Day Forty-Three: The Green Mile

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #91
Year: 1999
Director: Frank Darabont
Starring: Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan

I can't even joke about how Frank Darabont only makes movies about inspirational black men serving time in prison that have been adapted from Stephen King books right now. This movie was just way too good. There is almost definitely no movie more similar to The Shawshank Redemption than The Green Mile, but I can't even consider that a criticism. Both movies are so damn good in their own right that whining about their similarity and the fact that they share a director (and source material author) is all but invalid.

Just to make this easier on me, MASSIVE SPOILERS LURK AHEAD! There, now we can get started.

If the two movies are going to be compared anyway, it makes sense to start with where they differ. In Shawshank, human resilience and grit wins the day. Andy escapes because he just keeps chipping away at that hole in his wall with a rock hammer, and Red gets out because he is perfectly honest with his jailers when he's brought up on consideration for parole. Relatively small tragedies punctuate the film, but the two main protagonists are freed, and the main antagonist is dead. That's the ending everyone wants. In The Green Mile, we fall in love with John Coffey, the gentle giant who can heal ailments, but he gets executed, and his co-protagonist is cursed to live an exceptionally long life and watch all his friends and family die. There is no catharsis. Great things happen all along the way – and sad ones, too – but the ending offers no closure, except that of John Coffey's death. It makes the prevailing tone a hell of a lot bleaker than that of Shawshank, that's for sure.

The points of similarity come through mostly in the writing and direction. The Green Mile and Shawshank are filmed in a pretty similar way, and both create that claustrophobic, imprisoned feeling for the viewer that Darabont is so great at capturing. While the camera is inside the walls of this prison, you're going to feel hopeless. I think it's fair to recognize Darabont's direction slightly less than I did when I wrote on Shawshank since he basically self-plagiarized all of his techniques. It's still impressive and still a pleasure to watch, but it shouldn't be mistaken for something original, even within his own filmography.

The comparison to Shawshank that The Green Mile has earned which is the biggest compliment as the most accurate assessment is that it pulls off something truly epic in scope while managing to feel totally unpretentious. Frank Darabont spent over three hours telling his audience about a convicted murderer on death row who can heal people with a power that he received, in accordance with what all the characters believe, from God. That could be a formula for making the schmaltziest movie of all time, but it's entirely engrossing instead, and I've never talked to anyone who didn't love this movie. I'm a stone-cold atheist and I had no problem accepting that this character, within the context of the film's universe, received his magical power from God. I was seeing things in strict black and white moral shades that I don't even believe exist. Stephen King and Frank Darabont and Michael Clarke Duncan and Tom Hanks sold this to me, and I didn't even put up a fight. It was that good. Make no mistake, The Green Mile is deserving of the praise it receives.

The Good: That rare combination of epic feel and unpretentiousness.

The Bad: I'll be honest, both lead performances are highly overrated. Tom Hanks is doing his "Tom Hanks with a southern accent" character, and Michael Clarke Duncan overacts the shit out of a few key scenes. The script and cinematography are strong enough that the performances aren't distracting, but they certainly aren't great.

The Skinny: I can deal with this at #91. I really liked it.

Day Forty-Two: Duck Soup

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #221
Year: 1933
Director: Leo McCarey
Starring: Groucho Marx and Harpo Marx

While a lot of the Charlie Chaplin pictures on this list might feel too antiquated to the casual modern viewer to be good for much, the Marx Brothers' rambunctious style of comedy – one which combines classic vaudevillian slapstick with carefully measured witticisms and biting satire – remains accessible and, more importantly, hilarious even today. Duck Soup is the only Marx Brothers film that made its way onto the Top 250, and while it isn't considered their finest hour by the troupe's most devoted cultists, it's an excellent entry point to their work and a fine movie in its own right.

Duck Soup finds Groucho Marx taking over as president of the fictitious nation of Freedonia and waging war on neighboring Sylvania so that he can wed, and eventually take the money of, the pompous Mrs. Teasdale. The plot doesn't particularly matter since it just exists as a vessel for the Brothers' hysterical satire about war, espionage and bureaucracy, Groucho's plentiful blink-and-you'll-miss-'em one-liners about Mrs. Teasdale, and a whole lot of physical comedy gags involving Harpo and Chico. That sounds like an oversimplification, but it really isn't. I don't mean that as an insult at all, though. If you consider that more comedies are made than films of any other genre, and that this one, which was released in 1933, has found itself being judged as one of the 250 greatest movies of all time, it should be clear that the humor in it is top-notch. Like most Marx Brothers films, Duck Soup is infinitely rewatchable, sidesplittingly hilarious, and by the grace of God (and Netflix), extremely easy to find.

