Dan Tepe - Top 100

My indicator of a good movie is if you would feel comfortable giving away a Friday or Saturday night watching it. Within a list of top 100 movies, at least 90% should be Friday/Saturday movies. If you want to see a list of Sunday morning movies, check out Bob's list. He also can't spell Dark Knight.

1) Goodfellas

2) Shawshank Redemption

3) Blow

4) Saving Private Ryan

5) Band of Brothers

6) Forrest Gump

7) Departed

8) Braveheart

9) Bourne Identity

10) Gladiator

11) Bourne Ultimatum

12) Dark Knight

13) Snatch

14) Lord of the Rings (trilogy)

15) Godfather

16) Inglorious Basterds

17) White Men Can’t Jump

18) Bourne Supremacy

19) No Country for Old Men

20) Die Hard

21) Gangs of New York

22) Old School

23) Tombstone

24) There Will Be Blood

25) Christmas Vacation

26) Blood Diamond

27) Silence of the Lambs

28) Wedding Crashers

29) Jurassic Park

30) Sandlot

31) Dances with Wolves

32) Godfather II

33) Robin Hood Prince of Thieves

34) Apollo 13

35) Home Alone (first two)

36) Top Gun

37) A Few Good Men

38) Last of the Mohicans


39) Legends of the Fall

40) Hangover

41) Die Hard III

42) It’s A Wonderful Life

43) Scream (the original)

44) Mighty Ducks

45) Training Day

46) Back to the Future (trilogy)

47) Halloween

48) Meet the Parents

49) The Prestige

50) Saw (first only)

51) Predator

52) Spy Game

53) Indiana Jones (trilogy)

54) Ocean’s 11

55) Major League I & II

56) Beautiful Mind

57) Pulp Fiction

58) A League of Their Own

59) Reservoir Dogs

60) To Kill a Mockingbird

61) Caddyshack

62) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

63) Schindler's List

64) The Big Lebowski

65) Seven

66) Happy Gilmore

67) Titanic

68) Cinderella Man

69) The Good Shepherd

70) October Sky

71) Terminator 2

72) Charlie Wilson’s War

73) Maverick

74) The Ten Commandments

75) Kill Bill

76) Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

77) Animal House

78) Dumb & Dumber

79) Gran Torino

80) Batman Begins

81) Philadelphia

82) Big

83) American History X

84) Rocky

85) Mighty Ducks II

86) Inception

87) Jerry Maguire

88) The Count of Monte Cristo

89) Fugitive

90) Escape from Alcatraz

91) Breakfast Club

92) Rocky IV

93) Road to Perdition

94) Kill Bill II

95) Avatar

96) Pirates of the Carribean (first only)

97) Sherlock Holmes

98) Stand By Me

99) Interview With The Vampire

100) Blue Chips

Drive

Simplicity

Drive is about a guy that is good at driving, and all the shit that being a driver can get one into. The movie starts with the driver, Gosling, laying out his rules for some dudes needing his skills. His rules are as simple as he is. "You've got five minutes. A minute longer and I am gone." We learn first that he drives the get-away car and later that he drives for movies. The two occupations are never at odds - he just drives. Jean Luc Godard movies were known for simplicity. A guy, a girl, a sketchy goal, and a gun. This was enough. Nicolas Refn has a few cult movies that Gosling liked enough for Gosling to handpick Refn to direct and re-write 'Drive'. Refn is all about that throw-back. He wants the audience to react. Here, he puts out a movie about a guy, a girl, a sketchy goal, and a gun. I appreciated it.

Characters

Ryan Gosling is possibly in that top category. From the gut wrencher, Blue Valentine to Lars and the Real Girl, and from Remember the Titans to Ides of March, and now Drive, I mean, I'm convinced. Cary Mulligan plays his neighbor whose husband is in prison and whose son the driver seems emotional about. Refn allows Gosling and Mulligan the space to sit in a scene. I think it takes some decent acting to hold a scene through long moments without dialogue. They pull it off. Ron Pearlman left the set of Sons of Anarchy to play the same role he always plays. He's obnoxious, smiles when you need a villain smile and dies when you need him to die. The long scenes and slow motion Pearlman smiles wouldn't be enough without some far-out tunes.

Soundtrack

Some tunes that make it happen, complete with titles that dominate:

Nightcall - Kavinsky and Lovefoxx,

Under Your Spell - Desire,

A Real Hero - College,

Bride of Deluxe,

Kick Your Teeth,

After the Chase,

They Broke His Pelvis,

Skull Crushing,

Hammer,

Oh My Love - Riz Ortolanie feat. Katyna Raneiri

Coolness - Eastwood - Samurai

I was raised on Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen movies. I believe without doubt that the best movies are ones that feature a dude that believes in something and doesn't talk much. You just know that he believes in it. Le Samourai and Bullit and Josey Wales are three of my favorites for this reason. I'll put this movie in that category.

