best films ever

The American Film Institute's (AFI) top-ten movies of all time:

1. Citizen Kane
2. The Godfather
3. Casablanca
4. Raging Bull
5. Singin' in the Rain
6. Gone With the Wind
7. Lawrence of Arabia
8. Schindler's List
9. Vertigo
10. The Wizard of Oz

Others in the top 100 were:

50. Lord of the Rings
71 Saving Private Ryan
72. The Shawshank Redemption
81. Spartacus
83. Titanic
89. The Sixth Sense
96. Do the Right Thing
97. Blade Runner
99. Toy Story

duke

"You're the duke of New York. You're A-number-1."

23

I like seeing actors/actresses play parts opposite the genres they usually play...people like Robin Williams and, now, Jim Carrey...in 23.

Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest

Did I blog about "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest?" Surely I must have. It bit the big one, without a doubt. It was a silly, long-winded mish-mash, which ended up being no more than a tw0-and-a-half hour commercial for the sequal.

(I just saw an ad on television for the DVD. That's what prompted this diatribe!)

Peter O'Toole's "Venus"

I hope Peter O'Toole wins an Oscar for his role in Venus.

Pan's Labyrinth

Pan's Labyrinth, by Guillermo del Toro, is coming out this Christmas. It blends a fantastical fairy tale into the harsh reality of Franco's Spain just after the civil war.

More on this subject from Wikipedia.

"The Queen"

I saw "The Queen" today, with Helen Mirren, James Cromwell, et. al. I thought Mirren did a great job, but I didn't really understand the point of the movie, other than its being at attempt to show that someone could do a job imitating Queen Elizabeth II. Other than that, the movie (and definitely its soundtrack) could've done just fine on television. I didn't think there was much substance to the movie: it wasn't insubstantial, of course, but was, I thought, unsubstantial.

Here's Roger Ebert's review of the movie: I do agree that it was interesting to see the queen doing unqueenly like things, like driving her Range Rover, talking car mechanics with the Balmoral support staff, admiring a dead stag, etc.

"The Prestige"

I thought The Prestige was superb! It was fascinating to see David Bowie play Nikola Tesla, too. He's a good actor, though the part was a restrained one. I hadn't realized, having forgotten way too much high-school- and college history, that Tesla and Thomas Edison were rivals.

Christian Bale most definitely isn't hard on the eyes! But, seriously, he is a good actor, and I thought he did a good job with his hard London accent. Also good were Michael Caine, Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson, and others (I thought Bale's wife in the movie was quite good).

one more synopsis...

of The Bridge:

Inspired by a New Yorker story, "Jumpers," written by Tad Friend, director Eric Steel decided to train cameras on the Golden Gate Bridge over the course of 2004 to capture the people who attempted to leap off the famed structure, the site of more suicides than anywhere else in the world. He also tracked down and interviewed the friends, family members, and eyewitnesses to further recreate the events leading up to the incident and to try to explain what led these people to want to kill themselves, especially at this specific site. The documentary's primary subjects all struggled with mental illness, including severe depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorders, and the documentary struggles to understand their illness while illuminating the anger and hurt of their loved ones. Most questions remain unanswered, turning on the darker recesses of the mind. The shots of the bridge wreathed in fog turn the Golden Gate into a metaphor for a bridge between life and death, sanity and mental disturbance, and extreme isolation and connection with society. Though the camera crew worked with a set of guidelines, including that they would call in someone they thought was going to jump, the documentary still includes lengthy footage of the moments leading up to and including the suicides, so discretion is advised for sensitive viewers.

• All Movie Guide

"The (Golden Gate) Bridge"

This movie, Eric Steel's The Bridge, sounds fascinating. I'll try to see it. Here are two synopses, one from Graham Legatt, of the San Francisco Film Festival:

In the poem "Musee des Beaux Arts," W. H. Auden wrote, "About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood/Its human position; how it takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along." Auden's poem takes as its occasion a painting by Dutch master Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, in which, far from being central and tragic, Icarus appears only in a quiet corner of a busy frieze, as a pair of legs disappearing with a small splash into the water. The heartrending truths in Auden and Brueghel's works--that people suffer largely unnoticed while the rest of the world goes about its business--are brought literally and painfully home in Eric Steel's The Bridge, a documentary exploration of the mythic beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge, the most popular suicide destination in the world, and the unfortunate souls drawn by its siren call. Steel and his crew filmed the bridge during daylight hours from two separate locations for all of 2004, recording most of the two dozen deaths in that year (and preventing several others). They also taped more than 100 hours of interviews with friends, families and witnesses, who recount in sorrowful detail stories of struggles with depression, substance abuse and mental illness. The result is a moving and unsettling film that cannot help but touch everyone in the Bay Area in one way or another, not least because it admittedly raises as many questions as it answers: about suicide, mental illness and civic responsibility as well as the filmmaker's relationship to his fraught and complicated material.

and one from David Kwok, of the Tribeca Film Festival:

The Golden Gate Bridge, with its views of the San Francisco Bay and skyline, is an American icon and a major tourist destination. But it is also the site of more suicides than any other place in the world. The question of why this particular bridge is such a magnet for suicides (along with the broader issue of suicide, and mental illness in general) is explored in Eric Steele's debut documentary, which he began to work on after reading Tad Friend's New Yorker article on the subject. Every day during 2004, Steele set up his cameras and filmed the Golden Gate Bridge during daylight hours. Day after day, he and his crew observed thousands of people crossing the bridge on foot from San Francisco to Marin County and back. They filmed everyone from tourists to bicyclists, but ever so often a person would climb over one small part of the bridge's mile-long railing and let go. However, while the camera can record the act of suicide, it cannot tell us what leads a person to such an extreme action or what thoughts run through someone's mind during those last moments. In an attempt to uncover some of these mysteries, Steele crossed the country in order to interview friends and families of the jumpers he captured on film, on-scene witnesses to various jumps, and even a jump survivor. These testimonials elevate the jumpers in the film from nameless statistics to human beings whose lives have inexorably led them to a tragically decisive moment on the Golden Gate Bridge. Like the bridge itself, this film is beautiful, powerful, and possesses an underlying darkness.