Ruby Street

I’m not sure why there is always this flurry of best-of lists for the end of each year, and usually not even at the end of the actual year, thus simply being wrong, in all senses. Overall, my year wasn’t a good year, but that's another story. Suffice to say, I realised confirmed a few too many things about a few too many things. Nonetheless, the year, on a broad rather than exact scale, began and ended with two best things, for me. My last but one book, The Beautiful Anxiety , won a prize in late January . Well, I prize it anyway, plus they gave me money. It was the work of a number of years. And my most recent work, Breaking the Days , was published in late November. It was work of a different sort, a shorter term project, but it was a good thing. So me, myself and I raise my/our glass to these two, my little 2015 bests. And recognise it’s more betterer than what a lot of folks got this year. So, to myself I say, stop yr sobbing. As for other things, specific things of interest...

And in all of this I forgot such thing as 'In the Mood For Love', or 'Down By Law' (and 'Night on Earth') or 'Dead Man Walking'. Let alone my own oddities such as 'Two Girls and a Sailor' (oh June Allyson!), or 'The Last Emperor', or 'A Fish Called Wanda', 'Die Hard', 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', 'Dr Zhivago', 'Now Voyager', 'Reds', or that movie with one of the Bridges boys, 'Starman' was it? I should stop or I will go on.

I have also been tagged by Richard Lopez to do a top ten film list. Again, I just can't do the 'ten' thing . But what I thought I'd do is list some further movies that, for me, come from a certain era and had an effect on me, sometimes because of who I was with when I saw them as much as the movie itself. Occasions are important. And because I'm doing this in response to Richard's tag, he of "really bad movies", I've tried to keep more or less to popular(ish) and, mostly, English language films that, at some time or another (not necessarily at their first release by any means), I saw on screen, not in my lounge room. O Lucky Man Don't Look Back Romeo and Juliet My Fair Lady The Swiss Family Robinson Whistle Down the Wind Dr Strangelove Barbarella A Hard Days Night The Endless Summer A Man and a Woman The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Fantastic Voyage The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming Five Easy Pieces The Passenger Close Encounters o...

I've been tagged by Ivy to list my favourite 10 movies. I can't do 'favourite' (I'm too flighty) and I don't do 'top 10' anything. But I just sat down for five and came up with a list of movies I would watch again and, indeed, some of these I have watched again recently. Nothing out of the bag here, pretty predictable, but maybe that's what you'd expect. There's plenty more where these came from, especially a lot of films I saw in the 1970s which seem to have been forgotten (anyone recall Private Vices Public Virtues, or Abundance - err, I meant Providence - remember when Alan Bates was in every movie going?) Céline et Julie vont en bateau The Conversation LOTR 123 (esp 2) Rear Window House of Flying Daggers Hiroshima Mon Amour North By Northwest In the Heat of the Night Smiles of a Summer's Night Scenes From a Marriage Les Enfants du Paradis The Big Lebowski Fargo The Maltese Falcon Aliens Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back Poltergeis...

Very good post from Ernesto . about that film Apocalypto . The consensus of reviewers here in Sydney seems to be that it is a very violent and rather silly but well-filmed action pic, if that's what you want, but it's sense of 'history' is off-beam. Ernesto analyses it much more deeply. I haven't mentioned the director's name. I once wrote film reviews for a gay and lesbian weekly paper. The previous film reviewer whom I took over from, Simon Hunt (aka Pauline Pantsdown , for those who remember) told me, when handing over, that he had never reviewed or mentioned this certain person due to his well-publicised rants about gay men. I continued that tradition. But sometimes things need to be said.

Yes, I know that was a bit of a flurry of words. But the idea of 'conditions' (aka The August Project) was to end up with 31 poems - not necessarily one written every day but one for every day. So they were all written this month and, no, those last ones weren't just written tonight. I extracted them from notebooks and recent drafts. I didn't post much last week as I was unwell, bit of spring flu. I saw the Al Gore movie tonight. That was a blow to the head. Not new, mind, but necessary.