The other night I was coming back from a party with a friend, a movie fan like me.

Whilst the centre line of the road ran towards us, we spoke of the new movies and of how today, the Science Fiction and Horror currents of the American cinema, are increasingly poor in imagination and frequently resort to the so called ‘remakes’, bringing in the digital age past masterpieces. Without any doubt it is a peculiar time for this type of fiction. Both of us agreed on this.

“Movie producers only bet on winning horses” my friend said.

“And they bet only after they’ve seen them crossing the finishing line first.”

“Now you exaggerate!” He smiled. “The height of caution.”

“I don’t really know” I admitted in the end. “Maybe they have a time machine. It’s easy to invest in the past.” The second episode of ‘Back to the future’struck my mind.

“Yes, like in ‘Timecop’!” he answered.

We both burst out laughing.

There is really a sense of confusion in today’s fantastic movie. Only best-sellers become TV movies. There isn’t much to be happy about. Without any doubt, the remakes I referred to (as Coppola's ‘Dracula’, ‘Frankenstein' by Kenneth Branagh) are of great value, but in my opinion more space should be given to new ideas. There are also the exceptions that prove the rule, undoubtedly more so in the science fiction case, as James Cameron and Roland Emmerich movies.

The road is empty and lit only by my headlights. I’m tempted.

To stop in a lay-by and to repeat playfully the opening bar of the movie ‘The Twilight Zone’. But, before I have the time to do so, he amazes me with a question more overwhelming than my trivial idea.

“If the world were to turn into shambles.” he says “and you could save only ten movies, which ones would you save?”

“Into shambles?”

“Yes, destroyed.”

“Like after the nuclear holocaust?”

“Yes, like that. Everything and everyone gone.”

I laugh. It’s a very funny way to ask me which are my favourite ten movies, even though I know that he who asks such a question, in reality, is dying to tell you his favourite movies.

“Well, if everything broke into pieces, I certainly wouldn’t be saving movies.”

“Come on. It’s a hypothetical situation.”

“Precisely. Do you remember ‘The Omega Man’? Only Charlton Heston could have been so stoic to continue to save things from the past, whilst the world was dying. I would have preferred to be amongst the dead.”

“Among the living dead?!?”

“Which living dead? They were only mutants. No, I would have preferred to drop dead rather than to witness that havoc.”

“There you are, would you save that movie?”

“No…Well, maybe…”

“You would let it go lost. Hence, you would accept never to see it again?”

“But…” if a person were alone in the world, the only possible company (with humanly features) would be movies I would like to say, but I can’t go further than the “but…” I imagine Charlton Heston, in an empty cinema, endlessly watching ‘Woodstock’. 

“Mmm…” After all it’s not such a stupid game.

Well, my friend and I have spent the rest of the night playing this game – each of us choosing our favourite movies – and now I think that I know what I would save. It should be understood: I already had a favourite movie, like many others that I like to see again from time to time. But the difficult thing was and is to choose from a load of movies only ten, to be very selective. To choose ten favourite movies is definitely harder than to decide what to have for the last meal.

Fortunately, the world isn’t coming to an end (for the moment!), but, in any case, you can see my list. Anyway, it does seem too reductive to talk about only ten movies: I really love the cinema. Therefore, I’ve let myself be led by a free association of ideas. A movie brings the mind back to other movies, genres, movie producers and actors. And I have done the same abounding (in the Totò manner) in hypertextual connections. The main correlated information source is the Internet Movie Data Base the web’s most complete movie database). Anyhow, there are also other links in each description of a movie in my list.

I hope that I’ve chosen well…and now lets compare our opinions!