Me and two friends had “classic movie nights” for a couple of years before I moved away. We would watch something which is considered a classic and it had to have been released before 2000. We watched only those which none of us three have seen before and we would watch it like once every two months or so. Movies like:
- M
- Gone with the Wind
- The Godfather
- Taxi Driver
- Murder on the Orient Express
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Rear Window
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
- Chinatown
- Le Grande Bouffe
- L’Avventura
- Tengoku to jigoku
- etc.
It was a ton of fun and we talked about the movie before, what our expectations are and after just generally and each of us would give it a IMDB star rating.
Now sadly my friends live 9 time zones away, so we can’t really do that anymore. But I was thinking to try to convince my wife to do this classic movies night with me. Right now she is reluctant because English is her 4rth language and especially older movies are using language differently too, but one day she will give in :D.
Anyway, now that you know the rules, what movies do you think I still missed and should watch?
12 Angry Men (1957)
Definitely. I love this movie and I think it’s a great heavy character driven story. I believe it is something that everyone should watch once, at the very least. After all these years I’m still undecided on whether I would vote guilty or not guilty, there’s a lot to consider in the case and the jurors all have their flaws which makes it more interesting than just “juror good, juror bad”.
It’s a film that you can enjoy on so many levels. You can appreciate the way they keep a story shot essentially in a single room so visually stimulating the entire way through, or the performances from the cast whose characters grow into the film as more is revealed about their lives, or the way the film makes you think at the end about the morality, the legal system, peer pressure and the human desire to conform, etc. If you’re honest with yourself it’s a film that can really challenge some previously automatic beliefs you had about yourself as a person. Like the first time I watched it in my early 20s, admitting to myself that I probably would have been one of the jurors to cave to the majority opinion purely out of peer pressure was a reality I didn’t really want to face.