The Dark Knight (Nolan, '08)

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He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector... a Dark Knight.

Okay, okay, I get it... the last thing the world needed was even more discussion of The Dark Knight; after all, if you take into account both its critical acclaim and massive commercial success, with it being the first superhero movie to break the $1 billion mark worldwide, and the (former) best reviewed superhero movie of all time on Rotten Tomatoes, it's probably the most important, influential blockbuster of at least the past fifteen years, if not even longer. Very few films have so throughly dominated the cultural zeitgeist for so long, not just in 2008, but ever since as well, but even given all of this acknowledged, overblown hooplah, I still wanted, needed to revisit this movie regardless; like so many other people, it made a huge impact on me upon its release, basically hypnotizing me in the theater and instantly becoming one of my favorite films. But, despite that, I was still reluctant for a long time to watch it again it, since I was afraid it wouldn't hold up as well, and I wanted to preserve that great memory of the one (and only) time I saw it for as long as possible. Fortunately, I'm extremely happy to say that, despite a couple of minor flaws making themself more apparent this time around, The Dark Knight has held up absolutely superbly, remaining an incredibly ambitious, audacious effort from Christopher Nolan, and cementing its status as not only my #1 superhero movie, but also one of my favorite films of all time, period.

First off, though, I'll discuss the newfound problems that I discovered with the film upon my most recent viewing, chief among which is the film's habit of relying on clunky, blatant exposition, delivered through incredibly unnatural-sounding dialogue, where the characters spoonfeed us the Nolan brothers' rather naive, black-and-white moral outlooks (at one point, a character literally says "This city just showed you that it's full of people ready to believe in good"... ugh). The characters too often talk like they're aware of the presence of the audience that they're currently lecturing to, and sound like no real person ever would, a problem that could've easily been fixed with just a little more polish on the writing side of things. In addition to that, the film doesn't always pace itself the best when it comes to its editing and overall structure, sometimes rushing through certain moments and scenes by cutting away too quickly, instead of giving things room to properly breathe, along with having an overly compressed overall timeline, with too many events happening one on top of the other on top of the other at times. And finally, the film's inclusion of a certain legally-dubious surveillance system feels like an unnecessary, half-baked nod to a post-9/11 "surveillance state" (as if this movie needed any more echoes of that event), which mostly skirts the issue of the spotty righteousness of Batman's particular breed of vigilantism, and continues the bad habit of the The Dark Knight trilogy for trying to cram poorly-integrated technological McGuffins into their plots.

Still, even with those moderate flaws, there's still more than enough greatness contained within The Dark Knight to render it a great film on the whole, and first and foremost among its many strengths has to be the tremendous overall scope and relentless intensity of the entire affair, right from the beginning of its Michael Mann-inspired opening bank heist, until the final, iconic note that concludes its 2 & 1/2 hour long saga. This is not your father's Batman movie by any stretch of the imagination, but more like an epic, multi-layered crime drama that just so happens to have Batman in it, which does at times cause something of a disconnect between the film's grounded nature and the inherently silly imagery of a grown man fighting crime while dressed as a bat. But for the most part, The Dark Knight finds a good balance, creating a unique reality that simultaneously feels plausible and heightened at the same time, with the two qualities serving to strengthen the other, as the film presents to us a more realistic version of Gotham City, albeit one that's still populated by the legendary heroes and villains of the storied Batman canon, including Heath Ledger's iconic, Oscar-winning portrayal of the ultimate Bat-baddy, The Joker.

Ledger's gleefully sadistic Joker is a complete force of nature here, always stealing the show regardless of whatever else is going on in the scene, as his hideously scarred visage, creepy facial tics, and mocking, off-kilter line deliveries dovetale with his random acts of terror and anarchy to create not only the perfect foil to Batman, but the first Batvillian to feel like he could actually defeat Batman (in an ideological sense as well as a physical one). It's a true tour-de-force performance, one that gives Batman's greatest foe a far darker, more malevolent spin, unlike any of his previous live-action characterizations, and Ledger's Joker is rendered even more disturbing by Hans Zimmer's dissonant score, which prominently features razor blades run across stringed instruments in order to intill an appropriately sinister, unsettling musical motif for the character. Tragically, Ledger passed away before the film's release, but his Joker has still gone down in history as one of cinema's greatest villians, a fact further canonized by the richly deserved, post-humous Academy Award he won for Best Supporting Actor for his performance here. And, despite the occasionally clunky writing, the film's central conflict between, and discussions of, the struggle between order and chaos in society, the two forces that Batman and The Joker so vividly represent, give the film a real world relevance that no live-action Batfilm (and very few superhero films) have ever had before, in my humle opinion.

But of course, none of the characters, including The Joker, would count for as much without Nolan's incredibly ambitious hands guiding the film, as he truly swings for the fences here and constantly hits homers while doing so, creating an epic, multi-faceted, larger than life tale, driven by a dark, tragic tone, busy (in a good way) plotting, and an absolutely propulsive overall pace, almost never slowing down, but continually ramping things up to an almost unbearable degree, with a dread-laden, almost apocalyptic tone underpinning the whole affair. This is truly an uncommonly, undeniably powerful piece of pop entertainment, and all in all, my rewatch has convinced me that the (dark) knight in shining armor of modern-day cinema is officially here to stay, for a long, long time.

Favorite Moment:
https://youtu.be/4QYJgxkFajI

No Country For Old Men (Coens, '07)

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You can't stop what's comin'.

Against a pitch black screen, we hear the whistle of the Texas wind as it haunts its way across the gargantuan, desolate landscape, and, as the newborn sun slowly creeps its way above the horizon, we hear the voice of a weary, defeated old man say: "I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old... hard to believe". As the man continues, lamenting the incomprehensible new brutality arising from the modern world, we see a sheriff's deputy walking a handcuffed figure with an odd haircut into the back of his patrol car before driving away, as the unseen prisoner sits deathly silent all the while, the outline of his obscured figure looming over us like an angel of death. And, as the camera rises away from the sun-baked asphalt, the voice of the old man concludes: "I always knew you had to be willin' to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet somethin' I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say: 'Okay... I'll be part of this world.'".

This is the masterfully stage-setting opening of Joel & Ethan Coen's No Country For Old Men, an astonishingly tense neo-Western Thriller, one of the best movies of its decade, and just one of the best movies I've ever seen, period. It tells the tale of three men; Llewelyn Moss, an utterly everyday, blue-collar good ol' boy who randomly stumbles upon a suitcase full of cartel money, Anton Chirgurh, a bizarre, almost alien-like assassin tasked with recovering the cash, and the aforementioned Ed Tom, the weary old sheriff who observes everything on the sidelines, as the film use the men's dueling perspectives to illustrate its discussions of the central themes, all while the main pursuit wears on, the innocent continually get caught in the crossfire right alongside the guilty, and the bodies pile up all over the state.

Admittedly, while the basic story of No Country isn't particularly innovative on paper, on film, it differentiates itself from any more standard "cartel thrillers" out there (coughSicariocough) through its technical and atmospheric perfection, whether it be the way that the specter of death always looms heavy over the entire experience, or cinematography icon Roger Deakin's brilliant juxtaposition of lovingly detailed, intimate close-ups, and epic shots of the Texas plains as desolate as the characters' souls, or the emphasis on eerily placid moments of complete silence, which are inevitably shattered by the sudden outbursts of carnage, as the film's agonizingly slow pacing takes the sparse prose of Cormac McCarthy's novel and stretches it out into endless, nerve-shredding eternities.

But in addition to its overall amazing sense of tension, Country also distinguishes itself by utilizing McCarthy's philosophical musings on the natures of fate, chance, and what seems to be the increasingly worse presence of evil in the contemporary world, interspersing the scenes of cat-and-mouse carnage with genuinely piercing, thought-provoking discussions, as the story contrasts the perception of a more peaceful "Old West" with the horrifying crimes of today, suggesting that, as the film's Wikipedia so memorably put it, "rather than triumphing over evil, the best thing the modern heroes can hope for is to merely escape with their life intact.

