Top 100 Films of the 20th Century – Part 5: 85-81

90-91

Rank: 85

Title: Schindler’s List

Release Year: 1993

Genre: Holocaust Drama

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Fiennes

Plot Summary: Initially a war profiteer, Oskar Schindler gradually becomes concerned for his Jewish workforce in Poland after witnessing the horrors they face at the hands of the Nazis. He changes his focus from profit to saving as many as he can.

What Makes It Special: Holocaust dramas are almost all incredibly powerful and personal (particularly for their filmmakers). With Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg (a darling of Hollywood) was able to convey the pain of a generation to filmgoers worldwide by using his polished style to create a prestige blockbuster. Shot in black and white, Spielberg utilizes color in one very specific scene to iconic and haunting affect. The film stays with its audience, resonating deeply.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Streaming

Rank: 84

Title: Gone with the Wind

Release Year: 1939

Genre: Epic/Romance Drama/War Drama

Director: Victor Fleming

Cast: Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard, and Hattie McDaniel

Plot Summary: Scarlett O’Hara is a strong-minded southern belle who always gets what she wants. However, with the outbreak of the Civil War, she must make sacrifices to survive – including engaging in an affair with Rhett Butler, a blockade runner who normally would be an outcast in polite society (but he can is useful to O’Hara during the war as he greatly profits personally from it). But she is spiteful and cruel, leading their relationship down a tumultuous path.

What Makes It Special: Gone with the Wind is one of the great epics of American cinema and the highest grossing film of all-time (if you adjust for inflation). It is beloved by many as a grand romantic tale, filled with great characters, beautiful aesthetics, and iconic moments. All that said, however, the film also has blemished reputation (especially as today’s society becomes more cognizant and unforgiving of subtle racism and other discriminatory aspects of culture). It paints the South as a majestic place ruined by the North’s vicious war – as it is taken from the South’s perspective – propagating the myth (to some extent) that slavery was really not all that bad for those enslaved (especially for those unfamiliar with America’s history – which includes most Americans). It is undoubtedly a great film, a classic, but must be taken in its historical context.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Streaming

Rank: 83

Title: A Clockwork Orange

Release Year: 1971

Genre: Crime Drama/Psychological

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Malcolm McDowell

Plot Summary: In future Britain, criminal and delinquent Alex DeLarge is put in jail. While there, he is chosen for an experimental aversion therapy developed by the government (to cure criminals of their devious tendencies and thereby solve society’s crime problem). Alex is a good pupil, but not everything goes as planned.

What Makes It Special: A Clockwork Orange examines British society under the guise of being a satire set “the near future”, and it is harsh in its assessment. Stanley Kubrick warps the look of everything (to almost a dystopian degree). The idea of the government brainwashing criminals to always choose the good, in an effort to address their prison overpopulation problem, speaks to the great concern that government (or any other kind of authority figure) wants to control every aspect of the populace’s life, taking away the individual’s humanity. What makes this film so compelling is that Kubrick presents our protagonist as someone wholly unlikable but charismatic. His actions and perversity are disgusting, and yet seeing his humanity taken away (or at least attempted to be taken away) creates a sense of compassion in the viewer – for a man who certainly does not deserve it. And then, now that Kubrick has taken the audience from a place of hate to compassion, he reveals that Alex has not changed at all; he is still just as rotten as ever. His rehabilitation is one big joke – the government and audience have been lured into feeling a sense of compassion only to be laughed at, because really the world is just a wicked place that we just like to pretend is good and ordered – making this film the ultimate satire.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Streaming

Rank: 82

Title: Kes

Release Year: 1969

Genre: Character Drama

Director: Ken Loach

Cast: David Bradley, Colin Welland, and Brian Glover

Plot Summary: Billy is a young working-class English boy who has a hard life (both at home and at school). However, he finds something to be passionate about for the first time when he spends his free time caring for and training his pet falcon.

