The List!

Below is the complete list of films I must watch for my master's degree, in chronological order. Forgive the lack of italics, but I just spent hours typing them out and putting them in chronological order, so you know...

Anyway, here they are:

Voyage to the Moon (George Mélies, 1902)
Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1919)
Male and Female (Cecil B. DeMille, 1919)
Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)
The Blot (Lois Weber, 1921)
The Sheik (George Melford, 1921)
Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)
Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)
The Last Laugh (F. W. Murnau, 1924)
Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925)
The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925)
The General (Buster Keaton, 1926)
It (Clarence G. Badger, 1927)
The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927)
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dali, 1929)
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
Betty Boop and Popeye shorts (Max & Dave Fleischer Studios, 1930s)
Morocco (Joseph von Sternberg, 1930)
A Propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930)
City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
M (Fritz Lang , 1931)
Land without Bread (Luis Buñuel, 1932)
Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932)
Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932)
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)
I Was Born, But… (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)
It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)
The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
Composition in Blue (Oskar Last Fischinger, 1935)
Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935)
Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)
The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937)
Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937)
Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
Dance Girl Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1941)
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)
Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
Maria Candelaria (Emilio Fernandez, 1944)
Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1944)
Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)
Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)
The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio de Sica, 1948)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)
D. O. A. (Rudolph Maté, 1949)
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950)
Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
Awaara (Raj Kapoor, 1951)
The Hitchhiker (Ida Lupino, 1951)
Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1952)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)
Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)
Salt of the Earth (Herbert Biberman, 1954)
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
Mon Oncle (Jacques Talli, 1957)
What’s Opera, Doc? (Chuck Jones, 1957)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959)
Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)
Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus, 1959)
Hiroshima, mon Amour (Alain Resnias, 1959)
Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)
The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, 1959)
The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)
Primary (Drew Associates, 1960)
Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin, 1961)
Cleo from Five to Seven (Agnes Varda, 1961)
Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)
Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962)
Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1962)
8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1963)
Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1963)
This Sporting Life (Lindsey Anderson, 1963)
Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha, 1964)
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965)
Shop on Main Street (Jan Kadar, 1965)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)
Don’t Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967)
The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)
Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968)
High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1968)
The Hour of Furnaces (Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino, 1968)
Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968)
Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol, 1969)
Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)
Salesman (Albert & David Maysles, 1969)
The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)
M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)
Land of Silence and Darkness (Werner Herzog, 1971)
Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971)
The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1971)
Aguirre, Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
State of Siege (Constantin Costa-Gavras, 1973)
Ali, Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975)
Xala (Ousmane Sembene, 1975)
Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorcese, 1976)
Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)
All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979)
El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983)
Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)
Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984)
Kiss of the Spider Woman (Hector Babenco, 1985)
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Susaña Muñoz & Lourdes Portillo, 1985)
The Offical Story (Luis Puenzo, 1985)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986)
She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986)
Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee, 1986)
Street of Crocodiles (Brothers Quay, 1986)
Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)
Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988)
The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemeckis, 1988)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
Roger & Me (Michael Moore, 1989)
Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
To Sleep with Anger (Charles Burnett, 1990)
Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991)
Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)
Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1992)
Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambety, 1992)
Like Water for Chocolate (Alfonso Arau, 1992)
The Player (Robert Altman, 1992)
Tale of Winter (Eric Rohmer, 1992)
Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)
Menace II Society (Hughes Brothers, 1993)
The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)
Wallace and Gromit in the Wrong Trousers (Nick Park, 1993)
Red (Krysztov Kieslowski, 1994)
Strawberries and Chocolate (Gutiérrez Alea & Carlos Tabió, 1994)
Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996)
Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996)
The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)
A Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)
Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998)
Earth (Deepa Mehta, 1998)
All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1999)
Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano, 1999)
Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
City of God (Fernando Meirelles & Kátia Lund, 2002)
Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002)

My new thing is that I'm going to watch them all in chronological order over the next year, as a sort of guided tour through the history of film. That's roughly one film every two days. Yikes! But I can do it. Netflix is my friend. I just wonder how I'm going to fit in the rest of the Streepathon, Altmanathon, and all the contemporary stuff. Right now, of course, there's nothing good in theaters, but that'll change in a few months. Sigh.

But I guess there are worse things to complain about.

the one in which I bitch about bad DVD cover art

Yeah, you heard me. Bad DVD cover art REALLY pisses me off. Particularly when I think I'm ordering one edition and then somehow end up with another that is horrifically and senselessly uglier.

The thing is, apparently the powers that be just released this new Gandhi 2-disc set this February... even though there's been a BEAUTIFULLY designed, pristinely packaged set on the shelves for a while now. This new one coincides with the film's 25th anniversary, which I suppose is why they felt it appropriate to release a new one at all. But why why WHY did they go from this:


...to THIS:

Alright. Now, putting aside the discrepancy over just how many oscars the film won (the correct answer is 8), this new DVD art is inferior in every way. I mean, can you say LAZY DESIGN? Could they really not think of anything better than a generic big floating head, with uniform, disposable garbage in the background? And if they had to use a generic big floating head, couldn't they have gotten an image that was ACTUALLY Ben Kingsley!? This face is either not him at all, or heavily doctored. It smacks of photoshop tinkering. Not to mention that there was this lovely pristine quality and nice material used on the previous box (I've seen it up close and in person), and this one is just a generic DVD box with wraparound art. I'm SO pissed.

Aren't newer additions supposed to look nicer? Isn't that the whole point of new "anniversary" editions? This one may in fact have better special features (though the other wasn't lacking), but it sure is ugly. I just don't get how anyone could've approved this. It frustrates to no end.

I wish I could say the moral of this story is "don't buy any DVDs without seeing what you're getting" but everyone knows they're cheaper online. And sometimes it's hard to tell just what the deal is with the edition you're getting. Sigh.

P.S. I know Glenn can back me up on this. I realize not everyone gets all up in arms over bad cover art, but I know Glenn's on the same page. Right, Glenn? Right? I need validation...

I think the idea of Natalie Portman rapping all badass-like is really funny...

...and actually SEEING her do it?? Priceless.

I'm not even particularly big on her, but I could watch this all day.

omgSarahPolleyISUmaThurman!!!

Isn't it kind of eerie how similar they look? I would love to see them play sisters... or better yet, the same person.

So yeah, I realize the blog's kinda just been a forum for YouTube as of late... I've had neither the time nor the inclination to do much else. But I hope you all like videos. This one of Barack is choice. I had not seen this speech in its entirety, so I'm glad I caught it now. Expect more Obama love in the coming months. I heart him.

Because I haven't posted anything lately, and because it's so damn funny:

Because it's been awhile since I've posted any Jennifer Holliday: