ahwell's Top 100 Movies - 2020

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Toy Story is a good movie, but I've never understood the rabid love for it.
Probably because it was the first in a long line of the great Pixar films. Because A bug's Life wasn't great



For my part, it's just that the writing's really good (feels like they found almost every great little joke about toys in general, childhood habits, and lots of specific toys in particular, that was there to be found), and the voice acting's top tier for any animated film.



You can't make a rainbow without a little rain.


33. Toy Story (1995)

Toy Story is a great movie, and I think the voice actors are a big part of the reason for the success of the movie. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are perfect as Woody and Buzz. However my favorite characters are the little green aliens. I even have a toy crane machine filled with little figures of them.
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32. Stalker (1979)

A stalker leads a group of two men - a professor and a writer - into the Zone, a heavily guarded region where the physics of reality are a bit off kilter.

Sounds like the setup of some Christopher Nolan high concept high budget sci-fi action movie, starring some big name actors who'll make buckets of money for the producers.

Well, go home blockbuster fans, Stalker is one of the starkest, slowest moving, most poetic films I've ever seen. It's a horror story in the minds of our characters - a stalker (leader) who has utter faith and trust in the powers of the Zone - and two inexperienced men who doubt themselves and the stalker along the journey.

Which culminates in a hugely anti-climactic climax, with three men, depressed, horrified, lamenting the evils of humanity, sitting and watching the Room from the outside. Deeply poetic as I said. Stalker hits your soul in a way that other Tarkovskys haven't (even Andrei Rublev, my favorite).

To analyze Stalker from its themes is about as futile as trying to pick apart Mirror - it's simply too daunting a task and too bold of a statement for me to make, to say I've discovered the meaning of this mind twister. So I'll instead start with the wonderful use of color - a yellow-ish black and white when we are in the real world, and a dark grisly color shade when in the Zone. It works beautifully, and we are transformed the very instant the color cinematography begins.

The movie is extremely slow... however, it doesn't feel slow due to Tarkovsky's great tracking/slow moving shots. You always feel tension, suspense, awe, or just confusion. The scene in the passageway to get to the Room is "boring" but also fascinating, tantalizing, insane. You get to peer into what each character is doing, think about what they're thinking, wonder what will happen next.

Many sci-fi films would take the route of showing the characters cracking the code of the Zone. They piece together clues, discover a hidden truth, and then realize how to "beat" it. Not so here. Instead, Tarkovsky treats us wonderful scenes - in the middle of the most dangerous place on earth - in which the characters just talk. About their worries, fears, pleasures, sorrows... It's beautiful, and scary, and thought-provoking. The characters are built up so well, the Writer being a cynic (as the Professor is revealed to be) and the Stalker being a man of no second-doubts when it comes to the Zone.

It is only near the end when the Stalker himself begins to mentally breakdown. He questions his own faith in the Zone and the Room, the objective goodness of what he is doing, and lets the Writer reveal to him the secret of the Room - it only gives us our unconscious desires, meaning evil people are powerless.

Back at home, the Stalker gives a short monologue about his disappointment in humanity. They've lost hope and faith and trust. He's talking about the Zone, but who's to say the Zone isn't simply an allegory for the world, or the people of the world?

Afterward, his wife speaks documentary-style to the camera about her husband. She notes that she embraces the sorrow in her life, since without it there would be no happiness... and hope. In a way that is a cliche line, but it also rings so true, and it makes us wonder what happens to the people that return "happy" from the cave? As we know, Porcupine's fate was along those lines.

Stalker examines our fears and desires in a way that many movies are afraid to do. It's enigmatic but a completely unique experience in film.
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I’m not afraid or ashamed to admit that Tarkovsky is a guy I’m not even close to grasping... that’s both the strength and the weakness for me.

Sometimes it results in frustration, annoyance and perhaps a bit of boredom. Mostly because it’s hard to be invested constantly in something you don’t understand. But oftentimes he fascinates me and spellbind me in very interesting ways that I’m rarely prepared for.

So I will continue to check his stuff out. Stalker might be my best experience yet. I still think about it and there’s something about him I feel a “need” to figure out.



