The Top 10 Movies of 1997

Nigel Druitt

An avid Flickcharter since 2009, Nigel is a self-described fanboy whose Top 20 is dominated by the likes of Indiana Jones, Frodo Baggins and Marty McFly. Nigel is the Canadian arm of the Flickchart Blog, but try not to hold that against him. You can find him on Flickchart as johnmason.

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4 Responses

  1. Nigel Druitt says:

    My personal Top 10. L.A. Confidential should be a bit higher.

  2. Boogie Nights is a masterpiece. I’m surprised it’s not higher.

  3. dsubnet0 says:

    1997 was a special year for me because it was the first time I ever did an “ad hoc double-feature” at a movie theater: I walked out of “The Fifth Element”, bought another ticket, and walked into the next showing of “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery”.

    I was fourteen years old and my ego was still wet clay. Everything seemed to be forming, and INforming, parts of my larval personality. As I look at the emotional monstrosity that I’ve grown into, it is impossible to imagine that seeing those two PARTICULAR movies, huge and loud in a theater, within the same evening, in that PARTICULAR year, didn’t have some MASSIVE, “dialectical” impact on me.

    Patton Oswalt writes in SILVER SCREEN FIEND about how pairing the same films in different combinations causes drastically different impacts on the audience. As I was absorbing my colleagues’ amazing write-ups and reliving the films through their eyes, I began to sweat at the thought: what if I had seen a different pairing of movies in that crucial year of my life? What if it had been “Trial And Error” instead of “Austin Powers”? What if it had been “Gone Fishin'” instead of “The Fifth Element”?

    What if I had gotten my dad to take me to “The Full Monty” + “Event Horizon”? What if I had waited and seen “In & Out” together with “L.A. Confidential”? What if I had snuck into “Boogie Nights” right after “RocketMan”?

    Each of those pairings leads to a completely different person, leading a different, differently twisted life in some alternate timeline.

    New proposal for a Flickchart tag line: “Pairings matter.”

    • David Conrad says:

      I wonder about that. Did my formative movies help to make me who I am, or were they formative because of who I already was destined to be? I tend to lean toward the latter, so I don’t worry too much about my roads not taken; I think most of them probably lead back to the same highway. The movies that I think of as formative are cherry-picked in my memory from all the movies I saw, most of which left no significant impact.