What Makes It Special: Kes is at its heart a very beautiful and touching story, while at the same time a bleak look at the typical life of those living in a Yorkshire mining town in the 1960s. Billy is essentially a boy with no hope (and no escape) who finds something wondrous and meaningful in his life, if only for a moment. Kes also feels extremely authentic, as if Ken Loach were merely filming the real lives of the characters in the film. Loach appeals to many emotions, as the narrative elicits feelings of joy, anger, horror, and sadness, yet it never feels like Loach is pulling the strings for dramatic effect – again speaking to the film’s realistic feel. It is one of cinema’s finest and most intimate character dramas.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray

Rank: 81

Title: The Thin Red Line

Release Year: 1998

Genre: War Drama/Philosophical

Director: Terrence Malick

Cast: Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas, and John Cusack

Plot Summary: U.S. soldiers face a very entrenched Japanese army during the battle at Guadalcanal during WWII.

What Makes It Special: Most WWII films focus on the bravery and the accomplishments of the men involved, or the major turning points of the battle(s), but Terrence Malick did something completely different with The Thin Red Line (and during the same year that saw the release of Saving Private Ryan, a much more popular WWII film, though not as critically heralded today by comparison). The viewer does not really ever get a sense of how the battle is going or what the main objectives are or what the status of the battle is at any point. Rather, Malick focuses completely on the psychological make-up of the soldiers: how they are affected by the conflict; their dreams of home; their dreams of escape; their fear; and yes their heroism as well. Malick creates a mixture of the stunning beauty of nature and the devastating violence that man brings to it with his visuals, playing into the poetic resonance of the extensive voiceover narration throughout from the perspective of multiple characters. There may never be a more visually impressive or thoughtful film made about the horrors of war.

Trailer: Here

Available on: Blu-ray and Streaming

80-76

Terrence Malick – Movies Spotlight – May 2011

Auteur writer-director Terrence Malick is known for making atmospheric existential films that incorporate beauty and nature into the story and feel of the narrative (even more so than character or plot is some cases). His films are always amazing to behold – meditations on their subject matter. Malick is interested in the artistry and emotional resonance of his visuals and characters. His new film The Tree of Life looks at a young boy in the 1950s who losses his innocence as he comes to terms with the world around him, his relationship with his father and growing up. Malick’s films are about meaning, each viewer deriving their own from the experience of watching them, and thus are polarizing. But regardless, it is undeniable that he is one of the master filmmakers working today.

Early Career:

Malick started his filmmaking career as a student, receiving his MFA from the AFI Conservatory in 1969. While attending the program, he made his first film – a short called Lanton Mills. He also met and made contacts in the program with the likes of Jack Nicholson and agent Mike Medavoy, who got Malick freelance writing work (he revised scripts, wrote an early draft of Dirt Harry and the produced script for Pocket Money). Malick continued to write, producing the screenplay for Deadhead Mills for Paramount Pictures, but the studio felt that it was an unreleaseable film. This experience changed Malick’s focus from purely a writer to wanting to direct his own scripts.

Badlands and Days of Heaven:

Malick’s feature debut came in 1973 with the film Badlands, about a young couple that goes on a crime spree in the 1950s starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek (it is sort of like an existential Bonnie and Clyde). The film was made independently for little money and had a troubled production, but when it finally was screened for critics it received wonderful reviews prompting Warner Bros. Pictures to buy the distribution rights for three times the film’s budget. It is a brilliant film that is beautiful in its photography, but terrifying as it peers into the souls of it characters – a jovial amoral young man and apathetic young woman. Next in 1978, Malick wrote and directed Days of Heaven, a story about a hot-tempered farm laborer running away from his past who convinces his love to marry their rich but dying boss so they can claim his fortune, but becomes jealous when she beings to love him. It stars Richard Gere, Sam Shepard and Brooke Adams. The story, much like Badlands, is poetic and more concerned with the feelings and emotional experience of the characters than plot, but here the story and characters seem to take a backseat to the truly amazing aesthetics (specifically the cinematography). Malick and D.P. Nestor Almendros shot almost the entire film during the “magic hour” – the hours between day and night early in the morning and late in the evening. It is magnificent (Ennio Morricone provides a good score as well).

The Vanishing:

After Days of Heaven’s success both at the Academy Awards and at Cannes, Malick began work on a new film for Paramount Pictures entitled Q, about the origins of life on Earth. But, during pre-production he suddenly left the project and moved to Paris, disappearing from public view (though, he has always been considered shy when it comes to the media). During his twenty year absence from Hollywood, he worked on a number of unproduced scripts and produced a few films.

