Tag: 100 Movies

Top Ten! Top Ten! Top Ten! That’s right, it’s time to tick off my favorite ten movies of all time. Because all of Blogistan has been waiting, over a month for this concluding post in this thrilling series. Hooray! I imagine that none of these titles will come as a surprise to anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time, but hey, that’s the way it goes.

10. Princess Mononoke

This was the first Hayao Miyazaki film I ever saw, and I didn’t see it until more than a year after I’d bought – and fallen in love with – the film’s score by Joe Hisaishi. Many times when I’ve loved a score before I saw the film from which it came, the film has failed to live up to the imagery my mind creates while listening to the music, but in the case of Princess Mononoke, that was no worry whatsoever. I was astonished at the depth and scope of Miyazaki’s visuals: mountain ranges shrouded in mist, cloud-filled skies, wild boars possessed by demons, forest gods, and most charmingly, the forest sprites with the heads that wind like watches. (You have to see them to understand.) The story is a parable about environmental destruction, but it’s neither heavy-handed nor simplistic in its thrust. The film’s love story is touching and mature. Simply put, this is, in my view, the best thing Miyazaki has done yet.

Signature moment: Ashitaka steps forward in Irontown to save San.

9. Schindler’s List

It bothers me that this film seems to have been eclipsed, in cultural esteem, by Steven Spielberg’s later, and significantly inferior, Saving Private Ryan. Maybe that’s because the latter film capitalized on the whole “Greatest Generation” craze, with its straightforward tale of American wartime heroism, but Schindler’s List is based on actual history, and it doesn’t make things nearly as black-and-white as SPR does; Oskar Schindler has no big “epiphany” moment, and his motives are driven by money. Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth creates a stunning portrayal of pure malevolence, and Ben Kingsley’s Itzhak Stern perfectly walks the thin line between principle and practicality.

I watched the film again a couple of months ago, and I was amazed anew by its craft. The introduction of Oskar Schindler is a good example: he first appears in a series of shots as he’s getting dressed to go to an exclusive nightclub, choosing his best suit and tie and cufflinks and filling his wallet with money. A tracking shot follows him as he approachs the maitre d’ and bribes his way to a table, and we don’t see his face until he has been seated. Before Schindler ever says a word, before we ever even see his eyes, we know that he’s an opportunist who will brashly bribe his way through life.

The film is sometimes criticized for being occasionally too manipulative, but with the three-hour running time, I’ve always found those elements less than bothersome. Schindler’s List is, thus far, the crown jewel of Steven Spielberg’s career.

Signature moment: When Schindler is making the final arrangements to get “his Jews” away from Amon Goeth, it basically amounts to him “buying” each individual Jew. Goeth knows that Schindler is losing money on the deal, but he so reveres Schindler as a businessman that he convinces himself that somehow Schindler is making huge money on the deal. The scene wouldn’t work if not for the meticulous way the two characters are created throughout the film.

8. The Shawshank Redemption

I’ve always wondered how it is that word-of-mouth basically drove this movie to classic status once it hit home video, but did nothing at all for the movie when it was in the theaters. (Shawshank was a box-office flop.) I didn’t see it in the theaters, either; I knew nothing at all about it, and the title didn’t make a ton of sense, either. There was no word of mouth about the movie at all; I don’t even recall any significant critical buzz surrounding the movie at the time of release.

So when I rented it one Saturday night in 1995 or thereabouts, all I knew was that it was set in a prison and was said to be pretty uplifting. When it opened with the immediate aftermath and trial of Andy Dufresne for violent murder, I figured the film would be a “Did he do it or not?” kind of thing, but it wasn’t. Then I figured it was a prison escape type of thing, but it wasn’t. (At least not at first.) Every time I thought I had the movie pegged, it went into another direction entirely. Villains become good guys and become villains again. The film’s final act is among the most satisfying I can remember in a movie; I still remember the sheer sense of delight I felt in watching it all unfold, in seeing how Andy pulled it off, and realizing how Frank Darabont hid all of the key details in plain sight (the way the possibility of Andy tunneling out of his cell with the rock hammer is ridiculed at first only to be later revealed as exactly what he did, for instance). Add to this a terrific score by Thomas Newman (the “Stoic Theme” is a miniature masterpiece, and the final fifteen minutes or so of the score is as magical a piece of tone-painting as you’ll ever hear, right down to the piano chords depicting the lapping waves of the Pacific), and it’s just a truly great film.

Signature moment: Morgan Freeman’s final voiceover, one of the finest closing lines in movie history. (I do think that the film should have rolled the credits as Red’s bus disappeared down the road, and not actually shown the beach in Mexico. It doesn’t matter if Red finds Andy, because the whole point is that Red has learned again to hope. But as flaws in movies go, this one is totally forgiveable.)

7. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

It may seem weird that I’m putting this as high as I am, but really, the James Bond films are pretty iconic at this point, and this is simply the best of them. The story of how Sean Connery left the series after You Only Live Twice, and was then replaced by this neophyte actor, George Lazenby, who got the part by buying a suit in the brand that Connery liked and asking his barber for a “James Bond haircut” before his audition, is well-known, as is Lazenby’s unfortunate heeding of bad advice from his agent that resulted in him being dumped from the series after this one appearance. Lazenby’s performance as Bond is often criticized, but not by me; in my ears, only a couple of his line-readings sound stiff, and these come early in the film. I don’t know in what sequence the film was shot, but I swear you can see Lazenby’s confidence grow as the film goes on. I reject the notion that this film would have been better with Connery as Bond; in fact, I’m not sure that Connery could have pulled off the scene with Diana Rigg in the barn as well as Lazenby did.

And ahh, Diana Rigg, the most beautiful and capable of all the Bond girls. (I really don’t like the phrase “Bond girls”, and only use it here as shorthand.) Rigg’s Tracy Vicenzo is a full partner to Bond, a heroine pretty much unmatched and only a few times approached in all the other films. I think that Rigg’s task in this film was even harder than Lazenby’s, in a way; she had to play the one woman who captures Bond’s heart. She has to stand above every other Bond girl, and become a true Bond heroine.

I also like the film’s unconventional storyline, which is actually quite faithful to Ian Fleming’s book. There’s no briefing scene in M’s office, only a couple of bitter confrontations pertaining to Bond’s quest to capture or kill Blofeld. There’s even a rather cheesy, but forgiveable, love montage with Louis Armstrong crooning “We Have All the Time In the World” (my favorite Bond song) in the background. And there’s a nicely epic story, with the best ski chases of the entire Bond series. (Blofeld’s “All right, we’ll head him off at the precipice” is one of my favorite lines in any movie, ever.) And I like Telly Savalas’s understated malevolence as Blofeld much more than Donald Pleasance’s whiny mania from YOLT (the basis for Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers flicks).

And yeah, the score. John Barry never wrote finer music for the Bond series. Not even in Goldfinger.

Signature moment: Bond returns Draco’s dowry. “Her price is above rubies…or even your million pounds.”

6. The Lord of the Rings

Yes, I separated out each of the Star Wars films for this series, because while together they tell a single story, they each have a distinct rhythm and feel. Not so the Lord of the Rings movies; this is truly best thought of as a single movie divided into three parts, which is also the way the LOTR books are thought of, as well. Now, it’s not quite the case that the movies simply start and then stop at some point three or four hours later (depending on which version you’re watching); Peter Jackson found a way to end The Two Towers on a satisfying note and gave The Return of the King a suitable starting point as well. But these films really do form a very tight, singular unit.

And what a unit it is. It’s huge and vast, a tale of war that rages across an entire Europe-sized continent, and it’s a small drama about a single hobbit and the task entrusted to him. It’s a trio of films that have quiet moments between characters one minute, and the next has us sweeping across the mountains of Middle Earth. Do I think the movies have flaws? Of course. (Here, here and here are some reactions to the movies as I posted at the time that The Two Towers and The Return of the King came out.) Ultimately, do I care? Absolutely not. I’m still in awe of these films and the way they make Middle Earth almost as real a place as Tolkien did.

