I’m Just Sitting Here Watching the Reels Go Round and Round

For BWM & JCP, 

“BOO RADLEY?!?!”

If you picked up a copy of Enrico’s Inquirer in mid-Winter 1999, tucked within the scant pages of my high school’s newspaper was a belated four-star review of The Thin Red Line (****), noteworthy because it was the first film I caught in the theater with my best bud, Moore, and moreover (indulge the pun), the first (and to date, only) movie review I’ve had published. Faculty members and students alike were, on a whole, dissatisfied that I preferred TRL to Saving Private Ryan, but my sophomore year English teacher, the doting Mrs. Hayden, couldn’t have been more supportive. As she saw it, The New Yorker or Variety or the Enfield Press (a fifty-cent hometown weekly I’d eventually intern for) would be dialing the main office any second in search of the elusive pundit they didn’t realize they needed: a suburban teen more passionate about the Foreign section at Hollywood Video than inexpensive beer or co-ed bra removal. Getting shitfaced and fondling boobs was inevitable, but the dread of being hit by a bus before securing a dusty copy of The Magnificent Ambersons was terrifying.

My juvenile years are explicated further down the page apiece in capsules embodying genres I prized for the duration of the (Reagan/)Bush/Quayle years: horror/the heel sliced off in Pet Sematary clasps a bloody blade in my subconscious, action/Tim Burton’s Batman was one of my most visceral theatergoing moments (at the green age of six), and animation/Moana deserved to win Best Animated Feature (you were hoping for a childhood memory but #Justice4LinManuel)! There’s no refuting my ’90s allegiance to stupid-as-a-bag-of-hammers comedies; Jim Carrey was the funniest motherfucker who ever lived circa my final preteen years. Unfortunately, I can’t honestly boast that revisiting Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber now bears the same fruit. Around then was also when I first glimpsed At the Movies, happy to watch a duo of likeminded cineastes get paid to debate the merits of one of my favorite things to do. (In a clichéd treatise, I might’ve said I said aloud, “Ooh, these guys are onto something” or “Yeah, that’s the ticket!” at the time of my discovery but I’m preserving my trite and hackneyed zingers for once you’re wriggling on the hook. <— We’re gonna need a bigger gloat.)

As I mentioned at length in Lazerbeam Sandwich (didn’t expect to plug it so soon), my fetish for lists, pecking order, and completionism is a corollary of unmedicated OCD, and the Academy Awards accelerated my most abiding crush— =condolences to Gina Gershon, Diane Lane, and Mira Sorvino—into another realm. Curiosity piqued, it became my mission to see the nominees in each major category prior to the 1995 ABC telecast—commemorating one of the supreme movie years, 1994 (I was an eleven-year-old Forrest Gump stan who recommended Letterman’s conduct as host/regrets, I’ve had, uh, two) — which led to the most uncomfortable viewing experience in a life featuring plenty: partaking in Pulp Fiction’s sodomy scene from the recliner while Harry (my mother) squirmed on the couch. (Grimacing through a matinee of the terrific Eyes Wide Shut with my bud Josh, Harry, and my nana was the silver medalist, Josh and I situated a few seats afield of them in the theater along with minimal recapping, to the harrowing relief of our quartet, on the ride home.) Following suit in my middle school years, Harry began shuttling us to Hartford arthouses to behold critical darlings that wouldn’t surface at RX Place, our standby pharmacy-slash-dirt cheap video rental outlet, in time for March/Billy Crystal (including what remains her favorite movie we’ve ever peeped together: Sling Blade).

When freshman year detoured into its summer sabbatical, the American Film Institute celebrated the one hundred movies they supposed their countrypeople should hold in equivalent esteem, prompting an alternate take by the Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, and more significantly, my becoming hip to the website where I devoted most of my dial-up dependency memorizing Dave Kehr’s archival capsule reviews and poring over J.R.’s Friday column when not emailing him (I’m still beating myself up for requesting he tell me who Stan Brakhage was/he obliged). My infatuation led to a July 2000 vacation to the Windy City with Harry in part to see a (boring, overlong, Japanese) movie at the Music Box; snagging VHS copies of Day of Wrath and Sawdust and Tinsel at an artsy mixed media shop where I (knowingly) heard “Psycho Killer” for the first time was gravy.

Intimidated and aroused by the wealth of unidentified cinema flirting with me, I grabbed Leonard Maltin’s annual guide, opened a Mead Five Star college-ruled notebook, and used my Dr. Grip pen to jot down every movie within the almanac’s seven hundred-ish pages that I’d seen, organizing them alphabetically by year with the director’s name(s) in parentheses. (Later typed into a Word document, it has survived innumerable hard drive malfunctions.) Then I obtained my first job (at Blockbuster), watching my five free rentals each week (supplementary ones were gifted by apathetic cohorts) to grow my number quickly and check off chestnuts I forecasted would require years to ogle. Customers weren’t enthused by my testimonials to rent Apocalypse Now, Unforgiven, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but I’m positive Queen of the Damned, Shanghai Noon, and Corky Romano were instead worth their respective $3.99 (and invaluable cinematic education). Yes, I’m aware that was quite bitchy. Let’s move on.

Powerless to trade bizarre assessments about fossilized beauts like Battleship Potemkin and L’Atalante with video store proletariat or bourgeoisie—things got extreme when I borrowed my senior year Genocide teacher’s taped-off-PBS copy of Shoah and watched it in three sessions (he was aghast by my haste)—I bought anthologies authored by cinema’s most esteemed critics (Pauline Kael and John Simon in particular since their writing wasn’t then visible on the WWW) to train myself to be a devoutly perceptive critical thinker about both movies and life. (One English teacher, Mrs. Jonaitis, was concurrently in love with and in sheer disbelief that I kept For Keeps in my backpack beside my Physics textbook/no scrawls on the brown paper shrouding it except PHYSICS.) Even better, my two nearest and dearest pals (Moore and Josh) were up to the onus when, on Friday nights, we’d assemble at Josh’s abode and, disinterested with their preferences, I brought the stack of movies that accompanied us until two a.m. Moore grew so (condonably) bored during Blood Simple that he whipped a dodgeball at the basement telly whereas Josh disappeared to tweak a playlist in the midst of an interminable lag in Crash (the David Cronenberg car-fucker variant, not the Oscar-winner). Mindful of their patience, benevolence, and tolerance of my pubescent (lifelong) idiosyncrasies (returned in kind), movie references dominate our correspondences today, proof of our unity whether we loved (The Searchers) or loathed (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) the work in question.

The routine withstood college recesses; it was when Moore and Josh pursued post-graduate careers in History and Theology that I temporarily retired my English degree (and movie madness) to inspect the ongoings of The Golden Age of Television, a predictable swerve by a knowledge-hungry pop culture maniac. Meeting my girlfriend, Sue, yielded a complementary gluttonous nerd who cherished awards season as much as me (read: more), in turn causing me to care about hairstylists and fashion designers along with the nominees who spurred on Sue’s red-carpet reviews. Hesitant to ask if I’d examine a more teen-friendly alternative in her wheelhouse, I invariably accepted and apprised her how going to the movies was my version of attending church—I’ve only walked out on one (Osmosis Jones) and booed a blood boiler as the credits rolled (Moulin Rouge!)—confident that quiet scrutiny and sensory overload would produce an addition to the personal library. Smiling throughout La La Land with her a trio of times in as many weeks was our most memorable bout of seasonal cinephilia (it’s #76, or the first runner-up not on my list). 

Completing this essay in February 2021 is bittersweet primarily because no sane epidemiologist can advocate for basking in the projector’s light at this time. This will be the first year in over a quarter century when all Oscar nods—the ceremony was postponed to April 25th—must be beheld on my fifty-five-inch Sony via an HDMI cable, not exactly what Eadweard Muybridge had in mind. However, obscured by the media’s doom- and gloom-laden depiction of 2020, a year that initially appeared immune to pandemic workaround bronze linings (silver was too smart for 2020’s poppycock), was the ability (for those fortunate enough) to do what humans are conceived to do: seek as much pleasure as we can in our time inhabiting the world, and more specifically, during this protracted, mask-mandated aberration. After the first month of Covid shock ebbed, I became single-mindedly determined to view titles I hadn’t gotten around to and reconnect with a hundred-ish I’d been fondest of for roughly half my existence. (Ignoring sports—minus exceptions for the Yankees—was integral, but also painless due to my revulsion of brazen corporate greed.) One of Sue’s closest friends happened to be a savvy pirate who worshiped a challenge (he didn’t lampoon my druthers apart from asking how Wavelength, or “The Window Movie,” rated), donating his Blu-ray-caliber scavenger hunts gratis along with carte blanche access to his dad’s Netflix account. (To my credit, I presented him giftcards so he could pluck cheese pizzas from local grocer Big [Who What When Where How] Y.) YouTube, the Internet Archive, and Amazon Prime were essential workers for my undertaking too.

The Covid Film Festival (CFF on the Euro decal)—should’ve petitioned for my logistics to avoid that cancellation, Cannes (NOT pronounced con)—commenced on April 21st with Drive, an overrated movie I dug principally for Albert Brooks’s turn as a heavy. Many readers will now (or in due word count) accuse me of contrarianism, a label difficult for me to disavow given I became one before taking my first dump. (Due on June 12th, I continued dwelling in my mother’s womb for an additional twenty-two days, emerging in time to catch Dave Righetti no-hit the Red Sox to exalt America.) In the course of seeing approximately thirty-five hundred movies (both live action and animated shorts constitute that figure) in my thirty-seven-plus years, I’ve not once liked or disliked a movie exclusively due to its popularity or canonical standing but concede that it can be a struggle to set aside certain expectations based on reputation. I’m also a nonbeliever in objective, fixed approaches to art—I see your thoughtless provocation: Vertigo is an objectively better film than Freddy Got Fingered (ALFRED WOULD YOU LIKE SOME BANGERS?!)—but asserting that Great movies should be separated from Favorite movies suggests fear (or incuriosity) in viewers who lazily invoke the term “guilty pleasure” as justification for why a movie s/he loves doesn’t qualify as a classic. Own your truth, (un)imaginary person!

There are foreseeable takeaways I reckon you’ll have upon braving a couple months drifting off while treating the forthcoming encapsulations as a sub-bathroom break reading chore. (Thank you for your service.) You’ll be ecstatic to learn that your interrogations will be rhetorically addressed posthaste! Here are my criteria: I appointed one film per director to diversify my inclusions (and generated more adversity for yours truly). The list is divided into three distinct segments: my Sight & Sound ballot (the British Film Institute administers a decennial poll of critics, scholars, directors, etc. who each submit a list of the ten works they estimate are the best ever made, so I designated my favorite film by each of my ten favorite directors); twenty runners-up to said ballot; and a mix of others (keeping in the mode of my music list, “Canon in Me Major,” in the LBS, I narrowed it to forty-five so this list also totaled seventy-five, or a pair for each year + point five I’ve been drawing breath/talk about consistency, folks). As a fan of most genres—big budget action and science fiction not so much—and curious about output from all corners of the globe, you’ll calculate that more than one-third emanate from outside the U.S. (Sixteen hail from cinema’s birthplace, France, a country whose cultural peculiarities, sing-songy language, intellectual stimuli, and abundance of antique beauties have made me grieve acing cinco años of Spanish, plus ignited my desire to take Sue up on her perpetual quest for a “fake wedding” so we can be feted by a “fake honeymoon” in the very real Gay Paree, a locus where, I assume, newlyunweds are welcome to pseudo-consecrate their phony matrimonial celebrations. I don’t recall if Amélietackled this subject.)

I’m an experimental film ally too, not that you’ll encounter a deluge of them on my list—unless your definition considerably differs from mine—since attempting to prove something with esoteric selections is the antithesis of my heart(and brain)felt pathway to loving any artform. My aversion to being told “It was before your time” is painfully noticeable; less than half of my choices were released in my lifetime. I purposely tried to represent the past hundred or so years of the medium (better luck next list, 1890s to 1910s), and coincidentally, I deify movies spanning from 1924 to 2013. While I’m saddened that I’ve yet to see so many on The Big Screen, growing up in the home entertainment era hasn’t misled me into postulating that having a clicker with pause and rewind buttons along with a nearby toilet are more enticing than a trip to sit—legs crossed on top of the (p)leather chair in front of me—in a dark room full of strangers, but it has endowed an inestimable value to an only child millennial smitten with glowing screens and easy access. Still, the itinerary for my fortieth birthday is to rent out an against all odds residual Mom & Pop theater for a TBD double bill. Bigger is Best. Giggity.

Should you begin wondering what foundational movies I haven’t seen that could’ve made my list, I refer you to They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They, an online aggregator of the top 1,000 films ever made along with the top 250 directors. (The excellent name’s derived from a Sydney Pollack flick.) Confession: I’ve seen 710 of the movies (all of the top 100, 238 of the top 250, 430 of the top 500, and 597 of the top 750) along with at least one—usually more or several more—films by 244 of the directors listed. Of course, there are Important Directors whose work leaves me numb and/or angry—chief among them Federico Fellini (“Fellini-esque” is an adjective equated with Pure Trash in my purview), Andrei Tarkovsky, Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa, and Alain Resnais—but outliers come with encyclopedic territory. My acute distaste for humorlessness (recognized as Misery/Torture Porn in circles unfamiliar with snuff films—or Salò, I guess) also leads to the repudiation of the majority of Robert Bresson, Béla Tarr, John Cassavetes, Lars von Trier, and Michaelangelo Antonioni, wet blankets I’ve afforded copious dry runs. Unwilling to wrap this on a sour note, qualifiers are imperative since what’s to follow is uninterrupted praise, a more onerous scribe’s task than this admitted part-time cynic had planned on.

