2006

Easter Rap

One of the clues that Jean cooked up for the Easter treasure hunt was written in a faux 'rap' style of verse. Unfortunately, Renee is not all that 'hip to the jive', so she needed visual aids. Jean, with a little coaxing, was happy to oblige. The link is to the slideshow version of the photoset. I recommend setting the interval to around two or three seconds an image. That almost captures the timeframe of the actual performance. If you wish to linger, there is a photo set (for now).

In at least one photo, Jean is clearly on the edge of losing it. In others, she looks less like a dangerous rapper and more like a Popeye impersonator.


Easter Hunt

This image is not really from this weekend. Jean had a nursing shift Saturday and Sunday, so we celebrated Easter earlier in the week. Renee did the egg hunt, which I think is getting a little beneath her (she skipped Sunday School this weekend because it was primarily an Easter egg hunt "to give the little kids a chance -- I'm too good at it."). But she also does a customized puzzle-driven treasure hunt masterminded by her mother, who each year drafts a chain of clues, each leading to the next, until BOOM! Easter basket!

So I bring to you a snap of the not-so-little one applying her enormous brain to a clue, whilst lounging in the window box...


Friday, April 7, 2006

Salt the Earth

Follow the linky goodness to see pictures of ... wait for it ... dirt. We have had a ground-based deck behind our house for as long as we owned it. It came with the house, but we're not the backyard party 'n' barbeque types, so it sat idle. One summer we made a half-hearted attempt to waterproof the wood, but our long-term commitment was obviously lacking, so it eventually began to rot. So this week, we had it ripped out.

What'll go there now? Only Jean knows for sure. We're leaning away from edible crops, due to the danger of chemical leeching from the wood that was over it for so long. So decorative plants of some sort. Maybe by the end of the summer I'll be posting another picture... Or maybe sometime next year.

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

Sprouting

How's this for breaking my recent silence? Remember how I reported that Renee is getting her 'maturity' act together? You should, it was my last post!

So now, Renee has passed another milestone. She is now taller than her mother, by maybe 1/2".

We knew from the various rules of thumb for projected height of children that she'd be about midway between Jean's and my height. She's now begun that journey.