Friday, February 18, 2011

Movies To See Before You Die

The Magnificent Seven
A Day At The Races
A Night At The Opera
How Green Was My Valley (The best movie ever!)
Captains Courageous
Brazil
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
Waking Life
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Spirited Away
Iron Giant
The Endurance (documentary)
Saints And Soldiers
The Best Years Of Our Lives
It's A Wonderful Life
Red River
Rio Bravo
Condemned
Gaslight (either version)
2001: A Space Odyssey
Gunga Din
The Secret Garden
Wings Of Desire
Faraway, So Close! (sequel to above)
The African Queen
The Front Page
Saving Private Ryan
The Great Escape
The Bridge On The River Kwai
Stalag 17 (yes, guys like escape movies!)
The Magnificent Ambersons
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Quiet Man
To Have and Have Not
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Witness for the Prosecution (another Charles Laughton film)
King's Row
The Day the Earth Stood Still
The Flying Deuces
Block-Heads (yes, that's TWO Laurel and Hardy movies now)!
Breaking Away (liked the TV series too)
The Good Earth (Muni couldn't act, but it was still great)
Les Miserables
The Snow Walker
The Enchanted Cottage
All the "Thin Man" Movies (William Powell and Myrna Loy were the best screen couple of all-time)

11 comments:

  1. NO!, Danger Will Robinson! Girl movie! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. No,No, I hate Chick Flicks, really! This one, although a love story, truly is representative of the era, something so very unique to the United States, the conflict being the basis of all state rights vs central govt debates for the last couple hundred of years. My husband, who loves the movie but admits the girl overtones, says the antidote is an immediate showing of Gettysburg.

    Have you ever seen Ride with the Devil about the border war in MO, guerrilla fighting, etc? Stars Skeet Ulrich, Tobey Maguire and Jewel. Ang Lee directed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xtF0yVOuZs&feature=related

    ReplyDelete
  3. I haven't see Ride With The Devil. Looks pretty good though. That is indeed an interesting part of history. It gets more confusing afterwards though. I was watching Birth of a Nation at Hulu last month which is all about the Reconstruction era, and I had to read up on it because I hadn't read anything about Reconstruction since grade school. It's incredibly confusing and very hard to tell the good guys from the bad. Everyone has a different version of the truth.

    My mom is from a share-cropping family in Tenn, and they have a completely different view of the civil war down there to this day.

    I also read serval years ago that there were several black slave owners in two or three states, and some of them had white slaves. I think people don't realize that most slaves, black or white, were no different from indentured servants, and most were really treated pretty well for the most part.

    ReplyDelete
  4. We live just outside of Pacific, MO which is primarily a white community; however, the mayor is black. His family, along with a few others with old family names, are descended from freed slaves who remained in the area. Hope you get a chance to watch the movie. I was shocked at how brutal it truly was here.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Don't forget "Dead End" with Bogart (http://bit.ly/h3F8fF), the movie that gave us the "mahrk a da squealah" and "White Heat" with Cagney (http://bit.ly/gnyzK0) which left us with the immortal words, "Top a da world, Ma...Top a da world!" . Can't go wrong with either of them.

    ReplyDelete
  6. By the way, "Ride With the Devil" was filmed in Western Missouri in the areas most affected by the border wars and the dialect and language usage is true to the period. I've done a lot of study of the history of our state and this movie is about as close to the reality as fiction is going to get.

    ReplyDelete
  7. As a matter of fact, I wrote that list for my friend, Ann, and the very next day I shot her another email and mentioned a couple more movies, and Dead End was one of them along with Little Ceasar, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Public Enemy, and The Petrified Forest. I grew up watching those gangster movies on Saturdays out of St. Louis (channel 11 I think). Maybe you did too. Saturday was always TV day with me back then.

    I was hoping Hulu would have Ride With the Devil, but they don't. I'll check Blockbuster this week though. Sounds good!

    ReplyDelete
  8. I'm 52 and yes, I spent way too much of my youth watching Channel 11. Check out this link:

    http://www.tvparty.com/lostst.html

    ReplyDelete
  9. I'll be 52 next month. I've been to that link once before when I was searching for either Corky or Showboat. I watched both of those all the time. I saw a couple of those episodes where the Stooges were live in the studio on Showboat. I don't honestly remember anything about Patches though except the name. There's a rare cartoon we used to get on in the late 60s that almost nobody outside of the Midwest ever heard of called The 8th Man. This was before the Six Million Dollar Man came out, so it might have inspired it and later Robocop as well. But it was about a cop who had been severly injured and I guess his brain or something was placed in a robotic body, so he became incredibly fast and strong etc. They called him Tobor (robot spelt backwards), and I distinctly remember that he got his power from smoking a special kind of energized cigarette. Boy that would never air today!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Strangely, I just posted the theme song from 8th Man on Facebook today. You can find it at YouTube. Just search for Tobor. We used to watch it all the time, too. That and Johnny Socko.

    ReplyDelete