Number 2: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The shape of things to come.

Among its approximately 18,904,867 layers of subtlety and brilliance is 2001’s dramatic use of shapes. There are straight edges and there are curved surfaces. There are rectangles and spheres. There are parallel lines in Euclidean space, and the curving parallels of the cinematic equivalent of non-Euclidean space—the wide-angle lens. And since it is The Greatest Movie Ever Made, it all means something.

It is no surprise that in Kubrick’s magnum opus, humanity has lost itself. Yet 2001 shows not what we might become but rather the constant struggle. There is an ebb and a flow, and 2001 shows the ebb of human creativity, and more importantly, human activity. Machines have become the thinkers and doers. They are safer, more reliable, more comfortable, less prone to “human error.” And they are all very round. The space station, the Moon vessel, the Discovery, HAL’s eye, the pods—all share in common a lack of edges. There are no sharp cuts. There is no right and wrong. It’s all just a slippery slope of gray and banality.

On the other hand, the Monolith has nothing but edges. It refuses to provide comfort. One must decide when one looks upon it. It brings the cutting edge, and with it, responsibility. It brings progress, and with it, hardship. It brings knowledge, and with it, sorrow.

As Dave Bowman needs to overcome the computer HAL, what does he have to do? He has to somehow transfer from his round pod into the Discovery through means of a not-round door.

In the final sequence, as Dave lives a lifetime before our eyes, we see numerous lines—on the ground, in the walls, etc. At first, they are all shot in wide-angle, bending and curving and providing no edges or breaks. Then the monolith shows up, and in a violent, wrenching shift of perspective, the wide-angle is gone. Every line in the room is straight, every edge is sharp, and Dave Bowman’s mind is ready to take a giant leap for mankind.

Watch 2001 sometime, just looking for the use of shapes, and what is shaped like what. You will not be disappointed.

42.

2001 is 42 years old. This seems important, as the funniest sci-fi story of all time and the greatest converge into a weird synergy for a year. Just thought I’d point that out.

42.

2001 is forty-two years old. It is almost as old as the Super Bowl. It is older than Disney World. It is almost as old as our President. And it looks gorgeous. Only one shot in the entire film appears dated: one of the satellites in the early exposition shots. The rest not only have aged well, they have improved relatively as the quality of special effects everywhere else continues to plummet. While movies like The Matrix, Independence Day, Titanic (this list could go on forever, I’ll just stop it there) were forgotten mere moments after they became famous, 2001 looks as stunning as it did yesterday and the day before that. 2001 would have survived even had its effects aged poorly, because the movie does not rely on its effects in the same grotesque manner that many of today’s “science-fiction” films do. But the fact that its effects have aged so well is a stunning testament to the ability of visionary directors to achieve a lasting product that won’t simply make $700 million dollars and then be forgotten.

And there is more to that than mere technological innovation. If the effects serve the film, you tend to take them as part of a whole and your mind fills in what it needs to fill in. If the movie serves the effects, the effects are all you notice. The moment that they aren’t the hippest, newest, most garish technology around, they stick out like Sophia Coppola in the Godfather Part III.

Food.

One of the reasons 2001 is impossible to explain succinctly (I gave up trying a long time ago) is because it deals with everything. Everything important to mankind is treated in some way. God, nature, exploration, murder, identity, and of course, man’s physical needs—more specifically, food. The apes are dying for lack of it and kill to defend it. The men at Clavius eat sandwiches on their way to observe the excavated monolith. Frank and Dave are constantly eating. Dave is even eating in the bedroom Beyond the Infinite. Even more fundamentally, we require oxygen. The men on the Moon require spacesuits to observe the Monolith. The astronauts in hibernation need it even in their suppressed state. Frank certainly needs it when his supply is cut by HAL. Dave needs it when he forgets his helmet and must innovate in order to outwit HAL.

The Star Child, on the other hand, doesn’t. After all, Man does not live by bread alone.

The Narrative. My God, the Narrative.

Man falls, is sent prophets, and finally, a Redeemer. I could be talking about the Bible. I could be talking about 2001.

For a movie with about 73 spoken words (I exaggerate, but not by much), it weaves a narrative that can be understood both in the personal, literal, individual sense and in the cosmic, metaphorical, human sense. The fact that it so adeptly meshes the two should not be a surprise. Each of us lives a life every bit as important as Dave Bowman’s. We just forget somewhere between waking up and the first cup of coffee.

Up Next: What Missed The Cut And Why

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Number 3: The Right Stuff (1983)

Who’s The Best Pilot You Ever Saw?