This makes No Country the rare Thriller that gives us something to actually think about long after the screen has faded to black for the final time, as its three main characters all serve to contrast each other perfectly, whether it be Ed Tom's utterly conventional (and ultimately defeated) black-&-white morality, Anton's bizarrely-principled amorality that is perfectly adapted for survival in his pitiless day and age, or Moss's position in-between those two extremes, neither being "good" enough to keep his nose clean of the whole affair, but also not cunning or ruthless enough to ultimately survive it either. It's a central trifecta that is strongly supported by the film's minor characters, the colorful, salt-of-the-earth Texans who make for equally colorful exchanges that fit in plenty of the Coens' signature pitch-black sense of humor, simultaneously keeping the film from ever becoming too overbearing with its fundamentally dark tone, while also avoiding the dreaded, unnaturally-forced style of "comic relief" that Hollywood so often thrusts upon us unnecessarily.

And of course, I would be remiss in my review without discussing what is easily the best character within it, Anton Chirgurh, portrayed in a soul-chilling, Oscar-winning turn by Javier Bardem, who has become one of the newer additions to the cinematic pantheon of great villains, with his creepy, monotonic line deliveries, "pageboy"-style haircut that would look laughable on anyone else, but instead serves to make him even more unnerving, and his signature weapons in the forms of a silenced shotgun, and a cattle gun that's mostly utilized to shoot open locks, but which gets used for its original purpose (sort've) in a particularly disturbing moment early in the film.

With the inscrutable set of "principles" that he lives by, as an agent of the chaos he perceives as fate, Anton contrasts the other two main characters brilliantly, helping him become one of the greatest film villains for one of the greatest films, which, despite its receival of the obviously dubious honor of the Best Picture Oscar for its year, this really is one of the rare occasions where the Academy got it right, as, even considering all of the modern cinematic classics they've created to date, No Country For Old Men still remains the true magnum opus of the Coen brothers' long, storied career, as far as I'm concerned; "You can't stop what's coming" indeed.

Favorite Moment: https://youtu.be/7CIz8g-GLrY

2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, '68)

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After a few minutes of orchestral strings making an aimless, dissonant racket, the first thunderous notes of "Thus Spake Zarathrustra" begin to play, as the sight of a newborn Sun comes cresting over the Earth, and, as the musical piece booms towards its climax, a title card announces the name of the film we're about to have the pleasure of watching: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. This opening shot will prove to be a perfect microcosm of the movie itself; both incredibly intimidating, as well full of endless, epic promise, it's a film that is both immediately comprehensible on a gut level, while also cryptic enough with its deeper meanings that it's been endlessly scrutinized and over-analyzed for over half a century now, with still no end of its grip on film scholarship in sight, to the point that I just wrote the entire opening paragraph of this review about just the first few minutes alone without you realizing it, didn't I?

All jokes aside, while it's not easy (and rather pointless) to try to accurately describ the plot of 2001 in mere words, I'll make an attempt anyway; beginning at the "Dawn Of Man" with a starving tribe of apes, who learn how to use tools after the unexplained appearance of a foreboding stone monolith in their midst, the film suddenly jumps millions of years into the future, with the just-as-sudden reappearance of the massive, iPhone-shaped square on the Moon, a discovery that leads the men who discovered it (and mankind in turn) on the most epic of cinematic journeys, one that spans the stars, and ultimately, the very limits of human evolution itself. It's a grand story that manages to both be incredibly cryptic with its story and imagery, as well as make perfect sense upon deeper analysis, with Kubrick's screenplay collaborator, Sci-Fic icon Arthur C. Clarke, helping to ensure that the story always knows exactly where it's going and what it's saying, a striking clarity that I wish certain other works in the genre would be able to attain (I'm looking at you, Prometheus...)

But like I said, describing the story of 2001 is unnecessary anyway, as the real pleasure of the film is the unparalleled sensory experience it offers on the whole, with Kubrick adhering to a strict "show, don't tell" style of visual storytelling, as well as to a hard scientific accuracy in the film's portrayal of interstellar travel, including a complete lack of sound in space. It's an aspect that makes these scenes perfect for emphasizing the classical music soundtrack, which fits so well, it's hard to believe that it wasn't written specifically for the film itself, since it so enhances the elegant, slow-motion "dances" of the impossibly detailed space stations and ships on display here, all lovingly crafted by Kubrick's design team, and even over half a century later, the practical models and effects of 2001 still look more realistic than most works of Science Fiction that are being produced today.

Of course, some viewers have found the slow, extended sequences of space travel in the film to be fairly dull and uneventful, but I've always appreciated the way that these minutes-long intermissions allow us to just relax and soak in the interminglings of technology with the endless beauty of space, as the film makes us wait on its own, millennias-long timeline, which nonetheless still proves to be oddly propulsive in its own, one-of-a-kind way. It's a movie that's completely unafraid to take all the time it needs to craft the right mood, lulling us into the proper state of hypnotic viewing, even if you haven't tried enhancing your experience by certain "substances" as you watch, as a number of contemporary hippies are reported to have done during the film's original release (hey, there's a good reason why one of the film's taglines is "The ultimate trip", after all).

At any rate, another aspect that 2001 excels at is the way that it presents a truly full-bodied, three-dimensonal vision of the future, not content to offer another shiny but vague conceptualization, but one that really tries making informed, educated speculations about what life in the then-future year of 2001 would be like, with the way its portrayal of the commercialization of space travel turns it into being just another everyday errand, with such "mundane" details as the sight of a flight attendent making a disorienting, zero-G walk upside down simply to deliver lunch to a pair of eagerly waiting shuttle pilots.

This subtly, effortlessly ties into 2001's recurring message that, despite all the wondrous sights and technologies that the future of the film has to offer us as viewers, to the characters in the actual film, an experience like flying to a massive space station rotating in the heavens has become so everyday, it can be napped through, as humanity has become dull and jaded that none of the humans in the film exhibit so much as a hint of having an personality, with the most memorable character being the glowing red dot that represents the "HAL", the malfunctioning supercomputer, with the most emotional scene being when he helplessly begs (in his robotic monotone) to not have his "mind" erased.

Finally, 2001 excels in its absolute refusal to provide any unnecessary, audience-coddling answers to the universe shattering questions that it raises, as, even as advanced as mankind is in the film, it still shows there are certain things that will always be beyond our comprehension as human beings (at least, that is, until we evolve into something greater than that). It's perplexing storytelling that nonetheless knows exactly what to let the audience know (and not know), showcasing the great fear we would experience upon making first contact with an alien intelligence, with the eerie, harrowing choirs moaning in the background that accompany almost every sighting of the Monolith, while also ultimately proving to be optimistic about the endless possibilities of such contact. In that way, 2001 still towers over cinema like the Monolith itself over humanity, proving to be the finest example of Kubrick's legendary perfectionism, and watching it for the first time is a lot like experiencing what Dave does when he goes "beyond the infinite" towards the end; you have no idea what exactly what you're experiencing, but you also know that you'll never, ever be the same again.

Favorite Moment:

https://youtu.be/y3IkOL6Y0WA

Wall-E (Stanton, '08)

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Out there is our home.

About fourty years after starting out as nothing more than a special effects division of Lucasfilm, Pixar Studios has made an unparalleled impact on the modern history of animated film; starting with 1995's Toy Story, the first feature-length computer-animated film ever, Pixar has revolutionized the animation industry with what has arguably become the second "Disney Renaissance", continually putting out innovative, imaginative new works that (almost) always walk that ever-so-fine line between entertaining younger audiences, while still managing to engage older ones, often capturing the hearts of both alike in the process. However, to me, no single film in their oh-so-rich body of work stands out more than 2008's Wall-E, which is a one-of-a-kind mixture of sumptuously-animated visual storytelling, bold, imaginatively designed science-fiction concepts, and an overall overwhelming sense of wonder and emotion to ensure that, not only is it one of my favorite animated films, it's also just one my favorite FILMS, period.

