lifeasdaddy

lifeasdaddy - my best movies about boxing

Keeping with the film theme, here are  my all time great boxing movies:

Fat City. (1972) John Huston A movie about more than boxing.  And like many on this list, it doesn't glamourise the sport.  Stacy Keach gives a fine performance

When We Were Kings. (1996) Leon Gast's wonderful documentary about the Ali - versus - Foreman fight in Zaire. It takes in all the hoopla surrounding the fight (think Mailer, Plimpton, James Brown etc.) as well as direct footage of the two heavyweights training and fighting.

On the Waterfront (1956) Elia Kazan Brando in his "coulda been a contender" role. Rod Steiger is great as his corrupt brother. The fights are a dirty game.

Body and Soul (1947) Robert Rossen Classic biopic.  Good entertainment.

Million Dollar Baby (2004) Clint Eastwood Eastwood stars too.  Hilary Swank becomes another person for this movie.  Utterly believeable.  Morgan Freeman does a good set piece as a broken down old boxer dedicated to the cause.  A toss up between this and Fat City for my fave.

The set-up (1949) Robert Wise A noir classic.  Scorcese lists this as one of his influences.

The Quiet Man (1952) John Ford  This flick edges into the list because the John Wayne character (Sean Thorton) plays a pro boxer who retires after killing a man in the ring.  Really a love story between him and Mary Kate Danaher (played by Maureen O'Hara).  Has a very Hollywood fight scene between Wayne and Victor McLaglan.

Somebody Up There Likes Me. (1956) Robert Wise Paul Newman in straight forward biopic.

Raging Bull (1980) Martin Scorcese  Not my favourite boxing movie, although many people put it at no. 1.  Nevertheless Scorcese and De Niro together for any movie are compelling and must-see viewing.  Biopic of jake La Motta.  Warts and all.

Boxing, in the movies, has often been a vehicle for telling stories with eternal truths.

[I haven't seen Cinderella Man (2005) Ron Howard yet, so it's omission is without meaning]

See a further listing here.

Added 2011:

The Harder They Fall.  (1956) Mark Robson - A film meant to be based upon the career of Primo Carnera.  It stars Humphrey Bogart in his last role playing an ex-sportswriter.  The crooked boxing promoter is played by Rod Steiger. Amongst the supports are jack Albertson and Nehemiah Persoff. Need I say more?  Need I say noir?  Also notable for the boxing roles of Max Baer and Jersey Joe Walcott.

lifeasdaddy - Oh the movies I've seen!

Angry Pregnant Lawyer has written about Jim Fleming's list of 101 movies you must see before you die.

I've copied thelist here, and put in bold the ones I've seen with my comments in red:

