Watching Movies
As a kid I watched 80’s movies… I loved Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Vacation and Better Off Dead. In high school I watched boy movies like Scarface, Bloodsport and the Godfather. I did take one film class, but wasn’t really focused, and as a result can’t name any of the movies I saw.
Then I fell in love with a film maker in @ShayWade, had a wonderful son KidWonder, and am now a big homebody. About 9 months ago we decided we wanted to watch some good movies, and looked around for some. So there’s many Top 100 lists: the American Film Institute has a 100 years, 100 films list published in 1998, revised in 2007. Its a pretty politically correct list and some people think it sucks. There’s the Netflix Top 100. There’s the IMDB Top 250. We decided we would borrow from each of these lists, and allow ourselves to watch other movies as they came up. Here’s what we’ve seen so far:
Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Murder on the Orient Express, Cool Hand Luke, Lawrence of Arabia, North by Northwest, The Graduate, Gone With the Wind, On the Waterfront, 7 Samurai, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, The Searchers, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Inglorious Basterds, Shaft, The Mack, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Coffy, Foxy Brown, Apocalypse Now Redux, The Deer Hunter, Dirty Harry, Live and Let Die, Dark Knight, Guys and Dolls, Singin’ in the Rain, Witness, Heathers, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Munich, Slumdog Millionaire, Network, Taken, The Notebook, Sideways, Lost in Translation, Blade Runner, Tyson, Witness, There Will Be Blood, Iron Man, El Mariachi, Desperado, Land of the Lost, Let the Right On In, The Big Sleep, Charade, Born Yesterday, How to Marry a Millionaire, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Big Lebowski, Sunshine Cleaning, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pulp Fiction, Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Yes, a mouthful. So, what do I think about these movies? They are awesome. Pretty much all of them. Every time I think I like one genre over another, I see a new movie and realize that I’m attracted to passionate characters and stories that answer the big questions they pose, not a particular genre. The scenes don’t have to have a chronological order (I love Memento, Pulp Fiction), but the story should fit together at the end. I like twists, and I end up talking to the screen to try to work out how the twist will unfold. I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything I’ve seen by Tarantino, Kubrick and Hitchcock.
I find that I normally side with Roger Ebert’s reviews in terms of the emotional impact films have on me, and BTW, if you aren’t following him here and here and you like movies, you should. I’m no movie buff–I’m not the guy you want to talk camera angles and equipment terminology with.
I love the stories, and love to talk movie trivia. I’m fascinated now with just how much control movie studios and agents had on movies in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. Thanks to the the IMDB iPhone app (iTunes link), which has an easy to find “Trivia” button, I can read movie gossip 60 years later. 
I’m also absolutely loving the Netflix Instant Streaming service. At our house, we use a PS3 and the Netflix instant stream disc and our existing WiFi network and can watch (normally) an uninterrupted, high quality video stream, as well as playing Blu-Ray discs sent to us by Netflix.
I guess that’s it for now. We have a few movies at home right now to choose from: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Spirit, and 300. To all movie buffs out there–what is the one movie we should see?
