11 Movies I Can't Stop Watching
This list goes to 11
We can appreciate a really good movie. We may even watch it more than once. Some movies we really like and have watched a number of times. We even make our friends and significant other watch them. But then there's that movie we still own on VHS cassette. The movies we keep watching and never tire of. They have a personal value, speak to us in ways that nothing else can or just makes us laugh and feel good. Like an old friend. Some of these movies are probably considered "bad" by most but dammit, you love it. I have 11. In no particular order here are the 11 films I can't stop watching.
1. Young Frankenstein
There used to be local independent TV stations. They didn't belong to networks and they broadcast syndicated shows and the local news. On a Saturday afternoon I could tune into Action Theater where they would show Boris Karloff's The Mummy or The Werewolf. My favorite was James Whale's Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein shown back to back. Mel Brooks appears to have been just as big a fan because his parody feels like it was made with the love of a fanboy. He even found the original props for the lab and reused them for Young Frankenstein. But it's the performances that get me chuckling. It's pure silliness. It's one of those films that just feels like everyone is having fun. Yet the commitment to character and shared reality never breaks.
The Scene:
Gene Hackman was Gene Wilder's tennis partner and when he learned about the film Wilder had co-wrote, the thrice Oscar nominated actor asked if he could give comedy a try. The result may be one of the funniest parody scenes in cinema. "Wait! I was going to make espresso."
I often listen to the Blu-Ray commentary by Mel Brooks. You can tell the film holds a special place in his heart. The insights to each actor is priceless.
The Metaphor:
Gene Wilder's Dr. Frankenstein travels a character arc similar to that of an artist's. What you create is an extension of who you are. The scene wherein Frankenstein must present his monster (Peter Boyle's hilarious zipper necked Promethean) to his science community peers is a variety show routine complete with song and dance. Putting on the Ritz almost didn't make the final cut but Wilder fought for it to be included. The result is the funniest scene in the film. Things on stage don't go as rehearsed and scientists boo and start throwing vegetables like common groundlings at a burlesque show. Mel Brooks always loves a good meta reference to vaudeville. We are all performers in one way or another trying to sell our routine on a daily basis.
Fourth Wall Breaks: Marty Feldman's Igor always lets the audience in on the joke. His inspired glances our way cue us in to the irony of each situation as he navigates the crazy all around him.
2. Rushmore
I had a little Max Fischer in me during my high school years. School work always came in second to extra curriculars. I never directed a hit play or tried to build an aquarium on the baseball field, but watching Jason Schwartzman's Max Fischer in pure earnestness fill every waking moment with the founding of clubs, leadership positions and filling the wrestling roster as an alternate makes me feel like I have a kindred spirit living out a parallel high school life.
Each moment is prescient in this film. Max's journey has us feeling as though he's perpetually verging on wild success only to be brought to earth by the fact that he's 15. Max's persistence is what keeps each scene crackling with kinetic energy as he abates the melancholy drifting through the halls of Rushmore Academy just seconds behind his heels.
We as an audience feel compelled to keep up with him or risk missing some great revelatory moment. Is he a genius or just a dogged opportunist? Maybe being the latter makes it seem like he's the former. "She's my Rushmore, Max".
The Scene:
Bill Murray's Bloom and Schwartzman's Max become romantic rivals over Miss Cross, Rushmore's widowed elementary school teacher. The montage revenge cycle of their escalating hostilities is epic and hilarious.
The Metaphor:
Many references to underwater exploration are made throughout the film. Fischer, Max's last name, denotes that he is exploring previously unexplored depths to his emotional world. He views Olivia Williams' Miss Cross through her classroom door, and we hear the ocean waves in the background of Max's imagination as she sits profiled by aquariums. Her deceased husband loved the sea, and Max lost his mother to cancer. We can read between the fishing lines on where his obsessive infatuation stems from.
Fourth Wall Break:
Max puts on plays that are lifted from famous films. Serpico, American Me and Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth all get "remade" in Max's school plays. Subsequently each chapter in the film is framed by the drawing of a stage curtain. The chapters are labeled by the month that the action takes place in. Is Rushmore just another one of Max's plays? Well, each frame of the film feels inspired by other famous works. The Graduate, The Godfather and Heat all get sly nods in Rushmore as certain scenes and themes pay homage to these films. Art always inspires new art, and the best artists steal and make it their own.
