Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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Number6
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Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

Post by Number6 »

There are a lot of good movies to watch and I find myself re-watching a number of them. Which movies do you enjoy watching again. Here's a partial list of my favorite movies to re-watch.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) - Follows the actual book fairly well with a little swashbuckling thrown in.

Tremors - Fun scifi/comedy movie. A good bit of it parodies the prepper couple, Michael Gross and Reba McIntire.

The Music Man (1962) - IMO, one of the best musical movies of all time. Great songs and dance numbers.

The Martian - One of the best sci/fi/adventure movies of all time. Makes you think of how dangerous it would actually be to go to Mars let alone be stranded there. Only problem is the soundtrack makes me want to listen to disco music again.

The Goonies - Great adventure movie about friendships among teens and pre-teens. Plenty of laughs for everyone.

Back to the Future movies - A time traveling comedy movie involving a teen and an older man. The writers did a good job of making the viewer aware of differences in time like when Marty gets a glass of water and it's cloudy.

The Searchers (1956) - Perhaps the best western movie ever made. One of Wayne's best movies. Great character actors like Ward Bond, Ken Curtis (Festus of Gunsmoke fame), and Hank Worden add to the story.

Rio Lobo - Not one of John Wayne's best but it is entertaining.

Harvey - Funny, screwball comedy starring Jimmy Stewart as mild-mannered Elwood P. Dowd whose family thinks he crazy because his best friend is a six-foot tall rabbit.

Somewhere in Time (1980) - Christopher Reeve's character falls in love with a portrait of an actress,Jane Seymour, from the early 1900s and uses self-hypnosis to transport himself to her time in order to meet her.
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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Wag the Dog: Kind of a Hollywood in-joke, making it a favorite at industry parties, but also a good satire based on the social effects of politicians appropriating techniques useful in advertising and fad creation.

Airplane: Totally annihilates the genre of air-disaster movies, and funny besides. Mostly a series of hilarious one liners and send-ups of cliches from that overly heavy-handed genre.

The Music Man: A classic. Never gets old, despite corny plot. The Broadway musical was better, but the movie is a classic of the ultra-budgeted film adaptation genre, especially as done by the pre-Murdoch 20th-Century Fox studio before 2/3 of its lot became Century City. Takes a few liberties with the plot line of the original stage play, but they improve its dramatic arc. At the end, shows the power of cinema to turn a character's intent into an artificial reality.

Citizen Kane: Funny, I saw it as a period piece and shot-stealing source while in film school, but then they struck a new print and for whatever reason it was revealed as the original film noir even before the French named the genre 20 years later. The creative uses of the "black" in "black and white." At its core, a truly unsettling peek into the dark side of capitalism.

Rear Window: Hitchcock at his most Hitchcock, way better than Psycho. That latter one was at first overly plotty and then just gross. Rear Window is just good film making. The protagonist just happens to be a photographer, which does figure in the story, and it's tempting to try and identify who made all his classic cameras, but that shouldn't get in the way of a tight, generally perfect, crime flick. Also a tour de force in the use of virtual space in cinema (they actually shot 99 per cent of it on sound stages).
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Number6
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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ZoWie wrote: Sun Jan 07, 2024 12:01 pm The Music Man: A classic. Never gets old, despite corny plot. The Broadway musical was better, but the movie is a classic of the ultra-budgeted film adaptation genre, especially as done by the pre-Murdoch 20th-Century Fox studio before 2/3 of its lot became Century City. Takes a few liberties with the plot line of the original stage play, but they improve its dramatic arc. At the end, shows the power of cinema to turn a character's intent into an artificial reality.
I saw the version with Mathew Broderick and it didn't have the energy of the 1962 original. I had a hard time believing Broderick was a con-man called Harold Hill.
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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The Howling comes to mind. I saw it in college. The scene where the werewolf takes the file out of the reporters hands still sends shivers up the back of my neck. And I know its coming and I still get shivers.
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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I prefer comedy and action to anything else, but I do have my faves. ZERO horror movies for me.

