Here are the movies from the 80s and 90s that made me who I am. How does having a shared movie canon strengthen culture? How does declaring your odd tastes help you find your friends?
Now, as to your other questions, I've ended up being very scattershot about this, and I'm not convinced it's really worth reading all this, but I hope it's at least entertaining and perhaps insightful in certain respects. So, first, how does having a shared canon of anything help culture? Do you mean culture in the sense of all the best that has been thought and said, or in the sense of shared ways of thought and behavior? These are usually distinguished as, say, the literary and anthropological senses, but we can consider them together. Humans live in an essentially mental world by the very fact of possessing language and a society, and art is a basic part of how we make sense of our world. I could go on and on about that, basically regurgitating Huizinga and Popper and Langer, who most influenced me in that, but instead I'll just say everyone has their own world and their own reactions to things in the/that world (there is an ineluctable duality there). Canons can thus be nothing more, really, than suggestions (very strong suggestions informed by wide and deep experience, one hopes) of what best expresses artists' views of the world and what best helps a person to better understand their experience of the/their world, hence the literary sense, but people will like what they like and react strongly to (though hopefully informed by wide and deep experience), and eventually they'll find like-minded fellows, hence the anthropological sense. You could quote C.S. Lewis here, but as I much prefer A.S. Byatt, I'll quote her:
I worked my way through Dickens and Sir Walter Scott and Stevenson and Jane Austen when I was little. Then I read them again when I was older and was surprised how different they appeared! To me it seemed self-evident and exciting that one would live much more intensely in these complicated worlds of adventure and excitement and passion than one would in one’s daily life of getting up and having one’s little breakfast and being trotted off to one’s school where you were frightened of the other kids in the playground. It seemed to me that that was normal, but now I think that now perhaps it isn’t...And people who didn’t [have that childhood] become rather hostile to people who did because they feel that people who did had something rich. They try to say, “You weren’t spontaneous, you weren’t human, you only lived in your head and didn’t have any relationships.” That is sometimes true and sometimes not. And anyway, it often makes for better relationships when you’re older because you actually learn a lot about life from books. You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents. https://www.salon.com/1996/06/17/interview_10/
In my own experience, much of what was treated as canonical around me growing up just wasn't very good by my lights. Some of that was simply immaturity of experience and a lack of better things, but some of it was taste. For example, I had very little interest in music growing up--that was in Texas in the 70s, when all you had to listen to in the arid lands on five-hour drives to Houston was the arid world of Top 40 pop from the worst period in human history for Top 40 pop (like the Malign Trinity of Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, and B.J. Thomas, shudder shudder and heaven forfend) or 70s country, the absolute worst time in human history for that...arid, impoverished genre. But enough of my prejudices of the time. My friends would rave about that, or even the Beatles, and I'd just have to shrug--didn't interest me much, didn't offend me either, just left me bored. Then I discovered classical music when I was almost 15, and the world changed--eventually it led me to fall in love with literature, which had also left me pretty unmoved earlier.
Now, my tastes are extremely idiosyncratic and also extremely broad, so I'm not the best to answer the last question, perhaps, but I rarely connect with people over movie tastes, often not even over musical tastes, and I generally bounce hard off people who consider artistic tastes extremely important in judging people. For instance, and I have to laugh at all of these because I wasn't offended or even disappointed, just a/be-mused, I have been called irredeemably neurotic because I like Mahler (especially his most bizarre pieces like the 7th Symphony, precisely because they are deeply neurotic in esthetically fascinating ways), or a tasteless buffoon because I like Mahler and Bruckner (that was the judgment of Douglas Hofstadter when he interrupted me at a party to ruin a joke I was making), or a benighted fellow because I liked The Way of All Flesh and Lord Jim (two different professors--I like both novels rather less now, but I do still like them), or a backwoods reactionary with facile tastes because I love Vaughan Williams and Fauré, or the possessor of pedestrian tastes because I love Arnold Bax's symphonies (I freely admit they ARE a matter of taste, but I discovered them at just the right time), or actually a wicked threat to sound musical culture because people like me and my boss at the used bookstore I worked at in grad school have led the concert halls and recording companies to keep Shostakovich's string quartets alive when they should be buried and forgotten unmourned (to that one I simply bowed and said "Glad to be of service!"--but as he was a customer, we did change the CD we were playing). I've never had reactions like those to my movie tastes (oddly enough, to my choice of specialization when I was a physics major, yes, but movies, no), so maybe that's another sign that a canon of movies is less important for a shared culture? :) More likely it just means I'm not a typical cinephile and have missed associating with them that are, for better and for worse. The point of this nattering? Not sure, but if the root of art (and of so much human culture) is a sense of play (Huizinga), then it's very serious play indeed for many people.
But yes, movies as a mass art form do contribute something to a shared culture, or at least provide cultural enrichment, a variety of views of the world. Not in the same way as literature or music, or even stage drama, but it's a different genre, so of course. (And to revisit my comments above, I still dislike Manilow and ignore Thomas; Diamond I have found to be a good songwriter, just over-orchestrated to a fare-thee-well in his heyday--listen to Johnny Cash's performance of "Solitary Man" with Diamond and you'll hear it's a song with solid bones to it. As for the Beatles, like Simon and Garfunkel and several others I grew up with, I like them okay now that I no longer expect them to be greater than they are, and while I prefer their deeper cuts, they were good at what they did; it's just that treacle like "Bridge over Troubled Water" or "Let it Be" [I find the lyrics almost insipid, and find that rock music turns to syrup when it tries to be slow and weighty--and my wife has told me that because I hate ABBA's "I Have a Dream" I have no soul, to which I can only say, that might well be true, but neither does that song] has been overplayed to saturation, while songs like "I'm Only Sleeping" and "Patterns" with some innovative stuff to them are too little played. As for 70s country, meh, I still abominate it.)
