Number 9: Seven Samurai (1954)

The Original Jedi

I don’t know what the fascination with Ninjas is. Samurai are infinitely cooler than Ninjas. If you don’t believe me, think about this: Jedi are Samurai with lightsabers. Jedi are not Ninjas with lightsabers. Why? Because Ninjas simply aren’t cool enough to get lightsabers.

In all seriousness, though, Seven Samurai did more than provide a blueprint for George Lucas’ robed, sword-wielding heroes. Star Wars simply screams Kurosawa, from the warriors to the story to the erasure cuts and beyond. Without Seven Samurai, there is no Star Wars, or at least not in its well known form. There is also no Magnificent Seven, obviously, although that isn’t quite as important.

Japanese Filmmakers

Why is it that some countries are just good at making movies? Obviously, America would have to be at the top of all reasonable lists. I suppose one could make an argument that we simply make so many freaking movies that we’re bound to make amazing films as we go along, but to that I have to say… yeah. We make so many freaking movies we are bound to make amazing films as we go along. Movies in America are practically like national defense. We seem to spend as much and make as much as the rest of the world combined.

But after America, other countries have plenty to offer, though certainly not every country. For instance, France seems to be very good at it. Sure, they had the French New Wave and that’s what everyone remembers, and you could make the argument that they haven’t been spectacular since then (has anyone?), but even if so, how’d they do that? How did Truffaut and Godard just pop up in the same country that produced Renoir (even if I find his films to be… opaque)? And how did Japan get so bloody good at it? Kurosawa and Ozu alone produced a list of films that would challenge most other countries. Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Rashomon, Tokyo Story…

The list, needless to say, goes on. And then there is Italy, they of the neo-realism but also they of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by the wildly underrated Sergio Leone.

And at this point, I would like to point out: Britain sucks at making movies. BBC mini-series? They literally own the territory. TV shows? I’d rather watch them than just about anything else (save for Battlestar Galactica, The West Wing and Arrested Development), but movies? Look up a list of British movies sometime. You’ll laugh. Really, you will. I’m not saying they have never made a good movie (A Man For All Seasons, Bridge on the River Kwai) but for a country that size, they get the living daylights knocked out of them by their rivals to the south, ze Fronch! (It is actually kind of funny how much better we are at movies and how much better they are at Rock n’ Roll. Look up a list of best American rock bands and you’ll laugh at that, too).

Why is it that Japan, as a country, is so fine with regards to filmmaking? I don’t know. I just thought I’d ask.

The Foreign Film Inherent Advantage/Disadvantage

When watching foreign films, I am at a disadvantage, so when appraising them, I give them a bit of an advantage. After watching Tokyo Story with a friend of mine who can actually speak Japanese (more or less) it became exceedingly obvious that many nuances of the dialogue were lost on me. Thankfully, that particular film was all the richer for my having sat next to a translator, but most of the time that does not happen. So in evaluating films with subtitles, I tend to bump them up just a bit on the Right Thumb Scale™.

With Seven Samurai, I did not have to do that. For one thing, it does what any movie worth its salt has to do, which is to tell a story with images. For another, it does it freaking well. Finally, it does it so well that the dialogue seems to come to reside in a land of necessity but not in one of importance. Watch the movie without subtitles, and you’ll still probably understand everything that is going on.

Confession To Make

I put this film on the list a few months back, before I had actually finished watching the movie. Yep. I put this movie on my favorite movies list before I had even finished watching it. The first two hours were so good, I simply assumed the next hour and a half must be as well. And for about an hour, my expectations were met.

Then it rained.

It poured.

It stormed.

In one of the most astonishing battle scenes I have ever seen put to film, it rains it pours and my goodness does it all look gorgeous. I have no idea how they convinced God to send forth heavy showers for so long (there is simply no way they did it artificially. If they did, it was an inhuman feat), but the result is an unparalleled climax to an unparalleled movie, which managed to blow up my expectations even after three hours of viewing.


Next Up: Detective Fiction Matters Again

~Right Thumb~

Number 10: Blade Runner (1982)

Just look at that picture. How can a movie with that image not be great?

Harrison Ford.

Harrison is probably my favorite actor of all time. And not just because he has two last names. He is a modern day Bogey who managed to carve out his own persona somewhere in there. What is that persona? I dunno. It is unique, thus difficult to describe relative to other known quantities. He is Indiana, he is a drag racer, he is Rick Deckard, and yet somehow these are all very much Harrison Ford.

As Rick Deckard, he is a rarity: a somewhat mediocre character. It isn’t that Rick has no talent or nothing to say, but he isn't brilliant. He is working; here he does something well, there he does something kind of stupid, then he is just plain outwitted by the superior intellect of Roy Batty.

Replicants are supposedly smarter than humans, but instead of experiencing awe, we mostly wonder how it could be otherwise—humanity, ostensibly represented by Rick Deckard, doesn’t seem so great (or so bad). Outwitting us shouldn’t be hard. But then, does Rick represent humanity? Unicorns seem to indicate otherwise.

And Harrison channels all this complexity with the dry, wiseacre act of a tough-guy hawkshaw, ready to get beat up at a moment’s notice. Could anyone else have played this role?

It Seems Real.

What must have seemed marvelously futuristic in 1982 seems eerily realistic today. The dark, rainy, cramped sets contrasted with dark, rainy, empty sets seem anything but futuristic. We wonder how a society could be unable to move its elbows while broken down, empty apartment buildings persist, but isn’t that our experience far too often? Luxurious pyramids of the rich overlook dank locales which, it seems, were abandoned by most of humanity as it went “off-world”.

There are flying cars, of course. But outside of that poetic license, Blade Runner could very well be… today. Our climate hasn’t quite reached such drastic levels of decay (and we still appear to have sunny days, though in Pittsburgh, that is always questionable), but the dueling diseases of abandonment and overcrowding, so seemingly contradictory yet so coexistent, are as evident in our society as they are in Blade Runner.

Edward James Olmos

The movies gets points just for casting him, and double points for putting him into such a felicitous role.

Up Next: Seven is Nine

(Note, I am going to starting putting these out bi-weekly [Sunday and Wednesday], as it has to occurred to me that a) they are all written, so why go slowly and b) otherwise I'll be publishing them from Amsterdam.)

~Right Thumb~

Number 11: Vertigo (1958)

Masterpiece.

Back in the day, “masterpiece” did not actually refer to a particularly awe-inspiring work of art. It was simply the work which was required to elevate you to the level of master in your trade. You could have barrels that were masterpieces as easily as paintings or sculptures. Obviously, you had to make something that demonstrated your worthiness for promotion, and so masterpieces were often quite something. But the notion that everything a master made was a masterpiece is nonsense. Maybe they were, in the now colloquial sense of the word, maybe not. But you need a piece to deem you a master, and that is your master-piece.

Why do I mention this? Because I can’t stand Alfred Hitchcock. I almost didn’t put this movie on here because I was worried that if I watched it too many times, I would start hating it. But no, Vertigo is too good for that. Still, I am most decidedly unimpressed by Hitchcock. Rear Window? Bah. North by Northwest? Wake me up when that marathon ends. Psycho? Okay, whatever. The Birds? Good, but not the second coming. Suspicion? Could have been good. Wasn’t. As far as I am concerned, Hitchcock had a tenuous grasp on the title of “master” (or its cinematic equivalent: auteur), and that title is almost entirely beholden to one movie: Vertigo.

It is his masterpiece in both the colloquial and historical sense. All of Hitchcock’s stupid little quirks—painfully slow pacing, mediocre acting, unsubtle camera motion, suspense for the sake of suspense and nothing else, etc.—are either strengths of Vertigo or simply not there. For instance: Jimmy Stewart invented overacting. Seriously, I don’t think there has ever been a scene where he didn’t pull out every trick, facial expression and decibel change in his bag to evince how important that particular scene was. In Vertigo, this makes sense. He is obsessed. Psychotically so. His over the top act is a boon, not a wrecking ball aimed at our suspension of disbelief.

Hitchcock’s indulgent need to drag the simplest gimmick out over interminable periods of time (paranoia for an hour and a half in the Birds, helpless voyeurism for two hours in Rear Window, mistaken identity for two and a half hours in North by Northwest) works in Vertigo, because obsession benefits from an interminable length of time, and in fact probably requires it. The mediocre acting of the woman (women) in the movie makes sense, since she (they) are acting. And the suspense isn’t really there, per se. You are left wondering what is going on more often than you are left on the edge of your seat (though the movie does deliver in that area as well with a few superb scenes in the bell tower).

The herky-jerky camera zooms still bother me. Watch the “vertigo effect” (zooming in while tracking out) in Vertigo, and then watch it in The Lord of the Rings—that’s right, a Peter Jackson film. One of them is subtle and creepy. I’ll give you a hint: it isn’t Vertigo, where the effect looks more like a jump into Warp Drive than an anxiety disorder. But still, these minor baubles aside, Hitchcock was made for this movie. You could almost say that Alfred Hitchcock was Vertigo’s masterpiece.

Next Week: Cramped and Empty, all at the same time.

~Right Thumb~

The Eleven (give or take a few)

(Editor’s Note: Throughout this little project, I refer to “people thinking this…” or “some critics have said that...” etc. Normally, I detest such vague allusions to ethereal, semi-real “people.” But because this has taken longer to write than expected, I am no longer in the mood to find examples of what I claim. I absolutely could provide examples, and I guess you will just have to trust me on that point. Tough to do, I know, with a guy who doesn’t like the Sound of Music, but it’s either that or I fail a few classes…)


People are always asking me what my favorite movie is. When I tell them I can’t pick one, they ask me for a top five. I am unsure why they believe that after having failed to produce one, I could then produce five. Why so many people care about my favorite movie also baffles me. It does wonders for my ego but that particular abstract entity needs no foreign aid.

The essence of the question—what kind of movies do you like—is a valid query, one that I often pose to my own acquaintances. But even more important than what is why. For instance, if I divulge only that The Big Lebowksi is one of my favorite movies, you have as much evidence that I am a stoned hippie as that I enjoy film noir, neo-noir, homage to film noir, reflections on modern noir and the eclectic filmography of the Coens.

Maybe I just like bathrobes.

If I were to say that I love Manhattan, you might only think that I enjoy the complicated “modern” relationships portrayed, and in some way approve of the insecurities and uncertainties that the movie seems to suggest are inherent in a world where divorce is a necessity, commitment is passé, and so forth. In actuality, I enjoy the unabashedly esoteric humor and the utterly gorgeous depiction of New York. But you wouldn’t know that if I told you I liked Manhattan.

So in an effort to clear this up (in less than 15,000 words), I have compiled a list of my eleven favorite movies, as well as an honorable mention. Why eleven? Why not. What are the criteria? They are simple. If I were only allowed to watch a single movie for the rest of my life, which would it be? That is #1. If I were only allowed to watch two, which would the second be? That is #2, and so on.

Now, what exactly this list comprises, I am not sure. These are not the eleven movies I deem to be the “best”, although certainly many of those do find themselves on the list, and none of these movies are anything less than “great” in my not-so-humble estimation. Yet Citizen Kane and M are nowhere to be found, my lavish respect for them notwithstanding. As for favorite—I do not consider “replay value” to be a facet of favor, yet in this case some small attention must be paid to the worth of watching a movie repeatedly, since these are the only movies I am ever watching again.

So on each Sunday I will reveal the next spot in the order, with an explanation (ranging from a few paragraphs to a novella) as to why that particular film finds so much favor with me. If you don’t care about my particular cinematic pontification, you don’t have to read. But then stop asking me what my favorite films are. In all seriousness, I understand how little interest my favorite films might hold for you--so these little vignettes are supposed to be more interesting than simply why I like them. Maybe I fail, maybe I don't, but they combine what I like with what I see with what I have read and some historical context whenever I can throw it in there.

To start things off, a quickie...

Honorable Mention: Smultronstället (1957) (Wild Strawberries)

Had to Pick One

Choosing between Ingmar Bergman films is tantamount to choosing between a Ferrari, a Lamborghini and a Bugatti. One is the fastest, one is the prettiest, and one has the coolest name, but you can’t lose. This could have easily been the Seventh Seal or Fanny and Alexander. Persona is quite the film also, although it would probably not be one which I chose to watch more than five or six times. Given that I’ll be watching only these movies for the rest of my life, that is a bit of a handicap.

Regardless, every Bergman film I have seen is a masterful work. I can’t even say that about Stanley. Of course, I have seen every Kubrick film; I haven’t seen every Bergman film. What keeps Smultronstället from getting onto my main list is that as awe-inspiring as a Bergman film is, they are too profound for their own good. They rarely let you learn because they seem convinced that they need to teach. They do it well enough that Bergman is one of my favorite directors, his sometimes suffocating profundity notwithstanding.

Wild Strawberries is no exception to the rule that all Bergman films must be Biblical in their gravitas. But it has a heart that Seventh Seal would die for, characters that Persona doesn’t, and a relevance that Fanny and Alexander sometimes loses a hold on. As for all his other films… this is my list and I haven’t seen them, so too bad.


Next Week: We begin in earnest; at the top.

~Right Thumb~