BS: Films that most influenced you

Subject: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: GUEST
Date: 29 Jun 03 - 07:03 PM

What with the books and songs thread already going, someone had to start this one.

I'll stick to the films that most influence me the last decade or so:

Before Night Falls
Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colors Trilogy: Blue)
La Lengua de las mariposas (Butterfly's Tongue)
Dead Man Walking
Dancer in the Dark (as mentioned in the thread)
One True Thing
Down Came a Blackbird (this was actually made for TV--Raul Julia's last film)
Bamboozled
Four Little Girls

That should get folks started.

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: Rapparee
Date: 29 Jun 03 - 07:12 PM

Steamboat Willy. Such acting, such pathos, such comedy, such tragedy.

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 30 Jun 03 - 03:18 AM

Easy Rider.... wanted to go across America on a motorbike... still do, but will settle for England.

Any which way but loose - wanted to be in a Hell's Angel pack - but preferably not one as terminally stupid as they were. This one I did achieve, but the most violent thing we ever did was accidentally run over a litter bin. Not much cause for gang warfare in deepest darkest Dorset. Never wanted to possess an orang-utan.

The Colour Purple - no motorbikes, but a strong woman who fought back against domestic violence, sexual abuse and oppression. Also had a lot of things to say about God and being outspoken and honest with yourself and your deity. The book was also inspirational.

The Omen triliogy - came at a time when I was exploring different faiths and was in danger of falling into the 'bad side' of one. Scared me witless, because of what I then realised I believed all along. Blood, guts and gore never bothered me much, I grew up on a diet of Hammer Horror and Stephen King, but something about Damien got me...... Plus, I seem to remember a motorbike in there somewhere.

But the most influential of all films for me.....

Thunderball.

Saw it when I was 11 and the hormones were just waking up..... saw Sean Connery's hairy chest and that was it. Have loved Sean ever since, and have only ever been out with 2 blokes who didn't have hairy chests although none of the others were called Sean......

LTS

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: GUEST,Tunesmith
Date: 30 Jun 03 - 05:48 PM

For years, I used to cite " The summer of 42" as my favourite film. I can't say that it particularly influenced me, but it certainly moved me, and I've never really being able to quite understand why. Maybe, it gave me a certain nostalgic feeling, but, strangely, for people and places that were not- in an obvious way - part of my life experience.

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: Peter T.
Date: 30 Jun 03 - 05:52 PM

Curious version of the topic -- films are probably (with the exception of television) easily the most influential broadly on the whole population, but I wonder how many people would say that a film changes your life the way a book does -- interesting to see what people say. There is a difference between impact and influence, I think. I can think of few films that have changed my way of being or doing, except for the 10 minutes after the film is over (slouching like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca -- one of Woody Allan's smartest images). They seem to wear off.

I remember leaving Old Yeller at the age of 6 and lying in a snowbank crying for an hour. That counts I guess.

When I was in London in the 70's, I became fascinated with Greta Garbo, and as luck would have it, a movie house did a series of retrospectives, one of which was of her early films. The one I most remember was "Die Freudlose Gasse" (1924) -- her first international film (she had done a couple in Sweden, this one was in German). Marlene Dietrich has a part in it too, though if you blink you miss her. Garbo plays a secretary who becomes the mistress of her boss, and the striking thing about the movie is that everyone else in the film seems as if they are from about 30 years earlier. Or, to put it another way, they all seem to be in black and white, while she is in colour. Her teeth are a mess, and she completely overacts, but is something new, like a space alien. Watching her films was a great solace to me, and very influential.

I remember wandering into a theatre one day for the hell of it, and watching "Bonnie and Clyde"-- the scene in the escaping car where they have been wounded and are screaming in pain, completely wrecked the conventions of every previous Hollywood film -- the chase scene, the bank robbery, the shootout, you name it -- and made one wonder what else one had taken as truth that was convention.

"The Piano" is probably the film that had the greatest impact on me. I saw it one day in an empty movie theatre and was completely swept away by everything about it. The final scenes are still amazing, awe-inspiring, unbelievable.


yours,

Peter T.

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: GUEST
Date: 30 Jun 03 - 06:03 PM

No work of art ever changed my life. The greatest influence and/or impact a work of art has ever had on me has been to challenge my preconceived notions, biases, etc or my values, and caused me to change my thinking about the subject. The films I list above all did that, some more than others. But I most definitely had a change in my thinking as a result of each of the films I list above.

