Favorite Movies, 1-100

I'm sure nobody but boring bean-counters like me cares, but this post marks the 100th post by this blog! Woot woot! So in celebration of that milestone, I thought I'd do something fun. And because I'm a weird, boring bean-counter who likes quantifying art into meaningless lists, I make a list of my 100 favorite movies. Yay!

Actually, this turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. Apparently, I have a lot of favorite movies. My apologies to the many, many movies left on the cutting-room floor. In order to avoid making this list even more difficult than it already was, I didn't really do any sort of ranking here; the movies are just listed alphabetically by title (with the release year and director[s] in parentheses off to the side).

Of course, I make no claims to any of these movies being the "best" or anything like that. I just happen to really dig them. My intention here is, if anyone's interested, to start a conversation where everyone shares their favorite movies. I'm seriously much more interested in hearing y'all's favorite movies than I am mine. So please! Share! Tell me how bad my taste is! Tell me what movies you would have picked instead! That's the whole point of list-making.


For those who are interested, numbers:

• The most represented letters of the alphabet are S and T, with 11 films each.
• The most represented director is Ingmar Bergman, with 4 films to his name.
• The most represented decade is, not surprisingly, given my age, 2000-2009, with 21 films.

The List
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)
Airplane! (1980, Jim Abrahams and David & Jerry Zucker)
Aladdin (1992, Robert Clements and John Musker)
Alien (1979, Ridley Scott)
Annie Hall (1977, Woody Allen)
The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)
Babe (1995, Chris Noonan)
Barton Fink (1991, Joel & Ethan Coen)
Before Sunset (2004, Richard Linklater)
Being John Malkovich (1999, Spike Jonze)
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989, Stephen Herek)
The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez)
Cabin in the Woods (2012, Drew Goddard)
Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)
Certified Copy (2010, Abbas Kiarostami)
The Circus (1928, Charles Chaplin)
Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
City of God (2002, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund)
The Conversation (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)
Coraline (2009, Henry Selick)
Day of Wrath (1943, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Days of Heaven (1978, Terrence Malick)
Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)
Donnie Darko (2001, Richard Kelly)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick)
The Emperor's New Groove (2000, Mark Dindal)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982, Steven Spielberg)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry)
Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987, Sam Raimi)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999, Stanley Kubrick)
Fantasia (1940, So many people)
Frankenstein (1931, James Whale)
The General (1926, Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966, Sergio Leone)
Goodfellas (1990, Martin Scorsese)
Groundhog Day (1993, Harold Ramis)
His Girl Friday (1940, Howard Hawks)
The House of the Devil (2009, Ti West)
The Illusionist (2010, Sylvain Chomet)
Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)
The Iron Giant (1999, Brad Bird)
It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012, Don Hertzfeldt)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)
Juno (2007, Jason Reitman)
Kicking and Screaming (1995, Noah Baumbach)
The King of Comedy (1983, Martin Scorsese)
The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003, Peter Jackson)
M (1931, Fritz Lang)
The Magician (1958, Ingmar Bergman)
Magnolia (1999, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)
Man with a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov)
The Mirror (1975, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011, Brad Bird)
Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979, Terry Jones)
Modern Times (1936, Charles Chaplin)
Network (1976, Sidney Lumet)
The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000, Joel & Ethan Coen)
Pan's Labyrinth (2006, Guillermo del Toro)
Paper Moon (1973, Peter Bogdanovich)
ParaNorman (2012, Sam Fell and Chris Butler)
Persona (1966, Ingmar Bergman)
The Piano (1993, Jane Campion)
Pinocchio (1940, A whole bunch of folks)
The Prestige (2006, Christopher Nolan)
Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)
Pulp Fiction (1994, Quentin Tarantino)
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985, Woody Allen)
Radio Days (1987, Woody Allen)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg)
Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)
Repulsion (1965, Roman Polanski)
The Secret of Kells (2009, Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey)
A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi)
Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)
A Shot in the Dark (1964, Blake Edwards)
Sleeping Beauty (1959, A lot of folks)
The Social Network (2010, David Fincher)
Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)
Spider-Man 2 (2004, Sam Raimi)
The Star Wars Trilogy (1977, 1980, 1983; George Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Richard Marquand [respectively])
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, F. W. Murnau)
Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder)
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013, Isao Takahata)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991, James Cameron)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)
There Will Be Blood (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson)
The Thing (1982, John Carpenter)
Through a Glass Darkly (1961, Ingmar Bergman)
Toy Story (1995, John Lasseter)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, John Huston)
Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)
25th Hour (2002, Spike Lee)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992, David Lynch)
Up (2009, Peter Docter)
WALL-E (2008, Andrew Stanton)
When Harry Met Sally... (1989, Rob Reiner)
Winter Light (1963, Ingmar Bergman)
The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming)

