My Favorite Movies

The one liners are pretty special, though the plotting is terrible, suspense cannot be disbelieved in such shoestring circumstances. No, no, do not call it an action movie. I look at it as a sly failure in the midst of "Dirty Harry" style (and no substance) actioners. "His Girl Friday" also had a screwball plot and a tennis match of a couple's debate, this film lives up to those ideals. The battle of words between Clint and his ex-wife is witty and cathartic, and the desert chase and armor plated trailways bus are the stage upon which "The Taming of the Shrew" gets its guns on.

Contest of wills, overplotting, dialogue. Audrey has a special way of making Givenchy and $4000 purses bearable to a non consumerist, she's more than the clothes. Cary feels uncomfortable throughout the whole picture, which brought out the best in him. Paris atmosphere is a stereotypical plot gag, but alright because I admit I'm watching it for the travel brochure. A lot familiar faces plot and quarrel through this picture, not the least of which is the latin can-can of Henry Mancini. Solidly, capably made.

Terry Southern did not write the screenplay in good taste. Roger Vadim was not a man of good intentions. Jane Fonda does not seem to realize the joke that's being played on her. This is not just a B-movie where the heroine walks from cardboard set to cardboard set in futuristic outfits, even though that may be what the producers paid to see. Instead, the budget, the source material, the whole 60s enterprise, is being mocked with rhetorical dexterity and saytrishness. Real motive: This is Candide in the Space Age. Or did you miss that? This is camp but it also outsmarts you, which means you can't dismiss it as a mere artifact, because sometimes, the old ways, are so much better.

Too bad they remade it. It's off the wall and free. Django doesn't act because it's logical. Instead his destiny with the bridge is a dream and depression inspired fantasy projected into reality, an irrational irresolvable commitment to that woman he lost. It wouldn't have been so straightforward if it had used logic.

An underdog movie, that succeeds the less and less popular it is perceived. Bandies about thick music industry stereotypes in high camp. Begs you to see more than the gonzo, by quoting Hitchock/Welles behind the scenes. Some truly great songwriting from Paul Williams, despite the novelty lyrics.

An inversion of Mickey's politics. Meeker manages to infuse interest into Hammer's character through his brutishness and sleaziness. The noirishness goes for the jugular in this one, and by that I mean the misogyny

What is it about this type of urban quest that needs no language, logic, or mcguffin? Blatherly philosophizing instead of ear-cringing one-liners (no writer including Hammet, Elroy, or Chandler has never flipped of at least one ill-advised hokey-sounding cliche, or at least had one written into their movies). The comedic opening (continuous shot of up the elevator) and quarrel against Beatrix Third class is memorable and starts of an enthusiastic deconstruction of detective fiction. If you can recite the Kohans with the earnestness Godard gives to his filming (no snark, no "I'm really much cooler than them" contemporary american college humor) than you'll learn the secrets hid within the thick eyes of Natasha von Braun.

The movie that started the paris student riots, a sequence of moods, less a straightforward plot. A movie like they don't make anymore, one like they never made.

You get to the hospital, you're about halfway through the flick. You're in for a wild ride.

A movie to demonstrate how terrible a person you are. So it's drawn out, over the top. We all have to appreciate a good old fashioned date movie, which gets deeper into the details of relationships and obsession by reveling in its negativity. "Ravishing." (That's a sick in-joke)

Hard marching drumbeats, Clint fights Nazis, you know you want it.

Okay, a spoof, but you know what: they've got timing. They've got original gags, a million a minute, and you see that there's an emotional, intelligent attachment to the writing (they reach). How often has the spoof formula, in newer films, failed to live up to this level of showmanship and determination. Mel Brooks is all risk.

It's a stage play. The Leopold and Loeb murder. They should remake it in a dormroom in Adam's house.

The last turn, you don't expect, which makes this movie watchable twice under two expectations, a feature I congratulate.