Signature moment: Crikey, if ever there was a futile task, picking one moment out of this series would be it. But I guess I’ll name one anyway: Sam’s speech at the end of TTT about the old stories and how the people in them kept going when they could have given up.

5. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

It’s just such a good movie. It really, truly is. There’s only one major flaw in it (the scene where Luke’s recovering from his injuries on Hoth is, to me, as painful as the worst scenes in the Prequel Trilogy). What’s so amazing about it is the way it doesn’t just tell the same basic story of the first movie, as sequels so often do. The good guys get the stuffing knocked out of them. The big battle scene takes place in the first forty-five minutes. One character’s fate is left unresolved, and another learns a stunning secret of his past that leaves him in doubt of his future.

I don’t really have much more to say about TESB, except to note that it didn’t really become accepted as being as good as it is (although I, for one, don’t claim it as the best in the series – read on!) until after Return of the Jedi came out. Most probably think this is because ROTJ isn’t very good, although I don’t share that opinion; I think it’s because of the “middle chapter” syndrome, where the middle can’t really be appreciated for what it is until the resolution is known. But anyway, TESB rules. And the score? It’s John Williams’s finest effort, and that’s saying something. It’s one of the greatest of all film scores.

Signature moment: Yoda gives Luke his most important lesson: “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no ‘try’.” The underscoring to this scene is sublime, as is the puppetry behind Yoda. Frank Oz makes us genuinely see Yoda’s frustration with his student, and his wisdom when he lowers the X-wing onto the ground and gazes calmly at Luke, as if to say, “This is what I’m telling you.”

4. Singin’ in the Rain

Almost my favorite musical of all time, Singin’ in the Rain is pure joy from beginning to end, a virtual love letter from 1953 to the movies of twenty years before when the industry made the shift from the silents to the talkies. The movie is full of wit, good cheer, and sophistication. I don’t know that a better “backstage” film has ever been made.

Gene Kelly plays Don Lockwood, the male half of the beloved silent movie duo Lockwood and Lamont. Lina Lamont, played by Jean Hagen, is a sultry goddess in her pictures, but in real life she is shrill, dense (“Whaddaya think I am, dumb or something?”), and just plain stupid (“Why, I make more money than…than…than Calvin Coolidge! Put together!”). She is also convinced that Lockwood is her fiancee because that’s what she reads in the fan magazines about herself, which gives Don no small amount of annoyance, until he meets a struggling actress named Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) and falls in love with her after one of the most memorable “Meet cute” moments ever in a movie. Stoking all the fires throughout all this is Don Lockwood’s best friend, Cosmo Brown (), who has that honored “best friend” tradition in the movies of having all the best lines (“That means I’m out of a job! At last, I can start suffering and write that symphony!”).

A particular stroke of genius in the movie is the way all of the songs in the film (with the exception of “Make ‘Em Laugh”) come from the films of the period the movie is depicting in the first place. At first glance this probably seemed at the time like an excuse to make a movie without exerting a lot of effort to come up with new songs, but each song is folded into the nearly perfect screenplay so organically that it actually comes as a surprise to learn that the songs had been around for years before Arthur Freed ever decided to make a movie called Singin’ in the Rain in the first place.

I’m trying to think of a significant flaw in the movie, and I’m just not coming up with one. I even love the extended ballet sequence toward the picture’s end; “Broadway Melody” works better as a ballet sequence, for me, than the ballet sequence in An American in Paris (a film I’ve never much liked). This is almost my favorite musical of all time.

Signature moment: I might as well pick the obvious one. Gene Kelly’s title number, which is as perfect a bit of cinematic artifice as you’ll ever see. It was filmed on a soundstage, on a sunny afternoon, when Gene Kelly was suffering a fever.

3. My Fair Lady

This actually is my favorite musical of all time. There isn’t a single frame of this movie that I don’t love dearly, right from the opening credits with that gorgeous Edwardian script font slowly fading in and out over a sequence of shots of beautiful arrangements of flowers.

Most of the script springs directly from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, with musical numbers inserted into the proceedings by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. And what a job they do with those songs! If Singin’ in the Rain perfectly employed pre-existing songs in its story, My Fair Lady does the exact reverse: it perfectly incorporates new songs into a pre-existing story, a task made all the harder by the fact that the pre-existing story was written by one of the greatest playwrights of all time. All of the songs fit so seamlessly into Shaw’s original script that it’s almost as if Shaw wrote the songs himself.

Story-wise, the tale of My Fair Lady is one of the most familiar stories in our lexicon: Cockney girl and flower-seller Eliza Doolittle goes to Professor Henry Higgins in hopes of learning to speak in a more refined way, the assumption being that social status is largely defined by the way one speaks instead of the other way around. Higgins is a taskmaster, cruel even, but Eliza gradually falls for him and he for her as she realizes that his harshness is a front and as he realizes how intelligent she actually is. Most wonderfully is the way the film allows its characters to behave as if they actually are intelligent. These aren’t characters whom we’re told are smart going through a bunch of machinations of plot; these are characters who are smart whose smart actions drive the plot forward.

A lesser movie would have the scene at the Embassy Ball at the end of the story; here it happens halfway through, with the most emotional moments to come after.

And, of course, those songs, so full of amazing wordplay; here we have Lerner and Loewe at their very best. “I Could Have Danced All Night” makes me melt every time I hear it; “Why Can’t the English?” and “I’m an Ordinary Man” showcase Henry Higgins at his most arrogant and narcissistic; “On the Street Where You Live” is just gorgeous (never mind that Freddy’s basically pledging to stalk Eliza in that song); and of course, the witty showstoppers “With a Little Bit of Luck” and “Get Me To the Church On Time”.

The ultimate compliment I can pay My Fair Lady is that it’s nearly three hours long, and every time I watch it, I feel like it’s over in twenty minutes. Oh, and yeah, I really really really really love Audrey Hepburn.

Signature moment: The morning scene outside Covent Garden, with people freezing in place while others move into position before the whole place becomes a thriving bustle. Visually, My Fair Lady is amazing.

2. Casablanca

Don’t try to figure out just why General de Gaulle’s signature on the letters of transit would be of any authority in a territory governed by France’s Vichy government. Other than that, well, I can’t pick out a flaw in Casablanca. The dialogue is great, the film’s look is great, the music (by Max Steiner, who hated “As Time Goes By” and very nearly got the song axed from the film) is great, the acting is great. The movie has intrigue, humor, noble sacrifices, a love story, a bitter man who returns to the side of good, a cynical police officer who also returns to the side of good. Oh, and Ingrid Bergman doing my favorite closeup of all time (when she remembers her relationship with Rick as she listens to Sam playing “As Time Goes By”).

I think that I’ll just leave it at that. What a great, great movie.

Signature moment: The first scene between Rick and Louis, which is chock full of amazing dialogue. “I came to Casablanca for the waters.” “What waters? We’re in the desert.” “I was misinformed.”

And my favorite movie of all time? Can it really be any surprise at all?

1. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

No matter how many times I see it, I am always drawn into its story: its mythic structure, its excitement. I used to try and watch it “objectively” once in a while, to try to see the oft-cited massive faults in its pacing and its acting and its dialogue, but frankly, I never get far into the film (maybe five minutes in, tops) before I’m right back in that galaxy far, far away myself. I very much doubt that a movie will ever come along that means as much to me as the original Star Wars.

Signature moment: When Luke listens to Obi Wan and turns off his targeting computer. My heart still races every time I watch that part of the final battle. Each and every time.

And there they are, folks: the Jaquandor 100. (But I probably need to come up with some Honorable Mentions: movies that I’d forgotten about and thus didn’t include, or movies that came this close to making the 100. We’ll save that for a future “addendum” post.)

