What makes a favorite movie? For me, it’s wanting to watch it multiple times, enjoying watching it multiple times, nostalgic value, and the overall subjective “I liked it.”
These aren’t ranked by number, but you can assume that the higher on the list the movie is, the more I like it.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Wayne’s World
Children of Men
The Third Man
Dumb and Dumber
Goodfellas
Lost in Translation
Minority Report
Ghostbusters
The French Connection
The Three Amigos
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Hot Shots
Sneakers
Schindler’s List
Rear Window
Toy Story
Toy Story 2
Catch Me if You Can
Bringing Out the Dead
Bottle Rocket
The Hudsucker Proxy
Traffic
Touching the Void
The Darjeeling Limited
The Host (Gwoemul)
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
A King in New York
Pulp Fiction
Songs from the Second Floor
The Blues Brothers
21 Grams
Born into Brothels
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
Waco: The Rules of Engagement
Slumdog Millionaire
Forrest Gump
Young Frankenstein
A Beautiful Mind
Jaws
Life is Beautiful
The Rules of the Game
8 1/2
On the Waterfront
This list is perpetually incomplete. I will change it whenever and however I feel like it.
I wanted to include as many as I could here without being excessive. Maybe this is already excessive.
If I list every movie I’ve ever so much as remotely enjoyed or could at least recommend to people, we’d both be here all night. I don’t want that. Maybe I’ll categorize things like that in the future. Maybe I’ll make an “honorable mention” list. Maybe I should review every single movie I’ve ever seen in a separate blog. That’s the only way I could be completely thorough about this. Anyway, if/until that happens, we’ve got this concise list here for now.
Did I forget anything? Got any recommendations for me?
We’re having a baby! We’ve known for over a month and we just started telling everybody this weekend. It’s due May 15th, we’ll find out the gender in January, and it is all very exciting and humbling and totally rad.
For Halloween the baby went as Neo, before he’s unplugged from the matrix.
Head on left, body/feet on right, little arm top-middle. We saw it moving around, heart beating. Amazing!
This post is a list of songs/bands/music/music videos that I like. The “favorite music” section on my Facebook profile page redirects to here.
I’m doing this because I’m trying to minimize my dependency on using Facebook for listing things that I like (whilst simultaneously maintaining a healthy dependency on the internet in general, and using words like “whilst”). I did the same thing with TV shows a while back.
This list may get added onto at anytime without warning and without report.
Although this post is more about the music than music videos, some of these music videos are really quite good indeed (e.g. you’ll notice a lot of Michel Gondry). Also, I’ve learned that a lot of YouTube users have disabled embedding of their videos.
Not necessarily in any particular order, and really no big deal.
**
MODEST MOUSE (Favorite albums: Good News For People Who Love Bad News, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. Favorite songs: One Chance, The View, Dramamine, 3rd Planet, Spitting Venom, Dashboard, March Into the Sea, and more.) Here’s Ocean Breathes Salty:
RADIOHEAD (Favorite album: OK Computer. Once I got into that album, I listened to it at least once a day for 7 months straight. Kid A & The Bends are excellent too. So are the rest. Favorite songs: Let Down, Sulk, Packt Like Sardines etc, 15 Steps, Morning Bell (Kid A, not Amnesiac), Kid A, National Anthem, Planet Telex, I Can’t, and more.) Here’s No Surprises:
R.E.M. (Favorite album: New Adventures in Hi-Fi, maybe just because I think it’s underrated. Love the whole thing. Automatic for the People, Out of Time, Accelerate, Document, Monster, Up are excellent too. So are the rest. Favorite songs: Living Well is the Best Revenge, Hope, Leaving New York, Exhuming McCarthy, Finest Worksong, What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?, E-Bow the Letter, New Test Leper, Binky the Doormat, Imitation of Life, and more.) Here’s Supernatural Superserious:
BECK (Favorite Albums: Odelay, Mutations, Midnite Vultures, The Information, Mellow gold, they’re all good. Favorite songs: Elevator Music, Ghettochip Malfunction, Cellphone’s Dead, F***in’ With My Head, Nicotine & Gravy, Hollywood Freaks, Golden Age, Diamond Bollocks, Cold Brains, It’s All in Your Mind, most everything on Odelay, and more.) Here’s Orphans:
Arcade Fire – Keep the Car Running (dang, can’t find a music video for it, this is my favorite song of theirs. Well here’s Wake Up instead. This isn’t a music video–whoever made this just has the word Fusion appearing over and over again. This is what I get for relying soley on YouTube for this so far.)