It tells the story of a lone robot named Wall-E (short for "Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class"), a cute, curious fellow who also happens to be the last functioning unit in his series, and who, in the not-too-distant future, has been left behind by a bound-for-the-stars mankind in order to clean up a planet Earth that has become so polluted so as to no longer be firt for habitation, in the hopes of eventually making the world fit to live on again, one day... someday. Day in and day out, WALL-E continues forward with his Sisyphean task of trying to clean up the entire planet on his own, gathering every little bit of garbage he comes across and compacting it (while saving whatever little knickknacks he finds interesting), and then stacking up the resulting cubes of trash until they tower over the desolate landscape, as literal skyscrapers of garbage. It's a solitary life, his only companions being the non-operational Wall-Es he runs across here and there (which he then scavenges for spare parts), an oddly loyal, plucky cockroach with an enduring love of Twinkies, and his passion for Hello, Dolly!, the music of which he plays as he rocks himself to sleep each and every night, all alone in the world.

However, all of that changes when another, far more advanced robot named Eve ("Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator") literally drops out of the sky one day, on a search for a sign that Earth has become habitable again, a task that brings her across the path of Wall-E. From there, an unlikely but unbreakable romance will grow between the two of them, as as they set out on a journey that will take them to the farthest stars and beyond, and end up fundamentally determining the fate of all mankind itself. So that's the basic set-up of the story, but the real appeal of Wall-E lies in its incredible storytelling, as director Andrew Stanton utilizes an almost completely dialogue-free, visually-based style here, one that's not only unusual for a G-rated Disney release, but for any kind of film period, as it's more akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey than anything else, as an incredibly ambitious style for an equally ambitious film.

The depth of emotion that Stanton squeezes out here through the magnificent imagery is simply breathtaking, going from a completely desolate Earth to an impeccably sleek, futuristic spaceship and back again, with enough scope and detail to outmatch a thousand other movies if one were to compare. He respects his young Pixar audience (and us older viewers as well) to have the patience to digest the film as it plays out in relative silence, resulting in incredibly rich tableaus of post-apocalyptic/sci-fi visuals to dazzle our eyes, and engage our minds. The scientific concepts presented in Wall-E are incredibly well-developed, especially for a so-called "children's film", showcasing a garbage-brown, deserted Earth that we've polluted so much that it's no longer habitable by humans, an entire ship-bound society of people that are so sedentary, they've started to lose their ability to even move around on their own (which helps the film squeeze in some welcome commentary on corporate monopolies, obesity, and technology addiction), and of course, the central romance that blossoms between two "mere" robots.

Wall-E & Eve learn to love throughout the various hardships, and genuine, patient relationship-building they experience throughout the film, as the romance that develops between them has far more emotion in it than most live-action human couples have on screen, and the incredibly expressive 'bots of Wall-E display genuine loneliness, fear, and of course, love, and do it just as well as any real human actors ever had, all while barely saying anything more than each other's names. It's one of my favorite on-screen pairings in film history, animated or not, and the way that Wall-E the robot follows Eve to the ends of the universe, so too would I follow Wall-E, the film to the ends of this Earth; it's just that good.

Favorite Moment:

https://youtu.be/NPW3mvAN0Rc

Memento (Nolan, 2000)

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Now... where was I?

A hand holds up a fresh Polaroid picture, one that displays the image of a bloody corpse, before impatiently shaking it, as the image begins to... undevelop before our very eyes, gradually fading back into a pale, white nothing, before quickly sliding back inside the camera as though it never existed. It's quite the striking opening shot, one that deftly establishes the central reversed-time premise of Christopher Nolan's breakthrough film Memento, which, instead of being just some cheap cinematic gimmick, becomes so much more than that, through the various ways that Nolan experiments with and develops this structure over the course of the film, making it transcend to its full potential in order to create what is easily one of the most mind-blowing movies I've seen in my life.

It tells the story of Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator whose everyday existence is shattered (quite literally) by a botched home invasion, an incident that causes the death of his wife, and leaves Leonard himself with a form of "retrograde amnesia", one that leaves the entirety of his memory intact up until that night, but renders him unable to make any new memories since then. This leads to the film's unique, reverse chronological structure, as the story "begins" at the end, and goes forward in roughly five minute segments at a time, before jumping back to show us what happened beforehand, in a brilliant concept that Nolan utilizies to its maximum potential here, as the hunted becomes the hunter (and back again), former allies are gradually revealed in their treachery, and absolutely nothing is as what it seems.

Of course, I have to acknowledge that the film's plot is quite convoluted at times, and the way it unfolds in reverse (alongside the parallel scenes that proceed in normal order; jeez, even just talking about it is confusing) make it harder to follow anyway, and unless you're some kind of brilliant film savant, it will be impossible for you to absorb every little detail & nuance upon first watch, as the film practically demands for you to see it at least twice, preferably right after you've watched it the first time. However, rather than being annoyed at the Byzantine storytelling of Memento, I appreciate the confusion inherent in experiencing it, as this feeling is necessary for us to be able to sympathize with Guy Pearce's Lenny, the ultimate unreliable narrator, as a man caught in a Sisyphean nightmare of an existence, albeit one that we come to learn is partly of his own making, as his quest for revenge against the man who killed his wife (a revenge he won't even be able to remember) drags ever on, and he chooses to rewrite the past in order to retain a scrap of his own emotional sanity.

And besides its various narrative contortions, another thing I really enjoy about Memento is just how emotional it really is; at least half of its appeal comes from the extensive efforts Nolan takes to make us empathize with Lenny, as we watch him struggle to make meaning out of his situation, burn the last batch of his late wife's belongings, and reminisce often about her lingering memory, showing himself to be a man haunted & trapped by the spectors of the past (represented literally by the ever-growing number of "clues" he obsessively tattoos onto his body). It's the way these calm, beautiful, melancholic moments alternate with the frantic, confused portions of Memento that round it out to be a truly full package of cinema, and help it transcend its potentially gimmick-y nature to become something much, much more; whatever you do, don't forget to remember this one.

Alien (Scott, '79)

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In space, no one can hear you scream.

"You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? A perfect organism; its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." The preceding quote is spoken about the titular creature in Ridley Scott's Alien, but it might as well apply to the film itself; free of any needless complications, it doesn't concern itself with unnecessary details about the future it depicts, throwaway backstories, or needless romances between the characters, and, while all of that may make it sound thin on paper, on film, it results in a Horror offering that's unparalleled in its use of thick atmosphere, slow pacing, and foreboding environments and concepts to instill a sense of dread within us, to create what is, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the greatest Horror film I've ever seen.

The world of Alien is a frighteningly cold and isolated one, consisting solely of the ship Nostromo, the planet LV-246, and the seven people and various incarnations of the Xenomorph that inhabit both. Earth, and other forms of civilization, are briefly mentioned, but for all the relevance they have to the plot, the alien & the crew of the Nostromo may as well be the last living things in existence, which is essential to the film's overwhelming sense of isolation, but its sense of living in a hostile universe comes from the general production design, which is really the 8th star of the movie.

Even on the Nostromo, a ship supposedly designed for human beings, the environments feel very claustrophobic and er, "alien", with monitors, lights, and doors that turn on by themselves, cavernous industrial rooms with metal chains ominously dripping and hanging by overhead, and computer mainframes where the constant "whoosh" of the air-cooling fans make it sound like the room itself is breathing on you. Then you have the derelict alien craft and its unsettlingly gooey, asymmetrical, "bio-mechanical" corridors and openings, as well as the various creatures contained within: the Space Jockey, the Facehugger, and of course, the Alien itself, with frighteningly malevolent undertones in their designs, courtesy of an Oscar-winning H.R. Giger. This, combined with the horrors of a crewmate bleeding and spewing out white "blood" as he tries to suffocate you, or an infant extraterrestrial bursting out of your chest, result in a universe where you can't trust other people, or even your very own body.

But of course, all of these elements would be for naught without Ridley Scott's methodically cunning, atmospheric direction taking full advantage of them; because of him, this is a highly reassured, confident film, never rushing its storytelling nor delaying it unnecessarily, over-indulging in needless gore, or bringing in unnecessary story entanglements to give off an illusion of being "busy" (although Dan O'Bannon's screenplay must also be given credit for that). Instead, he recognizes the film's various strengths and focuses on them, keeping things slow so we can soak in Alien's highly pure, one-of-a-kind atmosphere and terror, resulting in a cinematic universe where truly, honestly, no one can hear you scream.

