WARNING: The majority of the following summaries contain major spoilers...
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| Disney |
Directed by Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff
Featuring the Voices of: Matthew Broderick, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Jeremy Irons, James Earl Jones, Moira Kelly, Niketa Calame, Nathan Lane, Ernie Sabella, Robert Guillame, Rowan Atkinson, Madge Sinclair, Cheech Marin, Whoopi Goldberg
Rated G
88 minutes
THE LION KING has always been a favorite of mine. When it first opened in theaters, I was still at that age where one's diet of movies is almost exclusively Disney cartoons, and through kindergarten, there wouldn't have been a second's hesitation to say that it was my favorite movie. It never stopped being one of my favorite movies, but I rediscovered a really passionate appreciation for it when I was in high school, sometimes starting the day by watching a few of my favorite scenes multiple times over before going to school. In college, while I probably needed the money for other "more important" things, the movie was re-released in 3D theaters for a special 2-week engagement ahead of its release on Blu-ray, so I went to it 7 times during those two weeks (6 times in 3D, once in 2D), while going out of my way to collect each of the Lion King kids meal bags in a promotion at Subway (although mostly in jest, I was probably a little too mean to a very lovely sandwich artist when the restaurant she worked at had run out of the bags was still missing). I don't watch it too often, because I prefer to keep it special, and what's more, it's always a really emotional wallop. There are little things about it that are a bit silly, and it might a little rougher around the edges than some other Disney classics, but it lands with such incredible weight in both its emotional highs and lows, the visuals are exceptional, and the music is sublime.
Best Part: The songs by Elton John and Tim Rice are all highlights (even Scar's number, "Be Prepared", which, like most villain songs, is the weakest of the songs, is still excellent), but the scene of Mufasa's ghost, from the moment Rafiki brings Simba to the pool until Mufasa's visage recedes into the clouds, is just an all-time great.
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| Disney |
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| Sony/Columbia |
THE SOCIAL NETWORK (DRAMA, 2010)
Directed by David Fincher
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Rashida Jones, Brenda Song, John Getz, Denise Grayson, Rooney Mara, Joseph Mazzello, Dakota Johnson, Josh Pence
Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language.
120 minutes
I don't remember THE SOCIAL NETWORK being especially apparent on my radar ahead of its release. I knew about it, but it was the so-called "Facebook Movie", and I hadn't had the requisite young white man's discovery of David Fincher yet. I'd seen THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON the year before, which was alright, but wasn't anything special. I went to see THE SOCIAL NETWORK based on the extremely enthusiastic reviews, and the chance to meet up with a best friend who I'd seen infrequently since we graduated from high school that previous summer. I remember being startled when it ended. I could have kept on watching more of the drama behind the making of the online phenomenon we'd all been using for a few years by then, but it wasn't until I rented it on DVD and stayed up until 4:00 in the morning watching it on repeat and with commentaries that I realized it wasn't just a great movie, but it was one of my all-time favorites. It may not be the true story of how Facebook became a fixture of our early 21st-century lives, but it's true to the experience of our internet lives, rendered perfectly in the viciously witty dialogue of Aaron Sorkin's Academy Award-winning screenplay and the polished cool and relentless drive of Fincher's directorial vision. "We live on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're going to live on the internet," Justin Timberlake's "serpent in paradise" Sean Parker excitedly proclaims. It's dark, funny, ironic, tragic and painfully poignant, and will likely stand as a defining movie of the "Millennial" generation for years to come, the way THE GRADUATE and EASY RIDER stand for the baby boomers.
Best Part: There may be too many to pick from. There's the rapid-fire opening scene of Mark's (Jesse Eisenberg) and Erica's (Rooney Mara) date conversation followed by her dumping him, and the poignant ending moments between Mark and the junior lawyer sitting in on his deposition, Marilyn (Rashida Jones), followed by Mark's quietly desperate attempt to friend Erica on Facebook. There's the devastating, emotionally-charged climax of Eduardo (Andrew Garfield) confronting Mark after being screwed out of his company shares, and marvelously chilling nightclub scene between Mark and Sean as they discuss the future of the company without Eduardo.
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| Sony/Columbia |
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| MGM/United Artists |
Directed by Billy Wilder
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Jack Kruschen, Ray Walston, David Lewis, Hope Holiday, Joan Shawlee, Naomi Stevens, Johnny Seven, Edie Adams
Not Rated (PG-13-level; thematic elements).
125 minutes
Billy Wilder's 1960 romantic-comedy-drama masterpiece was the last black-and-white movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture until SCHINDLER'S LIST thirty-three years later. It's the story of C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), just one of the many office drones at an insurance company, but one who's figured out a way to stand out- by lending his New York City apartment out to his managers to use for their extramarital trysts, in exchange for their glowing reports. Baxter's shady dealings ultimately get him the promotion that he hopes will impress his long-time crush, elevator girl Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), but the devastating consequences of his and his managers' actions come back to bite him when the big boss' girlfriend, who turns out to be Fran, tries to commit suicide in his apartment on Christmas Eve. But it's not too late for either of them, as even from the darkest places, they decide they can be human beings. That's what it's about. In an age of huge corporate structures that reduce people to numbers, cogs in a machine, Baxter and Fran can still decide to stop being used like objects and instead be human beings. Baxter's neighbor, Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen), believing that all the affairs taking place in the apartment are Baxter's and that he's "using and losing" all these women callously, exclaims at Baxter in a fit, "Be a mensch! You know what that means? A mensch - a human being!" Baxter tells Fran, "Ya know, I used to live like Robinson Crusoe; I mean, shipwrecked among 8 million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand, and there you were." Aw, hell, how can you beat that? Wilder was very well known for his sharp-tongued and deeply hard-boiled crime stories like DOUBLE INDEMNITY and SUNSET BOULEVARD, as well as for ultra-witty screwball comedies that revolved around situations considered lurid for the time, but for all his hard, acerbic shell, he had a gooey, sweet center, both of which are beautifully represented in THE APARTMENT. It has a few dated moments, and outside of Fran, women aren't terribly well-represented, but for the most part, it's aged remarkably well, and most importantly, it's still funny and tremendously heartfelt.
Best Part: Almost definitely Dr. Dreyfuss' "Be a mensch" speech, but I've also got to give mention to the Jack Lemmon's weirdly funny and poignant monologue about a botched suicide attempt from a past heartbreak, while trying to comfort Fran.
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| MGM/United Artists |
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| Paramount/Lucasfilm |
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (ACTION/ADVENTURE, 1981)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliot, Alfred Molina, Wolf Kahler, George Harris, Anthony Higgins, Vic Tablian, Don Fellows, William Hootkins
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (PG-13-level; sequences of adventure action and violence throughout, some intense frightening images and drinking/historical smoking).
115 minutes
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is probably the best adventure movie ever made. It's technically perfect and pure fun. It has no pretensions of importance, just the most exceptional entertainment value imaginable. It doesn't have a lot to do with heartfelt emotions or especially deep human ideas, which mark most of the movies that I'm this fond of, but it's so sublime in its execution of an exciting, fun, pulp adventure, it easily ranks alongside those. Even objectively, it's one of the best movies ever made. Lawrence Kasdan's sharp repartee and richly detailed characters building off of George Lucas' inspired story and concepts enriches Spielberg's amazing action and spectacle more than anyone could reasonably expect from this type of summer thrill ride. Harrison Ford in the tattered leather jacket, khaki, and of course the brown crushed felt fedora, whip on his belt, is the image of a movie hero that immediately sparks a sense of mystique, and he's a frequently in-over-his-head dick, which is just brilliant. In so many popular action movies, it's the villain we remember best, but here, it's all about the hero, and that's not for the shortcomings of its villains. The villains are great, led by Indy's sleazy but charming mirror image, the French archaeologist Rene Belloq (Paul Freeman), and the sweaty, bespectacled Gestapo man Major Toht (Ronald Lacey), a man you can just tell is a totally sadistic pervert of the highest order, and of course the Nazis, the best villains history has to offer. Lest it be just a boy's club, Indy's old flame (from an apparently seriously inappropriate relationship years before), Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) is a great heroine in her own right, if not with such an iconic costume (that hat at the very end though). You have globe-trotting from ancient temples in jungles of South America and isolated taverns in the snowy mountains of Nepal to the scorching deserts of Egypt to a secret Nazi base in the Aegean Sea. There are mummies, booby traps, a stunning Ark of the Covenant, and one of the all-time great finales when the Wrath of God kills dozens, if not hundreds, of Nazis like you wouldn't believe, including a couple of really choice deaths at the front of the line. I mean, come on, it's perfect. Arguably a little racist, but perfect.
Best Part: There's simply no way to decide in a movie that is actually constructed of one great series of thrills and chills after another. I guess it would have to be a tie between the collapsing jungle temple in the prologue, uncovering the Well of Souls and retrieving the Ark, the truck chase, and the opening of the Ark. I guess I should include the Map Room scene, as well.
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| Paramount/Lucasfilm |
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| Sony/Columbia |
SUPERBAD (COMEDY, 2007)
Directed by Greg Mottola
Starring: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Bill Hader, Seth Rogen, Martha MacIsaac, Emma Stone, Aviva Baumann, Joe Lo Truglio, Kevin Corrigan, Clement E. Blake, Erica Vittina Phillips, Marcella Lentz-Pope
Rated R for pervasive crude and sexual content, strong language, drinking, some drug use and a fantasy/comic violent image - all involving teens.
113 minutes
I like comedies, but they don't usually jump to the front of my mind when I think of 'favorite movies' unless they also pack an emotional punch, which SUPERBAD does. It comes from that Judd Apatow/40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN wave of ultra-raunchy comedies with heart, but SUPERBAD is the most sincere and smart of that crowd, being a personal story written by Seth Rogen (who co-stars in the film) with Evan Goldberg, a creative team who reportedly first started working on the script back when they were the age of their characters. The main characters are also named for them, Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera). Seniors in the last weeks of high school, Seth compensates for his insecurities with typical teenage boy crassness, while Evan is smart and awkward, sheepishly trying to be charming. The two have been best friends ever since young childhood, but Seth was unable to get into the same college as Evan, casting a pallor over their looming graduation. Besides their imminent separation and the uncertainty of the lives ahead of them, they've also got girls on their dirty, dirty minds, and with school ending soon, it becomes imperative that they hook up with their intendeds in time to have girlfriends over the summer. Their plan is to obtain alcohol for a party where, God-willing, Seth's crush Jules (Emma Stone, in an early role) and Evan's long-time crush Becca (Martha MacIsaac) will be drunk enough to have sex with them. The result is a "one crazy night" series of misadventures as they struggle to get alcohol, get to the party, and in the process, come to terms with what their friendship means to both of them and where they're headed in life, and start things off with the ladies in a more not-horrible fashion. It's overflowing with profanity (190 uses of the 'f-word' according to Wikipedia, for an average of 1.61 per minute, which is lower down on the 'most f-words in a movie' list than you might expect), really raunchy gags, and an ending with the warm fuzziness of the warmest, fuzziest pink bunny you could imagine.
Best Part: I love the scene where a stumbling drunk Seth encounters Jules at the party and discovers she's a teetotaler, but she's super sweet about the awkward situation, then they cap it off with a great pratfall. Plus, just about everything after the party, with Seth and Evan's sleepover and the trip to the mall. Really sweet stuff.
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| Sony/Columbia |
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| Paramount |
Directed by Sergio Leone
Starring: Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Gabriele Ferzetti, Marco Zuanelli, Paolo Stoppa, Frank Wolff, Keenan Wynn, Woody Strode, Jack Elam, Lionel Stander
Rated PG-13 for western violence and brief sensuality.
175 minutes
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST is a perfect western, partly a rollicking cowboy adventure and partly a poignant and sprawling epic ode to the fictional American West. I'm pretty sure it was the first movie I saw directed by Sergio Leone. It was on Netflix, and it was the kind of movie any self-respecting cinéaste should see at least once, so I decided to hunker down for three hours and get it done. And it was amazing. THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY is furious fun, but ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST is beautiful, brilliant and sublime. It's famously deliberate in its pacing, easing into things with a prolonged and quiet scene of three men waiting around a sleepy train station for an unknown arrival as Leone's camera studies the landscape of the men's faces as one patiently waits for drops of water from a leaky tank fill up his hat brim enough for a single sip, and another tries to rid himself of a buzzing fly with as little physical effort as possible, supplemented with an incidental soundtrack. What unfolds is the story of a New Orleans prostitute, Jill (Claudia Cardinale), who came west following promises of a new life with Brett McBain (Frank Woolf), a widower with a family, big dreams and a baron patch of land in the middle of the desert, only to arrive and find her new husband and his children massacred. Railroad construction is quickly moving across the west, and with it modernity, and the company, represented by the ruthless hired gun Frank (Henry Fonda), wants the new Mrs. McBain's newly inherited land. Caught up in the mix is Cheyenne (a marvelous Jason Robards), a roguish bandit framed for Frank's crimes, and Harmonica (Charles Bronson), a mysterious gunfighter with a vendetta against Frank, who decide to help Jill fight the railroad and realize Brett McBain's dream. Leone fills the frame with gorgeous vistas of Utah's Monument Valley, Arizona, Mexico and all the way in Spain, and the script, shared between Leone, master filmmakers Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento and three others, is richly layered with a greatest hits list of homages to classic western films and has some of the most gleefully cool dialogue imaginable. It has just the right amount of Spaghetti western cheese (the most hilariously dramatic sound effect accompanies the smallest backhanded slap), great visceral and psychological action, and Ennio Morricone's musical score is truly one of the all-time bests. Seriously, I cannot overstate how stupendous the music in this movie is. This is an orgasmically delicious steak of movies.
Best Part: Another movie too chock-full of amazing moments to pick just one, but there's the final showdown between Frank and Harmonica where Harmonica's past is revealed, the shootout between Harmonica, Frank and Frank's men, Harmonica and Cheyenne's meeting at the trading post, Cheyenne's monologue about his mother, Cheyenne's farewells to both Jill and Harmonica. Criminy, the whole thing is a delight.
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| Paramount |
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| Disney |
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END (ACTION-ADVENTURE/FANTASY, 2007)
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Starring: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Geoffrey Rush, Tom Hollander, Bill Nighy, Jack Davenport, Chow Yun-Fat, Naomie Harris, Stellan Skargard, Lee Arenberg, Mackenzie Crook, Kevin R. McNally, Jonathan Pryce, David Schofield, Keith Richards
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action/adventure violence and some frightening images.
168 minutes
This, I assume, is one of my slightly more unpopular opinions, but I have no reservations. I was an obnoxiously enthusiastic Pirates of the Caribbean fan when I first saw in theaters (in my youthful stupidity, I regrettably threatened to quit my dishwashing job if I didn't get the movie's Memorial Day weekend opening day off, but then again, that boss was a Turd Ferguson anyway), and I positively adored it, but even after my POTC mania, I don't just like it. I don't just love it. I think it's kind of amazing. It's the third installment in a series and I like the first two a lot, but I can take AT WORLD'S END all on its own. It starts superbly with a with a bizarre, violent and darkly comic musical number as "pirates" of all stripes are being hung on the gallows, including a cabin boy so small he must stand on a barrel to be fitted with the noose, as they begin to sing an ancient pirate anthem to call on the 9 "pirate lords" in their darkest hour. Then it begins again and even better in a fantastical 18th-century Singapore where all our familiar heroes, with one major exception, are re-introduced in the midst of action with the proper recognition and rhythm. The sets are sumptuous to take in, beginning with this amazing environment of intricate wood structures over water, which then gets the hell blown out of it in a deliriously fun and big early action sequence. There's plenty of great big, beautiful ships, many of which get similar hell blown out of them, and one sails over the literal edge of the Earth in the gorgeous realization of an ancient sailor's nightmares, and the effects are a noteworthy improvement over the already very impressive Academy Award-winning effects of its predecessor. It's an unlikely combination of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and the best parts of RETURN OF THE JEDI, with a dash of Gothic horror and a heaping dose of romance, done as a gleefully over-the-top pirate movie epic with a lot of really gonzo humor. The pirates are the cowboys and gunslingers of a bygone age, and the East India Trading Company is the railroad that brings ruthless order and modernity at any cost. The final showdown, an epic battle between the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman in the spiraling currents of a miles-wide whirlpool, is one of the most stunning and exciting action set-pieces in any movie, and what's more, there's a comic and swoon-worthy marriage scene stuck in the middle of it. It's absurdly long for a summer blockbuster at almost three hours, but I enjoy every minute of it. Granted, there's a give and take between the spectacular scale on the big theater screen and the freedom to take pee breaks in your own home.
Best Part: The whole maelstrom sequence as a whole, but especially the wedding. Props also to the soaring romance and heartbreaking poignancy of Will and Elizabeth's beach afterglow scene.
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| Disney |
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| Disney |
THE LITTLE MERMAID (ANIMATION/FAMILY-MUSICAL, 1989)
Directed by Ron Clements & John Musker
Featuring the Voices of: Jodi Benson, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Pat Carroll, Samuel E. Wright, Jason Marin, Kenneth Mars, Buddy Hackett, Ben Wright, Paddi Edwards, Edie McClurg, Will Ryan, Rene Auberjonois
Rated G
82 minutes
OK, yeah, it's a princess movie, and I really, really love it, and it has one of the best Disney soundtracks ever. It was born out of a desperate time for Walt Disney Animation, when animated features had become a costly obligation to the company's legacy, and out of the rough was yielded the first of a series of new Disney classics called the "Disney Renaissance." Although less polished and elaborate in its imagery than the animated features that soon followed, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ALADDIN and THE LION KING among them, it's all the more impressive as the last WDA film to be rendered outside of a computer, printed on celluloid sheets ("cels"), hand-painted and layered with scenery and extensive effects, then photographed frame-by-frame. There's an admittedly problematic nature to the love-at-first-sight, make a practical stranger kiss her in three days, capped off by a "damsel in distress" climax, all in a movie largely aimed at an audience of impressionable little girls, but my feeble argument to that is that it's a fairy tale that shouldn't be taken literally. That's at least this white man's defense. It's also a huge improvement over many Disney Princess movies by making the titular mermaid, Ariel (voiced by Jodi Benson, animated by Glen Keane), a proactive woman in control of her own story. She doesn't wait around. If she decides that she loves this random dude she just met and is willing to make a ridiculously high-stakes bet with a witch to change herself forever and score, then by gum, it's her decision.
Best Part: Nearly all the songs are knockouts, and special props to the zestfully peppy show-stopper, "Under the Sea", but nothing gets me like the "Part of Your World" reprise after Ariel rescues Eric from the shipwreck.
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| Disney |
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| Disney/Pixar |
Directed by Brad Bird
Featuring the Voices of: Patton Oswalt, Lou Romano, Ian Holm, Peter O'Toole, Janeane Garofalo, Brad Garrett, Peter Sohn, Brian Dennehy, Will Arnett, Teddy Newton, James Remar, John Ratzenberger, Tony Fucile, Julius Callahan
Rated G
111 minutes
RATATOUILLE may be Pixar Animation's boldest venture, a uniquely mature G-rated comedy-fantasy, with limited marketability and merchandising possibilities, as appetizing as to be about a rat who dreams of nothing less than being a gourmet chef. It's the Pixar movie I saw and thought, "Huh. That was interesting," and thought little else about for a while afterward. But then I revisited it, and then I revisited it again, and it just gets better. It exemplifies all the ingenuity, heart, beauty, humor, risk-taking and rich, rich payoff of Pixar at the height of their storytelling powers. It's about food, filmmaking, art, dreaming, yearning and passion in the gorgeously cinematic digital rendering of Paris, where Remy the rat (voiced by Patton Oswalt) finds himself thrust into the opportunity to realize his life's ambition of cooking great food. It's so simple and brilliant, the kind of movie where a rat can sit atop a hapless young man's head and animate his limbs like a marionette by tugging on his hair, and it makes just as much sense as it needs to. It's luminous and lush, its visuals perfectly matched by Michael Giacchino's delicious musical score and the cheerfully lovely theme, "Le Festin", performed by French singer Camille. It's a hopelessly romantic movie, a story about many loves, and the romantic world where they can be realized in one way or another.
Best Part: Jeez, the ending maybe, or maybe the montage of scenes as Remy runs between the walls of a Parisian building, or maybe Anton Ego's (voiced by Peter O'Toole) "A great cook can come from anywhere" monologue, or maybe the serving Anton Ego sequence.
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| Disney/Pixar |
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| Universal |
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Ron Perlman, Doug Jones, Selma Blair, Luke Goss, Anna Walton, Jeffrey Tambor, John Hurt, Brian Steele, John Alexander, James Dodd, Roy Dotrice, Seth MacFarlane (voice)
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and some language.
