The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen Brothers’ newest movie, the anthology collection The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is one of their best works. Being that I consider them among the greatest filmmakers we’ve ever had, that’s saying something. Anthology movies are always tough on me as a viewer, since inevitably some of the stories will be better than the others. You’ll always want to spend more time with some of the characters, but the group of stories that the Coen’s tell here has no weak spots. I was very much reminded while watching this movie of one of my favorite books to read, which is the collected western stories of Elmore Leonard.

Those stories are all tied together by Leonard’s writing style, and even when they don’t overlap in any way, they feel as part of the whole. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is tied together mostly by the theme of death. Each story contains death like a cloud hanging over the characters, and each story ends up with at least one character dead, even the two stories that only contain two characters. Sometimes the deaths are comical, in the twisted Coen tradition, mostly they’re not. Death is almost just part of the landscape of the west, whether it’s disease, murder, suicide, or even unknown causes. As always with the Coen’s, there’s humor here, but mostly contained to the first two stories. Taken as a whole or taken individually, these stories stick with you one way or another. The Coen's also use a framing device as though these stories are all part of a western collection of short stories in a book called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, complete with painted stills taken from each story.


I’m just gonna cover each one, so that (like the Coen’s) I make sure each gets its due.

1. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Tim Blake Nelson plays the title character of the piece here, one who sets us up to think that maybe he’ll be our narrator throughout the movie (he isn’t, the 6 stories are totally self contained) as he breaks the fourth wall, talking directly to us about himself and who he is. We first see him casually riding his horse Dan, singing the classic western song “Cool Water”, most often associated with Roy Rogers. This is the Coen’s take on the singing cowboy genre, obviously, except our hero here is a swift shooting son of a gun who kills damn near everyone who crosses his path, maybe unless they’re singing with him.

Nelson has such a wonderful command of the Coen’s flowery dialog and effortlessly sells his abilities as a white hatted singing cowboy, but also as the fastest and deadliest gun in the West. We see why the name Buster Scruggs is known by folks from all around. This sequence is also the lightest in atmosphere, despite being the most graphic in its violence. When the end of the chapter takes a flight of fancy, I went with it easily because the Coen’s had set up so much the ridiculous tone to a farcical level on par with their Raising Arizona, so the fantastical and ridiculous seemed to fit right in.

A 9/10 for this one from me.

2. Near Algodones

In this chapter, a young man (James Franco) comes into a small town bank and sticks up the teller (Coen regular Stephen Root) before the teller rebels and knocks Franco unconscious. Franco awakens to a rope around his neck and men asking him for his last words (and if they can have his horse after he’s dead). Things both do and don’t get better for Franco after this.

A kind of take on stories where things just can’t seem to go right for the hero, as it’s just one thing after another until the inevitable end for this poor unlucky bastard. It’s also evocative of the old Leone spaghetti westerns, as there seems to always be someone getting hanged in those movies. Franco is fine in the role, but this is the slightest of all the chapters even if it also has my favorite moment in the movie, with Franco’s delivery of the line “first time?” But I believe it's also the shortest, so it's not like it outstays its welcome.

A 6/10 for this one.

3. Meal Ticket

The saddest of the stories is this chapter about a man (Liam Neeson) who drives from town to town in a wagon that can transform into a stage, where we see the armless and legless “orator”, Harrison. Harrison recites, wonderfully and charismatically, classics such as Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, sonnets from Shakespeare, the biblical story of Cain and Abel, and the Gettysburg Address. Neeson then collects donations from the ever dwindling crowds before they’re off to the next town.

Neeson is quite good in a mostly wordless performance, reminding what a talented actor he can be, how much screen presence he has. He may have taken on too many shitty action movies at this point in his career (although he does those well too) that sometimes we forget that he’s a terrific and powerful actor at his best. Harrison is played beautifully by Harry Melling, best known on screen as Harry Potter’s awful cousin Dudley Dursley. Here, Melling is the opposite of Dudley. He’s sad, talented, tragic, lonely, and effortlessly relatable as the invalid completely at the mercy of his caretaker. This is the saddest of the chapters, but also one of the best.

A 9/10 for this chapter.

4. All Gold Canyon

In this chapter, based on a Jack London short story, Tom Waits plays an old prospector searching rivers for gold and digging holes looking for a big pocket of gold, a pursuit he talks to himself as looking for “Mr. Pocket.” Another aspect of the western story tradition, the gold prospector, but it's never starred Tom Waits before. I actually wish this one was a little longer, as Waits is so infinitely and easily watchable that you just want more.

Waits is so perfect for the Coen’s it really makes you surprised when you realize this is the first time they’ve worked together. He’s funny and sad and endlessly fascinating to watch, just as always. And since most of All Gold Canyon is just Waits on screen, that works to perfection. We get to know his character; he’s hard working, good humored, and even though he’s a gold prospector, he’s not greedy or entitled. We even see him put back the eggs he takes from an owl nest after he sees the owl looking at him. He feels guilty for taking all the eggs and so puts them all back but one, which he takes for his meal. This section is the most easily lovable of any of the chapters and it’s nice that they put it here in the middle.

Another 9/10 on this section from me.

5. The Girl Who Got Rattled

Zoe Kazan stars in this chapter, the longest of the bunch, as a woman on a wagon train to Oregon, who loses her brother to cholera and must figure out what she’ll do now, since they were headed to Oregon for her brother to do business, she’s left with few prospects and no money, not even to pay the boy who’s driving her wagon for her. Bill Heck plays Mr. Knapp, a sympathetic cowboy co-leading the wagon train, who sincerely wants to help out Kazan in her time of need.

This is what the Coen's doing a sweet little romance looks like, I guess. I love it. This is my favorite of the chapters. And another shade of the western tackled, the wagon train. Kazan (back on a similar Oregon bound wagon trail as she was in Meeks Cutoff) is really engaging, and I loved the sweet and developing chemistry she has with the kindly cowboy that Bill Heck plays. Maybe because this is the longest of chapters, but it’s the one that most feels like it could’ve been expanded into its own feature. It’s perfect as it is, but I wouldn’t have complained about another hour of this. It has the most developed characters, the most intriguing storyline and the actors are all wonderful.

10/10, this is my favorite of the bunch.

6. The Mortal Remains

To close out the anthology, the Coen's take us into the stagecoach style western story, but here with an ominous and ultimately unsettling tone. Five people are in a stagecoach together, a random bunch: on one side a French gambler (Saul Rubinek), a fur trapper (Chelcie Ross), and an elderly proper lady (Tyne Daly). On the other side, a snappily dressed Englishman (Jonjo O’Neill) and an Irishman (Brendan Gleeson). The coach is going to Fort Morgan, and over the course of the journey we find out that the lady is reuniting with her husband, and O'Neill and Gleeson are bounty hunters delivering a body.

