You will die one day. There’s going to be a day when you die. I’m going to die as well. I don’t want to. I’m scared of that. It sounds horrible. I don’t want to do that!!
There are only a limited amount of movies you will see before your fateful day, the day you meet Death face to face. Are you prepared for that?
These are ten movies I think you should see before that day.
Not necessarily the “best” or my “favorite,” just movies I think are important to see and experience, for various reasons.
10. Wall-E
Yes, I’m going to use this time to talk about the environment. Wall-E is a film which has an environmental message, but when you think about the movie in relation to Disney, the studio which released it, it’s kind of a strange experience. The film portrays a future Earth which is covered in trash. Old toys, plastic packaging, plastic DVD cases, cigarette lighters, Pez dispensers, whatever. Just a bunch of crap. Yet Disney itself is the producer and seller of a lot of this type of crap. Mickey Mouse hats, plastic toys, plastic figurines, plastic packaging, DVD cases, Pez dispensers, Disney loves to make money off this stuff, they love consumers and consumerism, they love building up the plastic wasteland that is shown in the film.
Wall-E also negatively portrays the mindless zombie aspect of consuming media. It shows people watching TV at all times. Yet, that’s what Disney wants you to do. Disney Plus, Disney Plus, Disney Plus! We know you want it. And maybe you don’t like The Little Mermaid or Cinderella, but I bet you like Star Wars, which we own. Or Marvel, which we own. And if you don’t like any of that, odds are you probably enjoy ESPN, we own that too. And there’s ESPN+ to stream sports 24/7. Maybe you don’t want a Disney-owned streaming service at all, so you get Hulu. [We own that too]. ABC, Disney Channel, FX, National Geographic Channel.
So buy our stuff, watch our shows, stream our movies, consume media. Become the mindless zombie we want you to be.
So it’s a bit hypocritical for Disney to be spreading these messages, but I think the messages delivered in Wall-E are still good messages. That is difficult for many people to accept. But I believe you can watch Wall-E, and you should, and absorb the environmental message and become inspired to stop buying useless plastic crap, and ALSO decry Disney, and other huge corporations [Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestle, Mars, Danone] from manufacturing so much plastic crap.
Now, I own some of this crap myself. I own a Mickey Mouse Pez dispenser. I own a few Disney Blu-rays. I also own a novelty dancing Groot figure. So this would indicate that I am guilty of that same hypocrisy [even though most of these were gifts]. I’m a hypocrite too.
But, here’s what I can do. I can become less of a hypocrite over time. Maybe I can stop buying so much plastic. Maybe I can use my car less and less, if I can. Maybe I can use the air conditioning less and less. Then I’ll become more consistent with what I’m preaching.
But hypocrisy with the environment is maybe not such a bad thing. If your aim is simply to be not a hypocrite, it’s way easier to be a non-hypocrite who is really bad for the environment, than it is to be a non-hypocrite who is really good for the environment.
Our society is designed to have you make environmentally poor decisions. Hopefully that will change in the future, but it’s still good to get better over time.
OH YEAH, the MOVIE!!! It is beautiful. It has some of the best visual storytelling in any movie ever. The story with Wall-E and Eve is very cute. There is one thing that is so strange about this movie. So the humans make the Earth uninhabitable, so they all live on this self-sustaining spaceship flying through space. The captain of the ship has access to video files from the last humans on Earth. And it’s just Fred Willard. It’s not animated, it’s just Fred Willard as a live-action human. This was such a poor decision in my opinion, as it throws off the entire feeling of the movie for those scenes. All the other people were animated, why didn’t they just animate this character? Fucking weird.
9. The Wizard of Oz
Most people that I’ve come into contact with during my time on Earth have already seen The Wizard of Oz, so that’s good. It is a classic, classic, classic movie. It’s just so iconic in the history of cinema. The characters, the costumes, the songs, the story, the memorable lines. Everything is so iconic. It’s hard to even think of another word to describe it. Iconic. Wait hold on..
