Every Saturday night I let Alex choose the movie. This started earlier last year when we found ourselves at home more and more and Alex was getting more and more into movies. Especially old movies!
You have no idea how varied his tastes are in movies. He’s big on the classic “bloke” movies — war, westerns, crime and general action, but if you check out this list of our movies for the year you will see they go from Stagecoach in 1939 to recent releases like Dunkirk and Hellboy.
And along the way, so much variety! Classics like “Lawrence of Arabia”! Quite obscure movies like “Operation Crossbow” or “Night of the Generals”. Popular classics like “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Longest Day”. He has this great habit of researching actors in his own way, jumping from movie to movie and following their careers. He knows Sean Connery from his earliest roles in “The Longest Day” to his star Bond turns to his later classics like “The Untouchables” and “The Hunt for Red October”. He’s more than familiar now with even older actors such as Henry Fonda and James Stewart.
If you know Alex you know what he can be like, but you may not know how clever he can be 🙂 He has such a good memory and such an open nature. What he has trouble with in communication he makes up for in friendliness, enthusiasm and such a wide knowledge of his favourite things.
This is the list of the year, month to month, charting one excited 15-year-olds wildly varied interest in classic movies for the year. I was impressed that more than half the movies we watched were movies I had never seen before either. Some classics like Lawrence or Stagecoach that I’d just never got around to, some that I honestly had never heard of! And to be completely honest, none of them were bad and all of them were interesting.
So he’s the year in full. We’re not stopping, with “Catch-22” coming right up tomorrow, January 1!
Dirty Harry
Jaws
Magnum Force
The Dead Pool
Lethal Weapon
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Every Which Way But Loose
The Gauntlet
Westworld
The French Connection
Patton
Rush
MAS*H (1970)
The Rocketeer
The Wild Bunch
Brannigan
McQ
My Darling Clementine
JFK
Dad’s Army (2016)
Batman (1989)
Once Upon a Time in the West
The Dirty Dozen
A Hard Day’s Night
Midway (1976)
Help!
Hindenburg (1975)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Hunt for Red October
The Bridge at Remagen
Ice Station Zebra
Darkest Hour
Battle of Britain
Clear and Present Danger
A Bridge too Far
Hellboy
The Longest Day
Valkyrie
Operation Crossbow
Stagecoach
Lawrence of Arabia
Dillinger
Hellboy 3 (2019)
The Night of the Generals
Speed Racer
Hamilton (2020)
Grease
Das Boot
The Death of Stalin
All the Presidents Men
Dunkirk (2017)
It’s a Wonderful Life (the perfect movie for Christmas Day!)
How many of these have you seen?
What a fun time you have been having. Wish we lived closer. Mum