My Favorite Movies

In a post on the favorite movies of conservative bloggers James Joyner contributes his own list of favorite movies:

Pulp Fiction
Big Jake
O Brother Where Art Thou
Top Gun
Shawshank Redemption
Die Hard
Cool Hand Luke
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Rio Bravo

I’m not a conservative let alone a conservative blogger and I belong, I suspect, to a very different age group than most bloggers but I’ll play along, too.

If you define “favorite movie” as a movie I can watch again and again, in no particular order some of the movies on my rather idiosyncratic list would be:

  • The 39 Steps (the old version with Robert Donat)
  • The Quiet Man
  • Strictly Ballroom
  • The Castle
  • The Shepherd of the Hills
  • Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
  • The Band Wagon

I may think of others.

Update

I’ve thought of some others:

  • A Matter of Life and Death
  • The Mark of Zorro (the Tyrone Power picture)
  • The Adventures of Robin Hood
  • Murphy’s Romance

Each of the pictures in the list I could watch and then watch right over again. I’m not sure I can even explain why I like them. Some are great pictures; some are just nice little pictures.

Update 2

I don’t like gangster pictures; I don’t like crime pictures, generally. One of the few gangster pictures I can stand watching is Key Largo and that’s only because of the great script, the great acting (particularly by Claire Trevor), and the allegorical aspects.

19 comments… add one
  • PD Shaw Link

    These are the movies I most enjoy watching again and again:

    Arsenic and Old Lace
    Singin’ In the Rain
    It’s a Wonderful Life

    The Maltese Falcon
    Casablanca
    The Big Sleep

    Bride of Frankenstein
    Wolfman
    Dracula
    Young Frankenstein

    Lawrence of Arabia
    To Kill a Mockingbird

    Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    O Brother Where Art Thou?

    The Lord of the Rings

    My Neighbor Totoro

  • “The Quiet Man” is definitely a favorite. Easily the best of Wayne’s non-cowboy, non-war movies.

  • Jeff Medcalf Link

    Casablanca
    The Princess Bride
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    It’s a Wonderful Life
    Bringing up Baby
    Apollo 13
    Midway
    2001
    All Quiet on the Western Front
    The Blues Brothers

  • Andy Link

    Well, I guess I’ll give a list too (in no particular order):

    The Third Man
    Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back
    The Lord of the Rings
    2001: A Space Odyssey
    Aliens
    Most of Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns.
    Saving Private Ryan
    V for Vendetta
    Brazil
    The Great Escape
    Dr. Strangelove

    There are undoubtedly others. The thing is, my wife and kids control the TV most of the time, so I don’t actually watch all those movies very often.

  • Jeff Medcalf Link

    Oh, and Groundhog Day

  • sam Link

    I’ve been going to movies for over 60 years. I started to list my favs and gave it up. Too many vying for the top ten. I would second Andy’s inclusion of The Third Man. Great camera work, Orson Welles… And then there’s Harry’s Switzerland speech. Marvelous. And the most haunting musical score in all of movie history.

  • I think I can probably recite The Quiet Man. I also like Casablanca but it’s in another tier. Maybe “Watch frequently” but not “Watch over and over”.

    Jeff, I love Groundhog Day. It’s surprising that I can watch a movie over and over again that largely consists of doing the same things over and over again. I also think that the notion that God isn’t omnipotent or omniscient but has just been around a really, really long time is amusing.

  • Again, nothing form Kurosawa.

    Sigh

  • Brett Link

    I don’t like gangster pictures; I don’t like crime pictures, generally.

    Me neither, although that also applies to virtually all crime-related television shows. Even what I’ve seen of The Godfather left me cold.

    Looking at my list (not in order of favor), on films I could watch and re-watch (by the way, these aren’t all -good- movies either)-

    1. “Groundhog Day”
    2. “The Dark Night”
    3. “Resident Evil”
    4. “Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring”
    5. “The Bourne Ultimatum”
    6. “Apollo 13”
    7. “Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust”
    8. “Lord of War”
    9. “I Am Legend”
    10. “The Day After Tomorrow”

  • steve Link

    My son and I are in the middle of a long term project of watching old movie classics. We started with Birth of a Nation and have worked forward. I was surprised, gratefully, by how much he enjoyed the Marx brothers and Charlie Chaplin. WC Fields did not go over well for some reason. May as well add mine, in n particular order.

