My top five favortie movies in order: Star Wars: Episode IV, The Matrix, The Shootist, Wayne’s World, and Animal House.
These movies aren’t necessarily the greatest film creations, but they each have a great amount of entertainment value. Star Wars is a classic, but there are were 5 other movies that I didn’t choose. Why? Because they don’t seem to be as special as the first movie. The actors were unaware that they were starring in a record-breaking blockbuster film. They were just acting in a crazy little sci-fi film, and they could have fun acting taking the roles as real as they wanted. (Luke Skywalker… not so good in any of the other movies.) The effects were incredible, because there wasn’t the unlimited budget that is available today. The ships in the opening scene were not computer animation, but models. The models look far more realistic than any animation ever could, so it makes the fight scenes far more believable. Unfortunately, scenes have been added to the movie that have computer animation, and it is extremely distracting.
Most of the films that I chose are somewhat classics, but they are all the originals (if they are in a series). The Matrix, Star Wars, Animal House, and Wayne’s World are all movies that had unclear futures. They ended up being major parts of our culture and many sub-cultures, but no one knew that when they were filming, which makes them special. The one movie that was intended to be a hit and a classic was the Shootist.
The Shootist is John Wayne’s last movie. He was losing a battle with cancer, and could hardly work some days. (I believe that he had lung cancer). Some of the other actors in the film were working for less than usual or nothing at all as a favor to John, or maybe just so they could act in his last movie with him. Lauren Bacall, Jimmy Stewart, Ron Howard, and Harry Morgan were all actors that probably (almost certainly) would not have been in the film at all if it hadn’t been for John Wayne. He had the choice of limping his way through the movie, or maybe even giving up entirely, but he decided to make it his best acting job ever.
It is a very dramatic western because of the camera angles that were different from most other John Wayne movies. Wide-angle shots and mirrors were used extensively throughout the movie to show who was watching, who was being watched, and when the bad guy finally enters the saloon. The final shoot-out wasn’t the usual fight on main street, and the town wasn’t deserted. John Wayne was sitting in a bar, and luckily the mirrors showed him everything. He played an ailing cowboy as his best performance ever, because he knew exactly what it was like to die of lung cancer (sometimes it wasn’t acting).
I guess the thing that I liked most about all of these movies was that the actors were trying extremely hard to make these movies go, and they weren’t sure at the time whether they would be major hits or not. Luckily, these movies became classics.
