My apologies to those dedicated few, who've expressed an interest in following this blog, and have waited patiently, or impatiently, for further posts to appear. Of course, the holiday season derailed me for several weeks; hopefully I'll get this blog back on track, sooner than later. My new year's resolution to have a script for a microbudgeted genuinely independent movie, that is, one I can go produce and direct myself, finished and ready to shoot by the end of this year, won't exactly help, in my endeavor to create new blog posts on a regular basis, any more than my bad health does; but as author and screenwriter Peter Carey once advised, "bite off more than you can chew, and chew like hell." (Peter Carey was describing the process behind the making of the deeply underrated 1985 Australian movie BLISS, and I'm actually not sure he meant the striking phrase to be taken as advice, at all, by anyone, ever, but that's how I took it.) (And by the way, I cannot recommend BLISS highly enough; it's a very strange, very funny, and, as I said, very underrated movie, and it's - hold on, let me check - yes, it's available to watch "instantly" at Netflix, as I write these words.) (The BLISS I speak of, is the second movie that comes up, when you search that title at Netflix; I have not seen, and cannot vouch for, the heavy Turkish rape drama that appears first, though it does look intriguing, doesn't it?)
In this post I'll answer multiple requests from several readers who asked me to share the list I mentioned in my first post; the list I've created of "masterpieces," that is, movies acknowledged by the Oscars that I've seen at least three times, and at least once since 2008, and still look forward to enjoying again (a "mechanical" approach to defining "masterpieces," which seems to work much, much better, than simply trusting my judgment following one screening, though of course it is considerably more time consuming).
So though I still have about 2900 movies left to watch, or try to watch, before I can call this list complete, here are the titles I've confirmed as of January 1st, 2012. (I'm trying to see five movies a week, but at that rate this project will still take something like twenty years to complete; perhaps I'll plan to post the list as it currently stands, at the beginning of every year... though someone might have to remind me.)
The list is arranged in chronological order; each title follows its year of release. If multiple versions of a movie are available, I've noted which "cut" bears my stamp of approval, with a note at the end of the line in italics, like this sentence. (If a complete line, date and title, are parenthesized, like this sentence, that means it's a personal favorite I've seen many times in my life already, but have not yet managed to get around to seeing again since I began this project, so they aren't quite "confirmed," in the same sort of final way, as the rest of the list; I include them because they're movies I do truly love, and that last screening, just to make sure I still like them, is pretty close to obligatory.)
1927 Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness
1934 The Thin Man
1935 Mutiny on the Bounty
1936 My Man Godfrey
1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1939 The Wizard of Oz)
1939 Gone with the Wind
1940 Fantasia
1941 Citizen Kane
(1942 The Jungle Book)
1942 Casablanca
1944 Double Indemnity
1944 Hail the Conquering Hero
1944 Laura
1945 Mildred Pierce
1946 The Blue Dahlia
(1946 The Stranger)
1946 Song of the South
1949 The Third Man
1953 The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
1954 Rear Window
1954 Them!
1955 Bad Day at Black Rock
1955 Pete Kelly's Blues
1955 Rebel without a Cause
(1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much)
1960 Psycho
1961 Yojimbo
1962 Mondo Cane
1962 Lolita
1962 Lawrence of Arabia
1963 The Birds
1964 7 Faces of Dr. Lao
1964 Mary Poppins
1966 Fantastic Voyage
1968 Planet of the Apes
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey
1968 Rosemary's Baby
1969 The Wild Bunch
1969 Fellini Satyricon
1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
1971 Straw Dogs
1971 A Clockwork Orange
(1972 The Ruling Class)
1972 Deliverance
1972 Sleuth
1973 Manson
1973 The Exorcist any version is fine
1975 Nashville
1975 Jaws
(1975 The Day of the Locust)
1976 Taxi Driver
1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind I'm not "up" on the various cuts - yet...
