Rambling About Movies What I Like

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Usually, I spend a good portion of the day before I post these rambling actually writing them. Unfortunately, I was running around all day yesterday and didn't have the energy to spend much time writing after I got back home. This was annoying until I realized that I hadn't actually finished the book I had planned on rambling about this week, which is infinitely more annoying. So I decided to utilize some of the various backup topics I have squirreled away in a chest labeled "the place most writers don't want to admit they get their ideas." 

You might think that talking about a list of favorite movie is a bit basic to which I reply: "if it's so basic, how come my previous two 'I have no ideas this week' posts were my Minecraft posts." To which you might rejoin: "I don't know, you're the one who has to answer for that. Maybe you were just playing Minecraft so much you couldn't do your writing properly." To which I have to reply by smashing a piece of rebar over your head and running away. 

The annoying this about listing your favorite movies, like listing your favorite books, is there you can't really select 1 or even 10 as a "favorite." I think lists like this can't be very static either, they need to live and grow as your opinions change. Admittedly I slapped this list together really quickly this morning, and while I'll be happy to defend any of the movies on this list as brilliant works of art, their status as my favorite movies will probably fluctuate. Except for a few. I've bolded the movies I'm all but certain will remain on my favorite movies lists for years to come. Anyways, here's a rambling selection of several movies what I like, in no particular order. 

• In Bruges - I might as well call this one my favorite, because I have for several years now, and I see no reason to change that. A darkly comedic exploration of a fairly serious morality play, filled with great performances. If I have to have one 'favorite' this would be it. 
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - I mean... can you blame me? Sean Connery is sexy as fuck in this movie. All joking aside, Last Crusade really should have been the final Indiana Jones picture because it's a damn near perfect conclusion. 
• 12 Angry Men - A fair number of movies on this list are explorations of morality. Actually that might be the defining theme that runs through this list. 12 Angry Men asks you to consider - through either logic or empathy - whether or not we have the right to condemn someone to death, and why we would even want to. 
• Murder on the Orient Express - As much as I'm a fan of Kenneth Branagh's flashier 2017 remake (which is very much worth a look if you haven't seen it) I'm picking Sidney Lumet's 1974 original here. This movie's brilliance lies in keeping the book's subtle thematic discussion subtle, and is something of the inverse of 12 Angry Men removing all ambiguity of guilt.  
• Seven Samurai - I don't think it's possible to have a best movies list without mentioning Akira Kurosawa. While I might be picking his most popular movie for this list... it still is really good and has become an architype for American westerns for a reason. 
• The Lives of Others - Doing the right thing in adverse circumstances is an extremely reductive summary of this movie. It's more about a morally neutral man becoming a good man through experiencing life vicariously.  
• Coyote Vs. Acme - This is the most recent movie on this list, and I will refer you to my review for a greater analysis and reasons why I love it. But in brief, I think this movie matches the dynamic animation and thematic resonance of Who Framed Roger Rabbit while still being, very, very, very looney. 
• Up - If you don't cry during this, you don't have a soul. That's literally all I have to say. 
• Lawrence of Arabia - I'm adding this because I recently rewatched a few scenes towards the end of the movie, and I was reminded of just how good it is. David Lean was a fantastic director almost a novelist in film, painting complex character portraits through images in the same way a novelist uses words. Also, this movie's ending is gutting. 
• The Big Lebowski - If you don't laugh during this, you don't have a soul. That's literally all I have to say. 
• Metropolis - I don't love silent movies enough and this film is proof of that. If you haven't seen this, please do yourself a favor. There's probably a version available on YouTube. 
• Spotlight - Any good movie about journalism will have to focus on what the press is supposed to be - and so rarely is - a watchdog against power and institutions. To my mind, that leaves three movies: All The President's Men, The Post and Spotlight. Good and important as the first two are, Spotlight hits in a way that sobering. I admit that it might hit more because I was raised Catholic and so the movie impacts more personally. 
• LA Confidential - I love a good film noir, and I will forever trumpet James Ellroy as a master of the literary noir. Not every adaptations of his books have proven successes (for the record though, I enjoyed The Black Dahlia) but you really don't need any other movie than this one. It's a tight script, economically told, and it has Danny DeVito.   
• The Third Man - Once again I love a movie for its writer and explorations of morality. Graham Greene is one of my favorite authors, and Orson Wells is one of my favorite actors. Add Joseph Cotton, a distinct Zither soundtrack, Dutch angles and noir storytelling, and you have a classic.  
• Calvary - Calvary has the hardest opening line I've ever heard in a movie, spat through a confessional panel, followed by a threat. From there on, a priest, played by a magnificent Brendan Gleeson, lives under a death sentence - though not because he did anything wrong. 
• The Birdcage - I need some pure comedy on this list aside from the Big Lebowski, and it really doesn't get better than Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. And Gene Hackman and Dianne West, good lord, this movie's cast is stacked. Oh my God Hank Azaria is amazing in here. 
• The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - what do you get when you cast Guy Pierce, Hugo Weaving and Terrance Stamp as 3 drag queens driving through the outback? You get a movie that should have been more controversial than it was, especially since it was released in 1994. The reality is, it's a movie with a lot of heart, especially in Terrance Stamp's performance as the trans woman Bernadette. 
• Emesis Blue - would you believe me that the single greatest horror movie of the 2020's (setting aside how good 2026 has been for horror) was released for free on YouTube and is a machinima starring the cast of Team Fortress 2? No, of course you wouldn't believe me. So watch it for yourself. Just watch it with the lights off. 

