Best Movie, Ever?

"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."HAL

2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke

I was four years old when this movie came out. I saw it. No. I do not recall that I saw it, though my parents tell me I seemed to watch it just fine - notably, both my sister and I giggled at the beginning scenes with the apes. This said lest you think I had any hope at all of understanding this film at that time. Nope. It was clearly something more than pretty lights, but not, apparently, by a whole lot.

It's only in retrospect, after having read the book and seen the movie again several times that I recognize what an impact the film had. Science fiction to this point had been poorly budgeted, slightly slap-happy stuff. 2001: A Space Odyssey *looked* real. It kicked the bar for special effects straight out of the park. The next big special effects reboot came courtesy of Star Wars.

2001: A Space Odyssey was also a departure from the 1950's Bug-Eyed Monster stories (all thinly veiled cold war fears processing). Sure, some horrible, terrible things happen in this movie. HAL is a new kind of monster - a completely amoral one. He presages some of the plot twists of the Alien movies Allison mentioned yesterday. The astronauts trust HAL. They believe he is their ally, put in charge of the mission to protect and serve them, when in fact, HAL serves the *mission*. Important distinction. Ultimately, this is a story of what humankind might be capable of becoming. It's a question mark. Who are we as a species? Have we stopped evolving? If not, what does that next step look like?

It's a spooky, sometimes horrifying story filled with optimism about human potential and it set the stage for all kinds of science fiction goodness to come.

Best Movie Ever?

by Allison Pang

 Well, like Jeffe, I have a very hard time deciding what is my favorite anything. Usually it's my favorite thing, right NOW. Ask me again in five months or a year or ten years, and chances are my tastes will have changed.

I mean, I wouldn't exactly put Dirty Dancing at the top of the list of "best movie ever," but you know what? I watch it every single time I come across it on TV. (It was probably one of those defining movies of my youth or something.)

 And yet oddly enough, most of the movies that have stuck with me over the years have turned out to be on the grittier side - Terminator, The Silence of the Lambs (seriously - the one-liners alone are probably a daily occurance at my house. "Ready when you are, Sgt. Pembry.") -  and Alien.

I'm not sure I get it either - I generally like fluffier movies for my everyday sort of watching, but for whatever reason the Alien/Aliens movies just resonated. (Scared me shitless too, but that's really kind of the point, isn't it?)  When I was in college I actually went to a back-to-back screening of all three Alien movies with a couple of friends. Which is an awful lot of Alien, if you think about it. And they've all got their pluses and minuses as far as storytelling goes, but Alien is still the classic.

Part sci-fi, part thriller/horror - most of its appeal lies in the fact that it relies on your own inner fears to pull off the scary. It had its fair share of special effects, but they've held up remarkably well, simply because they were done "old-school." No real green-screen type of cut outs to jar you from the story. We don't even really see the alien for most of the movie, except in bits and pieces. (We get to see where it's been, but in some ways that's far worse - imagining just what's lurking around the corner when you haven't gotten a real look at it is pretty awful. As it should be.)

But even aside from that, the story is what made it real. Unlike so many of the sci-fi/fantasy "adventure" type movies that are so prevalent these days, Alien didn't have a cast of young, nubile starletts or beefcake. (You know, the ones who die simply because they have sex, of course.) They weren't bad-ass marines with super-powers or weapons.

They were just people. Older, tired, doing their jobs (bringing a payload back to Earth for the "company"). So it becomes that much easier for us to self-insert with what the characters are going through. It's not about retrieving some mystical element to save the universe - it's about doing the job and getting paid and drinking your coffee and well, shit, it's Monday again. So in a lot of ways, it's that much more shocking when some unknown beastie is suddenly trying to kill you.



Now there's an underlying theme here that I don't have plan to delve into too deeply - specifically some of the more "horrific" elements deal with what is essentially male rape. And if you look at it - yeah - the face hugger orally shoves his way into Kane's throat and deposits an egg there...which Kane gives birth to via his chest a short time later. It's the scene the movie is probably know best for and you could argue that one of the reasons people get so squicked out about it is because it's putting a male character into that of the sexual assault victim, which is something that doesn't happen much in mainstream media. (Or that it is basically taking man's subconscious fears of a woman's role (i.e. childbirth) and throwing it on the table, so to speak.)

I suspect you could probably write a thesis on it, so I'll just leave that here for now.

And I can't really end the post without mentioning the heroine - Ripley. Considering the movie was made in 1979, the fact that the main character is 1) a woman 2) a woman who isn't a victim or naked during any part of the movie 3) a woman who uses her brains and not her body to get out of her situation  - is nothing short of amazing. (I'll argue that The Terminator comes in a close second here, though.)

But what I love the most is that there's nothing inherently sympathetic about her - i.e. we don't take her character for granted simply because she's female. She holds her own with the crew. She does her job. She has some amount of power on the ship and she's just doing her thing.

In short? There's nothing special about her. I can identify with that.

When the shit hits the fan, she doesn't just cower in the corner and cry. And I can identify with that too, because it's how *I'd* like to react.

But I do want to mention that end scene - yes she's in her underwear, but it has nothing to do with audience titillation. It's all about vulnerability now.

She thinks she's safe. Getting undressed to get ready for hypersleep. She's blown up her ship. Saved her cat.

