My favorite movies list

A friend asked me recently, “What are your favorite movies?”. I had just said that the Shawshank Redemption, which is the number one movie in imdb according to rating and popularity, will not be on the list with my favorite movies. It’s not like that I didn’t like the movie, it’s that, if someone asked me if only one movie in the history would be saved and all the others will be destroyed in a doomsday, what will be the movie that you want to be saved? I would not choose that movie for sure.

But then again I was in an uncomfortable place, because I had just criticized, a really nice movie, which most of the people consider one of the best movies ever, according to imdb at least, and I had to provide a list with better movies. As you may already guess, I could not find which would be the movie that I would save from doomsday. That was a real thinking. So I went to imdb and I made a list with the movies that I have rated with 10 out of 10. I have rated 294 movies in my imdb account. Of course I haven’t rated all the movies that I have ever seen, but I would need at least a day or two to find and rate all of them. So I thought that of course some important movies might be missing, but still that was a nice start to come up with a list. Here you go:

1. Judgment at Nuremberg: A movie for the famous judgment of some of the most important Nazi party members. Some said that it was a judgment of an entire nation, with the main focus of the movie on that question: is a person guilty for an act that didn’t do, but didn’t prevent as well? The massacres of the world war II, a time travel to history, judges that had to deal with the question: world stability vs fairness, and many other moral questions in a tree hours masterpiece.

2. The Matrix: Who doesn’t know the Matrix? The movie that reinvented computer graphics and questioned the world that we live from a science fiction point of view. Ok that, or a really nice action movie?

3. Requiem for a Dream: Anorofsky in his best movie for me. Drugs, tv, sex, money every kind of addiction can be harmful and this movie is the best to present all that in a realistic and scary way, that leads to a socked for hours after watching viewer.

4. 12 Angry Men: An adaptation of a play, with the whole movie taking place in a room of a court where the jury of 12 men are forming a decision if a young boy, accused to kill his father, is guilty or innocent. A straightforward case, where everyone thinks that the boy is guilty, turns to need more discussion and attention to be solved. A movie from the 50’s in which one can see the magic and the power that cinema has.

5. Donnie Darko: Probably the best anti-hero movie ever made. A kid in high school with psychological problems starts to see a human in a rabbit costume, when unexplained events are happening in his small town, like a crash of a plane’s turbine without the other parts of the plane. Donnie Darko is an anti-hero, a character that one time you love and the other you’re wondering what’s the matter with this kid. A movie that is really difficult to understand what is going on, and an amazing song at the end that stays with you. Ok, I can tell, Donnie Darko is not the movie that I would save from doomsday, but it is a nice movie.

6. V for Vendetta: An anarchist in a future fascist England is organizing terrorist attacks and tries to wake up the people to a revolution against the government. Lines as “People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of its people”, “Ideas are bulletproof”, “Whenever the world changed, that was for bad” and much more interesting thoughts on what is legal, what is not, what is fair and what unfair, what can people do to fight such circumstances. For sure not the best art-cinema experience ever, but a really nice script and an epic story-telling.

7. Léon: The Professional: A really nice movie with Jean Reno and Natalie Portman as a kid. Leon is a professional killer, who “cleans” for a living. Everything changes in his life, when the family next door is killed by corrupted police officers in a drug deal. He saves one of the family’s kids, and lives with her for a while. They form a special bond and he tries to give her what she wants: a revenge for her dead parents and brothers. A movie with original soundtrack “The shape of my heart” couldn’t be missing from list. 

8. Vertigo: The first Hitchcock movie I saw. I was so magnified by the cinematography and the direction that I gave the movie a 10. I don’t regret it. Nowadays it might be considered as an old way of filming, but I don’t think that this is an accusation for Hitchcock…

9. Mar adentro: A movie by Alejandro Amenabar that made famous Javier Bardem. A young man has an accident when tries to dive to the sea and remains completely paralyzed for the rest of his life. The life in a bed, without hope for tomorrow, without bright days and not even with the right to die.

10. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Two ex-lovers, try to erase their intimate moments from their minds after break up. Is though love erasable and can anyone escape from it? A film when you start to understand what’s going on, only when you are close to the end.

11. Rear Window: Alfred Hitchcock in one of his best movies. A man with a broken leg is confined in his home, when he starts spying his neighbors out of boredom. The script is not something extraordinary, but with minimal ingredients and amazing performances Hitchcock makes a movie that makes the viewer sitting in the edge of his chair to see what is the truth after all.

12. Welcome: The story of a boy Kurdish boy, immigrant in France, who wants desperately to go to England, in order to start a new life and find his beloved girlfriend. In a small town in France he meets a separated swimming coach and he starts a weird friendship with him. The french man from opposed to immigrants, starts to see the different and hard life of them and finally decides to help his little friend against the criticism of the society. A drama in the unknown Europe of the present, a Europe that doesn’t care and considers illegal human beings just because they exist and pursuing a better life. 

13. The Class: A documentary-style movie from a teacher, that presents his reality in a multicultural school in France. A really nice movie that gives the opportunity to everyone to see how difficult is the job of a teacher.

Oh come on I am not rating another movie with 10, I’m not superstitious. I don’t know why but I was not that satisfied with my list. All of them are of course really nice movies, but I cannot say which my favorite movie is, or even if it stands among them. Anyway I guess that it is a long thinking to do in order to determine such a thing, and it doesn’t make any sense to lose more time to rank movies, especially when the movie that I will see tonight or tomorrow could be even better that those I picked.

So, keep watching…