I actually gave a lot of thought to this question a few months ago when someone asked what our most influential ten or so films were, and I realized that even though I'm much more in love with music and literature, I have a surprisingly large number of films that are part and parcel of me, and so, with the necessary periodization :), here goes. (I've probably forgotten a couple.)
My father worked as a night clerk at a video store that specialized in foreign, classic, and cult films starting in the mid-80s on the grounds that that way he'd be paid to watch them instead of paying for them, so a lot of my tastes were influenced by that. There were a few influential movies for me before the mid-80s, and then I didn't watch almost anything from about 1991 until 2005 because I was working and poor, then in college and the beginning of grad school; and then I went through about a decade watching films on DVD before not watching anything again because I moved to Mongolia. So, from the early period, there are several Marx Brothers movies, especially A Night at the Opera (my father would make a big vat of potato soup and some garlic bread whenever PBS had a Marx Brothers marathon and we'd watch them in a carbohydrate-fueled haze); several Ealing Studio comedies shown on PBS (especially I'm All Right, Jack; The Man in the White Suit; Too Many Crooks; and The Lavender Hill Mob); Monty Python and the Holy Grail; and, keeping uneasy company with all that, A Man for All Seasons. (I was much more influenced by TV before high school, especially the original Star Trek, The Fugitive, Perry Mason, Blake's 7, and many British comedies, which we had a fine run of in Fort Worth because the Dallas PBS station had a special relationship with the Beeb, having been the first in the country to show Monty Python.)
In the next period, that's when I saw many of the films that have had an impact on me, many of them ones my father showed me, some from the great wave of 80s films in the theater. From my father's job: Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, The Bad Sleep Well, and not by Kurosawa, the 1962 version of Chushingura (simply one of the most beautifully filmed films I've seen); Sullivan's Travels, The Lady Eve, and The Palm Beach Story; Liana, Matewan, and Brother from Another Planet; Choose Me; Pascali's Island; The Assault (a little-known Dutch film); Blood Simple (I have since become a great fan of Miller's Crossing, The Man Who Wasn't There, A Serious Man, and The Big Lebowski, but they were all in the future); some of Eric Rohmer's earliest films, especially Genou de Claire and Ma nuit chez Maud, though it was only later my favorites of his became available (Pauline à la plage, Rayon vert, the Four Seasons series, and Triple Agent); Jules et Jim; and several others. (I also saw The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire, which were at most negatively influential in that I have avoided Buñuel like the plague since.) Worth special mention is Beat the Devil, with Bogart, Lorre, and many others, but most important for me because it had Gina Lollobrigida, who gave me my never-ending crush on Italian bombshells.
And ones I saw in the theater or on my own that impacted me: Aliens (despite the guff you sometimes hear about others existing, it is a shame they made only one sequel to Alien; Aliens was so good it makes you wonder what they would have done if they'd made another sequel!), the Back to the Future Trilogy (I consider them one big production), Ghostbusters (I was one of the few who liked the sequel, but I do NOT rank it here), Beetlejuice, Die Hard, Big, Witness, and The Thing. A subset of films in this category would be ones I watched compulsively for comfort and vicious satire after dropping out of college: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover; Roxanne; Heathers; Edward Scissorhands; Brazil; Jabberwocky; UHF; F/X; Life of Brian; Romancing the Stone; Hollywood Shuffle; The Coca-Cola Kid; and several others. After I went back to college at Rice, I saw a couple of movies through a film society there, of which none made an impression on me, and several Korean films (as part of my studies at Rice, and then a couple I saw when I studied in Seoul) that did: The Age of Success, I Wish for What is Forbidden to Me, and The Gingko Tree Bed, all three still favorites, the second especially. (While I took almost all the literature classes my classical Chinese teacher taught, I did not take her class on 20th century Chinese film, which I still regret. On the other hand, my Mandarin teacher arranged for us to see Eat Drink Man Woman before its US release because one of Ang Lee's nieces or such was in our class. The Wedding Banquet was better, but it's not at all bad.) I also saw a couple of films in grad school through a film society there, of which Dark City remains one of my favorites, and The Sixth Sense the most famous. (They also showed Signs, which ended any affection I had for M. Night Shyamalamadingdong's films.) Kind of in the same group is a later Korean film, Sunny, which has the best and funniest fight scenes in any chick flick EVAH. (The director made it as a tribute to his mother, who was in a girl gang in the 80s.)
Then there's a few films I watched in grad school at IU for language classes, especially Russian, some of which are still favorites: The Irony of Fate, The Caucasian Hostage (usually called Kidnapping Caucasian Style in the US), and The Diamond Arm for speaking class, and The Lady and the Lapdog (a famous classic film of the Chekhov story)--a great favorite of mine, both story and film--and the 1987 film of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (though the Russian film uses the original title of Christie's novel, which I won't repeat here), which is the best film of the novel. For advanced Mandarin we saw In the Heat of the Sun, the film of a major work of "Hoodlum Literature," as it's called, which was an interesting experience (for example, all the other students in class were Chinese-Americans who didn't know all the Russian culture in the film, so I got to sing "Moscow Nights" in Russian for them after it came up in the film), one I'm glad I saw but don't want to see again.
Finally, there's the films my best friends and I watched, usually with lots and lots of scotch in the process, in the early 2000s to make the doldrums of grad school more tolerable--Pleasantville, America's Sweethearts, Truman Show, Mississippi Masala, Bride and Prejudice, The Score, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Vanilla Sky, Groundhog Day, and a couple others. (Some of these I had seen earlier but only really connected with then.) Also, I once teased a Canadian friend that I had finally seen that classic of Canadian culture, Strange Brew. She wrote back, "At least learn something about my culture before you make fun of it!" and included a list of movies I had to watch in penance, so I got the better of that joke. New Waterford Girl is my favorite of them, very very funny; Jésus de Montréal and La chute de l'empire américain are both excellent, the former simply great; and the others included some good films as well, but none influential like those three.
