Lost In Translation

102 Movies You Must See Before...

I came across a blog entry that introduced this list by Jim Emerson. Being a film lover I have also put an asterisk next to the ones I’ve seen. I think I’ve seen 64. How about you?

101 102 Movies You Must See Before...

Jim Emerson /

EXCERPT FROM INTRO: This isn't like Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" series. It's not my idea of The Best Movies Ever Made (that would be a different list, though there's some overlap here), or limited to my personal favorites or my estimation of the most important or influential films. These are the movies I just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They're the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat "movie-literate." I hope these movies are experiences we can all assume we share.

So, I looked up the list and here it is, with only a couple changes. (I added "Fight Club" because it's essential and it hadn't been released at the time I made the list.) I remember I tried to represent key examples of all important genres, movie stars, directors, historical movements, and so on -- like an overview of the 20th century in 101 movies. Yes, there are many more I'd like to add, but remember, this is only a primer. How many have you seen? (Hot titles should link to Roger Ebert's reviews.)
Full meandering, long-winded, digression-filled, "will he ever get to the point?" intro here.

*"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) Stanley Kubrick
*"The 400 Blows" (1959) Francois Truffaut
*"8 1/2" (1963) Federico Fellini
*"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) Werner Herzog
*"Alien" (1979) Ridley Scott
*"All About Eve" (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
*"Annie Hall" (1977) Woody Allen
*"Apocalypse Now" (1979) Francis Ford Coppola*
*"Bambi" (1942) Disney
*"The Battleship Potemkin" (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
*"The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) William Wyler
*"The Big Red One" (1980) Samuel Fuller
*"The Bicycle Thief" (1949) Vittorio De Sica
*"The Big Sleep" (1946) Howard Hawks
*"Blade Runner" (1982) Ridley Scott
*"Blowup" (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
*"Blue Velvet" (1986) David Lynch
*"Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) Arthur Penn
*"Breathless" (1959 Jean-Luc Godard
*"Bringing Up Baby" (1938) Howard Hawks
*"Carrie" (1975) Brian DePalma
*"Casablanca" (1942) Michael Curtiz
*"Un Chien Andalou" (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
"Children of Paradise" / "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) Marcel Carne
*"Chinatown" (1974) Roman Polanski
*"Citizen Kane" (1941) Orson Welles
*"A Clockwork Orange" (1971) Stanley Kubrick
*"The Crying Game" (1992) Neil Jordan
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) Robert Wise
*"Days of Heaven" (1978) Terence Malick
*"Dirty Harry" (1971) Don Siegel
*"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) Luis Bunuel
*"Do the Right Thing" (1989 Spike Lee
*"La Dolce Vita" (1960) Federico Fellini
*"Double Indemnity" (1944) Billy Wilder
*"Dr. Strangelove" (1964) Stanley Kubrick
"Duck Soup" (1933) Leo McCarey
*"E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) Steven Spielberg
*"Easy Rider" (1969) Dennis Hopper
*"The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) Irvin Kershner
*"The Exorcist" (1973) William Friedkin
*"Fargo" (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
*"Fight Club" (1999) David Fincher
"Frankenstein" (1931) James Whale
"The General" (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
*"The Godfather," "The Godfather, Part II" (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
*"Gone With the Wind" (1939) Victor Fleming
*"GoodFellas" (1990) Martin Scorsese
*"The Graduate" (1967) Mike Nichols
*"Halloween" (1978) John Carpenter
*"A Hard Day's Night" (1964) Richard Lester
"Intolerance" (1916) D.W. Griffith
"It's a Gift" (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
*"It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) Frank Capra
*"Jaws" (1975) Steven Spielberg
*"The Lady Eve" (1941) Preston Sturges
*"Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) David Lean
*"M" (1931) Fritz Lang
*"Mad Max 2" / "The Road Warrior" (1981) George Miller
*"The Maltese Falcon" (1941) John Huston
*"The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) John Frankenheimer
"Metropolis" (1926) Fritz Lang
*"Modern Times" (1936) Charles Chaplin
*"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
*"Nashville" (1975) Robert Altman
*"The Night of the Hunter" (1955) Charles Laughton
*"Night of the Living Dead" (1968) George Romero
*"North by Northwest" (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
*"Nosferatu" (1922) F.W. Murnau
*"On the Waterfront" (1954) Elia Kazan
*"Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968) Sergio Leone
*"Out of the Past" (1947) Jacques Tournier
*"Persona" (1966) Ingmar Bergman
"Pink Flamingos" (1972) John Waters
*"Psycho" (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
*"Pulp Fiction" (1994) Quentin Tarantino
*"Rashomon" (1950) Akira Kurosawa
*"Rear Window" (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
*"Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) Nicholas Ray
*"Red River" (1948) Howard Hawks
*"Repulsion" (1965) Roman Polanski
*"The Rules of the Game" (1939) Jean Renoir
*"Scarface" (1932) Howard Hawks
"The Scarlet Empress" (1934) Josef von Sternberg
*"Schindler's List" (1993) Steven Spielberg
*"The Searchers" (1956) John Ford
*"The Seven Samurai" (1954) Akira Kurosawa
*"Singin' in the Rain" (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
*"Some Like It Hot" (1959) Billy Wilder
"A Star Is Born" (1954) George Cukor
*"A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) Elia Kazan
*"Sunset Boulevard" (1950) Billy Wilder
*"Taxi Driver" (1976) Martin Scorsese
*"The Third Man" (1949) Carol Reed
*"Tokyo Story" (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
*"Touch of Evil" (1958) Orson Welles
*"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) John Huston
*"Trouble in Paradise" (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
*"Vertigo" (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
*"West Side Story" (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
*"The Wild Bunch" (1969) Sam Peckinpah
*"The Wizard of Oz" (1939) Victor Fleming

