?? Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Nicholas Webster, 1964

Well, it's Christmas and I am not about to post to this thing until after New Year's. What's that? You won't have it?! Well, shut your pie hole, buster! You're lucky I've posted this long! Anyway, I'll be back around the 5th with #73 on. Still, as it is Christmas and I may as well post something as long as I'm making an excuse for being away. So, I'm using this space to start my What the Hell Is That? series. Occasionally, I'll be posting these things in lieu of an entry in the my favorite films list.

Anywho, as it is nearing the middle of Septober, I find I must recognize Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Not only does this film feature the screen debut of Pia Zadora, you may remember her daddy buying her a Golden Globe, possibly for Fake-Out (IMDB is a bit sketchy on this detail and I'm simply not going to research any further), but also for. . . well. . . this is a stupid movie. You see Mars has no Santa Claus, which only makes sense. So, Kimar, Voldar, Dropo, Hardrock, Cocoa, and Joe set out from Mars to kidnap the jolly old elf. They take him and two of the most annoying children ever spanwned from Lilith's womb to Mars, to fill the Santa gap. Once there, Santa stops giving a shit about the Earth, thanks Santa, and starts manufacturing toys for the Martians. As elf slave labor was abolished by Martian Abraham Lincoln, Santa and the kids, which now includes two Martian whelps whose mother has wisely stopped nursing, use a machine to make all the toys. They are occasionally hindered by Dropo, the laziest man on Mars. Think Beetle Bailey of space. Anyway, Voldar, played by the great Vincent Beck, who you'll remember from his ground breaking performance as Kassim in The Prisoner of Zalamar Affair episode of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., hates Santa. Why does Voldar hate Santa? Probably for the same reasons he hates April Dancer: the man can dance. So, Voldar begins a circuitous plan to defeat Santa by rewiring his toy machine and shooting a Whamo air gun at him. Santa then returns to Earth to find that Heat Miser and Cold Miser have ably picked up the slack in his absence. No longer needed, Santa retires to Connecticut, where he's currently catching up on his reading and hunting hobos for sport.

The big upshot of this thing is that it makes great fodder for your hosted bad movie TV shows. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode devoted to the film is quite good as is the yearly presentation on Svengoolie. If you now find yourself really wanting to see this thing, you're in luck. Relatively speaking. The movie is in the public domain, so feel free to download a copy here: http://www.archive.org/details.php?identifier=santa_claus_conquers_the_martians

74. The Jerk

Carl Reiner, 1979

“The ashtray and the paddle game, that’s all I need. And this remote control. . .”

As a young dude, no one had as much comedic influence on my life as Steve Martin. From the first time I heard my parents’ copy of Wild and Crazy Guy, incidentally, the first comedy album I’d ever even heard of, I was hooked. It must be fifteen years later, now, and I’m a much bigger dude than I once was, but I still adore Steve Martin. In the time since I was first introduced to him, his own act has changed. He is now less the wild and crazy guy who might go cruising for foxes with their big American breasts and more thoughtful. His comedy these days really comes through in his writing, in books like Pure Drivel, which is wry, witty, and insightful. His film work, however, has become appalling. I’d elaborate on this, but I think the trailers for Cheaper by the Dozen 2 more than make my case for me. Still, John Cleese insists that Martin takes these roles to fund his phenomenal art collection, and who am I to argue with Cleese? Of course, Martin still takes time for good roles, in films like Novocain and Shopgirl, recently adapted from his own novella. Again, these tend to be quieter, wry performance. They are good and I appreciate them, but, for me, Martin will always be the wild and crazy guy. He will always have the rabbit ears on his head and wonder if the pope shits in the woods, banjo in hand. My Steve Martin is the Steve Martin of, yes, Wild and Crazy Guy, Comedy Isn’t Pretty, Let’s Get Small, and films like Three Amigos and The Man with Two Brains, itself a strong contender for this list. Indeed, Martin has appeared in any number of films, but the one which most captures his anarchic sense of humor, at least as it existed in the seventies, is The Jerk.

Directed by the brilliant Carl Reiner, primary writer and creator of one of my all time favorite shows, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Jerk is the story of Navin R. Johnson, played by Steve. Navin is born a poor black child in the south. Upon realizing that he is, in fact, white and that he will not become any darker, he leaves his loving family to set out on his own. Navin finds himself working at a gas station, where a man tries to kill him with a sniper, but keeps hitting oil cans instead. Navin, a complete idiot if you haven’t already figured that out, assumes that the man must simply hate these cans! Navin then works at a circus before striking it rich thanks to his invention, the opti-grab. This is a small handle that extends from the center of your glasses and hooks down onto the bridge of your nose, allowing you to take off your glasses in such a way that it doesn’t put stress on the ear pieces. For much of the rest of the film, Navin lives it up as a rich man, with his wife, played by Bernadette Peters, until he looses it all. Like many of the comedies on this list, this one is defined for me by a series of hilarious lines and bits. Of course, I love the “poor black child” thing. Also great are a hitchhiking Navin getting a lift to the end of his block as his neighbor’s truck passes his house, the “all I need” bit, his dog, Shithead, the thermos, really just Martin’s and Peters’ whole performances, and, of course, cat juggling. Could there be a God that would let that happen?

Finally, nothing really explains the influence this movie has had on me than this. When I moved into my own place and got my first phonebook, I immediately opened to see my name, printed for the first time in a phonebook, and said, out loud, mind you, “This really makes somebody. Things are going to start happening to me now.” So, let me now leave you with these immortal words of Steve Martin, which I have never forgotten, “Never. . .” No. Wait. “Always. Always keep a bag of kitty litter in the trunk of your car. It doesn’t take up much space and when you use it up you can just throw it out.”

75. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Tim Burton, 2005

This is, undoubtedly, the most recent film on the list, but, God, do I love it so. Obviously this is a different film from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which is great, and I went to see this version of the Roald Dahl story with a certain amount of trepidation. Could it possibly compare? Well, the short answer is that yes, of course it can. Really, when I look back at Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the only thing the film has going for it, besides some decidedly campy, tripy visuals, is Willy Wonka himself. It’s Gene Wilder’s finest, non-Mel Brooks hour. He’s a delightful madman with just a touch of menace, particularly when on his canoe early on. “There’s no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going.” Still, the rest of the cast is kind of bland and the visuals, for all their camp value, never really hit a home run. Well, Burton’s vision hits the ball out of the park. I’ll get to Depp’s Wonka in a second, but I want to talk about the rest of the movie first. The world of the 1971 chocolate factory ultimately seems hopelessly fabricated, as if you really are in a factory, a weird ass, coked up factory, but a factory none the less. Burton’s factory, however, seems natural, organic, as if you stepped into this place in your dreams. It is a strange and wonderful world full of convincing detail. It is a strange, chocolate dreamscape, with nightmares lurking just around the corner for greedy children. Look at the chocolate forest at the start of the factory tour. It truly seems to have grown in the factory and brilliantly melds a wonderful child's dream with hints of nightmarish fright. The darkness of the place, the strange shapes, as wonderful as it all is, it is also strangely foreboding.

The film also has a terrific sense of humor and wisely ads the same dark tint apparent in the scenery throughout the film and into the characters. There is, for example, something strangely menacing about most of the parents, particularly Missi Pyle’s Mrs. Beauregarde, Violet’s mother, a track suit wearing predatory prom queen type with every sort of sports medal imaginable and a drive to make her daughter just like her. The way Mrs. B looks at all of the fathers and, indeed, Wonka himself, a look of almost predatory sexuality, is both creepy and hilarious. David Kelly is also terrific as the wide eyed and creaky Grandpa Joe. I really can’t say enough about this performance, at once wise and childlike, much like Charlie himself. This guy really deserves an oscar nomination. And then there’s Deep Roy, Hollywood’s midget of the moment, as every single Oompa-Loompa. The Oompa-Loompa’s here are hysterical, from the Oompa-Loompa secretary, to the Oompa-Loompa barber, to the Oompa-Loompa psychiatrist, and, my favorites, the Oompa-Loompas running the puppet burn ward, and I still bust up thinking about the last Oompa-Loompa of the film, which is one of the finest bits of business I’ve seen in quite some time.

So, where does that leave Depp’s Wonka. Well, of course, Depp’s great skill as an actor is that he really is a chameleon. Each performance is entirely unique. Willy Wonka is nothing like Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, or Raoul Duke. Nor is he much like Gene Wilder’s Wonka. If Gene’s Wonka is mad, Johnny’s is positively unhinged. There is very little about Willy Wonka that is like a functional, living person. He is a childlike nut job with wisdom and rage and an odd innocence. He is a mess of contradictions, knowing at once what is right for the greedy little bastards on his tour but hardly knowing his own mind at all, although he seems perfectly capable of figuring it out for himself as long as there’s an ineffectual Oompa-Loompa psychiatrist sitting nearby. His reactions to the children are just as terrific, moving from disgust, to hatred, to disinterest, and, for Charlie, even an amount of admiration. He is a wonderful comic figure, mixed with just enough tragedy to make him at least as enduring screen madman as Wilder’s own Wonka.

76. Danger: Diabolik

Mario Bava, 1968

Further back in the list, we looked at several camp films, but it has been a long time since anything truly campy has hit the list. Until now, that is. Mario Bava is primarily known as an Italian director of Gothic horror films like Black Sunday and Black Sabbath. While he went largely unappreciated in his own time, he has lately been recognized as the cinematic and visual effects genius he really is. The opening moments of Black Sunday, when a witch is tortured and killed, in part by having a spiked mask hammered onto her face, is some of the most beautiful black and white cinematography I have ever seen. Still, perhaps the reason Bava was so unknown in his time was because he was a contract director, making what films he was told to, rather than really seeking out work of his own. The result is an incredibly eclectic body of work, which includes the horror films mentioned above, slasher films like A Bay of Blood, science fiction fare like Planet of the Vampires, Westerns like Ray Colt and Winchester Jack, and a truly terrific camp action adventure, adapted from an Italian comic series, Danger: Diabolik.

I first saw Danger: Diabolik as an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s a very funny episode, one of the best of the later, Sci-fi Channel years, but what always struck me about it was how watchable the movie was. There are a lot of movies on MST3K which are so bad that they make simply watching the episode they’re on something of a chore. There are other which fit in so perfectly with the comedy of the show that they become classic episodes. There are still others, then, from which you get the feel that you could easily watch that movie on its own. Danger: Diabolik is one of these last few. Of course, the dynamic visuals of the film are lost in the MST episode, both because of the cropping needed for television and the truly poor print provided to the MST crew.