*types “iconic” into thesaurus.com*
Emblematic! Is that right? No. Paradigmatic? What the hell even is that? Quintessential, that’s right. This is a quintessential piece of American cinematic history. Quintessential!! Meaning: “perfectly typical or representative of a particular kind of person or thing” Uhhh.. is that right either? *sigh* I don’t know what words mean.
Of course The Wizard of Oz transitions from black and white, in Kansas, to color when Dorothy reaches Oz, and when I watched this as a kid, I thought that The Wizard of Oz was the first movie to have color, which was, unfortunately, wrong.
But it’d be cool if it was the first! Imagine being alive in 1939 and every movie that’s ever existed has been in black and white. So you go to see The Wizard of Oz and it’s in black and white because of course it is, that’s how movies are. And then like twenty minutes into the movie, Dorothy opens the door and it’s like a mind-blowing amount of color, the yellow brick road, Munchkinland, that would be an amazing experience.
It still is an awesome transition in the movie, but in my fantasy world in my own head, it’s better. And it’s a fantasy movie! So in my fantasy, this is the world’s first color movie, so that’s the reality I’ve constructed for myself.
8. Metropolis
This is a silent movie. I know, most people don’t want to watch silent movies, but if you’re gonna watch one silent movie, this is the one. It was released in 1927 but set in the future, the year 2026, which is not too far in the future now.
It’s about class conflict, wealth inequality, the plight of workers, automation, and artificial intelligence. Wow, those are some important themes which are still relevant to this very day. I already wrote a longer piece about why you should watch this movie, so why don’t you go check it out?
The interesting thing about foreign silent movies is that there isn’t any real indication that it’s foreign. The only words we see are on the title cards, so once those are translated, it’s basically like the film is in English.
Here’s another interesting thing about silent films: movies were around for a couple decades before they had sound. They were called “movies,” because the pictures moved. It sounds like something a kindergartener would have come up with. Picture move… Movie… Once sound movies came along, they were called “talkies,” because the characters talked. “Talkies” sounds like an ancient term, but we could have just as easily kept using the term through our current day. As the world transitioned from silent films to sound films, the new term, talkie, could have persisted. Almost all films nowadays are talkies, but no one calls them that. Funny thing, language.
7. Eraserhead
If you decide to watch all these talkies that I’m recommending to watch before you perish, then Eraserhead is probably the one you’re one that you’re most likely to not like. You’re least likely to like this one. You’re most likely to dislike this one. I’m such a shitty writer.
Anyway, that’s okay, you don’t have to like every talkie, but I still recommend this one, and you may like it anyway.
Eraserhead is a 1977 film directed by David Lynch. It’s strange. It’s weird. *scours thesaurus.com again* it’s bizarre. It’s odd. It’s.. funky!
I don’t want to say too much about it because I think it’s best to just watch it. Just jump in and experience it.
I know I’m not really giving much to convince you to see it, but, like I said, I don’t want to say too much about it to mess with your expectations. But it’s a strange movie, and you seem like a strange person. So go watch it.
6. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, also known as that talkie that those annoying white nerds keep quoting. One of those annoying white nerds was me! Like The Princess Bride, Anchorman, and many others, this is a comedy talkie that gets quoted A LOT. In my opinion, which is humble of course, this is the best of the bunch. Coming from the minds of the LEGENDARY comedy group Monty Python, this is their masterpiece.
It is a modern parody of old English legends such as King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, Excalibur, and of course the quest for the Holy Grail. It pokes fun at the absurd romanticized myth of the Middle Ages. The talkie shows filth, brutal violence, plague, and death. It is brilliant in its silliness and silly in its brilliance. It is one of the funniest films of all time, and the pace of the laughs is so fast. Definitely check this one out before you perish.
BRING OUT YOUR DEAD!
Lefty Forrester 