My Favorite Movies
My Favorite Movies 25 – Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965)
Everyone has their thoughts on who the best Bonds were. Some, inexplicably, like Pierce “coffee breath” Brosnan best. Others think the new guy has something more to him than washboard abs and the permanent expression of one suffering from constipation. I even once knew a guy who insisted that Roger Moore was the best bond–but…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 24 – The Pawn Shop (Charlie Chaplin, 1916)
Among the inner circles of my film graduate school, I am known for a few things: A almost fanatical devotion to Howard Hawks. An incomprehensible love of romantic comedies. The assertion that Chaplin’s much vaunted pathos is the worst part of his films. Thus, in the spirit of #3, I’d like to take a moment today to…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 23 – Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)
Far be it from me, a guy who has an unnatural love of romantic comedies, to try to tell you what MEN like in their movies, but that’s just what I’m going to do today. After all, I don’t just go from six to midnight for films involving last minute races to the airport to…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 22 – The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
Nobody loves Hitchcock as much as pretentious film snobs. I’m a year and a half into graduate school in film and media studies, and you would not believe the amount of Hitchcock bullshit that gets blown up my ass in about 90% of my readings. Not that I’m knocking the guy of course, Hitch deserves…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 21 – Send Me No Flowers (Norman Jewison, 1964)
It’s no secret to anyone who has perused my Daily Movie Reviews section that I am rather fond of romantic comedies. And I should make it clear that I don’t just like the old classics; everyone likes It Happened One Night, real rom com fans understand the delights of new films like 27 Dresses. Basically,…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 20 – A Day in the Country (Partie de Campagne) (Jean Renoir, 1936)
“Young people prancing around in the country” is right up there with “left handed forms of human endeavor” on my list of all time favorite movie subject matters. You name it, I heart it: People on Sunday, Smiles of a Summer’s Night, I even like Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy far more than I…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 19 – Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922)
“Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and its ugliness.” This was how French film critic Andre Bazin described the work of one of the greatest American film directors of the silent era. And while Bazin perhaps overplayed…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 18 – The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
The Maltese Falcon was hardly the first private eye film (indeed, the Dashiell Hammett story it was based on had been filmed twice before the 1941 version I am discussing today). However, due to its superlative quality and undeniable status as a cinema classic, The Maltese Falcon has become, in a sense, the prototypical private…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 17 – Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)
Johnny Guitar is like no other movie you’ve ever seen. Yes, it is a melodrama, but its overblown dialog ends up making All That Heaven Allows sound like My Night at Maudes. Yes, it is a western, but its overblown colors end up making The Searchers look like McCabe and Mrs. Miller. There is a scene in Ghostbusters (a…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 16 – My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
John Ford is, along with Howard Hawks, one of the quintessential Hollywood western directors. When one thinks of classical American westerns, John Ford films like Stagecoach and The Searchers immediately spring to mind. It is perhaps an overused term, but John Ford’s films really did have a certain “poetry” to them, a sense of hushed…
Read More