Top 100 Films, or Reasons To Be Thankful

I've been adding to my revised Top 100 Films list again, offering 100 words apiece about each of the entries. To give the list some added value, each entry also contains some suggestions about where interested readers might find a scholarly or film-critical response that's well worth your time.

The first ten listings in the new format have promised a place to leave comments, and though some early conversation began in this ribbon-cutting entry, you're welcome to revive the conversation here. If you've got feelings to share about Annie Hall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Joyless Street, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Flesh, When Harry Met Sally..., In the Year of the Pig, Nostalghia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Riddles of the Sphinx, have at it!

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...

Nick Woody Mediocrity

Woody Allen, for my money, has failed once again to "come back" in any meaningful way, but that doesn't mean that I can't take a stab at my own career resurgence. Remember when I used to write full reviews? Taste this and tell me if I'm ready.

Picked Flick #49: The Purple Rose of Cairo

"I've met a wonderful new man. He's fictional, but you can't have everything." So muses Mia Farrow's Cecilia in one of the most perfect and most perfectly played lines of dialogue Woody Allen ever wrote, a line that is equal parts honey and rue, just like the movie. Cecilia is a poor waitress, in at least three senses of the word: pitiable, without money, and wincingly bad at her job, lost as she often is in two kinds of daydreams. Some are about the movies she has recently seen, others about those soon to arrive in town. Even compared to the down-and-out customers and co-workers who surround her, even in contrast to her thuggish husband Monk (Danny Aiello), Cecilia's plight is especially dolorous, her happiness particularly moth-eaten. For some reason, this is how movies always portray inveterate filmgoers—who would haunt a moviehouse except someone in dire need of consolatory distraction?—but The Purple Rose of Cairo infuses real and enormous feeling into its characterization of Cecilia. She is constantly inspired by the movies to leave her husband and her current life and to imagine better versions of both, but then she is predictably rebuffed by how difficult it is to transform one's lot so utterly, and so she comes back. Her world is one of continual returns, and fairly early in The Purple Rose of Cairo, the misleading allure of popular fantasy seems almost as cruelly sad as the threadbare upholstery and the dim, amber-colored lighting in her apartment.

Did I mention, though, that The Purple Rose of Cairo is, at least in large part, a comedy? Alert as it is to the insuperable remoteness of reel life, it also concocts a dazzling, warm, and utterly joyful figure for the sheer pleasure of movies—the inexplicable way in which their silver flickers come to feel like a space you could happily inhabit, and the even more outrageous way in which cinephilia (which sounds a little like "Cecilia") starts to feel like a reciprocal adoration: if you love the movies enough, you start to sense or at least to dream that they love you right back. On her fourth or fifth trip to a matinée of The Purple Rose of Cairo, cheekily rendered as some mad Hollywood combo of Egyptian adventure, cabaret revue, and high-society romance, Cecilia is first noticed, then hailed, then magically wooed by the sweet-spirited movie character Tom Baxter, who literally walks off the screen to join her. The plaintive mood of small-scale tragedy has been so convincingly set by the preceding half-hour that the sudden rabbit-hole into comic farce is as unexpected as it is delightful. The rest of the movie, peppered with delicious dialogue and acted to perfection by the delicate Farrow and a buoyant Jeff Daniels, follows Cecilia's rapid courtship with Tom, then her run-in with Gil Bellows, the flustered actor who played Tom Baxter (and is also played by Jeff Daniels), and then her agitated decision about which of these figments—the matinée idol or his lovestruck alter ego—shall usher her over the new horizons of her life. The high spirits of the movie also encompass a zesty brothel interlude with Dianne Wiest and Glenne Headly; the Pirandellian fracas among the other Purple Rose characters whom Tom has abandoned; and a climactic montage, diced with expert period details and hammy innuendoes, in which Tom escorts Cecilia through the Hollywood dreamworld. All of these set-pieces and plotlines enliven the movie and invigorate the audience, but even they cannot compare to a short scene in a pawnshop, where Gil Bellows croons standards to Cecilia while she accompanies on ukulele, and the film leaps right into the stratosphere of movie bliss.

The Purple Rose of Cairo doesn't quite end how you expect, though it probably couldn't end any other way, and in wielding the masks of comedy and tragedy so deftly within the same film, it obviates any need for future Allen endeavors like Melinda and Melinda. Beyond the suppleness of the writing and the infectious, perfectly timed energies of the performers, The Purple Rose of Cairo works because the actual filmmaking emanates nostalgia and exuberance in such equal, doting measure. Cinematographer Gordon Willis, one of the truly indispensable figures in American movies, reanimates old-Hollywood idioms as perfectly as he did in Allen's Zelig, but with a sense of fun and depth that the one-joke premise of the earlier film didn't quite allow. For all of these reasons, Purple Rose situates you right in Cecilia's shoes: you recognize the limits and the artifice of movies, and you hope there is something more in your life to go home to, but nor would you want your life without the movies in it. The Purple Rose of Cairo was the first movie we saw in my high-school film studies course, where it was paired with Hitchcock's Vertigo, an even starker myth about the appeals and the dangers of gorgeous surfaces and emotional projections. In my mind, Purple Rose is also a natural companion to The Wizard of Oz, even though a reverse journey from color into black and white marks the threshold of fulfillment in this case, and the adage that "There's no place like home" echoes with even greater ambivalence. Beyond invoking connections to such undebated masterpieces, The Purple Rose of Cairo, in its admittedly tinier way, reveals itself with every viewing to be a masterpiece of its own, a witty and wise amalgam of innocence and experience. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1985 Orion Pictures.

Picked Flick #64: Bullets Over Broadway

"I'm an artist!" John Cusack bellows in the first line of Bullets Over Broadway, the last Woody Allen movie that needn't be embarrassed of such an opening. What is truly, wonderfully disarming about the movie is that Cusack's David Shayne, for all of his obviously Woody-ish mannerisms, doesn't sap the air out of the movie like most of Allen's recent alter egos have, especially when Allen has played them himself. Sure, it's probably a flaw that the scenes in which David bellyaches to his girlfriend (Mary-Louise Parker), agent (Jack Warner), and best friend (Rob Reiner) about the proper role of the artist make so little impression. Still, the formulaic punchlines and underserved characters don't weigh against the movie because Allen, for the first time since The Purple Rose of Cairo, aspires as much to entertain his audience as to sell his ambitions or gnaw away at his philosophical obsessions. Don't get me wrong: I don't necessarily favor Woody's comedies over his dramas, as higher entries on this list will verify. But Allen's humor can be so vivid and his direction so encouraging to comic actors that it seems a shame he has become so parsimonious with those gifts. That co-scripter Douglas McGrath's own subsequent movies felt so weightless, in absolute contrast to Allen's crushing self-consciousness in Deconstructing Harry and Match Point, implies that their partnership on this screenplay was an especially inspired and well-timed stroke of luck. The movie also has a reasonably credible beginning, middle, and end, even if the plot grows overly obedient to rather inane moral arguments. Finally, I think it's Allen's best-looking movie since Manhattan, achieving the kind of playful zest in its Damon Runyon interiors and pop-colored palette that his other Depression-set movies have often nodded toward but never fully attained. Jeffrey Kurland's costumes are especially marvelous, as giddy and plush with outrageous comic abandon as are the movie's dialogue and its performances.

