Day Six: The Wild Bunch

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #186
Year: 1969
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Starring: William Holden and Emilio Fernandez

Allow me to give a brief synopsis of my presently short (and therefore still torrid) love affair with the Western genre. In April of this year, I started reading previews for Red Dead Redemption. It sounded absolutely amazing, and screen shots revealed that it looked pretty much the same. Then, Willie Nelson's verse in the Highwaymen's "The Last Cowboy Song" ("Remington showed us how he looked on canvas/And Louis L'Amour has told us his tale") inspired me to do some research, and I started falling in love with the imagery of the Old West. Before long, I bought Red Dead Redemption and checked out Sergio Leone's Man With No Name trilogy, and became totally obsessed with the Western genre. My only experience with Westerns prior to April had been through Shane, which I disliked when I saw it in the 8th grade and have yet to give another chance to. Now, though, Westerns are my bread and butter, and I jump at the opportunity to see one I haven't seen yet.

That brings us to The Wild Bunch. Praised as an American answer to Leone's spaghetti westerns, Sam Peckinpah's 1969 epic is the tale of a rowdy group (nice synonym work, right?) of aging outlaws who get conned on what they hope is their last job and end up having to collude with an unscrupulous Mexican general. The gang is headlined by a fairly cool William Holden who clearly wants to one-up Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name performances with his own as Pike Bishop – and doesn't, by the way. The typically beautiful setting that is the trademark of any Western stands out as the protagonists hover around the Texas-Mexico border for most of the film's 180 minute duration.

A few things separate this movie from Leone's superior contemporary Westerns in a positive way, though: For whatever reason, American censors in 1969 must have been more tolerant of violence and sexuality than Italian censors. The impressive gunfights actually result in bloodshed unlike those in the Man With No Name flicks, and there's a wonderful abundance of – pardon my language – great Mexican tits, mostly those of prostitutes. These things might seem gratuitous, and I might sound adolescent for even mentioning them, but they do lend some realism to the film that was missing in contemporary Westerns.

Somehow, despite its merits and its faithful execution of the spaghetti western formula, nothing feels truly special about The Wild Bunch. It just feels like a good movie, one that you would never turn off if you stumbled upon it on TV, but still one that you would never buy on DVD. It's well-executed, but it's missing that certain special something that pushes Sergio Leone's and Clint Eastwood's contributions to the genre to the next level. There's nothing wrong with The Wild Bunch, per se, but there's nothing to make it stand out from the field of other movies that there's nothing wrong with, either. Still, it's several steps better than mediocre, and it's certainly worth a viewing, especially for someone with an interest in the genre.

The Good: The gunfights are all wonderfully choreographed and realistic, and they don't feel like something we've seen a thousand times before like so many gunfights tend to feel. Honorable mention to the fact that this is the crispest, nicest looking pre-1990s movie I've ever seen. Maybe I'm ignorant and the DVD was simply remastered, but the camera shots look amazing.

The Bad: There's quite a few scenes where Pike has flashbacks, and those are rather poorly executed. It's tough to even know what's going on until you've seen a few of them, and at that point, you're kind of rolling your eyes. I'm sorry for using lots of first and second person in this blog post, too. Really, I am. I'm very tired and LeBron James plays for the Miami Heat now.

The Skinny: Probably doesn't really deserve to be in the Top 250, especially considering the fact that The Outlaw Josey Wales and A Fistful of Dollars are not.

Day Five: Wild Strawberries

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #153
Year: 1957
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Starring: Victor Sjostrom and Ingrid Thulin

It took five days, but today we're looking at a foreign film – a work from a seminal period in famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's long career. Wild Strawberries is a lush rumination on life, love and death that follows elderly physician Isak Borg on his way to accept an honorary degree in Lund, Sweden. Through a series of surreal-for-their-time dream sequences, Borg has revelations that allow him to peek into his past and show him the way he should be living his life. This is a Bergman movie, so there's plenty of symbolism to pick through (the pocket watch with no hands that appears in his first dream and again several more times, most notably when he visits his mother is particularly interesting) which, paired with gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, creates a "world of the film" which, while technically our own, is wholly unique and unfamiliar.

