This is the fifth in a series of posts about my 102 Best Movies:
41. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) The best comedy ever made. My children used to have passages from this movie memorized. This dialog was their favorite:
Benjy Benjamin: Now look! We’ve figured it seventeen different ways, and each time we figured it, it was no good, because no matter how we figured it, somebody don’t like the way we figured it! So now, there’s only one way to figure it. And that is, every man, including the old bag, for himself!
Ding Bell: So good luck and may the best man win!
Benjy Benjamin: Except you lady, may you just drop dead!
42. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) This one is my children’s least favorite movie and my husband’s favorite. I think he identifies with Jimmy Stewart, the man who never got to live his dreams.
43. The King and I (1956) I really enjoy all the Siamese children and the wives and, of course, Yul Brynner as the king of Thailand. “Etcetera, Etcetera, Etcetera. . .”
44. Life Is Beautiful (1997 La vita e bella) This movie is strange. It’s in Italian with subtitles; it’s about a Jewish man and his son and his wife being placed into a concentration camp during World War II. However, it’s sort of a comedy or maybe a tragicomedy. ANyway, it’s very moving and bittersweet.
45. Lilies of the Field (1963) I love the nuns and Sidney Poitier as their hired man. This is a wonderful movie about faith and determination and the meeting of three cultures—Black American, German Catholic, and Mexican American. They all manage to somehow, by the grace of God, build something wonderful in the middle of the desert.
46. The Lion in Winter (1968) This one is a solid historical drama, and I like Katherine Hepburn.
47. Little Women (1994) A good modern version of Louisa May Alcott’s classic story. There’s an older version with Hepburn as Jo, but I like this one even if it is ever so slightly feminist.
48. The Longest Day (1962) Hollywood’s version of D-Day. Although it’s a little bit dated, this movie presents a pretty good picture of what happened to at least some soldiers on D-Day. Unlike Saving Private Ryan, which I thought was pointless, The Longest Day doesn’t try to be profound. It’s just your garden variety Hollywood epic with lots of big name stars and memorable little vignetttes of things that actually happened on D-Day.
49. The Magnificent Seven (1960) We just watched this one about a week ago, and I thought it was great. The offspring were not impressed. I thought Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner were both excellent even though I learned in watching the special features on the DVD that McQueen kept trying to steal scenes because he thought he should have been THE STAR. The funny thing was, after being told, I could see McQueen trying to take over scene after scene. This is the story of a Mexican village that hires seven gunslingers to teach them to defend their village from the local desperado. It’s one of the few westerns on this list, and I told the children that it was an “existential western.” It’s based on a Japanese movie,The Seven Samurai.
50. The Maltese Falcon (1941) Detective Sam Spade, another existential hero, gets involved in the search for a valuable statue. Spade has his own code of conduct and his own way of dealing with whatever life dishes out. Humphrey Bogart is the quintessential tough guy detective.
Archive | March 2004
Gladiator
Eldest Son, Second Daughter, and I watched the movie Gladiator tonight. It wasn’t too bad even though it was rated R. Very bloody, of course. And there was an incest theme that my children thought was “gross.” The main character, Maximus, was somewhat heroic, motivated by love of family and by desire for revenge–in about equal parts I would say. The bad guys were really bad, and the good guys were mostly good. Maximus believed that he would rejoin his family after death in Elysium, but that belief had no basis that I could see. His “faith” reminded me of that of most secular Americans. “God loves everybody, and so everybody except for Hitler and Osama Bin Laden will probably make it to heaven where we’ll all be happy forever.” I wouldn’t add this one to my list of 100 Best Movies, but as I said at the beginning it was not bad. (By the way, it’s rated R for graphic violence, not for sex or language.) Braveheart was better.
April is the cruelest month?
Here’s another spring poem, this one by A.E. Houseman whose birthday is also today.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
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Robert Frost
Today is the birthday of one of my favorite poets, Robert Frost. I was reading some of his poems here, and I came across this one:
A Prayer in Spring
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
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Teaching Preschoolers
I found this prayer in an article by Chris Schlect at Credenda Agenda while blog browsing tonight. I think I’ll teach Z (2 years) and Bee (5 years) this prayer:
Heavenly Father,
You are good,
and holy,
and righteous,
and just.
