I feel like I should open by saying: Hi. It’s been a while. As of late, I really haven’t had the time or energy to keep up this blog as much as I typically want to, which has resulted in an utter wasteland of writing on here. The last thing I wrote was almost two months ago and was about the Oscars. Things are dire. So in an effort to turn that around, I’ve settled on a single, expansive project that I can churn out in manageable installments. What I’ve decided to do is to take my unwieldy top 150 films list that I constantly tinker with, break it up into 10 film chunks, and count them down on here. I have no schedule for when these will be written. I cannot pretend to believe that it’ll be at a one-per-week pace. I can only hope that the pace will be better than what it has been. So let’s dive in. Today we have 150-141, a very strange collection of varied horror movies, arthouse masterpieces, and goofy comedies, for some reason. We begin with a film that could fit comfortably into all three categories:
150– Evil Dead II (Sam Raimi, 1987)
The pinnacle of one of the greatest franchises in film history, Evil Dead II sits at the intersection of the first film’s nasty horror and Army of Darkness‘s gonzo comedy. It simultaneously refines the rough edges of The Evil Dead and contorts the trimmed fat into something unique, something that epitomizes Raimi’s career-long commitment to delivering films in conversation with his own id. This is a movie that was directed with the sole purpose of driving forward reckless abandon. To watch it is to get swept up in pure cinematic chaos.
MVP: Bruce Campbell. No contest.
149– Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)
Like Evil Dead II, Being John Malkovich works as an experience of pure bewilderment. Unlike Evil Dead II, there’s something going on here besides the chaos. You pivot from laughing at the absurdity of John Malkovich and the New Jersey Turnpike to being genuinely invested in the dark story that’s always been secretly at play. Charlie Kaufman’s ability to probe the human psyche arrived fully formed. A rare thing that feels both profound and easily enjoyable for how funny it is, because it is funny. There’s just a lot more here.
MVP: Malkovich.
148– Inferno (Dario Argento, 1980)
Let’s make it a 3 film run of pure insanity. I believe I’ve talked about Dario Argento on here before, but allow me to do it again anyway: Argento makes fever dreams. If what Raimi’s doing with Evil Dead II is creating a bewildering, stream-of-consciousness nightmare playground, Argento just makes nightmares. The swagger with which he carries his work off is entertaining as hell, but he also genuinely unsettles in an uncanny way. His films communicate primal fears: fears of old buildings, secluded areas, creepy weirdos. There are moments in Inferno that feel so hooked into everything horror movies should be that one wonders why the guy didn’t just retire.
MVP: Give it up for the color blue!
147– That Thing You Do! (Tom Hanks, 1996)
When I was finalizing this list, going over the last few, making ultimate cuts, a thought occurred to me. That thought was “You know what I would really love to put on here somewhere? That Thing You Do“. I mourned the fact that I absolutely could not do this for a second before another thought occurred to me, which was “Wait a minute. This is my list. I can do that”. And here we are. That Thing You Do is one of the most easily watchable movies I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing that feels out of place, nothing that impedes the ridiculous enjoyment it coasts on. Does that necessarily make it one of the greatest movies ever made? Absolutely.
MVP: The song. This doesn’t work if you’re not down to hear the song a billion times, and it manages to pull it off easily.
146– My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)
Hayao Miyazaki has built a career out of putting wonder on the screen. The key to Miyazaki’s cinema is his boundless imagination, his capacity to come up with magical creatures and animals and translate them to vibrant imagery. To me, this is why My Neighbor Totoro succeeds so well: the titular Totoro is maybe the epitome of Miyazaki’s ability to throw random crap at the scene and compel amazement. Every time he moves, speaks, or just straight up exists on screen, it’s an important cinematic moment.
MVP: Totoro. Look at him for five seconds and tell me I’m wrong.