1979 Alien original theatrical release cut
1979 The Amityville Horror
1979 The Black Stallion
1979 Being There
1979 All That Jazz
1980 Heaven's Gate the really long version - is the mangled short version even available?
1980 Altered States
1981 Excalibur
1981 Outland
1981 Dragonslayer
1981 An American Werewolf in London
1981 Pennies from Heaven
1982 Poltergeist
1982 Blade Runner as far as I can tell, every available edit, is just as great as the rest
1982 Tron
(1983 Never Cry Wolf)
1985 Brazil the theatrical cut, and the "director's" cut, are both great; avoid tv versions
1985 Return to Oz
1985 Legend the original theatrical version is way, way better than the longer "European" cut
(1986 A Room with a View)
1986 Aliens the director's cut is too slow and long; see the original theatrical version first
1986 The Fly
1986 Blue Velvet
(1986 Betty Blue) I still need to triplecheck, but I think I prefer the short American version
1987 Matewan
1987 Full Metal Jacket
1987 Robocop
1988 Beetle Juice
1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit
1988 Die Hard
1988 The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
1989 Do the Right Thing
1989 The Abyss the director's cut is twice as good as the shorter theatrical version
1990 Dick Tracy
(1990 Wild at Heart)
1990 Henry and June
(1991 The Silence of the Lambs)
1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day
1992 Unforgiven
1994 Ed Wood
1995 Seven
(1996 Twelve Monkeys)
1996 Fargo
1997 L.A. Confidential
1997 Starship Troopers
1997 Jackie Brown
1998 The Truman Show
1998 Out of Sight
1999 Being John Malkovich
1999 American Beauty
2000 Vatel
2001 Amelie
2002 Minority Report
2002 Adaptation
2005 War of the Worlds
That's where the list stands, as of now, on the cusp between 2011 and 2012. Now you tell me where I'm wrong. (Please! I value your input!)
For the convenience of those among you who intend to go see which movies you can watch right now, at Netflix, I'll make the list for you. Here are the titles from the above list that are currently available for "instant play" at Netflix, in chronological order, separated by commas: My Man Godfrey, Double Indemnity, Hail the Conquering Hero, The Stranger, The Third Man, Them!, Fellini Satyricon, A Clockwork Orange, The Ruling Class, The Exorcist, The Black Stallion, An American Werewolf in London, Blade Runner, A Room with a View, The Fly, Betty Blue, Robocop, Die Hard, Jackie Brown, Being John Malkovich. (I know, it's a paltry few, by comparison to the length of the list, but that's an accurate snapshot, of the current state of things at Netflix...)
(I've also been asked to include a "reading list," that is, a list of the books that provided source material for the literary adaptations among these movies; that's a good idea, but right now I have to rush off to an acupuncture appointment - the reading list will be my next post.)
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
This Is Who I Am, and This Is What I'm Doing
I'm very torn, here: I'd like to push aside the long-term viewing and reviewing project I've undertaken, that gives this blog its title, and rush to treat this writerly real estate like a diary, to use this time and this space to tell you all about one or two of the more interesting movies I happen to have seen in the last few weeks, as of this writing, simply because, as you know, I can do that, if I want to; there are no editorial controls, here, to restrain me, to the task I supposedly have at hand, or anything else. For a writer used to constraining himself rigidly to assigned material, one way or another, the sense of freedom is breathtaking, vertiginous, even. However, I do, as I, and the title I've given my blog, have both already clearly intimated, have an intended goal in mind, and in hand, to which to constrain myself, and to do so is worth doing for its own sake, regardless of any and all writerly freedoms I may have to endure habitually, around these parts, to, you know, stick to it, at least intermittently.
About four years ago I moved to Miami to marry my amazing and wonderful wife, attorney Angie Wilt, and together we set about the grueling and expensive project of doing whatever it took to improve my health, and "put me back on my feet" as a writer, a filmmaker and a musician, if the thing is at all possible. We knew then that my health would demand of me several years yet of enforced convalesence, at best. But even during the worst parts of my now near decade of serious illness, I've been able to continue watching movies regularly; in fact, during the stretches when I was essentially bedridden, I've been able to see more movies than ever before, being unable to do anything else more active. So I began to consider the idea of using this excessive time I'd been forced to spend facing the TV screen, constructively; I began to think that my lengthy illness placed me in a unique position to undertake some vast structured movie watching project, to lay the groundwork for a blog, or a book, or maybe a blog, and then a book, to be written later, whenever I could do it.
