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.

The Road Warrior (1981)

AKA: Mad Max 2
Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Oh, so that’s it, you lost your family? That makes you something special, does it?

Three or four career meltdowns ago, Mel Gibson was still a fresh face on the scene when he went into a bar the night before his audition for a little film called Mad Max. The brawl that temporarily battered his youthful good looks actually helped land him the role that would launch his career. The first Mad Max was a hit worldwide but made a negligible impression in the States, partly due to a lousy dubbing job that was inflicted on the film because the studio thought Yanks weren’t ready for a real Australian accent (This was a few years before Crocodile Dundee).

The Road Warrior

As a result, the sequel was called Mad Max 2 everywhere but the U.S., because you can’t have a sequel to a movie no one had heard of. Call it Mad Max 2 or The Road Warrior, it was like a jolt of adrenaline right into the eyeballs.

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Director:  | Released:  | 95 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

The Great Race (1965)

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

Push the button, Max.

This big-budget, globe-trotting comedy is almost exactly as old as I am and I’ve always held a warm place in my affections for it. It’s not quiet or subtle, but it is spirited, like a Clydesdale that thinks it’s a quarter horse.

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Director:  | Released:  | 160 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

Now don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a terminator, right?

You have to hand it to James Cameron. He knows how to spend money. Not only did he spend $300 million on Avatar without blinking, but he was the first to sink $200 million into a picture, that being Titanic. Even before that, T2 was the movie to break Hollywood’s $100 million cherry. Considering the results, none of that money was wasted, but do we really want to keep encouraging this sort of behavior? What happened to the James Cameron who could make the first Terminator movie for less than the loose change he found in his sofa?

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

It’s hard to argue with the results when they look like this. Terminator 2 takes the lean, stripped-down muscle car that was the original and straps on a couple of booster rockets from the space shuttle. It’s sci-fi action filmmaking at such a level of relentless professionalism that it just wears you down and makes you hand over your skepticism like it was your lunch money.

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Director:  | Released:  | 137 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Them! (1954)

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Spit’s all that’s holding me together right now, too.

Them! launched what would be Hollywood’s version of the Godzilla movie, expressing our atomic-age fears via giant bugs and insects instead of rubber lizards. This particular sub-genre has been largely forgotten by our collective movie memory, but Them! remains as an example of 1950s sci-fi done with a style and self-confident maturity that the category often lacks.

Them!

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Director:  | Released:  | 94 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Invictus (2009)

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

How do we inspire ourselves to greatness when nothing less will do?

Invictus deals with two subjects alien to many Americans: African politics and rugby. After seeing it, I felt I understood just a bit more… about African politics. Rugby remains a complete mystery to me. It still seems like a bunch of drunk farm boys trying to steal someone’s chickens. I firmly believe it was invented in a courtroom to explain to a judge why the defendants had been chasing each other through the mud in their underwear.

Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon

Whatever its origins, the game served Nelson Mandela’s purposes in helping to unite his deeply divided nation. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 134 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Up (2009)

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

Squirrel!

What has always amazed me about the combined output of Pixar Animation is not just the consistent quality of the storytelling, but how different each film is from all the others. The Incredibles was as little like Cars as it was different from WALL-E. Disney’s traditional animation since The Little Mermaid, while often highly accomplished, has a certain sameness to it. With the exception of The Lion King, every film in that canon seems to have a heroine that resembles Belle from Beauty and the Beast.

Up

Up continues Pixar’s proud tradition of breaking its own mold with a charming film that takes a touching story of an old man’s promise to his late wife and effortlessly combines it with a giddy child’s fantasy. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 96 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Rollerball (1975)

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

Don’t try to frighten me. You don’t know how.

Rollerball is one of those movies that, once you dig down past the disco-era cheese, you might find very thoughtful and prescient science-fiction. On the other hand, you might just find another layer of that cheese. Norman Jewison’s 1975 fable of full-contact sports gone insane dares you not to take it seriously, to dismiss it as merely a more cerebral cousin of Logan’s Run.

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Director:  | Released:  | 125 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Heat (1995)

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Now, if you’re on me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a marriage?

Pacino buys DeNiro a cup of coffee

Poor old Michael Mann. Here he was getting ready to make what was going to be the Lawrence of Arabia/Citizen Kane of cops-and-robbers movies, and he thought he had the legendary Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino working together for the first time. What happens? They pull a switcheroo on him and stick him with the world’s worst Pacino impersonator. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 170 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Seven Days in May (1964)

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

You got something against the English language, Colonel?

Seven Days in May

Directed by John Frankenheimer, this film teams with his masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate to form a potent one-two punch of Cold War paranoia. The earlier film, with Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey, boasted a more complex plot and a layer of political satire that’s not found here. That doesn’t make Seven Days in May a lesser film, just a different one with different goals. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 118 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

S.O.B. (1981)

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Ben: I’ve seen week-old corpses that looked healthier.

Cully: But not happier.

I don’t think William Holden’s presence in this movie is a coincidence, because he almost automatically puts you in mind of Sunset Boulevard, and Blake Edwards1981 movie is obviously meant to make Billy Wilder’s 1950 poison pen letter to Hollywood look like a Shakespearean love sonnet. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 122 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Ghostbusters (1984)

Saturday, April 30th, 2011

Why worry? Each one of us is carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back.

Ghostbusters represents such a high water mark for not only the careers of those involved, but also for comedy in general, that it’s hard to overstate the level of accomplishment on screen. It’s difficult enough to make a good movie, not just a good comedy, but to produce a comedy classic while dealing with the complications of an ambitious special effects picture has to be some kind of cinematic grand slam.

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Director:  | Released:  | 105 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Speed (1994)

Friday, April 29th, 2011

Did you have any luck with the bomb?

Yeah. It didn’t go off.

Over the years, the words “Directed by Jon De Bont” and “Starring Keanu Reeves” have not always been recipes for awesomeness (Reeves does get points for Point Break, of course), but I guess accidents can happen. Of all the films built on the Die Hard blueprint, Speed is pretty much the only one that didn’t suck even a little.

Speed

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Director:  | Released:  | 116 min. | Rated:  | Genres: