I, Shane › Shane Adams’ personal weblog

OK, so I’m just flat-out STEALING post ideas from Jason Kottke these days. But they are good ideas. Today, he put up an article about film critic Jim Emerson’s list of 102 movies you should see before you consider yourself movie literate.

I love the movies. But I am not even CLOSE to what would be considered movie literate. I’m going to reproduce the list here, designating the ones I have seen with bold type. Enjoy. And try not to laugh at me too hard.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• The 400 Blows
• 8 1/2
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God
• Alien
• All About Eve
• Annie Hall
• Apocalypse Now
• Bambi
• The Battleship Potemkin
• The Best Years of Our Lives
• The Big Red One
• The Bicycle Thief
• The Big Sleep
• Blade Runner
• Blowup
• Blue Velvet
• Bonnie and Clyde
• Breathless
• Bringing Up Baby
• Carrie
• Casablanca
• Un Chien Andalou
• Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
• Chinatown
• Citizen Kane
• A Clockwork Orange
• The Crying Game
• The Day the Earth Stood Still
• Days of Heaven
• Dirty Harry
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
• Do the Right Thing
• La Dolce Vita
• Double Indemnity
• Dr. Strangelove
• Duck Soup
• E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial
• Easy Rider
• The Empire Strikes Back
• The Exorcist
• Fargo
• Fight Club
• Frankenstein
• The General
• The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II
• Gone With the Wind
• GoodFellas
• The Graduate
• Halloween
• A Hard Day’s Night
• Intolerance
• It’s a Gift
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• Jaws
• The Lady Eve
• Lawrence of Arabia
• M
• Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior
• The Maltese Falcon
• The Manchurian Candidate
• Metropolis
• Modern Times
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Nashville
• The Night of the Hunter
• Night of the Living Dead
• North by Northwest
• Nosferatu
• On the Waterfront
• Once Upon a Time in the West
• Out of the Past
• Persona
• Pink Flamingos
• Psycho
• Pulp Fiction
• Rashomon
• Rear Window
• Rebel Without a Cause
• Red River
• Repulsion
• The Rules of the Game
• Scarface
• The Scarlet Empress
• Schindler’s List
• The Searchers
• The Seven Samurai
• Singin’ in the Rain
• Some Like It Hot
• A Star Is Born
• A Streetcar Named Desire
• Sunset Boulevard
• Taxi Driver
• The Third Man
• Tokyo Story
• Touch of Evil
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
• Trouble in Paradise
• Vertigo
• West Side Story
• The Wild Bunch
• The Wizard of Oz

Embarrassing, isn’t it. 19 out of 102. I almost didn’t post this because I’m THAT embarrassed.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
by J.K. Rowling
Rating: 10 out of 10

Out of the five Harry Potter books I’ve read so far, this is the most complex to date. However, it is battling with The Goblet of Fire for the top spot of those that I have completed.

I have come to realize just how genius JK Rowling is as an author. Her vision of Harry’s world is so far reaching that we are beginning to realize that lesser-appreciated books, like The Chamber of Secrets and The Prisoner of Azkaban really served as foundations for later books yet to come out. I’m so impressed by the way that she continues to write these long novels and I have not yet found myself bored once…something is always happening that is moving the timeline of the story forward.

The Order of the Phoenix starts out as all the rest do, with Harry at his aunt and uncle’s on Privet Drive, miserable because of their mistreatment of him. The events that ensue bring many of the characters that have come and gone into Harry’s life over the past few books come together in glorious harmony as we finally are given the reason for Harry’s special gifts and his ultimate place in the wizarding world.

When we last saw him in The Goblet of Fire, he had suffered much, but had once again emerged triumphant over his enemies. When I began this book, I could only wonder where the story was going to go and it just continued to be revealed as I read on.

Rowling’s character development is just phenomenal. This book introduces a couple brand new characters, most particularly, a member of the Ministry of Magic named Dolores Umbridge who becomes a member of the teaching staff at Hogwarts. Her methods and personality do not sit well with anyone, but because she sits in a position of power, she is seemingly untouchable. I found her so loathsome that I wanted to punch the pages of the book. Seriously, she’s THAT irritating.
I was looking at the film listing on IMDb and found that she is going to be played by Imelda Staunton, recently nominated for her work in Vera Drake. I’m not sure it’s the best pick, but we will see. It is certainly not who I imagined playing the role while I was reading the book.

Other events of the book…Harry’s first date, Neville comes into his own (FINALLY!), and we finally start seeing some serious magic-ing going on.

It’s just flat-out a terrific book. I hope seriously that I’m not setting myself up for disappointment with the rest. I’m so enjoying these books, moreso than I even thought I would. Thanks to those of you who suggested me reading this book. (JULIE!) I’ve enjoyed them all so much. If you haven’t read these books, you should…doesn’t matter what age…you should just read them.

All I have left in the series to be totally caught up is the most recent…Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince. Jason has been kind enough to lend it to me…otherwise I would be finding it in the library or tracking down someone who has it.

I’m almost halfway to my goal of 25 books this year and it’s only April. It has been helpful that I’ve read great books up to this point…we’ll see what happens once I finish the last Harry Potter book…

I was fortunate enough to see two pretty good movies this weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve seen more than one so I was really excited for a multiple movie extravaganza.

Saturday morning, I woke up and caught the early Lucky Number Slevin with Brad and Scott. Alli mentioned AMC’s $4 before noon deal that they have going on…I was too glad to oblige as we arrived for our 10:30 movie at 10:25.

Lucky Number Slevin is a terrific suspense/thriller/crime movie featuring a stellar cast (2 Oscar winners - Sir Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, Stanley Tucci, Lucy Liu, and the surprisingly good Josh Hartnett). I would compare it a little to The Usual Suspects, but with the flair and style of a Guy Ritchie movie like Snatch. To tell anything about it would be to ruin it so I’m going to just suggest it if you like movies like I described above.

Yesterday, Alli, Jake, mom and I went to see the box-office disappointment, American Dreamz. A lot of people predicted that it would do well, but surprisingly it didn’t, losing out to yet another generic horror flick, Silent Hill. I thought that American Dreamz was pretty good. It was a satire…trying to take on American Idol, the President, and the conflict in the Middle East all at once. It was pretty good…the acting was funny and I will see just about any movie that Chris and Paul Weitz put out (American Pie, About a Boy). Hugh Grant is genius as the Simon Cowell-ish character. But as far a satires go, I thought that Thank You for Smoking was a better movie. It just seemed a little bit smarter of a movie. American Dreamz just seemed to take on too much…I think that the show might have been better just as a parody of American Idol. Just my opinion though.

Jason Kottke posted a link to a Guardian Story about the 50 (or is it 51?) greatest film adaptations from books of all time and then was inspired by another blogger, Michael Hanscom, to create a list of what he had seen and what he had read…Below is the list of the movies/books listed by the Guardian as the 50 greatest film adaptations of all-time. In the brackets next to the ones I’ve seen or read is a B or an M. Those letters indicate whether I’ve read the book [B] or seen the movie [M]:

1. 1984
2. [BM] Alice in Wonderland
3. American Psycho
4. [M] Breakfast at Tiffany’s
5. Brighton Rock
6. [BM] Catch 22
7. [BM] Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
8. A Clockwork Orange
9. [M] Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
10. The Day of the Triffids
11. Devil in a Blue Dress
12. [M] Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
13. [BM] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
14. Doctor Zhivago
15. [M] Empire of the Sun
16. [BM] The English Patient
17. [M] Fight Club
18. The French Lieutenant’s Woman
19. [M] Get Shorty
20. The Godfather (I know…I know…I haven’t seen the Godfather)
21. [M] Goldfinger
22. [M] Goodfellas
23. Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
24. The Hound of the Baskervilles
25. [M] Jaws
26. [M] The Jungle Book
27. A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
28. LA Confidential
29. [M] Les Liaisons Dangereuses
30. Lolita
31. [BM] Lord of the Flies
32. The Maltese Falcon
33. Oliver Twist
34. [BM] One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Thanks, Rich and Sarah!)
35. Orlando
36. [M] The Outsiders
37. [M] Pride and Prejudice
38. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
39. The Railway Children
40. Rebecca
41. The Remains of the Day
42. [M] Schindler’s Ark (aka Schindler’s List)
43. [M] Sin City
44. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
45. The Talented Mr Ripley
46. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
47. Through a Glass Darkly
48. [BM] To Kill a Mockingbird
49. [M] Trainspotting
50. [M] The Vanishing
51. Watership Down

Some good stuff left off the list that I’ve seen or read:

• The Lords of Discipline [BM]
• Being There [BM]
• The Princess Bride [BM]
• Silence of the Lambs [M]
• About a Boy [BM]
• High Fidelity [BM]
• Lord of the Rings [M]
• The Chronicles of Narnia [BM]
• Great Expectations [M]
• Fletch [BM] (it’s a travesty that this didn’t make the list)
• Jurassic Park [BM]
• ALL the Bond books/movies
• Robin Hood [M]
• Romeo & Juliet [BM]

That’s all I can think of right now…can you think of any others that I’m forgetting?

I had a MySpace account for all of about 3 days. I signed up because my cousins in California had them, my brother has one, and they all said it was the hip thing to do. (Nevermind the whole stigma about it it being a haven for sexual predators…)

Anyway, I thought I would try it out, just to see what it was like.

I didn’t like it. I just felt like everything it offers, I already had (a place to share pictures - flickr, a place to share thoughts - this site). The only thing that I don’t have already is the whole “social” aspect of it. There are over 50 million users on MySpace, all linked through “friendships” and schools and groups and other connections.

What always bothered me about it was how ugly every site that I saw was. Not only that, but even ones that used these so-called MySpace templates STILL looked crappy. So I promptly deleted my account.
Today, Mike Davidson, the CEO of Newsvine, put forth a MySpace effort that is clean, respectable and wicked worn.