Also, of your lists, I have seen 28 of the first 50, 17 of the second 25, and 16 of the third 25. Some movies that might make the list, might not, if I remembered them better: The Omega Man, which I saw in the drive-in theater with my parents as a wee one, and which I liked a lot when I saw it twice much later; The Last Unicorn, which is uneven and nowhere as great as the book; Femme Fatale (the even less famous one by that name, with Colin Firth, Billy Zane, and his sister Lisa Zane, which I mostly remember for some great lines by Billy Zane--he is an artist, and when Firth visits him, a model comes in nude and puts a paper bag over her face as he begins to paint her. Zane says, "It represents the objectification and obscuring of women's personality in a capitalist society" or some such boiler-plate guff. Then after a few seconds, Firth says, "Still can't paint faces?" He replies, "Still can't paint faces."); Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive (I watched both in great fascination several times, but I'm still not sure how much I actually LIKE them); Goodfellas and The Departed (probably make the list, but I haven't seen either in forever); and some of my favorite westerns (the original 3:10 to Yuma, The Big Country, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and, of course, Blazing Saddles).
Kind of amazed we grew up in the same household and don’t have much overlap!
Films of fixed eras don’t feel so “formative” to me and maybe some of it has to do with the fact that the first film that awakened my conscious film consumption was Lawrence of Arabia with some accompanying commentary by Martin Scorsese. The way I’ve watched films is very “before” and “after” that no matter the era the film was first released.
Because of dad, I think the most formative movies of all time for me were Lawrence of Arabia, West Side Story, and The Poseidon Adventure. But Lawrence of Arabia by far has influenced me more than anything. When I got to college there was a pop-up table selling CDs and I bought the Lawrence of Arabia soundtrack. I listened to Gregorian chant and that movie soundtrack as my study background music. 🎼 🎶
We have a lot of overlap with your top 50. My husband and I have been selecting movies from that era to share with our children. They are in a phase where they are excited to watch “new” movies, but we are not usually excited about what is out there now, so we show them these. A few years ago we took our boys to see The Wrath of Khan in the theater. They re-released it for the 40th anniversary. I even bought us special shirts. They recently watched Galaxy Quest and loved it.
Additional movies from this era that we have watched lately:
Flight of the Navigator
Hook
The Sandlot (one of my husband’s picks)
Flight of Dragons (it doesn’t quite live up to my memories of it, but still fun)
The Dark Crystal was a very formative movie for me. I have always been drawn to puppetry with depth. (Part of why I love The Lion King musical so much.) It was one of the first DVDs I purchased and I have a beautiful movie book that showcases the art.
That is so awesome that you brought your kids to see Khan in the theater for the anniversary. I would love to see this on the big screen again! And I am glad that we have all this overlap. Great minds, as they say... LOL
My husband and I have discussed the power of shared movies a lot. One thing streaming and DVDs have helped with is making it easier to make those connections with other generations. I grew up watching movies that my parents liked, but it was at the whim of the tv station. With our kids we can make an event out of it: make some popcorn, cuddle on the couch, and enjoy these movies and shows together. It gives us a similar frame of reference. I like to sprinkle in older movies too. My daughter often asks if the movie will be in black and white when we announce a movie night. As a result, she thinks anything in color is really new.
This made me wish for a more shared culture. I've seen 78 of the movies on your list and know many of the other ones osmotically. And my memories are quite positive.
Here are some that I thought of that didn't make your list and that aren't blockbuster franchise stuff (at least not in an Indiana Jones way): Airplane, Gandhi, My Cousin Vinny, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Blues Brothers, When Harry Met Sally, Coming to America, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Untouchables, Howard's End, Eight Men Out, The Right Stuff, Christmas Vacation, Witness, Midnight Run, Out of Africa, First Blood, Lethal Weapon, Bull Durham, Stripes, Major League, Fletch, and Big.
Coincidentally, I’ve been keeping a list too, mostly 80s movies, and have been rewatching them to see how they hold up. Maybe I’ll try a larger list as you’ve done—so interesting to see which movies affect us more, and the lists differ!
No one seems to have tried to answer your question: “How does having a shared movie canon strengthen culture?” Some thoughts:
“Culture” is too nebulous for me. It’s the water we swim in, the air we breathe, constantly moving, shifting, mutating for countless, unaccountable reasons. In that sense, I don’t know what “strengthen” would mean. It almost feels like it has a conservative connotation, connected to the simultaneously nostalgic and childlike idea of stopping time, or even reversing it.
What about: Does a shared movie canon make people more civil, empathetic? Probably not. Better consumers? Probably. Provide something that people have in common, like rooting for the same sports team, or listening to the same band, or liking the same food? Yeah, sure, but not sure why that’s necessarily desirable. Don’t a lot of interesting developments occur because of ideas and innovations coming in from _outside_? Like the way Shakespeare borrowed stories from outside of England. Or iambic pentameter coming into English poetry from Italy.
Or due to a confluence of trends, or technological developments, or even coincidences. So African-American music + electric guitar + John meeting Paul = Beatles. Or political refugees + international cast + WWII = Casablanca.
No Moonstruck (1987)? This was another pandemic movie for me to catch up to where everyone else already seemed to be. And as with Julia Roberts, I have to say that Cher is pretty good.
I watched Moonstruck, and mostly because Olympia Dukakis was in it and I lived in MA where our Governor Dukakis had run for president. I liked the movie, but perhaps I was not of an age at the time when I could appreciate it. I’d probably like it more now if I rewatched it.
I'm envious that you have your first-time viewing of Pretty Woman ahead of you! That said, I know how paralysing it can be not to have seen stuff it feels like everyone else has seen. Almost turns the movie into homework. I only got around to The Godfather last year! (Turns out, really great.)
Oh, the Godfather is epic. And yes, it shall be my first time watching Pretty Woman. Gotta block off some time this week, hopefully. There’s always another movie to watch, another book you haven’t read. It never ends.
That's about half of them. I'm not sure I'd have put all of these on my list had I not been looking at yours, but once you reminded me of their existence I thought: Oh yeah, that one!
I've seen almost all of the movies on your list and many of them had an impact at the time, but somehow they don't feel as foundational. Though they may in fact have had a greater impact than I give them credit for, they aren't as fascinating to me. They don't make me light up with excitement for one reason or another.
I'm going to ponder some more before posting my own list of favorites.
You know, on another day this list might look a little different. I forgot Mad max and Romeo + Juliet, which definitely should at least go in the latter half.
Long comment incoming, sorry! But since your question (and Steve's) is "what movies helped shape my cultural sensitives," I tried to think quite seriously about my answer and came up with this too long list:
Ethan, this is exactly what I was hoping for, so don’t apologize! I purposely kept myself to only two decades or else the list would have been enormous. Your list has so many favorites!
The Neverending Story would be towards the top of my list. I was late to getting to The Princess Bride, but now I love it and it is one of my kids' favorites.
This also made me realize how much of my childhood was formed just by Disney movies...and I'm not sure how I feel about that...
There’s nothing wrong with having lots of Disney from that era (you’re also a tad younger than I am which will affect lists). I had a Princess Bride poster over my bed in college and my wardrobe at the time could have been called “perpetual renaissance festival” 😂 Much love for that movie!
I've seen at most 25% of your list. I've seen probably three times as many films from 1930-1980 than from 1980 to now. More black and white than color films. I was struck by the absence of films from before your youth. We have very little in common! Which is neither good nor bad, I think. But like the music I write, sing, and play, I want to know the whole history of any art form I love. I mean, you read poetry from before your birth, right?
Oh, I purposely didn’t include before 1980. But I certainly was influenced by them, like Lawrence of Arabia, West Side Story, Chinatown, The Poseidon Adventure, Dr. Zhivago, and many many more.
Pre-color Hitchcock - especially Rebecca, Suspicion, and Notorious (I have a poem which uses that film to characterize a personal relationship) are in a different category from the great 50s color ones Rear WIndow, North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, and Vertigo, some of which I saw in the theater when they were released. But both periods are big favorites of mine. I study the careers of favorite directors, and Hitch is one.
Rope only appears to be shot in one take. The cameras of the time could load seven or eight minutes of film, so Hitchcock spliced together takes that long. He would dolly the camera behind a column every seven minutes, and splice at that point. It’s technically well done, and unobtrusive unless you’re looking for it. But films adapted from plays are always in danger of being set-bound, and benefit from variety – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a good example, where they added a scene where the characters go out to a diner to break up the indoor effect.
I used to think I had special tastes in movies, but during the pandemic I did a lot of catch-up viewing of movies, which included several Julia Roberts movies. 1. She’s pretty good. 2. My tastes are probably not that special. 3. You should probably watch Pretty Woman.
I totally have to see Pretty Woman. And I think I probably have more in common with other people than I think, although I’m not sure how many people love Something Wicked… as much as I do.
Now, as to your other questions, I've ended up being very scattershot about this, and I'm not convinced it's really worth reading all this, but I hope it's at least entertaining and perhaps insightful in certain respects. So, first, how does having a shared canon of anything help culture? Do you mean culture in the sense of all the best that has been thought and said, or in the sense of shared ways of thought and behavior? These are usually distinguished as, say, the literary and anthropological senses, but we can consider them together. Humans live in an essentially mental world by the very fact of possessing language and a society, and art is a basic part of how we make sense of our world. I could go on and on about that, basically regurgitating Huizinga and Popper and Langer, who most influenced me in that, but instead I'll just say everyone has their own world and their own reactions to things in the/that world (there is an ineluctable duality there). Canons can thus be nothing more, really, than suggestions (very strong suggestions informed by wide and deep experience, one hopes) of what best expresses artists' views of the world and what best helps a person to better understand their experience of the/their world, hence the literary sense, but people will like what they like and react strongly to (though hopefully informed by wide and deep experience), and eventually they'll find like-minded fellows, hence the anthropological sense. You could quote C.S. Lewis here, but as I much prefer A.S. Byatt, I'll quote her:
I worked my way through Dickens and Sir Walter Scott and Stevenson and Jane Austen when I was little. Then I read them again when I was older and was surprised how different they appeared! To me it seemed self-evident and exciting that one would live much more intensely in these complicated worlds of adventure and excitement and passion than one would in one’s daily life of getting up and having one’s little breakfast and being trotted off to one’s school where you were frightened of the other kids in the playground. It seemed to me that that was normal, but now I think that now perhaps it isn’t...And people who didn’t [have that childhood] become rather hostile to people who did because they feel that people who did had something rich. They try to say, “You weren’t spontaneous, you weren’t human, you only lived in your head and didn’t have any relationships.” That is sometimes true and sometimes not. And anyway, it often makes for better relationships when you’re older because you actually learn a lot about life from books. You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents. https://www.salon.com/1996/06/17/interview_10/
In my own experience, much of what was treated as canonical around me growing up just wasn't very good by my lights. Some of that was simply immaturity of experience and a lack of better things, but some of it was taste. For example, I had very little interest in music growing up--that was in Texas in the 70s, when all you had to listen to in the arid lands on five-hour drives to Houston was the arid world of Top 40 pop from the worst period in human history for Top 40 pop (like the Malign Trinity of Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, and B.J. Thomas, shudder shudder and heaven forfend) or 70s country, the absolute worst time in human history for that...arid, impoverished genre. But enough of my prejudices of the time. My friends would rave about that, or even the Beatles, and I'd just have to shrug--didn't interest me much, didn't offend me either, just left me bored. Then I discovered classical music when I was almost 15, and the world changed--eventually it led me to fall in love with literature, which had also left me pretty unmoved earlier.
