Movies and books

I am trying to fill out the profile form. I decided to move most titles to this post because I felt they belong in my past rather than in my present. Some are also not widely known so I include links in case you are interested. BTW it seems that The Maids of Wilko and The Birch Wood will be shown at the NYC Lincoln Center this Oct-Nov - more details at the link. Be warned, in The Birch Wood the performance of the sick brother is heartbreaking; The Maids of Wilko are more lighthearted, just a bit nostalgic.

These movies are not my favorites in the sense that I'd watch them a million times because they tend to be depressing. But they are award winning movies, all based on novels or short stories, which I enjoyed watching and which I'd recommend - if you are in the mood. All have a strong visual impact and feature a dreamy, poetic atmosphere: Fassbinder's Querelle, see a fragment here, Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre with haunting music from Popol Vuh, a homemade trailer here, Has' The Hour-Glass Sanatorium aka The Sandglass, a fragment here, Wajda's The Maids (aka Maidens) of Wilko, a fragment where much is said but nothing translated so it will kind of bore you here, and The Birch Wood, a scene where the sick brother dies here.

To counterbalance, comedies: Scorsese's After Hours, Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery, the British sitcom Fawlty Towers.

Nowadays I most often watch documentaries and reality TV.

Books - classics at random: The Doll, The New Woman (these have also been filmed and can be found at imdb.com under their original titles), The Street of Crocodiles (this one is a "Salvador Dali on drugs", as one enthusiastic reader put it), Escape to the South (read through pages 84-85 of the book Transcending the Absurd for a review of Escape to the South. In short, it's a satirical, picaresque story of three teenage boys' trip towards the southern border in the company of a giant ape; the form resembles a comic book with a drawing by author on each page. Note the Google book search displays the results correctly in IE but not necessarily in other browsers.)

I'll add more titles if I think of any.