Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
That would be the right-wing nutjobs like Yours Truly. I’m glad Hawkins does stuff like this now and then. It’s always interesting to see how one’s individual contributions stack up with, and contrast against, the prevailing viewpoint.
18. The Terminator: 4 (1984)
18. The Patriot: 4 (2000)
18. The Dark Knight: 4 (2008)
18. Serenity: 4 (2005)
18. Saving Private Ryan: 4 (1998)
18. On the Waterfront: 4 (1954)
18. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: 4 (2003)
18. Groundhog Day: 4 (1993)
18. Blazing Saddles: 4 (1974)
18. Animal House: 4 (1978)
18. 300: 4 (2007)
13. Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back: 5 (1980)
13. Schindler’s List: 5 (1993)
13. Patton: 5 (1970)
13. Monty Python and the Holy Grail: 5 (1975)
13. Gone with the Wind: 5 (1939)
8. The Godfather II: 6 (1974)
8. Jaws: 6 (1975)
8. Raiders of the Lost Ark: 6 (1981)
8. Pulp Fiction: 6 (1994)
8. Braveheart: 6 (1995)
6. The Shawshank Redemption: 7 (1994)
6. The Princess Bride: 7 (1987)
5. The Incredibles: 8 (2004)
4. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: 9 (2001)
3. Star Wars: 11 (1977)
2. Casablanca: 13 (1942)
1. The Godfather: 14 (1972)
I recall Maddox put up a page years ago called Five Shitty Movies Everybody Loves. It has not aged well. Braveheart, for example, made both his list and the Hawkins list…along with mine (below). Sum of All Fears? Last Samurai?
Top Gun, on the other hand. I think one day Maddox was sitting around doing whatever it is he does…Top Gun came on that Turner channel that likes to hack decent movies up into pieces, and Maddox thought Wow that sure is a shitty movie and there sure are a lot of people who love it all to pieces. I’ll bet I can find four more just like it. Well, the other four don’t quite fit. Braveheart has a lot of elements that make it quite a great movie, that went sailing over Maddox’s head, Karate Kid isn’t that bad, and the other three have tumbled down the memory hole as they deserved to.
Anyway, I’ve often thought I should start a list like that.
It might seem a tad brutal to put Lord of the Rings in there. But I grow weary of the Peter Jackson monotony. Same ol’ story…you can’t trash this, it’s great film making. And it always is. Jackson is an exceptionally talented fellow. Just answer me this: How many times have you put that thing back in the DVD player and spent an evening in front of it? Yeah, I thought so.
Know why that is? Because everything consumes roughly five times as much of your evening as it justifies. The “You Shall Not Pass” scene? Thirty seconds worth of story, maybe. Forty if you count the hobbits crying at the end. But no. It takes longer to watch Gandalf’s great fall, than it takes for my kid to do a math problem when he doesn’t feel like doing it. Almost. When the whole movie grinds on like that, so the entire trilogy takes nine hours, I lose patience. What happens in just six hours of the old Star Wars movies? Just about everything that can be flipped around, at some point, is. What happens in six hours of Godfather movies? Ditto. These guys took a ring to a volcano and tossed it in. Yawn.
Yeah, I need to start a list like that someday.
Anyway. Here’s the list I submitted of the movies I liked. We were asked for ten, in no particular order, and I took the liberty of grouping some of them together. It seemed to me to make sense:
The Godfather I & II
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Rob Roy
From Russia With Love
Casino Royale
The Patriot
Braveheart
Die Hard
Jaws
Star Wars: ANH & TESB
I thought after I hit “send” that two movies, both by Martin Campbell, really deserved to make the cut: Goldeneye and The Mask of Zorro. Also, Rocky, the first one, maybe.
I didn’t even think to put Patton in there until I saw the final. Pretty good choice. Terminator? I dunno. It is a fine piece of work, a fun flick. But as “list” material, it leaves me cold because you don’t pick up any deeper meaning from it, until you analyze it and by the time you analyze it you quickly pass the point where the story no longer makes any sense whatsoever. (The same problem hangs around the neck of Cameron‘s latest, lucrative as it may be.) It seems to me “just for fun” vehicles belong on a different list. You’d have to skip over all kinds of wonderful, meaningful, thoughtful works like The Incredibles before you got to something like Terminator.
“When everybody is special, then nobody is.” They worked that in twice without getting preachy about it. Strong story, lovable characters, unforgettable villain, subtle, thought-provoking message. Perhaps “movies with exactly the right balance” would be another worthy list.
Update: I’ll just plant this as a seed in the smartphone, see if it sprouts into something. A list of movie lists.
1. Movies I would like to take with me to a deserted island.
2. Movies that, when I was young and available, got me some action and will probably work for you too.
3. Movies with a simple and powerful message.
4. Culturally significant movies.
5. Great movies made great by their characters and not by their stories.
6. Great movies made great by their acting and directing and not by their characters or stories.
7. Movie tropes, thoroughly worn out and ground into the dirt, given a brand new lease on life through brilliant execution.
8. “He’s the traitor” moments I absolutely, positively did not see coming.
9. “Dragon” moments (physical contests between hero and bad guy’s second-in-command) that redeemed the entire movie.
10. Sequels better than the original.
11. Movies that are really two movies.
12. Really, really, really bad moments for going out to get popcorn.
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I don’t have a lot of favorite movies, which is odd for a guy whose wife has approximately 6 trillion DVDs. I enjoy movies, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them.
In no particular order, these would make a short list
The Princess Bride (always up there)
- philmon | 03/05/2010 @ 09:20Time Bandits
High Fidelity
Better off Dead (Coussak)
Brazil (took me a while to come around on that one)
Bringing Up Baby
His Girl Friday
The Thin Man
Open Range
The Cowboys
Rooster Cogburn
LOTR series
Indiana Jones series
Harry Potter series (sue me!)
“Scrooge” aka “A Christmas Carol” (Alistair Sim, but I like most versions)
A Christmas Story (sorry, it’s just a great, funny time capsule)
Quigley Downunder
Secondhand Lions
Actually, we do it quite often. But you’re right about that, especially in the third movie. Long, teary looks at Frodo’s eyes. Or Samwise’s. They make Frodo out to be a real wimp. Which is a shame, because it wasn’t like that in the books. But the handy thing is, on the DVD player you can skip over the Frodo parts. Which exactly what my wife does.
- philmon | 03/05/2010 @ 09:47King Kong was even worse.
Within LOTR, yeah the Frodo looks were bad but you know what offended me a whole lot more: Liv Tyler used to be immortal, but she gave it up for Viggo Mortensen, a human dude, because she loves him and wants to be with him. END of that particular subplot.
Now total it all up…and I say this not really having a clue what the bottom line number really is. But how many minutes did they spend on that? This is a rather outrageous transgression of “movie clock time” even by P. Jackson standards.
I have the same complaint — about the same actress — with Armageddon. Someone, somewhere, has figured out this girl is good at pouting. And perhaps if she plays a character with too complex of a story behind her, something falls apart. Maybe Liv Tyler can’t be told anything, I dunno. But she has definitely spent more than her share of screen time displaying some certain emotional state rather than moving a decent story along.
- mkfreeberg | 03/05/2010 @ 10:41Ok, I gotta admit half of the reason I like LOTR is the scenery. And Liv is a part of that scenery, even though I liked Eowyn better overall. So I didn’t have too many complaints seeing extended shots of her on the screen.
Liv does a very, very pretty pout. I think it’s the exaggerated lip she inherited from her Dad. From whom the word “pretty” should always be kept at a healthy distance when describing said “he”. But if you check Liv’s mom out in the 70’s (apparently Miss November, 1974), you see where she got the rest of her appreciable looks. But then pan back to her dad, and you’ve gotta wonder about her sanity. Rock stars. Go figure.
“Every time I look in the mirror …”
Yeah. Imagine being Steve Tyler and having a mirror. Wait, wasn’t I just saying he had a hot wife? Well at one point. Just sayin’.
- philmon | 03/05/2010 @ 12:28Morgan, do you have to bag on LOTR every time the subject of movies comes up?
Come on, man. We get it. The trilogy bores you. Why do you want to ruin it for the rest of us?
It’s about more than a ring being thrown in a volcano. It’s so much more of that. It’s a story about sacrifice, friendship, devotion – both the romantic and the platonic kind, struggle against impossible odds, fear and pursuit, temptation and more. So many complex human emotions are explored over the course of the three films.
One message I’ve taken away from it – and this, I think, is profound – you don’t have to be big and powerful and important to accomplish great things. Think about it. Who’s the REAL hero in LOTR? Gandalf? Aragorn, the mighty and brave warrior? The girl who kills the litch king? The brave little dwarf, the skilled elven archer? Is it even Frodo the hobbit? Is it anyone else who led the huge armies that fought off the trolls and orcs attacking Helm’s Deep?
No. No, no, no. Not even close.
It’s Sam the Gardener. He’s the real hero. Frodo would never have accomplished his goal without him. Sam wasn’t fooled by Smegel, he wasn’t afraid of the ring wraiths or that big spider. He wasn’t corrupted or tempted by The One Ring. He kept after Frodo, even after being betrayed and left behind on a barren mountainside. He was a true friend and loyal companion. He wasn’t strong or imposing, he wasn’t a military genius, and he didn’t have magical powers. Yet despite all his limitations he never gave up, and at the end he even gets the girl.
Now, you’re going to tell me that ISN’T a great story? That it ISN’T a masterpiece of literature, head-and-shoulders above all the revenge tales masquerading as action films, of mighty heroes slaying evil monsters?
Sorry. LOTR is a masterpiece and I’ll brook no dissent from that view. There’s a reason the books have stood the test of time.
- cylarz | 03/05/2010 @ 21:03Case and point …
Guess who watched ALL THREE … EXTENDED versions … BACK TO BACK yesterday?
(Skipping through most of the Frodo parts in the last two movies, especially the last one)
Yup. The wife. Had a marathon. Again. 🙂
- philmon | 03/07/2010 @ 16:34