there will be a fish

Anyone who feels like it should post their ten most CRUCIAL CRUCIAL CRUCIAL-ASS movies, like the movies that explain everything about yourselves in your current incarnations (not necessarily your ten favorite movies but the ten movies that you, as a person existing currently, feel would help people get to know you) (they can change later on obviously).

I kind of took this to mean films that were formative/watched a million times as a kid, or films that I currently can watch a million times and never get sick of.

1) Amélie
Just, ♥. All the ♥s

2) Casablanca
I find it physically impossible to hear someone say "but soon" and not add "...and for the rest of your life", because this movie has warped me. Also, Claude Rains is the best; he steals every scene he's in from Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. That's awesome. Most-quoted movie ever, and for a damn good reason.

3) Singin' In The Rain
This movie just makes me super happy. My discovery of OT3 fanfic just makes it better. :D

4) The Philadelphia Story
BANTER. And Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Cary Grant.

5) The Fugitive
I feel like this was always on TV when I was a kid. Innocent-man-falsely-accused trope, what what

6) GoldenEye
Shut up, Pierce Brosnan was my Bond growing up. I love the Craig films, but this is a great movie. Also always on TV growing up.

7) Die Hard
John McClane, y'all. This is my Christmas movie.

8) Shipwrecked
We used to have this one an old VHS tape with the commercials edited out; the tape perished after many many viewings. Just last year, I was delighted to discover it was on Amazon Instant for rental. It's actually held up pretty well, and my favorite character is still the girl stowaway who teaches the main character to read.

9) Brick
I fucking love this movie and everything it chooses to be, from the sound editing to Joseph Gordon Levitt's face to the script. Everything.

10) Star Wars
I'm counting the whole trilogy as one, shut up. We still have a VHS boxset of the ORIGINAL films, which I will never ever ever give up even though we no longer have a VCR until I can buy the unadulterated originals on disc. Which will probably not happen for years, but at least now there's a new hope thanks to Disney. I think I need to find a VCR now....

Katie and I were talking about "Patient Zero"-type author influences earlier re: Georgette Heyer and every Regency romance written after. Influences in general are something I always enjoy speculating on whenever a connection occurs to me.

You know the game: you read Dorothy L. Sayers and go "This Bunter character...she was totally a fan of P.G. Wodehouse, wasn't she?" Or you read Lois McMaster Bujold; in the early books, you think "Yep, she's a Star Trek fan," and in the later ones (particularly of A Civil Campaign), it's "Wow, she is a fan of Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, AND Dorothy Sayers, isn't she? And The Man From U.N.C.L.E., for good measure." Or maybe it's Naomi Novik, being a fan of the Master & Commander series. Or Stephanie Meyer and The Book of Mormon. :D Or, going off books and into film, Quentin Tarantino fanboying Sam Fuller, or a million and one people loving Hitchcock.

I don't really have anything insightful to say, I suppose. I just enjoy finding connections between things, especially in reverse – like being massively in love with Casablanca for years before I saw La Grande Illusion and realized hey, Jean Renoir did the whole La Marsellaise scene concept years before Michael Curtiz.

Anyway. Surely I'm not the only person to do this. Y'all have any favorite connections of your own?