Your top 5 ("Three sir!") 3 movies

[Coito ergo sum]

Top five (5):

[Coito ergo sum]

Honorable Mentions:

[Ian]

There are probably others that I'd like to put on a list, but these spring to mind as movies I can always watch start-to-finish:

The Hunt for Red October


Saving Private Ryan


Monty Python and the Holy Grail


The Empire Strikes Back


Dazed and Confused

[Coito ergo sum]

I fucking LOVE Dazed and Confused (and the other movies on your list), but Dazed and Confused can be watched anytime, at whatever point in the movie one runs acroos it....it so reminds me of my time in high school. My school was about 6 or 8 years behind the times...lol...they closed the student "smoking lounge" the year before I started high school. Kids still were able to drive their cars to school, and everyone had beaters or muscle cars.

Keggers in the woods! We even had the equivalent of a "moon tower" like in the movie...

[Audley Strange]

[quote="Audley Strange"]This is timely, since it's been a topic for much discussion around Strange Castle and environs. I think it very tough to limit to three. However I know definitely what my favourite is, because I have such a love hate relationship with it.

1. The Shining. I will now explain why in tedious detail.

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

Kubrick seems to have made a movie which on the face of it seems like a dark farce (something I think all his later movies share) From Jack's daffy duck performance to Shelley's clothing and mannerisms being reflections of goofy (cartoon characters appear a lot in the movie) the whole thing has an air of the absurd about it, even down to the big teddy bear with the eyes that are mirror images of the dials above the bloody elevator. But beneath the overtly cartoonish aspect there are several things going on that I think Kubrick did deliberately to disturb the viewer, without them being conciously aware of it. For example the dead children appear in a corridor that is never seen in the hotel no matter how many times Kubrick maps the place out. The scene with Jack an the zombie chick in the bathtub seems to not be real but a vision of Danny's and of course there is the proliferating and disappearing photographs as well as the moving chairs(in many scenes including the dead girls scene and the bloody elevator) and entrance to the maze moving from the front of the building to the side. Some people have suggested such things are continuity errors. If so there are a lot, too many in fact for someone as obsessive about image as Kubrick I'd say.

There's the whole subtext of the hotel being a place for the elite, placed on an indian burial ground and Jack always being the "muderous" caretaker. This monster character sets about trying to kill a woman and a child and succeeds in killing a black man (a nigger cook as O'Grady has it). In this sense it becomes a horror movie about colonialism and oppression (even having Jack talking about booze being White Man's Burden. Having recently read the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, one of the things that stood out was just how drunk off our asses we were). The hotel manager even mentions them living in the West Wing. I'm stopping because I could go on and on and on.

2. F For Fake. Welles real masterpiece as far as I'm concerned.

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

A fake movie about a faker who faked an expose about an art forger who may or may not have painted some of the classics considered cannon. A profound discussion about about what is art, what can be considered true or false using lots of clever anecdotes, humourous narration and interviews all edited out of context to tell a story that may or may not be true. That his co-producer was an art dealer and that all the characters in it are real people yet we can trust nothing they can say. "I must believe art is true" claims one of the commentators, but is it? It also asks what is more important, the art or the signature. A cheap, slow moving yet utterly compelling magic trick, made years before Banksy did a cover versions of it.

3. It was a toss up between Videodrome and Natural Born Killers, but I'm going with the latter.

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

I'm not Oliver Stone's greatest fan, he usually hammers his points home often and unsubtley, but in this case his bombast is perfect. A movie about The Spectacle, or the Veil of Maya if you're more mystically enclined. Stone took Tatantino's hipster schlock script and turned it into a reflection of the alarmist and sensationalistic assault to the senses that modern media has become. By exaggerating everything to a hysterical degree and by saturating almost every scene with images of sex and death, he turns this into a rod movie where the two protagonists and the viewer are journeying through a dreamlike Hell, only this is not a hallucination, it is the world people strive to be part of, to exist beyond the screen as immortal legends or to have their 15 minutes of fame, or now, to become a topical internet meme. Juxtaposing the underplayed almost naturalistic perfomances of Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis with the ramped up and increasingly insane and vile performances of everyone around them, this is a movie more like Burroughs Naked Lunch than Cronenberg's attempt was.

Edited to add more pretentious bollocks.

[Mr P]

This is timely, since it's been a topic for much discussion around Strange Castle and environs. I think it very tough to limit to three. However I know definitely what my favourite is, because I have such a love hate relationship with it.

