LVJeff's Individual Canon
The members of Cinemarati, the web alliance for film commentary, have each been asked to submit a list of top 100 films. These lists are referred to as "individual canons," and the rules for creating them were very relaxed. Member Bryant Frazer explained it this way, on The Cinemarati 100: Introduction page:
"The criteria for inclusion on each list submitted is left mostly up to the member compiling the list. It's a personal thing -- some of us pick 'best' movies, others pick the most comforting ones to come across on television during a bout with insomnia, others try to weigh a film's influence on their own development as movie-watchers."
The individual lists were then scored and compiled together to form a master list of 100 movies. As Frazer writes, "The list is hardly scientific... So it's hard to draw many solid conclusions about the list except this one: it would make one hell of a DVD collection." That said, the completed list, which is humbly little more than the most popular movies among an arbitrary group of 14 people, can be found on this page.
We were also asked to each write a paragraph about the highest ranked unique title in our lists (The Cinemarati 100: Member Picks), and to make our individual lists available to be viewed. And so, here on my site, is mine.
This was a fun project, although a little difficult because we basically had to make up our own rules for our own lists. After much time thinking about it, I decided to make my criteria a mix of things, but one objective had to take priority above all others: it had to feel personal. The highest-ranked movies on my list are movies that, for some reason or another, I found myself strongly attached to, without much regard to, and often in spite of, logic and objectivity. That's the way they should be, right? And, not surprisingly, a great majority of them were viewed during certain formative years.
Still, presenting a blank-faced list here will surely elicit more than a few instances of, "What the heck is he thinking?", so I've presented my canon with explanatory paragraphs for the top 25 movies. Also, a disclaimer: this list was put together in May of 2004. At the time of this writing (Nov. 2004), I'd expect many of these titles to shift positions and some of them to drop in favor of new entries. This would be natural -- one's top 100 movies should never be set in stone and should adapt to changes experienced by the listmaker. So maybe it will be updated one day. But now, for better or for worse, this is the the list I submitted to Cinemarati's Canon project.
1. RoboCop (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
After all this time, this is still my favorite movie, and a lot of the reason doubtlessly comes from its direct influence on my outlook on life in general. It was perhaps the first movie I had seen that deeply shook me with its depiction of life’s unfairness, and showed how asking for something to counterbalance that unfairness is an almost desperate act of hope. In the movie, that hope takes the form of an unstoppable cyborg, hardly an option in real life. In some strange way, that ultimately strengthened me, shaping much of my current philosophy that life doesn’t really care one way or the other about you, and so you’ve got to make the best of everything you have, and appreciate how precious and fragile it all is. Other elements factored into my high regard of this film, from the coolness of the hero’s design to the use of one of my favorite story ideas -- finding out what happens in the world around you after you die. But it’s the initial shock that has stayed with me from the first time I saw it through to the rest of my life. (By the way, my review for RoboCop was the first one I wrote for this website, and it shows. I'd much rather have this singular paragraph be the official review now, heh.)
2. Star Wars (dir. George Lucas, 1977)
Yes, it’s the one that started it all. Star Wars is one of the first movies I ever saw, and it inevitably became one of those experiences revisited often in childhood, whether it was through the reading of a kid’s book adaptation (complete with stills from the movie) or imagining new stories full of spaceships and outer space battles. It opened up my imagination and showed me the limitless possibilities of the movies. To this day, it still amazes me what a wonderful job Lucas and his team did to create a whole ‘nother universe you could jump into (which is why I lament Lucas’s decision to never make the original, with models-on-strings and all, available on DVD; I don’t think he understands how many of our childhoods were imprinted with those feelings of watching them fly).
3. Airplane! (dirs. Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, 1980)
It’s still the funniest movie I’ve ever seen. Ranking it so high among my favorites emphasizes how much I think good comedies are underrated. Drama is easy. Comedy is hard. And good comedy writing has always been an issue of concern for me -- I have a great appreciation for wit and timing, two essential ingredients for pulling off any great gag. The wonderful thing about Airplane! is how well it holds up -- I fell over laughing as a kid, and I can still crack up watching it today. The ZAZ team was great at this deadpan humor that didn’t call attention to itself, even as it existed alongside loud and obvious comedy. The movie’s outright, rule-breaking silliness -- it’s such a feeling of freedom to watch it happen -- was never quite matched for me until I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail over 15 years later.