Mini-Reviews for May 2 - May 22, 2016 (aka "Sorry for the delay!")

Due to a lot of end-of-semester craziness and some personal stuff, it's been two weeks since I've been able to write one of these review posts. I don't know if anyone hangs on these posts or waits up at night for them or anything, but if someone does, I'm sorry! Hopefully this extra-long post makes up for the delay.

Movies

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
The title leads you to believe that this is a Looney Tunes movie, and it's certainly anarchic and self-referential enough to earn that moniker. But what this movie really is is a salute to Warner Bros. history in general, which makes it way more fun than a Chuck-Jones-less Looney Tunes movie was ever going to be. It's sometimes trying too hard, and not all the jokes land. But it's got an Animaniacs-esque love of movie history, and it's hard to begrudge that. Grade: B+

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
It's one of the funniest American movies of the past few decades. It's also got that irritating, show-stopping meta-commentary by Robert Downey Jr.'s character, which doesn't stop it from being one of the funniest American movies of recent years. But it is something extra that just kind of drives me up the wall—we get it, movies are artificial. The core of this movie is just aces, though; bonus points to Michelle Monaghan for breathing life into her wafer-thin girl friday. Grade: A-

The Descent (2005)
Why aren't more horror movies set in caves? Caves are terrifying! Especially when, as is the subtext in this movie, the cave leads to Hell itself. It's a spooky, unsettling undercurrent that's made all the more spooky and unsettling by the masterful control of lighting. The lighting really is the MVP here; if I had to guess, I'd say that a full 25 percent of the film is entirely dark, while a not inconsiderable fraction of the movie's remainder is composed of shots with only a corner of the frame lit. It's wonderfully effective and creates the neat effect of making the audience as blind as the unfortunate cavers who star in the film, but what sets the lighting into truly incredible territory is the scenes lit by the cavers' various flares and glowsticks, casting the cave walls in fire-red and sickly green monochrome. It's without question one of the best-directed horror movies of the new millennium, and were it not for the relatively forgettable cast of characters (my one strike against the movie), we'd be dealing with an all-time classic here. Grade: A-

American Ultra (2015)
This movie thinks it's a lot more entertaining than it is, obsessed with its own presumed cleverness and ironic juxtaposition of tones. There are actually two really fantastic performances in here, one from Jesse Eisenberg and the other from Kristen Stewart, and the ending credits are, improbably, cool. All of which makes it even more of a shame that the movie surrounding those bright spots is such a bore. Grade: C

Steve Jobs (2015)
The cracker-jack Sorkin dialogue and inventive, stage-like structure (each of the three "acts" center around a long scene that focuses on a single product launch in Jobs' career) make this one of the best biopics in years—probably since Spielberg's Lincoln. That is, until it completely and catastrophically flubs the landing on one of the most astoundingly ill-conceived endings I've ever seen in a movie. There's a moment (I won't spoil it, but you'll know it once the final ten minutes slap you in the face) when the movie jumps from being a razor-sharp study of the compromises of genius to a weirdly beatific, tender mushfest, and it's awful. That said, 95 percent of the best biopic in years is still 95 percent of the best biopic in years. Cut your losses, I suppose. Grade: B

The Nice Guys (2016)
This will likely be the funniest movie of 2016—funny enough that it pretty much doesn't matter that the trailer revealed most of the best jokes. Of course, if you've been paying attention to the career of Shane Black, this should come as no surprise; unfortunately for me, I haven't been paying attention to Shane Black until just earlier this week when I saw Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, so I'm in the kind of dopey-eyed position of being surprised that The Nice Guys is every bit as funny—nay, funnier—than its trailer promised. I can't overstate how much the winning cast plays a hand in this success: Ryan Gosling in particular displays a proficiency with timing and physical comedy that makes this probably my favorite performance of his career. There's a lot of Robert Downey Jr.'s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang performance in him here, which is good. In fact, there's a lot of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in general here, which is mostly good but also comes with its own baggage: as in the earlier film, there's a troubling glibness surrounding the mistreatment of women, and the plot and writing in general hews closely enough to Black's wheelhouse that there's a definitely been-there-done-thatness to the whole movie that makes it just a tad less fresh than it might be in a vacuum. But still. This is great fun. Grade: A-

Television

Better Call Saul, Season 2 (2016) 
It's a slight step down from the first season, if only because the debut's sickening feeling of discovery made the tragedy of Jimmy's world all the deeper, but a slight step down from one of the best seasons of television in recent years still makes for very, very good television. This season is all about teasing out more complex varieties of the same basic conflicts from the first season, though in more heightened situations—as Jimmy works his way up the legal-world ladder, he faces again and again those same questions: the tension between what's right and what's right for his career, the gulf between what people deserve and what people get, all of which culminates in a riveting, tense showdown between Jimmy and his brother that reveals, yet again, that the great tragedy of the show is Jimmy's love for his brother. Also (and slightly unrelated): Kim Wexler is probably my favorite character on TV right now. Grade: A-


Books

Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A. S. King (2010)
I liked Reality Boy, the other A. S. King I've read, alright, but Please Ignore Vera Dietz is head and shoulders above that novel. It's got the same stellar command of voice and humor that gave Reality Boy its readability, but the dysfunction is dialed down just a bit, which makes room for a bit more tender (though still not exactly cuddly) character interplay, especially between Vera and her father. There are also the surreal touches, like the from-the-grave narration of "the dead kid," which serve alternatingly as flashback devices and little tone poems, and it adds tons of texture to the story. A broken heart lives at the center of this book—torn apart by lost friendships and death—and it's genuinely moving to see it pieced back together. Grade: A-

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King (1999)
It's not absolutely top-notch Stephen King, but it does present King in a very readable mode. The '90s were a decade of experimentation for King, where he starts moving toward new storytelling structures and types, and while Tom Gordon isn't as experimental as something like Hearts in Atlantis, the wilderness survival genre is relatively fresh ground for King, and he tills it well, serving up something not unlike Hatchet crossed with Lovecraft. Not everything works: I'm not sure the narrative voice is sufficiently different from the average King protagonist to justify it being that of an 8-year-old. But as a whole package, it's good. Grade: B



Music

David Bowie - The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
I'd heard this album already, but it wasn't until I bought it that I really listened to it in-depth. The Man Who Sold the World finds Bowie at this fascinating crossroads in his career, stuck between his space-oddity progginess and his fun-house-mirror pop star sensibilities. There's at least one alternate universe where Bowie went on become the fifth member of Van der Graaf Generator, and arguably, the reason why Hunky Dory is so important is that it established that Bowie wouldn't do that. This is fantastic stuff, both as this sort of fascinating "what if" and also, with classics like "All the Madmen" and the title track, as the beginning of Bowie's golden years. Grade: A-

Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith - A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke (2016)

I bought this album because I like Iyer (his 2015 record was one of my favorite of last year), but this is much more Wadada Smith's show. Iyer's piano lays down minimalist soundscapes for Wadada's trumpet to swoop and shriek over, and the results are spacious and thoughtful. A few songs are a little skeletal, which sometimes works for atmospherics but elsewhere just feels kind of underbaked. But on the whole, Cosmic Rhythm is an immersive, moody jazz record, the kind best played late at night. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for April 25 - May 1, 2016

Another week of reviews! I pretty much liked everything here, but feel free to disagree with me!