120 minutes
The first HELLBOY was the first Guillermo del Toro-directed movie I saw, and I was immediately a fan, but the sequel improves on it exponentially. Following a clumsy but slightly charming prologue featuring a really corny young Hellboy, the movie quickly dives into a rollicking fantasy-comedy-adventure full of beautiful monsters,wild and weird action, laugh-out-loud comedy, aching poignancy and surprising depth that makes it not only his best American movie, but as good as anything he's made. Ron Perlman, a talented and tall man whose career straddles the line between character acting and B movie acting, is truly perfect casting beneath a great deal of makeup as the titular hero, a wise-cracking demon summoned through a portal by Rasputin and the Nazis in 1945, intercepted by Allied soldiers and who now fights monsters for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), a top secret government agency. With his moody, pyrokinetic girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair) and amphibious best pal Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), he fights to stop a war with humanity before it can happen, when the elven Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) of the magical realm attempts to awaken an unstoppable killing force called the Golden Army in order to reclaim the world and remind humans why they once "feared the dark." Along the way, HB experiences some hiccups in his relationship with Liz, who unbeknownst to him has become pregnant, while Abe finds doomed love with Nuada's sister; lady problems they cope with by getting slobbering drunk while singing along with Barry Manilow. It sounds campy, and there's maybe a tiny bit of that, but only a tiny bit, as it's actually a really romantic and wistful, steampunk/high-fantasy monster mash with polish and substance. Plus, the swordfighting is awesome.
Best Part: Hellboy and Abe crooning drunkenly to "I Can't Smile Without You", the Angel of Death, and Hellboy vs. Nuada swordfight.
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| Universal |
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| 20th Century Fox/Lucasfilm |
STAR WARS (ACTION-ADVENTURE/FANTASY, 1977)
Directed by George Lucas
Starring: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing, David Prowse, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels, Phil Brown, Shelagh Fraser, Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, James Earl Jones (voice)
Rated PG for sci-fi violence and brief mild language.
121 minutes
STAR WARS is obviously one of the great classic films of all-time, a game changer on multiple levels and one of the most universally beloved movies. I would add that it's the best of the seven-film series as it currently stands, by a substantial margin. That's right. It's more than a little better than THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and that's not to say that EMPIRE isn't a really good film; it's just that the original 1977 film is so perfect. It's an unmatched course on world-building, beginning with an opening crawl borrowed from the science fiction serials of yesteryear that throws the viewer immediately into the action, expertly delivering just the right amount of information and building off archetypes and tropes that keep the story grounded in a familiarity while expanding every other which way with exotic fantasy. It's an amazing melting pot of genre and myth, molded into a stellar and wildly fast-paced adventure masterpiece. Nearly 40 years old, its vision of fantasy in space still looks fantastic in its original form, unadulterated by the "Special Edition" CGI tinkering in the versions most readily available, culminating with the thrilling space battle and trench run on the Death Star.
Best Part: The space battle and trench run. Duh.
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| 20th Century Fox/Lucasfilm |
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| 20th Century Fox |
LIFE OF PI (ADVENTURE/DRAMA, 2012)
Directed by Ang Lee
Starring: Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Rafe Spall, Tabu, Adil Hussain, Gerard Depardieu, Po-Chieh Wang, Shravanthi Sainath, Elie Alouf, Ayush Tandon, Vibish Sivakumar
Rated PG for emotional thematic content throughout, and some scary action sequences and peril.
127 minutes
LIFE OF PI is a gorgeous, thoughtful and exciting exploration of faith and its place in the human experience, in part a rendition of the biblical story of Job as a fantastical adventure. It's also an emotionally exhausting, tumultuous rollercoaster of love, loss, pain and peace, that's ultimately deeply fulfilling and thought-provoking. I used to be frustrated with Ang Lee's films, because I found him emotionally withholding, and while I don't think that anymore (my goodness, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is devastating), there was never any question about LIFE OF PI. Based on a novel by Yann Martel (I read some of it once, and while I clearly didn't give it a fair shake, early in, it was different enough from the movie I'd already seen that it bothered me), the story is framed by an adult Pi Patel, played by Irrfan Khan, telling his remarkable experiences (purportedly a story to make one "believe in God") to a writer (Rafe Spall). Khan's soothing tones transport the Pi's childhood in Pondicherry, India, where his family owned a zoo and while his father (Adil Hussain) was a staunch atheist, his Hindu mother (Tabu) raises him with her beliefs. As grows older, he becomes fascinated with Christianity and Islam as well, and strives to live by three religions, much to the chagrin of his father, but with encouragement from his mother. When Pi's innocent worldview almost results in a serious accident with the zoo's tiger, Richard Parker, Pi's father drives home a very harsh lesson of the world's cold realities, and Pi's enthusiasm for faith cools. As a teenager, Pi joins his family aboard a ship to travel to their new home in Canada with the zoo animals in tow to be sold, but in the middle of their journey on the Pacific Ocean, the ship and all its passengers claimed by a tremendous storm, except for Pi, who survives aboard a lifeboat which he's forced to share with Richard Parker, the same tiger from his childhood. From there, the film follows his months-long journey at sea full of fantastical incidents and wondrous sights as he must grapple with sharing tiny boat with a man-eating predator. But not all is as it seems, with the experience ultimately serving as a test of faith for Pi and those who hear his story afterward. It's a story that refuses to confirm the reality of incidents of faith, while also refusing to truly deny them, going to what are ultimately shockingly dark places but shining the light to carry the viewer up after. It doesn't force you to follow that light. It simply offers the choice. A shameless visual feast, Lee revels in the wondrous sights of the oceanic setting with bioluminescent aquatic life, a swarm of flying fish, and a strange, glowing island made of lush and edible vegetation, and most of the animals are CGI effects, some of the most realistic ever put to screen, too (some shots of the tiger are of an actual tiger, but good luck guessing which). The stylized visuals move with the flow of the story, and the music by Mychael Danna is soothing and sweet. It might not make you believe in God, but it certainly makes a compelling case to consider.
Best Part: Halfway through the film, it cuts back to adult Pi and the writer for a brief recap.
THE WRITER: "I think you've set the stage. We have an Indian boy named after a French swimming pool, on a Japanese ship full of animals, heading to Canada."
PI: "Yes. Now we have to send our boy into the middle of the Pacific, and uh..."
THE WRITER: "And make me believe in God."
PI: "Yeah, we'll get there."
The way Khan gives a grin just after that moment is perfect. The shot then turns to a map of the Pacific Ocean, closing as it transforms into a shot of their ship cutting through tumultuous waves.
PI: "It was four days out from Manila , above the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot on Earth. Our ship, the "Tsimtsum", pushed on, bullishly indifferent to its surroundings. It moved with the slow, massive confidence of a continent."
It's a great pivot point after all the set up and a chilling shift into the darker half of the story.
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| 20th Century Fox |
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| Weinstein |
DJANGO UNCHAINED (WESTERN/ACTION-COMEDY, 2012)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Laura Cayouette, Don Johnson, Dennis Christopher, Nichole Galicia, Dana Michelle Gourrier, Miriam F. Glover
Rated R for strong graphic violence throughout, a vicious fight, language and some nudity.
165 minutes
DJANGO UNCHAINED was the first movie by Quentin Tarantino that I saw in theaters. When his previous film, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS came out in 2009, I didn't yet have a driver's license or a theater near enough to see it, but I'd seen a few of his films on DVD, such as the BASTERDS, PULP FICTION and I'm pretty sure I'd seen KILL BILL VOL. 1 by that point. Those movies were impressive, for sure, but on the first viewings of each, I was more intrigued than invested. The thing about Tarantino is that he's incredibly intelligent and as much a master of cinema as someone can be, but he's so vicious and can be really mean as a filmmaker (and THE HATEFUL EIGHT didn't come out until just last year). DJANGO UNCHAINED just may be his most gruesomely violent to date with no shortage of oversized explosions of blood spraying from gunshot wounds throughout its 165 minutes, but it's also surprisingly romantic. KILL BILL VOL. 2 is probably his sweetest film, but it's not as riotously fun as DJANGO, as with JACKIE BROWN, and while PULP FICTION has more heart than is apparent on the surface, DJANGO has the advantage of setting. Set in the South, it's about 2 parts western and 1 part blaxploitation, and the titular Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave whose been separated from his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), but after a German bounty hunter by the name of Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) obtains him so he can identify a couple of marks, Schultz frees him and teaches him the trade. Intent on tracking down and freeing Broomhilda, Django learns that she's been bought as "comfort girl" at the infamously cruel Candyland plantation in Mississippi, owned by the sadistic Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), and seeing Django's plight as that of a "real-life Siegfried" (a German legend), Schultz determines to help him. Masquerading as parties interested in the savage slave gladiatorial matches known as "Mandingo fighting", which Candie indulges in, Django and Schultz embark on a perilous quest into the belly of the best to save Broomhilda. Being Tarantino, it's not exactly an historically authentic rendering of the time and place, and is instead full of Tarantino's trademark style, but much of it is historically-rooted, while in spirit it's more concerned with an honest portrayal of black slavery's place in American history, American identity, Southern identity and racial identities. The violence, which created significant controversy at the time next to the prolific use of the so-called "n-word", is divided into two categories; the horrific and sometimes sickening violence of slavery (whippings, the Mandingo fight, a man torn apart by dogs) and the often action or comedy-oriented, cathartic violence dealt out against slave owners and the like, which often results in geyser-like eruption of bright red blood painting over white, such tufts of cotton, a white horse or a carnation. From one perspective, it's very troubling and sadistic, but I think it's more like a purging of a horrible chapter of history, less about destroying people and more about destroying evil ideas. It's a great western, not without moral ambiguity, but largely in a white hats vs. black hats form of moral conflict, for lack of better terminology. The characters are as much representations of a concept as they are people.
Tarantino brings an abundance of cool style, fun and flavorful dialogue, and the Peckinpah-style gunslinging action is positively top-notch, but even under all that, it's a really sweet, simple love story.
Best Part: Gotta be the "I've Got a Name" musical montage showing Django's progress over the winter, especially a point at the bridge in the song when Django is bathing in a hot spring and looks over to see a vision of Broomhilda with him. Also the "Ancora Qui" sequence featuring a beautiful and original piece of music by Ennio Morricone, and the explosive shootout at the Candyland mansion.
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| Weinstein |
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| Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
Directed by William Wyler
Starring: Charlton Heston, Haya Harareet, Stephen Boyd, Jack Hawkins, Hugh Griffith, Martha Scott, Cathy O'Donnell, Sam Jaffe, Finlay Currie, Frank Thring, George Relph
Rated G (PG-13-level; some action/violence and intense images).
212 minutes
BEN-HUR is the bible epic, and you can find no better example of great filmmaking on a grand scale. Cecil B. DeMille's THE TEN COMMANDMENTS pales in comparison and BEN-HUR isn't even half as corny. Made at a time in Hollywood where the increasingly common presence of television in the average American home threatened the novelty of the cinema, MGM plunged headlong into massive production that cost a then-unheard of $15.2 million to make, and every dime is visible on the screen, never more than in the famous and still genuinely amazing chariot race set in a massive 18-acre arena with 5-story grandstands and a quartet of 30-foot tall (plus a 10-foot base) statues. Top-notch in its visual splendor, BEN-HUR sets itself apart from its contemporaries with powerful and deeply moving drama set against the backdrop of ancient Judea under the occupation of the Roman Empire. Basically The Count of Monte Cristo set within the origins of the Christian religion, the movie is actually based on the 1880 American novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, written by Civil War general for the Union Lew Wallace and stars Charlton Heston as the titular Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy Hebrew prince in the year AD 26 who is betrayed by a Roman tribune who was once childhood friend, Messala (Stephen Boyd), for refusing to give up the names of Hebrew agitators. With his mother and his sister locked away indefinitely, Judah is sentenced to labor as a galley slave rowing Roman warships until death, but Judah's will to survive is fueled by his desire for vengeance, and in a quirk of fate, he's freed by and adopted as a Roman citizen by a Roman commander he rescues in combat. When he's accomplished fame as a charioteer in Rome, Judah finally returns to his home at long last to challenge Messala in the deadly arena. Taking place in the background of Judah's story is another more familiar narrative, in which Jesus of Nazareth (played by Claude Heater, but whose face is never revealed to the audience eye) preaches a message of love that will change the world forever. BEN-HUR is marvelously subtle, and so much more graceful for it, in its religious subject, depicting God as a part of a man's story rather than a stolid narrative about an emotionally distant divinity. By never showing his face, director William Wyler allows the viewer to see Jesus in their own way, focusing on the impact of his countenance on the other characters who are struck by a sense of peace and warmth in his presence. He isn't the complicated human Jesus of something like THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST; he's more a concept than a character, just enough that the viewer can understand him in a way that speaks to them. The story ends before the Resurrection, but not to say that it doesn't happen. That would be a different story. BEN-HUR is hardly dogmatic. It's a story about Christ with an all-encompassing tent for all people, where the power of his teachings reaches all people. There's also spectacular action, but nothing (including from most other films made before or since) can match the nine-minute chariot race sequence, and when you consider this was all done well before the days of digital effects or modern wire-work, holy...crap. Oh, and musical score by Miklos Rozsa is one of the best of all time.
Best Part: The chariot race is the obvious go-to, but I always seem to get something in my eye when Jesus gives some much needed water to a chained-up Judah.
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| Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
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| Columbia |
Directed by Harold Ramis
Starring: Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliot, Stephen Tobolowsky, Brian Doyle-Murray, Marita Geraghty, Angela Paton, Rick Ducommun, Rick Overton, Robin Duke, Ken Hudson Campbell, Les Podewell
Rated PG for some thematic elements.
101 minutes
You really can't beat GROUNDHOG DAY for a really great feel-good movie. Starring Bill Murray as Phil Connors, a misanthropic TV weatherman who finds himself trapped in a 24-hour time loop on February 2nd in the podunk town of Punxsutawney, it's an immensely sweet romantic-comedy about self-improvement and an illustration of the Buddhist idea of samsara, the idea of a cycle of rebirth, each time building closer toward Nirvana. It's very funny, but it's as much or more a deeply moving spiritual story. Genius in a way that wasn't fully appreciated at the time of its 1993 release, it takes its main character on a believable journey of personal transformation within the fantastical context that everyone and everything else around him stays the same, day in and day out. It isn't afraid to go to dark places, when Phil attempts a series of suicides to escape his purgatory, initially with a tinge of dark comedy, but also genuine sadness, before building to simple triumphs.
Best Part: I always love the morning when Phil wakes up beside Rita (Andie MacDowell) and it's finally February 3rd. "I bought you. I own you," she says, referring to the Groundhog Day bachelor auction the night before. Also, the night Phil and Rita spend together after he's convinced her he's been living this day repeatedly for some time. Very sweet stuff.
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| Columbia |
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| New Line Cinema |
Directed by Peter Jackson
Starring: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Sean Astin, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Bean, Orlando Bloom, John Rhys-Davies, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Ian Holm, Hugo Weaving, Liv Tyler, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Marton Csokas, Lawrence Makoare
Rated PG-13 for epic battle sequences and some scary images.
178 minutes
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| Weinstein |
Directed by Peter Jackson
Starring: Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Andy Serkis, Orlando Bloom, John Rhys-Davies, Ian McKellen, Christopher Lee, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Miranda Otto, Bernard Hill, David Wenham, Brad Dourif, Karl Urban
Rated PG-13 for epic battle sequences and scary images.
179 minutes
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| New Line Cinema |
Directed by Peter Jackson
Starring: Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen, Sean Astin, Andy Serkis, Orlando Bloom, John Rhys-Davies, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Miranda Otto, Karl Urban, David Wenham, John Noble, Bernard Hill, Paul Norell, Thomas Robins, Lawrence Makoare
Rated PG-13 for intense epic battle sequences and frightening images.
201 minutes
It's fair to say that I have a movie obsession, but before it was movies in general, I had obsessions with certain movies in particular. When I was very little, it was THE LION KING. When I got a little older, it was the Star Wars series, and after that, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. If I'd gotten to it when I was a bit younger, I probably would have had a Harry Potter phase, but by the time I saw my first one, I was old enough to play it cool. But it was Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy that broke me through beyond seeing them as stories or worlds formed whole-cloth into recognizing movies as a great art form assembled out of so many other art forms. I'd read a few books about the behind-the-scenes stories of making the Star Wars movies, but I was all about the fictional universes and exploring all the fictional details and fictional facts. With Lord of the Rings, I wanted to know the purpose and craft behind all those world-building details, how sets and creatures were designed and why, where scenes were filmed and why, how all the players who came together and the parts they played to form the whole. It was a genuine breakthrough for me. Boy, and I had to push my parents, understandably concerned over the violence, to let me watch them. Technically, they are three different movies, but they were definitely one massive production, all three shot simultaneously over the course of 438 days with a single budget of $281 million, and it's difficult to look at them as three separate films. It's one big film. One tremendous, 9 hours long epic film. There's a fair argument to make that it's longer than it needs to be, occasionally retreading over ground, but about once a year, I'll watch it/them spread out over the course of a week, and its immersive. It's bold. They take a lot of risks, and some of them don't pay off, but the overwhelming majority do. In many ways, it's a crucial influence on a lot of today's top blockbusters (not to mention a little HBO series called Game of Thrones), but as improbable as it was to be made like that back then, this sort of production couldn't be done today. It's so massive and tactile, described by visual effects man Randy Cook as "Ray Harryhausen meets David Lean", building the bridge from epics of yesteryear, using hundreds of actors outfitted in painstakingly crafted costumes, armor and makeup, thousands of weapons and other props, hundreds of locations and so many horses, matte paintings and prosthetic effects, into modern visual effects fantasies with computer-generated armies of tens of thousands colliding with brute force on the battlefield, hosts of fantastical creatures that can only exist in the computer, and a breakthrough in CG character animation with Andy Serkis' iconic breakout role as Gollum/Smeagol. In contrast, an attempt to imitate this type of production with even the involvement of the same people in only a decade later resulted in The Hobbit trilogy, a series that to say nothing of the spotty script and characterizations traded in the LOTR trilogy's rich tactility for an overwhelmingly artificial aesthetic.
Peter Jackson approaches the trilogy with a deliberate sense of importance and earns it, treating high fantasy with broad respect and epic ambition that's palatable to general audiences without watering the material down but elevating it. It's awesome high adventure with a few of the most amazing cinematic battles ever realized, exotic locations, and substantive, meaty drama.
Best Part: Between all nine hours, there's a number of standout moments, especially the battles, my favorites in order of their occurrence, the Bridge of Khazad-dum, the Breaking of the Fellowship, Helm's Deep, the Battle of Pelennor Fields and the Battle of the Black Gate. I also have a special fondness for Frodo's (Elijah Wood) inner debate and leaving of the Fellowship pursued by Sam (Sean Astin) in THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING and a parallel scene in THE TWO TOWERS with Sam's "There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for," speech. Gandalf's argument against capital punishment in the Mines of Moria ("Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.") is a great, quiet moment, and I love the climactic moment in RETURN OF THE KING when the Ring falls into the Mount Doom and an imperiled Frodo finally makes the decision to reach for Sam's hand. Specific to the Extended Edition of RETURN OF THE KING is a really great scene where the remainder of the Fellowship at the head of an army meets with the horrific "Mouth of Sauron" (played beneath really impressive makeup by Bruce Spence with an impossibly cool voice provided by John Rye), who attempts to break their spirits before the battle begins at the Black Gate.
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| New Line Cinema |
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| Nordisk Film/Great Northern Film Company |
JAGTEN (English: THE HUNT) (DRAMA, 2012)
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Lasse Fogelstrom, Annika Wedderkopp, Lars Ranthe, Anne Louis Hassing, Ole Dupont, Alexandra Rapaport
Rated R for sexual content including a graphic image, violence and language.
115 minutes
This Danish production, titled "The Hunt" in English, is not what you might consider an "easy" watch, but it's an insanely moving one and thought-provoking, tackling very difficult but important material without resorting to easy answers. Mads Mikkelsen (known for the title role in NBC's Hannibal, and roles in CASINO ROYALE and the upcoming ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY) gives a wrenching performance as Lucas, a divorcee who works at the kindergarten in a tightly-knit Danish village, whose life is turned upside down when one of the students, the daughter of his best friend, falsely accuses him of exposing himself to her. He loses his job, and soon he becomes ostracized from the whole village as a pedophile, despite an overwhelming lack of evidence, while his accuser struggles to retract the lie from adults who dismiss her attempts to come clean as symptoms of repression or childish confusion. It's very dark and deeply soulful, set at the Christmas season and shot with a haunting beauty and burning with a cool intensity. Mikkelsen is authentic and powerful as a man falsely accused of as terrible a crime as one can be accused of in modern society, while friends and family, save but a tiny few, turn into distributors of punishment. I think of it every time I see people on social networks boiling over to dole out justice to someone they heard about in a news story or "kick [the] ass" of someone who upset one of their friends. People so sure that they're feeling the right thing, that they won't stop to think. People so angry they can't see the humanity of someone, someone who's human no matter what they may have done. I used to wonder how ordinary people could bring themselves to do something so horrible as taking part in one of the grisly lynchings that you read about in the history books, but just taking to Facebook or Twitter when a high profile rape case is in the news, or some story about a pedophile getting his comeuppance goes viral, I can see where that kind of hate might come from. THE HUNT is a movie that sees the humanity in the accused, his accuser, and the rest, but recognizes the truly terrible consequences of this false accusation and the way we respond to it. Eventually, relationships heal, and the truth will out, but it's almost impossible to kill the last embers of fear and hate once they've been stoked into a raging flame. It's a movie that believes things will be okay, but knows better than to just leave it off at that.
Best Part: The Christmas Eve church service when the kindergarten choir performs "A Child is Born in Bethlehem", and Lucas breaks down in tears. Oh gosh, gets me every time. Every time.
