Top Tens #5: My Top 10 Favourite Films of All Time

I’m off to camp tomorrow and I hope to see you all back at The Screening Room when I return in late August. Oh, and here is my new, improved, updated, refurbished, hot-off-the-press list of my favourite films!

10. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, dir. Steven Spielberg)

I first watched this film when I was five years old and I often return to that age (in spirit, at least) every time John Williams’ score kicks in. Steven Spielberg’s brawniest and most thrilling entertainment is, first and foremost, escapism as its purest. Mixing in the best parts of old adventure serials with a globe-trotting scope as ambitious as anything the James Bond franchised has ever tried, Raiders of the Lost Ark is the beacon of action filmmaking and also an illustrious peak for one of Hollywood’s greatest screen heroes—Harrison Ford. Oh, and that scene between Indiana and the swordsman is still one of the funniest sequences ever captured on film.

9. Chungking Express (1994, dir. Wong Kar-wai)

No director working anywhere in the world today has their films swim with romance quite like Hong Kong stylist Wong Kar-wai. Honest, passionate and dreamlike, his 1994 masterpiece follows two separate stories told one after the other: both are about cops dealing with recent break-ups while new women dance in and out of their lives. The photography of urban Hong Kong is intoxicating and the performances, especially from Tony Leung and Faye Wong, are terrific. The film breathes with life and a commanding energy, but it’s the raw, subtle nuances between the romantic leads in both stories that feel utterly true. It’s a buoyant journey, and one I’ll be delightful to take again and again.

8. Apocalypse Now (1979, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

Apocalypse Now could have been one of Hollywood’s biggest flops. During production, several sets were destroyed, director Coppola nearly went bankrupt, actor Martin Sheen nearly died, and plenty of hours of footage made it to the cutting room floor. So, it’s quite a miracle that the film turned out as stellar as it is. Undoubtedly one of the most complex studies of human madness and also a remarkably involving and harrowing war film, it’s a film that pulsates with so much vivid imagery and fiercely haunting performances, it practically recreates the fear, soullessness and destructive nature of the Vietnam War. In terms of recreations of war on film, this one smells like napalm in the morning.

7. Barton Fink (1991, dir. Joel Coen)

One of the signs of a great film is when one finds new things on every repeat viewing. Two directors, Joel and Ethan Coen, loves to immerse audiences with this treat and pack their films with symbols, metaphors and themes. As terrific as their filmography is, no film is as multi-faceted or as brilliant as their massively under-appreciated 1991 classic. In it, John Turturro plays an uptight New York playwright who moves to Hollywood to work on a boxing film, and ends up, well, wresting with himself. It’s a mix between a hilarious satire and a horror film, and it is an endlessly fascinating trip. Whether you leave the film scratching your head or entirely intrigued, it’s a hard movie to get out of your mind. Maybe another watch will do?

6. 12 Angry Men (1957, dir. Sidney Lumet)

When Sidney Lumet died last April, the motion picture community lost of their finest craftsmen. He was a brilliant actor’s director and made films that felt socially conscious but never self-important. The finest proof of his mastery is his 1957 debut 12 Angry Men, based on a Reginald Rose play. The set-up is simple: 12 jurors discuss, argue and deliberate the facts of a murder trial. It’s more riveting and suspenseful than any courtroom drama has any right to be, and the fact that it develops a dozen fascinating characters in the process (tremendous work from Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb and company certainly helps) is testament to Lumet’s genius as a director. Note that the film rarely moves beyond the jury room, yet the visual style never feels rote. It’s a compelling thriller that is composed entirely of dialogue and character development. Those kinds of films are becoming mysteriously hard to find.

5. Memento (2000, dir. Christopher Nolan)

Where was I? Long before he was earning big budgets to make Batman films, Christopher Nolan was primarily known for this brainy neo-noir puzzle about a man (an excellent Guy Pearce) with anterograde amnesia trying to figure out who raped and murdered his wife. The gimmick is that since he can’t remember what’s happened right before, we’re given the details backwards (so we have no prior knowledge of the previous events either). Clever, complex and undeniably compelling, Memento is probably the best example of how to construct a movie in a non-linear fashion. It’s also a fine mystery that may take a few viewings to entirely decipher—but that’s just part of the fun. Ok, so where was I?

