Mine is Lost Highway. It’s one of the most amazing pieces of media I’ve ever experienced. It’s dark, surreal, and I still don’t know what it’s about for sure. I have my own interpretation, as do many others. Who’s right? We’ll never know. The film is a fucking trip. I highly recommend.
Lord of the Rings. It has all my heart desires. Great shots of nature, camaraderie, action, feels, swords, a message, charge of the Rohirrim… I could go on. It’s a masterpiece.
You may say it’s cheating, that’s three movies - well to that I say the books are also actually one book split into three. They shot all the movies together as well. Besides, I only ever watch them all or not at all so… one big movie as far as I’m concerned.
君の名は。 (your name.). There’s so much to it. The one that comes to mind now is how humbled the writer (Shinkai) was by the west’s reception of his previous film that he insisted upon the soundtrack being done by a band with a bilingual singer, so if you watch the English dub, the music is also in English. I don’t, but I love that detail. (I prefer the Japanese dub with no subtitles, followed closely by the Japanese dub with some really excellent fan subs.) I’ve seen it enough that I no longer need the dialogue translated to fully appreciate it. I know what they’re talking about.
I also love how the trailer doesn’t tell you shit about what it’s about. The trailer is happy letting you think it’s a romantic comedy about teens body swapping. There’s a hard right turn about halfway through that changes the whole thing. And while the whole thing is beautiful and there are some great scenes before that point, that’s where the movie really begins. There’s a line in one of the songs that says “everything before now is prologue.” And that’s true. There’s the story and there’s a bunch of stuff that just sets it up, and the trailer only covers the latter.
Then there’s the multiple timelines…
Gotta be The Matrix (1999). It blew my mind with the action when I saw it as a teenager, it continued blowing my mind with the philosophical and existential ideas when I started understanding those as an adult, and now it’s the ultimate comfort watch for me.
The two sequels have a special place in my heart too.
I can’t decide, but what immediately comes to mind that hasn’t been said is “Everything everywhere all at once” and “Interstellar”.