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| Nordisk Film/Great Northern Film Company |
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| Touchstone Pictures |
Directed by Tim Burton
Starring: Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, Bill Murray, Lisa Marie, George 'The Animal' Steele, Juliet Landau, Mike Starr, Ned Bellamy, G.D. Spradlin, Vincent D'Onofrio
Rated R for some strong language.
I didn't quite get ED WOOD the first time I saw it. I had a Tim Burton phase; not a "Gothic", "emo" or otherwise "Hot Topic" sort of thing, but for a while there, he was one of my favorite directors. In my defense, this was before ALICE IN WONDERLAND, and I was coming from a perspective informed mainly by a love of BIG FISH, PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, and I guess CORPSE BRIDE as well. But ED WOOD was the one that everyone who had something to say about movies said was his best, so when I finally was able to see it, I had some expectations. But it was just another Burton stylized tale of social outsiders making their way, only this time based on real life people and in stylish black-and-white. It was so gentle, I mistook it for fluff. I don't remember quite at what point I realized otherwise, but my opinion has evolved more than a little. It's more or less based on the early filmmaking career of Edward D. Wood Jr.; I say "more or less" because while it doesn't deviate all that much farther from events than other biopics have, the perspective and personalities of the subjects is gleefully fictionalized for a poignant but optimistic comic melodrama. Wood is remembered as the man behind a number of infamous low-budget movies from the 1950s, most notably PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, which film critics Michael Medved and Harry Medved declared "the worst film ever made" in 1980 after Wood's death. In a stroke of genius, the script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (previously only known for the Problem Child films) envisions young Ed (played by Johnny Depp) as an admirer of Orson Welles (whose film CITIZEN KANE has often been declared a "greatest film ever made"), stressing to his girlfriend Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker) over his lack of accomplishment in comparison to his idol. When he finally gets the chance to direct a film, a poverty row production called "I Changed My Sex!", he turns it into GLEN OR GLENDA, a semi-autobiographical story about transvestism instead and receives no shortage of ridicule, but ever optimistic, Ed continues to make cheap and shoddy films with great enthusiasm, all the while assembling an entourage of devoted show business outcasts who come together to make art, even if it's terrible. In particular focus is Ed's relationship with horror icon Bela Lugosi (played by Martin Landau), the actor who played Universal's Dracula, but whose career has gone in the toilet while he struggles to feed a morphine addiction. Ed gets a star for his movies and the opportunity to work with his childhood idol, while Bela is able to work, and they become close. The story follows Ed's struggles to see his visions realized no matter the obstacles which he faces with near endless, if occasionally exasperated, optimism (Depp cited Ronald Reagan's "blind optimism" as inspiration), which draws together a figurative family of oddballs in which each are accepted and allowed to pursue unlikely dreams. Maybe living your dreams in spite of how seemingly inept at it you are isn't a way to make a living, but it's a way to live. ED WOOD doesn't shy from darkness, but it refuses to be brought down by it. It has a warm yet wistful heart beneath the zaniness, arguably like Wood's own work but better, and the result is immensely human.
Best Part: When a haunted house ride breaks down momentarily on Ed's first date with Kathy O'Hara (Patricia Arquette), Ed nervously takes the opportunity to confess something before it becomes a bigger issue in the future.
ED: "Kathy...I'm about to tell you something that I've never told any girl on a first date. But I think it's important that you know...I like to dress up in women's clothes.
KATHY: "Huh?"
ED: "I like to wear women's clothes. Panties, brassieres, sweaters, pumps. It's just something I do. And I can't believe I'm telling you this, but I really like you, and I don't want it getting in the way down the road.
Kathy looks perplexed and a little disappointed.
KATHY: "Does this mean you don't like sex with girls?"
ED: "No, I love sex with girls."
Kathy pauses for a moment to process this, before finally breaking the silence with a simple "Okay."
It's such a simple and sweet moment, and it's funny, because the ride breaks down for just the right amount of time for the exchange but it's no problem. It's a beautifully romantic exchange of trust and acceptance played with sincerity and maturity, and it gives me the warm fuzzies.
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| Touchstone Pictures |
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| DreamWorks/Warner Brothers |
Directed by Tim Burton
Starring: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Jamie Campbell Bower, Jayne Wisener, Laura Michelle Kelly, Edward Sanders, Sacha Baron Cohen
Rated R for graphic bloody violence.
116 minutes
Another Burton entry, SWEENEY TODD is a deliriously gruesome Hollywood musical with Academy Award-winning production design by Dante Ferretti that looks like it was ripped from the pages of an old penny dreadful and splashed over with an abundance of fake blood. It's old-fashioned musical entertainment in Gothic trappings and twisted with all manner of depravity in a darkly funny, visually thrilling and surprisingly emotional horror story with a sense of moral justice despite being almost utterly amoral in the Grand Guignol, filled with vengeance-fueled serial killing, lascivious designs and widespread cannibalism. Tim Burton has his way with the demon barber's tale, casting Burton's most regular stars Johnny Depp in the title role and Helena Bonham Carter as his pie-making partner in crime and unrequited lover Mrs. Lovett, both sporting Burton-trademarked pale face makeup with dark, sallow eyes and sharply slendering, ribbed costumes accented by feathery tufts of disheveled hair or frills, here all made part of the grey, black and red storybook nightmare tragedy. It's unusually mature Burton, standing alongside ED WOOD and BIG FISH, and unleashed with a horror genre and R rating, opening with a simply perfect opening credits sequence that flies manically through an illustrated version of Todd's deadly shop, the trapdoor barber's chair and the roaring firewood oven full of pies as a vibrantly red trickle of blood flows down to the sewers. Depp's Todd is a dead man from the moment he appears on-screen, a revenant on a gruesome mission of vengeance, not only against the despicable Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) who destroyed his life 15 years earlier in Victorian London, but against the whole of social order, trickster-like in his nauseating upheaval that turns dozens of murder victims into the best-selling meat pies in London. Carter's Lovett is more sympathetic, but willing to throw everything aside, even her humanity, to be with the man who can't possibly be bothered to notice her advances. Curiously, while using familiar elements, Burton overturns his usual formula, dealing out a couple of the most savage endings for his two outsiders, both having given up what was good in the world in light of so much that was bad, while young lovers Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) and Todd's daughter Johanna (Jayne Wisener, who resembles a living Tim Burton sketch) narrowly escape by hope, ingenuity and sheer luck. It's arguably bleak, a vicious, angry pot of Hollywood horror boiling with thunderous passion and a deep well of soul.
Best Part: "Pretty Women" and "Epiphany" are both major highlights, but I especially love the climactic explosion of fury as Todd finally reveals his true identity to Judge Turpin just before unleashing an absurdly messy vengeance upon him.
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| DreamWorks/Warner Brothers |
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| Focus Features |
Directed by Edgar Wright
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Rosamund Pike, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan, Pierce Brosnan, David Bradley, Michael Smiley, Steve Oram, Darren Boyd
Rated R for pervasive language including sexual references.
109 minutes
THE WORLD'S END is the third and final installment in the "Three Flavours Cornetto" trilogy, also called the "Blood & Ice Cream" trilogy, all three of them excellent genre-bending comedies, but THE WORLD'S END closes things out on an especially rich, mature and immensely satisfying note. It is not a narrative trilogy of one story carried out over the course of three installments. They're each original films directed by Edgar Wright, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and co-written by Wright and Pegg, and each gives a brief moment of free advertising to the western European equivalent of Drumstick pre-filled ice cream cones, Cornetto. In THE WORLD'S END, Pegg stars as Gary King, an alcoholic who strives to live life like the high school senior he was in 1990, even in the midst of a mid-life crisis, and no night of his life was better than the one in 1990 when he and his pals tried and failed to complete the "Golden Mile", a 12-stop pub crawl in their small hometown of Newton Haven. Determined to return and see the Golden Mile through to the end, drinking a pint of ale in each of the 12 pubs, Gary rounds up the four friends from high school he burned bridges with years ago, Andy Knightley (Nick Frost), Steven Prince (Paddy Considine), Oliver Chamberlain (Martin Freeman) and Peter Page (Eddie Marsan), and manages to convince each reluctant one to attempt that night again. It isn't long before the quintet realizes that not all is right with their old hometown, and they discover the town has been taken over by alien invaders which replace the uncooperative humans with alien androids. Rather than break routine, Gary convinces them to keep a low profile by continuing their drunken quest, but instead it becomes a pub-by-pub brawl with the androids as Gary will stop at nothing to finish his 12 pints and his friends are just hoping to get out of there alive. Like all of Wright's films to date, THE WORLD'S END is bursting with cleverness woven throughout, as pub and character names reference their places in the and parts in the plot, numeric references layering the sets and events within each pub according to their place in the plot, details and symbols that reward multiple viewings. Audiences' tolerance of Gary seems to vary, but I think he's funny. He's a terrible person, but he cracks me up, and I love the way he's returns as an unwilling presence into his old friends' lives like the Ghost of Drinking Binges Past, or as Wright and Pegg described him, a "wraith". Gary's the only real 'man-child' of the group, but it's a belated coming-of-age and coming-to-terms for the lot of them. Gary hasn't moved on with his life, but his friends have left things behind as well, and thanks to an unhealthy amount of alcohol, they get the chance to find some closure. The action is inventive and thrilling, the characters are fun, the script is smart and funny, and it hits some unexpectedly hard emotional notes, and by the time they get to the titular pub, The World's End, it hits sweet, pure perfection.
Best Part: Gary and Andy's fight and the revelation of the depths of Gary's desperation at The World's End.
ANDY: "You were Gary King! Gary f***ing King! I would have followed you to the end! I f***ing have!"
GARY: "You've got everything you want! You've got your perfect job and your perfect house and your perfect wife!"
ANDY: "You think it's so perfect? She left me, Gary. She took the kids to her mum's three weeks ago. Said I'm not present enough. I am trying to win her back, God knows I am losing. But I will continue to fight, because that is how we survive! For f***'s sake, Gary, I just punched my wedding ring out of a robot's tummy!"
GARY: "Exactly, you fight for what's important!"
ANDY: "What's so important about the Golden Mile?!"
"It's all I've got!"
Ah, jeez, it's such great melodrama with a tinge of comedy, and it just kills me. Also, love it when a slobbering drunk Gary, Andy and Steven become sort of insightful but seriously idiotic negotiators for the future of the human race with the alien "Network", voiced by Bill Nighy.
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| Focus Features |
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| Universal |
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover, Thomas F. Wilson, Claudia Wells, Marc McClure, Wendy Jo Sperber, James Tolkan, George DiCenzo, Frances Lee McCain
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (PG-13-level; some thematic elements and teen drug/alcohol use).
116 minutes
It may be a "white bread" movie, but BACK TO THE FUTURE is a white bread movie that is so damn good. It's a freaking sugar rush of feel-good movie. I actually saw PART III first, which I watched with my dad, and thought it was pretty fun despite having so very little context. I don't remember exactly when it was I finally saw the original, but it was probably something my parents left for me and my brothers to watch while they were out some Friday night. I thought it was funny, but I didn't start to really love it until my teenage years, which I guess makes sense. There are plenty of movies about teens rebelling and finding their own way with maybe a little moment of obligatory connection to their parents near the end, but BACK TO THE FUTURE is actually all about really connecting with and appreciating parents. It isn't authoritarian, it's empathetic. Michael J. Fox is Marty McFly and the perfect '80s "cool kid"; not quite a Judd Nelson bad boy, but edgy enough to be cool and nice enough to bring home to mom, tooling around on a skateboard and jamming on electric guitar. His family is a bunch of losers, with his dorky dad George (Crispin Glover), who met Marty's mom Lorraine (Lea Thompson) after getting hit by her dad's car while peeping on her through her bedroom window, and Lorraine just seems perplexed at how she landed in the life she's living and laments the way girls today, such as Marty's girlfriend Jennifer (Claudia Wells), are so 'liberated'. But while helping eccentric local inventor Dr. Emmet Brown test a DeLorean outfitted as a plutonium-powered time travel machine, he's inadvertently transported from 1985 back in time to 1955, where he inadvertently interferes with parents' courtship, threatening his own existence. He gets to experience firsthand his parents as peers so much more like him than he previously realized, full of the same insecurities and dreams, and his mother, so conservative in her sexual morals in 1985 is a healthily sexually aggressive young woman, which wouldn't be a problem if her attentions weren't so focused on Marty. It's a family film with just enough spice (studios in the early '80s were reluctant to make a comedy that wasn't raunchier like PORKY'S, except for Disney, who turned it down for being too risque), with a lot of everything mixed together perfectly; comedy, adventure, science fiction and romance. Mostly, I love how it connects generations, not only in its appeal, but its story.
Best Part: No question, it's the climactic romantic moment during "Earth Angel" at the "Enchantment Under the Sea" dance as Marty sees his hand starting to fade away but is saved just in time when George bucks up the nerve to kiss Lorraine, but I'll also make a note of George's big moment of standing up to bully Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson) in the high school parking lot. Just a couple of really big, heart-soaring triumph moments.
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| Universal |
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| Sony |
Directed by Richard Linklater
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, Xenia Kalogeropoulou, Walter Lassally, Ariane Labed, Yiannis Papadopoulos, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Panos Koronis
Rated R for sexual content/nudity and language.
109 minutes
Another third part in a trilogy, I love both its predecessors BEFORE SUNRISE and BEFORE SUNSET just about as much as I love BEFORE MIDNIGHT, but BEFORE MIDNIGHT is such a beautiful culmination of everything from those films. Sometimes called the "Before" trilogy, it all began in 1995 with BEFORE SUNRISE, a beautiful, low-key story about Jesse (Ethan Hawke), a young American man touring Europe, and Celine (Julie Delpy), a young French woman one her way home after visiting her grandmother, whose paths cross on a train to Vienna. After spending one night together strolling the city and discussing their intimate thoughts, hopes and fears, they parted ways, promising to meet again in six months. Nine years later in 2004, their story was continued with BEFORE SUNSET, this time set in Paris, where it is revealed that their plans to reunite fell through, and since they decided not to exchange contact information, they haven't seen each other during those nine years. Having become a writer, Jesse took a book tour through Europe, including a stop in Paris, where Celine finds him. But Jesse had become married and had a kid, and Celine is an environmental activist with a boyfriend, while both feel the unstoppable passage of time closing in on their unsatisfied lives. They left their other lives in order to be with each other. BEFORE MIDNIGHT comes another nine years later in 2013, and Celine and Jesse are officially a couple, living together with their twin girls on vacation in the Greek Peloponnese. Jesse is having continuing success as a writer, but laments not being able to maintain a consistent relationship with his son from the previous marriage, while his relationship with his ex-wife is bitter. Celine troubles over a lack of fulfillment in her career while also devoting so much time to being a mother, as time seems to sweep away her opportunities. BEFORE MIDNIGHT goes dark and hard like its predecessors don't, as what was meant to be a romantic evening together in Greece turns into a bitter, emotionally brutal, no-holds-barred argument in a hotel room, threatening to spell the end of their love. But ultimately, BEFORE MIDNIGHT is not a pessimistic movie. It's a mature think-piece on the balance of romantic fantasies and imperfect realities, where human beings who love each other will hurt each other, but communication in its many forms is where love is.
Best Part: After Celine delivers the nuclear option of a couple's arguments, telling Jesse she doesn't love him anymore and walks out the door, he follows her out to the table in the hotel's beautiful outdoor dining area and makes a Hail Mary attempt to win her back, delivering a line about being a time-traveler from the future with a letter from the future Celine advising her not to leave him that night. It's funny, sad, sweet and ultimately a home run ending. "If you want love, then this is it. This is real life. It's not perfect, but it's real."
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| Sony |
 |
| Paramount/20th Century Fox |
Directed by James Cameron
Starring: Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Zane, Gloria Stewart, Bill Paxton, Frances Fisher, David Warner, Danny Nucci, Jason Barry, Kathy Bates, Victor Garber, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Ewan Stewart, Mark Lindsay Chapman, Jonathan Phillips, Ioan Gruffudd
Rated PG-13 for disaster related peril and violence, nudity, sensuality and brief language.
195 minutes
So, yeah, this one. I like TITANIC a lot, and it's not that I'm unaware of or don't mind its less successful aspects, it's just that the stuff that works really works. I can enjoy watching it at home, but what gives this movie the extra boost to be on this list is that when it was re-released in 3D in 2012, I went to see it in IMAX, which was one of the most awesome theatrical experiences I've ever had. Writing is definitely not a strength for James Cameron. His dialogue is occasionally atrocious, on many occasions in TITANIC, in fact, and with the prominent exception of the Terminator movies, he usually takes an interesting concept and fits it to a far-from-original narrative for his stories and characters, but when it comes to spectacle and big cinematic drama, few filmmakers can knock it out the park like he can. TITANIC is the absolute best example of that, a truly old-fashioned Hollywood love story playing out against an iconic historical backdrop on a mind-boggling set. The scenes of lifeboats being lowered multiple stories from the top deck down to the water always bowls me over with its scale and the level to which Cameron is able to exploit it for the camera's eye. It's gigantic, and each of these decks are occupied by their own action taking place as this continent of a set is gradually claimed by the water. The first half is generally pretty good, primarily occupied with the romance between poor artist Jack Dawson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and the blue-blooded Rose DeWitt Bukater, played by Kate Winslet, both wrestling with cringe-worthy dialogue (JACK: "This doesn't make any sense!" ROSE: "I know. That's why I trust it.") but the most important essence comes through, and laugh if you will, but that "draw me like one of your French girls" scene is famous for reasons more than nudity. The second half is where it really cranks hard into high gear though with passions hitting a high at that last sunset, soon followed by the iceberg, and from there, it's a non-stop disaster movie thrill ride that's emotionally explosive and exciting as hell, and the cherry on top is James Horner's beautifully sentimental music score.
Best Part: From the moment the ship splits apart until the bobbing remainder is finally consumed by the water is simply unbeatable, desperate, poignant, exciting and frightening, but I also really love the scene when Rose is being lowered in the lifeboat and gazes up at Jack as the flares explode in the sky behind him like fireworks, prompting her to leap back onto the ship. The soundtrack erupts, the scale of the ship is stunning and the passions are sky-high.
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| Paramount/20th Century Fox |
 |
| Touchstone Pictures |
Directed by Mel Gibson
Starring: Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Jonathan Brewer, Morris Birdyellowhead, Carlos Emilio Baez, Amilcar Ramirez, Raoul Trujillo, Gerardo Teracena, Israel Contreras, Israel Rios, Maria Isabel Diaz, Ricardo Diaz Mendoza
Rated R for sequences of graphic violence and disturbing images.
138 minutes
Just months after his infamous drunken, anti-Semitic tirade effectively stalled his career, Mel Gibson released a movie in which he finally gotten it right, so, so right. APOCALYPTO is speculative historical fiction, an ultra-violent action-adventure story placed in the shadow of the Mayan Empire's twilight. All the dialogue is spoken in ancient Mayan, and Gibson tells his action movie through a lens of documentarian-like historicity, the scholarly assessment of which is a matter of debate, but the visceral success of which is top-notch. It's like peering through a window into a human experience forgotten by time. Why the Maya and other pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations only exist in fragments today, lending an air of mystery and mysticism, APOCALYPTO's characters are wonderfully human and accessible. The movie opens with a small hunting party from a tribe in the Yucatan rainforest when the subject of one man's infertility comes up, and the others persuade him to eat raw tapir testicles as a solution, only to burst out laughing when he actually does it. They brawl about it a bit, and yes, it was mean, but in a brotherly sort of way. Then one of the older men pulls the infertile man aside and offers him a paste to rub on the pertinent region before lovemaking in order to get his wife pregnant, but the paste is actually made from chilies. When the husband burst out of the house to dunk his crotch in water, the wife runs out and tries to wash out her mouth, and the rest of the tribe is positively keeling over with laughter at the prank. It isn't as mean as it sounds. It's just a dumb, vulgar prank, and however else these people differ from us, they still love scatological humor and pranks, and they still have sexual insecurities. How much more relatable can you get? But then, the movie turns very dark. Rudy Youngblood stars as Jaguar's Paw, a young man of the tribe, father of a little boy, Turtle's Run (Carlos Emilio Baez), and devoted husband of Seven (Dalia Hernandez), who is expecting their second child any day. The village is attacked war party that wantonly rapes and murders most of the villagers, but Seven and Turtle's Run escape by hiding away in a deep pit cave while Jaguar's Paw and the other survivors are bound and taken on a forced march through the jungle into the heart of a Mayan city where they'll be offered up as human sacrifices. Jaguar's Paw has to escape, but to do so, he'll have to evade dogged pursuers across mountains and jungles, while Seven is trapped with Turtle's Run in the cave, about to give birth any day, and the heavy rains threaten to drown them. It's a nerve-wracking adventure with spectacular action, spectacle, and a heaping dose of horror as Gibson doesn't skimp for a second on showing off the realistic impact of violence (it really works to the movie's benefit here, but Gibson clearly has an obsession with brutal, disfiguring violence, perhaps in a Catholic sense of corporeality). It's the kind of movie that nobody else could make, epic and sprawling in an exceptional environment and context, with a great deal of humanity.
Best Part: The whole thing from the moment Jaguar's Paw escapes until the end is a non-stop blast, but I particularly love the birth scene.