For the first time, I reconsidered my decision to delete my MySpace page, download his CSS hack, tweak it up and go back, but ultimately, MySpace isn’t really my scene. I found 1 or 2 people on there that I wouldn’t have otherwise, but to be honest it wasn’t worth the effort.

Maybe after their new security advisor gets things into order, I’ll go back…but for now, I’m dedicated to this site (and topFIVEdesign, of course).

*placing hand over heart*

I am a geek.

Now I don’t know if I was born a geek or if I grew gradually into geekdom, but I am 100% geekalicious now. I love computers and technology and I get excited about stupid things like Apple’s latest product release and Yahoo!’s purchase of Flickr (although I was somewhat skeptical about the latter…so far Yahoo! hasn’t screwed anything up).

The phrase “Web 2.0″ gets thrown around the blogodome a lot these days. Let’s assume for a sec that you are familiar with what Web 2.0 is (a collection of web sites and web applications designed to cater to consumer needs and wants in a browser environment rather than a desktop-based one), or at least that you are familiar with one or two Web 2.0 applications (Wordpress, the CMS that this site is built with, is one, as are the aforementioned Flickr, Yahoo!, and other stalwarts such as Blogger, Google, MySpace, etc.).

About 2 months ago, some news came to the forefront that Google, the “Microsoft of Web 2.0″, was purchasing a company called Writely, Whose Web 2.0 product is a web-based word processor, essentially Microsoft Word for the web.

There was some geekish fanfare (a story was dugg, it probably was SlashDotted), but it was mostly ignored. Now, with the announcement of the beta Google Calendar program, it appears that Google may be going after the evil Redmond, WA giant Microsoft after all. You see, much of the reason that everyone uses Microsoft is that their productivity products (Microsoft Office, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc.) have completely saturated the market and most people are comfortable with them. But people are getting comfortable with the web now and most people feel differently about Google than they do about Microsoft (mostly because it is FREE). Google’s calendar service and mail service are extremely usable and TOTALLY INDEPENDENT of the computer…they exist in cyberspace (oooooo…spooky…).

I really like it. Particularly since I use a bunch of different computers (typing this one on my wife’s Mac Powerbook laptop, work on a dual AMD Windows machine, and my main computer is an iMac G5). As much as I like to write, I think that a product like Writely is going to be wildly popular.

Anyway, I think that once that Google releases Writely into the wild with the full power of the Google brand behind it, it is going to do really well. Seriously…this Web 2.0 thing is really cool.

P.S. Sorry if this is disjointed…I’m a little scatterbrained.

I’m in a weird design funk at work.

I feel like my ideas are stale and everything that I do looks derivative. My wife, bless her, has given me some inspiration this morning that I am going to try and realize…we shall see what happens.

Anyone know what to do to get out of a funk?

I have a new reality TV obsession. I bow to thee, Top Chef, O King of Reality TV.

Here’s the deal. I never wanted to be THAT GUY. You know THAT GUY…he’s the one who watches all sorts of bad reality television and can’t help but spout off about it on a regular basis. But I am THAT GUY.

The truth is…the only mainstream reality that I watch is the new Season of The Apprentice. The rest of the reality TV that I watch resides on that station in the middle of the numbers called BRAVO. Owned by NBC, Bravo came to recognition originally with interesting shows like Inside the Actor’s Studio with James Lipton (brilliantly lampooned by Will Ferrell years back on SNL). Then came Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. That show was kind of the Tipping Point for the network, which followed it by Heidi Klum’s Project Runway (a show I can’t watch, but that Alli absolutely loves). As the Project Runway season came to a close, they began advertising a show “from the producers of Project Runway” called Top Chef.

Now, I LIKE cooking shows…I don’t love them, but I like them enough to sit and watch Boy Meets Grill with Bobby Flay in about 3 hour blocks if they are running a marathon of shows and there is nothing else on. But Top Chef intrigued me.

Then, Bravo embraced the awesomeness that is the iTunes Music Store and offered the Pilot episode for download through their video store. I thought that was a brilliant move on their part (one that NBC subsequently copied with its show Conviction, a show I downloaded, but never watched). I downloaded the initial episode and I was totally hooked.

What makes Top Chef so completely genius is what makes reality television so popular. THE CHARACTERS. Depsite the fact that they are “real people”, they aren’t exactly what one would call “normal”. There are some of the largest egos and biggest train wrecks ever on that show and I love it for that.

And it is a really interesting show, too. There are some extremely talented (albeit very eccentric) chefs on the show and I have already found myself rooting for my favorite (Harold) and rooting against the “villain” (Steven). It’s just really compelling television.

As much as I hate to admit it.

I’ve decided that my little experiment in shortening titles was a big pain. So I’m abandoning it.

Longer, more descriptive titles ahead.

P.S. I want to apologize for my site’s intermittent outage (as well as Jake’s site). My host, TextDrive, has been having MySQL outage issues with my server. So here’s the deal…I’m planning on switching hosts (AGAIN!) when our contract is up. I’m definitely going to rock Dreamhost…likely the best, most comprehensive hosting programs available.