The 1,000 Best Movies Ever Made

The 1,000 Best Movies Ever Made. All 1,000 original reviews from The New York Times on-line.

From A.O. Scott’s introduction —

And so this volume is a collection of first words, some prescient, some premature, and worth a good deal less than the thousand pictures they describe. Though its title may invoke the authority of The New York Times, this collection is more likely to start arguments than to settle them, argument being one of the solemn duties of criticism and, more importantly, one of the great pleasures of movie-going.

Jack Dempsey…

was born on this date in 1895 in Manassa, Colorado, which makes him about the most famous native-son of the San Luis Valley. As Red Smith wrote in Dempsey’s obituary for The New York Times in 1983 —

Jack Dempsey was one of the last of a dwindling company whose exploits distinguished the 1920’s as ”the golden age of sports.” His contemporaries were Babe Ruth in baseball, Red Grange and the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame in football, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen in golf, Bill Tilden, Helen Wills Moody and Suzanne Lenglen in tennis, Johnny Weissmuller and Gertrude Ederle in swimming, Paavo Nurmi in track, Man o’ War, the racehorse, and Earl Sande, the jockey. But none of the others enjoyed more lasting popularity than the man who ruled boxing between 1919 and 1926.

The obituary is worth reading.

Yup

“After Reagan’s death, the cable channels insisted on reliving the right wing’s fantasy version of the 80s. Now that Clinton’s book has been released, we are now forced to relive the right wing’s fantasy version of the 90s.”
— Bad Attitudes

Link via Atrios

My Life

None other than Larry McMurtry reviews Clinton’s My Life for The New York Times.

[B]y a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography – no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years.

A review well-worth reading.

This is getting serious

Another wildfire in the Albuquerque bosque today; the bosque is the grove of trees that lines both banks of the Rio Grande. Fortunately, there’s no wind and the fire appears limited to about 50 acres. Even so, they are still spraying water on the Bueno Foods plant to protect it.

Destroy the trees, burn down our houses, but leave the chile peppers and salsa out of this!

AFI’s Top 100 movie tunes

Perhaps you saw the show on CBS last night (NewMexiKen caught the last hour). The American Film Institute has named its 100 greatest movie songs.

Here’s the top ten:

  1. “Over the Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz”
  2. “As Time Goes By” from “Casablanca”
  3. “Singin’ in the Rain” from “Singin’ in the Rain”
  4. “Moon River” from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”
  5. “White Christmas” from “Holiday Inn”
  6. “Mrs. Robinson” from “The Graduate”
  7. “When You Wish Upon a Star” from “Pinocchio”
  8. “The Way We Were” from “The Way We Were”
  9. “Stayin’ Alive” from “Saturday Night Fever”
  10. “The Sound of Music” from “The Sound of Music”

Junior remembers

According to George Vescey in The New York Times —

In another month, [Griffey] could be attractive to a rich contender, maybe even the Yankees, even though he once vowed never to play for them.

He has not forgotten how the ogres George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin told him to pipe down when he was playing in the hallway outside the clubhouse, after being taken to work by his father.

Hoppy

Hopalong Cassidy premiered on NBC-TV on this date in 1949. According to John Dunning’s On the Air —

One medium fed on the other, and by 1950 [William] Boyd was at the center of a national phenomenon. For two years he was as big a media hero as the nation had seen. In personal appearances he was mobbed: 85,000 people came through a Brooklyn department store during his appearance there. His endorsement for any product meant instant sales in the millions. It meant overnight shortages, frantic shopping sprees, and millions of dollars for Boyd. There were Hopalong Cassidy bicycles, rollerskates (complete with spurs), Hoppy pajamas, Hopalong beds. The demand for Hoppy shirts and pants was so great that a shortage of black dye resulted. His investment in Hopalong Cassidy paid off to an estimated $70 million.