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| Touchstone Pictures |
 |
| Disney/Pixar |
Directed by Pete Docter
Featuring the Voices of: Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer, Bob Peterson, Delroy Lindo, Jerome Ranft, John Ratzenberger, David Kaye, Elie Docter
Rated PG for some peril and action.
96 minutes
UP is mostly remembered for it's first 10 or so minutes, which is entirely understandable because that opening is so efficient, so funny, such a sugar rush and such a heartbreak, a whole story in itself, essentially a prequel to the main body of the movie, but it's incredibly unfair to dismiss the hilarious, exciting, exotic and deeply moving adventure story that follows. I love the jungle as the setting for an adventure, and Pixar's digital rendering of the bizarre tropical South American landscapes doesn't disappoint. There are fog-cloaked tepuis (Venezuelan mesa rock formations), thick forests, chases through narrow canyons and a climactic dogfight sequence with actual dogs flying the planes! Though in no small part a story about moving on and not living in the past, it also has no shortage of nostalgia in its old-fashioned sense of adventure. The main character, elderly Carl Fredericksen (voiced by Ed Asner), who avoids a court-ordered move to a retirement home by taking his house aloft with thousands of helium-filled balloons toward Venezuela, is a throwback to screen legend Spencer Tracy in his later career, and his idol whose obsession with catching a fabled giant bird has turned him to sinister means is Charles Muntz (voiced by Christopher Plummer), a man styled in the fashion of Howard Hughes and Errol Flynn, flying around the world in an airship, and their climactic showdown is nothing less than a swordfight, but with Carl wielding a quad cane instead of a blade, plus the relevant geriatric issues. But while there's plenty of funny silliness, it doesn't shy away from darkness, and UP contains a couple of Pixar's most intense moments. It's one part love story, one part adventure story and one part a love-of-adventure story, and what's more, Michael Giacchino's musical score is a masterpiece.
Best Part: Well, the first ten minutes. Duh. But seriously, I love the whole thing
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| Disney/Pixar |
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| MGM/Sony |
Directed by Martin Campbell
Starring: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini, Caterina Murino, Simon Abkarian, Isaac De Bankole, Jesper Christensen, Sebastien Foucan
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violent action, a scene of torture, sexual content and nudity.
144 minutes
I'm not a huge James Bond fan. I'm not even sure that I've seen half of the 24 films in the Eon Productions-produced series, but for me, almost all of them are more like curiosities than anything else. GOLDFINGER and LIVE AND LET DIE are fun with their antiquated charms, but outside of Ursula Andress, there isn't much to DR. NO. GOLDENEYE is too long and too dumb, and the big favorite of many fans and critics, SKYFALL, is pretty good and plenty handsome, but takes the franchise a few steps back and really sets the stage for the misfire of SPECTRE. CASINO ROYALE, though, is a knockout. It concludes with some lose ends that are picked up the inferior follow-up, QUANTUM OF SOLACE, but it stands so perfectly on its own while playing as a prequel to the pop culture identity of James Bond. Daniel Craig's first outing as the first blond Bond is darker than Bond has been before or since, and brutal. How this movie got to be rated PG-13 instead of R isn't readily apparent, but I didn't mind in my teenage years. Bond himself is dark, and brooding and brutal, but so early into his career as a "00" agent with license to kill, CASINO ROYALE is a story about a brief window in Bond's career that he could have taken a different, happier path, how that window closed and left him a different man. His screen partner Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) stands far apart from other so-called "Bond girls" (the usual weird name receives brief notice, and the usual innuendo-based moniker is done away with except for an amusing one-off joke about her code name being "Victoria Broadchest"), and becomes the love of Bond's life, albeit a short one that ends tragically and bitterly in a way that forms him, building up the shell of distance and misogyny. It's a really cool, action-oriented thrill ride of a tragedy. Bond's a cold-blooded killer with a heart of stone that makes him ideal for his job, but when he opens his heart to another person, ready to give up his job and start life all over again for love, he gets burned. It's the first time that Bond, an iconic cultural figure, is rendered in a movie as a real and layered character, with a leading lady to match, and the action, taking a few notes from the Bourne franchise, is vicious and gutsy.
Best Part: Maybe it sounds a little demented, but definitely the torture scene. It's simple, raw and horrific; when Bond and Vesper are abducted by underworld banker Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), Vesper is taken away so they can do God knows what to get her to fess up the bank account number holding the winnings from a high-stakes poker game, while Bond, holding the password, is taken to a cold chamber, stripped naked and bound to a wicker chair with the middle of the seat cut out, and Le Chiffre proceeds to whomp his genitals repeated with a big, knotted rope. It is real painful to watch, but Craig and Mikkelsen are so great together, both reduced to total desperation, and Bond in severe agony turns to humor and taunting to keep from giving in.
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| MGM/Sony |
 |
| Warner Brothers |
Directed by George Miller
Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Josh Helman, Nathan Jones, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton, John Howard, Richard Carter, Angus Sampson
Rated R for intense sequences of violence throughout, and for disturbing images.
120 minutes
I was unsure about including this here, because it's so recent, but I mean, c'mon, it's so damn good. Actually, it seems to have trouble resonating with a whole lot of less enthusiastic film fans, as myself and other movie buffs have experienced when trying to share this gift from the movie gods with our families. I can't explain it, but I keep on trying. It's a tight two hours and runs like a dream from the first second as the rusted studio logos appear with the sound of a roaring engine, diving into a wild chase in a post-apocalyptic, barren wasteland where the survivors of an unspecified nuclear conflict or catastrophe have rebuilt pockets of less than civilized civilization controlled by brutal, dictatorial patriarchs who control the resources and set themselves up as leaders of machine based cults. It's the weird world of THE ROAD WARRIOR ramped up to 11, and like that movie, beneath its gonzo trappings, it's a good old-fashioned western. "Mad" Max Rockantansky (Tom Hardy, replacing the role originator, Mel Gibson, with quiet gruffness) is the gunslinger archetype, a warrior whose lost his way, given in to an animalian nature and captured by the "War Boys" warrior cult of a city called the Citadel and relegated to a human blood bag, all before the title card appears with explosive and terrifying force. Another warrior, and our main character, is Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron, sporting a shorn head), the trusted lieutenant of the Citadel's king, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a decrepit warlord who keeps tight control over the Citadel's water and keeps five women as his "breeders" to give birth to male heirs. But Furiosa betrays Joe and smuggles the wives out of the Citadel to take to her homeland, "the Green Place", prompting Joe to pursue with an army of War Boys and two other war party allies. Max is the lone gunslinger, the "man without a name" who finds a new cause in helping these women in their struggle for relief from this cruel gunfighter. A familiar western trope is that of a hero coming to the aid of prostitutes who are beset by a villainous man intent on staking claim to a child or taking one of the women as his wife, and FURY ROAD takes that idea and molds it into a non-stop chase with a potent feminist twist. The action is unparalleled in contemporary cinema, moving with kinetic fluidity and informing the characters and environment like an opera of violence with spectacular automotive mayhem and acrobatic combat, and an exhilarating sound design while Junkie XL's thundering, pulsating score seamlessly enhances each frame. It's spectacularly thrilling action and spectacle for sure, but what makes it really count is a resonating story and characters, one that, funnily enough, parallels another entry on this list, THE APARTMENT. It's a story about people who've been made into objects, cogs in the machine, and Max is literally reduced to a blood bag in the first scenes of the film, with medical information tattooed all over his back. It's the story of these people reclaiming their humanity, refusing to be abused by the 'takers', a cruel patriarchal system that turns them into commodities and destroys the world.
Best Part: The biker canyon, when Furiosa's deal goes sour, forcing them to hurry out as the bikers swarm and attack, leaping from wall to wall on their bikes while Joe and his party comes very close and his favorite wife, the Splendid Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), starts to feel contractions. The action is incredible (not that the rest isn't) and the emotions get really high.
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| Warner Brothers |
 |
| Marvel |
Directed by Joss Whedon
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Clark Gregg, Cobie Smulders, Stellan Skarsgard, Gwyneth Paltrow
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action throughout, and a mild drug reference.
143 minutes
THE AVENGERS is Marvel's best movie to date, and although by an admittedly thin margin, it's the best superhero movie I've seen. THE DARK KNIGHT is close, for sure, but I can throw THE AVENGERS on anytime, and it's just a non-stop blast of fresh escapism. I remember feeling positively pumped as I walked out of the theater after a midnight showing surrounded by moviegoers far more committed to the characters than myself. It's a feeling I associate with the most exciting movies of my childhood, the rush of feel-good adrenaline after seeing a new Star Wars movie or a Spider-Man movie as a 10-year-old boy. I love the action, but where it really soars is Joss Whedon's writing of characters and character-based interactions, milking them for fast-paced humor and simple drama with feel-good triumphs. It's a top-notch summer blockbuster entertainment that jumps right into the story with an opening action sequence that introduces the villain, Tom Hiddleston playing a delightfully sinister Loki, sets up the stakes and dives right into the chase as bullets fly, cosmic rays explode, cars and helicopters crash, a military base collapses in on itself, and finally the title plays, all carried out with gleeful coolness. That's like the first ten minutes. The 'getting the team together' stuff is just fantastic, introducing each player with motivation and appropriate fanfare, efficiently taking care of the necessary "what would happen in a fight between so-and-so and so-and-so" factors, then building the tension with comedy and emotion as these superheroes struggle to find harmony as a team. It's arguably a cotton candy of a movie, sugary sweet, colorful and a ton of fun without a lot of weight or intellectual nourishment (but, come on, it has some), but by gosh, it's a rollicking ride. It has laughs, feels and thrills that play out with a ensemble of great characters.
Best Part: The tracking shot from character-to-character during the Battle of New York is a huge highlight, as well as the Loki's conversation with Black Widow in the Helicarrier prison cell. Oh-oh-oh! Also the whole scene in Germany where Loki steals the iridium and meets up with Captain America before Iron Man shows up with his own soundtrack of "Shoot to Thrill." Just so much fun.
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| Marvel |
 |
| Sony/Columbia |
Directed by Sam Raimi
Starring: Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Alfred Molina, James Franco, J.K. Simmons, Rosemary Harris, Daniel Gillies, Donna Murphy, Elya Baskin, Mageina Tovah
Rated PG-13 for stylized action violence.
127 minutes
I never felt too compelled to see a movie in theaters multiple times over until SPIDER-MAN 2. I suppose there were movies, notably of the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings variety, that I would have liked to see over and over again on the big screen, but I had the drive to see it as reasonable with SPIDER-MAN 2. There were no theaters in town, in fact, the nearest was 30 miles away, and every time my teenage sister with the driver's license wasn't able to drive me there, I, well, didn't exactly handle it well. I only saw it 3 times, but I was pretty proud of myself at the time (my record is 7, which was in the course of two weeks when THE LION KING had its 2011 3D re-release). Sam Raimi's first SPIDER-MAN is good-ish, and I get a lot of entertainment value out of SPIDER-MAN 3, but SPIDER-MAN 2 is a superhero movie masterpiece of the first order. It stands alone just fine, with or without the other two, as young Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) struggles scrape out an existence as a college student, freelance photographer and city savior while his dreams of love with his longtime crush, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), seem to be slipping away. Raimi approaches the comic book source material unabashedly but with wide accessibility, making a funny and deeply heartfelt adventure for boys of all ages (or girls if you like, but it does strike me as particularly "boyish"). Character actor Alfred Molina is an insanely likable comic book villain as Otto Octavius/Doctor Octopus, wielding a quartet of aggressive, indestructible "smart arms," a villain in pursuit of dreams that aren't actually malicious, but controlled by an obsession that is, contrasted by Peter Parker, who's forced to choose between his heroic charge as Spider-Man and his dreams of an ordinary life with love. Something I really love about this movie is how it's an action movie, but it's not about the action in the way some recent superhero movies are. It's about heroism.
Best Part: The whole "Spider-Man returns" section beginning with a transition of Spidey swinging out through a Daily Bugle headline into a battle with Doc Ock atop a clock tower, carrying on to the roof of a speeding L-train, and culminating in the unmasked Spider-Man stretched to his physical limits to stop the careening locomotive. Also, Octavius' moment of redemption.
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| Sony/Columbia |
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| 20th Century Fox |
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
Starring: Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, Linda Harrison, James Whitmore, James Daly, Robert Gunner, Jeff Burton, Lou Wagner, Woodrow Parfrey, Buck Kartalian
Rated G for unspecified reasons (PG-13-level; violence, some disturbing images, thematic elements and male nudity).
112 minutes
My dad introduced me to this series sometime around when the aggressively miscalculated Tim Burton "re-imagining" opened in theaters in 2001, so I would have been about 9 years old. We rented it while my mom was on a trip, as was often the opportunity at which we'd rent and binge on a bunch of movies that she had little or no interest in, and it thereafter became a regular staple of our periodic father-and-sons movie benders, along with its sequels. The four sequels (not counting the two reboots comprised of three installments to date), BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES, CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and BATTLE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES all have their points of interest (BATTLE having significantly less of them) but none of them can touch the classic original. I remember my mom once teasing me as a kid that I liked any movie with big special effects, and while the effects were a consistent factor in most of my favorites back then, looking back, I think I really appreciated the sense of 'mythology'. APES is a lot like Star Wars from before Star Wars existed, an early science fiction film franchise with multiple movies, a TV series, and lots of merchandise, but what I love most about it now is that it's essentially the biggest and best episode of The Twilight Zone ever made. Based on a novel by Pierre Boulle, otherwise best known as the author of The Bridge on the River Kwai, the script was written by Twilight Zone creator and host Rod Serling, then re-written by "unfriendly witness" to the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted screenwriter Michael Wilson, who previously wrote THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, then directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, whose next movie, PATTON, would win him an Academy Award for Best Director. APES is a science fiction movie aimed at kids, starring actors buried beneath ape masks and makeup, with incredible pedigree. In perfect Serling fashion, the story centers around an astronaut named Taylor (Charlton Heston), a horribly cynical misanthrope leading an experimental space voyage to colonize another planet lightyears away, who crash lands with his crew on a desert planet inhabited by a civilization of intelligent apes, where dumb, mute humans are hunted for sport, experimented on in labs and stuffed for display in museums (it drives me crazy when people talk about how PG-13-rated movies would have been rated R when they were younger; this was rated G in 1968!), and the intelligent, man-hating Taylor finds himself acting as an advocate for humanity. The twist ending, ruthlessly proving Taylor's original sentiments correct, is one of the most famous movie endings of all time. It's incredibly dark, twisted and insightful for a science fiction adventure movie, with themes of anti-intellectualism, the tensions between science and religion, the treatment of animals and more that still resonate hugely today. The scenery is hugely evocative and the atmosphere is terrifically creepy, helped in no small part by Jerry Goldsmith's avant-garde score, and the makeup and costumes are iconic.
Best Part: The hunt, where it's first revealed that the dominant species of the planet are apes, as the feral humans begin to run and sticks poking out from the corn stalks approach, making menacing sounds, and shadowy figures gallop out on horses, shooting rifles and swinging nets, then one rider rears back and turns around as the camera zooms in on his gorilla face, while Goldsmith's score evokes the screeching strings of PSYCHO. The scene is chilling and unnerving, and the humans are gunned down, netted, snared and otherwise collected, living and dead, eventually giving way to pitch-black, absurdist humor as the macho hunters pose for a photograph in front of several strung-up human corpses.
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| 20th Century Fox |
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| Miramax |
Directed by Ted Demme
Starring: Timothy Hutton, Matt Dillon, Natalie Portman, Noah Emmerich, Max Perlich, Michael Rapaport, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Lauren Holly, Uma Thurman, Annabeth Gish, Rosie O'Donnell, Mira Sorvino, Martha Plimpton, Anne Bobby
Rated R for strong language and nude pin-ups.
112 minutes
This is a weird one, one that might be temporary, but lately, it's been speaking to me. I was having a really bad case of the blahs, so I did a Google search that I figured wouldn't return anything particularly useful. Something like "movies to make you feel better about life" or "movies that help with depression." Something like that. It was one that I wasn't already overly familiar with, let alone at all familiar with. I knew nothing about it, but it was directed by Ted Demme (nephew of Academy Award-winner Jonathan Demme), and I liked his previous movie, THE REF, and this movie was on Netflix. So I thought I'd at least watch the first 15 minutes, and if it didn't pull me in, I'd try something else. It pulled me in. THE REF is a hilariously acerbic dark comedy with a bit of sweetness; in contrast, BEAUTIFUL GIRLS is sweetness city. It's restrained, doesn't milk it too hard, but it's a lot of awkward late-20s male angst and good feelings. I'm not quite as old as these guys yet, but a lot of the feelings resonate already. Written by Scott Rosenberg (whose later credits are on the complete other side of the spectrum, such as CON AIR and KANGAROO JACK), it centers on Willie Conway (Timothy Hutton), who is just getting by as a pianist in New York and has a committed girlfriend, but as he returns to his small Massachussetts hometown for his high school reunion, he's feeling the pull of regression as he forms a borderline improper kinship with Marty (young Natalie Portman), the 13-year-old girl next door. The fact that the movie pulls that much off is a testament to its delicacy. None of his old friends have left their small town, and they're all dealing with the growing pains of their romantic relationships. There's Tommy (Matt Dillon), the former football star who now drives a snowplow and whose high school sweetheart (Lauren Holly, of DUMB & DUMBER) married another man, but carries on an illicit relationship with her while stringing along his current girlfriend (Mira Sorvino). Paul (Michael Rapaport) has a passion for pin-up models which he proclaims as the ideal, but all he really wants is mend things with his long-term girlfriend (Martha Plimpton) who recently cut things off. Then a beautiful woman named Andera (Uma Thurman) comes to town, a woman who drinks whiskey and talks sports, and though she's far from a "manic pixie dream girl," her short stay reminds each of them of what's really important. It's a really nice, really human movie that's been a bit like therapy at times.
Best Part: I really like the scene where Willie takes Andera ice fishing, and he tells her, "I think it's amazing that there's a guy out there who gets to do all kinds of things with you. He gets to make you happy and spend evenings with you...", and she turns the tables on him, reminding him that someone else has thought the same about his girlfriend. I also really like the scene at the skating pond where Willie comes to terms with the fact that he can't just sit around and wait for Marty to grow up.
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| Miramax |
 |
| TriStar |
Directed by James L. Brooks
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding Jr., Shirley Knight, Jesse James, Skeet Ulrich, Julie Benz, Lawrence Kasdan, Harold Ramis, Yeardley Smith, Lupe Ontiveros, Brian Doyle-Murray, Shane Black
Rated PG-13 for strong language, thematic elements, nudity and a beating.
139 minutes
Some of the sappier elements of James L. Brooks' 1997 romantic-dramedy make me a little hesitant, but even in spite of those treacly moments, I can't help but love it, which I guess says something to its credit. Jack Nicholson won his third Oscar in the role of Melvin Udall, a misanthropic, OCD romance novelist with an impressive array of antipathies that he openly spouts, taking pride in the shock his vicious racism, homophobia, misogyny and any number of insensitivities create in people, but who, deep down, is actually an emotional coward with a fragile ego. His neighbor Simon (Greg Kinnear) is a gay artist who dreads interacting with him, and he only likes to eat at one diner, where only one waitress, Carol (Helen Hunt), will put up with him, and that's the way he likes it, even if he withers whenever she calls him on his B.S. Melvin finds his antisocial lifestyle upheaved, however, when Simon is beaten within an inch of his life and Melvin is pressured into taking care of his dog while he's in the hospital. It's an involuntary act of kindness, if it can even be described as such, but Melvin bonds with the dog, and when Carol skips work to take care of her sickly son, making it so Melvin can't eat, he arranges for house visits from a doctor at considerable personal expense. Gradually, sometimes more voluntary than other times, Melvin finds himself stumbling into being acting like a better human being.
Roger Ebert wrote it "forces a smile onto material that doesn't wear one easily." I suppose that's true, but he was accusing it of being too sweet to please audiences, and I think it's the other way around. It's a very sweet movie that's trying to earn that sweetness by mixing in some bite, which it delivers regularly via Melvin's savage tongue, saying things that even the cynical who've written off the 7-time Academy Award-nominated film in the years since would have to blush at. Sometimes Nicholson seems to act aware of the camera, so he plays best as off-kilter characters like Melvin, and he shines in his more vulnerable moments, being a man who seems particularly uncomfortable with his own vulnerability. Melvin is a pretty rotten human being, there's no question to that, but when he's trying, it's hard not to feel for the poor bastard as he stumbles over his horrible, awful words, finally realizing with horror that he's gone too far once he sees the look on Carol's face. He does it repeatedly, but who hasn't at least once ruined a date or some other social interaction by saying something stupid? The characters in this movie are all struggling to make human connections; Carol feels isolated from any romantic involvement, Simon's lost his muse and is force to turn to his estranged parents for help, and Melvin his is own worst enemy, a fact he doesn't like as much as he once thought he did. It's about new beginnings, imperfect though they may be.
Best Part: The ending, as Melvin and Carol walk to a bakery in the wee hours of the morning on a spur-of-the-moment date, and she convinces him to join her on the sidewalk, in spite of all its cracks, is tough to beat, but I also really love the scenes of Melvin getting romantic advice from Simon.
