My 10-ish Best Movies of All Time Mar 05 '03 (Updated Mar 07 '03)    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Movies Love and Basketball From $6 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy From $8 The Bottom Line Yes, my list is American-centric, and includes an unusually high concentration of cartoons and comedies. But I've thought about it a lot, and this is my list. For now. This was going be my 10 best movies list, but when I narrowed the field down to 11, I couldn't decide which one had to go, so I simply put away the pruning shears. This isn’t about technical admiration per se; these are the movies that I have found to be the most enthralling. 11. The Terminator (1984) The epitome of a balls-out entertaining SF action movie. It took 15 years for an another SF action movie to come along that was as distinctive, smart, fast paced, well directed and well performed - The Matrix. Every movie James Cameron has directed since The Terminator has been nearly as entertaining, but he has developed a tiresome tendency to excess, the misogyny and racism in True Lies being his low point in that regard. 10. The Apartment (1960) This is the first of three romantic comedies on my list, by three great writer-directors. It amazes me how well The Apartment holds up after 43 years. It is still a little risqué, still captivating and funny. Had there ever been a character like Shirley MacLaine’s Miss Kubelik in a mainstream American movie before – a young, smart, single working girl with an active sex life? This is Billy Wilder at his peak, just one year after Some Like it Hot. (There is no good reason why one of Preston Sturges classics isn’t alongside this one on my list, other than I’m already up to 11 top 10 movies.) 9. What's Up, Doc? (1972) Writer-director Peter Bogdanovich’s tribute to the classic screwball comedies has itself become one. No other movie keeps me smiling and laughing throughout like this one does. It’s also so inoffensive that that I can watch it with my young kids, and they enjoy it just as much as I do. (I must admit that the funniest movie scene of all time is in another early seventies classic: Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle doing Puttin’ on the Ritz in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein.) 8. Say Anything (1989) Billy Wilder’s admirer, biographer, and successor as the best mainstream American writer-director of his time is Cameron Crowe. No one can capture “time of your life” moments the way Crowe does, in the films that he has written and directed: Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous. Often overlooked as just another of the many coming-of-age romantic comedies produced in the eighties, Say Anything is so much better than the rest. Every time I watch it, Say Anything manages to bring the 17-year-old in me back to life for a couple of hours. I truly love this movie, and I explained why in the full length review of it that I posted here. 7. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) It’s long and it’s uneven, but with so many original, breathtakingly bold and beautiful cinematic moments, plus Peter O’Toole’s astonishing performance, it easily overcomes its flaws. For me, Lawrence is the pinnacle of epic cinema. I have great fondness too for Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. Seeing it as a kid, I discovered for the first time how big and powerful movies could be. 6. The Wizard of Oz (1939) I have seen hundreds of films, and have admired many of them, but this was my first true love. I’m sure there are many other cinemaphiles who, like me, credit The Wizard of Oz as being the foundation of a lifelong love of movies. 5. American Beauty (1999) First, to declare my bias, I am living the life of Lester Burnham at the moment. Second, isn’t it refreshing when a popular movie not only surpasses its hype, but is profound enough to make you both think and weep? Thank you, thank you, thank you Alan Ball for crafting a lyrical script that so eloquently, movingly, and warmly describes the struggle of an average guy to save himself from the suburban insanity that surrounds so many of us every day. Thank you Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, and Chris Cooper for three very gutsy, smart and unforgettable performances. I thought this movie was just about perfect, but one scene struck me as false. My faith in Alan Ball was reconfirmed when I eventually learned that in his original script, Lester did have sex with his daughter’s friend Angela, which of course would have been truer to Lester’s quest, and truer to life. The production company required the scene to be rewritten to make it more palatable to the masses. Why should a movie about the pervasive absurdity of American society be spared from just that? 4. Chuck Jones’ Looney Tunes Masterpieces Predating The Simpsons by half a century, the Warner Looney Tunes short cartoons of the 1950’s are as cleverly funny as anything you are likely to find on planet Earth. Chuck Jones directed the best of the bunch: The Rabbit of Seville (1950), Rabbit Seasoning (1952), Bully for Bugs (1953), Duck Dodgers in the 24th Century (1953), Duck Amuck (1953), What's Opera, Doc? (1957). They’re all exceptionally entertaining, but my favorite is the brilliant parable, One Froggy Evening (1955) … you know, the one about the frog who would sing, but never on demand: “Hello, My Baby! Hello, My Honey! Hello, My Ragtime Gal!" I cannot fathom why the classic Warner cartoons including these Chuck Jones masterpieces have not been compiled and released on DVD. 3. Beauty and the Beast (1991) To some extent, this inclusion is token recognition of the singular quality of the body of Disney feature animation films since Snow White. Walt Disney the man has become somewhat mythic and is increasingly obscured by the modern Disney conglomerate, but he deserves to be remembered and recognized as one of the twentieth century’s great innovators, businessmen and showmen. Given the strength of his leadership, I find it all the more amazing that after Walt passed on, and the studio struggled for a number of years, that Disney's feature animation production was somehow reborn better than ever, starting with The Little Mermaid in 1989. While 1994’s The Lion King is also superb, I think Beauty and the Beast is not only Disney’s best feature length animation film ever, it is one of the best mainstream American movies ever. I first saw it at a double bill preview screening along with Dances with Wolves. What a telling comparison. Wolves was a pretty good movie and it won all the Oscars that year, but the superiority of Beauty and the Beast was so obvious in a direct comparison like that. It is pure entertainment: funny, moving, so beautifully and crisply crafted, with not a frame wasted. The vocal performances are outstanding, as are the score and lyrics. I can’t think of a funnier song in any musical than ‘Gaston’: “I'm especially good at expectorating”, I'm roughly the size of a barge”, “I use antlers in all of my decorating” – what a riot! 2. The Godfather: Part II (1974) Here is a movie so jaw-droppingly good that it almost defies explanation. I’ll skirt around the issue: why is Part II better than 1972’s The Godfather? De Niro, mainly. Pacino’s more complex performance. Lee Strasberg. The broader, more layered story. These gains are greatly offset but the absence of the incomparable Brando, but the sequel still comes out as a stronger movie overall in my view. I’m not sure anyone can adequately explain why these two movies are as astonishingly captivating as they are. Obviously Francis Coppola himself lost the formula, since he hasn’t come close to replicating the feat in the quarter century since. But somehow, in the early seventies, Coppola created this ultimate cinematic portrait of America, in all its hope and corruption. Here’s a simple formula for a first class weekend at the movies: (1) Buy the Godfather trilogy set on DVD. (2) Immediately throw away 1990’s The Godfather: Part III. If you want to do me a personal favour, first take your hammer and smash that vile disk into tiny pieces. (3) Turn off the phones and the lights, and give yourself up to the remaining classic pair. (4) Watch all the fascinating documentaries on the supplementary disk, and see if you can decipher Coppola’s erratic genius. 1. Chinatown (1974) Director Roman Polanski manages to aim all of the elements of filmmaking through his lens and converge them into brilliantly sharp focus. The performances by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and especially John Huston are superb. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is haunting. John Alonzo's soft sepia cinematography is gorgeous. The film’s greatest asset is Robert Towne’s textbook perfect script – a clever variation on the classic noir detective genre film, with a compelling story and smart dialogue; Huston as Noah Cross delivers my favorite line: “'Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” Polanski famously alienated Towne by overriding the script’s ending and replacing it with his own dark conclusion. I’m in the camp that says Polanski was absolutely right. If you haven’t seen it, do. Movies get no better than this. (Notably, Robert Evans at Paramount produced Chinatown and was involved in the production of The Godfather. For important insights into both movies, I highly recommend Lawrence Grobel's penetrating interviews with both Evans and Robert Towne. Both are found in Grobel's compilation Above the Line: Conversations about the Movies.)

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