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Wow! Eighty movies down, and only twenty remain in my roster of One Hundred Movies That Only A Patriots Fan Could Hate. Which films shall be listed next! The tension! The anticipation! The blogger trying to fill up space at the top of his post!

20. Apollo 13

I’ve probably made this point before, but it’s my blog and I can make the point again if I want to. I think of my corporate life and every lame meeting I ever attended in which some HR guru or consultant or motivational-speaker-for-hire waxed poetic about teamwork and then made us all play unimaginably stupid games designed to “force” us to act as teams so we’d have some kind of epiphany about teamwork ourselves and all that rot, and I realize that Apollo 13 is a more effective illustration of teamwork than any management “Yay Team!” meeting ever held. Seriously; instead of a meeting, managers should just have everybody watch this movie. It’s a virtual primer on teamwork, with people working together without ever whining or questioning it or worrying about goofy turf battles because the job still has to get done or the three astronauts are going to die.

And yeah, it’s as exciting and riveting a movie as I’ve ever seen. I also consider Ed Harris’s loss of the Best Supprting Actor Oscar for this movie (to Kevin Spacey for The Usual Suspects, if I recall correctly) the single greatest miscarriage of Oscar justice in Academy Award history.

Signature moment: Any time that Ed Harris is on the screen.

19. Castle in the Sky

Hayao Miyazaki’s blend of steampunk and SF and fantasy adventure is loaded with sense of wonder. Here’s a movie with giant robots, a hidden city in the clouds, sky pirates, giant airships, a poor boy who dreams of following his father’s footsteps, a girl with a mysterious heritage and destiny, and dastardly villains. It’s also full of stunning visuals, as Miyazaki films always are. And that amazing score by Joe Hisaishi. Many rankings of Miyazaki’s films hold his later works to be greater, and perhaps they are, but this one is particularly near and dear to my heart.

Signature moment: The landing on Laputa.

18. As Good As It Gets

The romantic pairing in this movie seems odder and odder, the more I consider it: Jack Nicholson’s uber-curmudgeon Melvin falls for Helen Hunt’s down-on-her-luck Manhattan waitress Carol. When I first saw the movie, after the ending I wondered how long they could have possibly made it as a couple; but seeing it again a year or two later, I realized that a good deal of Melvin’s crusty act is just that: an act he puts on to keep himself from forming attachments he’s afraid to form. And besides, the movie is hilarious and full of terrific dialog.

Signature moment: I like how the movie flouts a lot of romantic comedy tropes. At one point, having had a fight with Carol, Melvin puts a mix-CD of love songs he’s made into the CD player in hopes of thawing her out a bit. A lesser romantic comedy would have this gambit work; in this movie, however, Carol lets the music get to about to seventh or eighth bar before ordering Melvin to shut it off. I love that.

17. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Again, I’ve written a lot about this movie (look to the sidebar for details), and I’ll be virtually retooling it in the “Fixing the Prequels” series, so I won’t say a whole lot here. Suffice it to say that I continue to be flummoxed by the sheer amount of loathing directed at the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. I watch this movie and enjoy the hell out of it every time I do. What does everybody else see that I don’t? (or more to the point, why doesn’t everybody else see what I see?)

Signature moment: Obi Wan Kenobi, Jedi Detective on Kamino. I love every one of those scenes.

16. The American President

Ahhhh, the days when Aaron Sorkin could do no wrong! How well I remember them. (Although I have heard good things about Charlie Wilson’s War, so it could be that Studio 60 was an aberration.) Michael Douglas as Andrew Shepard, the widower President of the United States who falls in love with lobbyist Sidney Ellen Wade (Annette Bening). It sets the tone that would later serve Sorkin so well on The West Wing. It’s just a great, great movie.

Signature moment: When President Shepard finally manages to give Sidney a bouquet of roses, she asks him how he got them for her (an earlier scene had him trying to order flowers himself and screwing it up), and he replies, “It turns out I’ve got a Rose Garden.” Ahhh, the days when Aaron Sorkin could give his characters good lines as opposed to having them recite speeches at one another!

15. Love, Actually

According to my list as compiled, this turns out to be my favorite romantic comedy of all time. Fancy that. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but I do unabashedly love it. I love its structure, in which it tells a bunch of separate love stories that are intertwined amongst a circle of characters who are interconnected in a very “six degrees of separation” kind of way. I admire that it doesn’t hold to a single definition of “love” for each character, instead having insight to recognize that what constitutes love may not be the same thing from person to person. I also think it’s a masterstroke that it doesn’t give each one of its mini-love tales a happy ending; one of them is actually pretty downright sad, and another seems to have no ending as such and is clearly a work-in-progress. I probably should flesh these points out in a longer post someday, but for now, Love, Actually always makes me smile and feel happy.

Signature moment: Geez, how to pick one! The movie’s one great moment after another. I’ll just choose the opening sequence, a montage of people greeting loved ones at the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport as Hugh Grant (who later on turns out to play the British Prime Minister) delivers a wonderful little monologue that manages to include the words of the film’s title. It’s as good an opening to a movie as I can recall.

14. Titanic

I swear, as long as I live I will never understand the ferocity of the backlash against this movie. One is more likely to get someone to admit to liking the flavor of braised puppy in dolphin sauce than to liking Titanic. Sure, some of the dialog is clunky, but it’s not that clunky; sure, the love story is fairly corny, but it’s no more corny than any other romance flick; in fact, I think it’s probably less corny than most these days. And of course, there’s that magnificent ship, steaming full-ahead toward its grim fate. I think the movie holds up just fine. So there.

Signature moment: The sketching of the portrait. It’s a great scene because of that wonderful solo piano rendition of the love theme that underscores the sequence. Oh, and because Kate Winslet’s nude.

13. Peter Pan

This is my all-time favorite Disney movie. Maybe it’s the pirate angle; maybe it’s the magic of the flying sequence. Yes, the telling of J.M. Barrie’s Pan story is sanitized a bit, but it’s still full of magic and excitement. The story’s notion that being an adult with no real memory of childhood is in no way preferable to remaining a child forever is a pretty sophisticated moral.

Signature moment: “You Can Fly”.

12. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

The best of the Prequel Trilogy (and a pox on the house of the first commenter to mutter, “That’s not saying much”). For more on why I think so, see the review of the movie linked in the sidebar. I found the movie powerful, emotional, exciting, and a worthy conclusion to the cinematic Star Wars experience.

Signature moment: The Battle of the Heroes.

11. The Sea Hawk

Errol Flynn at the height of his powers as Captain Geoffrey Thorpe, one of the “Sea Hawks”, a group of privateer ship captains who pirated Spanish vessels as the threat of the Armada became more and more clear. I know that The Adventures of Robin Hood is the duly-admitted classic in the canon, but this film us actually closer to my heart. I still remember the first time I saw it: I was ten years old, in fifth grade, when Channel 7 in Buffalo ran it one Saturday afternoon, back in the days when one could catch up on one’s old-movie-watching via regular old teevee stations. I even remember the movie snack that day: a can of Planter’s Cheese Balls. (Hey, whatever happened to Planters Cheese Balls?) Anyway, all this movie needs, frankly, is a more charismatic villain.

Signature moment: “Strike for the shores of Dover!”

And there we are. Next time, we’ll wrap it all up with the Top Ten. Won’t that be exciting! It’s not every day that you get to see a series of blog posts limp to a conclusion, is it?

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Only thirty spots remain on my list of One Hundred Movies Everybody Who’s Worth Anything As A Human Being Had Better Love, as objectively selected by a committee of…me. Let’s fill another ten of those slots! Because what’s more fun than filling slots? (Besides playing Missile Command, that is.)

30. The Silence of the Lambs

What I always find interesting about Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter is that it’s so distinctive that virtually nothing of it carries over into his roles in other films. I’ve seen Hopkins in lots of movies, and I can’t think of a single scene in any other movie of his that makes me think, “Yup, that’s the same guy who played Lecter!”. And it’s not an illusion of makeup or appearance, either; the only thing distinctive about Lecter’s appearance is his slicked-back hair. The way Hopkins is able to fill his eyes and voice with quiet malevolence is astonishing, and so completely does he create his character that when Lecter makes his escape, we already know that there’s no way he’ll ever come after Agent Starling, even before she says that he won’t because “he’d consider it rude”.

