20

I've rearranged--or arranged--my days in order to get more stuff on this list done. In the afternoons, for a while anyway, I'll be spending time watching Roger Ebert's 102 Movies You Must See Before You Die*.

Today I watched Robert Wise's (1951) The Day the Earth Stood Still. About an hour into the movie, I thought to myself, "why is this on the list?" So I revisited the list, and here's what Ebert had to say about creating it, "These are the movies I just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies." That makes sense. These aren't great movies, but the kind of iconic movies that give us the sort of scenes that show up in genre films or don't, depending on what the director is aiming for. They're the kind of movies my students always hated because instead of seeing them as pioneering, they thought they were derivative. I love how backwards the young can see things.

I'm not much of a sci/fi person. But still I took away two things. Peace is good. (Give up the arms race!) (It was the Cold War.) And self-promotion at the expense of the entire world is bad. (No communism, but unfettered capitalism isn't all that great either, I guess.)

Helen: What about the rest of the world?
Tom, her fiance: I don't care about the rest of the world!
[Seeing her shocked expression]
Tom: You'll feel different when you read about me in the papers.
Helen: I feel different now.

* Or go to film school, either one.