The Long-Sweet Goodbye List

Here it am, here it am, it am as big as a 14 pound ham....


After the Fox (1966, Peter Sellers)
The American Friend (1977, Wim Wenders)
Angel Face (1954, Otto Preminger)
Angels in America (2003, Mike Nichols)
Animal Farm (1954)
The 'Apu' Trilogy (1950's, Satyajit Ray)
Atlantic City (1981, Louis Malle)
At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964)
Australia (2008, Baz Luhrmann)

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973, Robert De Niro)
Becket (1964, Peter O'Toole)
La Belle Noiseuse (1991, Jacques Rivette)
Beyond the Clouds (1995, Antonioni/Wenders)
Il Bidone (1955, Federico Fellini)
The Big Chill (1983, Lawrence Kasdan)
The Birth of a Nation (1915, DW Griffith)
Blue Sunshine
Boccaccio 70
The Boss of it All (2006, Lars von Trier)
The Bride Wore Black (1969, Francois Truffaut)
Bronco Billy (1980, Clint Eastwood)

Cape Fear (1962, Robert Mitchum)
Cat Chaser (1989, Abel Ferrara)
Cat O' Nine Tails (1971, Dario Argento)
The Celebration (1998, Tomas Vinterberg)
City Heat (1984, Clint Eastwood)
City on Fire (1987, Chow-Yun Fat)
City of Women (1980, Federico Fellini)
Cold Heaven (1991, Nicolas Roeg)
Cradle Will Rock (1999, Tim Robbins)
Crime and Punishment (2002, I think)
Crime and Punishment (1934, Peter Lorre)

Dark City (1998,, Alex Proyas, one of my biggest shames)
A Day at the Races (Marx bros)
Deadline USA (Richard Brooks)
Dead Set (TV series)
Death Wish II (1982, Charles Bronson)
Dog Soldiers (2002, Neil Marshall)
Dominion: Exorcist Prequel (2005, Paul Schrader)
The Duchess of Langeais (2008, Jacques Rivette)
Dudes (1987, Penelope Spheeris)
Dynamite Chicken (1972)

Ewoks: The Haunted Village (Seriously, an animtated fucking Ewoks movie... Win)

Fast Company (1979, David Cronenberg)
Faust (1926, FW Murnau)
Fellini Intervista (1987)
Fellini Roma (1972)
From Here to Eternity (1953, Fred Zinneman)
Fort Apache in the Bronx (1981, Paul Newman)
The Fortune (1975, Mike Nichols)
48 Hours (1982, Walter Hill)
Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931 - I may have seen this, or just clips, I don't remember)
Frequency (2000, Dennis Quaid)

El Galodo Oro
Game of Death (1978, Bruce Lee)
Il Generale Della Rovere (1961, Roberto Rossellini)
The Gladiators (1969, Peter Watkins)
The Gold of Naples (1954, Vittorio de Sica)
La Grande Bouffe (1973? I hear this is one of dem sick-as-hell movies)
Graveyard of Honor (1975 - if it's the Takashi Miike version I've seen it)
The Green Room (1978, Francois Truffaut)
Il Grido (1957, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Hard Rock Zombies
Harlem Nights (1989, Eddie Murphy)
Harvey (1950, James Stewart)
Heart of Darkness (1994, John Malkovich)
Hell and High Water (1954, Samuel Fuller)
Hell Comes to Frogtown (1989)
High Noon (1952, Gary Cooper)
The Hot Spot (1990, Dennis Hopper)

Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk)
In the Electric Mist (Tommy Lee Jones)
Intolerance (1916, DW Griffith)
Invasion of the Mindbenders

Jailhouse Rock (1957, Elvis Presley)
Joint Security Area (2000, Chanwook Park)
Julius Caesar (1953, Marlon Brando)

Kafka (1991, Steven Soderbergh)
King of Kings (1961, Nicholas Ray)
Knock on Any Door (1949, Nicholas Ray)
Kung-fu Killer

Leaves from Satan's Book (Carl Th. Dreyer)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948, Max Ophuls)
The Lodger (1944)
Loves of a Blonde (1965, Milos Forman)

Madame Bovary (1932, Jean Renoir)
The Meanest Men of the West (1967, Samuel Fuller - though he disowned it)
The Men (1950, Joseph Mankiewicz)
Miracle in Milan (1952, Vittorio de Sica)
Mister Roberts (1955, John Ford)
Mouchette (1967, Robert Bresson)
Mr. Klein (1974, Alain Delon)

The Naked Man (1998, Ethan Coen)
Needful Things (1993, Max von Sydow)
New York Documentary # 1-4 (1999, Ric Burns)
Nightwatch (1998 - or 1990, I'm not sure)

