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Mo's Movie Pageunder construction Movies for everyone (aka the "Sixth Sense" list)There are no guarantees in life. However, these are movies that most everyone likes, but most everyone seems to have seen already. If you somehow missed them, give them a try. In general, these may be movies that go beyond their genre; even if you don't like sci-fi or comedy, you might still get a kick out of Men in Black. On the other hand, don't ignore genre: if you don't like violent movies, you will not like Pulp Fiction! The Shawshank Redemption The Usual Suspects O Brother, Where Art Thou? American Beauty Fight Club Fargo Pulp Fiction The Princess Bride The Graduate Wallace & Gromit series (A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave) The Terminator Men in Black Lone Star Amadeus The Maltese Falcon Rebecca Holes The Matrix Sideways Recommended (aka the "Memento" list)These are movies I liked a lot, but that maybe don't have the wide appeal of the ones above. Children of Heaven The Bridge on the River Kwai Enlightenment Guaranteed Apartment Zero Full Metal Jacket The Full Monty The Widow of St. Pierre Titus Much Ado About Nothing Run Lola Run Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels A Fish called Wanda The Station Agent The Triplets of Belleville Croupier Adaptation Leaving Las Vegas Smoke Signals School of Rock I Capture the Castle Cold Comfort Farm No Man's Land Secret Lives of Dentists Movies about art or music that I liked because they taught me something about art or music (aka the "Amadeus" list)8 Mile Girl with a Pearl Earring Walk the Line Billy Elliot View at your own risk (aka the "Magnolia" list)These are movies I liked a lot, but that lots of other people might not. They might be overly disturbing, or just plain weird, I warned you ... Snatch Blood Simple Chuck and Buck The Wall The Ring Tadpole Lilya 4-Ever Better than you'd think (aka the "K-Pax" list)
The Score Spy Game Bandits The Myth of Fingerprints How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) Cast Away Elf Terminator III The Game Revenge of the Sith Worse than you'd expect (aka the "Phantom Menace" list)
Mulholland Falls The Man Who Wasn't There Ghost World Training Day Vertical Ray of the Sun The Princess and the Warrior Vanity Fair What's wrong with you, Mo?!? (aka the "Blade Runner" list)
Austin Powers The Buena Vista Social Club (I feel about this movie the way that Elaine Bennis does about The English Patient) Gladiator The Godfather Chinatown The Commitments TVI hate TV. Oh, how I hate TV! I hate the way one tends to sit there, watching whatever happens to flicker across the screen, cycling through the channels while mindlessly consuming ads, infomercials, stupid reality shows, and even TV shows that are basically ads for the pointless, self-absorbed, celebrity-worshipping lifestyle. I also hate those dumb icons that they put down in the bottom corner of the screen - is it just me, or are they getting more intrusive? Why not get TIVO, you say? Um, yeah, cause what I really need is to watch more TV .... But now that more series are coming out on DVD, I've taken to watching various shows (gobbling up whole seasons at a time) through the power of Netflix. I found a few series I like, so here's what I'm watching: Old favorites: Seinfeld, The Simpsons, ER, West Wing Excellent new finds: Six Feet Under, Firefly Good action brainmelters: Alias, 24 Liked, but don't stand up to watching all in a row. I actually really liked these series at first, but then started to find them repetitive and boring: Jeremiah, Sports Night, Dead Like Me, Northern Exposure, Monk Tried & hated: Monarch of the Glen, The Office, The Shield, The Sopranos, The Wire, Soap. I know I'm supposed to like them ... Bonus list: Hide the Body movies (aka the "The Deep End" list)Here is one of my least favorite plot devices of all times. Someone dies, usually as a result of an unfortunate accident. Onlooker, who is generally only marginally involved, decides that rather than going to the police, etc., the best thing to do is Hide The Body. Personally, I can't imagine any scenario in which I would get in less trouble by hiding the body of someone I didn't murder, than I would by reporting it. But these poor schmos never seem to figure that out. I'm not talking here about a movie like Rope, in which the folks who hid the body are the same ones who committed a deliberate murder. If you murder someone, hiding the body is probably a pretty sensible thing to do. My objection is to the idea that normal, basically honest people would choose to do something so horrific without giving it a second's thought. The worst thing about Hide The Body movies is that you can get an hour into a movie that seems perfectly good before realizing where it's headed. This list is so you won't waste your time. As a great alternative to Hide The Body movies, see Red Rock West with Nicholas Cage. Michael, an out-of-work drifter, gets offered a job due to a case of mistaken identity. Rather than correcting the mistake, he accepts the job (and the money), and only then learns that he is expected to kill his new employer's wife. In Hide-the-Body world, Michael might figure, Hey, I took the money, so now I have to go through with it. Instead, he acts like a normal person would: he goes to the wife, warns her that her husband is trying to kill her, writes a note to the local sheriff, and high-tails it out of town as fast as he can. The Deep End Bad Influence (it wasn't a very good movie even before the corpse showed up!) Mean Creek Unfaithful The Trouble With Harry Very Bad Things Deliverance Practical Magic George Washington Head Above Water With a Friend Like Harry Clay Pigeons 11:14 (goes in the Hall of Shame for having three independent Hide the Body efforts, all of which are incredibly poorly thought out) Other movie quirks So, lots of people are squeamish about certain things in movies. Like many people, I don't really watch movies with scenes of rape or violence against women, nor movies with dead or injured kids. And since having kids, I find that I can't really do horror movies at all. But I find that I have some other kinds of movies that I just can't stand, not for reasons of squeamishness, but just because they bug me! There are a few other plot devices I hate almost as much as Hide the Body movies: notably, "repressed memory" (though there are other psychological conditions that are probably just as overused, like amnesia and multiple personality). And I generally can't stand scenes of childbirth in movies, in which every woman seems to have "precipitous" labor, in which she has about 3 contractions before someone starts yelling, "Push!" "They" tell me that people in the medical profession tend to feel the same way about almost all medical shows, which apparently massively cheat on the amount of time that things take. From our most recent trip to the ER (4 year old with suspected appendicitis, diagnosed as "fartiness" 5 hours later), I can personally attest to the fact that no one is running around yelling "Stat" or anything. I know other people with some even stranger quirks, though. Here are just a few of the odder or more "limiting" movie quirks I've heard. Names are not given, to protect the privacy of these weirdos:
Oh, and I don't really watch cops and robbers stuff. That pretty much cuts out about 50% of what comes out of Hollywood. For some reason that I don't understand, though, I really like spy movies. Go figure.
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Address obscured to avoid spam: Mo dot corstono????r at gmail dot com
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