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The 40-Year-Old Affair

October 07, 2009

OK, I must confess. I’ve been involved in a long time affair. Not with a lover, but it is a love affair. I have a life-long love affair with books and movies.

Anyone who knows me well (or even sort of knows me) may recall how I generally liken someone to an actor or character in a book, or a book to a hybrid/hyphenate – “oh, that’s Four Weddings and a Funeral meets Bridget Jones Diary” … Local movie producer/director friend James Burke and I just cut to the chase in such interactions – he describes a movie he is directing and I say, “Oh, that’s Traffic meets 21 Grams meets Crash.” And he immediately agrees. (More on that genre later too…).

Perhaps like for me, movies remind you of certain periods in your life, or specific moments in time. For some reason, the big old theaters resonate the most in my memories. My first movie was Mary Poppins – seen on a big screen in New York City at age 3 after a crazy day of the 1964 World’s Fair and my first subway ride to Flushing Meadows. I recall crying through Gone with the Wind on the big screen at the High Point NC’s downtown screen (the first, and maybe only movie, I’ve ever seen with an intermission) and my first PG movie – Paper Moon with the now infamous Tatum and Ryan O’Neal. (I want my $200!”).

Other great movies have been caught illicitly as I snuck outside my parent’s bedroom and watched through a cracked door. (Does anyone else get the chills thinking of Rosemary’s Baby and the chocolate mousse with the “chalky under-taste“?)

Us movie lovers are lucky to have the Princeton Garden Theater and Market Fair and AMC Hamilton 24 and Montgomery Cinema just a short drive away…and Netflix just down the driveway for any movies we missed in the theater because we had babies or crazy jobs or no babysitters… and the list goes on. On any given Saturday or Sunday or Wednesday matinee (a real treat – more on that later too), we can whet our appetites for fantasy and mystery and action/adventure and chick flicks and bawdy comedy and historical epics and wry documentaries….

So as I kick off this weekly (or thereabouts) “blog” on all things movies and books, here’s my own list of best (personal favorite) movies of all time. You’ll be hearing about all of these at some point in the near future, as great movies borrow from other great movies… there’s no such thing as a new idea, as they say. And when you really relate to a movie, it’s often because it reminds you of one from another point in your life.

Here’s my top 25 list and some honorable mentions, in no particular order…