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Stephen Baker lists some reasons why journalists should ask dumb questions, but it’s good advice for anyone really. My favorite professor in college, his mantra in classes was that there was no such thing as dumb questions.
The NY Times has a big summer movie preview section, including a movie release schedule (May, June, July, August).
A list of the films preserved in the United States National Film Registry. (thx, robert)
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has compiled a chronolocial 100-song playlist/tour of mostly classical/instrumental music for the 20th century. Starts with Stravinsky & Gershwin and ends with Bjork.
The Onion AV Club is not impressed with this year’s crop of blockbusters in their 2006 Summer Movie Preview.
Film critic Jim Emerson recently compiled a list of 102 movies that you should see before you can consider yourself movie literate:
…they [are] the movies you 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’ve reproduced Emerson’s list here and marked with an asterisk those that I’ve seen.
* 2001: A Space Odyssey
* The 400 Blows
8 1/2
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
* Alien
All About Eve
* Annie Hall
* Apocalypse Now
* Bambi
The Battleship Potemkin
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Big Red One
The Bicycle Thief
The Big Sleep
* Blade Runner
Blowup
* Blue Velvet
Bonnie and Clyde
Breathless
Bringing Up Baby
Carrie
* Casablanca
Un Chien Andalou
Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
* Chinatown
* Citizen Kane
* A Clockwork Orange
* The Crying Game
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Days of Heaven
* Dirty Harry
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
* Do the Right Thing
La Dolce Vita
Double Indemnity
* Dr. Strangelove
Duck Soup
* E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial
Easy Rider
* The Empire Strikes Back
The Exorcist
* Fargo
* Fight Club
Frankenstein
The General
* The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II
* Gone With the Wind
* GoodFellas
* The Graduate
Halloween
* A Hard Day’s Night
Intolerance
It’s a Gift
* It’s a Wonderful Life
Jaws
The Lady Eve
Lawrence of Arabia
M
Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior
The Maltese Falcon
* The Manchurian Candidate
Metropolis
Modern Times
* Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Nashville
The Night of the Hunter
Night of the Living Dead
* North by Northwest
* Nosferatu
* On the Waterfront
Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Persona
Pink Flamingos
Psycho
* Pulp Fiction
Rashomon
* Rear Window
Rebel Without a Cause
Red River
Repulsion
The Rules of the Game
* Scarface
The Scarlet Empress
* Schindler’s List
The Searchers
* The Seven Samurai
Singin’ in the Rain
Some Like It Hot
A Star Is Born
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sunset Boulevard
* Taxi Driver
The Third Man
Tokyo Story
* Touch of Evil
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Trouble in Paradise
Vertigo
* West Side Story
The Wild Bunch
* The Wizard of Oz
That’s 40 out of 102. My pre-1970 movie knowledge is just plain pathetic, but I’ve seen all six movies on the list made since 1990 (and 5 out of 7 of the 80s movies). And I think I’ve seen Bambi (when I was a kid), but I marked it as seen even though I’m not completely sure. As for what’s missing from the list, I’m not even going to go there given my poor showing. There are some hardcore movie fans reading this…anyone seen them all?
Update: Mark Dominus takes issue with this list. (thx, greg)
Carl Durrenberger noticed some word for word similarities between Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson’s unwritten rules (as detailed in this USA Today article about the waiter rule) and those in a book written by a 1944 book called The Unwritten Laws of Engineering. Swanson claims to have written the rules himself during his career at Raytheon.
