Here are the films I will do my best to watch before Feb 26th.  This list exclused nominees for foreign films, documentaries, animated and shorts.  I have to draw a line somewhere.

The Adventures of Tintin

Albert Nobbs

Anonymous

The Artist

Beginners (check)

A Better Life

Bridesmaids (check)

The Descendants (check)

Drive (check)

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (check)

The Help (check)

Hugo

The Ides of March (check)

The Iron Lady

Jane Eyre (check)

Margin Call

Midnight in Paris (check)

Moneyball (check)

The Muppets

My Week with Marilyn

Real Steel

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

A Separation

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (check)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

The Tree of Life

W.E.

War Horse (check)

Warrior

Better get to it!

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Sleeping Beauty

War Horse

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Newlyweds

Bellflower

The Descendants

Leap Year (don’t judge me)

The Company Men

I Am Number Four

Rampart

For the rest of the year I will try to write something each time I watch a movie.  We will see how that goes. 

Since I really haven’t been writing very much I thought this year I would write something about every movie I watch.  I haven’t even begun that–but hey, we are only half way through the first month of the year so maybe I will keep that promise.  We’ll see.

When I moved to Greensboro I got a time slot on the college radio station so I really had time to express my own tastes.  I remember having a debate with my roommate’s brother—he was a classic rock fan.  I told him that I had heard all those songs way too many times.  There was nothing wrong with classic rock but I craved something new.  To prove my point I said that I could sing all the words to any song that came on the radio station he always listened to.  I never lost.  So what was I listening to?  If you listen to Spotify you can hear my playlist—1993.  Otherwise these were the cds I played over and over:

• When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.
• What is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger.
• The things I do for love
• You know nothing, Jon Snow
• Stick them with the pointy end.
• Valar morghulis.
• A Lannister always pays his debts.
• Fear cuts deeper than swords.
• Words are wind.
• Winter is coming.

Please feel free to add what I have forgotten.  If you haven’t read the books you are really missing out.

xoxoxo

Dogcatcher–hard to describe.  Big sound yet cool and quiet.  Seems great for these soon to come cool Fall mornings.  Ceheck them out here http://dogcatcherband.com/music/

The David Mayfield Parade–If you like the Avett Brothers and Gillian Welsh you will like them.

I once spent a masochistic weekend with The Road.  I started reading the book on Friday night, finished Sunday afternoon in time to see the matinee of the movie.  It was a grey and rainy weekend, thank the gods.  Had it been sunny I would have felt betrayed.

Yesterday I was listening to All Things Considered on my way home from work.  There was a story about an artist I have never heard of who made a movie about another artist I never heard of.  Yet Joann Sfar managed to capture my appreciation for the bleak.  He said:

“I’m so grateful when a beautiful thing try to teach me nothing,” he offers, almost as a weary provocation of the sort Gainsbourg might have uttered. “And it never occurs. You know sometimes movies seem to be like a medicine. … I wish to be sad and I wish to be lost, and I desperately don’t wish to be taught anything.”

I think Sfar and Gainsbourg are worth getting to know.

Comics Star Joann Sfar, Capturing ‘A Heroic Life’

I get that few people see the charm of this set the way I do.  When I was living in my first apartment my mom was driving out of her neighborhood and spotted this table on the side of the road left out for the trash man.  She loaded into her car and brought it to me.  It’s a great table with a leaf that folds out in this really simply but fancy way.  I refinished it myself.  I still didn’t have any chairs but I was getting closer to being able to eat like a grown-up.

Not long after I got the table Jim’s father passed away.  When they were selling his house, Jim mentioned that I was setting up my first home and needed many things.  So I inherited six chairs from my grandfather, who had taught me to cook.  When I think of him I always think of food, family meals, and learning to add a dash of this and a pinch of that until it was just they way you thought it should be.  How fitting I would sit at my table and enjoy meals on chairs that came from him.   I learned that he had  bought the chairs at auction from the King Cotton Hotel just before they tore it down.  That was in 1971, just a few years before my mom met Jim and we all became a family.

Coincidentally my mom had taken my brother and I downtown to watch them implode the King Cotton Hotel.   I was six or seven years old then and I remember that building coming down.  It probably launched a lifelong fascination with building demolition.  The irony that I am, by profession, someone that tries to save old buildings from demolition is not lost on me.  So my chairs and table have a great history.  Letting them go is tough.  But I let them go with the knowledge that I am making room for new memories not yet imagined.

The King Cotton Hotel when my chair populated the dining room.

I might be back there in the crowd.