Seeing as it is a 68 minute silly comedy, there isn't necessarily a lot to blog about. Sure, I could overanalyze its message as an anti-war film – which I don't believe it has – or the poignancy of Groucho's satire in the sensitive political times that the film was released during, but I won't. Instead, I'll suggest that you find a copy of the movie, whether instantly on Netflix or via a physical copy, watch it, laugh the entire time, and thank me afterward.

The Good: Funnier than 99% of the comedies that come out today, and made with a 1933 sense of humor. Of all the great comedy in the film, Groucho's one-liners are by far the best part.

The Bad: Too short! I mean, it might run long in the tooth if it topped 100 minutes, but they could have easily milked it for more than 68.

The Skinny: I can't believe it's only #221, and I can't believe that it's the only Marx Brothers picture on the list. Needs to be much higher, and needs to be joined by Animal Crackers and A Night at the Opera.

Day Forty-One: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #237
Year: 1993
Diretor: Henry Selick
Starring: Danny Elfman and Chris Sarandon

I was thinking about waiting to do this one until either Halloween or Christmas Eve or Christmas, any of which would have been more relevant than August 12th, but oh well – I worked from 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. today, and I did not at all feel like watching a movie when I got home. Instead, I'll be covering a movie that I've probably seen twenty times since its release. It's a minor holiday classic, and probably my favorite animated film of all time, so I shouldn't have any problem singing its praises for a few paragraphs.

The Nightmare Before Christmas follows Jack Skellington, the king of Halloweentown, as he faces a midlife crisis and finds himself questioning the merits of Halloween. Feeling empty, he stumbles upon Christmas Town and becomes immediately obsessed with that cheery holiday. He decides he and his Halloween cronies will try to pull off Christmas this year, and while his intentions are in the right place, the execution is painfully flawed, and he very nearly ruins the holiday. All this is driven by a classic Disney soundtrack written (and primarily sung) by former Oingo Boingo mainman and frequent Tim Burton collaborator Danny Elfman. Naturally, though, with Elfman and producer Burton pulling the strings, the result is much darker and much more tongue-in-cheek than the typical Disney fare, and it gives the film a dimension that helps to thrust it head-and-shoulders above films like Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid.

The most notable thing about this movie is the animation. For the first time in history, stop motion photography looked seamless and gorgeous, and actually suggested that there might be a real future in feature-length animated movies that weren't hand-drawn. (Toy Story confirmed this two years later.) I won't pretend to fully understand how stop-motion animation works, but the team behind Nightmare did an amazing job of moving their little figurines around and photographing them to create the illusion of motion. The illusion is so convincing, in fact, that the movie could pass for rudimentary computer animation – unlike the tragic current trend of making a film with rudimentary computer animation and trying to pass it off as stop-motion. 9, I'm looking straight at you.

The only real tragedy in this movie is that even though it was Tim Burton's baby – he wrote the poem it was based on when he was working as an animator for Disney in the early 1980s – he didn't get the chance to direct it because of his obligations behind the camera on Batman Returns. If he did, it probably would have been even better than it already is, and it undoubtedly would have become his best film. As it stands, The Nightmare Before Christmas is still my favorite animated movie of all time, and a true classic of the genre that we should kiss Disney's feet every day for boldly distributing.

The Good: The animation.

The Bad: A few of the songs have some laughable lyrics, but if you consider them tongue-in-cheek – which they are – everything is alright. But still, "I am the clown with the tear-away face!"

The Skinny: Way higher than my 237th favorite, probably in my top 25. But yes, it deserves to be on the list.

Day Forty: The Killing

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #185
Year: 1956
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Sterling Hayden and Elisha Cook

Most of the discussion surrounding The Killing, a 1950s noir classic centered on a failed heist of a racetrack, is about its director. That's fair; Stanley Kubrick would go on to direct more classics – including a whopping nine films on the IMDb Top 250 – than just about any other director ever. Unfortunately, it's precisely that that makes hordes of people question the quality of the film in question. It seems to be the consensus that The Killing is only even watched today because of what its director would go on to do later in his career, and that it isn't worth the praise that's been heaped upon it after the fact. I'm not sure if that's entirely fair; I enjoyed The Killing as much as any noir film I've ever seen.

Like the people who say this movie is only talked about because of its director, I think it's important to consider it in the context of Kubrick's career. Unlike those people, however, I think it's useful to look at it much as I look at Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese: as a brilliant introduction that shows us some of the techniques we would see more of in later, more fully realized masterpieces. Sure, The Killing has a pretty standard plot that pulls out most of the standard noir devices, but it's obvious that the hand of a master is guiding the process. The way the chronology is assembled, the series of unfortunate events that unfolds after the first failure in the heist plot, and the look of utter hopelessness on the protagonist's face in the long closing shot are all indicative of the power that Kubrick already wielded at such a (relatively) tender age.

