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To: sphinx
26 out of 70. Not a bad list, of those I've seen.

Ya beat me -- I've only seen 17; but I don't watch tv any more and don't have streaming services. There are so very many really good movies that are NOT on the OP's very pandering list. Here's the ones I've seen:

A Star Is Born (2018), A Streetcar Named Desire, Almost Famous, Billy Elliot, Good Will Hunting, Hidden Figures, Jaws, Lost in Translation, Rebecca, Remember the Titans, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Godfather, The Queen, Titanic, Vertigo.

I must say, Hidden Figures was an outstanding movie. I like "based on a true story" flicks, as long as they don't turn out to be fantasizations, like the recent dust-up over The Blind Side.

As far as drama, some of my favorites:
A Room with a View, Hotel Rwanda, Apocalypse Now, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Life of Pi, Cinema Paradiso, Inglourious Basterds, The Great Santini, The Apostle, Scent of a Woman, Stand and Deliver, Swept Away (the original by Wertmuller), Heartland (the 1979 film), Terms of Endearment, How the West Was Won, The Departed, Marie Antoinette (1938, with Norma Shearer)...

62 posted on 11/03/2023 4:25:59 PM PDT by Albion Wilde (Either ‘the Deep State destroys America, or we destroy the Deep State.’ --Donald Trump)
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To: Albion Wilde
My viewing tastes have changed so much over the years that I would have difficulty pulling together a personal "Best of" list. I just roll my eyes today at some of the movies I thought were great back when. Others I still recognize as great films and towering achievements in their day, but I would have no interest in rewatching them today. I rarely rewatch older movies, and if I do turn one on, I am likely to multitask through most of it and only focus on favorite scenes or tricky details that I had perhaps overlooked before.

Bottom line, I'm much more oriented today to trying to find the keepers among recent films and especially new releases. There are some good ones out there, but it is obviously true that the current output in any given year is not going to compare favorably to our personal GOAT lists. And the older we get, the longer our GOAT lists become. I just think it's a shame to wait for a movie to grow barnacles before we discover it as a golden oldie.

And of course, when I post on FR, I'm usually on the culture war track and on the lookout for good conservative movies. They don't need to be worthy of the GOAT lists, but if they are solid enough films to be watchable and enjoyable, and if they are on our side in the culture war, we should at least take note of them. I don't go into movies blind, I'm always sniffing around for leads, and I am willing to go genre slumming to find them. Which brings me to an amazingly traditional values/marriage-affirming recent "romcom" (it's not really a romcom, but most of the reviewers and viewers don't seem to realize this) and wildly crazy but somehow charming adaptation of a Japanese manga adaptation. But those are stories for another day.:)

I'm reasonably satisfied with my gleanings from the last five or six years, roughly the period that I took a renewed interest in movies. But this year has been disappointing; there are a few but not many, though I'll probably discover some more as time goes on.

Next year is going to be awful because of the strikes. The sooner the streamers die, the better. The streaming model is not sustainable, and at this point, they're all losing money and are engaged in a race to the bottom in pursuit of generic customers on global platforms. May it crash and burn. The question is what will arise from the ashes.

79 posted on 11/03/2023 6:43:05 PM PDT by sphinx
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