So why construct the list if the CFF hasn’t (technically) concluded? I’ll never cease from evaluating (and re-evaluating) movies, but it feels like the requisite time to signify an anticipated Life(long) Moment. In the wake of my departure from the Tickle Dumpster, authoring my book (might it be the last instance of shameless self-promotion?), and assisting Harry with a spat of health issues, I’m preparing for an endeavor sure to absorb a plethora of the hours currently spent on film study. Then why etch my opinions in (Internet) stone? Art doesn’t change, but we do. No matter who I am in a decade or three (unlikely due to my suicide pact to live a palindromic arc from 7/4/83 to 3/8/47), this essay certifies the covenant I made with myself when I wrote that (discarded to the dustbin of the Enfield Annex) review as a Fermi Falcon: to watch, discuss, criticize, love, and idolize The Movies for the beacon of optimism they’ve been since Follow That Bird gave me a cinematic complex as a two-year-old. (Harry: I’m sorry you rented it fifty-plus times. Harry, part deux: Why didn’t we own the videocassette?) As someone far too frequently reluctant (or unable) to express how touched I am sans the reliability of my age-old pal sarcasm, I hope I’ve conveyed just how deeply the movies move me.

If I were you (“Geez, this skin’s too small!”/there’s that g.d. sarcasm), I’d grab a large bucket of buttery popped corn (free refills!), a bag of Pull ’n’ Peel Twizzlers, a bottomless Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi, and a bidet—my ideal snack/crack pack—because that asshole Bubba (Gump) ate the baked stuffed shrimp I prepared to sustain you through this bloated montage. I’d award my prose, ehhhh, two stars (perhaps a mite generous) or a thumb sideways (fancied you more, Gene). But first…four commercials superseded by eighteen minutes of trailers. Now that’s why, more than anything else, I endorse residential cinema. May you find it très agréable, oui, oui.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Sight & Sound Ballot

Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
A movie with a surfeit of quotable lines whose contexts couldn’t possibly be foreseen if you’d heard them prior to seeing Lynch’s tour de force, this work fuses his iconoclastic impulses into his most coherent masterwork by asking observers to judge if they’re capable of ear extraction, gas huffing, sexual slavery, and brand loyalty (Pabst Blue Ribbon fans unite). Backed by a slew of striking performances—cinching my inveterate enchantment with Dennis Hopper (Frank’s shock value doesn’t taper off), Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, and Dean Stockwell (more inscrutable than the rest)—its thematic depth, Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting (can’t summon a stronger adjective) score, and the contrast-rich cinematography are equally vital to creating a film so unsettling that it continues to stun after a double-digit number of sightings. Lynch, my favorite American filmmaker, managed to create his own genre (commencing with Eraserhead) eighty years after cinema was invented—an accomplishment that would garner him first ballot Hall of Fame entry if the industry doled out such an honor—a genre he (thankfully) refined throughout his career/you do have your benefits, OCD. That the man behind Blue Velvet was hired to devise the strangest scripted program in network television history is my go-to line of reasoning when contemplating why my homeland is so great. Should you listen to a Roy Orbison compilation without thinking of Lumberton, you’re a fucking sociopath.

F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973)
In the nascent days of AOL, I befriended a fortysomething Midwesterner named Chris on a Usenet movie discussion group; my everlasting recollection of him is that he mailed me a sought-after dub of this cult classic (with Alejandro Jodorowski’s godawful El Topo—Chris swore by it—padding out the TDK E-240 for good measure). Referred to as both a documentary and an essay film, Welles said he was concocting “a new kind of film,” and it’s inconceivable to watch this work helmed by the self-described charlatan about a fraud (Clifford Irving) who was penning a book about an art-forging crook (Elmyr de Hory) without believing he did just that. One of the most cunning editing jobs in the movies—YouTube conspiracists often unknowingly pilfer from this essumentary(?), the king of “Do it in post” movies lacking special effects since the bulk of the movie is postproduction—Welles will have you querying on several occasions if anything in front of his lens is authentic. His beautiful speech (his is one of my favorite speaking voices) concerning creation and the erosion of time—spoken in regard to the longstanding Chartres (shouldn’t have trusted the fart) Cathedral—is a marvelously succinct explanation of art history. Given Howard Hughes also crops up as a case study herein, I envision Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator arguing on behalf of admirers begging to unlock this movie’s secrets. Show us the blueprints!

Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
The picture (that noun’s for you, Marty Brows  his made name) of my teens, Josh once (semi-sarcastically) lamented about our Fermi days, “Some guys had chicks; we had Goodfellas.” There’s no movie I’ve seen more since Return of the Jedi (government-ordered Star Wars plug quota met) exited my childhood rotation. Reciting this foul-mouthed feast, the most influential movie of the last three decades (more for worse than better), was très cool (as Mr. Sweet said) in tenth grade. You know the deal—it’s like a two-and-a-half-hour trailer (thanks to Thelma Schoonmaker’s gangbusters editing), the vigorous song selections exquisitely comment on the action within scenes where they’re implemented (“And Then He Kissed Me” is the ne plus ultra; “Jump Into the Fire” nuts disagree), the De Niro Stomp™️, the gender politics of the shared voice-over narration duties (I judge voice-over narration in all other movies against it), the manic coke-fueled climax, Joe Pesci’s angst about his kinship with un pagliaccio, and what the fuck are we doing?/you get it. Picayune detail that slays me: “What’s that movie that Bogart did?” “Shane?” Two wise guys discussing a horse opera before one casually opens fire on the bartender. I’ve read yahoos bicker that Scorsese glorifies the mob (aka their deficiency at denying how sexy and persuasive this flick’s sway is) and doesn’t dig deep enough into his protagonists’ collective remorse (Ray Liotta’s scrambling for disposed drugs to sell to maybe help his family after coming home from prison has long sold the murkiness of depravity for me/“WHY DID YOU DO THAT?! KAREN!!!”). To critics I ask: Does it not validate how these pallies can engender us to have such excessive fun while discerning that they’re so damn diabolical? Did You Know: Frank Vincent didn’t have a left foot. He had a hoof.

Late Spring (Yasujirō Ozu, 1949)
As poignant, humane, and profoundly personal as drama gets, it’s no surprise that such an evocative pearl arose from a domain alien to me except in art, specifically the movies, because it makes stimulating what an Anglo movie can’t fully accomplish due to (the slightest) familiarity. Chishu Ryu and “Smiling” Setsuko Hara are at the peaks of their powers in the tale of a widowed father and his lone progeny, the former wishing she would get married—in an astute move, we aren’t introduced to her future beau—while the latter wants to take care of the man she loves (her dad). Any work that can distill a land’s cultural distinctions into a snapshot so tender and inviting belongs on a short list of imported transcendence (I confess that the parent/child dynamic directly impacts me). Please see Kristin Thompson’s enlightening analysis after you watch this (hot and bothered for neoformalist theory now, huh?). My sole nit to pick is that in mentioning the unseen beau’s resemblance to Gary Cooper multiple times, how could the set designer—in a movie with a baseball scene, no less—fail to subtly hang a Lou Gehrig wall portrait?

Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
A very rare thing to discover in the wild: a perfect work of art. (I’d include it with Exile on Main St., Harmonium, and Nighthawks on the Twentieth Century Art Mount Rushmore.) Disclosure: Saw it for the first time in April, told Sue it was “one of the five best movies I’ve ever seen” the ensuing afternoon (while beaming at sun-kissed clouds and thinking of the opening credits), and in anomalous fashion, have already watched it three more times consistently in a state of delirious happiness, an easy feat given it’s been lauded for revealing more of itself on subsequent screenings, notably during the hourlong restaurant implosion (the sequence involving champagne, flowers, and hats is as untouchable as any sight gag since the Lumière frères got turned on by factories). Not only did I (clearly) fall hard for this film, it induced an exhaustive inquiry of everything the anarchical Tati directed (roll those peepers: he’s my favorite director and I consider his five other features masterpieces too) and acquisition of Taschen’s immaculate boxed book sanctifying his sui generis genius. Rather than babble on ad(am) infinitum, I submit a pair of incontrovertible accolades in case you’re unconvinced: There are zero close-ups and, contrary to Big Cynicism’s insistence regarding the hopelessness of realizing such an act, Monsieur Hulot (cinema’s most fortuitous Everyman) and the nonprofessional cast grant precise, refreshingly didacticism-deprived instructions on achieving an earthly utopia. Ya know, I bet Bernie Sanders worships this paragon too.

Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
The best movie I’ve seen in a theater (caught the restored print at Trinity College’s Cinestudio in 2000). Hypnotized by it since first espying Hitchcock’s apex, this sociological study of voyeurism (is anything more associated with the subject than this flick?), privacy, and cinematic creation itself (note how the curtains raised and drawn to bookend the enterprise aren’t handled by a mortal) seems like what Facebook might be if the platform operated after Wi-Fi eradication (Alfred Hitchcock Presents Net Neutrality). Grace Kelly was never lovelier—more or less playing herself wasn’t a handicap—and Jimmy Stewart’s in fine form, but it’s Raymond Burr and Thelma Ritter (the Best Supporting Actress Oscar should be named in deference to her even though she failed to win one) who bring the ruckus in secondary roles. If there’s something worth criticizing here—hint: there absolutely isn’t—it’s that the movie merges scopophilia and entertainment (aka what the movies are) so impeccably that this edge-of-your-seater feels over in a flash. Thelma wisdom: “Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence.” Glad she didn’t get to use Facebook.

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
My favorite movie since I was sixteen—the German replica poster I acquired was framed and hung above my DVD shelf by my third viewing—it’s the finest exploration of friendship (and maybe dignity) on celluloid. I have a soft spot for musical scenes within non-musicals that stems from Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and Walter Brennan performing “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” and “Cindy” in a jail for an admiring John Wayne (while, one speculates, he’s daydreaming about suffocating communists with his own bare hands). It’s difficult to dislike a movie starring characters named Chance, Dude, Colorado, Stumpy, and Feathers, never mind one containing a contender for the Most Enthralling Opening Scene (but not the best acronym). Angie Dickinson’s membrum inferius wasn’t the inspiration for ZZ Top’s “Legs,” which demands the question: Why the hell not?! Both Hawks remakes (El Dorado and Rio Lobo, his final two movies) are must-sees but if someone tries to tell you either surpasses the prototype, look him in the eye—his good eye—and counter with, “I no longer believe a word you’ve ever said.” Visit for the companionship, stay for when Brennan’s in stitches (and prepare to join him).

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Impossible for me to cite a movie heavier on aura—I feel like I’ve walked around The Overlook following viewings—Kubrick better implements the dissolve than anybody else. I swear it used to be demeaned as second-tier Stanley, but fiends have come full circle on Jack Nicholson’s demonic performance, the farewell zoom, and the inchoate storyline (prudent to remember there are unreliable narrators at play). From the introductory images of the Going-to-the-Sun Road to the Big Wheel Steadicam races, John Alcott’s camerawork has more shots worthy of a coffee table book than many could pull off in a career. Cracks me up whenever I think of the ’90s ABC miniseries with Steven Weber/I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that nothing gnaws at Stephen King more than this movie becoming the default visual reference point to define his staggering bibliography (a dozen please, half butter crunch/half toasted coconut). Minutiae I grin at most: The topless paintings of sistas hanging on opposing walls in Scatman Crothers’s bedroom. No flick makes me more covetous of the wealthy—gotta stop asking for doughnuts, not ducats, when I win wagers—because if I had a movie theater on my premises, this twisted tribute to The Tonight Show would be the first emitting from the projector. Carnac the Magnificent says, “REDЯUM.” Open the envelope: “A lost Captain Morgan marketing opportunity.”

Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)
The third installment in a trilogy that improves with each subsequent work—retroactively adding nuances to its predecessors—it’s a deceptively straightforward tale of the wrap-up of a film shoot in an earthquake-stricken Iranian village (during the World Cup/June 1990). However, the civilians/actors from the first two films reappear (nonprofessionals playing characters named after themselves), scenes from the second film are now revealed from a wider angle to have been part of the shoot shown in this one, and the central relationship of the film-within-the-film spills from the screen into the duo’s lives in an out of this world extended final shot for the ages. If it sounds too meta or contrived, it’s vital to note that hardly anyone does complexity with the deftness and unpretentious verity of Kiarostami, a man who doubles as one of the expert capturers of vast hillsides pictured from the windows of moving vehicles. My pal Drooq—we view a foreign flick whenever we kick it—abhors olives, yet I trust even he’d be able to get through this one by subbing postmodernity for the pimentos in his martini.

Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)
The towering cinematic achievement in defense of Bertolt Brecht’s doctrine of reflective detachment (the Distancing Effect). Starring my alternate timeline spouse/favorite actress, the incandescent Anna Karina, Godard utilizes his then-wife’s incomparable allure to offset the fact that we’re never made to be emotionally invested in her character, a housewife-turned-prostitute, by forcing the viewer to instead be riveted by Karina’s sheer existence, a fact I myself am awed by even when not watching her in movies. Shattering all kinds of rules—intertitles explaining what’ll manifest before each of the twelve segments is shown, shooting an unbroken scene from behind (a first in 1962), an improvised dance sequence in a pool hall—this is JLG’s clearest, most powerful, and candidly affecting work from his unmatched, fertile cycle of ’60s masterstrokes. The café scene spotlighting philosopher Brice Parain in the penultimate tableaux contains so much brilliant erudition that you’ll get annoyed with your rewind/pause buttons: “There’s truth in everything, even in error.”

