I'm giddy. Have a meme!
Jan. 29th, 2011 05:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ceciliaj 's movie meme because it looked fun and time consuming. And I had some time that needed to be consumed. So here goes: my favorite movies released each year of my life, then narrowed down to one movie per decade--with an explanation of why I have the greatest taste in movies ever.
I think what this meme will accomplish will be to out me as a lover of incredibly silly movies. Also, I'm going to cheat. There are just some years for which I can't possibly narrow it down to just one movie. So, I'm a dirty cheating cheater. Let's get started, shall we?
1981: Raiders of the Lost Ark
1982: The Last Unicorn
1983: WarGames
1984: Footloose/Neverending Story/Sixteen Candles
1985: Back to the future/Breakfast Club/Breakin’ 2 Electric Boogaloo (Nope--I'm not being ironic. I saw this movie in the theater, I owned it on VHS, now I own it on DVD. It's even on the harddrive of my computer right now--I have a completely unironic love for Ozone, Turbo, and Kelly)/Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
1986: Labyrinth
1987: Dirty Dancing/Lost Boys/Princess Bride
1988: Hairspray/Beetlejuice
1989: Heathers/Say Anything
1990: Pump Up the Volume
1991: Slacker? (It was a slow year for movies I like)
1992: Death Becomes Her/Wayne’s World
1993: Army of Darkness/Dazed and Confused/ Much ado about nothing/ 6 Degrees of Separation
1994: Pulp Fiction
1995: City of Lost Children/Clueless
1996: Swingers/Birdcage/Waiting for Guffman (WfG is really a tribute to my friend, Tim--it's like me pouring one out for my homie--but the movie-meme version of that)
1997: Grosse Pointe Blank/My Best Friend’s Wedding
1998: Big Lebowski/Pecker/Run Lola Run
1999: Drop Dead Gorgeous/Fight Club/Office Space
2000: High Fidelity
2001: Donnie Darko/Amelie
2002: Secretary
2003: Lost in Translation
2004: Shaun of the Dead
2005: Batman Begins, The Producers
2006: Underworld: Evolution
2007: Bourne Ultimatum
2008: Be Kind Rewind
2009: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
2010: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
My favorite movie of the...
1980s is...
without a single bit of doubt, The Last Unicorn. I should say that this is very significant--because any movie that can go toe-to-toe with The Breakfast Club, Heathers, and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and come out on top? That's serious bidness.
The Last Unicorn was my first obsession. It was, I guess, my first fandom. Though, I didn't know it. And the only other person in the fandom, as far as I knew, was my sister. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing--this movie is one of many things that bond my sister and I more closely than I can easily express in words. That we both were deeply enamored of it while our friends were watching the Care Bear movies or He-Man or something that we weren't allowed to watch--it just meant that we were a team, she and I. Sisters. Sisters in blood and sisters in our souls--because we really loved the same things (we still do a lot of the time). And it was completely organic--neither one of us was copying the other. I mean, sometimes we were. She loved Girls Just Wanna Have Fun because I did. And I loved The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe because she did. But this movie--it was ours. Ours in equal measure. I would make my mom rent it again and again from the video store. In fact, when we first bought our VCR in 1986, it was the very first movie that I picked out to rent. My parents rented Young Sherlock Holmes at the same time. The whole experience is pretty much crystal clear in my memory.
I rewatched it a few times just a couple of months ago. And I had some pretty freaky realizations. One was that almost my entire personality can be mapped out onto the themes of The Last Unicorn. This attraction to darkness, a desire for normality, a desire to not be alone anymore--to be understood, and a weird mixture of fear and attraction surrounding the concept of romantic love. I mean, it's one of those movies, that as an adult, I look at it and think about how dark it is. Even in its happy ending, it's dark: Love can't be requited; there's no explanation for human acts of evil. But damn, if I didn't have good taste as a kid. It's complex and sophisticated... and it's also got unicorns in it. And that's almost always a good thing.