But let's not bury the lead: Bullets Over Broadway lives, sparkles, even jubilates because of its dialogue and its performances. Why does it feel a little embarrassing to say so? Perhaps mainstream film criticism places such exclusive emphasis on words, story, acting, and character that it feels almost regressive to praise a movie so roundly in those terms. But there it is, and happily so. The narrative conceit of David Shayne's turgidly sub-O'Neill script, God of Our Fathers, is brilliantly borne out by such believably lumpen lines as "The days blend together like melted celluloid, like a film whose images become distorted and meaningless"—a line, in fact, that wouldn't feel at all out of place amid the strenuous solipsisms of Interiors (though, at least in that film's case, I take the solipsisms to be purposeful). As the plot requires, not just Shayne's writing but his way of speaking is utterly shown up by the perfect, vulgar concision of Chazz Palminteri's Cheech, who screams of David's play, "It stinks on fuckin' hot ice!" Dianne Wiest's Oscar-winning turn as the boozy, stentorian Helen Sinclair remains the movie's most famous calling-card. Like the movie itself, Wiest's broad overplaying yields so many dozens of delightful moments that you don't care how often the seams show in what she's doing, how Helen is so obviously more of a joke machine than a character. Even the justly celebrated running gag around the line "Don't speak!" is regularly excelled by Wiest's camp modulations and leopard growls at other moments, snaring David's ego through well-calculated praise in a bar, parading him around the roof of her Manhattan apartment, huffing out her love for the dark, empty theater where they rehearse with a perfectly pronounced, Hepburnian "Look! would you look!" When David enters her apartment and praises her exquisite taste, her purring retort—"My taste is superb, my eyes are exquisite!"—is almost literally killer. Indeed, her floridly self-conscious style of seduction, previously unknown outside of those species of insects that eat their young, is a gift that keeps giving, full of glorious, histrionic silences in which Helen mentally assembles her next audition for the Baby Jane-ish role of herself.

But you know, as I've belly-laughed my way through sixth and seventh and eighth viewings of the movie, the frizzed, helium-filled performance of Jennifer Tilly has come to rival Wiest's, revealing real creative ingenuity; look how many of her best scenes are delivered with her back to the camera, as when she lobbies in vain with David to protect the one speech she has managed to memorize ("But I like to say it..."), or when, also on-stage, her fabulously flubbed exclamation "The heart is labynthinine!" is somehow made even more uproarious by the perfect timing and ostrichy posture of her walk. But wait! The single funniest bit of physical acting in the movie isn't Wiest's or Tilly's but Tracey Ullman's. Just watch as Eden Brent, Ullman's own accelerated riff on actressy eccentricity, becomes the first among David's cast to publicly endorse one of Cheech's dramaturgical tips. It's a one-second tour-de-force in a film that just brims with instants like this. You can watch Bullets Over Broadway with the sound off and have a thrilling time. You can listen to it from the next room and achieve total bliss. The fullness and variety of its pleasures still don't amount to Allen's best movie, not even one of his best five (and bully for him for setting such a high bar), but of all of his pictures, I do think Bullets is his most easily, frothily, and durably enjoyable. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Cannes Post-Script

Okay, I wasn't done on the Cannes beat. Right now, in the two non-profit theaters in Ithaca, two of last year's Cannes victors—Hirokazu Kore-eda's Nobody Knows (Best Actor) and Agnès Jaoui's Look at Me/Comme une image (Best Screenplay)—are just now making their local premieres. So it may not behoove me to get too excited about the prospect of seeing this year's slate of contenders anytime soon. Still, Cannes is nothing if not appetizing for the future, and these were the films from this year's crop that I am most eagerly anticipating at an arthouse near me:

TIER 1
#1 A History of Violence David Cronenberg is one of my absolute favorite directors, as well as the subject of my first dissertation chapter—the chapter on which, incidentally, I completed my final revisions today. (Yay!) Any new Cronenberg movie is enough to get me excited, but especially when the reports are so bewildering. Even the bullishly intrepid Mike D'Angelo couldn't quite decide on a number rating for this one. If it's as weirdly discomfiting—and therefore as compulsively watchable—as Dead Ringers or Naked Lunch, color me ecstatic. (IMDb Page)