I've spoken with friends before about judging the acting in a movie shot in a language you don't speak, and it raises some very interesting questions. Particularly, vocal intonations are such a crucial part of the delivery of lines that, if you don't understand what's being said and aren't familiar with the way native speakers talk, is completely lost on you. Still, dubs are thought to be the bane of the true film fan's existence. We'd rather take four years of college-level Swedish than hear an English dub of a Swedish film. So we're stuck. We have to watch the performances closely, try to gather what we can from context and body language and go from there. Having some training in Swedish films (I had seen Bergman's The Seventh Seal as well as the greatest vampire picture ever made, Let the Right One In – both present elsewhere in the Top 250 – prior to watching Wild Strawberries), I was perhaps somewhat better able to decipher the quality of the performances. For people who have seen the movie, it probably goes without saying, but I'll say it: Victor Sjostrom's performance at Dr. Borg is nothing short of brilliant. The rest of the cast does a beautiful job as well, but I would love to speak Swedish just so I could appreciate Sjostrom's performance even more. He is at once tragic and heroic, and his trips through his dreams feature some of the best confused-person-trapped-in-surreal-sequence acting I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot.

Of course, it shouldn't come as a surprise that this movie makes the list. Among foreign directors, Ingmar Bergman sits on a lofty top-tier perch with only Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini for company. He is a rightful legend with the critical acclaim to prove it. Compared to his other film that I've seen, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries feels like a deeply personal movie for him, one that no doubt resonated even more strongly with him when he was in his own life's winter. I still remember the day I read the news that he passed away. I wasn't very familiar with his work; in fact, I knew only that he directed the great "knight plays chess with Death" scene. But I knew it was an important loss for international cinema, and I mourned just the same. Now, watching Wild Strawberries, I hope only that he heeded his own film's message and made meaningful connections with those around him and forgave those who had wronged him. It feels so personal when his character does the same that I imagine he must have. If his screenplay here is to be believed, Mr. Bergman must have been a wonderful person to know. May he rest in peace, and may God – depending on which character's side he takes in the atheism-versus-religion debate he scripted for this film – have mercy on his soul.

The Good: The cinematography is pure eye candy. Color would have ruined this movie. Speaking of eye candy, it's official: Swedish women are the most beautiful women in the world. Whereas the American and British standard for beauty changes so often that femme fatales from fifteen-year-old movies look like they belong in ancient high school yearbooks, Swedish women in 1957 looked much like they do today. That is, drop dead gorgeous.

The Bad: Despite a brief 91-minute running time, the pacing sometimes makes the movie drag. This is as much because it's from 1957 as anything else, though, and can be easily forgiven.

The Skinny: Deserves to be in the Top 250, and is probably right about where it belongs within the list.

Day Four: Gran Torino

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #92
Year: 2008
Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Clint Eastwood and Bee Vang

I knew going into this project that at some point I'd stumble upon some movies that would make a run at my list of all-time favorites. What I didn't expect is that it would only take four days. As a big Clint Eastwood fan, it's unforgivable on my part that I haven't seen a lot of his most acclaimed films from the last decade. Of all of the ones I need to see over the course of this blog, I was most excited to see Gran Torino. I wasn't disappointed. In fact, my expectations were exceeded, and I have a new movie that after one viewing figures to fall somewhere in my personal top 25 or so films of all time.

Clint Eastwood recently told the media that while he will continue to direct, his last performance as an actor will be Gran Torino. If he stays true to his word, it's safe to say he has gone out on top. As curmudgeonly Korean War veteran Walt Kowalski, Eastwood stretches his gravelly voice – now worn down with nearly 80 years of use – over a great, sprawling narrative befitting of a Best Actor Oscar (The film was snubbed of even one nomination, but we'll get to that shortly). Walt lives in a Detroit neighborhood mostly occupied by Hmong people – for whom he has a laundry list of racial slurs he picked up in Korea – and inadvertently takes his next-door neighbors under his wing when their young son tries to steal his prized 1972 Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation. As a one-man wrecking crew, Walt tries to subvert the gang's influence on the boy. From the film's climax to the end credits, the emotional intensity never relents, and I'll be the first to admit that I very nearly cried. No spoilers necessary; if you've seen it, you know why.