“Who was the best pilot I ever saw? Who was the best pilot I ever saw? Well, I’ll tell you, I seen a lot of them. Most of them are pictures on a wall, back at some place… that doesn’t even exist anymore. Some of them are… right here in this room, and some of them, are still out there somewhere, doing what they all do, going up each day, in a hurtling piece of machinery, putting their hides out on the line, hanging it out over the edge, pushing that envelope and hauling it in.

“But there was one pilot I once saw, who I think truly did have… the right—Aww, who was the best pilot I ever saw? You’re looking at him!”

Gordon Cooper, the last of the original Mercury Seven to fly, is portrayed much like I think most of the astronauts probably behaved—as a cocky, arrogant, egotistical son of a bitch. Yet to get into a rocket with a bomb underneath it waiting to push you out into space takes some kind of soul, and I think Cooper probably had that as well, along with the other astronauts. In one of the last scenes of the movie, reporters ask Cooper who was the greatest pilot he had ever seen. Cooper comes within a fraction of giving the answer before remembering his public image, stopping, smiling and giving the expected, narcissistic response. It is moments like these—which never let up—that make The Right Stuff more than just a movie about our journey into space. Any movie about that journey has a ludicrously unfair advantage on a list of my favorite movies, but The Right Stuff would have made it anyway. Enemas, bathroom trips on the launch pad, sperm tests, horses, pictures on a wall, humming, more horseback riding, John Glenn and LBJ—the moments never end.

True Story.

The movie tells the truth. It is nearly impossible to believe, but it all happened. Chuck Yeager did break his ribs by falling off a horse right before he broke the sound barrier. He did hide it from his superiors, who would in fact have pulled him from the mission had he not. “Slick” Goodlin did turn down the opportunity because they would not pay him $150,000. Yeager did need a sawn-off broom handle to close the hatch of the Bell X1. It compresses a few things as necessary, but few actual details were altered. And the movie is three hours long. That’s a whole lot of truth.

“That is a spacecraft, sir. We do not refer to it as a ‘capsule’. Spacecraft.”

Those who believe the astronauts simply rode machines into space or, metaphorically, rode the NASA program to the Moon in a passenger role, need to get a lobotomy and start over. As with all great history, the effort and sweat and tears of millions was needed to make something happen, but individuals decided what would happen. John Kennedy set the stage, Frank Borman saved the space program, Neil Armstrong kept himself from pulling “abort”, and if it weren’t for the Mercury Astronauts, a generation of kids would have grown up bored by the notion of “capsules” being sent into space. The guys at Grumman worked too long each day for too many years. Lunar-orbit rendezvous had to be dreamt up by someone. And someone had to pony up the cajones to be the first American spacewalker. The Right Stuff hails the power of the individual, and does so in a realistic, awe-inspiring manner. Any movie capable of this is worth watching, again and again and again.

Up Next: The Greatest Movie Of All Time

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Number 4: Barry Lyndon (1974)

(Editor’s Note: I get a bit combative on this one. Be prepared. Too few people appreciate Barry Lyndon, and for the worst reasons imaginable. This irks me. Ergo, I respond with ire.)

Most films lie 24 times a second.

Barry Lyndon paints 24 portraits. I really have no idea what else to say about this movie (well, we all know that isn’t true). Watching it is like walking through the Louvre, the Metropolitan, and the Sistine Chapel at the same time. Every frame is perfectly composed; each blade of grass seems obsequious to Stanley’s will. It is as if the universe said to him: “You have 300 days. Make me look good.”

Any film that uses cameras developed by NASA is going to have my approval, but to belittle it by claiming that a mere technical innovation allowed Barry Lyndon to flourish would be criminal. Charles Dickens it is not quite, but never has a movie been able to overcome a “weakness” like Barry Lyndon. The story is still very good. I do not think the beauty would matter if it weren’t. I think the story was meant to be slightly less captivating than The Sound and the Fury. It is almost as if Kubrick is asking us how we can care about dialogue and plot points and philosophizing when we have this to look at.

Mind Only Matters

Cold. I am told Barry Lyndon is cold. Unfeeling. Unfeeling!? Are you kidding me? How can you watch this movie and not be transfixed? Have you no intellect?

There is an absurd idea that has crept into modern culture, which more or less states that your heart should be telling you what to do. This has given us lots of sappy, emotionalist nonsense (and it gave us emo; if you are inclined to consider agreeing with this insanity of modern times, remember that it forced emo upon us) and led to a lot of bad policies and dumb decisions and recessions. Making decisions with our hearts is why we tear down a tree full of life of all kinds so that we can build a little dog house for our “adorable” puppy. Making decisions with out hearts got us into Iraq and it made Slumdog Millionaire an Oscar winner. I’m not sure which of those two things is more insultingly irrational.

