I’ve been struggling the last week with trying to get a book chapter done, and whenever I’m not working on that, I’ve been spending time either rearranging the furniture in my house, watching movies, or both. The semi-annual Deep Discount sale makes up something like 80% of my yearly DVD shopping (plus, like I’ve said before, I’m trying to pare down the collection, too), and as a consequence, I end up watching many more movies in June and early December than I do at other times of the year.

To top it off, I stumbled on the Back To the Future DVD set for $11 at Half Price the other day, splurged and ordered the R2 2-disc set of Hot Fuzz when I found out the US was only getting a single-discer, plus when I saw that the Mario Bava Box V1 was only $20 from Amazon, well, you can guess what I did. Anyway, yeah, movies.

Ever since I gave up on WoW, I’ve found myself spending more time in social MOOs, and hanging out on a few that I hadn’t been on regularly since the Clinton administration. Sometime in the mid-’90s, several of us got into long, in-MOO discussions about movies and, for whatever reason, made lists of our favorite flicks. I just found mine, originally written sometime around ’98 or so, and then revised in ’01. I present it here for your perusal:

SEAN’S MOVIES
=============

2001: A Space Odyssey – Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1968
All the President’s Men – Directed by Alan J. Pakula, 1976
L’Atalante – Directed by Jean Vigo, 1934
Citizen Kane – Directed by Orson Welles, 1941
The Decline of Western Civilization – Directed by Penelope Spheeris, 1981
The Godfather Part II – Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1973
Der Himmel Ueber Berlin – Directed by Wim Wenders, 1988
House of Games – Directed by David Mamet, 1987
It’s a Wonderful Life – Directed by Frank Capra, 1947
Love and Death – Directed by Woody Allen, 1975
My Dinner With Andre – Directed by Louis Malle, 1981
Network – Directed by Sidney Lumet, 1976
The Philadelphia Story – Directed by George Cukor, 1940
Point Blank – Directed by John Boorman, 1968
La Regle du jeu – Directed by Jean Renoir, 1939
Rio Bravo – Directed by Howard Hawks, 1959
Rope – Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1948
Rushmore – Directed by Wes Anderson, 1998
Shichinin no samurai – Directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1954
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – Directed by Nicholas Meyer, 1982
The Sting – Directed by George Roy Hill, 1973
Sullivan’s Travels – Directed by Preston Sturges, 1941
The Third Man – Directed by Carol Reed, 1949
This is Spinal Tap – Directed by Rob Reiner, 1984

Ok, this list is already beginning to look dated, and rather than revise it, I’ll simply add alternates that would probably be switched in or out of the list of 24 depending on my mood.

Magnolia – Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999
The Graduate – Directed by Mike Nichols, 1967
Miller’s Crossing – Directed by Joel Coen, 1990
Paris, Texas – Directed by Wim Wenders, 1984
Down By Law – Directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1986
Once Upon a Time in the West – Directed by Sergio Leone, 1969
Before Sunrise – Directed by Richard Linklater, 1995
The Great Escape – Directed by John Sturges, 1963
The Idiots – Directed by Lars von Trier, 1998 (?)

So, I find this list pretty amusing — I haven’t watched a bunch of these movies in years and years, and don’t remember being so fond of them that I’d bother putting them down in a list like this. Of the original list, I’m a bit surprised that Wings of Desire and It’s a Wonderful Life made the list. Rope made the list primarily because of the tense staginess of the movie, but how did this make it when Vertigo or The Lady Vanishes or Rear Window didn’t?

More embarassing are the additions in 2001. I was fanatical about Magnolia (saw it three times in the theater) and now just find the movie embarassing. Similarly, Miller’s Crossing is a lot of fun, but ultimately pretty empty, Idioterne was profoundly affecting the first time I saw it, but I can’t say I revisit it that much anymore, and The Graduate and The Great Escape are classics but not films I’d likely put on a list like this today.

I guess I see my movie-watching youth in this list — I was much more entranced by big-budget and modern studio films than I remember, which has morphed into my fascination with late ’60s through mid-’70s American studio pictures (the “American New Wave”). However, I clearly felt much less comfortable with including “guilty pleasures” on the list (c.f., Star Trek II, of course). Lists like these are hallmarks of where one is in life, and what kinds of cinematic experiences resonate the most with you at that particular time, I suppose.

Just for kicks, then, I think I’ll cobble together a new list of “favorite films” — movies I either watch over and over again, or strike me right now (June, 2007) as being ones that mean something to me, presented in no particular order:

The Third Man (Reed)
Rear Window (Hitchcock)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Altman)
Ugetsu (Mizoguchi)
F for Fake (Welles)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer)
The Gleaners & I (Varda)
Paris, Texas (Wenders)
Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)
The Conformist (Bertolucci)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone)
L’Atalante (Vigo)
Blow-Up (Antonioni)
Shaun of the Dead (Wright)
The New World (Malick)
Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami)
Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Stern)
Charade (Donen)
Stolen Kisses (Truffaut)

There’s no sense in posing — I’m a rather middle-of-the-road movie connoisseur, defined by largely English-language films. But there’s this weird streak of movies made by Italians in the ’60s and ’70s that I didn’t expect — Antonioni, Leone, Pontecorvo, Bertolucci. Interesting! Maybe in a few years, I’ll revisit this list and see what I still think of it.