Movie Time

A new forum for the cinefil members of the team

Post your favourite movies here or your favourite soundtracks and songs from movies you liked and tell us the story about it  

Please everybody is welcome to add in the forums even a single comment on any film or soundtrack or anyrhing, it would be great if all the members start to participate in the differrent forums of the team 

My most favourite film of all-time is Local Hero. It is mysterious why I love this movie so much, maybe because i was a student in Scotland and I love the people & the place, or may be because my cousin's uncle who was living in NewYork sent us the LP of the film and I liked the music and also i was surprised seeing the vinyll was transparent, i still remember that or may be because i liked the environmental hypothesis of the film

Local Hero is a 1983 British comedy-drama film written and directed by Bill Forsyth and starring Peter Riegert, Denis Lawson, Fulton Mackay, and Burt Lancaster. Produced by David Puttnam, the film is about an American oil company representative who is sent to the fictional village of Ferness on the west coast of Scotland to purchase the town and surrounding property for his company. For his work on the film, Bill Forsyth won the 1984 BAFTA Award for Best Direction.

"Mac" MacIntyre (Peter Riegert) is a typical 1980s hot-shot executive working for Knox Oil and Gas in Houston, Texas. The eccentric chief of the company, Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster), chooses to send him (largely because his surname sounds Scottish) to Scotland to acquire the village of Ferness to make way for a refinery....

Mac ultimately spends several weeks in Ferness, gradually adapting to the slower-paced life and getting to know the eccentric residents, most notably the hotel owner and accountant, Gordon Urquhart (Denis Lawson) and his wife, Stella (Jennifer Black). As time passes, Mac becomes more and more conflicted as he presses to close the deal that will spell the end of the quaint little village he has come to love.

Ironically, the villagers are tired of the hard life they lead and are more than eager to sell, though they feign indifference to induce a larger offer. Mac receives encouragement from an unlikely source: Victor (Christopher Rozycki), a capitalistic Soviet fishing boat captain who periodically visits his friends in Ferness (and checks on his investment portfolio, managed by Gordon).

As the deal nears completion, Gordon discovers that Ben Knox, an old beachcomber who lives in a snug driftwood shack on the shore, owns the beach through a grant from the Lord of the Isles to his ancestor. MacIntyre tries everything to entice Ben to sell, even offering enough money to buy any other beach in the world, but the owner is content with what he has. Ben picks up some sand and offers to sell for the same number of "pound notes" as he has grains of sand in his hand. A suspicious MacIntyre declines, only to be told there could not have been more than ten thousand grains.

The film's soundtrack was written and produced by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. This has led to the popularity of the film with fans of the band. Knopfler has since performed an arrangement of "Going Home (Theme of the Local Hero)" as an encore at many of his concerts.

This tune borrows some melodic riffs from traditional songs. In his review of the album in Allmusic, William Ruhlmann wrote:

Dire Straits leader Mark Knopfler's intricate, introspective fingerpicked guitar stylings make a perfect musical complement to the wistful tone of Bill Forsyth's comedy film, Local Hero. ... The low-key music picks up traces of Scottish music, but most of it just sounds like Dire Straits doing instrumentals, especially the recurring theme, one of Knopfler's more memorable melodies.

 

5 February

For the cinefil members of the team this weekend I suggest the all-time favourite movie "Thomas Crown Affair" starring Steve McQueen & Faye Dunaway with an exciting senario and the most magnificent chess scene in the history of the cinema

*The Thomas Crown Affair is a 1968 film directed and produced by Norman Jewison .It was nominated for two Academy Awards, winning Best Original Song for Michel Legrand's "Windmills of Your Mind"

Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen), a millionaire businessman and sportsman, pulls off a perfect crime by having five men rob $2,660,527.62 from a Boston bank and dump the money in a cemetery trash can. Thomas never meets any of the five face-to-face, before or after the crime, and they do not know each other. He retrieves the money and deposits it anonymously at a bank in Geneva.

Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway), an independent insurance investigator, is contracted to investigate the heist and will receive a percentage of the stolen money if she recovers it. When Thomas comes to her attention as a possible suspect, she intuitively recognizes him as the mastermind behind the robbery. Thomas does not need the money but is in need of diversions. He plays polo and golf, flies a glider, and drives a dune buggy but suffers from general boredom.

Vicki makes it clear to him that she knows that he is the thief and intends to prove it. They start a game of cat and mouse, with the attraction between them evident and their relationship soon evolves into an affair, complicated by Vicki's vow to find the money and help investigating police officer Detective Eddie Malone bring the guilty party to justice.  Thomas organizes another robbery exactly like the first one and tells Vicki where the "drop" will be, because he has to know for sure that she is on his side....

One more film for this weekend is another all-time favourite movie "The unbearable Lightness Of Being". I watched this film for the first time one weekend in Edinburgh University  Recreation Theatre and I really liked the film. I was really amazed from both Daniel Day-Lewis and  Juliette Binoche 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being  is a 1988 American film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Milan Kundera about two women, two men, a dog and their lives in the Prague Spring period written in 1984. Milan Kundera served as an active (but uncredited) consultant during the making of the film. Kundera wrote the poem that Tomas whispers into Tereza's ear as she is falling asleep specifically for the film. Amazing coincidence that in the opening scene of the film there is a game of chess going on in the swimming pool of the Hospital 

Director Philip Kaufman and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière portray the moral, political, and psycho-sexual consequences for the three bohemian friends, the charismatic Czech brain surgeon Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis), a successful lothario in Communist Czechoslovakia is pursuing a love/hate affair with Sabina (Lena Olin), an equally care-free artist in Prague. One day, Dr Tomas makes a long distance call to a spa town for a specialized surgery. There, he meets dissatisfied waitress Tereza (Juliette Binoche), who desires intellectual stimulation

Challenging Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence (the idea that the universe and its events have already occurred and will recur ad infinitum), the story's thematic meditations posit the alternative: that each person has only one life to live and that which occurs in life occurs only once and never again – thus the "lightness" of being. In contrast, the concept of eternal recurrence imposes a "heaviness" on life and the decisions that are made – to borrow from Nietzsche's metaphor, it gives them "weight". Nietzsche believed this heaviness could be either a tremendous burden or great benefit depending on the individual's perspective.

The "unbearable lightness" in the title also refers to the lightness of love and sex, which are themes of the novel. Kundera portrays love as fleeting, haphazard and possibly based upon endless strings of coincidences, despite holding much significance for humans. In the novel, Nietzsche's concept is attached to an interpretation of the German adage Einmal ist keinmal ("one occurrence is not significant"), namely an "all-or-nothing" cognitive distortion that Tomáš must overcome in his hero's journey. He initially believes "If we only have one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all," and specifically (with respect to committing to Tereza) "There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison." The novel resolves this question decisively that such a commitment is in fact possible and desirable. 

Another all-time favourite is "Blow-Up" directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. The film is about a fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings, who believes he has unwittingly captured a murder on film. It was Antonioni's first entirely English-language film. After watching this movie I bought my first camera and discovered my talent in photography which is one of my best hobbies since then

The film also stars Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin, Tsai Chin and Gillian Hills as well as sixties model Veruschka. The screenplay was by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, with English dialogue by British playwright Edward Bond. The film was produced by Carlo Ponti, who had contracted Antonioni to make three English-language films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (the others were Zabriskie Point and The Passenger). Film critic Andrew Sarris said the movie was "a mod masterpiece"

 Time magazine called the film a "far-out, uptight and vibrantly exciting picture" that represented a "screeching change of creative direction" for Antonioni; the magazine predicted it would "undoubtedly be by far the most popular movie Antonioni has ever made"

Bosley Crowther, film critic of The New York Times, called it a "fascinating picture, which has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed". Crowther had reservations, describing the "usual Antonioni passages of seemingly endless wanderings" as "redundant and long"; nevertheless, he called Blowup a "stunning picture – beautifully built up with glowing images and color compositions that get us into the feelings of our man and into the characteristics of the mod world in which he dwells".  