Movies

Sisters (2015)
A funny—often very funny—comedy that's entirely hogtied once it realizes that it has to figure out an ending. But hey, if we judged the success of comedies on the rubric of plot, we'd be awful short on good comedies (I mean, even shorter than we are now). What's important here is this: I laughed. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (but especially Tina Fey, who plays gloriously against type) are being their typical charming selves and having a great time doing it. It's not sophisticated or even all that internally consistent, but it's fun. Grade: B

Porco Rosso (紅の豚) (1992)
I like Miyazaki in swashbuckling mode, which is a mode I didn't realize he had. I'd like to see more of Swashbuckling Miyazaki. He needs more movies where people are inexplicably pigs (he's got at least two). Still, I won't lie: the best bits of the movie are the ones that are in regular-old Miyazaki mode, tender and wistful and slightly mysterious. Grade: A-

Eye in the Sky (2016)
Without a doubt the most upsetting 2016 movie I've seen so far and also possibly the first great 2016 movie I've seen (give or take Hail, Caesar!), Eye in the Sky is both not to be missed and not for the faint of heart. I'm really serious here: the bulk of the movie's plot revolves around the prospect of a little girl being blown up, so if you have any aversion whatsoever to seeing children in peril in movies, think long and hard about this one. I'm making it sound unpleasant because it is, but only in that way that any grim thriller is unpleasant—that is, in an absolutely necessary, profound way. It's a film about drone warfare, after all, which means that dives deep into the utter moral quagmire that is the War on Terror and the possibility that there truly is no such thing as "right and wrong" when it comes to that War. Postmodernism, it turns out, was not predicting society as a whole but specifically our modern military operations. Grade: A

Tabu (2012)
I don't hear a lot of people talking about it, but surely this Portuguese drama is one of the best films of the 2010s. Seriously, I'm blown away. It's stylish, moving, literary (it has all the hallmarks of a novel adaptation, but it's not, which is kind of charming), and at once classicist and modern. It's that combined old-fashionedness and cutting edge that makes this movie such a delight: in many ways, it's a revival of silent film and '40s melodrama, but with thoroughly modern technical twists. For example, especially in the film's jaw-dropping second half, the movie cuts out the dialogue audio altogether but keeps the ambient, environmental noise, to sublime effect: it appears as though we are in a silent movie but without the surrealism inherent in draining the world of sound completely—the actors seem merely lost in time, which is keeping right with the themes of memory and history in the plot itself. Beautiful. Grade: A

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
It's a fun little action movie but not a great one: the fantasy feels a little thin and (though far be it from me to speak for a culture but still) possibly culturally insensitive. But Kurt Russell is a treasure in general, and specifically here, he's far an away the best part of the movie. The central gag of having him look and sound like an '80s action hero but giving him the grace and intelligence of one of the Three Stooges is hysterical. The rest of the movie isn't half so entertaining, but it's nothing game-breaking. Grade: B




Television

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season 3 (2015-16)
Fox's cop comedy continues to be one of the most consistent traditional sitcoms on TV. The inclusion of more cop-drama-esque storylines in the quarter of the season via ex-undercover-cop Adrian Pimento (Jason Mantzoukas, aka Parks and Rec's Dennis Feinstein) does a great job of shaking up what is, most weeks, a classic workplace comedy in spirit, and the final stretch of episodes is some of the best work the show has done. Elsewhere, the series consistency means that there's the occasional predictability and lull to the rhythms of the show, but when that's anchored by one of the funniest casts on TV right now, it's still lots of fun. Grade: B+

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Season 2 (2016)
The only thing better than a fantastic rookie season is the proof that the sophomore season is every bit capable of keeping pace. There's a lot of 30 Rock here, which is good, but it took 30 Rock at least twice as long (and several missteps more) to hit the glorious levels of absurdity that Kimmy achieves on an episode-by-episode basis. Perhaps even more impressive, though, is that in the thick of all the jokes about Cate Blanchette (is she talented, or just tall??) and roller coasters, the show manages to preserve the human core that makes it all so endearing. If anything, the series manages to plumb even greater emotional depths than before with its portrayal of the psychological fallout of Kimmy's trauma. It's hilarious, bizarre, and sweet, which is just the way I like it. Grade: A-

Books (Plays?)

Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre) by Federico García Lorca (and Ted Hughes?) (1933 [1996?])
Sorry for all the parentheses and question marks. I'm frankly confused about Ted Hughes's involvement with my particular version of García Lorca's modernist play. The cover says, "in a version by Ted Hughes," which seems different from a simple translation, but the notes inside don't indicate what exactly makes it Ted Hughes's "version." Anyway, it's good, minimalist, politically charged drama with sharply human stakes. I enjoyed it, Ted Hughes or no. Grade: B+