Midlife Musings

Those That Didn't Make The Cut

In a follow up to my post on the 40 Before 40 Movie list, here are the films that didn't make the cut. All worthy movies that I will try and watch at some point.

The One Film Per Director Rule

[The Eclipse] - Antonioni
[La Notte] - Antonioni
[The Red Desert] - Antonioni
[The Blow Up] - Antonioni
[Fanny and Alexander] - Bergman
[Wild Strawberries] - Bergman
[Persona] - Bergman
[Through A Glass Darkly] - Bergman
[Winter Light] - Bergman
[Shame] - Bergman
[Pickpocket] - Bresson
[Modern Times] - Chaplin
[The Passion of Joan of Arc] - Dreyer
[Gertrud] - Dreyer
[The Marriage of Maria Braun] - Fassbinder
[8 1/2] - Fellini
[Amacord] - Fellini
[La Strada] - Fellini
[Satyricon] - Fellini
[The Quiet Man] - Ford
[Stagecoach] - Ford
[How the West Was Won] - Ford
[Pierrot Le Feu] - Godard
[Alphaville] - Godard
[The Mepris] - Godard
[Vivre Sa Vie] - Godard
[Fitzcarraldo] - Herzog
[Rebecca] - Hitchcock
[Psycho] - Hitchcock
[Rear Window] - Hitchcock
[The Birds] - Hitchcock
[Strangers on a Train] - Hitchcock
[A Streetcar Named Desire] - Kazan
[Sherlock Jnr.] - Keaton
[Paths of Glory] - Kubrick
[Barry Lyndon] - Kubrick
[Ikiru] - Kurosawa
[Throne of Blood] - Kurosawa
[Hidden Fortress] - Kurosawa
[Yojimbo] - Kurosawa
[M] - Lang
[Dog Day Afternoon] - Lumet
[Network] - Lumet
[Badlands] - Malick
[Sansho Dayu] - Mizoguchi
[The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums] - Mizoguchi
[Late Spring] - Ozu
[Floating Weeds] - Ozu
[An Autumn Afternoon] - Ozu
[Salo] - Pasolini
[The Grand Illusion] - Renoir
[A Day in the Country] - Renoir
[Night and Fog] -Resnais
[Last Year at Marienbad] - Resnais
[Mean Streets] - Scorcese
[Mirror] - Tarkovsky
[Stalker] - Tarkovsky
[Solaris] - Tarkovsky
[Jules and Jim] - Truffaut
[Day for Night] - Truffaut
[The Magnificent Ambersons] - Welles
[The Apartment] - Wilder

The Pre-1982 Rule

A Brighter Summer Day
A Fish Called Wanda
A Passage to India
Actress, The
All About My Mother
Babette's Feast
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Bharat Mata
Big Lebowski, The
Blue/Red/White (Three Colours trilogy)
Blue Kite, The
Blue Velvet
Brazil
Chungking Express
Decalogue, The
Do The Right Thing
Double Life of Veronique
Full Metal Jacket
Goodfellas
Happy Together
Kandahar
L'Argent
Mulholland Dr.
Paradise Now
Platoon
Red Sorghum
Reservoir Dogs
Room with a View, A
Satantango
Stranger Than Paradise
Thin Red Line, The
This Is Spinal Tap
Time to Live and Time to Die, The
Unforgiven
Wedding Banquet, The
White Ribbon, The
Yi Yi

Not Chosen

42nd Street
Adam's Rib
African Queen, The
Airplane

All Quiet on the Western Front
All That Jazz
American Graffiti
Apartment, The
Battleship Potempkin (Eisenstein)
Before the Revolution
Black Narcissus
Black Orpheus
Bringing Up Baby
Burmese Harp, The
Conversation, The
Das Boot

Deer Hunter
Diary of a County Priest
Discrete Charms of the Bourgousie, The
Don't Look Now
Duck Soup
Fiddler on the Roof
Forbidden Games
French Connection, The
Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The
Gigi
Good, The Bady, The Ugly, The
Grapes of Wrath, The
Harold and Maude
It Happened One Night
Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein)
Jeanne Dielman
Kes
Kramer vs. Kramer
La Jetee