Even film director Ingmar Bergman, who generally disliked Antonioni, acknowledged its significance: "He's done two masterpieces, you don't have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up, which I've seen many times, and the other is La Notte, also a wonderful film, although that's mostly because of the youngJeanne Moreau."  Of the film's ending, Roger Ebert wrote in The Great Movies: "What remains is a hypnotic conjuring act, in which a character is awakened briefly from a deep sleep of bored alienation and then drifts away again. This is the arc of the film. Not 'Swinging London.' Not existential mystery. Not the parallels between what Hemmings does with his photos and what Antonioni does with Hemmings. But simply the observations that we are happy when we are doing what we do well, and unhappy seeking pleasure elsewhere. I imagine Antonioni was happy when he was making this film."

Thank you  me I preffer to chose films I have already watched  

Since you like thrillers one I really liked was Roman Polanski's film  "Frantic" starring Harrison Ford & Emmanuelle Seigner.  Filming took place on location in Paris. Music unforgettable by Ennio Morricone

8 February    Propose Day today & Valentine's week, and in my mind come some all-time favourite movies with the appropriate Happy Ending 

One is "Notting Hill", a 1999 film produced by Duncan Kenworthy and directed by Roger Michell, starring Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts, Rhys Ifans, Emma Chambers, Tim McInnerny, Gina McKee, and Hugh Bonneville

The film has beautiful songs. Music was composed by Trevor Jones. Several additional songs written by other artists include Elvis Costello's cover of the Charles Aznavour song "She", Shania Twain's remixed version of "You've Got A Way", as well as Ronan Keating's specially recorded cover of "When You Say Nothing at All"; the song reached number one in the British charts. 

Pulp recorded new song "Born to Cry", which was released on the European version of the soundtrack album.

The song played when Will strides down Portobello Road is "Ain't No Sunshine" by Bill Withers. 

Tony and Max play "Blue Moon" on the piano at Tony's restaurant on the night it closes. Originally, Charles Aznavour's version of "She" was used in the film, but American test screening audiences did not respond to it. Costello was then brought in by Richard Curtis to record a cover version of the song. Both versions of the song appear in non-US releases.The soundtrack album was released by Island Records.

Another one is "Pretty Woman" with Julia Roberts again

Pretty Woman is a 1990 American romantic comedy film set in Los Angeles. Written by J. F. Lawton and directed byGarry Marshall, it stars Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, and features Hector Elizondo, Ralph Bellamy (in his final performance), Laura San Giacomo and Jason Alexander in supporting roles. Its story centers on down-on-her-luckHollywood hooker Vivian Ward, who is hired by Edward Lewis, a wealthy businessman, to be his escort for several business and social functions, and their developing relationship over the course of her week-long stay with him.

The film is noted for its musical selections and hugely successful soundtrack. The film features the song "Oh, Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison, which inspired its title.Roxette's "It Must Have Been Love" reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1990. The soundtrack also features "King of Wishful Thinking" by Go West, "Show Me Your Soul" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, "No Explanation" by Peter Cetera, "Wild Women Do" by Natalie Cole and "Fallen" by Lauren Wood. The soundtrack went on to be certified three times platinum by the RIAA.

The opera featured in the film is La Traviata, which also served as inspiration for the plot of the movie. The highly dramatic aria fragment that is repeated is from the end of "Dammi tu forza!" ("Give me strength!") from the opera. The piano piece which Gere's character plays in the hotel lobby was composed by and performed by him. Roberts sings the song "Kiss" by Prince while Gere's character is on the phone. Background music is composed by James Newton Howard. Entitled "He Sleeps/Love Theme", this piano composition is inspired by Bruce Springsteen's "Racing in the Street".

Another All - Time Favourite is "As Good As it Gets" a 1997 American romantic comedy film-drama film directed by James L. Brooks and produced by Laura Ziskin.  The screenplay was written by Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks. The paintings were created for the film by New York artist Billy Sullivan, whose work is part of the modern art collection at NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art. 