Ross's fur trapper is the most memorable character, as he talks loudly, often, and in a way that's offensive to the proper conservative lady that Daly plays to perfection. But the journey takes a turn as it becomes obvious that we're not where we think we are. When the lady becomes upset, the Frenchman calls out to the stagecoach driver to stop, which he doesn't do, and the Englishman informs them that the coach never stops before its destination. Never. When the Frenchman pops his head outside, the world doesn't look right, it looks stormy and forbidding and definitely not the Colorado countryside. We come to realize that three such people as the Frenchman, lady, and fur trapper would not be in the same company going to the same place. The fur trapper even says he rarely sees people, so why is he on the coach in the first place? What we come to realize is that this is a ferry to the afterlife and the "bounty hunters" are simply the guides of these three disparate souls.

To end the story on this kind of note, literally the end of life at the end of a set of stories about death, is just so perfect as the finale. And when the coach stops at a hotel for the night, the three souls seem to be realizing what's going on. There's a certain gallows humor to the lady still insisting on being helped off the coach, because they're all seeming to understand what's going on now. But the final note of the symphony is note jokey, but somber, as it should be. It makes for a powerful ending for the story and even more so for the anthology as a whole.


An 8/10 on this.

Overall, the Coen's have delivered one of their best movies, one that I've already watched twice and will watch many more times over the years. I love westerns, and so do the Coen's. Thankfully, they make great ones. I hope this gets some love come awards season, as Netflix has released it briefly in theaters specifically for awards consideration. This movie deserves the love. And I didn't even talk about the gorgeous cinematography or music. Both are among my favorites in the Coen catalog (cinematography by the great Bruno Delbonnel, who has become like their secondary director of photography if Roger Deakins is unavailable, and music by Carter Burwell, as usual for the Coen's).


Overall, even though only one of the six stories got a 10/10 from me, I give the whole movie a 10/10 because the stories feel of a whole, they inform and elevate each other even as they stay separate. And I love the way the Coen's did the book tying things together by feeling like we're going between chapters of this short story collection. This, at least to my mind right now, is the only anthology movie I love wholeheartedly.

Top 10 Animated Fantasy Movies

Following on from the rich world of my live action fantasy list, I here present my top 10 animated fantasy films. But first, a couple of honorable mentions that just didn't quite make the list proper:

Mickey and the Beanstalk


Sleeping Beauty


Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

And now the list itself!

10. The Adventures of Prince Achmed

The oldest surviving animated feature film (there were apparently at least two made previously to this 1926 movie by Argentinian filmmaker Quirino Cristiani but neither has a surviving copy and are considered lost), this stop motion cardboard cutout fairy tale is a visual marvel, even now, more than 90 years after it was released. German director/animator Lotte Reiniger developed her silhouette animation technique much in the style of Asian Wayang shadow puppets, but rather than being manipulated in real time as Wayang puppets are, Reiniger animated hers frame by frame, as stop motion clay animators would do. Greatly based on One Thousand and One Nights, specifically "The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou", its story is pretty episodic, and often it doesn't even matter, just sit back and watch the amazing visuals. Reiniger's technique was later used to great effect in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 1, in the Story of the Three Brothers. Reiniger used the technique throughout her career and much of her work can be seen on YouTube. It all has that same entrancing quality that Prince Achmed has, so be prepared to go down a rabbit hole if you check it out. You'll thank me.

9. Song of the Sea

Like writer/director Tomm Moore's previous movie, 2009’s The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea is a visually gorgeous movie to look at, is steeped in Irish folklore, has a terrific voice cast, and wonderful music as well. Both were nominated for Oscars for Best Animated Film, and I think Song of the Sea should’ve won (Kells, sadly, was up against tougher competition). It’s gentle, not full of the manic energy many filmmakers think a children’s movie needs, and ultimately tackles the deep themes of grieving, sibling rivalry, family love, and much more wrapped up in a wonderful adventure tale with lovingly created 2D animation.

What kept bringing me into this movie was the relative silence of it. I really just mean free of needless dialog. It’s not silent, it’s gorgeously scored by Bruno Coulais, collaborating with Irish band Kila, with multiple songs sung by the achingly beautiful voice of Lisa Hannigan, who plays the mother, Bronagh. She’s long been one of my favorite musical artists, from her days singing with Damien Rice, to when she truly blossomed into something special with her own albums Sea Sew (2008), Passenger (2011), and At Swim (2016). She’s got the voice of an angel, and perfectly fits what Tomm Moore is doing here. Her music is gentle, but never boring. It’s fascinating and feels handmade (indeed she even did a run of hand sewn album art for her first record). The 2D animation here is so perfectly crafted, so wonderful in conjunction with the music and story. 2D gives the movie the same handmade feeling of Hannigan’s music, it’s almost like you could reach out and touch this storybook being told to us.

8. Coraline

One that grows on me a lot each time I watch it, Henry Selick's dark fantasy Coraline is a wonderfully creepy and effective adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novella. It has the brilliant mix of humor and macabre that Selick pulled off with The Nightmare Before Christmas, but I found myself much more involved with this one, perhaps because of my distaste for the Tim Burton (who wrote and produced but didn't direct)-ness of the other movie as I get older. Here, Selick is both writer and director, and takes us on a crazy journey to an alternate universe where Coraline (Dakota Fanning) learns about appreciating the family and life she has rather than focus on the mundane things she hates about her life. The movie has a certain amount of the magical feeling I remember from childhood books like The Secret Garden, but it goes in a much different, darker, and weirder direction thanks to Selick.

7. My Neighbor Totoro

My Neighbor Totoro is one of the great animated movies that your average moviegoer hasn't seen. It was a wonderful gift given to us by Oscar-winning animation legend Hayao Miyazaki in 1988. It follows two young girls who move with their loving father into an old house near a forest in rural Japan, where they encounters mystical creatures, including Totoro, the King of the forest. What's wonderful about the movie is that it's just as engrossing when dealing with the magical Totoro and his friends as it is when we're simply watching the girls and their father clean up the house, or visit their sick mother in the hospital. It's a magnificent visual experience, something I have always loved Miyazaki for, with evocative renderings of the small village in which the family lives as well as the surrounding forest. In particular the animation on the sisters is brilliantly expressive, using the exaggerated tradition of anime to get us to recall the feelings of childhood. And like Song of the Sea, it's not afraid of having some silences. The silence makes us sit up and look closer, pay more attention, rather than lose interest. American animation needs to learn this lesson.

My Neighbor Totoro introduced Miyazaki to a much wider audience when it was released and has since become somewhat of a signature film for Studio Ghibli. The character of Totoro appears in the Studio Ghibli logo, and I've read that he is as known and beloved by the Japanese people as Mickey Mouse is to all of us in the US. It's not hard to understand why, once you've seen the movie. Totoro looks after the girls, finds them when they get lost, and uses his powers to speed up the growing of some trees the girls planted. I don't see how someone couldn't love Totoro.

6. The Toy Story Franchise

Okay, my list, my rules, and I'm including all the Toy Story movies. Now, I'm not a huge fan of the second, which I have found mostly unengaging every time I've watched it. Thematically, I think it also doesn't do anything that number three doesn't do better. Still, it felt weird to list 1 and 3 but not 2, so I'm just doing all of them. The fantasy of your toys coming to life when you're not around is such a universal one that it almost doesn't even register as being a fantasy anymore. But these movies are some of the great explorations of childhood attachments, the nostalgia of that, and the bittersweet feeling of growing up. I'm not sure where the next installment will go, but I have faith in Pixar and will be seeing it in theaters just like I've seen the first three.

5. The How to Train Your Dragon movies

Dreamworks animation has had a spotty career. It started out decently with Antz in 1998, which was overshadowed by Pixar's vastly superior A Bug's Life, they found huge success with the Shrek series, then again with Madagascar, again with Over the Hedge (which I actually liked), but didn't really hit a home run artistically, I think, until 2008's Kung Fu Panda. Then came '09's delightful Monsters vs. Aliens, and 2010 gives us their magnum opus, How to Train Your Dragon. It's a wonderful movie with astounding animation, terrific characters, and a good (if predictable) story. They create a world of Vikings and dragons and ships and battles, and imbue it with heart, artistry, and the kind of soul we're used to seeing from Pixar or Studio Ghibli.

The second movie came out and deepened the emotions, the back story, the mystery, and actually bettered the first movie. They've said they'll only do a trilogy, so the forthcoming third installment should tie everything up. I can't wait to see what they do with the final chapter. I'll say that although I love these movies, I like Toy Story 1 and 3 even more. However, How to Train Your Dragon just feels more "fantasy" to me, whatever that means, so I put it higher on the list. Maybe that's stupid, I don't care.

Even if I can't quite figure out why the Vikings have Scottish accents, I still love these movies.

4. Spirited Away

Spirited Away is one of the most wonderfully inventive movies ever made, with Miyazaki's imagination running wild in one of the best movies of the 2000's. As usual, there's the young female lead, 10-year-old heroine Chihiro, who falls into a magical world and ends up in a fantasy of mind boggling invention. After Chihiro's parents turn into pigs, Chihiro meets the mysterious Haku, who puts her on the run from the villainous Yubaba, then sends her to the four armed Kamajii, boiler master for Yubaba's bath house of the gods. Chihiro ends up working for the bath house, serving the various spirits who come to relax and wash there. And I think that only covers about the first 20 minutes or so of this 2 hour animation joyride.

Like many of Miyazaki's movies, Spirited Away is about the coming of age of the central female character. Chihiro begins the movie as meek and almost cowardly, she doesn't even want to accompany her parents into the dark tunnel leading to the amusement park that acts as the gateway to the bathhouse. But by the end, she is fighting to save the lives of her friends and defeat Yubaba's powerful spells and her hold on the citizens of this strange place. She begins on her journey from childhood into being a young woman, learning courage and purpose and the power of love.

3. Fantasia

A movie that I always wanted to see as a kid but was told I wouldn't like it, it was just animation with classical music and not a standard Disney story or anything. I thought that sounded great but I still wasn't able to see it until a few years ago, at the age of 32. It was even better than I could've imagined. It's like the best ballet you could ever dream up. The animation tied to the music so much that they become of a single piece. I could actually do without the introductions by the music conductor. Each section needs some sort of break between them, but I would've been fine with a fade to black, moment of blank screen, and fade up into a new section. Regardless, the movie is gorgeous to look at and, like The Wizard of Oz, a transportational viewing experience. Except the places we're taken in Fantasia are even more fantastical and amazing than Oz.

2. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

I watched Nausicaa not really knowing what to expect. It's not Hayao Miyazaki's most acclaimed movie (even if it's his third on this list!), and I watched it because I was on a Miyazaki quest and it was simply the next one I got my hands on. But what I got was among the best post-apocalyptic movies ever made. The world building in this movie (based on Miyazaki's manga of the same name) is really extraordinary, and serves as the best representation of all of Miyazaki's favorite themes: ecology, flight, and a strong young heroine. Nausicaa's impassioned adventure through the unforgiving and toxic landscape, looking for answers on how to make the world a better place, is also Miyazaki's greatest action/adventure story. Joe Hisaishi's score, when it doesn't sound like a Nintendo game, might be the most beautiful score I've heard to go with Miyazaki's best imagery. There's not enough I can say about this movie (it also inspired one of my favorite video games, the NES's Crystalis), I enjoy certain anime, but for me this is the big daddy of them all.

1. Beauty and the Beast

I know it's not the first movie I saw in the theaters, but Beauty and the Beast is the first one I have vivid memories of seeing. I was enthralled from the first second to the last. I had a huge crush on Belle, and knew all the songs by heart. Now, I'm older, more cynical, have a general distaste for musicals and still, I love this movie with all my heart. Belle is the best and most interesting of all the Disney heroines, smart, funny, kind, and fiercely intelligent. And the Beast is the most interesting of the Disney Princes, probably because he has his own fascinating personal journey. He goes from arrogance and self hatred to both learning to love himself and someone else. Meanwhile, the movie teaches us that we should be falling for the soul of a person, looks be damned. That's a pretty great lesson to be put on top of the impeccable animation, tremendous songs, and flawless voice cast.

Top 10 Live Action Fantasy Movies

Like science fiction, the term “fantasy” is loose and means many things to many people. Like sci-fi there are tons of sub-genres of various types as well. There’s high fantasy and low fantasy, soft fantasy, contemporary fantasy, sword and sorcery, Bangsian fantasy and fairy tales. You could even consider superheroes as part of the fantasy genre, though like most people I put that as it’s own separate genre. The point being that we all have different definitions of what constitutes “fantasy”. For example I’ve seen Albert Brooks’s masterpiece Defending Your Life listed as fantasy because it deals with the unknowable afterlife. For whatever reason, that doesn’t make sense in my mind as “fantasy”, even though I can logically understand why someone would consider it as such. So there might be a movie or two here that you don’t consider fantasy, I’d love to hear from you, what’s your own list? What do you consider to be fantasy or not?

There is also such a wealth of cinema to mine in the fantasy genre that I have split my initial list into two lists, this one covering live action movies, and next week's list covering animated movies.

Honorable Mention: The Neverending Story

Just missing the list is this classic from my childhood. Not a great adaptation of the book, which is a terrific fantasy novel, but a fine movie all its own. A triumph of set design, costumes, practical and visual effects, but not as successful in narrative (which is where its deviations from the book show, as the book is a cycle, which is where the title comes from), it's still a movie that deserves a place on this list.

