My favourite film: Readers' comments - week one

The first time he saw it – when he was 19 – Raging Bull left Peter Bradshaw wanting to "run all the way home, or pick up parked cars and flip them over". Scorsese's depiction of the rise and fall of boxer Jake LaMotta was pitted with fight scenes that showed the inside of the ring as an "expressionist newsreel footage of a bad dream". Life outside was just another battle. Robert de Niro as LaMotta was "tense, moody, seeming to vibrate like a plucked guitar string" – primped and pulled from glory to the gutter by family and the Family, both.

We're rounding up your comments and reviews from the first week of our My Favourite film series, and when it came to Raging Bull, you seemed to be shadowing Bradshaw's moves. "I tend to think people get Scorsese back to front, ie the great films are the often overlooked ones (The King of Comedy, After Hours, Casino) while the "great" ones I find a bit overbearing (Taxi Driver, Goodfellas)," said tommyboy79. "This is the exception – Raging Bull really is as good as it gets. If only we got American cinema as good as this now."

richard1980 agreed, but couldn't see the pleasure among all that pain: "Masterpiece? Very much so. A top 10 for me? No. Simply because it's one you watch once, and it sticks with you, but I'd have to be in one hell of a special mood to watch it again, as frankly some of it is just too painful to see."

"It's the reason why I can't be bothered to anger myself at De Niro's lazy work in previous years," said bobtastic, who also left a piece on the film on our dedicated review page. "When you've put in a performance like this then stick your feet up, phone it in and collect the dough. Who are we to argue?"

There were a few of you in the doubters corner … betterdeadthanred wondered if we weren't all a little punchdrunk from the heavy-hitting talent behind the film ("De Niro's performance repeatedly descends into parody and I think may have attracted ridicule had his stock not been so high at the time"), while lorenzo1 was one of a number of commenters who worried we had given Scorsese the belt without crediting the support team – editor Thelma Schoonmaker and writer Paul Schrader. Finally, MyFlippinValentine went out on a very long limb: "It's not as good as Rocky IV."

One comment on PB's piece hinted at responses that would meet other writers' choices. "I recognise Raging Bull is Scorsese's best film," said magick. "But my favourite of his films is definitely The King of Comedy, for me a quiet masterpiece. Not as 'big' or important a film as Raging Bull but definitely my favourite."

"Best" and "favourite" have fought each other across most of the series to date. Many of you are outraged that films such as Ghostbusters, Predator and even Raging Bull made the grade. Many more of you remind the outraged that while you can debate the merits of a favourite film, you can't debate the tag's validity. "Favourite" is thoroughly subjective, after all. The writer's choice is theirs to defend.

Xan Brooks had little work to do on that front when he chose A Canterbury Tale as his favourite flick, though he did offer up Powell and Pressberger's 1944 oddity with some reluctance. The film, which follows a land girl, a British soldier and US sergeant as they make a modern-day pilgrimage towards Canterbury, is "a thing of such fragile, broken glory, like some tubercular saint, that I hate the thought of people laughing at it", said Xan. "The most loving and tender film about England ever made."

"Also my favourite film," agreed blueswan56. "It is so slight and transient and twee at times, but you can't deny the magic of it all." Many of you agreed with Xan that the magic lay in how P&P connected the big issues of wartime Britain (alexito: "it's a propaganda film with a fragile message of 'pulling together'") with the minutae of English eccentricity – all that "gosh" and gallantry and glue poured on a pretty girl's head. "It has a beautiful weirdness," said kenrick. "It's a beguiling snapshot of an England that probably never existed." Although thuddles wondered about "the oppressive, crypto-fascist side to the glue man". "Isn't Powell perhaps implying here – as he did in Col Blimp – that … a deep, heartfelt love for one's country can so easily tip over into something nastier?"