One Wonderful Sunday (1947, Akira Kurosawa)
Orphans on the Storm (1921, DW Griffith)

Psychomania

Ragtime (1981, James Cagney)
Roadracers (1994, Robert Rodriguez)

Sanshiro Sugata II (1945, Akira Kurosawa)
Sergeant York (1941, Howard Hawks)
La Silence de la Mer (1947, Jean-Pierre Melville)
The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)
Spies (Fritz Lang)
The Spider's Strategem (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci)
Stromboli (1949, Roberto Rossellini)
Suddenly! (1955)
Susana (Luis Bunuel)

This is England (2008)
2010: The Year We Made Contact (1984)

Va Savoir (2001, Jacques Rivette)
Vagabond (1985, Agnes Varda)
The Velvet Underground Live (1993)

Waterworld (yeah, I KNOW!)
The Witches (1990, Nicolas Roeg)

The Yakuza (Sidney Pollack)
You're a Big Bow Now (1966, Francis Coppola)

Zelly & Me (1987, Isabella Rossellini)

Presenting - A Long, Sweet Goodbye to My Room's VHS

First off, you're probably asking: what is this V.H.S. you speak of?  Is it animal, mineral or vegetable?  Can you download it and watch it on the screen on your phone, which by the way is smaller than a man's genitals after being in a freezing pool?  Or is it some new fragrance that got rejected by Flavor Flav? 

Nope.  VHS is this bad boy right here:

Yep.  See kids, back in my day we had these er things called V-C-R's.  And here's one of em:

And on these thingamabobs you simply popped in the VHS tape into the slot right in the middle and either pressed play (thast is if it had the little black doo-hickey on that spot on the edge that said 'This is most likely originally a blank tape with other stuff now on it), or played automatically.  You could fast-forward, rewind, or record from your TV or if you were a little devious from another VCR, or later on from DVD (yeah, I did that, waddaya want?) 

Now, where is this history lesson going?  I'm glad you asked (and if you didn't, well, hell with it, I'll go on with this spiel anyway, gotta amuse myself somehow and the re-run of Colbert Report is long over).

I still have VCRs, and a plethora of VHS tapes.  Some of them I've sold, a hand-ful I've just thrown out, but gorram it, I have been super-stubborn when it's come to getting rid of them all.  And it's not out of some super-nostalgic sense like 'Oh, man, like, vinyl is SO much better than CD players or mp3 downloads.  I get it, and I've gotten it for a while - DVDs, more-so blu-rays, and now video-on-demand (which I lump Netflix streaming and other services) and, of course, DVR have become superior.  I believe that progression in technology is good, or at least inevitable.

At the same time, I say, if it ain't totally broke, don't chuck the fucker.  So I've kept my VCRs (the ones that still work anyway) and my VHS tapes, some going back to the 80's, others that I've taped over the years.  You can read more about my escapades in that era HERE.  But this is about something else.

I was in my room reading a book, and took a brief break and looked around my room at the book-cases - one by my desk, the other by my bed - and realized something looking at the various titles: Holy Mother of Dog, there are SO MANY movies and things that I've never gone around to.  And not just the semi-obscure Spanish horror movie or that forgotten biker flick that I set my VCR to record at 3 AM on a Saturday morning.  I mean big, epic pieces of film history, studio films of the 50's and 60's that are regarded as classics, and works by the masters.  When it comes to Film-Buffery (and damn if I didn't almost type 'Film-Buggery' instead), the only thing that is more astonishing to me than how many films I've seen over the years is how many I've yet to. 

But here at the Cinetarium, I plan to correct this, and use once again Kevin Murphy of MST3K and Rifftrax to finally get the ball rolling on a Super-Mega Film Challenge.  And like Murphy and his one-year trek to see a movie a day, I plan to do something not quite the same but similar in stamina.

All counted - and I'll post the list in the next post entry for all to see - I have about 120 films, give or take a couple, that are in my bedroom I have either never seen or started to watch and got about 1/2 hour in and didn't finish, either cause I was too tired or the movie just didn't appeal to me at that time in my life (and that's just there, not counting the living room or basement, and frankly... that's another movie challenge altogether).  My plan, which I've decided to keep loose as to not have a repeat of the Netflix-a-thon debacle last month, is to watch these movies over the course of this year.  I've already lost about six weeks of the year, but that's fine.  Still plenty of time to go.

And here I go on this quest - so many movies (and a couple of TV shows/specials that I have on one cassette btw), so much time.  Hope you enjoy as I give the tapes in my bedroom this long, sweet (or perhaps bittersweet) goodbye, and get some cinema-edumacation along the way, from silents by DW Griffith to the New York documentary series, and beyond.