Leopard, The (Visconti)
Man with a Movie Camera, The
McCabe and Mrs Miller (Altman)
Meet Me in St Louis
Mildred Pierce
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Nashville (Altman)
The Night of the Hunter
Nosferatu
Once Upon a Time in the West
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Philadelphia Story, The
Roman Holiday
Sayat Nova
Senso (Visconti)
Shadows
Shane
Some Like It Hot
Tin Drum, The
To Have and Have Not
To Kill A Mockingbird
Top Hat
Triumph of the Will
Ucho (The Ear)
Viridiana
White Heat
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Wild Bunch, The
Zemyla

Cable Car Ride

Cable Car Ride
for Minyi

Struggling to find the right words,
the cable car seems as
good a metaphor as any:

a fixed destination
reached after crossing different way points,
(we are approaching one now)
not without some bumps along the way.

It seems rather precipitious a drop
over which our little bubble is suspended
but we have trust
in what may seem so thin a thread
steeled, as I am
to take the plunge,
asking the four words.

You say yes.

Cucina Restaurant

I've always been curious about this long standing Italian restaurant, at the front stretch of Holland Village mainly because it has survived so long where many other eateries have come and gone. Noticing that they had a reasonably priced set lunch menu at $15 for a main, a dessert, and a drink one afternoon made the decision to drop in for lunch even easier.

I was clearly not the only one who thought so. The place was almost full, surprising as it was a Monday afternoon. Unfortunately that also meant that the staff were overwhelmed with three waiters attempting to manage a packed lunch crowd. After I was finally seated (which took far longer than I expected), I was pretty much forgotten. After a good 10 minutes and a significant amount of hand waving, I was at last noticed by the wait staff - and that was just to get the menu.

The service was, to put it mildly, indifferent - as in, the waiters were largely indifferent to my existence. Getting any kind of attention required behaving like a spectator at a football match, waving your arms around frantically whether you wanted to order, to get more water, or to ask for the bill. I found myself remembering a recent study about the kind of bosses that employees hated the most: not those who were rude or annoying, but rather those that effectively ignored and failed to acknowledge them. I could empathise given my experiences at Cucina - even bad service seemed preferable to receiving no attention at all.

Decor wise the place was a very odd mix of traditional Italian cantina complete with faux wall fresco of angel holding a sword, open concept kitchen, and slightly modern kitsch. The oddness was largely due to the incongruity between the bright red fake leather seating and the overall attempt to create a rustic look.

It was also an unseasonably warm day, and I suspected that the open concept kitchen contributed even more to the temperature. You know the air-conditioning needs to work better when you find your legs sticking uncomfortably to the fake leather seating.

Food wise, I was not blown away. I ordered a bacon and mushroom pasta, and I found it simple and unspectacular, not vastly different from something you could conjure up in your own kitchen. In particular, the sauce was far too salty, and the bacon overpowering any hint of the mushrooms. The bacon was also chopped into rather ragged bits. In all, the dish certainly could have used more balance and also more texture to it.

Bacon and Mushroom Pasta

Where things certainly did fall flat was in their dessert of the day - tiramisu. A good tiramisu is very hard to do - it is particularly hard to get the various layers just right. It is one of the tests of any good Italian restaurant in my book. To try to make tiramisu en mass is usually misguided and so it proved - mine was a rather mushy lump, with the bottom layer a fairly flavourful but soggy mess.

All in all, I found my experience at Cucina to be a disappointment. Perhaps others will have better dining experiences here, particularly if they come for a more leisurely dinner and order a la carte. Cucina seems to have gone mass market, what with the cheap set lunch and with the parent company branching off into catering. I would say that while it has had its time, there are far better and more authentic Italian eateries out there.

Overall Verdict:

Despite its admirable longevity, Cucina seems past is prime with fairly indifferent food and overworked staff. I would certainly give it a miss.

40 Movies Before 40

Choosing the films for my 40 before 40 film list turned out to be an immensely difficult task. In the end the list is noticeable as much for the titles that were left off as those that were eventually chosen. In helping me to formulate the list, I came up with a set of rules which I forced myself to follow strictly:

I could not choose a film which I had already seen before
I had to limit myself to only one film per director
The films should have been filmed before I was born (in other words prior to 1982) except the last entry on the list which should be a film from 1982 itself which I consider influential, that I hadn't yet seen.

Ultimately, the primary purpose of formulating this list was to broaden my cinematic education which made the first rule an obvious one to set. There were enormous gaping holes in this respect, notably silent film as well as the French New Wave (I have never seen a film made by Truffaunt or Godard or Antonioni). The whole point was to help fill these gaps and to watch new films.

Another obvious gap was having not seen any films by some of the great directors in cinema history, most notably Ingmar Bergman though you could add Renoir, Tarkovsky, Pasolini, Ozu to the list besides the aforementioned big three of the 1960s. To make sure I had as much breadth and scope as possible, I decided to put the second rule in place.

The third rule was related to broadening the range of movies I would see. Beyond the fact that most of the films I have seen and enjoyed date from the 1990s onwards, I find it easier to go back a decade at most barring a few exceptions (such as Film Noir). My birth year is an arbritary cut off point, but it does force me to largely consider films well outside my comfort zone.

The second rule in particular made formulating the list extremely difficult. I could only pick one film by Bergman - but how to choose between Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Fanny and Alexander and Persona just to name a few? Similarly, should I choose La Dolce Vita or 8 1/2 for my one Fellini film? Even though I have seen Rashomon and Ran, how to choose between the Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Hidden Fortress and Ikiru among the remaining Kurosawa films I had not seen? Needless to say, the choices were very difficult indeed.

For the silent era, I decided I had to pick F.W Mornau's acclaimed Sunrise, and I also had to pick a film each from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, silent cinema's two most influential film-makers. I chose The General and City Lights, generally considered to be their greatest films. Another extremely influential film-maker from the silent era was Fritz Lang, and Metropolis remains a quintessential Science Fiction film so I added that to the list, although that meant forgoing his equally famous M.

In terms of the silent film era, two films I neglected to choose stand out: The Battleship Potempkin and Nosferatu. I think there is a growing consensus for the former that as influential as it has been, it is overrated, and the latter was groundbreaking but mainly for its time. The last very influential silent film I didn't choose was Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, partly based on my decision to choose his late masterwork Ordet instead.

When forced to make a tough decision based on the one film per director rule, I decided I would choose that director's most famous work (if I had not already seen it). Thus, due to my complete lack of exposure to the French New Wave, I easily alighted on The 400 Blows, Breathless, L'Avventura as absolute foundational works for the era as a whole, and they were my choices for Godard, Truffaut and Antoninoni.

There were also some absolutely essential films which practically chose themselves, films that are practically written on every must-see-before-you-die list. Some of the absolutely essential films and very famous films that I still haven't seen include: The Bicycle Thieves, All About Eve, Tokyo Story, On the Waterfront, the Seven Samurai, Twelve Angry Men, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now. These practically chose themselves.

In the end, I was still left with some impossible choices. Both La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 are probably essential films. I chose the former as my only Fellini largely on weight of Roger Ebert listing it as one of his Top 10 choices in the Sight and Sound poll and my great respect for him as a film critic. Even leaving out Citizen Kane there were still several Orson Welles films to choose between, but I chose Touch of Evil because I love film noir, and that was one film noir classic I had not seen.

In other cases, my choice was essentially a toss-up. Hiroshima Mon Amor or Last Year at Marienbad? I picked the former largely having greater affinity with and greater curiousity about an inter-racial relationship than the aristocracy. On the Waterfront or A Streetcar Named Desire, two of Elia Kazan's greatest films and Marlon Brando's greatest performances came down to that famous line. The Rules of the Game or The Grand Illusion for Renoir - in the end I really had no clue so I chose the one placed higher on the Sight and Sound critics list.

As much as I wanted this to be a cinematic education, I also didn't want it to be completely stuffed full of foreign language art house films culled from the Sight and Sound list. I also wanted a wide range of genres (such is my cinematic ignorance that I could easily populate the list based on Italian/French/German/Spanish/Japanese/Eastern European art house directors). So I decided to choose a musical, and eventually settled for The Umbrellas of Cherborg (though I could have equally chosen Gigi, Oliver, An American in Paris or Fiddler on the Roof). I wanted a comedic film and All About Eve is the classic of that genre (though I Airplane! would have been an excellent left-field choice). One film I did include for the sake of variety, albeit reluctantly, was the holiday classic It's a Wonderful Life: it is a much loved film, and its sentimentality might be a good antidote to the stark, slightly depressing cast of rest of the list.

The final choice - the film from 1982 - was probably the most interesting and difficult to make. 1982 was not a great year for film. Gandhi won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year and I don't think it is a film that has withstood the test of time. Fitzcarraldo and Fanny and Alexander were ruled out because I had already chosen films by Herzog and Bergman respectively. Tootsie was a favourite of my parents who went to see it on a date, but was it really a defining film of the era? There was The Evil Dead and Poltergeist, two classic horror films, but I dislike horror in general (the one area I was unwilling to explore despite my intention to have as much diversity in the list as possible).

That left two Science Fiction films which were both very influential in rather different ways: Blade Runner and E.T respectively. That Blade Runner remains a highly influential Science Fiction and Noir classic made it the obvious choice. And E.T more than any other film, defined how Spielberg essentially dominated Hollywood in the 1980s. I love Noir and Science Fiction making Blade Runer an obvious choice (and yes, I have somehow only seen segments of it, never the full movie). But I also have sentimental reasons with regards to E.T (which I have also somehow also contrived not to have seen): when I was 6 years old, on a visit to Universal Studios, California with my family, I was chosen out of the audience to demostrate the special effects of the famous flying scene. I got to ride the bicycle and they superimposed it on a big screen so just like Elliot, I was flying. In the end, unable to decide between them I thought I would do them both as a rather unique double bill.

Here is the final list in full:

Sunrise (1927)
The General (1927)
Metropolis (1927)
City Lights (1931)
L'Atalante (1934)
The Rules of the Game (1939)
The Children of Paradise (1945)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Brief Encounter (1946)
The Bicycle Thief (1948)
All About Eve (1950)
Ugetsu (1953)
Tokyo Story (1953)
On the Waterfront (1954)
The Seven Samurai (1954)
Panther Panchali (1955)
Ordet (Word) (1955)
The Searchers (1956)
12 Angry Men (1957)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Vertigo (1958) [Watched 15 November 2014]
Touch of Evil (1958)
The 400 Blows (1959)
Breathless (1959)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
L 'Avventura (1960)
La Dolce Vita (1960)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) [Watched 28 Sept 2014]
Andrei Rublev (1966)
Au Hasard Balthasar (1966)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
Chinatown (1974)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Days of Heaven (1978)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Blade Runner/ E.T the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

40 Before 40 Book List [Fiction]

The Iliad - Homer
The Odyssey - Homer
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
The Dream of the Red Chamber
The Tale of the Genji
The Divine Comedy - Dante
Don Quixote - Miguel Cervantes
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained - John Milton
Emma - Jane Austen
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain [Completed July 2014]
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
A Passage to India - E.M Forster
Women in Love - D.H Lawrence
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The Collected Stories - Ernest Hemingway
Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable - Samuel Beckett
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dead Souls and Collected Stories - Nikolai Gogol
Collected Stories - Anton Chekhov
Madame Bovary - Gustav Flaubert
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
Old Goriot - Honore de Balzac
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
The Trial/The Castle/Short Stories - Franz Kafka
Collected Fiction - Jose Luis Borges
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [Completed June 2014]
The Tin Drum - Gunther Grass

What Love Is

In his extreme youth, Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and intelligence and heart.

John Williams, Stoner

This Too Shall Pass

There is a fable of a great king, who commands of a whole assembly of wise men: "make me a ring that can make me happy when I am sad, and sad when I am happy". The sages conferred, and after deliberating awhile, handed him a simple ring, unadorned except for four words etched into its surface: "This Too Will Pass". It had the desired effect.

In other versions of the tale, a great Sultan, wishing to test the wisdom of Solomon asks: "Oh wise Solomon, give me a sentence that will always be true, in both good time and in bad". And so Solomon responds: 'This Too Shall Pass Away."

This was a favourite story, one of many, that Abraham Lincoln often re-told, and Lincoln, who knew much of suffering said of those four simple words: "How much it expresses, how chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction."

And so, I shall tell this to myself: this too shall pass. Things will get better.

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