The movie’s an amazing thriller, by the way.

Signature moment: My favorite line of Lecter’s is when he comments on the grisly death of one of his former patients: “Best thing for him, really. His therapy was going nowhere.”

29. Wayne’s World

It’s not mentioned enough, I think, that the proper making of a lowbrow comedy requires quite a bit of sophistication. Wayne’s World is full of cheerful humor from beginning to end, it’s stuffed full of pop-culture references (“We gotta get him to Rampart, stat!”), it genuinely seems to know its subject matter (“I have an extensive collection of nametags and hairnets”), and it wisely never dwells on a single joke, allowing them to pass as quickly as they come.

Signature moment: “It will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine!”

28. Pulp Fiction

Oft-imitated but, to my knowledge, never equaled. I saw this movie on the strength of two particularly enthusiastic thumbs up from Siskel and Ebert, when they raved about the film’s intelligent dialog. The first time I saw it, it was an afternoon showing and the theater was completely empty save for me. The second time I saw it, a couple of months later, the film’s stature had grown, and this time the theater was packed. I’ve always admired the film’s cyclical structure in its narrative, as well as the admittedly brilliant, if profane, dialog.

Signature moment: There’s a terrific little exchange when Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and his dealer (Eric Stolz) are about to administer an adrenaline shot to Mia Wallace’s (Uma Thurman) heart. The dealer guy mimes the forceful motion Vega is to make with the syringe to get it through her breast bone, making the motion three times for emphasis, and Vincent, who isn’t too bright, asks, “Do I gotta stab her three times?”

27. ET: The Extra Terrestrial

Wow, it occurs to me that I haven’t seen this movie in way too long. I suppose its story is known by pretty much everybody. It bugs me that ET hasn’t become an annually televised movie on some network, the way that The Sound of Music and It’s A Wonderful Life have, because it’s just about the single best “family” movie I know.

Signature moment: “I’ll be right here” is one of the greatest closing lines to a movie that I’ve ever heard.

26. Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

And here we go, with the first appearance of a Star Wars movie on my list. Its pacing is a bit off at times, I admit, and the Ewoks are played too much for laughs; I’d have made them a bit more savage and fearsome (“short” need not indicate a lack of fearsomeness). However, the Ewoks have never offended me as they do most Star Wars fans; the space battle is amazing; the final confrontation between Luke and Vader is powerful, powerful stuff. I’ve also never agreed that Han Solo’s character is rendered uninteresting in this movie; his official joining of the Rebellion seems to me the logical conclusion to his character’s growth over the course of the Original Trilogy. Nor do I think that he should have died. So yeah, ROTJ is a good movie. So there.

Signature moment: The quiet scene between Luke and Vader on the Endor moon is, I think, a very underrated scene. It sets up the conflict in the heart of Darth Vader quite nicely.

25. Star Trek: First Contact

The Trek films have been an odd bunch, but overall I think that most of them have been halfway decent, with only one real honest-to-goodness bad movie among them (and no, it’s not The Final Frontier, although that one does come close). Although the record of the four films featuring the Next Generation crew is more spotty than the previous six featuring the Original Series crew, First Contact is the best of the TNG films and one of the best of the series. What’s good about it is that it doesn’t get overly bogged down in bizarre technobabble, that its story is grounded in both TNG and TOS lore, right down to the fact that Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship sports nacelles that are modeled on those of the Enterprise from the very first TV episodes way back in 1967. It’s too bad that the next two TNG flicks were, respectively, middling and then downright awful.

Signature moment: Data utters the classic Borg line, “Resistance is futile”. (If only they’d called that the last word on Data’s quest to be a human.)

24. Raiders of the Lost Ark

It’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark; just Raiders, thank you very much. I wrote about the Indy Jones movies last year, so suffice it to say that this movie made the three-year wait between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi much easier to bear.

Signature moment: The desert chase; one of the greatest of all action sequences.

23. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

I’ve spilled lots of cyber-ink about this, both in praising it and mentally remaking it, so I’ll just leave it there.

Signature moment: Sunset on Coruscant. This effects shot lasts all of ten seconds or so, but it’s utterly beautiful. For all the bitching about CGI, what the PT establishes is that in the hands of dedicated artists, CGI turns out to be just another medium for the creation of beauty.

22. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

For more, check the Star Trek Redux series of posts linked in the sidebar. Suffice it for now to note that I value this film more highly than the usual pick for the best of the Trek movies, The Wrath of Khan.

Signature moment: The signatures of the TOS actors at the very end of the movie.

21. Superman

X-Men 2 and Spiderman 2 have come close, but neither has quite managed to knock the original Superman from my personal perch as the best superhero movie ever. I love the epic scope of the production and that it has a “look” all its own, apart from the SF movie craze that was in full swing at the end of the late 70s (gee, I wonder why). Even more amazing is that the movie turned out good at all, given its turbulent production. (The nickel version is that the original intent was to shoot all footage for Superman and Superman II at once, but a falling-out between the producers and director Richard Donner resulted in lots of ad-hoc editing, rewriting and reshooting of sequel material by new director Richard Lester.) Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor is one of my favorite movie villains, and John Williams served up one of his classic scores.

Signature moment: Lex Luthor’s line, “We all have our little faults. Mine’s in California!”

And that’s it for now. Next time we’ll enter the Top Twenty, in which we’ll discover my favorite Disney movie ever, my two favorite romantic comedies ever, and my favorite Tom Hanks movie. Zap! Pow!

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Zounds! More than a month has gone by…yeesh. So anyhow, when last we left this series, we’d explored 60 of my favorite movies. Let’s bump that up to 70 movies now, shall we?

40. The Crimson Pirate

A different kind of pirate flick, existing in its own kind of world, neither an Errol Flynn-style swashbuckler nor a Pirates of the Caribbean-style epic. This film is executed in fairly tongue-in-cheek manner, with Burt Lancaster as the pirate captain who finds himself involved in some derring-do, as all pirates do, I suppose. What makes this one different is the way the thrills take place: Lancaster employs some spectacular gymnastic ability in some pretty wild action sequences, some of which are downright hilarious. If you think pirate movies mostly involve crossed swords and blazing cannons, check this out. Sure, swords are crossed and cannons blaze here as well, but they’re not the focus they are in other films.

Signature moment: The Captain’s escape from certain drowning.

39. My Neighbor Totoro

This is a children’s film, quiet and contemplative, by Hayao Miyazaki, and it’s one of his very best. Two young girls move with their father to a new house in the country while their mother recovers from an unspecified illness at a hospital. While exploring their new neighborhood, the younger of the two girls discovers that the giant camphor tree outside their house is actually the dwelling of a great magical being called Totoro and his two smaller brothers, or mates, or friends, or something like that. Their adventures with Totoro involve planting magical seeds, flying through the air by midnight, and going for a ride on a giant bus that is shaped like a cat. It’s all pretty indescribable, but that makes it even more special.

Signature moment: Totoro discovers the pleasures of umbrellas.

38. Lethal Weapon

Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in one of my favorite action movies, with Glover playing the aging cop (Roger Murtaugh) who’s only looking to play it safe until retirement and Gibson as the suicidally depressed younger cop (Martin Riggs) who’s been deemed too dangerous for just about anything. The crime they’re called to solve is pretty pedestrian; the pleasure of the film is in the witty screenplay and the winning chemistry between Glover and Gibson, chemistry that would serve them well for three sequels (the first two of which are also, in my opinion, pretty good).

Signature moment: When Martin Riggs goes to a roof to talk down a jumper, with unorthodox results.

37. Jaws

I didn’t see this movie in full until I was sixteen years old, and I watched it on TBS on a Sunday afternoon, in its pan-and-scan, edited-for-television version, and I still jumped when the shark rose from the water in front of Roy Scheider. Now that‘s effective movie-making. The movie never really falters in its pacing, and though its much-cited masterstroke of keeping the shark relatively unseen until late in the film was mainly due to the fact that the mechanical shark they built didn’t work, the movie’s a masterwork of mood. It also features the first truly great score by John Williams (who, I might add, did not steal the theme from Dvorak).

Signature moment: “Smile, you son-of-a-bitch!”

36. The Man Without a Face

This was the first movie Mel Gibson directed, and for some reason it never did all that well, which has always bothered me because it’s very well-made, and it’s a far better meditation on the relationship between good teacher and curious student than the stunningly overrated Dead Poets Society. By the way, whatever became of Gaby Hoffman? I thought she was a very promising child actor. I wonder what she’s doing now.

Signature moment: Gibson and his young charge act out The Merchant of Venice in Gibson’s living room.

35. Stand By Me

I made a number of attempts to read Stephen King when I was in high school, and I never much got into him. This, coupled with the fact that just about all of the movies they made from his books for a long time were crap, led me to conclude that King is a hack. I started to wonder if I’d misjudged him when I saw Stand By Me, based on a King novella. It’s a solid, solid piece of storytelling, and highly insightful in its treatment of the dynamic between childhood friends who will inevitably drift apart in the end. I love the movie’s elegiac tone, and the only fault I’ve ever felt with it is in the bookending bits with Richard Dreyfuss; I’m not sure that learning Chris’s ultimate fate is really necessary.

Signature moment: It’s a small moment, easy to overlook, but the shopkeep who speaks to Wil Wheaton as if a life without football is incomprehensible always stands out in my mind when I think of this movie.

34. Flash Gordon

What a cheerfully, deliriously fun movie this is! Seriously, it’s just a blast. I recently bought the DVD and watched it with some trepidation, thinking it couldn’t possibly live up to the hoot I’d had in the theater seeing it when I was nine, but no, it was just about as much fun as I remembered, if not moreso. Unbelievably goofy costume design, the two most wooden lead actors I’ve ever seen, some of the gonzoest action sequences ever filmed (that football fight especially), and production design that creates a look completely distinct from the reigning Star Wars and Star Trek look of SF films of the period. Oh, and the music by Queen? How can anyone not love it?

Signature moment: “Flash! I love you, but we only have eight more hours to save the Earth!”

33. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Steven Spielberg’s tale of the Indiana electrical worker who finds himself having visions of unearthly origin, ultimately leading him and others to a rendezvous with earthbound aliens, has been a favorite film of mine for years. What’s so great about this movie, as with Jaws, is the way Spielberg blends his mystery with the mundane, so that ordinary things take on ominous tones, such as when little Barry Guiler’s toys all start lighting up and moving for no reason. The John Williams score makes a fascinating progression from atonal mystery toward tonal glory at the end, and the visuals are as stunning as anything Spielberg or George Lucas have filmed since. It’s an amazing movie.

Signature moment: The abduction of Barry Guiler is one of the most unnerving film sequences I know. I’ve never been able to hear Johnny Mathis’s “Chances Are” without feeling a sense of dread, thanks to this one scene.

32. 2001: A Space Odyssey

I saw 2001 when I was only nine years old. It was screened at a science fiction convention that my sister and I attended in Portland, OR. I didn’t get it. At all. I didn’t understand the movie to save my life. I’m a young kid who’s all hopped up on Star Wars, and here’s this movie supposedly about space starting off with a bunch of apes in the beginning. Then we’re in space, but there’s this tall black thing on the moon…and then there’s a computer that goes nuts…and then the movie gets really trippy. No, I didn’t understand this movie at all. But what was weird was that I wanted to understand it; I didn’t hate it or feel bored. I’m still not sure I totally understand it, but I do think it’s one of the finest films of all time.

Signature moment: The waltz of the space ships, over “On the Beautiful Blue Danube”. There are a lot of film music fans who genuinely believe that the film would work better had Stanley Kubrick actually used the Alex North score that he rejected in favor of his classical music temp track, but I’ve never agreed.

31. Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Well, I don’t know what I can possibly say about this movie other than to just note its place on the list and leave it at that. So that’s what I’m doing.

Signature moment: All of ’em. Picking a favorite moment from this movie is like picking the prettiest flower from a field full of poppies. Can’t do it.

And that’s all for this entry. Still no space-based swashbuckler movies! How long can this go on?!

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Wow…it’s been almost a month since the last time I posted an entry in this series. I’m not sure how the time got away from me there, but let’s get back into it, shall we? We’re now entering the top fifty (although these rankings only get more “serious” as we approach the top of the list; my rankings in the top twenty will be more reflective of which movies I like more than others than this part of the list, where I’m just basically listing movies I love). How much longer can we go before I start writing about a certain group of movies conceived by George Lucas? Let’s find out!

50. Dances With Wolves

It seems to almost be a shibboleth these days that this movie is at best overrated and at worst downright bad, and that its Best Picture Oscar (over Goodfellas) is one of the greatest injustices in Academy Award history. Well, I may be the only person left on Earth who believes this, but I think the Academy got it right. Dances With Wolves actually is a magnificent film. Visually it’s terrific; the story is told exceedingly well; I actually like Kevin Costner’s understated portrayal of Lt. John Dunbar. For more on why I like this movie, here’s an old post of mine on the topic. Keeping it brief here, this film is one of those where I am never aware of the running time while I’m watching it.

Signature moment: Wow, so many that I could choose, but I’ll take the almost-imperceptible smile of Wind In His Hair when he tastes sugar for the first time.

49. Say Anything

Any readers who were around at the very beginning of this blog may remember my outrage that Say Anything inexplicably failed to make the cut of the AFI’s “100 Years, 100 Romances” list of the best romantic movies of all time. I continue to be mystified by this, as Say Anything is, quite simply, the best teen romance movie ever filmed, and I’ll have words with anyone who claims otherwise. There’s nothing in this movie that isn’t terrific. Every character is sharply drawn, even the most insignificant extras or bit players, and of course John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler is iconic.

Signature moment: “I gave her my heart…she gave me a pen.”

48. Jerry Maguire

Sticking with Cameron Crowe. Remember when Tom Cruise could be a romantic lead and not be really creepy about it? When did that all change? Anyhow, this movie’s grasp of sports lore still holds true even now, twelve or thirteen years after its release, and the film’s romance story works too. I love how it takes its time with its story, too; the movie’s on the long side, but it ends up not feeling overlong to me.

(When this movie came out, the memory of the Bills’ losses to the Cowboys in their third and fourth Super Bowls was still pretty fresh, so much so that in the theater where I saw Jerry Maguire the first time, a few audience members actually cheered during the Cardinals-Cowboys game at the end of the movie when an annoyed Barry Switzer was shown on screen. And Switzer wasn’t even the Cowboys coach in either of the Bills’ Super Bowls!)

Signature moment: I don’t care if it became cliché almost instantly: “You had me at hello” always gets me. Every time.

47. Almost Famous

I might as well finish my Cameron Crowe triptych. I honestly can’t tell which of these three movies is my favorite Crowe film (I liked his recent Elizabethtown, but it’s not as good as any of these), which is why I lumped them together on this list. Almost Famous is one of those period movies that makes me wish I’d been around during its time. It’s so convincing that, famously, lots of people actually claim to have heard the band Stillwater in concert in real life, when of course, the band is wholly fictitious. The movie’s funny, bittersweet, interesting – and it has no plot. Just a bunch of people living their lives and dealing with consequences.

Signature moment: “I am a golden God!”

46. Clerks

I love what Kevin Smith created here, with his true-to-life focus on the doings of a couple of ne’er-do-wells in their dead-end retail jobs. The film is raunchy, gritty, and harsh, but it’s also funny and, in its way, wise.