Now, my tastes are extremely idiosyncratic and also extremely broad, so I'm not the best to answer the last question, perhaps, but I rarely connect with people over movie tastes, often not even over musical tastes, and I generally bounce hard off people who consider artistic tastes extremely important in judging people. For instance, and I have to laugh at all of these because I wasn't offended or even disappointed, just a/be-mused, I have been called irredeemably neurotic because I like Mahler (especially his most bizarre pieces like the 7th Symphony, precisely because they are deeply neurotic in esthetically fascinating ways), or a tasteless buffoon because I like Mahler and Bruckner (that was the judgment of Douglas Hofstadter when he interrupted me at a party to ruin a joke I was making), or a benighted fellow because I liked The Way of All Flesh and Lord Jim (two different professors--I like both novels rather less now, but I do still like them), or a backwoods reactionary with facile tastes because I love Vaughan Williams and Fauré, or the possessor of pedestrian tastes because I love Arnold Bax's symphonies (I freely admit they ARE a matter of taste, but I discovered them at just the right time), or actually a wicked threat to sound musical culture because people like me and my boss at the used bookstore I worked at in grad school have led the concert halls and recording companies to keep Shostakovich's string quartets alive when they should be buried and forgotten unmourned (to that one I simply bowed and said "Glad to be of service!"--but as he was a customer, we did change the CD we were playing). I've never had reactions like those to my movie tastes (oddly enough, to my choice of specialization when I was a physics major, yes, but movies, no), so maybe that's another sign that a canon of movies is less important for a shared culture? :) More likely it just means I'm not a typical cinephile and have missed associating with them that are, for better and for worse. The point of this nattering? Not sure, but if the root of art (and of so much human culture) is a sense of play (Huizinga), then it's very serious play indeed for many people.
But yes, movies as a mass art form do contribute something to a shared culture, or at least provide cultural enrichment, a variety of views of the world. Not in the same way as literature or music, or even stage drama, but it's a different genre, so of course. (And to revisit my comments above, I still dislike Manilow and ignore Thomas; Diamond I have found to be a good songwriter, just over-orchestrated to a fare-thee-well in his heyday--listen to Johnny Cash's performance of "Solitary Man" with Diamond and you'll hear it's a song with solid bones to it. As for the Beatles, like Simon and Garfunkel and several others I grew up with, I like them okay now that I no longer expect them to be greater than they are, and while I prefer their deeper cuts, they were good at what they did; it's just that treacle like "Bridge over Troubled Water" or "Let it Be" [I find the lyrics almost insipid, and find that rock music turns to syrup when it tries to be slow and weighty--and my wife has told me that because I hate ABBA's "I Have a Dream" I have no soul, to which I can only say, that might well be true, but neither does that song] has been overplayed to saturation, while songs like "I'm Only Sleeping" and "Patterns" with some innovative stuff to them are too little played. As for 70s country, meh, I still abominate it.)
I actually gave a lot of thought to this question a few months ago when someone asked what our most influential ten or so films were, and I realized that even though I'm much more in love with music and literature, I have a surprisingly large number of films that are part and parcel of me, and so, with the necessary periodization :), here goes. (I've probably forgotten a couple.)
My father worked as a night clerk at a video store that specialized in foreign, classic, and cult films starting in the mid-80s on the grounds that that way he'd be paid to watch them instead of paying for them, so a lot of my tastes were influenced by that. There were a few influential movies for me before the mid-80s, and then I didn't watch almost anything from about 1991 until 2005 because I was working and poor, then in college and the beginning of grad school; and then I went through about a decade watching films on DVD before not watching anything again because I moved to Mongolia. So, from the early period, there are several Marx Brothers movies, especially A Night at the Opera (my father would make a big vat of potato soup and some garlic bread whenever PBS had a Marx Brothers marathon and we'd watch them in a carbohydrate-fueled haze); several Ealing Studio comedies shown on PBS (especially I'm All Right, Jack; The Man in the White Suit; Too Many Crooks; and The Lavender Hill Mob); Monty Python and the Holy Grail; and, keeping uneasy company with all that, A Man for All Seasons. (I was much more influenced by TV before high school, especially the original Star Trek, The Fugitive, Perry Mason, Blake's 7, and many British comedies, which we had a fine run of in Fort Worth because the Dallas PBS station had a special relationship with the Beeb, having been the first in the country to show Monty Python.)
In the next period, that's when I saw many of the films that have had an impact on me, many of them ones my father showed me, some from the great wave of 80s films in the theater. From my father's job: Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, The Bad Sleep Well, and not by Kurosawa, the 1962 version of Chushingura (simply one of the most beautifully filmed films I've seen); Sullivan's Travels, The Lady Eve, and The Palm Beach Story; Liana, Matewan, and Brother from Another Planet; Choose Me; Pascali's Island; The Assault (a little-known Dutch film); Blood Simple (I have since become a great fan of Miller's Crossing, The Man Who Wasn't There, A Serious Man, and The Big Lebowski, but they were all in the future); some of Eric Rohmer's earliest films, especially Genou de Claire and Ma nuit chez Maud, though it was only later my favorites of his became available (Pauline à la plage, Rayon vert, the Four Seasons series, and Triple Agent); Jules et Jim; and several others. (I also saw The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire, which were at most negatively influential in that I have avoided Buñuel like the plague since.) Worth special mention is Beat the Devil, with Bogart, Lorre, and many others, but most important for me because it had Gina Lollobrigida, who gave me my never-ending crush on Italian bombshells.