3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
A kid's film you say? High cinematic art I say. Just to get to the end credits and watch them scroll as footprints wander through the map is worth the repeated watching of this film. Alfonso Cuaron's direction is so stinkin' smart. Somehow he captures the awkward transitory mood of being an emerging adolescent in a world filled with Dementors, werewolves and psychopathic mass murdering wizards. That's quite a feat. I still don't look too hard at this one because it feels like a memory when you watch it. If I look too hard I'll see too many truths, too many reveals, and the golden rimmed varnish of early teen triumphs will diminish and that should never happen. They are the high moments of childhood left behind in the rearview mirror. High acts of bravery in the face of certain doom. During our lives that's how it feels. For Harry it's actually happening. That's why he seems so isolated amongst so many compatriots. This is the genius of the film. Those quiet moments when you witness something as the camera lingers in a spot where no one else is. That's what Harry's feeling. Alone as a witness to extreme events. Moments of grand beauty and grave danger. Like Harry we travel through this film of wonder with only ourselves to share it with. That's filmmaking.
The Scene:
"Turn to page 394..."
Alan Rickman turned every role he touched into gold. His Severus Snape looms over the goings ons of Hogwarts like a soul sucking Dementor. The visual parallel between his circular projected werewolf slide show and the closing of the following Quidditch scene creates an nice continuity or book ending for this sequence. The result is a sense that we are watching a fluid narrative that pauses for nothing and no one. While we lazily look for the page reference the film is too busy speeding along. It's a nice meta reference to the difference between watching the film and being a slave to the source material. They exist in different mediums and we should consequently experience them differently as well.
The Metaphor/Fourth Wall Break:
Several scenes in the film have the camera moving through glass as Harry looks out from behind windows and clock faces. Cuaron creates a sense of the audience's POV passing through this transparent barrier like we would if we were entering through the film's screen. Often Harry is isolated behind this glass in the film, and Cuaron is putting the audience in the same place as Harry. Alone and witness to his isolation. It creates an effect in the viewer that makes us pay closer attention to the smaller details while immersing us in Harry's POV. We become like Harry. We see things as he sees them.
4. Hot Fuzz
A cop movie that makes multiple nods to just about every other cop movie ever made. Along with homages to Agatha Christie films, this middle piece to the Cornetto Trilogy is the "Empire" to the first and last. It's as smart as it is absurd. Every time I watch Simon Pegg ride into the village on horseback I simultaneously giggle and pump my fist. As it descends into multiple well placed cliches and one liners I always marvel at Pegg's, Frost's and Wright's deft writing and camera work. It never disappoints.
The Scene:
Wright's early chase scenes give little hints as to what would come later in Baby Driver. Only Wright could turn a foot chase after a shop lifter through an English village into a pulse pounding no holds barred thrill run. Complete with visual jokes and puns.
The Metaphor:
Sandford has won "Model Village" several years in a row. So it seems appropriate that the final chase scene should end in an actual model village of Sandford. Timothy Dalton's Skinner gets his just desserts after what happened to the newspaper's beat reporter.
Fourth Wall Break:
Nick Frost's character constantly watches cop films. From Point Break to Bad Boys 2 he fills the hours with references toward his DVD heroes. As the film reaches the third act the action turns toward the same camera angles, lines and events of those very same films. We are getting the cop film payoff that we always hoped for. We are getting the cop film mashup to end all mashups. This film is Meta from the first siren to the last gun fired in the air as you cry "Ahhhhhhhh!"
5. Collateral
Is there anything more terrifying than being chased by a white haired Tom Cruise? Dude can run. This just edges out Heat for Micheal Mann's best for my personal favorites. It's a bare bones Hemingwayesque chase film that contains introspection without being introspective. Here everyone has a story that gets cut short. Cut short by Tom Cruise. Set in L.A. in one night and filmed with digital cameras that utilized "natural" city light, we get two amazing performances by two deft actors. It's nakedly about fight or flight but when you consider that all of the action turns on dialogue, you begin to see something underneath the simple narrative. The act of telling a good story can keep you alive for just long enough. Better have a really good story.
The Scene:
This is a chase film with most of the chasing happening in conversations.
Cruise's Vincent predates upon people's stories. He collects them as he wipes out the teller's existence. Here our antagonist has a flicker of remorse. Or what can only be described as a reflection on the honest moment that was shared and lost in a second.
The Metaphor/Fourth Wall Break:
Vincent is like a Hollywood exec listening to movie pitches. He calls bullshit on the stuff that doesn't sound true and cuts short what isn't selling. Jamie Foxx's Max evolves as a character when he stands up for himself as he realizes he needs to take control of the narrative that Cruise is creating for him. Throughout the film characters smash, crack and break glass. Like the action of the film breaking through the fourth wall of the screen the characters are breaking through the narrative for control of how the story ends. "A man dies on the train...does anyone notice?"
