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Brown: Uh, do you you think that John McCain, do you think the Republican Party has used race as an issue in this race? |
Barkley: Oh, no question, and they've used cold words like welfare and things like that. When people pick on welfare, first of all when they use the word welfare, that is really swaying, trying to use that as a minority thing, because people assume -- if they really knew anything about the numbers. There seven times as... |
Brown: You live in Arizona and you've said in the past that you have a lot of respect for -- |
Barkley: I do. |
Brown: Has his campaign changed your view at all, given the way it has gone, given what you have said? |
Barkley: I don't blame him. I blame the Republican Party. First of all because -- |
Brown: But he's the head of the Republican Party. |
Barkley: I know that, but this thing didn't start with him. It started with President Bush and these gifts to rich people like myself -- all these tax cuts and things like that. That's my biggest problem. Uh listen, John McCain, you gotta respect anybody who goes to war. But these Republicans who ran this economy into ... |
Brown: You, there has been a lot of polarizing rhetoric on both sides, frankly throughout this campaign. You yourself have called the evangelical base of the GOP fake Christians. |
Barkley: Well, because they are so judgmental. And you know what is really interesting about that? I was actually defending John McCain when I said that, because they were saying when he first got nominated that he is not part of the evangelicals. You got to respect Sen. McCain. What I meant by that and I still stick b... |
Brown: But aren't you judging them? |
Barkley: They judge me. First of all the notion that you would vote for a president because he is against abortion or against gay marriage is absurd. I think politicians have three jobs. |
No. 1 they should fix our public school system, they should make sure our neighborhoods are safe and they should give people economic opportunity. I don't care who is gay, I don't care who is pro-choice. I really think that is the only three jobs that our government and our elected officials should have and we obviousl... |
Brown: [Republican vice presidential candidate Alaska Gov.] Sarah Palin has gotten an enormous amount of attention in this campaign. What do you think about her? |
Barkley: I think they did a great disservice because they never let her speak. They are trying to do it now, but they did her a great disservice. Yes, I think he selected her to try to get the Hillary Clinton vote and I don't know that much about her because they never let her talk and when they do let her talk they le... |
Brown: Talk to me a little bit about your own political aspirations. You said in the past that you want to go back to Alabama. That is home for you. |
Barkley: Alabama needs a lot of help. You know Campbell, the reason I have become really pro-active -- and to be honest with you I never really got involved with politics until John Kerry and John Edwards last time. And the reason I'm supporting the Democratic Party [is] no more than I like Barack. I think he is a frie... |
Brown: So are you going to run for governor? |
Barkley: I plan on it in 2014. |
Brown: You are serious. |
Barkley: I am, I can't screw up Alabama. |
Brown: There is no place to go but up in your view? |
Barkley: We are number 48 in everything and Arkansas and Mississippi aren't going anywhere. |
Brown: And the top priority for you would be education? |
Barkley: All the way education, the public school system in this country is the worst it has ever been and what that does is that hurts crime, it hurts the judicial system. You know if you don't give people education and hope, they become criminals. They get involved in drugs. So we have got to fix the public school sy... |
Brown: Charles Barkley, good to see you, appreciate it, good luck to you. |
Barkley: Thank you very much, thanks for having me. |
All About Charles Barkley |
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Meta-post: The Ranking |
It’s the moment you’ve not been waiting for: my top twenty Best Pictures! |
It’s worth pointing out that these are my personal favorites; I’m not trying to objectively classify the actual Best Pictures. Maybe they’re not even definitive, considering how much tweaking I’ve already done, and I’m more than willing to accept that I have unrefined taste in film. I’m just looking forward to going ... |
Links to my original posts are included for reference. |
Continue reading |
Meta-post: Summary and Statistics |
Tools of the trade: My hand-scribbled list of Best Pictures (waterlogged from spending the year on my kitchen table). |