And ones I saw in the theater or on my own that impacted me: Aliens (despite the guff you sometimes hear about others existing, it is a shame they made only one sequel to Alien; Aliens was so good it makes you wonder what they would have done if they'd made another sequel!), the Back to the Future Trilogy (I consider them one big production), Ghostbusters (I was one of the few who liked the sequel, but I do NOT rank it here), Beetlejuice, Die Hard, Big, Witness, and The Thing. A subset of films in this category would be ones I watched compulsively for comfort and vicious satire after dropping out of college: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover; Roxanne; Heathers; Edward Scissorhands; Brazil; Jabberwocky; UHF; F/X; Life of Brian; Romancing the Stone; Hollywood Shuffle; The Coca-Cola Kid; and several others. After I went back to college at Rice, I saw a couple of movies through a film society there, of which none made an impression on me, and several Korean films (as part of my studies at Rice, and then a couple I saw when I studied in Seoul) that did: The Age of Success, I Wish for What is Forbidden to Me, and The Gingko Tree Bed, all three still favorites, the second especially. (While I took almost all the literature classes my classical Chinese teacher taught, I did not take her class on 20th century Chinese film, which I still regret. On the other hand, my Mandarin teacher arranged for us to see Eat Drink Man Woman before its US release because one of Ang Lee's nieces or such was in our class. The Wedding Banquet was better, but it's not at all bad.) I also saw a couple of films in grad school through a film society there, of which Dark City remains one of my favorites, and The Sixth Sense the most famous. (They also showed Signs, which ended any affection I had for M. Night Shyamalamadingdong's films.) Kind of in the same group is a later Korean film, Sunny, which has the best and funniest fight scenes in any chick flick EVAH. (The director made it as a tribute to his mother, who was in a girl gang in the 80s.)
Then there's a few films I watched in grad school at IU for language classes, especially Russian, some of which are still favorites: The Irony of Fate, The Caucasian Hostage (usually called Kidnapping Caucasian Style in the US), and The Diamond Arm for speaking class, and The Lady and the Lapdog (a famous classic film of the Chekhov story)--a great favorite of mine, both story and film--and the 1987 film of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (though the Russian film uses the original title of Christie's novel, which I won't repeat here), which is the best film of the novel. For advanced Mandarin we saw In the Heat of the Sun, the film of a major work of "Hoodlum Literature," as it's called, which was an interesting experience (for example, all the other students in class were Chinese-Americans who didn't know all the Russian culture in the film, so I got to sing "Moscow Nights" in Russian for them after it came up in the film), one I'm glad I saw but don't want to see again.
Finally, there's the films my best friends and I watched, usually with lots and lots of scotch in the process, in the early 2000s to make the doldrums of grad school more tolerable--Pleasantville, America's Sweethearts, Truman Show, Mississippi Masala, Bride and Prejudice, The Score, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Vanilla Sky, Groundhog Day, and a couple others. (Some of these I had seen earlier but only really connected with then.) Also, I once teased a Canadian friend that I had finally seen that classic of Canadian culture, Strange Brew. She wrote back, "At least learn something about my culture before you make fun of it!" and included a list of movies I had to watch in penance, so I got the better of that joke. New Waterford Girl is my favorite of them, very very funny; Jésus de Montréal and La chute de l'empire américain are both excellent, the former simply great; and the others included some good films as well, but none influential like those three.
Also, of your lists, I have seen 28 of the first 50, 17 of the second 25, and 16 of the third 25. Some movies that might make the list, might not, if I remembered them better: The Omega Man, which I saw in the drive-in theater with my parents as a wee one, and which I liked a lot when I saw it twice much later; The Last Unicorn, which is uneven and nowhere as great as the book; Femme Fatale (the even less famous one by that name, with Colin Firth, Billy Zane, and his sister Lisa Zane, which I mostly remember for some great lines by Billy Zane--he is an artist, and when Firth visits him, a model comes in nude and puts a paper bag over her face as he begins to paint her. Zane says, "It represents the objectification and obscuring of women's personality in a capitalist society" or some such boiler-plate guff. Then after a few seconds, Firth says, "Still can't paint faces?" He replies, "Still can't paint faces."); Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive (I watched both in great fascination several times, but I'm still not sure how much I actually LIKE them); Goodfellas and The Departed (probably make the list, but I haven't seen either in forever); and some of my favorite westerns (the original 3:10 to Yuma, The Big Country, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and, of course, Blazing Saddles).
Kind of amazed we grew up in the same household and don’t have much overlap!
Films of fixed eras don’t feel so “formative” to me and maybe some of it has to do with the fact that the first film that awakened my conscious film consumption was Lawrence of Arabia with some accompanying commentary by Martin Scorsese. The way I’ve watched films is very “before” and “after” that no matter the era the film was first released.
Because of dad, I think the most formative movies of all time for me were Lawrence of Arabia, West Side Story, and The Poseidon Adventure. But Lawrence of Arabia by far has influenced me more than anything. When I got to college there was a pop-up table selling CDs and I bought the Lawrence of Arabia soundtrack. I listened to Gregorian chant and that movie soundtrack as my study background music. 🎼 🎶
We have a lot of overlap with your top 50. My husband and I have been selecting movies from that era to share with our children. They are in a phase where they are excited to watch “new” movies, but we are not usually excited about what is out there now, so we show them these. A few years ago we took our boys to see The Wrath of Khan in the theater. They re-released it for the 40th anniversary. I even bought us special shirts. They recently watched Galaxy Quest and loved it.
Additional movies from this era that we have watched lately:
Flight of the Navigator
Hook
The Sandlot (one of my husband’s picks)
Flight of Dragons (it doesn’t quite live up to my memories of it, but still fun)
The Dark Crystal was a very formative movie for me. I have always been drawn to puppetry with depth. (Part of why I love The Lion King musical so much.) It was one of the first DVDs I purchased and I have a beautiful movie book that showcases the art.
That is so awesome that you brought your kids to see Khan in the theater for the anniversary. I would love to see this on the big screen again! And I am glad that we have all this overlap. Great minds, as they say... LOL
My husband and I have discussed the power of shared movies a lot. One thing streaming and DVDs have helped with is making it easier to make those connections with other generations. I grew up watching movies that my parents liked, but it was at the whim of the tv station. With our kids we can make an event out of it: make some popcorn, cuddle on the couch, and enjoy these movies and shows together. It gives us a similar frame of reference. I like to sprinkle in older movies too. My daughter often asks if the movie will be in black and white when we announce a movie night. As a result, she thinks anything in color is really new.
Love that The Dark Crystal is on your list!
I loved that movie so much!
