Top 10 Movies I Watched in School

What a random list. Let me tell you my inspiration. I’ve begun a new series on my TikTok where I take my son to the library and let him pull me some DVDs that I then blind watch (watch them without looking them up or doing any research). On the first round of this, one of the DVDs that Rider pulled for me was a 1946 French version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (La Belle et la Bête) and I received a lot of comments from people telling me they had watched that film in French classes in high school. And now you understand my thought process. Let’s do this thing. Also two movies I wanted to include, but they would’ve made this a Top 12 were the only two movies I remember watching in my college film studies class: ‘Die Hard’ & ‘City of God’ which are now both in my Top 25 favorites films ever.

Speaking of my college film studies class, I also took a film studies class my freshman year of high school. I only remember a handful of the movies we watched, so here’s the four I remember.

Nosferatu - I think this may have been the first movie we watched in this class. The original 1922 silent film, this movie was definitely the way to get a group of high schools invested into film. This feels like a good time to note that this was my first period freshman year of high school, so I was watching these movies in 2-3 part segments at 8:00 AM on a projector. The ultimate film watching experience.

Citizen Kane - Boring! Boring! Boring! No really, I do understand the acclaim for this movie, I just think it is wholly overrated & well, boring!

Chaplin - We also watched an actual Charlie Chaplin movie, but I don’t remember what exactly it was (maybe ‘The Kid’). But we did watch this 1992 biopic about Chaplin, and I have a very distinct memory from this movie. Our teacher attempted to fast forward through a sex scene in the movie, but went too far, so she rewound it, hit play, and boom middle of the sex scene. We then proceeded to do this a couple times, so I think we ended up watching the sex scene twice all the way through.

Saving Private Ryan - The only reason I remember that we watched this is because I was gone the back half of the week we watched this, so I never knew if they saved Private Ryan. Eventually I watched the movie on my own and am pleased to tell you, they did!

Aside from a film studies class, in my experience, the classes we watched the most movies in were usually English classes. We’d usually read a book, and then watch a fairly inaccurate film adaptation of said book. Some books we read, but I can’t 100% remember if the film version was watched were ‘The Great Gatsby’ & ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ but a couple specific examples I remember of this were:

The Outsiders - I’m not sure if this book was a staple in schools around the nation, or just here in Oklahoma since it’s one of our few well known literary exports. But we read it in my 7th grade English class, before watching the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola film. This is a movie I definitely need to revisit in adulthood.

Into the Wild - I’m mad about this one because I got a C on our big project for this because I formatted my citation improperly. Shoutout to the American education system, because I remember that better than anything I learned in this class.

Another class we watched a lot of movies in was my 7th grade Geography class, and I think that had more to do with the teaching style of my teacher than anything else. The two movies I remember watching are very different from one another.

Aladdin - I remember this one very vividly, because this was before the days of Disney+ so we watched this movie on a VHS I offered to let the teacher borrow. What a teacher’s pet.

Hotel Rwanda - I told you, DRASTICALLY different from Aladdin.

This next movie is cheating, because I didn’t actually watch it in school. But because I was incredibly cool, I joined an after school book club and one of the books we read was ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.’ After we finished the book, we watched the movie, and then we took an after school field trip to go see ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part One’ in theaters.

And for my final entry. I’ve racked my brain trying to think what grade I watched this in, but I can’t remember. It had to have been a science class because no other class would have made sense for ‘Osmosis Jones’ which is a super underrated movie to be honest. Or maybe it actually sucks? I should probably watch it again before I make that statement.