The reality of the film is a wild, colorful, and sexy romp through late sixties Italy. The film is filled with fantastic visuals, wonderful effects shots, and a sly sense of humor. John Phillip Law, Sinbad from the classic The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, plays Diabolik, a master criminal general clad in a black leather cat burglar outfit, complete with stylish mask that lets law act with his eyes in a terrific way. Bava places Diabolik all over the place, the best being a sequence in which he scales a stone tower wall with suction cup devices. It’s a series of great shots and makes use of the terrific idea of throwing Diabolik into a white version of his usual outfit so that he blends in with the wall. Pretty much, though, the movie is kind of a camp, super spy version of Bonnie and Clyde as Diabolik spends the movie running around with the insanely gorgeous Marisa Mell, playing his girlfriend Eva Kant. The two really just seem to find it both funny and thrilling to go out and commit these elaborate crimes, even if they’re as goofy as getting the French Minister, played by Terry Thomas, hopped up on laughing gas on live TV. Still, Mell really is just about the sexiest girl to grace the screen at the time and the film knows it. Bava doesn’t hesitate to dress her in a series of flimsy, sexy outfits, or to tease the audience by placing her in a shower with transparent doors, but also with two opaque circles on the door to obscure the best bits. There is even a shot early on that is a long, slow move from Mell’s toes to her face, showing her for the sex object she is right from the start. Not long after that, we get the somewhat famous shot of her and Diabolik rolling around and making love covered by hundreds of hundred dollar bills. Scrooge McDuck was never as sexy. In the hands of a lesser director, this fun romp would be just that, a bit of camp in the vein of Barbarella. Bava, however, brings a visual flair to the film that is unequaled in camp cinema and makes a fun movie into a truly dynamic one, with thrilling colors, fantastic action sequences, and great miniatures, particularly Diabolik’s own bat cave. It’s rare to find a movie this campy and this sexy that’s also this well shot. I really have fallen in love with Bava’s work and it is this film above all the others, largely for how unusual it is, that proves him to be not just a genius of horror, but a genius in the entire medium.

77. Videodrome

David Cronenberg, 1983

“Long live the new flesh!”

This year has been a real banner year for me as far as discovering some of the world’s great horror directors for the first time. At the top of that list are Italian maestros Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Also near the top of that list, although I suppose I officially began to look at his work at the end of last year, is Canada’s David Cronenberg. For most of you, Cronenberg’s most recognizable work is going to be the 1986 version of The Fly. He is also the director of Dead Ringers, The Dead Zone, Scanners, and, most recently, the excellent A History of Violence. Over the past year, I’ve watched a number of Cronenberg’s films and am fascinated by his uses of graphic sexuality and bodily transformation. Both of these are apparent in The Fly and, indeed, tend to appear, in one form or another, in most of the rest of his output. Yet, nowhere are these themes as prevalent, or indeed, intertwined as they are in Videodrome.

Videodrome is the story of Max Renn, played by James Woods and the head of a Canadian television station, who makes his living pirating television series from various, usually foreign, markets and broadcasting them on his own station. Renn’s tastes are increasingly dark, seeking out sexual programming at every turn. This is when he comes across Videodrome, a program of indeterminate origin which is part sadomasochistic sex game and part snuff film. Renn is drawn to the program and even begins an S & M heavy affair based on its influence. Weird? I know. It gets weirder. Stay with me. Eventually, Renn’s girlfriend, Nicki, played by Debby Harry (Blondie!), goes off to audition for Videodrome and disappears. Meanwhile, Renn finds his world and, indeed his very body, warping around him, due to the influence of Videodrome. Of course, he goes off in search of the signal and things only get weirder.

Eventually, the signal really begins to transform Renn’s body and this is where things really take off, especially for me. Now, the idea of film as an intrinsically voyeuristic and therefore, at least partially, sexual medium is an old one. The idea is we watch these people on the screen and take joy from it, whether it is joy in their joy or perverse joy in their fear. Critics like Laura Mulvey would argue further that that gaze is permanently male and is predicated a great deal on watching the women on the screen, sexualizing them at every turn. Whether you agree with that or not is not my point right now. I certainly have my problems with it. What I am getting to though is that, in Videodrome, Cronenberg takes this idea of a link between the film/video image and sexuality and merges them literally on the screen, all while servicing his own, particular oeuvre. When Renn transforms, as is almost inevitable in a Cronenberg feature, the transformation is to grow a long, vertical slit in his belly. His hand, meanwhile, grows into a sort of organic gun, which is explicitly phallic. The slit, meanwhile, is as vaginal as the gun is phallic, and serves to deliver Renn his orders by means of the insertion of a video tape into the slot, thus making the tape, both here and later in the film when an organic, pulsating, video tape is introduced, into a phallic symbol in a way I’ve never seen, certainly not so literally, before. Within Renn, sexuality and the video become one. He becomes a bi-gendered being who serves only the video. It is weird messed up stuff. Certainly, heavily surreal and just as thought provoking. I could go on for a while about the ideas implicit in combining sexuality and the video in this way, but, to be frank, I certainly haven’t worked through it all myself. I just find it fascinating to see this long bandied about idea made into something so literal on the screen, especially as part of an otherwise truly disturbing, effecting, and oddly entertaining horror film.

78. The Incredibles

Brad Bird, 2004

Perhaps the most disappointing film of this year was The Fantastic Four. Now, as I’m sure many of you know, The Fantastic Four is my hands down all time favorite comic book. Thus, when I learned that a feature version was immanent, I was more than a little excited. Finally, I though, Marvel’s First Family would receive the screen treatment they so richly deserved. I was a little discouraged by the selection of director Tim Story, whose previous experience was Barbershop, Barbershop 2, and Taxi, hardly the resume needed to bring Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and the Thing to the big screen. Still, I hoped. Even after a serious of casting decisions both questionable, really Jessica Alba as Sue Storm, and underwhelming, the Horatio Hornblower dude as Mr. Fantastic and the Nip/Tuck dude as Doctor Doom, I thought the movie might have a chance. As soon as the trailers hit, however, I knew I was doomed. “You’re hot!” “Thank you; so are you.” Yuck. Even Roger Corman’s 1994 unreleased FF feature is better. It’s certainly truer to the characters. God, I could go on and on about how wrong this movie is on every conceivable level. Take the scene where Reed and Ben walk past a giant statue of Von Doom. What could have been a bit of business subtly working to show Doom’s ego mania quickly becomes forced and hackneyed as Ben has to comment on it. Why not just have him turn to the freaking camera and say, “Doom’s an egomaniac folks! Enjoy the movie! And don’t worry, we’ll be showing off Jessica Alba’s breasts at regular intervals!” Jesus.