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| TriStar |
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| 20th Century Fox |
MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (ACTION-ADVENTURE/DRAMA, 2003)
Directed by Peter Weir
Starring: Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, James D'Arcy, Max Pirkis, Robert Pugh, Max Benitz, Lee Ingleby, Richard McCabe, David Threlfall, Ian Mercer, Bryan Dick, Ian Mercer, Mark Lewis Jones, John DeSantis, Billy Boyd
Rated PG-13 for intense battle sequences, related images, and brief language.
138 minutes
MASTER AND COMMANDER is another one of those movies that just don't get made, but by some miracle, this one did. It's a gentleman's action movie, a swashbuckler for the awards set, a seafaring adventure with adult sensibilities. Don't get me wrong; I love the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (except the fourth one, but even that I enjoy on some level) and Errol Flynn-style escapades, but this is really cool and so much rarer. There's a reason for that though. This kind of movie is awfully expensive (this one racked up a cost reported at $150 million), and it's grounded, dramatic, adult approach isn't as easy a sell as Jack Sparrow's antics, so while MASTER AND COMMANDER left itself open for sequels, even going so far as to use a subtitle, it wasn't able to break even in its theatrical run. Loosely based on the "Aubrey-Maturin" series by Patrick O'Brian, taking its titles from the first in the series, Master and Commander, and the tenth, The Far Side of the World, it stars Russell Crowe as the skilled, charming and arguably authoritarian Captain Jack "Lucky Jack" Aubrey of the British Royal Navy's warship the HMS Surprise, whose crew has been at sea for months during the Napoleonic Wars with the orders to find the French privateer ship the Acheron and "Sink, Burn or take her a Prize", but the Acheron finds them first and cripples their ship, beginning a pursuit that extends beyond orders and around horn of South America and into the Pacific. The movie takes a gritty, but also old-fashioned look at the day to day life of early 19th-century life at sea with painstaking detail including grisly, messy surgeries, fatal superstitions and strains of pride and duty, punctuated by fierce and brilliantly intense marine combat. The heart of the movie though, is in the relationship between Aubrey and Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), the ship's doctor, a compassionate and intellectual leftist, and a naturalist, admired but somewhat out of his element in this floating world of red-blooded fighting men. In Aubrey's cabin, in between renditions of classical and baroque pieces, Aubrey on violin and Maturin on cello, the two hash out the latest happenings from their respective worldviews, both of which ultimately balance each other out after the heated exchanges have passed. It's a surprisingly relevant movie for today's political landscape (of course, National Review misread that intention and happily picked it for a "25 Best Conservative Movies" list). It is more deliberately paced than the average swashbuckling adventure, because it encourages you to think, and through this, the impact of the action really counts. It's a movie with a lot of humanity, and once the climactic battle has ended, each of the character deaths from the Surprise crew is accounted for in a funeral at sea. It's a movie with seawater in its veins, transporting the viewer to a visceral experience of life on a British warship in 1805, where a morning could begin with the roaring groan of cannonballs quite literally ripping your world apart, where each man is an integral part of a small society with singular purpose, and where a stroll on a beach may yield the discovery of parts of creation not yet recorded by mankind.
Best Part: Both big battle scenes, one at the beginning of the film limited to cannonfire exchanges and the climactic melee that brings the crew of the Surprise aboard the Acheron, are spectacular, bloody, thrilling and frightening.
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| 20th Century Fox |
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| Miramax |
Directed by Danny Boyle
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald, Peter Mullan, James Cosmo, Eileen Nicholson, Susan Vidler, Pauline Lynch, Shirley Henderson
Rated R for graphic heroin use and resulting depravity, strong language, sex, nudity and some violence.
93 minutes
The breakout film of both director Danny Boyle and star Ewan McGregor, after previously working together on the black comedy SHALLOW GRAVE, TRAINSPOTTING is an explosively energetic, propulsive and wildly imaginative Scottish independent hit packed with outrageous humor and outrageous horrors across an incredible tonal spectrum in the story of a heroin addict and his ne'er-do-well mates experiencing the ups and downs of impoverished young life in Edinburgh. McGregor stars in an anchoring performance as Mark Renton, who struggles to get his life together now and again, each time relapsing back into drug use with his rough crowd of friends, not all of whom have his best interests in mind. The movie pulsates with fast-paced montages set to a house music soundtrack, while richly fleshed characters spout snappy, often hilarious dialogue in their thick Scottish accents, thinly masking the terrifying realities of their burnt-out young existences; the paradox of a drugged-out lifestyle. Some of them still have time though. It's painfully funny, painfully painful, and an ultimately triumphant journey.
Best Part: It's hard to top the "Worst Toilet in Scotland" scene, when Renton loses his heroin suppositories to a truly disgusting mess of a public toilet thanks to a bad case of diarrhea, then bizarrely dives into the poopy bowl which opens into a crystal clear natural lake of water beneath, grabs the suppositories and swims back up and out. It's funny and beautiful, scatological and divine.
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| Miramax |
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| Orion Pictures |
Directed by Terry Jones
Starring: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, Terence Bayler, Carol Cleveland, Sue Jones-Davies
Rated R for unspecified reasons (brief graphic nudity, language and sexual material).
93 minutes
THE HOLY GRAIL may be the more widely quoted and familiar of the Monty Python comedy troupe's films, possibly thanks in part to a greater availability in the age of video rental outlets, but LIFE OF BRIAN is their masterpiece. THE HOLY GRAIL is hilarious and wonderfully anarchic, and I love the over-the-top gross-out antics of MEANING OF LIFE as well, but the Pythons' most controversial film (one of the most controversial movies ever, in fact) is pitch perfect. The controversy, as most liberal namby-pambies who've seen it will tell you, was misguided at best. Seen by certain fundamentalist elements of Christianity as "blasphemous" and ridiculing the life of Jesus, it actually has nothing negative to say about him, and although the blasphemy charge is probably fair to some degree, it isn't any more so than HOLY GRAIL. It definitely makes fun of the people who were so upset about it, though, so there's that. As usual, each member of the troupe takes on multiple roles, with Graham Chapman starring as the titular Brian, a contemporary of Jesus and a hapless schmuck who becomes infatuated with Judith Iscariot (Sue Jones-Davies), who's a member the People's Front of Judea rebel group, so he feigns interest in her politics and soon accidentally attains a following as a prophet. Chock-full of the Pythons' trademark absurdism, it's their handsomest production thanks to a substantially larger budget than HOLY GRAIL and the huge advantage of ancient Jerusalem sets leftover from Franco Zeffirelli's epic miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, as well as a unusually smooth story flow that has room for the comic vignettes without the choppiness. In the midst of many gut-busting laughs, it's also a brilliant satire of religious cultures, but without being mean. As Python Eric Idle said about Jesus himself, "He's not particularly funny, what he's saying isn't mockable. It's very decent stuff." But you know who's fair game? Everyone else!
Best Part: Oh, yeah, good luck with that. This movie's a laugh riot from start to finish. I guess what comes to mind most are the Pontius Pilate scenes, portrayed by Michael Palin with a speech impediment which turns his 'r's into 'w's, especially when he asks the Judean crowd which prisoner he should pardon, but they keep shouting random names with r's in them (i.e. Roderick, which becomes "Welease Wodewick!') and rolling on the ground laughing when Pilate repeats them.
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| Orion Pictures |
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| Sony/Columbia |
THIS IS THE END (COMEDY, 2013)
Directed by Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen
Starring: Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Emma Watson, Michael Cera, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari, Kevin Hart, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jason Segel, Paul Rudd, Channing Tatum
Rated R for crude and sexual content throughout, brief graphic nudity, pervasive language, drug use and some violence.
106 minutes
The directorial debut of Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, who had previously worked as a writing team on movies like SUPERBAD and DRILLBIT TAYLOR (the difference in quality between those two films is astounding), THIS IS THE END is the perfect high concept comedy and balls-out insane in truly the best way. The initial idea is that it's an all-star cast of celebrities playing exaggerated versions of themselves, and already, I'm completely sold, because I love that crap. But then, it's a comedy-horror movie set within the literal Apocalypse, like out of the Book of Revelations, and they don't hold back an inch. THIS IS THE END goes all the way. A bunch of actors get together for James Franco's big housewarming party, but the party is ruined by the onset of the Apocalypse that opens up fiery chasms in the Earth, swallowing up most of the attendees while others die an assortment of gory deaths, and the righteous, none of whom are at the party, are raptured up into Heaven through beams of blue light. Among the few survivors of the initial catastrophe, Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel (of KNOCKED UP and THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE), Craig Robinson (NBC's The Office and HOT TUB TIME MACHINE) and Danny McBride (East Bound & Down and YOUR HIGHNESS) hole themselves up in Franco's fortress-like house to survive until they're rescued, unless they wind up killing each other first, which becomes increasingly likely as Danny's selfishness and belligerence makes everyone miserable and Jonah might be secretly psychotic. Things really get cooking though when our desperate Hollywood heathens realize they have to try being better people if they're going to save themselves. The jokes fly at a furious rate with an unusually high success rate, many of them of a surprisingly gross variety, becoming so gross it's almost not funny anymore, but then coming the other way around where it's too gross to not be hilarious. I particularly love really dark, violence-based humor, which THIS IS THE END has plenty of, dropping its idiotic characters into what's essentially a horror movie at times, with some hilariously extreme gore. It's one of the funniest movies I've ever seen, but what really sells it is its weird, weird heart, which is at once sincere and just a little ironic.
Best Part: The climactic scene in which Seth and Jay are running from a giant and well-endowed Satan (or otherwise Satanic monster), and Jay begins to be raptured, but can't lift Seth up with him. Cue the "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Huston as Seth realizes he needs to let Jay go and lets go of his hand, just in time to be caught in his own rapture beam of heavenly light that castrates Satan just as Whitney starts to belt the chorus. Seriously, one of the funniest movie scenes ever.
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| Sony/Columbia |
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| Universal |
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (DRAMA, 1988)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey, Juliette Caton, Harry Dean Stanton, Andre Gregory, David Bowie, Verna Bloom, Roberts Blossom, Barry Miller, Gary Basaraba, Irvin Kershner, Victor Argo, Paul Herman, John Lurie, Leo Burmester, Alan Rosenberg
Rated R for unspecified reasons (some strong violence, graphic nudity, and sexuality).
162 minutes
Another religiously-themed centerpiece of intense controversy, Martin Scorsese's deeply personal testimony of faith on celluloid is usually and unfortunately overshadowed by its over-heated reputation created largely by people who hadn't seen it and resulted in protests outside theaters that ranged from picketing to full-blown terrorism, while one noted evangelist tried to by the original negative from Universal in order to destroy it and prevent its distribution, and Eternal Word Television Network hostess Mother Angelica pronounced it "the power to destroy souls eternally." Well, with that kind of praise, how could I have gone without seeing it? I didn't expect, however, how beautiful and thought-provoking it would be. It's based on a book by Nikos Kazantzakis and grapples with the nature of Jesus Christ, the conflict of the human and the divine, the conflict of the love and the revolutionary sword, culminating what's essentially IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE with Jesus (Willem Dafoe) in the George Bailey role, or in the vein of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge but on the cross. Being raised Mormon, I grew up mostly thinking of Jesus as physically human and subject to temptation, but with divinity in the form of "perfection," and entirely without sin from childhood. It didn't make a ton of sense, but there you go. The most typical talking point among the detractors was a scene in which Jesus, perhaps more in a dream than in a reality, has become married to Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey) and they consummate their union, but that didn't seem all that out there to me. In Mormonism, where marriage is so revered, it's a typical matter of discussion whether Jesus ever took a wife, and the rest would be assumed (I'm not sure, however, to what extent this would be considered an "impure thought," the sinfulness of which is another matter of contention, especially if Jesus suffered "all temptations" as my religious upbringing espoused). What was strange to me was the idea of Jesus refusing the call to become the Messiah, and his struggling understand the will of God, receiving knowledge of his task piece by piece. But THE LAST TEMPTATION isn't based on the Gospels, and it would be a mistake to interpret as such. It's religious speculative fiction meant to reckon with ideas established by the Gospels and religious traditions, particularly from a Catholic perspective. It may be the most Catholic movie I've ever seen. It's a labor of love, a biblical epic making the most of a measly $7 million budget, and sometimes its lack of resources shows, but it's always enough and impressive in how much it milks out of it. It has a lot on its mind and even more in its heart, and may be the most emotionally moving film Scorsese has made in his illustrious career.
Best Part: I really love the scene of Jesus and the Apostles entering Jerusalem at Passover, especially with Peter Gabriel's swelling music, and the scene of Pilate's interview with Jesus, as David Bowie plays the Roman governor with a fascinating sensitivity and cold but melancholy sense of duty.
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| Universal |
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| Universal |
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Jonathan Sagalle, Embeth Davidtz, Malgoscha Gebel, Shmulik Levy, Mark Ivanir, Beatrice Macola, Andrzej Seweryn, Friedrich Von Thun, Krzysztof Luft, Harry Nehring, Norbert Weisser
Rated R for language, some sexuality and actuality violence.
197 minutes
Obviously, it's not a "feel-good" experience, but I find it an incredibly fulfilling one. Steven Spielberg's Academy Award-winning masterpiece blends his rawest, harshest work with his most handsomely, old-fashionedly cinematic in the epic arc of a man from cold and calculating capitalist to a human being who puts everything on the line to save others, initially for a similarly self-serving sense of glory and appreciation, but ultimately breaking under the realization of even one more life that could have been saved, let alone thousands. Some of the film's detractors (let's face it, there have to be some) argue against what may be seen as a sentimental ending, possibly a case of the "white savior" cliche, but it's the ideal framing point for Spielberg to tell the story of the Holocaust through, a deeply human perspective about the worth of human life in a time of horrific waste. Joseph Stalin famously said, "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." Spielberg, with a script by Steven Zaillian, goes above and beyond to realize the tragedy of both, pitching the personal stories of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) and the Schindlerjuden against the backdrop of the systematic extermination of a civilization, cutting away to reveal the horrors of rooms filled with stolen shoes, jewelry, gold fillings and more, being accounted for by Jewish slave labor observing the destruction of their own culture, and prison camps with walkways cobbled together from the fractured gravestones of their progenitors. It is a portrayal of flickers of human light in the midst of stark evil, evil rarely portrayed so powerfully on film as in the sequence of the mass graves being dug up and the corpses burned, resulting in ash that falls like perverted snow, and an S.S. officer stands in front of the pile howling monstrously. The little girl in the red coat (one of the few colored elements in the black-and-white film) Schindler observes hiding during the liquidation of the ghetto, indicates a warning flag, one the world could see and stood by until it was too late, as Schindler does, later observing the red coat among the burning bodies, the girl's face no longer recognizable. Only months later, in 1994, the world stood by while an estimated 500,000 to a million Rwandans were massacred in an attempt of genocide. We should all be Schindler at the end of this movie, recognizing the importance of that "one more person."
Best Part: Oof, how do you pick a "best part" in the midst of all this? It's all so brilliant, and also, all so horrible by design. I really do love the occasionally derided "one more person" scene, and Schindler's character introduction, arriving as an unknown entity in a nightclub before finishing the night as the toast of the party, is perfect. But the crafting of the list, and Stern's "The list is life..." speech, are sublime.
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| Universal |
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| Universal |
SPARTACUS (DRAMA/ADVENTURE, 1960)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, John Gavin, Nina Foch, John Ireland, Herbert Lom, John Dall, Charles McGraw, Joanna Barnes, Harold J. Stone, Woody Strode
Rated PG-13 for unspecified reasons (battle sequences and some sensuality).
184 minutes
To be perfectly forthcoming, SPARTACUS is a bit cheesy in that old movie sort of way, and it's the Stanley Kubrick movie that people pay little attention to, that is, if they even remember it as one of his movies. It's not without his fingerprints, but it's true that his singular influence as a filmmaker was not yet developed at the time, and with just as much or more pull on this film are his star, Kirk Douglas (who began developing the film in response Charlton Heston being cast in the coveted title role for William Wyler's BEN-HUR), and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who had been famously "blacklisted" for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee but made his comeback on this film, contributing to the end of the Hollywood blacklist. Kubrick, despite this being his fifth feature film (he'd just previously worked with Douglas on the deeply moving but very bleak 1957 anti-war drama PATHS OF GLORY), was actually still a bit of a rookie on this production (DR. STRANGELOVE, the movie that began the phase of his career that people are usually talking about when they talk about Kubrick, came 4 years later) and was second pick after Douglas fired the original director, Anthony Mann, after one week of shooting. SPARTACUS is one of the best mid-century Hollywood epics though, straddling a line between the old but heartfelt Technicolor melodramas, a side provided by Douglas, and a newer, smarter and slightly darker sort of historical epic, a side brought by Kubrick and Trumbo. Douglas stars as Spartacus, a slave in the Ancient Roman Empire trained to be a gladiator in a school owned by the unctuous Batiatus (Peter Ustinov), who led his fellow slaves, eventually swelling to numbers in the tens of thousands, in a revolution for their freedom and to leave Rome forever. Along the way, he finds love with a slave woman named Varinia (Jean Simmons), and forms a brotherhood with a slave entertainer named Antoninus (Tony Curtis), but meanwhile, Roman senators scheme to use the revolution to their own advantages between the right-wing Crassus (Laurence Olivier) and the left-wing populist Gracchus (Charles Laughton), with his protege, Julius Caesar (John Gavin). The scale of the movie is appropriately large, and the action is very impressive, with editions of the film since 1991 reintegrating some of the bloodier footage initially turned down by the content-regulating Production Code Office back in 1960 (another scene initially cut involved a homosexual implication between Crassus and Antoninus as his slave, but the audio track had to be re-done with Curtis recording his part and Anthony Hopkins filling in for the late Olivier). There's a great gladiatorial contest between Spartacus and the noble Draba (Woody Strode) that ends with a startling moment, but the climactic lost cause battle between the Spartacan and Roman armies is one for the ages. In a particularly Kubrickian moment, the stage for the battle is set with beautifully choreographed maneuvers of literally thousands of extras portraying the Roman army shown from above before the fiery mayhem of burning logs rolled at the advancing troops and ultimately the bloody close combat that leaves the field littered with hundreds of corpses. As much or more importantly though is how the movie succeeds in its intimate moments. The Spartacus-Varinia relationship is a very sweet one from the moment she's offered by their master to him as a sexual trophy and instead, he connects with her on a human level and doesn't rape her (always a smart move, boys), and blossoming into a believable connection that they're both fighting to maintain as part of their newfound freedom. Douglas is naturally a good strong-jawed hero, and Simmons is a similarly solid leading lady, but the cast's real treasures are scattered among the supporting players. Ustinov is delightfully sleazy and yet weirdly likable, like an Ancient Roman version of the used car salesman archetype with a sheepish effusiveness, and the always wonderful Laughton is spectacularly wily and noble in a most self-serving way. Olivier, as cruel Crassus, is anal on an epic scale. It may be a little rough around the edges, but it's so engaging.
Best Part: Both the climactic battle and the gladiator fight are excellent action sequences, but any scenes with Ustinov and/or Laughton are delicious, and the final scene of Varinia showing their son to Spartacus on the cross is a wonderful, bittersweet high note.
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| Universal |
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| MGM |
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Starring: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine, Anthony Heald, Brooke Smith, Diane Baker, Kasi Lemmons, Frankie Faison, Tracey Walter, Charles Napier, Danny Darst, Alex Coleman
Rated R for unspecified reasons (disturbing violent content including grisly images, language, some strong sexual content and nudity).
118 minutes
I first watched this movie on a portable DVD player inside a little car in a college parking lot in between classes. I made a point of watching it at the start of my birthday month before I turned 20. Maybe it was a bit trivial, but it was high up on my list of movies to see, and it was the Academy Award-winner for Best Picture from my birth year, so I thought it was fitting. On a side note, I probably first saw the highest-grossing movie of the same year, TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY soon after, but that didn't resonate quite as strongly. It's good, but SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is great. It's sometimes cited as the only horror movie to win Best Picture, which is interesting, because the line between what's a thriller and what's a horror is often ridiculously blurry, sometimes coming down to the horror genre's perceived lack of respectability. This is a horror in some ways, but while it's not a respectability issue, really, I think it's more of a crime-thriller with horror elements, not that any of that matters. It's a fascinating psychological story, a twisted sort of love story, and a smart procedural thrill ride. Winners of the Academy Awards for Best Actress and Best Actor, respectively, Jodie Foster as FBI trainee Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins as psychopathic genius/cannibal Hannibal Lecter are one of the all-time great screen couples, playing a mental chess game of admiration and affection, but ruthlessly. Their exchanges have set the template for great villain interrogation scenes popular in some of today's biggest blockbusters, including THE DARK KNIGHT, MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS and SKYFALL, and Lecter is one of the great screen villains to be aspired to. He's not physically imposing or even especially remarkable to look at, in fact, his very charming, but not flashy. His considerable charm melts away easily enough though to reveal an icy coldness and little patience for foolishness, and that's long before he makes his escape, beating to death and mutilating prison guards with cool, methodical precision. Starling is not psychotic, but is in a sense, a kindred spirit for the other side, neither one to suffer fools, and a stalwart and strong woman carving a path through a misogynistic "boy's club," standing her own in no less than the den of a psychotic murderer who kidnaps young women, starves them, kills them and finally skins them for purposes as twisted as imaginable. It's lurid for sure, there's no doubt about that, and rises far above what it might have been in lesser hands to be an uncommonly intelligent and gripping experience.
