This started as one of those silly Facebook memes where you post one thing every day and didn’t have to explain and you tagged other people and they continued with the meme. I was very bad at following the meme instructions, but I did find the exercise interesting. I found it difficult to identify 10 specific movies, and since I didn’t explain during the FB posts, I thought I’d make a blog post about them instead. So here we go!
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Back to the Future
The meme was supposedly to post movie posters, but for the first few ones I was feeling inspired enough to try to draw the movie posters instead. (Click to view full-size) When I started the meme, this was the only movie I was sure would be on my list, the only real easy pick. The rest of the list took a lot more thinking. Back to the Future (and the rest of the trilogy, really it’s hard to take them separately) is undoubtedly my favorite movie of all time. (And unquestionably the best time travel of all time, fight me!) There is not much to say: it came out when I was growing up and instilled with me a great love for time travel stories of all kinds. I was especially fond of how cleverly all three movies tied together.
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Star Wars
Han looks terrible in this drawing. I have yet to master capturing RL human faces properly. (Click to view full-size) I’m a fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek, but was a fan of light sabers before phasers. The original Star Wars actually came out the year before I was born, and I never saw any of the original trilogy in the theaters (or at least I don’t remember doing so). My earliest memory of these movies was watching A New Hope via betamax at my ninong’s house during one of our visits there when I was a child. ANH is my choice here, but Empire and Jedi hold up really well for me as well.
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The Dark Knight
(Click to view full-size) The Dark Knight is still easily the best superhero film of all time. Marvel’s MCU films have been good and entertaining, but nothing still comes close to Nolan’s second outing with the Batman. It’s the sort of movie where I wish I could watch it again for the first time.
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A Few Good Men
(Click to view full-size) I may or may not have reenacted that final showdown between Caffy and Jessop more than once. This movie is my favourite lawyer movie and/or show of all time, and was a big reason why I enjoyed lawyer shows like The Practice moving forward.
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Zoolander
(Click to view full-size) There are certain elements of pop culture that have a shared special meaning for certain groups of people. Zoolander is one of them. For some reason, me and a group of work friends latched onto the movie and kept quoting it in our internal chats for ridiculous reasons. The movie isn’t of the best quality, but it’s hilarious and we still randomly say Merman!! when we see each other. (The sequel did not make any particular impression on our group.)
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Toy Soldiers
(Click to view full-size) This is one of those weird instances where I can’t tell why I like this movie so much. I’ve never seen it in the theatres or TV nor do I have any digital copy, but I do believe we had a betamax copy of it back in the day and that me and my brother watched it several times. I have fond memories of this movie and being especially excited at the sequence where they use the flying drone thing to create a distraction while one of the kids sneaks out avoiding the hostage takers in order to communicate information to law enforcement, and he has to sneak back in in time for roll call, which he misses and he has to pretend he was in the shower all along. Actually, that’s mainly the only part of the movie that I can clearly remember.
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Groundhog Day
(Click to view full-size) It’s a bit strange for me to have a kind of a sappy romance movie on this list, but it’s also an awesome time loop movie that I’ve seen many, many times. I thought about putting Ghostbusters on this list as the representative Bill Murray movie, and it was close but Groundhog Day won out, probably because I really really like stories that mess with the flow of time.
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Captain America: Winter Soldier
(Click to view full-size) I’ve greatly enjoyed the MCU over the past ten years, so I’m pretty sure it deserved at least one slot on this list. I waffled between choosing Winter Soldier or Guardians of the Galaxy for this, but while the space adventure was fun, I chose the Captain America one because of the timely themes of government surveillance and the government being controlled by evil Nazis and well-meaning civil servants having to defy orders to save the day.
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Street Fighter the Movie
(Click to view full-size) Like Zoolander was the cult classic for my work friends, Street Fighter The Movie is the so-bad-its-good cult classic for me and my high school friends. The person who tagged me to make this list had to comment that he wishes he had added this one to his list since we basically quote it all the time whenever we get together.
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Transformers the Movie
(Click to view full-size) Transformers the Movie is basically a summary of everything that was awesome about childhood pop culture in the 1980s. It’s too bad no one ever thought about making a series of live-action movies in this franchise.
When I started this list I had trouble getting beyond the first item, but after having thought about it a while, there’s a lot of other movies I’d have liked to be able to fit in this list. _Ghostbusters, Die Hard, the Indiana Jones trilogy, Con Air, Shawshank Redemption, Inception, Infinity War, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, _and that’s just off the top of my head.
Thanks for reading! What are your top ten favourite movies of all time?
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