January Film Journal

One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch (Chris Marker, 2000)
La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini, 1953)
Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)
The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2004)
A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006)
Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942)
Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005)
The Razor's Edge (Edmund Goulding, 1946)
Beloved (Jonathan Demme, 1998)
Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)
The Devil's Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)
The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)
The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976)
Dark Days (Marc Singer, 2000)
Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)
The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding, 1939)
An Autumn Tale (Eric Rohmer, 1998)
The Butcher (Claude Chabrol, 1970)
The Story of Adèle H. (François Truffaut, 1975)
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)
Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

Work: Inside and Out

It has finally decided to become cold here and actually stay cold. A few daffodils at my workplace got a jump on spring, no doubt fooled by the 70-degree weather we had a little over a week ago. They are currently holding their own during the freezing nights and cloudy, chilly days.

Meanwhile, I am stuck inside in the middle of this horrible mess. This is what it looks like when I'm trying to ship two books. Pretty ugly, no? But there's no point in cleaning up until these books go. Anyhow, a slice of life:

So this is what it means to own a digital camera.

I recently got a digital camera, and I was driving home from work the other night and was stunned by how beautiful the sky was. Then I realized that I had my camera with me. It's just a shame I was, you know, driving. By the time I got out my camera and reached a red light so I could actually get the shot, I'd lost a lot of the sky because of the trees, and I had that darned light post smack in the middle of my view. But still, there's something really great about being able to take a shot just whenever. And I'm still amazed that my new camera is about half the size of my hand; I'm so used to my old-school Pentax (old-school, yes, but still pretty awesome). The more technologically advanced folks have, of course, appreciated this sort of thing for years. I'm late catching up, so I'm still in that phase of childlike wonder. Anway, this is not a great photo, but I'm quite glad I was able to capture at least part of that sky.

Daily Dose of Imagery

For some time, I've been meaning to highlight Sam Javanrouh's photo blog, Daily Dose of Imagery. I've become quite the fan, and I make it a point to visit every day to check out each new photo. If I'm away from my computer, I make sure to check the entries for the days I've missed. Javanrouh seems to do quite a bit of traveling, so you'll see shots from many different cities around the world included on his site. (Yesterday's photo from Rome, for example, is a stunner.) But he makes his home in Toronto, so that city is represented particularly well. For example, check out this fun composition (be sure to wait for the second box on the page to load and then move your mouse across it). And since something like this is pretty foreign to me, living down here in the deep South, I'm fond of these two shots of Nathan Phillips Square. I'm also drawn to his various photos of cafés, including these two of the Balzac. But I'm only scratching the surface. The archives page is a treasure trove. Enjoy!

Thoughts on the New Year (and the Old)

Here are the two words that best sum up my thoughts on 2006: Good riddance. I pray that 2007 will be much better all-around.

Julie, Mark, Ron, Melinda, Deb, Mom: Thanks so much for what you did for me (where did you get such patience?). You are each a blessing. Cue the song "Five Stars and Two Thumbs Up."

So, did anyone make any New Year's resolutions? I never make them, but I'm toying with some ideas this year, though they will probably be rather hard to pull off. But they would most likely be beneficial. Anyway, I do have some things to think about.

As far as this blog goes, I've learned to stop saying I have plans or even intentions to post on any specific thing. Any statement proclaiming that I will write about something seems to always work as a death knell, leaving you with film journal entries and personal anecdotes instead of, well, any of the film or music reviews I had hoped to write about. But so it goes. Thanks, dear readers, for hanging around these parts anyway. I am grateful for each and every comment.

Happy New Year, y'all!

December Film Journal

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1969)
The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956)
Knife in the Water (Roman Polanski, 1962)
Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960)
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
The Leopard (Luchino Viscont, 1963)
The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)
Plan 9 from Outer Space (Edward D. Wood Jr., 1959)
Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978)
Unfaithfully Yours (Preston Sturges, 1948)
3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)
The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002)
Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
The Sea Is Watching* (Kei Kumai, 2002)
The Shop Around the Corner* (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)
The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2003)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966)
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
49 Up (Michael Apted, 2005)

*rewatch