Wondering when you'd see another Top 100 Movies post from me? Wonder no more!
65. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The Wallace and Gromit half-hour shorts from Nick Park and Aardman Studios are some of the best entertainment to ever come out of the U.K. (I say that knowing full well that there's plenty of other fantastic British entertainment; Wallace & Gromit are among the best of the best.) This full-length motion picture is perhaps not quite as good as, say, A Close Shave, but it's still marvelous... more than good enough to merit a spot in my top 100. Hysterically funny, wonderfully sweet at times, and lavishly detailed. To hate Wallace & Gromit is to hate good things.
64. Raiders of the Lost Ark. The first and best of the Indiana Jones movies. Harrison Ford has spent the last two decades of his film career coasting along on formula, but he was in his prime here, and has perfect chemistry with every other wonderful actor in the movie. His romance with Karen Allen is perfect. His rivalry with Paul Freeman is perfect. His repartee with John Rhys-Davies and Denholm Elliott is perfect. The action scenes in the film are exhilarating; the suspenseful scenes are tense. This is one rip-roaring adventure.
63. The Cider House Rules. This emotional tale sports a truly magnificent cast, from headliners Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, and Michael Caine, to supporters Delroy Lindo, Paul Rudd (yes, he's in this), Kathy Baker, J.K. Simmons, and Kieran Culkin. Author John Irving wrote this screenplay from his own novel, and it takes you on a complete and moving journey. This was a Best Picture nominee in 1999, a year of truly worthy competitors.
62. Aliens and 61. Alien. It is truly difficult for me to pick one film over the other here, and perhaps because of this, they've ended up stuck together in my Top 100.
Ridley Scott's 1979 original is a masterfully suspenseful horror movie. It puts the characters in a truly impossible situation, completely trapped, fighting a creature who even if killed will threaten their lives. The movie upended all sorts of expectations by killing off the character who seems like the hero early on, and putting a strong woman (no coat-hanger-wielding, shrieking heroine like Halloween's Laurie Strode) at the center. The performances are outstanding, from a cast in which every name has appeared in countless other good movies: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Veronica Cartwright. And the musical score from Jerry Goldsmith is brilliant at every turn.
James Cameron's 1986 sequel is as good an action movie as the original was a horror movie -- and what a brilliant and gutsy choice it was to completely switch genres like that for the sequel. Populated by a fun cast of characters memorably brought to life by actors like Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Paul Reiser, and Lance Henriksen, this movie is both tense and full of ass-kicking action. Sigourney Weaver actually received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in this movie, one of the few times in history an actor has been nominated for "sci-fi" work, and it's wholly deserved. James Cameron's screenplay pops, with dialogue far better than his later successes, Titanic and Avatar. Composer James Horner contributed music so perfect and iconic that it got used in other movie trailers every year for more than a decade after he wrote it.
Both movies are sterling work in their respective genres, for their respective directors, by their respective casts, and so on.
No comments:
Post a Comment