It'shard to tell for me because I love animated movies and I love a lot of them. But if I absolutely HAD to narrow it down to 3 movies for my favorite of favorites list it would probably be Princess Mononoke, Song of the Sea, and Wall-e. With Song of the Sea and Princess Mononoke tied for first.
OMG MOVIES Heathers!!! Holy cow, talk about a movie that gets better with every minute. Chirin no Suzu. One of the darkest movie out there imo. I don't count movies that are like "AND THEN he raped a THOUSAND babies" as dark per se because there aren't any actual emotions explored. Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Blog. Dat ending. Man I love unhappy endings. I love them so much. Mewtwo Strikes Back and Mewtwo Returns. My favorite character <3 The common thread here is that the protagonists are all antiheroes or antivillains. I like my fiction morally grey : D
YES YES YES It's an anime movie about a cute little sheep and it just piles on the character pain as it goes : D And the protag is HELLA morally grey Watch the sub, not the dub. If I am ever mega rich I will pay new voice actors to do a decent dub Here's a link to part one, the deceptively fluffy part The recommended videos at the end should lead you to the next one in order It's made by the Hello Kitty people. If only they had kept doing movies like this instead.
oh man i hear you about doctor horrible, it's so wonderful. the others would be jurassic park, sunshine cleaning, and - okay i was going to say sweeney todd but if i get started on musicals adapted to movies we'd be here all day. same with most animated stuff haha.
fav movies? oh gosh.... Lilo and Stitch, RENT, Bunraku, Any and all studio ghibli/ Hayao Miyazaki movies, 1776, Sound of Music, WAll-E, 9, How to Train Your Dragon, Serenity, The Avengers (and all of phase 1), Grave of the Fireflies (even though this movie makes me sob like a baby), Pan's Labyrinth... there are too many!!!
Fritz Lang's Metropolis is a beautiful classic and I love it to bits, the production and the acting and the plot oh my. Disney's Beauty and the Beast is a fave, but I think the best western animation out there is still Prince of Egypt (I have watched this one probably 30 times in the last year and a half alone, and I always find more things about its production, character designs, plot etc. to be awed by). And I have a weakness for shitty 80's and 90's medieval fantasy films - Legend, Labirynth, Ladyhawke, Ever After and such. Ever After in particular is an all-time fave.
I love loads of movies. Most Disney animation, especially Mulan and Lilo and Stitch. Also, Legally Blonde. It is just a perfect movie, and the musical version that was done on broadway is even better. Definite must-watch.
It's awesome. MTV recorded it and broadcast it, and I think they have a version on Youtube. It has the most excellent songs. I seriously recommend you look it up, I promise it will not disappoint!
Hot Fuzz! Hot Fuzz is amazing. My friends watched it for the first time recently and I flapped at them until they agreed to watch it a second time so they could appreciate it properly. Also Pacific Rim. It is the stupidest fucking movie but it is stupid in all the ways I love.
HOW DID I NOT SEE THERE WAS A MOVIE THREAD I love movies! Favourite ones... Oof! I could just take a picture of my dvd library and call that a day, but well... Right now, I've been re-watching all my old movies and if I make a selection: The Third Man - oh god do I love this movie. The score is amazing, Orson Welles is cute and the set is really well made. Post war Vienna is so well visualised, with beautiful old houses amidst rubble, the long dark shadows that black and white movies did so well... It's amazing. My favourite scene is the reveal of Orson welles' character, the brief light, the zither music. Lekce Faust - by Jan Svankmayer. He also made Alice which is where most people know him from (really worth checking out! It's a batshit insane rendition of Alice in wonderland with really creepy stop-motion animation) It's better paced than Alice, but is still wonderfully surreal. The world of Faustus is a stage with literal smoke and mirrors, while the actual world is the rather pared down and grim world of former Soviet-sattelite Czech republic. Everything is old and worn and used way too often that you wonder when it will start to break down. I love the atmosphere of this movie and the rather worn and ironic gaze of the main character. Okay, now something stupid: Blood for Dracula - oh god is this movie so campy and fantastic. Produced by Andy Warhol and directed by Paul Morrisey, it features Udo Kier as a really, really sickly Dracula who travels to Italy in the hopes of finding a virgin, because Catholics still value virginity, right? Turns out the family he's set his eyes on, almost all the daughters shag the gardener in their free time, and he has to go by them one by one desperately trying to find the virgin. Also features Udo Kier biting a non-virgin only to turn green and vomit violently in the bathroom. This movie is FANTASTIC. I haven't watched Flesh For Frankenstein yet but I've been told it's just as good. And I'll stop with these. There's a lot more, but these I can (and have) watched time after time.
