Ok… after this one I am done…
This is actually a pretty difficult one, because more people watch movies than read (comics or otherwise), and there is less of a pre-established canon for me to work off of. I went to 65 here, and I probably could have gone to 1000. And even more so than in the previous two lists, there are a lot of things here that i think could easily be swapped out for other things. Once again, I basically centered on American films, with the exceptions of a few non-American ones that were so influential to American Film that they needed to be mentioned anyway. Anyway, here’s the list… Let your flaming of me commence:
- 12 Angry Men
- A Christmas Story
- Akira
- American Beauty
- Any Given Sunday
- Apocalypse Now
- Bicycle Theives
- Bill Cosby: Himself
- Blazing Saddles
- Casablanca
- Chinatown
- Citizen Kane
- Clerks
- Debbie Does Dallas
- Dirty Harry
- Do the Right Thing
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
- Easy Rider
- Emmanuelle
- Enter the Dragon
- Fight Club
- Friday the 13th
- Full Metal Jacket
- The Godfather
- The Graduate
- Grease
- Heathers
- Higher Learning
- I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
- Jaws
- Kiss of the Spider Woman
- Kramer vs. Kramer
- La Strada
- Léon
- Malcolm X
- The Maltese Falcon
- Marathon Man
- Metropolis
- Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
- Mullholland Drive
- Murder on the Orient Express
- Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror
- Nototrious
- Psycho
- Pulp Fiction
- Rebel Without A Cause
- Saturday Night Fever
- Shaft
- Taxi Driver
- The Shawshank Redemption
- Shinchin no Samarai
- The Shining
- Singing in the Rain
- Sleepless in Seattle
- Snow White
- Some Like It Hot
- Song of the South
- Soylent Green
- Star Wars
- Swimming to Cambodia
- Things to Come
- Tootsie
- Tombstone
- When We Were Kings
- Wizard of Oz
oooh…i’ve got a good flame:
what??? how could you not include joe versus the volcano? you are clearly a very ignorant neanderthal with some bizarre sexual dysfunction. may eels eat your eyeballs! begone!
hmm…maybe my flaming needs work…it’s been so long…
you also forgot warrior of the lost world. and zardoz.
oh, i just looked it up on IMDB and apparently, WOTLW was an italian film. no doubt that explains the oversight.
Figured I’d just leave the things I hadn’t seen (or didn’t remember):
* Bicycle Theives
* Citizen Kane
* Easy Rider
* The Graduate
* I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
* Kiss of the Spider Woman
* Kramer vs. Kramer
* La Strada
* Léon
* Marathon Man
* Murder on the Orient Express
* Taxi Driver
* The Shawshank Redemption
* Shinchin no Samarai
* Snow White
* Some Like It Hot
* Song of the South
* Soylent Green
* Tootsie
And…Friday the 13th…not so much. Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Night of the Living Dead…
Malcolm 10 isn’t all that “required” either…
It was a really good list but…. Marathon Man? Defend that one, please.
…Sunday
Simple. He listed every single movie we watched in Sharon Dilworth’s into to screenwriting class, and Marathon Man was one of the movies we watched.
(It is a pretty good movie, too).
I don’t think I caught all of them…. but most of them, yeah. And I happen to agree with Sharon’s choosing of most of the movies.
Jill, Marathon Man is remarkably well written, acted and directed… that’s why.
You forgot:
2001: A Space Odyssey
Alien
Brazil
Die Hard
Dracula (the Bela Lugosi version)
The Great Escape
Halloween (instead of Friday the 13th)
LA Confidential
On the Waterfront
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Rashomon
The Wild Bunch
Probably a lot more I’m forgetting until I’ve had some caffeine
Not so much that I forgot…. more that i didn’t feel like typing 100 movies, though I probably should have. But yeah, I can eaily see those added to or replacing various things on my list.
One thing though, you really think Halloween instead of Friday 13th? I tend to think if Friday as much more definitive a teen slasher horror flick than Halloweeen.
I saw both in the past year or so, and I’d definitely say that Halloween held up a lot better over time. And I thought you were going for influential as one of the main criteria — Halloween really kicked off the whole slasher genre, and came out two years before Friday the 13th.
also, that way you’d have a John Carpenter movie on your list.
More importantly, Friday the 13th is exactly that: a teen slasher movie. It rode the popularity of a valid genre, namely the grotesque social commentary a la the 2 movies I mentioned to replace it. If this is to be a cannon of movie appreciation, then it would be more appropriate to see the particular styles and genres in their pure form and not watered down examples…
You miss my point… Friday the 13th is (at least to me) the canonical teen slasher movie. When you say “teen slasher flick” its the one I think of to compare all the others to. That’s not to say that I think its the best. Just that I think its the standard.
That said, I concede that Halloween would have been a fine choice too… it just didn’t seem as definitive to me. Like I said, I thought there was a lot more room for slop on the movie list than the other 2.
Mmmm… Halle Berry….
…
Well, time to go kill some kittens….
Oh, I understand where you’re coming from, and I’ll concede the fact that you can watch Friday and pretty much know the premise of every other teen slasher movie. That being the case, however, you could just as well have used Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer. My point is that teen slasher movies are a sub-genre of horror movies and not really indicative of the vast range of moods and themes that quality horror flicks can contain. While pretty much all horror films revolve around the same idea of suspense, isolation and…drawing a blank, damnit…the only thing of note about Friday is the “inventive kill” (which is a poor mimic of the “ironic death” ) and thats been done much better (Last House on the Left, for an example within the sub-genre, and from the broader grouping, The Omen). Uhm…I had a point…
Oh, yeah…just like if you’re only ever going to read one comic book in your life you read Watchman, if you only see one horror movie you see Night of the Living Dead.
See, its not just the average one though. It’s the canonical one. The one that I just assume everybody has seen. Sort of like Star Wars for Sci-Fi. To me, Friday is linked to the word horror (or at least to the words “teen slasher”) in the same way. Scream and IKWYDLS don’t have that link. At least not to me.
Oh, yeah…just like if you’re only ever going to read one comic book in your life you read Watchman, if you only see one horror movie you see Night of the Living Dead.
Hmmm…. I would have said Psycho, which is on my list, but I guess I would entertain the notion that that’s really something slightly different (more suspense than horror). Note though that again, Psycho isn’t my favorite Hitchcock Horror/Suspense thriller, The Birds is, but again I was thinking more on a canonical American scale rather than just to me.
oh…you also forgot tron. and before you start badmouthing it, remember that it was the first movie to make extensive use of CGI, thus paving the way for probably 95% of the special effects that we’ve seen since, and apart from that was a monumental technical achievement and a perfect example of a film which is truly one-of-a-kind.
oh, and you forgot condorman, too 🙂
Oh man. Condorman was like the best movie ever when I was young. Even better than Tron. I think I wore out the tape to Condorman.
his car was pretty damn sweet, too. much better than those things remington steele drives.