Isegoria

Jim Emerson’s 101 Movies You Must See Before… “is not [his] idea of The Best Movies Ever Made,” but “the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat movie-literate”:

“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
“Bambi” (1942) Disney
“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 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (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
“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

I’ve seen more than half of the list, but not much more. I guess I’ve got some “work” to do.

The American Art Archives collect works from many Golden Age illustrators, including J C Leyendecker, his younger brother F X Leyendecker, Willy Pogany, Howard Pyle, Dr. Seuss, and N C Wyeth.

The list goes on and on:

A
Clark Agnew
Harry Anderson
Rolf Armstrong
Boris Artzybasheff

B
McClelland Barclay
Walter Baumhofer
Ben-Hur Baz
Michael Berry
W T Benda
Frank Bensing
Walter Biggs
James Bingham
M L Blumenthal
Hannes Bok
Enoch Bolles
Joe Bowler
Pierre Brissaud
Arthur William Brown
Reynold Brown
Gilbert Bundy
…

Daniel Akts asks, Sick of trashy pop culture for kids? and recommends classic movies. They’re Fun for the Whole Family, Really:

While the best family films nowadays are animated works such as Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, in the old days, for better or worse, almost every film was a family film. Many were dreck of course, but thanks to DVDs we can ransack Hollywood’s film libraries for the good stuff — and enjoy them together without worrying about nudity, foul language or excessive violence.

A recent Worth1000.com Photoshop Contest called “Childhood Renaissance” features art that the great masters may have done in their youth.

I particularly enjoyed the art teacher’s “corrections” on young M. C. Escher’s work.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Airport is a pretty sweet little animated film by Iain Anderson, done completely with airport infographics. Check it out. (Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Beloved Indian actor Rajkumar might have been too well loved. Mobs rampage in Bangalore after actor Rajkumar dies:

Mobs torched buses, attacked company offices and stoned police on the streets of India’s technology hub on Thursday ahead of the funeral of film icon Rajkumar, whose death has triggered widespread mourning.

Police said a man died of bullet injuries as officers opened fire in self-defence after their bus came under attack. ‘A man died in hospital due to bullet injuries,’ Additional Commissioner of Police Gopal Hosur told Reuters.

Officers had earlier retaliated with tear gas and baton-charges as thousands converged on a stadium in Bangalore, home to major Indian and international technology firms, where the actor’s body had been put on view in a transparent coffin.

The state government of Karnataka announced a public holiday, as authorities prepared for Rajkumar’s cremation later on Thursday at a film studio on the city’s outskirts.

Who was Rajkumar again?

Rajkumar starred in more than 200 Kannada-language films over five decades. He soon gained a fiercely devoted following amongst fans for roles ranging from police to gods.

He found fame outside his home state of Karnataka after being kidnapped by notorious jungle bandit Veerappan in 2000. He spent 108 days at Veerappan’s hideout before a release was negotiated.

In The Culture War, Tom Standage explains “how the establishment has greeted past scourges”:

Novels
“The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?”
— Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790

The Waltz
“The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced … at the English Court on Friday last … It is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous inter­twining of the limbs, and close com­pressure of the bodies … to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was con­fined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is … forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.”
— The Times of London, 1816

Movies
“This new form of entertainment has gone far to blast maidenhood … Depraved adults with candies and pennies beguile children with the inevitable result. The Society has prosecuted many for leading girls astray through these picture shows, but GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the ‘moving pictures.’”
— The Annual Report of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1909

The Telephone
“Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? Does [it] break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”
— Survey conducted by the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee, San Francisco Bay Area, 1926

Comic Books
“Many adults think that the crimes described in comic books are so far removed from the child’s life that for children they are merely something imaginative or fantastic. But we have found this to be a great error. Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store. Delinquencies formerly restricted to adults are increasingly committed by young people and children … All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers This kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children!”
— Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954

Rock and Roll
“The effect of rock and roll on young people, is to turn them into devil worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness; impair nervous stability and destroy the sanctity of marriage. It is an evil influence on the youth of our country.”
— Minister Albert Carter, 1956

Videogames
“The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it’s making the difficult job of being a parent even harder … I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control.”
— US senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2005

Cynthia Crossen finds Literary Self-Help in Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life:

Obviously, I am in a tiny minority of Americans who find more relief from life’s travails in Gustav Flaubert, Edith Wharton and George Orwell than Wayne Dyer, Rick Warren and Dr. Phil. But I couldn’t have explained my habit of turning to old-fashioned, long-dead novelists for comfort and counsel until I read Mr. de Botton’s 1997 encomium to Marcel Proust written in the form of a self-help manual. It turns out that In Search of Lost Time (Or Remembrance of Things Past, as the title is often translated), published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, addresses such eternal — if self-centered — lamentations as, “Why do I suffer?” and “How should I express my emotions?” and “Why can’t I be happy in love?”