10. Paperhouse

A type of movie that doesn't even really exist anymore, but should, 1988's Paperhouse is the best kids horror movie ever made. It's about a little girl named Anna (Charlotte Burke, who sadly only made this one movie and gives one of the great child performances here), an English girl suffering from glandular fever. She one day draws a picture of a house, with a sad looking boy in the window, only to find herself transported there in her dreams. This dream world has a strange logical nature to it, such as when we see the boy named Marc in the house, whom Anna meets and invites outside to play, but finds that he can't walk. Of course he can't, Anna didn't draw him any legs (nor any stairs for her to come up to him). This starts to take a dark turn when we watch Anna draw someone and then angrily cross out their face when she doesn't like it. What ramifications will that have? What horror did she just impulsively create? Anna also gets told by her doctor about a paralyzed boy patient she has named Marc. Is the fantasy world bleeding into the real world? Are Marc and Anna entering each other's dreams? What is happening? Director Bernard Rose took great inspiration from movies like Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter to create a dreamlike horror film that isn't predicated on blood or gore, but on psychological tension and the vulnerability of childhood and dreams. I've seen Paperhouse called "the thinking person's Nightmare on Elm Street". It's so effective because of the atmosphere that Rose creates as a filmmaker, where often the "real world" stuff can feel as dreamy as the fantasy stuff. Looking back I am very surprised that Rose didn't go on to a huge career. He was a prominent music video director in the 1980's, and although he has made some movies that have followings, like the horror film Candyman, he never became the star I would've anticipated he'd be after starting his career with this masterpiece. Sadly, Paperhouse has never been released on DVD in the US, but I bet you can find it on iTunes. Please do.



9. The Red Balloon

I remember as a child being fascinated by silent passages in movies. I am still to this day intrigued by completely visual film making. I think this all started with French director Albert Lamorisse's sweet 1956 masterpiece The Red Balloon. It was shown throughout American elementary schools from the 60's to the early 90's (and should still be shown to kids today, if you ask me), and I was one of the many children that the movie made a huge impression on. It's the story of a young kid who finds a balloon caught on a light post on his walk to school. He frees it and soon finds out the balloon has a mind of its own, which it uses to follow him to school and play games with him and be the friend that he so desperately needs.

Of course, one of the calling cards of the movie is its script. It won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, despite having lines of dialog in the single digits. It's nearly silent (and could've been completely had Lamorisse wanted to do so), and is all the more magical for it. It's a simple movie, but one that plays to our recollections of childhood and the feelings of finding a new friend. The Red Balloon is one of the great gifts of cinema. Its magic realism and understated brilliance has kept me coming back to it over and over again through the years. It gives me that wonderful fuzzy feeling inside that you just get from so few movies. Or, as critic Owen Gleiberman so wonderfully put it, "More than any other children's film, The Red Balloon turns me into a kid again whenever I see it...to see The Red Balloon is to laugh, and cry, at the impossible joy of being a child again." You could easily class The Red Balloon as "soft fantasy", as it's not a world of elves and dragons or anything, but a movie about a sentient balloon is definitely fantasy.


8. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

The best movie by Terry Gilliam, a filmmaker I don't typically much care for. But when I watch this movie, I miss Heath Ledger more than ever. He reached great heights with his Oscar-winning performance in The Dark Knight, which was his final completed performance, but not technically his final role. He died midway through re-teaming with his The Brothers Grimm director (and former member of Monty Python) Terry Gilliam in this dark comic fantasy. The role Ledger left behind was that of a mysterious stranger who joins up with the supremely odd theatre troupe of the title character. Thanks to the story, one involving a magic mirror that allows people to enter into a world of imagination partially controlled by Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer, at his best), Gilliam was able to recast Ledger's role during the sequences inside the Imaginarium. He recast it with three great actors who wanted to honor Ledger's memory, and took on the roles without payment (all three deferring their money to Ledger's daughter Matilda). Gilliam has said that many actors (including Tom Cruise) offered their services, but he wanted to "keep it family" with actors whom Ledger had befriended in his life, therefore the casting of Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell to complete the role.


Gilliam has always been known for his distinct imagery (often in a fantasy setting), but is a filmmaker I usually find short on story and character. Here, he is not. As I said, I've not typically been a fan of Gilliam’s, even his celebrated visuals, but this movie made me reconsider (I’ve since revisited much of Gilliam’s work and found that my dislike of his non-Monty Python movies hasn’t changed just because I love this one). Although the CGI isn't perfect, we're not always convinced that the actors and the effects are occupying the same space, the overall feel and impact of the images works the way I assume Gilliam wants it to. And that’s because of the amazing and dreamlike imagery in the Imaginarium. The fact that we don’t believe the effects actually ends up elevating the dreamlike state of those scenes.


7. Midnight in Paris

Owen Wilson plays the lead role of hack screenwriter Gil Pender. He churns out crappy Hollywood movies but yearns to write a book and be important and worthy like his literary heroes. He's in Paris on vacation with his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams), they tagged along with her parents who are there on business. While the clock strikes midnight one night, a car pulls up and a jovial group of people pull Gil in with them and take him to a party. At the party he sees a guy who looks mysteriously like Cole Porter singing songs to adoring listeners, and meet a couple who introduce themselves as the Fitzgerald's, Scott (Tom Hiddleston) and Zelda (Alison Pill). Scott takes a liking to Gil and offers to take him along to a bar they're going to to meet up with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll). Gil finds himself magically drawn into the world of 1920's artistic Paris, a time and place he'd dreamt of his whole life. He runs across Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Picasso, Matisse, and TS Elliot, among others during the few extraordinary nights he's able to return to this magical place. He also happens to run across the beautiful Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who has Picasso, Hemingway, and legendary bullfighter Juan Belmonte fighting for her affections. Gil falls for her just like the others do as he dreads the inevitable end of his miraculous journey through 1920's Paris.

Owen Wilson is one of the better actors when it comes to playing the traditional "Woody Allen" role. He has a bit of Allen's neurosis, while also keeping his strangely laid back charm, and some shades we've not seen from him before. His ability to portray Gil's hopeless romanticism, while those around him try to destroy it, is essential to making the movie work. Wilson's Wedding Crashers love interest McAdams is pitch perfectly hateable as Gil's relentlessly unsupportive fiancee. Marion Cotillard is as luminous as Paris itself, making it unsurprising that so many of these artists are inspired by her as their muse.

The script is Allen's strongest since Sweet and Lowdown, the sweetness and romance fully coming through without being forced in the slightest. The gorgeous photography by ace cinematographer Darius Khondji brings an extra amount of warmth to the movie that fits in nicely with the unassuming romanticism Allen's going for. I also like Allen's comments on coming to terms with the times you live in and not getting bogged down in the nostalgia of the past, because the people in that time probably didn't think everything was so great, and idealized an era previous to them. Even with a little bit of intellectual comments on nostalgia, it's still hard not to think of this movie as simply one of the sweetest love stories I've seen in a long time, and always glad to see one of my favorite filmmakers working at such a high level.