Updated on September 25th 2017-92

The Outsider

I recently read Colin Wilson’s seminal book, The Outsider, which is billed as “The Classic Study of Alienation, Creativity, and the Mind of Modern Man.” It does remind me of the time of my life when I was reading a lot of existentialist writers, in college. Wilson analyzes many of my favorite writers and thinkers: Camus, Sartre, Elliot, Hemingway, Hesse, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Blake, Kierkegaard, Shaw. I must say that it inspires me to dust off a couple of books that have been gathering dust on shelves: The Devils by Dostoevsky (which is discussed in length here) and Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann (which is supposed to be based on Nietzsche). Wilson is obviously well read and makes some interesting conclusions and draws other interesting parallels between the different writers and thinkers.

Standard Deli

I've noticed this place across from Shinjuku station's New South Exit, and didn't know what it was until I saw this review, so I thought I'd check it out today. They have good burgers and tasty looking pasteries, salads, etc... There's a nice outdoor seating area as well. I'll have to stop by again sometime in the future.

Yenx: Call Girl Fliers Translated

Yenx translates sex fliers gathered from the mailbox, however it looks like it has recently become illegal to distribute these fliers. So I guess it will close down soon, due to a lack of material. However, the ads that are posted on phonebooths would provide ample source material as well.

Rating Basketball Players

Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting book review this week that is availiable online in The New Yorker:

But how do we know that we’re watching a great player? That’s an easier question to answer when it comes to, say, golf or tennis, where players compete against one another, under similar circumstances, week after week. Nobody would dispute that Roger Federer is the world’s best tennis player. Baseball is a little more complicated, since it’s a team sport. Still, because the game consists of a sequence of discrete, ritualized encounters between pitcher and hitter, it lends itself to statistical rankings and analysis. Most tasks that professionals perform, though, are surprisingly hard to evaluate. Suppose that we wanted to measure something in the real world, like the relative skill of New York City’s heart surgeons. One obvious way would be to compare the mortality rates of the patients on whom they operate—except that substandard care isn’t necessarily fatal, so a more accurate measure might be how quickly patients get better or how few complications they have after surgery. But recovery time is a function as well of how a patient is treated in the intensive-care unit, which reflects the capabilities not just of the doctor but of the nurses in the I.C.U. So now we have to adjust for nurse quality in our assessment of surgeon quality. We’d also better adjust for how sick the patients were in the first place, and since well-regarded surgeons often treat the most difficult cases, the best surgeons might well have the poorest patient recovery rates. In order to measure something you thought was fairly straightforward, you really have to take into account a series of things that aren’t so straightforward.

Basketball presents many of the same kinds of problems. The fact that Allen Iverson has been one of the league’s most prolific scorers over the past decade, for instance, could mean that he is a brilliant player. It could mean that he’s selfish and takes shots rather than passing the ball to his teammates. It could mean that he plays for a team that races up and down the court and plays so quickly that he has the opportunity to take many more shots than he would on a team that plays more deliberately. Or he might be the equivalent of an average surgeon with a first-rate I.C.U.: maybe his success reflects the fact that everyone else on his team excels at getting rebounds and forcing the other team to turn over the ball. Nor does the number of points that Iverson scores tell us anything about his tendency to do other things that contribute to winning and losing games; it doesn’t tell us how often he makes a mistake and loses the ball to the other team, or commits a foul, or blocks a shot, or rebounds the ball. Figuring whether one basketball player is better than another is a challenge similar to figuring out whether one heart surgeon is better than another: you have to find a way to interpret someone’s individual statistics in the context of the team that they’re on and the task that they are performing.

In “The Wages of Wins” (Stanford; $29.95), the economists David J. Berri, Martin B. Schmidt, and Stacey L. Brook set out to solve the Iverson problem. Weighing the relative value of fouls, rebounds, shots taken, turnovers, and the like, they’ve created an algorithm that, they argue, comes closer than any previous statistical measure to capturing the true value of a basketball player. The algorithm yields what they call a Win Score, because it expresses a player’s worth as the number of wins that his contributions bring to his team. According to their analysis, Iverson’s finest season was in 2004-05, when he was worth ten wins, which made him the thirty-sixth-best player in the league. In the season in which he won the Most Valuable Player award, he was the ninety-first-best player in the league. In his worst season (2003-04), he was the two-hundred-and-twenty-seventh-best player in the league. On average, for his career, he has ranked a hundred and sixteenth. In some years, Iverson has not even been the best player on his own team. Looking at the findings that Berri, Schmidt, and Brook present is enough to make one wonder what exactly basketball experts—coaches, managers, sportswriters—know about basketball.

Unsung Hereos

The May edition of GQ magazine has a feature called unsung heroes where musicians, singers, and writers nominate their favorite secret musical genius. The South American writer John Jeremiah Sullivan nominated one of my unsung heroes-The Silos. Their eponymous record, The Silos (1990) on RCA still sounds as vital today as it did when I picked it up in college sometime in the early 90s. Perhaps, because, as Sullivan states:

“…the Silos are emblematic of all those bands who do something relatively narrow, do it with consummate taste, and refuse to stop doing it. And if one were high and leaning against the door by a bathroom at a half-empty club in Louisville, listening to Salas-Humara sing “A Few Hundred Thank Yous”---, one might call that heroic.”

The album did not sell well and they were dropped from RCA. The Silos were one of the bands that helped discover alt-country in the late 80s and early 90s, as Sullivan says:

“I’d challenge you to listen to the one with the bird on the cover (The Silos) and not conclude that Wilco, when they made Being There, had in many ways succeeded in reaching, years later, the place where The Silos started.”

I think that either my roommate Anders or I used to have the albums Cuba and About Her Steps, but I no longer have them so I think Ask The Dust, a sort of greatest hits collection, is going to be my next purchase.

The feature also has a nomination of Jonathan Richman by Chris Heath, whose “Roadrunner” with the Moderns Lovers is a punk/new wave classic. Richman has plenty of other great whimsical tunes as well; somehow I lost my greatest hits CD-time to replace it.

I was intrigued by Dave Egger's choice: The June Brides. I’ve never heard of them, a band from the UK. He makes them sound completely vital:

“…I found a compilation with everything they’d ever done, which was about forty-one songs, all of them jangly, ragged, literate, very sad=about how silly we all sound when we talk, how it is to feel that our homes are not our homes-but all the while, with help from trumpets and a viola, to sound less sad. I still think singer Phil Wilson wrote some of the best songs we have, and that the June Brides approach which always sounded live-as if recorded, drunkenly, in a living room lined with books-is the only real way to make music.”

I'll add one of my own: Gerald Collier, is another of my unsung heroes, former lead singer of the under-rated Seattle -based The Best Kissers In The World, and now a solo artist, who writes clever, catchy songs that stay in your mind for days, although he hasn't recorded in three years.

Click here for a link to the GQ page which has samples of the songs by the musicians nominated.

Do you have any unsung hereos?

The Frugal Traveler On The Road

In Galicia on My Trip Around the World

The Frugal Traveler at the NY Times is traveling around the world. It makes me want to get up and go, but I can't do that until July. The picture above is from the Galacia trip in Spain from the second installment-I plan to follow his adventures throughout the half year. Here's the skinny:

Frugal Traveler on the Road Published: May 17, 2006

This summer, the Frugal Traveler sets out to hopscotch the globe using low-cost carriers, buses, trains, ferries and your travel tips. Follow his journey here every Wednesday, until the deed is done.

May 17th, 2006

May 24th, 2006

Pulp Fiction Week at Slate

This week Slate is focusing on Pulp Fiction, which I think is cool. I guess I've been a bit book heavy here lately, but it might have something to do with work and the weather:

Welcome to Slate's first Pulp Fiction week. Summer is around the corner, and what better than a Dashiell Hammett novel to keep you cool under the hot sun? This week we'll publish a host of articles about pulp novels past and present. The week kicks off with a lament for the decline of the true "pulp" magazines, and a roundup of writers, critics, and editors telling us what they read on the beach. (Confessions were strongly encouraged.)

And that's just the beginning. We'll also have valentines to our favorite pulp writers and our take on why certain literary heavyweights really ought to be called pulp novelists. Enjoy.

Tuesday

"My Favorite Beach Book: What Scott Turow, Joyce Carol Oates, and Michael Connelly read on vacation." Posted May 23, 2006.

"Requiem for Pulp Fiction: The bygone days of seedy literature," by Bryan Curtis. Posted May 23, 2006.

"Pulp Valentine: Patricia Highsmith's erotic lesbian thriller," by Terry Castle. Posted May 23, 2006.

Wednesday

"Pulp Valentine: Donald Westlake's Parker novels are a genre of their own," by John Banville. Posted May 24, 2006.

"Purloined Poe: Fact is invading fiction," by Christopher Benfey. Posted May 24, 2006.

The Paradox of Choice

I recently picked up Barry Schwartz’s fascinating book, The Paradox of Choice and basically read it in three days. I had read an excerpt somewhere (Slate? The New York Times Magazine?), where he was explaining how in countries (like Japan and America for example) where there were significant increases in income, the level of happiness had not risen accordingly. He surmised from this that when you have basic levels of prosperity you don’t necessarily increase your happiness and other factors like strong familial connections were more representative of happiness across culture. He builds up the evidence of having too many choices often perplexes people and make them less happy, and often less likely to buy things. He identifies several reason why the free market economy and personal freedom sometimes have the opposite effect from which conventional wisdom would suggest-too many choices can be overwhelming for some people. He analyzes concepts like Opportunity costs, where people evaluate missed opportunities that would have come from a different choice. This happens to me a lot when I am ordering at a restaurant. He also looks at how people tend to be “maximizers” (looking for the best) or “satisficers” (people who will accept “good enough”). Sometimes people are both depending on what they are choosing. Which I agree with, I feel that I am largely a “satisficers”, but can have moments of choosing like a “maximizer.” Some of the other factors that lead to suffering from decisions include regret, disappointment through adaptation, and comparison. He gives a list of 11 things that can help make choices more satisfactory: (1. Choose When to Choose 2. Be a Chooser, Not a Picker 3. Satisfice More and Maximize Less 4. Think About the Opportunity Costs of Opportunity Costs 5. Make Your Decisions Nonreversible 6. Practice an “Attitude of Gratitude” 7. Regret Less 8. Anticipate Adaptation 9. Control Expectations 10. Curtail Social Comparison 11. Learn to Love Constraints). It was a thought provoking and inspiring book.

In Defense Of The "Small" Novel

Slate's Meghan O'Rouke, in light of the recent NY Times list of the best novels of the last 25 years, which is heavy with large sprawling novels--sings the praises of the "small" novel:

What's been lost in the conflation of "small" and "small-minded" is the recognition that small books can be powerful vehicles for big ideas—to say nothing of powerful examples of aesthetic rigor. In his otherwise astute essay accompanying the Times' list, A.O. Scott succumbed to a form of category confusion when he explained the absence of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried in the top five by noting that they are "small" books that do not "generalize" but "document"— a peculiar misreading of both novels, which hardly shy away from probing large themes, and do so with metaphoric richness. In fact, plenty of big novels do far more documenting than these two masterpieces.

This odd assertion—emblematic of the broader cultural confusion—raises a question that no one seems to have a satisfying answer to: What exactly makes a novel small, aside from its length? And if we don't know, is the term more of an obstacle than an aid in taking stock of great literature? The Great Gatsby, after all, might seem to be a small book: It is a novel of "lyric incisiveness," as Claudia Roth-Pierpont has put it, and deals with a small group of characters over a relatively short period of time. The narrative is a single thread, filtered through Nick Carraway's narration, rather than the intricate crosscutting—a la Underworld or The Corrections—that characterizes "big" novels. Clearly, part of what makes Gatsby seem big in our eyes today is that it frames its tale as a purposeful meditation on the American dream, and its propulsive last page explicitly deals with the tension between nostalgia for and disenchantment with our past's promise of an innocent future.

Being termed "small," it seems, is a verdict on whether a book is familiarly "American." It reflects a perceived failure to pursue explicitly enough, in formal or thematic terms, our representative narratives of money, regret, ambition, and individual struggle in the messy maelstrom of contemporary social reality. Would Rabbit Run (272 pages), we may wonder, have been called a small novel if it had shown up on its own (rather than in an edition of the Rabbit series) among the top five selected? Perhaps not, because it tells a story we've already accepted as somehow American: the spiritual quest of a man trying to break free from the normalizing bonds of marriage and the expectations of material success. But if Rabbit Run opened with a bored housewife in a remote town, rather than with a former star athlete playing basketball, would it suddenly seem small?