Time to think for yourself

This movies gives you time to think for yourself. Which is cool, cause it doesn't take much thinking to get this movie. You just kind of 'sit in' the movie. In another way, you get a bunch of time to wait for something cool to happen. Which is good, cause something cool happens a lot and it is not full of CGI or other stupid stuff. It's just a freaking cool movie. I think minimalist is a way to describe it.

Take-away

Afterwards, I feel that Refn used Gosling as 'the driver' to make a point that other cool movies (Eastwood and Godard movies) have made before. It is about, in movies, "Knowing what you know and knowing what you want, but being cool about it."

Dogtooth / Kynodontas (* * * * *)

Disturbing, perverted, weird...greek

Directed by Giorgios Lanthimos, 2010

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (which ended up going to Denmark's In A Better World), Dogtooth is quite a surprising pick. It deals with an authoritarian father whose son and two daughters have never left the premises of his countryside compound (which looks very much like Mon Oncle's Villa Arpel). He has kept them from doing so by telling them that stepping outside of the fence would result in immediate death. At least until the child is mature enough to venture out on its own, a state that comes with the loss of a dogtooth. The relationship between the father and his children, who have all reached an adult age yet act like infants for lack of socialisation, is so perverted that comparisons to the Fritzl case of Amstetten are far from absurd. When arrested, Fritzl claimed he wanted to shelter his children (and incestuous grandchildren) from the rotten outside world - words similar to those used by the father in Dogtooth. While the setting is far from likely, the film does raise the question to what extent parents may choose to circumwent the societal system and 'home school' (I use inverted commas so as not to discredit home schooling itself, which can work much better than compulsory school attendance). The repugant events taking place on the screen are contrasted by Lanthimos' sober camera work and the complete lack of music, making them all the more unsettling. Dogtooth will either make you guffaw or, if you accept its framework, leave you speechless - which was my reaction. Cinephiles will have noticed the remseblance of the photo above to a famous scene from The Shining - a film in which a father isolates his family from the outside world and goes apeshit.

Ides of March

Ides of March is a made for the stage movie with a really great cast. George Clooney hovers over the plot as the Democratic governor running for president. Religious but not in the formal sense of carrying an endorsement from a denomination. A loquacious throw-back to the ideals of an idealist version of the democratic ticket-manifested by side-stepping talking-points yet creating new talking points. America will be better if he wins, America can be the best again if he wins. America is doomed if he loses according to his quick wit, young media guru, number two -- Gosling. Replete with belief in a quality product, Gosling is the Shakespearen protagonist that serves to keep the movie from being too much of a commentary on the state of American politics and more about timeless human dilemmas-integrity, honor, honesty, promiscuity, loyalty. It's when his mistakes and his business becomes too closely linked with the mistakes and business of the governor's that the politics are less about ideals and more about reality, more about power.

I think that scripts that come from the theater can often suffer because the twists often seem too contrived on the screen. For some reason we, as viewers, are brought closer to the action in a theater. Movies, on the other hand, while getting us closer to the faces of an actor, can keep us at a distance from the plot. We simply, in the movie theater, are spectators, while in the 'real' theater, we are more of a role-player. The camera is less forgiving than a live audience. For instance, it doesn't make sense that Marissa Tomei, in this movie, as a the New York Times reporter, is the only reporter we see when it is time for a reporter to show up in the script. On the stage, we are ok with there only being one reporter involved in the story. Also, the interaction between opposing campaign managers, Paul Giamati and Philip Seymor Hoffman, would be easily managed on the stage, a live audience would expect the interaction to be a here-and-there type of relationship. While on a screen, we expect to be emotionally connected with each. We need to know how they arrived at a place and why their action in that place is related to how they got there. On stage, we are cool with them, all-of-a-sudden being in a place and acting as an actor should. My advice for watching this movie is to do your best to accept the movie as a traveling stage version. Expecting a full movie experience would leave one wanting more. The soundtrack helps some, the really good cast helps some, but the movie is best experienced as a stage performance.

The most fun part of the movie is realized in the truisms that Clooney, as one of the writers and actors, thrives on. Each scene seems to be built up around an absolute statement on the vague-ness of desired absolutes. Morality, integrity, loyalty, these sorts of things would be easy if they were absolute. This movie does well to make a loud statement about 'men' attempting to speak in absolutes as they seek out power. In the words of Shakespeare/Gosling, "Men, as politicians, can start wars, kill innocent people, bankrupt a nation, take part in corrupt corporate back-room deals. But they can't fuck the intern."