The Website that Went Up a Hill and, Ten Years Later, Came Down a Mountain

Updated, Dec. 30: And at long last... it's a wrap!

Original, Nov. 28: Wow. Even I didn't expect to be this productive.  When I decided a week ago to update the Favorites Countdown, a project that's been gestating on my site for literally ten years, I was responding to a few prompts. I've been pushing through one more essay for my job, having submitted three already in the last six months, and finding that my prose was getting more abstruse and congested. (Trust me, my editors agreed.) Writing more for the site usually coaches me back to less fussy, more avid self-expression.  I wanted more new content to show to anyone dropping in from my new gig at Film Comment, or from one I hope to start soon at Sight & Sound.  I was reluctant to show my face to Jonathan Storey, whom I'll finally meet this week, and who sent me a hand-written letter from the UK well over a year ago imploring me to wrap up this loose end. I couldn't even bear to show my face to myself if I actually let the project take more than a decade. Having written eight new entries inside of a week, I'm suddenly in striking distance of that goal.

Some time ago, I'd posted a version of the new entry on Junebug, hoping it might help me finish if I just wrote up the movies as I re-screened them, rather than honoring their order on the list. But that seemed confusing, and didn't work, anyway. Now that the revised entry is posted, the remaining 17 are all relative surprises, though I admit I'm curious: since several of you have been sweet enough to follow the site for years, how much of what's coming do you think you've deduced? I sometimes feel I talk about the same movies all the time, regardless of context, so I'm curious if I've tipped my hand more than I realize.

I'll also fess up that these last 17 films were all, at some point, in the endlessly shuffled Top 10, where any of them could still be plausible. The "ranking" aspect of this list is silly even by ranking standards, especially given the codicil that I'm omitting all the movies on my re-energized Top 100. (To keep from bewildering everybody, I'm going to pause on updates there while I finish the updates here.) There's no question that any list of my favorite-favorite movies would include The Piano, When Harry Met Sally..., Safe, Morvern Callar, Aliens, Harlan County USA, and several other movies you'll eventually find on that other roster, which pretends to disentangle aesthetic merit from personal bias.  So, probably none of the next and final 17 Favorites are the movies I name first when pressed at parties for my desert-island trove.  At the same time, I'd definitely want all of them on that desert island, #17 as much as #1.

The last thing to stipulate, given how long I've taken, is that I haven't altered the titles on the Favorites countdown to include any movies released after 2005, when I got going. A year or two into the saga, during the first Dormant Period, I shuffled a few out (still archived at the bottom of the sidebar scroll) and some new ones in, including Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Junebug, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, all quite new at the time. There is one more Favorite of comparable vintage still to come, and one more fugitive from the former Top 100 list that moved over here when Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind migrated in the opposite direction. By all rights, several movies from my last decade of moviegoing should be here: Margaret, Prodigal Sons, Sleeping Beauty, Fish Tank, Deep Water, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and The Heat all spring to mind as likely contenders. But lest anyone wonder, I wanted to give you the feature you've been awaiting all this time, not some weird Blade Runner/New World amalgam of the original, the rough cut, and the changes I now wish I'd administered all along.

So, without further ado—but also with protracted, belabored surfeits of ado, which I thank you so much for indulging—here are the final 17 movies I hope you'll take to your hearts as I have to mine, if you haven't already... and I hope, too, that you'll keep sharing reactions and personal pets in the Comments!