Bright Eyes – Four Winds (All the jerks in the video ruined the song. Why did they have that much garbage with them anyway?)
DAVE MATTHEWS BAND (Favorite songs: Warehouse, Lie in Our Graves, So Much to Say, The Best of What’s Around, Grey Street, Stay (live), and more.) Here’s I Did It:
THE WHITE STRIPES (Favorite songs: most anything from Elephant, I’m Slowly Turning Into You,Blue Orchid, Icky Thump, Fell in Love with a Girl, Effect & Cause, and more.) Here’s The Hardest Button to Button:
If you want to be a cool dude like me, watch 30 Rock tonight. Of course, if you’re reading this, then I already know you’re a cool dude/dudette.
Based on seasons 1 through 3, 30 Rock is my favorite thing happening on television right now. Season 4 begins this evening.
It’s hard to find clips from the show that would represent it well for people who don’t watch it. Here’s a couple anyway. What these don’t have is Alec Baldwin, who is excellent in this show.
When I typed a post on Allie’s blog last week, I said I’d come up with an embarrassing story about her and post it in the comments section of the post a few days later. Well, I couldn’t really think of any good stories, but here’s this:
On birthdays at my house, we would open presents in the morning before breakfast. This was on Allie’s birthday in 1988. This particular year, I guess Allie got a present in a long box, and unwrapped it real nicely. I saw mom getting ready to take a picture, so I thought it’d be great if I did this:
We can all agree that this is a nice picture, sure, but the best part is that neither of them noticed me do this until after they got the roll of film developed. In the moment I was sure that one of them would tell me to take that off my head for the picture, but that didn’t happen.
I work at VitalSmarts, a research-based corporate consulting/training company dedicated to elite skills training and behavior change initiatives. It’s nothing hokey, so that’s good. (Check out Influencer–it honestly changed the way I think about problems/things in general. Here’s a link and here’s another link.)
Here’s the latest video we’ve put together. I did most of the editing but it was a huge group effort. And now it’s done! Enjoy.
Last Thursday (Sept 10th) was the United Way Day of Caring in our area. My company had some of us volunteer for the morning. A group of us went, and (after a nice free breakfast) were assigned to go work on a home for Habitat for Humanity in Provo. We were there working for about 4 or 5 hours. I did some hammering, nail-gunning, board-carrying, and other house-building tasks I’m qualified to perform.
Last June, Rebecca’s parents went to Omaha to serve a one-year mission for their/our church, and we’re living in their house until they get back.
Rebecca’s mom is into scrapbooking-type stuff, and she’s decorated parts of the house with some sticker-phrases. For example, this one’s above a closet door in the kitchen:
Rebecca and I went to see The Wizard of Oz at the community theater (-re?) last Wednesday with a few of my coworkers. I’m not much for musicals or plays, but we went because one of my managers, Darren Poulsen, was in it as the Cowardly Lion. He was great!
I hadn’t seen that show in a really long time, so there was a lot in the story I had forgotten about. The “Winkies”? What? And the jitterbug? Oh well. Now I just need to do the Dark Side of the Moon thing with the movie; been meaning to do that for years.
Rebecca and I went to the Modest Mouse concert on Tuesday in Salt Lake. If you don’t know who Modest Mouse is, that’s too bad. You might know them from this song, it played on MTV a lot when it came out (and you can play it in Rockband): Float On, or this song: Dashboard, and this one’s good: Ocean Breathes Salty.
