102 Films

Jason Kottke posts a list by film critic Jim Emerson of 102 movies someone ought to have seen to be considered movie literate. I suspect my list and that of just about everyone else would be different, since we all like and dislike different things, but here’s the list.

An asterisk means I have seen it.

* 2001: A Space Odyssey (overrated)
* The 400 Blows (pretty good)
8 1/2
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
* Alien (defines the modern alien genre)
* All About Eve (good)
* Annie Hall (other than Tiger Lilly, I find Woody Allen’s movies boring)
* Apocalypse Now (great movie)
* Bambi (I liked it and my kids do too)
The Battleship Potemkin
* The Best Years of Our Lives (great movie)
* The Big Red One (pretty good)
The Bicycle Thief
* The Big Sleep (OK, not great)
* Blade Runner (one of my all time faves)
Blowup (never seen it, but would like to)
* Blue Velvet (great movie)
* Bonnie and Clyde (OK, not great)
* Breathless (nah)
Bringing Up Baby
* Carrie (good scary movie)
* Casablanca (as good as its reputation_
Un Chien Andalou
Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
* Chinatown (pretty good)
* Citizen Kane (great film)
* A Clockwork Orange (famous for being weird, but still pretty good)
* The Crying Game (great ending)
* The Day the Earth Stood Still (great sci-fi)
* Days of Heaven (fantastic movie; a must see)
* Dirty Harry (great Clint)
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
* Do the Right Thing (good movie)
La Dolce Vita
* Double Indemnity (one of my favorite of the film noir genre)
* Dr. Strangelove (great film)
* Duck Soup (I actually get the Marx brothers)
* E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial (great at the time)
* Easy Rider (good, but Wild Angels was better)
* The Empire Strikes Back (masterpiece)
* The Exorcist (great horror film)
* Fargo (great, but Raising Arizona is better)
* Fight Club (OK, not great)
* Frankenstein (masterpiece, if he’s talking about the 1931 one)
The General
* The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II (should have added III too)
* Gone With the Wind (I liked it the first few times I saw it)
* GoodFellas (great film)
* The Graduate (great film)
* Halloween (maybe the best modern horror film)
* A Hard Day’s Night (good because it’s the Beatles)
Intolerance
It’s a Gift
* It’s a Wonderful Life (my favorite holiday film ever)
* Jaws (how in the world has Jason not seen this!)
* The Lady Eve (good, but not great)
* Lawrence of Arabia (great epic film)
M
* Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior (great post apocalypse films)
* The Maltese Falcon (great Bogart)
* The Manchurian Candidate (OK, not great)
* Metropolis (never understood the big deal about this one)
Modern Times
* Monty Python and the Holy Grail (the funniest movie ever)
* Nashville (good, not great)
* The Night of the Hunter (great Mitchum)
* Night of the Living Dead (one of my all time faves)
* North by Northwest (my favorite Hitchcock)
Nosferatu
* On the Waterfront (Brando when he wasn’t a cartoon character)
Once Upon a Time in the West
* Out of the Past (Another of my favorite film noir movies)
Persona
* Pink Flamingos (great, but I like Hairspray better)
* Psycho (good)
* Pulp Fiction (one of my all-time faves)
Rashomon
* Rear Window (good)
* Rebel Without a Cause (OK, but not as good as its reputation)
* Red River (great movie- there should be more westerns on this list)
* Repulsion (weird, but with Catherine Deneuve)
The Rules of the Game
* Scarface (pretty good, but Casino’s better)
The Scarlet Empress
* Schindler’s List (masterpiece
* The Searchers (another great western)
The Seven Samurai
* Singin’ in the Rain (a rare musical I like)
* Some Like It Hot (OK, not great)
* A Star Is Born (the original is bearable; I hated the remake)
* A Streetcar Named Desire (great movie)
* Sunset Boulevard (another great film noir movie)
* Taxi Driver (great movie)
* The Third Man (great Orson Welles)
Tokyo Story
* Touch of Evil (definitely in my top 5 all time)
* The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (great movie)
Trouble in Paradise
* Vertigo (more great Hitchcock)
* West Side Story (didn’t like it)
* The Wild Bunch (great western)
* The Wizard of Oz (speaks for itself)

I’ve seen 78 out of 102.

