In response to a wonderful thread on one of my favorite mailing lists, here are a list of my favorite movies (in no particular order).
- Roman Holiday. Seriously, how much more fun can a movie be?
- The Sound of Music. Surely everyone has this on their list.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I’ve been a Tolkien fan since early childhood and, while the entire LOTR trilogy is grand, the second movie from the set is truly magnificent.
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 and Part 2. Again, a series of movies that I’ve watched multiple times, but these two in particular stand out. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is another great one.
- Casablanca. Yes, I’ll play it one more time, but for me.
- Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. I’m a huge Steve Martin fan, but this movie combines old films and stupid humor like no other.
- Star Wars. Take a terrible director and producer, a campy, mishmashed plot, and add in a pretentious, overly-complicated score, and what do you get? Pure movie magic. I saw it three times on opening day, and that boy in the rocket dropped that bomb down that tiny little hole (“a million-to-one shot”) every single time.
- Being There. Oh. My. God. I have never laughed as hard at a movie as I did at this one. Yes, it hasn’t aged well. But Peter Sellers is still a comic genius.
- Local Hero. A small, charming movie, featuring Peter Riegert and a pre-Doctor-Who Peter Capaldi, where every character behaves contrary to what you expect (plus, there’s a mermaid).
I’m sure there are others, and I’m sure that if I make another list tomorrow, it will be different. But here’s my list for today.