Why a man of 52 years appealed to so many children remains a mystery. Possibly some of it had to do with the novelty of television: just as Amos ‘n’ Andy had capitalized on the newness of radio a generation earlier, a TV sensation was bound to occur. And the hero had a no-nonsense demeanor: he was steely-eyed and quick on the draw, and he meted out justice without the endless warbling and sugar-coated romance that came with the others. As for Boyd, he became Cassidy in a real sense. His personal habits changed; he gave up drinking and carousing and lived with his fifth wife until his death in 1972.

Hopalong Cassidy was NewMexiKen’s first hero. None has been as good since.

Me either

From Brad DeLong —

I have not yet figured out why so much of our elite press is so… what should I call it? Feckless. Corrupt (in the sense of well-rotted). Decadent. Why does William Saletan [Slate] find it funny that Kerry tries hard to give nuanced, reasonably-complete answers to questions about issues with nuances? Why do Weston Kosova and Michael Isikoff [Newsweek] cover the government–rather than, say, cover something like advances in bartending–if they find debates over policy the equivalent of crossing the Gedrosian Desert? Why does Michiko Kakutani [The New York Times] think it pointless and boring to wake up early to watch the inauguration of the first democratically-elected president in sixteen years in a country of 130 million people?

Read whole entry.

And twins

From the Denver Post —

Pete Coors isn’t sure whether the busty, blond Coors Light Twins are a liability or an asset in his race for the U.S. Senate.

“The religious right doesn’t understand why we would have the twins in our advertising,” Pete told me last week. “But I’ve had an equal number of people come up and say, ‘Boy if you took the twins on the campaign trail, we’d really vote for you.”‘

Zoom zoom

The L.A. Times’ Dan Neil on the 2005 Ford GT —

The launch sequence goes like this: Raise the revs to about 4,000 rpm, slot the shifter into first gear and slip your left foot off the clutch pedal. The foot-wide rear tires squall briefly and then hook up. The carbon-fiber seat mule kicks you in the backside. The supercharger trills like a teakettle. One second or so later, the landscape goes all spin-art and you start looking like Keir Dullea at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Cue “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

Because of the way the car is geared, you will cross the 60-mph threshold well before you need to shift to second. By the time you start stretching in fourth gear (about 150 mph), the car’s aerodynamic underbody is producing several hundred pounds of ground-hugging down-force that actually causes the car to settle an inch-and-a-half on its suspension. The old race cars — which were the first to exceed 200 mph at Le Mans — didn’t have ground effects devices and were legendarily unstable on the Mulsannes straight. The new GT tracks like a Japanese bullet train.

Please keep your hands and feet inside the ride.

He goes on to say, “Think of it this way: If the Corvette is whiskey, the GT is a turkey baster full of heroin with a rubber-hammer chaser.”

Demands to be seen

Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan —

Unabashedly partisan, wearing its determination to bring about political change on its sleeve, “Fahrenheit” can be nitpicked and second-guessed, but it can’t be ignored. Set to open today in New York and Friday in Los Angeles and across the country, this landmark in American political filmmaking demands to be seen.

Read the whole review.

Local Woman Dies Of Lost Cell Phone

APALACHICOLA, FL—Catherine Polk, 24, died at a local Starbucks Monday afternoon, due to complications resulting from the tragic loss of her cell phone. “It was horrible—Cathy didn’t have any of her numbers written down anywhere else, and she was waiting on a call about last-minute tickets for a concert,” said best friend Melissa Barreth, who was with Polk when she first discovered that her Cingular V400 quad band/GSM cell phone was not in her purse. “We tried everything to find it, but in the end, there was nothing we could do.” The coroner’s report confirmed that Polk died of a sudden lack of wireless service.

From The Onion, of course.

Fix? Self-fulfilling prophecy?

From Sideline Chatter —

The only way Italy would fail to advance in the Euro 2004 soccer tournament was if Sweden and Denmark, also in Italy’s Group C, played to a 2-2 tie yesterday in Porto, Portugal.

They played to a 2-2 tie.

Italy was so rife with conspiracy theories beforehand that RAI, the state-run broadcaster, installed an extra camera behind each goal in hopes of picking up any shenanigans. And Italian reporters drew the ire of the Swedes and Danes by peppering them with questions about a possible fix.

Wrote Jon Brodkin of The Guardian of London: “Giovanni Trapattoni, Italy’s coach, has been a voice of reason, but some of his countrymen have failed to grasp that it would not be the Danish or Swedish manner to strike a deal.

“When Italian journalists asked their Swedish counterparts what the Swedish word is for ‘fix,’ they were stunned to be told that there was not one.

“In Italian, they pointed out, there are about 20.”

My Life

“Dan Rather compared Bill Clinton’s life story to the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Ulysses S. Grant? I think Hugh Grant would be more like it, wouldn’t it?”

Jay Leno

“It’s actually longer than the new Harry Potter book. And both of them, I believe, are about a boy and his wand.”

David Letterman

Amazing

The most amazing thing in the item below is that President Eisenhower had press conferences two weeks apart!

I like Ike

NewMexiKen has been provided with some background on the 22nd Amendment, including a paper by Bruce G. Peabody and Scott E. Gant, “The Twice and Future President: Constitutional Interstices and the Twenty-Second Amendment.” (Minnesota Law Review (1999), 83 Minn. L. Rev. 565).

The paper concludes there is no constitutional bar to a twice-elected president becoming president other than by election as president.

Particularly interesting to NewMexiKen however, was this material regarding Eisenhower.

As the election of 1960 neared, however, attention again turned to the Twenty-Second Amendment. In a press conference on January 13, Eisenhower invited reporters to look into the question of whether he would be eligible to run as a vice presidential candidate under the terms of the Twenty-Second Amendment. As Eisenhower put it, “the only thing I know about the Presidency the next time is this: I can’t run. [Laughter] But someone has raised the question that were I invited, could I constitutionally run for Vice President, and you might find out about that one. I don’t know. [Laughter]”

…

At a press conference two weeks after Eisenhower first raised the possibility of his serving as Vice President, he was asked whether he had received an “official opinion” on the question. Eisenhower was somewhat circumspect but he did say

that the afternoon of that [first] press conference, there was a note on my desk saying a report from the Justice Department–I don’t know whether the Attorney General himself signed this, but the report was, it was absolutely legal for me to do so. That stopped it right there, as far as I’m concerned.

…

While Eisenhower ultimately backed away from the idea that he might run as Vice President, there is some evidence that, despite the constraints of the Twenty-Second Amendment, he did not completely relinquish his presidential ambitions at the end of his second term. Only four months after Kennedy’s inauguration in May 1961, Eisenhower indicated that he would have considered running for a third term if he had not been constitutionally barred from doing so and he had been able to foresee Nixon’s defeat in the 1960 election. Eisenhower’s son, John, also indicated that he and White House officials believed that had Eisenhower not been barred from running for reelection, he probably would have done so in 1960. And some political commentators have speculated that if Eisenhower had run, he would have been renominated and reelected.

50 best magazines

From the Chicago Tribune:

What makes a magazine great? The writing. The ideas. The photography. The design. Sure. But more importantly, a magazine’s worth depends on how it catches readers’ glances, and then their hearts. Here, Tempo presents its second annual 50 Best Magazines list. Our selections reflect the periodicals that we pay good money to buy, that we pile on our nightstands, that we devour on trains, that we consider to be the best at what they set out to do. There are more than 17,500 magazines published in this country, so choosing the 50 best was daunting. We argued, we concurred, we scoffed. And we welcome you to continue the debate.

Top 10

  1. Wired
  2. Real Simple
  3. The Economist
  4. Cook’s Illustrated
  5. Esquire
  6. The New Yorker
  7. American Demographics
  8. Men’s Health
  9. Jane
  10. Consumer Reports