145– The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer, 1986)
In which Eric Rohmer invites you to wallow in listlessness for about 100 minutes, pausing briefly to give a science lesson about the optics of sunsets. It’s great stuff– Rohmer’s style is laid back and inviting enough that the film’s woozy depression never feels overbearing, and you get to be sad while luxuriating in his wonderfully-communicated feeling of summer. The genius lies in the way it’s enjoyable to watch while also burrowing under your skin, providing a catharsis you didn’t realize you needed while also making you self-aware of things you previously weren’t.
MVP: Marie Riviere completely owns this thing. I’m pretty sure she’s in literally every scene, and I’m almost positive that she plays the only character in more than one scene, so I’m not sure how cutting an observation this is.
144- RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
If Starship Troopers was to become Verhoeven’s crowning achievement in his brand of flagrant satirical over-the-top-ness, and Total Recall his opus in sci-fi worldbuilding, the fact that RoboCop is his best film can be explained by how well it synthesizes both of those things. It’s not that Starship Troopers doesn’t create a fully realized world, it does, and it’s not that Total Recall doesn’t work well as a satire, it does. It’s that RoboCop is so stunning in the way it constructs a perfect facsimile of contemporary America in an otherwise unrecognizable reality. What RoboCop has to tell us about ourselves and our society manages to outdo what RoboCop has to tell us about robots shooting dudes.
MVP: The pre-Twin Peaks Miguel Ferrer/Ray Wise tag team, which provides this film with double the normal amount of going “Oh hey it’s the Twin Peaks guy!” at a movie.
143– The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016)
One of the greatest comedies of the 21st century, as well as one of the most unsung. My earliest memory of The Nice Guys was seeing a trailer for it before Batman vs Superman, thinking “Oh wow that looks cool as hell”, and promptly forgetting about it for four years before finally watching it and realizing that it is, in fact, cool as hell. It’s everything you (read: me) might want in this kind of movie: ridiculously committed to its period, featuring an all-too-rare Ryan Gosling comedic performance, utter nonsense. Also, funny as hell. Can’t even begin to imagine how often I think “all the bees are riding around in cars these days” to myself and laugh. I must ask again, does any of this merit consideration at this level of cinematic quality? And to which I answer again, of course it does. The Nice Guys is a cinematic masterpiece.
MVP: Gosling. “Porn is bad.” Second place goes to corpse Robert Downey Jr, though.
142– The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, 1993)
Pretty much as perfect as the American studio action-thriller can possibly get. The Fugitive is never dull, never less than completely engrossing, never in danger of letting adrenaline levels drop. It’s such a simple cat and mouse story that’s made into a something special by the commitment of the craft and the performances: Tommy Lee Jones’s “I don’t care” remains the pinnacle of his career, and Ford might be doing his best work here too. Also a notable relic of the period in the early 90s where Julianne Moore was in a bunch of one-scene bit parts that feel almost designed to take advantage of the fact that she was about to be a huge star. She plays an almost completely inconsequential character in this who nonetheless gets undue attention and gravitas that feel like the film was laying the groundwork for decades-later rewatches in which she was the consensus best performer in the cast. I don’t know why I wrote like half of this on the Julianne Moore effect. Odd choice. Anyway, phenomenal movie.
MVP: Tommy Lee Jones
141– Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)
Audition is so notorious by now that its primary weapon has been lost. It’s as much of a horror movie as anything else has ever been, but you wouldn’t know it going in blind until maybe the last half hour. This slow burns into hell from a drama borne from what could reluctantly be described as a romcom, but oh man does it ever arrive in hell. Audition is scarring. It’s something you come out on the other side of more than something you watch. It is a nightmare. And it’s stunningly well-made enough that it compels fascination long before it ever arrives there. You could, conceivably, inflict this upon someone who had never heard of it by just giving them the elevator pitch (“guy holds audition for a girlfriend”) and pressing play. You could watch them stick with it and then slowly realize what’s happening, and then watch them recoil in shock and disgust. And then they’d never speak to you again, and they’d be right to do it.
MVP: Eihi Shiina’s repetition of “kiri kiri kiri kiri”, which will be with me until the end of time.
The Movie Files 
Seriously! At 17 you lack energy! You’re screwed at 30!
LikeLike