What is your “Core Movie” List

All of us has a group of movies that for one reason or another resonate with us. They don’t have to be deep, meaningful, or metaphysical- I just mean movies that were memorable or affected our lives in some way.

I was joking with my wife the other day about movies that I “coerced” her to watch with me when we first fell in love. This topic came up because I had just finished watching “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy with my oldest daughter (we watched for about an hour each Sunday night over the last few weeks). After it ended, I asked my wife if she’d ever seen the ending of the Lord of the Rings before, and she gently reminded me that she had, while also reminding me of the other movies I kind of “made” her watch. To be fair, she had a list of movies for me to watch as well, and with the over-abundance of curiosity and eagerness that comes when you’re newly in love, I drank up every little detail about her, including those movies.

You’ll note the absence of gory movies or murder-like movies: when I was about 7–8 years old I saw the immediate aftermath of a man who’d gotten stabbed to death right across the street from my grandmother’s house in Jersey City, New Jersey. After the police cars and ambulance and public servants left, the young man’s mother was tasked with using a push-broom and a garden hose to rinse off her son’s blood from her front porch. I’ve not been a fan of the sight of blood since then, and I certainly don’t embrace movies which treat death whimsically or callously (I’m looking at you, Pulp Fiction).