Schindler's List (Spielberg, '93)

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Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

A match suddenly sparks to life in a dark room, lighting a candle with a small, fragile flame, as a Hasidic family begins to pray around the dinner table, preparing for their Sabbath dinner. As the candle burns down to a smoldering heap, all the color is slowly drained away until it becomes a cold, stark black-&-white, before the whisper of smoke is abruptly replaced by the towering black cloud erupting from a train, as we're suddenly transported back in time to the dawn of World War II in Poland. And, as the invading Nazi troops force Jewish citizens nationwide to crowd into a few cramped ghettoes in the cities, and coldly, bureaucratically "register" them for what would become their eventual annihilation, we witness the scene being set for the unspeakable horrors of The Holocaust, which we will spend the next 3+ hours exploring in Steven Spielberg's masterful historical drama Schindler's List, what I personally consider to the best movie from a man who is (obviously) one of the most iconic directors in Hollywood history, and who, to be perfectly honest with you, made what is quite possibly my favorite movie of all time.

It tells the true story of Oskar Schindler (portrayed by Liam Neeson in a magnificently humane performance), a German businessman and swastika-wearing member of the Nazi party who initially sought to profit from exploiting the "free" Jewish labor available to his factories during The Holocaust, but, through the process of witnessing the pure, unrelenting evil of the genocide firsthand, eventually seeks to save the lives of his workers, and eventually, by spending his entire fortune bribing Nazi officials, ends up rescuing 1,200 people from a certain death.

But, to imply that List is nothing more than a straightfoward biopic of its title character, or some sort of unblemished, secular canonization of a modern-day saint is doing a grave disservice to Spielberg's masterfully balanced storytelling, as, rather than seeking to whitewash the more unflattering aspects of Schindler's persona, Spielberg instead magnifies them, focusing on his brazen womanizing, his disgusting wining-and-dining of prominent, high-ranking Nazi officials, or the grotesque manner that he initially seeks to profit off of the occupation, when he brags about how wealthy his enslaved laborers has made him. In addition to that, we also view Schindler's flaws through the outside lenses of a number of other characters throughout the film, such as his wife's frustrations with his constant adultery, to the point where maître d′s just assume that she's another one of his numerous mistresses when they see her, or the way that Schindler's personal accountant Itzahk Stern serves as the stubborn, resilient manifestation of his boss's initially non-existent conscience, outright refusing at all to indulge in Oskar's celebrations of his own war profiteering.

But, rather than turning us as an audience against him, this warts-and-all approach instead greatly humanizes Schindler, so that, as we witness his slow, gradual change of heart over the course of the film, instead of being elevated over us, he seems so much more fallible and real instead, showing us the ways that great, world-changing acts are always undertaken by people who are, in the end, as fundamentally flawed as any of us.

And of course, all of Schindler's exploitations end up paling far, far in comparison to his ultimate mirror image, camp commandant Amon Goethe, masterfully portrayed in a soul-chilling performance from Ralph Finnes, who gives one of the greatest villainous performances in film history for a man whose existence was the definition of pure evil, whose sheer, icy malice and soullessness is proven time and time again from his abrupt, senseless murders of random innocent people in his camp for "fun", the way he regularly terrifies and beats his housemaid to a pulp (a cover for his own self-rage at being attracted to a Jewish woman), and even the brief stretch of the film where it seems like he's considering becoming more merciful (which was brought about merely because Schindler temporarily convinces him that restraint is a way of showing "true" power over his prisoners) is quickly ended when he embraces his true self, and shoots a Jewish boy in the head for failing to cleaning his bathtub properly.

But, to also imply that List is nothing more than a simple tale of historical good vs. evil as represented by its main villain/protagonist is again, to do the film disservice, specifically its screenplay (which was rewritten at one point to more prominently emphasize the Jewish characters and their perspectives), as it achieves a basically perfect trade-off between the personal and historical, displaying unspeakably visceral individual horrors like a family having to swallow their own diamond rings in order to conceal an amount of wealth from the Nazi regime, or a man being forced to stand and wait as everyone else around him is randomly shot in order to force a certain confession out of him, or a child having to escape from a sure death by hiding in a pool of human filth down inside of an outhouse (where there are already other children cowering in fear).

But, at the same time, the film balances these individual experiences out by remembering the overall mass of humanity who suffered and by exploring various facets of the overall genocide whenever it can, whether it be the conversations that show Jewish people minimizing their persecution by choosing to believe that it can't get any worse, the way they refused to believe that they were being wiped out with the rationalization that they were the "essential work force" for the Nazis, or a particular sequence in Auschwitz that concludes with a lingering shot of a line of people being calmly herded like lambs to the slaughter towards one of the camp's infamous "shower" facilities, a shot which includes a particularly ominous billow of smoke arising as the result of the flames of that human-made Hell, one of many sobering reminders in the film that, although it's about the story of 1,200 people that were saved from The Holocaust, the vast majority of European Jews were far, far less fortunate.

And finally, stylistically, Schindler's List surpasses feeling like the historical reenactment that it fundamentally it is, and even goes farther than having the relative intimacy of a documentary, as cinematographer Janusz Kamiński balances the potential distancing effect of his crisp, period appropriate black-and-white imagery (which I find only adds to the overall starkness of the experience anyway) with his usage of intense close-ups, point-of-view angles, and disorienting, unstable handheld cameras to make us feel like we're actually there, personally experiencing the many depicted horrors, as SS men shout in our faces for us to present our papers, we line up for "inspections" to see whether we're judged worthy to live, and the ashes of our cremated brethren fall on us from the heavens, like a demented, out-of-season snowfall.

Even at over 3 hours long, the fact that the film ever ends still ends up making it feel far too short anyway, as it's such an intensely visceral telling of one of the most traumatic chapters in human history that the raw emotion depicted within more than justify whatever occasional Spielberg-ian sentimentalities that exist in it, as List ceases to play out like a mere "movie" at all, and just feels like pure... experience, placed onscreen as a warning to never let such horrors repeat themselves, a lesson humanity has sadly proven itself all to eager to forget. However, towards the absolutely heart-rending end of the film, as a character quotes the now-famous line from the Talmud, "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire", we can't help but be reminded that, although this world will always contain evil and people willing to commit it, one person's actions can make all the difference in that world, at least, that is, to the people their lives touch.

Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, '98)

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The mission is a man.

Despite its status as one of the most momentous events in living memory, one that defined the entirety of "The Greatest Generation" as we know it, I don't think we got a truly definitive World War 2 film out of Hollywood for a long time, at least, not one that tried to deliver an authentic-feeling impression of the war itself (so The Longest Day, with its PG-level violence, doesn't count for me). Sure, we got some iconic films set around it, like Casablanca, but that's more of a Romantic Drama, and not really about the war directly, and the same thing goes for something like The Dirty Dozen, which was more of a men-on-a-mission flick that served as an early prototype for the modern Action movie, you know? On the other hand, just a few years after the Vietnam War, we get Apocalypse Now; doesn't really seem fair to the prior conflict, does it? However, over half a century after WWII ended, we finally did get a film that has come to define that war in a cinematic sense, with Stephen Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, a movie that both upheld a number of previous cultural perceptions of that conflict, while also radically changing certain others, resulting in a work that has stood tall within the genre of War films in general, and has endured in the decades since its release as one of the finest films in Spielberg's lengthy, unparalleled career.

It tells the story of John Miller, an Army Captain who, in the bloody wake of D-Day, is tasked to lead a squad of men in order to locate Private Ryan, a random, lowly soldier whose three brothers were all just killed in action, leading him to be chosen for early removal from combat, in order to ensure that an entire generation of a family isn't lost to the all-consuming maw of the war. Of course, Ryan's location in the active, chaotic war zone that is Normandy is currently unknown, leading Miller and his men into a grueling mission across the blood-stained landscape, as they're continually forced to engage with the enemy, their already meager numbers are steadily whittled down in the process, and they increasingly question whether saving one man is worth all of this torment, pain, and sacrifice on their parts.

