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Shlomi Fish’s Films’ Recommendations

Shlomi Fish’s Films’ Recommendations

This is a list of films I have watched and can recommend. The source used to generate this page can be rendered using the XML-Grammar-ProductsSyndication CPAN module.

My Favourite Films

This is a list of my favourite films.

This is my favourite movie, and the favourite of a lot of others from my generation. It has an excellent dialogue, with many power sentences. The acting is excellent, and the film is very enjoyable.

The Princess Bride has the format of a classic fairy tale, but with a few interesting and non-ordinary twists. It is funny, engaging and highly recommended.

Spaceballs is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. Essentially a parody of Star Wars and other Science-Fiction films, this films features Druish Princesses, merceneries who “don’t do it for money”, but rather for “a shitload of money”, and an old small alien guru who claims that you should “never underestimate the power of the Schwartz”.

I’ve seen this movie several times, and have either enjoyed it, or found it disappointing alternately. But the first time is a blast.

Comedies

I always like a good laugh. This is a list of comedies that I enjoyed.

This is one of my favourite live-actors Disney movies. It’s funny, fun, with a lot of great songs and other music, with many jokes and anecdotes, and with a great plot.

I’ve seen it several times and always enjoyed it. I’ve also read the first two books in the series, and they are very nice, but very different from the film.

Preview

Amélie
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
IMDB
Wikipedia

A wonderful French bittersweet comedy that takes place in early-2000 France. Amélie is a young woman who was raised in solitude, and is starting to familiarise herself with the outside world. She tries to do good deeds to her loved ones, and avenge a man she hates.

Funny, exciting, and engaging - Amélie is a wonderful movie.

I saw this movie several times on television, and liked what I saw. An Irishman decides to popularise his Bed and Breakfast hotel by pretending it is a ghost castle and inviting several American guests to stay there. But much to everyone’s surprise, real actual ghosts appear and start haunting the living.

My favourite quote from the movie is:

Oh my God, What have I done? Oh my God! What have I done? Oh my God! What a woman!

The Naked Guns

The Naked Guns are among the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. I’ve watched them many times on T.V. (and watched the third one originally in the cinema), and enjoy them almost every time I watch them.

Leslie Nielsen portrays a tactless, clumsy, and naïve (but lovable) policeman, who manages to save the day despite everything, with the help of his friends. The movies have a lot of jokes, from slapstic, to funny dialogues, to punch lines, to absurd situations.

A high school graduate is in love with his female neighbour (played by Keri Russell) and taking advice from his grandfather, decides to stay at her lawn until he wins her heart. In the mean-time there are some funny incidents from both families and from the neighbours.

Here’s my review of the movie upon first seeing it.

I originally saw this comedy on Video, and really liked it. It is one of the only movies with both Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfus, who are two of my favourite actors and comedians, and they are both wonderful in this movie.

It tells the story of a lovable, but multi-phobic psychiatric patient, who at his mature age has already accumulated a lot of psychiatric pseudo-knowledge. He follows his recent successful psychiatrist on his vacation, and slowly drives him mad. This setting enables many jokes, gags, and positively great humour.

This is a sports comedy about an award-winning San-Diego-based cheerleading squad that discovers that its departing Captain stole their moves from a different squad from a run-down part of Los Angeles. As the Toros struggle to get their act together, there’s a lot of fun to be seen.

It’s hard for me to know what I exactly like about this movie, but there are probably many things to like. Kirsten Dunst acts great as usual and I always adore her facial expressions. Eliza Dushku and Gabrielle Union are also good. It’s a fun movie, which I enjoyed watching several times, and it’s still fun.

Back to the Future

This series of movies takes on the decades-old fascination of science-fiction writers with time travel, and combines it with a lot of zany humour, high-paced action, a great plot, wonderful acting, and a superb setting.

Michael J. Fox plays Marty McFly, a hip kid who is friends with Dr. Emmett Brown (the excellent Christopher Lloyd), a Mad Scienties who invents a time machine that causes a mess-up in Marty’s past, future, and present, and a wacky attempt to restore it.