This made me wish for a more shared culture. I've seen 78 of the movies on your list and know many of the other ones osmotically. And my memories are quite positive.
Here are some that I thought of that didn't make your list and that aren't blockbuster franchise stuff (at least not in an Indiana Jones way): Airplane, Gandhi, My Cousin Vinny, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Blues Brothers, When Harry Met Sally, Coming to America, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Untouchables, Howard's End, Eight Men Out, The Right Stuff, Christmas Vacation, Witness, Midnight Run, Out of Africa, First Blood, Lethal Weapon, Bull Durham, Stripes, Major League, Fletch, and Big.
Coincidentally, I’ve been keeping a list too, mostly 80s movies, and have been rewatching them to see how they hold up. Maybe I’ll try a larger list as you’ve done—so interesting to see which movies affect us more, and the lists differ!
No one seems to have tried to answer your question: “How does having a shared movie canon strengthen culture?” Some thoughts:
“Culture” is too nebulous for me. It’s the water we swim in, the air we breathe, constantly moving, shifting, mutating for countless, unaccountable reasons. In that sense, I don’t know what “strengthen” would mean. It almost feels like it has a conservative connotation, connected to the simultaneously nostalgic and childlike idea of stopping time, or even reversing it.
What about: Does a shared movie canon make people more civil, empathetic? Probably not. Better consumers? Probably. Provide something that people have in common, like rooting for the same sports team, or listening to the same band, or liking the same food? Yeah, sure, but not sure why that’s necessarily desirable. Don’t a lot of interesting developments occur because of ideas and innovations coming in from _outside_? Like the way Shakespeare borrowed stories from outside of England. Or iambic pentameter coming into English poetry from Italy.
Or due to a confluence of trends, or technological developments, or even coincidences. So African-American music + electric guitar + John meeting Paul = Beatles. Or political refugees + international cast + WWII = Casablanca.
No Moonstruck (1987)? This was another pandemic movie for me to catch up to where everyone else already seemed to be. And as with Julia Roberts, I have to say that Cher is pretty good.
I watched Moonstruck, and mostly because Olympia Dukakis was in it and I lived in MA where our Governor Dukakis had run for president. I liked the movie, but perhaps I was not of an age at the time when I could appreciate it. I’d probably like it more now if I rewatched it.
I'm envious that you have your first-time viewing of Pretty Woman ahead of you! That said, I know how paralysing it can be not to have seen stuff it feels like everyone else has seen. Almost turns the movie into homework. I only got around to The Godfather last year! (Turns out, really great.)
Oh, the Godfather is epic. And yes, it shall be my first time watching Pretty Woman. Gotta block off some time this week, hopefully. There’s always another movie to watch, another book you haven’t read. It never ends.
The ones on your list that would probably be on mine:
[The Princess Bride](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_the%20princess) (1987)
[Ferris Bueller’s Day Off](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091042/?ref_=fn_all_ttl_1) (1986)
[The Neverending Story](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088323/?ref_=fn_all_ttl_1) (1984)
[The Last Unicorn](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084237/?ref_=fn_all_ttl_1) (1982)
. [The Breakfast Club](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088847/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_in_0_q_The%20Breakfast%20Club) (1985)
[Aliens](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090605/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_6_nm_2_in_0_q_aliens%20) (1986)
[The Lost Boys](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093437/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_The%20Lost%20Boys) (1987)
[Labyrinth](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091369/) (1986)
[Ladyhawke](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089457/) (1985)
[Ghostbusters](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_Ghostbusters) (1984)
[The Secret of NIHM](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084649/) (1982)
[Shawshank Redemption](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111161/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_0_in_0_q_Shawshank%20Redemption) (1994)
[Henry V](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097499/) (1989)
[The Goonies](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089218/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_in_0_q_The%20Goonies) (1985)
[Office Space](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/) (1999)
[Heathers](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097493/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_5_nm_3_in_0_q_Heathers) (1989)
[Bladerunner](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/) (1982)
[Wargames](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/?ref_=fn_all_ttl_1) (1983)
[Babette’s Feast](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092603/) (1987)
[Big Night](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115678/) (1996)
[Silence of the Lambs](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102926/) (1991)
[The Sixth Sense](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167404/) (1999)
[Beetlejuice](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094721/) (1988)
[Pulp Fiction](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/) (1994)
[Groundhog Day](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/) (1993)
[E.T the Extra-Terrestrial](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083866/) (1982)
[The Last Emperor](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093389/) (1987)
[Who Framed Roger Rabbit](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096438/) (1988)
[Dead Poets Society](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097165/) (1989)
[The Little Mermaid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_\(1989_film\)) (1989)
[Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096928/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_Bill%20and%20Ted%E2%80%99s%20Excellent%20Adven) (1989)
[Ghost](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099653/) (1990) - At the time I really loved this movie.
[Beauty and the Beast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_and_the_Beast_\(1991_film\)) (1991)
[Reservoir Dogs](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105236/) (1992)
[The Usual Suspects](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114814/) (1995)
[Fargo](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116282/) (1996)
[Trainspotting](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117951/) (1996)
[Amadeus](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086879/) (1984)
[Say Anything](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098258/) (1989)
[Good Will Hunting](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119217/) (1997)
[Saving Private Ryan](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120815/) (1998)
That's about half of them. I'm not sure I'd have put all of these on my list had I not been looking at yours, but once you reminded me of their existence I thought: Oh yeah, that one!
I've seen almost all of the movies on your list and many of them had an impact at the time, but somehow they don't feel as foundational. Though they may in fact have had a greater impact than I give them credit for, they aren't as fascinating to me. They don't make me light up with excitement for one reason or another.
I'm going to ponder some more before posting my own list of favorites.
You know, on another day this list might look a little different. I forgot Mad max and Romeo + Juliet, which definitely should at least go in the latter half.