Signature moment: Someone puts, for reasons passing understanding, a cat-litter box on the counter of the store. And then a cat comes along, and…well, you know.

45. Kiki’s Delivery Service

It starts off seeming like some kind of Harry Potter-type of story: a thirteen year old girl, who happens to be a witch, must leave her family for one year to live in the world as a witch. Along with her black cat, with whom she has long conversations in which she shares her dreams and doubts, Kiki sets out into the unfamiliar world and confronts the evils of…well, that’s just what makes this such a magical movie. Kiki doesn’t end up confronting any evil at all. She just goes to a city by the sea and carves out a life for herself there, living in the upstairs apartment of a bakery, supporting herself by launching her own parcel delivery service (delivering packages via flying broom), meeting a local boy, and so on. This is a quiet, gentle movie about what happens in a world where there happen to be witches and where nobody much thinks about the fact that there are witches. It’s everything you’d expect from Hayao Miyazaki.

Signature moment: Any of the flying sequences. Hayao Miyazaki’s most wonderful sequences often seem to involve flight of some kind.

44. The Wind and the Lion

This is a grand-style adventure film made in the early 1970s, featuring Sean Connery as Raisuli, a Berber warlord and Brian Keith as President Teddy Roosevelt, who become adversaries after Raisuli abducts an American woman and her children. Despite the kidnapping, Raisuli quickly becomes one of the film’s good guys. The film is both a throwback to romantic epic adventures and a complicated, thoughtful examination of how people can be adversaries without necessarily being enemies. Oh, Jerry Goldsmith wrote one of his greatest scores for this film. “Raisuli Attacks” is one of the best action cues in all of film music.

Signature moment: This movie has the third best closing line — “Is there nothing in your life worth losing everything for?” — of all the movies on this list.

43. The Emperor’s New Groove

I can’t imagine how this movie got made, what with the reputation the Disney folks have carefully cultivated for themselves as staid, corporate, “Nobody shall have any fun that we don’t personally micromanage!” stuffed shirts. Seriously, The Emperor’s New Groove channels the spirit of Chuck Jones far more than it does that of Walt Disney, and it’s terrific for all that. Jokes the break the “fourth wall”, cheerful leaps in logic, characters who are jerks and who are aware that they’re jerks and are perfectly happy to be jerks – Daffy Duck would be perfectly at home in this movie.

Signature moment: “Now what are the odds that trapdoor would have led out here!”

42. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I need to watch this again. It’s one of those mind-bending films whose story wraps in and around itself, jumping forward and backward in time, delving into mental states of its characters, doing all that self-referential stuff that’s extremely compelling when done well (and, sadly, terribly lame when not – luckily, not the case here). Jim Carrey is a man who learns of a medical procedure whereby memories can be erased, so he decides to undergo the procedure to have his memories of his departed girlfriend (Kate Winslet) removed. However, he soon has second thoughts. At times it’s a funny film, at other times it’s a disturbing one. Jim Carrey is a terrifically talented actor, in my opinion.

Signature moment: In response to being asked if the procedure can cause brain damage, the inventor guy chillingly replies, “Well, technically, it is brain damage.”

41. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

I think this film gets short shrift a lot of the time. I myself didn’t really come to appreciate it until I was in college and got copies of the entire Indy trilogy on tape and watched them all back-to-back-to-back, and I was surprised to note that Temple holds up for me much better than Last Crusade does. (Last Crusade‘s plot is basically a reworking of Raiders, with a different Judeo-Christian relic substituted and, of course, that wonderful chemistry between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery.) Temple is a much darker film, with some moments that are pure horror. It’s not perfect (a bit too much of the Kate Capshaw character being whiny), but I do like it more than Last Crusade.

Signature moment: Indy’s about to drop Short Round into the lava pit to his death, when he winks and says, “I’m all right, kid”. And then he yanks Shorty back from the brink and starts beating the snot out of Mola Ram’s thugs.

And there we have it for now. Only 40 more movies to go! You’d think we’d get to one of those movies with the laser swords sooner or later. Maybe next time!

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And away we go with ten more movies that I like a whole lot. Yup. A whole lot, I say! With this entry we get halfway through the Byzantium One Hundred:

60. Nanny McPhee

This Emma Thompson vehicle is one of the better childrens’ films of recent years. It’s the tale of an English household where the Father can’t provide adequate discipline for his kids, who terrorize one nanny after another until a horrible woman named Nanny McPhee arrives, with her discipline techniques that don’t seem…quite…possible. I always enjoy British stories for children; the Brits seem generally more aware than Americans that kids are often not very nice at all.

Signature moment: The wedding; nothing like a bunch of stiff Brits doing slapstick.

59. X-Men 2

I remember being quite frustrated with the first X-Men movie when it came out in 2000 or whenever. It felt like the producers had taken a really, really good superhero movie and cut half an hour from it, thus turning it into a merely pretty good superhero movie. Luckily, they got it right with X-Men 2. They didn’t scrimp on the running time or the character development, making for a slickly fine film. I haven’t seen the third movie yet, having heard little good about it. But X-Men 2 really is quite good.

Signature moment: Ian McKellen as Magneto has a tiny moment when he gives his helmet a knowing tap. Hard to describe, but it’s a perfect moment.

58. Batman Forever

Ah, the strange trip of the Batman movies. I never much liked the first one, actually; for all the talk of its dark tone, I found it decidedly un-dark, with much of the film outright played for laughs. The production design was amazing, sure, as were the performances, but it just left me cold. The second film, Batman Returns, worked a lot better for me. This one actually was quite a bit darker. Batman Forever is the film with Val Kilmer in the title role, and this is my favorite Batman film yet. (Full disclosure: I haven’t seen Batman Begins yet.) The tone is a bit more fun, but not so campy as to be, well, Batman and Robin.

Signature moment: Alfred,w hen he tells Bruce Wayne that Mr. Grayson has borrowed the car – the “other” car.

57. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Tim Burton’s version of the Roald Dahl story is chock full of creepy weirdness as befits a filmed version of a Roald Dahl story. I was skeptical of a second filmed version of this book, but Burton did well, I think. Johnny Depp’s turn as Willy Wonka is interesting; he seems at times to be channeling Michael Jackson.

Signature moment: The animatronic “It’s a small world” type display thing at the outset of the children’s visit to the Wonka Factory…and that display’s horrible destruction.

56. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

And here’s the earlier classic. This film is much sweeter in tone than Burton’s later effort, choosing to emphasize heart and warmth over the Burtonesque dark fantasy. There is still some fairly dark stuff, particularly the fates of the naughty children and the world reaction to the news that Willy Wonka is going to allow visitors to his factory.

Signature moment: “Pure Imagination”.

55. The Incredibles

Superheroes, via Pixar, who have yet to make a bad movie. (I wasn’t wild about A Bug’s Life, but it’s not bad.) This movie boasts some terrific design, and some sneakily dark material, such as the roster of heroes who have fallen before the villain’s steady progression of improved killing machines. Michael Giacchino’s music is reminiscent of John Barry’s James Bond scores. This is kind of a “meta-superhero” movie.

Signature moment: The Sam Jackson character shouting, “Honey, where is my super suit?!”

54. The Fugitive

What a great movie! I don’t think it gets enough love these days, but it was certainly highly regarded back in 1993 when it came out, getting a Best Picture nomination and a Best Supporting Actor win for Tommy Lee Jones. It’s just a taut, riveting story that still manages to depict its characters as real people with genuine concern.

Signature moment: Is there another one? The train wreck. One of the most spectacular such sequences ever put on film, and even more impressive by virtue of not being computer-generated.

53. Excalibur

I don’t know why this film works as well as it does, because it probably shouldn’t. Telling the King Arthur story in a single film is hard enough, as the Matter of Britain consists of a huge number of interrelated stories. The film’s design is highly stylized, with often-impenetrable dialog. The music is a mish-mash of original scoring by Trevor Jones combined with selections from classical works like Carmina Burana and Wagner. Nevertheless, the movie in many ways sets production precedent for later fantasies like The Lord of the Rings, with its carefully selected locations and stylized shots.

