Dear dudes who complied Time's 100 Best Movies List,

Man, do I have a bone to pick with you. I understand that narrowing down all of cinema to an essential list of the top 100 films is tricky business. In all honesty, I think I'd have some difficulty making a top 100 list just out of movies I personally own. 100 slots is really not that many, when it comes down to it, and it's likely a thankless task the two of you were saddled with.

Still, though, you botched it. And not just botched it, but botched it in some really irritating ways. Just to set the record straight and to give you a sense of where I'm coming from, I'll now lay out my top five movies of all time ever ever (no easy feat):

1) Wages of Fear
2) Rashomon
3) The Duellists
4) Lawrence of Arabia
5) The Seventh Seal

Let's discuss that list for a second. Three out of the five are in black and white. Only two are in English. Not a single one was made during my lifetime. That is a list that could only come from some practically housebound film geek who didn't get out enough as an adolescent loner (which is a shamefully accurate description of me). And not just any loner film geek, but a film geek of the rather art-snobby pretentious variety. A hipster-style film geek who has never seen American Pie. In short, one of your own. Yet, you still managed to piss me off.

Reason 1
Would you like to know how many of those five films up there you included on your list-to-end-all-lists? Huh?

One.

You gave Lawrence some props, and I thank you for that. And, hey, The Duellists is a personal favorite of mine but I understand that there are bigger, better movies out there, so I can let that one slide. Wages of Fear is a woeful oversight on your parts, but hell, it's kind of been a woeful oversight on everyone and their mother's parts since it was made. I honestly don't understand why it's never been more widely viewed than it is, but it isn't, and though I don't approve I can't say its omission surprised me.

But Rashomon? What the hell is wrong with you? It's goddamn Rashomon! It's a landmark in so many, many ways! The direct shots of the sun through the trees! The multiple perspectives and retelling and non-traditional narrative structure that was so awesomely, shockingly new at the time that it's been done and re-done now into cliche! Mifune while he was still young and untamed and really, freakishly hot! I mean, come on.

The same goes for The Seventh Seal. It's the ultimate Bergman, the Bergman to end all Bergmans. For folks not so into slow-moving subtitled films it has been and always will be synonymous with bizarre art house movies. The characterization of Death is so inescapable and prevalent that people who have never seen the movie and have no intention of ever seeing the movie can recognize it instantly when it's being referenced. And on top of that, it really is one of Bergman's most watchable films. I'm totally not kidding -- it's got sex and Death and death and plagues and Max von Sydow's bony-ass face and a rather wicked sense of humor all wrapped up in one fairly straightforward tale. How could you make any film list and not have it float to the top? Just...wow.

Reason 2
Here's where I try to give you some benefit of the doubt and end up failing. You ready? Ok, here we go. So you didn't include Rashomon, but you did include to others by Kurasawa: Ikiru and Yojimbo. Now, being a huge Kurasawa fan (and I mean, like, rabid - I have twelve of his films, no exaggeration), I was all like, yeah! Ikiru! Yojimbo! Woot!

And then, I was like...Seven Samurai much? Because, let's face it, as awesome as Ikiru and Yojimbo are, Seven Samurai is the Kurasawa film to end all Kurasawa films. And if there were slots enough for two Kurasawas, we go right back to square one with Rashomon.

Here's the problem I have with your Kurasawa choices in particular, above and beyond the fact that in his wide and varied ouvre (see? playing your game here with the fancy, pretentious film-geek lingo, fellas) these two films are really second-stringers. They are fabulous films -- I am not undercutting them in any way, and in fact I was all sorts of excited to see Ikiru in particular get some love because I think it's horribly overlooked more often than not -- but they are not the ones he is most famous for. And he's not famous for them because they weren't massive game changers and sprawling opuses (opii? who knows.) like a couple of other films of his I have previously mentioned.

We run into a similar issue with Bergman. There are two Bergmans on the list: Persona (which I am 100% on board with) and Smiles of a Summer Night. Dudes. Smiles of a Summer Night, really? Honest and true, you're going with that over our ever-present chess-playing buddy Death and co.? That's just so wrong. Smiles of a Summer Night is like Bergman's version of a Lifetime movie. I've seen it, I know all about his little foray into comedy and sexcapades. And you know what? He should've stuck to the dour, depressing descents into madness like he was good at. I...just, well, I just don't even think it's that good a movie, frankly. And with that catalogue to choose from, I mean, jesus. If you really have a beef with The Seventh Seal, at least give that other spot to the Through a Glass Darkly/Winter Light/The Silence trilogy (hey, you collapsed Godfather I and II and the LOTR, you can do that here) or Cries and Whispers or Wild Strawberries. Those are Bergman movies. Real Bergman movies.

