Film Survey

[omorka]

So princejvstin asked the Hollywood question:

"A great movie is a movie I cannot bear the thought of never seeing again"

Roger Ebert uses this in his review of Stardust and attributes it to Derek Malcolm. I think its a fairly good succinct definition, and it can be an individualistic one. What you consider a great movie by this definition can be my dreck. And it allows for liking a movie and thinking it good, but drawing a distinct line between good and great.

. . .

So, what movies can you not bear the thought of never seeing again?

Here's my list. Per a strong interpretation of the question, this is the list of films that I might well go crazy if I were never permitted to see again. For someone like myself who doesn't think of herself as a film buff, it's an uncomfortably long list.


Back To The Future
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (although I actually don't rewatch it very often)
Brokeback Mountain
But I'm a Cheerleader
The Celluloid Closet
Clue
The Corporation
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
The Dark Crystal
Dave
Dogma
The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain
Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room
The Fog of War
The Full Monty
Ghostbusters
The Imposters
The Incredibles
Interstate 60
Jeffrey
Joe Versus the Volcano
The King and I
The Last Unicorn
Like Water for Chocolate
The Lord of the Rings films
Magnolia
Men In Black
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
The Neverending Story
October Sky
Playing By Heart
Pleasantville
Pump Up the Volume
Real Genius
The Road to Wellville
Saved!
Say Anything
The Sealed Card: CardCaptor Sakura Movie 2
Short Circuit
Singing In the Rain
Sneakers
Spellbound (the documentary)
Stand and Deliver
Still Crazy
Toy Story & Toy Story 2
Tron
UHF
Watership Down

The Princess Bride doesn't make the list solely because, if I knew I could never see it again, I and my friends could perform it from memory for the rest of our lives.

At this point, I should point out that my philosophy is something closer to "Anything worth watching is worth watching again," although there are some very good films that I only needed to see once (The City of Lost Children, for example), and there are a number of films that are better in quality than many of the ones I have listed here that I could stand, albeit uncomfortably, to never see again (like Amelie).

(Edited because I suck at HTML)

Comments

[princejvstin.livejournal.com]

More movies for my Netflix Queue! :)

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Which ones hadn't you seen? My tastes are not all that obscure, at least by my social group's standards. (Then again, my social group includes bassfingers.)

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

I could try to play the obscure film card, but I just discovered that (IMHO) the most obscure film I've seen, Tajna Nikole Tesle, a Czech film about Nikola Tesla featuring Orson Welles as J.P. Morgan, is actually available on DVD in the States!

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

Sorry, Serbo-Croatian. Not Czech.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

If it's got Orson Welles in it, how obscure can it really be? ;-)

Speaking of obscure, any news on Hercules Returns recently?

[bibulb.livejournal.com]

Right now, there's a legit R4 exceptionally barebones release, but there's that pesky "actually playing it" issue.

[princejvstin.livejournal.com]

(The first list I sent was bad. Here we go again)

The Celluloid Closet
The Corporation
Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room
The Fog of War
The Full Monty
Interstate 60
Jeffrey
Like Water for Chocolate
Playing By Heart
Pump Up the Volume
The Road to Wellville
The Sealed Card: CardCaptor Sakura Movie 2
Still Crazy
UHF

[omorka.livejournal.com]

The CCS movie won't make any sense if you haven't seen the series (which I think is worth watching, but it's only available subtitled - the cut-and-pasted dub called Cardcaptors is a butcher's job).

The first four things are all documentaries - I suppose it's not strange that you wouldn't have seen those.

I highly recommend seeing Interstate 60, Like Water for Chocolate, The Road to Wellville, and UHF as soon as possible. The others are all worth the watching, but they're more specialized tastes.

[princejvstin.livejournal.com]

I've heard good things about UHF and in actuality you must have mentioned Wellville somewhere else because I found it buried in my Netflix queue.

I do take your recommendations and thank you for them. :Grins: