Personal Favorites

Maybe not essential (and perhaps even a few guilty pleasures), but these are still films I'll never hesitate to add to my collection.

Forbidden Planet

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Seeing Forbidden Planet today is like meeting an old friend’s great-grandfather and seeing the family resemblance. Sort of a gold standard for the science fiction genre during the fifties, this film has its DNA in much of what we’ve seen since in film and on television, particularly the original Star Trek. From fifty years later, however, the movie is also a wonderfully nostalgic mix of forward thinking and amusingly dated social mores.

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Judgment at Nuremburg

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Stanley Kramer’s second courtroom drama starring Spencer Tracy in as many years is mostly an actor’s tour de force, but surprisingly not for the film’s nominal stars, Tracy and Burt Lancaster. Both of these veterans step back and let a handful of others take center screen. The talent pool is so deep in this film that the fifth-billed actor, Maximilian Schell, took home a Best Actor Oscar, the deepest that award has gone into a film’s “bench.”

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The film is a heavily fictionalized version of the actual Judges Trial during the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. Continue reading

Galaxy Quest

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Original Star Trek cast member George Takei has allegedly said that Galaxy Quest is more true to the spirit of the TV show than any of the other theatrical movies based on the 60s TV series. While I wouldn’t hold it up against Wrath of Khan, this affectionate 1999 spoof is definitely a better Trek film than any of the odd-numbered entries in the franchise.

Galaxy Quest fits a spot-on satire of virtually the entire Trek phenomenon, from the show itself to the actors and the fans, into a tight 102-minute running time. The designs of the ships, the costumes and the sets veers just far enough from the source material for the filmmakers to avoid being eaten alive by a horde of ravenous Paramount lawyers.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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Philip Kaufman‘s adaptation of Milan Kudera‘s novel is a long, erotic rumination on the nature of freedom, personal, political and sexual. It follows an informal triangle involving a womanizing surgeon named Tomas (Daniel Day Lewis), his shy, sensitive wife, Tereza (Juliette Binoche), and his free-spirited lover, Sabina (Lena Olin), through the Prague Spring of 1968, the brutal Soviet crackdown and its aftermath.

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Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

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The massive corporate malfeasance that led to the self-destruction of the Enron Corporation was stunning not just because of the bubble of unreality that surrounded the company for years as it bled cash like a hemopheliac while driving up its stock price like it was strapped to a Saturn booster. What was really like a kick to the head was the sheer number of corporate enablers they had. Had someone, anyone, called Enron on their practices, the company would have disintegrated years earlier than it did, presumably taking fewer pension plans and 401k’s down with it. The outrage that was the California energy crisis of 2000 might have been avoided as well.

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Le Mans

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The 24-hour race in an around the city of Le Mans every June is still considered one of the ultimate tests of driver, crews and cars, but in 1970, when filming on this movie began, it was even more so. This was before many of the safety features drivers now take for granted and when the cars were insanely powerful and fast. The Mulsanne straight was still more than two miles of flat-out, unbroken driving, with cars reaching over 230 mph before braking for the next curve.

Steve McQueen didn’t write, direct or produce this film, but it was still in every way his baby. He wanted to make the ultimate racing film. When not acting, McQueen raced cars and motorcycles for real, much to the horror of the studio executives who coveted the box office he brought in. McQueen was no dilettante, either. He was a serious driver who was competetive in virtually everything he raced and was well respected by his fellow racers. To them, he was just one of the guys who also did some acting on the side.

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Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

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Star Trek: The Motion Picture‘s spiralling production costs and lukewarm reviews must have left a cold feeling in pit of the Paramount brass’ collective stomachs. Fortunately the box office returns were good enough to justify at least thinking about a sequel. If nothing else, it would help amortize the production costs of the first film across more than one movie.

To keep costs in check, they assigned the film to their television production division. To direct, they hired Nicholas Meyer, whose only other directorial credit to date was the well-received thriller, Time After Time. Both decisions proved fortuitous. Literate, focused and not awed by the Star Trek legacy, Meyer proved to be just the hand to keep the film on course.

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Aliens

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Aliens represents a true rarity among movies, a sequel that not only equals or even surpasses the original, but also one that stands alone as work unto itself. You could see this movie without knowing the first ever existed. Knowing the original allows you to enjoy the sequel on other layers of course.

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Serenity

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Once upon a time there was Firefly and it was one of the best television shows that almost no one ever saw. Premiering on the Fox network in September, 2002, it was shown out of sequence in a very nomadic time slot. Finding the next episode was like playing “Where’s Waldo – The TV Guide edition.” After doing little to promote or support the series, Fox cancelled it after airing only 11 of the 14 episodes produced.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

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There’s little to say about Return of the King that I haven’t already said about the first two installments in Peter Jackson’s trilogy of Lord of the Rings movies. To my mind, it inherits the same virtues of the previous two movies while bringing the cycle to an epic and satisfying conclusion.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

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The middle entry in a trilogy often has the hardest job, picking up where the first story left off and leaving enough for the final part to build on. In other words, it has to hit the ground running, assuming you remember what you saw a year ago and then leave you hanging two or three hours later. I don’t count faux trilogies like the Indiana Jones movies, which are only called a “trilogy” because there just happened to be three movies. There was, however, no common narrative thread tying the films together, like there is for Lord of the Rings.

Like The Empire Strikes Back, The Two Towers successfully avoids the “middle movie” trap. Continue reading