There are other examples of this weirdness, too. For Kurbrick, you nailed it with Dr. Strangelove, but then passed over 2001: A Space Odyssey and Full Metal Jacket for Barry Lyndon. Again, it's not like I don't like Barry Lyndon, but it's just not up there with the other two. Or even up there with A Clockwork Orange, which while more recognizable and famous, is probably not as good or important a film as the others. You went with Chungking Express over other Wong Kar-Wai's, and while it's a lovely and charming little thing, it begs the question of whether you've actually seen In the Mood for Love. And the nail in the coffin: Purple Rose of Cairo over Annie Hall. how do you sleep at night? Apparently not with Annie Hall, and so I guess it sucks to be you.

You see a pattern developing here? I do. This is like a weird, paternalistic way of peppering the list with 'forgotten gems.' Movies that the rest of us really should have seen that just never get their due. Or something. Because anyone who goes with Smiles of a Summer Night over anything else Bergman did is just throwing it around to prove they can. It's like when hipsters say they only like the bands no one else has ever heard of. It's just showing off for the hell of it. And I find it rather condescending, frankly, because I can't believe you're actually serious about some of those choices, considering.

Reason 3
Like I said before, 100 spots is really not that many. How then, dare I ask, did the 1986 The Fly make it in there? No room for anything by the Marx brothers (the goddamn Marx brothers!) or anything by Sergei Eisenstein or apparently by any black people at all (not a single Spike Lee movie? Really?), but, sure, Jeff Godblum with a fly's head get's a pass.

That's just not right. So not right. I can't be alone in thinking this.

Now, I can see that you got a little playful, there, with your listings. I appreciate the sentiment behind Drunken Master II, although it wouldn't have been the kung fu movie I'd have chosen (hell, give it to the original Drunken Master if you've got to give it to Jackie Chan, otherwise there's always Enter the Dragon), and I think it's impressive that you've got I believe not one, but two Bollywoods in there. I honestly do. I can even kinda sorta see where you were going with The Fly -- something along the lines of hey! let's include some guilty pleasure-ish horror flick!

To which I respond: flies over zombies? Because I think anything by George A. Romero can do the double duty of genuinely influential and important historical film/awesomely gory guilty pleasure, plus the added benefit of the Living Dead. Ok, maybe you've got a shared zombie phobia or something. Whatever. How about Rosemary's Baby, then? There's just so much genuinely right and deliciously wrong with that one. How is The Fly going to top that?

But when it comes down to it, I don't even know if I can support you on this, either. Because if my back was against the wall, there's no way I could look at myself in the mirror if I took anything I just mentioned over Dr. Zhivago. Which you left off your list. In favor of The fucking Fly.

Conclusion
Your list fails. Not just because you left off any number of my all-time favorites, but because it's full of purposely irreverent inclusions that seem to serve no purpose but to make it look like you're trying to tell us that a) you've seen way more movies than anyone else and the obvious choices are just too obvious for you and b) you're really not a movie snob - honest! You like all kinds! To which I say, that's just obnoxious. Give the greats the credit they're due, man.

-- a fellow film fan

PS -- all ranting aside, I do agree with you on leaving Gone With the Wind off the list. That is just the most overrated piece of schlock ever.

The Ever Elusive Short Story

So, I think I may have finally written a short story. I think so. It's a bit touch and go and I can't really say for sure until I get some outside confirmation on this, but all signs point to yes.

It's part of a set of stories dealing with a bunch of mixed-race kids in the City of Mages that takes place about 80-90 years after the end of the Jarthen books. We might end up throwing them up on the Jarthen blog, actually, since there not really any Jarthen-related spoilers in them. Anyway, these stories, I don't really know what they count as. They're pretty squarely in the short story range in terms of length (only one gets past 10,000 words, which for me, is a rather big change of pace), but in terms of structure things get a bit murkier.

See, the same loose cast of characters shows up in story after story, so the characterization gets diffused and spread across them. And there are three, maybe four storylines that get picked up and developed across a few of the stories. I think there really is just the one section (incidentally, the last section) that could be counted as a standalone. There's a little bit of characterization that's borrowed from the other sections, but it's minor and you probably can read it in isolation and still catch everything just fine. And the plot of it is totally unintegrated with the rest of them. The themes are congruent, sure, but nothing that happens in it happens because of what's in the other stories. I...I think it's a real, honest-to-god short story.

But, having said that, I have no idea what the rest of them are. To call them short stories, when part of the point of that form of fiction is precisely to present a self-contained plot and develop characters within that limitations of that length, feels a little like cheating. But I really don't think it's a novel, either. There's no overarching, unified plot, just a few threads that intersect and reveal themselves over the course of a few sections. But, it's not like the stories build on each other in a clear, progressive way.

I don't know what the hell it is. It's 10 thingies plus a real live short story.¹

I still kind of like it, though. I still think, despite it's rather schizoid and somewhat unclassifiable form it's readable and interesting. I'm biased, though. I'm not one of those people who doesn't like the stuff they write, I tend to spend a few hours hear and there rereading sections of the books I've finished just for the sake of reading them. Which is maybe a little embarassing to admit. But still, point is, I think in it's weird flipper-baby (Dani, if you're reading this, that's a shout out for you) state it still kind of works.

But that one story, it works all by itself. I'm so proud.
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¹Ok, I'm also rather proud that it ended up with 11 sections instead of 10 or 12. I have a weird, slightly OCD thing with numbers, especially multiples of 5. But I also like multiples of 12, if multiples of 5 are unavailable for whatever reason. Like, I'll buy extra things in stores just because it feels wrong to only buy 3 items. Because 5 is just so awesome. So, I'd specifically planned this for 10 sections, but one of the characters kind of took on a life of his own and got his own section, so I revamped it to 12 sections, but then this other character totally skipped out of town on me and couldn't really get worked in and I just...settled on 11. It's a prime number, and usually me and prime numbers are like oil and water. But I'm alright with this. I think it's a good sign.

I swear it's the weirdest and most OCD tick I have. Well, that and compulsively writing things in my planner (this post is in my planner, for instance). Other than that, I've got a clean slate.

Random and very scattered update

1) I have knitted objects to blog about again! 1 and 1/2 pairs of socks, actually, and the one pair has been done for awhile. I just need to get around to taking pictures of them.

2) I saw the Doves in concert last week. I actually bought the tickets the day the advanced sales were available, a good while before Kingdom of Rust was actually released just on faith. Because they may be my favorite band. They're at least in the top five, but I think they may be number 1. There were fantastic, just buckets of awesome, and played a good wide sampling of stuff from all of their albums, which was nice. And the tickets were ridiculously cheap -- $20! $20 bucks and I was right up to the edge of the stage! What you have to understand is that these dudes are huge in England, like with number one albums and such, and here no one but me and a handful of hipsters (of which, I grudgingly accept, I am one) pay any attention to them. Tell you what, I was glad to be American that night.

The opening act was a band called Wild Light, which I think I would have enjoyed more if I'd just listened to them instead of having to watch them, too. See, thing is that they (well, three out fo the four of them, the drummer stayed put) kept randomly switching instruments between songs - practically every song - and I just wanted to yell out that they should maybe have planned their set better and each members' facility with bass, guitar, and keyboards was growing less impressive with each handoff. Also, they kept turning around when they played and showing their skinny asses shoved into ludicrously tight pants for no discernible reason. Which was distracting. I kept worrying that they would get blood clots.

But the best part is that one of the multi-insturmentalists bore a rather striking resemblance to Trent Lane from Daria. Good show, that.

I also kind of think the dude behind him looks like Jonny Lee Miller when he was all blond in Trainspotting.

3) I'm growing rather improbably attached to crayons. One of the characters (who is a sneaky surprise character that sort of popped up out of nowhere and is steadily taking things over. There's a looming blog post in that phenomenon, I think, so stayed tuned. If you're so inclined.) from the 2nd generation City of Mages thing I'm working on is a painter, and I have felt compelled to replicate what I imagine his style of portraits of the other characters would be if he existed. I'm not sure why, it's not like I'm terribly artistic. In any case, I have no paint, so I've settled for a somewhat strange mixture of a black sharpie and crayons. You can do a surprising amount with crayons if you get creative - lots of shading and using the direction of the strokes to heighten shapes and simulate thre dimensionality. I never knew that way back in the day. One thing though, all the colors are so damn bright that everything I do looks a little too pop art-ish. Because apparently children hate muted, rich dark colors and they don't make a box of crayons for adults who like to channel fictional elvish painters. Crazy world.