#2 Manderlay "Most anticipated" movies are not the same as the ones I expect to be good, and I must say I have some serious skepticism about this project. I enjoyed Dogville quite a bit, and I've found that it holds up to repeat viewings, but it seemed to me like more of a one-off than a solid premise for a trilogy. Still, whenever anyone's got anything to say about race, class oppression, the history of slavery, etc., I'm hooked, even if what they have to say is nonsense. Topics covered + Lars' history = I'm ready to pay attention. (IMDb Page)

#3 Hidden/Caché My experience with Haneke is a little scattershot: I've only seen Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, and Time of the Wolf, which made my Top Ten list last year when it opened Stateside. (The Piano Teacher would have done the same if 2002 hadn't been such a superlative movie year.) The reviews for this film were exceptional, I love a solid formalist thriller, and French-Algerian relations are another one of those subjects for which I have a standing weakness. Which reminds me, is anyone ever going to swing a US release for Tony Gatlif's Exils, the French-Algerian drama that won Best Director at last year's Cannes? At least Caché already has US distribution in place. (IMDb Page)

#4 The Wayward Cloud This one has been building huge buzz since Berlin, and I can only live so much longer without having seen any of Tsai Ming-liang's movies. They sound right up my "Weird" alley, with a camp/homoerotic bent (always a plus). And look what happened when I went searching for a photo: I found this image of what is, indeed, a man either caressing a woman's vagina with a watermelon, or possibly trying to insert it. Whaa? Color me intrigued. Incidentally, The Wayward Cloud was only in the "Market" section of Cannes, not in any of the official programs, but Mike D'Angelo and others still wrote it up, and I'm still stoked. Which reminds me: what am I going to do next year without Cornell cinema?? (IMDb Page)

#5 The Child/L'Enfant Any film that won the Palme d'Or would have a leg up on my viewing list, but my interest in the Dardennes' work has been steadily growing. Thus far, I've only seen Rosetta; their last picture, The Son, was a critical favorite around the world, but it played for two seconds in Ithaca, while I was out of town and then took its good time coming to DVD. So I'm actually eager to see any of the Dardennes' recent work, up to and including this latest. I love filmmakers who can squeeze a lot of affect out of a seemingly simple aesthetic, which is different than squeezing a lot of affect out of a fussily "simple" aesthetic, as with most of the Dogme films. (IMDb Page)

#6 Match Point Remi Adefarasin! Say it three times fast, 'cuz he's the genius cinematographer behind the ice blues of Onegin, the inky shadows of the palace in Elizabeth, and the high-society chilliness of The House of Mirth. Now, he's working for Woody, who, say what you will about his lack of a stable aesthetic, at least works with some interesting D.P.s. And Remi showed he knows how to light Scarlett Johansson in this winter's beguiling In Good Company. And, if all the reports are true, it seems that Woody remembered how to write. Say that it's so! (IMDb Page)

#7 Don't Come Knocking I will see any movie where Jessica Lange plays a long-lost flame, and that's lucky for me, because there were two of them at Cannes. I am particularly excited about Don't Come Knocking because, like Lange herself (maybe my favorite American actress), writer-star Sam Shepard and director Wim Wenders are such mercurial talents. Sometimes they just... stall. And other times they generate something really interesting, like the last Shepard-Wenders collabo, Paris, Texas. I didn't love that film, and there's a self-romanticizing streak in both men's work that can spoil even a good thing, but I'm still intrigued by what this movie's got to offer. (IMDb Page)

TIER 2
#8 Three Times As I wrote earlier, Hou Hsiao-hsien's appeal kind of eludes me. I did think A Time to Live, a Time to Die was lovely and involving, especially in the final sequences. Maybe I was just tired, but I remember The Puppetmaster being quite a slog, and I usually love long, quiet movies. Millennium Mambo had me for a while until that film, too, seemed to get stuck in an endless rut of gossamer mood accents. But I'm always hoping I'll come around, because so many people see so much in Hou's work, so if Three Times ever makes it to an American theater—with Hou, you can never take that for granted—I, for one, will show up. And I'll try. I'll at least take three bites before I decide I don't like it. (IMDb Page for Hou Hsiao-hsien)