And then she discovers the monster escaped into the shuttle with her. So now she's stuck in a tiny room with something that wants to kill her. She has no weapons, no backup...and she's nearly naked.

There's something very visceral about that - to be stripped away of all your defenses physically is a fairly humbling thing. There's a certain dignity about clothing that we take for granted, and horrific situations seem to be that much worse when we don't even have that much.

So it's gratifying on so many levels when she not only manages to survive, but she blows the thing out of the airlock. Not with a gun, but by using her intelligence to outmaneuver the thing that's hunting her. (And there's definitely some luck in there too, but I daresay she earned it.)

Dreaming in Color

by KAK 

Believe it or not, I actually took a few film study classes back in the day. I can tell you why Hitchcock is revered. Why Rear Window works better as a film rather than a stage production. If we wanted to discuss the mad genius of Orson Wells and Citizen Kane, we could easily close down a bar.

I can also tell you I don't own those movies. 

My DVD collection is half of one shelf. Mostly because, once I've seen it, I've seen it. I'm done. The first exception to that was a bittersweet flick called:

What Dreams May Come

The plot is good (no, I haven't read Matheson's book that spawned the film). The cast is great (Robin Williams at his dramatic best). What consistently takes my breath away is the cinematography. They used special film for the specific purpose of capturing very vivid colors. They filmed in naturally stunning real-world locations, then took that back to the mad computer geniuses who layered even more color and texture on into the movie. A third of the story takes place in a heaven that is an actualized boldly beautiful painting. That sets a very high bar. Fortunately, the rest of the sets are gorgeous too.

If you haven't seen it. Grab a box of tissues and bottle of wine and watch it for the heart-twisting story. Then, go back and turn the sound off and just watch the scenery.

Breathtaking.

IS THIS A KISSING BOOK?

Hands down, best movie ever, the pinnacle of movie making, most quotable movie ever, the best thing that Rob Reiner, Cary Ewles, Mandy Patinkin, Robin Wright, Chris Sarandon, and Andre the Giant ever did, AND the movie that got me The Missus' digits:

THE PRINCESS BRIDE



I mean seriously, this is the greatest movie ever made. You have pirates, revenge, love, death, giants, swordplay, humor, shrieking eels, and some of the wittiest dialog ever misquoted in dozens of languages around the world.



If you haven't seen The Princess Bride then get up, get up right now, get your ass in the car, and go buy it. RIGHT NOW.

No I'm not playing. Move it.




Okay, now that you are back and you have watched the movie God won't have to kill any kittens tonight.

Best Austen Ever

by Jeffe Kennedy

I'm really terrible at picking the best this or that. Or my favorite anything. And that's under the best of circumstances.

So, here I am at a pretty glass desk in my room at Aria in Las Vegas, scraping the brain I baked at the pool yesterday and pickled in mojitos all afternoon, trying to decide what I think is the best movie ever made and then defend that choice.

We will leave out, then, all the movies that I happen to love. These can be easily measured because I own copies of them. I don't own many. But they're the happy movies that make me smile, that I watch when I'm sick or feeling low: Bed of Roses, Romy & Michele's High School Reunion, Clueless, Wimbledon, Notting Hill. There are others, but I'm not looking at my little collection right now, am I?

For a long time I told people the best movie in my opinion was Out of Africa. I can also make a passionate pitch for A Room with a View. Both of those movies accomplished the most difficult of tasks, in that they illuminated the books for me. I also would put in a strong vote for The Mission - a heart-rending movie with a soundtrack I continue to listen to.

But for a movie that I feel I can defend for its cinematic value, with the caveat that I know next to nothing about cinematic values, is Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice, with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen.

This is such a subtly beautiful movie on so many levels, not the least of which is that it condenses all the brilliant and complex detail of Jane Austen's novel into 127 minutes running time.

I also own the five-hour BBC version with Colin Firth, and I *love* me some Colin Firth, but I think Joe Wright's version is better. And yes, I may have watched all five hours of the BBC version and the two hours of Wright's version back-to-back for comparison. Possibly more than once.

From this movie I've learned how he uses visuals to compress the story to its finely honed core. I love it when a movie can teach me how to be a better storyteller.

It's also filmed in this amazing circular style, that I'm sure there must be a name for, but I don't know it. It's continuous and shows so much. For example. Lizzie sits on a swing and spins and we see what she does, the circle of the house and yard, the changing of the weather and seasons. From this shot we get both her emotional state and the passage of time.

During the balls, the camera drifts through the assembled guests and we catch bits of conversation, overlapping stories all moving forward. Every time I watch the movie, I see something more -- one of the characters in the background snickering at the drunken Mrs. Bennet, or a haunted-looking Darcy starting to walk up to Lizzie and turning away again.

In one intense scene, Darcy and Lizzie dance and the crowd of fellow revelers disappears, creating a bubble of them seeing each other alone.

And there's the first proposal in the folly, during a pouring rainstorm. The rain and the landscape become both secondary characters and a reflection of the player's internal landscape. Fabulous.

Here's a little montage of some of the lovely scenes to leave you with.

And the news that Wright's version of Anna Karenina, with Keira again and Jude Law, will be out soon. Oh yes yes yes.