Signature moment: Merlin’s magic to help Uther seduce Igraine.

52. The Man Who Would Be King

The Rudyard Kipling story, with Sean Connery and Michael Caine as the British con-men and adventurers who journey to a distant land in India and convince the locals that they are gods and kings, is a grand entertainment, funny and poignant and sad.

Signature moment: The last time Connery sings “The minstrel boy”.

51. Legends of the Fall

This big-hearted horse opera is a tale of three brothers (Brad Pitt, Aidan Quinn, and Henry Thomas) and the woman (Julia Ormond) who comes between them. It’s set in the rural country of Montana. There are scenes set in World War I France. Anthony Hopkins plays the family patriarch. The tale spans several decades, and features mystical narration by a wise old Native American. There is nothing at all that’s subtle about this movie. Maybe that’s why I like it so much; it plays out with operatic intensity (helped along by one of James Horner’s best scores).

Signature moment: When Tristan (Pitt) meets Susanna (Ormond).

All for this week. Next time we’ll delve into the Top Fifty. You may have noticed that thus far on the list we haven’t referred to a certain sextet of space opera films. I wonder how long that can last?

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Returning to our excursion through one hundred movies that I consider favorites (or, the Greatest Movies Ever If I Had My Way), we find ourselves counting down from 70 to 61. Or, at least I find myself counting them down thusly. You’re just reading this, not counting down anything. Yeesh.

Anyhow:

70. Independence Day (ID4)

I don’t care how implausible it is. I don’t care that an entire starfaring species, capable of interstellar travel and able to construct spaceships whose force shields can withstand direct hits by tactical nuclear weapons, are nevertheless undone by a computer virus uploaded via an Apple Powerbook. I don’t care that Will Smith somehow manages to learn of Area 51’s existence, a secret kept for fifty years, when he flies over it in his jet fighter while in a combat situation. I don’t care that Smith later ups and goes to his old military base which he’s told has been destroyed, for no other reason than that’s how he gets reunited with his girlfriend. I don’t care that the movie has people outrunning fireballs and surviving firestorms by ducking into maintenance closets. I don’t care that Bill Pullman plays the President of the United States and delivers a pseudo-Churchillian pep talk before getting into a fighter jet to attack the alien ship. I don’t care that the movie gets the orientation of the Empire State Building wrong. I don’t care that the script tells us that the Communications Director for the President of the United States has her cell phone number listed in the phone book “in case of emergencies”. I don’t care how much of this movie makes absolutely no sense. Why? Because the movie is so infectiously fun that it makes me not care about any of those things. So there.

Signature moment: When the alien ships open fire.

69. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

I keep trying to think of where this movie makes a mis-step, and I’m not thinking of one. I love its reversal of the original Terminator, with Arnold as the good Terminator. It’s too bad that the advertising and reviewers gave away the game prior to the film’s release, because the first act is constructed to keep us in the dark as to which of these Terminators is the good one and which is the bad one, right up to the moment when Arnold grabs John Connor and whips the boy around so he can shield Connor with his own back. Oh well.

Signature moment: Arnold, naked, walks into the biker bar.

68. Total Recall

Remember, these are in no particular order in the “lower” half; I tried to rank titles for the top twenty or so and then I just listed titles as they came to me. That’s why I have two of Arnold’s best SF action flicks back to back. I’ve decided that this movie is almost underrated. Its premise is loads of fun, keeping us guessing as to which Arnold is the real Arnold and with some cool SF gee-whizzery at work. I also like the Paul Verhoeven SF violence – nobody does blood-spattering gunfights like Verhoeven. Oh, and in my opinion, this film boasts the last truly great score by Jerry Goldsmith.

Signature moment: “Get your ahss to Mahs!” (By the way, there are times when my sinuses feel like they could really benefit from the use of the gadget Arnold uses to pull the bug out of his nose.)

67. Witness

Come to think of it, I should probably bump this up a bit, but here it is. I love this movie, and when I watch it now, it takes on a different note as I watch Harrison Ford back then and realize what a talented actor was lost when Ford decided, roughly in the early to mid 1990s, to stop challenging himself. John Book is John Book, with nothing at all of Indiana Jones or Han Solo visible in the character. The “fish out of water” story is as old as anything, but it seems so fresh here by virtue of the Amish setting and by virtue of the script that finds gentle comedy in those scenarios but still treats both cultures with respect. The chemistry between Ford and Kelly McGillis is terrific, and the crime thriller plot is well executed. The film also contains two of the most memorable scenes I can remember in a film: Book dancing with Rachel in the barn, and the barn raising. Seriously, the only blemish on the film that I can ever find is in the rather dull score by Maurice Jarre. The barn raising scene is scored well, but it’s done with all synths; a recent compilation album of Jarre themes has the cue arranged for full orchestra, and it is stunning. Too bad they didn’t go with that for the movie.

Signature moment: “You be careful out among them English.”

66. Ben Hur

Biblical epics are kind of like…Christmas fruitcake. They’re all heavy and leaden affairs that sit in your stomach like a rock after you consume them, but some of them taste good enough that you don’t mind that feeling that the thing just won’t end. Ben Hur is one of the best, vastly superior to The Ten Commandments in my view. Yes, it’s long and parts of it drag to a degree that would bring a stampeding herd of bison to its knees, but those parts are offset by a number of thrilling set pieces, the best of which is (obviously) the famous chariot race. I like this movie…but like Christmas fruitcake, I can pretty much only indulge it once a year. (Its score, by Miklos Rozsa, is one of the great classics of film music.)

Signature moment: The chariot race is justly famous, but I always like the sea battle a little more.

65. Far and Away

This movie is pure, pure cheese. It’s a romance novel writ large on the screen; if it were an actual romance novel, the title on its cover would be done in large, looping cursive script over an image of the leads on horseback or something similar. The movie is totally predictable; there is not a single plot development in it that can’t be seen a mile away. It’s the tale of a young Irishman and a young Irish woman who emigrate to the United States, thrust together even though they’re from different classes and they at first don’t even like one another. It’s Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman doing faux-Irish accents. It’s got bare-knuckle boxing, pistols at dawn, and the big Oklahoma land race at the end. It’s got a big John Williams score that features the Chieftains and Enya. And I love it so! This is partly pure sentiment; when The Wife and I were dating in college, we spent our summers apart, and we always went to see a movie on our last day together for three months. This was one of those movies, and our favorite.

Signature moment: The land race, obviously. Terrific music in that sequence.

64. Eating Raoul

This is a weird movie, all right. It features a married couple whose dream is to open a restaurant, but they just don’t have enough money, so they decide to raise money by posing as swingers, and then when people come over to “swing”, they kill them by beaning them with a frying pan and then steal their wallets. It’s a black comedy, obviously. Not the kind of subject matter I’d usually choose for myself; actually, if not for my sister, I’d have never chosen this movie for myself. But I do think it’s pretty funny. Although I do have the bad feeling that I’m someday going to pay a price for actually having watched this movie with my grandmother.

Signature moment: The couple’s surprise windfall at the swingers’ party.

63. The Hunt for Red October

I remember reading a review of this movie before I saw it. Released in 1990, a year after the Fall of Communism, the review wondered if a movie like this could possibly still be exciting in a post-Cold War world. The answer is an obvious Yes; I still find it riveting every time I watch it. What’s better than a good cat-and-mouse movie? A movie with about half-a-dozen cat-and-mouse games going on.

Signature moment: “We get the right sort of American, this will work. But if we get some buckaroo….”

62. Amadeus

If there is a movie out there that recreates a specific time and place better than Amadeus, I don’t know what it is. The creation of late 1700s Vienna is as complete a cinematic illusion as I can think of. The famous story of the rivalry between the freakishly gifted Mozart and the desperately ungifted Salieri is well known; I simply note that the film holds up as well now as it did in its original release. I reviewed this film for GMR here.

