'The Haunting'

If you ask a dozen people who the best film directors of all time are, I would bet Robert Wise probably doesn't come up. Maybe once.

Fact is, Wise won Best Director and Best Picture Academy Awards for The Sound of Music and West Side Story. Furthermore, his filmography expands to sci-fi (the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still and Star Trek), horror (The Haunting, Audrey Rose) to the random thriller-drama.

Still, he's often criticized for not being an "auteur" like Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock. That to me is like saying Hank Aaron wasn't a very good defensive outfielder. Maybe the criticism sticks, but that shouldn't take away from the fact that he was very good.

What's more, Wise started out as an editor and was nominated for another Academy Award in the category for Citizen Kane (he did not win). His editing work can be seen on Dance, Girl, Dance, The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat and The Magnificent Ambersons. It's hard to find anyone in film with all of those movies under his sleeve.

'The Last Wave'

Three of Peter Weir's pre-Hollywood films, when he was filming in his home country of Australia, made it to the 1,001 list. The Hollywood films -- Witness, Dead Poet's Society, Master and Commander, The Truman Show -- made money, but almost zero critical attention. Hollywood sucks.

One thing I can't figure out is the aborigine's influence in Australia. For all the slavery and racism in the United States, the influence and role of blacks is large and nearly indefinable. It's like a planet.

Being divorced from the situation, I can't tell and watching films isn't helping things. The aborigines seem tribal, simple and mostly living outside of white society. In fact, The Last Wave deals with a Sydney lawyer, who is defending three aborigines in a homicide case that deals with the idea that there are aborigines still living in a tribal culture and those that live in the city.

The lawyer -- dealing with premonitions and dreams -- finds himself wrapped up in this mystical voodoo. I would imagine that there is sort of an inherent fear of the whites in Australia of the aborigines. The blacks in the United States clearly aren't indigenous. In Australia, the whites came in and honed in on the existing culture. They're in someone else's back yard and that's uncomfortable no matter how control you are in. Maybe that's the point of the film.

'Out Of The Blue'

My mind was blown when the Travelling Wilbury's debuted. The idea of a rock supergroup was a foreign idea. So was free agency in professional sports.

Some of my favorite rock musicians was Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and George Harrison. Bob Dylan I wouldn't get into for another 10 years.

What I really wanted to know is who was this curly-haired doofus with the sunglasses?

Pre-Google, it took a while to figure this out. It was Jeff Lynne. OK. Who is Jeff Lynne? He's only the lead singer of the Electric Light Orchestra.

To this day he seems like the biggest hanger-on in the history of rock music. Those dumb sunglasses and the unkempt hair. Barf. He co-wrote and recorded with Petty and Harrison, which explains his inclusion with the great Orbison and the legendary Dylan with the Wilburys. He's frankly still the odd duck in the row. His work with Harrison and Petty are maybe some of their most popular and it also may be some of their worst.

As for Electric Light Orchestra, it's your typical 1970s rock music. Fans might try to label progressive, multi-layered and experimental and all that. At its heart, it's bad Beatles songs.

'Crime Of The Century'

Supertramp's breakthrough album was dedicated to "Sam."

"Sam" is actually Stanley August Miesegaes, a Dutch millionaire, who was funding the goings on of the band Joint. Disappointed, he offered to support keyboardist Rick Davies' new band. That band would be Supertramp, the butt of about a trillion jokes about bad rock bands.

After a name change, several line-up shifts and two fruitless albums, the band -- and Sam -- hit it off with Crime of the Century and five years later with the ultra-hit record, Breakfast in America.

Honestly, this is the most of Supertramp I've ever listened to and in general it's not terrible. Sounds just like 1970s power-pop rock and everything that brings to mind. Of course, I'm passing judgement -- good or bad -- based on one album, which happened to be one of their earliest.

It does cheapen things knowing you had a millionaire behind you willing to front money for equipment travel and whatnot. It's stories like this that make you appreciate a band like The Beatles a lot more. No one ever supported them more than they deserved. The only professional help came from their manager, Brian Epstein, but he was by no means a millionaire and he put as much sweat and tears into the band as anyone.

Considering Supertramp seemed perpetually in doubt as far as staying together, they would never have had survived without a financier like Sam.

'Shock Corridor'

Directed by Samuel Fuller, himself a veteran of World War II when he took part in the landings in Africa, Sicily and Normandy in addition to helping liberate a concentration camp, it's a story of a journalist, who fakes incest with his sister (actually his stripper girlfriend), to get admitted into a mental hospital to investigate the murder of a patient.

With his eyes on the Pulitzer Prize, the journalist sinks deeper and deeper into the psychosis of his fellow inmates as they attempts to break down their mental issues to find out who killed the patient.

Meanwhile, his own mental health is waning in his mania and he begins losing connection with reality. He actually starts thinking his girlfriend is his sister.

In the end, he finishes his story and blows the lid off the murder. However, his digging wound up burying his mind and he becomes a permanent resident of the mental ward.

'The Thin Man'

Dashiell Hammett published five novels. I've read three. The Thin Man was his final one and the last one I've read.

Hammett wouldn't write again. Twenty-seven years from the time The Thin Man was published and his death in 1961.

The Thin Man was made into a very famous and well-regarded film starring Myrna Loy and William Powell. Maybe one of the few times the film is as good as the book, or vice versa. There were many sequels to the films in addition to a TV series.

