ADAM SCHOALES

Alright. You wanna know why I love and admire Mr. Steven Soderbergh? It’s this:

One day the man can make an insanely artsy film where he more or less tells his audience “I don’t give a shit if you get it or not, in fact, I hope you don’t get it!”.

The next day he’ll make a depely thought provoking yet also artisitcally tinged film about the war on drugs.

And then he finishes off the week by making a Hollywood romp through Vegas with Messieurs Clooney, Pitt and Damon.

In all seriousness, I admire that this man is not able to make a beautiful film that is in many ways quite artistic (and sometimes borderline “art film”) but also manages to tell a story. And not some loosely strung together narrative to show off his pretty shots, but a straight up story. With a begining, middle, and end.

And that my friends is why he is a genius. I want to do that.

And did I mention: Two Oscar nods, in the same category, in the same year. Boom!

He is the only director to have been nominated in the same year for Best Director for two different films by the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild of America.

Oh, and let’s not forget about the movie about the “hooker with the heart of gold”.

via mandrs:

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100

THESE ARE THE ONES THAT I HAVE READ:

01 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -
02  The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -
03 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -
04 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -
05 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -
06 The Bible -
07 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -
08 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -
09 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - (Started this… couldn’t get into it)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - (I’ve Seen the Movie!)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - (and the Radio show, and the Movie, and PART of the TV series)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - (Read an abridged one… but I wont count that)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -
34 Emma - Jane Austen - 
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - 
36 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis -
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -
42  The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - 
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - (saw the Musical!)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -    
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - 
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - (I do have the audiobook ready for reading)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas-
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie –
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - (did you know Moby is related to the author, hense the Nickname?)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - (Again, read an abridged one… but I wont count that. Also saw the Musical and then was IN the musical)
72  Dracula - Bram Stoker - (and again: abridged - but not counting)
73  The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante -
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - 
80 Possession - AS Byatt –

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - 
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -                            
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - 
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl -
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - (sorta, I read an abridged version, and part of the unabridged version… IN FRENCH)

Not Bad for someone with a hatred of novels and reading…