Of course, if this makes it sound as though Ryan is questioning our collective cultural & cinematic perception of World War II as being America's token "good war" of the 20th century, that's because it is to a certain extent; of course, it also engages in a re-valorization of The Greatest Generation's exploits during the conflict at times, particularly in a bookending frame device that some might (not unjustifiably) describe as sappy, but I feel the film justifies this by putting us through the absolute wringer to get there, with its brutally honest, unflinching portrayal of warfare, one that places a tremendous emphasis on the traumatizing effects of combat (a stark contrast to certain WWII films that portrayed combat as "adventurous" or exciting), with Janusz Kamiński's grim, grey, desaturated cinematography, which makes extensive use of a jittery, immersive, "you are there"-style handheld camerawork, and makes it feel as though the production sent a cameraman back in time in order to document the war firsthand for the film.

This is also reflected in the film's overall unflinchingly realistic level of gore, which almost certainly would've earned it an NC-17 rating had it not had the historical background as justification for it, as SPR feels less like watching a movie at times, and more like being fed through a literal meat grinder, particularly during the now-legendary D-Day sequence, which feels like the closest thing to experiencing the war firsthand short of actually fighting in it, with such sensory details as the absolutely deafening, never-ending sound of machine gun fire, or the sight of a mortally wounded soldier screaming for his mother as his intestines are spilling out all over the sand, with the battle being portrayed in such a chaotic, vivid, and disturbing manner, it actually lead the Department Of Veterans Affairs to create a hotline for veterans to call for counseling upon the film's release.

This de-glamorization of the war also extends to the film's portrayal of the American soldiers as well, whether it be the sight of them straight-up murdering a couple of enemy soldiers who were attempting to surrender, the way that Miller's men are increasingly hesitant to follow his orders as their losses pile up (culminating in an attempt to straight-up desert the mission at one point), and the way that Miller himself is emotionally burdened by the weight of having to lead men into combat to die, in addition to the way that he's shown to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder throughout, with the first shot of him being as close-up of his hands quivering as he (tries to) steel himself for battle, which not only helps to conveys the massive weight of the sacrifice he and the rest of his generation gave during the conflict, but also showcases the inherently messy, ugly reality of any war, regardless of how justified the involvement in it may be on the part of any one nation.

And finally, the film excels not just through the unparalleled intensity of its scenes of combat, but during the quieter moments outside it as well, as its potentially hackneyed "I miss home so much" dialogue exchanges succeed through the sheer, meticulous amount of craft behind the filmmaking, avoiding feeling manipulative in order to become genuinely emotional in the best of ways, and, while some people may decry some moments here as just more examples of Spielberg giving into his overly sentimental nature, as far as I'm concerned, like the titular character himself, Saving Private Ryan "earns" it, and then some.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark (Spielberg, '81)

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We are simply passing through history; this... this IS history.

If I were hard-pressed to name a favorite action movie, Raiders Of The Lost Ark would almost certainly be it, although that isn't because I think it has the best, er, action of any film in the genre. Don't get me wrong, the stunts in this are good and all, but I can't really say they're the absolute best I've ever seen or anything; rather, it's the grand, larger-than-life ADVENTURE of Raiders' action/adventure hybrid that puts it over the top for me, as, from the opening dissolve from the Paramount Logo into a real-life South American mountain, until its epic, iconic final shot of the Ark being lost in an endless warehouse, Raiders aims to entertain on a massive scale. And, even though it should collapse under the weight of its (to be honest) ridiculous premise and scenarios, its sheer audacious nature instead transforms it into an absolute Action classic, and just one of the greatest films of all time, period.

It achieves this minor miracle by constantly going big and then some, with shots of massive Nazi flags looming at us, Indiana casting shadows as big as the impact he's made on pop culture everywhere he goes, and the impending wrath of God lurking through sudden gusts of wind, eeriely unnatural thunder storms, and ominous orchestration courtesy of the legendary John Williams. Its pure adventure pulp at its finest, although the film doesn't just excel in its broad strokes, but through smaller ones as well, namely its rich cast of characters.

Of course, Harrison Ford puts in a classic performance as the irresistibly charming, seasoned, but emotionally/physically vunerable Dr. Jones ("Snakes... why'd it have to be snakes?"), but Raiders is also notable for its unusually rich, well-rounded supporting cast, such as John Rhys-Davies's boisterous Egyptian archelogist Sallah, Paul Freeman's arrogant antagonist Belloq, or Ronald Lacey's incessantly quivering, fish-lipped Major Toht, which has to be, to this day, one of the creepiest performances I've ever seen in my life. Finally, Karen Allen makes for the perfect foil for Indy as the fiesty Marion Ravenwood, an old flame who's still stewing over the way he walked out of her life, as the two have a great love/hate dynamic growing between them as the film goes on, and Allen adds a lot to the film's already strong sense of personality.

Besides all of that, Raiders' often sudden, shocking use of graphic violence lends it a real sense of danger, and makes you long for the days when the PG rating wasn't almost exclusively for slightly "edgier" animated movies aimed at pre-teens, like the Shreks of the world. And, while one could argue that its depiction of the "exotic" peoples present in its various locales is at best, an afterthought, and at worst, stereotypical, within the unrealistic, exaggerated context of the film, it's not so much offensive as it is there to enhance the overall adventerous, storybook feeling of Ark. The individual bits here all work together in order to serve the outstanding whole, and give Raiders more sheer character and personality than just about any other action movie out there, rendering it one of the grandest, most timeless entertainments out there in the end; don't miss this one for the world.

Gladiator (Scott, 2000)

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What we do in life... echoes in eternity.

Ridley Scott has certainly had an unusually long, influential, but nonetheless inconsistent career as a director, and Gladiator stands as one of his most noteworthy, but still divisive efforts; after all, not only did it win the Best Picture Oscar, but it was also a significant commercial success, grossing close to half a billion dollars worldwide.. but, on the other hand, it still seems to displease a good number of film fans and critics regardless, including Mr. Roger Ebert himself. But, while my recent rewatch of the film did clarify certain problematic aspects of it that I hadn't really noticed beforehand, helping me to better sympathize with its various detractors, the overall power & effect of Gladiator is still just so strong, that I can't help but declare it to be a flawed modern classic, but a modern classic nonetheless.

To get my newfound issues with Gladiator out of the way right away, I have to say that I now better understand the people who complained that it was its tone was rather, er, monotone, to the point of being self-defeating, as at times, its almost relentlessly morose, downbeat nature comes across as being borderline tragedy porn, even by the usual standards of a dark revenge narrative, and there are times I can't help but wish Scott had injected just a bit more levity into the proceedings, as too many of the characters seem to do almost nothing but just wallow in their own tortured misery for the entirety of its running time. This is especially true of the main villain, Emperor Commodus, as he often comes across as a somewhat cartoonish, one-dimensional baddie, but even Maximus's own family, who are his main motivators during the film, get essentially zero character development here, as they basically just exist as plot devices, as people who are there just to die in order to justify Maximus going on his warpath later on. Now, I know they aren't anywhere near being the main characters here, so I'm not expecting much of a focus on them, but something besides just being referenced in dialogue and a few shots of them standing around in a field would've been appreciated, Ridley.

However, all of that being said, one of the main reasons why I still love Gladiator on the whole is, while the emotional beats it hits may be rather repetitive, they're still incredibly intense and unabashedly raw nonetheless; I really became invested in Maximus's epic quest for vengeance "in this life or the next", which is written with sharp, memorable, insightful dialogue, and which Scott portrays through the huge, sweeping scope and grand tragedy of the overall tale. The shots of Maximus's family waiting for him in the afterlife, and the sight of him finally reuniting with them at the end, never fail to pluck at a couple of my heartstrings, and you can feel the righteous rage in every ounce of Russell Crowe's performance here. Besides that, the rest of the cast fills out Gladiator well, such as Richard Harris's old, war-weary Emperor Marcus Aurelius, or Connie Nielson as Marcus's daughter, Lucilla, who is torn between her past love for Maximus, his blind rage at her for being related to the man responsible for his family's deaths, and the fear of her brother's twisted desires, which are alternatively incestuous at certain times, and downright homicidal at others.