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Runners-Up

Amadeus (Miloš Forman, 1984)
First saw this one in a middle school Music class—taught by grumpy ass Mr. “Don’t Call Me Chipper” Chapdelaine (this choice neutralized making us watch Bye Bye Birdie, Chip)—and was entranced, awaiting the weeklong mid-morning chunks in hopes that Tom Hulce’s infectious laughter continued surfacing daily. My allergy to anachronisms has been a sticking point in my (unwritten) film criticism, but Peter Shaffer’s play willfully introduced historical gaffes, enabling Forman & co. to openly embrace such tomfoolery in the adaptation, casting Americans to depict eighteenth century Austrians (F. Murray Abraham’s sacred work as Salieri eclipses a superlative ensemble) and enlivening the (modernized) behavior in its interactions, devising the optimal way to amusingly trick the youth into loving classical non-muzak. Seamlessly integrating a stockpile of Wolfie’s compositions to score his own life is an additional plus; the terminal piece where he finishes writing the Requiem in preparation of his demise is a trope that’s normally facile and loathsome yet succeeds by averting the maudlin (with a colder than ice—your move, Lou Gramm—finale as the kicker). Nonetheless, it’s the humor and extravagant production design that invite one in, pitching Mozart as a genius doofus who loves tits and farts (the latter was true—look up his coprophilic streak/former probably also true), suggesting there’s more genuine Animal House in this best Best Picture winner’s DNA than The (Crotchety/“You said crotch”) Elite would like us to believe.

Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
Robert Towne’s chef’s kiss of an original screenplay deserves every accolade bestowed upon it—“Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough”—although Jack Nicholson’s monumental performance (my favorite role by my favorite actor/you’re close, The Last Detail) ain’t no slouch either. It’s an example of all conditions being right: the ’30s period specificities, the disquieting trumpet-drenched Jerry Goldsmith score, John A. Alonzo’s yellow-tinted cinematography, the cast (John Huston embodies the ideal too wise amoral bastard), and complex-yet-compact plotting are each noir exemplars. Polanski’s superior finesse behind the camera is seldom so confident—he saves us from his acting “skills” by appearing in one (indelible) scene—as he navigates a compendium of inhumane layers en route to the inexorably acrid kiss-off. Many have confused Towne’s fictitious reimagining with historical accuracy, which is why Thom Andersen’s exegesis in Los Angeles Plays Itself (more below) is essential if you’re as dazzled by this movie as I am. Please resist the (uncomfortable) urge to snicker during the sister/daughter to and fro, arguably the most infamous scene in a movie with a bundle of them. Needless as it may be, its sequel, The Two Jakes, is worth a watch (would’ve been more fascinating to see Roy Scheider or Joe Pesci opposite Jack). Another excerpt for the road? “To tell you the truth, I lied a little.”

Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)
One of the triplets from a favored genre—existential French New Wave films starring enchanting ingénues—its opening tarot card scene’s in color before it transitions to lucid black and white (hereafter B&W), employing a ninety-minute runtime to relay the titular two hours in the life of a budding pop star sweating biopsy results. Varda’s touch with realism—cafés, car rides (one accentuating a prominent radio broadcast from June 21st, the solstice plays a stellar supporting role), and strolls in the park that might as well be narrated by Sir David Attenborough—is enhanced by her use of dark and light to metaphorically convey the looming diagnosis. The cameos by Michel Legrand playing piano in Cléo’s lavish, kitten-cluttered palace and JLG and (blonde) Anna Karina in a short movie Cléo watches with a nude modeling pal flow effortlessly, but the soul-stirring finale in Parc Montsouris pushes this one into the realm of The Greats. Corinne Marchand engages Antoine Bourseiller, a soldier poised to return to Algeria, who spontaneously discusses life’s cruelties to succor her unease; it’s the uncommonly natural chemistry and dialogue that make for the most authentic depiction of falling in love you’ll see, turning what feels like a presumedly dreary resolution inside out. Choice sample from the exchange: “Your jokes are disarming.” “I guess I’m armless.” Varda is my pick for the finest female filmmaker—don’t yell sexism, it’s a mighty appellation—so as compensation for this essay, I’m demanding her box set.

Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000)
When I proclaimed this as my nominee for Best Film of the 21st Century, my buddy George William retorted that it seemed as if I craved a challenge whenever watching movies. I’ll welcome any challenge, regardless of its caliber, over a coasting—all but one of its scenes is an uncompromising single, lengthy take (an AHF Movie Boner)—especially when it all caps CONFRONTS issues (race/it lands when you see the effect of schoolyard hatred on a sobbing black child recounting an altercation with a bully, connection/the title concerns inputting an invalid door code, intractable cultural deviations/French, German, and Romanian in these two hours) still plaguing us. Featuring a typically sublime performance by World Heavyweight Thespian Champion Juliette Binoche along with unnerving percussion soundtracking the appropriately deflating terminus, Haneke distinctively fucks with the audience (halting scenes prior to their payoffs, omitting key details, etc.). Although cell phones and computers don’t factor in but briefly, this movie has as much to investigate about the state of the world as anything released in its wake. Warning: You’ll never feel safe riding on a subway afterward. Oh, you already didn’t? Touché. P.S. My dream Haneke flick stars Tom Hanks as a mortician. 

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)
If you reach the end upset by the skimpy narrative, you missed the point. Malick intermingles nature doc (the joint cinematographic work by Néstor Almendros and Haskell Wexler easily makes this one of the ten best-looking films ever made/how can you petition otherwise once you see the locomotive on the bridge?), essay film/interior monologue (via Linda Manz’s eerie New Yawk-accented narration/“Sometimes I’d feel very old, like my whole life is ovah, like I’m not around no moah”), and a bare bones plot functioning as a decoy to probe metaphysics (and the magnetism of the golden hour). It’s a movie revolving around feeling—should its isolated nostalgia seep into you the first time you watch it, you’ll torture yourself trying to find a comparable work to equal said ineffability—for landscape (and creatures who populate it/the locust scene is fucking bonkers/spoiler: none burrow inside Richard Gere’s sphincter), for days that used to be, and for innocence, bolstered by Ennio Morricone’s stirring score. I can only guess how much more cathartic this would be in 35mm. During the two years it took to edit this flick, Gere was cast in another movie, which was shot then debuted while Malick scissored his reels. Perfectionism = assholery at its most admirable.

D’est (Chantal Akerman, 1993)
This may be the titleholder for most tracking shots in one film—plan on sporting a Naked Gun body condom if you’re as bewitched by them as I am—as it almost silently (ambient noise is present) studies the decaying Soviet Bloc. Listening to pretenders eat regional cuisine on cable and pontificate, “This borscht tastes like I’m in Moscow” (foodstuff and city are a stretch, but hey) infuriates me, but it’s a crucial setup: Watching this personal essay/documentary (catalogued when Akerman visited her mom to research Russian poetry then reconfigured into its adroit schematic) imparts the twinge of having set feet in Eastern Europe. Akerman has a painter’s eye for composition and a journalist’s knack for the nitty-gritty: concert(non)goers cavorting in the vicinity of a venue during a gig, middle-aged workers picking potatoes, overcrowded train stations, sledding children, and the director herself cutting sausage and bread all adopt an otherworldly guise, frozen in time as the past and future hang opaquely outside their formalist framework. Don’t miss the woman who (FINALLY!) waves at the lens, a fleeting snippet of optimism encoring for the jaw-dropping cello solo beforehand. If you’re of my ilk, the glut of themes will prolong your takeaway(s), so let me state that as much as anything else, it’s an objective illustration of fortitude, best gleaned when a troop of women saunter down a tree-lined and snow-covered road, the long take implying their destination is more years than kilometres away. #MetricSystemCompliance

Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)
I’ve only seen the four-hour cut—von Stroheim’s cut was closer to eight hours, but was (prophesied, as history tells us) hacked to hell, surviving in a one hundred and forty-minute rendition until, in 1999, film stills were interspliced with said surviving footage—and it’s my submission for the ultimate silent movie. The silents aren’t my strongest epoch, and when I spend limited junctures immersed in century-old stories, I often side with laughter, but the Ken Burns-influenced live action/freeze frame mashup cut heightens a destructive account of, well, avarice. Von Stroheim was so infatuated with credibility that the concluding scenes were shot in Death Valley during summertime, where the highest recorded temperature of the shoot was over one hundred and twenty degrees; fourteen members of the forty-three-person cast/crew fell ill and were sent back to L.A. As a cinephile, I’m not attached to many movies surpassing the three-hour threshold, so it surprises me that the lengthiest work on this list is silent. Recommended/this remark isn’t faultfinding: Watch it once per decade and split it into afternoon and evening sessions.

The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961)
If only they comprehended at the time how much The People vs. Larry Flynt would need this movie’s title thirty-five years later. No-brainer choice for Best Sports Movie, assuming this depressing psychological drama about addiction, self-loathing, and pool emphasizes enough of the latter. If you’ve seen it, you know it does, the see-sawing marathon straight pool match—the homosexual match is on the LaserDisc’s gag reel—between top-of-their-games Paul Newman (a performance for the ages as Fast Eddie) and Jackie Gleason as The Land of 10,000 Lakes Fats (how’d they drape a suit around all that water?/*rimshot monkey GIF*) alone earning it consideration. Anecdote to assure you of the film’s veracity: Rossen, in his pursuit of neo-neo-realism (who knew?), enrolled goons he found loitering on neighboring NYC streets in the Screen Actors Guild so he could hire them to “play” background greaseballs (and defraud his financiers, I suppose). Eugen Schüfftan’s remarkable B&W camerawork, George C. Scott’s turn as a shithead gambler/manager, Piper Laurie’s ghostly face, and every damn second of this muted “crowd-pleaser” make for—Power Statement Advisory—one of the dozen greatest American movies (the qualifier is that there isn’t one).

It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)
Hot dog! Not sure if there’s a fresh way to encapsulate this one—yes, it’s grimmer than you might postulate (if you’ve somehow not seen it or had it spoiled, a tall order by the time you’re ten) and the paramount life-affirming post-WW2 Hollywood heart-warmer—but I’ll stick to a variety of noteworthy observations from my recent/annual Xmas Eve viewing. How can you not salute that Capra bucked endowing Mr. Potter (the easily imitable grouch Lionel Barrymore) with his richly warranted comeuppance? Donna Reed plays perhaps the summit of loving, kind, and compassionate brides on film, a superb performance that gets neglected because Jimmy Stewart (justifiably) towers over the picture. Observing them dance the Charleston could be my favorite scene except five other contenders spring to mind, including one where Gloria Grahame’s shapeliness inside a sparkly dress causes an ogling cop played by Ward Bond to not-so-subtly indicate he’s taking his lunch break to greet (i.e. fuck the shit out of) his old lady (as he thirsts for Ms. Grahame). While 4k restorations are never unwelcome, I scorn abrupt cuts that have been inserted to bypass milliseconds of overly dinged up celluloid; the beauty of a single take should forever triumph against dots on the screen, Brainless. Bonus points if you correlate this gem with ravens, goats, and squirrels. Hee-haw!

Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997)
Anyone reading must scan this as a blatantly contrarian pick despite Tarantino’s sole adapted screenplay—sourced from Elmore Leonard’s tip-top Rum Punch—shaping an emotionally resonant work unlike the rest in his oeuvre. Why Q.T.’s yes men aren’t as fond of this slow burner’s more developed degenerates and baggage (Robert Forster and Pam Grier—in debatably career-best roles—shine in one of filmdom’s most poignant unconsummated love affairs) is beyond me. These are his realest people both for how they talk and their deeper pragmatic concerns (aging, getting out of the game, getting high and watching reruns/comparably meaningful). The remainder of the cast is aces—Samuel L. Jackson and his glorious Fu Manchu, Bridget Fonda (never funnier or sexier), Robert De Niro in a rare turn as a dipshit, and Michael Keaton chewing gum like he’s trying to win a new jawbone—along with a trademark earwormy soundtrack where the movie now owns the tunes (The Delfonics and Randy Crawford). Given my obsession with shopping malls and the Rashomon effect (seeing one event from the perspectives of multiple characters), it’s as if the extended sequence driving the film toward its bittersweet denouement was hatched for my inner fetishist. Good luck not extolling the cream of mushroom soup-thick pace that enlivens the finest scene’s suspense: Does Louis locate the car?

Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)
Built upon a preposterously dry sense of British whimsy, director and co-writer Hamer concocts a vengeful yarn about a British-Italian man (Dennis Price aka Jeeves) who defends his materfamilias’s virtues by murdering the seven dukes and one duchess (all played by Alec Guinness) ahead of him in line to succeed the D’Ascoyne throne. (One of the farcical monikers in the movies—might it have influenced Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert?—is Lord Ascoyne D’Ascoyne.) In a film chronicling class warfare/carnal prudence (and hardcore repression), Price exploits his relatives’ leisurely indulgences—using a boating accident, exploding dark room, felled hot air balloon, and hunting mishap to play the crimes as inauspicious happenstances—until the shrewdly ironic framing device (our prime mover awaiting the death penalty) switches from triumphant to tragic in the double twist final frames. Douglas Slocombe’s stately B&W cinematography finds nobility in Kent villages and Leeds Castle (supplemented by a studio mimicking the House of Lords), but it’s the bon mots that rule the movie. Exhibit A: “I always say my West window has all the exuberance of Chaucer without, happily, any of the concomitant crudities of his period.” B: “He wants to go to Europe to expand his mind.” “He certainly has room to do so.” C/D/E: ibid. Deadpan British mordancy was crystallized here, an adaptation so literary that Merchant-Ivory must’ve debated how they blundered at translating anything so cheekily.

