When I say “guy”, I mean blue-collar salt-of-the-earth guy. The kind of guy who showers after work, like a mechanic or construction worker. Think Dan Connor from Roseanne. I’ll just make a short plea that geeky stuff is, generally speaking, testosterone-deficient. Can you picture Dan Connor sitting through the Lord of the Rings trilogy? I sure can’t, but that doesn’t mean you can’t include one or more of them on your list.
The only firm rule is that you must list exactly five, and sequels count as multiple movies. I don’t care if it was always intended as a trilogy, or even if they broke up a single four-hour movie into two two-hour releases; one feature film for each list spot.
I’m a huge fan of movies, and like way too many to be able to come up with a list I’m happy with. That makes it interesting to me. Here’s the one I ended up with, in alphabetical order:[ul][li]Braveheart[/li][li]Caddyshack[/li][li]Die Hard[/li][li]Raiders of the Lost Ark[/li][li]Saving Private Ryan[/ul]Gladiator was good, but Braveheart seemed to me to be of higher quality in pretty much every single aspect. Better story, better characters, better production values, better battle scenes, etc… I’m still not sure how or why Gladiator won the best picture oscar, but whatever.[/li]
Since Braveheart is in there, my choice between Lethal Weapon and Die Hard becomes a no-brainer. We don’t need two Mel Gibson movies.
My first instinct was to include Full Metal Jacket as the war movie representative because the hour at Paris Island is IMO the greatest single hour ever committed to celluloid, but Saving Private Ryan has way more wow factor. And Platoon seems a little angsty for this list.
For comedies, I was torn between Bill Murray and John Belushi. Rodney Dangerfield is the tie-breaker, so Caddyshack goes in over Animal House.
It would have been nice to get a horror movie in there. I considered Alien(s), Jaws, or the Exorcist, but I dunno. They didn’t seem to rise up to the level of Die Hard, which I think is clearly the weakest choice of the five.
You’d think a sports movie would be a no-brainer, but how many really good ones are there? Raging Bull probably deserves a spot, but I’m comfortable with excluding it.
A mob movie would be good to have in there, but dammit there are only five slots!
And it’s painful not having a single Arnold movie on the list. No Predator, no Terminator, no nothing. That’s a travesty.
Just as bad as no Arnold, not a drop of Tarantino. Pulp Fiction might come off as a bit goth for a guy’s guy list, but I think we can all agree that Kill Bill kicked all kinds of ass. The only explanation I can figure is that I went for the movies of my youth. If you consider that my first instinct was to put in Full Metal Jacket, that would have made the most recent movie 20 years old. So I guess the newer ones got short shrift from me.
Anyway, that’s my list. What’s yours?
