Showing 40-51 of 51 results tagged “Self-Involvement”

In response to a call for movie-related haiku, I submitted the following on Robert Altman’s The Player:

The pitch, in 10 words:
Griffin Mill kills the writer,
and he steals his girl.

Unless you’re holed up in your bedroom poring over blogs and obscure magazines for the best music that isn’t being hawked by the major labels, there’s an excellent chance you’re a bit lost in the current marketplace. The rise of digital music delivery has meant that there’s very little you can’t download from somewhere, and the simple fact is that there is more music in the world than a person could possibly listen to in a thousand lifetimes.

As my wife and my bank account will confirm, I’m trying to do my part. So here are 12 albums (and one stray song) from 2005 that I loved, most of them in the indie-rock vein and all of them a bit off the beaten path.

The wife and I commissioned a painting of our dog. We asked not for a portrait, but for a painting that included Bad Dog Ginger. This is what we got.

Red Sox fans have officially gone apeshit over the team’s performance.

If this is the way Boston is going to play — and we have no indication to the contrary — I hope the team collapses in the next few weeks, allowing management to get some value for all those free agents the Red Sox can’t afford to sign.

Netflix has ruined my life. Oh, it’s not quite that bad, but it has certainly altered the role of movies in my life. While they have been important to me, probably to a fault, now films have become the sun around which our leisure time orbits, to the point that leisure time isn’t quite so leisurely.

A marker of getting old — not old old, but well beyond one’s 20s — is recognizing the flaws of something once adored in youth. Twice recently I’ve had that experience, once while watching Peter Weir’s Fearless (from 1993) and more recently with Dolores Claiborne, the 1995 movie directed by Taylor Hackford and adapted from the Stephen King novel by Tony Gilroy.

The first movie I remember seeing was Bambi, probably when I was about four years old. We went swimming that day, and there was a thunderstorm, and the mental image the day conjures is me standing in the baby pool with nobody else around. I have no idea if the memory is accurate.

When I was nine or so, I saw a movie on HBO at a neighbor’s house. It was slow, had strange music, dealt with a picnic at some desert locale, and haunted me for years. In college, an English and film professor described the scariest movie he’d ever seen. It sounded awfully familiar. My roommate at the time recalled seeing the same movie as a child in a hotel room in Scotland. So we began a long journey to find a video copy of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.

In 1999, the person I’d just started dating commented in an e-mail that every time she read the Stephen King essay about baseball, she knew what it felt like to be one of those little leaguers, even though she (at the time) knew little of baseball and less of little league. I was struck immediately: It’s not how I felt in little league.

I love Jeff Bridges. I love Tim Robbins. I love them equally, and (my gut tells me) in about the same way. We are a ménage à trios, even if they don’t know it yet.

Top 20 (roughly in order of preference)

1. Magnolia. 1999. Anderson, Paul Thomas. Essay, essay, essay, and commentary track.
2. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. 1997. Morris, Errol.
3. Calendar. 1993. Egoyan, Atom. Essay.
4. Memento. 2001. Nolan, Christopher. Essay and aborted essay.
5. Antonia’s Line. 1995. Gorris, Marleen.
6. Trees Lounge. 1996. Buscemi, Steve.
7. Before the Rain. 1994. Manchevski, Milcho.
8. Sweet Hereafter, The. 1997. Egoyan, Atom.
9. Pan’s Labyrinth. 2006. Del Toro, Guillermo. Brief commentary track.
10. Vertigo. 1958. Hitchcock, Alfred.
11. Picnic at Hanging Rock. 1975. Weir, Peter. Essay.
12. Crumb. 1994. Zwigoff, Terry.
13. Truman Show, The. 1998. Weir, Peter. Brief commentary track.
14. Monster in a Box. 1992. Broomfield, Nick. Essay.
15. Requiem for a Dream. 2000. Aronofsky, Darren. Essay.
16. Three Colors: Blue. 1993. Kieslowski, Krzysztof. Commentary track and essay.
17. No Country for Old Men. 2007. Coen, Ethan, and Joel Coen. Essay.
18. Fearless. 1993. Weir, Peter. Essay.
19. Spider Forest (Geomi sup). 2004. Song, Il-gon. Essay.
20. Batman Begins. 2005. Nolan, Christopher. Essay.