Stalker, hell yeah! That might be my favorite movie on your entire top 100 list, what an amazing film! I rated it a
and said this about it:

Oh, the amazement of it all! I loved the opening scene that seemed to go on forever like time had been slowed down...and what a thing of beauty the gold monochromatic look gave to the film. It was all so richly textured, the walls, the furniture, the floor, even the deeply lined face of the Stalker was textured. That my friends is a stunning use of side lighting.

I really liked how the film used monochrome color to represent the world of the Stalker, where he merely existed. But it's in the zone where he comes alive and so did the colors! I loved the look of the zone with the early morning soft light and mist...mist everywhere, like a soft blanket concealing the mysteries of the zone.

The use of negative space in the compositions really imparted an emotion of poetic peace and yet there's this understated uneasiness that occurs in the zone.

It's amazing how by the actor's reactions, we believe the zone is this place with ever changing mazes, where the laws of physics don't seem to apply and danger is only a misstep away. Yet, we never seen any evidence of that...but I totally believed it.

Stalker
is about a personal experience...it's reflective, as four people go into the zone...The fourth person is the movie viewer.



I remember quite liking Stalker, but getting to about 100+ minutes and losing interest and have never gone back.
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31. No Country for Old Men (2007)

Easily the best Coen Brothers movie I've seen yet, No Country for Old Men is the definition of the gritty, modern, Western that completely entrances its viewers for the two hour run time.

It's interesting, because the two other Coen movies I've seen have been the Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Blood Simple. And No Country is a fascinating fusion of both of those. It's through and through a Western, although BoBS is more traditionally so. But it's thriller/horror aspects are very "Blood Simple"-esque. Especially those long scenes in the dark, with no dialogue... there's just tension. That's something I saw a lot of in Blood Simple, and was executed to perfection here.

So yeah, there are a lot of similarities between this and the others. But No Country for Old Men stood out to me as having more tightly focused - and more developed - themes that Blood Simple and Ballad only touched on. At the forefront is of course the tug-of-war between fate and choice. It's at the center of No Country for Old Men, or at least my interpretation of it. We get the first glimpse of that with the coin toss, with Anton and the store clerk. He guesses wrong and he's dead. Yet the clerk guesses correct. Anton walks out of the store, leaving the poor guy scratching his head.

At the very end, that coin toss comes back, which was when I finally realized what this was all about. As Moss runs and runs and runs, Chigurh is slowly, steadily, ruthlessly catching up to him. It's like Chigurh stands for fate, or maybe even the devil. He is pure evil, with no moral conscience, or at least one that we as humans couldn't understand. His motives are simply to confirm and carry out his own ideologies about fate.

So when Moss's wife is confronted by Chigurh in that pen-ultimate scene, we sense the dread of the situation. It has built and built and built, and the chain reactions of all the characters and the events has lead to this moment. He tosses the coin and asks her to guess. Yet unlike the store clerk, she refuses. She tells Chigurh, to his clear surprise and annoyance, that it's his own choice.

Although he kills her in the end, and indeed gets away with the murder, we're left with that final hope. The movie isn't telling us that our fate has been pre-decided and that it may be decided by the flip of a coin. Instead, it offers a choice about the morality of the tale. One that I quite frankly haven't made my mind up about. I don't have the answers yet to what exactly No Country for Old Men is saying deep down. Of course I intend to rewatch this eventually so maybe I'll understand more on that viewing.

But besides those amazingly well thought out and fascinating themes, the Coen Brothers bring us some of their best iconic dialects from Chigurh, Moss, and the sheriff. The way they play with their protagonist is fantastic, just like in Blood Simple. We are constantly switching sides and facets of the story, and in the end I still don't think the protagonist is very clear. That makes it all the better for the story to develop. Moss switching his moral choices - both good and bad - in order to escape Chigurh is masterfully done, but when he dies the audience is left shocked. Not shocked that he died - in fact, I expected that. But shocked that there was no grand scene, no final statement, and it wasn't even the climactic moment of the film. We just see Moss dead, probably from the Mexicans shooting him. And that's that. The story moves on, and we can't help but get swept up in it.

