My worst quality is that I ruin movies.

I don’t give spoilers (heaven forbid). I don’t talk over important pieces of dialogue (sacrilege). And I don’t shout advice to characters on the screen (most of the time.)

I am, however, the most judgmental amateur movie critic you have ever met.

Marriage has been a great eye opener, especially when my wife asked me to leave the room while watching her favorite movie. Apparently, not everybody enjoys hearing how stilted the dialogue is, or complaints about static shot/reverse shots, or obscene and gratuitous uses of Dutch tilts (not that anybody knows what those are). Some people just watch the dang movie. Or so I’m told.

I’m trying to get better about this.

That being said, I yearn for an educated, movie-going public. I am passionate in my love for movies and in sharing them with others. But, aware of my faults, I don’t want my passion to ruin movies for other people.

The same goes for any number of other art forms. Literature, drama, art, poetry, the humanities in general tend to get freighted with this unfortunate weight: everybody must enjoy the same things. Love these things or be labeled an uncultured swine. The worst affect of this, I think, is that people know they haven’t seen or don’t enjoy the things they’re “supposed” to like and then people like me give them all kinds of grief and ultimately we all end up missing the point of art, to observe and comment on the way things are and to offer us images of who we are and what we can aspire to and what despairs our sins and shortcomings might bring us to. In other words, the arts-the humanities, exist to help us understand what it means to be human.

Movies, in particular I think, excel at this goal in the modern era because they are able to provide us with such an evocative vernacular of symbols, speeches, scores, and spectacle over the course of two hours which will leave lasting impressions for a lifetime.

As an aside, I think books do the same thing, with the added benefit of helping to build a robust muscle of imagination, which movies, for all their wonder, simply cannot do as effectively.

Here at Forging Honor, we’re going to recommend all kinds of things, books, skills, exercises, the list goes on, but I wanted to set aside a little time to talk about movies and how and why we’re going to recommend them here on our site.

They’re Accessible

It’s never been easier to recommend movies. With the advent of streaming (physical media is better and will not die, but that’s a rant for another time) it’s so easy to find a movie for cheap. No more hunting around a video-store or waiting for a library loan, now watching a movie is as easy as searching it up on Amazon or Netflix. This creates a problem though which is:

Making Finite Choices In a Near Infinite World

With so many things to watch, how do you make any kind of decision? Where do you begin? The Algorithms exist to keep you happy, appetized and un-offended, so where do you go to find something challenging, thought-provoking, or something that wakens your imagination? Again, we’re here to make suggestions, not demands on your time. We don’t have definitive answers, but we might be able to point you towards some trails and paths you might enjoy. One last thing:

Movie Lists Provide a Shared Vocabulary

Listeners of our podcast will know that I (Banjo) have a bad habit of quoting movies nearly every episode. I can’t help it. It’s not that I learned how to be a man from movies, it’s that movies provide a quick and easy short hand for me to build from, symbolic characters and artistic representation which help me to chip at and mold and change my ability to speak to what I understand my own masculinity to be. Are any of these analogies perfect? No. Are they all worth imitating? Definitely not, but I find the broken images the most helpful. They show me where my own follies will lead if left unchecked. Plus, I love the feeling of throwing out a movie quote I think only I know, and having someone call out the response unprompted. Instant seal of friendship.

So you’ll see some recommendations coming onto this page soon enough. Before we start tossing them out there, though, I thought it would be good to break down, briefly, my criteria for recommending a movie.

When I suggest a movie to my friends I often try and break any recommendation into one of three categories. It’s either going to be:

• A Great Movie that Shaped the Form
• An Excellent Movie from the Last 20-30 years Changing the Form
• Or A Movie that Shaped Me

Great Movies that Shaped the Form

These are the movies from the AFI 100 hundred list. These are the films that, like them or not, they’ve made up the way movies have looked for the last 100+ years. They’re the movies hidden in every other movie, the one other movies steal from. The Godfather, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and On the Waterfront, would all be examples here.

Excellent Movies From the Last 20-30 Years Changing the Form

These are movies from the last 25-30 years that are changing the things we see in theaters, or are entering the cultural vernacular, influencing the way we talk, imagine or interact with the world. These aren’t classics yet, but they probably will be in the next twenty to thirty years. These are movies that are open to a lot of subjective interpretation, since history hasn’t validated most of our hypotheses yet. Some examples (and personal favorites) here would be Fight Club, The Social Network, There will be Blood, Oppenheimer, Whiplash, or No Country for Old Men.

Movies that Shaped Me

It’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling we have to like only the “great” movies. I’m a firm believer that you don’t have to say Citizen Kane is your favorite movie ( if it is, good on you, but if not, join the club, we get jackets). There’s some movies that will never be on the greatest movies of all time list that you will just love. Maybe you saw them at just the right time or they remind you of a place or a person. Whatever it is, this kind of movie will always be in your life no matter what anyone says, and that is awesome. It’s great to have those movies. Treasure them. They only belong to you. But when you get to share them with someone else, and they get it, man, that’s magic. For me, I’ll never forget where I was or what I first thought of Inception (or really any of Christopher Nolan’s movies), Moneyball (Or, again, almost any of Aaron Sorkin movies), Heat, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Fletch, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, The Three Amigos, The Warriors, Glengarry Glen Ross, or (the Rosetta Stone of Benjamin Jones) Henry V.

All of this is preface and prologue to any recommendations of movies or books or tv shows or art or any other thing we might suggest on this website. They are suggestions, but these are the criteria: Did they leave a historical mark? Do they continue to shape the conversation? Have the been personally impactful? These kinds of questions allow us to build a shared vocabulary, giving us common texts and archetypes to pull from and share together.

Let me wrap this up with some wise words my pastor gave recently. “We don’t get our morality from movies. We get our morality from scripture.” It’s a great point. If we recommend something here it’s not necessarily because we think every recommendation is the paragon of Christian Masculinity. It might be incredibly broken, but it might be a piece of art that gives us an essential and vibrant vocabulary, helping us to understand and depict the human condition accurately and thoughtfully. I hope you enjoy them.

And if not…forgive me…I’m not sanctified yet.