TOP of the list is To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). It had a huge effect on my life. Also Grapes of Wrath (1940). Also 12 Angry Men (1957), as well as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).

Bringing Up Baby (1938) with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. The quintessential screwball comedy. I also loved The Thin Man series of films from the thirties.

Big fan of westerns as a kid, and yes, John Wayne. My faves were Sons of Katie Elder (1965) and especially McClintock! (1963)

I think Mel Brooks made the greatest comedies in history. Blazing Saddles (1974) and The Producers (1967) lead the way. Unmatched. I’d add Animal House (1978) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).

As for musicals, I loved musicals and I was always a fan of Fred Astaire. Not that crazy about Gene Kelly. My fave was Finian’s Rainbow (1968) with Astaire in his last movie appearance, along with Tommy Steele and Petula Clark. I know it’s not a well-regarded movie, but I love it. Lessee, also Cabaret (1972) with Liza Minnelli and the incomparable Joel Grey. Little Shop of Horrors (1984) - who knew Rick Moranis could sing. Also the crazy good voice of Ellen Greene and the great cameo of Steve Martin and Bill Murray, as a sadistic Dentist and his masochistic patient, respectively. I’ll round it out with Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Fiddler on the Roof (1971), Chicago (2002), Grease (1979) and All That Jazz (1979). Can’t ever forget “Bye bye LIFE!”.

I could watch Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) over and over and over. It and the third one with Sean Connery are the only good ones. One of my favorite lines wasn’t in the movie. There was a “making of” short film made that was shown on HBO. Harrison Ford had spent a day being drug under a truck for one of the big scenes of the movie. They put a mic in his face, and you could tell he was just bone weary. They asked “what was it like?” And he said “just another useless experience”. :lol: :lol: :lol:

And lastly, I guess I’ll add the Lord of the Rings films. Nothing like that was ever done, and will probably never be done again. During the pandemic, after I retired and we’d moved here, we binge watched a number of movie series, and the first one was the extended LOTR movies. We watched it twice.

Okay, I’m done before I think of twenty or thirty more. Hey, I love movies.
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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I'm talking about the 1962 production of Music Man with Robert Preston doing the role he'd done on Broadway. I never saw the TV remake. You know what I think of modern day TV.

The initial scene on the train, which was just kind of a plot exposition in the Broadway play, was expanded into a crosscut version that alternated the performance of the salesmen in the coach with the various hissings and chuggings of a steam locomotive, greatly opening up the scene. The library scenes were similarly opened up, though the town still looked more like Disneyland. Oh, and of course Preston sold the part better than Harold Hill sold band instruments. You really believe that the energy in his con was enough to reboot the whole town.

This thing was made on the old Fox lot, which no longer exists, and they spent a bundle on it. They made it all back and then some. Later on, Fox lost the edge, well before Rupert Murdoch bought it. They sold off most of the lot for a rich people's high rise development, and by my time they were so desperate that they didn't even buy the subsidiary rights for Star Wars. Luca$ was briefly on the top ten billionaires' list as a result.

Those old musicals made a bunch of other movies, though I can't think of one that sustains the energy as well as Music Man. Fred Astaire comes close in a couple of movies. That guy could dance.

Studios don't have the resources to do these right any more. They still spend the big bucks on productions, but now they seem to prefer such premises as the secret life of a plastic toy doll.
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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ZoWie wrote: Mon Jan 08, 2024 10:58 am I'm talking about the 1962 production of Music Man with Robert Preston doing the role he'd done on Broadway. I never saw the TV remake. You know what I think of modern day TV.

The initial scene on the train, which was just kind of a plot exposition in the Broadway play, was expanded into a crosscut version that alternated the performance of the salesmen in the coach with the various hissings and chuggings of a steam locomotive, greatly opening up the scene. The library scenes were similarly opened up, though the town still looked more like Disneyland. Oh, and of course Preston sold the part better than Harold Hill sold band instruments. You really believe that the energy in his con was enough to reboot the whole town.