We are sinful
because of Adam
and because
of what we have done.
Thank you for Jesus,
who gave to us
His righteousness
and took from us
our sins.
Thank you for the saints,
for baptism,
for the bread and the cup,
and for all good things.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen.
Lady Anne Fanshawe (b.1625)
I looked up Lady Anne Fanshawe since she was in my birthday book for today and found that she was married to a royalist diplomat, lived during the Restoration (Charles II), and had fourteen children. She wrote a memoir which was published a century or two after her death. I tried to read some of the memoir online, however, I’m fairly sure that books are going to be around for a long time. Reading a blog or a column online is one thing, but trying to read a book online is miserable. I’m not sure why. I didn’t even make it through the introduction. Give me a paperback (or a hardback) that I can take with me where ever I go. I think I’ll go to bed and read P.G. Wodehouse. I’ll wait for Lady Fanshawe’s memoir to come out in paperback.
The Modern Day Secretum
(This was written by Eldest Daughter for a college class–based loosely on parts of Petrarch’s Secretum.)
Dear Diary, Monday
I?ve been really depressed for a while now, so today I decided to go see a shrink. Normally I think that psychologists make people worse than they are in the first place, but I’m kind of desperate. I mean, I’ve been miserable for quite a while, and I don’t seem to be getting better, despite my efforts to get myself out of this rut. So this morning I picked up the phone book, flipped to the P’s, and picked a name at random– Dr. Vera Veritas. I dialed the number and set up an appointment for tomorrow afternoon at three. I don’t have much hope for the interview, but we’ll see how it goes.
Yours,
Frankie
Dear Diary, Tuesday
When I got to her office, Dr. Veritas showed me into a small room, and asked me to wait for a few minutes. When she came back, she brought an old man with her, introduced him to me as St. Augustine, and explained that he was better qualified to talk me through my problems. This was clearly some kind of joke, but I decided to suspend my disbelief and go along with it. This was our dialogue:
Augustine: What seems to be the problem?
Frankie: Well, you know, I’m depressed.
A: Not nearly depressed enough.
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William Morris and FlyLady
William Morris (born March 24, 1834) was a prominent and vocal socialist in his day, and I suspect FlyLady of psychobabble tendencies, but they have something in common.
FlyLady says, “If you don’t use it and it doesn’t make you smile, fling it!”
Morris said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Same sentiment, good advice even from a socialist.
Morris was multi-faceted–interested in textile designs, stained glass, poetry, crafts, furniture design, and home decoration in general.
Parody of nursery rhymes
After wishing yesterday that I could write a decent nursery rhyme, full of sound and fury signifying something, I find out that good old G.K. Chesterton did. He wrote parodies of nursery rhymes. Oh, well, I already knew that I wasn’t in the same class with Chesterton. And Eldest Daughter tells me that she’s going to write a paper for her Great Texts class in which Augustine “psychoanalyzes” a modern-day seeker after self-esteem. Apparently, according to same daughter, Petrarch managed to call Augustine back from the dead and have him spout Petrarch’s ideas about death–which seem rather morbid to me when I hear them from Eldest Daughter third hand–or is it fourth hand? Anyway, the question is: why can’t I be creative like Petrarch and G.K. Chesterton and P. G. Wodehouse and Eldest Daughter? Is it because I go by Sherry instead of S.D.?
Randolph Caldecott and Sing a Song for Sixpence
This illustration is from English illustrator Randolph Caldecott for whom the Caldecott Medal for Illustrators is named. His birthday is today. The Caldecott Society in England has this information about the nursery rhyme on its website:
When Randolph Caldecott produced this book, the Nursery Rhyme on which it was based seemed to be just a children’s song. But, only 60 years previously, when the rhyme about “four and twenty black birds” first appeared, it was full of political significance, based on the “Cato Street Conspiracy” (1820) in which 24 men (one of whom was black) plotted to murder the entire Cabinet at dinner one night. When they were discovered, many of them began to tell about the others in the hope of saving their own lives – hence “the birds began to sing”.
I wish I could make up a seemingly innocent poem full of political significance.