Tag: movies

Top five favorite movies

~ EMM

Years ago, I used to have this list of top five favorite comfort food movies on the about page of my blog. I took it down at some point, but I save the list. Well… there are actually two lists. I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, here are the lists:

Tonight I re-watched 10 Things I Hate About You. It wasn’t until after the movie was over that I realized my favorite scene in that movie… this one:

Was probably partly to blame for one of the scenes I wrote into Ash of the Fae. Maybe at some point I’ll talk about that whole “compost heap” of culture that feeds your story brain, but it’s getting late, and I can’t really use that scene as an example without giving spoilers for the book. So, put a pin in that topic for later.

Watching 10 Things reminded me of the top five movies list I made. Only, when I dug it up off my hard drive, I realized it was actually two lists, not one. And I remembered why I took it off my bio.

While I stand by the choices on these lists, I no longer call things I love “guilty pleasures.” I don’t buy into the concept of feeling guilty about stuff that brings me joy. And there was no way I was going to be able to condense this list down to a real top five list.

Even now, I’m realizing that there are a lot more movies that have left a lasting impression on me and that I re-watch whenever they become available to stream. (Unless they never are available to stream. Those I have on DVD.) There are two movies in particular that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately that I was kind of surprised to find don’t appear on either of these lists.

The first is a romantic comedy. But not just any romantic comedy. A Meg Ryan romantic comedy that, in my opinion, is the BEST romantic comedy: French Kiss. I just found and bought a copy of on DVD because it’s never available to stream, and I really wanted to re-watch it. The only copy I had was on VHS, which I got rid of a loooooonnng time ago.

So, I re-watched it last week, and damn that movie is good. It really should be on that “comfort food” movie list, but I don’t know what I would bump off in order to add it.

The other one I am reminded of every time I walk into my office because I have the (full size, massive) movie poster hanging on my office wall. I inherited this poster from someone we met here on the island shortly after we moved here. I mentioned that there was this one obscure favorite of mine that he’d probably never heard of… The Big Blue (aka Le Grande Bleu). Well, it turned out that he’d not only heard of it, he had the movie poster, and he gave it to me!

The Big Blue was a movie we watched in my French class in high school, and I don’t know what it was (the dolphins, I mean, of course it was the dolphins), but I just fell in love with this movie. It was only later that I figured out that the director of this movie is the same guy who did The Fifth Element and The Professional (aka Léon), both favorites of mine, as well as La Femme Nikita (the French version that was eventually remade into another of my all-time favorite movies, Point of No Return).

So, yeah. What are we up to now? Fourteen movies? All those movies should be on this list. There is no way I can narrow it down to five. Unless maybe I just re-watch all of them over the course of the next few weeks so they are all fresh in my mind?

Honestly, if I did that, I’d probably just come up with even MORE comfort food movies that I love to re-watch. But it sounds like a fun project… I should probably do it anyway. For science. Right? Not because I’m procrastinating on my editing. Definitely not that. 😉

What about you? What’s the last movie you re-watched? What’s your go-to comfort food movie?