Madame de… (Max Ophüls, 1953)
Heavens to Eliza! If you’re desirous of upper crust social politics, this love triangle (isosceles, duh) melodrama will ring your cherries like no other. The magnifique cast of Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, and Vittorio De Sica (as world-class a performance by any director not named Orson Welles that you’ll applaud) all end up victims to a pair of cursed heart-shaped diamond earrings, delineated in their pre-WW1 trappings by some of the medium’s most graceful camerawork (staircases, ballrooms/now that’s a top-tier time lapse, and a beach are given romantic glances that assess each with a vitality equal to the humans inhabiting them). In one scene, a letter is torn and tossed out the window of a carriage into a snowstorm, the unrequited shreds coalescing with the falling flakes as if the sky opened to lament quelled passion. Ophüls’s pacing is commendable in large part due to how exciting he makes a simplistic, ill-fated scenario, training his curtains shot on Chekhov’s lobe splitters (Roget: You’ve got work to do in the earrings department, buster!), one of cinema’s astringentest (c’mon, Merriam-Webster, give us/mainly me adjective leeway already!) takedowns of material possessions. Andrew Sarris called it “the most perfect film ever made.” I’d hate to be the one tasked with formulating a rebuttal.

The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
Best One-Off Movie Ever Made? Quite the softball, Me, but that’s why you wanted to be a reviewer, not a prosecutor. (Lost track of things for a moment.) Laughton directed this film, one that’ll be enduringly lodged in your gray matter after your inaugural screening, and only this film; have fun debating how his ace (you’re welcome, ya limey cunts) collection of performances stack up against it. Stanley Cortez’s camera uncovers Shelley Winters strapped in a car at the bottom of a lake, the most ravishing shot of a corpse I’ve witnessed (Non-IRL Division — j/k…Simmons), along with Robert Mitchum’s shadowy presence astride a steed on the horizon, Silent Film Queen Lillian Gish gripping a rifle and warbling in a rocking chair with Mitchum silhouetted by her fence, and one of the creepiest (and tensest) basements not associated with Wes Craven. (As my favorite Old Hollywood actor, I must disclose that this is Mitchum’s pinnacle in a vast list of ‘em/check out The Lusty Men but save your catcalls for The Crusty Ken.) James Agee, arguably the landmark movie critic of the first half of the 20th century, wrote the stark screenplay, one Spike Lee venerated four decades later. Hellbent on infusing silent films back into cinema, Laughton crafted something expressionistic enough to be mistaken for the know-how of an Austrian (don’t forget the topographically vibrant helicopter footage prefacing the opening credits). Art like this—adhering to The Three C’s/clean, clear, and concise—makes me envious, both for seeming like a piece of cake (cheese, s’il vous plaît) and for the immortality the work achieves when those involved are abundantly aware to meet it on its bold terms. I’ll now be collecting that one hundred bucks for not using the word chiaroscuro in this Pulitzer-worthy synopsis. <— Guuuuuurrrrl!

Ordet (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1955)
The gatekeeper of the most breathtaking send-off in the movies, no film tackles The Big Question (religion) akin to Dreyer’s awkward, unrealistic conceptualization. His cast members are regularly posed one beside/behind the other (a denial of truth and/or doubts about faith), one of them (Johannes, played with affecting/affected grace by Preben Lerdoff Rye) has been declared insane (his brother claims Johannes had an epiphany that he was God upon reading a surplus of Kierkegaard, a fundamental comic aside), and they drink a shit-ton of coffee (nearer, their Supplementary God, to thee?). In short: a torrent of theological banter transpires until the eldest brother’s wife succumbs to an ectopic issue while giving birth, the excruciating build-up not baring a drop of blood yet permanently etching itself in my mind due to how agonizingly Dreyer mounts pressure. Prior to when he goes missing, Rye speaks with his niece in a three hundred and sixty-degree shot that The Baumer assuredly proselytizes is a miracle of mise en scène; it’s followed by his return where, no longer believing he’s supernatural, he executes a Christian resurrection before stone cold astounded onlookers, converting his elder sibling from an agnostic to a zealot at once. Parsing the layers has exhausted scholars for sixty-five years, so I’ll briefly add: This atheist wants to stamp Dreyer’s rebirth a deus ex machina, but no work of art about the subject has ever shook me all rite long. J. Hoobastank C., that was a meek pun. “Alright, I’m done here.” — Lazarus’s (not-so-)last words

Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir, shot in 1936/released in 1946)
Here is the one incomplete film on the list, a forty-minute short (great short or greatest short?) slice of countryside French poetry that left a solid, if not edifying, initial impression only for several images to float around my brain like (not uninvited) apparitions for days thereafter. The topics are all-inclusive—lost love, urbanity versus ruralism, horniness—but Renoir’s National Geographic-level camera captures their charming aspects minus judgment. (No joke: I’m grateful the shoot was hindered by rain delays because the lone additional director who unearths such pulchritude from precipitation is Malick.) Many (understandably) wish fragmentary art could be beheld in its finished form, but there’s no easier argument for the gift of unfulfilled flawlessness than this reimagined Maupassant adaptation. Seriously, don’t you feel wet?

The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Buñuel, 1974)
A one hundred-minute straight-faced, interlinked series of abstract sketches—think: an episode of Monty Python (O.G.) and Mr. Show (zenith) absurdities—it’s about chance (per Buñuel) and the truth (per the title and that ostrich head freeze framed as the credits unfurl, the same head routinely seen buried in the sand avoiding said truth). Exploding taboos is part of what it’s after, with the early line “I’m sick of symmetry” telling all: a seedy fellow in a park gives kids lurid photos (subject matter’s not what you’re picturing), dreams literally come alive, monks gamble while ingesting eucharists as snacks, a high schooler seduces his virginal sexagenarian aunt (she has the body of a teen), S&M is practiced in the presence of caught-off-guard strangers, reality is momentarily embraced then immediately treated like it’s false (sound topical?), a terrorist gunman is convicted then discharged to a groveling public, and two of our most primal survival instincts are inverted (wait until you see how the dinner table and bathroom are rendered in reverse). Buñuel’s nimble examinations are invigorated by an A-List cast (Jean-Claude Brialy, Michel Piccoli, and Monica Vitti, to name a few), but if you’re predicting you’ll be desensitized to this movie’s DNA, brace yourself for the discomfiting machinations of this Grand Statement by one of visual media’s kookiest surrealists. In an ageless morality play evincing the inane confidence intrinsic to conquering shame, nothing screams 1970s more than a doctor disclosing a cancer diagnosis to a patient before offering him a cigarette (filtered/the man’s not a monster).

Real Life (Albert Brooks, 1979)
There are few men in popular culture who’ve had lengthier runs as one of my platonic (suppressed) man crushes than Brooks, the most talented, insightful, and outrageous American comedic triple threat since Chuckles Chaplin and Joey Keaton grew voice boxes. While all seven of Brooks’s movies are at least gratifying, his first, this mockumentary doubling as a prophetic perspective on reality TV mores that wouldn’t originate for a quarter century, is not just his best premise—he plays a fictional version of himself shooting a documentary about the idealized American family (the patriarch is Charles Grodin, at his drollest, whose family member’s lives unravel as soon as “Action!”’s called)—but also his most prescient, and good for a scream per minute (I’m a sucker for a snarky montage). Damn near impractical as the exercise may be, my pick for Scene Guaranteed to Ensure-Cry Laughter documents veterinarian Grodin performing surgery on a horse, a remarkable unforeseen sight gag in a movie brimming with nonsense. You might be more taken with Modern Romance (the embodiment of sardonic romcoms), Lost in America (the Death of the American Dream ’80s satire), or Defending Your Life (the trophy holder of afterlife send-ups), not that any Brooks acolyte can hold your opinion in contempt. Shit! Accidentally pictured Al’s avalanche of chest hair. Need a coal miner’s glove, jar of molasses, and a wheelbarrow to extinguish this erection.

Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmüller, 1975)
Owner of juxtapositionally exhilarating opening credits—newsreels of Mussolini, Hitler, & co. scored to a jazzy instrumental as the narrator facetiously intones, “Ohhhhh, yeah!” following each line regarding “The ones who…” (a list of annoying to evil traits in our fellow wo/man)—you’re reading about my choice for Film Most Successful at Making the Viewer a Sadomasochist While Somehow Being Hilarious Yet Not Condescending (The Editor had no stronger suggestion for that title, the useless POS). Be prepared for a septet of the ugliest Italian siblings filmdom can offer, rape of the mentally retarded, farcical seduction of a two hundred and fifty-pound female Nazi commandant, and diarrhea pits (lotta corn in Deutschland, yah?). Paisan cinema isn’t a favorite of mine (illogical dubbing = intolerable), but this demented, flashback-structured, tragicomic look at a desperate, pathetic, and captivating asshole—played masterfully by Giancarlo Giannini (his eyeballs are their own character), he kills a man to safeguard his family’s honor then enrolls in the army during WW2—who manages to survive his gruesome circumstances despite losing all of his dignity, sanity, and ultimately humanity (returning home to marry the Town Whore after ascertaining that his madre and sorellas have also become hookers). Over one hundred hours of film were captured by Tonino Delli Colli’s divine camera (no one can shoot a forest like the visionario/*said while NOT gesticulating, you prejudicial asshole!*); I’ve never been more intrigued by the temptation of inaccessible bonus features. This movie is made even better if you study John Simon’s review, one of the most perspicacious pieces of film criticism ever written.

Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985)
An uproarious, unprecedented, and influential rumination on Japanese food culture, Itami dubbed it a “ramen western” because the primary plot follows a group of gents who gather intel from the competition to revitalize a floundering ramen restaurant (owned by Tampopo aka Nobuko Miyamoto/her name means Dandelion) and conceive the be-all end-all bowl o’ noodles. Don’t be shocked if you’re persuaded into assuming that Itami created Food Network’s blueprint for successes like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (we are, indeed, rollin’ out). Interspersed with the main course potboiler (had to) are patently absurd mini episodes documenting food’s function as a godlike figure in Japan—venereal (hard-boiled) eggs, rules concerning slurping spaghetti, and the most ludicrous dying man’s farewell words in cinema—plus there’s no misinterpreting the marked Tati influence on the overall spirit infused within these frames. Itami’s a hero for addressing the criminal faux pas of loud chomping in theaters, the biggest detriment to frequenting the multiplex; his self-consciousness yields a pristine anthropological goldmine about a nation that’s routinely obfuscated by samurai swords and anime creatures. Before popping this one in the player, confirm that scallions, sesame oil, and ginger are on hand. And if your wife claims she’s ready to die, insist m’lady feverishly cook one last meal to be remembered by but do take a filtered print for the Grambituary ahead of noshing. For double bill purposes (strictly based on goofy titles that are a gas to monosyllabically enunciate), Tampopo pairs well with Rififi (and a nice Beaujolais). 

The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
One of the masterly transmissions of unadulterated sleaze—Touch of Evil is close—you know if you’ll cotton to it from the onset: Can you find a sliver of sympathy for a ragtag gang of pillaging murderers? When they’re charismatically played by William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, and Jaime Sánchez, there’s no way you’re not rooting for their cozy espirit de corps. Hate to insinuate that the film peaks midway through—all two-and-a-half hours are a peak—but the train robbery is so monumentally mind-blowing that Breaking Bad’s attempt couldn’t begin to improve upon it. Unable to link to Pauline Kael’s unabridged New Yorker review, the capsule summarizes one of her most representative analyses, thousands of words that helped me enthrone westerns, revisionism, and the art of the critique when I was still in short (analytical) pants. If you’re a Peckinpah junkie like me, it’d be easy to choose a less clear-cut work from his (under-appreciated) filmography—I’m a dedicated Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia buff (not because Chevy Chase mentions it in Fletch, not that that’s a drawback)—but the fiery tone, chaotic bloodbaths, and grasp of an unstable future (in both America and the world) are as exemplary as anything in the genre.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Other Favorites

All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
Gazing at this pigmentation powerhouse will make you feel awful that color blindness has no cure. If there’s a movie on this list in need of being called picturesque, Sirk’s postcard-quality New England images (shot on a Paramount backlot, of course) reap the laurels, evoking a paradigmatic 1950s (white) America. Rock Hudson plays a hetero beefcake (fools me every time); when an older woman (Jane Wyman) falls for him, the Melodrama Machine commences overheating to manufacture a movie so soapy that Irish Spring (excuse my sponsored content) sought to patent it. Should you find deer as gorgeous as I do, brace thyself for the closing scene (it’s pleasant/no hunting). Arduous choice to designate this or The Tarnished Angels, but preferring Sirk in B&W would be disrespectful to Sir Isaac Newton.

Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)
Alternate Title: Panties. Pitch-perfect courtroom drama, it declines stuffiness in favor of a relaxed milieu that adds dimensions to its delightful cast (George C. Scott is more hardened than your above average alcoholic attorney/#AlliterationAbundance). Dispensing a rape case’s touchy ABCs with a defter hand than one might expect out of the ’50s makes this continue to feel relevant. The copout Ben Gazzara supplies for murdering the beast who violated his better half—claiming temporary insanity to defend the modesty of coquettish Lee Remick—scans as a suspiciously prophetic appraisal of our contemporary litigious environs. Jimmy Stewart’s defense counsel moonlights as a jazz pianist, bringing about one of the most pleasurable cameos there is (tickling the ivories with Duke Ellington, the man responsible for the multifaceted, unimpeachably swinging yet periodically darker-inflected soundtrack). Funny that you mention it, Self, because while it’s too meaty a role to be a cameo, Joseph N. Welch’s turn as the judge—he’s the badass who lambasted Fuckface Joe during the Army/McCarthy hearings—couldn’t have been improved by a seasoned ham/I’ll take extra cabbage. The B&W cinematography by Sam Leavitt, shot in upstate Michigan, lost the Oscar to The Diary of Anne Frank, a defeat remembered as the Third Reich’s greatest embarrassment.

And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956)
Even in the age of Internet porn, all of us defer to a movie we watch to cater to our inner pervert. (Puritans’ll squabble, “You can look at photos of [insert actor/yes, please!],” but that’s reductive criticism.) Others might pick Showgirls or Magic Mike or Cruising (kinky choice, hypothetical libido feeders), but this one, the one that invented the term “sex kitten” (sacré bleu balls!) and focuses on female sexuality, is mine. A character affirms about Brigitte Bardot: “Her ass is a song.” One can also assume her mouth is a poem, her (majestic) hair is a sonata, and her bust could’ve reanimated Michelangelo’s David. Ahem. The Saint-Tropez photography’s splashy (e.g. a boat lowered into the glittering Mediterranean), the wedding night scene should be spliced into boner pill ads, there’s a rabbit (non-vibrator) named Socrates, and in case you worried that I’ve abandoned all critical faculties—I haven’t/Vadim’s Barbarella is a campy abomination, Jane Fonda’s b(r)e(a)st efforts aside—a thorough dissection of marriage (curiously directed by BB’s then-groom Vadim, his sexism mingles with a defense of distaff liberation amidst her getting slapped by the fictional husband whose brother she rudely morphed into his eskimo brother). Choice out of context quote: “Her biggest fault is that her parents are dead.” Now you can feign how I’m a filthy pig—I’ve never wrapped up this flick by telling myself, “Wham, bam, thank you, hand”—while rifling through your mental vault to determine your desire in the Kink genre.

Beau travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
A sort of miracle, Denis blends the beauty of an epic with the jarring impressionism of an experimental project, steering what could be a repetitive, mundane chronology to zag whenever it should zig. I hesitate to stamp any movie—chiefly one based on Billy Budd—as being without antecedent, but it has the semblance of a ritual (the Full Metal Jacket-style military choreography scenes are beneficial too). Ostensibly the reflections of a disgraced French Foreign Legion officer (Denis Lavant/I’d bless him as the man, the myth, and the legend, but he eats menmythlegends for brunch/more on him in a different capsule) dealing with his time training soldiers in Djibouti—a baked-out brown landscape bordering the shimmering Red Sea (Agnès Godard’s lens oughta hang at the MoMA)—and his jealousy (with a scoop or two of homoeroticism) of one underling that begets a court martial, it depicts the fragmented thought process of memoir formulation more poetically than anything I’ve seen. Don’t predict tried and true results—the expectantly explosive culminating punch gets an anticlimactic slo-mo/jump cut treatment—but do arrange for scattered memories to puncture your consciousness afterward (anticipating that they’ll be accompanied by Benjamin Britten’s forceful, operatic score), especially the utterly perfect final scene. Footnote about said scene: I love that Corona song. As a kid, I trolled my mother—and waited until a few years ago to expose it—by reiterating that it was a pro-geography ditty called “The River of the Nile.” Sold it so emphatically that she now thinks I’m trying to pretend I was trolling her but really misheard it over and over, stipulating that Earth’s largest river be recognized at 128 BPM.

Begone Dull Care (Norman McLaren & Evelyn Lambart, 1949)
Canada’s solitary contribution to my list amalgamates Oscar Peterson tracks and scratched/painted on film to birth an eight-minute synesthesia masterpiece. The film stock intimates colors that are dancing in harmony with lively piano playing. Works of art like this make you ponder if they were partly to blame for the motto sophisticated simplicity (or is it the inverse?). It’s too on the money for me to not borrow the first-rate one-liner from user megadave83 (probably Dave Mustaine himself) on RYM: “This is how Guitar Hero looked in 1949.” Pack the bong, open a YouTube tab, and do the damn thing.

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)

Fell for it as a teen for two reasons: (1) New Hollywood’s approach to violence and (2) immediately getting a crush on Faye Dunaway (apologies to Warren Beatty and his massive…muscles). I’m aware this isn’t history remotely as it happened, but its Nouvelle Vague ideology makes for a doozy of a thrill ride before the inevitable, grisly bloodletting. Floored by the frank depiction of impotence—[redacted wisecrack about me maintaining a diamond cutter in the presence of twenty-five-year-old F.D.]—along with how everyone pans Estelle Parsons’s Oscar-garnering turn as The Most Annoying Matron of the Depression (she nailed it), this fucker’s charismatic enough to start a cult once the house lights flip on (you dim ’em at your domicile too, right?). You’re also invited to one of the more portentous family picnics on record, Gene Hackman having a blast robbin’ banks, an abbreviated Gene Wilder cameo (cue up the fuckin’ meme), and banjo accompaniment Deliverance potentially lifted. The influence on Peckinpah is pronounced(/ˈinflo͝oəns/—*inner dialogue: “You agreed to not go there!” “Moi?”*); insert B&C into a double bill with The Wild Bunch but confirm that your .22 and .45 are firing more blanks than ole Clyde Barrow.

Charley Varrick (Don Siegel, 1973)
This formidable crime crackerjack is more ’70s than wearing a mood ring while thumbing through Tiger Beat on shag carpeting. Pitting shitbags opposite shittier bags—our “pro”tagonist wastes Five-O to kick things off—the unseemliness isn’t watered down by moralizing. Walter Matthau has his grandest two hours as the titular robber/pilot, double-crossing an acquaintance to stall Joe Don Baker’s racist, misogynistic hitman pursuing him so he can run errands (swap X-rays, procure dynamite, stretch out Felicia Farr). Tarantino filched Marcellus Wallace’s “pliers and a blowtorch” line directly from this screenplay, one of his craftiest acts of cinematic cannibalism. Michael C. Butler’s location photography—western Nevada more than capably fills in for the New Mexico setting (says the liar who’s set foot in neither)—guides us to the barnburner finale, home to the vertex of car-chasing-plane pulse pounders. Matthau saw the film three times, unable to make noggins or posteriors of its meaning, evidence that fabricating a slob was more detrimental to his cerebral acuity than if he’d played the neat-freak/Felix > Oscar, as convictions go. Favor: Forgive the aimless tangent, okay? (“Which one?”)

Cold Mountain (Anthony Minghella, 2003)
Based on a punctilious National Book Award-winning novel, it was the first film I saw thrice in the theater (twice with Josh), and it remains the only film I’ve drunkenly explicated for ten-plus minutes to my pal Connor at a wedding reception, praising its “parallelism” more than Jack Daniel [non-sic] himself could’ve surmised was a viable outcome when refining the recipe. Minghella gained a rep for stuffy historical dramas following The English Patient’s ascendancy, yet his treatment assuredly gives profundity to the meticulously costumed principles (two Aussies playing Civil War southerners/Jude Law and Nicole Kidman as superior as ever, Renée Zellweger in a wildly colorful turn, and an irreplaceable ensemble including potent work by Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Eileen Atkins, and one of my favorite supporting players in general, Donald Sutherland). The years-long trajectory of the narrative and yearning for the partitioned couple to reunite is broken up by episodic vignettes faithful to Charles Frazier’s prose, mixing the jocular with the violent and downright heartbreaking. If you’re prone to come to my door with a bottle of scotch, I’ll stream the soundtrack so we can sip to Gabriel Yared’s nostalgic score and jitterbug to “I Wish My Baby Was Born” and “Great High Mountain” (your new Jack White playlist jam). Putting too much stock in seeing the annual Oscar nominees may be silly, but this forgotten five hankie-weeper’s a strong example of why my OCD(iscipline) prowling for statue chasers furnished a select assemblage that makes the traditional hunt satisfying.

Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973)
Movies about making movies trigger instant sentimentality within me; it’s as if the idea of creating them provides a restorative reminder of why I’ve spent so much of my time as a biped—my four millennia as a giant sequoia were something though (minus all that dog piss)—devouring, studying, and worshiping cinema. Truffaut’s films consistently have warmth—he said this one was made as an act of friendship with everyone in the movie business—which humanizes his breakdowns of unending takes, alternate angles, and histrionic behind the scenes divadom (both leads—Jean-Pierre Léaud’s at his weaselly best—hysterically broadcast, “I’m quitting movies”). Truffaut plays the director (what a stretch) who dreams in B&W about Citizen Kaneposters, a heartfelt nod to cinephiles whose deep-seated love of The Medium began with The Movie. There’s a splendid window-centric sight gag working overtime as a sly dig at budgetary constraints and a comical bit about the most fretful What If… (one of the leads perishes during production). If I were born in 1960, gawking at freckle-faced Jacqueline Bisset—her in braids/me with the vapors—in the theater would’ve nourished my thirteen-year-old nocturnal dreamissions (and contrition/don’t ask) until In the Realm of the Senses came to the local indieplex (/movienerdom…PSYCH!). Two quotes that sum up the bipolar alchemy frolicking outside the (main) frame: “We’ll shoot the scene when you find a cat that can act” and “The actors are into their roles, the crew is solid, problems resolved. Cinema is king.”

Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)
In tandem with my preteen horror preoccupation, I also had a hankerin’ for Ridiculous Action Movies (plead the fifth when quizzed on how many times I’ve air gunned my way through Commando). This one has innate flaws—Alexander Godunov’s villain on the cusp of eliminating our protagonist only to be foiled twice (until his on-brand ’80s Lazarus Moment); all those bullets that fail to find flesh; the inability to suspend disbelief that a USC/Notre Dame game would be contested on Christmas Eve—but for a two-hour shoot-‘em-up, you get to chew on ample twists, set pieces, and genre-defyingly outstanding performances (Bruce Willis at his most likable, Alan Rickman achieving the apogee of waggish nonchalance, and a cast of heavies who aren’t reduced to redshirts). There’re broadly acerbic digressions about LAPD, media, and FBI incompetence (a black and white duo named Johnson & Johnson/no relation), an undecided voter’s archetypal foreplay (black cop as unexpected savior), and no denying that it influenced a lot of heinous action movies. Standing ovation to the makeup team for Willis’s bloody continuity along with the script: the pacing is tight enough that it never feels protracted while it avoids rushing the fine points. Funny throughout, to boot: “You throw quite a party. I didn’t realize they celebrated Christmas in Japan.” “Hey, we’re flexible. Pearl Harbor didn’t work out, so we got you with tape decks.” (Biggest revelation is that the soundtrack plays yuletide and Classical bangers, nothing else.) Unsubstantiated IMDb trivia: On his deathbed, Roy Rogers sputtered, “Now I know what a TV dinner feels like.” Hot Take: This isn’t a Christmas movie. You know why.

Diner (Barry Levinson, 1982)
A knockout coming-of-age tale I saw when I was coming of age—Moore kept passing out, startling himself awake, and mumbling R.E.M. gibberish—it’s undoubtedly a Boys Club movie, but it’s too natural and engrossing to be derided as myopic (Ellen Barkin’s eloquent performance adds heft to the unequal side of the pendulum). Centered on an ensemble above reproach—Mickey Rourke (the movie that caused his becoming A Thing), Kevin Bacon (excelling at sketching the embryonic stages of alcoholism), Daniel Stern (as a giddy music geek with no grasp for women), Steve Guttenberg (the one getting hitched/why they reassemble at the neighborhood diner, a set I’m predisposed to revere), and Timothy Daly (you know him from when your parents knee-slapped through Wings)—it engenders a wormhole sensation: I wasn’t alive in 1959 and haven’t visited Baltimore, but damn if this flick doesn’t try to convince my inner conspirator otherwise. Pussfarts who denounce the dick joke (Best Supporting Prop Oscar goes to…popcorn/“Ya know, the butter’s actually coconut oil!”) are unwilling to detect that there can’t be growth without the immaturity. Levinson is one director who might not belong in The Pantheon, but you’ve peeked at more than one movie by him you dig (I’m keen on the other three parts of his Charm City tetralogy), mainly because he nails how gregariousness and friendship can rival (and supersede) family. I’ve never applauded Ingmar Bergman more than when The Gutte and Daly see The Seventh Seal, an implausible alibi for why I forced my teenage buds to weather international war horses.

Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
Likely The First Great Talkie Comedy, its extraordinary follies will have you rolling in the aisles (you drunk-ass bitch!) ninety years later, a rave not penned about manifold peers from the era. As long as a stand-up set (sixty-eight minutes), there’s an inundation of tremendous mischief conducted via slapstick, silent hijinks, sight gags, and slick editing (Groucho meows at a doghouse tattoo on Harpo’s sternum only for a barking boxer to emerge, which makes me titter harder [the sequel to Titter] than anything else in here); the sheer variety and quality summon repeat viewings. You might be frustrated that this political parody didn’t aim as high as Dr. Strangelove, but then you also might admit you were disappointed that the nominal recipe wasn’t revealed either. As Groucho says, “Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head or tail out of it.” Now go ahead and relish the timing of The Mirror Scene if you’ve never peeped it.