Also--let's not forget that it has some seriously rad ladies in Lady Amalthea and Molly and Mommy Fortuna and the Harpy. And one seriously righteous feminist ally in Schmendrick. How could I not pick this movie? Screw the eighties--The Last Unicorn is the single greatest movie of all time. OF ALL TIME, I SAY. Whoops. That was more than 1 paragraph wasn't it? I told you I'm a cheater.
1990s is...
Pump Up the Volume. If you haven't seen this movie, there's really no need to rush over to your Netflix queue. It's... not high quality filmmaking. But, like The Last Unicorn, this is a movie that really shaped me and gave me something of a ray of hope. Growing up in a rural area of Texas before the age of the Internet was pretty rough. We couldn't get cable out where we lived, so it was just 3 or 4 channels of television and a couple of radio stations. When my sister's best friend introduced me to Pump Up the Volume via a tape recorded off of Showtime, it literally changed my life. All I knew before then was that I didn't really fit. I would listen to country music because that's what my friends listened to. Hell, I even tried to embrace it. I felt like a liar. But I didn't know why. I just knew that I was faking my way through life. Mark Hunter, though, and Nora--they didn't fit. And maybe part of Mark wanted to fit--but not enough to lie about it. Instead, he said fuck fitting. Fitting sucks. Nobody fits--so let's all not fit together. He also said, here, have some awesome music--like The Pixies, Sonic Youth, Leonard Cohen, and the Descendents. And that ain't half bad.
2000s (oughts, whatever) is...
I'm gonna go with Lost in Translation. Because that movie is just good. Bill Murray is good. Scarlett Johansson is good. Sophia Coppola is good. Everything about it is good. And really--what I love most about it is the egalitarian way in which it approaches the Murray/Johansson relationship. It's maybe the first movie I've ever seen that gives equal depth to both sides of a romance. Both characters are equally lovable and equally contemptible. It felt to me like an artful, feminist rom-com with a believable ending. I can get behind that.
ceciliaj 's movie meme because it looked fun and time consuming. And I had some time that needed to be consumed. So here goes: my favorite movies released each year of my life, then narrowed down to one movie per decade--with an explanation of why I have the greatest taste in movies ever. I think what this meme will accomplish will be to out me as a lover of incredibly silly movies. Also, I'm going to cheat. There are just some years for which I can't possibly narrow it down to just one movie. So, I'm a dirty cheating cheater. Let's get started, shall we?
1981: Raiders of the Lost Ark
1982: The Last Unicorn
1983: WarGames
1984: Footloose/Neverending Story/Sixteen Candles
1985: Back to the future/Breakfast Club/Breakin’ 2 Electric Boogaloo (Nope--I'm not being ironic. I saw this movie in the theater, I owned it on VHS, now I own it on DVD. It's even on the harddrive of my computer right now--I have a completely unironic love for Ozone, Turbo, and Kelly)/Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
1986: Labyrinth
1987: Dirty Dancing/Lost Boys/Princess Bride
1988: Hairspray/Beetlejuice
1989: Heathers/Say Anything
1990: Pump Up the Volume
1991: Slacker? (It was a slow year for movies I like)
1992: Death Becomes Her/Wayne’s World
1993: Army of Darkness/Dazed and Confused/ Much ado about nothing/ 6 Degrees of Separation
1994: Pulp Fiction
1995: City of Lost Children/Clueless
1996: Swingers/Birdcage/Waiting for Guffman (WfG is really a tribute to my friend, Tim--it's like me pouring one out for my homie--but the movie-meme version of that)
1997: Grosse Pointe Blank/My Best Friend’s Wedding
1998: Big Lebowski/Pecker/Run Lola Run
1999: Drop Dead Gorgeous/Fight Club/Office Space
2000: High Fidelity
2001: Donnie Darko/Amelie
2002: Secretary
2003: Lost in Translation
2004: Shaun of the Dead
2005: Batman Begins, The Producers
2006: Underworld: Evolution
2007: Bourne Ultimatum
2008: Be Kind Rewind
2009: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
2010: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
My favorite movie of the...