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
Just when you thought I was all about moving shots, linear plots and broom chases I throw in the greatest film ever made. We could argue about that last statement... and I would win. Because I started watching this film when I was 11 and haven't ever really stopped, I guess you could call it my Rushmore. But what makes this film so re watchable is how much you discover each time you view it. It's a beautiful enigma to me. Terrifying and slow it has planted a seed in my furtive imagination and grown an insight into Kubrick's genius that leaves me in awe every time. Here. I can't help myself:
The Scene:
Two separate scenes that supposedly have nothing to do with each other. But look at them closely. It's like a mirror of positioning. The crouch of the Russian in the grey suit is like the sapien's crouch at the water hole. The one standing with a bone clearly has the advantage and will soon club the other to death. The figure seated below in a relaxed pose of authority wins this game of subterfuge as the opponents eye each other from across their own watering hole. It's the same scene. And it only took me some 30 years to see it. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The Metaphor:
Strauss' Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the opening title music as well as the theme for early man's awakening.
The title for the music is also the title of Friedrich Nietzsche's book which discusses the author's philosophy on "the eternal recurrence of the same" and the Ubermensch or superman. Much of the film explores recurrences of past behavior. From the dawn of man's discovery of meat to his leap into space we have been a species that thrives because of war and domination of our foes. What starts as a bone turned weapon thrown into the sky jump cuts into a space weapon aimed at Earth. We have advanced but have not truly evolved into something better. We still need to eat and have shelter and protect those needs with force. The ending of the film can only be described as man's next step into superman. The Star Child.
Fourth Wall Break:
There are three scenes wherein the characters become aware of the edge of the movie screen.
The sapien ape Moon-Watcher awakens to what the Monolith has instructed him to learn. Here he regards something down right of the screen. He later picks up a bone and brandishes it at the watering hole thus insuring his genetic line survives. But there's something else going on here as well.
Keir Dullea's Poole has dropped his glass of water and it breaks on the floor of the "space hotel" he now resides in. Here he pauses and regards the down right edge of the screen. Here again we see two scenes mirrored. It's the same point of reference associated with an acknowledgement moments before a major change in the characters state of being. When Poole looks up from the glass he sees himself laying in bed on the verge of death. This is just moments before he transforms into the Star Child. Moon-Watcher is about to embrace life and transform into a dominant species. Heywood Floyd makes a similar gesture as well.
Here he touches the monolith's surface or what appears to be the right edge of our screen. The way this scene is shot gives a visual impression that Floyd has discovered the edge of the physical screen. Moments later a deafening signal is sent to the other end of the solar system from the monolith and HAL and crew are sent on a mission to find out why. There is a character arc from ignorance into enlightenment that is involved with subliminally finding the edge of the movie screen. These characters are on the verge of realizing their own narrative and change as a result.
7. The Big Lebowski
"Donny, you're out of your element!"
It's a film where things happen but nothing really adds up to anything significant. When this first came out after Fargo in the late 90's everyone just kinda shrugged their shoulders. A lot of people hated it actually. Here we are now approaching the 20th anniversary of this film and there is an official religion based on The Dude along with a Lebowskifest that attracts thousands. My friends and I knew better at the time. I suppose there's still haters but, you know, that's like your opinion, man.
The Scene:
"Mark it zero!"
The explosivness of Walter Sobchak visited upon the denizens of Star Lanes is something to behold. John Goodman is by far one of the most complete character actors to have ever graced the screen.
The Metaphor/Fourth Wall Break:
Sam Elliot's narration brings the old Hollywood feel that we as an audience are witness to some kind of Western/Noir/Musical straight out of the backlots of MGM Studios during the Golden Age of Cinema. So how did the Dude get mixed up in all this? I don't rightly know but maybe we ought to just go with it.
8. Rear Window
There are few films as well crafted as this one. Every time Grace Kelly goes across the way to go snooping around those apartments I get queasy. Sunday afternoon watching this one. Never gets old. Hitchcock shows how to tell a story and keep it interesting. They built an entire closed set for this film and when they tore it down the cast and crew mourned. Am I the only one who wouldn't mind living in that cramped apartment provided Grace Kelly help me solve crimes every few nights? 'Nuff said.
The Scene:
There are so many great scenes in Rear Window but it's the opening that displays Hitch's mastery of the art. Here we see what he learned in his silent movie days. The camera is the storyteller and Rear Window's opening tells us everything we need to know about James Stewart's L.B. Jeffries.
Without a word spoken we know where we are, we know who he is and we know how he got there. It also sets up that this is a film you need to pay attention to. Miss one detail and you could miss a major piece of information in the mystery of what happened to the woman across the way.
The Metaphor:
Every window is a movie screen into another story. L.B. Jeffries is the narrator as he creates stories for each apartment. Miss Lonely Hearts resides on the bottom floor. Miss Torso is a dancer across the way; toying with gentleman callers. We're watching a narrative about multiple narratives and Jeffries is scrolling through them like they're a Netflix menu.
