Julia Sweeney's Discussion Forum

Norma,
I can’t take credit for starting this thread - ‘twas only I whose fingers first galloped out of control on it. And “film heaven” sounds good. Now that’s an afterlife I’d sign up for, especially if the "theater cloud" was made of fresh popcorn and raisinets… And think of the surround sound possibilities!

CB,
Oh no, someone else who likes many more of my favorites, and now I have to investigate still more movies!
You bring up another all-time top tenner - 12 Angry Men. Wouldn't it be great if it was always playing in jury pool waiting rooms? I guess nobody would watch it then, though. Maybe sheriffs or bailiffs could use eyelid toothpicks like in Clockwork Orange? (or not )
I loved the original Day the Earth Stood Still, too. Like the best sci-fi, it's about much more than sci-fi, no?
And Airplane - well, Roger, Over!

All of youse are really making me realize how much movies have been a part of my life – even more than I’d thought.

The great thing about movies is that there is enough to go around: everyone can have his own list: "My 500 All Time Favorite...(....but wait... let me add 10 more)... Films."
Such pleasures...
And it is so interesting how many intersections there are among people who clearly have disparate but eclectic, predictable and unpredictable choices.

And now, CB, after you have rested perhaps you will take on the job of explaining the enjoyment in being fightened, no, better terrified... by what's on the screen... slasher movies, horror films...
I'm not sure what the difference is.
But "Scarface" that gory tale of fulfilling the American dream by really hard work, persistence and admirable ambition, has a scene that is the ultimate in slashing (a drug dealer is strung up ... nah, if you haven't seen it yet, I son't want to spoil what IS really a kind of enjoyment)... and the end of the film is quite literally a blood bath....
I watched both those pivotal scences from behind a scarf pulled over my head...but I do get that to have left any of that out would have diminished the destructive force of the story..
What I don't get is what it means to be frightened for the sake of being frightened... but I sure would like some savvy person (rather than a moralist) to explain it.
When I am watching a TV tale involving a serial killer in the neighborhood, and the sexy, nubile protagonist decides to go for a walk to the grocery through dark streets without another human being in the streets (sometimes wearing nothing but a raincoat), I turn it off...
I can't watch what seems to me either dopey or suicidal...and fills me with dread... but I do understand that it's me... I just don't get it...
Because if if didn't work for a large number of people who are human just as I am, it wouldn't be a part of entertainment OR art.
So tell.

NMB

More: Curious as to whether anyone has considered my two favorite Robert Altman movies: "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," for its off-beat frontier society, it gorgeous cinematography, as well as giving the world at large Leonard Cohen, whose early music provides the lovely score of that beautiful (to me) film.... "oh, the Sisters of Mercy..."

And "The Long Goodbye..." from a story by Raymond Chandler.... film noir as noir but not so noir that it isn't funny as hell... despite being full of references to some nasty human qualities... ..greed, envy, lust...but love too (witness the relationship of man and his cat).
With a memorable Elliot Gould as Marlowe, the worst, emotionally involved P I in P I history.
A great depiction of Los Angeles... .. it also includes, again to me.. the most shocking unexpected act of violence until the Sopranos appeared on my TV screen...
Sociopathic, explosive rage.... that seems to be characteristic ...growing, growing, ... of America.... in which the retribution is never meted out to the allegedly guilty but manages, in the chaotic, irrantional nature of the anger to always do damage to the completely innocent...
At least to the degree that ANYONE is innocent...but that's back to religion... and this is about film..
Funny though that there IS a connection...
Just musing...


NMB

Well I can't claim to be an authority but I'll give you my perspective, and a bit of what I think I know about horror films.

I think some folks are scared by different kinds of films. Some folks really find ghost stories frightening (not me, I don't believe they exist) and are attracted to that for a scare. Some folks are afraid of alien/mutant/machine invasion (again I don't really think any of those are likely so no scare there) those people fear the conquest of "them over us".

I have never really been too much of a fan of a lot of the slasher type movies. Most of the villain/killers are way over the top and get made on such tiny budgets that they have to skimp on acting, writing, or directing talent. Most often more than one of those are missing. Those movies were attractive to me as a teen because I wanted to do special effects make-up.

The movies that really scare me shitless are shows that are about the things that are possible even if unlikely, soylent green, is an example. This is a very real possibility that my children or grandchildren could face. Zombie films are another example (not that the dead will rise up and eat the living) where civilization goes to hell and leaves the survivors to figure out how to survive. Red Dawn was pretty damned scary for me.

As to why I like to be scared, well I don't really know. Maybe I like putting myself in to the childhood mindset where I want to peek into the dark closet where the boogyman might get me and where deep down I know it's not really a life threatening situation. Like the lazy man's bungie jumping. I get the thrill of a frightening experience without any physical effort expended or actual risk taken. I suppose it only works if you are good at willfully suspending disbelief.

Then there is the idea of seeing how mistakes are made by people who get into crazy situations "Don't split off from the group to investigate that noise moron!" "Hey stupid, why don't you take that knife with you, you know, just in case the guy who killed those other three people in the house is behind that door!"

Where Zombie uprising/Civil collapse/survival horror is concerned, it's a "what do you do?" thing. Where do you take shelter? Where do you find food? How do you make a safe excape if things don't go according to Plan-A? Can you find an ally? Can you trust them if you do find one? Thats what I take from them anyway and why George Romero is a personal hero of mine. He has made a lot of really great survival horror and set the standard that all others are measured by. Oh and he does it as an independant, so his films are really his films, that goes a long way in my book.

Does that help?

CB.

Regarding Robert Altman . . . I think a number of his pictures are terribly overrated, but I am fondest (in decreasing order) of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Yes!), The Long Goodbye (after Howard Hawks's 1946 version of The Big Sleep, the best adaptation of Raymond Chandler's P. Marlowe on film), and of course major parts of Nashville.

A 'Chandleresque picture (set in modern L.A.) that is reminiscent of Altman's "touch," but not directed by him (I think it was produced by his colleagues at Lions' Gate) was a mid-1970s comedy titled (I think) The Late Show, with Art Carney as an aging but still whip-smart private eye, and Lily Tomlin as a loony who hires him to find her abducted cat and draws him into a messy conspiracy involving adultery, black marketeers, and multiple murder. I haven't seen it in years and don't know it's availability.

I'm amazed and delighted about how many of Captain Black's listed favorites are also "guilty pleasure" / "closeted" favorites that I didn't mention in my previous two posts here . . . such as the Harryhausen stop-motion-animated pictures (mostly for Columbia in the late 50s and early 60s). I have a hard time deciding whether I like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1957) better than the black-and-white 20 Million Miles to Earth (also 1957, with its magnificently animated Venusian chimera "Ymir", but not as good a movie overall).

Mention of Dr. Seuss brings me to the very weird musical fantasy The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, which was produced in the 1950s by the perennially overrated Stanley Kramer but not directed by him, co-scripted and with lyrics by the Good Doctor himself.

I don't have a better explanation than CB about why a number of us humans enjoy being vicariously frightened in special aesthetic settings, i.e., movie theatres and our living rooms. Stephen King has written well about this, in the context of both horror fiction and horror movies, in his 1980s non-fiction book Danse Macabre.

A couple of days ago I was in a Borders bookstore looking at the British TV and foreign films on DVD. I continue to wait, apparently in vain, for BBC video or someone to release the terrific multi-part series Mother Love (with a central character played to perfection by Dame Diana Rigg) which ran in the late 80s or early 90s on PBS "Mystery!" Anyhow, I came across, and somehow resisted the impulse to buy, a Criterion DVD edition of Georges Franju's early 1960s poetic-horror classic Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without A Face), which also sports, as part of the same set, Franju's documentary about French slaughterhouses, Blood of the Beasts. Maybe someday there will also be a release of Franju's unclassifiable picture channelling Louis Feuillade, Judex.

Something in one of Norma's previous posts on this thread made me think of the Franju film, and also another classy-but-creepy black-and-white horror film from the mid 1960s, Roman Polanski's Repulsion, with Catherine Deneuve portraying a young woman who descends into complete paranoid madness, mostly in the confines of a London apartment.

My wife and i just started re-watching the restored version of The Wild Bunch (1969) and have made it to the scene where the Bunch has dynamited a bridge to protect their escape, leaving the entire mid-span of the bridge to drop, in slow motion, into the river with the bounty hunters and their horses standing slack-jawed on the roadbed of the falling bridge. What a movie!

N.B. to Norma: Much as I'm delighted by your determination to acquire and watch Fools' Parade (less than 2 hours) and Edge of Darkness (about 5 hours), it's unfortunate that neither of these (like A Thousand Clowns) is available on DVD, at least not in Region 1 NTSC format. In larger TV markets one can occasionally see obscure movies like Fools' Parade on television. A couple of years ago, I ended up buying Edge of Darkness on VHS (CBS Video) and laboriously transferring it to DVD myself.

There is no rhyme or reason to which pictures go permanently "out of stock" or out-of-print on DVD and which ones stick around (no correlation with quality). One that Norma mentioned, Alan J. Pakula's paranoid political thriller The Parallax View (1974) is supposedly permanently out of production, and I'm glad I have a copy.

Last example: Nigel Kneale wrote a TV script for the Quatermass science fiction series on British television in the mid-1960s, and around 1967, it was produced for the "big screen" as Quatermass and the Pit (released here in the U.S. as Five Million Years to Earth). A genuinely creepy, effective movie that overcomes all the potentially silly S.F. elements of the plot (which would sound silly if I were to summarize it here). The bad news: It's permanently out-of-print, no longer being manufactured in NTSC DVD format, and it's only available in the secondary collectors' market on Amazon, etc. at prices of around $100 and up.

The original poster asked for a single "favorite movie," and I think it's fair to say we've blown that query out of the water!

So I started wondering if I could even make a list of my TEN favorite movies. No, impossible.

Then I wondered if it might be possible to remember ten movies that seemed to have had the most impact on me emotionally, or that may have actually affected my worldview, or one thing or another. No doubt that's a useless quest, too, and the answers would change daily with memory and mood. But I took a stab at it.
Am not necessarily suggesting anyone else post such a thing - it's rather personal and probably a narcissistic and silly thing to do,(which may be why I enjoyed it ) but these are the ones I thought of just now, FWIW, in the order that they crossed my mind:

Twelve Angry Men
The Killing Fields
The Diving bell and the Butterfly
Dr. Strangelove
To Kill a Mockingbird
It’s a Wonderful Life
Wings of Desire
Casablanca
Cinema Paradiso
Sleeper – (think I injured my diaphragm laughing)
Love Story (was 13 when I saw it, and had just “broken up” with a girl who was a dead ringer for Ali MacGraw)

Revision: Guess I'd have to replace one of the above with the Vietnam era docu "Hearts and Minds," which I saw as a young Marine while stationed at the Marine Barracks, 8th and I, Wash, D.C. (according to one recently polled voting-age American, D.C. stands for "da capitol." )

Yes... it does and I've been thinking about it since I read it.. especially the idea that it is connected in some way with a longing for childhood... as so many things we so-called adults do, ultimately are.
Perhaps the subliminal wish is that if you can recreate a childhood terror, you can also recreate those dear dead days beyond recall, when you imagined that nothing bad could happen to you that your powerful parents couldn't fix...
It might also be connected with a wish to recapture childhood fears which in restrospect seem so much easier to handle that real adult terrors...
And thanks for reminding me about Romero... I do tend to get fixated on the "chain saw murderer/rapist kidnapper ghost" horror films... and I forget that there are graceful, imaginative horror film creators like Romero, some of whose images are permanently planted in my mind...
Another example of not letting one's personal biases thoughtlessly make you throw out the film with the developing solution....
Of course, survival films will always have a place in the human psyche... I think... perhaps I read too much into literary symbolism.. that's what accounts for the prevalence in almost all cultures of "Noah/Ark" stories...or the fascination (and suspension of belief) with tales like the flight from Egypt: will the sea really part when its our turn to make a run for it?
What place does leadership of the group play in surviving?
Will I be better off alone... depending on my wits (atheist)?
Or is inclusion in the group. even if I don't fit into its requirements very well, or even at all, more conducive to living yet another day?
Thanks for reminding me to contain my prejudices.. especially when it comes to the creative... which is the bottom line (film makers, at least the best of them as you pointed out about Romero,make films for themselves.. the viewer is just a way to pay the rent,..) You called to mind the first horror film I ever saw... and I loved it: "I Married a Zombie..." atmospheric, sensual, mysterious with enough material for a lifetime of uneasy dreams.