Gran Torino could be seen as a meditation on race, but I don't really see it that way. Walt uses the same racial slurs for people that he loves and people that he hates. It's just the way he talks. Sure, it's offensive, but he picked up those racial epithets in Korea and can't lose them now, fifty years later. He judges people for who they are, and while he does have some prejudices, it doesn't really take him much effort to shed them. This is definitely a movie with its racial undertones, but it's much more about how the Hmong see Walt than the way he sees them. When he protects his friends from a violent gang, race is the last thing on his mind. He just wants the people he loves to be safe.

I'm definitely scratching my head about the zero Oscar nominations that this movie earned, and I'm more disappointed in the Academy than I have ever been. In my opinion, Eastwood should have earned nominations for Best Director and Best Actor, the screenplay should have earned a nomination (How many racial slurs can you put in a character's mouth while keeping him that likable?), the film should have been nominated for Best Picture, and hell, why not: Ahney Her should have earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her performance as Sue Lor, the girl who brings Walt into the Hmong community's life. The fact that it received none is extremely confusing since Clint is usually a critical darling – or has been since Unforgiven, anyway.

Despite the heinous oversight on the part of the Academy, the free market of ideas prevails. While Gran Torino was snubbed on Oscar night, it finds itself securely within the Top 100 on the IMDb with a legion of fans willing to fight for it. Clint Eastwood proves that it doesn't matter how old he is, he will always dominate the screen whenever he's on it and dominate the camera whenever he's behind. Long live the king.

The Good: Clint's performance leaves a strong impression, which was probably by design since he recently declared it his last. The final twenty minutes of the movie are also crucial since the exclamations you'll make at the screen radically change from "That's hilarious!" and "What a badass!" to "Oh my God, no" and "I can't believe that just happened," with just a touch of "Awww, that's really nice" thrown in. But that's just Clint being the master that he is.

The Bad: Bee Vang's performance as Thao isn't great, but that's forgivable since this movie is his only film credit.

The Skinny: Definitely deserves its place in the Top 250. On my personal list it would rank even higher.

Day Three: The Shawshank Redemption

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #1
Year: 1994
Director: Frank Darabont
Starring: Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman

I'm not watching a new movie today (mail doesn't come the day after the Fourth of July and I can't waste the battery to instant watch), so this will be the first of 89 entries on movies that I have seen prior to starting this blog. For some, I'll need to re-watch the movie to make sure I'm good and familiar with it, but I just saw The Shawshank Redemption about a month ago, so I'm kind of winging it. Here goes.

All I can think of when I see The Shawshank Redemption at #1 on the IMDb Top 250 is a debate that the newspaper I work for at Indiana had in the newsroom when we were putting together our "Top 100 Films of the Decade" list back in December. Truth be told, it wasn't much of a debate. My editor suggested that The Lord of the Rings trilogy be counted as one film and placed at #1 for the decade. No one protested. We got to talking about it, and we realized that it wasn't actually anyone's pick for the best movie of the decade, but everyone was perfectly okay with putting it at #1.

Shawshank is at #1 for the same reason. I've never met anyone who actually said it was their favorite movie of all time, but then again, I've never met anyone who had anything bad to say about it. It is an undisputed classic with a pair of indisputably classic performances. Morgan Freeman's strong, soothing baritone fills in the holes not occupied by perfectly written dialogue with perfectly written narration. The cinematography is gorgeous, despite the fact that 90% of the film takes place inside the walls of a prison. There's really not much to complain about, and it's such a familiar part of popular culture that even a plot summary feels unnecessary. (Quick and dirty one anyway, SPOILERS included: Andy DuFresne (Tim Robbins) is wrongly convicted of killing his wife, goes to Shawshank prison, meets Red (Morgan Freeman), gets into all kinds of mischief and misadventures while he's there, and eventually escapes. Red gets out on parole; they move to the beach and live happily ever after.)

But there are hundreds of very good movies. What sets Shawshank apart in people's minds as Numero Uno? In my opinion, it's the prevailing positive vibe. Despite all the bad shit that happens – both literally and figuratively – our two genuinely likable protagonists succeed and find the paradise they've spent the whole movie pining for. It's possibly the only movie with prison rape, murder, corruption, and suicide that can still be described as "feelgood".

There isn't too much else to say about one of the greatest movies of all time, and as a massive, anonymous collective has dictated, the greatest movie of all time. If you haven't seen it, you need to.

