So there was a little thing going around Facebook where people would start at the year they were born and list their favorite movie in each of those years. Apparently the rule was one movie per year. But it also looked like people would break that rule when it suited them (like I'm going to do). It also appeared that people put down the movies with no explanation, either. I like doing all that writing, so, when appropriate, I'm going to have little commentaries sprinkled throughout. I spent a stupid amount of time doing research for this, so I might as well put in the extra effort.
1972 - The Godfather
1973 - Charley Varrick (I've seen it one time only, but this tight, funny, and mean thriller with Walter Matthau has never left my brain. Still one of the best endings I've ever seen.)
1974 - The Conversation (On almost every list I've seen, The Godfather Part 2 gets put on here. While I do, indeed, love The Godfather Part 2, Francis Ford Coppola's other movie is one of my all-time favorites.)
1975 - Jaws (duh)
1976 - Taxi Driver
1977 - Close Encounters of the Third Kind/Star Wars (The first tie. Star Wars is the easy pick for most people, and I really do love it just as much as everyone else. But Close Encounters is just as magical. If Spielberg had never made Jaws, this would be my favorite film of his.)
1978 - Halloween ("You can't kill the Boogie Man.")
1979 - Apocalypse Now (not the Redux version, the original.)
1980 - Dressed to Kill/The Empire Strikes Back/The Stunt Man (Three way tie! Each one of these movies affects me on very deep levels.)
1981 - Blowout/Raiders of the Lost Ark (In any other year, either one would be my top movie. In 1981 however, they get to be tied.)
1982 - Tootsie (So much funnier and heartfelt than you think it could ever be.
1983 - The Right Stuff
1984 - The Natural/Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom/Sixteen Candles (Another three-way tie. There's a few of us who recognize that Raiders is the better movie, and we still don't care. I like Temple of Doom. The Natural is my favorite baseball movie. As for Sixteen Candles - casual racism and sexism aside, I really, really like it. So there.)
1985 -Purple Rose of Cairo/Pee Wee's Big Adventure (Behind Chaplin's City Lights, The Purple Rose of Cairo is the most touching, funny, tragic movie I've ever seen. And on the other end of the spectrum, Pee Wee's Big Adventure is flat-out one of the funniest movies ever made.)
1986 - F/X (I make no bones about how much I love this movie.)
1987 - Robocop ("I'd buy that for a dollar!")
1988 - My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece is just a joy to experience.)
1989 - Field of Dreams (The Little Mermaid and The Killer both gave this a run for the money, but it moves me too much to even make it a contest.)
1990 - Dances With Wolves (The First movie I ever saw three times in the theater. I still love it.)
1991 - Silence of the Lambs/Barton Fink (If we're going to be honest, Silence of the Lambs beats out the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink by a hair, but Barton Fink is in my top 10 favorite movies of all-time a few spots behind Lambs, so that has to count for something, right?)
1992 - Hero/Hard Boiled - Hero affected me more than a lot of other people. But I love it just the same. And Hard-Boiled is just an action masterpiece.
1993 - True Romance/The Piano/The Fugitive/Short Cuts (True Romance is cool personified, The Piano blindsided me with how good it was, The Fugitive actually made TV show reboots a good idea, and Short Cuts is just a Robert Altman multi-character, multi-story piece of art.)
1994 - Pulp Fiction/Serial Mom (Serial Mom? Really? Yes, indeed. At the time it was made, it was about five minutes ahead of it's time. Now it almost seems quaint. What should have been a John Waters spoof, ends up being creepily on the nose.
1995 - Beyond the Clouds (One of Michaelangelo Antonioni's final films, this one just carries me in every time.)
1996 - Beautiful Girls (so great.)
1997 - Titanic (yeah, that's right.)
Part 2 in a day or so.
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