Thoughts

Well, well, the weeks until Moving Day are dwindling away, aren't they?  23 more days in Georgia and then it's Texas, here we come! 

This weekend, we kept it simple and low-key and watched movies - Mama and This is 40 among them.  Mama wasn't bad until the last third, when it dissolved into too much whirling-CGI silliness.  This is 40 was a loose, overlong blast, with plenty of funny bits and some scathing, possibly autobiographical moments that were easy to relate to. 

This week, our goal is to start crossing things off our list of Things to Do Before We Leave: cancel cable services, take the pets to the vet, etc.  Oh, yeah, and finishing the Jeffrey Archer novels we are reading would be nice, too: Julia's reading Paths of Glory (about George Mallory, the ill-fated Everest climber), while I've started his recent, Follett-esque saga that kickstarts with Only Time Will Tell.

We went up to 2nd and Charles, the used bookstore in Augusta, this weekend and bought 26 mostly longish fiction titles - John Jakes, Dan Simmons, Archer, James Clavell, etc.  Can't wait to start reading them. 

Finally, let's briefly mention the recent copy of Entertainment Weekly list of the Greatest Ever:

Movies: It's simply too easy and too unoriginal to call Citizen Kane the best movie ever.  And what is The Sound of Music doing on this list?  Only about 12 or 13 foreign films - are you kidding me?  World cinema has only accounted for less than a sixth of cinema's greatness?  Not much from the last 20-25 years, either: Rushmore (overrated), Titanic, All About My Mother, Toy Story, There Will Be Blood, Pulp Fiction, etc.  The comedies on the list were too predictable, too - the films that are "supposed" to be there.  Two Woody Allen movies in the top 40?  Where's Raging Bull?  Where's The Godfather Part II?  I could go on about the foreign directors neglected, but what about Groundhog Day, Unforgiven, L.A. Confidential, Rio Bravo, etc? 

Music:  Not too m any qualms here, but there is far more hip-hop than I would have on my own list.  It's funny, because back when I, you know, owned music, I had most of these albums.  Revolver probably is the greatest album ever, people - inventive and groundbreaking, sure, but such an eclectic assemblage of great songs - my favorite Beatles song, "Eleanor Rigby," the great ballad "Here, There, and Everywhere," the sublimely goofy "Yellow Submarine," the chugging, angry "Taxman," etc.  Even the artists I don't particularly like or I haven't listened to in a long time on here deserve to be on the list.  And kudos to EW for including my favorite soundtrack of all time - The Harder They Come, the great reggae accompaniment to a little-seen (and certainly not by me - I don't even know what it's about) Jamaican film of 1973. 

Books:  Can't argue with too many of the books that were included that I have read (39, to be exact), but I am mystified by what isn't on the list: 1984, Brave New World, Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh, Ulysses, The Grapes of Wrath (oh, come on!), Don Quixote, Revolutionary Road, Pillars of the Earth, The Good Earth, to name but a few no-shows.  Never read Anna Karenina, their top pick, but I hear it's not bad. 

TV:  Look, I really liked The Wire - superb on every level - but by the end of the series, I was just tired of the unrelenting bleakness of its vision of Baltimore.  I never got tired of The Sopranos, so that would be my top pick, but that's to-may-to, to-mah-to.  Who cares?  I don't watch any shows that were on before I was born, but I wasn't sure why Friday Night Lights was below Gilmore Girls, do you?  And no Dexter?  That's just cruel.