6. Harry Potter series




The Harry Potter books are among my favorite pieces of art in existence. I first starting reading them when the fourth book came out and have read the whole series so many times I stopped counting (I stopped counting after it reached a dozen). I was more excited to see the first movie in theaters than I’ve ever been to see any other movie. And I like it. Didn’t love it, but liked it. Over the course of the next 10 years, as all 7 books were made into 8 movies, the series really became a touchstone for a generation. Although the best of the movies isn’t as good as the worst of the books, the movies have a lot of issues and problems, a couple of the movies are poorly directed, there are too many changes made in adaptation that don’t make sense, etc. Still, I love this series enough that if I don’t feel good, I will throw on one of the movies and enter again into this wonderful world that JK Rowling created for us. I didn’t have the heart to just pick one movie to represent the whole series and just thought “fuck it, it’s my list and my blog, my rules, I’ll just pick them all.” So I did.


5. Fellowship of the Ring
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I had to force myself to finish the Lord of the Rings books. While I admire J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination and dedication to creating his world, he gets too caught up in showing off what he’s creating and neglecting to tell the story that we’re actually wanting to read. If Gimli and Legolas are running through a field, I absolutely do not want 2+ paragraphs about the history of that field and all the battles fought there and blah blah blah, because none of that shit affects the story I want to read. There is no narrative flow to the novels because Tolkien has to keep having these asides that have no bearing on our story, but just show off how much work he put into this world building. So when the books are pared down to make movies, Peter Jackson stripped away all that fat to make what the books were at their heart, an action adventure story in a fantastical setting. But even Jackson wasn’t perfect, as the second and third movies both have way too many issues for me to care as much about the series as a whole. But our entry point, Fellowship, is an extraordinary movie in nearly every way. It’s epic and emotional and funny and exciting and everything it should be. Ian McKellan, Viggo Mortensen, Elijah Wood, and the whole bunch. Everyone fits their role perfectly and even though it doesn’t have a real conclusion, it’s still the only one of the three movies that feels like a total narrative. It’s the only one I ever fee compelled to go back and watch. And when it’s over, I don’t have any desire to watch the other two. I’ve seen Two Towers and Return of the King twice, and that’s enough. I’ve watched Fellowship at least 5 times and will continue to watch it again and again. It’s one of the great fantasy movies ever made.
4. Monty Python and the Holy Grail

One of the handful of funniest movies ever made, Holy Grail is a right of passage for every teenager (especially boys, as girls don't seem to respond to Monty Python quite as well, on average). It's not often you see a successful fantasy comedy, but this take on the Arthurian legends is probably the most quotable, and quoted, comedy of all time, and with good reason. Everything Python ever did was messy, with some bits that work and others that don't, but they were never as consistently hilarious as in Holy Grail. Surprisingly well shot on a shoestring budget, it's a good old fashioned "let's throw everything we can at the wall and see what sticks" kind of comedy, with musical numbers, animation, failed musical numbers, storybooks, narrators, and many more techniques showing up on the episodic quest for the Holy Grail. And none of that even covers the characters, sequences, and lines that have entered pop culture over the past 35+ years.

There's much debate among Python fans as to whether this or their subsequent movie, the controversial Biblical tale Life of Brian, is superior. For me it's easy. Life of Brian obviously benefited from the Pythons experience making this movie, as it's more professional looking and was made on a significantly higher budget. It's a good movie, with many hugely hilarious and wonderfully quotable lines. But it's no Holy Grail. Holy Grail is the best comedy of the 70's, period.

3. The Princess Bride

There are probably only two movies as quotable as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and this is one of them (the other is the great This is Spinal Tap). Based on the book by ace screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men), which he adapted to the screen himself, it's a movie that I can remember exactly where I was when I first saw it, and I was only 5 or 6 years old. It's been one of my most watched movies since then, and that's a very common story for the movie's many fans.

The casting is perfect, not a single character could've been played any better. Cary Elwes and Robin Wright make a wonderfully idealic couple in Westley and Buttercup, but of course everyone knows this movie belongs to the supporting characters. Mandy Patankin has said that people still to this day come up to him on the street (multiple times a week) and say "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." and he never gets tired of it. Wallace Shawn is inconceivably good as Vizzini, and Billy Crystal and Carol Kane are hysterical in their brief time. Chris Sarandon is wonderful as Prince Humperdink, and his sidekick Count Rugen is played with surprising coldness by comedy genius Christopher Guest. The biggest surprised to me when I watch it, even after nearly 30 years of seeing it, is the wonderful performance from Andre the Giant as Fezzik. It's not like there are many giants in the world that could've acted the part, and reports are that he could do hardly any of the physical things the role required (he had enormous back pain at the time, to go with his enormous size), but his ability to imbue Fezzik with warmth, humor, and a certain way of reminding us he was still big, strong, and scary. And of course there's Fred Savage as the spoiled sick little brat, and Peter Falk as his grandpa reading him the story. Both perfect.

It's a storybook movie that actually feels like a storybook, and is a movie that I hold other such fantasy movies up to in comparison, whether they're comedies or not. Because The Princess Bride is so perfect, it's one of my "sick movies", something I always watch when I'm down or sick, it's so easy to watch because it makes me feel so good to see it again. To spend some more time with these characters and the terrific writing. And it's one of those rare movies that I loved as a kid, and go back and watch it as an adult and love even more.

2. The Wizard of Oz

Another one of those magical childhood movies that you go back and revisit later in life, hoping it holds up after the years, and find that it's better than you ever thought it was. Oz is a wonderfully realized place full of magic, mystery, impeccable sets and makeup, a wonderful star turn from Judy Garland, and maybe the greatest villain in movie history. I was floored on my last viewing by how transported I was by this movie. There's not a ton to say about it, since it's probably one of the most written about, studied, beloved movies in cinema history. I've seen it countless times since I was a kid and yet it still holds magic and wonder for me.

1. Pan's Labyrinth

Guillermo del Toro had shown promise with some of his earlier films, most particularly in the comic book adaptation Hellboy, and his ghost story The Devil’s Backbone. But he had never melded his extraordinary talents as a visual stylist with some storytelling craft as well as he did with his 2006 masterwork Pan’s Labyrinth. He wrote a simple story about a young girl escaping from her hellish life into a fantasy world that may not be any less brutal, but tells it with an elegance and assurance that he’d only hinted at before. The effortless flow of the story makes the simplicity all the easier to enjoy, with the only character who isn’t really a defined good guy or bad guy being the Faun who opens up this alternate world to our young heroine.

Movies with children as the lead characters can often get bogged down in “cute” moments from the young actors who fail to give much in the way of a real acting performance. Pan’s Labyrinth is not one of those movies. Premier among the movie’s many pleasures is the central performance from Ivana Baquero as Ofelia. The rest of the cast is littered with wonderful performances as well, but Ofelia is our guide and needs to be something truly special. Baquero is most certainly that. The film’s detractors often point to the simplistic nature of the movie as a negative, usually pointed at Sergi Lopez’s villainous Captain Vidal as the biggest offender. So what? So he’s obviously the bad guy, and he’s a really, really bad guy. He’s not even the most memorable villain, as the infamous Pale Man sequence has demonstrated. Regardless, do we denigrate The Adventures of Robin Hood because Claude Rains is so wonderfully hissable, or the Harry Potter movies because Voldemort is one-sidedly evil? No, we enjoy the obstacle for our heroes to overcome. And the movies are better for it.

The feeling that often stays with me after watching Pan's Labyrinth is one of a beautiful melancholy. The Javier Navarrete score is gorgeously haunting, and fits the movie perfectly. The rich cinematography from Guillermo Navarro, as well as Del Toro’s developing compositional brilliance, leaves us with some stunning images. One thing I would like to address that Del Toro purposefully leaves open to a bit of interpretation is whether or not this fantasy escape is all happening in Ofelia’s head. There’s a shot near the end where Vidal runs into Ofelia talking to the Faun, but he can’t see the Faun. Del Toro has said he meant this as adults aren’t as in tune with the fantasy world as children, more than that the fantasy world doesn’t exist. And that’s the way I’ve always looked at it as well. I’m more one who believes in the fate of the fig tree as an indication of what was real and what wasn’t. What is very real though is that this is one of the great movies I’ve ever seen, definitely my favorite fantasy movie.

Director's Spotlight: Guillermo del Toro

One of the great visual stylists of his time, Guillermo Del Toro has also always made movies that I think are deeper than they first appear. He also constantly references other works of art, other movies, and often times themes that would go over my head upon first watch. He often tackles themes of feeling out of place, or searching for your place in the world. And the rigid authoritarianism of his villains often forcing his protagonists to make difficult choices. His first big movie, Mimic, was taken away from him in the editing room and recut by producer Harvey Weinstein in the late 90's. Del Toro vowed to never work with Weinstein again after that. I guess you could say that was Del Toro's choice as the hero against Weinstein's villain.

 

He’s also obsessed with symbols. Clocks, watches, rings, idols of some kind, etc. His films often have the fantastical coexisting or hiding within our mundane “real world”, sometimes where only the protagonist can see. I don't want to paint him as some sort of intellectual genius filmmaker, but I do find his movies to be deeper than you might think. And all of his trademarks were there from the start in Cronos: mechanisms, insects, monsters, elaborate camerawork, impressive sets, imperfect families, a fascination with the mythic and legendary, Ron Perlman, all of it, it was all right there. Actually one of my favorite moments in my moviegoing life was watching Pacific Rim on opening weekend and when Ron Perlman came onscreen, the theater broke out in applause. Wish Perlman had been there to feel the love for his awesomeness.

One of the things I love the most is that for Del Toro, the monsters aren't the bad guys. The ghost in The Devil's Backbone is not the villain, people are. The monsters during Ofelia's trials in Pan's Labyrinth are nothing compared to the horrific Captain Vidal. Even Hellboy, despite literally being born as the sign of the apocalypse, is the hero of his movie, not the villain. The monsters in Del Toro's work are not these horrific, one-dimensional things to cause fear or wreak havoc in the story. They are objects of sympathy and even curiosity. The monsters are often even the heroes, obviously taken from Del Toro's childhood love of movies like Frankenstein and the Hammer Dracula films.

Anyway, my ratings of his movies are:

1. Pan's Labyrinth - 10/10
2. The Devil's Backbone - 10/10
3. Pacific Rim - 9/10
4. Hellboy II: The Golden Army - 8/10
5. Cronos - 8/10
6. Hellboy - 8/10
7. Crimson Peak -7/10
8. Blade II - 6/10

Obviously haven't seen Shape of Water or Mimic yet, but I will.

Top 10 Science Fiction Movies

What is science fiction? This is one of the great debates within the world of science-fiction, as it's one of the genres most difficult to define. In 1975, the great sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov (author of I, Robot, the Foundation series, and many others) said: "Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology." But that seems to encompass only what we now call "hard sci-fi", that which deals in real current technology, or future technology based on current scientific understandings, which seems to me to preclude any elements of fantasy being able to be attached to the story, such as in Star Wars, or even speculative fictional scientific technologies. Author Mark C. Glassy argues that the definition of science fiction is like the definition of pornography: you do not know what it is, but you know it when you see it. I think this is both a more frustrating, and more accurate definition. There are movies that others consider to be sci-fi that I don't, such as Shane Carruth's Upstream Color, which would've been high on this list if I'd included it, but I also wouldn't argue much with someone who said that Upstream Color is science fiction. So anyway, let's get on to the list!



Honorable Mentions for:


Alien
Planet of the Apes
Ex Machina



10. La Jetee

French filmmaker Chris Marker's sci-fi masterpiece La Jetee is a short film, only 28 minutes long, told almost entirely through still photographs pieced together with narration. It tells the story of a post-WWIII time traveler who is sent back and forth through time in an attempt to find help for the current time as a small group were able to hide underground in Paris and escape from the nuclear annihilation. Terry Gilliam would later use the movie as the basis of his film 12 Monkeys, but La Jetee is truly unique and special. It's harrowing in the psychological stress put onto our unnamed protagonist (portrayed in the photos by Davos Hanich, but the narration by Jean Negroni). But the man finds a woman he remembers from his past. It's taxing to be thrown throughout time, and the man ends up searching for answers to his own life as much as he looks for answers to his post-apocalyptic present. The mystery of the movie is wonderful, the ability to get us to feel like we've traveled through time with this man is palpable, and the ending is simply perfection. I've never seen another film made like this, with the photos and narration, Marker himself apparently didn't even refer to it as a film, but as a photo novel. Either way, it thoroughly deserves its place on this list.

9. Gravity

Alfonso Cuaron has my money any time he makes a movie. I've liked or loved every single movie of his I've seen. My least favorite in his catalog, the third Harry Potter movie, is typically considered the epitome of that franchise. I'd closely followed the production of his follow up to "best movie of the 2000's" Children of Men (named as such on this very blog). When he finally released Gravity in 2013, I was completely blown away. Sandra Bullock's central role as astronaut Ryan Stone was the best work of her career, and she was supported by one of the most visually ambitious movies ever made. The opening shot alone is 17 minutes long, and all of this was done with Bullock and co-star George Clooney the only non cgi items on screen. The planning that had to go into the lighting of the actors faces, to match what would be done in the computer, is staggering to think about (and an aspect of cinematography I'd not considered until I heard the great Emmanuel Lubezski talking about how difficult it was). The simplicity of the movie, though thematically ambitious, is its key. It lets the realism it presents to become a kind of horror movie. A survival horror movie. But then it touches on things like making the decision to keep fighting for life when the universe seems destined to kill you. To decide to live even when you're grieving an unimaginable loss. There are beautiful images of womb-like safety, and triumphant rebirth. How many $100 million budget Hollywood movies have the poetic and artistic talent and balls to try and get you to think and feel these kinds of things? Only the type Cuaron makes.