Anyways, here's a few others that came to mind that I didn't feel like writing about just now: Chimes At Midnight, F For Fake, M, Sherlock Holmes A Game of Shadows, The Hunt for Red October, the John Wick Franchise (all 5 movies because fuck you,) Barry Lyndon, Topsy Turvy, The Magnificent 7 (2016), Hell or High Water, Unforgiven, Ratatouille, Rashomon, Ran, Throne of Blood, True Grit (both versions), Wake Up Dead Man, The Red Shoes, The Great Dictator, The Northman, The Lighthouse, Blazing Saddles, The Searchers, Zodiac, Paths of Glory, The Batman, Amadeus, Sinners, Sully

Consider the Leftovers: David Foster Wallace's Non-Fiction or: Why I Haven’t Read and Will Probably Never Read Infinite Jest

Saying that I have a strained relationship with David Foster Wallace is both factious and necessarily true. He’s dead for one thing, so of course we won’t ever have a good relationship or any kind of relationship; and let’s be clear right now: I don’t wish that to sound callous about the death of David Foster Wallace. He had a lifelong struggle with depression and finally killed himself and I certainly sympathize with the pain he was obviously in. My strained relationship with him comes from the fact that I’ve almost always bounced off his writing before now, and if you might object that shouldn’t lead me to assume a strained relationship with him, well, I would argue that you form relationships of a sort with any authors that you read. (I’m almost certain that there’s a literary theory that claims this, maybe Reader-Response theory.) And in that case, with my prior exposure to David Foster Wallace, He and I, we don’t get along. 

Let me put it to you this way. Most of the people who have tried to read Infinite Jest have put it down for three reasons: It’s too long, It’s too pretentious, the footnotes, or some combination of the three. For my money, I found it to be emotionally overwrought, too dense for it’s own good and surprisingly empty of meaning. The people who have read it, who I have no doubt are very intelligent and much, much more patient than I am, have insisted to me that the books is well worth reading. That it’s about the ways we find hope and enjoyment in life through pain. That’s all very well and it could be that that’s the case. However, I don’t think that stacking endnotes and footnotes to establish a fictional world is the right way to grab my attention or to convey a message of hope to people who need it. It strokes me more as a literary novelty than serious fiction. 

All this complaining to say that since I haven’t shown much interest in his fiction, you can imagine my surprise to discover that I kind of liked his book of essays Consider the Lobster. I would never deny that David Foster Wallace was unintelligent, but frankly his fiction was either about topics that were poorly explored or uninteresting. That said, I can’t write off his nonfiction as the subjects he chose or was assigned were just more interesting to write and read about, ranging from the AVN Awards to language usage to the fallout from 9/11 to the ethics of boiling lobsters alive (ostensibly [more detailed notes below.]) I can complain about Wallace’s footnote-heavy writing style in his fiction, but I’m happy to say it works better in his nonfiction (Even though I really think he should have used parentheticals; I mean, even in the audiobook they just slot the footnotes into the text with a short ‘begin footnote’ and saying ‘parenthesis wouldn’t have been much different. [Also, I'm only using parentheticals because blogger won't let me insert footnotes.{No, I'm not being a hypocrite, I'm being funny.}])

All in all, I liked this collection. I don’t like all the essays, but that’s an unavoidable fact of anthologies, not everything is good. I will admit that my positive reaction to this collection might be the result of my extreme hatred to the previous book I read this week (A Little Life. I hate that book. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate it. I don’t advocate burning books outside of Atlas Shrugged, but I now have a new book to recommend as kindling.) I don’t know if my relatively positive reaction to this book is down to me just hating that one but for the moment, I enjoyed Consider the Lobster. I find it to be interesting. 

And now, you ask, that I’ve had a positive experience with a David Foster Wallace book, will I go back to Infinite Jest? I don’t think so. I might read some of David Foster Wallace’s short fiction, but I honestly don’t have the interest or energy to read Infinite Jest right now (If you don’t know, don’t ask. Just avoid A Little Life.) 

Anyways, here’s my reading notes on the contents of Consider the Lobster if you are at all curious. 