1. Pola X (1999, dir. Leos Carax)
2. Velvet Goldmine (1998, dir. Todd Haynes)
3. The Way We Were (1973, dir. Sydney Pollack)
4. The Portrait of a Lady (1996, dir. Jane Campion)
5. Dog Day Afternoon (1975, dir. Sidney Lumet)
6. Frances (1982, dir. Graeme Clifford)
7. The Bridges of Madison County (1995, dir. Clint Eastwood)
8. 11'09"01 (2002, dirs. Miscellaneous)
9. Ocean's Eleven (2001, dir. Steven Soderbergh)
10. Grizzly Man (2005, dir. Werner Herzog)
11. Cape Fear (1991, dir. Martin Scorsese)
12. The China Syndrome (1979, dir. James Bridges)
13. Strange Days (1995, dir. Kathryn Bigelow)
14. Blackboards (2000, dir. Samira Makhmalbaf)
15. The Cell (2000, dir. Tarsem Singh)
16. You Can Count on Me (2000, dir. Kenneth Lonergan)
17. demonlover (2002, dir. Olivier Assayas)
18. Junebug (2005, dir. Phil Morrison)
19. Crash (1996, dir. David Cronenberg)
20. Walking and Talking (1996, dir. Nicole Holofcener)
21. Eyes Wide Shut (1999, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
22. Opening Night (1977, dir. John Cassavetes)
23. Blonde Venus (1932, dir. Josef von Sternberg)
24. Beau travail (1999, dir. Claire Denis)
25. Naked Lunch (1991, dir. David Cronenberg)

Nick's Flick Picks: The Force Awakens

What are those guys doing in Claire Denis's Beau travail? Has anyone ever figured that out?  My guess is that, after many years of assuming that my website would never get its act together, they have just found out there are long-postponed updates to the Top 100 listings, where I've recently celebrated Hiroshima mon amour, The Wages of Fear, and The Third Man, and to the Favorites countdown, where I've shared some of the backstory that led to my late-breaking ardor for Beau travail and Naked Lunch, both of which survived cool first impressions to become personal pets and central frames of reference for my book, The Desiring-Image.  (I've also, incidentally, re-programmed both features to ditch the cumbersome frames, streamline the html, and make for easier viewing on tablets as well as laptops. Hope that's all working on your end.)

I'm drafting another essay for work, and as usually happens when writing juices flow in one part of my life, they start moving in others as well. I've already written the next entries on both countdowns, so maybe I can keep some momentum going through the holidays. Some of you have been waiting on these for ten years!  Hope you'll share your thoughts about these posts and others soon to follow.

Subsequent entries added to Favorites: Crash, Walking and Talking, Eyes Wide Shut, Opening Night, Blonde Venus
Subsequent entries added to Top 100: Under the Sun of Satan

2012 Oscar Class: When I Loved Them Best

February 23: Rundown completed, with the late, truly great Eiko Ishioka. By all means, keep adding your own past favorites in the Comments.

Winter quarter at Northwestern is too clogged to offer much to this blog: —think hiring, admissions, course planning, and speaker recruitment for next year, on top of the usual day-do-day and week-by-week work... and in my tenure year, no less! —Failing the opportunity to get any real blog series going, even during Oscar season, I have compensated with a Twitter series in which I reflect back on my favorite career achievements by many of this year's nominees, the famous ones and the less so.  I thought I'd archive the posts here, grouped by category, with regular updates.

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BEST PICTURE
Margaret Ménégoz (nominated for Amour): Rohmer's The Green Ray, cinema's loveliest valentine to exasperating women and fleeting sublimity

Ben Affleck (nominated for Argo): Politically, his work in and advocacy for the Congo; personally, when he earned the Garner Endorsement... Artistically, as he shatters his mask of civility in Changing Lanes and as head piranha in Boiler Room

George Clooney, as producer (nominated for Argo): Far from Heaven, the pinnacle of Section Eight's short, happy life of spreading wealth 

Stacey Sher (nominated for Django Unchained): Erin Brockovich, where she produced a vanity star vehicle and an "issue film" minus pitfalls of either... Though if we're talking pure affection, bless Sher for taking the chances she did on Living Out Loud, Caveman's Valentine, and Out of Sight.

Gil Netter (nominated for Life of Pi): The creamy, campy, nasty, and wonderfully cast My Best Friend's Wedding reigns supreme from a spotty CV

Kathleen Kennedy (nominated for Lincoln): E.T., because talk about nailing your debut, and Bridges of Madison County, for heroic distillation

Tim Bevan (nominated for Les Misérables): Laundrette, for charmingly challenging the market; Pride & Prejudice, for new tones; United 93, for guts

Donna Gigliotti (nominated for Silver Linings Playbook): Effervescent Oscar champ Shakespeare in Love and deft remake Let Me In. Why so many non-believers?