"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) Stanley Kubrick
"The 400 Blows" (1959) Francois Truffaut
"8 1/2" (1963) Federico Fellini
"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) Werner Herzog
"Alien" (1979) Ridley Scott
"All About Eve" (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
"Annie Hall" (1977) Woody Allen
"Bambi" (1942) Disney
"Battleship Potemkin" (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
"The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) William Wyler  This is a good bookend to Casablanca.  Casablanca was made before the US entry to WWII, and Best Years deals with the immediate war aftermath.  One has elements of propaganda, one is about people trying to rebuild their lives.
"The Big Red One" (1980) Samuel Fuller
"The Bicycle Thief" (1949) Vittorio De Sica
"The Big Sleep" (1946) Howard Hawks
"Blade Runner" (1982) Ridley Scott
"Blowup" (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
"Blue Velvet" (1986) David Lynch
"Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) Arthur Penn Beatty and Dunaway in their prime.
"Breathless" (1959 Jean-Luc Godard  Far better than the version starring Richard Gere.
"Bringing Up Baby" (1938) Howard Hawks
"Carrie" (1975) Brian DePalma
"Casablanca" (1942) Michael Curtiz  "Round up the usual suspects."
"Un Chien Andalou" (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
"Children of Paradise" / "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) Marcel Carne
"Chinatown" (1974) Roman Polanski
"Citizen Kane" (1941) Orson Welles
"A Clockwork Orange" (1971) Stanley Kubrick
"The Crying Game" (1992) Neil Jordan
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) Robert Wise
"Days of Heaven" (1978) Terence Malick
"Dirty Harry" (1971) Don Siegel   "...you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"
"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) Luis Bunuel
"Do the Right Thing" (1989 Spike Lee
"La Dolce Vita" (1960) Federico Fellini
"Double Indemnity" (1944) Billy Wilder
"Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964) Stanley Kubrick
"Duck Soup" (1933) Leo McCarey
"E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) Steven Spielberg
"Easy Rider" (1969) Dennis Hopper
"The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) Irvin Kershner
"The Exorcist" (1973) William Friedkin
"Fargo" (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
"Fight Club" (1999) David Fincher
"Frankenstein" (1931) James Whale
"The General" (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
"The Godfather," "The Godfather, Part II" (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
"Gone With the Wind" (1939) Victor Fleming
"GoodFellas" (1990) Martin Scorsese
"The Graduate" (1967) Mike Nichols  Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.
"Halloween" (1978) John Carpenter
"A Hard Day's Night" (1964) Richard Lester And I been working like a dog.
"Intolerance" (1916) D.W. Griffith
"It's A Gift" (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
"It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) Frank Capra  Capraesque.
"Jaws" (1975) Steven Spielberg
"The Lady Eve" (1941) Preston Sturges
"Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) David Lean 
"M" (1931) Fritz Lang
"Mad Max 2" / "The Road Warrior" (1981) George Miller
"The Maltese Falcon" (1941) John Huston  "The stuff that dreams are made of."
"The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) John Frankenheimer
"Metropolis" (1926) Fritz Lang
"Modern Times" (1936) Charles Chaplin
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
"Nashville" (1975) Robert Altman
"The Night of the Hunter" (1955) Charles Laughton  Robert Mitcham in scary mode with those classic tattoos.  Love and Hate.
"Night of the Living Dead" (1968) George Romero
"North by Northwest" (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
"Nosferatu" (1922) F.W. Murnau
"On the Waterfront" (1954) Elia Kazan  Brando in his "I coulda been a contender role." Karl Malden.  Lee J. Cobb. Rod Steiger.  Plus music by Bernstein.
"Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968) Sergio Leone
"Out of the Past" (1947) Jacques Tournier
"Persona" (1966) Ingmar Bergman
"Pink Flamingos" (1972) John Waters
"Psycho" (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
"Pulp Fiction" (1994) Quentin Tarantino  "They call it a Royale with cheese."
"Rashomon" (1950) Akira Kurosawa
"Rear Window" (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
"Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) Nicholas Ray
"Red River" (1948) Howard Hawks
"Repulsion" (1965) Roman Polanski
"Rules of the Game" (1939) Jean Renoir
"Scarface" (1932) Howard Hawks
"The Scarlet Empress" (1934) Josef von Sternberg
"Schindler's List" (1993) Steven Spielberg
"The Searchers" (1956) John Ford    Ford and Wayne together again.  Great direction from Ford.  Great Acting from Wayne.  A film dense with meaning and themes.
"The Seven Samurai" (1954) Akira Kurosawa
"Singin' in the Rain" (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly It's joyous.
"Some Like It Hot" (1959) Billy Wilder
"A Star Is Born" (1954) George Cukor
"A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) Elia Kazan  Vivien Leigh wins best actress oscar. Brando gets nominated.
"Sunset Boulevard" (1950) Billy Wilder "I am big.  It's the pictures that got small."  Swanson plays Desmond's descent into madness.   A great Hollywood film about Hollywood's films.
"Taxi Driver" (1976) Martin Scorsese  "You talkin' to me?"
"The Third Man" (1949) Carol Reed  Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, book and screenplay by Graham Greene.  Post WWII Vienna and that zither music by Anton Karas
"Tokyo Story" (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
"Touch of Evil" (1958) Orson Welles  Welles doing his director, writer, actor thing.
"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) John Huston
"Trouble in Paradise" (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
"Vertigo" (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
"West Side Story" (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
"The Wild Bunch" (1969) Sam Peckinpah  Great cast.  Great cinematography.
"The Wizard of Oz" (1939) Victor Fleming  A good story well told.

Some other films I reckon are essential viewing:

Cool Hand Luke (1967) Stuart Rosenberg

The African Queen (1951) John Huston

One flew over the cuckoo's nest (1975) Milos Forman

Paths of Glory (1957) Stanley Kubrick

Shane (1953) George Stevens

Zelig (1983) Woody Allen

My Fair Lady (1964) George Cukor

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967) Stanley Kramer

The Producers (1968) Mel Brooks

Adaptation (2002) Spike Jonze

All the King's Men (1949)

The Caine Mutiny (1954)

In the heat of the Night (1967)

Driving Miss Daisy (1989)

The remian of the Day (1993)

Lost in Translation (2003)

Million Dollar Baby (2004)

lifeasdaddy - Stay at home Dads have better sex.

