Damn near the ultimate in re-watchable films right there. The only problem is that I’ve seen it so many times, I have my favorite parts and most of them are up until the point Westley faces off with Inigo, Fezzig and Vizzini. Once that’s done and Westley reunites with Buttercup, the movie kind of downshifts for me. Still an amazing movie, just a little bit less interesting. So I can’t give it my top spot.
I would say Casablanca and Pulp Fiction are similarly quotable, but Princess Bride is a good one to be sure.
Hidden message?
#thetruthisoutthere
Navaronegun is Keyser Söze!
That one was surprising for Peewee Herman.
Star Wars.
Too much of an influence on my life to pick anything else.
And… this is why my top 5-10 is so fluid. I forget half the movies that deserve to be in there. Which this one does, without question.
I might go see ‘Once Upon a Deadpool’ just because of the Princess Bride reference. All 3 min of it.
Well it would be fellowship of the ring, but I feel like “favorite film” needs to stand on its own, and fellowship is very much part of a trilogy and needs to other two films.
Therefore I say Die Hard.
I would have to say The Thin Red Line. I know there are nits to pick with that film, but watching that in the theater was a revelation. I had no idea a film could bypass so many different parts of my brain and hit me…
… right in the heart…
There are other movies that I just can’t sit still watching because of how good I think they are. The Godfather 1 and 2, The Third Man, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Miller’s Crossing, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Empire Strikes Back, Alien, both Blade Runners (yes, I really like the second one as well), Arrival really struck me, Chinatown, The Conversation, Hoop Dreams, Fog of War, All The President’s Men and Spotlight and Mississippi Burning and on and on and on and on. But The Thin Red Line genuinely affected me to the core and fundamentally changed my understanding of what the medium could accomplish with its storytelling.
I feel much the same way - I never knew through my many years of movie watching that the one missing piece was seeing Woody Harrelson blow his ass off with his own grenade. And the feeling of satisfaction and, dare I say it, peace that I felt upon viewing said scene was, well, transcendent.
Is there somewhere on the internet that has a good explanation for what happened in The Thin Red Line?
I just left the theater utterly confused, not really sure what I’d just seen. I didn’t understand any of it. It was like a David Lynch movie, except I didn’t get the impression that The Thin Red Line was trying to hide anything from me.
I just told you what happened in The Thin Red Line. I mean sure, I guess some other stuff happened, but it’s not it was of any consequence.
I just read this:
https://www.filmcomment.com/article/let-there-be-light-the-thin-red-line/
But I’m not sure if I’m any wiser as a result about what happened in the movie and how and why. Maybe a little wiser.
Basically a guy goes AWOL, gets found, gets busted down to carrying a stretcher just as they land to take Guadalcanal. That becomes a clash between two commanders, one who refuses to throw the lives of his men away where the other (the commanding officer) sees the battle from a higher viewpoint where he sees only objectives and battle glory.
Adrien Brody just sits around wide eyed because even though he’s one of the main characters of the novel, all of his stuff landed on the cutting room floor. Cameos pop up for no reason because that’s partly how anyone agreed to make the film in the first place.
A guy hangs on to the love of his wife to help him get by and has that taken away with a dear john letter. AWOL guy and his immediate supervisor clash over our role here on earth and what else there might be and at the very end AWOL guy makes peace with himself, his views on that stuff, and lets himself get killed. Woody blows his own ass off. Alligator slips into the swamp. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it so I know I’m leaving huge chunks out but I feel that covers some of the basics.
So what’s the piece that hit you right in the heart in all of that?
The alligator.
Actual answer is what often gets meditated on, what does it all mean, why are we here, does it matter? It gets presented in a way I hadn’t experienced in a film before with abstractions that really hit home with me for some reason. Sometimes it was VO, sometimes it was a memory of the wife, but there were things I thought I was used to when watching movies and how they presented stories and this skipped a bunch of that and presented me with a story that resonated personally.
I imagine it’s like empaths talking. We are used to making sounds with our mouths and hearing those sounds, but the empath steps in and skips that part but I still get what was said. Then the empath can’t help but judge me because of the filthy thoughts scattered everywhere.
edit: just to add given that empath part, now imagine the first time you hear an empath speak, that was shock and awe I felt watching The Thin Red Line for the first time.
The specific bit that just destroys me every time is the shot of the Japanese soldier having a nervous breakdown during the assault on the village.
Yeah, there’s so many moments like that for me. Another one that always hits me is after that assault, one Japanese soldier holds the body of another frantically mourning. American soldiers sit in the background watching with almost no interest maybe sticking cigarette filters in their nostrils to block some of the smell.
That whole sequence will reduce me to a blubbering mess without fail.