My movie list has evolved as I have aged. The ones I’ve left behind from 12 years ago have not shifted from my esteem. It’s just that others have been added that are more contemporary, and I’ve promised myself to keep to 40 so that I must make choices.
This is a partial description of my tastes:
I cannot bear Marvel movies or their ilk. They are boredom squared for me, or as someone put it – one movie after another about silly figures in costumes chasing something shiny which will blow up the universe.
There are no comedies here. I find most contemporary comedies infantile – overly enamored with bodily fluids of every kind and populated by idiots.
I know that I will watch Denzel Washington and Tom Hardy in almost anything, that I love good writing in a script even more, and that if any one quality unites all the movies, it is that they tell a story efficiently. They … move.
I’ve listed the movies in order of their appearance. Perhaps you will see evidence of a shifting zeitgeist.
A partial list of the directors: Scorsese (4), Coppola (2), Spike Lee (2), Barry Jenkins (2), Denis Villeneuve (2), Clint Eastwood, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann, Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, Ridley Scott ….
In 2011 I wrote “In Australia, the Aborigines speak of “dreamtime” and “song-lines”; the Aborigines, before the Brits arrived, had a pre-literate, oral culture, a culture based on stories — think of Homeric Greece, another place where poets memorized thousands of lines of verse and stories. The continent is crisscrossed with these unseen lines, with these stories, that connect memory, ancestry, sacred places, animals and sacred journeys all in a spiritual whole.
In a secular context, our love of stories and thus movies are the same. Think of the landscape of your lives, crisscrossed with lines connecting places, friends, fundamental experiences, and your stories, your favorite movies and books all in
the mix, and all of this coming together to create a spiritual core that is largely who you are. Think of all the images of movies you carry in your head and all the lines of happiness that emerge from them.”
I believe this now. That sense of why I love movies has not changed. But there’s this too: I’ve become more patient in how I watch them, and that patience has produced a finer, more exacting set of interlocking lines of pleasure — for example, watch Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise wield their effortless charm even as they play killers — they possess old fashioned star power, that mesmerizing feeling of naturalness in front of a camera. Or George Miller’s astonishing eye for vehicles and bodies in motion in Mad Max — all of that chaos making perfect sense to our viewers’ perceptions. Or Scorsese’s wonderful variety. Or how in at least 13 of these movies (maybe more depending upon your count) the trope of ‘the chase or hunt’ dominates the action and pushes the movie forward. How ancient is that plot engine?
I’ve loved movies ever since I sat in front of our ancient black and white TV at 7 or 8 years old and watched the original 1933 King Kong and wept quiet tears after his death. Maybe I should have made this list 41 movies long. I could add dozens more, more than dozens. Movies remain for me the greatest show on earth.
I’ve kept The Third Man (1949), The Thing (1951), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Godfather I and II (1972, 1974), The Deer Hunter (1978), Alien (1979), The Right Stuff (1983), Glory (1989), Goodfellas (1990), Unforgiven (1992), Master and Commander (2003), Michael Clayton (2007) and The Wire (2002 to 2008, 5 seasons).
I’ve added The Best Time of Our Lives (1946), Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Verdict (1982), Malcolm X (1992), Fargo (1996), The 25th Hour (2002), Collateral (2004), Munich (2005), Apocalypto (2006), The Departed (2006), There Will Be Blood (2007), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Spotlight (2015), Sicario (2015), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Moonlight (2016), Silence (2016), Arrival (2016), Hell Or High Water (2016), The Death of Stalin (2017), 1917 (2020), The Underground Railroad (2021), Tar (2022), Fargo, the series (2014 to 2020) 4 seasons, and Happy Valley (2014 to 2023, 3 seasons).
