I’ve had this web site in mind for fifteen years, and the full name was originally going to be: “Other People’s Favorite Movies: Saying bad things about The Great Films.” So whatever you think are The Great Films, at some point I would get around to writing about them and suddenly this would not be your favorite web site anymore.
Other People's Favorite Movies picks a year from the past and looks back at the critical and popular favorites from that year. The current OPFM year is:
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World throws too many stars at too much comedy, and it’s still a very good time after six decades.
At first I thought, that looks just like the front of Auschwitz. Then as the story continued, I thought, they really created something that would look like the real thing, not a film set. Then I thought, no, it can’t be.
If you’re MAGA, this movie is your sacred mythology to a T. You could still enjoy it! But before we get to that, I want to share with you my absolute favorite thing in any movie of 1963.
If they had put a homely actress in Contempt, and she weren’t naked some of the time, you wouldn’t watch it. It would be an incredible bore. In fact, it is anyway.
What is 8½ really about? It’s really a male fantasy about Being Marcello Mastroianni.
It would be interesting to make a movie about finding out that your real-life grandpa is a piece of shit. If Kazan had taken it that direction, that would have been impressive.
The Cardinal is supposed to be a religious picture about a priest so pious and right-headed that his path to cardinal is assured. But it would take only the slightest change in tone to make this the most anti-Catholic film imaginable.
I liked Bond pretty well in the From Russia With Love era, when it was good clean Russia-fightin’ fun, but I finally got turned off of him by Live and Let Die (1973), in which I found the racism grossly obvious. Now, reading and rewatching the movie that started it all, I see that it was in the DNA. And why not? Bond is the British Empire’s DNA.
Much of the movie is spent around pimps who have nothing French about them — they’re wearing American gangster suits out of Guys and Dolls, and they talk like they’re in Happy Days or Grease. There is in fact not a single French person in the movie. It feels dumb a lot of the time.
Lord of the Flies deserves to be recognized among the greats of the British/French/Etc New Wave, and in fact near the top of the list because it’s not about louche layabouts doing nothing — it uses the New Wave ideas to intensify a story of precarity, expressed through the unpredictable actions of children. It’s a great match.
If you, like me, are bored by arty movies in which very little happens, you know what you will think of The Silence. If we must discuss it further, we’re going to find ourselves in the realm of Deeper Meaning.
I wonder if you’ll find The Trial quite so brilliant if you weren’t a depressed kid who read all the alienation literature you could find and thought Franz Kafka’s novel was a masterpiece. If you weren’t that kid, you might sit through this film and say, “What was that and why did I watch it?” If you were that kid, you’ll say . . . “Wow, yeah, they did it.”
I see on Letterboxd I previously gave The Birds a nice, generous *** out of five from the memory of having seen it many years ago. Lesser Hitchcock, but still some kind of a thrill. Rewatching it today . . . nah.
The great Alfred Hitchcock movie of 1963 wasn’t made by Hitchcock — it was the wonderful thriller called Charade.
Audiences and critics loved the antihero Hud in 1963, but Paul Newman’s amoral character feels more like a bundle of bad behaviors than a person.
Today, I would tend to say that nobody would make a movie like this because it doesn’t do anything. Oh, look at the nice interracial people learning to get along! But I would probably be wrong because they gave Oscars to Driving Miss Daisy, Crash and Green Book.
There is one great thing about Love With the Proper Stranger, and it is neither of the two not-very-Italian leads but their very Italian families.
Tom Jones was about as much fun and eye candy as a movie could be in 1963, and I can see why it won all the awards. Still, why do I just feel barely okay about it?