“I find that in your 60s, everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again. And it’s imbued with a kind of leave-taking resonance, that it’s not going to be around very long, this world, so it begins to look poignant and fascinating.” – Martin Amis, Interview, “The Guardian” Sept. 4, 2012
“If people see enough of themselves in a leader, and that leader in themselves, a dearth of decorum, contempt for fact, a gelatinous command of policy—none of these will matter much to voters. A leader can float along on bombast as long as he speaks what feels true to the group.” – Gwynne Guilford in Quartz, way back on April 1, 2016. The whole essay is still worth reading.
“You really shouldn’t incarcerate people who are committing nonviolent behavioral crimes. … What they need is they need treatment so they go back into society, so their family survives, so they have a job. They don’t need to be put in prison where they learn how to be a criminal.” – Newt Gingrich, Washington Post interview, Dec. 20, 2016. Once again, the surprise is not so much the quote, it’s who said it.
I’m working on a list of my all-time favorite Hollywood movies (most of them), arranged chronologically. Here’s the first installment. This is not a list of the best movies. Rather, these are movies that I will watch again if I catch them on TV, even though I own most of them on DVD. There are plenty of good and even great movies that don’t meet that standard. Your list will undoubtedly be different.
1940-1949
Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles, 1941
The Maltese Falcon, dir. John Huston, 1941. Favorite quote: “Everybody has something to conceal.”
Sullivan’s Travels, dir. Preston Sturges, 1941
Casablanca, dir. Michael Curtiz, 1943. Favorite quote: “If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.”
Double Indemnity, dir. Billy Wilder, 1944
It’s a Wonderful Life, dir. Frank Capra, 1946. Favorite quote: “George: You know what the three most exciting sounds in the world are? Uncle Billy: Breakfast is served, lunch is served, dinner…”
Miracle on 34th Street, dir. George Seaton, 1947. Favorite quote: “There’s a lot of bad ‘isms’ floatin’ around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism.”
The Third Man, dir. Carol Reed, 1949. Favorite quote: “Do you suppose he was laughing at fools like us all the time?” – Graham Greene’s take on Kim Philby.
Traded in, because I never wanted to see them again:
The Debt – Not out-and-out terrible, but doesn’t deserve all the accolades.
L.A. Confidential – I know some people love it, but IMHO the best thing about it is the soundtrack, which I did not trade in.
1900 – I had fond memories of this Bertolucci film, but couldn’t sit through it when I tried again two years ago.
Prospero’s Books – I had to sit through this one to the end because I was the projectionist. Most of the audience (a college crowd) left long before the final reel. Recently (April 2016) I saw an interview with Peter Greenaway on RT, where he actually endorsed the description of his movies as “paintings with soundtracks.” Who wants to look at a painting for two hours?
Synecdoche, New York – Pressed the eject button after 20 minutes. Never looked back.
In invite your contributions to this fledgling academy of the overrated.
Futurist Zoltan Istvan: “People will follow the will and statistical might of machines,” he said, pointing out that people already outsource way-finding to GPS or the flying of planes to autopilot.
“Soon there just won’t be any reason to keep us around,” Istvan said. “Sure, humans can fix problems, but machines in a few years time will be able to fix those problems even better.
“Bankers will become dinosaurs.” – Reported in today’s Guardian
About 70 book and film reviews now available at this site – hamiltonbeck.wordpress.com
Have a look, explore, drop me a line.
“We’ve got most of the world against us at the moment. When we drag out our gunboats, bomb villages and kill a lot of women and children — a lot more than the terrorists kill — we turn the world against us. And the American people don’t care. They don’t give a damn. But those people whose job it is to look after the interests of the U.S. government abroad, they’ve got to care. They have to think of the consequences of everything we do. And they know the consequences of dragging out the gunboats are absolutely the wrong ones. In fact, these are the consequences the terrorists created acts of terrorism in order to provoke. That’s the purpose of terrorism, not to kill, maim or destroy, but to terrorize, to frighten, to anger, to provoke irrational responses. Terrorism gains more from the responses than it gains from the actions themselves.” – Miles Copeland, Jr., retired CIA, interview with Rolling Stone magazine, 1986. The whole interview is well worth reading.
“Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not ‘scientifically’ significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.” – Edward-Isaac Dovere, “How Clinton Lost Michigan – and Blew the Election” in Politico.
“I felt that in cyberspace, people would much rather be ‘right’ than related. In person, we could share opinions and come away influenced by others. Online, we became entrenched in our own perspectives. Face-to-face, we almost automatically acknowledge and validate each other, though this is a skill we develop in maturity. Online, there is no chance to develop this ability… I’m reminded of the Ubuntu proverb: ‘people become people through other people.’ By narrowing our experience of people to text and image, opinion and ‘likes’, we endanger our ability to fully become people. While there are exceptions, and there are substantive stories of online connections making a heartwarming difference, the social media experience provides a false sense of relationship.” – Ravi Chandra, a psychiatrist and writer in San Francisco, writing in the NY Daily News (March 28, 2015), on why he gave up Facebook
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