The 18 best films I've seen in the last 250. part 5

#10: Gilda (1946)... or, Why I Love Glenn Ford
I dread writing about this movie.  Not because it's not worth discussing (obviously) or because it's a deep story that's hard to put into words.  I just loved it so much that I'm afraid to sum it up with a small amount of memories and opinions.  This disservice has already been committed by the short attention span of Americans that only ever recall one or two scenes from this rich and highlight-packed film.  Most people have seen a scene from this film without knowing it.  In "The Shawshank Redemption" Morgan Freeman hoots at the scene you first see Rita Hayworth in where she flips her hair back.  But this film works best as a whole, and what a wonderful movie experience it was!
Glenn Ford is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors.  I've only seen him in five or so movies but the diversity in his roles has been incredible.  I was first introduced to him by the 1950 film "Convicted".  It's not the greatest prison film and I didn't actually find his acting all that great at the time.  He seemed like he was either an awkward actor who was lucky to be involved in so many classic films or a good actor who could play an out-of-place prisoner with mixed emotions.  I now know it was the latter.  After his entertaining comedic performance in "The Gazebo", I knew there was more to this baby-face.  Then in "The Big Heat", Ford juggles portraying a tough-as-nails cop and a sweet family man.  And in the last act of the film he goes through a successful transition becoming a vigilante bent on revenge.  It's obvious to me now that it was the studios that were lucky to have this dynamic and diverse actor and not vise-versa.  And I recently saw the original "3:10 to Yuma" where he was offered the part of the protaganist and wanted to be a bad guy instead for the challenge.  In "Gilda" he plays a grifter-turned-big league casino tycoon and never makes you doubt it for a second.  I've praised him enough so I won't go into other reasons why I'm really starting to look up to this guy.  Look him up on wikipedia though.  It's interesting how much of a Jack of all trades he was.  Especially for an actor!
The script is so dark and witty that it's a wonder that this film isn't mentioned along side other noir greats.  So many scenes stood out, but one always worth mentioning is the scene with Rita Hayworth's despairing "strip tease".  But I won't further encapsulate it like others have.  Just trust me and watch it.

The 18 best films I've seen in the last 250. part 4

#14: Crank 2: High Voltage (2009)
You can't fault this movie for being slow or inconsistent.  It is what it is and you're either along for the ride or you're sitting in disgust.  Statham turns out another great action performance in a movie that could be viewed more as a stoner comedy than an action-adventure.  It manages to stay true to the original and surpasses it in every way possible.  The godzilla fight, the burning skin, the race track scene, the tongue/car boost, the talk show with Geri Halliwell.  It all comes together and takes the film to a rare place where it's self-referential, existential, and still endlessly entertaining.  Definitely not for everyone, definitely for me.  Hooray for excess to the nth degree!

#13: Wall-E (2008)
Pixar's most creative, thought-provoking, and touching film may be too slow for toddlers (but judging by DVD sales I don't think it was) but should be pitch-perfect for anyone else whose ticker is still ticking.  Wall-E is adorable and hilarious.  The movie takes amazingly unpredictable turns.  A friend of mine says it has the best love story in the last decade which is probably true.  Some people say it's too preachy, but seriously! It's a kids movie and kids will love it.  The preachiness is aimed at adults and it's really not that bad.  With the world being so green now, a few years from today it'll probably be seen as having a relatively tame message.  Bit of a spoiler here: I loved that the people in the movie have less personality than the robots.  I also loved the army of malfunctioning robots.  And watch how Wall-E puts on his tracks in the morning.  I love that he's not a morning person.
I laughed so hard I cried at "Presto", the animated short preceeding the movie.  All in all, a great theatrical experience that I hope Pixar revives in the future like it recently did with Toy Story and Toy Story 2.

#12: Synecdoche New York (2008)
You can read a previously posted review for this here.

#11: The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Hepburn, Stewart, and Grant are like the over-romantic, screwed up, alcoholic friends I never had.  The writing is top notch and the acting, especially Hepburn's, is a great fusion of screwball and realism.