So, what does my utter and unrelenting hatred of The Fantastic Four movie have to do with The Incredibles? Well, the Incredibles is not only the best super hero movie to come out in a long time, it is also the best Fantastic Four movie we’ll likely ever get. They’re all here, admittedly in different guises. We’ve got the great family dynamic that always drove the four. We’ve got their powers: invisibility, super strength, super, um, stretchiablity, and we trade in having a little kid burst into flame every couple of minutes (can you say imitatable?) for super speed. True, these aren’t the exact FF. We don’t really get a super genius or a self hating monster, but we do get a family who loves each other deeply, despite their near constant bickering. We also get a near flawless and original super hero plot. I especially like the idea of the heroes being forced to retire and having to return. Finally, we get something that is really only possible in animation, constant and creative use of super powers. Really, it’s all just terrific stuff. I don’t really know how else to describe how much I like this movie and how right it gets the whole super hero thing and the family thing except to relate my favorite scene to you. Bob, the dad and the super strong one, is being held prisoner on an island. His wife Helen speeds to the rescue in a borrowed plane, their children having snuck aboard. Helen discovers her children just as missiles, courtesy of our villain, streak toward the plane. Helen tries evasive action and begins to plead over the radio, asking her assailant to back off. There are children on board. The terror in Helen’s voice and the anguish on Bob’s face are absolutely palpable. It’s simply one of the most human and hear trenching moments to come to the screen in a long time. When the missiles close in, Helen has only moments to act and launches herself at her children, using her stretching powers to form a protective cocoon around them, completely willing to sacrifice herself for her children, while, back on the island, Bob’s face falls, a broken man, believing his family dead. This one scene really just captures everything about this movie that’s great: the drama, the super heroics, and, most of all, the family. It’s not only an incredible movie, it’s fantastic.

79. The Big Lebowski

Joel Coen, 1998

“Donny, you are out of your element.”

Let’s face it, this movie really ties the list together, man. As writers and directors, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen are masters at mixing genres. Their favorite genre to play with definitely seems to be the film noir, with its generic elements showing up time and again in the Coens’ various films. The Big Lebowski is one of them. The Big Lebowski is about a lot of things, but, at its core, it is the story of a new sort of American folk hero, the laid back, drug addled, slacker, in this case the Dude. The Dude, also known as Jeffrey Lebowski, is the quintessential former hippie, eking out his life in nineties California. He is no complete slacker or two dimensional hippie, however, but a wise man of high moral fortitude, who would, none the less, rather spend his time on the couch, in the tub, smoking weed, or bowling. As the Dude himself says when asked what he does for recreation, “Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback.” His high moral character, seen throughout in his drive to do the right thing, and his ability to see around the bizarre characters and the convoluted plot so common to noir plotting, recognizing them as bizarre, both mark him as the hero. Yet, the most endearing and forceful way the film marks the Dude as unquestionable hero, even elevating him to the level of folk hero, is through Sam Elliott’s character, the Stranger. The Stranger, a mysterious, cowboy hat wearing Westerner, tells us the story of the Dude, making his adventures into a timeless American ballad, likening him implicitly to the likes of Paul Bunyan and John Henry.

Of course, whether or not the Dude is a hero hardly matters if the Dude is not, in fact likable and the Dude is that. This is, undoubtedly, Jeff Bridges best performance. We immediately love the Dude and his laid back ways. He isn’t a character out for revenge or intent on changing others; he is simply a man who, because he shares a name with a wealthy, older man, who may or may not be a spinal (the Dude’s friend Walter believes he’s goldbricking), gets his rug peed on by a group of nihilists. The Dude just wants his rug replaced, man. Meanwhile, the other Jeffrey Lebowski’s wife, Bunny, goes missing and the Dude gets pulled into an elaborate plot involving the nihilists, the other Mrs. Lebowski, pornography (specifically the movie Logjammin’ featuring Karl Hungus), the gentleman who wrote the bulk of the popular television Western Branded, and drugs. Meanwhile, the Dude has to contend with his friends, the perpetually out of his element Donny, and Walter, a Vietnam veteran who has converted to Judaism. The three friends have a big bowling match coming up and, outside of having to compete with Jesus Quintana (and nobody fucks with the Jesus), a pederast, the boys have to deal with Walter’s refusal to roll on Shabbos. The Big Lebowski is a big, strange movie, blending the traditional slacker comedy and characters with the archetypical film noir plot. The result is a terrific and weird movie, featuring one of the most endearing, honest, and memorable leads to come out of a major motion picture in a long time. And what would the Dude have to say about this? The Dude abides, man. The Dude abides. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there. The Dude. Takin’ ‘er easy for all us sinners. Shoosh. I sure hope he makes the finals.

80. Airplane!

Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, 1980

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.”

Ahh. Bask with me, if you will, in the glow of what must be one of the funniest movies of all time. Surely, there isn’t one among you who hasn’t laughed out loud at this film. Oh, and my apologies for calling you Shirley. Really, though, this film set a whole new standard for film comedy, introducing an inspired lunacy to the screen. The film is full of puns, both verbal and visual, and while every actor takes his role with deathly seriousness, the film itself never once takes itself seriously. In the years since, there have been many films which have followed in the same style, from Naked Gun to Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, but Airplane! did it first and it did it best.

