Good Movies to Keep You Warm
At first it shone fresh in memory, the gold filigree earring formed on a redbud leaf bought for me by my husband on a book tour visit to Nebraska’s Arbor Day Farm, where good practical environmentalism pairs abundantly with good food. But in the cold days and weeks after I lost it — after I’d searched coat collars, scarves, carpets and car crannies —it faded into forgetfulness.
So its reappearance months later on the bulletin board of my post office sweetened my remembered appreciation with the shock of recognition and the surprise of recovery.
That’s just how I felt running again into old friends among the movies in our annual Groundhog’s Movie Guide to Surviving Six More Weeks of Winter.
Bay Weekly Moviegoer Diana Beechener is the big brain behind our guide in recent years; hence her credit as curator. Her suggestion to make Je Suis Charlie one of our categories sent me straight — do not pass go — to Richard Pryor. In my memory, nobody’s funnier or more outrageous.
But memory fades. Tastes and styles change. Would Pryor be all that I remembered?
With some trepidation, husband Lambrecht and I considered Netflix’s delivery of the first of six on my Pryor list, a 1979 performance filmed at Long Beach, California. We’d just sample it, we agreed. An hour and 19 minutes later, properly scandalized and aching from laughter edging on pain, we reaffirmed our faith. Pryor was even better as we traveled back in time.
Will The Godfather hold up as well? The Nights of Cabiria? Life Is Beautiful? The Lives of Others? The Great Escape? The Fisher King? To Have and Have Not?
Hurry up Netflix! I’m eager to see.
Other movies I’ll be seeing for the first time. So I’m hoping to make new friends and new memories.
There are 30 in this year’s Guide, reflecting the disparate tastes of seven Bay Weekly moviegoers as well as that of Beechener and me. So you’ll find variety, from science fiction to sleepers. Particularly attractive is the In Memory Of collection featuring seven of the great talents who died in 2014: Maya Angelou, Richard Attenborough, Lauren Bacall, James Garner, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mike Nichols and Robin Williams.
Six more weeks of winter? Let it snow. I’ve got all these movies to keep me warm.
Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher; [email protected]