Lisa's Top 100 Films

I really love movies. I love going to movies, I love reading about movies, I love talking about movies, I love collecting stuff related to movies…I have had a lifelong love affair with movies. Though it wasn’t easy, I compiled a list of my top 100 films and to the best of my ability ranked them from 1 to 100. These are my favorite films and the list is subject to change as time goes on but for now this list captures for this particular moment in my life: my 100 favorite films. If I had to choose today—only 100 films that I could watch over and over again—I would choose these films. I plan on working from number 100 to number 1 though I suspect those who have subscribed to this blog can take a stab at what my number 1 favorite film is. Why read this? Well I hope this blog will give my friends some insight into what films I love and why—and while my top 25 I would suspect are films that everyone has seen I think there a few films in this list that you may never have heard of and maybe after reading my blog you may check out. Consider this blog my answer for when anyone asks me: Lisa, what movies would you recommend? So here goes…

100: The Right Stuff (1983)

Sam Shepard (Chuck Yeager), Scott Glenn (Alan Shepard), Ed Harris (John Glenn), Dennis Quaid (Gordon Cooper), Fred Ward (Gus Grissom), Barbara Hershey (Glennis Yeager)

In the fifth grade I wrote a report on John Glenn, U.S. Senator and Astronaut. My father suggested I write the Senator a letter because he thought it likely that I would get a response and wouldn’t that be awesome for my report? Well he was right, I got a letter from John Glenn advising me that if I wanted to be an astronaut to study hard, especially in the subjects of math and science. I got an A+ on that paper and to this day I have that letter—and because of it I will always love John Glenn. The Right Stuff, based on the book by Tom Wolfe, tells the story of the beginning of the American space program from Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in 1947 to the seventh Mercury astronaut, Gordon Cooper, orbiting the globe 22 times. After the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957 the United States was anxious to get the American space program up and running. The film chronicles the beginning of the NASA program but highlights the space flights of Shepard, Grissom, Glenn and Cooper. Director Phillip Kaufman also delves into the emotional stress of the wives and families of these test pilots and astronauts. When we first meet the Mercury 7 they seem just a bunch of egotistical competitive hot-shots. By the end of the film they are a band of brothers who back each other up no matter what happens. When John Glenn’s wife refuses to let Vice President Johnson in her home for an interview (Annie Glenn stutters and does not want to be interviewed on television) John Glenn assures her if she doesn’t want to let the Vice President in her home she doesn’t have to. The head of the space program confronts Glenn saying he can’t do that—then the other six astronauts all back up Glenn in protecting his wife. While all of the performances in this film are excellent Ed Harris, Scott Glenn and Sam Shepard are my favorite. This is a superb film that always leaves me feeling patriotic and thanks to The Right Stuff I know the answer to a couple of trivia questions.

Trivia: Mary Jo Deschanel (wife of Caleb Deschanel the Director of Photography on this film, mother of Emily and Zooey) is Annie Glenn in her first feature film performance. In 1990 Mary Jo Deschanel would star in Twin Peaks as Eileen Hayward (mother to Lara Flynn Boyle’s character).

The real John Glenn starred as himself in a 2001 episode of Frasier.

If you like this film I also recommend the following films which do not appear in the Lisa’s Top 100:

All the President’s Men (1976)

JFK (1991)