I considered several long range long term movie viewing projects, before I thought of the Academy Awards. I could set out to watch every movie ever nominated for any Oscar. After a few months of trying to think of something that people might enjoy reading a blog about, more, and failing, I decided that Oscar was it, and so The Oscar Excavations is what this is (I couldn't resist the nod to the movie that remains my best known writerly work, even if that does happen to be misfortunate, insofar as THE ATTIC EXPEDITIONS was work I was never paid for).
During the exhaustive and exhausting process of compiling a list of all the movies ever nominated for any Academy Award since the Oscars began in 1927 (thank you Wikipedia; thank you, Imdb), I worked out these ground rules and/or operating parameters: one final result, needs to be a list of definite masterpieces, organized by their original release dates, a chronological chronicle of the times the Academy "got it right," an ordered row of movies I confidently recommend as true, irreducibly timeless classics. It was important to me that in this context, I try not to make mistakes, as a critic; having been, for one hot year in Hattiesburg MS in the late nineties, a regularly publishing newspaper critic, one of the guys who covers and writes up everything the corporate cinema plays, I found out, some years later when I started seeing some of the movies I'd covered, again, that seeing a movie once, is no basis for judging how that movie will hold up over a period of years, over the course of multiple screenings. It is both maddening and humiliating, how often I found that I'd been wrong about which movies were good, and which movies weren't, when my opinions on the subject went into print.
So I decided that any movie I can personally sit through at least three times and still enjoy, including at least once since this project began, is a demonstrated masterpiece. If anyone here can come up with a better way to determine which movies really withstand the test of time, than to watch each movie three times over a period of several years and see if I still like it enough to sit through it again, at the end of that process, please let me know. (Seriously.)
Movies that clearly don't "work" anymore, as art or as entertainment, I don't feel obliged to sit through, in this pursuit, any more than I feel obliged to sit through them, as a private viewer seeking entertainment. The way things are currently, with streaming video backing up my home collection of DVDs, and Turner Classic Movies filling in the gaps, life is too short, and the possibilities for movie viewing too wildly various and enticing, for me to feel it's necessary that I require myself to sit through every last damned movie I start watching. Unless someone's paying me to sit through it, I give any unfamiliar movie a fourth of its running time, to hook me, or even to merely intrigue me; if it can't make me enjoy sitting there watching it by that far into a movie, I shut it off, and I think that's fair enough, given how experienced a viewer and critic I am, and, frankly, how much other cooler stuff I can and will watch, with those precious minutes of time I shave off the Oscar project. If you want to set out to look at every movie ever nominated for any Oscar, and you want to do better than sticking to only feature films (no short films), and you want to do better than giving each movie a fourth of its running time (about twenty-five or thirty minutes, usually) to demonstrate that it continues to be worth anyone spending the time to watch it all the way through, please, go right ahead and do better than me and supercede me. Let me know when you start, because my backup/fallback plan is "fantastic film and TV of the seventies and eighties," and that subject is looking like a lot more fun, by comparison, now that I've been keeping up with five Oscar titles a week, for more than three years.
Five Oscar titles a week: that's right. That's about half my total viewing, in any given week, give or take. I'm awfully ill; my medical condition, the pain, and the drugs I take for the condition and for the pain, all keep me from functioning very well, in most senses, during most hours of most days, but they rarely knock me down so hard I can't watch a movie. (No more often than twice a day, lately, and it passes within a few hours.) (Seriously.) (If it sounds like no small comfort to a man as ill as I am, to have a nice TV, and stuff to watch on it, you hear me accurately. Though believe me, there isn't a day on which I wouldn't trade the extra movie-watching time I get out of this chronic illness, for the promising career as musician and filmmaker I had going, ten years ago, when illness first knocked me down completely, and forced me to begin to set aside that life, for this one.)
