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Friday Fun Thread for February 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm trying to compile a list of movies that would be useful in an overview of 20th Century History. I have two versions of the list, one with about 90 movies and a longer one with about 130 movies. I feel like I've covered most key events and themes, but the 1950s and 1990s feel a little thin. I probably have most of the obvious choices covered, but am likely missing some key outside-the-box options.

If you could pick 10 movies to show, say, a teenager to supplement their understanding of the century before they existed, what would you pick?

Edit: I've uploaded my long list to Letterboxd here:

https://letterboxd.com/dorrk/list/20th-century-the-movie/

Edit 2: To be clear: This not meant as a list of "important movies in movie history," or "the best movies of the last century," but rather as a list of movies that can be used to inform discussions of real world history, even if through fictional treatment of or adjacent to its subjects. What was important in/about the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, etc.: what key events happened, how did people live, what were the thematic currents that for you summarize key times and places in the 20th century?

Good list, but missing some big ones, especially from comedy. His Girl Friday, Some Like it Hot, Dr. Strangelove, Die Hard, Tootsie, Network, Star Wars IV, Airplane!, Rambo, Gone with the Wind, and I’d throw in some Marx bros. and James Bond.

I tried to stick to movies that depict the actual times of the 20th Century, so no Star Wars or Gone With the Wind. And I tried to avoid -- with the exception of the first movie, which is a bit of a thematic gag to start it off -- obvious fantasy elements. My object was to pick movies that reflect mostly real-ish events and lifestyles. In that vein, Le Carre is a more apt type of spy storyteller than Fleming. I think I did a poor job of outlining parameters. But it's interesting to see how others interpret the prompt.

‘Realism’ is an aesthetic as artificial as absurdism in many (most?) cases IMO. Le Carre seems more ‘real’ because of his tragic tone but his MI6 was just as fantastical as the shark tanks Bond swings over using his wrist-watch grapplehook. But jokes and fantasies are often better than serious drama to grok the spirit of a time. Contemporary films about the past always carry with them modern concerns, no matter their fidelity in set dressing, so we can’t come to a true meeting of minds across time. But stuff like this or this can let us peek across that chasm, if only to realize how big that gap is.