Poets' Favorite Movies
Lawrence Raab
I've often
thought of my Ten Best, or Ten Favorites, or (since I got a better tv
and DVD player) the movies I'd most want to own, or most enjoy watching
repeatedly. So my criteria is somewhat mixed here.
My first
five:
8 1/2
(Fellini)--the end is just transcendent, well the whole thing is
wonderful;
Blow-Up
(Antonioni)--far more than a romp through swinging London, a beautiful
and intellectually challenging film;
Jules and
Jim
(Truffaut)
which I haven't seen for a while, so maybe
Shoot the
Piano Player
or
Day for
Night
instead;
Hour of the
Wolf
(Bergman)--not the "greatest" Bergman film, but how can you go wrong
with vampires, Mozart, and a suffering artist, not to mention a
wonderful confessional narration from Liv Ullman; and
Citizen Kane
(Welles)--still the best story about trying to get the story that you
can't get.
My second
five:
Once Upon a
Time in the West
(Sergio Leone)--if only for the opening sequence, but also the great
music, and Henry Fonda as the bad guy;
Psycho
(Hitchcock)--I still remember seeing it in a packed theater when it
first came out;
Betrayal
(David Jones)--from the Pinter play, and yes, not a great film (though
maybe a great filmed play) but the acting by Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley,
and Patricia Hodge is absolutely riveting, and the play is wonderful and
disturbing;
Monty Python
and the Holy Grail--which
I almost know by heart, and is still hilarious; and finally
Out of the
Past
(Jacques Tourneur) holding down the film noir spot which I might use
sometimes for
Double
Indemnity
or
The Maltese
Falcon
or
The Big
Sleep.
As soon as I
send this I'll probably think of one that absolutely without question
should have been included. Ah well.
Lawrence Raab is the author of six
collections of poems, most recently Visible Signs: New and Selected
Poems (Penguin. 2003) and The Probable World (Penguin,
2000). He has published a chapbook of collaborative poems with Stephen
Dunn, Winter at the Caspian Sea (Palanquin Press, 1999). His
poems have appeared in several editions of Best American Poetry
and in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems. Raab was a finalist
for the National
Book Award in 1993. Penguin will publish The History of Forgetting
in 2009.
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