Top 5 Movie Lists, Part 4
RECAP: Amelia and I purchased a 5-disc DVD changer over the weekend, to celebrate our generous tax return. In honor of this, I wanted to list my five favorite movies, as though deciding which movies I would choose if I could only put 5 movies in the DVD player. However, after pouring over all of my favorite flicks, I realized that it would be completely impossible to pick just five. Therefore, I narrowed it down to my top five movies in each of twelve genres (some of which I made up myself). A lot of time and effort was made in compiling this list, and I’d like to thank Netflix, IMDB, and Wikipedia for their tireless help in my review. Also, due to the size of this list and the time it is taking me to compile it, I have decided to split it into four installments to be posted here over the next few days. Check back all week, and be sure to add comments detailing all the different ways in which you disagree with my assessments.
Horror
The Shining
Stanley Kubrick’s silver screen interpretation of Stephen King is one of the best. Kubrick’s methodical pacing and attention to detail—which turn off the average moviegoer in many of his other films—work to build the suspense and sense of isolation that the story relies on. Add to that some truly twisted imagery and the brilliant acting of Jack Nicholson as a writer who slowly goes homicidally insane and you have a recipe for great horror.
The Fly (1986)
“Be afraid,” warns heroine Veronica in David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly, “Be very afraid.” The Fly is the story of scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), who has invented a machine that allows transport between two places simultaneously. Impatient to go through the arduous steps leading up to the first human trial, he undergoes the experiment himself, only to discover much later in the film that he made one fatal error: he accidentally fused his genetic material with that of a simple housefly. As a result of this, Brundle slowly becomes more insectoid, in ability, appearance, and attitude, until he essentially transforms into a human-sized fly. While the story could easily make for a hack-and-slash monster flick, Cronenberg wisely chooses to focus on the psychological horror of the transformation itself, as it not only affects Brundle, but also his budding relationship with Veronica (played by Geena Davis), who is the real protagonist of the story. This is a startlingly profound movie, but I don’t recommend trying to eat dinner while you watch it.
Misery
The second King adaptation to make this list, Misery is a writer’s worst nightmare. Everybody wants recognition—even admiration—but there comes a point where fame breeds fanaticism, and then fanaticism breeds the likes of Annie Wilkes. Annie (Kathy Bates won a well-deserved Oscar for her portrayal) is the self-proclaimed number one fan of Paul Sheldon (James Caan), writer of a series of pulpy romance novels centering on the character of Misery Chastaine. Sheldon, who has recently made the decision to kill off his popular character and focus his writing energies on more serious work, is suddenly caught in a snowstorm on a mountain, causing a car accident that leaves him nearly dead. He is miraculously rescued by Annie Wilkes, who nurses him back to health, proclaims her love for him, and then takes a turn for evil when she discovers that he has killed her beloved Misery. It contains one of the most difficult scenes for any writer to watch, as Annie forces Paul to torch the only copy of his latest novel, and one of the most toe-curling scenes involving a sledgehammer.
The Thing (1982)
The “aliens among us” story has been done so many times that it is practically its own subgenre of horror/sci-fi. However, John Carpenter’s incredibly moody The Thing takes all of the standard themes of that subgenre—deep paranoia, xenophobia, and isolation—and makes sure they don’t feel cliché. Set in the Antarctic, The Thing is about an unknown lifeform that has been extracted from the ice and can take on the appearance of any living thing. Of course, in order to assimilate that living thing, the lifeform has to kill it. There are only a handful of characters, and it’s a fascinating study to watch how they all-too-slowly figure out what is going on and that they can’t trust anyone but themselves. Twenty-five years later, and the psychological overtones of the film seem more relevant than ever.
Jacob's Ladder
No movie has scared the shit out of me more than Jacob’s Ladder, a film about a Vietnam vet who has lost his only son and quite possibly his own sanity. He starts seeing demons (including the devil himself, who has sex with his girlfriend at a dance party), having intense fevers, and begins unraveling a conspiracy involving tainted LSD his old platoon had been given back in the jungles of Vietnam. The movie is ultimately about madness, death, regret, guilt, and depression, but all of that culminates in one of the trippiest and most terrifying experiences to be found on screen. ***SPOILER ALERT!*** Also, the twist at the end, which is wholly appropriate and gives the film its deep spiritual message, is far more original and shocking here than it is at the end of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense.
