Thoughts I Had While Trying to Prioritize My Favorite Movies List for My Profile

1. Movies, like music, are often mentally categorized by the time in your life when you first saw them/became obsessed with them/finally gave in and bought a copy. This reminds me fondly of that scene in High Fidelity wherein you see him feverishly re-organizing his vinyl.

Oh, that was every scene. Right.

Yes, that guy reminds me a lot of me. Only, I don't have an extensive collection of records. Mp3s, yes. Those I can categorize in many ways simultaneously because of the miracle of the digital playlist. But I digress. Back to movies.

2. I really do prefer to laugh. You see, as I was making this list, I wanted to include the films that I appreciate--even love--for their darkness: Apocalypse Now, The Shining, Taxi Driver. You know. But realizing that my profile would only show 20 forced me to prioritize. Sure, I cheated a bit by listing the original Star Wars trilogy as one, as well as the Lord of the Rings trilogy and anything Monty Python. But those are special cases. As I began cutting and pasting and ordering, I realized that the ones I really had to have at the top of the list were films that made me happy. Not with their cinematography, or their dark message, or their intense acting. No, just films that overall caused me to be in a happy state.

The Princess Bride makes me happy. Wedding Crashers made me happy. (Well, up until the end of that long weekend. Then the film started to drag.)

3. And those happy films can be divided into three categories: the ones I watched and re-watched as a kid. The ones that defined the time I spent trying to figure out who the hell I was going to be. And everything else.

When I Was a Kid
I'm not sure exactly where the dividing line is, but I know that my childhood was somehow defined in relation to these movies (some of which actually didn't make the cut, but are still close to my heart): Goonies, Back to the Future, Grease, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the original Star Wars trilogy. The Karate Kid, Weird Science, Jaws, Explorers... Saturday Night Fever. (Hey, I grew up in Brooklyn. And that's a damn good movie. "Hey, would ja just watch the hair!")

I'll grant you, people being eaten alive by a great white, or falling to their death from the Verrazzano Bridge aren't heartwarming sights, but the films overall make me feel warm and fuzzy--reminding me of the days when there were really only seven television stations to choose from. As do the classics that I learned to appreciate as they were played and replayed on tv--West Side Story and Breakfast at Tiffany's being two of my favorites.

Sometimes, if you're really lucky and I'm feeling particularly dramatic, you can catch me performing Maria's monologue. "How many bullets? How many bullets, Chino?" Oh, my family just looooooooves that.

The Who Am I? Years
Four of my "who am I?" years, the ones I spent in college, were also spent working at a movie theater, so for me movies are somehow doubly-definitive of that time, if that is semantically possible. From 1993-1997 I saw just about every film that came out in wide release. Really, I'm not exaggerating. There were times that I literally had seen every film out (in wide release.)

These were the movies that when I saw them, I was like "Did these people crawl inside my head or what?" Clerks and Reality Bites and Kids...

And even though by this time there were considerably more television stations to choose from, there was one cheesy sci-fi thriller that my friends and I would watch whenever it turned up on one of the lesser cable stations--Coma. Has anyone seen Coma? By God, it is addictive in its cheese factor.

Beyond
If I don't know where the dividing line is between my childhood and beyond, then I definitely can't pinpoint the border between those days and these days. But I do know that there have been a handful of filmmakers that always make me feel as if someone out there either "gets me" or "knows how to entertain me, thank God." Running through the list in my brain, I wish there were some women! I don't love every thing about every one of each of these guys' films, but in my new-found spirit of appreication and validation, I'm just going to put the list out there.

My thanks to: Cameron Crowe, P.T. Anderson, Guy Ritchie, Ben Stiller, Kevin Smith, the Coen Brothers.