I still often (for cause) hum a song from the film (also the first calypso rhythms I ever heard, and the start of a lifelong love) "If you want to be happy all of your life/never make a pretty woman your wife..."
Not a lesson one is liable to hear in adult, liberated female, environments..
And of course,the film itself is, in retrospect racist in the way that so many Hollywood films of the time were racist, full of stereotypical physical types that reinforced our fear of neighbors... but that's another story..


Norma

Oh, I remember "the Late Show" fondly... I was living in Los Angeles at the time.. and a side bar to the mystery was how the film captured certain phenomena of space and light that are unique to that strange city.. and of course the fact that on the cusp-of-elderly Art Carney seemed to be the only non-driver in the city... I thought of him, at the time, as mythic, that mysterious occupant of the cities many street corner benches, advertising cemeteries and funeral home, and promising public transporation that was never to be seen... Yes.. good film for our time capsule of American films...
And with, speaking of suspense and horror... that great image of the body stuffed in the refrigerator.... Memorable!!
The problem with film: how to be considered for "great" when there are so many "almost greats" as well as on relatively smaller themes, to be seen and savored.

Which brings me to a truly great... and I am shocked that I should have forgotten to mention it... Anyone who has not seen it should thank Jeff for entering it here: "The Wild Bunch.." A not to be missed American film... underappreciated ... marvelous in every way.. but not for the weak of knees or faint of heart...
Like looking in a window watching your own hopes and dreams being erased before your eyes..
Were thia any less perfect in its execution, it would be unbearable to watch, impossible to think about.
But is isn't... And my god!! What a movie!! So gorgeous ( in the truest sense of that word), so completely unself-consciously honest...so full of subtext...a film about EVERYTHING, about wanting to be good, and failing, about adaptaing to an every changing world, about love, and longing and aging...
With its absolutely, to a man, to a women, to a horse, perfect cast... all but one now dead in what is loosely known as real life.
it deserves a college course all by itself.
And so American... the good, the bad, the ugly..the incredible innocence, the omnipresent cynicism.. the "it can be done.." spirit that has characterized so much of what moves us to act, even heedlessly..
An elegy (but not in a country graveyard) to mark the end of an era.. its appearance coincided with both the landing on the moon AND a growing awareness of the ugly and ominous war that was raging in Vietnam..


The last four or five minutes of this amazing film is available on YOUTUBE, and for violence with a point, as a parable, it has no peer...an opera, a ballet of men, women, bullets, the music of death..


And a personal note: my twelve year old son's rabbit died a cruel demise one day, were and so sad were we all, that I suggested an evenings outing to a movie ..."a Western.." I had never heard anything about, by a director whose name rang only a vague bell.
No one was really in the mood, but I prevailed, and that evening we found ourselves watching, mouths agape, "the Wild Bunch..."
After the first incredible moments we sat upright, our brains shaken, our eyes popping..
Except for my youngest,slumped in his seat, eyes closed, cheeks damp... "And I thought I was BEREAVED for my rabbit...!!"
Jeff, what does this film look like on a small screen... all those panoramic vistas... those arroyos, those ominous skies?
One of the films I am literally fearful of watching other than on a great screen, as if it will erase my memory of being engulfed in that dying world...

NMB

..

