My Totem Movies
- Terminator 2: Judgment Day
- The Matrix
- Reservoir Dogs
- The Crow
- American Beauty
- The Last Wave
- Fanny och Alexander
- Real Genius
- Field of Dreams
- Independence Day
There are just some movies in the world that, well, have a ton of significance to me. Totem movies, like totem animals. :)
Most of my worldview is fairly unabashedly escapist-- "the world would be so much cooler if everyone was a larger-than-life hero." Blame it on a childhood full of X-Men comics. T2, The Matrix, and ID4 all fulfill that Hollywood kind of need...
I also sometimes just enjoy watching violence (otherwise, the Ultimate Fighting Championship tapes my friend has wouldn't be so damn amusing). Reservoir Dogs and The Crow provide plenty of that, with (in RD's case) some crackling dialogue. Shame they've made the Crow such a franchise, though...
Surreal is big with me-- I first saw The Last Wave and Fanny och Alexander in a class on "sacred drama" at Boston University, taught by the screenwriter of Slaughterhouse-Five. If you didn't come out of that class with your reality bent five ways to Sunday, there was something wrong with you... but the films we watched and the books we read were amazing. I never thought I'd have the patience for five and a half hours of *one* foreign film until Fanny och Alexander (we got the director's cut).
Field of Dreams is baseball. And life, and fatherhood... and well, I played a lot of softball later on in life after I'd moved well away from the father I never did get to know that well.
And Real Genius is just what my reality ought to be (I spend too much time kicking around college campuses embarking on weird schemes with my friends). I've *met* at least one person who qualifies as Chris Knight (and one Mitch, as well).
Hmm...you could ask everyone about their specially significant movies and see which ones get the most mentions...conduct a sort of totem poll.
:-) seriously though, this list doesn't mean a whole lot to anyone else, unless you care to explain the significances.
Your wish is my command ;)
Wow! Thanks. You could have told me to mind my own beeswax.
It's strange what we consider to be escapist, isn't it. A movie in which a mega-computer and its robotic minions threaten humankind with extinction. Another movie in which a mega-comuter uses human wetware for its own ends and keeps us in a false 'reality'. And a movie in which one of modern man's greatest fears, invasion of Earth by hostile aliens, is realised. I guess the escapism is that we defeat these threats - but think how scary that is.
I would want to distinguish between fun, unrealistic violence, a la THE CROW, and nasty, realistic, morality-eroding violence, a la RD. But maybe that's a passe attitude now.
I can see how THE LAST WAVE qualifies as 'sacred drama', but FANNY AND ALEXANDER? But you place these movies under 'surreal'. My favorite surreal movie is Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL.
Some of us have had our fathers around for decades and still don't really know them - if that's any comfort.
Ah, yes, I enjoyed REAL GENIUS - one of the few college life wish-fulfilment fantasies for intelligent students.
And you missed AMERICAN BEAUTY - but that's okay, I haven't seen it yet.