Love With A Capital L

A journey towards living an inspired life of love in the modern world

Tag: movies

Top 10 — August 19, 2026

Top 10

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The site wants to know my Top 10 Favorite Movies… In no particular order: Fight Club, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Pulp Fiction, Lord of The Rings (for sure, Return of the King, maybe both others), Star Wars Episode 8: The Last Jedi, Point Break, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Avengers, The Big Lebowski. That’s 9 or 11, depending on the first 2 LOTR movies. As I think about them, they are all there for different reasons.

I’ll admit Point Break is not the best movie any of us have ever seen, but I did see it probably 10 or 15 times in a theater during the summer between my 10th & 11th grade years of high school. It makes me think of my friends… Later on, you don’t usually have friends like the friends you have in high school. Maybe that’s because everything that happens to a teenager is in neon or caps lock. Everything seems so intense and meaningful, because we are all exposed nerves trying to figure out how we’re going to live our lives. We’re bulletproof AND totally fragile. We’re FBI agents AND surfers. We live in a suspended hyper-reality. It makes me think of my friends.

The Avengers is a great time, it’s just a really fun time. It isn’t deep or affecting, it’s awesome. It’s spectacle, relationships, conflict, good v. evil, sacrifice and victory. Pulp Fiction is fun AND a Brilliant, Great Film. It’s probably the best film on my list. You don’t need friends to love it, it stands on its own, above and away from context. Eternal Sunshine broke my heart – I remember crying to the Angel afterwards, holding her so tightly, desperately, promising no one would ever take her (or her memory) from me.

You know, I just wrote a post for my other site (bridgefaithcommunity.com) about presence and the inextricable tie between love, pain, and gratitude. I wonder how much this film cemented my 2 hands philosophy. The pain of loss was so great, he chose to erase her from his memory. In the beginning, it was fine, the memories went in reverse, so eliminated first was the destruction of the relationship and the heartbreak. But as the memories worked backwards, the wonder, beauty, the love, he didn’t want them to go and desperately tried to hold on to them. He couldn’t, they took all of her. It was devastating. Love hurts. Big, real love can hurt more. It’s worth the risk.

The Big Lebowski is hilarious with one of the best characters in modern cinema, we all sort of want to meet the day as the Dude. Everybody hates The Last Jedi, and they’re all wrong. It has the 4 best scenes in the Star Wars universe. Luke dies, the Rebellion/Resistance lives. It’s perfect. The Winter Soldier is the movie you make your friends watch that think superhero movies are dumb. Fight Club is The Most Spiritual Movie Ever.

I have no idea how much impact these films have actually had on me, if they were truly integral in building the Chad that I am. What I know is that my life would not have been as cool without them, and I am thankful.

Top Ten — August 20, 2025

Top Ten

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As you might have guessed, I have been making lists of “Top ___” lists as long as I can remember. Top 5/10/25/100 albums/songs, soundtracks, top 10 moments in professional wrestling history, top 3 MLB pitchers/shortstops, top 5 pizza shops, etc. You get the idea. This is not a new idea to me.

A very good friend once had a husband who made a list of his Top 500 songs. It was mostly awesome, (he turned out to be not awesome at all), but when you get past the first few, it gets pretty muddy and begins to be governed by little more than which one you listened to most recently. It’s obvious “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” is #1, but is “Rebel Yell” or “Possession” 14 or 15? I’d say “Heartbreaker” by Pat Benatar is somewhere in the area of 153, and so is “Overkill,” by Men At Work – who is to say which is 153 or 154 or even 171? AND are we including all Morrissey/Smiths songs? Because if we are, then the kind of list we’re making starts at, roughly, 40, with the exception of “I Can’t Help Myself” by Gene, which is either 1 (if Morrissey is omitted), 2 (if we’re only including “…Light That Never Goes Out”) or 6 (if everything is in play).

My Top 5 songs, incidentally, are 1. “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out,” The Smiths. 2. “I Can’t Help Myself,” Gene. 3. “Good Enough,” Sarah McLachlan. 4. “Hey Jealousy,” Gin Blossoms. 5. “Just Like Heaven,” The Cure. The 5 don’t change, but when “Just Like Heaven” is on, it’s #3.

Movies are an interesting proposition, though, as far as rules. Do you count entire series/trilogies as 1 or each individually? Will there be all 3 Lord Of The Rings films, or do you call it Lord of The Rings and leave it at that? What I’ll do is give my favorite of the series/trilogy and not include any others. And are there any genre limitations? Nope. Documentaries alongside fiction? That’s right. Here we go (maybe I’ll expand, if I feel it’s necessary). And we’ll decide at the end if this is the actual order…

Fight Club. Pulp Fiction. Kill Bill, vol 2 (and ONLY vol 2 – if I were to make a list of the movies I hated the most, vol. 1 would be high on that list). Point Break. Star Wars, ep. 8: The Last Jedi. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier (this will be the only entry from the MCU, although it probably could have been the first Avengers, Endgame, or Thor:Ragnarok. Any of those would be fine, too). Into The Spiderverse. LOTR: Return Of The King. The Dark Knight.

Now, I’m thinking about movies I loved that might have been high at different points in my life. I loved Dogma and Vanilla Sky. (Yes, I recognize Vanilla Sky is not the greatest, but for about 15 minutes in 2001, I thought it was just the cat’s pajamas.) Fraternity Vacation was exactly the kind of movie to really matter to a 13 year old. The Matrix, Adaptation, We Bought A Zoo, 12 Monkeys, and Knives Out all could’ve maybe made the list on a different day (with many others). But looking at the list – which is not in order, except Fight Club, that is #1 – maybe they couldn’t have. Those 10 are just about right.

I wonder what that says about me. Do we become the people we are because of the art we choose, or do we choose that particular art because we are those kinds of people? The Angel can’t get through 5 minutes of Pulp Fiction. Of course, she’s wrong, but why? What happened to make our interests so varied? Or did nothing happen, are we just pieced & wired together differently? Who knows? And honestly, who really cares?

When I took the Angel out on our first date, the first thing I did was look at her cd collection. It was cool and quirky, and it made me like her even more. As it turned out, the collection was her roommate’s. The Angel had about 15 cds, including Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, John Secada, and Backstreet Boys; it was like a traffic accident. Why would anyone possibly own these particular albums? After 25 years together, I still can’t answer that question, but what I did learn is that what we like isn’t nearly as important as I thought. Maybe it isn’t important at all. She finds no joy in Sarah M or The Cure, either. And I think she’s just the greatest, #1 in my list of favorite people.

I still make the lists, they still matter to me, I still care…I guess I just don’t need you to care anymore.