It stars Jack Nicholson as a misanthropic, racist, obsessive-compulsive novelist, Helen Hunt as a single mother with a chronically ill son, and Greg Kinnear as a gay artist. Nicholson and Hunt won the Academy Award for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively, making As Good As It Getsthe most-recent film to win both of the lead acting awards. It is ranked 140th on Empire magazine's "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time" list.

Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) is a misanthrope who works at home as a best-selling novelist in New York City working on his 62nd book. He suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder which, paired with his misanthropy, alienates nearly everyone with whom he interacts. He avoids stepping on sidewalk cracks while walking through the city due to asuperstition of bad luck, and eats breakfast at the same table in the same restaurant every day using disposable plastic utensils he brings with him due to his pathological fear of germs. He takes an interest in his waitress, Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt), the only server at the restaurant who can tolerate his behavior

Once in Baltimore, Carol persuades Melvin to take her out to have dinner...

Melvin's comments during the dinner greatly flatter—and subsequently upset—Carol, and she abruptly leaves. Upon seeing the frustrated Carol, Simon begins to sketch her semi-nude and rekindles his creativity, once more feeling a desire to paint. He briefly reconnects with his parents, but is able to tell them that he'll be fine.

 After returning to New York, Carol tells Melvin that she does not want him in her life anymore. She later regrets her statement and calls him to apologize. The relationship between Melvin and Carol remains complicated until Simon, who Melvin has allowed to move in with him until he can get a new apartment, convinces Melvin to declare his love for her.

 Melvin goes to see Carol, who is hesitant, but agrees to try and establish a relationship with him. The film ends with Melvin and Carol walking together. As he opens a door at an early morning pastry shop for Carol, he realizes that he has stepped on a crack in the pavement...

Last film for today "Crocodile" Dundee   a 1986 Australian comedy film set in the Australian Outback and inspired by the true life exploits of Rodney Ansell. It stars Paul Hogan as the weathered Mick Dundee. Hogan's future wife Linda Kozlowski portrayed Sue Charlton

Sue Charlton is a feature writer for Newsday (which her father owns) and is dating her editor, Richard Mason. She travels to Walkabout Creek, a small hamlet in the Northern Territory of Australia, to meet Michael J. "Crocodile" Dundee, a bushman reported to have lost half a leg to a Saltwater Crocodile before crawling hundreds of miles to safety. On arrival in Walkabout Creek (by helicopter due to its remote location), she cannot locate Dundee, but she is entertained at the local pub by Dundee's business partner Walter "Wally" Reilly, who does his best to explain the town and some of its inhabitants, including the towering hulk Donk, who wins money by placing a glass of beer on his head and challenging people to try and spill the beer by punching him in the stomach. When Dundee arrives that night, Sue finds his leg is not missing, but he has a large scar which he refers to as a "love bite"

At first, Sue finds Dundee less "legendary" than she had been led to believe, being unimpressed by his pleasant-mannered but uncouth behaviour and clumsy advances towards her; however, she is later amazed, when in theOutback, she witnesses "Mick" (as Dundee is called) subduing a water buffalo, taking part in an aboriginal tribal dance ceremony, killing a snake with his bare hands, and scaring away the kangaroo shooters from the pub from their cruel sport of shooting kangaroos. Mick shoots at their truck using a dead kangaroo as cover, making them think the kangaroo is shooting at them, which in their drunken state causes them to flee. The next morning, offended by Mick's assertion that as a "sheila" (Aussie slang for a female) she is incapable of surviving the Outback alone, Sue goes out alone to prove him wrong but takes his rifle with her at his request. Mick follows her to make sure she is OK, but when she stops at a billabong to refill her canteen, she is attacked by a large crocodile and is rescued by Mick. Overcome with gratitude, Sue finds herself becoming attracted to him.

Sue invites Mick to return with her to New York City on the pretext of continuing the feature story. At first Wally scoffs at her suggestion, but he changes his mind when she tells him the newspaper would cover all expenses...

