Fun Your Top 10 Favourite Movies of all Time

[Daniel Larusso]

Mine:

• 1. Love Exposure
  
• 2. Your Name.
  
• 3. Lost in Translation
  
• 4. Ghost World
  
• 5. The New World
  
• 6. Fireworks
  
• 7. Princess Mononoke
  
• 8. 2001: A Space Odyssey
  
• 9. The Godfather: Part II
  
• 10. Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion

 

[sitenoise]

1. M
2. Trust
3. Cafe Noir
4. Apocalypse Now
5. Love Exposure
6. The Spanish Prisoner
7. Noriko's Dinner Table
8. Shakespeare in Love
9. Vertical Ray of the Sun
10. Kabukichô Love Hotel

 

[divemaster13]

Since this is an "International Film" forum, I'm gonna cheat. I'll post my top-10 "International" films AND my top-10 U.S. films. It's like cheating! but not really.

Stay tuned...

 

[divemaster13]

In alphabetical order...

Favorite 10 International (i.e., non-U.S.) films
Comrades, Almost a Love Story
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Fish Called Wanda, A
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The
Hero
Ikiru
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Mystery of Rampo, The
Moment to Remember, A
Tale of Two Sisters, A

Favorite 10 U.S. films
Airplane!
Goodfellas
Jacob's Ladder
Kill Bill
Mulholland Dr.
Pulp Fiction
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Sin City
Sixth Sense, The
Tropic Thunder

 

[sitenoise]

Yeah, Jacob's Ladder. I wanted to get that one in there but I didn't cheat

I liked Snatch more than Lock, Stock. Both are great films.

 

[plsletitrain]

I still can't rank my favorite films. I wonder when will I be able to do that.

 

[sitenoise]

New I still can't rank my favorite films. I wonder when will I be able to do that.

Don't worry about ranking them or if you will change your mind tomorrow. Just share with us ten films that made you happy.

 

[plsletitrain]

Just share with us ten films that made you happy.

There's a lot of them. I can be happy with the smallest, most generic, shallow films but I don't know if they deserve to be in a top 10 list. Back in the day, I thought Blade II was the best movie ever made. I don't know what my stand today is.

You know the movies that made me happy. I would usually write my reactions right after I watch a movie. I just can't think of them now. :( I think The Isle is the best Asian film ever made. I think. :( You can ask me anything, just don't make me submit my top whatever list. I don't have it. Its not tangible.

 

[plsletitrain]

I think @divemaster13 will disagree with what I said about The Isle.

 

[divemaster13]

I think @divemaster13 will disagree with what I said about The Isle.

Yeah! ZERO stars!!! ZERO, I say! No, wait, I just checked my spreadsheet. 1 star. Probably for the cinematography.

I, too find it hard to list "top-whatever" films because I can't easily get past the ones I have to leave off the list. I mean, I've got a ton more 5-star films that what I've posted. I'm not sure how I could leave Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind off my list above, but I'll be damned if I know what I would remove.

Another way to approach it (in addition to "films that make you happy," which is a very good criteria), is "what films have I watched the most?" If I sit down to watch the same movie over and over, it must be because it is so good that each time I get much additional pleasure out of it. Some of the movies on my lists I've watched many, many times. They just never grow old to me. That's a clue right there that they must be special to me. Do you have any like that?

 

[sitenoise]

My movie viewing habits are different now from before I discovered Asian Cinema. I used to watch movies the same way I listened to music. Sometimes I give it my full attention, sometimes it drifts in and out of the background. No one would think it's odd to say you've listened to the same music album twenty times.

I'm not sure if it was an influence or a result, but back in the day of having thirty pay cable movie channels I'd leave the TV on in the background all the time. NEVER to commercial TV because I hated the sound of commercials. If I heard people screaming, the sound of gun fire or car tires squealing, or the worst of all, the sound of men grunting, I would change the channel. More often than not it was the sound of a movie that would draw me in to watching it. Here's a top ten list of movies I've listened to at least twenty times:

1990 - Jacob's Ladder Director: Adrian Lyne
1990 - Trust Director: Hal Hartley
1992 - Jennifer Eight Director: Bruce Robinson
1993 - Groundhog Day Director: Harold Ramis
1993 - Bodies, Rest & Motion Director: Michael Steinberg
1994 - Nadja Director: Michael Almereyda
1995 - Kicking and Screaming Director: Noah Baumbach
1997 - The Spanish Prisoner Director: David Mamet
1997 - Mr. Jealousy Director: Noah Baumbach
1998 - Shakespeare in Love Director: John Madden

Brutal limiting it to ten. There's many more.