While it's not my favorite movie the Thai version of Shutter is one of my favorite movies. This is because Shutter has moralistic ideas that I'm familiar with, and what's more, actually agree with at least partly. My favorite bit of the film is what happens to the girlfriend. She herself did not actively hurt the wronged woman. Not at all. What she did do however is indirectly wrong her by knowingly not doing shit. When she finally started doing things it was far too late. She had already hurt this person and her fruits were already going, and whether or not you think it's fair that is a fact. A cold hard fact of reality that is result of a law of reality. Karma's a bitch. This was probably the first time I had seen that sort of thing in a movie and honestly it was very, very refreshing. I should look into Thai fiction more in general. I also really liked Beautiful Boxer on this note. Nong Thoom's long been one of my favorite people. She's an inspiration and a big part of why I know that I'm trans at all. And what's more again I saw something that I personally believe in. Namely that Nong Thoom in the film says that being a kathooey and suffering is the result of her karma. She did some wrong in the past and the dysphoria and maltreatment is the result of that. This she learned from a monk during her time in the Sangha. That is personally how I view dysphoria. I fucked up in another life and this is the fruit that fell. Does that mean I deserve to suffer? No. It doesn't. Nor does it mean people should treat me like shit for it. Quite the contrary really. We should feel sympathy and pity for those who suffer because of past actions, and even aim to help them if we can. But the fact of the matter is that I am dysphoric because I did a wrong in the past. That's my lot in this life.
Here's another fantastic movie that is absolutely on my list of favourites but is really hard to find: 'Le Roi Danse'. It's about court composer François Lully, who worked for Louis XIV - or the 'sun king'. My beef with a some modern period movies (late 90's and early 00's, Hollywood being main culprit - Amadeus doesn't count because that movie was AWESOME) is that they tend to overcompensate for realism - 'the past sucked and people were dirty'. Yes, not everybody looked like a Hans Holbein painting, but at the same time it gets a little ridiculous when even nobles or kings are wearing the same drab and dirty colours - as if a nobleman wouldn't want to show off his wealth with pretty clothes!! I also feel not a lot of people know what to do with the Baroque period, it was a pretty over-the-top period and I can imagine it must be pretty alien in a lot of ways: the baroque concept of masculinity doesn't gel really well with the typical Hollywood male hero (men wear high heels! Men wear wigs! Men like long, luscious hair! Men wear frills! Men have delicately embroidered jackets! Rich men wear silk tights!), and the French actually won wars! This movie, however, gets it right, and it does it so well. Every shot looks like a Georges de la Tour painting: It's an incredibly accurate depiction of the music and drama of the era, using actual professional Baroque orchestras who play on replicas of original instruments, with a smattering of court intrigue, religion and politics. It follows the career of François Lully, his rise to fame and relationship with the young Louis, his friendship and rivalry with Molière and his fall from grace. What's also fantastic is that they don't gloss over the fact that Louis was a fanatic dancer and his obsession with art, wanting to have complete control not only over France but also over Music and Dance. Because of him it became fashion for a king to not only have some political sense, be a good fighter, but also be a really good ballet dancer. The costumes are amazing and I think they even managed to film some parts of the movie in Versailles. The only pity is that I don't think there is an English subtitle version of the film that you can easily buy/find. It's in French and the DVD is out of print unfortunately. :(
My favorite movies are probably Pacific Rim and Kiki's Delivery Service, and then favorite Disney movies are The Little Mermaid and Lilo and Stitch.
I am possessed with a need to ramble about how much I love the movie version of Chicago. One of my favorite movies ever. God, Roxy Hart is such a fucking narcissist but I can't help but love watching her sing about how bad a person she is. Like, watch how fast she turns in "Funny Honey" and how convinced she is that Amos is in the wrong for not doing exactly what she wanted. "YOU are a DISLOYAL husband!" Like, the sheer conviction she has. It's amazing. Even the way she treats the narrator/piano player is perfect. I should make a thread for just musicals, they are so good.
A few of my favorites have already been mentioned, but What Dreams May Come is also on my list. Grief and beauty and the mishmash of identity with death and reincarnation... It's got a lot of heavy to it, but in a way I reach out for.
Well, I have a new favorite: Dario fucking Argento. I already loved his movie Suspiria about a haunted ballet school, but now I've seen Inferno, Opera and Profondo Rosso, and I just love this crazy son of a bitch. Film strips that are dripping with pure colour (crimson red, mint green, lemon yellow and ultramarine blue are his standard palet) , ketchup-red blood, weird and unnerving music, actresses with high cheekbones that he seems to hire based on how thick their eyelashes are, and an obsession with burning buildings, secret passageways, breaking windows, lingering shots of beautifully mangled corpses, beautifully shot murders, SO much dripping blood and stilted dialogue. He chooses the best and weirdest locations - a combination of hyper-modern looking buildings with glass and steel, and old neo-gothic houses painted in pinks and greens. It's dramatic, operatic and fantastic. His films are surreal as hell and make sense in a dreamlike way - of course that drunkard was the son of the murderer, of course that girl's teachers are witches, of course that guy is being stalked by death in a living house... I absolutely love it. Start with Suspiria and just go down that rabbit hole. Don't be fooled by the fakeness of the blood - it's gory as fuck and the deaths can be pretty disturbing. Next on my watchlist: the bird with the crystal plumage with music by Ennio fucking Morricone ('The Good, The Bad and the Ugly' and 'Once Upon a Time in the West'). Wish me luck. I fucking love a lot of Italian films from the 60's and 70's - the highbrow (Fellini), the lowbrow (Sergio Leone) and the lowlowbrow (Mario Bava and Argento) - the colours and filmography are SO GORGEOUS, in spite of horrific things or really weird stuff happening in them. These films are really a case where I barely care about the story, it makes just enough sense that I can enjoy it and not be too confused, and just take in the lovely, dripping, juicy atmosphere. I love them so much I could EAT them.