The point here is not merely to pontificate, though I do love doing so. The point is that when you watch Barry Lyndon, your mind should be ordering your emotions into ecstasy. So the main character failed to grab your heart—who gives a rabbit’s foot?! Your head should be telling you that this is one of the most beautiful things man ever created. If you want to legitimately argue (I’ll split my infinitives when I want to split them, thank you very much) about the merits of Barry Lyndon, I’ll listen. You’re probably wrong, but I’ll listen. If you argue based on some nebulous, “emotional” impact, all I can say is that Slumdog Millionaire is thirteen dollars on Amazon. Enjoy.

Up Next: You Can't Screw This Pooch

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Number 5: L.A. Confidential (1997)

The Spacester

Kevin Spacey either was born to play this role, or he is a ridiculously talented actor. I am told the latter cannot be true (I am never told why, but I am told) so he must have been born to play this role. His cocky indifference and smooth coolness seem so natural that I would be shocked to meet him and discover he is neither of those things, even though I am fairly certain he is neither of those things.

While every character in L.A. Confidential is well-written and superbly acted, Jack Vincennes is the Han Solo of film noir. He doesn’t remember why he became a cop, he doesn’t do a very good job of it, but there’s something about him…

Too Sordid, Not Sordid Enough

If the Maltese Falcon is not the best film noir ever made, L.A. Confidential probably is. Chinatown can suck it. (Films noir might not have to be constantly pitch black, but it does benefit, from, you know, a bit of “noir” now and then, which Chinatown fails to provide.)

Some people don’t like L.A. Confidential just because it has a happy ending. I would first argue that any movie ending with fifty-odd more people dead than when it began is not meeting a very stringent requirement for “happy”. Secondly, I would argue that this garbage about every movie needing to be moody and lugubrious and macabre from beginning to end is nonsense. Schindler’s Freaking List is sometimes denigrated for being too hopeful. Film critics must comprise an utterly depraved, depressed bunch, which can’t imagine meaning or realism in any narrative that doesn’t involve rape and drugs and evil winning the day (not that L.A. Confidential doesn’t involve rape and drugs and evil.)

And I am sure a large contingent of non-critics believe that L.A. Confidential is an acid trip for the reprobate, full of nothing but licentiousness and vice from beginning to end. G.K. Chesterton had a line about the Catholic Church being derided by some as too liberal and others as too conservative. I don’t remember the line, but it was a good one. I’m sure it would apply analogously here, as well. If I could remember. Dangit.

The Click of a Shotgun

I find gunfights to be tedious. They get absurd very quickly, they seem staged at the best of times and hackneyed almost all of the time. It takes talent to make a good gunfight. Curtis Hanson directed L.A. Confidential. Based on his filmography, I would never have guessed he had talent but for this movie, and these gunfights. When the click of a shotgun echoes from underneath the floorboards, I think my head exploded. The movie had already convinced me. I was already sold. The majestic shots of light filtering in through bullet holes, complete with Tyndall’s effect everywhere (Tyndall has to be one of my favorite names ever, if only for the effect which is named after him) had already won me over, and yet the moments continue.

At some point in The Godfather, viewers watching for the first time have to wonder: how many more timeless quotes are coming? But they never really stop. L.A. Confidential is just like that, but with shots and sounds instead of lines.

Though the lines are pretty good, too.

Up Next: If I Told You What The Movie Was, The Movie Would Approve

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Number 6: The Godfather, Part II (1974)

“You have two stories here, and neither one works without the other.”

Although George Lucas disappeared in 1984 to be replaced by an evil alien with an abnormally large chin whose sole purpose is to spit on the memories of beloved franchises, once upon a time the guy could write, direct (sort of) and at the very least speak intelligently. That was his quote to start. He was referencing the #6 movie on this list, the Godfather, Part II.

I don’t think I need to explain why I love the Godfather (this seems to be one of those movies where you get it or you don’t), but explaining why I like the second one more than the first might be worthwhile. It starts with the two stories—Eisensteinian dialectical composition taken to the absolute extreme. Instead of two separate shots that create a new meaning, or two intercutting scenes that create a new idea (although Francis Ford Coppola does also adore such cross-cutting), The Godfather Part II gives us two whole movies that, juxtaposed, create a whole new meaning.