And in addition to all of that, Gladiator draws a lot of strength from capturing the cultural mystique of the Roman Empire at the peak of its power, with the weight of history laying heavily on the film (in a good way), whether it be in the dusty markets of Rome, the mighty catapults and calvary of the Empire's great army, or, of course, the bloody gladiatorial combat of The Colosseum, where about a good half of the film's scenes are set, which play a bit like similar moments from mid-century Hollywood sword-&-sandals epics like Ben-Hur & Spartacus, but updated with a modern emphasis on gallons of spilled blood, and piles of disemboweled guts. And, while the action in Gladiator isn't quite as coherent as I would've preferred, with too much over-editing, shake-y handheld camera work, and overly close framings of the combat that sometimes make it difficult to make out exactly what's going on, just the sight of epic, bloody, gladiator-on-gladiator combat adds a lot to the film, whether it be the recreation of The Battle Of Carthage where the barbarians get to win this time, an intense, relentless fight with a legendary, fearsomely-masked retired champion (where ravenous tigers keep getting released at the most inopportune moments), or one final, man-to-man duel to the death with the loathsome, tyrannical Emperor himself.

Gladiator has all of this and then some, and, again, while I can now better respect and understand why certain people don't care for it, the overall experience of it for me is still just so strong, with its lavish, grandiose period detail, and Maximus's tragic tale of righteous vengeance, that I can't help but love it anyway. This is rousing, operatic, larger-than-life entertainment, the kind that we sadly don't see out of Hollywood much anymore, and with how powerful a cinematic experience Gladiator is on the whole, all I really have left to say now is... are you not entertained?

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (Leone, '66)

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Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money... we're gonna have to earn it.

It may be difficult, or even near impossible to believe now, but there was a time when The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly wasn't really regarded as a great movie, at least when you look at the initial critical reaction to it. And upon hearing that, some of you may wonder, "How can that be? After all, wasn't it a genre-defining classic, and one of the greatest Westerns ever made?". Well, to put it in my own words, I'd say that TGTB&TU didn't so much as define the Western in the first place, but helped to redefine the genre, after Hollywood had spent decades building the myth of a relatively sanitized, morally black-and-white vision of the American frontier. So given that background, it's no surprise that some critics were hostile to the film, as part of a larger bias against Spaghetti Westerns in general; after all, who was Sergio Leone and these other "Eyetalian" filmmakers to tear down their memory of the West from the outside, tarnishing the image of the most quintessentially American genre? However, it's precisely that kind of cultural vandalism that helped distinguish the film in the first place, allowing it to become not just one of the greatest Westerns, but also just one of the greatest movies of all time, in my humble opinion.

This is clear right from the first few seconds of the movie, as a wide shot of a vast, sun-baked desert, the kind of scenery that you could see in any number of Westerns, suddenly becomes an uncomfortably tight close-up of an ugly, sweaty man as he unexpectedly lumbers into frame, showing us the literal face of the "real" West, or at least Leone's unique vision of it, as he will continue to reenvision its familiar iconography for his own purposes here. It's an aesthetic that's both highly dynamic, and as gritty as the grain on the print itself, as the locations here are universally rough and shabby, with nary a sanitary soundstage in sight, as live flies constantly buzz around, and we see a never-ending Mount Rushmore of various sweat, grime (and occasionally blood)-covered faces in great detail, creating what is still the filthiest-looking vision of the American West I've seen on film.

This dirty feeling isn't just limited to the film's visuals, however, as it also extends to the main characters and their lack of traditional morality, with Lee Van Cleef's Angel Eyes ("The Bad") murdering multiple people, including a child, in just his first few scenes, Eli Wallach's Tuco ("The Ugly") living as a crafty, motor-mouthed Mexican bandito, wanted for at least a dozen different crimes in just as many counties, while Clint Eastwood's gunslinging Blondie (the so-called "Good") is motivated purely by personal financial gain, and only does one truly good thing the entire movie (and even that is still partly to benefit himself). A more accurate title would be The Morally Ambivalent, The Really Bad, And The Almost Just As Bad, but that's a big part of why the film has held up so well over half a century since its original release; it doesn't exist in order to justify some outdated, self-aggrandizing myth of "Manifest Destiny", but in order to present a darker, harsher portrayal of the West, one that feels more honest than many of its cleaner predecessors, regardless of how uncomfortable some may have been with that at the time.

Besides that, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is also exemplary for Leone's amazing overall direction of it, as it serves as a sort of culmination of his career up that point, taking the comparatively smaller scales of the previous Dollars films, and majorly upping the scope in its depiction of the mad, elaborate dash for treasure that is the central plot, both setting the stage for the director's future epics, while also serving as the all-time peak in his impressive body of work. However, while you may picture historical figures having dull, stuffy conversations in ornately decorated rooms when you think of epics, TGTB&TU is an epic that keeps its overall sense of fun from lagging, even with its 2 & 1/2+ hour runtime, as there are plenty of moments of levity, lots of colorful dialogue, and a generally playful mood, as seen in a great moment when a "Confederate" soldier brushes himself off to reveal the blue uniform beneath an accumulation of grey dust, before a sudden cut reveals our protagonists having been taken as prisoners of war in a Union Army camp.

In all honesty, this might just be the most purely entertaining movie I've ever seen, and even watching it now, twenty years after my original viewing, I found myself enjoying myself just as much as I did the first time, with so many moments here constantly bringing a faint smile upon my face, giving me the same exact sensations I felt when I was fourteen. I mean, Ennio Morricone's score by itself is fantastic, and about as iconic as movie music gets (and I'm not just talking about the "coyote yell" of the main theme, either), but how well it's used to underscore the onscreen action here? It's just glorious, glorious filmmaking all-around, resulting in an experience that's pretty much as close to perfection as movies get (hell, even the occasionally obvious English dubbing has its charm), and while the film was responsible for disregarding a lot of the myths surrounding the Old West, it replaced that with just as many of its own, creating reverberations not just throughout the rest of Eastwood's lengthy career, but the entire genre of the Western as a whole. To borrow some language from the Bible, it's the stone that the builders rejected, that ended up becoming one of the cornerstones of the modern Western, one that still stands tall, even to this day; "Go, go, amigo...".

Favorite Moment:

https://youtu.be/ubVc2MQwMkg

Lawrence Of Arabia ('62, Lean)

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Nothing is written.

The Arabian desert; an absolutely brutal, pitiless, and unforgiving landscape, the ruthless, scorching daytime sun beats down on it relentlessly, as a veritable ocean's worth of sand stretches out to the horizon, seeming to go on for an eternity and beyond, creating one of the harshest, most inhospitable places on the planet. Even more endless than this desert, however, are the sheer complexities of the human soul, both in its capacity for good as well as evil, and in almost no other person were these inner depths and contradictions explored deeper and further than in Thomas Edward Lawrence, whose wartime exploits in Arabia were immortalized in David Lean's 1962 classic Lawrence Of Arabia, one of the last (and one of the best) "hurrah!"s of the old-school Hollywood historical epic, and also just one of the best films of all time, period.

The film tells the story of "T.E. Lawrence", a British military officer who, during World War I, was dispatched to Arabia to serve as liason between his government and the Arab rebels who, at the time, were not only struggling for their independence against the brutal dominion and oppression of the Ottoman Empire, but also against the ancient, bitter tribal divides that still threatened to tear them apart, even in the face of far greater, more urgent crises. And, if you're familiar with the history of the real "Lawrence Of Arabia", you already know that he was fairly successful in his quest to guide the Arab Revolt; he made alliances with various Arab tribes, leaders, and even royalty, helped lead them in numerous successful raids against the Turkish Army, and even oversaw the captures of the strategically vital outposts of Aqaba and Damascus, the capital of Syria. However, the main question that David Lean poses to us in Lawrence Of Arabia isn't whether or not Lawrence succeeded in his physical journey (although the overall fate of the Arab world post-war poses that question naturally), but rather, at what price did that success cost his soul?

Over the course of Arabia's near 4-hour(!) running time, Lean compellingly tells the story of Lawrence's journey, both in a purely aural/visual sense, as well as in the inner, personal struggles of the man himself; Maurice Jarre's majestic, sweeping score still stirs the soul just as much even half a century later, while Frederick Young's breathtakingly epic cinematography fully captures the harsh, impossibly expansive beauty and majesty of Arabia, with its ugly, jagged rock formations, and disorientingly vast, incredibly parched stretches of sand that often threaten to swallow the characters whole, both visually and literally. As for Lawrence himself, Lean methodically captures every defining moment in his quest, painstakingly displaying the journey he takes from being a borderline insubordinate, restless intelligence officer stewing away in a "nasty, dark little room" and lusting to experience some sort of excitment in the desert, to a cynical, world-weary adventurer, disillusioned both by the bloody reality of front-lines warfare, and the self-serving, behind-the-scenes ambitions of the nations waging such wars.