Another all-time favourite movie is "The Graduate" starring Dustin Hoffmann. This film was one of the first I have seen in my life and I was really amazed by the film, the music by Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel, the hero who was driving an open Alfa-Romeo Spider and the character of the hero. Dustin Hoffman became an all-time favourite actor, especially after the second movie I watched with him, Cramer Vs Cramer. Dustin was acting with his mind and he was so committed as a character that his movies had a very strong influence in me in a degree that I wanted to be like him

The Graduate is a 1967 American comedy-drama film directed by Mike Nichols. It is based on the 1963 novel The Graduate by Charles Webb, who wrote it shortly after graduating from Williams College. The screenplay is by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, who appears in the film as a hotel clerk. 

The film tells the story of 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a recent college graduate with no well-defined aim in life, who is seduced by an older woman, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), and then proceeds to fall in love with her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross).

In 1996, The Graduate was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". 

The film boosted the profile of folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel. Originally, Nichols and O'Steen used their existing songs like "The Sound of Silence" merely as a pacing device for the editing until Nichols decided that substituting original music would not be effective and decided to include them on the soundtrack, an unusual move at that time.

According to a Variety article by Peter Bart in the 15 May 2005 issue, Lawrence Turman, his producer, then made a deal for Simon to write three new songs for the movie. By the time they had nearly finished editing the film, Simon had only written one new song. Nichols begged him for more, but Simon, who was touring constantly, told him he did not have the time. He did play him a few notes of a new song he had been working on; "It's not for the movie... it's a song about times past — about Mrs. Roosevelt and Joe DiMaggio and stuff." Nichols advised Simon, "It's now about Mrs. Robinson, not Mrs. Roosevelt."

On the strength of the hit single "Mrs. Robinson", the soundtrack album rose to the top of the charts in 1968 (knocking off The Beatles' White Album). However, the version that appears in the film is markedly different from the hit single version, which would not be issued until Simon & Garfunkel's next album, Bookends. The actual film version of "Mrs. Robinson" does appear on The Graduate soundtrack LP.

Another film I really like very much is "Down With Love" 

I was amazed by the colours, the picture, the brio of the prodagonists. Everything was so cool, it captured me from the first moment and I felt like I was in Broadway

Down with Love is a 2003 romantic comedy film. It was directed by Peyton Reed and stars Renée Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Sarah Paulson and David Hyde Pierce.

The story follows a woman who advocates female independence in combat with a lothario and the patriarchal, even male chauvinist society of the 1950s and early 1960s.

In early 1960s New York City, Barbara Novak arrives in town at Banner House to present her new work, Down with Love, a book the intent of which is to free women from love, teach them to enjoy sex without commitment, and to replace the need for a man with things such as chocolate. Following her rules would, she believes, help to give women a boost in the workplace and in the world in general.

The men who run Banner House refuse to support the book. The only way Vikki Hiller, Barbara's editor, can find to promote the book is for Barbara to meet Catcher Block – a successful writer for the magazine Know and a notorious "ladies' man, man's man, man about town" 

Barbara starts promoting her book with Vikki's help, and things take off when they get Judy Garland to sing the song "Down with Love" as a promotion to the book on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sales skyrocket, as housewives and women around the world buy the book and rebel against their men; Catcher now wants to meet Barbara, but now it is she who rejects him.

It all comes to a boiling point when Barbara appears on a national TV show talking about a chapter from the book – "The Worst Kind of Man" – and cites Catcher Block as the perfect example. Subsequently, Catcher's date rejects him, which infuriates him. Catcher swears revenge on Barbara and to undo the damage (as he sees it) done by her book by writing the "exposé of the Century" - he will prove to the world that, deep down, all women are the same, they all want love and marriage. Including Barbara Novak...

Blake Eduards "The Party" was an unforgettable movie starring Peter Sellers with Claudine Longet !

It is considered a classic comedic cult film  Peter Sellers is a bungling Indian actor accidentally gets invited to a lavish Hollywood dinner party and "makes terrible mistakes based upon ignorance of Western ways

I liked that movie not only because when I was young I was like a-fish-out-of-water in all the parties

but also the main character of the film Hrundi V.Bakshi is a romantic friendly and honest person who has the quality to become the center of attention at any moment

 The score of The Party was composed by Henry Mancini, including the song "Nothing to Lose."

