The Best Movie Casts

I first watched LA at a very depressing time of my life. It was the holiday season, and my heart was broken because the girl I love was going out with this complete jackass. I was in tremendous pain, but I watched this movie and I felt a regenerative power that I have seldom felt before or since. Every scene of love found, love lost, love gotten resonated within me and I laughed, smiled and sighed continuously. The music is wonderful, more so because it sets the mood of nostalgia and melancholy so wonderfully. This movie has a large amount the crème de la crème of British film on its cast (and some non-Brits too). Everyone and everything is so beautiful, filled with Curtis' trademark wit and warmth. I have seen this film dozens of times and it still works its magic on me. This movie is always there to cheer me up and for that I believe it to be one of the best films I have ever seen.

A crime/action caper filled with Tarantino's trademark dialogue and pop culture reference woven into a romantic story filled with gangsters, pimps, cocaine, hookers and Hollywood types. The scene between Chris Walken and Dennis Hopper is one of moviedom's best, but for my money James Gandolfini shines as a brutal (yet philosophical) mob enforcer, showcasing a great talent even in his early movie years.

I have a theory that the main factor that determines what makes a movie great comes from how much we see ourselves in its story and characters. "The Godfather" not only does that for individuals, but the entire human experience. It's a thrilling Mafia movie, as well as a moving saga about family. Artistically speaking, it is perfect: the acting, the directing, the script. It's dark, funny, angry, joyous, brooding, romantic, violent and enlightening. After many years watching, I still notice new things and I'm never bored by it. I could watch it in one sitting once a month and feel like it's the first time I've seen it. And beneath the story of organize crime, there lies a rich, lush epic about the war between tradition and modernity, loyalty and betrayal, love and bloodshed and our very own struggle, family and friends included, to survive in a savage world of hyper-capitalism and dying honor. Simply The Best.

Kurosawa's most awesome film is perhaps the most artistically perfect action film of all time. Containing one of the best ensemble movie casts, ably led by screen legends like Takeshi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune, the film doesn't waste a single minute of its 3:30 long screen time. It doesn't drag, contains both light humorous moments and terse dramatic scenes, and it develops character and plot with tremendous easiness. Kurosawa's use of slow motion and expertly edited scenes enhances the thrilling action and the title characters all come on their own and become flesh and blood human beings in a masterpiece that deals with issues like class, heroism, moral dilemmas and loss in the midst of rarely surpassed epic adventure.
BEST SCENE: The Battle In the Rain.

While cryptic dialogue and shadowy chracters took a little of it's grade for me, there's no denying the excitement of this movie's car chases and loud gunfights. DeNiro and Reno make a terrific pair and McElhone is ridiculously beautiful. There's a great supporting cast and a great David Mamet script filled with memorable hard-boiled lines.

One of the most meditative and philosophically complex films you'll ever see. Bardem is terrifying and Brolin is effective but this is the story of Jones's sheriff, who confronts a world of increasingly senseless violence, decaying values and his own mortality and existence. This movie will stay with you for a while and make you contemplate issues like fatalism and the value of life. A masterpice.

Words cannot describe the blood-and-thunder majesty of the greatest western of all time, and one of the most important movies of my life. It introduced me to the great Sam Peckinpah, and it also affected how I view movies and how I hope to direct and edit them. This movie changed the world with its depiction of brutal hyper-violence, brilliantly slow-motion and multi-scene cross-cutting time. It is an enjoyable adventure film, with the aptly-titled Bunch waging war against some icons of Mexican film. Almost every scene is a classic, and codes of honor, male bonding and the death of the West are present, the latter perfectly summed up in the climatic Battle of the Bloody Porch, the best gunfight I have ever seen and a truly numbing orgy of death and destruction. This leads into a moving ending complete with a rousing rendition "La Golondrina"�, the Mexican funeral song par excellence. A true masterpiece.

Funny and touching. This is the actual story of my life. I'm Andy and the Arab guys, Alex is David, Stephen and Myles are Cal and Brandon is Jay, only white and more sexist. Oh, and Kevin is the weird guy at the Ebay store.