Fifteen films
My friend Chris Gwilliam on Facebook got sort of tagged in the Fifteen Films meme, and I wondered if I had time to post this before our internet connection dies again: The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen films you’ve seen that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen films you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag at least fifteen friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what films my friends choose. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste the rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note).
So here are my 15 films, more or less in the order in which I thought of them.
- The wages of fear
- Dr Strangelove
- The mission
- Ostrov (The Island)
- At play in the fields of the Lord
- Sammy going South
- Lawrence of Arabia
- Dracula
- The horse’s mouth
- The ugly American
- The seven samurai
- Morgan: a suitable case for treatment
- Pan’s Labyrinth
- Z
- District 9
… which doesn’t mean that is the order in which I liked them.
And I’m not tagging anyone because trying to think of more than fivce people to tag is to much schlep, so feel free to respond if you are so moved, and if not, well, don’t.
Khanya 
I haven’t seen any of those. Haven’t even heard of most of them! Not sure I can think of 15 that had any significant effect on me…
I thought of adding a brief description to each film, or at least saying what impressed me about it, but then our Internet connection was down for three days, and it’s now probably too late. But perhaps a few comments here may help.
The wages of fear – based on a book I had read, about lorry drivers taking tankers of nitroglycerine over rough roads to blow out an oil-well fire. It impressed me greatly at the age of 13, and so I just had to see the film, though it was rated as “No persons 4-16”. And the film was as scary as the book.
Dr Strangelove Cold War MADness (MAD = Mutually-Assured Destruction)
The mission, Ostrov and At play in the fields of the Lord – as a teacher of missiology I recommend these to all missiology students. The first is Catholic, the second Orthodox and the third Protestant, but students could learn more from viewing and discussing these films than from a dozen books, no matter how learned.
5-12 are all 1960s movies, and deal with various themes of the 1960s. Perhaps Dracula and The horse’s mouth were 1950s, I’m not sure. Dracula is so much better than the wimpy vampires of today. The horse’s mouth is about an artist in London who outraged critics and poseurs alike.
The last three are political satire. Z is about the Greek colonels of the 1967 coup, which had uncanny parallels with South Africa in the same period, right down to the defenestrations by the Security Police. Pan’s labyrinth combines political satire with fantasy, and District 9 combines it with science fiction, and both are very good indeed. I’d strongly recommend them.