I love my films but there are a certain few classics which have completely excaped me and which I have no desire to watch.

Dr Zhivago - Too long for a love story.

The Sound of Music - Just wasnt into musicals until I saw West Side Story. But this one with its fluffy edge just didnt appeal to me.

E.T. - I missed watching this film amid the hype by about three weeks. By the time I could go and see it, I had heard so much that I didnt want to be disappionted in it not being that good, so I didnt watch it all (does that make sense?)

Casablanca - Seen the ending soooo many times, heard the lines and even sang THE song, but do I have the patients or incling to watch it? Not a peep.

Taxi driver - Just cant bring myslef to sit and watch it.

Got nothing against these film, just cant sit and watch them.

I'm guessing based on the films you listed that by the term "classic" you mean films more than 25 years old that continue to have some cultural currency among American viewers generally. Have I got that about right?

Gone With the Wind
Seven Samurai
The Silence of the Lambs
Forrest Gump
Blade Runner
Top Gun

Is Pulp Fiction considered a classic film? If so, I don't want to see it. Everything else I've seen of Tarantino's I thought was awful...so what makes Pulp Fiction so different from his other crap?

This thread is hurting me.

Gone With the Wind
E.T.
Once Upon a Time in America
The rest of Ingmar Bergman's catalog (hated Seventh Seal/Persona)
Top Gun

ditto

Other than Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, I agree that the rest of the flms he directed are not that good.

True Romance (which he wrote but didn't direct) is fantastic however. Probably the best blind buy I ever made.

I actually never seen True Romance. I'll check it out though.

Pretty much anything that's in b&w and/or fullscreen aspect ratio, which is a lot of older films.

Are you serious?

I hope you're just being sarcastic, because some of the best movies ever made are in B&W or Fullscreen OAR.

Anybody with 40,000 posts over 8 years at a movie forum has to be joking about that.

I ALWAYS love Groucho's post. ALWAYS.

lol

I agree with Groucho just with the older films comments. I don't mind black & white or full screen though.

As much as I love Arsenic & Old Lace, Freaks, Metropolis, and Blackboard Jungle, they ain't as rewatchable as anything made post-1960s.

I'll take Point Break over Casablanca any day...

Don't forget silent .... or maybe that was intentionally left off .....

I was going to accuse you of either being insincere or of not having seen much of the post-1960s garbage out there, but given your affinity for Point Break and after a quick glance at your collection, it seems you have, so all I can say is there's no accounting for taste.




There's really not that many silent films in color and widescreen, though there probably should be.

Rocky. Titanic. Citizen Kane.

Mostly because I've heard about the endings already.

= J

YAKUZA BENGOSHI,
so...which old films do I have to see?

What, that the ship sinks?

Blade Runner was on my list...but I saw that in January and I realized I had been missing out.

As for Pulp Fiction being classic or not, I guess it comes down to whether or not you have seen the films that inspired it. Majority of the stuff I watch is in that vain, so for me yes it has classic status. But that doesn't mean that the "original classics" get any disrespect from me. As far as I am concerned, Citizen Kane is the best ever made, Dr. Strangelove is the funniest, and King Kong is the best fantasy film.

There's no old films you have to see, and I doubt that there's any that will change your mind. If you find 300 more enjoyable/rewatchable than Metropolis, you're just approaching film with a completely different expectation that than I am. Nonetheless, here's a few other pre-1960 feature-length fiction films I personally think great, though this list is far from exhaustive:

Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928)

Ordet (Dreyer, 1955)

Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)

L'Atlante (Vigo, 1934)

Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Wiene, 1920)

Ace in the Hole (Wilder, 1951)

Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922)

Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)

Apu Trilogy (Ray, 1955, 1957, 1959)

Ivan the Terrible Parts 1 & 2 (Eisenstein, 1945, 1958)

La Strada (Fellini, 1954)

Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein, 1938)

Day of Wrath (Dreyer, 1943)

Last Laugh (Murnau, 1924)

Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin, 1947)

M (Lang, 1931)

Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929)

Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)

Sunrise (Murnau, 1927)

Journey to Italy (Rossellini, 1953)

Umberto D (De Sica, 1952)

Children of Paradise (Carne, 1945)

Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950)

The General (Keaton, 1927)

Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)

Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)

Wooden Crosses (Bernard, 1932)

Wages of Fear (Clouzot, 1953)

Silence de la Mar (Melville, 1949)

Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950)

Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944)

Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)

I like how it's near the top of your list.
I believe Billy Wilder is the only director who has two movies in my top twenty (the other being Sunset Blvd.)

Titanic. I've seen large chunks of it, but I have no desire to sit and watch the entire thing.

Other than that I'm open to watching just about anything, unless it stars Whoopi Goldberg. If certain films are considered "classic" I want to watch them to see why.

There are a number of classics I haven't seen (most pre-1970), but I can't say it's because I don't have a desire to see them...more of a time thing than anything else.

I will say many older films are "harder" to watch just because of the acting/pacing standards that existed "back in the day". Many older films feel much more like watching a stage production (both visually, and the way the actors do their dialogue), than the "realism" modern audiences are used to.

For example, Gone With The Wind is hard for me to sit through because it plays so "theatrical".