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Ask HN: Inspirational movies

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Re: Ask HN: Inspirational movies

#65

Post by swombat »

Apart from those already mentioned by others, some challenging classics:

  Zorba the Greek
  Ikiru (Living), by Akira Kurosawa
  Babette's Feast
  La Strada
  La double vie de Véronique
  Lawrence of Arabia
  It's a Wonderful Life
  Jakob the Liar
  Citizen Kane
  Deliverance
  Dogville
Worth noting that none of these are "feel-good" american movies. They're "kick you in the balls and get you busy living" movies. I much prefer those to simple feel-good movies. If you want feel-good, just go watch some reruns of Friends (I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing; I do it quite often; but those are not the best inspirational movies by a long shot).

Re: Ask HN: Inspirational movies

#66

Post by kevin_morrill »

Ken Burns's Frank Lloyd Wright documentary is one of my favorites. The guy went through so many ups and downs in his career and created some of his most amazing works well and age when most would have retired. Leaves you feeling like it's never too late to accomplish something amazing if you stick to your convictions.

Re: Ask HN: Inspirational movies

#70

Post by gojomo »

cb33 wrote: post #34
aamar wrote: post #31

Don't overlook the obvious: The Matrix Also: Primer, Amadeus, Ratatouille Older movies: The General and other Buster Keaton movies, Trouble in Paradise and other Lubitsch movies.

To each his own, but can I ask what about Buster Keaton movies motivates you? Just wondering.

I was impressed with Die Hard (1988) when I first saw it; so well engineered, as a movie and story and visual spectacle. Now that's the way action movies should be made, I thought, and hoped there'd be more like it -- even while wary of formulaic recombinations, like 'Die Hard on a boat', etc.

Years later, I saw The General (1927), and it blew my mind. There, 60+ years earlier, was 'Die Hard on rails'. There were so many action-movie scenes and stunts and plot points that have been repeated over and over in the decades since.

But: when Keaton did it, he wasn't cribbing anyone else. These weren't old familiar cliches (yet). He was risking his health with dangerous stunts. He didn't have the help of later special effects. He didn't even have sound or spoken dialogue. But still it all worked: the humor, the story, the stunts, the tension.

It was like discovering the common ancestor of hundreds of later movie and TV tropes, the very first action flick that crawled out of the oceans of text and imagination to walk on the dry land of motion pictures.

To have created that, with the limited tools of the era, prefiguring so much of what came later -- well, we can only hope to do something similar with the still-young digital and network media of our age.

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