The two first parts of the trilogy are really fun, with the second being more wacky and high-paced. The third part is not as good, but still worth the watch, if only for closure.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a hilarious and very memorable comedy. King Arthur and his brave knights of the round table are commanded out by God to seek out the holy grail, with a lot of fun along the way.

This film has many memorable quotes and sketches, and has provided a lot of fodder for popular culture and geek culture.

This is a Walt Disney parody/tribute to the classic Robinson Crusoe novel. A U.S. Navy pilot by the name of Robin Crusoe (played by Dick Van Dyke), finds himself stranded on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean, where he finds an abandoned Japanese submarine, an astronaut Chimpanze, and finally, a female native which he calls Wednesday. He is trying to survive the perils of the island until being rescued.

The film is funny, entertaining, and highly recommended.

Science Fiction

Star Wars IV-VI (The Original Series)

I guess you’ve already heard of Star Wars. I watched these movies on video as a child, and recall liking them a lot. Star Wars is a mixture of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Adventure, with a lot of vivid imagination, wonderful special effects (especially for its time) and an engaging plot.

Preview

Enemy Mine
Wolfgang Petersen
IMDB
Wikipedia

This is a relatively obscure, but positively beautiful and touching science fiction film. A human pilot ends up stranded on a strange planet, beside a reptilian humanoid-like alien, who belongs to a race, which the humans are at war with. While initially being enemies, they learn to cooperate with each other, speak each other’s language, and eventually even love and care for each other.

There are some twists to the plot after that, and the movie kept me captivated. Unfortunately, the movie budget’s had gone out of proportion, in part due to a change of director, and it was not successful commercially. But watching it on the Television proved to be an engaging experience for me when I was younger.

Fantasy

An adaptation to film of the first part of the Novel The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (which I’ve read later and can also recommend). The film is aesthetically pleasing, with wonderful special effects, exotic fantastical creatures, great acting, and wonderful and atmospheric music.

This is one of the finest fantasy movies I’ve ever seen, and I highly recommend it.

A fantasy film based on a story by George Lucas. An evil queen-sorceress is told that a newborn baby-girl will end up killing her, and orders her to be killed. The girl’s mother puts her cradle on the river, where it ends up being found by Willow, a member of a village of a Hobbit-like race of men.

In order to save the village, Willow must travel along with the baby, and find the destiny of the baby, himself, and Madmartigen (Val Kilmer), a gifted but non-trustworthy warrior.

I really enjoyed this film.

Animated Films

Preview

The Lion King
Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff
IMDB
Wikipedia

This is my favourite of the new crop of Disney animated films. Inspired by African legends, the Lion King tells the story of a lion cub, who learns about the place of his kind in Nature.

A few people told me that they heard people claim this movie was pro-Fascist, but there are some obvious anti-Fascist elements in it, and I didn’t find it so.

This film has great visual side, very nice songs and music, great dialogues, a lot of funny bits, and an engaging plot. Highly recommended.

This is probably the funniest Disney animated picture. An emperor of a pseudo-South American empire (voiced by David Spade) is being conspired by his advisor, and is turned into a Llama. Now he’s trying to become a human again, with lots of fun for the viewers in the process.

Dramas

A positively touching, funny and beautiful film about a sports agent who decides to change the way he and his peers treat their clients. Wonderful camera-work, great acting, and some very memorable quotes make for a movie I could not forget.

Action Films

A modern Western movie (sort-of), this film is half-action, and half-drama. It features several good actors, breathtaking camera work, and an engaging plot.

Sharon Stone plays a gun-woman, who is trying to avenge the death of her father by challenging the responsible villain (Gene Heckman), who is hosting an elimination tournament in a town he rules in the wild west.

We meet the people who take part in the contest, and learn on what they are trying to prove by it.

Highly engaging, spiritually involving, and otherwise lots of fun, this is a movie I still fondly remember.