As I Lay Thanking

I'm in an infinitely better place than these women—click on the photo if you want to know why—but still, it must be said: I've had a frustratingly flu-like cold since Tuesday, right through Thanksgiving, so at any given moment that I wasn't calling a family member or cooking a holiday dish, I've mostly been splayed out on my red futon, trying to let the seasonal tide of gratitude and life-loving overcome my incipient grouchiness about my raspy throat and my upset stomach. Unable to complete any professional tasks, I tried to think of something lovely I could produce for this site—often a delightful restorative when I'm in low spirits or ill health, even if this tends to make my sentences even longer and my number of typos even more disheartening. And I thought, while I'm feeling so thankful and full-stomached, why not revive my very favorite of my dormant writing projects? Why not seize upon this time to transcribe my feelings of gratitude toward movies I especially adore?



A few of you have noticed that, three years after I began the Favorites countdown, and almost two years after slamming into a brick wall at #34, I've gone back to clean up the graphics, fix some links, and most importantly, rearrange the lists to reflect that it's a new day. Cuz you know some movies I like a bit less than I did three years ago, and some a lot more (which I sometimes only realized by re-watching them for this feature), and some didn't even exist when I started this project, so ghastly has my procrastination been. Here are the old entries for the ten films that dropped off my list when I revised it two months ago. The recalibrated list still has some gaps where new movies will debut to replace the retired ones, or where movies scheduled to drop from my revised Top 100 list (coming in January!) are resurfacing instead on the mutually-exclusive Favorites listing, or where formerly high-ranked Favorites from '05 have slipped to lower rungs. The current and forthcoming #68, for example, would have been #33 when I last checked in, and my purely gratuitous list-maker's panic in the face of this obvious travesty ("But I don't like this more than Bram Stoker's Dracula, I don't!!!") partly explains why it took me so long to resume.



Anyway: such are the holes I'm filling now with new entries, and LOOK: I've got four of 'em already! And what a combo, right? Click on the images, please enjoy, and I hope you all had a terrific Thanksgiving, whether or not you live someplace where it made any sense to celebrate it.