Long comment incoming, sorry! But since your question (and Steve's) is "what movies helped shape my cultural sensitives," I tried to think quite seriously about my answer and came up with this too long list:
Favorite Movies That Made Me Who I Am Today
In Childhood
- The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)
- Amazing Grace (2006)
- Back to the Future (1985)
- Behind Enemy Lines (2001)
- Braveheart (1995)
- A Christmas Carol (1984)
- The Chronicles of Narnia (2005)
- Crossroads (1986)
- Davy Crockett (1955)
- Dumbo (1941)
- The Fox and the Hound (1981)
- Gettysburg (1993)
- Gran Torino (2008)
- Hondo (1953)
- The Incredibles (2004)
- It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
- Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
- The Jungle Book (1967)
- Jurassic Park (1993)
- The Lady Vanishes (1938)
- The Land Before Time (1988)
- The Lost World (1925)
- Luther (2003)
- The Man from Snowy River (1982)
- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
- The Mask of Zorro (1998)
- Master and Commander (2003)
- Michael Collins (1996)
- Moby Dick (1956)
- Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
- Next of Kin (1989)
- O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
- Old Yeller (1957)
- Open Range (2003)
- Over the Top (1987)
- The Prince of Egypt (1998)
- The Princess Bride (1987)
- The Quiet Man (1952)
- Rocky (1976)
- Saints and Soldiers (2003)
- Secondhand Lions (2003)
- The Seventh Seal (1957)
- Shenandoah (1965)
- Smoky and the Bandit (1977)
- Taken (2008)
- That Thing You Do! (1996)
- The 13 Warrior (1999)
- The War of the Worlds (1953)
- When Harry Met Sally (1989)
- Winchester '73 (1950)
In Adulthood
- Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
- Apocalypse Now (1979)
- Apocalypto (2006)
- Bend of the River (1952)
- Benediction (2021)
- Chariots of Fire (1981)
- The Cobbler (2014)
- Die Nibelungen (1924)
- Excalibur (1981)
- Fort Apache (1948)
- 48 Hrs. (1982)
- Geronimo (1993)
- Get Low (2009)
- La Grande Illusion (1937)
- Hero (2002)
- Intolerance (1916)
- Man of Steel (2013)
- Napoleon (1927)
- No Country for Old Men (2007)
- Pain and Gain (2013)
- Patton (1970)
- Ride the High Country (1962)
- Rio Bravo (1959)
- The Searchers (1956)
- Southern Comfort (1981)
- Spanglish (2004)
- The Sun Shines Bright (1953)
- The Three Colors trilogy (1993-1994)
- Vox Lux (2018)
- Wild Bill (1995)
I loved The Man from Snowy River when I was a kid!
Also on my list would be:
Master and Commander
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Prince of Egypt
Ethan, this is exactly what I was hoping for, so don’t apologize! I purposely kept myself to only two decades or else the list would have been enormous. Your list has so many favorites!
The Neverending Story would be towards the top of my list. I was late to getting to The Princess Bride, but now I love it and it is one of my kids' favorites.
This also made me realize how much of my childhood was formed just by Disney movies...and I'm not sure how I feel about that...
There’s nothing wrong with having lots of Disney from that era (you’re also a tad younger than I am which will affect lists). I had a Princess Bride poster over my bed in college and my wardrobe at the time could have been called “perpetual renaissance festival” 😂 Much love for that movie!
I've seen at most 25% of your list. I've seen probably three times as many films from 1930-1980 than from 1980 to now. More black and white than color films. I was struck by the absence of films from before your youth. We have very little in common! Which is neither good nor bad, I think. But like the music I write, sing, and play, I want to know the whole history of any art form I love. I mean, you read poetry from before your birth, right?
And Apocalypse Now!
Oh, I purposely didn’t include before 1980. But I certainly was influenced by them, like Lawrence of Arabia, West Side Story, Chinatown, The Poseidon Adventure, Dr. Zhivago, and many many more.
Well all right then. How about black & white? Bringing Up Baby? Philadelphia Story? The Lady Eve?
How about The Thin Man — saw that in college. And I love Hitchcock.
Pre-color Hitchcock - especially Rebecca, Suspicion, and Notorious (I have a poem which uses that film to characterize a personal relationship) are in a different category from the great 50s color ones Rear WIndow, North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, and Vertigo, some of which I saw in the theater when they were released. But both periods are big favorites of mine. I study the careers of favorite directors, and Hitch is one.
I actually was intrigued by Rope. I could just watch that over and over just for the mastery. A marvel in one take.
Rope only appears to be shot in one take. The cameras of the time could load seven or eight minutes of film, so Hitchcock spliced together takes that long. He would dolly the camera behind a column every seven minutes, and splice at that point. It’s technically well done, and unobtrusive unless you’re looking for it. But films adapted from plays are always in danger of being set-bound, and benefit from variety – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a good example, where they added a scene where the characters go out to a diner to break up the indoor effect.
GenX literary types might find these 90s movies interesting:
Barton Fink (1991) — Joel and Ethan Coen, with characters based on Clifford Odets and William Faulkner
An Angel at My Table (1990) — Jane Campion, life of novelist Janet Frame
Kafka (1991) — Soderbergh, Kafka as a character in his own horror movie
Romeo+Juliet (1996) — Baz Luhrmann, with Leo and Claire as the star-cross’d you-know-whats
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) — Tom Stoppard, remember those two guys Hamlet sent to their death? it’s about them
Crumb (1994) — Terry Zwigoff, catch up on the 60s influencers you never knew in this doc about the underground cartoonist
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is near the top of my list.
Barton Fink almost made the 100. I can’t believe I forgot Romeo + Juliet!!!!
I used to think I had special tastes in movies, but during the pandemic I did a lot of catch-up viewing of movies, which included several Julia Roberts movies. 1. She’s pretty good. 2. My tastes are probably not that special. 3. You should probably watch Pretty Woman.
I totally have to see Pretty Woman. And I think I probably have more in common with other people than I think, although I’m not sure how many people love Something Wicked… as much as I do.