K-PAX

Today we exercized our Sunday morning ritual of a movie and the farmers' market at jack London Square. At my request, we saw K-PAX. I personally love Don Juan DeMarco (1995) as my choice for cheesy patient-helps-the-shrink film. This story has been made into a film a dozen times before, so it would be pretty difficult to come across as great, but it is intruiging, and the whole light-play theme, though heavy handed at times, is visually interesting. I give it rating

Waking Life

In the evening we went to see Waking Life with Devon (of jiffysquid.com). I had trouble with some of the shaky camera scenes, but the film was engaging and took my write back to all my college film classes. If you can find it playing near you, and you like structuralism, semiotics, post-modernism, or just thinking about importance dreams play in our perception of reality, see it rating
 

 
I added three new cards to the ideabox today, and we selected three also.
 

 
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Sunday
4 November 2001
 

10 50 pm pst [ movies ]

Karina, a friend of mine who was a film major with me at Berkeley, said to me recently, "One thing that people don't seem to get is that I would be happy watching movies all day long." I get it. I think all of the film majors did.

So it should come as no surprise that Devon, another friend who was a film major with me Berkeley, and I sat on the phone four hours the other day discussing films. I went over his list of 4.5 & 5 star movies and then he went over my list of brilliant films. Of Devons list, I have not seen:

  • Seven Samurai (1954)

  • Nights of Cabiria (1957)

  • Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

  • Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

  • The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

  • Blowup (1966)

  • Bonnie & Clyde (1967)

  • Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

  • The Wild Bunch (1969)

  • Medium Cool (1969)

  • The Conformist (1971)

  • The Last Picture Show (1971)

  • Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)

  • The Long Goodbye (1973)

  • Badlands (1973)

  • The Conversation (1974)

  • All the President's Men (1976)

  • Breaking Away (1979)

  • Manhattan (1979)

  • Excalibur (1981)

  • Sans Soleil (1982)

  • Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

  • Platoon (1986)

  • House of Games (1987)

  • Bull Durham (1988)

  • The Thin Blue Line (1988)

  • Roger & Me (1989)

  • Miller's Crossing (1990)

  • J.F.K. (1991)

  • Unforgiven (1992)

  • Safe (1995)

  • Buffalo 66 (1998)

  • Saving Private Ryan (1998)

  • The Thin Red Line (1998)

Of that list, I have no intesion of seeing any of the war movies. War films and scary movies are the two genres I least enjoy.

But I'm pretty determined to work my way through the rest. Devon and I have agreed to swap movies and continue giving each other recomendations. I rented The Parallax View and he gave me Drugstore Cowboy and Goodfellas. I gave him True Stories and Kind hearts and Coronets. I am excited about being exposed to some more great films.

In other news, I made a purple potato and leek gratin for dinner which was oh so scrumptious.

I can't tell if the photos look better with the flash on or without...