 

Big Red Son

• David Foster Wallace attends the Adult Video News Porn Awards. Don’t you just cringe. 
• Tonally, this article comes off as either hopelessly naïve or dismissive of porn’s place in the entertainment industry. Hell, the published title of this essay was once “Neither Adult or Entertainment”
• A serious complaint that Wallace lodges against the porn industry is that its insistence on porn being a legitimate genre just makes it tacky. I wonder if it was setting of Las Vegas that made the whole show seem tacky. 
• On the other hand, the industry executives Wallace encounters are definitely sleaze incarnate. Not the actors so much as the executives who seem like they’re profiting from the humiliation of the people they employ. 
• Disappointingly, the essay doesn’t have much to say about the porn’s actual place as a genre, or the social and political influences keeping it from being a regulated, safer industry. 
• I won’t lie, this essay did make the laugh a fair few times, but it wasn’t an auspicious start of the book. 

Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think

• David Foster Wallace reviews John Updike’s (then) latest book Toward the End of Time. 
• Admits to liking Updike, despite his somewhat homogeneous main characters, misogynism, overwrought scenic descriptions and perverted lust after women. 
• Hates Toward the end of Time and from his description, I would too.  Seriously, it’s just an Updike novel wearing the skin of a Sci-Fi novel. Boring. 

Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed

• David Foster Wallace insists that Kafka is funny in this short piece that was apparently an after dinner speech. 
• And yes Kafka is. It’s dark humor, but humor nonetheless. 

Authority and American Usage

• David Foster Wallace reviews the dictionary. 
• Specifically Bryan A. Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Also:
• David Foster Wallace reviews the concept of lexicography 
• Lexicography, Noun. Lex-i-cog-ra-phy 
• 1) the editing or making of a dictionary 2) the principles and practices of dictionary making
• Related:
• lexicographical: adj. lexicographically: adv.
• In reality, a very dense essay on the difference between Prescriptive (preferred usage of language; ie conservative) and Descriptive (how language is objectively used, ie liberal), something that only serious philologists (snoots, as David Foster Wallace calls them) would care about. I’m kind of a language nerd, and this seems a good introduction to the political philosophy behind the usage of language.   
• Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is still the definitive work on the subject, however, and David Foster Wallace does admit that.  

The View from Mrs. Thompson's

• David Foster Wallace witnesses 9/11 from his neighbor’s house in Bloomington, Illinois. 
• Emotionally, this essay reflects the trauma of 9/11 far better than I ever could have. The Numb horror that affects all of David Foster Wallace’s neighbors doesn’t seem to strike David Foster Wallace, who reveals a twisted sort of cynicism about the event, seeing it as the culmination of the horrors of the 20th Century. 

How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart

• David Foster Wallace spends too long talking about a book that isn’t worth talking about. 
• And he even admits it’s not worth talking about, and that’s kind of his whole point. 
• He loves tennis and hates ghostwritten, self-aggrandizing, ostensibly autobiographical biographies. I think we can all agree with that. 
• I don’t care about tennis that much (although I have played it more than I would like to admit, and I do like playing it, must be said.) 
• I wonder if David Foster Wallace’s pure seething contempt of this book was the reason Infinshite Gestation (that was puerile, I'm not sorry) was partially set at a Tennis Academy where every character seems to have some sort of personality flaw. 

Up, Simba

• David Foster Wallace trails John McCain’s failed republican nomination bid in the year 2000
• Basically a poor man’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 . David Fostar Wallace is nowhere near as funny, but is as at least as sharply observant as Hunter S. Thompson. 
• Still, John McCain proves to be an interesting subject for political analysis like this, even though I, and David Foster Wallace disagree with his political assertions. As a presidential candidate, he struck David Foster Wallace as being a rare thing in politics: exactly what he said he was. 
• As we know from John McCain’s performance during the 2008 election and his opposition to the first Trump administration’s absurd policies, he certainly was a man who prized honor above all. 
• Would he have been a good president? I don’t know, and that’s not the purpose of the article. The purpose is that for all the cynicism with one must apply to politics, for all his cany politicking, John McCain is interesting, and I can’t shake that opinion after reading it. 

Consider the Lobster

• David Foster Wallace argues that most methods of eating lobster are inhumane
• Disappointingly insubstantial on the subject of boiling Lobsters alive for cooking. Offers no real ethical standpoint other than “Yeah, it sucks, but I still like eating meat, so maybe I’ll just avoid the lobster. Glad I tried this food though." 
• I wonder what Stephen King thinks of the Maine Lobster Fair? 

Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky

• David Foster Wallace reviews the 4th volume of Joseph Frank’s biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Asks a very important questions: have morals become separated from literature? (specifically the literature of the late 1990’s?) Why did we abandon serious literature for desperately unserious, Ironic literature? 
• Honestly sounds like a good biography. 

Host

• He weirdly argues that it’s not so much a brainwashing program from the pro-capitalist right as it is a merely a cold hard business strategy. I ask you, what logic is there in that? 
• Boy, this essay is really dated in the era of slop podcasts. (Seriously, I can't think of a single essay that has aged worse than this fairly blasé dismissal of the populism behind conservative radio)

Alright, I've considered; he looks delicious. I don't own this image