All the actors make you even more immersed in the story, and it's Oscar-winning screenplay boosts the movie to an insane amount. It's just a powerhouse of a film, all around one of the most polished, nuanced, darkest, well acted, best written, films I've seen - not something I'm bound to forget any time soon, and shoots the Coen Brothers straight into my top 15 directors.



I HATED the ending to No Country and didn't care much for the rest of the movie either. Waste of money blind buy. Still collecting dust in my collection, though.





30. The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

My relationship with the Lord of the Rings series - particularly the first movie - has always been a bit odd. When I was just a kid, I must have glanced at the TV one night or something while my parents were watching The Fellowship of the Ring. Or maybe I saw an art still while walking through a store. But I remember seeing that iconic image of Rivendell, wherever it was, and absolutely falling in love. I've always been a huge fan of fantasy/myth. I was obsessed with the Percy Jackson series as a kid, and would later just read Greek and Egyptian Myths for the hell of it. Even the Bible, a book I had been taught to see as the one True Word, had it's mystical qualities, and that's what fascinated me the most about church.

So it's no surprise that, in my younger years, when I saw that picture of Rivendell, heard about this world of hobbits and elves and dwarves and wizards and demons, I was entranced. I think I tried reading the books once, when I was in second or third grade, but they're not the same as Rick Riordan's or JK Rowling's magical worlds. They're dense, wordy, and often slow moving. I have yet to read them, but one day I hope to.

But, anyways, around seventh or eighth grade is when, once again, I fell in love with the Lord of the Rings. I had still not seen the movies - instead, my orchestra teacher played for us a little clip of the Howard Shore's magnificent score for the series. It was magical, breath taking music. I later remember sitting for hours and playing through the entire 4-hour YouTube video, absolutely taken to this magical fantasy world.

The score, in a sense then, very nearly could be traced back to the reason I got into movies in the first place. Back then, I was sort of a classical music snob - I only really wanted to listen to classical music, and I didn't have an interest in any other genres, including film score music. But Howard Shore's score - which reminded me immensely of Wagner's masterpiece Der Ring des Nibelungen, which happens to be possibly my favorite piece of music of all time - made me hungry for more film scores. I loved the luscious full sound. I loved the leitmotifs, and later on I would find out that Howard Shore did indeed take direct inspiration from Wagner's music, specifically his use of melodic motifs to represent characters and ideas.

So before I was even allowed to watch the series (yes, my parents wouldn't let me see PG-13 movies until high school, and I still have to sneak some of the R movies I watch!), I was introduced to many many wonderful movies through The Lord of the Rings. I became obsessed with the orchestral scores of the 30s and 40s, and that inspired me to watch quite a few older movies I had never even heard of. From there, my love for film blossomed into the admitted obsession I have at the moment

Still, however, I had not seen this god damn film trilogy. It was probably my freshman year that I saw The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time. I remember watching it with my older brother. The movie was three hours. We did not talk or fidget for three hours. It was an experience that I had been hyping up for myself ever since that first childhood encounter with Rivendell. And now, here it was, every frame either gorgeous visually or riveting emotionally. There was no mistake: I would never forget this movie.

After that, I vaguely remember watching The Two Towers, but for some reason it doesn't stick with me quite as well. Yet The Fellowship of the Ring was a film I've rewatched several times throughout those few years. I've always intended to revisit the next two - and indeed, the third, I haven't even seen yet - but I will be very soon, since this time I really have the time and motivation to finish this trilogy I have technically loved my entire life.

As for the movie itself, need I say more? It's one thing to make your movie interesting for three hours, but when you can get the audience to actually hold their breaths the entire time, and then let it out to scream for an even longer cut, you're probably doing something right. I often can't imagine how people pictured book versions of a story before the movie. Harry Potter is one (I grew up with the books and the movies), and both Jaws and The Godfather are, for me, movies in their definitive version. The same goes for Lord of the Rings. I know this was written many many years before 2001, but it feels like the director, the cinematographer, the writer, the editor, the actors... are creating their own film.

Even if it feels odd to say considering I've only truly seen a third of the series, The Fellowship of the Ring feels like the sort of movie that truly sticks with you for a lifetime. I know I say that about a lot of movies... but in this case, it's probably no longer my choice - everything about this film will forever be ingrained in my head. And that gives me so much courage and happiness for the future.