The concert started at 8. It was at a place called In The Venue. It was sold out! There was a line to get in. It was standing room only. We got a good little area on the right side of the room to stand in that gave us a good view of everybody on stage, especially the lead singer, who was on the side of the stage nearest us.
The opening band was The Night Marchers. They were alright, fun, you know, as good as a band that isn’t the one you came to see can be. The lead singer was funny. During one of the songs, a lot of the teenage boys in front & center were moshing. When the song ended, the lead singer said “I appreciate everybody who was slamdancing during that last song, that’s great… Little boys, rubbing up against each other… dot com. …That’s my website.” Ha ha. I guess you had to be there.
Modest Mouse was awesome. Maybe it’s just because I don’t go to concerts very often at all, but they were just so much fun live. There were a lot of songs I was hoping they’d play and they played a ton of them!
Here’s the setlist. I’m not sure how accurate this is because the website I copied this from got the first encore song wrong, so I fixed it.
Dramamine
Gravity Rides Everything (Nice!)
Fly Trapped In A Jar
Never Ending Math Equation
3rd Planet (Awesome!)
Satellite Skin
Blame It On The Tetons (unexpected, great!)
King Rat
Here It Comes
Dashboard (Awesome!)
The Whale Song
Breakthrough
The Good Times Are Killing Me (Yeah!)
The View (Love it!)
Spitting Venom (Really wanted to hear this live!)
Encore:
Bury Me With It (Yeah!)
Tiny Cities Made of Ashes (Adrienne you’re so jealous)
Broke
After the first couple songs, lead singer Isaac Brock said that they had some broccoli and cauliflower that they weren’t going to eat, and offered to give it to someone as long as they promised not to throw it around and make a mess. So, in addition to a rockin concert, two or three lucky individuals went home with some free veggies.
There was a guy next to Rebecca who kept jabbing her with his elbow whilst rocking out, so I switched spots with her. Then the guy in front of her kept sticking his butt out behind him, thus invading her space. It didn’t make sense. Other than that, and the various forms of smoke, and the HEAT, we were fine.
At the beginning of Spitting Venom, after playing a couple of chords, there was a bit of feedback from an amp behind Brock. He immediately yelled “WHAT THE F*** IS THAT?!” into the mic, took a few seconds to check it out, and then started the song over. Awesome. Now I might start reacting like that to things at work, as an homage.
At the beginning and at the end of the Encore, Brock said “Uh oh, Spaghetti O’s!” Huh? Awesome.
So there it is, the summary with some highlights. It was totally rad. If you don’t know the band, I recommend starting with Good News For People Who Love Bad News, it’s my current favorite album of theirs.
I use Final Cut Studio to edit video content at work. Sometimes Final Cut Pro sees a difficult part in a video and has a hissy fit about how long it’s going to take to render everything after that.
Heh heh, amusing. It’s a 2-hour sequence, and it’ll really only take a few hours (as long as Final Cut doesn’t crash on me, it’s been doing that lately).
What do I think is the best R.E.M. album? You’d think it might be Automatic For The People, but it’s not, it’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Maybe that was more of a facebook status line than a blog post… guess I’ll put it there too. Whatever. Anyway, it’s not often that I’ll pretty much love every single song on an album. Check it out. The 90’s, man, yeah.
I worked on a bunch of films (mostly students’) during my time in film school (2004-2007). Camera crew, producing, writing, gaffing, whatever. This means I have a few credits on a small handful of stuff.
In 2006 I co-produced the short film Bubbie, which is an endearing Yiddish slang word for “grandma.” It’s a great film (won some great recognition at some festivals!), I’m proud to have been a part of it, and it was great to work with Matthew Schramer, the writer/director; Lauren Moss, producer; Cole Webley, director of photography; and everyone else. Very talented people who are still out doing great things.
So anyway, if you search my name on imdb.com, here’s what you see:
Heh heh. I just think it’s funny that the human brain, upon seeing this juxtaposition, may associate/connect my name with this image, thus creating [unintended] meaning. Thanks, Eisenstein!
