I feel like having a top "..." list.
So...
My Top 3 Movies of All-Time
Exhaustively Decided by Myself
- When I say exhaustively, I mean it. I've watched more movies than I should have. In fact, I'm rewatching Raging Bull for the seventh or eighth time as I write this, and I already watched Goodfellas just before, and last night I wagged Sisterhood of The Travelling Pants, sans pants.
1. Citizen Kane.
~ I don't know why, I don't know how. It almost seems too cheesy, too expected for this to top a person's list of their favorite movies of all time, but I enjoy this movie as thoroughly as some people enjoy sex. Watching Kane as he finishes the negative play notice that his best friend had been writing, as a way to fire him, is brilliant. The way it jumps from the end of his life to the beginning, to the middle, to his 20's, through his 40's, like an epic and crazed novel. The sheer amount of artistic benefit, the fact that it's a two-hour movie with no sag on the belly, and the performances -- they're all incredibly great, even by today's changed standards. I've said before, I'll say it again: Kane did things in '41 that movies today should do more. Sad, but it also shows how monumentally brilliant the movie is.
2. Goodfellas
~ I'm not a fan of straightforward plots, if you can't guess. I love the jumping timelines that many movies tend to avoid for fear of losing their audience. Anyway, Orson Welles is not my favorite filmmaker; Martin Scorsese, eyebrows and all, is. There's a primordial joy in the making of Goodfellas that just fills every centimeter of that screen -- the movie is a love letter, like all of Marty's movies are. It's a mobster epic, one that has tucks and winks to Casablanca and The Godfather, but one that kicks straight ahead into a zone that is all the movie's own. Liotta, DeNiro, Pesci, Sorvino, Bracco, so and so on -- all great, great performances. The goddamn movie is the gem of the latter-half 20th century's moviemaking process.
3. The Dead Quadrilogy
~ Four movies, but I'm going to count them as one. You remove one, the others still stand on their own, but the cohesive whole that Romero manages to add onto is greater than any of the movies alone. Night's dread and interplay is a masterpiece of dark, dingy independent filmmaking; Dawn's issue-on-its-sleeve bravery and plain-out crazy slapstick cemented Romero as a great satirist; Day proved that he could do a political thriller involving some crazy people in a bunker, and yet STILL speak about the decade at hand. And then, Land is just a purely great action movie with two perfectly paced plotlines interweaving and yet there's still the damnation and class-battle overarching theme ingrained in the movie. Plus, there hasn't been a bad performance in any of them -- they always, always work perfectly for the films.
So...
My Top 3 Movies of All-Time
Exhaustively Decided by Myself
- When I say exhaustively, I mean it. I've watched more movies than I should have. In fact, I'm rewatching Raging Bull for the seventh or eighth time as I write this, and I already watched Goodfellas just before, and last night I wagged Sisterhood of The Travelling Pants, sans pants.
1. Citizen Kane.
~ I don't know why, I don't know how. It almost seems too cheesy, too expected for this to top a person's list of their favorite movies of all time, but I enjoy this movie as thoroughly as some people enjoy sex. Watching Kane as he finishes the negative play notice that his best friend had been writing, as a way to fire him, is brilliant. The way it jumps from the end of his life to the beginning, to the middle, to his 20's, through his 40's, like an epic and crazed novel. The sheer amount of artistic benefit, the fact that it's a two-hour movie with no sag on the belly, and the performances -- they're all incredibly great, even by today's changed standards. I've said before, I'll say it again: Kane did things in '41 that movies today should do more. Sad, but it also shows how monumentally brilliant the movie is.
2. Goodfellas
~ I'm not a fan of straightforward plots, if you can't guess. I love the jumping timelines that many movies tend to avoid for fear of losing their audience. Anyway, Orson Welles is not my favorite filmmaker; Martin Scorsese, eyebrows and all, is. There's a primordial joy in the making of Goodfellas that just fills every centimeter of that screen -- the movie is a love letter, like all of Marty's movies are. It's a mobster epic, one that has tucks and winks to Casablanca and The Godfather, but one that kicks straight ahead into a zone that is all the movie's own. Liotta, DeNiro, Pesci, Sorvino, Bracco, so and so on -- all great, great performances. The goddamn movie is the gem of the latter-half 20th century's moviemaking process.
3. The Dead Quadrilogy
~ Four movies, but I'm going to count them as one. You remove one, the others still stand on their own, but the cohesive whole that Romero manages to add onto is greater than any of the movies alone. Night's dread and interplay is a masterpiece of dark, dingy independent filmmaking; Dawn's issue-on-its-sleeve bravery and plain-out crazy slapstick cemented Romero as a great satirist; Day proved that he could do a political thriller involving some crazy people in a bunker, and yet STILL speak about the decade at hand. And then, Land is just a purely great action movie with two perfectly paced plotlines interweaving and yet there's still the damnation and class-battle overarching theme ingrained in the movie. Plus, there hasn't been a bad performance in any of them -- they always, always work perfectly for the films.