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Poets' Favorite Movies

Charles Harper Webb

My top ten movies, listed by Charles Harper Webb as they sprang to mind on December 3, 2006.

1) Taxi Driver
2) Straw Dogs
3) The Loved One
4) Life of Brian
5) Sleeper
6) Unforgiven
7) Seven Samurai
8) A Clockwork Orange
9) Dracula (with Bela Lugosi)
10) King Kong (with Fay Wray)

There are, of course, many other films that I love: Carrie, The Godfather Trilogy, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Charles Laughton's version), A Night at the Opera, The Bank Dick, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest would have made my top twenty. I also limited my list to a single film by any one director. These ten are, however, iconic movies for me—movies that I still think about regularly, and that have influenced the way I view the world.

Charles Harper Webb's book Amplified Dog won the Saltman Prize for Poetry and was published in 2006 by Red Hen Press. His book of prose poems, Hot Popsicles, was published in 2005 by the University of Wisconsin Press. Recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, he directs Creative Writing at California State University, Long Beach. He was once paid $500 to think up horrific and inventive ways for people to die in Friday the Thirteenth; he forgets which number.

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