DVDs weren't out yet, so please ignore my box set

[sovay]

The hundred movies meme was even harder to assemble because I spent far more of my childhood and adolescence immersed in books than in movies and therefore many of the films on this list were not so much formative as illuminating once I finally started paying attention to cinema as an art form, and/or they wired themselves instantly into my brain and are quoted regularly to this day. A list of favorites might overlap significantly but not identically, I imagine tilting more heavily toward sff and noir. I feel it may be a much more mainstream list than my formative books, although still full of meaningful absences. (I sacrificed a number of classics as well as movies whose circumstances were potentially more important than their content, but just glitched on The Medium (1951) and Katerina Izmailova (1966), both of which I even own.) I find it very difficult to try to winnow accurately. I may just not be designed for this format of meme.

Comments

[sovay]

The exception is documentaries and other nonfiction, which I can and do watch solo, and occasionally the right kind of animated show. But for whatever reason, watching live-action stuff is pretty much always a social activity to me.

Fair enough!

If I lived alone, I'd probably learn how to watch things solo more, admittedly. When I was living in Montreal, there was a movie theater right around the corner from me, and I'd go see blockbusters in the French dub sometimes as practice.

I lived about three blocks from a small independent cinema in New Haven and it was the first place in my life that I really went to the movies by myself. I have never lived that close to a movie theater again, even the Somerville. It was ludicrously convenient.

(These days, bulk of the nonfiction I watch is youtube, which I have playing on my phone on the windowsill while I do the dishes. It's a tightly curated list that includes PBS, though -- I love Eons, which is 10-20 minute videos about paleontology and deep time -- so I sort of count it as tv-adjacent.)<>/i>

Ironically I have a much harder time watching videos for nonfiction information, but I am glad that a deep-time PBS show exists!