Kathryn Bigelow (nominated for Zero Dark Thirty): Hurt Locker for tension, economy, contrapuntal vision; Strange Days for absorbing scuzz and sprawl

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BEST DIRECTOR
Michael Haneke, as director (nominated for Amour): Time of the Wolf, for being haunting, austere, emotionally direct without seeming smug. Amour next.

Ang Lee (nominated for Life of Pi): Crouching Tiger, for rich palette, woozy movements, and fierce women; and Lust, Caution, for getting nasty

David O. Russell (nominated for Silver Linings Playbook): I ♥ Huckabees, equally earnest and ironic, metaphysical, tricksy, hysterical, but fluent in Folks

Steven Spielberg (nominated for Lincoln): ET, a peak of mainstream product and a sad, gutsy, eccentric artwork; Schindler, for votive power

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BEST ACTRESS
Jessica Chastain (nominated for Zero Dark Thirty): Performing quiet risk assessments on Shannon in Take Shelter; shaking up that chicken in The Help

Jennifer Lawrence (nominated for Silver Linings Playbook): Winter's Bone, especially for sibling bonds and boat scene; she's also a fine foil in Like Crazy

Naomi Watts (nominated for The Impossible): "Dream Place," unpacking sweaters, touring Adam's set, everything after "Llorando" in Mulholland Drive

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BEST ACTOR
Bradley Cooper (nominated for Silver Linings Playbook): As he keeps insisting on picking Amy Poehler's clipboard off the ground in Wet Hot American Summer

Daniel Day-Lewis (nominated for Lincoln): For all his "bigger" turns, I can't shake straight-backed but broken John Proctor in The Crucible

Hugh Jackman (nominated for Les Misérables): The Fountain, stoking real feelings, his slight blandness ideal as a vessel for souls passing through

Joaquin Phoenix (nominated for The Master): Master, for ace Pennmanship; We Own the Night and To Die For, for poignant takes on two lost guys

Denzel Washington (nominated for Flight): Cagy, smart, fiery in Malcolm X; discomfited in Philadelphia; hypnotic and venal in Training Day

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Amy Adams (nominated for The Master): Junebug, for awe, sunniness, and rue; The Fighter, for pugnacity; Sunshine Cleaning, for hints of anger

Sally Field (nominated for Lincoln): Steel Magnolias, which took best, blended advantage of her humor and almost surly toughness

Anne Hathaway (nominated for Les Misérables): Prada, finding a detailed girl in drabbest role; Rachel, using neediness, exhibitionism brilliantly

Helen Hunt (nominated for The Sessions): Mad About You, for intimacy; Dr T, for carnal ease; "G***amn Motherfu**ing HMO Bastard Pieces of Sh*t."

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Alan Arkin (nominated for Argo): From my narrow survey, his delicacy in Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and quietly memorable turn in Glengarry

Robert De Niro (nominated for Silver Linings Playbook): Taxi Driver, for poignant but dangerous inarticulacy; New York, New York, for charisma and cruelty

Philip Seymour Hoffman (nominated for The Master): Magnolia, for panicked tenderness; Ripley, for 16-carat smarm; Synecdoche, for prismatic sadness

Tommy Lee Jones (nominated for Lincoln): Indelible husbands in Coal Miner's Daughter, Blue Sky, Hope Springs; two triumphs in Three Burials

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BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Kirby Dick (nominated for The Invisible War): Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, so touching and confrontational in equal parts

Howard Gertler (nominated for How to Survive a Plague): Shortbus, a movie on which my feelings remain mixed but a clear feat of producing. Rooting for you!

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BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Michael Haneke, as writer (nominated for Amour): As scripts, the unflinching Piano Teacher, queasy Code Unknown, and elliptical Caché take the cake

Quentin Tarantino (nominated for Django Unchained): My answer since '97, you Jackie-Come-Latelys. Heightened form and idiom minus the heartlessness.