#9 Down in the Valley Some interesting reviews are building behind this film, which none of the critics seem to describe quite the same way, and whose secrets they seem to be glad to preserve. Hmmmm. Edward Norton and I have been seeing other people for a few years now. Am I the only one who thought he started sending out this weird Self-Importance vibe, right around the time he started turning in the same performance in film after film? Even in 25th Hour, a film I really liked (and apparently he did, too), he seemed bored and uninspired to me. If this film restores the Edward I loved, I'm prepared to take him back. Also, I'm getting these nasty, risky, Blood Simple sensations from reading the write-ups, and if that's a fair comparison, it's a good, good thing. Oh, and Ellen Burstyn's in this, too. Yay! (IMDb Page)

#10 Battle in Heaven/Batalla en el cielo Also known as, when bad reviews create unwittingly good buzz. I kept reading that this project was way too self-consciously arty, full of gratuitous and overly explicit sex, recycling the same old shit about modern anomie and the spiritual emptiness of existence, and marred by director pretension. In other words, it got the reviews that Pola X and L'Humanité got at Cannes '99, and demonlover and Irréversible got at Cannes '02. I loved three of those, and thought L'Humanité was just fine (sorry, Manders). So, as these rotten-tomato reviews piled up, my stomach started growling. (IMDb Page)

#11 Broken Flowers By all rights, this film should be higher on this list. If Jessica Lange isn't my favorite actress, Tilda Swinton is, and they are both in this movie. [This is the sound of Nick's head exploding.] Plus Sharon Stone and Julie Delpy, two good eggs, and Frances Conroy, who I'd been writing off until her sharp work as Kate Hepburn's snootily progressive mama in The Aviator. But one of my qualms is named Coffee & Cigarettes, Jim Jarmusch's last picture, which somehow thought that 11 arch vignettes about people who are bored with each other would be something besides arch and boring. And my other qualm is called Bill Murray, who has somehow found his way onto the Tom Hanks fast-track as Our New Beloved Actor. Yeah, Murray was great in Lost in Translation, but when people I trusted started plugging his "brilliant" work in The Life Aquatic, I felt like the schmo who's trying really hard to see the Virgin Mary face in the pancake syrup. It just ain't there, man. I'll be there on opening weekend, but more Ghost Dog and less Rushmore would be a good recipe for pleasing me. (IMDb Page)

#12 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada I figured this would be the Life and Death of Peter Sellers of this year's festival, especially since it got slotted into the same, ignominious last-day press screening. But reviews were kind, I'm a Barry Pepper fan, and the project sounds like it's going for that whole Cormac McCarthy revisionist-border-mythology thing. I got a little churlish about the prose in All the Pretty Horses but had to confess after I finished it that the book had a soul, and a memorable kick. If Jones' movie has one or both, more power to him. (IMDb Page)

If anyone is wondering about some conspicuous absences, I am only half-excited about Last Days, even though it seems like a better subject for Gus Van Sant's recent aesthetic (ya know, kinda formalist, kinda gauzy) than either Gerry or Elephant provided. The French thriller Lemming sounded interesting, especially with Charlotte Rampling and Laurent Lucas in the cast, but Caché sounds much more inventive and much more topical. Atom Egoyan pretty much lanced my mid-90s interest in his films with the grueling duo of Felicia's Journey and Ararat. If I ever get around to his earlier films I have on tape (Calendar and Family Viewing), I might get piqued again, but if indeed that happens, Where the Truth Lies doesn't seem like the kind of film I'd want as a follow-up. And the Jury Prize notwithstanding, Shanghai Dreams sounds like the sort of wistful, overly stylized Chinese cinema that tends to bore me to tears (see: Springtime in a Small Town, Zhou Yu's Train, etc.)