Sherry Chandler

Watch at YouTube.

And check out the resophonic ukulele.

Thanks to Donna Rhae Marder.

At Salon, Stephanie Zacharek picks the Movies that Mattered in 2007. I don’t always agree with her picks, though I agree that by and large the American public no longer watches “movies that matter.” What I want to enlarge on here, however, is this statement:

I recently met a young writer who, having decided he didn’t know as much about movies as he wanted to, put together a film course for himself via his Netflix queue, a way to work through the likes of Godard and Chaplin, Fellini and Hawks, Hitchcock and Renoir. We talked about Netflix queues not just as lists of titles but as dream outlines of the people we’d like to be — you, or I, might be a person who watched “Masculine Feminine” three times before returning it; who had every intention of getting through “Hiroshima Mon Amour” but ultimately sent it off in the pouch, unwatched; who is glad to have seen “The Passion of Joan of Arc” but also relieved at the prospect of never having to watch it again. Through movies, we collect bits of ourselves, and sometimes we reject parts of ourselves, too.

So what is the shape of my Netflix queue? Nothing, I’m glad to say, quite so earnest as a course in film history, though I do have an interest in historically significant films. It doesn’t seem to reach as far as Robert Mitchum’s fifties noir, however. In the last two years we’ve watched two highly touted Mitchum films: 1947’s Out of the Past and 1952’s Angel Face. We found both of them a little silly.

But I love Mitchum in films like Cape Fear and Night of the Hunter. Even Thunder Road.

Looking at my (our, really) rental history, I see that we’ve rented 90 films since November 29, 2005. That comes out at not quite one a week, so I suppose we don’t really qualify as cinamatophiles.

Social conscience caused us to rent some earnest documentaries like Shakespeare Behind Bars and Gunner Palace.

But mostly I think it’s a fan list: a lot of Kurosawa and Terry Gilliam, several Johnny Depp films, a bunch of Shakespeare, behind bars and otherwise. We did some comparative Hamlets, including Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead.

We went on an Erroll Flynn kick for a while. And we enjoyed old silent comedies with Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.

At one time I set out to see every movie for which Ry Cooder had done the sound track, which led us to a lot of Walter Hill movies we wouldn’t ordinarily have watched. But also to Wim Winders’s Paris, Texas, which I loved.

I haven’t achieved that goal yet, though. Not all of these movies seem to be available on Netflix.

The list is maybe a little bit snobbish, as you might expect from a houseful of writers and classics scholars. But not really film buff snobbish.

Mostly we just follow our noses. One film leads to another. Like The Seven Samurai leads to The Magnificent Seven. Like Yojimbo leads to A Fistful of Dollars leads to Last Man Standing. A terrible film, that one, but we’ve made a circle back to Walter Hill.

Thus it’s all a great wheel: life, time, and my Netflix queue.