4. Almost Famous (2000, dir. Cameron Crowe)

There’s a scene at the beginning of Cameron Crowe’s 2000 rock-and-roll epic where William, the aspiring music journalist, is dismissed as merely a critic by the rock band he is assigned to cover. William then spends the next minute unleashing his intense adoration and enthusiasm for each member of the band. He is a fan first, critic second. I like to approach films in a similar way. That said, this semi-autobiographical film from writer/director Crowe is such an intelligent, exuberant, compassionate, dynamically acted film that every scene feels like its part of a terrific album from decades ago. It’s also one of the best films ever made about music, and one that I will always be happy to give another spin.

3. Se7en (1995, dir. David Fincher)

This film is bloody brilliant, and both of those adjectives can be used equally to describe this grisly detective thriller, arguably David Fincher’s finest achievement. A headstrong rookie (Brad Pitt) and a warm-hearted veteran (Morgan Freeman) are working to track down a serial killer who is murdering victims who have committed one of the seven deadly sins. It’s a frightening journey, filled with twists (courtesy of Andrew Kevin Walker’s cunning plotting) and stomach churns (striking, if lurid visuals come from Fincher’s cold vision). It also features the most spine-tingling finale that I can recall, an ending so devastatingly brilliant that Pitt almost quit the film when studio heads were thinking of replacing it.

2. The Apartment (1960, dir. Billy Wilder)

I already spoke about this one of my Top 10 Comedies list, but it bears repeating: The Apartment is tightly plotted, bruisingly funny and blissfully romantic. Few onscreen couples have had as much zing as the irreplaceable Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, the former which gives a performance of precise comedic timing and dramatic weight. He plays the owner of a New York apartment, who lends it out to his co-workers and their dates in exchange for a good word and a promotion at his workplace. Lemmon’s balance of humour and pathos is almost as remarkable as the deft way in which director Billy Wilder massages dark themes with light comedy—tone-wise, of course.

1. Magnolia (1999, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

The world of film buffs is filled with two types of people: those who thought that Magnolia was an overlong, pretentious bore, and those who thought that Magnolia was a magnificent opus of Biblical proportions. I am of the latter variety. It is P.T. Anderson’s masterpiece, an audacious and remarkably acted three-hour journey through one rainy afternoon in the San Fernando Valley. We follow several lonely, troubled souls struggling to find each other—and then the unimaginable happens. Magnolia blooms with big themes, brave ideas and bold methods of storytelling and performance. It’s a film that has grown on me ever since I saw it years ago, and it leaves me spellbound every time I watch it again.

Daze of Heaven

The Tree of Life

**** out of ****

Directed by: Terrence Malick

Starring: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler and Sean Penn

Running time: 138 minutes

For those of you who aren't keeping a tally, this is my 100th post on The Screening Room. And, boy, do I have an incredible film to mark the occasion.

There are only a small handful of directors who can create a film with the title The Tree of Life without extending their reach or pretension, and Terrence Malick is one of them. The reclusive American artist, best known for his World War II epic The Thin Red Line, is a name that means zip to mainstream audiences. But, his small yet revered filmography and his stature as an evocative, expressionistic filmmaker that is more concerned with how story is defined by patterns of image and sound rather than through a cohesive narrative, means that every project of his becomes a cultural event for film buffs.

His latest film, the recent winner of the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, encapsulates the best attributes of Malick’s work, meaning it’s a film that’s easier to describe with adjectives than with nouns.

The film opens with a whispered voice-over from Mrs. O’Brien, the saintly small-town mother played by Jessica Chastain. “There are two ways through life. The way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you follow.”

This quote becomes the defining conflict for her son, a doe-eyed preteen named Jack (newcomer Hunter McCracken), who is caught between these two halves. Jack and his two younger brothers (Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan) are growing up during the 1950s in the midlands of Texas. Their father (Brad Pitt) goes by the way of nature: he is a failed musician, whose stinging regret for the things he hasn’t accomplished makes him determined to live vicariously through his boys. He is a strict disciplinarian who nurtures his children with pride and punishment, demanding the best from them.

Mr. O’Brien is the face of nature and the struggles and demons that come attached to it, while Mrs. O’Brien embodies grace. She is a sunny mother, although naïve—her husband pointedly remarks about her slightness on occasion—who raises her children in a different way, through prayer and plenitude.

The Tree of Life is about the battle between religion and reason just as much as it is about the binary that separates this family. It is a film both intimate in its approach to character, while transcendent and exhilaratingly grand in its depiction of everything else, from the creation of the world to the beauty of the neighbourhood where the O’Briens reside.

The scenes are small in action but have an overpowering aura surrounding them—can this be reminiscent of Biblical territory, as the tiny property of man tries to explore his relationship with a higher power?

