I’ve found another movie meme over at Electronic Cerebrectomy, and like SamuraiFrog, the proprietor of that fine web establishment, I just can’t resist a halfway-decent movie meme. So…

The idea here is to refer to the American Film Institutes’s 100 Years… 100 Movies list and answer the following questions:

1. Your favorite five movies that are on the list:
   Like SamuraiFrog, I had a difficult time narrowing my favorites down to only five (for one thing, I had to eliminate Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and American Graffiti so it wouldn’t appear that I only watch Lucas and Spielberg movies!). It turns out that I enjoy the vast majority of the flicks on this list, so I finally decided to go with only those specific (non-Lucas-and-Spielberg) movies that always make me stop channel-surfing when I encounter them on TV, the ones I’m apparently always in the mood to see:
   • Casablanca
   • Star Wars
   • (Did you really think I’d leave off this one, even with the moratorium on the output of the film-school generation?)
   • The Maltese Falcon
   • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
   • Dances with Wolves
2. Five movies on the list that you didn’t like at all:
   This was somewhat easier than selecting five favorites, but only incrementally. There are really only three movies out of the hundred that I absolutely despise…
   • Annie Hall (I’ve never understood the appeal of Woody Allen. His neurotic persona makes me want to hit something, his humor seems to be very narrowly aimed at a specific demographic — New York intellectuals, of which I am neither — and besides, I’ve never forgiven this movie for taking the Best Picture Oscar away from Star Wars.)
   • Birth of a Nation (I’m ambivalent about this choice. The movie is a masterpiece of technique — hell, Griffith practically invented the feature film as we now understand it — and it is undeniably involving and moving… but only if you can forget that the film’s heroes are Ku Klux Klansmen. And that’s a helluva big thing to ask…)
   • M*A*S*H (Another ambivalent selection. There are parts of this film I like very much and parts I find tedious as hell, and in general Robert Altman’s “overlapping dialogue, lots of activity but little actually happening” thing has gotten more irritating to me as I’ve gotten older.)
   • Forrest Gump (Yes, it’s true: I am one of those heartless bastards who doesn’t “get” the point of everybody’s favorite movie about a mentally challenged doofus who encounters every important historical figure of the late 20th century, gets repeatedly crapped on by a woman who doesn’t deserve his love, and never learns a damn thing from any of it.)
   • Pulp Fiction (Ah, yes, my perennial hate-target, the amoral and gimmicky flick that launched a thousand imitations that were somehow, as improbable as it might seem, even more disturbing and annoying than PF itself. The only good thing that came out of this thing was Samuel L. Jackson’s breakthrough to a wider audience, and John Travolta regaining enough street-cred that he was able to make Get Shorty.)
3. Five movies on the list you haven’t seen but want to:
   Hm. It seems there are 21 films on the list I definitely haven’t seen, which is more than I expected, and two — Bringing Up Baby and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? — that I think I’ve seen but can’t say for certain. As it happens, I’d like to see most of the ones I haven’t yet, so just running down the list, here are the first five I’ve not seen:
   • On the Waterfront
   • All About Eve
   • Raging Bull
   • Midnight Cowboy
   • From Here to Eternity
4. Five movies on the list that you haven’t seen and have no interest in seeing:
   Almost as difficult as coming up with five faves; as I said, I’d like to see most of the unseen ones. Still, I’m not big on musicals or westerns, so…
   • The Sound of Music
   • Stagecoach
   • An American in Paris
   • Wuthering Heights
   • The Searchers
5. Your favorite five movies that aren’t on the list:
   Many of my faves are already represented on the AFI list. Still, giving it a go (and in no particular order)…
   • Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe is hit-and-miss for me, but he knocked it out of the park in this sweet-natured, semi-autobiographical ode to growing up, the joy of writing, and rock ‘n’ roll music. I love every golden-light-washed frame of this movie.)
   • Superman: The Movie (The first superhero movie that took its subject matter remotely seriously, that said “hey, this stuff isn’t just for kids.” There would have been no Dark Knight without Superman: The Movie.)
   • Blade Runner (I know some of my readers — and you know who you are — find this movie as overrated and pointless as I do Forrest Gump. C’est la vie… I think it’s a magnificent visual feast with a lot of food for thought about the nature of humanity.)
   • The Thin Man (William Powell and Myrna Loy are one of the funniest and sexiest on-screen couples in the history of cinema, and this is probably the sharpest of their many outings together.)
   • The General (I like Chaplin fine, but Keaton is funnier. Why does he never appear on these lists?)