Tag: Persona

Favorite Films, One Letter at a Time

I rarely organize my collections alphabetically, at least not as the major organizational tool, since the letter the title starts with is usually less meaningful than the year it was made or the genre that it’s in. But there’s a meme going around film blogs (starting with Blog Cabins) to choose one favorite film that starts with each letter of the alphabet. Forcing you to pick something from each letter is generating some interesting results, so I thought I’d give it a try. (Other entries I’ve seen include: Only the Cinema, Film Doctor, The House Next Door, and Spoutblog.)

Shameless self-promotion – this task was made a lot easier since I recently completed a full list of all the films I’ve ever seen over at my archive site. Still working on the ancillary lists organized by year and rating, but the by title one is done.

AThe Adventures of Robin Hood (1938; Michael Curtiz & William Keighley)
BBand of Outsiders (1964; Jean-Luc Godard)
CCity of Lost Children (1995; Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
DThe Double Life of Veronique (1993; Krzysztof Kieslowski)
EElection (1999; Alexander Payne)
FThe Fountain (2006; Darren Aronofsky)
GGentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953; Howard Hawks)
HA Hard Day’s Night (1964; Richard Lester)
IIn a Lonely Place (1951; Nicholas Ray)
JJFK (1991; Oliver Stone)
KKey Largo (1948; John Huston)
LLock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998; Guy Ritchie)
MMulholland Drive (2001; David Lynch)
NThe Naked Kiss (1964; Samuel Fuller)
OO Brother Where Art Thou (2000; Joel & Ethan Coen)
PPersona (1966; Ingmar Bergman)
QThe Quiet Man (1952; John Ford)
RRear Window (1954; Alfred Hitchcock)
SSunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927; F.W. Murnau)
TThe Thin Man (1934; W.S. Van Dyke)
UThe Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964; Jacques Demy)
VVertigo (1958; Alfred Hitchcock)
WThe Women (1939; George Cukor)
XX-Men (2000; Bryan Singer)
YYoung Frankenstein (1974; Mel Brooks)
ZZodiac (2007; David Fincher)

Anyone else reading this, please feel free to post your own. Consider yourself tagged.

Class connections…

Two things I’m really grateful for at the moment.

1 – That I chose to do my short paper/panel assignment on Ellen Douglas’ Can’t Quit You Baby, because of all the books we’ve read so far in Southern Lit, it’s my favorite. Each one we read I like better than the previous one, which either means that I like the newest books the best (which is not usually true), that I’m very fickle (which is true), or that I’m getting better acclimated to the class and materials each week (which is probably true to some extent). Anyway, Can’t Quit You Baby has an awesome intrusive narratorial voice which makes me happy. I hope I can work it into my paper somehow. Or maybe write my long paper on this novel, too, and incorporate it (I haven’t even thought about the long paper yet).

2 – That I had the Harlem Renaissance class last semester, because the article we have to read and respond to in the paper/panel discussion is about the relationship between the white employer and the black employee who are the main characters in the book, and whether Douglas is co-opting African-American culture in the form of the black woman order to “save” the white woman from her detached and superficial life. That idea came up a lot in the Harlem Renaissance class, especially relating to music and the ways that white music producers took over jazz and blues and smoothed them out to sell them to white audiences (often with white performers). I haven’t finished reading the article yet, but I already feel like I have a grounding in the point of view the author is coming from, which is encouraging.

I don’t know what I’m going to write yet, or what tack I want to take in the short paper, but at least I won’t be completely lost, like I would’ve been if I’d had to write about some of the earlier books.

I’m also grateful for having acquired the other two Rilo Kiley albums I was missing (three if you include their first self-produced EP), but I think I’ve already done a fine job convincing everyone that I’m obsessed with Rilo Kiley at the moment. I wonder if that will happen every time I got to a concert, or if as I get more used to going to concerts the desire to listen to the band 24/7 for the next several days will go away. Meanwhile, I did find out that Inara George, the singer in The Bird and the Bee, also has a solo album called Rise Up (actually recorded before the band was formed), and based on the 30-second previews at the Amazon.com store, it’s just as good as The Bird and the Bee’s stuff. I wish there were a wishlist for the Amazon.com MP3 store. This is a problem with iTunes as well…I mean, just because the music is digital and I could have it right now doesn’t mean I have the money right now, and I might like to have a list of MP3s to remember to buy in the future when I have money. Just a thought.

EDIT: Third thing I’m thankful for in relation to the paper–there’s a whole Ingmar Bergman connection I think I can make, which will be AWESOME, because nobody else will do that for sure. The main character actually goes to see Persona at one point, there are some similarities between the Persona characters and the Can’t Quit You Baby characters, and none of the critics so far have even mentioned it or tried to examine what a Bergman-Douglas connection might mean! Plus I may even be able to bring in the Spiritual trilogy and its spider-god. It would help if I knew what the spider-god meant, but maybe I can read up on Bergman some, too, which would be good for me anyway.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén