No list-by-committee like the AFI’s Top 100 Whatevers is going to completely reflect any one person’s individual tastes. Given that this here blog-thingie lets me write about any damn thing I want to, I thought I’d supplement the previous entry with some of my own personal favorite movie quotes that didn’t make the “official” list. I present them in no particular order…
I don’t how this slipped past me, but it seems the American Film Institute has released another of those “Top 100 Something-or-other” lists, specifically (as the title of this post indicates) the 100 Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time.
This particular list is a good one, conversationally speaking, because it’s a subject that most everyone is qualified to comment on. Everybody seems has a favorite line from something, and it seems to me that trying to stump one another with obscure bits of dialogue has replaced charades as the most popular form of party entertainment in our culture today, at least in the circles in which I run.
I’m going to spare myself the trouble of retyping and/or reformatting the list, so you may want to go have a look at it on your own. Come back here when you’re finished, I’ll be waiting with a few thoughts…
Are you back? Great, then let’s discuss…
After reading the previous entry, a friend of mine e-mailed to let me know of someone else whose passing is worth noting: Shelby Foote, the soft-spoken Southern novelist and historian who became a minor-league celebrity after appearing in the landmark PBS series The Civil War. Foote died Monday at the age of 88.
The general style of Civil War director Ken Burns — a slow pan across or zoom into an ancient photograph, accompanied by appropriate sound effects and actors reading from letters, diaries, and such — has become so much the de facto standard for historical documentaries that it’s hard to remember what an impact The Civil War really had back in 1990. I think it still stands as the highest-rated program ever to air on PBS, and I myself was utterly spellbound by the series. I’ve always been interested in this conflict anyway, but Burns and his talented cast of voiceover artists and subject-matter experts brought it to life in a way I’d never experienced before. Not the ersatz life of even the best fictional movie, in which you’re always aware that you’re watching modern people pretending to inhabit another era, but a sense of what things were really like in the early 1860s. I felt so in touch with the lives of the people being discussed that, at times, I almost expected the black-and-white photos that comprised most of the series to begin moving. It was like they were merely some sort of membrane between now and then, and if you just knew how to push, you could break through and see, hear, and smell everything that was.
Foote’s presence in The Civil War no doubt contributed greatly to this effect. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he appeared on-screen no less than 89 times during the 11-hour series. He had a knack for storytelling, and for breathing life into individuals who were formerly nothing more than meaningless names in a textbook. His mission was to make men like Lee and Grant human, to strip away the marble that now encases them and turn them back into the sweating, fallible, heroic, miserable people they actually were. That mission dovetailed nicely with Ken Burns’ goals, and the end result was one of the greatest pieces of documentary filmmaking I’ve ever seen. As Burns himself has been quoted as saying, “[Shelby Foote] made the war real for us.”
If you want to read more, that Times article on Mr. Foote is the most complete I’ve found. You’ll probably have to register to see it, but I think it would be worth your trouble. As for me, I’m thinking that I may stop by Barnes and Noble tomorrow afternoon and see if I can pick up Foote’s own history of the war… all three volumes of it. Hey, it’s summertime; I could use a little light reading.
Well, here we go again… two more fine character actors that none of my readers will recognize by name have passed away. Oddly, both John Fiedler and Paul Winchell, who died within 24 hours of each other, are best known for working on the same projects, specifically Disney’s “Winnie the Pooh” films. Winchell, who died Friday at the age of 86, was the voice of Tigger from 1968 until 1999, and it was he who coined Tigger’s memorable catch-phrase “ta-ta for now!”
Meanwhile, Fiedler, who was 80 when he left us on Saturday, continued to play Pooh’s gentle little buddy Piglet right up to this year’s entry in the long-running franchise, Pooh’s Heffalump Movie.
I’ve just received word that one of my oldest friends in the world — by which I mean the friends I’ve known for the longest time, not those friends who are actually old — became a father last weekend. Keith Jensen’s daughter Aubrey Elise entered the world on Saturday, June 18, and she and Keith’s wife Danielle came home the following Tuesday. Presumably mother and daughter are both doing fine, and in the photos he e-mailed me, Keith himself looks like a new daddy should — somewhere between busting with pride and wondering what the heck he’s gotten himself into. (Just kidding! Mostly he looks very happy, and I’m happy for him and Danielle.)
Here’s an interesting idea: a new study indicates that people’s political leanings may be genetic in origin. The researchers behind this study are not suggesting that we’re all destined to belong to a particular party or that we’re programmed from birth like little politibots, just that we may be drawn by nature towards a particular side of the spectrum. In other words, our genes pre-dispose us towards being conservative or progressive, and then our upbringing and unique life experiences shape our opinions on specific issues. The real fun seems to occur when someone’s innate inclination clashes with their family’s expectations and affiliations. (The study was intended partly to figure out why people defect from the parties in which they were raised, such as when the children of staunch Republicans become hippies, or vice versa. While some of that behavior can be chalked up to youthful rebellion, there are plenty of cases where children just plain think differently from their parents for no apparent reason, which makes little sense if you believe that our attitudes are entirely shaped by “nurture” without some element of “nature” being involved.)
Long-time readers may recall my fondness for the movie Shaun of the Dead, which was one of my top-five favorite films last year. Or, at least, it would’ve been, if I’d ever gotten around to compiling a top-five list. What can I say? Procrastination is my greatest vice.
Anyhow, I’m not generally a big fan of zombie movies, but Shaun was an amazing little feat of filmmaking — it stayed faithful to all the zombie-movie tropes while also subverting them for the purposes of humor and character development. It was a smart and entertaining love letter from its creators to the genre that it was spoofing. Now the creator of that genre is thanking the creators of Shaun in a very wonderful way. Here’s the relevant paragraph from an LA Times interview with George Romero, writer/director of the seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead and the upcoming Land of the Dead (which opens Friday, if that’s your thing):
There were the pilgrimages of fans trekking to Toronto last winter for the freezing, all-nights “Land” shoot to fulfill lifelong dreams of being a Romero zombie. Two of those were Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, who created last year’s respectful zombie spoof “Shaun of the Dead,” which Romero loved. “They’re the zombies at the photo booth,” tips Romero to their cameo in the film. “They shot their own little film [while] on set, and it’s going to be on the DVD.”
For the record, Simon Pegg played the title character in Shaun of the Dead and co-wrote the film with director Wright.
I just love this kind of intertextual stuff — in-jokes, homages, tributes, and “guest appearances” almost always make me smile. They’re like a wink-and-a-nod to the informed viewer (or reader, in the case of novels) that acknowledges the whole wide body of material out there and reminds us that it all relates on some level or other. I know this sort of thing bothers some people, but I think it’s fun. Almost fun enough to consider seeing Land of the Dead just for that half-second glimpse of my old buddy Shaun…
With no sign of the Cosmos 1 solar-sail spacecraft two days after its launch, members of the Planetary Society’s operations team are packing it in and returning to their regularly scheduled lives. Before the project’s official blogger Emily signs off, however, she leaves us with this typically hopeful message:
At the Society, we’re already talking about what to do next. A few hours ago, Bill Nye — the Science Guy, and also the Vice-President of The Planetary Society — asked all of the staff to gather together in the living room of the 100-year-old house in which we work. He opened and poured champagne for all of us, and we raised several toasts. We toasted Cosmos 1, first of all; it was an audacious dream, that we arrogantly compared to the flight of the Wright Brothers. We toasted [project director] Lou Friedman in absentia, for whom it must have been a pretty rough week. We toasted the staff and volunteers of the Society, for all the work it’s taken to bring Cosmos 1 to the world. We toasted Ann Druyan, the chief sponsor of Cosmos 1, for making it possible, and for being the mission’s spiritual leader. We toasted our members, for their devotion to our cause and their support. Finally, we toasted: Cosmos 2? Many of our members are telling us they’re ready to try again. We can’t say whether or not we’ll try again with this mission until we find out what really happened. But we’ll certainly stay in the business, and try more audacious things, like the Solar Sail, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Mars airplanes, or Venus balloons we’ve advocated in the past.
Sounds about right to me…
Disappointing news for space enthusiasts: Cosmos 1, which was to have been the first solar-sail spacecraft, has disappeared and was most likely destroyed following its launch yesterday aboard a Russian-made ICBM. The Planetary Society, the private organization that planned and provided most of the funding for the project, issued a statement this morning:
In the past twenty-four hours, the Russian space agency (RKA) has made a tentative conclusion that the Volna rocket carrying Cosmos 1 failed during the firing of the first stage. This would mean that Cosmos 1 is lost.
While it is likely that this conclusion is correct, there are some inconsistent indications from information received from other sources. The Cosmos 1 team observed what appear to be signals, that looks like they are from the spacecraft when it was over the first three ground stations and some Doppler data over one of these stations. This might indicate that Cosmos 1 made it into orbit, but probably a lower one than intended. The project team now considers this to be a very small probability. But because there is a slim chance that it might be so, efforts to contact and track the spacecraft continue. We are working with US Strategic Command to provide additional information in a day or so.
If the spacecraft made it to orbit, its autonomous program might be working, and after 4 days the sails could automatically deploy. While the chances of this are very, very small, we still encourage optical observers to see if the sail can be seen after that time.
Just to tie up a loose end, I see that British authorities have recovered that missing Dalek I wrote about last week. According to the BBC, the thieves decided the stolen prop was “too hot to handle” (i.e., they figured they were going to have a problem fencing it, or decided their original scheme wouldn’t be so funny if it ended with them in handcuffs), so they dumped it on Glastonbury Tor and dropped a dime to let somebody know where it was. (According to the Wikipedia, a tor is a “large hill, usually topped with rocks,” in the southwest of England.)
The owner of the tourist attraction from which the Dalek was taken denies that this whole event was a publicity stunt, and despite the offer of his services, the presence of Colin Baker was apparently not required.
Kind of a let-down, actually… I was hoping the thing would turn up in the middle of Piccadilly, dressed in a pink tu-tu or something.