The Good (SPOILERS): As mentioned above, the prevailing mood of the movie is nothing short of brilliant. I'm left with a mile-wide smile on my face as Red approaches Andy on the beach at the end of the movie every time.

The Bad: Hate to use the word here, but I suppose The Shawshank Redemption is overrated. Anything that's called the best movie of all time is going to be stuck with that stigma though, so I don't hold anything against it.

The Skinny: Just like The Lord of the Rings ascended the decade-end list at the IDS to no protestation, Shawshank deserves the #1 spot, whether it's really the best movie of all time (or anyone's favorite) or not.

Day Two: Patton

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #226
Year: 1970
Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
Starring: George C. Scott and Karl Malden

Making World War II pictures is a tricky business. All the clichés are well-established. The same goes for biopics. We've seen characters overcome struggles in their personal lives to excel in whatever it is they're famous for a thousand times. Combining the two genres is a cocktail set to fail. Still, Franklin J. Schaffner's follow-up to his well-received science fiction film Planet of the Apes, 1970's Patton, is heralded as an all-time classic. Is the praise deserved?

In a word, mostly. A lot of that is thanks to George C. Scott's Academy Award-winning performance as General George S. Patton. The film opens with Scott famously standing against an American flag – with 48 stars, I counted – and giving a speech to what is presumably an audience of young recruits. This six-minute monologue would be very nearly enough to make a great film on its own, and it certainly has to be one of the greatest opening sequences of all time – indeed, the extent of my familiarity with the movie going in was Space Jam's parody of the scene and the sample Skinless took from it as an intro to their stellar "Trample the Weak, Hurdle the Dead". The film follows Patton from his entrance on the scene in North Africa through the Germans' surrender in 1945.

The film clocks in at an epic 2 hours and 49 minutes, so there's plenty of development of General Patton. What didn't really surprise me but may surprise some is the fact that the movie is really driven by Patton's personal affairs and not much by the events in the European theater of the war. Many of his actions are motivated by a rivalry he has with a British commander, a petty desire to be the best general in the Allied Forces, and the disciplinary grit that earned him the nickname "Old Blood and Guts" ("Our blood, his guts," one wounded soldier quips after a battle).

Perhaps it's just because today is the Fourth of July, but despite Patton's bloodthirstiness, petty attitude, and maltreatment of his emotionally fragile soldiers, Scott drums up a lot of sympathy for the man in his portrayal of him. He's constantly gazing over battlefields and talking about skirmishes that occurred there in the B.C. Era, reading and writing war poetry, and attempting to recreate the battle strategies of Julius Caesar and Alcibiades, so the fact that he doesn't really understand PTSD is permissible.

Faced with the tall order of immortalizing an enigma as sacred as General George S. Patton, the people behind Patton did a more than competent job, and despite some questionable pacing that leads to the movie's marathon length, it's fair to call it a great film.

The Good: George C. Scott's performance as Patton, particularly in the famous opening sequence. Special mention once again for connecting with my life: When a group of reporters questions General Patton at one point, they bring up what Ernie Pyle has written about his second-in-command, General Bradley. Hey! Ernie Pyle! He's who my program at Indiana is named for!

The Bad: For being a biopic and not an honest-to-God war movie, there's a lot of pointless, extended scenes of tanks rolling over things and things blowing up. The movie is about Patton, not the World War II.

The Skinny: Patton is a great movie, but to me, it's not a masterpiece. But are there even 250 masterpieces in existence such that the Top 250 should be masterpieces-only? If not, then Patton finds itself at the right part of the list – towards the bottom. Grudgingly approved.

Day One: Sunset Blvd.

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #31
Year: 1950
Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: William Holden and Gloria Swanson

We begin this movie odyssey with a film that I've wanted to see for a very long time. I've always read that Mulholland Dr., one of my favorite movies of all time, is like a darker, David Lynch-ified Sunset Blvd. Having seen the films in the wrong order for that comparison to make sense, I set off to watch a lighter, un-David Lynched Mulholland Dr. instead.