Honorable Mentions: 1408 (unrated version), The Blair Witch Project, Interview with the Vampire, The Jacket, The Others, Poltergeist, Session 9, Seven, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Science-Fiction
Blade Runner
Before Ridley Scott became overly fond of historical epics, he made two movies that secured him a place among the greatest science-fiction moviemakers of all time. Unfortunately, after making those two great films, he stopped making sci-fi altogether, so we are left with just two masterpieces. But that’s okay, because they stand very well on their own. The first such masterpiece is Blade Runner, and I’m not going to get into the endless debate over which of the half dozen edits of the film is the best, because even the worst edit is still one of the best sci-fi movies of all time. Though it has practically nothing in common with the brilliant Philip K. Dick novel upon which it is supposedly based (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), Blade Runner is one of the finest examples of dystopian film. It is dark, mind-bending, violent, and philosophical, with layers beneath layers that you won’t even notice until you’ve watched the movie a dozen times or so. As deep as the finest piece of medieval art, Blade Runner is nothing short of a religious experience for the science-fiction fanatic.
Alien
Ridley Scott’s other movie just happens to be the next one on this list, the sci-fi flick he made before Blade Runner. Alien is one of those movies that was so different, brilliant, and effective for its time that it became a template for thousands of movies to follow it. Modern audiences with no knowledge of this might think Alien is less than original, but they will still be surprised by how frightening it is. Whether you attribute it to Ridley Scott’s direction, the state-of-the-art special effects (effects that still hold up today, much like Blade Runner’s), the masterful creation of H.R. Giger, the deeply disturbing character-driven story, the deep allegory of a fear of the unknown and visceral, or the breakout performance of a young Sigourney Weaver, you have to recognize that Alien is something special.
eXistenZ
My personal favorite Cronenberg movie, eXistenZ, is a trippy exploration of the blurry line between fiction and reality, like many of his pre-Viggo films (Naked Lunch, Videodrome, and Spider, to name a few). However, unlike the rest of them, this story is probably the clearest and most accessible. Instead of using the medium of drugs, television, or insanity, eXistenZ uses video games of a slightly cyberpunk future to illustrate the point that realism, when taken to its most extreme, can break down the existential barriers of reality to a point where all morality and consciousness is ferociously relative. Murder, mayhem, and even terrorism can be justified through the lens of overly realistic interactivity, and while it’s not something that seems dangerous just yet, Cronenberg’s film might just be a little more accurate about the future than we’d like to imagine. It should be noted that two other films came out the same year, dealing with similar subject matter: The Thirteenth Floor, which is good in its own right, and The Matrix, which relies too heavily on action and inconsistent philosophies to make this list, despite the fact that it is clearly the most popular of the three.
Gattaca
Another sci-fi film that may prove to be a surprisingly accurate bit of foreshadowing is Gattaca, a movie about the future of genetic engineering. Ethan Hawke plays Vincent Freeman, a natural born human in a world of genetically superior supermen and superwomen, who wants nothing more than to travel to the stars. Due to a genetic heart defect and his limited life expectancy, however, Vincent is forced to falsify his identity and become the much more desirable Jerome Morrow (Jude Law), a man with a perfected genetic code and a ludicrously high life expectancy. He succeeds in doing the impossible, but as the date of his trip to space nears, a murder investigation explodes at his place of work, threatening to expose him for who he really is, and he falls in love with fellow scientist Irene Cassini (Uma Thurman), giving him a possible reason to stay grounded on the Earth. Gattaca is an emotionally complex movie with a blatantly obvious—but critically important—theme. It’s a fantastic movie, and an uplifting example of what science-fiction should be.
Contact
For some reason, it is popular to dislike Contact, the Robert Zemeckis adaptation of Carl Sagan’s highly influential novel. However, as far as I’m concerned, Contact is the most important science-fiction movie ever made. Even though I could write endlessly about the amazing special effects, acting talent, and actual science poured into the film, the thing that makes it such an integral work of art is the story itself. It deals with the all-encompassing question of faith versus science, a question that is central to how every modern human being faces his or her life. Most people, I think, don’t like to dive too deeply into that question, but Contact forces you to do just that, to reach into the darkest corners of your beliefs and study what you find there against the cold light of reality. While the movie carefully avoids telling you to chose faith or skepticism, it makes it clear that neither of the two is without its flaws. ***SPOILER ALERT!*** When Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) is forced to admit she doesn’t believe in God, you feel bad for her, not because she doesn’t believe in God, but because she is so harshly judged for her belief. Then, when her character undergoes the dramatic change towards the end of the film, you can’t help but feel intensely strong for her when she is forced to admit that she has decided to take something on faith alone. If that is not the central struggle of the modern psyche, I don’t know what is.