The General (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926)
No burying the lede: Keaton gets me cachinnating—yes, I went there: *Madonna voice* “CACH-I-NNAAAAATE!”—more boisterously than Chaplin, the rationalization for why this is King Shit of Silent Comedy. My memory (and search engine acumen) betrays me, but I’m cocksure that somebody famous once proffered how nothing looks better in the movies than trains; s/he is spot the fuck on! It’s a dual love story—Keaton’s Confederate hero (cue pearl clutching) may prefer his locomotive to his lady (guess who has the better caboose?)—featuring insanely acrobatic and daring physical comedy (how BK avoided taking a dirt nap on a set can’t be overstated), cranked up suspense (what about the detonating bridge and un-dammed river?), and throwaway details that make Keaton one of cinema’s greatest comedians in perpetuity (the toothpick payoff). The fact that this operates as the standard action movie template implies plenty about Keaton’s role as a visionary. Having one of the most memorable (didn’t say it was handsome) faces doesn’t hurt.

The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin, 1940)
Chaplin’s first talkie survives as the apotheosis for Truth to Power filmmakers, a gut-busting satire of totalitarianism and antisemitism that refuses to age due to sycophants around the globe, a la the one Chaz frolics with in cinema’s most enduring memento to ensure that Nazis fuck off. Playing both the dictator (a phooey, not Führer) and a Jewish barber, Chaplin doesn’t shield from confiding how there’s an iota of The Tramp in Hitler and vice versa, which might mean Hitler impersonated the funny walk prior to inhaling his daily spoonful of amphetamines. I hazard that numerous adherents will find my choice inführiating—“No City Lights, Kerl?”—but it’s the climactic oratory (spoken by the barber mistakenly dispatched to the microphone in place of the dic(k)tator), an amazingly ballsy and authoritative solicitation to treat people with kindness, that seals the deal. Learning how ghastly Chaplin found the similarities between himself and Dolf—born four days apart, raised poor, huge Wagner zealots—substantiates that while a Great Artist must believe in him/herself at all times, s/he also needs to keep a healthy dose of self-flagellation in reserve.

Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984)
I was a childhood horror movie addict—Chucky, Freddy, Jason, and other psychos who thrived on bloodshed—and was particularly partial to re-watching said gruesomeness with glee given it infrequently terrified me. (My mother insisted I’d be an animal torturer before obtaining my driver’s license.) Gremlins stood out because it hilariously mocked the tropes its peers espoused, and viewing it in adulthood has unmasked a black-hearted, subversive flick I cherish even more as the offspring of Steven Spielberg (producer) and Christopher Columbus (screenwriter); it’s more traumatizing when you mull over how Phoebe Cates delivers a disturbing speech that ruins Santa’s mythology for anklebiters whose parents are sick enough to screen this for them. Columbus’s script ridicules capitalism and commercialism (probably drafted while Gizmo toys were stitched in The Orient), predicts the now prevalent reliance on in-home technology, and has endless classic movie and TV allusions that intermittently arise. Since I learned of The Howard Hawks Rule™️—the director decreed that a worthwhile movie had three good scenes, no bad ones—I’ve substantiated that it’s an infallible path to a recommendation. As proof, I propose that Gremlins uses a blender, motorized handrail chair, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to earn the designation, making for one helluva transgressive kids movie (and half of the reason the PG-13 rating was birthed!). Many protest that the sequel is an improvement but that’s retconned malarkey if you ask me. You didn’t ask me? Carry on.

Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
A first ballot entrant into the Oh, That’s on Cable, I’ll Neglect the DVD on the Shelf and Examine All Four-and-a-Half Commercial-Fettered & Edited Hours Now Hall of Fame! (Aside: It was the first DVD I bought.) One thing this movie may not get ample acclaim for is how crushingly melancholic the trio of relationships are portrayed—Amy Brenneman and her (presumably velvety-to-the-touch) flowing curls as a southern belle opposite De Niro’s no bullshit heavy is my favorite although Val Kilmer/Ashley Judd is more agonizing whereas Al Pacino/Diane Venora (“JUUUSSSTEEEEN!”) is plain dicey—and Elliot Goldenthal’s guitar-saturated moody score wholly complements their existentialism. It deserves credit for expertly casting recognizable faces (Natalie Portman, Jon Voight, Ted Levine, Tom Sizemore, et. al.) and has earned a justifiably excessive amount of encomiums for its signature heist sequence—note to self when witnessing a bank robbery: don’t worry, it’s the bank’s money being stolen, not my money, my money is federally insured—which utilizes vivid daytime downtown L.A. scenery not commonly displayed in Tinseltown-centric flicks. No other violent scene eerily predated reality like the heist’s resemblance to the horrific North Hollywood shootout in ’97, a calamity I watched on the news while judging the verisimilitude in opposition to the legitimacy of Mann’s magnificent set piece.

Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)
Joaquin Phoenix’s most impressive performance is a marvel for convincingly exhibiting his love affair with A.I. and in its facility to transmit the utter lack of irony in Jonze’s screenplay, a hallmark of Charlie Kaufman’s pen in Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. (both exceptional for reasons different from Her, natch). Designing a vaguely futuristic L.A. via a unique aesthetic I wish cropped up in more illusory sci-fi, it intensely fixates on one man’s courtship of an invisible amour and small clump of characters (Olivia Wilde and Portia Doubleday are unforgettable in their lone scenes; Amy Adams provides reliably tender work), the emotions so raw they’re rendered universal despite the temptation to think nobody would stoop to sightless broadband boning. Recasting Samantha Morton’s larynx for Scarlett Johansson’s expressive, allegedly* Pall Mall-soaked vocal cords aids the obligatory (yet in no way comic) sexual layer to what could’ve been an obnoxious premise and may have you feasting on the copulative perks: “We’re not married but I’m sleeping in the same bed with my earpiece on weekends at my folks’ house because they’ll never know!” If this movie was titled Him and helmed by Harmony Korine, I can visualize an actress like Michelle Williams winning her Oscar for inexplicably getting Munchausen syndrome by proxy from her robot dick.

* Look at her rip through a lung javelin in Match Point. Jonze knew what he was doing. 

Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)
One of my favorite (nonexistent) genres is the I Have No Fucking Clue What Will Happen Next movie, and Holy Motors is one of the definitive participants in the field. After an opening scene that indicates what follows occurs in a dreamlike progression, Denis Lavant aka French William Robert Thornton leaves his Paris home, gets in back of a limo, and—U-TURN!—plunges into a day where he plays nine divergent roles even though no cameras or audiences are seen, the majority of his scripts strenuous: motion capture sex, eating flowers (and an assistant’s fingers) then kidnapping a model (an unanticipated Eva Mendes) in a cemetery, slaying a man who’s a dead ringer for Lavant (the one entering the limo to begin the day), and domesticity with his “partner and children” (who are chimpanzees). One might argue that it’s a tribute to all the ways, uh, movies can be movies, but it also might be what life could be like if reveries became reality or an homage to the commodification of limited attention spans. Or…maybe it’s verifying that we can all hatch our own interpretation, which is itself a testament to imagination (and cinema’s clout). Whatever it is, it rewards repeat viewing for hitting multifarious variations aided by Lavant’s spectacular performance(s); the guy is mesmerizing, hot damn. *wipes brow/wrings perspiration out of soaked wife beater* While I’m not partial to canonizing films less than a decade out, this and Her are my inclusions from the 2010s for introducing innovation to an art form cantankerous critics like to believe has nothing left to offer.

Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976)
Stunningly scenic, this road movie lays claim to a couple notable rubrics: the foremost is that it’s the most Drop-Dead Gorgeous-looking flick I’ve seen (filmed in B&W by Robby Müller, the cinematographer who inspires ceaseless idolatry—he put THIRTY MILES of celluloid in the can for this one!—and whose work on Wenders’s The American Friend or Paris, Texas, may be your optometrist’s DDG preference). Documented by the East German border from July 1st-October 31st, 1975, it’s also my favorite Road Movie, the story of two men who meet by chance; Rüdy Vogler plays a stand-in for Wenders who’s a film projector fixer-upper while Hanns Zischler is the sad sack who half-asses a suicide attempt in the Elbe River then hops in Vogler’s mammoth van-truck (accompanied by an achingly beautiful score along with brilliant oldies like Roger Miller’s lilting, de facto “King of the Road”). Buddy movie themes are ubiquitous—masculinity (penises are shown pissing and being masturbated, and Vogler takes a robust footlong dump on the riverside sand/praise be to the Germans and their lack of shame), traumas, familial dilemmas—as the boys hang out and, according to Wenders, improvise the dialogue for a compulsory three hours (could withstand three more, not a pitch I’d expect to write in defense of improv—labeling it as such is specious methinks). Yet for all the kudos, this is overwhelming Landscape Porn. Without Müller’s eye for trains (his iron horse shots should be the handbook in a Cinematography 101 class), trees, bodies of water, a multitude of angles depicting the travelers inside their Möbeltransporte (the size of a bus), clouds displayed through the sunroof skirting by the moon, go-karts, motorcycles, shaving cream, newspapers, and how film is projected (Factoid: one reel is called the slave, the other is the master), it wouldn’t be one-one thousandth the rapturous watch that it is. Bookended by conversations with an elderly man then woman bemoaning the upcoming death of cinema, it’s one utterance somewhere in the midsection that aptly explains the medium (and Wenders’s point): “I am my story.” Can envisage you thinking about it next time you pinch a loaf, ya depraved sicko. 

The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924)
This edges out his own visionary Sunrise because here Murnau created a virtually foolproof film without intertitles—except for that studio-imposed one preceding the cynical postscript—that tells a global tale of a German doorman’s mournful downfall via an immaculately self-aware Emil Jannings performance (the man mastered how to contort his face) and a similarly eager subsidiary cast. Murnau’s penetrating angularity, use of chiaroscuro, and meet-the-moment herky-jerky camerawork during a scene of drunken revelry tally up to the least dated ’20s movie you’ll see; this flick’s spirit may clandestinely be the basis for Robert Eggers’s career. Whenever someone falsely blusters about the inaccessibility of soundless cinema, force him/her/they to screen it by fabricating a statement and attaching a nationality to it for added gravitas: “As the Austrians say, ‘If it weren’t for The Last Laugh, we’d all be pedophiles.’” Disclaimer: Success rates will fluctuate depending on your geographic region.

Lola (Jacques Demy, 1961)
“A musical without music,” or so Demy dubbed it, it’s the third early ’60s New Wave film on the list—one is from Demy’s spouse (Varda)—consumed by a dominant heroine. In this instance, our (male) protagonist is crestfallen to see Anouk Aimée decamp (what man wouldn’t be?) with her One True Love, but the aftertaste holds the bitter, goes heavier on the sweet, largely because well-earned happiness is no bedfellow of derision. Set in Raoul Coutard’s spotless B&W Nantes, Marc Michel encounters his lost love, agrees to do a job for a diamond smuggler, and accepts how the greatest constant in Life is change (while being teased by the ephemeral lack thereof). Deftly juggling crisscrossing narrative pathways, Demy’s idée fixe is best served with harmonies subtracted; editorializing on the hustle and bustle with lyrics isn’t undesirable (I like The Young Girls of Rochefort nearly as much), but it undercuts the primacy. One could posit that this is the most French film on this list. Why? It’s the one nation—not to sell the collective licentiousness of Germany, Japan, and Thailand short—where a bookstore clerk suggests a Marquis de Sade novel for a fourteen-year-old girl.

Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
An astonishing documentary about Don’t Call It L.A.—Andersen as screenwriter/narrator is correct that no other metropolis gets verbally truncated as such—that’s a history of movies set in the city (and movies posing the city as a proxy for faraway locales), a personal history of the filmmaker’s time in his adopted hometown, a civics lesson about corruption (how symbolic a role immoral elected officials and conspicuously dirty cops play in El Lay movies) and institutional racism (citing black independent cinema—shout-out to Killer of Sheep—to illustrate that family values are constantly at risk due to the never-ending fear of unemployment), a manual of film terminology, and a recommendations rolodex (must see the original Gone in 60 Seconds stat). Not a ton of one hundred and seventy-minute movies about any subject matter flash by this expeditiously; Andersen may be pungent, but he’s chasing why the epicenter of his life’s passion has been controlled by privileged Caucasians who are deluded enough to think they know a city whose major source of their grief is traffic. Greatest Hits: The McDonald’s closed to the public/used exclusively for shoots; Bradbury Building annals (no need to Bing it if you’re a Blade Runner aficionado); how heroes and evildoers are signified by architecture; the self-abnegation of the artistic hivemind in relation to how disaster movies deserve to destroy landmarks (with Bunker Hill as the perfunctory postapocalyptic backdrop); how Dragnet made the city “the world capital of the weird” (discriminating televisual evaluations crop up too). When Andersen gets to expounding on how the “best films about Los Angeles are, at least partly, about modes of transportation” by implementing Chinatown and Who Framed Roger Rabbit to support his thesis, it’s obvious that if anybody else aims to comprehensively research a Cinema About Cinema topic, s/he better share the man’s exalted taste. Forget it, Thom. It’s L.A.