Breaking the Fourth Wall:
Lars Thorvald does not appreciate being spied upon. The moment of discovery occurs when our murder suspect figures out that Jeffries is watching from his rear window. Looking straight at Jeffries he is looking at our narrator and he's looking at us. When Thorvald ventures across the way to confront Jeffries he breaks the fourth wall. He is no longer a character in Stewart's narrative and not only breaks through this fourth wall but succeeds in pushing Jeffries out his own window. Now the narrator has entered his own narrative and Thorvald has very nearly killed the narrator. This is a Defcon 5 of meta narrative and still blows my mind to this day.
9. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
There really isn't any film like Michel Gondry's and Charlie Kaufman's dream trip of a film. This has slowly and slyly taken the place of Adaptation for me over the years. It's still about narrative but from the perspective of both sexes in this one. A disjointed story flows along as Jim Carrey's hero slowly starts losing his memories. It's a re working of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream set in mid winter. Smartly written with incredible performances. The Scene:
The blurring of reality and memories being erased must be the closest a film has ever gotten to realistically portraying what losing your mind must be like. Scary and exhilarating every effect serves the story. It's as beautiful as it is terrifyingly sad.
The Metaphor/Fourth Wall Break:
Clementine works in a book store and Joel is an artist drawing his characters as he sees them. As their relationship unravels so does the narrative. Like a writer and director fighting over the films storyline we experience the dysfunction and chaotic bliss of a story whose lost it's sense of narration. Can Tom Wilkinson's Dr./Oberon fix this mid-winter night's nightmare by completely erasing it? Or do we fall right back into the lives we were always destined to live? Maybe it's just best to forgive.
10. Inception
Nolan loves to explore the nature of narrative via unreliable narrators, double identities and lapses in sequential storylines. This truly is one of the most watchable meta narratives ever put to film. Putting all of that highbrow stuff aside it's just fun to watch. You can get all wound up in all the rules of the dream if you want to, but when you consider that Leo DiCaprio's character always breaks his own rules, then you need to just remember one thing: It's just a movie. Movies always break their own rules. Get it?
The Scene:
Does the top keep spinning or does it fall? Inception's unanswered cliffhanger haunts everyone who watches the film.
What really matters at this point though is what what both we as an audience choose to believe and what Cobb has accepted. POV is everything.
The Metaphor/Fourth Wall Break:
Well, this is a film about dreams which is actually about film. Jean Cocteau once described film as "a dream that can be dreamt by many people at the same time." Nolan puts together a heist film that explores the various aspects of creating a film. From the "architect" (writer) to the "dreamer" (director) to dream logic (film logic) and the concept that time passes differently in a dream (movie) we get a mirror put up to the creative process involved with making an audience believe in a movie. If the filmmaker can just slip the plot holes and paradoxes past their audience you might just incept them into buying it. They might even point out that the movie is doing just that as it's happening. Now that's meta.
11. Raising Arizona
"Now, y'all without sin can cast the first stone."
The Coen's don't understand why people like this film which just makes me love it more. Fatherhood can be foisted upon any man, and in this film every man becomes one. Somewhere between the non sequitur lines and the insane foot chase for a box of Huggies is an existential masterpiece about the paterfamilias. I started loving this film at the age of 12 just for the chuckles but as I age it resonates ever the more. What were we before we became father's? Criminals, con artists and grifters? Well, maybe most of us no, but there's a transition that takes place in a man when he knows there's a little one depending on him now. Whatever we were before becomes moot, and when those eyes look up and behold our face, we become knights on a quest. Rescuers of innocents.
The Scene:
Nicholas Cage's H.I. knocks over a convenience store for a box of Huggies. Holly Hunter's Ed (short for Edwina) gets mad and leaves, and one of the most inspired chase scenes in cinema ensues. It all accumulates at the super market where Altman's The Long Goodbye inspire's the environment.
The Metaphor:
H.I. wears a Woody Woodpecker tattoo that is reminiscent of the old Hot Rod Magazine's version: clenched teeth and feathers strewn back in the wind. It's the same tattoo that the bounty hunter from Hell wears, and we associate that this may be what Nathan Jr. may become if the McDunnough's raise him in their outlaw family. It's the fear that every father bears. Will I inadvertently screw up this beautiful kid? Also, H.I. refers to Ed as a beautiful desert flower when courting her from across the booking photo room. This image later appears on screen as the rider of the Apocalypse zips by on his Harley.
There is a sense of impending doom as H.I. and Ed's plan to abduct Nathan Jr. becomes reality. They have created a domino effect that will spiral out of their control.
Fourth Wall Breaks:
H.I.'s introduction to the audience starts with his narration as he is pushed in front of the screen. Like a character forced unto the page, he regards the audience directly with a look of devil may care charm. He's going to tell us a yarn and try to con us into his POV. Of course this scene is his first mugshot taken by Ed, so the audience may want to regard him as an unreliable narrator at best.
The final scene is his dream of the future. Is it a happy ending for our couple in some unknown place? Where are they exactly? I don't know. Maybe it was Utah.