Introduction
Andrew's top 100 films, approximately
A TOP 10
An actual top ten would be hard to define unchangeably, and not necessary in the real world. But this isn't reality, so this is as close as I'm likely to come - though other films may come along to change the listing. I've still rarely seen anything to rival my response to The Man Who Fell to Earth (maybe it's to do with the age I was when I first saw it: 14.) Various links to come...
• The Man Who Fell to Earth (Roeg)
"Well, I'm not a scientist Dr Bryce, but I do know that everything begins and ends in eternity."
[Trailer]
• Hud (Ritt)
"This country is run on epidemics, where have you been?"
[Trailer]
• Galaxy Quest (Parisot)
"Let's get out of here, before one of those things kills Guy!"
[Trailer]
• 2001: a space odyssey (Kubrick)
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
[Trailer}
• Performance (Roeg/Cammell)
"I'm normal"
[Trailer]
• Woman of the Dunes (Teshigahara)
"It's useless. The sand can swallow up cities and countries, if it wants to."
[Trailer]
• American Psycho (Harron)
"Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?"
[Trailer]
• Gattaca (Niccol)
"A year is a long time."
"Not so long. Just once around the sun."
[Trailer]
• Cabaret (Fosse)
"Divinely decadent"
[Clip]
• The Outlaw Josey Wales (Eastwood)
"They call us 'civilized' because we're easy to sneak up on. White men have been sneaking up on us for years."
[Trailer]
After a top ten, rather than list 90 more, I've continued to a top 99 by splitting into various categories, and left an entry for a selection of films which might make it up to 100:
THE BEST OF THE REST OF ROEG AND KUBRICK
Two favourite directors, who between them have the most entries on this list, with Roeg having two in the top 10. Kubrick's one is added to here, and as a possible 100th film below...
• Walkabout (Roeg)
• Don't Look Now (Roeg)
• Bad Timing (Roeg)
• Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)
• The Shining (Kubrick)
SMALL-TOWN AMERICA
Independent American movies are still among the best in the world (along with the occasional studio one!) And one favoured subject among them (and for me) is small town America. It's a subject among films that I like which for some reason haven't made this list, like Transamerica, Spanking the Monkey etc. Director Mark Romanek made the first here, Static, and also made the good One Hour Photo. For some reason he has chosen to essentially disown Static, though I don't know why - it remains very strong and quirky in my memory...
• Static (Romanek)
• Trouble in Mind (Rudolph)
• The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich)
• Lawn Dogs (Duigan)
• Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (Scorsese)
• Paper Moon (Bogdanovich)
PAN-ASIA: A SELECTION
From earlier (in my film-going times) Japanese films like Muddy River, Summer Vacation 1999 and some by Shohei Imamura etc, via films from elsewhere in Asia such as Farewell my Concubine, Raise the Red Lantern, to Oldboy and 3 Iron - none of which for reasons unknown (!) make this list - certain Asian movies continue to be a source
of impressive filmmaking.
• Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul)
• The River (Liang)
• Spring Summer Autumn Winter... and Spring (Ki-Duk)
• Rouge (Kwan)
• Scent of Green Papaya (Hung)
• Maboroshi (Koreeda)
• Ai No Corrida (Oshima)
• Gates of Flesh (Suzuki)
• Nobody Knows (Koreeda)
• Hard Boiled (Woo)
HORROR
Another genre to my liking from early days, from being a pre-teen watching The Innocents on TV to revelling in Carrie as a teenager. Tastes change, of course - Suspiria, a teenage favourite, didn't hold up for me at all on a recent viewing and I have little interest in the current mainstream horror like Saw etc. But when something like Mist comes along, I'm happy.
• The Innocents (Clayton)
• The Exorcist (Freidkin)
• The Haunting (Wise)
• Carrie (de Palma)
• Mist (Darabont)
• Rosemary's Baby (Polanski)
• Psycho (Hitchcock) and
• Psycho [the remake] (van Sant)
• Solaris (Tarkovsky)
MEN, GAMES AND CONSPIRACY
For some reason, like small town America, this seems a great topic for good movies. Is it just me, is it just because there is an excess of men represented among film directors, or is it just a fine topic for good stories? Meanwhile, others include All the President's Men and even Network etc.
• Breach (Ray)
• Three Days of the Condor (Pollack)
• Michael Clayton (Gilroy)
• The Insider (Mann)
• Copland (Mangold)
BIG BOX OFFICE
Many good movies and some great movies are big, funded ones - although independents and quieter films still seem to lead this list. Some are relative start-outs, like James Cameron's Terminator and Steven Spielberg's Jaws, that become a big series or the launch pad of a "major" career. Some are from big studio productions in the past. Not far off this list could be The Abyss (another strong Cameron film. But his Titanic wouldn't get off the bottom of a lifetime-list of movie-going.)
• Terminator 1 and
• Terminator 2 (Cameron)
• Mission Impossible 1 (de Palma)
• Mission Impossible 2 (Woo)
• Jaws (Spielberg)
DOCUMENTARIES
Only a couple of entries here. I feel there should be more - maybe small-scale like Paris is Burning. And I'm definitely unconvinced that I shouldn't have made room for a Michael Moore film.
• Man on Wire (Marsh)
• Etre et Avoir (Philibert)
HUMAN DRAMA: A SELECTION
Small town America crosses with this grouping, which extends to small town anywhere, and much further into any subject which broadly might be called the human condition - covered here: wealth and isolation, loss, emptiness, relationships, love and happiness...
