100 Years...100 Movies 99-100: Toy Story, Ben-Hur

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

This is it! These are the last two movies on the list, and this is the last post in the project. Not to rush things, but I say we just jump right into these movies. So...

99. Toy Story (1995, John Lasseter)
Otherwise known as the greatest entry in the greatest film trilogy of all time. That's right. I said it. Let's just skip over that big, baiting "greatest trilogy" statement (sorry, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Before..., and Three Colors—you're great and all, but seriously, Toy Story. End of discussion!) and move on to why I feel like this first entry is the best of the three Toy Stories. I love all three, obviously, but what I really appreciate about this movie in particular (setting aside the unprecedented technical feat that it was in '95) is how discretely it handles its thematic resonance. Toy Story manages a neat trick that most other movies fail to pull off: it explores real, philosophical depth without interrupting its own fun, instead using that very fun as the medium of conveying the depth. For a movie about mortality and existential dread, Toy Story is an astonishingly breezy watch. Don't misunderstand me; I adore the emotional weight of 2 and 3, and the trilogy as a whole is better off for it. But there's just something infinitely wonderful about the way that the first Toy Story gets at those very same emotions without a Sarah McLachlan song or a trash-incinerator-as-mortal-abyss scene. Let's face it: for all their good will and humor, 2 and 3 can feel downright heavy at times. Toy Story, on the other hand, isn't. It also avoids the later films' tendencies to underline their own profundity. Toy Story is a movie built on subtext—subtext not alien to its otherwise family-film format but so organically a part of the movie's plot and execution that it doesn't feel like it's there at all. I bring all this up not to fault Toy Story 2 and 3 (I like sad songs and staring into the abyss) but rather to point out how the first one is the movie that leaves its audiences with the most agency in responding to the film. Are you interested in an entertaining adventure movie with vibrant animation and endearing, hilarious characters? Toy Story will let you enjoy it completely on that level. Do you want to analyze how Toy Story is a complex, affecting study of an individual's worth in society, abandonment, the value of community, the terror of invisibility/non-existence, and the effects of technological innovation on the human spirit? You can do that, too. In fact, please do. I'd love to read that essay.

100. Ben-Hur (1959, William Wyler)
Here it is, y'all. The last movie on. this. list. And you know, I like it. I know the early posts in this blog series contained a lot of griping by me about Hollywood epics and the associated bloat. And those complaints still stand. In fact, a lot of those complaints still stand in specific regard to Ben-Hur. It's super long and super self-serious, for one, and, in the grand tradition of many of the worst epics (lookin' at you, Cleopatra), it tries to bolster its own significance by annexing stories and/or historical events central to the Western canon. In Ben-Hur's case, it's none other than the New Testament that gets annexed, and given that text's importance to my life, I'm sure there are all sorts of ways I could pick apart its appropriation in this movie and in the novel it's based on[1]. But... I've never really explored those avenues, and for as big and as messy as it is, I've always had a soft spot for Ben-Hur. For one, theology aside, it's a darn good adventure film, with the brisk pace of deterred justice propelling the narrative. The conflict between Judah and Messala is compellingly drawn, and the action scenes play a nice balance between sheer, enthralling spectacle (that ship battle is pretty dang cool) and emotional stakes (the chariot race, y'all--my goodness). For two, taking up theology again, it's always appealed to me that the grand narrative of this movie is one that points toward redemption and reconciliation, which is something that definitely does square with the general thrust of the New Testament and something that feels meaningful when tackled by the movie. That's more than I can say of a lot of film epics.

And... done! That's a wrap, folks. This project is hereby complete. Many, many thanks to everyone who stopped in to read and comment on Facebook, even if only occasionally. You've all been great and encouraging conversation. This has been a blast of a series for me, and I hope it's been the same for y'all.

I've been kicking around the idea of finishing out this project by posting my own 100 favorite American movies as a sort of response to AFI's list. I've actually made the list already, but as it turns out, my tastes are so boring and canonical that I feel like you might as well just be reading the actual AFI list. Still, if anyone out there is interested, let me know, and I can post my list anyway.

If not, this post will close out the project. It's been a great ride, y'all. Now to write on something other than classic movies for a while...

You can read the previous post, #s 97-98, here.

1] Yeah, I know that this film is technically more of a remake of a 1925 silent film than it is an adaptation of the novel, but since I haven't seen the original, I don't really have a whole lot to say on the value of the '59 flick as a remake. Also, now that I've brought up the novel, I want to give Ben-Hur props for being one of those movies that, in my estimation, definitely improves upon its original book. The book's okay, but it's got only a fraction of the narrative propulsion of the movie. Besides, I mean, c'mon, that chariot race was made to be put in a movie. Well, not literally, since the novel predates motion pictures by some years. But you know what I mean.

100 Years...100 Movies 37-39: The Best Years of Our Lives, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Dr. Strangelove

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Judging by the number of pageviews my last post got, it seems that people really like reading about Disney princesses. Regrettably, there's nary a princess in any of these movies, and two of them don't even feature significant female characters at all. Welcome to the AFI, folks.