8. The Empire Strikes Back

So the Star Wars universe makes an appearance! This is one of those movies that I often forget just how good it really is. I know I like all the Star Wars movies (even the new ones) but until I watch them again I forget how well they work. Still firmly in the Saturday morning adventure serials crossed with the space opera setting, Empire is always pointed to as the best Star Wars movie, and there's a reason. The acting is better than any of the other movies, as the story gets a little darker and the actors have more to play with. There's also better humor, both in the banter between Leia and Han (and Luke) but many also tend to forget just how funny Yoda is. Ah, Yoda, one of the biggest reasons for this movie's success. He's easily one of the best and most affecting non-human character in all of movies. Maybe THE best. When we meet him here, he's an eccentric and funny little guy, but he still conveys the old pains and history that we don't learn about until later. Wonderfully voiced by the great Frank Oz, who also puppeteered. It's his training with Luke that really elevates the story, as we watch Luke grow both inside and out. It's still a big fun summer blockbuster George Lucas type of movie, but it's the best he ever did.

7. Wall-E

The next movie on my list is the Pixar tour-de-force that is Andrew Stanton's Wall-E, quite possibly the greatest of all animated movies. Its visual invention and nearly silent opening section are reminders of what a little ambition can do for a movie. Stanton and his co-writers provide pointed commentary on the laziness of the human race and where our reliance on technology will logically lead us to (a commentary lost on so many viewers who thought the filmmakers were just making fun of fat people). But at its heart, Wall-E is a simple love story, one that just happens to star robots.

Most of note, really, is the genius creation of the title character. Stanton gives ample time for his mostly silent hero to show of his comedic skills, ones worthy of the great Buster Keaton. Stanton has actually said that he and his staff studied the entire available catalogs of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton in an effort to understand and emulate the great silent comedians. Wall-E is a delightful creation, and the movie starring him equally enchanting. It was another one that didn't quite hit me with its full force on first viewing. Looking back on my original review, I wasn't even sure if it was Pixar's best movie. After repeat viewings, I always find wonderful little details in it, plus there's still the beautiful sequences like Eve and Wall-E's dance, and the simplicity of the story proves to be a strength rather than a hindrance. Our adorable hero and his quest for love hits me in the gut every time since that first viewing.

6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

This is one of the most interesting visual experiences ever put on screen, with Michel Gondry able to project what the inside of our minds just might look like. Also the crowning achievement in Charlie Kaufman's catalog, in my eyes, teaming him again with French music video director Gondry (who had previously directed Kaufman's script Human Nature, still unseen by me). A haphazard journey through the memories of Joel Barish (a never better Jim Carrey) as he tries to erase his recently ex-girlfriend Clementine (the always brilliant Kate Winslet) from his mind. Kaufman started from the idea of erasing someone from your memory (who hasn't wanted to do that before?) and the impact that memories have on us as people. The way a loved one can get so associated with something that to remove it would be to remove a part of your own being. The impulsive Clem has had Joel erased from her memory by a company called Lacuna that provides such a service. As a way of getting back at her, Joel decides to erase her from his memory. Joel at one point asks Dr. Mierzwiak (the infallible Tom Wilkinson) if there's any chance of brain damage caused by the erasing. He answers "Well, technically speaking, the procedure IS brain damage."



There's an achingly sad moment later in the movie when you realize that Joel doesn't remember the song "My Darling Clementine", even though it had deep meaning to him long before meeting Clem. It had become so associated with her in his mind that to remove her removes all traces of the song as well as his childhood favorite, Huckleberry Hound. For the majority of the movie we travel with Joel through the good and bad memories of the two years he spent with Clem. It's hysterical, heartbreaking, amazingly true to life while being totally surreal. Also, the brilliant score by Jon Brion is worth mentioning. It plays more like an accompaniment to the action onscreen, instead of trying to underline it, or try and inform the audience how to react emotionally. The movie is a beautiful, hilarious, and melancholy trek through the emotions one experiences with both the good and bad in a relationship, and how you should live with the balance of the two instead of trying to forget. Your memories help make you who you are, appreciate that you have them.

5. Cloud Atlas

What is the point of a movie like Cloud Atlas? I'd say that the point of a movie like this is to shame other filmmakers for their lack of ambition and insistence on giving us the same ole shit. Not a film for people who don't pay attention, or those uninterested in thought provoking art, Cloud Atlas is a movie for those of us that thirst for greatness. This is one of the great movies ever made.

To give a plot synopsis is futile. Writer/directors Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer weave together six or seven different plot lines from across hundreds of years and many locations. It's a thriller, a romance, comedy, sci-fi/action movie. It's everything you could want in a movie. It was adapted from the 2004 novel by David Mitchell, unread by me. If the novel is anything like the movie, I would've thought it completely unfilmable. What Tykwer and the Wachowski's have done, however, is extraordinary work on every conceivable level. The movie has wonderful and distinct looks across all of its stories, which also takes many recognizable faces and reincarnate them across the stories. Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, Ben Whishaw, and many others appear across many, if not all, of the stories. Korean actress Doona Bae was my favorite, although everyone is flawless in their roles, stepping up their game since the filmmakers were setting such an ambitious bar. Also obscenely amazing make-up allows the actors to jump not only through the timelines to play their differing characters, but also jump through ages, races, and even genders.


Unsurprisingly, with what I've just said, Tykwer and the Wachowski's were unable to get any studio financing for the project. Ultimately they raised a little over $100 million independently to make the movie. I wouldn't have been surprised if you'd told me the budget was $400 million. It's expert filmmaking through and through, making more of its budget than any movie in recent memory.

Ultimately, Cloud Atlas takes on themes of love, kindness, friendship, and human decency. Actions ripple across time and space and give us the sense that no persons life is without meaning or influence, even if we don't feel it while we're alive. It's a life affirming movie of the highest order. It's also the type of movie that comes along not very often that affirms the great power of cinema. I think the filmmakers were laying down the challenge to all other artists to push themselves into greatness. Although I've not been a fan of their previous work, this film is exhilarating and enriching to the soul.

4. Children of Men

I have rarely been as emotionally impacted while watching a movie as I was sitting in the theater watching Children of Men. Having since seen it multiple times, I am more convinced than ever that it is the best movie of the 2000's, and one of the greatest achievements in all of cinema. Its story is very simple: the year is 2027, and the human race has been infertile for the past 18 years. An emotionally disconnected former activist (now anonymous bureaucrat, played by Clive Owen) is asked by his ex-wife to escort a young girl to safety across the dangerous obstacles now occupying England as the world's last surviving powerful nation. The by now well known complication being that the girl is pregnant. Director/writer/editor Alfonso Cuaron uses this concept as the basis to tell a powerful story of action, love, and hope rarely touched in cinema. The almost oppressive grimness of the frighteningly realistic future setting is offset with the optimism brought about by the prospect of a future generation.



Children of Men has become somewhat famous for its single-shot sequences, including an assault on a car that lasts for more than 4 minutes, and a shot during a chaotic battle that lasts for around 7 1/2 minutes. The thing that many people don't know about these shots are that they aren't really a single shot, but a couple of shots stitched together through the aid of computers. Some detractors have taken this as a negative, as though the only point of single-shot sequences is an exercise in technique. The single-shot sequences, whether actually a single unaided shot or not, work as a single take, not allowing the audience the chance to distance itself through an edit. We can't get away from the action, because the camera isn't getting away from the action, making the movie all the more tense and exciting.




