Oldies But Goodies

For me, a favorite movie is one that I’d watch again and again. My wife and I have a selection that we keep coming back to. And most of them are old ones. So, I’ll get these out of the way before I mention movies that bring back golden memories of my childhood, early adulthood or my own kids growing up. Here they are:

• 2. Casablanca (1942)
• 3. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• 4. Room With a View (1985)
• 5. Enchanted April (1991)
• 6. The African Queen (1951)
  7. Sense and Sensibility (1995)
• 8. Emma (1996)
• 9. The Sound of Music (1965)
• 10. The Third Man (1949)

TV series that we repeatedly watch include the following BBC TV series:

• Middlemarch (1994)
• Martin Chuzzlewit (1994)
• Pride and Prejudice (1995)
• Bleak House (2005)
• Little Dorrit (2008)

You’ll notice that many of them are based on novels. But these are excellent adaptations. And anytime we ever watch other adaptations of the same novels, we generally hate them 😀.

Then, you have the films that we’ve watch as a family repeatedly over the last 25 years or so. These include the following series

• Star Wars
• Pixar movies, such as Toy Story
• Pirates of the Carribean series
• Harry Potter
• Marvel Avengers movies, such as Iron Man
• Chronicles of Narnia, such as the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Lord of the Rings
• The Hobbit
• Indiana Jones
• James Bond
• Disney animated movies

Individual movies that we enjoyed as a family include the following:

• Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the other Indiana Jones movies
• The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
• The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
• Golden Eye (1995) and all the James Bond Movies
• Babe (1996)
• Titanic (1997)
• Fantasia (2000) and all the Disney animated movies
• O Brother Where Art Thou (2000)

I’m sure that there are lots more, but these are the ones that I can think of off the top of my head.

Then, I come to my earlier years. I’m old enough to remember the 1960s. Our cinemas (or picture houses as we used to call them 😀) in Cork city included the Savoy, Pavillion, Palace, Lee, Ritz and Cameo. They’re all closed now, although I went to see a mock Beatles show and a Shakespeare play in what used to be the Palace in recent years. It’s called the Everyman Palace these days. It’s right across the street from Cork Baptist Church.

Here are some movies that I remember seeing in the 1960s. I might not have seen them when they were first released. Movies often came back to cinemas a few years later. I probably first went to the cinema in 1967.

• Mary Poppins (1964)
• Batman the Movie (1966)
• The Bible: In the Beginning (1966)
• Dr No (1962)
• From Russia with Love (1963)
• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)
• Ben Hur (1959)
• The Sound of Music (1965)
• The Love Bug (1968)

I saw many movies throughout the 1970s, particularly the early 70s. I used to particularly enjoy war movies, cowboy movies, and Disney movies. And of course, there were all the movies that we’d see at home, on RTE, our only channel, such as the Hollywood musicals. During the 1980s, I’d probably only go to the cinema once or twice a year. We got our first home video player in 1984. The most impactful movies that I remember are The Elephant Man from 1980 and Chariots of Fire from 1982. I’d always watch the James Bond films, but I can’t say that I love any of them. Action movies are fun, but I lose concentration once the action stops 😀. And I don’t tend to want to watch them repeatedly.

In the 1990s, when the kids were born, we’d generally just go to kid’s movies. At the Omniplex cinema at the Crescent Shopping Centre, Limerick, which is near where I live, everyone, parents and kids only had to pay £1 for special showings on Saturday mornings. Perhaps the first one that we saw was Jumanji, which was quite scary for kids.

Bedford row has been redeveloped now, and the Cineplex is gone. Strangely, I tried to look up when it finally closed on the web, and there was either no information or misleading information. It’s true that it had replaced an older cinema that closed some years earlier. But I remember seeing Lord of the Rings there in the early noughties, so perhaps it closed shortly after that.

So, I generally try to say something about music and Christianity. Let’s begin with my top music films. You’ll gather from my blog that I’ve always been a big fan of the Beatles and Pink Floyd. So, I can’t leave them out 😀.