Noir and New Orleans. It's what you want, despite De Niro camping it beyond what needs be. Foreshadowing overkill (black nuns in white robes!). But Mickey Rourke is great, as cool with the PI character as all the greats. He pushes the method to Brando limits.

This is about being sentimental. But hey, you've got to savor your John Laroquette opportunities (I also like houseguest). Somehow "Do you believe in magic", allows Balki to hijack a jumbo jet and drive it down Route 78 and save the day. New age mixed with cynicism is cool.

An indy that does make you want to puke, but gets saved by the modest reality from D'Onofrio. But the kid brother doing Il-chung has the perfect moment, we could be stuck in the main character's self obsession, but it's the little non-actor that frees it.

The Hemingway is tediously boring (sport fishing, I get it, but...), the drunk gets needlessly annoying, Hoagy Carmichael steals one too many scenes, and the "not quite as menacing as the real thing" Vichy police state doesn't give the desperate undertone of danger that Casablanca had. But between the staged anachronisms, the noir courtship between Bogart and Bacall is what sells the film. The Vichy element, plot doesn't make sense and is largely time filler. Bacall owns the film, even while being decentralized from the action. What you wish is that it had been more of her, what she was doing as a runaway American thief trying to get her way home, less adventures on a boat.

Watched this a thousand times in elementary school, usually on snow days. Three kids build a spaceship out of a junked tilt-a-whirl, with the help of alien technology given to them during dreams, hardwired into a Commodore 64. They float through space, fly havoc about town, and have an adventure.

Is it believable? Is it Oscar worthy? Does this fading 8mm print stand as a thriller against the psycho-stalker-killer features that came after? Eh. You'd still like to be Donald Sutherland. He's up way over his head, but comes through, victory comes to the farmhand.

This, like Van Peebles, under-rated, and sells itself as sleeze. But the contest of wills is better than that. If you're looking for anti-social noirish fun, there's a lot more here in this late-night TV movie than you get from all the decade's big-budget horror-torture . Celebrates the contest between a coward and a sociopath.

Made in Italy, existentialist humor, Rupert Everett plays Dylan Dog's cemetery worker friend. At what point does it go off the deep end? Why does Anna Falchi keep coming back as every woman Rupert meets? Does the persistence of the dead contrast something against Dellamorte's lifeless emotionally impotent dead end purgatory? Rupert shows that he deserves to be a leading man, proving despite himself that he can be heroic and risk-taking as any character, more self-effacing than preening limited Hollywood types.

The Court Jester's lullabye, aren't you glad they made it?

Filmed all in a bank in Los Angeles with a few exterior shots. A "heist gone wrong" movie, and thats the plot of it. Eric's unleashed insanity isn't believable, but it's definitely expressionist. Did you want catch phrases? References to 80s television? Heroism/celebration of the selfish, lawless sadists? Well you don't get that Tarantino moral equivocation in this film. You've got a single guiding light, Julie Delphy is hot. Why not admit that we're seeing what our terrible desires want to see, because the easy way out doesn't seem as appealing as the outrageous way.

This is an Altman and Elliot show that happens to work off a Chandler script by Leigh Brackett. Talky, quirky, anti-sex-symbol,Elliot isn't doing the hardboiled as much as the down trodden. Maybe they're doing the "40s icon set in the 70s" thing or maybe they aren't, the colors are too bright for noir, and you think there might be comedy. Yet it feels like Los Angeles, and the Hemingway conundrum makes this deal more poetic than the standard chandler "mob bosses and freak characters make puzzling announcements" fare. Sterling Hayden is a big, scary, guy, bigger than Arnold in his yellow thong; you're worried for Nina's safety, Elliot's safety, but you don't know what's really going on in these jagged scenes from a marriage until it wanders off to its destruction. When the film ends, the denoument is more vicious than what Chandler imagined, and you can't listen to the radio "Hooray for Hollywood" again without considering the nasty, soured results. Well, we'll drink a freezer cold coffee mug of akavit to the loss of Altman, a man unafraid to direct his actors in their neuroses at 50 fps witticisms, we lost a good cat.