1980s is...
without a single bit of doubt, The Last Unicorn. I should say that this is very significant--because any movie that can go toe-to-toe with The Breakfast Club, Heathers, and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and come out on top? That's serious bidness.
The Last Unicorn was my first obsession. It was, I guess, my first fandom. Though, I didn't know it. And the only other person in the fandom, as far as I knew, was my sister. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing--this movie is one of many things that bond my sister and I more closely than I can easily express in words. That we both were deeply enamored of it while our friends were watching the Care Bear movies or He-Man or something that we weren't allowed to watch--it just meant that we were a team, she and I. Sisters. Sisters in blood and sisters in our souls--because we really loved the same things (we still do a lot of the time). And it was completely organic--neither one of us was copying the other. I mean, sometimes we were. She loved Girls Just Wanna Have Fun because I did. And I loved The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe because she did. But this movie--it was ours. Ours in equal measure. I would make my mom rent it again and again from the video store. In fact, when we first bought our VCR in 1986, it was the very first movie that I picked out to rent. My parents rented Young Sherlock Holmes at the same time. The whole experience is pretty much crystal clear in my memory.
I rewatched it a few times just a couple of months ago. And I had some pretty freaky realizations. One was that almost my entire personality can be mapped out onto the themes of The Last Unicorn. This attraction to darkness, a desire for normality, a desire to not be alone anymore--to be understood, and a weird mixture of fear and attraction surrounding the concept of romantic love. I mean, it's one of those movies, that as an adult, I look at it and think about how dark it is. Even in its happy ending, it's dark: Love can't be requited; there's no explanation for human acts of evil. But damn, if I didn't have good taste as a kid. It's complex and sophisticated... and it's also got unicorns in it. And that's almost always a good thing.
Also--let's not forget that it has some seriously rad ladies in Lady Amalthea and Molly and Mommy Fortuna and the Harpy. And one seriously righteous feminist ally in Schmendrick. How could I not pick this movie? Screw the eighties--The Last Unicorn is the single greatest movie of all time. OF ALL TIME, I SAY. Whoops. That was more than 1 paragraph wasn't it? I told you I'm a cheater.
1990s is...
Pump Up the Volume. If you haven't seen this movie, there's really no need to rush over to your Netflix queue. It's... not high quality filmmaking. But, like The Last Unicorn, this is a movie that really shaped me and gave me something of a ray of hope. Growing up in a rural area of Texas before the age of the Internet was pretty rough. We couldn't get cable out where we lived, so it was just 3 or 4 channels of television and a couple of radio stations. When my sister's best friend introduced me to Pump Up the Volume via a tape recorded off of Showtime, it literally changed my life. All I knew before then was that I didn't really fit. I would listen to country music because that's what my friends listened to. Hell, I even tried to embrace it. I felt like a liar. But I didn't know why. I just knew that I was faking my way through life. Mark Hunter, though, and Nora--they didn't fit. And maybe part of Mark wanted to fit--but not enough to lie about it. Instead, he said fuck fitting. Fitting sucks. Nobody fits--so let's all not fit together. He also said, here, have some awesome music--like The Pixies, Sonic Youth, Leonard Cohen, and the Descendents. And that ain't half bad.
2000s (oughts, whatever) is...
I'm gonna go with Lost in Translation. Because that movie is just good. Bill Murray is good. Scarlett Johansson is good. Sophia Coppola is good. Everything about it is good. And really--what I love most about it is the egalitarian way in which it approaches the Murray/Johansson relationship. It's maybe the first movie I've ever seen that gives equal depth to both sides of a romance. Both characters are equally lovable and equally contemptible. It felt to me like an artful, feminist rom-com with a believable ending. I can get behind that.