4. The Princess Bride (dir. Rob Reiner, 1987)
The first time I saw The Princess Bride, I instantly took to it, but I don’t think I knew why right away. It would be easy to say it works because it’s funny and sweet, but there’s something else -- it’s cynical. It has a sarcastic take on life, which comes through in its humor; much of the reason the movie is so easy to get into comes from the way it disarms the viewer with that sarcasm -- therefore, you know it’s not putting you on. And then somehow it can use that cynicism to sell you a sincere tale of true love (both in the fairy tale sense and in the familial sense). It takes a lot of skill to use cynicism and sarcasm to weed away cheap idealisms in order to encourage deeper ones (as opposed to using it as a traditional defensive mechanism to avoid or attack idealism). I respond extremely well to The Princess Bride because that’s me as well -- cynical with a deep, hopeful idealism. "Life is pain, Highness," says Wesley. "Anyone who says otherwise is selling something." But from those same lips comes, "Death can not stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while."
5. When Harry Met Sally... (dir. Rob Reiner, 1989)
Romantic comedies come and go, but this one resounds in the memory because the love is substantial. While most stories celebrate the instantaneous love at first sight, When Harry Met Sally... shows the evolution of a deep love forged by a trusting friendship. I can believe this story, and I can believe in this kind of love. The movie gets compared a lot to the great Woody Allen romantic comedies Annie Hall and Manhattan, largely because it seems to be modeled after them. The main difference here is the Allen movies don’t focus on the success of a couple, whereas When Harry Met Sally... shows us how things can go right. Talk about feeding my hopeless romanticism; no other movie has filled that appetite of mine so satisfyingly.
6. Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001)
I don’t think I've evolved faster as a critic and analyzer of movies in general than when I had my maddening experience with this movie. I immediately disliked it thanks to my adherence to the idea that things had to make sense in a movie (you can still read my dismissive review on this site). Steadily, though, I gave it much reconsideration after reading and debating about it in the months after I saw it. I learned to see more clearly the other important elements of film, and began to see that story is often not the most important part of a good movie (most stories are recycled, anyway). What happens is less interesting than how it is presented; how it is presented becomes infinitely more effective when a director truly understands the range of the tools he has to work with. (On the side, though, it also helped that forming theories about the story was such a fun activity in and of itself.) I’ve watched Mulholland Drive another two times since that first viewing, and each time I found more to appreciate and embrace. Thanks to David Lynch for giving me something that helped me to learn so much in so short a time.
7. Koyaanisqatsi (dir. Godfrey Reggio, 1983)
(Note: This is also my "orphan" write-up on (The Cinemarati 100: Member Picks.) My friend lent me this movie and described it by saying it had no plot and no characters. Naturally, that made me more eager to see it, and as I watched it I could see that although the description was true, a story was being told anyway. At first, I was annoyed -- the early parts felt like a finger wagging, saying technology bad, nature good. But then it accelerated and entered the section entitled "The Grid," and it all came together, becoming clearer and clearer the faster it went. It's not that technology is bad, it's that it turns us into... drones. And this isn't particularly good nor bad, but it is ugly. And fascinating. Koyaanisqatsi is a brilliantly put-together film -- shot beautifully, sequenced well, edited superbly, scored magnificently by Philip Glass -- and its lasting effect is a haunting one, not warning us of becoming routine-driven slaves to technology, but showing us that we already are. This is a movie with no plot and no characters, and yet it demonstrates how cinema can have no limits.
8. Die Hard (dir. John McTiernan, 1988)
Here’s the story on this one -- in the late ‘80’s, I disliked Bruce Willis. No, I didn’t see much of Moonlighting, but this guy struck me as some kind of annoying hot shot. Anyway, one day my father put on the tape of Die Hard while my cousins’ family was over, mainly so he could show off his sound system and big-screen tv. My cousins and I watched for a while... and then found that we couldn’t stop watching. What a story! What attitude! What suspense! And Bruce Willis, in one great action-hero turn, totally won me over. I loved John McClane, and I also loved the calculating evil of Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber. This was one of the best good-guy/bad-guy matchups I had ever seen. We were blown away, and the next day I put it on and watched it again! Today, Die Hard is my action-movie standard, a combination of well-drawn characters, both confident and intelligent, who can make you believe -- and care about -- the deadly situations they find themselves in.
9. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1989)
This is the movie that made me love going to the movies. It remains my favorite ever theater-going experience, and is the main reason why I prefer to see a great movie with a large crowd than to watch one in a nearly empty room. When a film works, getting into it becomes a communal experience, and that is awesome. My friends and I caught this movie one lovely summer evening, and the place was packed. We all knew what we were getting into -- we wanted to see Indiana Jones, who thrilled us in two previous wondrous movies. And when this new one got going, the audience was hooked, laughing raucously at every joke and hanging on the edges of their seats during the action. I can still feel those giddy feelings when I watch it again these days, by myself. I consider this flick to be pop movie-making at its crowd-pleasing best.
10. Moulin Rouge! (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
2001 was a great year for movies with vision. With features like Mulholland Drive, Memento, and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, we saw movies that looked as if we were peeking inside the directors’ heads and could watch what they imagined. Perhaps this was more true for Moulin Rouge! than for any of the rest. Baz Luhrmann mastered his style and daringly put it on screen, where it was screwy enough to be ridiculed but, when the wavelength connects with the viewer, could just as easily be wholly embraced. The effect of this movie is both loopy and infectious; it's a modern, mad joy. It also has a personal connection to me -- it became the movie my girlfriend (at the time) always stopped on when she surfed throug the cable channels. And those car trips where we would try singing "Come What May" at the top of our lungs -- those were the days.
11. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (dir. Stephen Herek, 1989)
Long story short -- at the end of one particularly downbeat day in high school, I lost my wallet (with my driver's license and some other cards in it) and became depressed. My brother's friend suggested watching a movie to cheer up: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Heading to the theater, I fully expected the movie to be stupid, but, to my surprise, it was inventive and very funny. It really cheered me up, and I was quite grateful (and, to give the story a happy ending, I got my wallet back at the school's lost-and-found the next, minus the seven bucks in cash). To me, this is an excellent! example of being able to love a movie even when its total "objective" quality isn't relatively high -- so many intangible factors affect movie love, we may never fully understand it. To that, I say: "Party on, dudes."
12. Clash of the Titans (dir. Desmond Davis, 1981)
Here's the response I wrote when Cinemarati polled its members to answer the following question: What is the best single sequence in an otherwise flawed or even failed movie? When I think of flawed movies with great moments, the special effects showcases of Ray Harryhausen come to mind. Their casts of stop-motion monsters make a case for greatness all by themselves, but often the cheesy stories and acting don't live up. So I'd guess most people wouldn't watch them for the plot -- instead, they want to marvel at the creatures, like sword-wielding skeletons and giant dinosaurs. At least I do. My personal favorite scene comes from a movie I love, despite the fact that Harry Hamlin is the lead -- Clash of the Titans. It's the part where Medusa first appears, her silhouette announcing her arrival as she crawls on her hands before she reveals her lower body as that of a serpent's. With snakes for hair and a bow and arrow for a weapon -- not to mention the fact that her ghastly gaze turns anyone to stone -- her moment on the screen is tension-racking and creepy, and the jittery stop-motion effects only serve to enhance the eeriness. I think it's one of the greatest entrances in the movies, and exemplary of the magic Harryhausen could spin with his craft. (I also wanted to add: I love Greek mythology. There's not enough movies about Greek mythology.)
13. Back to the Future (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
One of the neatest sci-fi concepts ever is employed in the name of comedy and thrills. It got me to play with the notion of time travel in my mind, and when you exercise your brain like that, you're bound to come out smarter... or, at least, more imaginative. And, for some reason, the final act, from the start of the dance to the DeLorean's run, manages to nail me to my seat everytime I see it.
14. Jurassic Park (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1993)
Dinosaurs were a childhood obsession for many people, including me. I loved dinosaurs -- I read about them and drew them and dreamed of stories about them. And I never saw them move or come to life, except in my head, and, really, how menacing could they have been in there? But Spielberg made them real. Seeing them on the big screen was awesome. So awesome that I'm willing to forgive the idiocy of that "This is UNIX!" scene.
15. Spider-Man (dir. Sam Raimi, 2002)
It's the only recent movie I've seen that makes me feel like a kid again, and makes me want to be a kid again. Why couldn't this movie have existed when I was 12? I know, without the cgi, it could never have happened. Well, at least I'm glad it happened in my lifetime. That's better than never having it at all.
16. Return of the Jedi (dir. Richard Marquand, 1983)
My love for Star Wars was fulfilled once more with this fast-paced, action-packed conclusion. When I was a kid, someone gave us a bootleg tape of this movie (hey, don't look at me, I don't know where he got it from), so it became the only Star Wars movie my brother and I could watch over and over again. And back then, we loved the Ewoks. Yes we did. So sue me.
17. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (dirs. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, 1975)
It's possibly the outright funniest movie I've seen since Airplane!. And I only saw it for the first time some time at the end of 2001! Where had this been all my life? And what is the capital of Assyria?
18. Clueless (dir. Amy Heckerling, 1995)
Some things you just never see coming. During the '90's, which were my college years and the years of my first real jobs, I barely watched any movies (for reasons I won't go into right now). So here it's 1996, and I made an exception when I borrowed three movies from my parents' video store: Braveheart, Mortal Kombat, and Clueless. Guess which one I ended up loving? Braveheart? As if! I totally fell for Clueless, one of the wittiest exercises in snappy comedy writing ever to be disguised as a mere teen flick.
19. The Emperor's New Groove (dir. Mark Dindal, 2000)
Actually, I'm a little surprised that this movie ended up being my highest-ranked animated film. I love animated movies -- I think they're terribly underrated in America, ghetto-ized as family pics and children's fare. You'd think, then, that I'd have some kind of counter-example as my highest-ranked cartoon movie. Well, family-friendly New Groove may be, but I can still make a case for this being a prime example of sophisticated animation. It's Disney humor-animation at its finest, a tight combination of style, polish, dynamics, motion, rhythm, and timing. It owes more to zany Bugs Bunny shorts than it does to, say, Beauty and the Beast. It's a cartoon that's great at being a cartoon. Oh yeah, and the end always makes me laugh. "How did we get here, Kronk?" "You've got me -- by all accounts, it doesn't make sense."
20. A Boy Named Charlie Brown (dir. Bill Melendez, 1969)
Actually, it's been a very long time since I've seen this movie, but I know it deserves a high spot for many reasons. First, I'm a die-hard Peanuts fan. Charles M. Schulz will forever be one of my idols. Second, I associate this movie with loneliness and the recurring, haunting, yet strangely welcome feeling I get of being lost in a big city. I can't explain why I sometimes go there in my mind, but I do, and the feeling is scary and romantic. Thirdly, it contains an abridged passage from (and thus introduced me to) the transcendent second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, my favorite classical piece in all the world. A Boy Named Charlie Brown, like Peanuts itself, is an exploration of finding an individual place in the world in the face of loneliness and neglect. It's a universal theme that's always been able to speak to me.
21. The Secret of NIMH (dir. Don Bluth, 1982)
Yes, that's right, we're deep in a cartoon block on this list. This one's an inventive animated feature, the first by Don Bluth. It gave me an alternative to the Disney style I grew up on, and it was also one of the first movies I saw that got me to read the book afterward, thus exposing me to the art of adaptation.
22. Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (dir. Bill Melendez, 1977)
Another Peanuts movie? Good grief, yes! Peanuts inspired my original ambition -- to be a cartoonist! And this movie was always a favorite of mine because it focused on ensemble dynamics, which never fails to fascinate me. It's still my favorite kind of story to write: get a good number of distinct personalities, stick them in a situation together, and just watch what happens.
23. Mulan (dirs. Tony Bancroft, Barry Cook, 1998)
Cartoon row ends with Mulan, which isn't necessarily one of Disney's standouts, but does nail pretty squarely a subject I feel strongly about -- traditional Asian treatment of women. I think, as a movie aimed at kids, its tackling of the issue of women's equality is both cheerworthy and subversive -- that song, "I'll Make a Man Out of You," is quite ingenious, if you ask me (as is its reprisal at the turning point where the men have to save the day by dressing as women). The movie does have several questionable elements, but overall I think it's an underappreciated piece of social and cultural commentary -- it's basically the modern West scolding the ancient East, which has all sorts of fascinating implications.
24. The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
The highest horror movie on the list is the one that scared me the most. I saw glimpses of it as a little kid, and it's scarred me for life. Even now, as immune to horror as I am, thinking about The Shining can still give me the creeps. In my opinion, Kubrick's style has always been most suited to horror, since it's so cold, calculated, and geared towards isolation. His images are naturally scary and disturbing, so the effectiveness of The Shining is only too natural.
25. L.A. Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson, 1997)
Energetic, labyrinthine, and self-assured, L.A. Confidential was the first movie I saw during my movie-watching revival phase (which started in 2000 and is now going on stronger than ever) that really got my juices flowing again. I loved how it was a character study centering on strong-willed men, each one blessed with certain strengths and cursed with dangerous flaws. That I got so into it was a way of telling me that, however jaded I think I've become, when watching movies, I never can tell when that magic will just work perfectly for me. It's always a wonderful surprise when it does.
The rest, listed as Rank. Title; Year; Director:
26. Unforgiven; 1992; Clint Eastwood
27. Spirited Away; 2001; Hayao Miyazaki
28. Animals Are Beautiful People; 1974; Jamie Uys
29. Lilo & Stitch; 2002; Dean DeBlois/Chris Sanders
30. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; 1984; Steven Spielberg
31. Ghostbusters; 1984; Ivan Reitman
32. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring; 2001; Peter Jackson
33. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; 2003; Peter Jackson
34. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; 2002; Peter Jackson
35. Mildred Pierce; 1945; Michael Curtiz
36. Goldfinger; 1964; Guy Hamilton
37. Amadeus; 1984; Milos Forman
38. Audition; 2000; Takashi Miike
39. Notorious; 1946; Alfred Hitchcock
40. The Little Mermaid; 1989; Ron Clements/John Musker
41. Beauty and the Beast; 1991; Gary Trousdale/Kirk Wise
42. Toy Story 2; 1999; John Lasseter
43. Toy Story; 1995; John Lasseter
44. The Wizard of Oz; 1939; Victor Fleming
45. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!; 1988; David Zucker
46. From Russia with Love; 1963; Terence Young
47. The General; 1927; Clyde Bruckman
48. The Untouchables; 1987; Brian De Palma
49. The Empire Strikes Back; 1980; Irvin Kershner
50. Terminator 2: Judgment Day; 1991; James Cameron
51. 2001: A Space Odyssey; 1968; Stanley Kubrick
52. Rashomon; 1950; Akira Kurosawa
53. Psycho; 1960; Alfred Hitchcock
54. Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror; 1922; F.W. Murnau
55. Red River; 1948; Howard Hawks
56. Aladdin; 1992; Ron Clements/John Musker
57. Tarzan; 1999; Chris Buck/Kevin Lima
58. Kill Bill: Vol. 1; 2003; Quentin Tarantino
59. Raiders of the Lost Ark; 1981; Steven Spielberg
60. Vertigo; 1958; Alfred Hitchcock
61. Babe; 1995; Chris Noonan
62. Rear Window; 1954; Alfred Hitchcock
63. Paths of Glory; 1957; Stanley Kubrick
64. 12 Angry Men; 1957; Sidney Lumet
65. The Maltese Falcon; 1941; John Huston
66. The Insider; 1999; Michael Mann
67. Fight Club; 1999; David Fincher
68. The Apartment; 1960; Billy Wilder
69. It's a Wonderful Life; 1946; Frank Capra
70. The Third Man; 1949; Carol Reed
71. Frankenstein; 1931; James Whale
72. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; 2000; Ang Lee
73. Groundhog Day; 1993; Harold Ramis
74. The Bridge on the River Kwai; 1957; David Lean
75. Finding Nemo; 2003; Andrew Stanton
76. High Noon; 1952; Fred Zinnemann
77. Memento; 2000; Christopher Nolan
78. The Nightmare Before Christmas; 1993; Henry Selick
79. North by Northwest; 1959; Alfred Hitchcock
80. The Godfather; 1972; Francis Ford Coppola
81. The Godfather: Part II; 1974; Francis Ford Coppola
82. Pulp Fiction; 1994; Quentin Tarantino
83. Manhattan; 1979; Woody Allen
84. Jaws; 1975; Steven Spielberg
85. Seven Samurai; 1954; Akira Kurosawa
86. Apocalypse Now; 1979; Francis Ford Coppola
87. Goodfellas; 1990; Martin Scorsese
88. It Happened One Night; 1934; Frank Capra
89. Schindler's List; 1993; Steven Spielberg
90. Princess Mononoke; 1997; Hayao Miyazaki
91. Gone with the Wind; 1939; Victor Fleming
92. Dances with Wolves; 1990; Kevin Costner
93. Saving Private Ryan; 1998; Steven Spielberg
94. Lady and the Tramp; 1955; Clyde Geronimi/Wilfred Jackson/Hamilton Luske
95. My Fair Lady; 1964; George Cukor
96. Unbreakable; 2000; M. Night Shyamalan
97. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; 1974; Tobe Hooper
98. Kwaidan; 1964; Masaki Kobayashi
99. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; 1937; producer: Walt Disney
100. Mary Poppins; 1964; Robert Stevenson
List compiled on May 27, 2004. Article written on Nov. 14, 2004.
©Jeffrey Chen, Nov. 14, 2004
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