Filmgoers uninitiated by Malick’s cerebral approach may find a lot of the film and the connections between certain moments perplexing. For instance, why does the family storyline suddenly move into a colourful interpretation of the Big Bang and the creation of the cosmos, full of rushing waters and fiery blasts of light?

It is a challenging parallel to explain concretely, but the theme of creation and destruction is a central aspect in The Tree of Life. By delicately chronicling the early days of how the O’Brien sons grew from babies into boys, and by later depicting how their stable family fabric crumbles, Malick frames a battle between the possibilities of creation and the vast soullessness of nature that threatens to tear it all apart.

Adding to this thematic element, one could frame the film as a series of mementos from Jack as an older man (played by Sean Penn). He works in a colossally tall glass skyscraper in a giant metropolis—the unlimited potential of the building’s architecture sums up creation—but his family, who are no longer with him, are fading, fragmented memories that still wrestle inside of him.

With such a careful, cautious perfectionist behind the camera, the technical aspects are all masterful. No cinematographer working in film today is as innovative as Emmanuel Lubezki. (His Oscar loss for Children of Men still hurts and his camerawork here will hopefully make the Academy atone.) Filming most of the action outside, Lubezki ensures that the camera doesn’t move as much as float, capturing the fluidity of youth, and the dreamy movements and colours that can pervade one’s memory when they harken back to an earlier time. Immaculate set design from Jack Fisk and a hymnal score by Alexandre Desplat appropriately adds further grandeur.

The cast is remarkable, as well. With a riveting intensity and a slight vulnerability, Brad Pitt has never expressed a wider range as a leading man. Chastain is also a revelation with a terrifically, expressive face—vital considering how her character says very little. Hunter McCracken debuts as the young son who is enveloped by his loss of innocence, and he is sublime, with a haunting, ashen face that darkens his tender spirit (the young actor also lets his body language do much of the talking).

Due to the writer/director’s private nature, we will likely never know how personal this tale is for him. Malick was a young boy growing up in Waco, Texas, at the same time as the young characters in the film. Even though its personal sympathies will remain a mystery, The Tree of Life is an audacious, glorious symphony of sound and image, and an endlessly fascinating coming-of-age tale. It is a daunting but glorious work of art that beckons to be seen and seen again.

Close Encounters of the Nerd Kind (Part II)

Super 8

*** out of ****

Directed by: J.J. Abrams

Starring: Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee and Kyle Chandler

Running time: 112 minutes

In the year 1979, a 13-year-old middle-schooler named Jeffrey Jacob Abrams started making films with a Super 8 camera in his backyard. The young director, working alongside good pal Matt Reeves (the future director of Cloverfield), submited his works into local film festivals. Reeves and Abrams were even hired by a certain high-profile director to restore some of the amateur films that he had made in his younger days. That director’s name was Steven Spielberg.

Fast forward 32 years and J.J. Abrams, now one of sci-fi geekdom’s most idolized creative minds, harkens back to the 1979 that he envisions his Super 8 camera would have picked up had Spielberg’s cinematic powers transcended through the device. It is a time where every kid lives in cozy, small-town suburbia, races their bicycle through the street, communicates through walkie talkie, quotes Star Wars at a whim, and bops their head to The Knack’s “My Sharona.”

This is the self-conscious although blissfully nostalgic environment that Abrams creates in his latest film, an exhilarating and moving pastiche to his filmmaking hero entitled Super 8. The sci-fi adventure operates from the perspectives of six young teens during a summer in the fictional town of Lillian, Ohio.

The clan are amateur filmmakers working on a five-minute zombie film—itself a tribute to director George A. Romero—that they plan on entering into a regional student film festival.

The gang includes perfectionist director Charles (a pitch-perfect Riley Griffiths), tall leading man Martin (Gabriel Basso), brace-faced explosives expert Cary (Ryan Lee), alluring actress extraordinaire Alice (Elle Fanning), and our protagonist, makeup artist and model maker Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney, whose celebrity will hopefully last longer than Henry Thomas's did).

While the pubescent group are shooting a nighttime scene at a railway outside of town, an unexpected train derailment halts the filming and the teens flee for their lives. But they are unprepared for the crash's aftermath, as several mysterious events start occurring around Lilian, including disappearing dogs, vanished power lines and an abducted sheriff. It is now up to Joe’s stern father, Jackson (Kyle Chandler), also serving as the town’s deputy sheriff, to investigate the dangerous presence in town.

Super 8 allows J.J. Abrams the opportunity to unleash his inner Spielberg, giving him the chance to show all he learned about storytelling from watching and re-watching E.T., The Goonies and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As the film lets on, he’s learned a lot from his movie-making hero, but he still has some storytelling skills that need sharpening.

The finest thing Abrams gleaned from Spielberg was his affection for working with young actors. Just like how the auteur pulled great work from Drew Barrymore and Christian Bale at their budding prime, Abrams shows the same confidence with child performers. He writes very believable 13-year-old boys, even ones whose interests lie more in girls on film than girls in general.

The interactions by the young ensemble, all uniformly terrific, never feel rote, and these young actors—mainly newcomers outside of Fanning—create an endearing impression by balancing their kid-at-heart sentiments with a more mature frame of mind. The chemistry between the kids works wonderfully, especially the innocent romance between Joe and Alice. To borrow a term often used by the ambitious director played by Riley Griffiths, the young cast is “mint.”

The second thing Abrams masters are the Spielbergian techniques of creating suspense, dread and excitement. Foremost, he hides the dangerous being and lets the audiences’ imagination take over (reminscent of the same methods used in Jaws and Close Encounters). Secondly, he masters the effectiveness of a prolonged reaction shot—another of the director's trademarks— to help make a grand and utterly unbelievable moment more easily acceptable for an audience. Super 8 is full of these, and it only generates more excitement.

Unfortunately, Abrams doesn’t pull off one of Spielberg’s signatures: the conflicted parent-child relationship. Abrams sets up this tribute admirably, in quiet character-driven scenes between Joe and his father. At the start, Jackson admits that he will make a greater effort to be a better and more omnipresent dad. But the difficulties of the father-son bonding are rarely addressed after that scene, leading to an underdeveloped family dynamic.

But, that’s not the film’s biggest issue. Abrams struggles to find the right tone to unleash moments of mushy sentimentality. He simply cannot pull off the same emotional release that Spielberg is known for creating. This inexperience with big emotions leads to a credibility-straining, eye-rolling final ten minutes, where Super 8 abruptly shifts from a terrifying thriller to a family drama of such hackneyed gooeyness that it could fill a lifetime supply of Reese’s Pieces. To keep up with the references to that 1982 classic, let’s just say that, well, J.J. Phones In.

Nonetheless, much of Super 8 looks and feels like a classic tribute to Spielberg, and in many ways, it is a terrific one. It’s wonderfully acted, thrillingly shot, unpredictable and has that buoyant sense of wonder that any unabashed honour to the famed writer/director ought to have.

Oh, and do yourself a favour and stay for the terrific end credits surprise (Abrams kept his biggest secret for last).

The Name's Xavier... Charles Xavier

X-Men: First Class

**1/2 out of ****

Directed by: Matthew Vaughn

Starring: Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Rose Byrne and Kevin Bacon

Running time: 132 minutes

Director Matthew Vaughn probably really wants to direct a James Bond film. He likely adores ultra-violent vigilante fare and may also be an enthusiast of 20th century American history. These predictions all spawn from the end result of his latest film, the long-anticipated origin story about the superhuman clan known as the X-Men.

Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class, despite its ambitious approach and strong performances, seems like four good ideas that never quite gel together. It’s a prequel that’s often exciting yet overwrought, and chock full of good ideas but often calculating in the method in which they are communicated, as if their purpose were to jumpstart a franchise rather than tell a story.

The first of the four concepts, as audiences expect, is the introductory tales of the Marvel comic-book characters that have cemented themselves on screen since 2000. We meet a younger Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), who is working with the CIA to recruit a crew of mutants to stop a ruthlessly power-hungry scientist, Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), during the Cold War era.

This crew includes the shapeshifting Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), sonic screamer Sean Cassidy/Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones) and the ultra-powerful Dr. Hank McCoy/Beast (Nicholas Hoult), among others.

The middle section of the film, where Xavier rounds up his crew in a swift montage (akin to Ocean’s 11), the young gang connect with and improve their abilities (in another quickly paced montage) and form a steady alliance is fun, engaging, and briskly handled by Vaughn and Co. Unlike the prior films from the franchise that put the mutants' abilities ahead of the mutants, it’s refreshing to see an installment that manages to develop the characters as they hone their powers.

The second idea Vaughn (and his screenwriting team) develop is stylistic, following the guidelines of a globe-trotting 007 flick, complete with a lavishly designed ‘Swinging Sixties’ repertoire, a retro-animated credits sequence and enough air miles to disorient George Clooney's character from Up in the Air. Oh, and some of the visual effects seem unfinished, although I don’t think that was an homage to the early days of the Bond franchise.

