The Movies That Made Us - Forrest Gump, is good!

[Ralphie ★]

Sadly I have no interest in most other movies in the 3 seasons of the Netflix program.

[Prophet Zacharia]

I will die on the hill that Pulp Fiction should have won Best Picture.

[Ralphie ★]

Lots of interesting factoids in there. I always love the behind the scenes stuff. 

[MickinMD ★]

Amadeus (1984), about Woilfgang Amadeus Mozart, tripled sales of classical music albums in the USA and made me want to have some exposure to classical music - which I knew very little about.

So, when I finally had time, near retirement in 2005, and managed to get accepted into the Adult Program of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins Univ, I picked classical piano - an instrument I also knew little about.

It turned out I grew to love both, partly because I studied under an acclaimed classical pianist also rightly acclaimed as a wonderful teacher, the late Frances Cheng-Koors: a former child prodigy from Shanghai who escaped Red China and eventually became head of the piano dept. at Peabody.  After a decade with her - and Peabody also requires Adult students to take courses in music theory, history, and composition including harmony and voice leading - I came well-schooled in classical music.

So the movie Amadeus is partly the reason that, when I ordered 14 books of music from sheetmusicplus.com after I got my new piano this year, half of them are Mozart, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, etc.  I'm working right now on a Minuet in G from The Notebook for Anna Magdelena Bach as well as Memory from Cats.

So it's hard for me to put anything else in the category as Amadeus.

Close behind though, and the movies I'm most likely to watch from time to time, are two Tom Hanks movies, Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan, as well as Hunger Games (the first one), Harry Potter (the first one), Jumanji, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Graduate, Gandhi, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (Doris Day) and The Wizard of Oz.

Anaglyph 3D videos - which are typically viewed with left-red-lens right-blue lens glasses - are great for entertaining kids and some are exciting in their own right because the 3D is done so well.

I have 3D several movies that are exceptionally well done - I have the anaglyph 3D versions where you can watch it on a regular TV or computer screen with special $5-$10/pair glasses: left lens tinted red and right lens tinted blue: Avatar, Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and The Life of Pi.  I use VLC Media Player on my laptop, which can run Anaglyph 3D, and a 25' HDMI cable to connect my computer's HDMI output port to a TV's HDMI port - all the video and sound come through the TV but, if needed, you can adjust brightness, contrast, subtitles, etc. with the VLC Media Player.

Avatar 3D (2009), Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (2008), SpongeBob 3D: Sponge out of Water (2015), and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle 3D (2017) are four movies that are fantastic to show when you're watching over a bunch of 11 - 14 year old kids. Jumanji 2017 is not as well-done in 3D, but there are so many action scenes with Albino Rhinos and a damaged helicopter, etc. that it's more exciting in 3D. I buy 50 pairs of cardboard-frame anaglyph 3D glasses for less than $10 from Amazon and give them, never worn before, to the kids (usually my nephew's friends) to avoid spreading pink eye or anything else that age tends to spread.

All three of the Jumanji movies in regular 2D are great to entertain a bunch of kids for a couple hours.  Sometimes the kids are playing Gameboy and other hand-held stuff when the movie starts, but put them away within a few minutes because the movies are so entertaining.  During the 3D movies, on occasion they'll move the glasses above their eyes and back down several times, trying to figure out what causes the amazing 3D effect.

There have been scenes where the kids sit on the floor and duck in unison in the same direction because 3D shows a river branch sticking out of the TV that seems to move across the room and they duck under it or when a fireball is flying out of the TV.

 

[Dottleshead ★]

FG was a great movie... but I think it was a close second to a film that came out the same year.  Shawshank Redemption I think narrowly tops it.  But I could go either way.  I know I've rewatched Shawshank more than I've rewatched Gump.  I'm trying to listen to the song, you jerk.

[Zephyr]

9 hours ago, Prophet Zacharia said:

I will die on the hill that Pulp Fiction should have won Best Picture.

Pulp Fiction losing to Forrest Gump is not near the travesty of Saving Private Ryan losing to Shakespeare in Love is.

[Dottleshead ★]

37 minutes ago, Zephyr said:

Pulp Fiction losing to Forrest Gump is not near the travesty of Saving Private Ryan losing to Shakespeare in Love is.

No but Shawshank was. 

[Prophet Zacharia]

59 minutes ago, Zephyr said:

Pulp Fiction losing to Forrest Gump is not near the travesty of Saving Private Ryan losing to Shakespeare in Love is.

Fair enough.