Ten of My All Time Favorite Movies

Blade Runner:When I was seven, my family and I vacationed in Vancouver for a week. We stayed at this trashy downtown hotel called the Ambassador on Granville Street, which was much less luxurious than it is now. It had one of those elevators that you had to close the metal gate yourself before it went up and there was only one bathroom on the each floor. My brother found this porno-mag that someone stashed behind the toilet paper roll and the wall. I remember my brother and I giggling in awe at a picture of who I’m almost sure now was porn star jack Holmes and his grandiose member. Granville Street was wash of strange looking people under neon lights as far as the eye could see. The Granville Cinema off Robson had these pillars made up of stacked televisions on all four sides showing movie previews and such. The theater was playing Return of the Jedi, which I went to see with my older brother. I remember the rain at night. I don’t actually remember seeing much daylight while downtown. It’s like it was just meant to be dark. It’s this brief segment of memory that Blade Runner in position of number one on my list of movies.

The Shining: I saw this movie for the first time when I was quite young, probably much younger than most kids should be to watch this movie. I give my older sister credit for that. The Shining scared the pants off me for many years. I think it was the combination of the angry dad, the dead lady in the bathtub, and the whole idea of being snowed in that really gave me the willies. From time to time, the old lady still creeps me out on those late nights when I'm home alone and forget to turn the bathroom light off.

True Romance: Marry a hooker, kill her pimp, steal his cocaine, move to LA, evade the mafia, run from the cops, and live happily ever after. It’s the new American Dream. This is one of those movies that you can’t find in the video store because you have no idea what genre it belongs in.

Leon aka The Professional: This is another one of those movies that transcends genres. Without giving away the story, this movie is about taking care of people whether it’s by sheltering them or plugging them full of bullet holes.

Apocalypse Now: I saw this movie during it's 1987 re-release in the theater and I never looked at movies the same way again. The digital audio alone knocked me on my ass. The whole movie is a symphony of madness. It's Alice in Wonderland with napalm. Thank god the theater staff didn't care that I was only 13 at the time.

Batman (1989):I saw this movie four or five times in the theater when it was first released. I couldn’t get enough. I was big into comics at the time but I wasn’t really a huge Batman fan. I think it was Gotham City that I couldn’t get enough of as well as Jack Nicholson’s role as the Joker. I’ve been a huge Tim Burton fan ever since.

Stand By Me: This movie defined the last days of summer before junior high school. For me it was the summer of sneaking out during sleepovers, and smoking for the first time, and venturing into the bushes by the train tracks to do nothing more than just be there. Watching Stand By Me is like comparing on childhood memories.

Hard Core Logo: There's so many movies out now that are filmed in Canada. It seems only a few even claim to be set in Canada as opposed to be pretending to be somewhere in the states. Hard Core Logo is the ultimate Canadian road trip movie and being that so much of Canada is nothing more than endless highways, this movie is a kind of national anthem to me and it's funny as hell.

Sin City: I'm always reluctant to add movies to my list of favorite movies that was originally just five movies and not ten. Sin City draws me back into the whole comic book genre that I loved so much in Batman. In this case however, it wasn't just the setting that I adored. I love everything about Sin City.

Connections Between These Movies

• Stand By Me and the Shining were both written by Stephen King. Almost any Stephen King movie can capture my attention for the full two or three hours.
• Quentin Tarrantino wrote True Romance and i also a guest director on Sin City. Tarrantino has an incredible eye for action and pace in his movies but it's his dialogue that really owns me.
• Harrison Ford plays Dekkard in Blade Runner but also has a small role in Apocalypse Now as Colonel Lucas who appears during Captain Willards's mission briefing.
• Brad Pitt makes a cameo in True Romance as the pothead roommate of Clarence's friend in LA. Brad Pitt modeled the character after one of his old roommates who happened to be Bernie Coulson who plays Pipefitter in Hard Core Logo. I'm a big fan of commentary tracks on DVDs.
• Jack Nicholson is Jack Torrence in the Shining and Jack "The Joker" Napier in Batman.
• Gary Oldman plays Detective Stansfield in Leon as and Drexel the wannabe Rastafarian pimp slash drug dealer in True Romance.

100 Other Movies That I Loved

1 Blade Runner (DVD & VHS)

2 Apocalypse Now (DVD)

3 The Empire Strikes Back (DVD & VHS)

4 True Romance (DVD Special Edition & VHS)

5 Pulp Fiction (VHS & DVD)

6 Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

7 Aliens (VHS & DVD Directors Cut)

8 Batman (DVD & VHS)

9 The Boondock Saints

10 Pump Up The Volume (VHS)

11 Heavy Metal (VHS)

12 Terminator 2: Judgment Day (DVD Special Edition)

13 Chasing Amy (VHS)

14 Leaving Las Vegas (DVD)

15 Sneakers (VHS)

16 The Matrix (DVD)

17 The Shining (1980) (VHS)

18 The Lost Boys (DVD Special Edition & VHS)

19 Interview With The Vampire (DVD)

20 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

21 Scarface

22 The Devil's Advocate

23 Goodfellas

24 Armageddon (DVD)

25 Dark City (1998) (DVD)

26 Leon (The Professional) (DVD Director's Cut)

17 8mm

28 Se7en

29 Go (VHS)

30 The Shawshank Redemption

31 Creepshow (DVD)

32 Mad Max (DVD Special Edition and VHS)

33 Psycho (1960)

34 Doctor Zhivago

35 Fargo

36 Strange Days (DVD)

37 Disturbing Behavior

38 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974 (DIVX)

39 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

40 Edward Scissorhands (DVD Tin Box Edition)

41 Dead Man (XVID)

42 City of Angels

43 My Girl

44 Natural Born Killers (VHS)

45 Pet Cemetery

46 U-Turn

47 The Twilight Zone: The Movie

48 Stand By Me (VHS & DVD Special Edition))

49 La Femme Nikita (DVD)

50 A Clockwork Orange (VHS)

51 Taxi Driver

52 Dead Poet's Society

53 Nineteen Eighty Four

54 Gunnm: Battle Angel (VHS)

55 Reservoir Dogs (VHS)

56 Independence Day (VHS)

57 Carlito's Way

58 Heat (DVD)

59 The Outsiders

60 The Breakfast Club

61 A Nightmare On Elm Street (VHS)

62 Johnny Mnemonic (DVD)

63 Trainspotting

64 Purple Rain

65 A Nightmare Before Christmas (DIVX)

66 The Untouchables

67 Ghost Dog (VHS)

68 Young Frankenstein (VHS)

69 Threads

70 Macross Plus

71 Black Rain

72 21 Jump Street the Movie

73 Metropolis (DVD)

74 Stir of Echoes

75 Vanishing Point (DVD)

76 Red Dawn (DIVX)

77 Braveheart

78 Ed Wood

79 Good Will Hunting

80 Rebel Without a Cause

81 Sin City

82 Drugstore Cowboy

83 Gattaca

84 The Commitments

85 Hardware (VHS)

86 Yellow Submarine

87 King Kong (1933) (DVD Special Edition)

88 Carrie

89 Pink Floyd The Wall (VHS)

90 Clerks

91 Mall Rats (VHS)

92 Batman Returns

93 200 Cigarettes

94 Rock N' Rule (VHS)

95 Southpark: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

96 Bram Stokers Dracula

97 Ronin

98 Flatliners

99 Return of the Living Dead Parts 1 and 2

100 Dogma