Best Part: I love the last scene between Agent Starling and Lecter in person at his portable cell as time is running out, she's still missing crucial information, and in a desperate moment before the snotty Dr. Chilton's (Anthony Heald) men pull her away, Lecter hands her the case file, and for a single instance, their finger tips touch. It's not a really a love story, definitely not in any traditional sense at least, but there's something there.
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| MGM |
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| 20th Century Fox |
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, William Forsythe, Trey Wilson, Sam McMurray, Frances McDormand, Randall 'Tex' Cobb, Lynne Kitei, Charles 'Lew' Smith, Sidney Dawson, M. Emmet Walsh
Rated PG-13 for unspecified reasons (language, and some suggestive content and violence).
94 minutes
The Coen brothers' second directorial feature is their first comedy and also their funniest, and surprisingly sweet, in contrast to their usually caustic sensibilities. It's no less smart though, and has a infectiously rambunctious and yet poetic, dreamlike quality that I love. Nicolas Cage gives one of his wackiest performances under some of his wackiest hair, years before he started getting really weird, as H.I. "Hi" McDunnough, a convenience store-robbing repeat offender who makes his way in and out of prison enough times to strike up a romance with the police officer who takes his mugshots, Edwina "Ed" (Holly Hunter), prompting him to finally get his act together. They get married, he gets a factory job that he hates and they move into a mobile home in the American Southwest desert; it all seems perfect until they learn they can't have children, and they can't adopt because of Hi's record. But when news breaks that locally famous furniture outlet tycoon Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson) and his wife Florence (Lynne Kitei) have been blessed with quintuplets, Hi and Ed come to the conclusion that it wouldn't be wrong to take one when the Arizonas have so many. And that's all before the title card rolls! What follows is a a series of madcap comic mishaps in Tex Avery fashion as a pair of bank-robbing brothers Hi knew in the joint (John Goodman and William Forsythe), Hi's uncouth factory supervisor and his wife (Sam McMurray and Frances McDormand), and a potentially supernatural bounty hunter straight out of a Mad Max film (Randall 'Tex' Cobb) all vie for possession of the child. It's wild, weird and hysterical with one of the Coens' best scripts, bursting with flavor and deliriously fun, distinctive dialogue delivered by a great cast. It's just a ton of fun, and in the end, it's also very sweet, ending on a thoughtful, somewhat ambiguous but kind note.
Best Part: Ha, that beginning, with Hi's voiceover rapidly setting up the scenario for him and Ed to perform a kidnapping, culminating with the high-energy yodel over the title card.
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| 20th Century Fox |
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| Disney |
Directed by Byron Haskin
Starring: Robert Newton, Bobby Driscoll, Basil Sydney, Walter Fitzgerald, Denis O'Dea, Finlay Currie, Ralph Truman, Geoffrey Keen Goeffrey Wilkinson, John Laurie, Francis De Wolff, David Davies, John Gregson
Rated PG for mild violence.
96 minutes
This first of the fully live-action productions to come from Disney, the studio whose output was strictly of the animated variety (occasionally accompanied by live-action characters and/or framing stories, i.e. SONG OF THE SOUTH or THE RELUCTANT DRAGON), TREASURE ISLAND was made out of the studio's necessity to utilize assets locked up in the UK during the country's economic recovery post-WWII, and prior to the formulaic milquetoast broad family comedies that would eventually dominate their live-action output, this movie has a meatier flavor as a fun and old-fashioned boy's adventure. It's a pretty faithful adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, injected with full-blooded vigor by an iconic Robert Newton performance as the charming but villainous rogue, Long John Silver. Even if you haven't seen it, you've seen its influence throughout popular culture, with growling "Arr"s and the exaggerated West Country English accent, which originated as so-called "pirate talk" with this movie (in one scene, concluding a eulogy, Silver mutters "Arr-men" (amen)). 13-year-old Bobby Driscoll, the original Disney child star, whose other work for the studio included SONG OF THE SOUTH and SO DEAR TO MY HEART before going on to voice the title character in the animated classic PETER PAN, stars as Jim Hawkins in a child performance with exuberance but without the annoying artificiality of most, and directed by Byron Haskin (best known for the 1953 version of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS), the perils of life among pirates from the source material are not neutered. You might be surprised at the violence in this Disney classic; swords and cutlasses, kids getting pinned in the arm by knives, knife-throwing pirates getting shot in the face by kids. It's simple, handsome, exciting and excellently acted, robust old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure.
Best Part: Just about anything with Newton as Silver, but also the scene where Jim sneaks aboard the Hispanola to steal back the map and faces off against the drunken, villainous Israel Hands (Geoffrey Keen).
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| Disney |
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| MGM/United Artists |
Directed by Peter Hedges
Starring: Katie Holmes, Patricia Clarkson, Derek Luke, Oliver Platt, Alison Pill, John Gallagher Jr., Alice Drummond, Lillias White, Isiah Whitlock, Sisqo, Sean Hayes, Jack Chen, Jacqueline Dai, Rosa Luo
Rated PG-13 for language, sensuality, drug content and images of nudity.
81 minutes
I try to watch as many seasonally appropriate movies as possible around certain holidays; obviously horror movie and otherwise "spooky" fare during the early fall, Christmas, Hanukah or whatever else themed movies during December, no matter how loosely connected sometimes, and so on. Thanksgiving is tough though, because there's not a whole lot of Thanksgiving movies, most of them only involve one Thanksgiving dinner scene that's loosely tied into the larger plot, and a surprising amount of them are depressing. I first heard about PIECES OF APRIL back when it was still normal to get DVDs in the mail from Netflix, and it had already shown up in my recommendations, but I didn't bother to actually order it until I realized it was all about a family getting together for Thanksgiving dinner. It's since become a family tradition to watch it shortly before the holiday every year for the past several, and every year, I find more to love about it. It's a little jarring at first; the movie, directorial debut of What's Eating Gilbert Grape writer Peter Hedges, is made on an extremely low budget of $300,000, shot on ordinary, grainy handheld digital cameras, and the sound isn't as polished as it would be on the average professionally made movie. April Burns (Katie Holmes) is the "problem child" of her family, now scraping out an existence living in an apartment on the rough side of New York City with her affectionate boyfriend Bobby (Derek Luke), but her sardonic mother, Joy (Patricia Clarkson), is now dying of breast cancer, and this may be her last Thanksgiving. So Joy and the rest of April's estranged family, including her optimistic dad, Jim (Oliver Platt), her overachieving and somewhat sycophantic sister Beth (Alison Pill), her sarcastic brother Timmy (John Gallagher Jr.) and her sweet-natured but senile Grandma Dottie (Alice Drummond). Despite the potentially very sappy material, Hedges' excellent script and stellar cast earn the emotions of the story, and it doesn't just go for the throat; it's often laugh-out-loud funny, especially thanks to Clarkson, whose character is simply letting loose with a mischievously wicked attitude in her terminal condition, protecting a soft and scared center as the family goes to what they hope will be a reconciliation but fear may be a disaster. I love how it undercuts expectations with the subplot involving April's boyfriend Bobby, her latest after a previous relationship with a drug dealer, teasing the audience with perfectly innocent implications that can be misconstrued to set up a seedy side to Bobby, but are revealed to be, in fact, admirable. I love how it's a story about a family overcoming pains dealt out by both sides, both fearing the possibility of more pain, but acting against their fears in a desperate hope for healing. Crap, it usually gets me at the end, but it has nothing to do with the typically manipulative nature of cancer in movies or death or anything else like that. It's just that it's such a sweet endorsement of family, understanding and tolerance. People in this movie have expectations based on preconceived biases, and they're frequently undercut by the revelations of each character's humanity. It gets right to the heart of what a modern Thanksgiving means.
Best Part: The funniest part is a outburst from Joy when she has a panic attack on the way to the city and storms out of the car to hitchhike a ride back home, but just the ending, when it stops and the rest plays out in a series of photographs, is where the whole thing pays off in such a beautiful way.
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| MGM/United Artists |
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| Universal |
Directed by Ron Howard
Starring: Steve Martin, Mary Steenburgen, Dianne Weist, Jason Robards, Rick Moranis, Tom Hulce, Martha Plimpton, Keanu Reeves, Harley Kozak, Joaquin Phoenix, Helen Shaw, Jasen Fisher, Eileen Ryan
Rated PG-13 for unspecified reasons (mature thematic elements including sexual content- some involving teens).
124 minutes
Before it was a TV series (it's actually been a TV series twice, but more successfully the second time around), it was a hit movie with a stellar ensemble cast and a convincing argument for the benefits of child-rearing. I mean, it's not happening for me anytime in the foreseeable future, but if I was a bit tipsy and had been watching PARENTHOOD, I could imagine myself tripping into a lifetime commitment. It's like the tagline says, "It could happen to you." Being a Ron Howard-directed comedy, plus a script by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (whose credits include the likes of CITY SLICKERS and A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN), it's actually about as much heavy drama as it is comedy, but it's highly successful on both fronts, telling the stories of tribulations and triumphs in parenting for members of the Buckman clan. At the forefront is Gil Buckman (Steve Martin), who with his wife Karen (Mary Steenburgen), stresses over balancing career and family while their oldest is displaying emotional problems that have the school teachers concerned. Gil's sister Helen (Dianne Wiest) is divorced and dealing with a belligerent teen daughter (Martha Plimpton) and an angsty pubescent son (a young Joaquin Phoenix) as a single parent, and their younger sister Susan (Harley Kozak) is growing weary of her husband Nathan's (Rick Moranis) micro-managed, cognitive development-obsessed parenting style that's taking a toll on their relationship. Finally, there's Gil's youngest brother Larry (Tom Hulce), whose gotten himself into trouble with loan sharks over his get-rich-quick scheming and can hardly be bothered to take care of his own son, but who comes to their dad Frank (Jason Robards) for help, which forces Frank to come to terms with the consequences of his own actions as a father. It's melodramatic, sure, and maybe even a bit on-the-nose, but it's tremendously human and very funny. Martin, with the right material, is one of those comedic actors with great deftness at balancing the heightened comedy and gentle humanity, and the supporting cast is all pitch perfect. The joys and aches of family life resonate deeply in the smart warmth of PARENTHOOD. It kind of feels like a big hug.
Best Part: Grandma's monologue about the roller coaster is lovely, and I also really like the scene where Larry's abandoned his son and Frank offers to take care of him. On the more comic side, the vibrator scene never seems to get old.
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| Universal |
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| Sony/Columbia |
Directed by Rob Reiner
Starring: Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, Jerry O'Connell, Kiefer Sutherland, Casey Siemaszko, Gary Riley, Bradley Gregg, Jason Oliver, Marshall Bell, Frances Lee McCain, William Bronder, Andy Linberg, John Cusack, Richard Dreyfuss
Rated R for unspecified reasons (some language and disturbing content).
88 minutes
I'm pretty partial to the song, too. I didn't see this movie for the first time until maybe a few years ago, but I remember reading about it one of those "guide to movies," one geared specifically toward children, which I got from the library for browsing. I took special note of it because the book's authors made a point of not including R-rated movies, because those movies were presumably unsuitable for children, but they made a single exception for this one. It's based on a short story by Stephen King called "The Body", but it's not of the horror genre, and it's seemingly of an especially personal vein. It's a nostalgic movie about a childhood adventure, not too dissimilar in its intentions from something like THE SANDLOT or MY GIRL, it's more than a little rawer. It's a boy's dark coming-of-age story told through a lens of innocence, as a quartet of preteen lads spend the last weekend of summer 1959 walking and camping their way to see the missing body of one of their peers. It's a morbid notion, one masked by their innocence, as each teeters on the cusp of manhood. There's Gordie (Wil Wheaton), a quiet and creative boy with a gift for storycraft, but who's neglected by his parents in their grief for the recent loss of their older son. Teddy (Corey Feldman) comes from an abusive home, with the scars to prove it and a lot of attitude, but he's tremendously sensitive about his PTSD-ravaged war veteran father. Vern (Jerry O'Connell) is the most comic element of the group, flabby and bumbling. Finally, there's Gordie's closest confidant and truest pal, Chris, played by the late, great River Phoenix in a tour-de-force young performance as the kid from the wrong side of the tracks whose tough facade conceals an honest sincerity. Their's is a meandering journey with opportunities for the kinds of seemingly trivial conversations young boys have, rude and reckless behavior, grandstanding and emotional revelations; ultimately, it tears right into male vulnerability in a real and honest way that sticks.
Best Part: Chris' confession about the milk money and "Old Miss Simmons" is one of the great lump-in-your-throat moments, and the "Lardass" story is hilarious.
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| Sony/Columbia |
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| Disney |
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Charles Fleischer (voice), Stubby Kaye, Alan Tilvern, Richard Le Parmentier, Richard Ridings, Kathleen Turner (voice), Lou Hirsch (voice)
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (action/violence, language, comic sensuality, thematic elements and smoking).
104 minutes
WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, combining the gifts of Robert Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg, the Walt Disney Company, animator Richard Williams and others, is just pure fun and its existence is entirely implausible. For cripes' sake, Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny appear on screen together for the only time ever, because that's the kind of magic you get when you have a Hollywood god like Spielberg pulling the strings. Essentially CHINATOWN but with cartoons, not only does this comedy-mystery-fantasy feature a wide assortment of iconic animated characters from the Disney and Warner Brothers libraries, as well as Betty Boop, Woody Woodpecker, Felix the Cat and more, but they knocked together a few iconic new cartoon characters who can hold their own, very loosely based on the Gary K. Wolf novel, Who Censored Roger Rabbit? Voiced by Charles Fleischer, there's the titular Roger Rabbit, who had a popular dance named after him in the '90s and has his own bronze statue in Disneyland, and who teeters on annoying in his outrageous "tooniness" but is well-balanced as a foil to the great Bob Hoskins' gruff and alcoholic private eye Eddie Valiant. His instantly recognizable, superbly, absurdly proportioned wife Jessica Rabbit (voiced by an uncredited Kathleen Turner) has a number of knockout moments, from her big sultry musical number to a couple of hilarious pratfalls related to her more than ample bosom, and of course, there's Baby Herman (voiced by Lou Hirsch), the foul-mouthed, cigar-smoking cartoon baby whose transition from the obnoxiously cutesy opening cartoon into a growling diva is inspired. The post-WWII California setting with fantastical twist is splendid and the effects, of course, are really cool.
Best Part: The whole Ink & Paint Club sequence is great, and I love the gag of Eddie bending over to pull up his pants and bumping Jessica Rabbit in the breasts with his head on the way up.
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| Disney |
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| Miramax |
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Starring: Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Ben Affleck, Stellan Skarsgard, Minnie Driver, Casey Affleck, Cole Hauser, Colleen McCauley, John Mighton
Rated R for strong language, including some sex-related dialogue.
126 minutes
GOOD WILL HUNTING may be an easy target (the cult-favorite sitcom Community has certainly taken a few swipes at it). It's a little cheesy and overly familiar, but when it gets to me, boy, it really gets to me. It's another one of those movies honing in on the fragility of male identity, about coming of age and into one's own, confronting your past and embracing your future. It's written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (who wrote it so they could star in it), and their then-lack of experience shows through in some overly contrived moments, but the acting is so strong and director Gus Van Sant's real and human-driven style more than make up for it. It's a very good-natured, romantic film which sparks strongest in its scenes between its title character, Will Hunting (Damon), a brilliant young man with an antisocial streak, and Skylar (Minnie Driver), a spunky Harvard student he might want to spend the rest of his life with, and the scenes between Will and his therapist (court mandated after a violent episode), Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), a man with a romantic worldview and an intense devotion to his late wife, and who challenges Will, slowly prying away his defense mechanisms. It's a big, fat, beautiful cliche and a very loving one.
Best Part: Again, a bit of derided moment, but I really do love Sean and Will's "It's not your fault," breakthrough moment. Just shut up, it's beautiful. I also really like the way Minnie Driver says "weiner." Not in a perverted way. It just cracks me up.
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| Miramax |
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| Warner Brothers |
Directed by David Yates
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Michael Gambon, Jim Broadbent, Tom Felton, Alan Rickman, Robbie Coltrane, Helena Bonham Carter, Georgina Leonidas, Freddie Stroma, David Thewlis, Julie Walters, Mark Williams
Rated PG for scary images, some violence, language and mild sensuality.
153 minutes
I was initially reluctant to include a Harry Potter film in this list, going back and forth on the decision. My relationship with the series is a bit complicated. I revisited each of the eight films last year and wrote about them then. I didn't read any of the books until my senior year in high school, even while they were possibly the greatest pop culture phenomenon of my childhood years, but when I did read them, I read them out of order and became enraptured in that melting pot of myths made new. I didn't think they were all perfect, and I think J.K. Rowling's storycraft evolved with each installment, with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone being a lot rougher around the edges, and The Deathly Hallows flowing perfectly and poignantly. The movies, which I also saw out of order, similarly all possess great moments, but are also wildly uneven, ultimately coming into their own as they go on. In any case though, this isn't a list of movies I consider the "best" or most perfect; this is a list of my favorite movies, and I'm not sure that should go without any one of these movies, especially seeing how I find myself weirdly drawn to the them in the fall months. Everything really sucked back in fall 2010, but these movies and books made me feel considerably better. But then which one to choose? I'll rewatch them, sure, for the sake of the journey, but I've never cared a whole lot for the first two. PRISONER OF AZKABAN is the usual critics' choice, and I think tonally, it might be the most together. GOBLET OF FIRE was my favorite for awhile. ORDER OF THE PHOENIX has grown on me over time. DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 2 is a thrilling and surprisingly melancholy, fitting conclusion to the series, but for me, it undoubtedly comes down to DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1 or HALF-BLOOD PRINCE. PART 1 has the advantage of time, being committed to no more than a half of one book's story, and gets to play things a little quieter and introspective, and it was the first one I saw in theaters, something that I really clinged on to. It's only half a story though, and as much as I love that movie, I've never felt terribly invested in the character of Dobby or the house elf plot elements in the book. As you can already see, I went with HALF-BLOOD PRINCE. Like PART 1, it has the luxury of a more delicate pace; certainly not as much as PART 1, but more than most in the series. It's also a whole lot bolder, with the filmmakers doing things on their own terms, because it's not like the movie wasn't always going to make bank anyway. The Academy Award-nominated cinematography and color-graded look is beautifully modeled on the paintings of Rembrandt, and while very dark in tone (although considerably lighter than the source material), it's the funniest in the series. The frustrations of young love are drawn upon for laughs and hearrtache (how else?), which the lead trio play to perfection. I really like the injection of teen drama into the high fantasy, something that other installments in the series also do, but this one does it best. It feels grown-up too, full of the eccentricities of Ms. Rowling's Wizarding World (Jim Broadbent's transformation from an old sofa comes to mind) but with a cool finess, dark and emotional tones, and warm humanity. Plus, I really like the musical score by Nicholas Hooper.
Best Part: Most of my favorite things about this movie come from the romantic angst plotlines, such as the scene of Ginny (Bonnie Wright) helping Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) hide the potion book in the Room of Requirement, where she also steals a kiss, and Harry's moment comforting Hermoine after she sees Ron (Rupert Grint) start macking on another girl. Props to the potion-making montage when Harry first discovers the "Half-Blood Prince"'s potions textbook, too. Oh, and the first scene of Harry reading the paper in the diner and flirting with the waitress. Love that.
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| Warner Brothers |
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| Universal |
Directed by George Lucas
Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charlie Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Wolfman Jack, Bo Hopkins, Harrison Ford
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (PG-13-level; thematic content throughout involving reckless teen behavior, smoking and drinking, language, suggestive references and brief nudity).
112 minutes
George Lucas' AMERICAN GRAFFITI is one of the quintessential coming-of-age movies and the original "one crazy night" movie, following the adventures of several young men and women in 1962 Modesto, California at the height of baby boomer rock 'n' roll and car culture. It was the last movie Lucas made before STAR WARS and its sequels turned him into a Hollywood mogul, made after his cynical dystopian science fiction THX 1138 was a box office disaster for him and his mentor/co-producer Francis Ford Coppola. As with the original STAR WARS, this is Lucas as an artist, forced to prove himself, and the results are movie magic. In most ways, it's a very fun, funny and feel-good story of youth on the cusp of adulthood, but it also possesses a subtle, melancholy undercurrent. It's a truly nostalgic film in a traditional sense, the word "nostalgia" meaning homesickness, or a yearning, sweet ache, as AMERICAN GRAFFITI looks back on the days of Lucas' youth with a sense of pain for innocence lost. The movie also has a light sense of irony about the so-called "good old days" though, not necessarily oblivious to the darker side of America's "age of innocence." At the center of the events is Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss), something of a Lucas surrogate, a smart but somewhat recent high school graduate struggling with the idea of leaving his hometown the next morning and going to a university across the country, when he glimpes a beautiful woman while cruising main street that night and becomes obsessed with learning who she is. His longtime best friend Steve Bolander (Ron Howard) is far more eager to be on his way to college, but the suggestion to his girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams), Curt's younger sister still in high school, that they "see other people" while they're apart seems to make neither of them terribly happy. Terry "The Toad" Fields (Charlie Martin Smith), a younger, dorky kid who sometimes hangs with them, and to whom Steve lends his hot rod for while he's away, tries to use his newly borrowed wheels to impress the ladies and gets caught up in misadventures with an eccentric and somewhat experienced young lady (Candy Clark). Finally, there's John Milner (Paul LeMat), an older and graduated one of their peers, something of a hometown hero and a notorious street racer, but who, like the proverbial aging gunslinger, is constantly hounded by new drivers hoping to prove themselves against him, the latest being an arrogant cowboy big-shot named Bob Falfa (Harrison Ford). Milner's also dealing with an obnoxious teenybopper (Mackenzie Phillips) he accidentally picks up while hoping to get a young lady to join him in cruising. The soundtrack is a greatest hits collection of early rock music (with the notable exception of Elvis, whose tunes were out of the production's price range), while the raspy tones of radio DJ Wolfman Jack (played by himself, a California radio personality who'd been popular at the time) act as a Greek chorus, a disembodied voice that ties everyone's stories together and imparts words of wisdom. It's immensely likable and wistful, and has been a font of inspiration for a few films that have been pretty darn good themselves, such as Richard Linklater's DAZED AND CONFUSED and another film on this list, SUPERBAD.