• Choose Me (Rudolph)
• The Ice Storm (Lee)
• In the Mood for Love (Wai)
• The Great Gatsby (Clayton)
• My Own Private Idaho (van Sant)
• The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan)
• Kiss of the Spider Woman (Babenco)
• The Turner of Pages (Decourt)
• Ma Vie En Rose (Berliner)
• Toto L'hero (Van Dormael)
• Respiro (Crialese)
• The Hidden (Michael Haneke)
• The Third Man (Reed)
• Talk to Her (Almodovar)
• Scene at the Sea (Takeshi)
• Into the Wild (Penn)
• Happy Together (Wai)
• Gods and Monsters (Condon)
• Sideways (Payne)
• The Right Stuff (Kaufman)
• Away from Her (Polley)
• Kissed (Stopkewich)
• Black Orpheus (Camus)
1970s AMERICA: A SELECTION
Now established as one of the great eras - at least in my head. Directors who were at work then note how comparatively difficult it is to get a film of the kind then made now funded. Some still slip through - the occasional Soderburgh, George Clooney film etc. Still, something stands out about that time - when current US "stars" were still "actors", when to some seemingly larger extent, money could be spent on serious drama, when independent funding was easier to find. When Altman could make a film based on a dream with such a great and unusual colour palette and starring two now-disappeared-from-our screens actresses (Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall) 3 Women, or when a host of films could disproportionately fill a top 100 listing.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Forman)
• French Connection (Freidkin)
• Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet)
• 3 Women (Altman)
ABOUT VIOLENCE
Inevitably, considering its large presence in the "human condition", a fevered topic for movies. While there are plenty of violent movies, fewer look within that violence as a theme for exploration in itself. Here's a handful that do.
• Badlands (Malick)
• Cyclo (Hung)
• Dead Man (Jarmush)
• The Long Goodbye (Altman)
• Deliverance (Boorman)
• Elephant (van Sant)
SUPPOSEDLY FOR KIDS...
...but really for kids of all ages: films that it's enjoyable to take younger children to while being absoutely fully engaged yourself. Toy Story could be here too, as could The Incredibles and Ponyo as well as some live-action stories and even one or two others elsewhere on this Top 100 list. For older children Whale Rider comes to mind...
• Storm Boy (Safran)
• Tonari no Totoro (Miyazaki)
• Finding Nemo (Stanton, Unkrich)
COMEDY AND MUSICAL
I'm not sure why I've followed a categorising of comedy and musical together. But what the hell, it'll have to do. I may be the target of scorn from many "serious" film-goers for including Mamma Mia as a top 100 film but, again, what the hell... it was great.
• Mamma Mia (Lloyd)
• Monty Python's Life of Brian (Jones)
• Harvey (Koster)
• The Ladykillers (Mackendrick)
ABOUT WAR
Separated only as a specific topic from the above category of violence, it has of course fascinated filmmakers through time - not least Kubrick, who in his varied career approached the topic three times, with Dr Strangelove selected here. Other close contenders for a listing would be de Palma's Casualties of War (but not his misjudged Redacted), Three Kings, Catch 22, even The Great Escape. But, meanwhile, selected here are some passionate condemnations of war or off-centre approaches.
• Cross of Iron (Peckinpah)
• Dr Strangelove (Kubrick)
• Downfall (Hirschbiegel)
• A Canterbury Tale (Powell)
• Tombstone for the Fireflies (Takahata)
• Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino)
OTHERS
This film is usually shown in galleries or art cinemas. I saw it immediately after a dull movie
in a mainstream cinema, and was not in the mood for another film. It was, however, transfixing. Should I also include David Beckham sleeping, the video from the National Portrait Gallery in London, then?
• The Passing (Bill Viola)
The 100th?
That's 99 films. Even the top ten is flexible or in flux. So to round the list off to 100
would miss out some great films. Last on the list - although not neceassrily least by any means - what should I include? The likes of...
• North by Northwest, Nortorious?
• The Lives of Others?
• The Conversation?
• Baghdad Cafe?
• She's Gotta Have it?
• Get on the Bus?
There's no Spike lee's on the list, but not just the above two but Jungle Fever stick easily in my mind.
• A classic like Citizen Kane?
• Peeping Tom?
• Rebel Without a Cause?
• Something by Peter Weir?
• Yet another Kubrick (Lolita perhaps).
• Something minor (from the mainstream, like Jodie Foster in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, or the less known like Euzhan Palcy's Rue Cases-Nègres or Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence?) or something quite major (Coma?)
• Satyajit Ray? The Marx Brothers? Jacques Tati?
• Dustin Hoffman is missing from the other 99 which means I've missed out Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate, All the President's Men and Papillonwhich is inexcusable...
There's also an uncountable HOST of films - many considered classics - I haven't seen, of course. The list, therefore continues
Since the subtitle of Cho Film Club is "Film without boundaries", above is an approximation of the distribution of these films. Well, there's certainly a US and home-country (UK) bias, with adopted country, Japan, coming in third - a good indication that my chosen films will differ from yours). Then France, Canada and China, with the rest distributed around east Asia, Europe and a couple from Brazil and Australia. This is necessarily an approximation, as the definition of a film's nationality is flexible. Where there's co-productions I haven't split the nationality, and I've opted for a definition more on story, director and intention more than where the funding's from...