So... a new month, and that means ten more selections for my list of 200 Essential American Films.
- Airplane! (1980, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, David Zucker)
For my money, still the funniest movie ever made. It's impossible not to crack a smile when Robert Stack enters the picture all serious and removes his sunglasses... only to reveal another pair of sunglasses underneath those. The dialogue has been quoted so often, it's almost not funny any more, but I'm still gonna smile at a line like "I guess the foot's on the other hand now, isn't it, Kramer?"
- All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
For all intents and purposes, the Bette Davis Performance. "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to a bumpy night!" Backstabbing, envy, romance, cynical wit, put-downs, dialogue so sharp it could slice lard, George Sanders, Thelma Ritter, even a young Marilyn Monroe.
- Annie Hall (1977, Woody Allen)
Okay, so it's no longer my favorite Woody Allen movie, but it' so essential to everything intrinsic about the artist, it would be like acknowledging one's love for Picasso and giving glancing, short thrift to Les Demoiselles d'avignon. And Allen never had a back-and-forth with anyone as sublimely as he did with Diane Keaton.
- Fargo (1996, Joel Coen)
Still my favorite Coen brothers movie. A compendium of their trademark black humor, specific regional observation/caricature, dry-ice performers, shocking violence. For whatever reason - be it the "yah"s or the woodchipper or Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare peering into the back door of William H. Macy's wife as she watches TV- you just remember this movie. It's almost impossible to only watch it once. Can the mere mention of any American city - or any city, really - bring to mind, associatively, a movie like this can? Despite the fact that almost none of the movie has anything to do with the North Dakota city.
- Inglorious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)
Christoph Waltz's terrifying, raucously poised turn as Colonel Hans Landa alone would qualify the film for the list. Tarantino goes for broke here - hell, Hitler and Goebbels die! - and if the movie isn't really that much more than a string of six to eight drum-tight set pieces, what set pieces they are.
- Match Point (2005, Woody Allen)
This'll do as Allen's masterpiece. The auteur's New York films had long since grown stale, so he moved his neuroses abroad and revitalized his career. Has there even been a more infuriating, detestable protagonist than Jonathan Rhys Meyer's spineless tennis instructor? Has Scar Jo even been more intoxicating and sexy? Allen's instinct for filling out supporting roles with often over-qualified talent hits home here - Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox, Penelope Wilton. The ending is shocking. But it's the thematic logic, the forceful clarity and depth of Allen's screenplay that is the benchmark.
- Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese)
To a generation of movie watchers who see Robert DeNiro in crud like Meet the Mother Fockin' Fockers or whatever, it's easy to imagine them asking themselves, what's the big deal about that guy? This. This is the big deal.
- Reds (1981, Warren Beatty)
The Russian Revolution as a tearjerker - a smart, layered, moving, Hollywood epic with outrageously good-looking stars (Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill), Oscar winner Maureen Stapelton as anarchist Emma Goldman, an earthy love story, a clever, affecting use of real-life witnesses to the period. Stirring and well-shot, with a wonderful climax set at a Moscow train station.
- Strangers on a Train (1951, Alfred Hitchcock)
A marvelous thriller that still holds up, Hitch's film actually improves on the Patricia Highsmith source novel with its brilliant staging, iconic and creepy tour-de-force by Robert Walker as momma's boy Bruno Anthony, signature framing, including a shot at a tennis match in which the other fans turn their heads left to right, following the ball; at first, we don't see Bruno, but as the camera zooms in, we realize he's right in the middle of them, the one figure not following the ball but, rather, staring straight ahead; this was Hitchcock's visual cue that nothing can distract or divert this relentlessly focused, isolated figure.
- Wonder Boys (2000, Curtis Hanson)
A movie that's good - if not better - every time you watch it, Hanson's adaptation of the one Michael Chabon novel I actually made it through has a killer song by Bob Dylan and, as the slovenly, stoned, fumblingly blocked professor Grady Tripp Michael Douglas in his finest performance. It's a poignant, albeit quirky, singular vision of middle-age sadness and growing old, well-shot around Pittsburgh with a memorable supporting cast (Robert Downey Jr., a particularly exceptional Frances McDormand, a spot-on Tobey Maguire, Rip Torn, Katie Holmes).
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