All in all, a fairly good list. I would certainly add The Birds, Suddenly Last Summer, Summer of 42, The Last Picture Show, and A Place in the Sun. I would seriously consider adding Full Metal Jacket, the remake of The Thing, Belly of an Architect and the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Bubble 2.0 Watch: He Said Thought Leaders

web20 Om Malik says that the thought leaders (a new “pre-owned car” word for my dictionary of needlessly fancy terms), along with investors and pundits, have lately begun to wonder about the whole Web 2.0 business.

Proving that thought leaders have been reading blogs for months, a “well known angel investor,” which I believe is a nice word for a rich guy who swoops down like an angel from heaven and tosses some cash at whatever science project turned business grabs his fancy in exchange for the possibility to get even richer by later selling said project to either Yahoo or some poor smuck in an IPO, wrote, according to Om, “that many of the Web 2.0 companies that were cropping up were targeting a niche audience. He found that many were me-too or forgettable permutations of some of the more established players such as Flickr, You Tube or Digg.”

Ya think? I and a bunch of other average Joes must be thought leaders too, since we have been saying that for months.

Om, who is generally on the money about things technological, goes on to talk about scalability and Web 2.0, arguing that eventually some of the advances that are being made in the Web 2.0 arena will find their way into the enterprise applications that run big business, sort of the way NASA’s velcro found its way onto my 4 year old’s tennis shoes.

Maybe. Eventually. But most big business is running enterprise applications that are 2 or 3 versions old, so Om and I will be retired before the benefitted versions find their way onto most corporate desktops. By then my grandkids will be hoping to get links from Om’s grandkids.

I continue to think that too many people are trying to stuff business, hobbies, old media and blogs into the same bag. I don’t know if it’s a mass scam in the making or if people who are used to writing about business and old media are just writing about what they know.

What I do know is that to judge success you have to start with perspective.

As Dave Winer points out, TechCrunch’s 53,000 or so subscribers is huge in blogosphere terms. 53,000 viewers would be a gigantic bomb if it were a TV show, which is measured in old media terms. Similarly, a Web 2.0 application that has a million users at $0 a month makes a lot less profit than my blog, which makes very little, but costs almost nothing to operate.

You can’t measure success in raw numbers. And you can’t judge a blog by old media standards.

Blogs are not businesses, no matter how many people try to pretend they are. A part of a business, yes. The business, no.

Similarly, most of these Web 2.0 applications are not businesses. A part of a business, yes (thus the sell to Yahoo business plan). But still not the business.

I think there are a lot of people trying to stuff a lot of square pegs in the old and familiar round holes.

As soon as they realize that won’t work, we’ll step back, get some perspective and see where we are.

Web 2.0 Wars: Quarter-Finals Round Four

The Web 2.0 Wars season has come to an end. The list of winners and playoff brackets were posted the other day.

Here’s how the playoffs will work. After taking a look at my prior commentary about each application, I’ll revisit each application and see what, if anything, is new. I’ll add an update for each contestant and pick the winner.

We are now in the quarter-finals and have already had Round 1, Round 2 and Round 3. It’s time for the fourth and final round of the quarter-finals.

Here are the contestants for the fourth quarter-final round:

Digg
Basecamp
Backpack
Technorati
Mercora

Digg is a wildly popular, user driven site that allows users to link to and vote on internet blog posts and news stories. It has huge mindshare and I greatly admire the technology, but as I’ve said many times I don’t like the news by contest process. There is also the potential for gaming which stories get top billing.

Basecamp is a web-based tool that lets you manage and track projects. Prices range from free to expensive. I like the fact that I haven’t seen a million of these and they actually charge for the service, thereby at least giving a nod to a legitimate business plan.