The comparisons are well-deserved, and Sunset Blvd. is easily one of the best classic Hollywood movies I've ever seen – even if "anti-Hollywood" is perhaps a better description for it. We open on Joe Gillis, a down-on-his-luck though not talentless Hollywood screenwriter played admirably by William Holden, as he seeks sanctuary from debt collectors. He takes shelter in a seemingly abandoned garage, but is ushered into the mansion by a foreign butler. The Mulholland Dr. similarities take off from there, as our protagonist discovers that he has been brought inside because the butler thought he was bringing a coffin for a dead chimpanzee.

After the confusion is assuaged, we quickly learn that the giant house belongs to Norma Desmond, a forgotten (and delusional) silent film star from a lost era in Hollywood played terrifyingly by Gloria Swanson. She hires Joe ostensibly to ghost-write her comeback film, an adaptation of the story of Salome, but he's really there to keep her company as she spirals into madness. Joe spends the rest of the film simultaneously overcoming Stockholm syndrome and trying to keep from going mad.

Sunset Blvd. fascinated me for two primary reasons: In 1950, when it was released, there were hundreds of former film stars just like Norma Desmond living in Hollywood. The movie business had transformed when cinemas were equipped for audio and again not much later with the advent of Technicolor, and for every Charlie Chaplin who adapted with the times and became successful in talkies, there were fifty Norma Desmonds who would never find work again. This film must have struck a very real chord with audiences who knew this or, worse, lived it.

Second, Gloria Swanson's performance as Norma is one of the most disturbing performances I've ever seen, nearly on par with Jack Nicholson in The Shining. True, Sunset Blvd. isn't a horror film or anything remotely like one, but the madness that Norma descends into is as frightening as that of any serial killer. Caked with the copious amounts of makeup she needed to stand out before camera technology improved, she watches her own movies without accompaniment, keeps photographs of herself all over her living room, believes that she is still as popular as she ever was, and remains convinced that her comeback picture will be made any moment, even when it is clear to all that it won't. Even the film's trademark line – "Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my closeup" – is truly frightening in context.

While it would be easy to assume a movie from 1950 entitled Sunset Blvd. is a tribute to the glitz, glamor and excess of Golden Age Hollywood, the movie defies all expectations and stands alone as an absolute masterpiece of noir.

The Good: Gloria Swanson's otherworldly performance as Norma Desmond. Special mention to the fact that Joe Gillis alludes several times to the possibility that he could leave Hollywood and go back to copy editing in Dayton, Ohio. Word up, Joe! I might be doing just that soon!

The Bad (SPOILERS!): Gotta admit, I groaned when I realized Joe, our narrator, has been dead the entire movie. Everything else is steeped in gritty realism, and I'm supposed to believe this guy has been narrating the whole thing from the spirit realm? Maybe it was just assumed that everyone believed in that stuff in 1950.

The Skinny: Deserves to be in the Top 250. No question about it.

Dominating the Indomitable: IMDb's Top 250

The Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, is every remotely serious movie fan's paradise. There's an entry for every movie ever made, usually complete with trailers, reviews, and an active message board full of Interweb warriors ready to do battle with trolls over their favorite directors and films. The most popular feature of all, however, is the Top 250. Based on votes from thousands upon thousands of users, this list ranks the greatest movies of all time in a way that is less old-fashioned and arbitrary than the American Film Institute's list, but is still ultimately useless.

That apparent uselessness doesn't stop the entire Internet movie-loving community from hailing it as gospel when it's convenient ("Seriously, dude. The Dark Knight is in the top 10") and bashing it as overly populist when that suits them better ("Dude, you can't take it seriously. The Dark Knight is in the top 10.") This constant bickering makes the inherently flawed list the most revered list available. At the very least, every serious movie fan should see everything on the list, right?

As one of these serious movie fans, it shocked and appalled me to discover that I've only seen 89 of the top 250 movies as of press time. I mean, I watch movies just about every week, how have I not stumbled upon at least 200 of these babies? Well, re-watching and an aversion (ignorance, really) to pre-1970s movies is a big part of the reason.

That brings us to the point of this blog. Over the next 250 days, with the help of my good friend Netflix, I will be reviewing one of the IMDb's top 250 movies every day. On days where I don't watch a new movie (there will be 89 of these in total), I'll review a movie I've already seen. Expectations will be revealed and revelations should be expected.

It's about to get real. Hope you'll join me.