M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
Constructed at the dawn of the Talkie Era, Lang integrates direct sound spoken word scenes, distant silent shards, bulkier set pieces that were shot mute then overdubbed, and off-camera noises that elucidate the narrative, a puzzle piecing methodology not many could’ve coordinated. Peter Lorre’s an irresistibly credible creep—his bug eyes are scarier than a cabinetful of cockroaches—who is simultaneously sympathetic and deplorable, which flourishes because of the script co-written by Lang and his wife indicting societal hysteria, governmental malfeasance, and the tyrannical rumblings ripe to ransack the Weimar Republic. This movie’s ninety years old and you’re gonna reach for a spatula to scrape your jaw off the floor after the Holy Shit ending! Moore and I took a Film class at UConn where two dudes parked nearby mystifyingly looked like Jimmy Neutron and Lorre, the Pixar installment fans of oddball duos are now demanding but on the condition that Lorre’s child murderer isn’t left unattended with the Boy Genius unless it’s for charity. What charity? When the Children’s Defense Fund dries up? Sue Grafton Spoiler: The consonant’s not for Malice.

Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
Caught the 10 p.m. showing with Harry on opening night—an early January Friday in 2000—and was spellbound by the preparatory coincidences segment, unsure where the fuck it might take us from there. By the time the frogs splatted, we literally jumped out of our seats. Gotta do a Laundry List of Goodness because there’s too dang much: Aimee Mann has a warm spot in my heart forever for the “Wise Up” scene; this movie is why I like Supertramp (and think of Henry Gibson whenever I hear Roger Hodgson’s falsetto); the ensemble’s fabulous (Tom Cruise’s best role must be acknowledged—same for Melora Walters—but several familiar countenances give them quite a run along with Jason Robards’s fittingly bed-ridden and dying onscreen swan song); as has been noted, it owes a debt to Robert Altman’s sprawling composite dramas albeit surpassing his formula by a decent margin (bye-bye, Short Cuts); the unapologetically brutal emotional beats ring true for the entirety; and the dazzling moving camera and long takes flabbergast (looking forward to the sequel planted on the kids quiz show set). PTA is the rare director whose complete filmography is highly laudable, yet this one was so personally transformative that it cannot be topped. Addendum: Ricky Jay missed his calling as a narrator.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)
Ford directed a cluster of good to great (a handful are exceptional) movies, usually dragged down by unnecessary one-dimensional fringe characters (guilty as charged, Judge Priest). This revisionist western (my favorite type)—the fourth movie on my list starring Jimmy Stewart (Josh will be elated to tell you how I once knocked Jimbo for being too competent/Adam Harrison-Friday regrets the error) and one of four westerns (my favorite genre)—plays differently: soundstage sets (sadly no Monument Valley here/best ogled in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), shot in B&W, and with an uncharacteristic, ethically clouded, and notorious ending that sharply contrasts with Ford’s prior oaters. Lee Marvin’s irritable blowtorch of a villain makes you covet more of his screen time; the pessimistic tone when he’s not in frame helps keep the unsavoriness simmering. Tucked within the script’s demythologizing is a primo depiction of societal formation, boasting lovely portrayals of a free press and municipal debates. If you’re one who thinks The Duke’s a bootlicker, be sure to gleefully devour the Wikipedia entry detailing Ford’s treating him like The Dookie. 

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
The movie that cemented my love of Leonard Cohen—“He was just some Joseph looking for a manger”—is one of the most peculiar westerns there is. Altman’s fondness for improvisation, sideshow muttering, and subversion is on parade (archaic phraseology was the proper swerve in a revisionism sentence) frame by frame as a community is built from the ground up, yet it’s during the decisive pseudo-showdown when he flips the boilerplate duel upside down (“Boy, you turn me…”). Beholding Warren Beatty wade through a blizzard while his madam (a feisty Julie Christie) gets baked in an opium den, the townsfolk obliviously douse a church ablaze, and Vilmos Zsigmond’s foggy camerawork station our de facto hero’s underwhelming fate in a snowbank to propagate a gloriously stoned farewell, Altman implies that the good guys sometimes lost (big whoop) and that nobody gave a damn (big whoopsie-daisy). The director’s bent toward experimentation and nonconformist structure—“Let’s zoom in on a worthless character like Whiskey Drinker at the Bar #3,” he doubtlessly mused from the outset of an oeuvre enamored with the little guys (and dolls)—hit other highs (you’ve still got it, M*A*S*H) but couldn’t capture thunder in a bottle (R.I.P. Lightning—wait, what?) like this again. John McCabe 101: “If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass so much, follow me?” But if pigs flew, would they let frogs go along for the ride? That’s beside the point, which Altman deified.

Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
The quintessential Classic Film Noir (finally the bridesmaid, Double Indemnity), this thing has it all: an ideally cast Robert Mitchum (he clogs ashtrays with twelve cartons in ninety-seven minutes); Nicholas Musuraca’s gobsmacking cinematography/ here’s lookin’ at you, Sierra Nevadas; a vaunted ensemble (Kirk Douglas/incapable of an unsatisfactory performance and Jane Greer/slyly sinister and never finer/take that how you may); a script sharp enough for its attention to details within its twisty, multilayered plot, but able to contest anything in the genre on the back of its dozens of quotables/see: “She can’t be all bad. No one is.” “Well, she comes the closest.” Meaningless honor though it is, this movie’s the best one bookended by scenes with a deaf-mute person (played by Dickie Moore, a name begging for a “That’s what she said” response). The previous setup was strictly to unload a pen15 joke, but are any reviewers bequeathing you phallic content about ’40s noir? My gripes: Why steal forty grand and enter it as a deposit in your savings account ledger? And should they have retained the unbeatable title of the book Build My Gallows High? Yes, indeed!

The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)
There’s no separating the two: whatever you call Preston Sturges’s preeminent screwball comedy is what you’re calling THE Preeminent Screwball Comedy (no insolence directed at Howard Hawks’s runners-up). Originally titled Is Marriage Necessary?, the wonderful leads (Claudette Colbert and my main man Joel McCrea) split from the onset, allowing Colbert to accept money from the Wienie King, travel to Florida by train with a group of inebriated millionaires in the Ale and Quail Club (their specialties are booze and hunting, the second option if Reese’s “two great tastes” campaign flopped), and mercilessly mock John D. Rockefeller (his doppelgänger’s named John D. Hackensacker III/his yacht’s The Erl King). It winds up with a choreographed-from-the-get-go sight gag so phenomenal that it feels like Sturges was operating on another plane of comedic existence when concocting his WW2-era output. Lazy asshole’s graph ending but withholding these (snortable) lines would be beyond the pale: “Thank you for your chivalry.” “Any time from 8 to 12.” And: “I’m just a milestone around your neck.” “Millstone.” One more for the ode: “Captain, we should have met sooner, and if I’d seen you around, we would have!”

Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen & Hamilton Luske, 1940)
With due respect to Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, and Aladdin, this tale of the old fable is immutably linked with Disney animation in my mind. Revering the tease of immolation, donkey metamorphoses, and smoked-out whale sneezes should be all the verification you need to know about my disturbed prepubescent cartoon propensities. Four generations later, the effects spectacle wows: Monstro and the limitless, authentic-looking surrounding ocean, the visit from the ethereal Blue Fairy, the use of fire/flames, and Figaro (because I wish my schizoid cat were more analogous to him). It might seem simple and episodic, but the dips into morality—dishonesty, single parenting, and under-age imbibing and smoking cigars (but not gaspers/medical professionals were legally issuing cartons of Old Golds to newborns in 1940)—are timeless. The greatest geniuses habitually make it look too maddeningly easy. Can’t omit a salute to the magnifico voice work (Cliff Edwards as Jiminy Cricket exemplifies homespun clarity) or evergreen earworms (“When You Wish Upon a Star” and “I’ve Got No Strings”/I wouldn’t classify this as a musical, but it has compatible genetic code); your mileage may vary if the darkest and most distressing labor of Walt and Roy doesn’t amuse you. If so, remind me to forgo asking your opinion of Space Mountain.

Red Hot Riding Hood (Tex Avery, 1943)
My father hoarded bootlegged tapes of incalculable classic cartoons—the Warner Bros. archives, Scooby-Dooup the wazoo, and no auxiliary citations are necessary to reaffirm bygone actuality—along with the Tex Avery MGM cache. In this demonic seven minutes, the European legend is centered on a cooze-obsessed wolf, a vixen whose comeliness inspired Jessica Rabbit’s animators, her slutty grandma (she’s into bestiality), violent sight gags, (attempted then victorious) suicide, and the likelihood of necrophilia! You bet that seven-year-old AHF loved it and—Banal Critique Alert: “It’s even more radical today than it was then” (Take a big step back and literally fuck your own face, Me!)—it’s aged well despite the Blu-ray disclaimer’s embarrassing caveat that the content may be offensive nowadays because it was devised in a slept time (fka unwoke time). Like we don’t wanna see the “lost scene” of cel-by-cel incest/you won’t believe where his tail travels! Self-explanatory advice for further scrutiny: (Re-)watch all the Avery and Chuck Jones clips you can smoke out from the Google Video tab.

Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (Jeff Margolis, 1979)
The least hyperbolic hierarchical declaration in this opus: No better stand-up comedy has been documented. During my Blockbuster days, I enjoyed my breaks in the back/overstock space by watching a plenitude of the stand-up VHSes in the racks (two shifts per set)—Jeff Foxworthy’s blue-and-yellow-stickered clamshells were disdained—unkindly not rewinding at the halfway point/few rack hunters rented anyone but Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, or George Carlin. Viewing Pryor became a monthly habit until I discerned it wasn’t worth the lockjaw and headache each sitting left in its wake. There’s a laugh every fifteen to twenty seconds on average in this one, the abundance of highlights futile to report in full, but The Stuttering Chinaman, talking dogs (love how they call him Rich), lying child, imitations of white people cussing (nobody’s ever parodied honkies like Pryor), heart attack recreation, tales of exercising difficulties, the fuzz’s reaction to him shooting his car, and memories of his dad dying while digging out a prostitute (“He came while we went”) are why this man is Physical Comedy Godhead. If you’ve seen this set, you cover your ears whenever a monkey comes (pun intended) to mind.

Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)
Some may opt for the overlong Le cercle rouge, but Rififi (French Film Trivia: Jean-Pierre Melville gave the reins to Dassin) has more identifiable bandits, mouthwatering B&W Parisian cinematography, and filmdom’s most elaborate, logical, and nerve-racking (wordless) sting (based upon a real-life caper/mmm, that sounds tasty). Even though heist movies tend to have a mere pair of conclusions in play—left or right at the fork, you’re not going straight—it’s the execution that counts; here is the mold for the genre, “the biggest take since the Sabine women.” Dassin observes (and frequently revisits) the family lives of the four heistmen, initiating the ineluctably tragic final act, but not before the director obliquely rebukes Hollywood’s blacklisting him. Quibblers (unwisely) argue that the tone becomes sententious as the world crumbles around our antiheroes—Jean Servais’s performance is the linchpin—because they (in predictably alpha mode) regard pithy, feminist flurries of introspection as a buzzkill, not a boon. More troublesome is the youngster clenching a revolver in the climactic car ride; be glad we didn’t get a sequel nor any moralizing (the fateful implications are more ominous than those panning scribes intimated). Wrinkle: The title’s loosely translated as “chest puffing and macho tough guy posturing.” Beats Rifififofum, innit?

Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
I’m not sure my anticipation for seeing this in the theater had been equaled by any release upon my discovery of the arthouse in ‘94—I’d read a rave in Film Comment, a lapsed subscription I’m occasionally wistful about, checking the Hartford Courant on Thursday for weeks during awards season until it surfaced—and it more than lived up to the hype. The soundtrack (“Ooh La La” is faultless rock, and other inclusions from the British Invasion aren’t far off), signature color-accented set design, and Tati-inspired inclusive widescreen montage threw my fifteen-year-old psyche for a loop, boosted by a same-age, same-wiseass dork whose absurdity further tickled my inner goofball. Everything in this movie feels like it’s hovering a smidge beyond the edge of plausible reality, a fruitful byproduct of its beguiling worldview. I know Wes has a disdainful rep these days—I only care for his first three movies, but I love each of them—yet he’s the easiest choice for the modern director in possession of a visual sensibility so unmistakable that his movies wouldn’t require credits for one to instantly identify The Man Behind the Curtain. Hate to do it, but I’ll hate myself more—as if that’s possible—if I don’t do it. “Oh, are they?”

Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)
Call me crazy but there’s a period from (roughly) ’65-’75 when select directors used empty space to heighten (defined: make taller) images, washing out hues for a hazy, immense refinement; prime cinematographic case studies can be found in the stylings of Vittorio Storaro (Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris) and Gordon Willis (Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather/Part II). As you assumed, I assert that this flick’s blue-gray sheen best inhabits the je ne sais quois template poorly articulated in the previous line, the ocular epitome of cool (icy and fashionable). Melville’s spare style—sparse dialogue, anxiety-inducing cuts (*dad joke alert*/the metro pursuits are more intense than a campground), and suave props (Alain Delon’s fedora, trench coat, and sleek suits)—magnifies the singularity on hand; a deaf viewer might find it more enjoyable than silent works although the synthy score, a surefire John Carpenter favorite, would be missed. (Mea culpa to the theoretical deaf.) The nightclub set home to the unavoidable conclusion could fit in adjacent to Playtime’s Royal Garden, forming a consummately chic Paris-in-’67 double bill. Arrive for the elegance, revel in the panache, and tout its tranquil grandeur whenever a derivative wrongly seizes loudness instead.