I knew nothing of Proust’s personal life before reading How Proust Can Change Your Life. In many ways, the man was a mess. When he wasn’t physically ill — and he usually was — Proust was a snobbish insomniac and hypochondriac who couldn’t abide fresh air or sunlight. His love for men was mostly unrequited. His relationship with his mother was infantile well into his adulthood. “While it is clear why someone might be interested in developing a Proustian approach to life,” Mr. de Botton comments, “the sane would never harbor a desire to lead a life like Proust’s.”

Yet with his almost supernatural sensitivity to human relationships (as well as ordinary objects like biscuits called madeleines), Proust explained in poetic detail how and why people behave as they do, and, Mr. de Botton demonstrates, how they might feel and behave better. “Far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, In Search of Lost Time is a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to appreciate life.”

Unfortunately for the typically overscheduled citizen of the modern world, Proust needed 3,000 pages to do the job that ordinary self-help writers do in a few hundred. Proust’s own brother Robert bemoaned the “sad thing” that “people have to be very ill or have broken a leg” to read In Search of Lost Time.” An esteemed Parisian publisher confessed to a friend, “I may be dense, but I fail to see why a chap needs 30 pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.” Proust ended up using his own money to publish the books.

For those of us without lingering illnesses or brittle bones, Mr. de Botton, with humor and cunning, distills Proust’s insights into 197 pages without reducing them to so many fortune cookies.

In The Girls Next Door, Joan Acocella looks at The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds — and, by extension, at Hugh Hefner:

Hefner said from the beginning that he was not producing a girlie magazine; Playboy was a “life style” magazine, of which sex was only a part. He was put off by the men’s magazines of his youth, with their emphasis on riding the rapids and fighting bears. Why did virility have to be proved outdoors? Why couldn’t its kingdom be indoors? “We like our apartment,” he wrote in his editorial for the first issue of Playboy. “We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

Hef has a peculiar set of vices — beyond the obvious:

Hefner is addicted to games: pinball machines, electronic games, board games. He likes to do forty-hour Monopoly marathons, fuelled by Pepsi (of which, it has been said, he used to consume three dozen bottles a day) and Dexedrine.

At “the end of the sixties, one-fourth of all American college men were buying his magazine every month,” so things have dropped off quite a bit — but not as much as they could have:

As for the magazine, the surprise is not that it has lost fifty per cent of its readers but that, outdated as it is, it has lost only that many, and that the faithful are not all in nursing homes. (According to a 2005 market study, the readers’ median age is thirty-three.) A good comparison, made recently in Time, is with Mad, which was launched a year before Playboy and was as much a product of the fifties as Hefner’s publication. Mad is still in print, but with one-tenth the circulation it had in the early seventies. Next to that, Hefner’s half a loaf looks pretty good.

According to Fox News — and not The Onion — Dutch Immigrants Must Watch Racy Film:

The camera focuses on two gay men kissing in a park. Later, a topless woman emerges from the sea and walks onto a crowded beach. For would-be immigrants to the Netherlands, this film is a test of their readiness to participate in the liberal Dutch culture.

Apparently South Park isn’t the only show to subversively mock Scientology. From Further Muppet Resistance:

A while back I noted the disquieting resemblance between the Emperor Gorg (of Fraggle Rock) and L. Ron Hubbard (present whereabouts unknown). Now my sources have alerted me to this clip from the short-lived Muppets Tonight. The premise of the clip is a look back at “The Kermit Frog Club,” like the Mickey Mouse Club but with Kermit as the object of devotion and guest Cindy Crawford in the Annette Funicello role. (The MMC is outside the range of my pop culture: I have no idea what I’m talking about here.) Anyway, of interest are the muppet Frogsketeers, whose names are emblazoned on their shirts: along with Cindy, there’s Newt, Stu, and … L. Ron. Now that I look at the screenshot again, Newt’s crop of hair is also somewhat evocative.