The late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was very fond of repeating Bakshi's line, "In India we don't think who we are, we know who we are!", the character's reply to a hostile "who do you think you are?"

   My most favourite part of the film is the 10min dinner scene with the drunk butler Rivaling Sellers with one of The Party's stand-out performances: Steve Franken as the increasingly inebriated butler, slathering on a layer of slapstick to the proceedings with his incontinent antics. Franken's interaction with his vexed supervisor, his drunken stroll through the shallow indoor pool, his struggle to rescue the roast chicken perched precariously atop a bewigged socialite's bouffant hairdo: all comedy gold !!   I remember me I broke the seat from laughing when i first watched it on the cinema

The film draws much inspiration from the works of Jacques Tati; Bakshi arrives at the party in a Morgan three-wheeler which may suggest Monsieur Hulot's car inMonsieur Hulot's Holiday. However, it was not the same car (Salmson AL3). The entire film storyline is reminiscent of the Royal Garden restaurant sequence ofPlaytime; and the comedic interaction with inanimate objects and gadgets parallels several of Tati's films, especially Mon Oncle.

4 MarchWell since we are talking about the millions of beetles which overflooded the Argentinian coasts yesterday in a biblical surrealistic way to celebrate the debt agreement and freedom, I would like to suggest 2 Argentinian movies for this weekend

One is a a lyrical drama by Fernando Solanas and the other one road movie starring Danielle Day Lewis and Mirjana Jokovic who won best actress for San Sebastián International Film Festival.

Eversmile, New Jersey (Spanish: Eterna sonrisa de New Jersey) is a 1989 Argentine-British comedy-drama filmdirected by Carlos Sorín and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Mirjana Joković and Gabriela Acher. It was written by Sorín,Jorge Goldenberg and Roberto Scheuer.

Fergus O'Connell, an itinerant Irish dentist, offers his services free-of-charge to the isolated rural population of Patagonia, in Argentina. He's able to do so because of the supposedly no-strings sponsorship of a "dental consciousness" foundation. He runs free with his motorbike through all the places giving his dentical care for free and making the people happy, this and the smiling free-style attitude of the main character were enough for me to adore this road movie.  While his motorbike is being repaired, O'Connell meets Estela, the garage-owner's daughter, and they quickly become affectionate towards each other. Both lovers have prior commitment: he is married, and she is engaged. Yet, they go off together all the same. After a series of surrealistic adventures, O'Connell discovers that there's a subliminal price tag attached to his altruistic free services.

 "El SUR"  I loved this movie for the music of Astor Piazzolla

Sur (English: South) is a 1988 Argentine drama film written and directed by Fernando E. Solanas. The film featuresSusú Pecoraro, Miguel Ángel Solá, Philippe Léotard, Lito Cruz, Ulises Dumont among others.

Following its debut at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, Sur has collected a host of awards from prestigious international film festivals. Sur garnered its director, Fernando E. Solanas the Best Director at Cannes in 1988 and was nominated for the Palme d'Or in the same year. 

The film was selected to be screened in the Cannes Classics section of the2015 Cannes Film Festival.

The soundtrack of the film is magnificent  with an unforgettable Roberto Goyeneche 

I guess the most famous tango in the history of the cinema is from the film "Scent Of A Woman" starring Al Pacino. The music is "Por una cabeza" by Carlos Gardell and the girl dancing is Gabrielle Anwar.

Scent of a Woman is a 1992 American drama film produced and directed by Martin Brest that tells the story of apreparatory school student who takes a job as an assistant to an irascible, blind, medically retired Army officer. The film is a remake of Dino Risi's 1974 Italian film Profumo di donna, adapted by Bo Goldman from the novel Il buio e il miele (Italian: Darkness and Honey) by Giovanni Arpino and from the 1974 screenplay by Ruggero Maccari and Dino Risi. The film stars Al Pacino and Chris O'Donnell, with James Rebhorn, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Gabrielle Anwar.

