My Movie Challenge

Last week the wife came home and made a bold declaration. "There's tons of movies ... really good ones ... that I need to see."

See, she'll watch hours of Real Housewives and tons of useless crap on Bravo and E! but when I've mentioned watching movies of actual value, I get the eye rolls and the "it's probably got subtitles in it, doesn't it?" kind of wisecrack. One of her co-workers told her about AFI's Top 100 movies of all time list, and decided she wanted to conquer the list.

CHALLENGE!

I rattled off the list, and we figured out how many movies she hadn't seen and I hadn't seen. To her shame, she's about 60 movies away from completing, which honestly isn't that bad unless you see the ones she hasn't seen (I'm missing about 20 movies). So below is the AFI 100 list. Bold titles are what we need to see. Bold with an asterisk are films I've already seen, Bold with a dash are movies she has already seen.

1. CITIZEN KANE*

2. CASABLANCA*

3. THE GODFATHER

4. GONE WITH THE WIND

5. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA*

6. THE WIZARD OF OZ

7. THE GRADUATE*

8. ON THE WATERFRONT*

9. SCHINDLER'S LIST

10. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN

11. IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE*

12. SUNSET BLVD.

13. THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI

14. SOME LIKE IT HOT-

15. STAR WARS

16. ALL ABOUT EVE-

17. THE AFRICAN QUEEN

18. PSYCHO

19. CHINATOWN*

20. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST*

21. THE GRAPES OF WRATH

22. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY*

23. THE MALTESE FALCON*

24. RAGING BULL*

25. E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL

26. DR. STRANGELOVE*

27. BONNIE AND CLYDE*

28. APOCALYPSE NOW

29. MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

30. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE

31. ANNIE HALL*

32. THE GODFATHER PART II

33. HIGH NOON

34. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD*

35. IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT

36. MIDNIGHT COWBOY*

37. THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

38. DOUBLE INDEMNITY

39. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO*

40. NORTH BY NORTHWEST*

41. WEST SIDE STORY

42. REAR WINDOW

43. KING KONG (1933 version)

44. THE BIRTH OF A NATION

45. A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE*

46. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE*

47. TAXI DRIVER*

48. JAWS

49. SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

50. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID*

51. THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

52. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

53. AMADEUS

54. ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

55. THE SOUND OF MUSIC

56. M*A*S*H**

57. THE THIRD MAN*

58. FANTASIA

59. REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

60. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

61. VERTIGO

62. TOOTSIE

63. STAGECOACH

64. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND*

65. THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

66. NETWORK*

67. THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE*

68. AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

69. SHANE*

70. THE FRENCH CONNECTION*

71. FORREST GUMP

72. BEN-HUR*

73. WUTHERING HEIGHTS

74. THE GOLD RUSH

75. DANCES WITH WOLVES

76. CITY LIGHTS

77. AMERICAN GRAFFITI*

78. ROCKY

79. THE DEER HUNTER*

80. THE WILD BUNCH

81. MODERN TIMES

82. GIANT

83. PLATOON*

84. FARGO

85. DUCK SOUP

86. MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY

87. FRANKENSTEIN*

88. EASY RIDER*

89. PATTON

90. THE JAZZ SINGER*

91. MY FAIR LADY-

92. A PLACE IN THE SUN

93. THE APARTMENT*

94. GOODFELLAS

95. PULP FICTION

96. THE SEARCHERS*

97. BRINGING UP BABY-

98. UNFORGIVEN

99. GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER*

100. YANKEE DOODLE DANDY

This week, we knocked three off the list.

The African Queen: Neither of us had seen this is a 1951 movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. She's a missionary in the Congo and he's a crusty boat captain during World War I. A lot funnier than I had expected, with some funny interplay and a story about the two of them forced to survive on a riverboat in Africa.

North by Northwest: The wife hadn't seen this Hitchcock classic. Starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint (as well as an uber-young Martin Landau), it's about a businessman who gets mistakenly confused as a spy. This movie has the famous crop-dusting chase scene as well as the climactic scene on Mount Rushmore. As Hitchcock movies go, I'm still always going to consider Rear Window my favorite, because it's just an awesome, tense movie and features probably the hottest woman ever with one of the best 'hot woman enters the scene' moments, Grace Kelly.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?: Another the wife had not seen, this one stars Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier. Sidney meets a nice girl in Hawaii and they decide to get married, so she brings him home to meet the folks. He's black, she's white, and interracial marriage is illegal in 17 states so everyone is in a panic except the happy couple. Tracy died two weeks after filming the movie ended, so at least in his last speech in the film is a damn good one.

I Love My Wife, But ...

Hopefully this will not become a running series of posts, but I guess it all depends on the wife's actions, not my own.

In this inaugural post, this is all about the wife's new routine in the kitchen. In something that can almost definitely be defined as life imitating art, the wife is trying to kill me. Or at the very least, give me some kind of bodily injury.

About a month ago, we watched "Date Night" starring Steve Carrell and Tina Fey. Decent movie, nothing special, but had some OK moments and it was worlds better than having to suffer through another of the wife's "Real Housewives" marathons. One of the movie's obscure subplots is what she has somehow brought into our everyday life. What she does is open up drawers, cabinets and whatnot, and forgets to close them. In the movie it's a gag where Carrell does it and Fey keeps banging her head and knees into doors and such, and it's all his fault. Well I'm Fey in this real world interpretation. For instance, this is a typical look at the gauntlet I face nightly:


And this is only one part of the kitchen. What makes it worse is that she NEVER had this problem until after seeing the movie. Maybe a drawer here or there, but it's uncanny. Plus, this isn't even a subplot in the movie that we talked about or laughed particularly hard at or anything, just something that through one way or another, she's now adopted. It's amazing ... and it's going to injure me I'm sure.