This thing was made on the old Fox lot, which no longer exists, and they spent a bundle on it. They made it all back and then some. Later on, Fox lost the edge, well before Rupert Murdoch bought it. They sold off most of the lot for a rich people's high rise development, and by my time they were so desperate that they didn't even buy the subsidiary rights for Star Wars. Luca$ was briefly on the top ten billionaires' list as a result.

Those old musicals made a bunch of other movies, though I can't think of one that sustains the energy as well as Music Man. Fred Astaire comes close in a couple of movies. That guy could dance.

Studios don't have the resources to do these right any more. They still spend the big bucks on productions, but now they seem to prefer such premises as the secret life of a plastic toy doll.
I agree with the opening scene of The Music Man where the tempo of the tune incorporates the hissing and chuggings of the train. The scene in the library is both fantasy and comedy. I loved it when Marion is surprised to be dancing and then lets loose and goes with it. No doubt, that scene was probably the most difficult scene to stage and choreograph.

The one thing about the movie, which was typical of the movies back then, was the leading woman fell in love with the leading man who was twice her age.
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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You can't get too picky about musical theater plots in that period. The young girl always fell in love with the older man, except when the male lead was her age, but then love always conquered all anyway. All these classic musicals tended to end with church bells chiming.

Also it's in Marian's character that she's been around. She didn't actually do it with old miser Madison, but the town thought she did. "The sadder but wiser girl for me."

I wonder... is Rocky Horror Picture Show still a cult flick? It's really a lousy movie, but that was its charm. It was a whole subculture in the 1980s when the computer underground was just starting to coalesce, but of course the problem with undergrounds is that they become the mainstream and lose their original content that made them compelling.
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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I think one of the best scenes in a musical is the “They both reached for the gun” scene in Chicago. They really put a lot of work into that one.
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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The crap game in the stage version of Guys and Dolls is pretty compelling dramaturgy, and the actors in the Broadway revival a few years back absolutely nailed it. I got goose bumps. Can't say about the movie, been too long.

Not always easy to compare, though. By nature, stage plays are acted out live, and movies are built.
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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ZoWie wrote: Wed Jan 10, 2024 12:39 pm The crap game in the stage version of Guys and Dolls is pretty compelling dramaturgy, and the actors in the Broadway revival a few years back absolutely nailed it. I got goose bumps. Can't say about the movie, been too long.

Not always easy to compare, though. By nature, stage plays are acted out live, and movies are built.
Yeah, to me there's no comparison. I love live theater. Movies are a different animal altogether.
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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Live theater was a threatened species for a long time, but it's gained popularity recently.

It's completely different, of course. Stage plays are performed. They start at the beginning and play through to the end. The actors show up for every performance. There's some level, however distant, of real-time interaction with the audience.

Movies are acted out, but unless you've sat through hundreds of hours of wretched dailies and tried to edit them into a performance which is then further edited, processed, massaged, dubbed, CGI'd, looped, matted, supered, scored, mixed, released, and thrown onto large walls in dark rooms by fully automated machinery, without a performer within hundreds of miles, several times a day, you've not seen how movies are made. Basically, in the immortal words of the pundit, they are built.
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

Post by Motor City »

This one has a few interesting twists and some relevant insights, contrasts from the past and present.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6prdi1J19w

A DOG'S BEST FRIEND

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhhUxcR6NO4
part 2
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Motor City
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXGSKEjR6_U

SHE


1935 movie based on an 1887 book

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If5wfXdSXRQ

SHE - 1935 - TRAILER



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSoOFn3wQV4
Eternal Flame

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGIZtEhmgAk

Too late for love



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH4z2nt4DJw

She 1935 Fantasy Adventure Movie Starring Randolph Scott, Helen Gahagan & Nigel Bruce
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Re: Movies You Never Get Tired of Watching

Post by ZoWie »

The original version of "She" is a camp classic. I don't know much about the remakes.
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