Think about it: without either story, the other makes no sense. Robert DeNiro’s admittedly spectacular Vito Corleone is a bit of a louse. Sure, he loves his family, but a lot of guys love their families. Michael Corleone is apparently a complete reprobate, beyond all redemption, slowly sinking into ever deeper circles of Hell. Put the two together, and it’s like mixing NaOH and HCl; instead of two caustic compounds you get salt. Instead of two pointless, depressing stories, you get a cautionary myth of epic proportions.

Almost everything else about The Godfather and Part II can be roughly compared: great narratives, great violence, great Italian accents, great acting, great lines, great beginnings, great endings. I’m not saying I would complain if I had to watch the original. But with Part II, you get two for the price of one.

If No Godfather, No Wall-E

This isn’t a rationale for my love of these movies, but just as an exercise, let’s look at how different cinematic history would be without The Godfather.

First off, simply, the careers of Pacino, DeNiro, Keaton, Duvall would have been completely different if they happened at all. American Graffiti would never have happened, as it was only Coppola’s suddenly golden name that allowed George Lucas and he to get funding for it. Without American Graffiti, there is no Star Wars. Without Star Wars, say good-bye before you even say hello to Harrison Ford’s career, which probably means no Indiana Jones. Also, no Industrial Light and Magic. No THX (no sound effect before movies!) More importantly, no Pixar, which Lucas would later sell to Steve Jobs before it eventually became what it is today. So no Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Wall-E, Up, etc. Apocalypse Now never happens. Blade Runner probably never happens. And, while we would have had the Wilhelm Scream (it being first recorded for 1951’s Distant Drums, and then re-used for Private Wilhelm in 1953’s The Charge at Feather River) it was only Ben Burtt’s re-discovering of it for Star Wars that made it famous, and in fact Burtt is credited with christening the scream.

And that’s off the top of my head. Needless to say, The Godfather was important.

(On the other hand, without The Godfather, we would have been spared Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christiansen. Let’s call it a wash.)

Up Next: Always hush hush.

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Number 7: No Country for Old Men (2007)

Note: The following contains massive spoilers. You have been warned.

A review I wrote a while back:

“The wages of sin is death.”

We have a problem with this phrase because it doesn’t appear visibly true. Great sinners don’t get struck by lightning. Saints too often find the world an inhospitable place. But while Paul was undoubtedly referring to death of the soul in Hell, there is still a place for the literal. Sometimes we just need a visceral reminder, and No Country for Old Men is nothing if not visceral.

Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a Vietnam veteran who can weld anything able to be welded, stumbles across a drug deal gone wrong in the desolate landscape of the proverbial West. He finds bloody bodies, lots of drugs, but no money, no “last man standing”. He tracks a line of blood to a spot a few miles away. Two trees stand on a hill. Under one is a dead man and an apple in the form of two million dollars. Llewellyn takes a bite.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable (that word was created for the Borg and Anton Chigurh) villain, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, is introduced to us as he strangles a police officer with the handcuffs on his wrists. Chigurh unemotionally steps over the myriad scuff marks on the floor. He uses the cop’s car to pull over an unsuspecting driver, and Chigurh uses a cattle gun to procure the new vehicle. The cattle gun is the earliest indication of Chigurh’s Lucipher-esque opinion of humanity.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, opens the film with a voiceover about old time sheriffs and guys so tough they didn’t even carry guns. Then he asks what they would have done in modern times. Soon enough, he is investigating the drug deal catastrophe and the puzzlingly vacant cash. The chase is on as Bell tracks Chigurh, and Chigurh tracks Moss.

It isn’t so much a man hunting Moss as it is guilt. Moss tries to hide from Chigurh; that doesn’t work. He tries to run, even fleeing to Mexico. That doesn’t work. Eventually he gets the bright idea to kill Chigurh. Like so many before him, Moss loses in a battle with Hell.

At one point in his slow march of carnage Chigurh stops at a gas station. For some reason, Chigurh is irked by the owner of the gas station. It might be the fact that he married into the house out back. It might be the fact that he asked Chigurh a superficial question. Whatever the reason, Chigurh eventually makes it plain that the man’s life rests on a coin flip. “Call it.” The man does, and he wins his life. But one wonders if he lost his soul.

After giving Moss the option of forking over the cash to save his wife—Chigurh won’t tell Moss he can save himself “because he can’t”—and being rebuffed, Chigurh goes through the same coin flip routine with Moss’s wife, telling her it is “the best he can do”. Perhaps the only virtuous character in the movie, she tells him the coin flip has nothing to do with it; it’s just him. Chigurh walks out of the house and wipes the blood off of his boots, but Karla Jean Moss was the only one who survived Chigurh—she refused to fight.

The aging sheriff, the only character in the movie with the right or duty to take Chigurh head on, follows after him with reticence. It isn’t the possibility of losing his life that scares Bell; it is the possibility that his life, his profession, his life’s work, is obsolete. He doesn’t know where to go or how to fight something so implacably evil that it would kill hotel desk clerks because they were inconveniences.

Chigurh is as inexorable as the devil, but even the devil needs to know where to look. A tracking device in the satchel of cash is pulling Chigurh along. The devil needs a sin to get his claws into you. Once he does, you get nightmarish, late-night visits from a guy with a silencer on a shotgun. On a shotgun. The Coen brothers (who adapted the screenplay, produced and directed) create scenes as well as anyone, and the several battles between Moss and Chigurh reek of compunction, fear, and more than anything, inevitability.

And Moss is no simpleton. He is resourceful, tough and quick-witted. He uses tent poles to hide the money, can fashion a sawed-off shotgun with ease, knows when to move onto the next hotel and dresses a bullet wound with dexterity. His braggadocio in believing he can defeat Chigurh—“What’s this guy supposed to be, the ultimate badass?”—is not entirely unfounded. But like Adam and Eve, he does not know who he is dealing with. The best description of Chigurh is in response to a question regarding how dangerous he is: “Compared to what? The, uh… bubonic plague?”

And, of course, the bubonic plague was often believed to be, and is still used as, a symbol for the devil. No Country for Old Men comes from a Cormac McCarthy novel, and it doesn’t waste words.

Along that line, the sheriff’s closing monologue is every bit as probing as the opening. In effect, the sheriff is the character we can identify with. He knows what he needs to do, to an extent, but doesn’t quite do it. Yet he knows his father would have, and his dreams haunt him.

The Coen brothers have long been obsessed with characters of seemingly preternatural evil—from the terrific “Barton Fink” to the pitiable “Raising Arizona”—but only when they took the supernatural out of their villain did they achieve something actually resembling ultimate evil. Chigurh is frightening because he isn’t riding a motorcycle or stampeding through hallways. He kills with a coin flip. And most fail to realize that the stakes are higher than one’s life.

Atheists or Saints

The Coens are one or the other. Their most recent film, A Serious Man, has been derided as an anti-religious satire. I saw the film. I actually went to the theater and watched it. I have no clue what the people deriding it as such are talking about.

Except I suppose do. If I were a fundamentalist Protestant, I would probably take it as an attack on religion. It questions certainty, simple answers and above all it questions those who refuse to question. None of that is anti-religion but it is anti-fundamentalism.

Similarly, No Country for Old Men has been cited as a movie fairly certain God can’t exist. I have also seen No Country for Old Men. I went to the theater to see it. I have watched it many times since. I have never seen a movie so convinced that God exists. Guilt, wonder, fear, implacable evil—none of these things make much sense in a universe lacking a God. I have no idea if the Coens believe in God. But their movies, contrary to popular opinion, certainly do.

Every Pixel

And just to mention it: every single pixel on the screen, at all times, matters. I have never seen a movie that is fuller than No Country for Old Men, and that includes #2 on this list.


Up Next: Quite the Sequel

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Number 8: The Maltese Falcon (1941)

“Nah, you’ve seen everything I could.”

With these words, Sam Spade put the last nail in the coffin of “Golden Age” (fool’s gold, really) detective fiction. Gone were the days of amateur detectives somehow noticing thirty-three vital clues that the police officers had missed. Gone were the days of “Inspector Pinch-Bottle to the Rescue” and “The Triple Petunia Murder Case” as Raymond Chandler mocked in his brilliant essay The Simple Art of Murder. Gone were the days of detective fiction being nothing more than logical puzzles that required massive irrational leaps to remain logical.

To briefly explain: Sam Spade, a private detective, is standing on a hill overlooking the ravine where his partner is lying dead. The place is crawling with officers, one of whom explains the situation to Spade. Finally he asks Spade if the private eye wants to examine the scene for himself. Spade’s reply rings true.

The Maltese Falcon is not the best film noir or detective story ever filmed/written. But it made the rest possible, and its place in history as both a novel and a movie, along with its snappy dialogue, classic Bogart performance and willingness to begin detective fiction’s descent into the underworld make it a joy to watch, time and again. Film noir would become Hollywood’s trump card for years. Sam Spade started it all.


Up Next: Better Than The Book

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