Norma,

The Wild Bunch is a very close second in my list of greatest Westerns, with The Searchers first by a nose. I had the good fortune to see both in good widescreen prints (albeit 16 mm) during my college years, as opposed to on television. I first saw the Wild Bunch when I was the "film chairman" at my residence hall at Purdue University, way back in the pre-VHS, pre-Beta days when theatrical films were rented in 16 mm. And as the "film chairman," I could cadge a screen or a taut white sheet, break out the projector and anamorphic lens, and have a preview screening of the week's feature in my dorm room. I think I did that twice with The Wild Bunch.

On a decent-sized, properly-calibrated monitor (not less than 32 inches diagonal), the widescreen DVD doesn't look bad at all, but nothing like what it must have looked like with decent projection of a pristine print in its original release in 1969. Of course, the 1969 release prints didn't include some footage that was excised, over Sam Peckinpah's objections, regarding the background of the complex past relationship of Robert Ryan's and William Holden's characters.

RIng out the NEWS!!! The SECOND COMING IS AT HAND!!
A Director's print of "The Wild Bunch" is (rumored) to be available...
I was just looking for it when your message popped up....

As I have said before, I would find it as impossible to choose even a thousand of my favorite films...in any genre... as I would be able to compose a short sentence....
I sometimes amaze myself at my tolerance... finding a word here, a shot there, a camera angle somewhere, a line of dialogue, a performance... something that redeems the worst films (I just don't force others to watch them... and they are quickly forgotten).... but there are films... that transcend their form and even their function... and become something else; that assume an importance in your life, like a past love affair that left its mark in ways that have nothing to do with whether it was the best one or the worst one, just one that had a life long influence on your vision of your world and yourself...

I can't say, as Brad has, that there are films that have changed my life... but there are films (and books, and music, and PEOPLE..many of each ) that have made me think about my life in other terms than before... " the Stranger" of Camus was such a seminal book... and "The Wild Bunch" was such a film... not to be compared, not for better, not for worse, with any other...
Just the lines on the face of the once impossibly good looking, decent American boy, Wm Holden... were enough for me to do a summing up of my own prodigal existence.
..
Only Charlie Chaplin, in "City Life.." tapping his feet with desire to dance when he didn't know how... and finally throwing reality to the wind, and jumping up to join the dancing throng.... is an exact comparison... a moment when you felt at absolute oneness with what was going on on the screen, even though your own life was completely otherwise, geographically, historically, personally...
Just a thought: film is the latest of the arts that allows us to have a glimpse into lives other than our own... and the most democratic in being the most easily and inexpensively available to all.
Once theater was the great purgative of emotions, tears, laughter, howling at the vagaries of fate, the cruelty of existence, as well as its pleasures..
For us, I think... theater no longer has such impact... really great seminal works are few and far between, and the truth is that very few people have access to really expressive classical OR original theater.
For our various generations here, therefore film and music are the two inlets and outlets for emotional expression and connection...... for laughing and crying, for terrors, for joys, for passionate involvement.
In my mind, rock n roll, personified by the Rolling Stones, Beggar's Banquet," .and "the Wild Bunch" are intertwined ... probably forever... and I feel sorry for anyone who missed either of them...
Both of them?
Condolences... but you can still (is this a great life or what?) find them to relish... or even be pissed off at.

NMB

Hello Everyone...

In last few years, My favorite movies are Titanic,Transformers and MIB.

Hmmmm, ok, gotta think of my list and narrow it down, maybe seperate the ones I actually enjoy from those that make me feel good having watched. In the meantime, the weekend is comming up and all this talk of horror films has my asking for a suggestion. Can anyone suggest a Lovecraftian movie that doesn't look like it was made as a college film project? And the question of the ages.....Fast zombies or slow zombies, discuss.

My provisional top ten, subject to change depending on a variety of factors, and in no particular order.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
The House of Yes
Bad Boy Bubby
The Butcher Boy
2001: A Space Odyssey
Oldboy
Monty Python (I'm cheating and not specifying any one of MP movie)
Empire Strikes Back
Bubba Ho-Tep
The Big Lebowski

"Dead Poet's Society" is my favorite movie.

Just curious, why do you consider it an "atheist" movie?