Backpack is an online information collection and storage application. Sort of like a turbo-charged on-line Onfolio or One Note.

Technorati is a blog search and tagging service. It has huge mindshare, and I’ve called it the backbone of the blogosphere- when it works. Unfortunately, it has regularly occurring hiccups.

Mercora is a music search service that stumbled across the finish line first in a weak heat. I got flamed for not picking StumbleUpon.

And the Winner of the fourth quarter-final round is:

This is also a hard round. I have been a devoted user and defender of Technorati, and I still like it, but my link numbers go up and down in a random fashion and I know for a fact (via trackbacks, etc.) that a lot of blogs are not being tracked correctly. Digg is a technological juggernaut, but I just don’t like news by contest. Basecamp has a business plan, but plays to a niche market. Backpack is cool, but in a crowded field.

Most people would give it to Digg in a landslide. But I’m going with a fading Technorati.

Technorati joins YouTube, Memeorandum (now called Techmeme) and Myspace in the Final Four.

Look for the semi-finals shortly.

If I’m to Be Your Camera

If I’m to be your camera,
then who will be your face?
-REM

After researching cameras for a while and considering the various alternatives, I bought a new digital camera. I wanted a digital SLR that would allow me to take photos semi-automatically, like my trusty Sony DSC-V3, and do a lot more manual stuff as I climb up the learning curve.

30D-775836 I settled on a Canon EOS 30D. I also bought a Canon Speedlite flash to use with it. My impressions so far are (a) it is a great camera that can do everything I want it to and more, and (b) I have a lot to learn about photography. I am going to take a camera class later this month, but so far it has been a process of trial and error. I happened across Darren Rowse’s excellent Digital Photography School blog. If anyone has any other sites I should bookmark, please let me know. My initial objectives are to learn the proper settings to take shots of the kids playing their sports and colorful shots in lower light settings and to learn how to manipulate depth of field.

Through reading the manual several times and trial and error, I have already flower-723925 learned a lot more than I knew before about the various camera setting. I am still confused by the practical interplay between aperture, shutter speed and ISO. I know what each term means, but I don’t yet know how to set each for a particular shot or which one to set first.

I took a hundred or so photos today, first of a birthday party and then of the kids and their friends swimming.

jumping-771950 The kids love to jump off the walls behind the swimming pool. Previously, getting a decent photo of them in flight was a hit and miss proposition, with at best one face sort of in focus and the rest of the faces blurry.

This camera will take 5-6 shots of the same jump, with every part of the picture in focus. This camera compared to my old one is more than night and day.

And that’s notwithstanding the fact that I am a mere novice at the digital SLR thing.

It’s going to be fun learning all this stuff, and I certainly welcome any bookmarks or pointers from the experts.

RanchoCast – May 12, 2006 Edition

I did a new podcast tonight. I think it’s another good one, with some great new music by relatively unknown artists you will love.

I played some Deadstring Brothers, Pieta Brown, a two-fer from the Gourds, a song I once described as “perfectly beautiful,” a song by the greatest American rock and roll band working today and much more. 60 minutes of great music.

Not much tech talk tonight, as I am profoundly bored with the blogosphere these days.

MPAA Lets Loose the Dogs of War

snifferdog-701085 Just when I thought we might go a whole week without the MPAA making a greedy fool of itself again comes word that the MPAA is training an army of dogs to sniff out all those pirated DVDs.

Of course so far it is an army of two: Lucky (not to be confused with Lucky Dog, our dog who cares not a whit about DVDs) and Flo.

And of course, Lucky and Flo’s noses, as good as they are, can’t distinguish a pirated DVD from a legal one. So I suppose if you carry a DVD through the airport, you may get the drug dealer treatment unless you can prove to the MPAA that you bought the DVD.

What’s next, a flock of movie sniffing pigeons who will join the MPAA in crapping all over its customers?

