[Sculpt]

Originally Posted by neverending

I pretty much just chose 20 films that popped into my head when I think of "great," without too much thought. If I had stopped to think about it the task would have been too daunting and I would have been bogged down for weeks with internal debate.

It's a terrible task when there are directors, like Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola, Hitchcock, Robert Altman and Akira Kurosawa, whose entire bodies of work can be considered masterpieces or near, with few missteps. Now I'm regretting RAN wasn't on my list... Nor were any Woody Allen films; like him or hate him, he's one of the most influential filmmakers of the modern era.

I probably broke some rules here mentioning some films by name.

I picked Annie Hall (one of my favorites) from Allen. I think it has good story flow, which can sometimes be disjointed in his films. We'll at least have one. Something tells me our group won't have a lot of Allen.

Originally Posted by metternich1815

Personally, I am a big Star Wars fan with my favorite being A New Hope. Honestly though, I enjoy all of the Star Wars films including the prequel series.

In regards to Star Trek, despite my love for Star Wars, I am a far bigger fan of Star Trek than Star Wars. In my opinion, Star Trek is a more compelling, universal series. To me, it has many more layers and levels of meaning than Star Wars. Related to this, it is absolutely loaded with philosophy, which is a topic I intimately love. By the way, I only regard on screen material as part of either series. I do not take the books and so forth for either series into account. Also, the term "Star Trek" refers to all the shows and movies, not just TOS ("The Old Series").

I wouldn't say the Star Trek films necessarily have more layers of meaning than Star Wars, but the TV shows had more per min than Wars films.

Originally Posted by Straker

I started off with a rough draft of about 40 or so movies then started to thin it out as best I could, but I wasn't ever really satisfied with my final 20. I'm hoping some people have picked up on a few classics that didn't quite make my cut or that I just overlooked altogether and that some of the lesser known classics aren't completely ignored. Its not easy picking just 20 movies.

I ran up about 30 films off the top of my head, and then I looked at about 3 of the more highly regarded lists to catch the ones I missed.

Originally Posted by Kandarian Demon

Picking just 20 movies was incredibly hard - much harder than when we made the horror list, because at least that was limited to one genre. With all genres BUT horror, there was so much to choose from.

As you'll probably find out, I have 4 movies from the same movie franchise on my list, and I debated that a lot with myself - should I just pick the best one of them, and make room for 3 completely different movies. But then again, I couldn't actually choose between what I consider to be 4 incredible works of art, and hated the thought of picking what I felt was a less deserving movie over one of them.

So... my list might be a little "boring" in that way, but my choices came from the heart, and I have a "defence" for every choice... I also fully expect that I'm going to need it!

I think it's proper to pick more than one film from one franchise if you think they're the best.



Ah, the films list got posted a few minutes before my last post...

All of those films were on my list. So yes, those all pass for me.