I don't know how many movies I started with, though of course I could go figure it out, and so could you. (If you do, let me know.) (Seriously.) Because I counted them to prepare for this blog entry, I can tell you how many Oscar-nominated titles remain on my list, now:
As of this writing, I have 2901 movies left to watch (or try to watch). That includes:
21 I've seen three times, but not yet since this project began; these require one more viewing.
125 I've seen twice, and need to see again, to either confirm them as worthy of my final masterpieces list, or to find that they don't make the cut, as failing to solidly entertain me and sustain my interest, through and through, three times through the movie.
435 movies I've only seen once, and so need to see twice more, to complete this project to my own satisfaction. (Many of them I will only see once.)
The rest of the 2901 titles, belong to movies I haven't seen at all.
As of this writing, my final "masterpieces" list contains 88 movies. That's 88 movies I've seen at least three times in my life, and at least once in the last three-and-a-half years, that I still enjoy and like enough, to be looking forward to seeing them again. I guess I'll hold off on sharing that list, until I hit a hundred titles; it shouldn't take more than a few months, now.
At the moment, I'd rather write about the best things I've seen this week, than bother more with the Oscar list: I do intend to use this space to tell you about everything excellent and awesome I run across, and not just this Academy Award-nominated stuff.
What's that? This is already way long enough for one entry? I'll try to check in toward the end of every week, and next time, I'll be actually writing about movies, directly, rather than, you know, writing about writing about movies, which, frankly, gets to be a drag kind of quickly, whether or not you happen to be seriously ill, or editor-controlled, or anything else.
About four years ago I moved to Miami to marry my amazing and wonderful wife, attorney Angie Wilt, and together we set about the grueling and expensive project of doing whatever it took to improve my health, and "put me back on my feet" as a writer, a filmmaker and a musician, if the thing is at all possible. We knew then that my health would demand of me several years yet of enforced convalesence, at best. But even during the worst parts of my now near decade of serious illness, I've been able to continue watching movies regularly; in fact, during the stretches when I was essentially bedridden, I've been able to see more movies than ever before, being unable to do anything else more active. So I began to consider the idea of using this excessive time I'd been forced to spend facing the TV screen, constructively; I began to think that my lengthy illness placed me in a unique position to undertake some vast structured movie watching project, to lay the groundwork for a blog, or a book, or maybe a blog, and then a book, to be written later, whenever I could do it.
I considered several long range long term movie viewing projects, before I thought of the Academy Awards. I could set out to watch every movie ever nominated for any Oscar. After a few months of trying to think of something that people might enjoy reading a blog about, more, and failing, I decided that Oscar was it, and so The Oscar Excavations is what this is (I couldn't resist the nod to the movie that remains my best known writerly work, even if that does happen to be misfortunate, insofar as THE ATTIC EXPEDITIONS was work I was never paid for).
During the exhaustive and exhausting process of compiling a list of all the movies ever nominated for any Academy Award since the Oscars began in 1927 (thank you Wikipedia; thank you, Imdb), I worked out these ground rules and/or operating parameters: one final result, needs to be a list of definite masterpieces, organized by their original release dates, a chronological chronicle of the times the Academy "got it right," an ordered row of movies I confidently recommend as true, irreducibly timeless classics. It was important to me that in this context, I try not to make mistakes, as a critic; having been, for one hot year in Hattiesburg MS in the late nineties, a regularly publishing newspaper critic, one of the guys who covers and writes up everything the corporate cinema plays, I found out, some years later when I started seeing some of the movies I'd covered, again, that seeing a movie once, is no basis for judging how that movie will hold up over a period of years, over the course of multiple screenings. It is both maddening and humiliating, how often I found that I'd been wrong about which movies were good, and which movies weren't, when my opinions on the subject went into print.