Web 2.0 Wars: Quarter-Finals Round Three

The Web 2.0 Wars season has come to an end. The list of winners and playoff brackets were posted the other day.

We are now in the quarter-finals and have already had Round 1 and Round 2. It’s time for the third round in the quarter-finals.

Here are the contestants for the third quarter-final round:

Wikipedia
Flickr
Myspace
Blogger
Pandora

Wikipedia is a collaborative online encyclopedia that has become the best resource on the net, and it’s free. I use it every day and link to it all the time at Newsome.Org.

Flickr is simply the best photo storage, organization and sharing site in the world, period. I use it to store and share photos, to order prints and to make books and posters of my photos. It is an indispensible part of my internet experience.

Myspace is, well, Myspace. I don’t get it, but millions of people do. It has more mindshare at the moment than any other part of the internet. Even non-geeks know what Myspace is.

Blogger is a free blog creation and hosting service. I use it to publish this blog, though my files are hosted on my own server. In fact, I’m typing this post via Blogger.

Pandora maps songs by melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, etc. to create and play groups of similar songs. It works incredibly well and along with Last.fm and Vault Radio, it forms the basis of my internet music listening experience

And the Winner of the third quarter-final round is:

This is a tough one, since I use every one of these applications and services almost every day, except the one that is the most popular site on the internet. I love Pandora and Blogger, but there are other services that do similar things almost as well. Flickr is probably my favorite site on the internet and one of only a few that I actually pay to use. But Wikipedia and Myspace are titans of the internet.

Wikipedia ought to win, but if you give any weight to financial prospects, you simply cannot not pick Myspace.

Myspace moves to the Final Four.

C|Net and the Return of the Bad Old Days

How deep is the online-ad well?

That’s the question and title of an article by Elinor Mills at C|Net today.

The article begins by recalling Bubble 1.0, during which a lot of people, including me, launched web sites and services that were to be supported by online ad sales. Next, of course, it reminds us that for many of those people, it didn’t work out.

A few “industry experts” are claiming that since Ford and P&G are mad buyers of online ads and because more companies buy into the online ad medium, things are just as rosy as rosy can be. Certainly there are more buyers now, which is why all of Web 2.0, Yahoo, Google, AOL, Stowe Boyd, a baby and even Microsoft are making plays to get the advertising dollar while the getting is good.

And I absolutely agree that the decline of some traditional advertising allotments (because no one watches them and they don’t work) has resulted in a renewed, and somewhat desperate, focus on online advertising.

But here’s the thing. We have a confluence of several industries with a vested interest in placing and receiving ad dollars. That’s why everyone is singing the happy song about the long term prospects for online advertising. The reality, however, is that while this song and dance will prolong Bubble 2.0, it will not prevent an implosion once the entire internet hops onto the shoulders of the advertising dollar. Sure, a few people will get rich in the meantime, as more and more of the overall ad dollars chase the mythical internet ad clicker.

But the basic game is the same as last time. And the result will be substantially the same.

In the meantime, we can watch things play out and battle to protect our privacy as more and more targeting (read tracking) technology is tossed out as reason number one why ad buyers should look online.

The ad agencies who look past the low hanging fruit of the internet and develop the next big thing in advertising (whatever that may be) are the ones who should and will get rich. Advertising is at a pivotal point in its evolution. I can’t tell where it’s going yet. I suspect Steve Rubel has a pretty good feel for it. But I know where it’s not going- online. The smart agencies are the ones who see the internet as a rest stop on the way to a more stable destination.

In sum, I don’t agree with everything that’s in the C|Net article, but I am glad to see someone else asking the dreaded question.

Steve Gillmor and the Art of Unnecessary Navel Gazing

Steve Gillmor craps all over Nick Carr about something having to do with Google after apparently having Nick as a guest on his latest podcast, which I used to greatly admire before Steve came out with this non-linking nonsense. Now I think that listening to Steve’s podcast will somehow dilute my brand or my reputation or my credibility or whatever it is that Steve says we should protect by creating a cocoon around ourselves.

