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

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...

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.

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.