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TOP 10 Film Discussion:
[home][books][women[movies]
TOP 10 Film Discussion:
Greetings screenwriters!
These are lists I've posted on
the
site this year, the first is a top ten/bottom ten detailing my favorite
and
least favorite movies of 2004 along with a short blurb about my
reaction. The
second, which should be of some use to this class, is a top ten screenplays
list - I recently had the privilege of voting in a Writer's Guild
Survey to
determine the ten greatest screenplays of all time. The post
explains my
choices and reasoning behind them.
Enjoy the reading, I've liked
reading your various top 10 lists and look forward to interacting with
such a
diverse group!
-Nicholas Thurkettle
So here we go with 10 2004
releases I liked the most:
Hotel Rwanda
The road to bad filmmaking is paved with good intentions, and Hotel
Rwanda
has the best of intentions, which is why I'm glad to report that its
merits go
beyond its urgent true-life story about African genocide. This movie
succeeds
with its human face and heart, the expertly-shaped story and the
extraordinary
acting of Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo. A powerful experience.
9. Collateral
An absolutely unique thriller that shows director Michael Mann back at
fighting
weight. Lean, moody, beautiful and relentless, this duel of wills
between a
hitman and his unwitting chauffeur showcases not only highlight-reel
acting
work from Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx, but an eye for delicate character
detail
that extends down to the smallest role.
8. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
A mesmerizing Mulligan stew of filmmaking styles climaxes Quentin
Tarantino's
ultimate chopsockey revenge epic. You will never see another film that
looks
like this one, feels like this one, or rocks like this one. Q finally
excites
as a film artist again, and Uma Thurman has her absolute finest hour ?
is there
another actress on the planet who could have pulled this role off?
7. Vera Drake
I love how lived-in writer/director Mike Leigh's films are, and here is
a
pitch-perfect drama that never cheats, never overreaches. It just
depicts with
absolute color, detail and clarity the plight of a woman who wants to
aid
people in trouble colliding with a system that punishes the poor for
needing
the same help the rich can easily buy. Imelda Staunton is heartbreaking.
6. Kinsey
Fewer biopic subjects offered more challenges than the quirky,
controversial
and revolutionary Dr. Alfred Kinsey, but Bill Condon (Gods and
Monsters)
triumphs with an expansive, emotional, even cheeky look at the way one
man's
drive to uncover knowledge helped ignite a war over the sexual mores of
America
that rages as hot today as it ever did. Career best work from Liam
Neeson and
Laura Linney.
5. Sideways
The warmest, most human and best of Alexander Payne's scathing
comedies, played
uproariously by its fine quartet of actors. Paul Giamatti,
4. The Incredibles
An absolute delight from the first frame, Brad Bird's jazzy and
excitable
superhero adventure/family sitcom extends Pixar's unbroken streak of
animated
masterpieces. The rare movie that?s actually good for all ages, it
delivers an
inspiring message about being yourself along with one of the most
disarmingly
true depictions of a nuclear family you?ve ever seen.
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Merry Prankster screenwriter Charlie Kaufman crafts his best trip yet,
a
yo-yoing love story that feels more and more real the stranger it gets,
and
challenges our assumptions about happiness. Jim Carrey?s best
performance and a
skewed, delicious sense of humor are just part of what makes the year?s
best
romance so endearing.
2. Million Dollar Baby
Faith, determination, destiny and sacrifice, lots of movies say they
are about
these things, but in Clint Eastwood's overwhelming drama they are more
than
just labels. With patience, the savvy eye of a classic filmmaking
minimalist,
and the rich acting of Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman, Eastwood has
made the
movie that, more than any other of 2004, tunnels deep into your heart
and stays
there.
1. The Aviator
A triumph in every capacity, The Aviator is an epic that
contains
everything you could possibly love about the movies. Martin Scorsese's
best
film since Goodfellas and Leonardo DiCaprio's best performance
ever are
just part of the spectacle, passion, madness, humor and sex that make
the story
of Howard Hughes the most extraordinary, the most exciting, the most
impressive
movie I saw in 2004.
And now we will see how the other half lives? Ranking bad movies is a
delicate
business. Some movies are gargantuan miscalculations, others just
unwatchably
incompetent. I will say that I am often harder on the $100 million+
studio
movies, as they should know what they are doing by now. Worse movies
were made,
I am sure, but it is the spectacular failures that you remember most.