So I decided that any movie I can personally sit through at least three times and still enjoy, including at least once since this project began, is a demonstrated masterpiece. If anyone here can come up with a better way to determine which movies really withstand the test of time, than to watch each movie three times over a period of several years and see if I still like it enough to sit through it again, at the end of that process, please let me know. (Seriously.)
Movies that clearly don't "work" anymore, as art or as entertainment, I don't feel obliged to sit through, in this pursuit, any more than I feel obliged to sit through them, as a private viewer seeking entertainment. The way things are currently, with streaming video backing up my home collection of DVDs, and Turner Classic Movies filling in the gaps, life is too short, and the possibilities for movie viewing too wildly various and enticing, for me to feel it's necessary that I require myself to sit through every last damned movie I start watching. Unless someone's paying me to sit through it, I give any unfamiliar movie a fourth of its running time, to hook me, or even to merely intrigue me; if it can't make me enjoy sitting there watching it by that far into a movie, I shut it off, and I think that's fair enough, given how experienced a viewer and critic I am, and, frankly, how much other cooler stuff I can and will watch, with those precious minutes of time I shave off the Oscar project. If you want to set out to look at every movie ever nominated for any Oscar, and you want to do better than sticking to only feature films (no short films), and you want to do better than giving each movie a fourth of its running time (about twenty-five or thirty minutes, usually) to demonstrate that it continues to be worth anyone spending the time to watch it all the way through, please, go right ahead and do better than me and supercede me. Let me know when you start, because my backup/fallback plan is "fantastic film and TV of the seventies and eighties," and that subject is looking like a lot more fun, by comparison, now that I've been keeping up with five Oscar titles a week, for more than three years.
Five Oscar titles a week: that's right. That's about half my total viewing, in any given week, give or take. I'm awfully ill; my medical condition, the pain, and the drugs I take for the condition and for the pain, all keep me from functioning very well, in most senses, during most hours of most days, but they rarely knock me down so hard I can't watch a movie. (No more often than twice a day, lately, and it passes within a few hours.) (Seriously.) (If it sounds like no small comfort to a man as ill as I am, to have a nice TV, and stuff to watch on it, you hear me accurately. Though believe me, there isn't a day on which I wouldn't trade the extra movie-watching time I get out of this chronic illness, for the promising career as musician and filmmaker I had going, ten years ago, when illness first knocked me down completely, and forced me to begin to set aside that life, for this one.)
I don't know how many movies I started with, though of course I could go figure it out, and so could you. (If you do, let me know.) (Seriously.) Because I counted them to prepare for this blog entry, I can tell you how many Oscar-nominated titles remain on my list, now:
As of this writing, I have 2901 movies left to watch (or try to watch). That includes:
21 I've seen three times, but not yet since this project began; these require one more viewing.
125 I've seen twice, and need to see again, to either confirm them as worthy of my final masterpieces list, or to find that they don't make the cut, as failing to solidly entertain me and sustain my interest, through and through, three times through the movie.
435 movies I've only seen once, and so need to see twice more, to complete this project to my own satisfaction. (Many of them I will only see once.)
The rest of the 2901 titles, belong to movies I haven't seen at all.
As of this writing, my final "masterpieces" list contains 88 movies. That's 88 movies I've seen at least three times in my life, and at least once in the last three-and-a-half years, that I still enjoy and like enough, to be looking forward to seeing them again. I guess I'll hold off on sharing that list, until I hit a hundred titles; it shouldn't take more than a few months, now.
At the moment, I'd rather write about the best things I've seen this week, than bother more with the Oscar list: I do intend to use this space to tell you about everything excellent and awesome I run across, and not just this Academy Award-nominated stuff.
What's that? This is already way long enough for one entry? I'll try to check in toward the end of every week, and next time, I'll be actually writing about movies, directly, rather than, you know, writing about writing about movies, which, frankly, gets to be a drag kind of quickly, whether or not you happen to be seriously ill, or editor-controlled, or anything else.
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