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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

Posted by dpwakefield at 09:49 PM | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by dpwakefield at 08:30 PM | Comments (0)

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...

Posted by dpwakefield at 07:47 PM | Comments (0)

April 07, 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.

Posted by dpwakefield at 10:11 PM | Comments (2)

April 04, 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.

Posted by dpwakefield at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)