Best Part: I really like Steve and Laurie's dance under the spotlight at the sock hop, and I really like the scene of Curt unwittingly meeting the mythical Wolfman Jack at the broadcasting station, but my favorite part is probably when John thinks he's finally ditched Carol, but his conscience gets to him and he goes after her in his coupe while the Monotones' "The Book of Love" plays.
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| Universal |
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| Focus Features |
Directed by Chris Butler & Sam Fell
Featuring the Voices of: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tucker Albrizzi, Anna Kendrick, Casey Affleck, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, John Goodman, Jeff Garlin, Leslie Mann, Elaine Stritch, Jodelle Ferland, Tempestt Bledsoe
Rated PG for scary action and images, thematic elements, some rude humor and language.
92 minutes
I went into PARANORMAN with some apprehension. I don't really know why. The teaser trailer with "Season of the Witch" was interesting, but it just didn't reach out to me much. I quickly changed my mind almost as soon as it began in the theater where I worked, having just finished my shift and slipped in to see a show. It starts with an old grindhouse-style "Feature Presentation" card, and from that point, you know this is far from your average animated movie. The story takes place in a small New England town whose claim to fame is that their town founders once hanged a witch, and according to lore, before she dropped, the witch cursed her accusers to return from the grave. They have a small tourism industry built up around this, with kitschy businesses like "Witchy Weiners" and the "Lucky Witch Casino", while the local school performs a cheesy and highly fictionalized play about the so-called "Witch's Curse" annually. Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a social outcast at school and in his family, because he can see and talk to ghosts, a claim that is naturally dismissed by everyone, except for Neil (voiced by Tucker Albrizzi), a fellow social reject who responds to his bullies with buoyancy and resiliance, but Norman is reluctant to socialize with the living. When it comes to light that the witch's curse is real though, it falls upon Norman, one who can speak to the dead, to hold her at bay. Created by the artists at the Oregon-based stop-motion animation studio Laika, every frame of PARANORMAN is painstakingly and uniquely crafted, and there's something about the long-term devotion and added effort required in the medium that fosters a special artistic and tonal boldness in stop-motion animation, to which this movie is perfectly evident. It's very funny, occasionally with a wicked edge to its comedic sensibilities, and it doesn't temper its darker, scarier aspects for a younger audience. Even for older viewers, it has a few chills, not the least of which comes when, late into the film, it's revealed that the much-discussed witch was actually a small child named Agatha (voiced by Jodelle Ferland), who, like Norman, communed with ghosts, a gift which won her the label of 'witch.' The first time I saw it, I was thrilled at the visions that Norman began to have that slowly revealed the secrets of the witch, the real world burning away to reveal eerie episodes from the past of Puritans seeking the unseen witch in the Massachussetts woods at night. That sort of morbid history, of old superstitions and horrors human beings can commit out of fear, is especially fascinating to me, and here it is being broken into in an exciting way, and responding to that kind of fear with humanity. Much of the film is a kooky, '80s-style kids adventure with chases and goofy mayhem with Norman, Neil, Norman's prissy cheerleader sister (voiced by Anna Kendrick) and Neil's dimwitted but hunky brother (voiced by Casey Affleck), but there's also a lot to chew on. It's not moody; it's warm-hearted, progessive and humane. For years, the witch's agitated spirit has been kept dormant by the simple reading of children's fairy tale, a dismissive papering-over of the past's horrors, but human connection and understanding, empathy, is required to effectively confront the wrongs of our past.
Best Part: The climactic scene when Norman finds Agatha's grave and tells her a story, the story of how her isolation, anger and hurt have changed her from who she really was, and the earth starts to break apart in a big, cataclysmic tantrum.
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| Focus Features |
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| Focus Features |
Directed by Ang Lee
Starring: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhall, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, Randy Quaid, Linda Cardellini, Anna Faris, Kate Mara, David Harbour, Roberta Maxwell, Peter McRobbie
Rated R for sexuality, nudity, language and some violence.
134 minutes
It took a bit of time for BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN to grow on me. I thought it was good the first time I saw it, but too restrained, maybe stifled. Over time though, it creeps deeper under the skin. It is a love story, but it's also about the American myth, about cowboys and our ideas of masculinity in the story of America. On the surface, it seems pretty quiet, but just underneath it contains a massive resevoir of feeling. A lot of people can look at it and see different things. It's been often labeled "the gay cowboy movie," which, while obviously an oversimplification, I don't think is entirely unfair. Many of its defenders countered that label when it came out by arguing the two main characters weren't gay but were actually bisexual because they had wives and had sex with their wives, which was a ridiculous and misinformed argument, but of course, the characters in the movie clearly aren't "Kinsey 6 gay." That's not important. Humans are sexual beings, the characters are human, and their interests aren't singular. They're both full of yearning desires and fears, and they have to find a way of balancing those two forces. Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) is the real focus of the story, a man who since childhood has been pent up and forced to be the idea of a man his father instilled in him, one day taking him to see the body of a gay hate crime victim, bloody and lying in a ditch, as an example of what happens to men who aren't "real men." Ennis allows himself to be defined by self-denial, contained by deeply residing fears and pains that keep him from fulfilling his needs until its too late. Ledger plays him as a man so tightly wound that he can barely open his mouth to speak. Then there's Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhall), a rodeo cowboy who is paired with Ennis to herd sheep up on the titular Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming for a summer. Jack is different. He's subject to similar concerns, but more willing to heed his feelings, and yet, when he marries a gorgeous barrel racer and daughter of a farming machinery tycoon named Lureen (Anne Hathaway), he's repeatedly, metaphorically castrated by a macho father-in-law who has nothing but disdain for him. It's an incredibly sad movie, and both Jack and Ennis' feelings of inadequacy as men hurts those around them. Ennis' marriage to Alma (Michelle Williams) ends in bitter divorce, not only for his infidelity but also his sense of inadequacy as a provider, and Jack's lack of sexual interest in Lureen leads her to pour herself into a sterile life of business finances. Ultimately, it's a call to a more complex form of carpe diem, to not let fear deny the happiness within reach.
Best Part: It's not a movie where best or favorite scenes readily come to mind, but the scenes of the titular mountain are gorgeous, and the very last scene is an emotional gut-punch. Certain scenes of Ms. Hathaway though...
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| Focus Features |
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| Disney |
Directed by Nathan Greno & Byron Howard
Featuring the Voices of: Mandy Moore, Zachary Levi, Donna Murphy, Ron Perlman, Brad Garrett, Jeffrey Tambor, M.C. Gainey, Paul F. Tompkins, Richard Kiel
Rated PG for brief mild violence.
100 minutes
TANGLED doesn't quite get the respect it deserves as an animated Disney masterpiece. I mean, people generally know it's good, but it's actually great, on par with THE LITTLE MERMAID and SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. It does have the slight disadvantage of a fairly average soundtrack, a factor which seems to play heavily into the magnitude of success these movies have. Don't get me wrong, the songs, composed by Disney regular Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater, are perfectly good, but none of them have the staying power of an "Under the Sea", a "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" or a "Let It Go". In just about every aspect though, as an animated Disney princess feature, it's exceptional. Made for a massive $260 million (one of the most expensive movies ever made), the look of the film is inspired by Rococo paintings (specifically Jean-Honore Fragonard's "The Swing") and their use of lumination and lush colors, with sumptuous results that make it one of the most beautiful movies Disney has ever made. The well recognized problems of gender roles and unhealthy relationship portrayals in Disney princess movies are dealt with perfectly in TANGLED, building up the film around an adventurous young woman character in Rapunzel (voiced by Mandy Moore) with a strong personality who's equal to her male counterpart, Flynn (voiced by Zachary Levi), and a relationship that's more balanced and more developed.
Best Part: There's the "Kingdom Dance" montage where Rapunzel and Flynn first arrive in the town and take part in festivities with nice Celtic-style piece of music, and I love the size and space of the sequence where they evade royal forces at the flooding dam.
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| Disney |
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| Warner Brothers |
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhall, Chin Han, Eric Roberts, Monique Gabriela Curnen, Ron Dean, Ritchie Coster, Nestor Carbonell, Anthony Michael Hall, Joshua Harto, Keith Szarabajka
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and some menace.
152 minutes
I was initially reluctant to include this movie on the list, because it's fallen into the same category as movies like FIGHT CLUB and SCARFACE, great movies that have been claimed by a contemptible subculture (you know, "douchebags") that just thinks it's cool, but it really is pretty great. It's not perfect, but it's intense, powerful and incredibly fierce, and it's ace in the hole is the Joker, as written in its screenplay by Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, and as performed by Heath Ledger. He's an ideal metaphor for terror in the post-9/11 United States, an unknown entity that arrives as if out of nowhere that cannot be negotiated with, which kills and destroys seemingly at random, an unstoppable force that challenges everything we stand for. Ledger's performance is immersive (but please don't tell me "it killed him"), ferocious and inhuman, a character that is often imitated but has not been matched (in fact, most imitators suck). His design is striking, the comic book "Clown Prince of Crime" rendered in a slimy and uncouth crime world grounded in cinematic reality with a greasy, greenish mop, sloppy face paint reminiscent of a skull (the idea of it as "war paint" is good, but the line about in the first scene is dumb), and his "grin" in fact the scars of a "Glasgow smile." Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale) is the man willing to compromise morality in order to stop an unstoppable evil, but the question is how far one can go down that road and still return intact, and even then, who should? In that great final scene, a scene that knows all too well how iconic it is, Police Commissioner Jim Gordon's (Gary Oldman, in the film's unsung great performance) monologue identifies him as "...not a hero. He's a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A dark knight." It's a superhero movie where the superhero (yes, Batman has no "super powers," but he dresses up in a bat-themed costume with borderline science fiction technology and fights crime outside the law, so shutup) isn't really a hero, and it's not clear if the movie is advocating that or not. It becomes even hazier in the next movie in the trilogy. THE DARK KNIGHT poses the questions of the so-called "War on Terror", holding up a mirror to terrors that we can inflict upon ourselves in such times, and how Batman's noble but illegitimate war on crime creates an environment for escalation, but also where hope and ideals belong in those times. Also, that armored car chase is spectacular.
Best Part: Oh, the Batman and Joker interrogation room scene, hands down.
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| Warner Brothers |
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| Sony/Columbia |
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie, Richard Briers, Kate Winslet, Nicholas Farrell, Michael Maloney, Rufus Sewell, Robin Williams, Gerard Depardieu, Timothy Spall, Reece Dinsdale, Jack Lemmon, Ian McElhinney, Brian Blessed, Billy Crystal, Simon Russell Beale, Charlton Heston, Rosemary Harris, Richard Attenborough, Judi Dench
Rated PG-13 for some violent images and sexuality.
242 minutes
At four hours long, you'd be forgiven for taking this movie in over a couple of sittings, in fact, you really should to maximize your enjoyment. It's Kenneth Branagh's third and best Shakespeare film adaptation, and there's a solid argument that it's the best cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare to date. The words of Shakespeare's great tragedy are all here, entirely unabridged in their fullness, but transported to a lush 19th century setting with one of the most incredible all-star casts ever assembled. Branagh himself stars as the melancholy Danish prince and savors every line of Elizabethan English, but allows all of his illustrious co-stars to have a spotlight with their monologues as well, including comedians like Robin Williams as Osric and Billy Crystal as the First Gravedigger, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Timothy Spall (mainstream audience might recognize him best from the Harry Potter series) as Rosencrantz, Jack Lemmon as Marcellus, Charlton Heston as the Player King and Richard Attenborough as the English Ambassador, many of whom match wits with the sarcastic Hamlet. The scenery is spectacular, to fit the extravagant 70 mm format, the Bard's words sing (duh), and the acting is excellent. Plus, you know, there's a swordfight.
Best Part: While I love the swordfight, I'm going to go with the "Alas, poor Yorick," scene. In a way, it makes me crazy, confronting ideas about mortality so aggressively, but it's so poetic and resonates, and Billy Crystal is perfect as one of the gravediggers.
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| Sony/Columbia |
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| Focus Features |
Directed by Michel Gondry
Starring: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson, Jane Adams, David Cross, Dierdre O'Connell, Thomas Jay Ryan, Debbon Ayer
Rated R for language, some drug and sexual content.
108 minutes
I always like Charlie Kaufman's screenwriting, with his mind-bending, abstract introspectives, metaphysicality and parapsychology, but he does sometimes come off as a little cold or too melancholy. However, I love his more fun and human side, and actually, ETERNAL SUNSHINE is the best of both worlds. It is melancholy, but it's also very funny, and most of all, it's deeply human. Visually distinct director Michel Gondry sticks with what works here and directs in service of the writing, and Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are unconventionally cast in their roles, and it works beautifully. Carrey plays Joel Barish, a soft-spoken, sheepish man who is perplexed and hurt to discover that his girlfriend of two years, the impulsive and quirky Clementine Kruczynski (Winslet), is suddenly treating him like a total stranger. He discovers that she actually doesn't have any idea who he is, having gone to the firm of Lacuna, Inc., which performs a specialized memory loss procedure to comprehensively erase all awareness that a past relationship ever existed. Heartbroken, Joel decides to have his own memories of Clementine erased, but while asleep during the midst of the procedure, he realizes too late that he wants to keep those memories and INCEPTION-style, tries to hide his mental manifestation of Clementine away in repressed areas of his memory from the Lacuna employees that are erasing them one by one. The film's structure is deliberately disorienting, rewarding the viewer as they catch up, as much as I like INCEPTION, ETERNAL SUNSHINE depicts a superior dreamscape and logic. Someone like Clementine would annoy the hell out of me in real life, I think, but there's a special weirdness about Winslet that makes her a winning combination, and it's Jim Carrey's best dramatic performance.
Best Part: As the last of Joel's memories with Clementine, chronologically his earliest, begin to break apart, and just before his mental Clementine disappears, she tells him to, "Meet me in Montauk."
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| Focus Features |
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| Paramount |
Directed by Hal Ashby
Starring: Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, Vivian Pickles, Cyril Cusack, Charles Tyner, Eric Christmas, George Wood, Ellen Geer, Judy Engles, Shari Summers
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (PG-13-level; mature thematic content including violent images and some suggestive content).
91 minutes
This one is pretty weird. I probably shouldn't like HAROLD AND MAUDE as much as I do, but from the moment it begins with Harold (Bud Cort, a young man with a weird face and a weird haircut) hanging himself with a noose in his living room while Cat Stevens' "Don't Be Shy" plays on record and Harold's bourgeois mother (Vivian Pickles) walks by to say, "I suppose you think that's very funny, Harold" I'm all in. Harold is obsessed with death; not in a 21st-century emo way, but despite his mother's attempts to get him a luxurious sports car, he insists on driving around in a hearse, and for fun he goes to funerals for people he didn't even know and stages elaborate suicides with an appreciation for variety (funny thing, the "fake" part of these suicides are never established, and possible excuses are even undercut, but the movie takes it on faith that the audience accepts them as fake after the first time). These fake suicides come in handy for scaring off the many upper-crust dates his mother sets up for him. But Harold meets someone who does interest him though in Maude (Ruth Gordon), a 79-year-old woman who's all about living life to the fullest. Maude is a perfect example of the "manic pixie dream girl" (described by film critic Nathan Rabin in reviewing the 2005 film ELIZABETHTOWN as "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writers-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures") except that she's 79 years old, and there may be an argument that she has a little more story to her than the usual MPDG. I think of it as an interesting response to 1967's THE GRADUATE, an excellent but incredibly cynical film, with another story of a wishy-washy upper-class young white man who has a relationship with an older woman and breaks off the shackles of the status quo, but to a more optimistic angle. I love its twisted sense of humor, the Cat Stevens songs, and Ruth Gordon is a blast; even when it's a bit messy, it's too likable to deny.
Best Part: The scene of Maude singing and playing the movie's signature song, "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out" on the piano in unpolished form.
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| Paramount |
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| Warner Brothers/Allied Artists |
Directed by Bob Fosse
Starring: Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Joel Grey, Fritz Wepper, Marisa Berenson, Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel, Helen Vita, Sigrid Von Richthofen, Gerd Vespermann, Ralf Wolter, Oliver Collignon
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (PG-13-level; mature thematic elements including sexual content, and for some violent images and language).
124 minutes
CABARET is the other musical with Nazis in it, and it is so, so much better than THE SOUND OF MUSIC. It's a deeply engaging satire and historical snapshot, one that pulls me in with all its Bacchanalian weirdness and gives me chills. It's a little bit terrifying. The story revolves around the Kit Kat Club, a nightclub den of sin in 1931 Berlin where the Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey) introduces and takes part in various song and dance numbers that comment on the ongoings in an almost fourth wall-breaking fashion, and where our leading lady, the young and American Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli, who, let's be honest, has a really weird face) is a performer. It's the last days of the Weimar Republic and Germany has a thriving, decadent, Bohemian nightlife that the Kit Kat Club is a proud part of, and while the Nazi Party is on the rise, they're still a little respected, often ostracized faction of extremists, some are even kicked out of the club early into the film. Sally boards with recently arrived, bisexual British author named Brian Roberts (Michael York), and the two have a relationship. They also cheat on each other with the same German aristocrat in their attempts to climb the social ladder; the Kit Kat Club is a haven for broken people from around the world to find kindred spirits. Ever on the margins of their lurid, sexually animalistic sanctuary though the burgeoning threat of fascism, an evil wave that promises to wash them and other "social undesirables" away, until the chilling final moments of the film when the Nazis have finally come into a position of power. It's a powerful and bleak, but also ironic and electric portrait of a nation's seduction and a eulogy to a world gone by. It's incredibly unnerving.
Best Part: The opening musical number, revealing the MC's leering, grinning reflection in the brass before breaking into "Wilkommen" and the final scene, a reprisal of "Wilkommen" that concludes with the chilling reveal of Nazi emblems, worn by the audience, reflected in the same brass.
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| Warner Brothers/Allied Artists |
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| Warner Brothers |
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
Starring: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris (voice), Orto Ignatiussen (voice), Phaldut Sharma (voice), Amy Warren (voice), Basher Savage (voice)
Rated PG-13 for intense perilous sequences, some disturbing images and brief strong language.
91 minutes
Writer-director-producer Alfonso Cuaron is a fantastic filmmaker, and I had to wrestle some between CHILDREN OF MEN and GRAVITY, because they're both masterpieces, but as you can see, I went with the latter. I'm more familiar with it, and it speaks to me more directly. It's very concise, clocking in at only an hour-and-a-half, but bursting with wall-to-wall thrills and rich, empowering emotions anchored by Sandra Bullock's best performance. It's a story of rebirth after tragedy and the will to live when everything goes wrong. Bullock's Dr. Ryan Stone is a woman adrift, literally and metaphorically, grieving the death of her daughter by an accident of the most arbitrary happenstance, and cut loose in orbit around the Earth after space debris hurtling at high velocity destroys her shuttle and continues to come around to wreak havoc just as things start to calm down again. She can either remain adrift and slip quietly away into death, or she can recover and reclaim her place in life. Every frame of this movie is beautiful, the intensity is relentless, the action is stunning, with an aggressive musical score by Steven Price. It's unique and hugely ambitious, and is probably the last time I sat in a theater puzzling over how on Earth they did that.
Best Part: Once again, I love the climactic action, as Dr. Stone, ready to live again, makes a fiery reentry into the atmosphere.
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| Warner Brothers |
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| Warner Brothers |
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Starring: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Lionel Atwill, Basil Rathbone, Ross Alexander, Guy Kibbee, Henry Stephenson, Robert Barrat, Hobart Cavanaugh, Donald Meek, Jessie Ralph, Forrester Harvey, Frank McGlynn Sr., Holmes Herbert, David Torrence
Not Rated (PG-level; adventure violence).
