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.
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.
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
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.
Oh, and Groundhog Day
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
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”
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
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.
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.
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
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.)
I remember watching old romantic comedies on the old couch in your basement on Winding Brook on Saturday mornings….. Those were still the best!
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.
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
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