• A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
• Help (1965)
• Yellow Submarine (1968)
• Let it Be (1970)
• Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii (1972)
• Tommy – The Who (1975), which I went to on my 14th birthday.
• The Wall Pink Floyd (1982) (Not great, but I like the album)

I used to like some of the Elvis movies back in the early 1970s. I can’t say that I liked older musicals much, apart from the Sound of Music and perhaps Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Generally speaking, pop films are bad. Concert films are a little bit better, but I tend to get bored after an hour or so. I remember seeing a couple of Elvis concert movies, which showed on the same night, in the Ritz cinema in the Autumn of 1977, just after he died. They were very boring – “Oh no, he’s not gonna start singing Bridge Over Troubled Waters again.” Sorry Elvis 😀.

So, let’s get to Christian films. I’ve seen an awful lot of bad ones. What’s worse is that in evangelistic work, I’d be inviting people to films that I’d find hard to sit through myself 😀. But as a child, I used to love the films about the life of Jesus. You’d generally see them on tele around Easter. I do remember seeing The Robe in the cinema as a child with my mother. And shortly before my own conversion, I saw Jesus of Nazareth in the Cameo, which used to be way up near Collin’s Barracks on top of Patrick’s Hill. Ben Hur also featured Jesus, and there were a few older movies such as The Greatest Story Ever Told and King of Kings. There was another simply named Jesus, which we used to give out free. I suppose my favourite was Jesus of Nazareth.

I remember seeing The Bible: The Beginning as a young child in the Capitol Cinema. I tried to watch it recently, and it’s quite boring. The problem with Bible films is that if you know the story already, there’s no suspense. That happened to me with the Lord of the Rings films too. We had read the books before the movies were released.

With Bible movies, if they add elements, people complain that they’re tampering with the word of God. But some do work. In recent years I saw Risen (2016), and I was quite impressed with it. It featured the nasty boy from Harry Potter as a grownup – Draco Malfoy.

I remember seeing The Late Great Planet Earth shortly before my conversion in 1980. I thought it was a little silly, and pretty much all evangelicals that I ever met didn’t think much of it. The Bible does contain teaching about the end times, but some get a bit carried away with speculation. But local evangelicals did take the opportunity to stand near the cinema and distribute leaflets. I do remember chatting to a guy who remembered me when I committed my life to Christ some months later. He told me that I seemed very hard and argumentative, which I was 😀.

Many years later, a friend of mine in Tipperary told me that he was distributing leaflets outside the cinema in Tipperary town when The Late Great Planet Earth was showing. The security guy kept chasing him away. But soon after, the security guy himself was converted. I knew them both for many years.

The Bible film that I was most impressed by as a child (apart from the Jesus films) was The Ten Commandments (1956). Back in 1972, we were studying ancient Egypt in school, and I was fascinated with Tutankhamun and ancient Egypt in general. Then, when I heard that the film was coming to the Pavilion, I was so excited. I actually felt unwell in the morning that it arrived in Cork, and I skipped school, but I brightened up in the afternoon and decided to go to the movie. And who did I bump into near the ticket office, but my teacher 😀. I think that they were given the afternoon off. I loved that film. I’m not sure that I’d get as much out of it now, because I know the story so well. I know that various other movies about Exodus have been released, but I generally find them boring.

Last year, we were studying Exodus at church, and just out of curiosity, I watch Prince of Egypt, an animated kid’s movie released in 1998.

Another Bible movie related to Egypt is Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which was released in 1999. I’ve never seen it, but we knew the musical well in Ireland back in the 1970s. It was popular in 1974, and I remember seeing it at the Cork Opera House in 1978, with Tony Kenny as Joseph. And my daughter was in a school version of the show in the mid-noughties.

I always like to end with a Bible verse, but there’s nothing about movies in the Bible 😀. Maybe we can think of creation and history as one long movie and all of us are the characters. Like all good movies, bad things happen, but there is a happy ending for all those who truly reach out to God. Here’s what Paul said to the Greek philosophers on Mars Hill:

Acts 17:26
²⁶ From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. ²⁷ God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ²⁸ ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’