Catching up with my own ballot...
Casablanca is simply one of the greatest films ever made, and quite possibly
the greatest made in the old Studio system. It is damn near perfect and the exception to the rule that a great script can't be written on the fly. One of the many reasons
Casablanca shines so brightly is that all of the characters, including the smaller supporting roles, are inhabited by colorful character actors and given arcs and purpose. It seems as though every single line is quotable and every attitude is perfect.
Casablanca is funny, romantic, stirring, tense, triumphant, and just plain wonderful. I had it fourth on my ballot, twenty-two if its 292 points.
The Thin Red Line was at the very top of my ballot, the full twenty-five pointer. I vacillate between
The Thin Red Line and
The Tree of Life as to which is my favorite Terence Malick flick. It depends on which I have seen more recently, either by watching the movie or which images are invading my dreams. World War II's Guadalcanal campaign proved to be the perfect subject for Malick's cinematic obsessions with the beauty of the natural world juxtaposed with the brutality of mankind. I know people who HATE this movie, my own father among them. There are War movies like
The Longest Day that are concerned with troop movements and command decisions and the coordination of might and resources. There's certainly nothing wrong with that approach.
The Longest Day may be the best of them, but there are dozens of those kinds of movies, especially centered on WWII battles, and the least of them manage to mangle the facts (
The Battle of the Bulge may be one of the most notorious). Malick just about completely abandons that formula or even that notion of war. His is an emotional, philosophical, often surreal look at men in battle. Even when one section of the narrative is focused on the taking of a hill it is only tangentially about strategy and training but mostly about palpable terror.
Like all of Malick's best it is a beautiful and haunting experience. On the day I made this list I put it numero uno. These two masterworks make a baker's dozen of my choices with seven more coming in the collective Top Twelve, including the rest of my own top ten.
HOLDEN'S BALLOT
1.
The Thin Red Line (#17)
4.
Casablanca (#14)
7.
Fires on the Plain (#59)
9.
Army of Shadows (#29)
10.
Waltz with Bashir (#45)
11.
The Pianist (#23)
14.
MASH (#39)
15.
Rome, Open City (#37)
16.
Letters from Iwo Jima (#60)
17.
The Battle of Algiers (#24)
18.
The Great Escape (#19)
19.
The Ascent (#33)
21.
The Killing Fields (#69)
25.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley (DNP)