- The Blues Brothers (original)
- Animal House
- Any movie that features Monica Belucci in the nude (the most beautfiul woman in the world)
- On Any Sunday
- Team america: World police (and i haven’t even seen it yet)
- First 3 star wars (cliched choice, but they are great anyway)
- Monty python’s 3 movies (meaning of life is the best)
- Dumb and Dumber
- The Mask
- Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
- Braveheart
- Avalon’s mistery [or Shadows of Avalon, don’t know GB Title]
- Atilla
- Kingdom of Heaven
- Alexander
- How High
- Troy
- American Pie
And maybe Constantine, but it’s too cruel for me.
Btw, I’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption in my server, so I’ll download and watch it, as I see your lists, it seems I won’t be dissapointed.
How could no one have mentioned:
The Beach – that was one hell of a good movie!
Great movie!
ok here we go.
(in no order)
-Waking Life
-Trainspotting
-Snatch
-Donnie Darko
-I heart Huckabees
-American Beauty
-Almost Famous
-Muholland Drive
-Pulp Fiction
-The Matrix 1&2
I do laugh at people who put The Matrix and American Pie in their top 10 movies lists. It reveals more about their lack of having watched a lot of movies more than anything else
Not that I mean to blow my own trumpet but I’ve seen just about every movie mentioned on this thread (I’m a film student) and there’s no way The Matrix is more worthy of a top 10 slot than, say, The Godfather trilogy or just about any Kubrick film you care to mention.
Nevermind, here’s my ten (in no particular order)
- Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1958)
- A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971)
- The Last Broadcast (Stefan Avalos, 1998) - a tremendously original precursor to the Blair Witch Project with more ontological undertones
- Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1957)
- Pi (Darren Aranofsky, 1998)
- Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999)
- Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1999) - much better Holocaust movie than Schindler’s List
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemekis, 1988) - best existential movie of all time - Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
- King Kong (Merian Cooper, 1933)
I would have liked to have found space for a few others, including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and a 70s sci-fi movie called Capricorn One all about a faked mission to Mars. But those are my ten, and they are all far, far better than American Pie.
edit - I’d also like to add to the list Mean Streets, which I think is the best gangster movie ever made, and not just because of the soundtrack. Also anything written by Charlie Kaufmann (i.e. Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine etc.). He’s a big fan of Nietzsche, you know.
Ace film, but brutal. The guy wandering around with the knife stuck in his head is amusing, but sickening simultaneously. If you liked that you’d probably like Vanishing Point.
Has anyone on this thread seen Emmanuelle (the original French movie)?
How about Baise-moi?
Interesting choice… alot of people would say it’s a shitty movie (perhaps Kubrick’s worst) however if you approach the movie in the way of a dream… sequence (or lack thereof) you see alot more. It plays just like a dream does… alot of teasing and ridiculousness than any real resolution. It’s like cruise’s character is sitting at work half asleep with lustful thoughts in his head. This is compounded by the seemingly strange way that kidman and cruise interact… like a married couple who know they are both gorgeous… but still in some sort of a sexual angst. Why would cruise be out looking for sex… when he’s married to such a gorgeous wife himself? I think that at least some of the movie is a dream… because there is a scene where the costume guy sells his daugther to some men or something… but then the next day the whole thing seems different? I forget I haven’t seen it in a while
In a way I feel like Kubrick played a practical joke on the whole business… because he dared to make a film he -knew- most would hate… and with the cast he had and the expectations… he smiled evilly to himself and went about his business.
Anyways… like I said interesting choice.
Oh and someone… if you look at the matrix purely froma philosophical point of view… it’s near overflowing. Sure there is alot of special effects… and keanu’s bullshit… but you HAVE to admit, the philosophical questions brought forth are both the old classics… and a few ones ones (AI god, etc)
Com’n… .you can’t even give it a 9th place spot?