Airplane! is, essentially, a parody of the various airplane tragedy/suspense movies of the seventies, like Airport, Airport 1975, Airport ‘77, and The Concorde: Airport ‘79. It is also a parody of a fifties plane tragedy film entitled Zero Hour!, which actually featured the line, “We have to find someone who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner.” What I think is really brilliant about Airplane!, though, is how unnecessary it is to have seen those films. Take a more current parody film, like Scary Movie 3. To understand the jokes in Scary Movie 3, one needs to have seen Signs, The Others, The Matrix, and several other films. I say understand because, even if you understand them, the jokes in Scary Movie 3 aren’t funny. At any rate, I’ve never seen any of the Airport movies, but I still find just about every line in Airplane! funny. The same can be said of most people I know. The genius, of course, is that Airplane! contains hundreds of brilliant jokes, but all of them avoid being topical or too closely tied to the films being parodied. Further, Airplane! has a cohesive central plot on which it can hang its jokes, so that the film is easily understood and followed on its own merits. This is why Airplane! has lasted and will last so long: because it is immenent accessible.

Still, I’m finding it pretty difficult to offer any sort of cohesive, whole hearted analysis of Airplane! For one thing, Airplane! just isn’t a film meant for deep analysis and consideration. The joy of Airplane! and the reason I like it so much is the joy we can take in its barrage of ridiculous jokes and puns. As such, I think I’ll close out the post with some of my favorites. “Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?” “Johnny, what can you make out of this?” “This? Why, I can make a hat or a brooch or a pterodactyl. . .” “You ever been in a cockpit before?” “No sir, I’ve never been up in a plane before.” “You ever seen a grown man naked?” “We had a choice of steak or fish.” “Yes, I remember, I had lasagna.” “No wonder you’re upset. She’s lovely. And a darling figure. . . supple, pouting breasts. . . firm thighs. . .” “Do you know what it’s like to fall in the mud and get kicked. . . in the head. . . with an iron boot? Of course you don’t, no one does. It never happens. It’s a dumb question. . . skip it.” “Just hang loose, bloods.” “Surely you can’t be serious.” “I am serious. . . and don’t call me Shirley.”

81. Being John Malkovich

Spike Jonze, 1999

Dr. Lester: Which of these letters comes first, this one or this one?
Craig: The symbol on the left is not a letter, sir?
Dr. Lester: Damn, you’re good. I was trying to trick you.

This was, most definitely, a huge “What the fuck was that?” movie for me. This came out while I was still in high school, sophomore or junior year. I knew nothing about this movie, nothing at all. All I knew was that one John Welsh was raving about it. So, I go. Holy God. What a movie! Bizarre doesn’t even begin to describe it. True, I’ve seen weirder, much weirder since then, but, at the time, this film was an epiphany for me of exactly how out there a film could be and still work within the strictures, more or less, of the classical narrative system. The plot is this: John Cusack plays Craig Schwartz, a puppeteer who performs marionette shows, such as one involving a priest and a nun who are in love with each other, but can who can only hump the wall which separates their rooms for relief, on street corners. He goes to work for a Dr. Lester on the 13 1/2 floor of an office building. The 13 1/2 floor is just that, half of a floor. It is only about five feet high from floor to ceiling, requiring all of those who work their to crouch down uncomfortably throughout the work day. It’s a lot like spending all day in your crawl space. He works for Dr. Lester, as I said, who is an absolute mad man, who spouts lines like, “My spunk is manna from heaven,” played to perfection by Orson Bean. While at the office, Craig discovers a secret portal to the inside of John Malkovich’s head, which, when entered, allows a person to see and hear everything from Malkovich’s perspective and, with practice, even control Malkovich. Craig spends more and more time in Malkovich’s head and eventually takes over his life, pissing off Lester, who had planned to move into Malkovich as part of his continued bid at immortality over the centuries. There is also Craig’s wife, mistress, Craig’s wife’s monkey, Charlie Sheen, and Craig/Malkovich’s new career as the world’s preeminent puppeteer to consider. Really weird stuff.

The film is born from the fevered imaginations of director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman. This is one of only two films from Jonze, who is primarily a music video director. His videos, however, are just as gloriously bizarre, resulting in such greats as the “Oh So Quiet” Bjork video and the Fat Boy Slim “Weapon of Choice” video featuring a dancing Christopher Walken. Jonze clearly has a genius for imagining and creating truly bizarre and eclectic images, as is also evidenced in Adaptation, his other teaming with Kaufman. The true genius of Malkovich, however, must be Kaufman. Kaufman’s scripts have, since Malkovich, exhibited a true fevered genius. His films move at a breakneck pace, giving us strange comedy, complicated plots, but always the most human of moments. His other films include the equally weird Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The importance of the right director to team with Kaufman can be seen in a survey of his films. Spike Jonze gets Kaufman, bringing his unusual print to the screen with strange pinache, as does Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, however, while well written, just doesn’t come across as well in direction. It was directed by George Clooney, who, while not a bad director, is clearly to conventional and conservative for a Kaufman film. Still, I do like, on one level or another, all of Kaufman’s films, but Being John Malkovich is the one that helped open my eyes in my high school years to the wonderful and weird possibilities of film, and for that I will always love it.

