35 Favorite Movies

[collisionwork]

Earlier this year, I posted a list of my "50 Favorite Movies." As I noted then, if you were to go through all of my notebooks (as I sometimes do, all the way back to age 15 or so, looking for interesting ideas to develop I'd forgotten about), you find these lists, of varied length (10 films, 15 films, 20 films, 25 films), carefully dated, occurring here and there, months apart, sometimes years, sometimes just weeks.

No good reason to do this really, especially at first (except if you're a film buff, you get asked what your favorites are fairly often, so making lists means you usually don't forget them). Now that it's been years of doing this, I like to go back and see what's stayed or vanished or newly appeared on my lists, and what filmmakers I love but who don't even have one film on the list (most often, as below, Powell & Pressburger, Ken Russell, Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky, with whom their entire oeuvre means more to me than any individual film; Godard used to always be in this bunch, too).

Looking over a list of my "favorite films" on Facebook today, I felt that a few things were missing. By the time I added the missing ones, today's list was at 35. This time I didn't stop at a "5" because that's how lists normally work (last time I hit 45 and then kinda forced in another 5 to make an even 50), I just stopped when I had a list of the very VERY special films that make me feel a little more something (at least today, right now) when I think of them than any other movies do. This doesn't always mean they're "great," of course (there are movies generally regarded as "bad," and VERY understandably so, below), but they ARE my Favorites - that is, when I think of any one of these movies, I am overwhelmed with a great sense of love for and protection of them, and want to see them again IMMEDIATELY (luckily, I own video copies of some viewable kind of all but 4 of them).

The list is maybe a bit more English-language and American than last time - I think I was self-conscious about that then and forced in some non-English films to try and seem less USA-centric. Well, I am that, I guess.

Here's today's 35 Favorite Movies of mine:

Sherlock, Jr. - directed by Buster Keaton, 1924
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans - directed by F.W. Murnau, 1927
Citizen Kane - directed by Orson Welles, 1941
The Seventh Victim - directed by Mark Robson, 1943
Detour - directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945
Magical Maestro - directed by Tex Avery, 1952
Duck Amuck - directed by Charles M. Jones, 1953
Glen or Glenda? - directed by Edward D. Wood, Jr., 1953
Kiss Me Deadly - directed by Robert Aldrich, 1955
The Birds - directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1963
Contempt - directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1963
Two or Three Things I Know About Her - directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1967
Wavelength - directed by Michael Snow, 1967
Point Blank - directed by John Boorman, 1967
How I Won the War - directed by Richard Lester, 1967
2001: A Space Odyssey - directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1968
Performance - directed by Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1970
THX-1138 - directed by George Lucas, 1971
The Last Picture Show - directed by Peter Bogdanovich, 1971
Tout Va Bien - directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972
Mean Streets - directed by Martin Scorcese, 1973
Singing on the Treadmill - directed by Gyula Gazdag, 1974
Barry Lyndon - directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1975
Eraserhead - directed by David Lynch, 1977
The Falls - directed by Peter Greenaway, 1980
Bad Timing - directed by Nicolas Roeg, 1980
Stardust Memories - directed by Woody Allen, 1980
Videodrome - directed by David Cronenberg, 1983
Tough Guys Don't Dance - directed by Norman Mailer, 1987
Road House - directed by Rowdy Harrington, 1989
Barton Fink - directed by Joel Coen, 1991
The Age of Innocence - directed by Martin Scorcese, 1993
Heavenly Creatures - directed by Peter Jackson, 1994
Schizopolis - directed by Steven Soderbergh, 1996
Lost Highway - directed by David Lynch, 1997

Any connecting threads here? I'm a little surprised to see that most of them (at least 26, but maybe more if I thought about it) deal with problems of identity in some way, as in "Who Is This Person?" or "Who Are You?" or "Who is ANY person?" or mistaken identities, or shifting identities, or masks and hidden identities. Hmmn.

Comments

[frawst.livejournal.com]

What jumped out at me, perhaps because you sorted it that way, is that you haven't had a movie in the last 10 years that really cracked into your brain.

[collisionwork]

Well, somewhat (some of these are older movies I've only discovered in the last ten years or so).

Also, I don't trust quick impressions, and whenever I've put a movie (or anything) on a "favorites" list of mine when I just saw it and was still cracked open by it, it dropped off within a year or two (Fight Club and Battle Royale were both on for a brief time after I encountered them - still love them, but, no, not on this list anymore). of course, I've only seen Singing on the Treadmill twice, within one week, back in 1987, and it's been on the list ever since. For all I know, if I saw it again now, it'd drop right off.

Both How I Won the War and Two or Three Things I know About Her went on the list for a while right after I saw them and then dropped off when I didn't see them again for years and figured I'd overrated them. Then I finally got back to them. They've stayed since.

Maybe some of the films I HAVE seen and loved in the last decade will show up someday. I dunno - can't think of many that might make it there. Maybe there's a good reason I've moved so much over to Theatre in my life - I see mind-altering theatre with a lot more regularity than I do film these days . . .

1 definite match

[theaterofideas.livejournal.com]

There's only one definite match that I see - Barry Lyndon. Close are The Birds (I would go for Vertigo, though), 2001 (Eyes Wide Shut would be my 2nd Kubrick pick, though if I went for 3, 2001 would make it), Barton Fink (Miller's Crossing for me, but BF is number 2), Lost Highway (make mine Mulholland Drive), Mean Streets (the old standard, Goodfellas), and Crimes and Misdemeanors would be my woody Allen pick. As for Heavenly Creatures...well, maybe that one does make my list.

Two others I sort of thought you might share are Henry Fool and Ed Wood...