Archives for June 16, 2005

I won’t be around today. Nothing dire, I just have work to do elsewhere. I’ll see you again on Friday. While I’m gone, visit “Sites to See” and explore the blogosphere!

I’ve been tagged with the film meme by such stuff:

1. Total number of films I own on DVD and video: About 200.

2. Last film I bought: The Red Shoes. (I know, you can’t believe I didn’t already own it, but I only just saw it for the first time
last year.)

3. Last film I watched: Henry Bromell’s Panic, with William H. Macy, Donald Sutherland, and Neve Campbell, a beautiful and alarming neonoir film about a midlife crisis. It sank without trace on its theatrical release five years ago, and shouldn’t have.

4. Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me (in no particular order):

– Brad Anderson’s Next Stop Wonderland

– Roman Polanski’s Chinatown

– Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game

– Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me

– Steve Kloves’ The Fabulous Baker Boys

5. If you could be any character portrayed in a movie, who would it be? Dr. Ben Stone, the title character in Doc Hollywood, a sweet little film that is one of my not-so-guilty pleasures.

You’re it, Girl.

Nobody can take a hint.

“He’d been thinking about late middle age, the years which a generous God and good health now offered. They could be fruitful years before death knocked, or a sterile barren delay before the cold. It all depended on how you handled them. It was absurd, no doubt, to pretend to be young: after thirty years of desk work it would be ludicrous to start waving guns. Charles Russell didn’t intend to. What he intended was a calculated avoidance, the avoidance of too much discipline and of over-rigid habits. At sixty one wasn’t elastic still, one had one’s little drills for things and was fully entitled to do so. They made life simpler, they spun out leisure, but what was very dangerous was when the drill became its own reward, not the muddle avoided, the moment saved, but the deadly satisfaction of having completed some trifle efficiently. If that was the trap of old age, its threshold, then Russell had seen it and wouldn’t step over.”

William Haggard, The Hardliners