Just for fun over the weekend.  The American Film Institute reissued their top 100 films ten years after the original list.  If you’d like, copy the list on your blog and mark ones you’ve seen, ones you liked, disliked, would like to see, using any coding system you’d like. 

We must still have some medieval blood in us: the medieval people loved lists.  I have to admit that I do too.  The colored ones are ones I’ve seen.  I’m certain any one reading this will have seen more. 

Movies were taboo in my childhood and I won’t even tell you what my childish mind imagined took place in “evil theaters”.  I once remarked to my brother that “Mom and Dad must have gone to a lot of movies to have seven children.”

I’d love to know which ones from this list that you think we really need to watch.

AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies--10th Anniv. Edition:

1    Citizen Kane (1941)
2    The Godfather (1972)
3    Casablanca (1942)
4    Raging Bull (1980)
5    Singin' in the Rain (1952)
6    Gone With the Wind (1939)
7    Lawrence of Arabia (1962)  
	slowest movie I've ever seen
8    Schindler's List (1993) Q
9    Vertigo (1958)
10   The Wizard of Oz (1939) I saw this *after* 
	I humiliated my son
11   City Lights (1931)
12   The Searchers (1956)
13   Star Wars (1977)
14   Psycho (1960)
15   2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
16   Sunset Blvd. (1950)
17   The Graduate (1967)
18   The General (1927)
19   On the Waterfront (1954)
20   It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
21   Chinatown (1974)
22   Some Like It Hot (1959)
23   The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
24   E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
25   To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
26   Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
27   High Noon (1952)
28   All About Eve (1950)
29   Double Indemnity (1944)
30   Apocalypse Now (1979)
31   The Maltese Falcon (1941)
32   The Godfather Part II (1974)
33   One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) 
	this one disturbed me
34   Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
35   Annie Hall (1977)
36   The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)Q
37   The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
38   The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
39   Dr. Strangelove (1964)
40   The Sound of Music (1965)
41   King Kong (1933)
42   Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
43   Midnight Cowboy (1969)
44   The Philadelphia Story (1940)
45   Shane (1953)
46   It Happened One Night (1934)
47   A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
48   Rear Window (1954)
49   Intolerance (1916)
50   The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship 
	of the Ring (2001) five stars, we loved this
51   West Side Story (1961)
52   Taxi Driver (1976)
53   The Deer Hunter (1978)  
	I cried for days after seeing this
54   M*A*S*H (1970)
55   North by Northwest (1959)
56   Jaws (1975)
57   Rocky (1976)
58   The Gold Rush(1925)
59   Nashville (1975)
60   Duck Soup (1933)
61   Sullivan's Travels (1941)
62   American Graffiti (1973)
63   Cabaret (1972)
64   Network (1976)
65   The African Queen (1951) 
	you gotta love Katherine Hepburn
66   The Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
67   Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
68   Unforgiven (1992)
69   Tootsie (1982) We laughed so hard when 
	this came out. We started it again ten 
	years later with our boys and abruptly 
	turned it off; standards had changed.
70   A Clockwork Orange (1971)
71   Saving Private Ryan (1998) 
72   The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
73   Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
74   The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
75   In the Heat of the Night (1967)
76   Forrest Gump (1994)
77   All the President's Men (1976)
78   Modern Times (1936)
79   The Wild Bunch (1969)
80   The Apartment (1960)
81   Spartacus (1970)
82   Sunrise (1927)
83   Titanic (1997)
84   Easy Rider (1969)
85   A Night at the Opera (1935)
86   Platoon (1986)
87   12 Angry Men (1957)
88   Bringing Up Baby (1938)
89   The Sixth Sense (1999)
90   Swing Time (1936)
91   Sophie's Choice (1982)
92   Goodfellas (1990)
93   The French Connection (1971)
94   Pulp Fiction (1994)
95   The Last Picture Show (1971)
96   Do the Right Thing (1989)
97   Blade Runner (1982)
98   Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
99   Toy Story (1995)
100  Ben-Hur (1959)

Last year when Dan and Val visited, he gave us a Mars Hill Audio Magazine CD, a duplicate of one he owned.  On a road trip in the summer Curt and I listened to it together.  There was a segment on the mystery writer P.D. James, her thorough familiarity with the Book of Common Prayer, and the nuanced character of her detective, Adam Dalgliesh.  I hadn’t read any P.D. James, but determined right then to check out what our library offered. 

Thus, P.D. James became one of my “2006 author finds”.  There is nothing quite so delicious as discovering a great author, confirming the discovery with a second read, and then realizing that there are many, many more of that author’s books available.  To discover more than one in a year – remember Anthony Trollope? – induces one to think she has won the lottery. And get this — P.D. James loves Anthony Trollope!

We enjoyed the film version of Death in Holy Orders.  I found Martin Shaw’s
portrayal of Adam Dalgliesh even better than I had imagined AD in my head.  (The
last time that happened was with Gollum – I couldn’t grasp his
character until I saw him on film.)  The tenor of his voice, his quiet command, the way he
held himself so still but communicated so much through his eyes and
mouth was, frankly, entrancing.  There were plentiful tight close-ups of his face as he questioned witnesses and suspects.  The blurb described his performance as soulful.

The mystery stumped all of us who hadn’t read the book; it required close attention to keep track of the characters.  The setting of St. Anselm’s Abbey on the coast of England was gorgeous, the soundtrack lush in parts and eerie in others.  If you enjoy a mystery, set in England, in a cloistered community, I recommend this.

Caution:  The producer seemed smitten with backside nudity.  There were several scenes of a young man running into the ocean for his daily swim.  There are two brief sex scenes of the gag-me variety: private parts aren’t shown but I would have preferred oblique references to what was happening instead of front and center shots.

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Ushpizin tells the story of Moshe and Mali, an  Orthodox Jewish couple in modern Jerusalem.  Like Abraham and Sarah of old, they struggle with infertility and they are visited by strangers.  But these visitors are no angels; much the opposite. 

I wasn’t impressed with the acting (think Home Alone‘s burglars for the bad guys); the storyline was predictable.  The merit in this film is that it was filmed in Jerusalem among Orthodox neighborhoods and gives a great view of life in Orthodox households.
You see how the Feast of Succoth is celebrated today and what a sukkot looks like.  [We were in a pietistic church, when the announcement guy invited the congregation to come to a Feast of Booths, but said booze instead of booths…it was hilarious!] 

I particularly enjoyed Mali, but my favorite part was a scene where Moshe asks for forgiveness.  He apologizes profusely and then presses the man for complete forgiveness, insisting that he repeat his words three times.  Very endearing.
 

I’m tackling one of the weightier books on my pile: a one-volume history of the Middle Ages, The Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor.  According to the jacket, “Cantor’s book was innovative in 1963 because it was the first comprehensive general history of the Middle Ages to center on medieval culture and religion rather than on political history”.

In my search for footnotes (which don’t exist), I found a list of films Cantor recommends.  Here is my severe abridgment of his list.

I am intrigued. 

Well, with numbers 1 through 8!

I’ve seen Olivier’s Henry V (I own Branagh’s version and much prefer it)  and I’ve read The Name of the Rose  (perhaps the only George Grant recommendation which I had to push myself to get to the end); the rest are complete mysteries.  For the first time in my life, I’m not frustrated by this kind of list, thanks to Netflix. But convincing my beloved husband to watch some of these with me might be a challenge, especially with daylight savings time in place.

Has anyone out there seen heard of any of these movies?

I’ll start with The Seventh Seal and if it’s any good I like it, my dear reader, I will let you know. 

Right here on this blog.

HT: Sweetbriar Patch

Mostly Martha is a German film about a chef who is obsessed with her art to a point that precludes personal relationships.  She hides behind her precise measurements and particular flavors.  Her sessions with a therapist devolve into Martha’s rambling descriptions of dishes.   Food is her focus; but it is food without fellowship, food  to be admired and analyzed in a scientific sense, calories without communion. 

Two events change Martha: becoming the caregiver for her young niece Lina and the entrance of a robust, hearty, jovial sous chef into Martha’s restaurant kitchen.  Mario’s zest for life is reckoned insanity by Martha; his laughter infuriates her.

The interplay between food and relationship dominates this film.  Before Mario appears, food is strictly clinical.  Even the patrons of the restaurant prefer a particular texture or flavor over a shared experience.  Martha is seldom seen eating and when she does eat it is at a stark table, alone.  Mario understands fine food and appreciates a discerning palate, but he insists on keeping meals within the context of community. The culmination of the film is a feast, a full-orbed celebration that marries friendship with food.

Mostly Martha is the opposite of the downward arc of the 1990 film Avalon.  At the advent of  Avalon we see multi-generational dinners – loud, boisterous gatherings of brothers’ families.  After a television joins the furniture, the empty dining room table is silent and folks eat gathered around the tube.  Eventually a solitary old man is in a care facility sitting in a trance before a tray of untouched food.