80 Movies To Watch Before You Die
I’ve been making this list of films that had ways to cut people to the core.
It’s taken me six months to compile.
I know everyone’s on Letterboxd now, logging everything they watch, building their profiles. This is basically my version of that.
These are the films I’ve watched until the VHS warped. The ones I rewound three minutes at a time.
A list of 80 films and synopsis that taught me how to see, including three so intense I’ll never watch them
Jackie Brown - Quentin Tarantino directing Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda, and Michael Keaton in a heist movie where everyone’s too old and too tired to be doing this shit anymore. A flight attendant running guns gets caught and has to play the cops against the criminals while staying alive long enough to steal everyone’s money.
The real masterclass is in the movement. Ordell at Jackie’s apartment after she’s released. He turns off her light. She doesn’t react. She’s making him a screwdriver, acting normal. He turns off the light again. She turns it on and walks straight to the couch with her back to him. She thinks she’s about to die. The dialogue? Pleasant. Calm. The physicality? Pure terror.
E.T. - Spielberg shooting the first half from a kid’s height so you never see adult faces, just their legs and authority. The first time I recognized adults know that they are the enemy too.
Strange Days - Kathryn Bigelow directing Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, and Michael Wincott in a movie about illegal recordings of people’s memories and experiences sold on the black market in 1999 Los Angeles. A former cop deals virtual reality clips of other people’s lives while the city burns on New Year’s Eve and Angela Bassett is the only person trying to save him from himself. This Y2K masterpiece is a vision of the gnarly future warped in music. Warning: only a woman could capture this murder scene so accurately that you think you’ve actually witnessed it.
