My Favorite Movies
My Favorite Movies 65: Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home
It can be tricky to figure out exactly what criteria to use when trying to pin down one’s “favorite movie of all time ever!” Is it the film that you find the most intellectually and artistically stimulating? If so, my favorite movie is The Mirror. Is it the film that you find the funniest? If…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 64 – Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941)
Some movies, when viewed at an impressionable age, can live on in our memories as possessing qualities far beyond their actual worth. Ball of Fire, I’m happy to report, is not one of those movies. It basically operates under the same premise as The Big Bang Theory (hot chick moves in with a bunch of nerds–hilarity…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 63: Street of Crocodiles (The Brother’s Quay, 1986)
I’ve always been a little on the fence about experimental film. I mean, I get it, or at least I think I do, but, at the end of the day, I really just kind of want to watch a STORY. I’m not saying narrative filmmaking is a more valid means of cinematic expression, I’m just…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 62: Bladerunner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
I talk about cyberpunk a lot on this blog. It is, in fact, one of my favorite things–a thing about which I have thoughts. Next to the perpetually cloudy winter of Middle-earth, the perpetually orange-tinted pseudo smog-twilight of your typical cyberpunk dystopia is one of my favorite settings. And no work of art, neither Neuromancer…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 61: Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)
All the classic Westerns strike a different chord with me. My Darling Clementine is pure poetry, Stagecoach is like witnessing the birth of something new into the world, Rio Bravo is like a laid back summer memory, and Red River like the pure distilled essence of storytelling, the kind of film they would make outside the walls of…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 60: Christmas Vacation (Jeremiah S. Chechik, 1989)
Quotable movies can be pretty tough to objectively review. One one hand, a quotable script is doing something 99% of movies don’t do, namely: “sticking in your mind for more than an hour after you leave the theater.” On the other hand, who can say what makes a film’s various lines of dialog worm their…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 59: Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950)
George Cukor was always known as a “woman’s” director. I was never quite sure whether he was called that just because he directed The Women, because he chose screenplays that attempted to address issues of gender in a more forward thinking manner than his contemporaries, or because his homosexuality was all but out of the…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 58: Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
Comedy is always best when played straight. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not, by any means, casting aspersions Caddyshack‘s way, I’m just saying that a deadpan delivery can pay more dividends than loudly farting while wearing plaid pants. Ok, fine, at least it can pay equal dividends. Dr. Strangelove, while it isn’t without…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 57: It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)
People watch romantic comedies for one main reason: to experience the vicarious thrill of seeing a Hollywood fantasy version of love that can never (or, perhaps, rarely) be found in real life. In a romantic comedy, nothing truly horrible ever happens, soul mates always find each other, and true love always triumphs over everything the usual…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 56: Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939)
Exotic locales, daring displays of machismo, and high adventure–in addition to being the basic ingredients for a Bond movie, these are also some of my favorite things to watch in non-Bond movies as well. Unfortunately, most of the time when you combine all those things, your end product might just end up being somewhat problematically racist…
Read More