Hello F(r)iends,
Below is my current top ten and then some… {in order as of 08/22/2005}
- Fight Club
- The Godfather
- Gone With The Wind
- Casablanca
- Forrest Gump
- The Godfather II
- Pulp Fiction
- American History X
- Devils Advocate
- Stand By Me
- Saving Private Ryan
- The Matrix
- Trainspotting
- Vanilla Sky
- The Shawshank Redemption
- Lord of the Rings: Pt. 1
- Braveheart
- Lord of the Rings: Pt. 3
- Kill Bill Vol. 1
- Reservoir Dogs
Personally, I think that “Life is Beautiful” was not a great film not even for a foreign film, I think “A Beautiful Mind” was a tad dull, I think that “American Beauty” is out of its league with any top 50 movies, I think that “Schindler’s List” is one of the greatest documentaries (and maybe top 50 movie), I think that “Snatch” had a great twist ending that saved the movie but that was about it, I think that “Donnie Darko” was a good movie but it wasn’t great, and I think that there haven’t been any truly great movies this year (closest thing is “Sin City”)…
-Thirst4Movies
I see you’re a man with good taste.
1.)“The Green Room.”
2.)“Nights of Calabria.”
3.)“The Trial.”
4.)“The Killing Fields.”
5.)“The Last Temptation of Christ.”
6.)“Throne of Blood.”
7.)“The Dead.”
8.)“M.”
9.)“The Hustler.”
10.)“The Piano.”
11.)“Mind Walk.”
Dark City, 1998
Shining, 1980
Guerre du feu, La (1981) aka Quest for fire
Such a Long Journey (1998)
C’era una volta il West (1968) aka Once upon a time in the west
Aliens (1986)
Spaceballs (1987)
The Naked Gun (all existing and future ones)
The 13th Warrior (1999)
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
The Gift (2000)
Flatliners (1990)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)
The African Queen (1951)
Grey Owl (1999)
Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
And many already posted. And more, not available in North America.
I don’t think I ever could come down to my all time favorite top ten movies because there’s just too many of them…maybe a top 50 but that’s too many to list right now… so… I’m going to do something different, and actually a lot easier. I’ll list my top ten favorite directors…
Sagesound’s Top Ten Directors
- Akira Kurosawa
- Stanley Kubrick
- Stephen Spielberg
- John McTeirnan
- John Carpenter
- James Cameron
- Ridley Scott
- Quentin Tarantino
- Frank Darabont
- John Milius
I do not feel I can make a top ten list right now but I liked, in no discernable order:
Simple Men, Flirt and Amature by Hal Hartley (and I await his masterpiece)
The Loved One
Dr Strangelove
Total Recall (Ok, Arnold played the lead but it was still an excellent premise with a more than adequete follow-through even if it did have Arnie in it… come to think of it, who better to play a person who does not know who he is?).
Being there
Star Wars (the respectable first three)
Star Wars (the prequels, but only if you are on enough of the right drugs to see a better than they actually made; same goes for The Matrix trilogy)
Eternal Sunshine
I’ll refine this list in a couple of days as this thread has reminded me that there are some movies that I’ve been meaning to watch.
I’m shocked and appalled that you’d pick Darabont (who has made a number of overly long, boring movies that make no effort to use the medium effectively) over Hitchcock and that you’d take McTeirnan over Fritz Lang.
So you like Scorcese then? I maintain that Mean Streets is the best Gangster movie in US movie history. I’m glad Scarface hasn’t shown up too much on this thread, a more overrated movie you will not find.
Stanley maintained it was his best. However I’ve not read the novel from which is was adapted, as I have with A Clockwork Orange, The Short Timers (Full Metal Jacket), 2001: etc.
The motif of the Christmas lights contributes to this, though from my watching I noticed that pink Christmas lights preceded any scene of nudity or sexual conflict. Perhaps this was intentional, perhaps not.
Cruise turns up at night to get the costume and the Father unlocks the store and finds his daughter in there with 2 men (very, very pretty actress, possibly the most beautiful in a film populated by beautiful women - more fantasy/dream connotations) and blows his lid. The following day when Cruise returns the costume (sans the mask) everything is sorted out and the Father is now whoring his daughter out to the men, he even offers her to Cruise.
Cruise isn’t looking for sex for the sake of sex, he’s looking for it as a weapon, a secret he can hold from his wife like the one she reveals to him about the handsome soldier in the stoned scene in the bedroom.
