Best movies

This is a list of my favorite movies.  This is by no means complete.  I will add more movies to it and expand my discussion of them.

The Princess Bride

I read somewhere that your favorite movie is the one that you always stop to watch on cable whenever you run across it while channel surfing.  “The Princess Bride” does that for me.  There are parts that are simple, but the longer arc to the movie is the love of the grandfather, played by Peter Falk, for his grandson, played by Fred Savage.  “As you wish” is the last line in the movie.

Hombre

This movie, based on an Elmore Leonard novel, is one of the great Western moral plays.  Paul Newman plays a man called John Russell.  But that isn’t his real name; Russell was the name of the man who took him in after he was reclaimed from the Indians.  He is called ‘hombre’.  Man.  A faceless man to most of the other characters.  But he knows where he is going, and he struggles to save them, in spite of themselves.  Leonard’s Catholicism is all over this movie.  This is a 20th century parable about Christianity.

Go Tell The Spartans

Burt Lancaster in one of the two great movies about Vietnam.  This movie got little acclaim when it was released, but it captures the presence of American ideals and the corruptive influence of reality.

Kolya

I have a moment of reflection when watching foreign language movies, wondering how much of the movie I’m missing because I don’t understand the iconography that the director is using.  Even so, this movie is a wonderful tale of learning.  Learning to live, learning to trust.

Where is the Friend’s Home

I don’t know if this was the first Iranian movie I ever saw, but it stayed with me for a long time.  Abbas Kiarostami is on my ‘cinema watch’ list.  A boy realizes that he has the notebook for another schoolboy.  That schoolboy lives in another village.  He will be in trouble if he doesn’t have his notebook with its lessons ready for the next day.  The boy goes to find the other boy.  Simple story, right?  See the movie.

White, Blue

Red?  Not so hot.  Kieslowski directs Juliette Binoche and Benoit Regent in “Blue” and Zbigniew Zamachowski and Julie Delpy in “White”.  In the first case, the patient man gets the girl, in the second, the man is a little more proactive.  The movies are about love.  And beautiful women.

The Life of Brian

“What did the Romans ever do for us?”  Yeah, verily, what did they do for us?  This is another movie I will watch anywhere, anytime.

Saving Private Ryan

This movie raised the bar for sound editing and lowered the bar for the amount of violence allowable on screen.  It asks a powerful question of the audience, “Have I lived a life that justifies the love and sacrifice that others have made for me?”

Jump Tomorrow

A little seen movie, but lovely none the less.  A shy Nigerian man is to go to from New York City to Buffalo to meet the woman to whom he has been promised in an arranged marriage.  Hippolyte Giradot, unseen in America, but a huge star in France, turns his quest into a road movie in a decrepit Citroen.  The shimmering Natalie Verbeke provides some combustibles.  A movie about love.  Again.

The Claim

Michael Winterbottom makes movies he likes.  Period.  “The Claim” is Hardy’s “Mayor of Casterbridge” set in Sierra Nevada gold country, shot in the winter in anamorphic with a largely unknown cast.  He obviously likes to walk a tightrope.  The only way to see this is in a movie theater to enjoy what a wide screen can really do.  Winterbottom followed this with a road movie shot on DV, porn and “A Mighty Heart”.  An acquired taste, but good.

Three Kings

The desert this blue sky that most movies don’t get right.  David O. Russell and Tom Sigel shot this movie on Ektachrome.  Blue for days.  This movie should been seen in a theater just to get the sky.  The movie also catches the inane conversations that soldiers have.  Russell’s script has several scenes where the dialog means absolutely nothing, and the visual subtext is what it is all about.  I’ve been a soldier, and Russell gets it right.

Something Wild

American movies are about redemption.  Love is about sacrifice.   Jonathan Demme directs Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith in a story about love, sacrifice, and redemption.  Ray Liotta is the spark that sets it off.

Insomnia

I felt like my eyeballs had been sandpapered after watching this movie.  Al Pacino is somewhat restrained in this movie, as oppose to that pile of offal, “The Scent of a Woman”.

Laurel Canyon

Frances McDormand, Christian Bale, Kate Beckinsale and Alessandro Nivola in a Pinteresque four handed story about love and lust in the canyons.  With a dose of Natascha McElhone thrown in.  This movie walks the viewer right up to the edge of just how far people can go in relationships.  Each step down the road to perdition seems so reasonable, but when it ends up where it ends up, we can only say that we knew it was coming.  This is a tight, tough movie.  I don’t know how much of it was direction and how much of it was work that the actors brought to the movie, but Beckinsale’s little actions, Bale’s interior gestures are some great but unnoticed work.