Now that all the technical awards have been handed out at
earlier ceremonies, we’ve reached the crescendo of this pomp and
circumstance. The top ten:
10. Unforgiven
(1992)
Credit the success of Unforgiven
that, nearly 25 years on, it looks less revisionist by comparison. Not that it hasn’t been done better before
(Boetticher) or since (“Deadwood”), but I think where it looks tame today is
largely due to the now well-tread path it forged.
It’s hard to think that the Academy didn’t anticipate it was
Eastwood’s, as well as the traditional Western’s, dusk and—while I wouldn’t
trade A Perfect World or Letters from Iwo Jima for anything—I
could have largely done without the geriatric tour. I’m not refusing to take responsibility for
my cynicism that has come with age, but I think I would have preferred a
romantic end for The Man With No Name instead of a world where Clint makes the
empty-chair speech at the Republican National Convention. Unfair to the art, probably, but it can’t exist
in a vacuum either.
9. All Quiet on the
Western Front (1930)
The Academy has, historically, loved the war film while
trying to, historically, remain apolitical.
Put another way, war films are rarely about the complexity of war and
more about projecting social issues, the human spirit, or American guilty
conscience over a war backdrop. All Quiet on the Western Front had a
great effect on me when I was 14 as I imagine it did many of the supposed 100
million viewers who saw it, worldwide, in the 1930s.
It’s sticky, and I like this aspect of it. Not its pacifistic message, mind you. That is crystal clear, but it’s the character
and nationalist representation that is interesting. War is harrowing, ugly, and crushes our
humanity. It is a waste, the film says,
but conveniently from the German point of view.
It’s remarkable America could sympathize with the film’s German
protagonists in 1930, but I wonder if it could have succeeded had its
protagonist been a slaughtered American.
8. Rocky (1976)
So sad for cynical New Hollywood idolaters that Taxi Driver lost out to the rare,
genuine, everyman auteur triumph of Rocky. If you really want to rankle ‘em, Letters from Iwo Jima should have beat The Departed, too.
7. It Happened One
Night (1934)
There are great movies and then there are movies that
revolutionize a genre, threaten to transform gender hierarchy in screen
representation, entrance a generation and still hold up 80 years later. The screwball comedy might be my favorite
classic genre, God bless Frank Capra.
6. On the Waterfront
(1954)
On the Waterfront
is my Casablanca. It’s a male-centric melodrama with a
bittersweet (but mostly positive) ending full of sharp, quotable dialogue and
iconic, star-driven acting. The
difference, for me, is that it also has a visual panache (Casablanca is rather flat) to earn its legendary status.
5. Sunrise: A Song of
Two Humans (1927)
F.W. Murnau, like his visual compatriot and Fox colleague
Frank Borzage, perfected visual language in a remarkably short time, elevating
film—this is no understatement—to the highest of arts, rich in the aesthetic,
the moral, the religious and the dramatic.
It’s like the Renaissance happening 15 years after the invention of oil
paints. Shakespeare emerging from shadow
puppetry. There’s no Hitchcock without
its Americanization of German Expressionism.
No Ford without its lyrical folkways.
4. Annie Hall
(1977)
It’s easy to underestimate how revolutionary Annie Hall is. For starters, the Woody Allen character we
know to this day was surely honed through Allen’s early comedies but modified
and unleashed specifically with this picture.
It’s a comedy in name only as “screwball” sounds a lot less funny from
the psychiatrist’s couch. It’s dark,
it’s unafraid to stoke the ugliness of human nature and feed it to a large
commercial audience. It wears its
influences on its sleeve—from the French New Wave to Ingmar Bergman to Walt
Disney—yet feels original in its rapid-fire delivery. It’s remarkable how much is thrown at the
wall here and even more remarkable that it sticks. Annie Hall is not my favorite Woody Allen,
but the time is overdue to reexamine how such seemingly light fare changed the
cinematic landscape. That it appears
effortless is its biggest ruse.
3. No Country for Old
Men (2007)
It’s not that I don’t believe Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis claiming the West closed
in 1890, it’s that I don’t believe the frontier—conquerable, virgin, feminized
land awaiting our manifest destiny—ever existed. No
Country for Old Men, as true an adaptation as exists, isn’t a Western in
terms of genre iconography but is revisionist in putting to rest the mythology
of rugged individualism and rough justice.
Uncanny in its reflection of our time, it manages to metaphorize our
murky quagmire of modern morality with the devious concision of a coin flip.
2. Rebecca (1940)
Romantic only in the sense that its relationships run
medieval and supernatural in turns, Rebecca’s
search for identity post aut propter the myth of juvenility is drawn from the
same frightening well that gave us both Snow
White and Persona. They’re favorite themes for Hitchcock, but the
chaos at the moral of the axiom “through fire, nature is reborn whole” is indelible.
1. The Apartment
(1960)
Louis C.K. recently said, when forced to pin down genre for
his new series “Horace and Pete”, “It can be funny. And also not.
Both. I believe that ‘funny’
works best in its natural habitat. Right
in the jungle along with ‘awful’, ‘sad’, ‘confusing’ and ‘nothing’.”
Of course this is true and everyone believes it. But just like C.K.’s idiosyncratic prose, the
joy is often more than the humor; it’s in the invitation to the human
infrastructure of the artist’s jungle.
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