In reference to several recent movies, including Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:
“Suspension of disbelief does not mean ‘by the neck, until dead’”
(lifted from Tanya’s weblog comments…)
SCI-FI Wire announced today that AFI has picked a “Top 50” list of science fiction movies. I’ve taken their list and bolded the ones I’ve seen. I have 18 16 movies to see to catch up!
Film of the Book: Top 50 movie adaptations revealed
I’ve marked the one’s I’ve seen (any version of) and/or read (12 books, 20 movies, including 10 “both”):
1. [BM] 1984
2. [BM] Alice in Wonderland
3. American Psycho
4. [M] Breakfast at Tiffany’s
5. Brighton Rock
6. [BM] Catch 22
7. [BM] Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
8. A Clockwork Orange
9. Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
10. [BM] The Day of the Triffids
11. Devil in a Blue Dress
12. Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
13. [BM] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
14. Doctor Zhivago
15. [M] Empire of the Sun
16. [M] The English Patient
17. [M] Fight Club
18. The French Lieutenant’s Woman
19. [M] Get Shorty
20. The Godfather
21. [BM] Goldfinger
22. Goodfellas
23. [M] Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
24. [B] The Hound of the Baskervilles
25. [M] Jaws
26. [BM] The Jungle Book
27. A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
28. LA Confidential
29. Les Liaisons Dangereuses
30. Lolita
31. [B] Lord of the Flies
32. [M] The Maltese Falcon
33. [M] Oliver Twist
34. [BM] One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
35. Orlando
36. The Outsiders
37. Pride and Prejudice
38. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
39. [M] The Railway Children
40. Rebecca
41. The Remains of the Day
42. [M] Schindler’s Ark (aka Schindler’s List)
43. Sin City
44. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
45. The Talented Mr Ripley
46. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
47. Through a Glass Darkly
48. To Kill a Mockingbird
49. Trainspotting
50. The Vanishing
51. [BM] Watership Down
:: rogerebert.com :: Editor’s Notes :: 101 102 Movies You Must See Before…
This isn’t like Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” series. It’s not my idea of The Best Movies Ever Made (that would be a different list, though there’s some overlap here), or that they were my favorites or the most important or influential films, but that they were the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”
Of course, I just love movie-list memes, so here’s the list with the ones I’ve seen marked. 34 out of 102; more catching up to do :-). I know Rob & CL have some of the movies I haven’t seen; I’ll have to borrow them sometime.
I was a little surprised by the smattering of movies I have and haven’t seen, both before and after the early 1980s (when I started going to movies regularly). Although, many of the “classics” are actually Andy Beaton’s fault, via the old rep theatres in Toronto :-).
“2001: A Space Odyssey“ (1968) Stanley Kubrick
“The 400 Blows” (1959) Francois Truffaut
“8 1/2” (1963) Federico Fellini
“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) Werner Herzog
“Alien“ (1979) Ridley Scott
“All About Eve” (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
“Annie Hall“ (1977) Woody Allen
“Apocalypse Now“ (1979) Francis Ford Coppola*
“Bambi“ (1942) Disney
“The Battleship Potemkin” (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
“The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) William Wyler
“The Big Red One” (1980) Samuel Fuller
“The Bicycle Thief” (1949) Vittorio De Sica
“The Big Sleep” (1946) Howard Hawks
“Blade Runner“ (1982) Ridley Scott
“Blowup” (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
“Blue Velvet“ (1986) David Lynch
“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) Arthur Penn
“Breathless” (1959) Jean-Luc Godard
“Bringing Up Baby” (1938) Howard Hawks
“Carrie” (1975) Brian DePalma
“Casablanca“ (1942) Michael Curtiz
“Un Chien Andalou” (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
“Children of Paradise” / “Les Enfants du Paradis” (1945) Marcel Carne
“Chinatown” (1974) Roman Polanski
“Citizen Kane” (1941) Orson Welles
“A Clockwork Orange” (1971) Stanley Kubrick
“The Crying Game” (1992) Neil Jordan
“The Day the Earth Stood Still“ (1951) Robert Wise
“Days of Heaven” (1978) Terence Malick
“Dirty Harry” (1971) Don Siegel
“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) Luis Bunuel
“Do the Right Thing” (1989 Spike Lee
“La Dolce Vita” (1960) Federico Fellini
“Double Indemnity” (1944) Billy Wilder
“Dr. Strangelove“ (1964) Stanley Kubrick
“Duck Soup“ (1933) Leo McCarey