1. The Shining. I will now explain why in tedious detail.

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

Kubrick seems to have made a movie which on the face of it seems like a dark farce (something I think all his later movies share) From Jack's daffy duck performance to Shelley's clothing and mannerisms being reflections of goofy (cartoon characters appear a lot in the movie) the whole thing has an air of the absurd about it, even down to the big teddy bear with the eyes that are mirror images of the dials above the bloody elevator. But beneath the overtly cartoonish aspect there are several things going on that I think Kubrick did deliberately to disturb the viewer, without them being conciously aware of it. For example the dead children appear in a corridor that is never seen in the hotel no matter how many times Kubrick maps the place out. The scene with Jack an the zombie chick in the bathtub seems to not be real but a vision of Danny's and of course there is the proliferating and disappearing photographs as well as the moving chairs(in many scenes including the dead girls scene and the bloody elevator) and entrance to the maze moving from the front of the building to the side. Some people have suggested such things are continuity errors. If so there are a lot, too many in fact for someone as obsessive about image as Kubrick I'd say.

There's the whole subtext of the hotel being a place for the elite, placed on an indian burial ground and Jack always being the "muderous" caretaker. This monster character sets about trying to kill a woman and a child and succeeds in killing a black man (a nigger cook as O'Grady has it). In this sense it becomes a horror movie about colonialism and oppression (even having Jack talking about booze being White Man's Burden. Having recently read the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, one of the things that stood out was just how drunk off our asses we were). The hotel manager even mentions them living in the West Wing. I'm stopping because I could go on and on and on.

edit. I'll be back with my other two in a little while.

Funny you should mention that:

[Audley Strange]

Funny you should mention that:

Holy shit! I thought it was just me who was nuts for it. I go watch. I appreciate that Mr P, thanks very much.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

LOTR.

[Animavore]

Wow. That Shining thing was actually way more interesting than I thought it was going to be when I pressed 'play' out of boredom.

Why Kubrick, you old dog.

[Svartalf]

LOTR.

Interesting, but I could never agree on that.
Just the fact that the theatrical releases had me wanting to messily slaughter everybody who had to do with making them, Jackson, scriptwriters, producers, editors... some more; is enough that I'd never put it in my top ten.
Even the long versions have me want to slap jackson and some of the responsible personnel regularly, and NOTHING will save the people responsible for the cave troll scene if I get my hands on them.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

LOTR.

Interesting, but I could never agree on that.
Just the fact that the theatrical releases had me wanting to messily slaughter everybody who had to do with making them, Jackson, scriptwriters, producers, editors... some more; is enough that I'd never put it in my top ten.
Even the long versions have me want to slap jackson and some of the responsible personnel regularly, and NOTHING will save the people responsible for the cave troll scene if I get my hands on them.

Don't make me kill you.

[Coito ergo sum]

He's only pettifogging.

[klr]

LOTR.

Interesting, but I could never agree on that.
Just the fact that the theatrical releases had me wanting to messily slaughter everybody who had to do with making them, Jackson, scriptwriters, producers, editors... some more; is enough that I'd never put it in my top ten.
Even the long versions have me want to slap jackson and some of the responsible personnel regularly, and NOTHING will save the people responsible for the cave troll scene if I get my hands on them.

In fact, you plan a real-life re-enactment.

They'd never be in my Top Ten, or even Twenty ... or probably even Fifty. Sorry 'Zilla

[Svartalf]

LOTR.

Interesting, but I could never agree on that.
Just the fact that the theatrical releases had me wanting to messily slaughter everybody who had to do with making them, Jackson, scriptwriters, producers, editors... some more; is enough that I'd never put it in my top ten.
Even the long versions have me want to slap jackson and some of the responsible personnel regularly, and NOTHING will save the people responsible for the cave troll scene if I get my hands on them.

Don't make me kill you.

After I have slapped Jackson and massacred the scriptwriters responsible for the Mazarbul bit and the SSFX morons who committed that abomination? I'll be ready for your lead.

[Mr P]

Wow. That Shining thing was actually way more interesting than I thought it was going to be when I pressed 'play' out of boredom.

Why Kubrick, you old dog.

The guy's also done a similar treatment of Aliens:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDH_TLpMn0g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDH_TLpMn0g


Which reminds me...

My top 3 are Blade runner (the final cut of course), Aliens and The Shining.