82. Legend

Ridley Scott, 1985

Well, here it is, another of Scott’s three great movies before he decided to start making films about the real world. Unlike Alien or Blade Runner, though, Legend is not a science fiction tale, but a fairy tale. Starting from scratch, Scott crafts a fairy tale so convincing and full of wonderful images and wicked characters, that one would swear the story was told to little German children every night for decades. The story is a simple one of good versus evil. Tom Cruise is Jack, actually turning in a nice performance as a largely innocent and often bewildered sort of nature boy. Jack is in love with the beautiful Princess Lily. Lily is played by Mia Sara, who would later play Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend, in her first screen role. Like Cruise, Sara offers a performance full of innocence, also bringing a striking and pure beauty to the part. She is simply stunning here, an enchanting presence who would be easy to fall in love with. There is a striking scene in the second act in which Sara, in a magnificent black dress, dances by herself through a huge dining room. Here, her innocence combines with a sexuality that is made all the more potent by the fact that it is simply part of her character. She is being seduced by evil here, as I will explain in a moment, and this one small moment wonderfully reinforces the true and absolute innocence that is at the base of the character and at the base of the performance. We realize and appreciate what she is by glimpsing what she is not. Anyway, in hopes of winning Lily’s love, Jack shows her a pair of unicorns. Enter Darkness, the absolute personification of fantasy evil. He is a massive, red devil, with huge black horns, a truly menacing figure. Best of all, he is played by Tim Curry. Curry, I believe, is one of the great under appreciated film villains. Curry brings a palpable menace to the character, making him also a silver tongued seducer, a being capable of unspeakable cruelty with a voice to convince man or woman to do even worse and to think of it as a good idea. Part of what I love about Curry is how big an actor he is. His every performance is so much bigger than anything in life. He is the perfect Shakespearian mad man, reveling at all times both in his evilness and in his penchant to chew the scenery. I don’t mean that as an insult either. Especially with a character like Darkness, who is so far beyond anything in real life, I think it adds weight and true overpowering menace to play that character so far to the hilt, to make the performance as big as the character himself. Well, Darkness hatches a plan to kill the last unicorn and bring night to the world, all the while, seducing Mia Sara to evil.

Legend captures the images of the fairy tale perfectly on the screen. The make up effects, whether for Darkness or the helper demons or even Jack’s allies, is fantastic. The real visual high point, though, is the set. Scott and his crew built an entire, functioning forest in a sound stage in England. The forest is bright and huge and full of life. It looks unbelievably real, while at the same time capturing all the truly unreal qualities of the forests of our collective imaginations. It just looks wonderful. Legend was recently rereleased on DVD in a special edition restoring the original Jerry Goldsmith score, which is phenomenal and much more fitting than the Tangerine Dream score, and almost twenty-five minutes of running time. This is the edition to see. As I said, the score is much more fitting to the overall fairy tale nature of the film and the extra time lets the story breathe more and adds a little to the tale. Further, there is a second disc, which, along with several other features, includes the shorter, theatrical cut of the film, with the Tangerine Dream score. While I prefer the longer cut, it is nice to have the original as well, especially since I am sure there are people who would prefer it. I really wish all director’s cuts and special editions would feature the original cut as a supplement, especially on films like Star Wars, in which the differences between the cuts are so divisive. Luckily, the DVD of Legend gets it right, allowing us a look at two tellings of a great screen fairy tale.

83. Rio Bravo

Howard Hawks, 1959

This is probably my favorite Western, as far as traditional, Hollywood Westerns are concerned. I call it a traditional, Hollywood western because of the way it is made, the way it looks, which is wholly in keeping with the clean, action packed Westerns Hollywood put out throughout the fifties and which are stylistically very different from the grittier Spaghetti Westerns or “End of the West” Westerns that came from Hollywood in the late sixties and seventies, films like The Wild Bunch or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Yet, director Howard Hawks and star John Wayne would likely push that statement even farther, considering the film to be, in many ways, the prototypical Western, as they made it in rebuttal to a film which they believed had the ideals of the West, or, at least, the screen West, all wrong. This is how Howard Hawks relates the story in Peter Bogdanovich’s book Who the Devil Made It? “[Rio Bravo] started with some scenes in a picture called High Noon in which Gary Cooper [playing the town sheriff] ran around trying to get help and no one would give him any. And that’s rather a silly thing for a man to do, especially since at the end of the picture he is able to do the job by himself. So I said, we’ll do just the opposite, and take a real professional viewpoint. We did everything that way -- the exact opposite of what annoyed me in High Noon -- and it worked.”

Part of the reason I like this movie so much is that I agree with Hawks absolutely. High Noon really is a bullshit Western. The sheriffs job, particularly in the world of the Hollywood Western, is to protect the townspeople at all costs. Yet, here we have Gary Cooper going up to every last townsperson he can find, asking them to help him in a gunfight. Good day, sir. In Rio Bravo, however, we find John Wayne faced with a similar problem, but he doesn’t once go looking for help. He sucks it up, like the Duke always does. Hell, poor Duke’s even stuck with some of the crummiest deputies this side of the Picos. You’ve got Walter Brennan, who is not only doing his usually old timey prospector style performance, which is always a lot of fun, really, but is crippled, Ricky Nelson, who is as wet behind the ears as you can be, and Dean Martin, playing against type as a drunk. Again, though, the Duke never goes looking for more men, but makes his stand with what he has.

I also just think its great that, instead of just sitting around griping about how crappie High Noon was, Hawks got off his ass and actually made a film rebuttal. How cool is that? Maybe, someday, I’ll get to make a rebuttal to Surf Ninjas. It could happen. Regardless, this film really does stand in my mind as the iconic Hollywood Western. It has a great look, there may be dirt on the floor, but everyone’s pretty clean and their shirts are real bright, and some terrific directing and camera work. You have a solid Western story, banditos are a comin’, with some terrific character work, particularly the redemptive arc for Dean Martin’s character. You also have the two people who really need to be in every Hollywood Western: Walter Brennan and, of course, John Wayne. Really, you can’t get much better than that.