    Groundhog Day
    Princess Bride
    The Third Man
    Cassablanca
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    Young Frankenstein
    O Brother Where Art Thou
    A Night At The Opera
    The Adventures of Robin Hood
    High Noon

    Sam- Besides all the great qualities you list, think Third Man is also essential viewing as it shows just how badly European cities were damaged. Just devastating. I wish they would show it in school rather than the pablum kids usually get.

    Steve

  • Jeff Medcalf Link

    Steve, I love love love Kurosawa (Seven Samurai in particular), but I also have four kids. Watching a Kurosawa film is not sitting down to watch a movie, it’s sitting down to think about man’s place in the universe. It’s hard to think about man’s place in the universe while making paper airplanes or having a Lego creation explained to you. Same reason I didn’t list Princess Mononoke.

  • PD Shaw Link

    Jeff Medcalf, I have two young kids and that was part of my thinking as well. I picked movies that I might end up watching only 20-30 minutes of and still be happy — the staccato patter-patter of a Bogart movie, the sweeping vistas of a David Lean epic, or the slapstick absurdities of Python.

    OTOH, a couple of movies that I passed over because I really love only a part of the movie. I loved the first half hour of Saving Private Ryan and Princess Bride, but neither can usually sustain my attention (he means falls asleep).

  • Jeff,

    I just watched both Yojimbo and Sanjuro with my son (12). He really liked them, and I think we might give the Seven Samurai a shot. He’s seen quite a bit of Miyazaki’s stuff as well.

  • Michael Reynolds Link

    I’ll see your old man movies and raise you, Dave:

    Duck Soup
    A Night at the Opera

    And of course:

    Casablanca

    Somewhat more recently:

    Airplane!
    2001: A Space Odyssey
    LOTR
    A Clockwork Orange
    The Amazing Mr. Fox
    Patton
    Network
    Dr. Strangelove
    Hunt for Red October
    The Shining (Kubrick much?)
    Sin City

  • sam Link

    Steve V.

    Seven Samurai…great, great movie. Nobody, but nobody, could handle crowd shots like Kurosawa (pay attention to the village scene when the seven are being recruited). As a treat, get SS and The Magnificent Seven and watch SS first, the TMS. 🙂 When I saw SS in a movie house, everyone applauded when the sword master did his stuff. Interestingly, in You Only Live Twice (James Bond, aka Sean Connery, in Japan), the same guy plays a sword master. When I saw that movie in in a movie theater, everybody applauded when he did his stuff–again. Class tells.

    Speaking of movies based on movies, Yojimbo is based on Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. And Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars is based on Yojimbo. Cross-fertilization at it’s very best. (Now you might see why I can’t come up with a list of my 10 favs. Too damn many really good movies have passed in front of these eyes.)

  • Jan (Surkamp) Johnson Link

    I remember watching old romantic comedies on the old couch in your basement on Winding Brook on Saturday mornings….. Those were still the best!

  • Michael Reynolds Link

    I forgot: Harvey.

    It was a play of course, but wow, what a perfect piece of writing, and Jimmy Stewart and Josephine Hull (the sister) are brilliant.

  • tredspane Link

    FWIW, here are some of my faves in alpha order, and I have a bunch:

    Avatar
    Dances With Wolves
    Dave
    The Fugitive (Harrison Ford)
    Gandhi
    A Guy Named Joe
    Heartbreak Ridge
    It’s a Wonderful Life
    Key Largo
    The Man From Snowy River
    Miracle on 34th Street
    Overboard
    Savannah Smiles
    Somewhere in Time
    The Sound of Music

  • Films. Link

    My top 20 favorite movies in order…
    2001: A Space Odyssey
    The Lord of the Rings (trilogy)
    A Clockwork Orange
    Fargo
    Psycho
    Goodfellas
    Pulp Fiction
    Schindler’s List
    Reservoir Dogs
    The Big Lebowski
    The Shining
    The Shawshank Redemption
    Full Metal Jacket
    Apocalypse Now
    Citizen Kane
    Raging Bull
    Pan’s Labyrinth
    Good Will Hunting
    The Godfather
    Fight Club

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