Some Statistics for the Nerdy: |
How many minutes total: 12,339 minutes (205 hours, or 8.5 days) yowza |
Longest film: Gone With the Wind (or Lawrence of Arabia if you count the director’s cut, I guess) |
Shortest film: Marty |
Longest decade: 1990s (1679 minutes; bloated historical epics) |
Shortest decade: 1940s (1262 minutes; war rationing) |
How much time I spent calculating all this: Way too much |
How much money I spent watching these films: Less than $15 total |
Spotlight: $8 or $9 for a discounted ticket in theater |
Gigi: $2 rental on Amazon (I was in a time pinch) |
Cavalcade: $3 rental on Amazon (I couldn’t find it anywhere else) |
Otherwise, I found everything at the library or streaming |
How many films had I seen before? Eleven (seven, if you exclude the few I watched in an earlier attempt at the project) |
How many movies involved World War II? Eight |
Other wars? Nine |
I’ll be honest: I’m pretty surprised that I actually made it through this year of Best Pictures. I watched 88 films this year, most of which I’d never seen before. Not only that, I wrote blog posts for each film, into which I put at least a minimal amount of thought. Literally multiple people read most of my posts. |
Technically, it’s doable (since I did it), but it really felt like a job at times. It interfered with my (fortunately non-existent) social life simply with the volume of material I had to get through in any given week or month. I didn’t have much time to watch all the trendy TV shows that people loved two years ago (... |
So how do I feel about it? Good question. It feels like an accomplishment of sorts, but not quite as impressive as I’d hoped. Although there are certainly films that have entered the general cultural mindset, many others have faded, such that it probably doesn’t matter whether I’ve seen them or not. However, one of... |
I’ll do a Top Something list in my (probably last) post, coming soon! |
Titanic (1997) |
Image result for titanic |
My only fond memory of Titanic is from a student exchange trip to Russia, when I saw a middle-aged Russian man rocking a Titanic-themed t-shirt plastered with Leonardo DiCaprio’s face. |
Back when I was in high school, and this movie was all the rage, and Celine Dion was inescapable, and I was cynical of anything pop culture, I vowed to myself that I would never watch Titanic. And until now, I’ve been able to keep that promise. |
I knew the obvious plot points, of course – the boat sinking, the doomed love story, something about a naked drawing, old lady framing device. I recognized some other random moments thanks to various parodies or references in other media, such as the Irish jig replicated in Battlestar Galactica or that episode of Futu... |
You would think that a movie about a massive ship sinking would carry enough drama and gravitas on its own, but no: this movie also has to add a ridiculous MacGuffin to explain why some guy would be sending submersibles to search the wreckage, and why a little old lady would travel by helicopter to the middle of the o... |
Right around the time a normal movie would be wrapping it up in time for the closing credits, the iceberg finally strikes. Trivia point: both in real life and on film, the impact took 37 seconds, which happens also to be the 37 seconds that I stopped paying attention. I actually liked the way people mostly didn’t re... |
But what didn’t feel genuine was the way Jack and Rose decide to go traipsing back and forth through flooded sections of the ship, completely impervious to the cold temperatures. And the absurd gun fight when Billy Zane decides he’d much rather shoot Jack than hop in the lifeboat. When the stern splits off from the b... |
Did cold-hearted Bridget get emotional watching this film? Okay, I’ll admit that I did – but it was when they showed all the second- and third-class passengers who clearly weren’t going to make it out alive, not when Jack was cheerfully turning himself into an icicle. |
At least Rose finally gets to share her story of lost love. “He exists only in my memory, which is why I like to imagine him looking like Leonardo DiCaprio.” |
Thank God I took on this project, because otherwise I never would have experienced the pure face-palming that is Titanic. And with that, gentle readers, I’m finished! Next week, I’ll do a summary post or two, along with a ranking (of either the whole list, or maybe only part, depending on how lazy/busy I am. Thanks ... |
Theme: On a Boat |
First Time Watching? Yes |
Final Verdict: I have a sinking feeling… |
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) |
Image result for mutiny on the bounty |