119 minutes
I debated between this and Errol Flynn's next movie, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, which is the more polished of the two and just as great, but I lean oh-so-slightly on the side of CAPTAIN BLOOD I think because of pirates and the 17th-century seafaring story. They're surprisingly similar though, a young boy's perspective on storybook-style nobility and comradery of roguish heroes collecting treasure, swordfighting with sneering, mustachioed villains and rescuing beautiful damsels with a dashing gentleman's flair, like the stories acted out by Tom Sawyer. There is a troubling probability that in his real life, Errol Flynn was a bad dude, arguably 'evil' (accusations of rape, often of underage girls, were a regular occurrence, violent episodes, and the claim that he may have freaking sold some persons into freaking slavery before he came to stardom), but he sure makes a charismatic old-fashioned screen hero (ironically, it usually seems the people who typically play villains are the friendlier folk in real life). Here, he's Dr. Peter Blood, a non-combatant in the 1685 Monmouth Rebellion against King James II of England, but he's arrested regardless on charges of treason for providing medical treatment to wounded rebels and sentenced, along with men who did fight, to slavery in the Caribbean colonies. He and others are bought to work on the plantation of the cruel military commander Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill) in Port Royal, but when the Spanish attack the colony, Blood and the revolutionaries escape and steal a ship to roam the sea as free men, as pirates. It's very old-fashioned, layered with distinguished character actors in the supporting roles throughout, such as the former reverend in Blood's crew who spouts lines of scripture and little else, played by Frank McGlynn Sr., or Leonard Mudie, who oozes contempt at the judge who sentences the rebels in a single scene. The great Basil Rathbone, who would have a larger role as Guy of Gisborne in THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, is fantastically British, but here plays the sleazy Frenchman, Captain Levasseur, a pirate who teams up with Blood, but their partnership ends in a great seaside swordfight when Levasseur refuses to follow Blood's strict codes of conduct. Entirely shot in California in the Golden Age of Hollywood, it's a grand illustration of the Golden Age of Piracy and great summer fare.
Best Part: Well, the swordfight, of course.
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| Warner Brothers |
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| Sony/Columbia |
STARSHIP TROOPERS (SCI-FI/ACTION, 1997)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Starring: Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, Clancy Brown, Seth Gilliam, Patrick Muldoon, Michael Ironside, Rue McClanahan, Marshall Bell, Eric Bruskotter, Matt Levin, Brenda Strong, Amy Smart, Dean Norris
Rated R for graphic sci-fi violence and gore, and for some language and nudity.
129 minutes
I'd known about STARSHIP TROOPERS for years before I finally saw it for the first time, but I just thought it was supposed to be a cool, cartoonish G.I. Joe vs. giant bugs dumb action movie with gratuitous graphic gore. In a way, it is those things, I found out, except that it merely plays dumb, and that's all part of the fun while it's actually pretty dang brilliant. I also really love Paul Verhoeven's TOTAL RECALL, but STARSHIP TROOPERS is more interesting to me, thematically. A young child in the Netherlands when it was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1945, Verhoeven has a fascination with the rise of fascism in the 20th century that has appeared in a number of his films, and from what I understand, the early roots of this film were in the idea of a story about young and idealistic youth in Germany as the rise of Nazism who become indoctrinated into this ideology of evil without recognizing it. It's an awesome concept perfected in the adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's far right wing 1959 novel Starship Troopers, twisted into a blockbuster satire (blockbuster in size, that is; the film was a box office failure). The movie does pitch itself as dumb. It's already about soldiers fighting against giant bugs in outer space, and Verhoeven's chosen cast of matinee idol types further add to the B movie sensibilities, while the movie occasionally pitches itself as fascist propaganda in internet video-style snippets of media from the "Federal Network." People "doing their part," advertisements to join up for military service to earn citizenship and advocating the civic virtues of this demented version of "utopia." It draws the viewer in from the start with its ironic humor and striking visuals of futuristic world built on the merits of strength and militarism while setting its characters on a melodramatic but believable trajectory into becoming true believers and authorities for the cause to then pass it on as mentors. It's playful and always possesses a sense of irony, but the character journeys are played with an earnestness that mimics similar stories in movies about young people coming of age that opens a way of understanding the worldview of these characters while at the same time being horrified by it. And even outside of its thematic points of interest, STARSHIP TROOPERS is a spectacular world-building sci-fi action film packed with special effects-heavy action of the kind you might see in most sci-fi summer blockbusters, but with SAVING PRIVATE RYAN levels of resulting gore. The battles are great, but what I really love are the spaceflight scenes. For 1997, the computer-generated visuals still look remarkably good today. It's an exciting and funny movie throughout, with just enough heart and a lot of food for thought once all is said and done.
Best Part: Visually, I love the scene of Carmen (Denise Richards) taking the ship out into open space during flight training, but I also really do like when Rico (Casper Van Dien) finally reciprocates Dizzy's (Dina Meyer) years-long unrequited love. Being from a Mormon background, I also have a special appreciation for the "Fort Joe Smith" interstitial, even if it is a non-sequitur.
Best Part: Visually, I love the scene of Carmen (Denise Richards) taking the ship out into open space during flight training, but I also really do like when Rico (Casper Van Dien) finally reciprocates Dizzy's (Dina Meyer) years-long unrequited love. Being from a Mormon background, I also have a special appreciation for the "Fort Joe Smith" interstitial, even if it is a non-sequitur.
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| Sony/Columbia |
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| Miramax |
Directed by John Patrick Shanley
Starring: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis, Alice Drummond, Audrie Neenan, Susan Blommaert, Carrie Preston, John Costelloe, Lloyd Clay Brown, Joseph Foster II, Mike Roukis
Rated PG-13 for thematic material.
104 minutes
John Patrick Shanley's DOUBT is adapted from his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and there's an argument to be made that even with its stark cinematography by the great Roger Deakins, it's still a little stage-bound as a movie. But I probably wouldn't have seen the stage version, and the movie has a perfect cast of powerful performances, with all four major roles earning Academy Award nominations. It's a real actors' movie, full of meaty extended dialogues and layered characterizations, but more importantly to me, it's a thought-provoking and ultimately rattling meditation on doubt and it's role as part of faith. It takes place in a Catholic church and its parish school in The Bronx in 1964, where the kind-natured and tolerant Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) collides with the strict and punitive principal Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) over a suspicion of impropriety that could go as far as the sexual abuse of a child, with the sweetly naive and young Sister James (Amy Adams) caught in the middle. It's a subtle and quietly intense journey of faith for each of the characters, most particularly Sister James, who discovers the dark complexities of a life of faith in a world of uncertainties. The sisters are subject to a patriarchal society, and the mother of the boy in question, played by Viola Davis in small but highly impacting role, has the added factor of race, in a world on the cusp of significant changes outside of the parish. It's not a story against faith, but one against certainty, a parable about the important part that doubt holds in a life of faith in our imperfect human existences.
Best Part: The final conversation between Sister Aloysius and Sister James in the courtyard when Aloysius breaks down over her doubts and "The First Noel" plays on organ is undoubtedly my favorite part, but special props are due also to the conversation between Sister Aloysius and Mrs. Miller, and Sister Aloysius' condemnation of "Frosty the Snowman" is hilarious.
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| Miramax |
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| DreamWorks/Paramount |
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Jeremy Davies, Barry Pepper, Giovanni Ribisi, Adam Goldberg, Matt Damon, Vin Diesel, Harrison Young, Paul Giamatti, Ted Danson, Dennis Farina, Leland Orser, Nathan Fillion, Max Martini, Harve Presnell
Rated R for intense prolonged realistically graphic sequences of war violence, and for language.
169 minutes
The first time I saw SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the random and merciless nature of death in war and the reality of these experiences in the lives of real men hit me like it never had before. It's one of the most viscerally effective movies I've ever seen. I've never been in the military and I've never had an interest to be. My feelings on the matter confuse myself, but I'll try to put it out there. I believe war is an absolute evil. I don't believe there's such a thing as a "good war," although I do believe that there have been times that military force became the least abhorrent direction left. I don't believe that made killing human beings in those wars a good or just thing. Looking at war on a broader scale, even taking nuance into account, you can reason the necessity of this large scale violence, but looking at every individual life, it's intolerable. But I'm thankful that there are people willing to volunteer for the armed forces, meaning that I don't have to against my will. The heroism of soldiers is not at all a simple one. They kill people, which I don't believe is justified, nor do I believe it is heroic. I don't feel that any act of violence, even in war, is truly heroic. I think that what makes a combatant heroic is that they sacrifice their morality when no other option is readily apparent. They're heroes for doing what no hero would do ever. I'm inconsistent though and reserve the right to make alterations to that opinion according to circumstance. I apologize for subjecting you to my obnoxious worldview, but it has a lot to do with my feelings about this movie and what makes it one of my favorites. Before I'd seen it, I'd frequently heard about SAVING PRIVATE RYAN being a "war is hell" movie, one about how war is senseless and cruel, but that's an oversimplification. It reflects on the value of a human life, contrasting that against other human lives, searching for purpose in so much violence and the ending of millions of human lives, and then considering what it means to be a human being in all of that. It's exciting and terrifying and horrifying, but always through the lens of its human characters.
Best Part: It's tough to top that famous opening sequence at the landing on Omaha Beach, where thousands of young men, many of them only at the beginnings of their lives, are served up to enemy bullets as the doors to their landing crafts drop and the metal tears them apart into gory chunks of meat. It strikes me with such an authenticity and terror, continuing up the beach in a bloody, dirty disaster that reduces what was a human being full of memories, experience, love and fears into a mangled mess of meat in a mere instant. It's one of the most powerful scenes I've ever seen on film. I'm not going to argue however that it neuters everything that follows by upstaging the remainder of the movie. I love the whole, but the beginning is an all-timer.
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| DreamWorks/Paramount |
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| Warner Brothers |
Directed by Spike Jonze
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson (voice), Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Chris Pratt, Matt Letscher, Luka Jones, Portia Doubleday, Spike Jonze (voice)
Rated R for language, sexual content and brief graphic nudity.
126 minutes
You tell someone that there's a movie about a man who falls in love with his computer and it's great, and they usually give you funny looks. Such as it is. I loved Spike Jonze's films with screenplays written by Charlie Kaufman - the delightfully weird BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, about a puppeteer who discovers a portal into actor John Malkovich's mind in an office building, and ADAPTATION, about a screenwriter struggling to adapt a book and writing the story about himself trying to adapt that book - and HER, though written by Jonze himself this time, is in a similar vein of high concept intellectual comedy, but a lot warmer and more sensual. It is a story about a man who falls in love with his computer in a futuristic world, a concept that cleverly opens a window to a unique examination of our romantic lives as human beings. It's a sensitive film, accompanied by an appropriately electronic and soft score by Arcade Fire, about the struggle to connect with kindred spirits and the evolution of intimate relationships. It's hopeful and kind about the highs and lows of the human quest to pursue connection and overcome loneliness, with a healthy sense of humor toward the more ridiculous moments.
Best Part: The spoken "sex scene" between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and his OS Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) is plainly brilliant, and I also really love the scene where he laments to Samantha after a blind date (played by Olivia Wilde) ends on a sour note.
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| Warner Brothers |
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| Sony/Columbia |
DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (COMEDY, 1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, Peter Bull, James Earl Jones, Tracy Reed, Shane Rimmer
Rated PG for thematic elements, some violent content, sexual humor and mild language.
94 minutes
I'd heard about DR. STRANGELOVE plenty of times before the first time I saw it, in an American History high school class, of all places. I knew who Stanley Kubrick was, and I knew he was considered one of the "important" filmmakers, but I'm not sure if I'd seen any of his movies before then. I may have seen SPARTACUS by that time, and possibly either 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY or PATHS OF GLORY, but probably not. I was interested in the movie for sure, but what I didn't expect was how damn funny it was. Unfortunately, the rest of the class apparently wasn't into it, while I could stop chortling. Their loss, because this movie is hilarious and despite being one of the definitive films of the Cold War era, it remains persistently timely in its satire of warfare, government, military, and of course, that mad, mad doctrine of international policy, "mutually assured destruction." Sterling Hayden is perfection as the USAF Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (subtle), a man gone mad with paranoia resulting from is revealed to be nothing less than a moment of impotence, which he blames on a Communist plot to pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of decent Americans by way of water fluoridation. He circumvents regular procedure with an emergency measure to initiate nuclear war against the Soviet Union and barricades his office with the reluctant UK Royal Air Force Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), while the military leaders of the United States, with the incredulous President Merkin Muffley (Sellers, again) and the gung ho General Buck Turgidson (the great George C. Scott), gather in the "War Room" to try to stop the en route airplanes from delivering their nuclear payloads with apocalyptic implications. The eponymous Strangelove, a third role by Sellers, is an eccentric mad scientist-type and former Nazi recruited by the US after WWII, and part of the War Room council. It's a dark, essentially nihilistic movie, accepting the concept of mutually assured destruction at face value with a cheery, c'est la vie attitude and a hilarious, insightful interpretation of war tied into sexual psychology. Sellers' three roles are each winners and it's tough to pick a favorite, but maybe President Muffley, who struggles somewhat fallaciously to be the "adult in the room" while his general and the Soviet ambassador (Peter Bull) keep coming to petty blows in the midst of thermonuclear holocaust. Scott, who reportedly disagreed frequently with Kubrick's choices and may have been deceived so that what he believed were "practice takes" were what wound up in the film, is the highlight among the highlights as the caveman of a top-ranking general, happily spouting statistics about "acceptable" casualties and trying to defend insane militaristic situations with his eyes completely and enthusiastically on the wrong issues. Still today, the comedy is so fresh and so smart and most troublingly, relevant.
Best Part: Definitely the grand finale where the B-52 commander Major Kong (Slim Pickens) rides a nuclear bomb like a rodeo bull down to the ground, but also when General Turgidson first gives the report of General Ripper's actions to President Muffley and has to counter each of the supposed "fail-safe" measures that Muffley brings up.
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| Sony/Columbia |
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| MGM/United Artists |
ANNIE HALL (ROMANTIC-COMEDY/DRAMA, 1977)
Directed by Woody Allen
Starring: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Janet Margolin, Colleen Dewhurst, Donald Symington, Christopher Walken, Helen Ludlam
Rated PG for unspecifed reasons (PG-13-level; mature thematic content throughout involving sexual material, and for drug use).
93 minutes
I like Woody Allen, but I rarely "love" his movies. They're mostly amusements, pleasant, with maybe a little meat to chew on afterward, but nothing that really reaches in and grabs me, nor anything that I find particularly laugh-out-loud funny. ANNIE HALL is special among his movies though. I'd known about it mostly as the movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture over STAR WARS, which seemed ridiculous. STAR WARS is one of the most significant, important and perfect movies of all time, and no reasonabl person disputes that (that's right, if you dispute it, you're unreasonable), so what's with this ANNIE HALL business? It's actually really great, and I guess STAR WARS got all the money and more Oscars overall, so I guess ANNIE HALL deserves something. It's one of those miraculous accidents of the filmmaking process where a movie called Anhedonia (referring to "the inability to experience pleasure"), a romantic-comedy with a murder mystery plot, became a simple and insightful analysis of human relationships full of neuroses and the chaos of a modern world, about how romantic relationships change in our memories, how people come together and grow apart, and the imprints lovers leave on one another long after their time together ends. It's all about the contradictions of the human quest for love and a sense of importance, framed by a couple of great insights as nebbish comedian Alvy Singer (Woody Allen, essentially playing a slight variation on himself, as usual) looks back on a number of past relationships, in particular his most recent with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). He begins: "Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly. The... the other important joke, for me, is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud's "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious," and it goes like this - I'm paraphrasing - um, "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member." At the conclusion of the film, over a montage of memories with Annie, he muses, "I thought of that old joke, y'know, the, this... this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and... but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us... need the eggs." I used both of those for a monologue I had to give back in high school drama class. I love 'em.
Best Part: That ending monologue. We need the eggs.
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| MGM/United Artists |
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| Disney |
Directed by David Hand, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce & Ben Sharpsteen
Featuring the Voices of: Adriana Caselotti, Lucille La Verne, Billy Gilbert, Pinto Colvig, Otis Harlan, Scotty Mattraw, Moroni Olsen, Stuart Buchanan, Harry Stockwell
Rated G
83 minutes
I don't remember the first time I saw SNOW WHITE, but I remember when my family got it on VHS when it was first made available on a home format in 1994, and it was definitely a presence during my childhood. I had a reawakening to it though during my later high school years as a junior or senior at the height of my Disney-mania, and it's stuck around. It's a very simple movie, only 83 minutes, and it only reaches that runtime thanks to several musical sequences, while contrasting between very cheery, vaudevillian comedic tones and surprisingly dark, horror genre tones. It's likely a lot darker than you remember if you haven't seen it for some time (legend has it that some theaters had to replace their seat cushions after running the film back in 1938 due to rampant wetting by frightened children, but I've been unable to substantiate that), drawing heavily from the great early horror films such as THE CABINET OF DR. CALAGARI and DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931), which may seem strange, but the fanciful German Expressionism used heavily in early horror was an ideal relative to animation striving to be more cinematic as the Disney studios made the leap from short to feature filmmaking. It has a luscious handcrafted look that's beautiful and just a little unsettling and reminds me greatly of creepy European storybooks or European decor that could be found in abundance in my Europhile grandma's house (her favorite movie was THE SOUND OF MUSIC, which I don't like much at all). The songs are rightly famous and stand the test of time, even while some, like "Whistle While You Work" have jazzed up intervals that call back to the 1930s, but the music score by Paul J. Smith and Leigh Harline deserves credit as one of the great film scores. Snow White, herself, admittedly isn't much of a character, and the Prince is even less of one for that matter (animators famously had a difficult time learning to animated "realistic" human characters, so the Prince's role was cut down to the bare minimum). It's a movie cut down to the basics, one that moves at a brisk pace with great music, gorgeous, detailed visuals (I love the peacock feathers design of the vain Queen's throne, and the zodiac around the Magic Mirror), and a fairy tale's simplicity that flows viscerally through the dark corners of the human psyche before emerging into a rapturously joyful finale that has a "Well done, thou good and faithful servant," air about it (the Prince takes her to his castle as it appears in the clouds).
Best Part: The Queen's transformation sequence, from creating the potion to the moment her voice changes to a raspy cackle (Lucille La Verne provided both voices, creating the hag's voice by removing her dentures), the scene cutting between the dwarfs racing (led by Grumpy) to stop the Queen as Snow White is about to bite the poison apple, and the happy ending accompanied by the Hall Johnson Choir reprising "Someday My Prince Will Come".
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| Disney |
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| 20th Century Fox |
Directed by Peter Yates
Starring: Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley, Paul Dooley, Barbara Barrie, Robyn Douglass, Hart Bochner, P.J. Soles, Amy Wright, John Ashton
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (language, thematic elements, smoking and some violence).
101 minutes
The first time I saw BREAKING AWAY, I was too young to really appreciate it, but I did get a kick out of Dave Stoller (Dennis Christopher) shaving his legs to his old-fashioned dad's (Paul Dooley) shock, and especially Cyril's (Daniel Stern) response to "How are you fellas doing?":
"Well, we're a little disturbed by developments in the Middle East, but..." I try to use it myself when I remember to. But it was after high school graduation while most of my peers were leaving for college and I was at home trying to get a job, any job, in hopes of kickstarting something, that I watched this movie and really appreciated it. Admittedly, it made me a little uncomfortable watching it recently that six years later, I'm still struggling to make baby steps toward independent-ish adulthood (people who can just drop everyone and everything and be totally "independent" are not free; they're sociopaths), but the movie still resonates. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with the story of four young men fresh out of high school in Bloomington, Indiana, where the new crop of Indiana University students have arrived. Dave has become obsessed with bike racing and idolizes Italian bike racer in particular, doing everything he can to absorb Italian culture. Mike (Dennis Quaid) worries his glory days are behind him, having once been the high school quarterback, and now feels inadequate next to the jocular college guys. Cyril is a little simpler, loyal to his pals, and Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley) is sensitive about his short height and is contemplating marriage to his girlfriend. They're all trying to find their identities as adults, or trying to avoid being forced to find an identity, spending their days basking in the sun and swimming in the water-filled abandoned limestone quarry. It's another story about masculine insecurities and identities (I don't know why I like these movies so much, because I'm clearly so secure), with a really goofy sense of humor and a heart.
Best Part: Again, I love the "developments in the Middle East" line, and I really love any of the scenes at the quarry, especially the opening when they're walking through the trees and Dennis Quaid is singing. Sometimes Dave's breakdown to his dad after the Italian racing team cheats gets me, too.
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| 20th Century Fox |
So there you have it. 67 movies I love. 67 movies that feel fresh and exciting each time I rewatch them. There were a lot that entered in and out of consideration but had to be culled. Some of them are arguably about on the same level as other movies I included on this list, but eventually fell by the wayside regardless. I only just saw the 1991 Albert Brooks comedy DEFENDING YOUR LIFE for the first time a few weeks ago, and I don't feel comfortable including a movie that I've had so little time to live with, but based on the first viewing, I wouldn't be too surprised if I still wanted it for a future iteration of this list. Other movies that I left out with some reluctance are
DO THE RIGHT THING (1989; dir. Spike Lee)
THE AVIATOR (2004; dir. Martin Scorsese)
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (2013; dir. Martin Scorsese)
TOTAL RECALL (1990; dir. Paul Verhoeven)
THE HUNGER GAMES (2012; dir. Gary Ross)
THREE KINGS (1999; dir. David O. Russell)
THE GODFATHER: PART II (1974; dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
FARGO (1996; dir. Joel & Ethan Coen)
PAN'S LABYRINTH (2006; dir. Guillermo del Toro)
NOAH (2014; dir. Darren Aronofsky)
I guess you could call those honorable mentions, but that would seem a little weird. This is just my list. My list of movies that I love.