The 18 best films I've seen in the last 250. part 3

#15: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Wonderful, wonderful romp through three British wars is beautifully shot and written with equal parts whimsy and zest.  Too many favorite moments come flooding into my head at once: The war games in the bath house, the orchestra playing for beer, the hunting trophy time lapse sequences.  All around a great film worthy of its fame.  Way way way ahead of its time with how it used color and its methods of historical fiction.

The 18 best films I've seen in the last 250. part 2

#16: La Ronde (1950)
Dear Max Ophuls,
I have no idea who you are or where you've been all my life, but man do you ever know how to make a romantic comedy.  Directors today could learn a lot from you since not only do most romantic comedies today have very little originality and skill, they also know nothing about the heart.  I say heart instead of love because I think we both know there's very little real love involved in La Ronde.  That's not a criticism of your work though.  No, it's one of the many miracles in this film.  The characters are all so sleazy and selfish that they wouldn't even feel comfortable in an episode of Seinfeld.  In yet it's still such a sweet and tender tale.
One of my favorite scenes is the bedroom scene with the husband and wife.  It's just so funny and real.  We know he's cheating on her and it's so fun to see how he deludes himself into still seeing minor faults in others.  We must both know people like that for us to find that funny.  Or maybe we're looking at our own hypocrisy.
There are many other hilariously cute additions to the story that stuck out to me.  Such as when the carousel breaks down due to a lover's inadequacies.  Or when the ringmaster sings the word "censored" after interrupting a love scene.
Your movie truly is as charming as an ill-moralled movie can be.

The 18 best films I've seen in the last 250. part 1

As of this week, I have been keeping notes on 250 new-to-me movies that I've seen since February 2008.  Not all of them got full reviews.  In fact some of them were summed up in a mere sentence.  The "reviews" I've been posting on this site so far are second drafts of these scribblings.  Being a list-obsessed individual, I decided to make a list of the best ones from this time period.  After over-analyzing the titles, 18 seems to be the perfect amount...


#18: Paths of Glory (1957)
Stanley Kubrick's war trial film is brilliantly shot, excellently acted (Kirk Douglas in one of his most powerful performances), and emotional, but not forced, in its execution.  A timeless war story and a beautiful parable of responsibility and punishment.  The walk to the firing squad is tense and glorious.

#17: Cat People (1942)
Fear of the unknown and unseen is the key here.  And it couldn't have been tackled better stylistically.  Simone Simon's performance is perfectly under-dramatic and Jacques Tourneur's use of feline imagery is subtle and timeless.  Hitchcock must have loved this film... and possibly was inspired by it.

An early movie related memory that's always stuck with me #1.

I'm in my grade 6 home room class.  We're discussing plans for our field trip to Drumheller.  Our teacher asks us if anyone has any movies they could bring for the drive and all the other kids are shouting out movie titles such as Top Gun, Backdraft, and whatever chick flicks and action movies were out at the time.  I raise my hand in an attempt to both fit in and be helpful.  I announce to the class that I could bring along my dad's Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and Beverly Hillbillies VHS tapes (three of the only things even resembling movies that we had in our house at the time).  The entire class laughs their asses off and Mr. Zalaski tries his hardest to calm everyone down while trying not to laugh himself.  I'm not embarrassed because I don't get what's so funny.

I feel like I've come a long way.

Terminator: Salvation (2009) 3/4

For all its bad press, in some ways this is the best Terminator film.  Terminator 2, for all its glorious special effects does still look a little dated today and liquid machines are nonsensical no matter how much I leave my senses at bay.  And I'd rather sit through the last 45 minutes of Return of the King than sit through Arnold being lowered into the lava any day.  If I want that much melodrama, I won't put on an action movie, I'll watch Coronation Street.

The first Terminator film had a lot of imagination and introduced us to the Arnold we know and love.  But it had some very slow scenes and the special effects were atrocious.  The stop motion and model ship stuff in the flash-forward scenes are the best examples of this.  You can't even blame the time period or the budget for that because, come on! It was the 1980s, not the Ray Harryhausen 1950s.