37. *The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)
This movie bored me. I'm sorry. I hate that word, "boring," because it's a critique that never really goes anywhere productive. But boredom was the overriding feeling I got while watching The Best Years of Our Lives. The cinematography is flat, much of the acting feels phoned-in, and the plot lacks a clear structure and compelling stories. It's not for lack of trying on the plot's part, though, as I gather (from the largely didactic and tiresome score that plays throughout most of the film) that the movie at least intends to make me feel very deep emotions throughout. And it seems to have managed to swell those emotions in other people, given its placement on this list and the fact that it pretty much swept the Academy Awards back in '46. Heck, Roger Ebert even liked it. It just didn't click for me, though. Part of me wonders if this is just one of those "you just had to be there" movies (though, unless he's a time traveler, Roger Ebert wasn't "there" either). There's no question that the concept of soldiers returning home after WWII was a lot more immediate in 1946 than it is today. Its thematic territory might have felt a little fresher back in the '40s, too; by 2014, we've had dozens of movies, documentaries, TV shows, and books, chronicling the challenges soldiers face when trying to reenter domestic life after being in combat, and conditions like PTSD and some of the other emotional and psychological trauma experienced by those men and women have reached a decent level of mainstream awareness. Looking back almost seven decades to The Best Years of Our Lives, I can't help but find the whole thing a little uninspired and uncompelling, not because of the subject matter (that will always be important) but because of the relatively trite way in which it engages that subject matter. This movie seems content to say, "Yeah, it's hard for soldiers to return home after war," and leave it at that, whereas so many other movies since then have dug deeply into the specific whys and hows of the soldiers' difficulties. It isn't all bad; the early sequence depicting the soldiers' first night back with their families is engaging, and there's some spectacular framing of shots in the final wedding scene. But overall, The Best Years of Our Lives was not the best three hours of my life (ha. ha.. ha... *rimshot*).

38. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, John Huston)
I don't have a whole lot to say about this movie except that it's a ton of fun. It's funny that my write-up of the last John Huston-directed movie on this list (The Maltese Falcon) spent so much time trying to parse out if the movie had a moral or not, because in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, there is most definitely a moral: don't be greedy. And that's a fine moral and all, but it has absolutely no bearing on why I like this movie so much. Whereas The Maltese Falcon sometimes feels like it's trying its hand at profundity (hence making the moral, or lack thereof, kind of important), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is pretty much cool with just being the most entertaining, thrilling picture it can be. Whether or not it has a moral "point" isn't all that important. And as far as entertaining and thrilling pictures go, this one works like gangbusters. It's one of the great adventure movies of all time, and Humphrey Bogart gives a fantastic turn as the film's villain. It also has one of the more useful of famous movie quotes in the "We don't need no stinkin' badges" line. Really, you can use that quote anywhere. Observe: We don't need no stinkin' barges. We don't need no stinkin' vegetables. We don't need no stinkin' bicycles. We don't need no stinkin' Transformers sequels. We don't need no stinkin' long write-ups of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Wish granted.

39. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick)
I like Dr. Strangelove a whole lot. It's a wonderful mix of the dry and absurd flavors that I usually prefer my comedies to come in, and it's also the rare comedy that is beautifully shot, which should surprise nobody once the Stanley Kubrick name flashes on the screen. The screenplay is tight and fun and greatly accessible for the kind of brainy comedy that this is; even as a kid, I loved the "precious bodily fluids" bits and some of the more slapsticky moments, even though most the sociopolitical satire flew way over my head. It's a movie filled with so many instances of comedic ridiculousness of such a wide range of types that I imagine most people will find at least one joke that lands for them. There are the big "you can't fight in here, it's the war room" moments that are of course huge laughs, but my favorite jokes come at the film's margins, those little details of uncommented-on silliness, like the way the flight commander dons an enormous cowboy hat when he gets word to drop the bomb. Great stuff. And yet... I can't help but wonder if, like The Best Years of Our Lives, I haven't missed the boat on this movie. Don't get me wrong; it's great. But how much greater must it have been back when the Cold War was actually happening? How much more would the fear of a real-life nuclear apocalypse have galvanized the humor? How much sharper must the satire have been when it was picking apart versions of actual possibilities? How much more bite must that final montage of nuclear blasts have had? With the world no longer a sneeze away from H-bomb oblivion, Dr. Strangelove must have lost a little of the terrifying edge that it once had. It's no longer a movie speaking directly to our society. Sure, there are plenty of ways that this movie's themes are still in conversation with contemporary culture (heck, the world is still a violent place rules by raging military powers), but you have to generalize the film a bit to make that work, forming metaphors and fables out of things that were once quite literal. That's the thing about great satire, I guess; there's always the chance that it'll become slightly obsolete.

That's all for now, folks! Thanks so much for reading. It's always great hearing from y'all, so if you have any insights or grievances or humorous anecdotes or whatever, feel free to share. Until next time, be sure to protect your precious fluids from the dirty Reds.

If you feel so moved, you're welcome to go back to the previous post, #s 34-36, here.
Update: Also, you can go on to the next post, #s 40-42, here.