The Thin Man has a very different tone from a lot of Hammett's other works. The protagonist is actually a couple, Nick and Nora Charles, the former being a retired detective sucked into a case involving some acquaintances seemingly invading his home. Nora is a precocious, liberated and smart woman. Really, if you want an early flag bearer for the feminist movement in literature, how can you not include Nora Charles. If there's anyone that doesn't answer to anyone in the whole story, it's her.

This is an easy-going narrative. The Charleses are wise-cracking know-it-alls seemingly viewing this thread of murder, deceit and manipulation like spectators at a Civil War battle. They tend to rise above it and do not get caught up in the fray (except for getting grazed by a bullet) unlike some of Hammett's other detectives.

'The Invention Of Curried Sausage'

Germany during World War II from the point of view of a German intellectual.

Granted, our intellectual, Uwe Timm, was only four years old when the Russians and British fought their way to the German border and Hamburg, when the story is set.

Still, it's not the author telling the story. It's from the point of view of a single mother, her husband and son lost in the battle lines -- dead or captured. Mere days before the Allies take over. Before justice is levied on the Nazis and years before things are considered "normal."

She starts shacking up with a AWOL naval officer. She delays telling him that the war is over in order to keep him with her. Sort of wrong. Yet, it showed this vulnerability when life for a lonely woman, just trying to live, was impossible.

Timm was too young to fight in World War II, even if he wanted. Timm would actually get active with a number of leftist parties and organizations in 1960s. He would not become the friend of any Nazi as he came of age.

Timm's brother and father did fight. The former died. I think there was probably quite a bit of guilt for a war and a party that he would not have supported and probably died trying to defy. I also think Timm was quick to defend Germany. Not Nazi Germany. But Germany: this collection of vulnerable and sad people swept up in this wave, many drowned and we are apt to blame all of them for building the beach.

It's not a fair assumption. Timm probably understands this as much as anyone. He didn't see the full impact of the war on his family and home. He did have a front-row seat to how it would rebuild the next 25 years. You don't need to see the destruction to understand the rebuilding.

'The Great Gatsby'

The Great American Novel.

The Great Gatsby may or may not be this. I do know that it's great, it's American and it's a novel. A beautifully written novel about America at its most glorious and its most vulnerable. The Roarin' '20s showed America at an odd time: Conspicuous consumption mixed with the self-righteousness of Prohibition and those in-between years after the Great War, before the Great Depression and a good 20 years before any able-bodied men were shipped back to Europe for another Great War.

It was a time of innovation. Ironically or not, in terms of this blog, it was pretty monumental. It was high tide for literature, the birth of film and popular recorded music was not far from being in every home as part of a mass medium.

Funny thing, friend saw what I was reading and she noted that she "hated" Daisy. I found Daisy, actually, was probably the most sympathetic character in the entire novel.

She was a product of a mysogonist culture where pretty young females were supposed to "marry up" and just enjoy the ride and ignore the other women. Tom was the real asshole, naturally. Daisy was caught in this trap that it was impossible to get out of. Maybe she was melodramatic or whatever, but she was the real victim. She's the real story here. Gatsby was only "great" because of Daisy.

'The Chirping Crickets'

It had to be pretty cool to be a rock-and-roll fan in Lubbock, Texas in October 1955.

Elvis Presley came to the West Texas cattle town to play a concert. I could only imagine it raised quite a bit of fuss. I'm sure the fine residents of mid-1950s Lubbock didn't take to Presley's hip-juking, slap bass and provocations.

Nonetheless, Lubbock was treated to a show. For the random teenager taking in the show, they had to fight through an opening band led by local boy Buddy Holly. In hindsight, attendees probably now realize how important that night was. It was an older kid (The King was 20) providing an opportunity for the younger kid (Holly had just turned 19).

What Presley had done for Holly, Holly would win up doing for The Beatles, whose first recording session included a worked down cover of "That'll Be The Day."

Holly died in that plane crash just two years after recording The Chirping Crickets, his first album. He only "recorded" two other albums although he had enough material that the record company kept churning out collections of his tunes.

It's fascinating to think that this guy lived just a mere 22 years and his life was snatched around a series of circumstances and decisions that just as easily have gone a different way. This wasn't Mama Cass chocking on a ham sandwich or Janis Joplin choking on her own vomit.

Yet, he left this brilliant legacy of music. The adage that artists do all this creation and whenever they pass this work will all survive centuries and centuries afterward. Picasso was 91 when he died. Hemingway was 61. Their work resonates still. Holly's legacy started a little early.

'A Date With The Everly Brothers'

This is a story of a song. "Love Hurts" was written by Boudleaux Bryant, who also penned "Bye Bye Love" and "All I Have To Do Is Dream," both hits for the Everlys.

It was first recorded by the Everlys on this album in 1960. Over the next 50 years it'd be recorded by another two dozen artists in some form or fashion, everyone from Emmylou Harris, Heart, Corey Hart, Pat Boone, Cher, John McLean, Journey, Joan Jett, The Who and Roy Orbison.

The song would wind up charting four different times (Orbison, Cher, Jim Capaldi, Nazareth). Ironically, it would be the biggest hit with Nazareth. All those great artists and no one quite hit it like Nazareth.

A song I largely ignored for most of my life, I've since learned to love it after hearing Harris and Gram Parsons cover it and release it on his posthumous album, Grievous Angel. It's really a gorgeous song, full of loss and regret. And it all started on this album in 1960 without any aplomb.