Honorable Mentions: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Aeon Flux, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Aliens, Alien^3, Back to the Future, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dark City, The Day the Earth Stood Still, E.T. Extra Terrestrial, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Event Horizon, Fifth Element, Forbidden Planet, The Fountain, I, Robot, Metropolis (1927), Minority Report, Planet of the Apes (1968), Somewhere in Time, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Star Trek: Nemesis, Signs, Strange Days, Vanilla Sky, War of the Worlds (1953), War of the Worlds (2005)
War/Politics
The Sum of All Fears
I was horrified when I heard that the Jack Ryan film franchise was going to be rebooted (before “rebooted” became a popular term in Hollywood) with Ben Affleck taking over the role. However, when I was finally dragged to see The Sum of All Fears by my good friend John, it instantly became my favorite film in the entire series. While Tom Clancy might be a fat, pretentious, arrogant fuckwad of a human being, he is a damn good writer, and The Sum of All Fears is an alarmingly realistic imagining of events that could potentially lead to nuclear war in the modern world. The novel was written before 9/11, but the movie was made after, so certain changes had to be made, although the central players—the European neo-Nazis, the Islamic terrorists, the arms dealer who finds an Israeli broken arrow, and the two leading world superpower nations—are still more or less present in the final tale. Still, the movie is just as troubling and nightmarishly realistic as the novel upon which it is based. ***SPOILER ALERT!*** When the final act of the film begins with a nuclear bomb detonating in the heart of Baltimore, it makes your heart skip, because the movie not only convinces you it could happen, it makes you realize that such a thing is inevitable. Then, when you realize it’s just the beginning of the film’s climactic endgame, it’s almost too much to take.
Paths of Glory
Though Full Metal Jacket is Stanley Kubrick’s better-known and more popular war movie, Paths of Glory is a more important film. Dealing with a group of soldiers in World War I who disobey orders and retreat from a hopeless battle, Paths of Glory is not about the hellishness of war, the conflict between warring soldiers, or the sacrifices of heroes; it is about the loss of humanity that necessarily comes from leading men to their death. It’s not a movie that uses the story for some current (which at the time it was made would have been 1957) political agenda, like most war movies, nor is it a movie that tries to preach to an audience about how war may or may not be necessary. It’s a timeless human story, and for that, it belongs on this list before most others.
Hotel Rwanda
Like most people, I was fairly oblivious to the conflict in Rwanda when it happened sometime in April 1994, despite a wealth of high-speed communication and 24-hour news broadcasts. The unfortunate truth, a truth that continues to this day, is that there is so much atrocity in various parts of this world that it is impossible to keep track of it all. The Rwandan massacre, though, inspired several incredibly good movies, and the best of them is probably Hotel Rwanda. What makes the Rwandan massacre so important is that it is a perfect allegory for most major human conflict. Two groups of people, the Tutsis and the Hutus, have practically everything in common; the difference between the two is superficial and arbitrary at best. But these two groups wanted to eradicate one another, believing in an inherent superiority that simply does not exist within the bounds of reality. It shows that you can commit genocide for no reason at all, and that’s what makes man’s inhumanity to man so maddeningly incomprehensible and disgusting. What the films about Rwanda focus on, Hotel Rwanda in particular, is how uncaring the world seemed to be about the event, how the U.N. stood by and did exactly nothing while politicians split hairs over what constitutes a genocide and whether they can legally intervene based on such bureaucratic definitions. Man’s inability to help his fellow man is just as disgusting, if not moreso, and yet I freely admit I didn’t know what was going on back in 1994.
Schindler's List
Still, as genocides go, the Hutus don’t got shit on the Nazis. Schindler’s List is really the same story as Hotel Rwanda, it’s just framed in a different time with different people. But Schindler’s List is the far more effective film, and remains the only cinematic experience where I watched the entire audience sit quietly through the closing credits, shocked beyond the ability to function. If you haven’t seen Schindler’s List, you owe it to yourself to watch it. Right now.
Saving Private Ryan
Equally important is Saving Private Ryan, but I put it higher than Schindler’s List for technical reasons rather than thematic ones. While Schindler’s List is certainly an amazing feat of movie magic, Saving Private Ryan has the ability to put you into shell shock. In fact, many veterans of World War II who watched the film had incredibly traumatic reactions to its realism. But this is not a movie for the men who lived through that horror in order to save the free world; this is a movie for everybody else. It’s impossible to understand the sacrifice, but Saving Private Ryan does the best it can to explain it.
Honorable Mentions: Black Hawk Down, The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Clear and Present Danger, Full Metal Jacket, The Hunt for Red October, Live from Baghdad, Platoon, Sometimes in April, Wag the Dog
Western (BONUS GENRE)
The Searchers
Who Shot Liberty Valance?
The Naked Spur
3:10 to Yuma (2007)
Tombstone
Honorable Mentions: The Shootist, Stagecoach (1939), Unforgiven
-e. magill 02/07/2008
Check out the other installments:
| PART 1: | Action/Adventure
Animation
Classics |
| PART 3: | Drug Movies
Fantasy
Historical Drama/Epic |
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