From the glue man to the new men. Swingers centres on a struggling comedian's attempts to get over an ex while hanging out with his mates in the revamped swing scene of 90s LA. It's "the seminal bromance film that is yet to be bettered," said tangles, something that Henry Barnes exploited to the full in his love letter to Doug Liman's movie, which starred Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn in their first starring performances. "Swingers makes me thankful for my friends, because it's a film about men realising that without them, all you have to get you through the worst of life is time," he said, welling up at the homosocial loveliness of it all.

tommyboy79 joined the group hug ("the only film ever made about modern men that shows them as they really are"), while devildaycare remarked on how a generation of men were affected. "There was indeed a little period where me and my mates were strutting around town doing a weak impression of Vince Vaughn," he said. "Cringeworthy looking back." Vaughn might have made instant, if derogatory, catchphrases of "money" (good, popular) and "beautiful babies" (attractive women) but the point, said Henry, was the friendship, not the macho posturing behind it. Coming out of Swingers with a swagger in your step was understandable perhaps, but definitely not money.

Swingers spun us two or three catchphrases, but couldn't compete with the comment thread (stream? Seems more appropriate) that greeted Hadley Freeman's choice, Ghostbusters, which – fuelled by a frenzied quotefest – grew and grew and grew like a proton-blasted confectionary mascot.

"The Stay Puft marshmallow made me laugh so much it brought on an asthma attack!" said Stig789. "Wheeze wheeze ha ha haaaa haa wheeze ha ha ha!!! Where's my inhaler? Ha ha ha!!!"

Hadley hasn't (yet) risked her health for the film, but Ivan Reitman's story – about four exorcists working to rid contemporary New York of its poltergeist problem – did have a bodily effect on her. "I knew from the first time I saw this movie that when I grew up I wanted to be Bill Murray, marry Dan Aykroyd or, ideally, both," she wrote. "Those ambitions remain unchanged."

Others remember being similarly inspired into creative thinking by Murray et al. Says rossf: "I recall with great glee making my own Ghostbuster toys. I had a membership card with a very crudely drawn Ghostbusters sign, a proton pack (old box of cornflakes, several loo-roll tubes and string) and a "trap" (old shoebox, I think). Also a tub of the official "ectoplasm" – I can still vividly remember the smell of that."

The smell of acrid childrens' playstuff could be masked only by the waft of nostalgia that hung heavy over your comments. "I first saw this with my girlfriend – we were 12," said NonOxbridgeColumnist. "She said afterwards that she found Bill Murray incredibly attractive, mainly for his wit and delivery." Not everyone remembers being quite so precocious, but you all a) had love for the Murray and b) seemed keen to remember the mid-80s as a pretty great run for cinema.

ApostropheDiva put it best: "The line up at our local, three-screen cinema was: Screen 1 - Ghostbusters. Screen 2 - Gremlins. Screen 3 - Beverley Hills Cop. How's that for a golden age?"

"I bet this doesn't get as many comments as Ghostbusters," said JohnBarnesOnToast as Andrew Pulver brought the week's action to a close with his selection: mid-great-period Woody Allen's comedy Broadway Danny Rose. It didn't, of course, but those it got were star turns, if a little odd. Pulver describes the film, which sees Woody play a sleazy past-prime theatrical agent who "collects terrible performers like other people collect tropical fish", as "a recognition that we want wrongs to be righted, that good will prevail, and that the faithless will be punished or reformed." gavinscottw agreed: "A beautiful cast of Allenesque losers whose lives are conveyed with sensitivity and an understanding of aspirations dashed by hopeless self-belief."

LlivracNhoJ was less sure: "Even as 'my favourite Woody Allen film', this would have been an off-beat choice." Inevitably there were a few who wandered whether the film really matched up to Woody's Oscar-winner, Annie Hall, none more aggressive than chasbot1, who said: "You've got to be kidding me! It's not even at the level!" before labelling the Pulv a "mook".

dowland was a little more sage with his analysis and said there was "a cruel message underneath about just what bastards people can be to those to whom they owe so much". Bear that in mind. We'll be back later this week with more of your responses from weeks two and three of the series. In the meantime we'll say see yah. You mooks.