This list of the 50 best book to film adaptions that I posted yesterday inspired Michael Hanscom to mark which of the movies he’s seen and which of the books he’s read. Here’s my list:
1. [BM] 1984
2. [BM] Alice in Wonderland
3. [M] American Psycho
4. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
5. Brighton Rock
6. Catch 22
7. [BM] Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
8. [M] A Clockwork Orange
9. [BM] Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
10. The Day of the Triffids
11. Devil in a Blue Dress
12. [M] Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
13. [M] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
14. [M] Doctor Zhivago
15. [M] Empire of the Sun
16. [M] The English Patient
17. [M] Fight Club
18. The French Lieutenant’s Woman
19. [M] Get Shorty
20. [M] The Godfather
21. [M] Goldfinger
22. [M] Goodfellas
23. [M] Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
24. [B] The Hound of the Baskervilles
25. Jaws
26. The Jungle Book
27. A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
28. [M] LA Confidential
29. [M] Les Liaisons Dangereuses
30. [BM] Lolita
31. [M] Lord of the Flies
32. The Maltese Falcon
33. Oliver Twist
34. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
35. Orlando
36. [BM] The Outsiders
37. [BM] Pride and Prejudice
38. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
39. The Railway Children
40. Rebecca
41. [M] The Remains of the Day
42. [M] Schindler’s Ark (aka Schindler’s List)
43. [M] Sin City
44. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
45. [M] The Talented Mr Ripley
46. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
47. Through a Glass Darkly
48. To Kill a Mockingbird
49. [M] Trainspotting
50. The Vanishing
51. Watership Down
Note: In the cases of more than one movie adaptation (e.g. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), I marked it as viewed if I’d seen any version of the movie. Also, like Michael, I have no idea why the “top 50” list has 51 items.
Rule of thumb from CEOs: forget how people treat you, how they treat the waiter is a window to their true character. “A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person.”
A list of the 50 greatest film adaptations of all time. No Lord of the Rings? Anything else missing?
2006 World Monuments Watch 100 Most Endangered Sites, including the entire country of Iraq.
The World Heritage List consists of natural and man-made wonders from around the globe. Thirty-four of the sites are currently on the “in danger” list, in some cases because of a site’s inclusion on the master list (and subsequent dramatic increase in tourism).
Five suggested Flickr tags. Merlin brings the funny. “Rows Of Seated White Men Typing At Conferences”.
A list of the world’s 50 best restaurants for 2006, compiled by Restaurant magazine. Here are the winners from previous years.
Photos of the top 15 city skylines in the world. Hong Kong is #1 and I can’t disagree.
A list of the best Steve Jobs quotes ever. A contradictory fellow, this Jobs.
Fascinating thoughts on the future of science by Kevin Kelly. The sequence of recursive devices and triple blind experiments (“no one, not the subjects or the experimenters, will realize an experiment was going on until later”) were especially interesting.
In his new book, Twelve Books That Changed the World, Melvyn Bragg discusses, um, there’s no other way to put this, twelve (British) books that changed the world.
Collection of publicly available articles from The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005. Good reading. (thx, robin)
A list of the most-linked blogs from September 2000 (scroll for the notes at the end). Metalog and Metalog Ratings comprised the first weblog tracking/ranking system, predating most of the current crop by at least a year or two.
Somewhat related to this, parallels between my living through two years of middle school and the two terms of the Bush presidency.
This is a bit old (from March last year), but the most photographed city on Flickr at the time was London followed by New York, but when you take population into account, Vancouver, Amsterdam, and Las Vegas win for photos per capita.
The folks who do the Oxford Dictionaries have a list of frequently asked questions about language, grammar, and usage. Nice resource.
Top 1000 publications owned by US libraries. The Holy Bible, the 2000 US Census, and Mother Goose top the list. (via o’r)
A list of the best license-free quality fonts. From a few months ago, but still useful.
List of science books up for the 2006 Aventis Prize. Need. More. Time. For. Reading.
Rediscovered this while looking for something else last night: a list of questions from a panel Jeff Veen, Jason Fried, and I did on Design for Web 2.0 in Octobr 2004. Have we made any progress?
Critics pan some Academy Award-winning films. Said Slate’s David Edelstein of Life is Beautiful: “Benigni’s movie made me want to throw up.”
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