Steve, trust me, Nick thinks he’s smarter than you. Although you may be closing in on him in the arrogance department with gems like this (from the same post):

Links produce economic ripples that keep incumbents in charge; removing links puts users in charge. Clicking on a link does not pay the author….

Actually, I don’t think Steve is arrogant at all. I just think he is trying to stuff the blogosphere into a magazine’s hole. They are different animals, Steve, and try as you might, you can’t turn a blog into a magazine. What you can do is turn it into a non-conversational personal web page, circa 1996. You can do that alright. But why would you want to?

Steve seems to have fallen into the Sisyphus trap of basing a blog’s success on the amount of money it makes. That’s like basing the success of a dinner table debate on who pays the check. Both are important, but there is generally no causal relationship.

And while I’m at it, is there any normal person in the world who can decipher this:

[T]he data only starts to speak when you get into the 6 citation and lower range. Above that, the numbers speak to clouds, silos, and their relative opaqueness. Not that that’s bad data; it’s negative gesturing at its root level. GMail, doubleclick, Rojo, Bloglines, etc. It tells us what we already know: Users have agreed to the terms of service in return for what they see as privacy, tools, and ease of use….

Steve, are you trying to be enigmatical? Do you think this sort of top down writing is why blogs are eating magazines’ lunch?

And then, the crown jewel:

Some of my best friends are linkers. Don’t forget to tip your linkers. Don’t want to link? What, and give up show business?

How, exactly, do you think people find your posts Steve? Are lesser beings born with an innate knowledge of where to find your writing? Or anyone else’s? Of course not. They find it via links. Just like I found this post via a link from Dave Winer.

There is more mumbo jumbo in Steve’s post, but when I got to this:

Remember that the greatest yield in time management is the culling of the less interesting. Looked at from a gesture perspective, each affinity link represents a dynamic ecosytem composed of a collaborative group with gestures rippling out and intersecting with other like or unlike-minded affinity systems. Where those emanations are more pronounced and back-referencing, powerful waves are generated. The Beatles are probably the most profound example of such a foldback affinity wave in our lifetimes.

I fell into a deep sleep and dreamed a of place where people just shared ideas and talked about topics of interest, without all the unnecessary navel gazing.

When I woke up, somehow I felt that Steve’s post was, to quote a phrase, “less interesting.”

More Advertising Madness

I read somewhere that a good blog should have a consistent set of themes.

So I guess one of mine has become the idea that advertising dollars simply cannot support the entire internet and all of Web 2.0. I feel pretty certain about this, yet every day I read about some great new venture that some famous blogger (which is sort of an oxymoron) who refuses to link to me thinks will one day be bigger than all four Elvises (Presley, Costello, Grbac and Dutton) and whose only meaningful revenue source is from advertising.

toomanyads

First we have all of Web 2.0.

Then AOL tosses in the towel and decides that since nobody wants a closed internet anymore, it will bet on ad revenue to keep its teetering boat upright. The magical $81M in ad revenue notwithstanding, it won’t work long term. There are only four ways to get rich legally: by birth, by gift, by doing something few others can do and by selling a product. AOL was not born rich, will not be given money because it is already public (no greater fool money for you, Mr. AOL), is now entering a mature market dominated by Yahoo and others, and its product no longer sells.

Of course you can say the same thing about most of Web 2.0, and I have. Over and over.

Meanwhile, TIVO, which is still running around like a chicken with its head cut off, has one-upped itself in the bad idea derby by adding ads on demand to last years’ bad idea champion, searchable ads. It’s like the time Raina and I tried in vain to convince the kids that vegetables were actually a treat. It may sound good, but even a three year old knows it’s a head fake.

Last but not least, Jake takes a page from Stowe‘s book (and apparently a hat from his closet) and wants to become a toddling advertisement for $10,000 a month. If he sells a month of ads he will have made more profit than Stowe and all of Web 2.0 combined.

When the advertising house of cards collapses, there is going to be a lot of carnage.