Werner Herzog has often said that the world is starved for great images. With Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron continues his fight to give us extraordinary images. He has the audacity to be poetic in an almost Herzog-ian way such as in the scene where the soldiers all stand around dumbfounded at the sound and sight of the baby Theo is escorting out of a building. Some people, even in the midst of the fighting and destruction going on around them reach out to the baby as the first sign of hope in nearly 20 years. The soldiers, many of whom are probably too young to even remember seeing a baby in their lifetimes, look on at the young child in a paralyzing shock. It's a tremendously moving sequence, and again, Cuaron's use of music (an opera) is very reminiscent of Herzog. Cuaron has given us some wonderful images in his previous movies. Y tu Mama Tambien, A Little Princess, and even his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban were expertly filmed and gave us gorgeous shots to behold. But nothing he'd ever done in the past prepared me for the power and poeticism of some of his work here. I would single out more shots, but I could nearly single out anything in the movie and use it as an example, since Cuaron often finds the poetry of images in small ways that many viewers may not even be aware of or remember.

3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

The concept of "first contact" (the first interactions between mankind and an alien race) has long been one of the most fascinating to me. It's one of the most explored concepts in science fiction, but rarely to my satisfaction. Many movies and books have revolved around the topic, in an infinite number of ways, and my favorite movie dealing with it is Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Like he often does, Spielberg picked just the right leading man for the job here, as Richard Dreyfuss is not exactly your regular everyman. He gives off that quality, but has a sarcastic intelligence, and sometimes anger, that makes him feel even more relateable. As he says at one point in the movie, he didn't ask for "this" to happen to him (to have contact with aliens). He's not even really sure what happened, or why, or what it means, or where he goes from here. He loses everything in his life to find the answer to those questions.



I loved the movie when seeing it as a kid, but watching as an adult, I wonder why. It's actually not a very fast paced movie, with much of the time being spent watching Dreyfuss think and try to figure out what he's going to do, or with French UFO scientist Claude Lacombe (legendary director Francois Truffaut) and his interpreter (Bob Balaban) as they go on a similar chase for knowing the unknown. But I bet the seeds for my fascination in first contact were sown when I saw the powerful final section of this movie, where the Mothership shows up and we finally make our contact. It's a transcendent piece of filmmaking, awe inspiring and impressive on both a technical and storytelling level, the special effects are so prominent but always serve to better the story. I also love that we see the aliens, but they never speak nor directly communicate. We follow Richard Dreyfuss search for answers, but we're never given any. I like that.

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Another movie that must be talked about and examined in detail is the best movie of the 1960's, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Disappointed that there were no great sci-fi movies, in his mind, Kubrick set out to collaborate with one of sci-fi's great minds, British author Arthur C. Clarke. They came up with the general outline together, and Kubrick went off the write the script and make the movie while Clarke wrote the book, that way both had artistic freedom in their fields, while also having worked together at the project's inception. What we got from Kubrick (I've strangely never read the book, despite being a huge Clarke fan) is sci-fi's great intellectual work, taking a long hard look at technology and how it affects us.


The movie really is driven by concept of technology and how we grow from it. The apes in the opening sequence discovering the use of bones as tools/weapons really being the first discovery of a form of technology. We jump ahead to spaceships and all this crazy cool tech stuff that has become so commonplace it's boring to the characters. Next, the most conventional (and entertaining) section, with the HAL9000 and its crew on their dangerous mission to Jupiter. And the final section where our technology is irrelevant, but our evolution keeps going. A fascinating look on every level, with all the questions it raises stimulating our minds, while the still nearly flawless SFX holding our eyes, 2001 is really an amazing achievement on every level.


Not necessarily easy to get through, I turned it off just a few minutes after the opening "Dawn of Man" sequence was over during my first attempt to watch it. But I went back time and time again and am glad that I did, as seeing it as a whole let me see what Kubrick was going for. Really the only complaint I have about this movie (which is in my all-time top 10, so you know the complaint is minor) is the "Beyond the Infinite" sequence, where Dave goes through the wormhole into universes and planets and surfaces we could never imagine and can't really even process in our minds (this subject was also explored in a section of Clarke's 1953 masterpiece Childhood's End). The sequence goes on long after the point has been made, but even though it becomes monotonous after a bit, that makes the eventual sudden cut to Dave's face all the more shocking and effective. Kubrick's greatest movie, and the best movie of the 60's, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

1. Dark City

I vaguely remembered Dark City being advertised, but only knew one person who saw it in theaters and they told me it was just ok. So I was surprised when I saw at the end of the year that it landed at #1 on Roger Ebert's year end top ten list. That made me want to check it out and see what was up. I did, and just thought, "it was ok". But then I started thinking more about the philosophy behind it, and especially the images contained within it. I was caught by the incredible German expressionistic architecture, and the subconscious evocation of old school noir movies (subconscious to me, because I didn't know much about noir at the time) and the paintings of Edward Hopper. So I bought it on DVD, watched it again, and liked it a lot. Then a few weeks later watched it again, and loved it. A few months or a year or whatever later, I watched it again and decided it was one of my favorite movies.


Dark City takes a different approach to "first contact", in that most people don't know that they've been contacted by aliens. We also get a different take on alien invasion, as the aliens in this case don't want to rule us, although they are unintentionally doing that. They want to learn from us. They want to grow as we grow, change as we change, but sometimes (again, as in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End) certain species may be doomed to not be able to evolve. The Strangers may just be stuck with where they are right now. It may all be futile. This movie doesn't quite explore that idea as much as it explores the idea that The Strangers were looking in the wrong places for answers, as humanity does sometimes in our studies. Still, this movie brings up so many ideas of what it means to evolve, what memories mean to us, who we are inside of ourselves (do we have a soul?), what makes us human? Just as all great sci-fi does, it works as a straightforward story, but there is also so much there to explore underneath the surface if we desire to look at it.


In 2008, director Alex Proyas released his Director's Cut of the movie. I'm not normally a fan of Directors Cuts, but this one took one of my favorite movies and turned it into an all-time top 5 for me. The theatrical cut is like a sprint, the quick cutting and relentless pacing rushing towards the final confrontation. The DC adds in just a few scenes, but Proyas cuts them in in a way that lets the movie breathe and not exactly take its time, since it is still paced quite rapidly, but feel like it's not the sprint to the finish line that the original cut is. I listed it last year as one of the most beautiful movies ever made, because it can be viewed in slow motion and just taken as a moving painting and it still works. Roger Ebert said so eloquently in his original review (he's since written another one, when he added it to his list of "The Great Movies", as well as doing a commentary track for the DVD) and I can't top it, so I'll just close with this quote "If it is true, as the German director Werner Herzog believes, that we live in an age starved of new images, then Dark City is a film to nourish us. Not a story so much as an experience, it is a triumph of art direction, set design, cinematography, special effects--and imagination."