Rebeldad's got a  blog post here referring to some studies which indicate stay at home Dad's are seen as sexier, and have more satisfying sex lives.   You can click through to get to the study summaries.

Modesty prevents me from commenting further.

lifeasdaddy - Marc Vandersluys' search for the mythical stay at home Dad.

I was checking my blog referrer log this morning and saw a couple of arrivals from here.  It's from the blog of a bloke called Marc Vandersluys.  He's got a couple of kids, and stayed home one day recently to look after them. 

It got him to wondering if there are actually any stay at home dads.

One of his readers kindly referred him to this blog as proof.

lifeasdaddy - PostSecret update

Since I'm on the topic of art today, I figure it's time for me to check back with PostSecret.

Why don't you check out the latest postcards here. 

lifeasdaddy - Lucas Ihlein: performance artist.

Flicking throught yesterdays' Sydney Morning Herald, I burst out laughing when I read these lead paragraphs written by Sununda Creagh:

If you were in Double Bay on Sunday, you may have seen a young man wearing an airline-style eyemask at an outdoor cafe. It was the artist Lucas Ihlein, pretending he was in Petersham.

The PhD student is part way through an art project called Bilateral Petersham, which requires him to stay within the boundaries of the inner-west suburb for two months. An unforeseen but important family commitment led to the emergency trip to Double Bay, but the blindfold protected the project's integrity - in the past fortnight he hasn't laid eyes on anyone or anything outside of what he has come to refer to as "the 'Sham".

The item became more interesting to me, because I used to live in the suburb adjacent to Petersham, and infact drove along New Canterbury Road, Petersham this morning.

Before it disappears behind the subscription wall, you can read the full article here.

Ihlein's got a blog about his art project here, and if the SMH article has disappeared, you can read a version of it in one of his blog posts here.   

It's also intereseting to see Ihlein's account of his interview by the SMH's Creagh here.  Hilarious in fact.

It's fascinating to read the comments on the blog posts, and it looks like the Petersham and near petersham community is getting behind the project.

The project's funded by a grant from the Marrickville Council.  We used to live within the Marrickville council area. 

I think this is a pretty cool project.  And I'm glad my money's not being spent on it. 

lifeasdaddy - Google's RSS aggregator

I just found out via Mark Jones' blog that Google has got a content reader, or aggregator.

I used to use bloglines, and I'll give the new Google Reader  version a go.  AFter entering just 3 blogs into the content reader, I like it. More reports soon.

Mark Jones said he thought it a bit of a chore to import his feed list from Bloglines.   

I think it's a great opportunity to clean house. 

lifeasdaddy - If Microsoft designed the iPod..

Joe Wikert pointed to this video about Microsoft's version of the iPod.

You'll get more out of the video if you've got some good sound.  The backing track is quite appropriate.

lifeasdaddy - Why? by Charles Tilly

Charles Tilly has written a newly released book: Why? In the book he gives his analysis of reasons given to explain various events.

Malcolm Gladwell has written an interesting review of Why? in the New Yorker. (pointer from R. Blood) Gladwell believes that Tilly compells parents to reassess how they talk totheir children.

Today, the book's ranked #1063 on Amazon.com sales, yestereday it was #770.  Be interesting to see if Gladwell's review gives it a boost.

Tilly postulates that what gives an explanatory reason credibility is a  narrative story.  He goes on to explain the elements of the story which make it compelling to the listener/reader.

I've been thinking lately myself about stories, and how they are consturcted.  I'm going to write a book, and I've been thinking about how best to do it.  It's non-fiction, and I recall that Robert McKee's principles of story telling (enumerated in his book Story) will apply.  I've got a copy of the book, but I think it's in storage somewhere.  I'd better find it.

Added:  I just checked Malcolm Gladwell's blog, and he's got some more discussion on Tilly inspired stuff.  Read it here. 

lifeasdaddy - Let the Journey Begin. Lifelong literacy from the Library of Congress

The Library of Congresss has a great website.  It's also got an intiative to encourage lifelong literacy. 

I love the public service announcements about the lifelong learning initiative(adverts) here.

The Library of Congress has many treasures.  For instance this online exhibition of photographs Bound For Glory - America in Color 1939 - 1943   as the USA emerged from the Great Depression and into wartime production.  The image quality is stunning, using the then new Kodachrome film.

Noodling around the net, I see that NPR also has a radio story about the Bound For Glory exhibition, if you want some background.