84. To Be or Not to Be

Ernst Lubitsch, 1942

Ernst Lubitsch's original To Be or Not to Be, as opposed to the remake starring, but not directed by, Mel Brooks, is one of the great, rarely seen comedies of the forties. That is not to say that people haven't seen it or heard of it, but that it seems rarely seen any more. The film stars the incomparable Jack Benny, in what is doubtless his best screen role, playing a variation on his egotistical actor character, perfected week in and week out on his radio show. Here, Benny is a Polish actor named Joseph Tura, who finds himself at the head of a company performing Hamlet at the outbreak of the second World War. Of course, Benny considers himself to be the greatest actor in the world and, as is usually the case with him, much of the film's comedy comes from watching his fellow actors, his audience, and even the Nazi party take the mickey out of him, so to speak. Benny's wife in the film is played by Carole Lombard, who has a secret admirer in the form of American flyer Robert Stack. Several of the film's funniest moments come as Benny launches into Hamlet's most famous monologue, "To be or not to be. . ." This, we are told, is the finest monologue any actor can play and Benny the finest to play it. It is hilarious then to watch Benny's face contort in indignation and confusion as Stack gets up only a few lines into the monologue, pressing his way past the others in his row, time and again. The meat of the film comes with the Nazi occupation of Poland and a complicated plot that involves Benny posing a Nazi scientist. Watching Benny try to bluff his way through a meeting with an oafish Nazi officer is hilarious, but the appearance of the real scientist's dead body and Benny's reaction to it is sheer genius.

This is probably my favorite film from Ernst Lubitsch, a director whose work I have only recently begun to know, but which I have also enjoyed in The Shop Around the Corner, Trouble in Paradise, and That Lady in Ermine. Lubitsch has a knack for crafting comedies that are at all times clever, human, and, above all, charming. They are usually set in out of the way foreign corners of the world (admittedly To Be or Not to Be is not the best example of this; the charming European village setting for The Shop Around the Corner, however, exemplifies the idea perfectly) and frequently mix hilarious sequences with charming romance and bittersweet humanity. Here, the comedy of remarriage style romance of Benny and Lombard is quite good, but, for me, the best, most human, most heartbreaking moment comes in the form of one of the film's supporting characters. Rawitch, played by character actor Lionel Atwill, is a quiet, older man, a Jewish supporting player in Tura's company. It is his fondest wish to play Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and to utter those famous lines, "If you prick us, do we not bleed? Tickle us, do we not laugh?" The point in the film in which Rawitch gets his chance, acting as a willing distraction to keep a group of Nazi soldiers from noticing the Turas is unspeakably heartwarming and heartbreaking.

85. The Thing

John Carpenter, 1982

What can I say? I’m a huge fan of John Carpenter. I love Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, and, of course, The Thing. I am a little bothered by this odd and recent trend to remake John Carpenter films, particularly since they hold up very well as is. Still, in addition to the umpteen Halloween installments Hollywood, and Carpenter himself, seems dead set on releasing, including Halloween Water, we have had to bear recent remakes of both Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog. I would hardly be surpassed if The Thing were next on the list. Of course, that would actually be sort of appropriate given that The Thing itself is a remake, specifically of The Thing from Another World, the 1951 film commonly attributed to director Howard Hawks. Now, as a rule, I’m not much of a fan of remakes. There are exceptions, of course, but, by and large, I’d just as soon see the original and have today’s filmmakers create something new. Still, if one is going to remake a film, I would just as soon see a complete reinvention of the core concept and that is what Carpenter gives us in The Thing. At it’s core, The Thing is the story of an American Antarctic outpost, what they’re doing there is unclear, who comes into contact with an alien monster that had been buried beneath the ice for millions of years. In the Hawks original, this was a Frankenstein’s monster looking vegetable man. Trust me, its cooler than it sounds. In Carpenter’s film, however, the creature is not limited to just one form, but an form. It comes to the camp, populated by Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, and a series of then unknowns cast to preserve realism, in the form of a dog. As the dog shoots out tentacles and grows a second head while attempting to eat the other dogs, our boys realize something is very wrong.

Like Alien, this is the ultimate claustrophobic horror story. Our heroes are based in the Antarctic, so there is no hope for rescue and, once the helicopter is destroyed, no hope for escape. Worse though, is the fact that the alien here can be anyone. Once the alien kills and eats you, it can assume not just your shape, but become a perfect copy of you on a genetic level. Thus, for most of the film, our heroes have no way of knowing which of them are human and which are alien. There is, quite simply, no one you can trust. Carpenter has taken away our one monster and given us a dozen possible monsters, who can kill you in any number of surpassing and grizzly ways. True, the alien may look like a human on every conceivable level, but it can also grow tentacles or spider legs or claws. It can kill you anyway it wants and then become you. Worse still, the monster is not limited to one form. By killing a man, it can reproduce. It does not stop being the man who killed you to become you. It becomes both. In this way, we’re told, if this thing should escape Antarctica, it will replace the world’s population in under three years. It’s a hell of a monster, unlike anything we’ve ever encountered before and Carpenter plays it to the hilt, particularly with the undertones of extreme paranoia.

Another thing I like about this film is how it pays homage to the original, while still being its own story. Indeed, in some ways, The Thing functions more as a sequel to The Thing from Another World, taking the original concept and expanding it, making it more threading, upping the stakes. There are even a series of visual cues to the original film in Carpenter’s version. The Norwegian camp visited by Kurt Russell in The Thing, and where the threat seems to have struck first, is identical to the American camp in the Hawks version. In particular, Russell and his fellows watch a video of the Norwegian team forming a giant circle around a flying saucer buried beneath the ice, just as the Americans do in the Hawks film.