The entire 83 minute movie is spent setting up, executing, and dealing with the aftermath of the heist at the racetrack. As such, there isn't a whole lot to talk about in terms of message or meaning, or much to read into beyond what's committed to the celluloid – not that that should matter. What you see is what you get with The Killing. It isn't the tangled web that some of Kubrick's later works would be, but it's still an occasionally psychologically taut, high quality film, and one well worth your time.

The Good: Following the plot and seeing how the heist unfolds singlehandedly puts this movie's bread on the table. You sure as hell won't be watching it for...

The Bad: ...the performances. Yikes. Not even competent, most of them.

The Skinny: Of the nine Kubrick films on the list, it deserves its spot the least of the ones I've seen. I still think it deserves its spot, though.

Day Thirty-Nine: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #66
Year: 1948
Director: John Huston
Starring: Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston

Ah, the backend of a two-part post. You'd better believe this movie is unfairly going to get the shaft. I'll give it my best shot to do it just a little bit of justice. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, like part one of today's double post, is a study of the effect of the gold rush on men's souls. Unlike that earlier film, though, it's a very serious treatment of the topic, and it doesn't shy away from some of the more grim realities of prospecting, including but not limited to murder. The movie follows three gringos living in Mexico – played wonderfully by Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and Tim Holt – who set off into the mountains to strike it rich as prospectors. Once they find a little bit of gold, they all start to get paranoid that the other guys will take their share. Living in fear of each other and the countless banditos that patrol the area, they are effectively driven mad by the gold.

Then there's the stinking badges, which the banditos don't need. There is possibly no line in movie history that has been paid homage to, parodied, stolen, copied, aped, plagiarized, and lampooned more than "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!", spoken by the Alfonso Bedoya when Bogart asks him where his badges are if he is indeed with the police. The line has become so ingrained in the national subconscious that any ten-year old kid who has never so much as heard of this movie would recognize it in a cold screening. The delivery of the actual line in its actual intended context, of course, is superb. Despite its decades of misuse, the source still holds up remarkably well, and that's a credit to Mr. Bedoya's performance.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a Western in a very general sense, but it's not one that looks like a Leone or Eastwood or Peckinpah film. The landscape is mostly mountainous, there are no lawmen or bounty hunters or cowboys or Indians. But the Western atmosphere pervades just the same, and the same vibe is felt when watching. It's not terribly fair to judge it against other Westerns, though; it's a traditional Hollywood movie made in the classical tradition, and it's no wonder that Bogart made it in the same decade that he made The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and The Big Sleep. Even though those films are (presumably) very different, they (presumably) have a similar Golden Age of Hollywood feel about them, and it's best to think of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in that context, not the context that Sergio Leone would establish fifteen years later. It's a great movie, even if some of that comes from the fact that it feels like it's supposed to be great.

The Good: There is a Wikipedia article entitled "Stinking badges." 'Nuff said.

The Bad: SPOILER ALERT: I didn't like seeing Bogey go. Even when he was devolving into a barely human greed machine, he was the most likable character.

The Skinny: #66 is really high for any movie and I'm not sure if I can totally get behind it here. If it was somewhere around #100 I would probably be a little more comfortable with its placement. Deserves to be on the list, though, without a doubt.

Day Thirty-Eight: The Gold Rush

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #176
Year: 1925
Director: Charlie Chaplin
Starring: Charlie Chaplin and Georgia Hale

My wireless connection has been acting up at home, so I'm doing two posts today to make up for skipping yesterday. By either coincidence or divine circumstance, the two films I'm writing on – Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush and John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – happen to be indelibly linked. Both examine the tremendous weight that the hunt for gold places on the human soul and the consequences it holds for relationships and mental stability. While The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which I'll discuss in more depth in my next post, won a screenplay Oscar for its very serious treatment of the subject, The Gold Rush offers a more comedic approach. But that's not to say it's a wholly lighthearted affair. Like most of Chaplin's best work, the film is anchored by its most serious moments, and there are plenty.

The Gold Rush has two scenes in particular that have become canonized as shining examples of Charlie Chaplin's greatness as a performer, but taking them out of context belies their depressing nature. In one scene, Chaplin's tramp and his hirsute companion Big Jim are sitting at the dinner table in their windswept cabin in the Klondike region. They haven't eaten in days, and their friend is lost outside in a blizzard. Chaplin saunters to the stove, and we see that he's preparing one of his boots in a boiling pot of water. He carves it like a Christmas goose, and he and Big Jim manage to choke it down. It's comical that they are eating a shoe, and that's all that seems to be remembered about the scene. But it's totally spirit-crushing that they're eating a shoe because they're starving to death on the Alaskan frontier, trapped in a shack because the blizzard outside is too strong for them to leave. In the other iconic scene, Chaplin entertains his dinner guests – including his love interest, the beautiful Georgia – by stabbing two rolls with forks to make them look like legs and doing a soft shoe dance routine on the table with them. We learn shortly after this that he had only dreamed this, and that he fell asleep waiting for dinner guests that never came. The dance routine is brilliantly executed and very funny, but it only happens because Chaplin was stood up by the only person he cares about in the Great White North while she was too busy partying with a burly, handsome jerk. Taken as a whole, the movie is only as funny as it is bleak.

