What is Best in Life

The time you have all been waiting for is here!  That’s right, the final www.isleyunruh.com Monday feature will be Middle Earth Monday: where I use my love of fictional cartography to take an in depth look at a different place in Middle Earth each month!  Oh don’t all leave at once, it can’t be any worse than my film “essays” right?  Besides, Middle Earth is a place of enchantment and wonder, so why not take a moment to fill you head full of knowledge that will have no bearing  at all on the real world?

For today’s inaugural post, I’d like to take a look at my all time favorite lake in Middle Earth!  No, not Lórien’s famous shaded lake Lórellin, nor the misnamed “Sea” of Núrnen, and, no, not even Lake Titicaca (that would be my all time favorite REAL lake); instead I’ll be talking about the lake of Nen Hithoel for this month’s Middle Earth Monday. (more…)

I always have to stop myself when I say I like “all kinds of music”.  Because, honestly, that just isn’t true, there is really only one kind of music I like.  No, not [just] Black Metal, I’m talking about music in a minor key.  I mean, I’m a pretty happy guy, but there is something about sad, sad songs that just does it for me.  I don’t dislike Vivaldi’s “Spring” and “Fall”, but I far prefer “Summer” and “Winter” (guess which seasons he writes in a minor key).  “Satisfaction” is a fine song, but I’d rather listen to “Paint it Black” any day…you get the idea.  Basically, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that sting [of soul crushing sorrow and sadness].

So I’ve decided to make the third Monday of every month “Minor Key Monday” and discuss some of my favorite songs in a minor key. I’m no music expert, but who wouldn’t want to create an outlet where they can inflict their favorite songs on the world at large?  And to prove that Minor Key Monday will not be “all Black Metal, all the time”, I won’t start today with Darkthrone’s Hank Amarillo, but rather with Hank Williams Sr. and my all time favorite country song “Ramblin’ Man”: (more…)

There are many directors I admire greatly, but none as much as Eric Rohmer.  With his death yesterday morning, cinema lost a true master whose unique voice has never been (and most likely will never be) matched.

It’s easy to think of Rohmer’s films as “all being the same”. After all, “young attractive french couples (often on holiday) endlessly dissecting their relationships” pretty much sums up the bulk of his work.  Yet while his movies all inhabit the same realm of human interaction, upon any close inspection they are as unique as tomorrow will be from today.  The fact that Rohmer has made so many films of such astounding freshness (even when compared to each other) despite their similar premises says volumes for the infinite variability and wonder of life as a member of the human species.

But I’ve discussed my love of Rohmer’s films before, so instead of focusing on his entire body of work in today’s memorial post, I thought I would discuss my personal favorite (as if one could really pick one from so many superlative movies) film of his: Chloe in the Afternoon. (more…)

Welcome to the very first ever Internet Meme Monday!  What is a meme you say?  Well, as I understand it, a meme is similar to a gene, except instead of passing on genetic information it passes on cultural ideas.  A meme can take many forms, from a catch phrase to a hand gesture, but the type of memes I’ll be looking at every second Monday of the month are “internet memes”.  Of course all that was a fancy way of saying I’ll be ripping off funny things I’ve seen on the internet.  See, the internet has almost as much funny stuff as porn, and while it isn’t all comic gold, I catch myself thinking “I wish I’d thought of that!” on a fairly regular basis.  Thus, Internet Meme Monday is my way of ripping off all your favorite internet memes guilt free (guilt free because I’ve set myself up a forum where I freely admit that’s what I intend to do). (more…)

Hello dear readers, it’s MAILBAG MONDAY again!  On this special day I will search through my mountain of reader mail and answer the five most pressing questions!

What’s that you say?  Do I really get that much mail?  Well, I’ll admit…the contact section of this website doesn’t get used that often, but, one of the perks of wordpress stats is that I can see the google search terms that people use to find my site.  And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that these search terms will count as reader mail, since they are often entered in the form of a question.  So as you read these, remember that each “question” was something that someone actually typed into google that brought up my site as a hit which they then clicked on thus letting wordpress stats report to me the search they used to find my site.  I could make up the questions myself, but it turns out the actual google searches are far better than anything I could come up with!

This time I answer the questions:

• Dementor vs nazgul?
• How much garlic to add to a roast for tacos?
• John wayne was awesome?
• Is it unhealthy to eat pancakes on its own?
• Most epic metal song ever hilarious?

So, without further ado, it is time to dig into the old Mailbag to see what kind of things have been on my reader’s minds in the last month! (more…)

Top ten lists might be completely subjective affairs that are meaningless to anyone other than their creator, but they also happen to be a hell of a lot of fun to make.  Obviously nobody can really say any one movie is exactly the 7th best movie of the year, the decade, or all time, but the process of deciding for yourself how you would rank your favorite films is a very legitimate method of thinking about cinema.  Which films have the necessary level of mastery to even make your list, what about those films, specifically, appeals to you, specifically, and just what the best movie on your list will actually be are all very valuable questions.  Sure, my 4th favorite movie of a particular decade might shift up, down or ever disappear from any of these lists based on the whims of my fancy at the time, but the fact remains that the act of creating such a list is very helpful in sorting through your thoughts and preferences in the world of cinema.

That said, any list such as this must have criteria and guidelines for its creation. Here are the ones I have decided to use (the choice of guidelines being equally subjective as the ordering of my list):

1. One film per director. A tough choice (and not really in the spirit of things) but a necessary one to keep (for example) a decade like the seventies from being dominated by Altman and Fassbinder films.
2. Find a balance between mastery of the medium and personal preference. For example, Pather Pachali is a true masterwork, but it does not resonate with me enough to quite make my 1950′s list, and yet Rio Bravo, its own kind of masterwork gets the top spot.  Again, I said *balance*, Die Hard, for all its brilliance is simply not even in the same league as something like Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, the #10 spot on my 80s list. And Excalibur, much as I love it, is still enough of a mess to keep it off my 1980′s list as well.
3. You must have seen a movie more than once to include it on your list. I will break all of my rules, and probably this one most of all.  Even someone who watches as many movies as I do can not realistically do this for every film, but when able it is strongly advised as repeat viewings always provide new insight as to a film’s relative position on a list.

With those simple rules for me to try to break, let’s move on to my list of the top ten best films of the 2000s!

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Because today marks the one year anniversary of my Monthly Movie Review segment, I thought I’d spend a bit of time looking back over my year in movies.  And when I say in movies, I mean a lot of movies…like an embarrassing amount.  It’s almost as if I have a bit of free time on my hands.

How many movies did I watch in the last year?  According to my calculations: (more…)

Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in December.

Stats

• Movies watched – 35
• Movies that were new to me – 22
• Most movies from the last decade watched in a month ever – 25
• Monthly Masterpieces – The White Ribbon, It’s a Wonderful Life, In the Mood for Love

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