Pacino won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance and the film was nominated for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film won three major awards at the Golden Globe Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Motion Picture – Drama

Another all-time favourite movie is Dead Poets Society starring Robin Williams  I thought about this film while I was working on poetry forum during this week It was really touching and Robin Williams the perfect poetry teacher, reminded me of mine poetry teacher mr.Monios who was even better than him  Soon I'll try to analyse the last 2 favourited films

 Dead Poets Society is a 1989 American drama film written by Tom Schulman, directed by Peter Weir and starringRobin Williams. It tells the story of an English teacher who inspires his students through his teaching of poetry.

Keating was based on Harold Clurman, who taught at the Actors and Directors Lab, and Samuel Pickering, who taught Schulman's sophomore English class. While Keating's inspiring speeches may have come from Clurman, his quirky teaching style came from Pickering. In an essay, Pickering says he sometimes taught class while standing on a desk (as Keating does) or in a trashcan. One of his students remembers Pickering making him stand on a chair and flap his arms every time the class said the word “nevermore” while reading Edgar Allan Poe'sThe Raven.

“I did such things not so much to awaken students as entertain myself,” he wrote. “If I had fun, I suppose I thought, the boys would have fun, too, and maybe even enjoy reading and writing.”

Keating tells the boys to sound their “barbaric yawp” from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. He quotes Henry David Thoreau's line from Walden, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The boys chant lines from Vachel Lindsay's almost-forgotten poem "The Congo": “Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black, cutting through the forest with a golden track.” Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Lord Byron are also mentioned.

Of course, the most memorable literary reference is the use of Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln. At the end of the movie, after Keating has been fired, the boys climb on their desks and declare their loyalty by saying, “Oh Captain, My Captain.”

Another all time favourite epic film, I liked so much is "Legends of the Fall"directed by Edward Zwick and starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, Julia Ormond and Henry Thomas. Based on the 1979 novella of the same title by Jim Harrison, the film is about three brothers and their father living in the wilderness and plains of Montana in the early 20th century and how their lives are affected by nature, history, war and love.

Sick of betrayals the United States government perpetrated on the Native Americans, Colonel William Ludlow leaves the army and moves to a remote part of Montana. Along with One Stab, a Cree friend, he builds a ranch and raises his family. Accompanying them are hired hand and outlaw Decker, Decker's wife, and daughter Isabel Two. Ludlow has three sons: Alfred, the eldest, is responsible and cautious; Tristan, the Colonel's favorite son, is wild and well-versed in American Indian traditions; Samuel, the youngest, is educated but naive and constantly watched over by his brothers.

Brad Pitt and sir Anthony Hopkins and the Indian One Stab are unforgettable

The Secret of the Sahara is an Italian TV Miniseries with Michael York and Andie MacDowell , James Farentino , Ben Kingsley, Mathilda May etc

directed by Alberto Negrin and broadcast in 1988 in four episodes of approximately 90 minutes each. The filming was done mainly in Morocco.

The original soundtrack is by Ennio Morricone; the main theme is Saharan Dream performed by Amii Stewart.

It takes its main inspiration from the books of Emilio Salgari with some elements from Pierre Benoît's Atlantis.

1925: an American archeologist, Desmond Jordan moves to Africa, seeking the "Speaking Mountain". This brings him into the middle of the Sahara desert, where he meets some deserters from the French Foreign Legion. Jordan escapes with Orso (Bear) from a siege by Ryker, a lieutenant of the battalion and moves towards the mountain.

Ryker and El Hallem, head of local tribes, pursue Jordan, who has gone blind approaching the mountain. The lieutenant gives vent to his violence, murdering some locals and sparing only their queen, Anthea. Later she cures Jordan's blindness and, together with El Hallem (redeemed), helps the archeologist to defeat Ryker.

Eventually, Jordan helps Anthea and Orso discover the secret of the mountain, an alien power that arrived with their ancestors from the stars thousands of years before.

Jaws is a 1975 American thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg

Indeed, one of the film’s most memorable tag-lines was “See it before you go swimming!”. 