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BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Tony Kushner (nominated for Lincoln): Angels, for Harper, Roy, ideas, convictions, cubistic compassion, more life; Homebody/Kabul, for brio

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BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Seamus McGarvey (nominated for Anna Karenina): Winter Guest, for deep, delicate chill; War Zone, for unnerving tactility; Soloist, for surprises.

Robert Richardson (nominated for Django Unchained): JFK and NBK, two bold, disparate phantasmagorias; and groggy but hopped-up Bringing Out the Dead

Janusz Kaminski (nominated for Lincoln): Dull answers, but Schindler is stunningly lensed, first acts of Diving Bell and Pvt Ryan do amaze

Roger Deakins (nominated for Skyfall): Dead Man Walking, for faces and subtle atmospherics; Fargo, for memorable framings, evocative whites

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BEST FILM EDITING
William Goldenberg (nominated for Argo and Zero Dark Thirty): Ali, whose unexpected rhythms and episodic structure accumulate so much force, up to potent end

Tim Squyres (nominated for Life of Pi): The same pair (see: Ang Lee) plus Sense and Sensibility for cadence and balance, Rachel for carefully managed entropy

Michael Kahn (nominated for Lincoln): Indelible images in energetic succession for Raiders; oscillating fever and quiet in Fatal Attraction

Jay Cassidy (nominated for Silver Linings Playbook): Into the Wild for rhythm, panorama; Assassination of Richard Nixon for enabling odd, great performance

Dylan Tichenor (nominated for Zero Dark Thirty): Ambition, originality of Boogie, Magnolia, most of Blood; classicism of The Town; energy of Whip It

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BEST SOUND MIXING
Andy Nelson (nominated for Lincoln and Les Misérables): The Thin Red Line, Moulin Rouge, and A.I., three very different jewels in one hell of a crowned résumé

Greg P. Russell (nominated for Skyfall): Point Break and Salt, two instances when detailed sonic hyperbole ideally suited a dialed-up story

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BEST SOUND EDITING
Wylie Stateman (nominated for Django Unchained): Nixon, for Stoned hyperbole and eerie quiets; and Kill Bills, for sharp sounds gleaming like swords

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BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Jacqueline Durran (nominated for Anna Karenina): Anna Karenina's architectural couture; Tinker Tailor's subtle detail; Happy-Go-Lucky accessories

Joanna Johnston (nominated for Lincoln): About a Boy, for contemporary cool in all senses; War Horse, for textures; Unbreakable, for color.

Paco Delgado (nominated for Les Misérables): Bad Education, where the color, cut, and print of the men's clothes make them look like Gila monsters

Eiko Ishioka (nominated for Mirror Mirror): Muscle suit, basilisk gown in Dracula. Taloned mask, four-storey cape, unraveled heroine in The Cell.

Colleen Atwood (nominated for Snow White and the Huntsman): Beloved, for unusual colors and details in new contexts; Edward Scissorhands, for instant iconicity

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BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
David Gropman (nominated for Life of Pi): I never forgot the lived-in homes and neighborhoods of Nobody's Fool, Bobby Fischer, Mr & Mrs Bridge

Jim Erickson (set decorator, nominated for Lincoln): Boy, can he decorate US period sets, as also seen in New World, Little Women, and There Will Be Blood

Eve Stewart (nominated for Les Misérables): Topsy-Turvy is an unqualified triumph, but where was her nod for woolly, chilly, indelible Vera Drake?

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BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Alexandre Desplat (nominated for Argo): Birth and The Painted Veil are the two scores from the last decade I'd gladly attend in concert

Mychael Danna (nominated for Life of Pi): Exotica score evokes grotty desperation without standard tricks. Sweet Hereafter sad, odd, soulsick.

John Williams (nominated for Lincoln): Star Wars' glorious fusion of magic and chintz; AI and Nixon, taking nervy risks; iconic ET and Jaws

Thomas Newman (nominated for Skyfall): American Beauty, for fusing discord and sublimity as well as Hall or Ball did; Good German for yuks

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BEST VISUAL EFECTS
Bill Westenhofer (nominated for Life of Pi): Stuart Little, where mouse's charm, simplicity, and deft execution defied a typically antic genre

Janek Sirrs (nominated for Marvel's The Avengers): The Matrix, because in the middle of the night, I can be big-hearted. Nice work on Pleasantville, too.

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BEST MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLING
Howard Berger (nominated for Hitchcock): The outlandish archetypes inside a diseased mind in The Cell; phantom behind the diner in Mulholland Drive

Peter King (nominated for The Hobbit): Velvet Goldmine's UFO-ready makeup reveals and conceals character, nails glam-à-clef allusions. Fierce!

Lisa Westcott (nominated for Les Misérables): Notes on a Scandal, where makeup on Dench, Blanchett conveys all you need to know but isn't too much

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BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Tim Burton (nominated for Frankenweenie): Edward Scissorhands for heart, Mars Attacks! for ack-ack and ruthless momentum, Ed Wood for everything

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Thanks for the Memories, 2010

You'll be able to tell from this list that I devoted quite a bit of film-rental energy this year to Best Actress nominees and to catching up with classics from the mid-1940s, while Nathaniel and Mike and I slowly advanced through our Best Pictures from the Outside In series, for which a new installment goes live any day now. (One way to counteract the frustration with early Oscar victors as tepid as Going My Way, The Lost Weekend, and Gentleman's Agreement is to use those screenings as excuses for making dates with all the superior films that coulda and shoulda been contenders.) No time for adding explanatory text, but these were my 25 favorite viewing experiences in 2010 of non-first-run films:

1. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Elia Kazan, 1945)
2. To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944)
3. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945)
4. Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
5. Borom sarret (Ousmane Sembene, 1963) - full review
6. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri, 1970)
7. The Emigrants (Jan Troëll, 1971)
8. Dillinger (Max Nosseck, 1945)
9. A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954)
10. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
11. No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis, 1990)
12. At Land (Maya Deren, 1944) - full review
13. The River (Tsai Ming-liang, 1997)
14. Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960)
15. Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947)
16. The Man I Love (Raoul Walsh, 1947)
17. Pandora's Box (G.W. Pabst, 1929) - full review
18. Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932)
19. This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963)
20. The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975)
21. The Abyss (James Cameron, 1989) - full review
22. Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961)
23. Boy! What a Girl! (Arthur C. Leonard, 1947)
24. The Nun's Story (Fred Zinnemann, 1959)
25. The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960)

Whip It On

For nine years I've wanted to know, once again, what love is. I wanted Drew Barrymore to show me. She did: this is as delicious as this. The Hurl Scouts even share a color scheme with the Compton Clovers. "Babe Ruthless" she is, but she's also Bliss.

'Georgia' on My Mind

Still immersed in a long bout of writing and revision in my professional life, but as usual in these moments, through some bizarrely homeopathic logic, the most sustaining activity during my daily breaks turns out to be more writing—as long as it's about something I love. And since I've had no time to watch or re-watch for the Films of the 00s feature, I am turning to the next film up on my Favorites countdown, which seems to be one of the most popular features on this site anyway. Which means a trip back to Georgia, a film that generated a surprisingly robust love-it-or-hate-it conversation among critics and audiences in 1995, given the brevity of its release and its undeserved short-shirking by awards bodies, notwithstanding Mare Winningham's Oscar nomination (which should have netted the actual trophy) and Jennifer Jason Leigh's prize from the New York Film Critics Circle. Georgia got under a lot of people's skins, but that's part of what love is, as the movie is only too ready to show you. I wish the film and its actors had maintained even more momentum in the last few years, though Leigh, Winningham, Ted Levine, and Max Perlich keep fighting the good fight with dedication and purpose in character parts, and somehow that's a great legacy for Georgia to have. It's like an ideal, often-ignored album by a group of artists who have only united that one time, and have flirted off and on with the cultural radar even in their solo careers—but if you're receptive to it, you'll never stop spinning it. And of course, the musical metaphor isn't an accident:

"Georgia's key tool for dissecting and complicating the sisters and their relationships is its completely unerring gift for intensely focused realism, a completely unerring gift for intensely focused realism, a deep familiarity with character and environment that one rarely sees outside of a Mike Leigh movie, and with a deeper, richer palette and a sophisticated approach to rhythm and concision that Leigh's films, in their thespian virtuosity and their thinly laminated improvisations, sometimes miss. Ulu Grosbard, a solid actor's director who hasn't made another movie to touch this one, uses the songs ingeniously to carry the scenes and guide their textures, to include his pitch-perfect recognitions of the kinds of wanderlusters, make-doers, drop-outs, long-distance runners, and swaggering, self-conscious 'legends' who combine to scratch out a living or a niche, or a phantom-image of both, in the traveling world of music. And without making a movie that makes an issue of shattering any conventions, Grosbard still plays as though there are no rules, dilating the song performances for much longer than usual in a non-concert film, and often back-to-back, almost the way David Cronenberg used the sex scenes in Crash..."

Keep reading for more on Georgia's unimprovable acting, terrific music, and terse but adventurous direction, and for why all this matters to you if you loved Rachel Getting Married, or if you loyally love the Oscars but don't always know why.

Films of the 00s: Late Marriage

If you were bummed that I ended the 2000 retrospective (at least for now!) with such a lukewarm review, I can doubly make it up to you. My first trip back to 2001 is not only an unqualified rave, it doubles as the next entry up, aka #27, on the Favorites countdown, which has been dormant ever since we checked in on Howards End last December; no question those Wilcoxes have got a splendid cottage there, but I didn't mean to slumber there for quite so long. Here, then, is a peek at what I have to say about another family's crisis of social conventions, class prejudices, and sexual mores in Dover Kosashvili's stark, punchy, funny, and humbling Georgian-Israeli dramedy Late Marriage:

"Even given its stripped-down style, the simply but sharply drawn characters, the bluntness of its sexual scenes and of its dramatic narrative turns, Late Marriage is apparently much more than meets the eye, or the English-speaking ear. I love knowing that even a familiar object contains so many unaccessed depths and complexities, but you have to hand it to writer-director Dover Kosashvili that his peculiar naturalism never pretends to be spelling out all of the meanings in the story or the currents between the characters.... Dramaturgy alternates, sometimes on a dime, from the casual ease of Zaza's scenes with Judith and her daughter to the sinister ritualism with which Zaza's extended family intrude into the apartment to the grippingly dilated reality of Zaza and Judith's love-making, amidst which Judith reveals a secret that ironically invites comparison to the character who is her most formidable antagonist." (keep reading...)

Because Sandra Bernhard's "smash hit one-woman show" Without You I'm Nothing rocketed up the chart after last winter's revised rankings, we're just now catching up to it at #26. Which means we've only got the very best quarter of my stable of prize pets to explore, plus, back on the 00s track, a handful of beloved films I haven't looked at in a while, some mixed bags that I've never stopped arguing about (think eyeliner and Izod dresses), and a sampler of titles I've never seen, ranging from boisterous epics to silly shenanigans to coolly received products from some of the world's most legendary auteurs. 2001: A Blog Odyssey.

I'm Buying What Merchant's Selling

Wow, no love for Solaris, huh? Awful quiet around that entry. Maybe this one'll fare better.

Loss in Space

Even if the characters in the two film versions of Solaris were good at making choices or at telling things apart, I wouldn't be, and I certainly wouldn't be able to opt for Tarkovsky's philosophical epic or Soderbergh's shimmering headspace romance. Or, for that matter, Stanislaw Lem's bizarre and beautiful novel. I want all three. But if it's any consolation to all of you who have had trouble putting up with my Libra indecisiveness thus far in the countdown, this is the last joint entry. Stay tuned next time for some adventures in real estate, metaphor, and moral relativism.

No Longer in My Thirties...

...but only insofar as Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai was my last entry in this bracket before we move up to the 20s. The oxygen is getting thinner—and not just because we're climbing higher. We're actually prepping for a quick launch into outer space. But Ghost Dog would advise us to be cool and stay in the present moment. Don't rush. Read and absorb. And I'm sure he'd tell you to leave a comment.

Toddie Gets Listed

We've done a Campion short, so why not a Haynes? In fact, why not two?