A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954)
Get your eyes ready to roll (hold the rock): I’m “one of those” who picks nits at the unnaturalness of musicals, which is why this one’s rule flaunting hits me square in the love bone (my heart, ya deviant!). There’s the greatest Old Hollywood dame at her vulnerablest (yeah, yeah) and most emotional (Liza Minnelli’s mom, singing her knockers off), James Mason (and his beloved accent you’ll be impersonating) as one of cinema’s legendary drunks, diegetic songs (Judy Garland’s a singer in a band who Mason’s transfixed by), a bleak view of Glitz ’n’ Glamor atypical for a big budget ’50s Cinemascope picture, and its mangled history (cut, re-cut, stills reinserted in place of lost footage a la Greed) that make it a noncompliant jewel in a genre teeming with artifice. I’ve never seen the original with Fredric March or the ’70s pairing of Babstofferson, but it struck me how heavily Lady Stef was influenced by Garland for her mimetic, vulnerable turn in the recent iteration (a clunker, not solely because Bradley Cooper modeled his role on Eddie Vedder). This movie is a masterwork for the lead performances alone—Garland would’ve shone even if Ed Wood was behind the camera—and corroborates that the right actor(s) can subvert Auteur Theory stalwarts.

Step Brothers (Adam McKay, 2008)
I’d be foolish if I failed to anoint a generation-defining comedy—Superbad is its unequivocal second banana—and this one, the only one that’s made me cry-laugh multiple times during multiple sittings, has to be it. Upon seeing it when it was released, I unintentionally avoided it for a decade afterward, saving myself from the preordained “bro-ing out” by dudes like the mouth-breathers I disparaged in college whose personalities revolved around quoting The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers. Will Ferrell’s brand of improvisational zaniness—best savored with Chuckle Wizard John C. Reilly as his foil—succeeds by eschewing Big Issues, wisely settling for fatuous simplicity to spotlight the monkeyshines. Should you hear anybody bitch about how asinine the plot is—too bad David Lean wasn’t alive to pretty it up—point out that seeking cinéma verité in box office knee-slappers would be more pretentious than Bjork donning a dress comprised of Florence Griffith Joyner’s discarded fingernails to an exhibition of Mark Rothko’s “lesser-knowns.” (Joke dedicated to Dennis Miller.) Choice cuts: scrotal drumming, Kathryn Hahn’s postcoital urinal visit (no Ponyboy quip can hold a three-wick candle to it), Christmas-themed somnambulance, fresh appreciation for Axl Rose and Bonnie Raitt, and Adam Scott’s Big Dickhead Energy. New tradition: smoking a bowl and depleting a box of Kleenex (just kidding/too rich for my laughtears) eagle eyeing this one on Thanksgiving.

Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984)
The unquestionable mountaintop of concert movies, this chronicle of The Band I Would Pay $500 to See Reunited (Even If I Had to Get Vaccinated to Scan My QR “Stub”) is unrelentingly entertaining. “Life During Wartime” is about as pleasing as live music gets whereas the “Genius of Love” strobe light breakdown a half hour later enjoins you to readjust your earlier praiseworthy feelings. Building the stage from David Byrne, an acoustic axe, and a boombox to a rhythmically metronymic nonet, one of my five favorite bands cycles through a batch of alt-anthems eliciting shrieks, haphazard torso movements, and a general sonic inclination toward joy that merits being more of an idiosyncratic FM radio benchmark. As a loyal fan of concerts on film—best witnessed with a bud with a bud (a pal holding the kind that puts you under some kind of influence)—this one incorporates an abundance of dynamism, energetic close-ups, and subtle ingenuity to win over anyone who likes spending time with a frontman who impugns the attractiveness of imposter domiciles and spouses.

Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)
Shot in static, grainy B&W takes, this ninety-minute movie has sixty-seven scenes (!!!)—all ending with a cut to black before the next vignette—its nonchalant beats set in the ’80s but scanning more like a cinematic universe all their own. Jarmusch’s oeuvre is hit and miss (unless musicians-as-actors is one of your innocent pleasures/go pound sand, guilt), but his second feature is an unfathomably compelling road movie, especially given NYC, Cleveland, and Florida are glimpsed inside rooms more than on avenues and interstates. You may be prejudicial enough to presume it’s a Hipsters Only affair, but the thoughtful reliance on a single (killer) tune (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You”), circumvention of pop culture nods, and dependence on understatement generates an offbeat, dryly comic work worthy of its reputation as the steppingstone of American independent cinema. Jarmusch’s unorthodox cast is commendably laconic and John Lurie’s advice to his cousin (played by Eszter Balint in her movie debut) that she’ll be more American by euphemizing vacuuming as “choking the alligator,” a phrase I’ve yet to hear any Yank speak, secured a reservation in my reference lexicon (reflexicon?). Wim Wenders gifted Jarmusch film stock to make the short that mutated into this film; pairing it with Kings of the Road would forge the Shangri-La of Road Movie double bills (“Jim & Wim” on the marquee).

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
I know everything about this movie and nothing about this movie and hope to watch it twenty-five more times before I’m reborn as a glow-in-the-dark orchid. My oft-fantasized idea of unveiling the same story twice (or more) is (sort of) actualized: the first half’s set in a rural, verdant Thai hospital (1970s) whereas the second’s in a present-day, urban hospital. Numerous performers play borderline identical personages—Buddhism is one of the motifs (a dentist who performs country ballads about cleaning one’s teeth and love, not mutually exclusive, asks a monk if he’s his reincarnated brother)—in exact or thematically similar scenarios, but the dialogue, perspective, and outcomes differ. Director A&W (he gets the ampersand because names so awesome must stand alone) predicated both halves on his physician parents’ lives, stating the movie’s about transformation and memory yet it’s also about dichotomy (country/city, past/present, personal/ impersonal, solar eclipses/air ducts, playing acoustic guitar/flying a drone: Quirky Monk Interests) even if it forsakes declaring one half of each either/or more optimal than the other, wafting away as the camera surveils people performing activities in public (with a closing shot of pure jubilance!). Don’t mistake its art installation motives for hollowness; the Lynchian Air Duct of Doom along with one kooky character staring eternally at the lens while a drinking doctor performs chakra healing in the background are trancelike, an invitation to how one should read the tone of the film. By focusing on tiny moments/holding inconsequential frames to pinpoint emotions, A&W illuminates the human experience via a small scale “narrative” as—please, oh no, fuck, yep, you’re cringing, whatever, fuck you!—poetry metamorphoses into film. (Note on the previous sentence: the majority of my self-respect oddly died in a housefire years ago.) I guess what I’m trying to say is: If you’ve sealed its fate as artsy garbage, it’s the inadequacy of my keystrokes, not A&W’s (okay, fine, he’s authorized you to call him Joe) astral vision.

Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, 1999)
Saw it in a deceased, prized theater of my teens with Harry—she was instantaneously bored and opted to nap, commanding me to wake her for the trek home—and idolized every shred of it, aided by an audibly receptive, geriatric Hartford matinee crowd. I don’t care about Gilbert & Sullivan apart from this biopic, which functions as a method I’m keen on: works concerning behind the scenes evolution of something fit for a stage (backed by Leigh’s well-rehearsed-by-way-of-improvisation technique with his troupers that appends significant depth). Featuring peerless performances by Jim Broadbent and Allan Corduner as the titular librettist/composer duo, never mind a similarly well-defined ensemble that dramatize staples from G&S’s The Mikado at length on kaleidoscopic, amply detailed late 1880s replica sets, said criteria make this pantheon period piece overdue for a new audience (since its own generation didn’t find it). As much as I treasure them both—and would attempt to sell you that any of the movies on my list pair to produce a supreme double bill—this one doesn’t mix with Amadeus unless your sentiments about opera rival my cousin’s (as yet undiscovered) fetish of catching me rubbing my balls on his sedan.

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)
The utmost saccharine choice on my list, this (admittedly) Boy movie was the cinema equivalent of Nintendo’s Mario 64 release eight months later. Not only did it look like the future of animation, it was gratifying for several reasons: witnessing the indescribable idea of animated (aka breathing) toys—toys who happened to be cute, mirthful, clever, gutsy, etc.; the sullen undercurrent (tips of the cap to Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist, plus neighbor Sid’s vicious predilections); dirty jokes (as Pixar’s first production, it spawned the “There’s plenty for adults too” party line that conjoined with the company ethos forevermore); skeptic Randy Newman’s touching songs; a profusion of excitable voice actors (Don Rickles, R. Lee Ermey, and Wallace Shawn are standouts); and on and on. Jackasses may accuse it of being geared toward merchandising, but the twelve-year-old me who saw it on the big screen would’ve been devastated if he couldn’t have his own Buzz Lightyear action figure/doll/plaything forthwith. Don’t quote me—odd phrasing for an essay—but it may be the best movie franchise (non-trilogy division) for combined quality (all three sequels are excellent, proved by the plastic Forky who sits in front of my TV). I adore this film so much that I regularly end text messages to Sue with, “I love you to infinity…and beyond!”

Trois Couleurs: Bleu/Blanc/Rouge (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993–1994)
My favorite trilogy—always preFrentiously referred to in its mother tongue—I’m cheating by including it as one entry. Rouge was top drawer as a teen, but time has warmed me to Bleu due to aforementioned Thespian Grandmaster Juliette Binoche’s aptitude for expressing emotional turmoil. Blanc’s (rightfully) been deemed the weakest link (“Au revoir!”), but as Roger Ebert noted, each film is the antithesis of the genre it’s replicating/deconstructing (Bleu/tragedy, Blanc/comedy, Rouge/romance), a tricky ballet with laughless beats that Blanc sticks. If metaphors are your bag, Rouge has enough intricate camerawork to be assessed as a touchstone by the brood of cinematographers who drooled over it in film school (probably at USC/so basic). Kieślowski’s fastidiously convergent (and uplifting) ending cements the credo: They can be savored individually but are best appreciated as one unit. If you’re unsold on my love for this triumvirate, I present Moore’s AIM away message from July 4th, 2006: “I am wearing Red, White, and Blue today. This, however, is not because it is Independence Day, but rather because it is AHF’s birthday. And as he is the only person I know who has seen Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Trois Couleurs trilogy, the colors seem more than fitting.”

25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)
Blasphemous though it appears, it’s the best thing both Spike and David Benioff (wrote the book and the screenplay) have ever done (Amanda Peet excluded for the latter). Set in the aftermath of 9/11 without the rah-rah bullshit but with a just right blend of atmosphere, Edward Norton plays a drug dealer on the verge of a seven-year bid who devotes his farewell day to his boo (yikes!—scared myself), Pop, best buds (a financial broker and professor), and one of said bud’s underclasswomen (an irreproachable cast of Rosario Dawson, Brian Cox, Barry Pepper, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Anna Paquin). Ethics get explored in such nuance that Aristotle, Jr. (apocryphal) would be proud; best of luck forgetting Norton’s misanthropic, racist rant from the reflective side of a mirror, the height of chilling, self-loathing scenes in a script that has its fill. The fever dream finale—graciously permitting us to come down from a bruising culmination of the corrosive and resentful aspects of male camaraderie—clinches the poetic momentum of the portraiture in myriad ways, ending on a stoically hopeful note endemic to NYC circa 2002. Inserting a track from The Rising as the credits roll unites the most deeply felt album and film about America’s worst terrorist attack. 

The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)
Maximizing tension—nail-biting (yum) and homoerotic (yummier)—this sleazy thriller, upon repeat viewings, holds up better than any other for prompting (already engrained) winces at the prospective destiny of its morally gray principals. Before two duos drive trucks snaking nitroglycerine through three hundred miles of winding, narrow South American roads, Clouzot allocates an hour to evolving his headliners, embedding the sensual frustration (between both Charles Vanel and Yves Montand, and the female love interest—Clouzot’s femme Véra—and her cleavage’s pointless protestation of desire for an inattentive Montand), and shunning the getting-to-know-you clichés one would expect if we skipped to the hour mark; respect for not relegating lingering character development in favor of cheap thrills. There’s one scene involving a rickety bridge, mud, and a slight incline that may assault your nervous system enough to have you gesticulating at the B&W treachery more than a mime with Parkinson’s. Can’t ignore a few conveniences and minor quibbles that arise, but they should be cast away moments prior to the playfully malevolent FIN zipping into focus. 

The Weather Man (Gore Verbinski, 2005)
The least likely entrant on this list—a hoot that it’s the anchor—I’ll attempt to fortify a position you, dear reader, have written off (“He had a slot for that but not [offal] by [mechanical pencil in acclaimed director]!”). My college roommate (Sal) and I got high, took our weekly jaunt to the one video store on the UConn campus in the autumn of ’06, and for reasons unclear, he read the back of the DVD box and elected to disburse $14.99 to own this previously viewed flick. We watched it four days in a row—first together then adding virgin viewers on subsequent days—and couldn’t stop howling at its caustic commentary on commercialism (Nicolas Cage’s meteorologist—Dave Spritz, which one of his detractors calls a “bullshit name”—keeps musing about passersby in cars throwing fast food at him), the rigors of adulthood responsibility (Michael Caine—in a characteristically unflappable performance—plays Cage’s demeaning father along with Hope Davis’s sensational turn as Cage’s ex-wife), and adolescent struggles (pedophilia: photography :: camel toes: archery). As if that weren’t sufficient, it contains cinema’s choicest scene about unseen tartar sauce, a eulogy unified by Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock,” a top shelf insult (try not using “blue ribbon fuck” post hoc), and a snapshot of the dissociative nature of not only city life, but life anywhere in the twenty-first century (initially you laugh at Cage, later you dislike him, ultimately you empathize/how did we reach the moronic paradox when he became a leading man laughingstock?). The ending’s a bit pat, but the wisdom preceding it is trenchant enough to dismiss the flaw: “To get anything of value you have to sacrifice” and “In this shit life we must chuck some things.” Those are Spritz Nippers worth engineering an outlook around.

FIN

(End)