Frank Ocean’s 100 Favorite Films

This weekend, Frank Ocean released his long awaited album, Blonde. I’ve been enjoying it. I wish I could’ve gotten my hands on his short run magazine, “Boys Don’t Cry,” but none came to Austin (if you’ve got one you can part with, get in touch).

At least people are posting all the goodies on the web. My new favorite: Ocean’s list of favorite films. In no particular order (that I can make out), here are 100 of his favorite movies. (All notes are Ocean’s.)

{::nomarkdown}

  • ATL (ATL is not the best movie lol but ok)
  • Un Chien Andalou
  • Blue Velvet
  • Barry Lyndon
  • Battleship Potemkin
  • Eraserhead
  • Chungking Express
  • Raging Bull
  • The Conformist
  • The Bicycle Thief
  • Taxi Driver
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • Mean Streets
  • Gods Of The Plague
  • Persona
  • Mulholland Dr
  • Happy Together (Wong Kar Wai)
  • Fallen Angels
  • Apocalypse Now
  • The Last Laugh
  • Pi
  • Full Metal Jacket
  • No Country For Old Men
  • Wild At Heart
  • Memento
  • Metropolis
  • Rushmore
  • The Royal Tenenbaums
  • Miller’s Crossing
  • The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel)
  • Blood Simple
  • Rashomon
  • Orpheus
  • LA Confidential
  • Reservoir Dogs
  • Eastern Promises
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • Battle Royale
  • The Passion Of Anna
  • Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia
  • Oldboy (Park Chan-wook 2013)
  • Django Unchained
  • One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
  • The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
  • The Godfather
  • M (Fritz Lang)
  • Scarface (Howard Hawks 1932)
  • Scarface (de Palma 1983)
  • Blade Runner
  • Citizen Kane
  • On The Waterfront
  • Annie Hall
  • Psycho
  • Dr. Strangelove
  • The French Connection
  • The Deer Hunter
  • Wild Strawberries (Bergman)
  • Fargo
  • The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky)
  • El Topo
  • The Holy Mountain
  • The Shining
  • Pulp Fiction
  • Fitzcarraldo
  • American Beauty
  • Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky)
  • True Romance
  • Elephant Man
  • Seven Samurai
  • Woyzeck
  • Jackie Brown
  • Aguirre, The Wrath Of God
  • Paris, Texas
  • Devil In A Blue Dress
  • Inglorious Bastards
  • Serpico
  • Alien
  • Ed Wood
  • Hard Eight
  • The Seventh Seal
  • Sonatine
  • Paths of Glory
  • There Will Be Blood
  • Spartacus
  • Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
  • Fight Club
  • Brazil
  • Throne Of Blood (Akira Kurosawa)
  • The Master
  • Dog Day Afternoon
  • Rosemary’s Baby
  • Phantom of the Paradise
  • Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
  • Malcolm X
  • Scorpio Rising
  • The Friends of Eddie Coyle
  • Puce Moment
  • Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau 1929)
  • Basquiat
  • The King of Comedy

[Ed. note: I capitalized the titles. Ocean lists “Inglorious Bastards” without a note. This could refer to the 1978 Enzo G. Castellari film, or it could (more than likely) refer to the Quentin Tarantino film, which is spelled “Inglourious Basterds.” I left the original spelling.]

Ocean’s list is one of the best of these sorts of things I’ve seen. It’s eclectic and comprehensive. There are short films, foreign films, old films, weird films, popular films…like I said, comprehensive. It’s anything but pretentious. I’ve only seen 65 of the films on the list, and would love to fill in my gaps. I would say anyone looking to get into cinema would do well to pick a few off this list and check them out.

I love when artists do things like this, especially when it’s for a different discipline. The worlds of film and music are not without their crossovers, but they certainly have their own die-hard communities. This is a great way to bring more people into the cinema fold.

Speaking of, Ocean also shared his favorite songs, which Dean Gouskos made into a Spotify playlist. I’ll have to give those a listen.

(via Vulture.)

UPDATE: I made a page for this list over on Letterboxd. What’s nice about that is that you can quickly check off which films you’ve seen. Even better, you can filter the list by streaming service. So you can quickly file down and see what’s on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and a host of other sites. This works reasonably well in the US. I have no clue how well it works (if at all) in other countries. Some are even available on YouTube (for now), like Kenneth Anger’s films Puce Moment and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.