As welcome as these artistic flourishes are, the leaden villains played by Bacon and the icy (literally) January Jones, undoubtedly similar to other world-domination-seeking Bond types, are maddeningly cheesy. Both actors are utterly wasteful, usually sneering in delight but without any other identifiable personalities that would articulate a multi-dimensional character.

The third idea pursued in the film is its chronological structure: here, we have an alternate history drama. X-Men: First Class places the characters within notable moments in recent history, beginning during the Holocaust (recycling the opening scene from the first X-Men film) and ending at a standoff during the Cuban Missile Crisis. By outlining the story through these historical frameworks, the stakes are high and there is a sense of place—although a surprise cameo from a notable screen X-Men doesn't fit the timeline.

While X-Men: First Class gets a passing grade for many of its efforts so far, the final attempted idea is a mishandled failure. It involves the character of Magneto. A Magneto spin-off (a la X-Men Origins: Wolverine) was in the works but later scrapped and his tale squeezed into Vaughn’s film; unfortunately, there’s very little juice to his story despite a terrific turn by Michael Fassbender.

Born Erik Lehnsherr, the mutant who becomes Magneto sees Shaw murder his mother and is dead-set on revenge for the rest of the film’s duration. While these qualities are a key part of the character, it is all we learn about him. The rest is sadly skimmed over and doesn't develop organically. One aspect that is given the shove is Erik’s friendship with Xavier, a major component of the later films (where they were portrayed by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart).

Fassbender is magnetic in the part, although his accent wavers to such an extent that we do not know the phonetic source. But with very little to do, he doesn’t make much of a mark. When the climax comes and the character makes a life-altering decision, we don’t know enough about him to be convinced that what he is doing is reasonable, and is thus unconvincing. Fassbender’s turn is representative of much of X-Men: First Class: absorbing, but its tone is all over the place.

'Paris,' Je T'Aime

Midnight in Paris

***1/2 out of ****

Directed by: Woody Allen

Starring: Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen and Kathy Bates

Running time: 98 minutes

The opening scene in Woody Allen’s 1979 masterpiece Manhattan shows a kaleidoscopic montage of New York skyscrapers and sumptuous city sites, as the writer/director contemplates (in voice-over) the perfect way to describe the place he has called home and always will.

The Paris-set slideshow that opens his latest film, Midnight in Paris, is similar. It may take in the scenery without the director commentary, but the sparkling photography and swanky Gershwin rhythms are still there. While Allen may always have New York as his home, Paris is his dream house.

The prolific writer/director has been taking Europe by storm. After conquering England (Match Point) and Spain (Vicky Christina Barcelona), he has situated his latest comedy—a time-travelogue of sorts— in a city of love, passion and whimsy. It’s also a film that’s as dreamy and delightful as anything Allen’s ever made, a film with plenty of Oscar caliber behind it that’s also the sunniest piece of summertime escapism to hit theatres so far this season.

Owen Wilson seems an unlikely Woody Allen surrogate, but he’s excellent as wistful American screenwriter Gil Pender, who vacations to “The City of Love” with his fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams). He wants to soak in the sights, but she’s happy to chat up with old friends (including an obnoxious intellectual played by Michael Sheen) and shop around.

Gil, frustrated by his career path as a “Hollywood hack,” wants to be taken more seriously as a writer. He hopes to explore Paris, allured by its cultural clout, to gain inspiration as he reworks his first novel. His work tells a tale about a man with a nostalgia shop, a protagonist who likely doesn’t stray too far from its author.

While strolling down a lonely avenue one evening, Gil is suddenly transported to a new side of the city that only comes out at the stroke of Midnight. I would love to delve further into the details of these surprising nightly excursions, but my Parisian lips are sealed.

So while I could spend the next four paragraphs analyzing the film’s exploration of fallacy and reality, and discussing the ingenious storytelling techniques, I won’t for your sake. I want you to be surprised.

Still, it shouldn't be too surprising that the character actors who pop up in these adventures—including Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates and Thor's Tom Hiddleston—are all terrific. Wilson is an excellent Woody Allen type, freshly mixing in the exaggerated perplexity, neurotic tics and that amicable smirk that Allen typically has plastered on his face in his better romantic comedies. Regardless, the comedy actor still keeps his individual charms intact.

Faring worse is Rachel McAdams and her parents played by Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy, who portray boorish upper-class stereotypes. Thankfully, they’re not in the film for very long.

Midnight in Paris is an intoxicating pool of sparkling images, sly storytelling, terrific performances and, of course, Allen’s adoration for shining a light on all things romantic (and romanticist). Go ahead and dive in: it may be the best swim you have this summer.