In the story, a giant man-eating great white shark attacks beachgoers on Amity Island, a fictional New England summer resort town, prompting the local police chief to hunt it with the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter. The film stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, Robert Shaw as shark hunter Quint, Richard Dreyfuss as oceanographer Matt Hooper, Murray Hamilton as Larry Vaughn, the mayor of Amity Island, and Lorraine Gary as Brody's wife, Ellen. The screenplay is credited to both Benchley, who wrote the first drafts, and actor-writer Carl Gottlieb, who rewrote the script during principal photography.

 famous line not actually in the script – Brody’s “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” line was improvised by Roy Scheider.

Shot mostly on location on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, the film had a troubled production, going over budget and past schedule. As the art department's mechanical sharks suffered many malfunctions, Spielberg decided to mostly suggest the animal's presence, employing an ominous, minimalistic theme created by composer John Williamsto indicate the shark's impending appearances. Spielberg and others have compared this suggestive approach to that of classic thriller director Alfred Hitchcock.

 filming got under way at the Massachusetts resort of Martha’s Vineyard, "needed a vacation area that was lower middle class enough so that an appearance of a shark would destroy the tourist business." Martha's Vineyard was also chosen because the surrounding ocean had a sandy bottom that never dropped below 35 feet (11 m) for 12 miles (19 km) out from shore, which allowed the mechanical sharks to operate while also beyond sight of land. Several residents were cast in minor roles, but a few feathers were ruffled by the prospect of a Hollywood production rolling into town. 

Nowadays, Martha’s Vineyard attracts a steady stream of tourists eager to visit the locations where Jaws was filmed. “It really is like walking around a movie set,” says Jones. “ When we were making the documentary, we went with Lee Fierro [the Martha’s Vineyard resident who plays Mrs Kintner in the movie] to the stretch of coast where the beach scenes for Jaws were filmed. It’s very exciting to see those vistas that have become so iconic. And we got taken out to the wreck of the Orca [Quint’s boat], which was just a shell sticking out of the edge of the water. It was bizarre; we stood in it and touched it – it was like touching a piece of the true cross.”

As Spielberg wanted to film the aquatic sequences relatively close-up to resemble what people see while swimming, cinematographer Bill Butler devised new equipment to facilitate marine and underwater shooting, including a rig to keep the camera stable regardless of tide and a sealed submersible camera box. Spielberg asked the art department to avoid red in both scenery and wardrobe, so that the blood from the attacks would be the only red element and cause a bigger shock.

Three full-size pneumatically powered prop sharks—which the film crew nicknamed "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Ramer—were made for the production

Spielberg attributed many problems to his perfectionism and his inexperience. The former was epitomized by his insistence on shooting at sea with a life-sized shark; "I could have shot the movie in the tank or even in a protected lake somewhere, but it would not have looked the same," he said

As for his lack of experience: "I was naive about the ocean, basically. I was pretty naive about mother nature and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy, but I was too young to know I was being foolhardy when I demanded that we shoot the film in the Atlantic Ocean and not in a North Hollywood tank."  Gottlieb said that "there was nothing to do except make the movie", so everyone kept overworking, and while as a writer he did not have to attend the ocean set every day, once the crewmen returned they arrived "ravaged and sunburnt, windblown and covered with salt water"

“Within the frame of most horror tales we find a moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smile”, and that certainly seems to apply to Jaws. Key to this reading is the character of Hooper, who [plot spoilers ahead!] dies in the novel after having a sordid fling with Brody’s wife, Ellen, but miraculously survives on screen, largely because the affair doesn’t happen in the film. Benchley, who makes a cameo appearance in the movie as a news reporter, remembers that the very first thing Zanuck told him when writing the script was to lose “that love story, the whole sex nonsense" 

Spielberg agreed: “The shark doesn’t care whether you’re married or single,” he laughed. “It just wants to eat ya!” But what about Hooper’s survival? I insisted. Surely that only makes sense because you cut out the affair? “Well, I cut the soap opera because I wanted to go out and do a sea-hunt movie, I wasn’t interested in doing Peyton Place.”