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: Little Hawk
Date: 30 Jun 03 - 06:25 PM

Well, there were some that had a big effect on me, for sure.

Bonnie & Clyde, Lawrence of Arabia, Dances With Wolves, and Windwalker come to mind. The first two Star Wars movies really impressed me too.

I also really liked "Summer of '42", tunesmith. It had a wistful sort of feel to it. Things can only be like that once, and it's melancholy to remember it.

Easy Rider impressed me a lot at the time it came out, but not too much later in retrospect.

- LH

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: Clinton Hammond
Date: 30 Jun 03 - 06:30 PM

"The Buddy Holly Story" with Gary Busey... It made me wanna play guitar...

Now I do it for a living...

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: rangeroger
Date: 30 Jun 03 - 07:05 PM

H.G.Wells "Things to come". Made in 1936, I first saw it as a child on TV in the very early 50's. The use of flying wings as combat aircraft really impressed me. I had seen pictures of them in a dictionary,but when I saw my first one in real life it really hit me.

I lived in Chula Vista, California at the time and just to the east of us on Otay Mesa was Brown Field Naval Air Station. They flew a lot of experimental aircraft out of there at the time and there was always some sort of strange aircraft in the sky. Just after seeing "Things to Come" , a flying wing flew over the house. And for those that say they were all destroyed by that time,no they weren't.I decided then that I had to live to see 2036,where the movie ended, to see what life was going to be like.

By the way, Brown Field is the airport where Reba McEntire's band was lost when their plane slammed into Otay Mountain.

rr

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: GUEST
Date: 30 Jun 03 - 07:54 PM

The link below goes to a webpage about a movie called 'Waking Life'. About lucid or controlled dreaming. Filmed using digital cameras and then hand-animated frame by frame with a vector art drawing program. The main character interacts with others who relate stories about William Blake, Philip K. Dick, etc. Lots of University of Texas professors confusing things, too. But the link below contains the entire movie dialogue, and at the left are links to the people and concepts discussed in the movie. The DVD is less than ten bucks on Amazon and has lots of extras. Might be the most unique thing you'll ever see. Made by the same director who made 'Slacker'...Richard Linklater:

Waking Life

...Anyway, I read this essay by Philip K. Dick.

What? You read it in your dream.

No. I read it before the dream. It was the preamble to the dream. It was about that book, "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said." You know that one?

Uh, yeah yeah, he won an award for that one.

Right, that's the one he wrote really fast. It just like flowed right out of him. He felt he was sort of channeling it or something. But anyway, about four years after it was published, he was at this party, and he met this woman who had the same name as the woman character in the book, and she had a boyfriend with the same name as the boyfriend character in the book, and she was having an affair with this guy, the chief of police, and he had the same name as the chief of police in his book. So she was telling him all of this stuff from her life, and everything she is saying is right out of his book. So it's totally freaking him out, but what could he do?

...So this whole episode is kind of creepy, right? And he's telling his priest about it, you know, describing how he wrote this book, and then four years later all these things happened to him. And as he's telling this to him, the priest says, "That's the Book of Acts. You're describing the Book of Acts." And he's like, "I've never read the Book of Acts." So he goes home and reads the Book of Acts, and it's like uncanny. Even the characters' names are the same as in the Bible. And the Book of Acts takes place in 50 A.D., when it was written, supposedly. So Philip K. Dick had this theory that time was an illusion and that we are all actually in 50 A.D., and the reason he had written this book was that he had somehow momentarily punctured through this illusion, this veil of time, and what he had seen there was what was going on in the Book of Acts.

And he was really into gnosticism, and this idea that this demiurge or demon had created this illusion of time to make us forget that Christ was about to return, and the kingdom of God was about to arrive. And that we're all in 50 A.D., and there's someone trying to make us forget that God is imminent. And that's what time is. That's what all of history is. It's just this continuous daydream, or distraction....

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: GUEST
Date: 30 Jun 03 - 08:06 PM

Deliverance. Changed my whole way of camping.

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 30 Jun 03 - 09:03 PM

"Eraserhead" made me aware of the fact that I, at least sometimes, dream in black and white.

Subject: RE: BS: Films that most influenced you
From: LadyJean
Date: 30 Jun 03 - 11:43 PM

"Desk Set" Starring Spencer Tracy, and the great Katherine Hepburn. I saw Katie step on the scene and thought, if I was like her, I'd be drop dead gorgeous, and men would still take me seriously.
I'm not like Katie Hepburn, except for my broad A. But I still think she was the greatest!