(no subject)

[prog]

aspartaimee assigned a movie meme unto me but I am too lazy to do it up properly except for the bit about the five most personally meaningful films. Also, too lazy to format it out of the outliner I wrote it in.

- Silent Running - the Baby jmac Cut
- To watch the Baby jmac Cut of Silent Running, you have to skip
over the first half hour or so, until after the main
character destroys most of the ship and is alone with the robots.
That way you miss all the horribly stupid setup, including the
"Earth First!ers in Space" angle. What you're left with is the
movie I saw two or three times on TV as a kid (I always tuned
into it late, for some reason) which I found infinitely sad and
beautiful. It may have been the first "grown-up" movie I felt I
understood, with my mom helping explain some of it. (She was
wrong, it turns out, since she was working with the Baby jmac
Cut's incomplete information, but her explanation was much better
than the movie's intended reality.)

- The Manchurian Candidate (old version)
- The best paranoid thriller ever. with a tight, gripping plot and
lots of tantalizingly unanswered questions at the end. Both the
writing and the cinematography are incredibly good: contains some
of my favorite examples of camerawork (the single-pan
transformation of the ladies' flower club into a conference of
communist despots) and dialogue (Janet Leigh and Frank Sinatra
meeting on the train).
- Of all movies, this is the one I can willingly watch over and
over.

- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Though it must be said I like the movie less every time I see it,
and I haven't seen it in, mm, seven years now. Still: I will
always adore those parts of the movie that take place on or near
the Discovery, with HAL's murder of Poole being one of
my favorite scenes from all of cinema.

- O Brother, Where Art Thou?
- Best-case scenario of all the films I ever saw with no prior
information. An utterly delightful and happy experience.

- The Fellowship of the Ring
- "I hate to say it but". Not because I am a big Tolkien fan (I'm
not) but because of the timing of the film, the mood I was in
when I saw it and the state of things in my life at that time...
it really just blasted me with its hugeness and made me utterly
lost, in a good way.

Comments

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

Hard to say which would be the 5 most personally meaningful movies for me. Some good candidates:

Bambi -- remarkably I didn't actually see this until 1990.

Planet of the Apes -- get your stinking paws off my you damn dirty ape!

Flight of the Navigator -- dopey movie... coolest spaceship ever on film.

Contact -- for Carl

I Robot -- A lot of people knocked this movie for not following the book but if you've read Asimov's stories you'll see this movie really retains a lot of the spirit of Asimov's work .. except with more things blowing up.

More favorite movies:
- 5000 Fingers of Dr. T
- Forbidden Planet
- War of the Worlds (1953)
- TRON

The real trick for me is finding personally meaningful movies that AREN'T science fiction and AREN'T animated. Some candidates:
- 12 Angry Men (1957)
- Das Boot
- Birdy (1984)
- Momento

[xymotik.livejournal.com]

When I first scanned through your list, I misread Dr. T as MR. T and immediately thought of a giant tentacle monster Mr. T: "I pity the foo' who only got ten fingers!"

Turns out the actual movie sounds even sillier. I must watch it.

[prog.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite aspects of this year's Boston SF marathon was the audience reaction. At the start there was a lot of talkback, but pretty soon this tapered down into normal movie-watching silence. This is actually hard to accomplish at the 'thon!

I get the impression that a lot of fans (esp. younger ones) hadn't bothered to ever see the movie, figuring that it was famous cheese like "Plan 9" or something... they just knew the catchphrases and that Chuck Heston was in it. But it's actually a damn good movie.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I liked Paths of Glory because it managed to make me angry.

(I won't compile a list of films that were especially meaningful to me, though, because I'm not sure I could pull it off. I liked It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for its humor. But I also liked Kung Fu Hustle for its humor. More violent than M. World, though.)