Essential Viewing (Page 1 of 5)

Hm. Well, here's a list of very good movies off the top of my head.

The Princess Bride.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The Incredibles.
Ghostbusters.
Requiem for a Dream.
Back to the Future.
The Prestige.
The Matrix.
Fight Club.
Jurassic Park.
Alien, then Aliens.
Titanic.
Silence of the Lambs.
Children of Men.

Constantly refreshing the thread to make sure nobody steals my answers, steering clear of Teague's suggestions though I agree with plenty.

Blade Runner
Apocalypse Now
The Good the Bad and the Ugly
A Clockwork Orange (and also 2001: A Space Odyssey...)
In Bruges
Groundhog Day
M*A*S*H
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Chinatown
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Sunshine

They're mostly just personal favorites, it's a hard question to consider. And even harder to not just list every movie I like. As for my own missed essential viewing. I never saw any of the Godfather movies until last summer, much to my great shame. And the world at large was correct, two of them are great...

Easy for you to say, refresh ninja. I said refresh genie for a second before I realized it wasn't in any way correct.

If repetition emphasizes importance, though... Raiders of the Lost Ark. Just... Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I agree with Teague. Princess Bride is a special case, cause I honestly don't like it that much, but if you've never seen it then watch it, because you can't truly understand about 40% of the internet unless you have.

For foreign movies, I will add:

Seven Samurai / Sanjuro / Yojimbo / Ran / Ikiru / High and Low / Red Beard
(Just about anything Kurosawa ever made, really...)
Hana-Bi / Sonatine / Brother (or Outrage, tho it's not at the same level, really...)
Twilight Samurai / The Hidden Blade / Love And Honor
(Anything Yôji Yamada has done since Twilight Samurai, really...)
13 Assassins
The Chaser
Delicatessen / City Of Lost Children
Let The Right One In (The US version is close-but-no-cigar in my opinion)
Life Is Beautiful / Johnny Steccino (aka Johnny Toothpick)
Hard Boiled
La Strada

For more US / English flicks:

Fargo
Ronin
Heat
Cop Land
Pulp Fiction
Kill Bill
The Terminator / Terminator 2
First Blood
Die Hard
Lethal Weapon

To be continued by another person...

And...

• The Gold Rush, The General

• Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein

• Monkey Business, Some Like It Hot

• The Maltese Falcon

• Swing Time, Singin' in the Rain, The Sound of Music, Guy and Dolls

• Psycho, North by Northwest, Notorious

• Young Frankenstein, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory

• Goldfinger, The Spy Who Loved Me

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail

• Rocky, Rocky II

• The Muppet Movie, Blues Brothers

• And God Created Woman, because Brigitte Bardot—holy shit—Brigitte Bardot

• Cinema Paradiso, so that you understand what cinema is

AH! YES!
How did I forget to put that one on my list?!!

Last edited by Snail (2012-05-29 04:41:31)

"Life is about movies; anything else is a bonus!"- Me   

I actually prefer Keaton to Chaplin, but that's not to take away anything from Chaplin - they were both geniuses.    It's just that Keaton's sense of humor is more my style.      Every time I watch The General, I'm amazed at how well it holds up.

Honorable Mention: Harold Lloyd, because of Safety Last.   Wow.

Good thread. That'll help me add stuff to my watchlist (that, and iCheckMovies. God I love this website).

I will toss in the required non-Pixar animated suggestions.

• The Wings of Honnamise- an incredible tale of a nations first attempt at space flight (its beauty and detail all the more amazing because it was created by a bunch of geeks after a fan film got some attention). Watch it subtitled, as the English dub changes two critical lines of dialog

• Voices of a Distant Star- one man on a Mac created this incredibly moving short

• Nausicca of the Vally of the Wind- actually, any Miyazaki film will do, but this is one of his best.

• Watership Down- adaptation of the novel.

• Batman The Animated Series- what can you do when told to make a kids superhero show? This. Also the anime series Mobile Suit Gundam for the same "they turned a toy commercial into THAT?" vibe.

I hung this poster on the wall of my dorm room at USC before I ever saw the movie.   People would see the poster and say, what is that movie about?   And I would say, I have no idea.

But every time I looked at that poster, I started to imagine what the movie could be about.     Because seriously, WTF could have happened to lead to a scene like this?

I did finally see the movie and loved it... and recently watched it again and it mostly holds up.  That Tangerine Dream soundtrack, not so much.

And I still have the poster.

But this reminds me that I have a lamentable gap in my own film viewage - I still haven't seen Wages of Fear, the original film of which Sorcerer is a remake.    *runs to check Netflix*

Roy Scheider is in this? I'm in.

Ya, it's an awesome setup for a thriller, and the movie just drains you emotionally with how much shit it throws at the protagonists. Funnily enough, it kind of represents the end of the 70s wave of successful auteur cinema, and the dawn of the modern summer blockbuster, as it came out the same summer as Star Wars and got completely crushed at the box office.

Also, the fact that is was PG back then is INSANE. The movie would be a hard-R today, there's graphically burned human corpses, people shot in the head, blood, swearing, etc. It's draining to watch as an adult, I can't imagine what it would do to an 8 year old.

I also still haven't seen Wages of Fear, gotta get on that.

Last edited by bullet3 (2012-05-29 21:02:52)