I live in a city with quite a nautical history. I’ve seen the U.S.S. Constitution, “Old Ironsides,” in the Charlestown Navy Yard (spoiler alert: not actually made of iron). Every once in a while, there’s some interesting ship that comes into Boston Harbor, and I’ve toured a couple of them. That includes a nineteent... |
Based on how commonly-referenced the story of the mutiny is, I’d have guessed that I would have a better sense of what happened and why. But I genuinely knew next to nothing about it, and it’s a really interesting story. More fascinating, I’d say, than is given justice in the film. |
The year is 1787, and Captain Bligh is assigned to set out on a trade mission to Tahiti on the British naval ship the Bounty. As was apparently common practice for the navy at that time, sailors were conscripted from local pubs to fulfill a two-year mission overseas, which probably explains why so many of the reluctan... |
They land on Tahiti, and obviously all the native women fall in love with the white guys, and the white guys explain civilization to them in condescending ways. (As a side note, I would love to know if there exists narratives from the perspective of indigenous peoples during this time period of European exploration/ex... |
In some way, we see the mutineers as heroic, or at least justified in what they did. Particularly in the movie’s portrayal, Captain Bligh is a terrible guy who punishes his men in severe ways for minor transgressions. When he’s set adrift in (an even tinier!) boat with some of his loyal men, basically left for dead, ... |
At this point, the film seems to get itself mixed up with Moby Dick, because Bligh comes back on an even bigger ship, searching for the escaped mutineers, who returned to Tahiti. There’s a high-speed boat chase (not really), and Bligh’s obsession with capturing his crew leads to the destruction of yet another ship. I... |
As a side note, on the DVD, there was a bonus “documentary” about Pitcairn Island today, made in the 1930s, which was interesting/hilarious as a historical document. The descendants of the mutineers and their Tahitian wives/kidnapped women? still eke out a living there. |
And that’s the film, too – interesting as a historical document, impressive for its time in its special effects (the special-est effect being water, which to be fair would probably be added as CGI today). Ultimately, though, I’d rather read a book that went into more detail about the nuances and realities of the situa... |
Theme: On a Boat |
First Time Watching? Yes |
Final Verdict: Saying, unironically, “we’re all in the same boat.” Twice. |
A Man for All Seasons (1966) |
Image result for a man for all seasons |
If you know anything about Henry VIII, it’s probably that he went through wives like a teenager goes through hashtags. (Is that a hip, relevant reference – all the kids these days use the Twitter, right?) In fact, he was so pissed at the pope, he broke off and formed his own church where he could marry, fuck, kill wh... |
The man for all seasons featured here is actually Thomas More, who is famous for writing Utopia, a book that you may have learned was significant in school but would never actually read. He also, out of some deep moral feelings, resisted Henry VIII’s crazy moves by… not explaining why he wouldn’t sign on to the divorc... |
As I may have mentioned, I’m a little rusty on royal history. As evidence of this, I spent a decent portion of the early section of this film wondering why Oliver Cromwell was in a movie about Henry VIII and how I’d learned so little in AP Euro History in high school. Lo and behold, another Cromwell played a role in ... |
I found the first half of this pretty dull, in large part because I had trouble figuring out who was who and what the story was. Then Henry VIII shows up, and acts in a manner that seems to be now standard for autocratic figures: he’s downright jovial one minute and spins on a dime to be creepy-scary when he doesn’t ... |
As Thomas More sits with the decision he’s made – not to support Henry VIII’s break from the Church, but also not to openly oppose him – it gets a bit more interesting. But it’s never exactly clear what game he’s playing and why he thinks remaining mysterious is the way to go. Maybe he hoped that he might avoid the k... |
Sometimes movies appear to be educational, or at least to inspire you to go read a book or something. I’m not sure whether I care enough about Thomas More to read more about him, unfortunately. I am, however, looking forward to spending more of my free time reading in the near future. Or maybe I’ll go binge-watch Th... |
Theme: King |
First Time Watching? Yes |
Final Verdict: This isn’t Spain |
The King’s Speech (2010) |
Image result for the king's speech |
Theme: King |
First Time Watching? No |
Final Verdict: Positively medieval |
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