 

[JepGambardella]

1. Les Enfants du Paradis
2. In the Mood for Love
3. Trois Couleurs: Bleu

and then in geographical order:

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain

Brazil

Jesus de Montréal

Rear Window
Raiders of the Lost Ark
12 Monkeys

 

[plsletitrain]

Yeah! ZERO stars!!! ZERO, I say!

Ouch. Zero, in capital, bold letters. You sure there was no 1 before the 0?

I, too find it hard to list "top-whatever" films because I can't easily get past the ones I have to leave off the list.

Yeah, that's why I find it hard to narrow down my favorite lists and worse, rank them. I can probably rank films from a certain director, but to rank my favorite films? I'd rather watch a sitenoise movie against my will. Its like taking the exams. Its so hard.

Another way to approach it (in addition to "films that make you happy," which is a very good criteria), is "what films have I watched the most?" If I sit down to watch the same movie over and over, it must be because it is so good that each time I get much additional pleasure out of it. Some of the movies on my lists I've watched many, many times. They just never grow old to me. That's a clue right there that they must be special to me. Do you have any like that?

Hmmmm............not sure about this also. I have songs I listen to everyday, songs which I listen to for more than 15 years now and I'm not exaggerating when I say that I listen to them more than ten times everyday but movies? Hmmmm.... I "study" music more than I study movies. I listen to my music in full blast volume and even then it still feels lacking. Music enables me to think, to focus, and helps me tackle my life issues. It takes me to places. When I listen to my music, I forget my name. Its different with movies. I don't re-watch movies because it doesn't interest me much when I know what's going to happen next. I only re-watch when I've forgotten about the plot or if there's any particular scene that confused me. And that's why I'm quite slow with my viewings, I listen to my music majority of the time. When I was still single I used to go the cinemas at least once a week, even if nothing interests me much. I just had a lot of time because I was on night class so I had the whole day to myself. Now, its just home-work to me. So I just watch on my laptop or on cable. The cable isn't much reliable because its Hollywood blockbuster movies that usually gets played.

I do have some movies though which I think are worthy of honorable mentions because of my experience with them. Psycho is I think the father of psycho-thrillers. If anyone asks me what's the movie that's very much ahead of its time, I answer 2001: A Space Odyssey. Avatar is special to me because its the advent of 3D here and I'm one of the firsts to experience it because I watched it on first hour on first day. And there were just a few of us in the theater, all first time users of the 3D shades.Titanic is the first time I felt kilig. Leonardo DiCaprio is my first crush. The Ring or The Grudge is the first Asian movie I watched on the cinemas.

 

[divemaster13]

1. Les Enfants du Paradis
2. In the Mood for Love
3. Trois Couleurs: Bleu

and then in geographical order:

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain

Brazil

Jesus de Montréal

Rear Window
Raiders of the Lost Ark
12 Monkeys

Hey, thanks for chiming in! Please feel welcome to contribute to our discussions here. There are plenty of review and discussion threads for "international" (a vast majority Asian) films in our little neck of the woods here, and all perspectives are welcome. Some threads are dedicated to a particular movie or director, but also check out the monthly "recently seen" threads, where a whole bunch of movies are blurbed about and discussed to varying degrees. It's no problem at all to bump an old thread if you want to contribute to a discussion and missed it earlier, or to start your own thread.

I've seen seven of the films you listed and liked them with varying degrees. Amelie makes me smile; couldn't get into Brazil like a lot of the die-hard fans of that movie, but it does have its interesting points.

 

[clayton-12]

Okay, I’m not so big on numerical rankings at the best of times, so trying to narrow down a top 10, out of all the wide and wonderful range of films I watched over the past decades, is a fairly big ask for me. It becomes easier when there’s some defined scope, say, the top 10 of 1979 or the top 10 Korean films. Even then, though, I Saw the Devil and A Quiet Dream were both absolutely fantastic films, but how can I objectively measure their merits against one another?

With that in mind, I’ll take @plsletitrain's idea of a list of films that are worthy "because of my experience with them". So I've focussed not so much on the objective merits of the films I’ve seen, but rather on the impact they have had on me. I’ve also narrowed the scope to a single decade of my life.

So here it is, a list of 10 or so films that had a profound effect on the pre-teen clayton-12:

1. Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World: They say you always remember your first time, and this was the film that saw me lose my big-screen virginity. No, it won’t stack up on revision, but at the time, the special effects were awe-inspiring, and the guy who played the doctor (who I would later learn to be Spike Milligan) was hilarious.
2. Herbie Rides Again: The trailers and clips were played over and over again on The Earlybirds Show, so by the time the film came out, it had been drummed into my little brain that this was going to be good. And it lived up to the hype – it was so good, that little clayton-12 was now hooked on pre-publicity and anticipation. I think around this time, I started looking forward to Thursday’s newspaper, which always contained the film review page.
   
3. Picnic at Hanging Rock: I didn’t know the words “ethereal beauty” when I saw the first clips from this, but I certainly recognised it. While it would take a few years before I got to watch the film (on a black-and-white TV with the sound turned down to a whisper lest mother-12 realise what I had tuned into), I was entranced. Miranda? Miranda?! Miranda?!!! MIRANDAAAAAAARGH!!!!
   
4. The Ghost and Mr Chicken came out of nowhere. It just happened to be on TV one night, I had never heard of it, but man it was funny. And in the playground the next day, everyone was talking about it - retelling the best bits, quoting their favourite lines. Welcome to concepts like ‘sleeper hit’ and ‘word-of-mouth’.
   
5. King Kong was an absolute hoot, a thrilling boys-own adventure. But there was something else that it had, something special, something that I had never seen before on the cinema screen, something life-changing, something to be cherished and never forgotten … it had boobies. Really, what more can you ask for in a film?
   
6. No Deposit, No Return came across my radar via a women’s magazine article I read – probably titled something like “How to Get Some Peace from the Brats during School Holidays” – and it immediately jumped out at me. Don Knotts and David Niven together?? How cool was that! I instantly knew that this was going to be a Classic, a cinematic masterpiece and I was going to be there to witness it as it unfolded. But it wasn’t released during those school holidays. Nor the next. Still, it was there in the back of my mind, and if anything, the delay in getting it released down under only served to convince me more about how good it must be. And then, when it finally came, it was … okayish, I guess. My hero Don had jumped the shark, had started making middling tripe, and I walked away a little older, a little wiser.
   
7. Star Wars versus Rocky: If I was to have given an honest review of Star Wars when I saw it on the initial release, I would have mentioned that I thought it was too long, maybe said I found it a little unfocussed, and confessed to have been somewhat bored by the time the climactic chase scenes came around. But I didn’t make those confessions to anyone at the time – everyone inside and outside my circle of friends were loving it, and I was not about to go against the overwhelmingly popular opinion. But there was this one kid who rocked up to school and said it was the dumbest film he had ever seen (“stupid men in stupid white plastic costumes running around shooting people”) and we all should have gone to see Rocky instead, because that was real life and it was exciting. I probably didn’t show it, but I was impressed by the sheer guts of what he was saying … I wanted to see Rocky, and moreover, I wanted to be like that kid.
   
8. The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and Midnight Express were the opening films at the swanky new Hoyts cinema in the swanky new Wanamba Arcade, and they were both getting glowing reviews. I felt that by all the awards and adjectives they were receiving, they were important films, more than entertainment, they were significant works of art. But did I see them at the new cinema? No! Why? Because my fascist mother said I couldn’t go, giving some lame-ass made up excuse like “because you’re only eleven years old and they’re both rated R” or something like that. The indignation at being denied what I considered to be a basic human right burned deep inside me, although to this day mother-12 still stands by her decision.
   
9. 2001: A Space Odyssey was re-released on its 10th anniversary, and so I went to see it with a friend. Afterwards, there was a completely new experience. We walked home immersed in a conversation that was not about how good or how bad the film was, but about wtf did we just see, trying to piece together the themes and decipher the messages and process the whole experience.
   
10. Freaky Friday and The Little Girl Who Lived down the Lane: Unlike Jessica Lange, Jodie Foster never showed her boobies. But they were both hot, and I always thought that if I met them both in real life, I would have a better chance of getting it on with Jodie.

 

[ant-mac]

Your Top 10 Favourite Movies of all Time

In no particular order, although DOCTOR ZHIVAGO has been my absolute favourite for nearly two decades...

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1965)

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966)

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

FIRST BLOOD (1982)

SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT (1977)

SCARFACE (1983)

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977)

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)

HE WALKED BY NIGHT (1948)

PS - It would be much easier to do a top 20 or 50. I wouldn't feel so guilty for leaving out so many films that I love...

 

[ebossert]

Top 10 is hard. It's much easier to break out by genre and country of origin, but here are a few English-language ones that are near the top for me.

Alien (1979)
Die Hard (1988)
Heat (1995)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Psycho (1960)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
The Matrix (1999)
Memento (2000)
Ghostbusters (1984)
Ben Hur (1959)

 

[divemaster13]

So here it is, a list of 10 or so films that had a profound effect on the pre-teen clayton-12:

Interesting concept! I'll play as well, using my 13th birthday as the cut-off (I was born in 1968). The below films all have a special place in my heart and memory for various reasons.

When I was a kid, my and my friends' moms had no problems dropping us kids off at the movie theater and coming back to pick us up 4 hours or so later. The movie theaters didn't seem to care, and we'd sit through 2-3 showings of a film back to back, usually in the front row. And the next day we'd do it all over again. Ones I particularly remember:

The Island at the Top of the World (1974): Live-action Disney Adventure. This was the first movie I can ever remember seeing in the movie theater with just my friends (no parents).

Young Frankenstein (1974): Even as a kid, I loved any and all horror movies, including the old B&W classics. And I loved comedies, so this hit me right in the sweet spot. As a 6-year old, I probably missed a majority of the humor references, but it was still damn funny.

The Bad News Bears (1976): I'm sure our parents thought this was an appropriate kiddie baseball movie, but if they had only known the language used! I'm glad they didn't. It was the secret of me and my friends and in a day (and culture) where even the word "damn" would get you a spanking, this movie totally rocked our world.

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976): We loved Inspector Clouseau movies, and this was one of the ones I remember best.

Midway (1976): Good guys vs. Japs in a war movie with ships and planes. Little boy heaven.

Star Wars (1977): Of course

Smokey and the Bandit (1977): This movie probably had more influence on me as a kid than any other. I actually remember my kid movie theater experiences with Smokey and the Bandit a whole lot more than I do Star Wars. It's hard to convey just how much I loved this movie.


Others of Note:

The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972): This was given a theatrical run in my hometown, perhaps because the events depicted supposedly happened about 45 minutes away and had local interest. It was rated "G" so my parents probably didn't realize how much of a "scary movie" it would be to a 4-year-old. I still remember some of the "scary" scenes.

The Blue Lagoon (1980): My first R-rated movie. My dad took me and my younger sister. I was, what? 12? Young Island Love and boobies. Ah, yes.

Airplane! (1980): Another treat from good ol' Dad. I can remember laughing so hard I literally (yes, really) fell out of my seat and was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. I had never seen anything like this. And it still remains in my all-time top 10.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): I checked the release date, and it was prior to my 13th birthday, so it counts. Still the best adventure movie ever. Could a 12-year-old ask for anything better? This also remains in my all-time top 10.

 

[ant-mac]

Smokey and the Bandit (1977): This movie probably had more influence on me as a kid than any other. I actually remember my kid movie theater experiences with Smokey and the Bandit a whole lot more than I do Star Wars. It's hard to convey just how much I loved this movie.

Snap!

Although I saw it at the local drive-in - there was no cinema - as an impressionable 10 year-old with my dad, because mum was working.

It was my first favourite film and still makes my top 10 list. I still love the film to this day.

The only other film from 1977 I enjoyed anywhere near as much was CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND.

I found the original STAR WARS rather dull and boring as a kid. As an adult, my opinion hasn't changed.

 

[clayton-12]

Ones I particularly remember:

The Island at the Top of the World: I have absolutely zero recollection of this, beyond walking out of the cinema thinking it was the greatest film I had ever seen. I acquired a copy some years ago, but never watched it lest I find out that it actually isn't a forgotten masterpiece.

The Bad News Bears almost made my list, on account of its role in introducing me to black humour and cynicism in the movies. And the message of the film? "It's not how you play the game, it's whether you win or lose". As for the language, kids today are incredulous that you could say things like that back then and get away with it.

Smokey and the Bandit was one on those films that I never saw, but whose cultural influence massively seeped in (I could have included Convoy on my list). A school friend had a CB radio set up in his bedroom, my older bogan cousins would cruise around chatting up giddy teens on their CB ... it was really my first introduction to subculture. To bring the thread more on topic, Hiroki's Vibrator probably owes one helluva debt to Smokey and the Bandit!