So this
is primarily a list of failures, movies that didn't clear the bar:
Here are 10 2004 releases I hated the most:
10. Day After Tomorrow, The
Rather than make a serious movie about climate change, Roland Emmerich
simply
remade Independence Day with cold air replacing slithery aliens
as the
boogeyman. Once again the death of millions is just an excuse for glib
sight
gags, and the story is willfully lacking in dramatic shape. Cataclysmic
special
effects are a fun afternoon companion to popcorn, but we have a right
to demand
more for our money.
9. The Clearing
A shapeless shame has three of our finest actors (Robert Redford,
Willem Dafoe,
Helen Mirren) muddling through a kidnapping story that can?t figure out
what it
amounts to, and in the end doesn?t amount to much at all. A real
disappointment
that had all the right ingredients to be on my other list.
8. Saw
The final de-evolution of the Se7en/Silence of the Lambs serial
killer
thriller is here: a near completely-nonsensical parade of (admittedly
imaginative) gruesome executions stitched together with convoluted? Gotcha!
plot reversals. It is a house of blood-stained cards that crumbles at
the
smallest scrutiny ? in the end one of our leads must cut a limb off to
escape
it all, but there is no hope, for his bad acting will go with him.
7. Ocean's Twelve
The damned thing is that this movie shouldn't be on this list at all?
it's
beautifully shot and designed, has more star-charisma-per-capita than
any movie
going and is helmed by Steven Soderbergh, one of the best filmmakers
alive. But
it's just so insufferably pleased with itself, within twenty
minutes
it's so captivated by admiration it seems to forget the audience is
even here.
Comparison to the superior Ocean's Eleven makes this all the
bigger a
disappointment.
6. Beyond the Sea
Kevin Spacey earned the clout to do pretty much whatever he'd like, and
he used
it to make this awkward and vaguely creepy fourth-wall breaking musical
pseudo-biography.
He proved he could dance, he proved he could effectively mimic every
crooning
note of Bobby Darin's career, but he never gave us the opportunity to
care.
5. Laws of Attraction
A stupefyingly clumsy romantic farce and an alarming waste of Pierce
Brosnan
Charisma, one of our most precious natural resources. Between this and Intolerable
Cruelty we?ve now had two unaccountable misfires at the seemingly
fat
target of a divorce attorney in love. Is it really so hard to pick a
profession, insert a handsome man and a beautiful woman, and have them
hate
each other for a couple of reels before hitting the hay?
4. Alien vs. Predator
Is it really so hard to pit two legendary movie monsters against each
other?
Instead of the celebration of these creatures? legacy, it?s a cheap and
illogical spookhouse joke without a single memorable character to call
its own.
Imagine cloning Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton then casting them as
the
burglars in Home Alone 5 and you?ve got some sense of what a
violation
this is to creature-lovers everywhere.
3. Van Helsing
This is one of those all-time big money flameouts that you?d like to
pretend
never happened. Its plot is a ludicrous shambles and the whole movie
such a
naked full-time exercise in vertically-integrated synergistic
franchise-making
it forgets to be, you know, good. If it had just followed the
lead of
the unaccountably whimsical Count Dracula (hammed into immortality by
Richard
Roxburgh) maybe the whole thing could have passed into the realm of
camp, as is
Van Helsing is one of those summer tentpoles that?s so wasteful
and
excessive it literally hurts.
2. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Is it really so hard to make a zombie movie? Paul W.S. Anderson?s
tentacles of
crap penetrate ever deeper into
1. The Village
M. Night Shyamalan has finally stopped writing movies, now he merely
writes
twist endings. As brilliant a director as he is with mood and pacing
and
technique, that he provides himself with such recklessly half-assed
material
compounds his crime. And in this case the twist isn?t scary or
shocking, in
fact it has basically nothing to do with anything you've tried to care
about.
Instead you watch 100 minutes of actors darting their eyes fearfully
and
whispering grim portents in Period High-Speak (our ingenues even woo
each other
this way). Then they ask us to Be Very Afraid, no wait, not about that,
we were
lying about that; but you should Be Very Afraid about this, no wait?
And to the greatest of all time: these lists cause nothing but
conflict and
misery.
10) The Seven Samurai
Screenplay by: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni
It's some kind of landmark to not only invent a genre with a single
movie but
provide still the best example of that genre almost a half-century
later. Akira
Kurosawa's epic adventure would deserve enough respect for being an
action
picture that never slows a jot in a 3 hour running time when most can't
put up
90 good minutes without wheezing. But it's also the virtuosic
introduction of
the against-all-odds big screen adventure, the story wherein a motley
crew is
assembled for a seemingly-impossible task not all of them will survive.
It?s a
long list of filmmakers who owe fealty to this work.
9) Miller's Crossing
Screenplay by: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
I can't count the number of times I?ve watched this twisty ode to
snappy hats
and gangland betrayal, and with every viewing I discover some new angle
on the
plot. It?s a finely-sustained act of audacity, from its invented slang
to its
goofy gestures of operatic grandeur to the volume of story that manages
to
unfold off camera then slip into our consciousness at the margins of
the frame.
It tosses us in right in the middle of a conversation, and through to
the end
credits I wouldn?t change a word of it.
8) Annie Hall
Screenplay by: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
It is the epitome of the movie confessional and the ?personal? project.
It is,
as its subtitle perfectly captures, a ?Nervous Romance?, wherein a
fearfully-self-protecting misfit uses the screen to expose the workings
of his
mind and heart. It?s always fascinating to catalog just how many
shattered
conventions are woven into this 90 minute piece without costing it
warmth or
integrity. It gleefully breaks the fourth wall, spins off into
fantasies,
follows tangents of memory, puts subtitles under dialogue to point out
what
people are really thinking, even has an animated segment. But under it
all is
that clever current and rhythm of Woody Allen the filmmaker, here
making a work
that?s simultaneously his most convoluted and his most naked and most
lovable.
7) Tootsie
Screenplay by: Larry Gelbart and
This is the script I mentioned above, a flawless romantic
cross-dressing farce
whose development was so rocky the final credited writers never met
each other
until the awards started rolling in. Bill Murray's contribution was to
improvise all his dialogue. But think about all the criss-crossing
plots?
Michael's attraction to his co-star, her attraction to her sexist
director, her
father's and Michael's co-star's attraction to him as a woman, his
deranged
student?s attraction to him as a man. Most comedies couldn?t keep half
as many plots
in the air, hell, I have a hard time listing them in a coherent
sentence, but
this one never feels labored for a second.
6) A Fish Called Wanda
Screenplay by: John Cleese, from a story by Charles Crichton and
John Cleese
Words like outrageous and tasteless, hell, even naughty, have all had
their meanings drained from over-application to unworthy subjects. A
Fish
Called Wanda earns them all and more. It's a sex farce whose only
nude
scene is by a balding middle-aged Brit, and a comedy whose best jokes
involve
the crushing of helpless little dogs. It pushes embarrassment and
cruelty and
amorality to their utter bonkers limits and still has time to mock
Anglo-American relations and the speech-impaired, but does so with a
clockwork
precision on a peer with the Marx Brothers.
5) The Apartment
Screenplay by: Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
It's a swelling romance that passes through depression, infidelity,
despair,
lies and suicide on its way to hope. Like in It's a Wonderful Life,
only
by facing the worst darkness can we fully appreciate the joy. This is a
movie
about a small but decent man who shows a woman his love for her in
1,000 ways
but can't bring himself to say it to her and the movie manages to delay
this
breakthrough until its last tender dialogue. The obstacles are everyday
stuff,
worrying about your job, fear of crossing the powerful, it makes it
universal
but our characters never blur, they remain uniquely themselves.
Everything
Billy Wilder was as a filmmaker fits into this movie.
4) Goodfellas
Screenplay by: Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi from the book Wise
Guy by Nicholas Pileggi
This did conflict me, since it's near impossible to draw a line between
Scorsese the writer and Scorsese the flamboyant cinema artist. But it
took a writer's
sensibility to shape the story of Henry Hill and turn Pileggi's book
into such
a dynamic film. And there?s something pulsing underneath every scene
and line,
a crackling zeal and urgency that showed this movie was alive and
thrilling
before they filmed one second of it. Finally, I preach as much as the
next that
dialogue is only the icing on the cake, but you never saw such bloody,
brilliant icing.
3) Network
Screenplay by: Paddy Chayefsky
Everytime I flick past the Fox News Channel my mind flashes to this
movie. This
is a movie where every lead role was filled after the first choices
turned them
down, and only got greenlit in order to make a lawsuit go away. It is
the most
literate, the most lacerating, the most eerie and overwhelming
indictment of
television culture, the rise of the unaccountable conglomerate and the
death of
emotional connection you will ever see in any medium. It is intense,
gut-busting, heart-breaking. Its dialogue is a ruthless poetic storm,
the crash
of intimacy against banality never happened with more jaw-dropping
verbosity.
Everything about this movie?s greatness starts and ends with the script.
2)
Screenplay by: Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, based on the
writings of T.E.
Lawrence
How confounding a hero T.E. Lawrence makes on screen. To try and solve
the
mystery of him would have been hubris, but almost any writer would have
preferred the safety of a wrong explanation to what this brilliant film
does.
It puts
1)
Screenplay by: Julius J. Epstein & Philip G. Epstein and Howard
Koch,
based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick's by
Because it?s the absolute highest achievement of the factory-system
produced
handsome
***
I flip-flopped a few times on that number 10 slot. Up until a few hours
ago I
had Unforgiven sitting there with confidence. What swayed me
was
remembering the true emotional structure of the story, how beneath the
revenge
and killing and pontificating it was really an unspoken question about
why a
decent woman from a good family married the most vicious killer in the
West.
You can learn a lot about a good movie by the first and last things it
chooses
to show you, and in this case Eastwood chose the wife?s grave and those
plaintive titles about her untimely death and the mystery of her
attraction to
him. The question is answered only for us in the audience, and you have
to pay
close attention to even see it.
This was not the case in The William Munny Killings, the
original
script. It closes with an awkward scene where the killer comes home to
confront
his children. That speaks to the question of whether the man can live
with who
he is. That?s enough to make a great movie out of, but Eastwood made
just
enough delicate changes to discover the even deeper story which made
the movie
immortal.
Maybe that?s not a fair reason to knock it that crucial step from #10
to #11,
but it was equally painful not to have a single Kurosawa picture in the
top
ten. And because I made my decision today, on this particular day Seven
Samurai meant more to me.
Also surging for a spot were the likes of Some Like it Hot,
Others I abandoned reluctantly but with, I think, good cause. The
Maltese
Falcon is hands-down one of my all-time favorite movies, but having
read
the book I know that save for one short deleted scene it is essentially
an act
of near-flawless transcription, with whole scenes and lines of dialogue
drawn
straight from Dashiell Hammett?s book. A Lion in Winter and A
Man for
All Seasons are both witty and compulsively watchable historical
soap
operas, but were equally so as plays and have barely been altered in
their
cinematic versions.
And so on and so on, this piece could easily spin out further and
further to
treatise length. It?s what it would take to fully document how I
arrived at
that final 10. I should say I?ve probably well impressed on you by now
that I
didn?t make it an easy decision for myself.
This is a much earlier list:
About a Boy - Nick Hornby also
wrote the book "High Fidelity" (which
nearly made this list) and this is so far my favorite movie of 2002.
Touching,
honest, unexpected in so many ways, and one of Hugh Grant's sharpest
performances (see this and Bridget Jones, he plays such a good
bastard!)
Almost Famous - This movie gets me
every time I see it. So funny and
heartbreaking at the same time, so honest about the awkwardness of
adolescence
(as well as the prolonged adolescence of rock stars). When
Amelie - Pure, uplifting magic, and
it reminds you just what movies can do. You
start to see how lazy so many other movies are.
Best in Show - I've seen this
half-a-dozen times, and I still laugh out loud
from start to finish every time.
Improvisational, character-nuanced humor at
its absolute peak.
Boogie Nights - Exhilirating
filmmaking (Scorsese cribbing, at least he steals
from the best!), brilliantly-realized characters, and the world's worst
drug
deal, one of the best scenes in any movie of the 90's.
The Iron Giant - This animated movie
has gone so far under the radar because it
wasn't Disney, please see it and spread the word! Imagine an animated
ET, except
replace the little alien with a 100-ft-tall robot. If there's a part of
you that's not cynical,
this movie will get to you!
L.A.
Les Miserables (Claude LeLouch) -
What impossible genius - parts of Victor
Hugo's story, some re-enacted, others reflected in the life of a group
of
characters struggling to survive the Nazi occupation of
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of
the Ring - I've waited half of my life for
these movies. A lot to live up to, and they
did. In every way.
Shakespeare in Love - I love
Shakespeare, and I love Tom Stoppard, and they're
both at their best here. This is the kind of movie that really lifts my
spirits - I'm
so enraptured by it that I want to cheer at every clever plot turn.
A Simple Plan - I'm a big Sam Raimi
fan, but even I was amazed that he pulled
this one off. Any Hitchcock fan will love this thriller about the evil
a little
ill-gotten money can create. Career work from Bill Paxton and Billy Bob
Thornton.
Toy Story 2 - I actually like this
better than the original. I'm in awe of
Pixar, and how they manage to make these perfect little animated gems
time
after time, and breathe so much humor and life into computer-generated
characters!
"Zurg, you killed my father!" "No, Buzz, I AM YOUR FATHER!"