E is for Easy, that's Good Enough for Me

So the ever-profound doubtful_salmon presented a variation on the Ten Things With One Letter Meme, this one limited to movies, and gave me the letter "E." Surprisingly little by that letter is in our actual DVD collection, and it's almost impossible to search anywhere by first letter like we used to do in card catalogs, but with some out-the-box thinking and a little help from an out-of-date Blockbuster print guide to videos, I think I can collect my thoughts and my ten.

In no particular order:

Eternal Sunshine. The first to pop into my head, if only because the grrl happened to use Clementine in her icon announcing her ten choices (that is her, yes? My eyes are getting too old for this.....) This is perhaps the only Jim Carrey movie ever I can actually stand, where he keeps the mugging to a minimum and generally/genuinely comes off as a human being rather than as a cariacacuture/God/TV character/whatev.  Not to mention, I was born in Rockville Centre- and sorry, Charlie (Kaufman), but that's the correct spelling, unlike what you put on the Metro North tracks that played the LIRR.

Eight Men Out. From the golden age of baseball movies- which brought us The Natural, League of Their Own, Bull Durham and the very underrated Pastime within a few short years of each other- this piece of John Sayles amazement followed the 1919 Chicago White Black Sox through the scandal that almost took down the entire game.

Eating Raoul. A guilty pleasure, to be sure, and one I haven't seen in years, but I've always had a soft spot for comic cannibalism and this one certainly fills the Bill. Plus, Buck Henry's in it, and there's nothing with his fingerprints on it (from Get Smart! to some of the best early Saturday Night Live episodes) that I didn't fall in love with.

English Patient. Just think, we could've taken out Voldemort years before Harry ever got the chance, when this Fiennes-played adventurer showed up in an abandoned MASH unit. We didn't lay hands on the film until a year or so ago, but its beauty and powerful message more than made up for the delay.

Executioner's Song. Using a TV movie is perhaps cheating, but I'm entitled: I had a morbid fascination with the in-the-news story of Gary Gilmore's self-imposed execution, the first in this country in a decade, and I'd read Norman Mailer's lengthy, by-the-same-name account of the events on the side in college even as I was reading his Armies of the Night book in English class. Tommy Lee Jones and Rosanna Arquette had groundbreaking roles in this adaptation, and for a country that was just getting back into Serious Redneck Mode in 1982, one year into the Reagan empire, seeing a man shot on network television was certainly a preview of coming attractions.

(You pick one or the other of these.) ET or Empire Strikes Back.  Both hit at about the same time, and in about the same way- making the marketing more important than the message, the latter being simplified and homogenized to a point where everyone had no choice but to Go See It. Neither ranks among the greats, but both rank among the most important in terms of what they did to the Hollywood of decades to come.

Educating Rita. Yeah, it's pretty much Pygmalion II without the good songs of the R&H remake, but where else can you watch Michael Caine and Julie Walters have at it in a true literary sense for close to two hours?

Everything You Always Wanted to Know....* Perhaps the strangest adaptation Woody Allen ever did, of a straightforward nonfiction sex manual, yet he filled it with an amazing cast, including himself, and continued his fascination with the subject that goes back to Play it Again, Sam and defined his work up until, well, whatever the hell it is he's working on now.

Empire of the Sun.  Man, the things you learn doing these memes. I remembered this movie- its beauty, its sadness (a British subject abandoned in China during the post-Pearl Harbor Japanese invasion), but not the name of the child actor who played the lead role. Would you believe a 13-year old future Batman by the name of Christian Bale?

Elephant Man. If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you John Merrick's remains. I saw this film whilst living in the UK, not that it becomes any more meaningful for that reason, but that viewing is part of the time-and-place associations I still have for the film all these years later, which include recalling John Hurt's powerful performance even more than all the pop-culture jokes to get associated with it in the decades since.

Other honorable choices I excluded simply from never having seen (or, sadly at my age, being unable to remember seeing): Easy Rider, Escape from New York, Eraserhead, East of Eden (the James Dean original), Enter the Dragon, Europa Europa, Eat Drink Man Woman.

A few I did see and almost included: The Exorcist, Electric Horseman.

Not on the list, but appropriate for this place in the post: The End.