Anyone Remember This One?

I bet you do. Doesn't this photo make you want to drop everything and watch it again this instant? I do, which is why it's a favorite.

Strange Fruit

But in the best possible way. And it's the family that's strange, not the fruit. Actually, it's not the fruit or the family, it's the lusciously offbeat way they get filmed:



By the way, speaking of superior short films, my friend Jeff Middents has been leading his students at American University through a course in short films, which has required them all to contribute to a Short Films Blog. Each week, the students post about short films that satisfy a given rubric, often including embedded YouTube footage or other links to the films they're discussing as well as their own appraisals. As a two-time guest judge on the students' work, I've been really impressed by their insights and delighted to have a chance to see so many wide-ranging shorts. I hope you'll feel inclined to have a look—and if you're feeling so inclined, leave an admiring comment, and help Jeff's hardest-working students earn some extra credit. The week-long focus on award-winning shorts, including several Oscar winners, may be especially interesting to many of you; I particularly enjoyed the footage and the write-ups in the entries about Glas (entry by Drew Rosensweig) and Der Fuehrer's Face (entry by Lindsay Z.). Plus, as an ardent lover of The Danish Poet, I can't fail to mention Trinnyallica's spiffy reflections on that one.

To Jeff's students, if you're reading: great job! And since you're newly able to relish the art of the short film, here is Peel in its eight-minute entirety!

Mr. Altman & the Women

One more shout-out to the steps we're skipping. The actual daisy-chain after yesterday's paean to Positively True Adventures would lead you through an anti-corporate documentary; a queer Latin American prison drama; a spunky French sketchbook about all things Maggie Cheung; Holly Hunter visiting her parents for Thanksgiving; a South Central 'hood tragedy; a florid update on the Dracula legend; and one singularly ass-kicking flight attendant. And that's when you'd be ready to climb into this portal, right into a brilliant if somewhat erratic artist's imagination. It's better than Malkovich. It's Altman...

"He's always askin' me out and everything, but I'm not gonna go out with him till he gets over that cold..."

Hey, Shanna, You Made My Cut!

So, one last reminder: we've been leap-frogging and lily-padding up the list in order to fill holes that were created by my reshuffling, a necessity after resuming this hibernating Favorites project. If we were advancing step by step, as we'll soon have the luxury to do, we would have advanced from the Woody Allen duo I unveiled yesterday at #48 to everyone's favorite water-safety crusader at #47, then to three barely consolable women at #46, and then to yet more Woody, at his dearest and most delicate, at #45. I'm hoping all these new entries are luring people back to the ones I wrote before the great Rip Van Winkle nap of 2006-2008.

But any cheerleader who's worth her high kicks is also up to a huge, bounding jump now and then, so if you're vaulting straight from #48 to #44, you're in good company. Just watch your back, and be careful not to upstage anyone who cares even more wildly than you do... (P.S. Slightly edited, since I forgot to explain why I often only want to watch the first half.)

Two F's that Deserve A's

As if it wasn't clear enough in the 1980s that you needed to be careful where you poked around, here's a desecrated body and a vengeful one-night stand to keep you celibate and terrified forever. But of course, if that's all they were, they wouldn't be personal favorites...



And while we're moving up the ladder, plugging holes at a steady clip, and while we're already talking about relationships that you wouldn't want to emulate at home, here's another two-fer, in the 48th spot:



All four are horror movies, really. There's something in here for everyone's nightmares, and though I don't worry about turning into a fly or having an affair, I do hope I don't grow up to be one of those professors who looks up at 50 and has no idea where her life has gone, and whether she actively pushed it away. Another Woman: a horror movie for the tenure track.

Lastly, if you're wondering, there aren't many more of these joint entries left to go. I have forced myself the higher I climb to make up my own damn mind. And also, I mentioned in the Adam's Rib entry that Katharine Hepburn, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore are the best-represented actors on this list, with four titles apiece. Woody Allen and David Cronenberg are the leading directors, also with four apiece, including the movies indexed in this entry. Keep all this in mind as you guess your way toward #1...