Now, of course, there's a happy ending. Chaplin and Big Jim find their mountain of gold and become millionaires, and Chaplin gets the girl. This is a classic comedy, and nothing different should be expected. The somewhat contrived ending is hardly the point; the hour that leads up to it is. The Gold Rush is Chaplin at his bipolar best, and both the silent version and the 1942 version with narration by the star and director himself are worth watching.

The Good: The comedy is almost always born out of agony, and for having as much slapstick as it does, it's a very serious movie.

The Bad: Typical 1920s continuity and tape issues. Only distracting if you let them be.

The Skinny: Very deserving of its place.

Day Thirty-Seven: Kick-Ass

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #162
Year: 2010
Director: Matthew Vaughn
Starring: Aaron Johnson and Chloë Moretz

Enjoy this post, Kick-Ass lovers. This is probably the only year that someone doing an IMDb Top 250 blog will be able to write about it. When people criticize the list for being biased toward new, popular movies, this is pretty much exactly what they mean. Since it was on the list on the day that I set out to write this blog, though, I get to write about it. I'm more than okay with that, because Kick-Ass is one of my four or five favorite comic book movies of all time, and I watch every goddamn comic book movie that comes out.

Kick-Ass is a simple enough concept for a comic, but it still feels fresh. In an eight issue miniseries by Mark Millar with pencils by John Romita, Jr., a young man with no superpowers of any kind decides to become a superhero despite that handicap, and rises to popularity on the Internet when a video showing him protecting a victim of gang violence is posted to YouTube. He decides to call himself Kick-Ass, meets two highly trained weapons masters called Big Daddy and Hit-Girl bent on vigilante justice, and is drawn into a trap involving a fourth superhero called Red Mist. This is all brought to the screen mostly faithfully by director Matthew Vaughn, and in the places where the adaptation deviates from Millar's original script, it actually improves upon the source material. Where Millar sometimes goes a little wild with comic book nerd in-gags, Vaughn offers a more universally appealing look at the world of Kick-Ass – and he keeps most of the over-the-top violence and foul language that makes the comic what it is.

By far the highlight of the film is the way that Chloë Moretz plays Hit-Girl, a thirteen-year old girl with a taste for homicide and a filthy vocabulary. Like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver and Natalie Portman in The Professional before her, she plays the adolescent girl who is wise beyond her years through no fault of her own, and like those other actresses, she brings a combination of badassness and tragedy to the role. Also like those other actresses, it's obvious that she has a bright future ahead of her. Sure, Kick-Ass isn't a Scorsese or a Besson, but it doesn't try to be. All it tries to be is a fun popcorn movie that will elicit some "Aw, hell yeah!" moments as well as some uproarious laughter out of its audience – not at all an uncommon goal for a Mark Millar work – and in that right, it was a blistering success.

So I think we've succeeded in proving that Kick-Ass is a very fun movie. But there was really never any question about that, unless you're Roger Ebert. The real question is whether it should be on the IMDb Top 250. As of press time, it's one of four 2010 films on the list, along with Inception, Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon. The list stretches back to 1921's The Kid, which allows for a total of 2.8 movies per year. That doesn't make 4 a ridiculous number at all (even though it is only August), and I don't think it's fair to say that these movies only made the list because they're fresh in peoples' minds. There's plenty of years on the list that are better represented than 2010, so that can't be a criterion used to keep it off the list. Personally, I think Kick-Ass belongs. For what it attempts to do, hardly any movie has done it better. It shares list real estate with fellow comic book movies The Dark Knight, Batman Begins and V for Vendetta, which, if you added Iron Man and X2 to that list, would be all of the greatest comic book movies of all time. It's a controversial pick, to be sure, and some of the non-comic book movie company it keeps on the IMDb Top 250 could inspire eye-rolling in the first degree, but I stand behind the placement of Kick-Ass at #162. Let's just see if it's there at this time next year.

The Good: You heard it here (and everywhere else on the Internet): Chloë Moretz is going places. I seriously wanted every scene to just be Hit-Girl swearing and killing.

The Bad: Christopher Mintz-Plasse sucks so bad. He was funny in Superbad, but that's because he is probably just like McLovin in real life. Let's try to keep that mug and that voice out of all movies in the future. Thanks, Hollywood.

The Skinny: I dig the placement at #162.