A Three Hour Tour
cartoon desert island Originally uploaded by kristineinindonesia
I want to learn more about you.
Some people would do this by asking direct, obvious questions. Not me. That’s a little too easy for my liking. So here’s a question I want you all to answer so I can glean more information about who I’m interacting with:
Let us suppose that you know that you are going to be stranded on a desert island for what you think will be the rest of your natural life. For some reason, you know this ahead of time and you have the opportunity to take with you one single movie to watch on said island. Which movie would you take?
Caveats:
No trilogies! One individual movie only! It can be a movie from a trilogy, but you can’t take all three.
If you get stuck trying to figure out how there would be a working DVD player, TV, and electricity, please note this along with your movie.
If you can’t get past the whole “If I know ahead of time, why would I still go?” issue… please note that as well.
Ready, GO!
May 6th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Easy. The first Ghostbusters. Most quotable, repeatedly entertaining film I know.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Casablanca. No other movie comes close to combining dialog and emotions.
May 7th, 2008 at 6:29 am
A Clockwork Orange, best movie ever when it comes to voilence and a good moral to the story.
May 7th, 2008 at 7:58 am
Lilo & Stitch. Fun, quotable, and I can dissect the animation and design when I’m starting to lose my mind after the 50th viewing.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Well, for starters unless I knew that there would be a building of sorts that was hooked up with electricity (not to mention a tv, a dvd, player, or a vhs player)…brining a movie along would be completely pointless. Unless you were brining it to have something to look at, like the cover or any inserts. If that was the case I’d bring along my Final Fantasy Advent Children dvd because I like the artwork. If it were possible to actually be watching the movie then I’d bring along (this is hard to chose) I’m going back and forth between two movies- My Sassy Girl and Love My Life. Hm, I’d have to go with Love My Life. I’ve watched the movie quite a few times before and I really enjoy it. Its a very nice love story, I believe. Its also a foreign film so just possibly if I watched the movie enough I could understand what they were saying. (That is if there are no subtitles.) Haha, good enough answer for you?
May 8th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Well… I just did a Amazon search.. and I can get “Survival Basics” that ships with “SAS Survival Handbook: How to Survive in the Wild, in Any Climate, on Land or at Sea”, that I think would come in rather handy at this point… however, not to miss the point of this exercise… I’m sure I’m going to have to dig a little deeper than that. I guess I’ll have to settle on “The Natural” staring Robert Redford. Besides being the greatest baseball cliché movie ever made… (I mean come on.. he faces himself 16 years earlier… bottom of the ninth… two strikes…), being a fabulous story of good versus evil… a romance story… a lesson of moral courage….. this movie holds itself dear to me in the deepest sentimental way.
“Ya know.. I should have been a farmer. My mother always wanted me to be a farmer… I would have been a good farmer. I like ducks and pig s and chickens.”
“My Dad wanted me to be a baseball player.”
“Well yer the best player I ever ahd.. and yer the best damn hitter I ever saw…. Suit up.”
I still get goose bumps. He did it all for his Dad… Here’s to you Wonderboy!!!
May 9th, 2008 at 9:36 am
The original 1967 “Bedazzled” with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. There are so many more laughs and touches of satire to discover in this richly complex and hilarious film.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:55 am
I think I’ll go with October Sky. A wonderful, hopeful story.
May 10th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
I think I would have to go with The Princess Bride. It’s my all-time favorite movie, and I never seem to get bored with it.
May 10th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
My first thought was that Tom Hanks movie with the volleyball and the fire, but eff that. Also, Princess Bride was an excellent choice, 50 points to Missy. I could have said Interview with the Vampire or Harry potter and the Something of Something just to piss you off, but lets not take that route. I might have to go with Boondock Saints. “O lord…. Please raise me to thy right hand and count me among thy saints.” I mean come on. How can you not love that. Either that or Lost in Translation. Or Duck Soup. Effing difficult questions. Wait i got it! Mother May I Sleep With Danger!
May 11th, 2008 at 2:53 am
If I were going to be stuck with one movie for the rest of my life alone* it would have to remind me of the best and worst of humanity. It would have to present a turning point in human history and it would have to focus on interesting characters and their roles in that turning point.
So I would select the sort of Gone With The Wind of the Russian Revolution, Reds. You have Warren Beatty proving he was more than just a pretty face as John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook The World and cog of the revolution. You have Emma Goldman and the Socialist movement in the US in the early 20th century. You have Jack Nicholson playing playwright Eugene O’Neill, who is competing for the affection of Diane Keaton, for once playing serious, as radical journalist Louise Bryant.
It depicts the doings of radicals/bohemians/activists who hung out in Greenwich Village and Provincetown and were players in history, out to change the world. And in fact they did. Finally, it has music by Stephen Sondheim.
So yeah, Reds. (And if not Reds, Animal House. ;))
* Now that I think about it, you didn’t say I would necessarily be stranded alone. So, if it were a stranded group, I would have to go with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which would give us the bonus of interactivity, along with entertainment.
May 11th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Ghostbusters or Caddyshack. Quotable, hysterical, and able to be watched back to back for all eternity.
May 11th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
I’ve struggled with this question, for a couple of reasons. First: If I’m being completely honest, I’d pick music over a movie — something like a recording of the Grateful Dead show I saw at Riverbend in Cincinnati in 1985 maybe. And then if I skip over music in favor of a film, I’d have to get past the temptation to pick something that would pass muster as an acceptable all-timer — like The Godfather, Manhattan or Casablanca — and go with what is in fact my favorite movie ever: Airplane!
*J.D. makes a good point about Rocky Horror, though — maybe if you could grow a little rice somewhere on the island?
May 11th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
It’d probably be a Pixar flick, and most likely The Incredibles. I love Edna - I never knew initially that she was modeled on one of Hollywoods more famous costume designers. :-) Half the action takes place on a remote island, and in the other half, the Parr family is separated from the rest of humanity by a figurative ocean, by the fact that they are “supers”.
BTW, wouldn’t a desert island be an oasis? ;-)
May 12th, 2008 at 11:11 am
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. It would have to be some humor.
May 12th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
This is hard, because after a few years I would be bored with even my most favorite movie.
I would choose a movie that would teach me something. Survival tactics would be smart, but one of your other commenters thought of that and I won’t copy. So I would choose either a movie that featured tap dancing or a foreign language film.
For dancing, I’d take Singing in the Rain, because trying to learn any of those dances would take me the rest of my life.
For foreign languages, I’d take 8 1/2. It’s a funny film anyway, and the plot is confusing enough to keep me thinking. And I would love to speak Italian. Also, I would enjoy looking at Marcello Mastroianni for a few years.
But I suppose I have to choose between those two, eh? Hmm. I guess I’ll go with the dancing; it’ll get me in shape too.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
A Clockwork Orange? I could not imagine a more maddening choice. I would have said Princess Bride, as it has everything (like Peter Falk promised). Or I might chose Joe vs. the Volcano as encouragement during the situation.
I choose Josie and the Pussycats. “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your…”