Jean de Florette before Manon of the Spring (too obvious?);

The Thin Blue Line before The Green Mile (for an earth-based framework in which to consider the issue of black men on death row in the south, plus, what a nice serendipity of titles!);

Taxi to the Dark Side before any episode of the television show 24 (I know, 24 is not technically a movie, but I can’t think of a movie that has advanced the view that torture is just one part of a well-rounded program of crime prevention in quite the way that 24 has);

The Gold Rush and City Lights before, oh, ANY modern romantic/physical comedy (it seems to me that the boxing scene in City Lights is overlooked as one of the most hilarious and perfectly choreographed bits of physical comedy ever put on film – absolutely priceless – after a dozen times seeing it, it still makes me laugh until I cry – sheer genius – in my humble opinion much funnier, orders of magnitude funnier than the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera which is often cited as one of the classic comedy scenes – have I used enough superlatives yet? (full disclosure: I have a tiny bit of experience with boxing));

Nanook of the North before March of the Penguins (maybe just my northern hemisphere bias showing?);

Little Big Man before Dances With Wolves (although, really, the latter should simply be avoided – I think it’s a terrible movie – these are contrasting visions of “white man goes native”, and I have a hard time believing that the parallel nature of the titles is purely accidental, inviting the unhappy comparison that arises by viewing in this order)

Amadeus before any of the other of the myriad “great composer” movies

Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, and perhaps the rest of the Kubrick oeuvre before Next (and I am NOT recommending seeing Next – I didn’t care for it – but there was a scene in which Dr. Strangelove was playing on a television in the background, something I found kind of clever and intriguing, plus a second scene (eyelids propped open while being forced to watch media) that seemed an obvious nod to A Clockwork Orange – I wonder if folks can identify other Kubrick references in Next?)

Any movie that the Coen brothers directed with the actors/actress John Goodman, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Nicholas Cage, Dan Hedaya, William H. Macy, Frances McDormand, and Tim Blake Nelson before any other movie with these actors/actresses (I think the Coen brothers movies managed to extract the most brilliant career performances from this group; I know, Cage did Leaving Las Vegas, but everything that is good about him was already there in Raising Arizona)

There is, of course, an enormous body of WWII movies, and though I can’t recommend a specific order, if someone is working their way through these, the standard triumphalist fare should probably be alternated with Slaughterhouse Five, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Catch 22, and Saving Private Ryan; some other antidotes to military glory movies that should be required to be interspersed in the viewing order include Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, M*A*S*H (which also should be seen before any episodes of the derivative and, I think, wildly inferior television series), Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and Full Metal Jacket.

I don’t have a recommended order for these two movies, but I do think they should be watched back to back: A Prairie Home Companion and The Devil Wears Prada. (I was simply stunned at the brilliance of Meryl Streep’s acting in these two extremely different contemporaneous roles – I think their contrast highlights her genius like nothing else).

See any other movie that you’re likely to watch that has actor Brad Dourif in it before you see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest because after OFOCN he WILL be Billy Bibbit. Actually, that’s an interesting thread in itself: which movie performances/roles do you find so compelling in some way that the role carries an indelible permanent association for you afterward? These must be a very mixed blessing for an actor/actress if there is any commonality in such experience – this would be closely related to the issue of typecasting. Here’s a few other possibilities for me: John Turturro as Bernie Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing; Marisa Berensen as Lady Lyndon in Barry Lyndon; Keir Dullea as Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey; Christopher Walken as Nick in The Deer Hunter. Wow, that’s an interesting look under my hood – all of these are characters that in some fashion embody desperation. I wonder what that means? All right I’ve definitely drifted from the theme – time to end.

I thought it was going to be a musical…but no…

Generally agreed. Except when I saw Chicken Run with the kids (and had only seen The Great Escape years and years before and only part of it, maybe, and at first didn’t get the parallels between the two), it got a lot better when I realized the specific instances of parody in it.

Very popular with the audience, but Kubrick was apparently livid.