Why is this important? Because the whole movie is about how sex need not be an intimate act, how it has increasingly become a public act, a tool in a discourse or battle. This is a theme I’m exploring in one of my own novels (which may yet end up as a screenplay) and a very timely one for the late 90s. Incidentally the original book was set in 1920s Vienna, and so was very different.
I think he was clever in advertising the film as a piece of erotica (the trailers showing Kidman’s naked rump and shots from the orgy in the house) when it is actually about the awkward, embarassing, risky business of sex rather than just being a piece designed for comfortable voyeurism. For those who just wanna see titty there’s plenty of it, but anyone who actually follows the story will be more likely to end the movie in confused tears than with an erection.
No, it isn’t. 2 minutes of dialogue butchering the opening page of Descartes’ Meditations doesn’t qualify as philosophical content when the same theme had been dealt with far more effectively a decade before in Total Recall. You might also want to watch Pi, which is the best British sci-fi movie ever made, and has more philosophical content in it’s opening scene than in the whole of the Matrix trilogy.
The questions are never answered, and aren’t even brought forth to inspire questionning. They are brought forth to allow for the narrative conceit of two worlds that is necessary to justify the SFX sequences which are the primary concern of the movie. They don’t really ask ‘what is reality?’ they ask it so they have an excuse to piss about with lots of cameras at different angles.
Visually and technologically the movie is extremely innovative. Thematically it is shallow, ignorant and unoriginal. If you’d watched as many movies as I have you’d realise just how much philosophical content can be put into a movie and you’d also realise that there’s as much philosophy in the Matrix as in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Off the top of my head and in no particular order:
Aliens 2
Dogma
Saw
Fight Club
Star Wars
Indiana Jones 3
Shrek
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Resident Evil
Dumb & Dumber
I probably forgot many movies, so this isn’t a definitive list.
I admit that “The Majestic” was a bit drawn out, but Darabont’s particular use of time allows the viewer to soak in more character development and plot as used in “The Green Mile” and “The Shawshank Redemption” (that movie being the reason I put him on the list). He’s also working on “Farenheit 451” right now…
I’m not an overt fan of Hitchcock. Mainly because I’m just not really into his kind of filmwork, and I have my reasons why I chose McTiernan. Which reminds me, how many Lang films have you seen???
I really expected someone to give an uproar about Milius being on the list…
Obviously we disagree…
However I would still urge you to check out the matrix 2 again… skip all the fighting scenes and see what remains, if you still contend it’s ignorant and unoriginal I guess I’ll have to live with that… but I just… can’t agree with that critique. Also… have you seen the animatrix? it’s a great enforcer to the main storyline, also jammed full with philosophical ideas… (self realization for humans/robots, human nature, desire, etc). I haven’t seen as many movies as you (I’ve heard Pi is amazing though) but I suspect you might not have caught all there is to catch the first time through… I’ve seen the movie countless times and i still find things… the W bros attention to detail is incredible. Sure this may be their 1 trick pony… but I think this pony does it’s tricks extremely well (except for the 3rd movie).
Also… how do you guys feel about David Lynch? i think muholland drive is… a mindboggling genuis film.
Interesting idea. This is a LOT easier than trying to think of ten movies. My argument is with James Cameron mostly. Now don’t get me totally wrong, I think he’s a good director but I definitely wouldn’t put him in the top ten. He likes to add too much of his own fluff into the movies for me to get him up there too high (doesn’t help that I disagree with most of his fluff). And I agree that I would put Hitchcock in there, but I like his style.
Old Gobbo wrote:
David Lynch is a good director but I think his film style is too wacky to fit for most people. Mulholland Drive was good, and for tv, Twin Peaks was good (at least I thought), but both can be definitely hard to follow or make sense of, even for those who try. There’s just a different way you have to go into a Lynch movie to really get anything out of it.
As for my attempt at a top ten, here goes, but this is subject to change weekly.
- Alien (yeah I’m weird)
- The Princess Bride
- Hero
- American Beauty
- Psycho
- Gladiator
- Full Metal Jacket
- Office Space
- Seven Samurai
- Sin City
Odd to most (if not all) of you I’m sure. But there you go.