The top fifty, so far, are:
50. Total Recall
49. The Wrestler
48. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
47. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
46. The Game
45. Saw
44. Shrek
43. The Hills Have Eyes
42. Fletch
41. The Fifth Element
Marching on:
40. True Romance - I could say a million good things about the story and the dialogue and the cinematography, but you can't discuss True Romance properly without talking about the casting. Off the top of my head, I can't immediately think of a movie with more star power, even in the smallest roles. Special recognition goes to Brad Pitt as Floyd the stoney roommate ("Get some beer ... and some cleaning products ..."), Christopher Walken as the mafia lawyer ("I'm the anti-Christ and you got me in a vendetta kind of mood."), and the never-disappointing Gary Oldman as Drexel the pimp ("He must've thought today was white boy day. It ain't white boy day today, is it?"), but really, there's no one out of their league here. Written (but not directed) by Quentin Tarantino, True Romance is the dictionary definition of what a love story should be. That is to say, it's full of guns, cocaine, Los Angeles, and vulgar language. I guess that makes this a "chick flick" for dudes?
The Moral of the Story: All you need is love. Love is all you need.
39. The Usual Suspects - "Who is Keyser Soze?" was one of the best marketing campaigns I can remember, and the buzz around this movie seems, in retrospect, much more organic and honest than the whole "midnight screening event" thing that has taken hold of the movie industry. The Usual Suspects is one of the rare cases in which the movie lives up to and exceeds the expectations created by the hype. It's got one of the most engaging stories on this list, exceptional acting (Kevin Spacey, of course, is amazing, but the entire cast owns it), and you just can't say enough about the ending. If I were making a list of the best plot twists of all time, this would easily be in the top five, if not number one - no matter how many times I watch this movie, watching it all unfold never gets any less enjoyable.
The Moral of the Story: Never judge a book by its cover.
38. The Dark Knight - Everybody loses their mind over Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker, which is certainly understandable but a bit of a disservice to the rest of the cast. Honestly, every time I watch this movie, it's Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent/Two-Face that really blows me away. And whenever Gary Oldman is in something, he is great and the movie usually is, too. As far as huge-budget blockbuster films, it doesn't get any better than this but there's one problem with The Dark Knight that kept it from ranking higher on the list: Christian Bale as Batman. Don't get me wrong - I think he's a good actor, and he's definitely handsome and charming enough to be peerless as Bruce Wayne. But then he puts on the Batman suit and drops his voice an octave and it's just a little too over-the-top for my taste. In the grand scheme of things, this is still a freaking excellent movie, though.
The Moral of the Story: When life hands you lemons, flip out and go psychotic.
37. Evil Dead II - All three of the movies in the Evil Dead series made my short list, and any could have easily made the top fifty - for that matter, Sam Raimi's lesser-appreciated but equally magnificent Darkman also could have made the cut. But I only had one space open so I went with the middle installment of the trilogy primarily because it is, hands down, the single most bizarre movie I have ever seen in my life: demonic tree possessions; limbs self-severed by, and replaced with, a chainsaw; flying eyeballs; the boomstick; a teleportation vortex back to the Middle Ages. Yet no matter how off-the-wall the plot becomes, it never gets unfocused or loses the balance between horror and humor. Topping it all off: Bruce Campbell, the only man alive who can say "groovy" and still be cool.
The Moral of the Story: Always expect the unexpected.
36. Sin City - Most books lose something in translation to film. This is especially true for graphic novels, which are already so tightly bound to images and visual composition that it's hard to either reinvent them or to recreate them faithfully. Sin City is the exception to that rule. Robert Rodriguez (and, to a lesser extent, Quentin Tarantino and series creator Frank Miller) beautifully recreated the world of the novel, shooting most of the movie digitally against green screens to allow him to fill in the backgrounds with the radical camera angles and semi-exaggerated set pieces in the original work. The high-contrast black and white presentation - using only brief flashes of color from scene to scene - is absolutely gorgeous to watch; of all the films on this list, this might well be my favorite, aesthetically. It would also land somewhere on my list for "best casting" - Bruce Willis, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Clarke Duncan, Clive Owen, and another amazing comeback performance by Mickey Rourke, to name just a few. Just about every minute of Sin City is filled with something awesome and it's about as close to flawless as movies get.
The Moral of the Story: Crime doesn't pay, except when it does.
Tomorrow: #31-35. [[justin]]
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