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.

Poltergeist

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★★★★★

Conceived and shot virtually in tandem with E.T., Poltergeist is that film’s loud and scary cousin. Whatever the controversy about who actually directed it, this tight, nifty suburban ghost story is unquestionably a Spielberg movie. He produced, wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay, leaving his trademarks all over the place. The archetypal middle-class family living in an ever expanding sprawl of housing tracts shares a lot of DNA with the less happy families in Close Encounters and E.T.

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The Enemy Below

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★★★★★[/types]]

Often imitated, this movie practically drew the blueprint for the World War II submarine movie. This lean, efficient story of the hunter and the hunted rises above the pack, courtesy of a pair of superb performances in the roles of two crisply drawn antagonists. Some elements of the film seem conspicuously dated, especially the scenes aboard the American destroyer that don’t involve Robert Mitchum hunting the submarine, but when the action is joined, the forced, stilted dialog disappears like it never existed.

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Glory

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★★★★★[/types]]

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144 years ago this coming week, a Union regiment from Massachusetts led a futile assault on a Confederate bastion near Charleston known as Battery Wagner. As Civil War battles go, it was relatively minor and would normally go unremarked compared to the Battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg, which both happened at roughly the same time. What made this action remarkable was the fact that 54th Massachusetts Volunteers was the first regular unit of the Union army to consist entirely of black soldiers, led by a white colonel, the son of prominent Boston abolitionists.

As an account of this event, Glory is reasonably accurate and thoroughly inspiring, built around a core of superb actors giving some of their best performances. It’s portrayal of Civil War combat is technically on par with the later Gettysburg, only more realistic and bloody, fully deserving of the film’s R rating.

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Gettysburg

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★★★★★[/types]]

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Eighty-seven years after they founded this country with the institution of slavery still intact, the country celebrated the Fourth of July in the bloodiest way possible in any effort to resolve that question. The Turner Network’s film of the decisive Battle of Gettysburg is a rigorously faithful adaption of Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels. Perhaps they were a bit too faithful. This movie occasionally suffers from a little of what I call “The Longest Day Syndrome,” which is the tendency for characters to pontificate on the importance of the events in the film as if they were reading from, well, the pages of Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels.

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1776

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★★★★★[/types]]

If the rest of American history would have had such great musical numbers, I might have gotten better grades. Okay, this adaptation of the hit Broadway play wasn’t exactly letter-perfect history but it is remarkably faithful to the facts for, you know, a musical. It’s also extremely entertaining if you allow for its stage bound origins.

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Lethal Weapon

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★★★★★[/types]]

You might not remember it, but this film was Mel Gibson’s “comeback” after his first career meltdown during the mid-eighties. At least that one didn’t wind up offending any ethnic groups. Through the production of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Gibson had acquired a reputation for surliness, hard drinking and brawling, until he finally walked away from the movies for two years. This 1987 prototype of the buddy cop movie marked not only his return to the film business but the birth of a new Mel Gibson, the funny action star with the Three Stooges fetish.

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Kelly’s Heroes

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★★★★★[/types]]

A contemporary of both M*A*S*H and Patton, this gleefully anti-establishment World War II comedy manages to bridge both films, turning a lot of the clichés of earlier war movies on their heads while not totally disrespecting the genre. The American GIs in this film are still square-jawed and tough-as-nails, but they are also tired of war and bored out of their minds.

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The Hunt for Red October

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★★★★★[/types]]

How quickly did we leave the Cold War behind? The dust had barely settled on the fall of the Berlin Wall when this 1990 Tom Clancy adaptation was treating the subject like a period film. Of course, the world had changed so drastically since the novel’s 1984 publication that it was impossible to view the material as current events.

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail

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★★★★★[/types]]

Believe it or not, those potheads who sat around all day back in the seventies, listening to Led Zeppelin IV or Dark Side of the Moon, actually contributed something worthwhile to Western Civilization

Members of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd used some of the profits from their albums to help finance a little gem of cinematic anarchy known as Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

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The Abyss

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Theatrical Cut: ★★★★★
Special Edition: ★★★★★[/types]]

James Cameron’s deep sea science fiction tale is one of those rare instances of a director revisiting a finished work and genuinely improving the film. The 1989 theatrical release was marred by an abrupt, confusing ending that was the product of Cameron removing almost an entire storyline to bring the film down to a more commercial 146 minute running time. This drastic surgery earned it some lukewarm reviews when it first hit theaters.

Four years later, Cameron re-released a 171 minute cut to theaters and then home video. Continue reading →

Casino Royale

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★★★★★[/types]]

You can tell right from the start that Casino Royale is cut from a different mold than the previous twenty James Bond films. For one, the pre-credits sequence features a brutal, drawn-out fight scene that is very atypical for the film series, which usually prefers its violence more stylized and sanitized. The credit sequence also breaks with Bond custom, which usually emphasized the female nude in discreet silhouette, this time depicting violence against male figures without a single naked girl in sight.

Daniel Craig’s first outing as Ian Fleming’s classic super-spy feels like they tore down a Trump casino and built an army barracks in its place. Continue reading →

Best In Show

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★★★★★[/types]]

Best In Show is easily the funniest of the three Christopher Guest mockumetaries, if only because it keeps a bit of distance from its subjects and is better able to take its jabs at these uncommonly obsessive people. The movie doesn’t hold dog fanciers up for abject ridicule but it does expect them to be able to take a joke at their expense.

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