Peter O'Toole's star-making performance as Lawrence is still one of the all-time greats, perfectly capturing the man's initial, seemingly insatiable hunger for adventure, followed by his gradual but confident winning of the admiration of various, vitally important Arab tribesmen after they're initially suspicious of the foreign "Englishman", before his initial vision of an independent Arabia is dashed by the colonial ambitions of European powers, including those of his own country, and his extended exposure to the true, ugly horrors of tribalism, colonialism, and of course, war, transforms his innate self-masochism slowly but inevitably into a merciless outward bloodlust. O'Toole's portrayal here is as vivid as you could expect from any actor, past or present, with his piercing blue eyes and intensely emotional, quivering facial expressions combining to create one of the finest, most unforgettable embodiments of a historical figure on film, and one of the greatest tragic heroes in the history of cinema as well.

And finally, despite having one of the longest runtimes in the history of non-experimental film, Lawrence Of Arabia still manages to feel its length in the good sense of the phrase, alternating between lengthy but (almost) never tedious physical travails across unforgiving, awe-inspiringly HUGE expanses of the Arabian desert, mixed in with scenes of strikingly personal, intimate character development and political maneuverings, not merely with Lawrence himself, but for just about every character around him as well, whether it Sherif Ali's tug-of-war between his hopes for Arab independence fighting against his innner xenophobia against Arabs of other tribes, the "slim customer" Mr. Dryden's naked, unashamed desire for future colonial exploitation of the Arabian peninsula, or Jackson Bentley's journalistic eagerness to find an idolistic figure to "sell" the war to his readers being dashed by his discovery of what kind of man Lawrence really is (or at least, the kind of man the war has turned him into), is a multitude of rich characterizations that just wouldn't be possible with a running time cut to be "friendlier" to general audiences. In all of this and more, Lawrence Of Arabia truly proves itself to be an epic to end all epics, and if it had to be one of the notes that the Hollywood of old was meant to go out on, what a magnificent note it was, indeed.

Unforgiven (Eastwood, '92)

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It's a hell of a thing, killing a man; you take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have.

Unforgiven is haunted by many things; as a film, it's haunted by an American west that never existed, its protagonist is haunted by the memory of his late wife, by the atrocities he committed as a young outlaw, and by the fear he'll get what he deserves in the afterlife, and finally, one could say that Clint Eastwood himself was haunted, by the long shadows his cinematic mentors still cast over his career (Sergio Leone & Don Siegel to be exact, to whose memories the film is dedicated to). However, while Will Munny never truly escapes any of the demons haunting him, the man who portrays him did, winning himself an Oscar for Best Director, in addition to the well-earned Best Picture Oscar the film itself received, earning it a richly-deserved status as a true modern classic, and the status of a "Western to end all Westerns", so to speak.

You see, it's immediately obvious that Unforgiven is no traditional Western from its first five minutes alone, when a scene of intercourse is interupted by a cowboy slashing his prostitute's face for giggling at the size of his manhood, and, when the local sheriff gives the man and his friend a rather light punishment, the women of the brothel conspire to offer a $1,000 "Wanted Dead" bounty on the two men, a catalyst that causes the notorious outlaw Will Munny to come out of "retirement". However, it's obvious from the very first moment we see him that Munny is no unstoppable, Man With No Name-style gunslinger, but a muddy, exhausted old man, struggling to wrangle his pigs, half of whom are sick anyway, into the pen of his small, meager farm, and this demythologization of the Western outlaw continues throughout Unforgiven, as Munny gets pistol-whipped half to death at one point, nearly dies from a "mere" fever instead of a bullet, and, most importantly, is constantly, emotionally tortured by the memories of the past horrors he committed.

This extends to the tone and conventions of the overall genre as well, as the prostitutes are treated more like livestock than human beings here, the "action" scenes are realistically bloody and confused, with no exciting "quick-draw" duels in sight, and law enforcement isn't shown to be any more moral than the criminals it opposes, as Gene Hackman delivers a memorably chilling performance as "Little Bill", a man who seems reasonable and pragmatic at first, but who eventually reveals himself to be a brutal sadist instead, dealing mercilessly with anyone who threatens the tranquility of his town, often enjoying himself as he does so.

He's trying to achieve a good end through evil means, a moral ambiguity that extends to Munny as well, as it's obvious that he wouldn't have taken the job if he didn't have two young children to support, he expresses constant, legitimate remorse over his past sins, and when he shoots one of his bountyheads in the gut (the one who had nothing to do the initial mutilation of the prostitute, it must be noted), Munny ceases firing when he hears the man's cries, and demands that he be brought a canteen of water, to ease the pain of a slow death just a little. Unforgiven's absolute refusal to provide any easy answers or moral conclusions is what makes it so incredibly, undeniably powerful, and elevates into being a grand eulogy for Westerns overall, really, as the whole affair has a timeless, mythical quality to it, no more so than in its masterful final shot, when Munny visits his wife's grave at sunset one last time, and, as the lone, sorrowful acoustic guitar of "Claudia's Theme" (written by Eastwood himself) begins to play, the bookending text tells us:

"Some years later, Mrs. Feathers made the arduous journey to Hodgeman County to visit the final resting place of her only daughter. William Munny had long since disappeared with the children... some said to San Francisco, where it was rumored that he prospered in dry goods. And there was nothing on the grave to explain to Mrs. Feathers why her only daughter had married a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously violent and vicious disposition."

The Third Man (Reed, '49)

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We should've dug deeper than a grave.

While the cinematic and literary roots of Film Noir stretch back well before the 40's, it's only natural that the genre would truly begin to flourish during that decade, as it obviously saw the global devastation of World War II, an event that brought a newfound paranoia and anxiety upon the world, even among the nations that were left relatively unscathed in its wake. And so, keeping that in mind, it only makes sense that Carol Reed's The Third Man had such a close connection to that conflict, as the film expertly balances its status as a living history lesson with being a wonderful piece of entertainment at the same time, telling a fantastic mystery set amongst the rubble of post-war Europe, and becoming one of the greatest Classical-era Noirs ever made in the process, if not, at the risk of hyperbole, the greatest.

It tells the story of Holly Martins, a self-described "hack writer" of pulp Westerns, who travels to Vienna in order to accept some sort of vague job offer from Harry Lime, an old friend of his. However, as soon as the hapless Holly arrives there, he's shocked to learn that Lime recently died, apparently killed in a freak car accident... that is, until a number of details fail to add up, forcing Holly to reopen the closed case himself, connecting with an old flame of Lime's that refuses to burn out, all the while continually dodging the murderous denizens of the local underworld, as he digs ever deeper into the seedy past of his "dead" friend, buried amongst the labyrinthian rubble of a post-war Vienna.

It's a fairly rich, multi-layered mystery, but rather than getting tangled up in unnecessarily convoluted plot knots like some of its peers in the genre, Graham Greene's sharply-written screenplay instead remains streamlined throughout, never becoming overly complicated just for the sake of it, but only throwing new wrinkles into the story when they're strictly needed, which keeps things intriguing without ever overwhelming us in the process. Anyway, speaking of other Noirs, The Third Man also distinguishes itself from them with its unexpected sense of fun, forgoing the fatalism that often characterized the genre with its generally lighter tone, literally from the start, with the close-up of Anton Karas's zither as it begins to play the quirky, iconic score, and continuing with a number of playful or comedic moments throughout, whether it be the sight of a small child leading a mob through the streets of Vienna, a hilarious misunderstanding involving a unwanted chauffer, or the unexpected appearance of a talking parrot at a most inconvenient moment.

All that being said though, there's still absolutely no doubt that The Third Man is a work of Film Noir on the whole, whether it be the deep, monstrously distorted shadows of its high-contrast lighting, or the way that the off-kilter dutch angles of Robert Krasker's virtuosic cinematography create a sort of topsy-turvy, funhouse mirror of reality. And, character-wise, the fresh faced, almost newborn-like naivety of Joseph Cotten's Martins starts to give way to the kind of cynicism we expect from a Noir protagonist, as he's repeatedly splashed with the cold water of Harry's greedy, sociopathic behavior throughout, with Lime himself making a tremendous impact with very little actual screentime, particularly during one of the greatest character reveals ever filmed.

But of course, despite the presence of such screen icons as Orson Welles, the real star here is Vienna itself, as the film was filmed on-location amongst the rubble of the once-glorious national capital, still recovering from the continent-wide "hangover", as a devastated city divided up among the authorities of various post-war powers, with the classy architecture of the buildings that were lucky enough to survive the war, and the rubble of the ones that weren't, providing a concrete maze for the characters to survive, and concealing a new mystery around each and every one of its sharp corners, giving the city just as much character as any of the actual, well, characters. It's this conspiratorial atmosphere the locale provides that further sets The Third Man apart as a film, makes it one of the finest examples of its genre, and ultimately creates an experience that's just as fresh and entertaining today as it was over half a century ago; now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go get some zither lessons.

Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (Herzog, '72)

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On this river, God never finished his creation.


Aguirre: The Wrath Of God is nominally a period piece, focusing on a 16th-century expedition by Spanish conquistadors into the Amazon rainforest, but for a "historical" movie, it isn't particularly, er... historical. The director himself, German film legend Werner Herzog, admitted that the story is mostly fabricated, and it isn't really designed to educate us about the real Aguirre, since the historical figures it does feature are mostly used in fictitious ways. Instead, Werner Herzog uses history as his jumping-off point for a surreal, crazed fever dream of a film, portraying the inherent madness of power through the savage lens of the Amazon jungle, resulting in what is easily one of the best films I've ever seen.

Its "plot" (if it can be called that) focuses on the titular character's coup of the expedition, and Aguirre's failed journey into the Amazon to establish a grand empire, but this really isn't a film driven by story details, but rather, mood; the Amazon serves as a "set" far more memorable than any soundstage, with its thick foliage, heavy humidity, and the chirping of various unseen animals and insects creating an atmosphere that is subtly, quietly hostile to the arrogance of the "civilized" colonists to think they could ever conquer it.

It's an atmosphere that Herzog takes full advantage of, getting up close and personal with the rainforest with his unsteady, handheld camera in a guerrilla-documentary fashion, as arrows and spears, fired by unseen native tribes, continually fly at the expedition at random, and various traps and ambushes serve to steadily dwindle their numbers as their raft wears its way down the Amazon. Some might consider Aguirre's portrayal of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon as mostly hostile, cannibalistic "savages" to be rather cliched, or even offensive, but it's obvious to me that this was never meant to be a realistic portrayal of South America, but rather, a cautionary tale of the madness that comes with any kind of lust for power; after all, the European settlers of the film behave just as savagely as the "savages" do, if not more so, and its period and setting are ultimately irrelevant except so far as they enhance the film's central themes.

It isn't meant to reflect reality at all, but rather, represent Herzog's mad personal vision, and the schizophrenic, stream-of-consciousness pacing serves to further enhance the surreal mood, as the story doesn't unfold with a lot of traditional structure or momentum (a jungle adventure ala Indiana Jones, this is not), but rather, Herzog takes his time in letting everything just play out slowly, as if in a dream, seducing us into a cinematic trance, and creating an example of fragmented storytelling at its best. The film's insanity doesn't wear on you in an over the top way, but a in a slow, gentle manner, as crazy things (talking severed heads for the win) just sort of randomly... happen, and sometimes, nothing happens, like a beautiful, slow-motion, minute-long closeup of river rapids just clashing together, a moment that adds so much more to the film than any traditional plot exposition could've hoped to.

The film goes from episode to episode, lurching much like Klaus Kinski's Aguirre himself, an undeniably powerful, memorable central performance. His wild, unkempt blonde mane and deep blue eyes convey so much paranoia and madness, while his performance is still charismatic and human enough at times to make you believe that an entire group of men would willingly (at first) follow such a man to their death. Following Aguirre the film, on the other hand, will not lead you to death, but rather, something much, much better; pure, cinematic greatness.

Pan's Labyrinth (del Toro, '06)

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Dare to enter.

It's a sad reality, but the truth is, no one is immune from the various horrors of the real world, whether it by death, emotional sorrow, or even war, and that's especially true for those among us who are the least prepared to deal with them, particularly children; in fact, the helplessness of childhood can often actually magnify such horrors, and make them even worse than they already are, leaving the people affected desperate for any sort of escape from them. And, what better escape than the one that's offered to us in cinema, the artform that's given people temporary relief from reality for well over a century now? However, rather than serving as a denial of such reality, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth serves as a cold reaffirmation of it, yet one that derives its power from the way that it blends the real with the fantastical, creating what is, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, an absolute masterpiece, as a film that's not only my favorite from del Toro to date, but also just one of my favorite movies of all time.

It tells the story of Ofelia, a highly imaginative girl who's forced to move to the Spanish countryside with her pregnant mother, in order to live with her cruel, sadistic stepfather, an army captain who's waging a brutal campaign to eradicate the last of the local rebels in the area, left over in the aftermath of the country's civil war. Faced with this harsh new reality, Ofelia begins escaping into a fantasy world with the help of an ancient Faun (the purveyor of the titular "labyrinth"), who gives her three tasks to complete before the next full moon, in order for her to achieve immortality, and return to the idyllic underground kingdom that she supposedly came from, where Ofelia's real family is awaiting her return (or so he claims). And so, undertaking this quest, Ofelia must deal with the lines between her fantasy and reality, and the various kinds of horrors contained within both realms, becoming increasingly ambigious and blurred, as she becomes ever more desperate to find an escape from her cruel new life, and the conflict outside creeps closer and closer to her front door.

Because of all this, Pan's Labyrinth ends up being a highly unique mixture of genres, blending disparate elements of Fantasy, Horror, and War films all into one, but it's a mix that del Toro makes work superbly well together, by taking his time to build the world here, and maintaining a tonal consistency even as he "shifts gears", with the horrors of the rich fantasy world serving to be almost as disturbing as the stomach-churning violence of the actual guerrilla warfare depicted outside it, as the two tones serve to compliment each other, making us sympathize with Ofelia's desperate plight, and yearn for an escape from it right along with her, creating a dark, violent fairy tale that's experienced by a child, but one that holds just as much weight (if not moreso) for the adults watching it.

Besides that, Pan's also excels on a technical & emotional level, with its eerie, darkly enchanting tone, rich color hues, and ornate sets and production design bringing the murky underworld within it to undeniable life, as its elaborate fantasy setpieces, lead by a solitary Ofelia all on her own, make us feel just as immersed in them as she does. Additionally, del Toro's lifelong fascination with fantastical creatures reaches its creative peak here, particularly with the character of The Faun, who, even buried underneath a mountain's worth of makeup and prosthetics, still very much comes alive with the wise, earthy performance of frequent del Toro collaborator Doug Jones stealing the show. Of course, he's far from the only memorable character here, as Sergi López's Captain Vidal proves to be just as memorable a presence, even in a far more grounded form, as his particular brand of authoritarian evil serves to horrify just as much as any of the creatures in the film, in a way that is as as chilling as it is believable, proving that the evil of people in the real world can be just as bad, if not worse, than the monsters of our imaginations.

Finally, on that note, Pan's Labyrinth leaves a lasting impression with its political themes, and the way it deconstructs the message of many fairytales that are designed to instill obediance in children, by creating an ode to the virtue of disobediance in the face of oppression, a message that has become sadly more urgent in the decade and a half since its release (for more detail, go watch the Nerdwriter1's excellent video essay on Youtube on the subject). But, outside of its particular historical or political contexts, the greatest power of Pan's ultimately lies on a personal level, particularly with its tragic ending, which is set to the haunting sound of a forgotten lullaby, and the sight of a fading life proving to be one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever seen in a film, albeit in the most beautiful of ways; do you dare enter?

Final Score: 10

Goodfellas ('90, Scorsese)

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As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster...



Final Score: 10