The third film wasn't too bad.  It had Arnold at top form and the car chase with the picker truck was awesome.  But the scene where Arnold is trying to stop himself from attacking Nick Stahl should make even the most forgiving action fan roll their eyes.  The film did however patch up some of the continuity problems from the second film.

And now there's Terminator: Salvation, the fourth in the series.  It has great special effects and acting and a pretty decent script too.  This time at least it didn't feel like it was written by a twelve year old.  The first three films left a lot of hard-to-connect plot lines and Salvation meshes them as well as anyone could have hoped.  When it came to discussions of time travel I was able to suspend my disbelief with a lot more ease than with the first films.  And I wasn't left feeling ripped off from lack of action sequences.  So well done, McG, you've pulled off a hard feat.

Rachel Getting Married (2008) 4.1/4

This is another great example of a movie that changed the way I look at life.  It's so easy to judge people based on your first conversation with them, or to sum up a person's entire existence with one mindless sentence of gossip.  This movie forces the audience to judge all the characters in the first act and then judges the viewer throughout the rest of the film.  We go through many opinion shifts through the course of the story.  I started off hating Anne Hathaway's spoiled, irritating character, then hating her dad.  And by the end, when I understood them better, my sympathies and respect changed entirely.  What a powerfully realistic story of a family!

Jonathan Demme does his best Robert Altman impression and while there's nothing new about the style of filmmaking, it still manages to feel so fresh and full of life.  The supporting cast deserves a lot of credit for this.  And Anne Hathaway has never been better.  She definitely deserved the Oscar more than Kate Winslet.  It was a lot of fun to see Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio in the role of the groom.  His character doesn't seem to say or do much, but that's exactly what a groom's job is: suit up, show up, and shut up.

"Rachel Getting Married" took me on a surprisingly cathartic journey.  Instead of relying on a narrator, flashbacks, or forced back story to explain the family's dysfunctions, we learn about them through the way they interact with each other.  Just like in (gasp!) real life.  Easily the best wedding movie I've ever seen.  Welcome back, Jonathan Demme!

Being a movie lover in Calgary isn't always easy...

In fact, today I had to hang my head in shame.  I went to calgarymovies.com like I often do to see what's playing around town and saw an article on the main page titled, "Citizen Kane Can Suck It".  It's not surprising to stumble onto such naive statements when browsing the internet but it came from the site's leading contributor, a guy that goes by "S. Tran".  I found the article too frustrating to finish, but if you're curious, you can find it here.

The article reminded me of a statement that Roger Ebert made recently in his blog about how we are living in a Dark Age of mainstream film.  If S. Tran is saying what many others today are thinking, Ebert save us!

Destry Rides Again (1939) 4.1/4

Jimmy Stewart comes blazing into town to save the day, armed to the teeth, with a sinister glower.  Actually, he shows up unarmed, carrying a birdcage and a parasol, and order milk at a bar.  Not your typical western hero.  It would eventually become a typical role for Stewart to play, but here it feels so fresh.
Marlene Dietrich plays an old-west bar-floozy to a T (not that I'm an expert on old-west bar-floozies) in one of her most wonderfully dynamic roles.  In one memorable scene she scams a man at poker and then tells the man's wife "he would rather be cheated by me than married to you".  Classic!
Another great quotable line is when Stewart tells a dying man who feels he is dying without honor, "That's how they shot my father.  They didn't dare face him either."
The ethical statement of taking on an anarchic old west town unarmed can be applied to any time period.  And it's written, directed, and performed so well that it's a wonder the American Film Institute insists on ignoring it.
The climax to the film starts off like many other westerns, with men assembling on both sides for a big final shootout.  But it's broken up by housewives armed with rolling pins and rakes.  And that doesn't even spoil the touching resolve.  A western from Hollywood's golden year way ahead of its time that needs to be seen!