Signature moment: Mozart on his deathbed, dictating his Requiem to Salieri, and Salieri’s struggle to understand Mozart’s compositional genius.

61. The Adventures of Robin Hood

What a great, great movie this is – it should probably be farther up this list. Oops. Errol Flynn, Olivia DeHavilland, Claude Rains, Basil Rathbone, Nathan Hale; one of the all-time great scores by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. It’s such a classic that further comment here seems pointless, so I’ll just leave off there.

Signature moment: “What say you to that, Baron of Lockesley?” “May I obey all your commands with equal pleasure, Sire!”

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It’s been a while since the last entry in this series, so let’s get going again! Here are the next ten of my favorite movies (give or take a few I may have forgotten about), starting at #80 and going to #71.

80. Forrest Gump

I’m not sure which movie has suffered the greater backlash, Titanic or Gump. (Come to that, Dances With Wolves also always has to be mentioned in the topic of backlashes against once-beloved movies.) I can sort of understand the backlash, but the sheer hatred that both movies now seem to inspire amazes me. I’ve never found Gump to be what its detractors say it is; I’ve never found it to be an apologetic film for either a conservative or a liberal mindset. In fact, I’ve never much found it to be an mouthpiece kind of film for any real viewpoint at all. I just think it’s a very well-made film with a well-told story about characters who are sympathetic, but not too sympathetic. For a film that takes the basic form and feel of a fable, it really doesn’t offer much by way of easy answers, and Gump’s own answer to the central question of the movie basically boils down to “I dunno.”

Signature moment: Lieutenant Dan’s final “reconciliation” with God, if that’s even what it is.

79. Every Which Way But Loose

Yes, I am openly admitting to loving this incredibly goofy flick. It stars Clint Eastwood as Philo Beddoe, a truck driver who earns extra money by bare-knuckle boxing in the backlots of southern California, with his buddy Orville (the always wonderful Geoffrey Lewis) and his pet orangutan at his side. Yes, this is a movie whose main characters include an orangutan named Clyde. And it’s full of country music, barroom brawls, and a motorcycle gang that’s only slightly less competent than the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. I’ve never really believed in the idea of a “guilty pleasure”, but darn it, this movie might just well qualify. This is about as goofy a movie as you’re likely to find. (I also like its sequel, Any Which Way You Can, although the first film is better by virtue of its bittersweet ending.)

Signature moment: When Philo finally meets Tank Murdock.

78. Braveheart

I wonder sometimes if this film gets its due, with the current renewal of interest in fantasy filmmaking. Granted, Braveheart isn’t fantasy (although it certainly isn’t history, either), but its approach to depicting the realities of a medieval kind of life turned out to be enormously influential. No suits of armor here that shine in the morning sun and somehow remain clean throughout days of travel; no banners of brightly colored cloth. Instead, everything is mud-spattered and worn, and the atmosphere of the exteriors is one of chill. The battle scenes of The Lord of the Rings would look very different if this film hadn’t pioneered the brutally violent approach to such sequences.

I love this film’s first half, with its dreamy appearance and pacing and dialogue that occasionally rises to poetry. The film slows down a bit in the second half as the court intrigues take over, but that’s fine by me. This film deserved the plaudits it got.

Signature moment: It would be easy to note the Battle of Stirling, with Wallace’s “Sons of Scotland!” speech, but for me, the film’s essential sequence is the courtship and secret wedding of Murron. Without those scenes, the rest of the film would be a dull exercise in medieval history.

77. Bull Durham

Almost my favorite baseball movie of all time! This is just one great moment after another, one of those movies that takes us to an offbeat location (a minor-league baseball team) and lets us live alongside the offbeat characters who live there. The film just oozes authenticity in its setting, which helps us to overlook the frankly bizarre nature of Annie Savoy’s approach to dating (“Within the confines of the baseball season, I am, strictly speaking, monogamous.”). Crash Davis is one of the great characters in moviedom, as far as I’m concerned.

Signature moment: So many, but I’ll take one little touch of minor league baseball lore that may or may not be the way things are done, but it just feels so right that if I found out that this never actually happened at all, I’d be disappointed. I’m referring to when the Durham Bulls’ radio broadcasters have to do an away game, so they get the game action via a teletype, and when there’s a hit, the guy takes a mallet and smacks a block of wood, as if to fool the listeners that they’re hearing the crack of the bats. I love that.

76. Field of Dreams

Definitely my favorite baseball movie of all time! It’s just a great piece of American fantasy. Yes, that’s exactly what it is: a fantasy. What else to call it? The film’s approach to the supernatural is as refreshing as the unlikely subject matter. No one ever sits around drearily theorizing as to just what particular power is at work in Ray Kinsella’s corn field, or why this particular power is steering Ray toward a reconciliation with his father. I love it when a film has enough confidence in its story to simply posit whatever it needs to posit, and then proceeds accordingly.

Years ago, during my college years, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) and I went to the Field of Dreams itself, in Dyersville, Iowa. It seems trite to say so, but it really does look like that, and yes, I was a bit disappointed when I walked out into the corn and found myself…in a field of corn.

Signature moment: My favorite part of this movie has always been the scene when Burt Lancaster as Doc Graham describes his one half-inning of play in the Majors, which was enough of a baseball career for him to put down his glove and return home to be a doctor.

75. The Poseidon Adventure

Ahhhh, the cheesy 70s disaster flicks! And this one’s just so much fun, with everyone in scenery-chewing form. One can almost sense the director saying, “OK everybody, overact as much as you want, just as long as you don’t overact more than Hackman or Borgnine!” As engrossing as the post-disaster stuff is, I also find something sweetly engaging about the first half hour or so, when we’re being introduced to the cast. This is definitely the only movie you’ll ever see where one of the characters offers the bit of wisdom to “Don’t let your son grow up to be a haberdasher!”.

Signature moment: Any of the arguments between the Preacher and Mr. Rogo. (I changed my Signature Moment for this movie after it was pointed out in comments that the first one I had up here was, really, a big spoiler for the movie.)

74. Breakfast at Tiffany’s

I heart Audrey Hepburn. End of story.

Signature moment: “Moon River.”

73. For Your Eyes Only

I always cite this movie to people who insist that Roger Moore played James Bond for laughs most of the time. After the Bond films of the 70s, which were all studies in various kinds of excess and self-parody, the producers returned to the sorts of lesser-scaled espionage that marked the first couple of films in the series, resulting in FYEO, which was the strongest Bond film to come from Moore’s tenure in the role. It’s just a very well-made thriller, very welcome after Moonraker.

Signature moment: Bond’s final confrontation with Locque. In this scene, Moore is as ruthless and cold as Sean Connery ever was.

72. The Living Daylights

Timothy Dalton took over as Bond for TLD in 1987, which turned out to be another instance in which the producers had to dial down the previous film’s excesses (1985’s A View to a Kill). Dalton based his portrayal of Bond on the character as actually written in the books by Ian Fleming, resulting in a fascinatingly vulnerable type of James Bond. The plot is a complex espionage tale, seemingly more in league with a Robert Ludlum novel than a typical Bond flick. It also features one of the series’s best heroines.

Signature moment: The fight in the cargo plane at the end.

71. The Abyss

Perennially overshadowed by Aliens, but not in my book, as this is one of the finest SF films ever made. Seriously, this movie’s got it all – a unique setting, a mystery, loads of conflict between interesting characters, and some terrific “sensawunda” to boot. I actually prefer the Director’s Cut, although that version of the film does tend to lay on the preaching of the film’s “message” a bit thick. Still, this is one wonderful film.

Signature moment: Bud and Lindsay, trapped on a flooding submersible, with one functioning set of SCUBA gear, and too far from the undersea rig to swim for it. I always find this sequence harrowing.

And there we are. Next up: Numbers 70 down to 61!

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