Back After Twenty Years:

Malick finally returned to Hollywood in 1998 with The Thin Red Line, a war film focusing around the Pacific Theatre of WWII, specifically the conflict at Guadalcanal. The film boasts a fantastic cast (here is the full list) and Malick’s typical brilliant aesthetics (this time working with cinematographer John Toll). Malick shot over a million feet of film, and his original cut was barely under six hours (the theatrical cut runtime is 170 minutes). The film was critically praised and accompanied Steve Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan as a nominee for Best Picture at the 1999 Oscars (while both are WWII films, tonally they are almost 100% different, and initially I liked Spielberg’s more but now I favor Malick’s). He next began work on an article about Che Guevara, which incited Steven Soderbergh to offer Malick the chance to write and direct a film about Guevara that Soderbergh had been wanting to make with Benicio del Toro (though Soderbergh ultimately ended up writing and directing it). Malick accepted, but after a year-and-a-half the financing had not come through and Malick moved onto a project he was just as excited about – The New World. The film is a poetic and romantic interpretation of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, with John Rolfe playing a major role as well. The cast is brilliant with tons of wonderful actors; it stars Colin Farrell, Q’orianka Kilcher and Christian Bale. Again like his other films, it is beautiful and atmospheric. Malick’s collaboration with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki garnered maybe the best visual work to date (and Malick is again working with Lubezki on The Tree of Life and his next project). The film deals with many themes including the corruption of nature by civilized man, colonialism – the stark juxtaposition of the Americas to England is crushing. The film received a very mixed reaction upon its release in 2005, but since then has come to be regarded as one of the best films of the decade (making a number of critic’s lists, including Mick LaSalle’s).

Producer:

Malick has also served as a producer on a number of independent films, most of which he worked on during his twenty year break from directing. The highlights include Yimou Zhang’s Happy Times, David Gordon Green’s Undertow, Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace, Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country, and the documentaries The Endurance and The Unforeseen.

Future Projects:

In 2012, Malick has a yet untitled film that he wrote and directed scheduled for release. It is a love story starring Rachel McAdams and Ben Affleck, while featuring Javier Barden, Rachel Weisz, Jessica Chastain, Olga Kurylenko, Amanda Peet, and Barry Pepper in supporting roles (making for a great cast). And Emmanuel Lubezki is shooting the film and Jack Fisk is doing the production design (which is awesome for those that enjoy amazing aesthetics; Fisk has worked on all of Malick’s films, production design on The Thin Red Line and on, and as art director on his first two).

Terrence Malick’s Career Highlights:

1.)    Badlands (1973) – Director* [DVD/Rent]

2.)    Days of Heaven (1978) – Director* [Blu-ray/DVD/Rent]

3.)    The Thin Red Line (1998) – Director* [Blu-ray/DVD/Rent]

4.)    The New World (2005) – Director* [Blu-ray/DVD/Rent]

*Editor’s Picks

Movie of the Week - The Thin Red Line

This week’s movie is The Thin Red Line (1998).

The film is about U.S. soldiers’ experiences of the battle of Guadalcanal during WWII, and while the film itself is fictional, it is based on James Jones’ autobiographical novel. The film is directed by Terrence Malick and was the first film he made since Days of Heaven (a twenty year break). The crew is superb on the film featuring a score by Hans Zimmer and wonderful cinematography by John Toll. It also boasts an all-star cast, though many of them are briefly in the film (check out the full credits). While the film could be compared to Saving Private Ryan, both coming out the same year, both taking place during WWII, both being nominated for a number of Oscars, the films are very different – Malick’s focuses on the emotion of the characters and features the landscape prominently, almost as a character onto itself (something that is apparent in all of his films). The story is secondary (almost fading away) to the emotion that the images evoke in the viewer, while Spielberg’s film is very story driven. The initial cut of the film was far too long; some estimates have it at ten hours and others at five. It took Malick and his multiple editors about two years to refine it down to its theatrical cut, and in the process losing performances from Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen, and Mickey Rourke and by some accounts vastly altering the initial project. What makes the film great is that while it is an epic in scope, it feels very subdued and personal. Malick’s collaboration with Toll is beautiful and there is a great scene featuring John Cusack leading a charge on a hillside turret/bunker. This is a must see for fans of war movies and/or existentialist cinema. Check out the trailer.

The Thin Red Line (Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD/normal DVD)