This is some really interesting reading. No one is reaching for something to impress. Most of you seem to have settled on my method: what movies can I always stop for and watch if I'm channel flipping? What movies DO I always stop for and watch? Some of them are other people's favorites, too--Shawshank, Grease, Kelly's Heroes...
I want to expand the rules, now that we've gotten a good response to single most favorite. I guess I can, since I started the thread and set the rules.
My point here was to make people really choose. Not to pick their 10 favorite movies and then arrange them, but at each level to have to pick ONE. So when I now open up the thread to your SECOND-most favorite movie, the rule is still the same: one movie to occupy the second spot. In a way, as we descend to number 10 (if people like, maybe we could go as far as 20), this way of doing things forces each of us to pick 10 number ones, instead of, as I said, the usual way of laying out your top 10 before posting, which you first have as a kind of mulligran stew of movies in your head, and THEN arrange in the post. That makes it too easy. This way, you're really forced to make a hard decision at every numbered spot.
I'm a case in point. I thought I knew what my second most favorite movie was when I made the first post. But as I chewed it over today, I realized that, although I think that movie is a magnificent movie (as do most people who love cinema), I don't watch it all that often. It's a bit of hard work to watch--the dialogue is some of the most bitterly self-aware and brilliant dialogue ever, and it's somewhere in my top 20, but I have to be honest and say it isn't number 2. I won't name it--that would be cheating, a way of sneaking in an extra, or qualifying the number 2 spot.
I knew number 2 for me would be a Bogey movie. Even THEN it was still hard. But when I stop to think of the movies I can watch a bazillion times, and watch any time, I finally came down to:
2--The African Queen
Man, I just love it when the captain of the Louisa (played by Robert Bull), says (to Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn) "I pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution." Perfect delivery. Of course I like much else about the movie, but I'd have to say that's my favorite moment.