“E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial“ (1982) Steven Spielberg
“Easy Rider” (1969) Dennis Hopper
“The Empire Strikes Back“ (1980) Irvin Kershner
“The Exorcist” (1973) William Friedkin
“Fargo“ (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
“Fight Club“ (1999) David Fincher
“Frankenstein” (1931) James Whale
“The General” (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
“The Godfather,” “The Godfather, Part II” (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
“Gone With the Wind“ (1939) Victor Fleming
“GoodFellas” (1990) Martin Scorsese
“The Graduate“ (1967) Mike Nichols
“Halloween” (1978) John Carpenter
“A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) Richard Lester
“Intolerance” (1916) D.W. Griffith
“It’s a Gift” (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
“It’s a Wonderful Life“ (1946) Frank Capra
“Jaws“ (1975) Steven Spielberg
“The Lady Eve” (1941) Preston Sturges
“Lawrence of Arabia“ (1962) David Lean
“M” (1931) Fritz Lang
“Mad Max 2” / “The Road Warrior“ (1981) George Miller
“The Maltese Falcon“ (1941) John Huston
“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962) John Frankenheimer
“Metropolis” (1926) Fritz Lang
“Modern Times“ (1936) Charles Chaplin
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail“ (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
“Nashville” (1975) Robert Altman
“The Night of the Hunter” (1955) Charles Laughton
“Night of the Living Dead” (1968) George Romero
“North by Northwest” (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
“Nosferatu” (1922) F.W. Murnau
“On the Waterfront” (1954) Elia Kazan
“Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) Sergio Leone
“Out of the Past” (1947) Jacques Tournier
“Persona” (1966) Ingmar Bergman
“Pink Flamingos” (1972) John Waters
“Psycho” (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
“Pulp Fiction“ (1994) Quentin Tarantino
“Rashomon” (1950) Akira Kurosawa
“Rear Window” (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
“Rebel Without a Cause“ (1955) Nicholas Ray
“Red River” (1948) Howard Hawks
“Repulsion” (1965) Roman Polanski
“The Rules of the Game” (1939) Jean Renoir
“Scarface” (1932) Howard Hawks
“The Scarlet Empress” (1934) Josef von Sternberg
“Schindler’s List“ (1993) Steven Spielberg
“The Searchers” (1956) John Ford
“The Seven Samurai“ (1954) Akira Kurosawa
“Singin’ in the Rain“ (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
“Some Like It Hot“ (1959) Billy Wilder
“A Star Is Born” (1954) George Cukor
“A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) Elia Kazan
“Sunset Boulevard” (1950) Billy Wilder
“Taxi Driver” (1976) Martin Scorsese
“The Third Man” (1949) Carol Reed
“Tokyo Story” (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
“Touch of Evil” (1958) Orson Welles
“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre“ (1948) John Huston
“Trouble in Paradise” (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
“Vertigo” (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
“West Side Story“ (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
“The Wild Bunch“ (1969) Sam Peckinpah
“The Wizard of Oz“ (1939) Victor Fleming
That list has a Saturday afternoon “I’m bored”/headache feel to it, especially without “The Matrix” and some other notables and anime. Also what’s with Jaws, Halloween & Hard Day’s night…? gag.
Comment by Jeff K — 4/28/2006 @ 6:58 am
I stole your meme and put in the URL for this posting but no track-back happened. Ah well, I guess thisd is a manual track-back!
My score seems to be 63, and I have a few of the ones you haven’t seen:
The Big Sleep
Bonnie and Clyde
Chinatown
Citizen Kane
Maltese Falcon
Metropolis
Once Upon a Time in the West
Rashomon
Rear Window (which Luisa and I watched just last night, me for the 1st time!)
The Third Man
So let me know if you want to borrow them!
Yes, I’ve turned off trackbacks completely, because I was getting nothing but spam, spam, all day long.
Comment by Harald Koch — 4/28/2006 @ 9:36 am
Man, do I love lists like this .. If I may be so bold as to make a recommendation from the ones you haven’t seen yet, check out Godard’s Breathless .. pure movie magic
Comment by Keith Demko — 4/28/2006 @ 5:55 pm
Cool; thanks, Keith!
Comment by Harald Koch — 4/28/2006 @ 6:03 pm
72. Could have been better, but there’s a few there that I didn’t finish watching because I didn’t like them. But Jeff, you disappoint me greatly. A Hard Days Night is not only delightful, but enormously influential. It’s worth 20 Matrices. Halloween and Jaws, well, they’re more there for historical purposes, being the roots of the Horror-Slasher-Franchise film and the Hollywood-FX-Blockbuster.
Comment by aiabx — 4/29/2006 @ 10:10 am
Erum, “A Hard Days Night” was conceived prior to it having a script or a soundtrack and I wasn’t much of a Beatles fan. However, I just rented “Hard Days Night” for the prurposes of this discussion, and must say it’s an okay music video. I hate almost all Beatles songs except for “Revolution” and “Hard Days Night”, both of which are fantastic and tend to be on my mp3 player a lot. Anyway, aside from slighting a great movie like “The Matrix”, why didn’t you take a moment to comment on “Breathless” by Godard. The reviewers of “Hard Day’s Night” said it pioneered “jump cuts” in 1964, however “Breathless” 4 years earlier is regarded by reviews as the pioneer of “jump cuts”. Anyway, I am hopeless behind in my movie watching and have not seen “Breathless” yet, just that in my research of why “Hard Day’s Night” was influencial, I keep coming across stuff like that.
Comment by Jeff K — 5/29/2006 @ 8:01 am
[…] 102 must-see movies Filed under: friends, entertainment — rae @ 9:02 am Stealing a meme from Harald, here is my version of the list: […]
Pingback by ReidNews » 102 must-see movies — 11/15/2006 @ 5:16 pm
The list is from The Science Fiction Film Canon, from the book The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies by John Scalzi. He describes it as “Reviews and commentary on the 50 science fiction films you have to see before you die”…
I’ve bolded the ones I’ve seen, and marked the (two) that I own. 31/50; Not too bad…
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
Akira Kaneda!
Alien
Aliens
Alphaville
Back to the Future *
Blade Runner *
Brazil
Bride of Frankenstein
Brother From Another Planet
A Clockwork Orange
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Contact
The Damned
Destination Moon
The Day The Earth Stood Still
Delicatessen
Escape From New York
ET: The Extraterrestrial
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
The Fly (1985 version)
Forbidden Planet
Ghost in the Shell
Gojira/Godzilla
The Incredibles
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
Jurassic Park
Mad Max 2
The Matrix
Metropolis (Extended version)
On the Beach
Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
Robocop
Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
The Stepford Wives
Superman
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
The Thing From Another World
Things to Come
Tron
12 Monkeys
28 Days Later
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
2001: A Space Odyssey
La Voyage Dans la Lune
War of the Worlds (1953 version)
Wow, the only ones I have NOT seen in that list are:
Alphaville
The Damned
Destination Moon
Delicatessen
The Thing From Another World
Btw, I assume you mean the 1936 version of “Things to Come” with Raymond Massey in it . I haven’t seen the later versions.
I bow to thee, O Alpha Geek :-)
Comment by Harald Koch — 11/14/2005 @ 1:30 am
I have seen Alphaville and Delicatessen (the latter is definitely worth seeing). Also Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version) which I didn’t find as scary as the later version with Sutherland but then I saw it later. On the other hand I have never seen Ghost in the Shell.
Comment by David Brake — 11/14/2005 @ 6:30 am
What, T2 made it, but not T_original? Bah…
Comment by Greg — 11/14/2005 @ 9:48 am
I could entirely do without Delicatessen, “ET”, Mad Max 2, Tron and Godizilla. Most folks don’t “get” Alphaville or Clockwork Orange, I don’t think. I own about 40 DVDs on that list. The list looks suspiciously popular to me, missing the Road Warrior, Matrix Reloaded, Time Bandits, Andromeda Strain, and some others on my shelves.
Comment by Jeff K — 11/15/2005 @ 1:05 pm
A Clockwork Orange is not really a Sci Fi film. It a future film based on the book by Anthony Burgess about a foursome of British “droogs” or stoners who beat people for fun. Their main guy, played by Malcolm McDowell, gets caught, is sentenced and has to watch “deconditioning” film until he goes mad.
The only thing fantastic in Fantastic Voyage is Rachel Welch.
Soylent Green is a new food for all the world’s masses of people to stop everyone from starving. Guess what it’s made of? People!
Westworld is very scary in which the story is that Westworld is a theme park a la Disney where you get to play gunslinger. A robot gunslinger played by Yul Brynner has one of his safety circuits blow and he becomes a real killer contrary to everything Isaac Asimov ever preached about Robots.
Helge
Comment by Helge — 2/22/2008 @ 3:22 pm
Clockwork Orange not science fiction?
Erm, the government uses new scientific methods to curb antisocial behaviour. That’s an application of technology affecting mankind. That’s pure science fiction. You can’t really have science fiction without the science, otherwise it’s just fiction.
Unlike, say, Star Wars which is just a western fantasy and keeps getting called science fiction simply because it’s set in space and they use blasters instead of six-shooters.
-Viper Pilot
Comment by Viper Pilot — 3/11/2008 @ 7:09 am
[…] sf film canon and AFI Tpo 50 SF Movies […]
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