When people send around those lists of the top 100 movies or the top 50 movies or the top greatest movies, I have to admit that I have seen nearly every single one of them. I started watching great films at the Student Union at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill -- for a few dollars, you could sit in a grungy auditorium, eat stale popcorn and watch old classic films and all the foreign stuff. I shared this love with most of the boys I dated, so I spent many a two hour bit of time, holding hands and romanticized by either the boy or the movie or both. In fact, while many of my top twenty or so movies are included regularly on those lists of the best movies of all time, many of those on my list are so deeply entwined with my life at the moment that I watched it, that judging them as good or bad is ridiculous. Even though I can't remember much about the movie
Diva, other than the spectacular aria sung by the diva and the scenes where the Asian girl skates around and around a living room, it goes on my top list because after I saw it in a theater in Newport, Rhode Island, I ran in the rain to my car with the boy I loved most in the world who had come back to me. Ingmar Bergman's
The Seventh Seal introduced me to real angst and the torture that comes with questioning religion. I went on to watch all of his movies, some ponderous and many soaring, but I never got over the scenes in
The Seventh Seal, Max Von Sydow playing chess with the Grim Reaper during the Bubonic Plague, the pure-hearted carnival family, the final scene of linked arms and dancing on top of a hill. I went through a serious Jack Nicholson phase after seeing him in
Five Easy Pieces, continuing to have ridiculous dreams about him well into my middle agehood -- And then there's Marcello Mastroianni in all those Fellini films, but mostly
8 1/2, Daniel Day Lewis, Javier Bardem, Marlon Brando, Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, and Juliette Massima -- well, I could go on and on, but I won't.
My Top 22, In No Particular Order:
Wings of Desire
The Seventh Seal
8 1/2
The English Patient
Harold and Maude
The Graduate
The Secret of Roan Inish
Annie Hall
On the Waterfront
La Strada
Pan's Labyrinth
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
The Sea Inside
Bonnie and Clyde
Breakfast at Tiffany's
The Philadelphia Story
Diva
Five Easy Pieces
Days of Heaven
Casablanca
The Secret Garden
All About My Mother
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Wasn't that fun? Reader, tell me some of yours.
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