Nicci and I stopped for lunch at Aroma Cafe today in Studio City, and who should sit down at the table next to us but actor/producer/director Saul Rubinek. You might know him as Harold Salt in Wall Street, or Dr. Jim Curran in And The Band Played On. You might even have recognized him as the custody attorney in Season 2 Episode 2 of LOST (entitled “Adrift”). Me? I’ll always know him as the crazed, coked-up movie director Lee Donowitz in True Romance, one of my all-time favorite films. Yeah, I know that the plot is cheesy and it’s a love story, but it’s so good! Tarantino’s writing is incredible. The scene with Dennis Hopper (Autolux fan) and Christopher Walken is classic. Even Brad Pitt is hilarious as the stoner roommate Floyd, and he’s never made a good movie (except for 12 Monkeys). Patricia Arquette’s character, if you’ll remember from this post, was long-considered to be my ideal woman. If you’re not a True Romance believer, if you don’t think it is one of the greatest films of all time, re-visit it. The movie, and Saul Rubineck are so good. That’s why it made my list of my list of the 100 best films of all-time.
Oh, and Rubineck played English Bob’s (and, subsequently, Little Bill’s) biographer in Unforgiven. I watched it for the first time while Nicci was on vacation, and was blown away by the film. No wonder the American Film Institute awarded it a spot on its list of the 100 greatest films ever made.
Which reminds me. I’m doing fairly well on my quest to watch all 123 films included in both the 1998 and 2007 editions of AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies list. I have until So far, I’ve seen 46 of the films. Wait, maybe that’s not so good. I’m not counting films I saw as a child, because time has worn on my memory and I can’t remember much about them. So, even though I’ve technically seen things like Tootsie and Fantasia and American Graffiti, I’m not comfortable including them on the list. I’ve also elected not to include movies I’ve only seen portions of, and movies that I’ve only seen while under the influence, because I don’t feel like I’ve really experienced them. So, Easy Rider, Chinatown, Platoon and Do The Right Thing don’t count. I’m pretty confident I can achieve my goal before October 28th, 2010.
How many have you seen on the combined list(s)? What’s your favorite film not on the list. I showed you mine, now you show me yours!