So, creepy, original monster, excellent atmosphere, fine directing in Carpenter’s usual pulpish style, no breasts, multiple beasts, about a gallon of blood, metamorphosis fu, tentacle fu, spider leg fu. Four stars. Joe Bob says check it out.

86. Judgment at Nuremberg

Stanley Kramer, 1961

Based, as I understand it, on a episode of Playhouse 90, a weekly television show which presented live plays, Judgment at Nuremberg tells the story of three Nazi judges put on trial in Nuremberg in the days after the second World War. This is a terrific movie and another one of my all time favorite courtroom dramas. Whereas Witness for the Prosecution is told from the point of view of the lawyer, this film is told from the point of view of the judge, or at least the chief judge of the American tribunal, played by the great Spencer Tracy. Tracy plays a midwestern lawyer who feels as though he is in over his head, but who’s profound wisdom is exactly what the case needs. The main thrust of the film is the moral dilemma of whether or not these men, particularly the otherwise noble Ernst Janning, played spectacularly by Burt Lancaster, were simply following orders, condemning others to die by Hitler’s decree while doing their best to maintain order, or whether their crimes are so morally corrupt that these men, particularly in their roles as judges themselves, had it as their duty to defy Hitler. Maximilian Schell plays the defense attorney masterfully, even winning the academy award for best actor that year, making the vocal argument that Lancaster makes with his face. Of course, this was years before old Max would turn in his best performance opposite Ernest Borgnine and a couple of cute robots in The Black Hole, but I digress.

While, Judgment at Nuremberg sports an excellent story and terrific direction, it is a film which requires a great deal of thrust to keep it going, especially at just over three hours. Yet the film never lags. Stanley Kramer, a truly phenomenal director who is also responsible for films as diverse as Inherit the Wind and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, really keeps the film moving and clearly understands that it is the drama of the story and not overly elaborate camera work, although the camera work is very nice, that will drive the story along. To that end, he and his producers have assembled an absolute who’s who of great acting talent, all of whom turn in amazing performances. Along with Spencer Tracy, who’s quiet, yet intense performance is the backbone of the film, Burt Lancaster, and Maximilian Schell, we also get Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, William Shatner, and Werner Klemperer. Marlene and Judy are both fantastic, displaying both real strength and heartbreaking vulnerability over the course of the film, but I’d really like to talk for a second about the last two. Having William Shatner and Werner Klemperer in this picture is really surreal, not so much so as to distract and this is obviously long before either would play their most famous roles, but still . . . Shatner plays a young army captain, which is weird. Having Shatner their and having people call him captain, well its just like watching “Patterns of Force.” That’s a big shout out to the Trek fans in the audience. Rock on. And then there’s Werner. Werner Klemperer, of course, gained eternal fame in the role of Colonel Klink in the immortal Hogan’s Heroes. In Judgment at Nuremberg, he plays one of the accused Nazi judges. That’s right, another Nazi. When he finally takes the stand, you really expect him to blame “Hooogan!” Still, despite Klink’s whining, this really is one of the most powerfully acted dramas you’ll ever see.

87. Picnic at Hanging Rock

Peter Weir, 1975

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a beautiful dream. It is based on a true story, about how a group of schoolgirls set out for Hanging Rock in Australia on Saint Valentine’s Day 1900 and how some never returned. Yet, this is no mystery film. It is not some true crime story. It is very much a dream. It is a film filled with eerie, bizarre music, beautiful girls who dream their lives away, and haunting, lingering images. It is a film less about plot than the dream like meditation of a thing which happened, but which no one understands. That said, it is important to note that, while the film does indulge in one or two unrealized possibilities concerning the disappearance of the missing girls, it offers nothing even approaching a concrete explanation. This is fitting as the real mystery was never solved. This is, perhaps, the films most unique quality and one which rests at its core. Other films approaching unsolved mysteries, if I may borrow Robert Stack’s shtick, generally offer a solution. Take, for example From Hell, one of the numerous films which tries to present “what really happened” in the Ripper Murders of London’s Whitechapel district. From Hell suggests the killings were ritual in nature, committed by a nutty Free Mason. Time After Time, another Ripper film, suggests that Jack escaped Victorian London for 1980s San Francisco by means of H. G. Wells’ time machine. That said, it is remarkable that Weir leaves well enough alone in Picnic at Hanging Rock, offering not solutions, but a film which is every bit the enigma the actual event remains to this day.

Like some of Weir’s other, and In my opinion , better Australian films, Picnic at Hanging Rock is also about the natural in Australia. This is not to say that his films, particularly this one and The Last Wave, are rooted in reality. Instead, Weir approaches the idea of nature in Australia from an aboriginal standpoint. The view he offers in these films is one of a land that is impossibly old and possessed of powers beyond human comprehension. It gives mystical powers to native aboriginal people, makes young girls disappear, alters the perceptions of other women, and, most of all, defends itself against the growing encroachment of so-called civilized humanity into its ancient heart. Hanging Rock, after all, is an impossibly old, entirely natural rock, standing amid the Australian wilderness. It seems willing to accept into itself those people who are willing to embrace its power, while repulsing all others, stopping their watches, spinning compasses, and putting them asleep. Make no mistake though, while the rock is clearly possessed of some sort of ancient power, it is not the films antagonist. I am not saying that it, malevolently or not, snatched those girls most willing to commune with nature while actively repulsing those who resist it (The girls who disappear are shown to be the sort who enjoy spending days at a time outside, sleeping in the grass, picking daisies, frolicking among the wild. The girl in the smaller group which wonders onto the rock who is not taken is the bookish one who will not even remove her shoes and stockings outdoors). I am saying that the film is a dream and that, within its boundaries, anything is possible.