She Gave Him Class. She Gave Him Sex.

Wait, isn't he supposed to give her something? In fairness, he did. I'd call it venerability. To say nothing of companionship. Such as it was, though. Got all her best years, the old drunk. But then, she seemed to like it that way. Whatever. None of my biz.

All I'm saying is, I love Adam's Rib, and I hope you do, too. And I hope you love this picture. Love the black & white. Soak it up. Because I'm afraid you won't be seeing much more of it as the countdown continues...

Russ Meyer and Robert Bresson

Together at last! I'm loving it. You know the drill from yesterday. Click the images. See the movies. Love them. That's right, love them. Justify my love.



And by the way, I keep harping on how gorgeous most of these films are, so I wondered, why am I keeping the snapshots so tiny? Why make you click them in order to behold their succulence? Why keep their light under a proverbial bushel. No longer. Go back and see for yourself.

As I Lay Thanking

I'm in an infinitely better place than these women—click on the photo if you want to know why—but still, it must be said: I've had a frustratingly flu-like cold since Tuesday, right through Thanksgiving, so at any given moment that I wasn't calling a family member or cooking a holiday dish, I've mostly been splayed out on my red futon, trying to let the seasonal tide of gratitude and life-loving overcome my incipient grouchiness about my raspy throat and my upset stomach. Unable to complete any professional tasks, I tried to think of something lovely I could produce for this site—often a delightful restorative when I'm in low spirits or ill health, even if this tends to make my sentences even longer and my number of typos even more disheartening. And I thought, while I'm feeling so thankful and full-stomached, why not revive my very favorite of my dormant writing projects? Why not seize upon this time to transcribe my feelings of gratitude toward movies I especially adore?



A few of you have noticed that, three years after I began the Favorites countdown, and almost two years after slamming into a brick wall at #34, I've gone back to clean up the graphics, fix some links, and most importantly, rearrange the lists to reflect that it's a new day. Cuz you know some movies I like a bit less than I did three years ago, and some a lot more (which I sometimes only realized by re-watching them for this feature), and some didn't even exist when I started this project, so ghastly has my procrastination been. Here are the old entries for the ten films that dropped off my list when I revised it two months ago. The recalibrated list still has some gaps where new movies will debut to replace the retired ones, or where movies scheduled to drop from my revised Top 100 list (coming in January!) are resurfacing instead on the mutually-exclusive Favorites listing, or where formerly high-ranked Favorites from '05 have slipped to lower rungs. The current and forthcoming #68, for example, would have been #33 when I last checked in, and my purely gratuitous list-maker's panic in the face of this obvious travesty ("But I don't like this more than Bram Stoker's Dracula, I don't!!!") partly explains why it took me so long to resume.



Anyway: such are the holes I'm filling now with new entries, and LOOK: I've got four of 'em already! And what a combo, right? Click on the images, please enjoy, and I hope you all had a terrific Thanksgiving, whether or not you live someplace where it made any sense to celebrate it.

TGFN

That's a mash-up of TGIF (yay!) and TTFN (till soon!), but it also stands for "Thank Goodness for Network" and "Thank God for Nathaniel." I love to link up when I read a piece of film writing that really excites me, and Nathaniel's brilliant, witty, and gorgeously modulated take on Network is a total grabber. It deserves a hot rating in the triple digits and a 100 share.

If When I resume that long-interrupted favorites countdown, as I keep promising, I'm going to have to own up to the passage of time by reshuffling the order a bit, and dropping in some more recent fetish objects ... which also means phasing out a few of the originals. Network will be one of the titles that will have to fight for its life on that list—my most recent visit, to prep for my own write-up, dropped the film a peg or two in my esteem. But, if Network winds up in what Faye Dunaway's Diana Christensen so memorably calls "the sh*thouse," I'll leave you to wonder whether I really didn't like it enough to keep it in, or whether I just want to retire my essay because I like Nathaniel's so much better. (The only point where we disagree? So long as Long Day's Journey into Night and Dog Day Afternoon are around, Network won't ever be Lumet's best movie.)

Photo © 1976 MGM/United Artists