The 100 Best American Films — From Movie Critics Around the World
Posted on July 24, 2015 at 3:46 pm
The American Film Institute has its top 100 list and the Library of Congress has its National Film Registry. But how do movie critics around the world see our films? The BBC prepared a list of the 100 greatest American films, based on the selections of international movie critics. Of course there is a lot of overlap. You know “Citizen Kane” and “The Godfather” and “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Searchers” are going to be there. The top 10 are pretty easy to guess (though I still think “Vertigo” does not deserve to be ranked so high).
10. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
9. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
8. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
7. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)
6. Sunrise (FW Murnau, 1927)
5. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
3. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
2. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
1. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
But there are some nice surprises in the rest of the list, like “Ace in the Hole,” “Heaven’s Gate,” “Marnie,” and “Imitation of Life.” Crank up that Netflix queue and add some of the ones you haven’t seen yet.
Cut to the Chase: A Brilliant Compilation of Movie Chase Scenes from Michael Mirasol
Posted on July 24, 2015 at 11:23 am
My friend and fellow critic Michael Mirasol has shared another of his brilliantly edited supercuts of movie moments, and this is one of his best. There’s nothing the movies do better than chases!
Inside “Inside Out” — Takes on Pixar’s Hit Movie About Feelings
Posted on July 6, 2015 at 3:35 pm
“Inside Out” is not just one of the best movies of the year (animated and live action). It is also one of the most psychologically profound and astute films about emotions and the mind ever made. It set the all-time box office opening weekend record for a non-series film and reached number one at the box office this week, out-doing two huge holiday weekend releases, “Terminator Genisys” and “Magic Mike XXL.” Copyright 2015 Pixar
And it has provoked some exceptionally thoughtful responses from movie critics and specialists in child development. My friend Jen Chaney wrote one for The Dissolve, tying the movie’s themes to other Pixar films that touch on the bittersweetness of the end of childhood, but explaining how this film takes it to a new depth.
According to Inside Out, the middle-school-girl brain is simultaneously orderly yet fragile, crowded with highly charged voices (some previously heard on NBC sitcoms, The Daily Show, and/or Saturday Night Live), and aesthetically similar to a pinball machine, a Lite-Brite, and multiple levels of Candy Crush. It’s rare in a children’s film—or for that matter, any film—to see elements of the human nervous system rendered with such exquisite care and unmitigated glee.
But the film’s point of view is more important than its plot, or its sophisticated view of the machinations behind Riley’s meltdown. For the first time, a Pixar film is confronting how much it hurts when a child realizes her childhood will end—while it’s still ending. It literally gets inside her head, then bluntly announces that being a kid hurts because it doesn’t last. That feels refreshingly candid, even for Pixar.
he movie’s portrayal of sadness successfully dramatizes two central insights from the science of emotion.
First, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking. Traditionally, in the history of Western thought, the prevailing view has been that emotions are enemies of rationality and disruptive of cooperative social relations….Second, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — our social lives. Studies have found, for example, that emotions structure (not just color) such disparate social interactions as attachment between parents and children, sibling conflicts, flirtations between young courters and negotiations between rivals.
They would have preferred that Sadness have a less dreary affect. And they note that they recommended many more emotions, but Pixar explained that they could not handle that many characters.
he emotional messages of most entertainment for kids are pretty relentlessly positive: Love your family, stay true to yourself, keep positive, never give in to despair. As the research of Stanford’s Jeanne Tsai has shown, one of the emotions that Americans in particular privilege is joy—excited pleasure. Children see around them, in books and movies and advertisements, exemplars of delight at growing up. “That makes it harder to grapple with sadness,” University of California, Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner told me. “It’s a vacuum in our culture.”
But, points out Keltner, who consulted with Pixar’s Pete Docter on the film, sadness is a powerful tool, a trigger that sends kids back to their parents for comfort and connection. “You gotta hang on to that sadness,” he told me, because in the tumult of early adolescence, it’s the thing that can bring parent and child back together.
Major kudos are due Pixar and Disney for elevating the importance of the emotional lives of children and providing a creative vehicle for helping kids learn to understand and manage their complex emotions. Most importantly, the film reminds parents that having a happy child does not mean your child must always be happy.
Young children are deeply feeling beings. Starting in the earliest months of life, well before they can use words to express themselves, babies have the capacity to experience peaks of joy, excitement, and elation. They also feel fear, grief, sadness, hopelessness, and anger—emotions that many adults understandably find it hard to believe that such young children can experience. But just as Riley in the film needs her parents to hear and empathize with her difficult feelings of pain and loss—which helps her move on in positive ways—so do babies and toddlers.
She concludes with some very practical recommendations for parents.
And be sure to listen to co-writer/director Pete Docter, who spoke about what was behind the film and the crucial moment that changed everything in an interview with “Fresh Air’s” Terry Gross.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” somehow captures the voice of the novel in allowing us to see the story through the eyes of a child but with the understanding of the now-adult Scout who provides the narration. It is almost as though the camera is at a child’s eye level, as we, along with Scout, have a growing appreciation of what her father is doing and what kind of a man he is. Even the music expresses the wonder of children for whom so much of they see is equally new and intriguing, but who also take so much still for granted.
On the surface, an Australian import about a mother and child haunted by a children’s book character has little to do with Roman Polanski’s 1968 opus about a Vidal Sassoon pixie cut, a dream New York City apartment, and a woman who’s been knocked up by the devil (in that order, yes). But both are those rare films that embrace rather than demonize mommies. From “Psycho” to “Mama,” motherhood – and all associated female biological functions – has always loomed as the ultimate horror in American cinema….Of course, the real demon of “Rosemary’s Baby” is a post-World War II, Freudian-drenched culture invested in robbing mothers of their authority. Given his checkered past, Polanski seems an unlikely feminist but his films have always demonstrated a sympathy for underestimated women. A Polish Holocaust survivor, he may have especially resonated with this story of evil tied up in banal packages. (He also adapted the screenplay from Ira Levin’s eponymous novel.) A poster child of the mid-1960s, Rosemary (and Mia) belongs to that lost female generation caught between 1950s housewives and those 1970s libbers wielding speculum mirrors at macrame parties. (Goddess bless them.) Though we’re told nothing about her educational or work background, Rosemary is clearly bright, with a detective’s eye for details and a penchant for word play (when given an amulet containing the fictional herb tannis root, she murmurs, “Tannis anyone?”). But she speaks in a little-girl singsong, shrinks like the Alice she resembles, and waits on hubby hand and foot, apologizing profusely even when something’s not her fault. (When she won’t wake to make his breakfast, he swats her behind only half-jokingly.)
Rosemary’s female eagerness to please may pave the road to hell, but when she does speak up, she’s gas-lit by men intent on keeping her ignorant. When she asks Dr. Sapirstein if her pelvic pain is caused by an ectopic pregnancy, he thunders, “I thought you weren’t going to read books!” Guy goes so far as to throw away her books himself, and he dismisses her suspicions as if she’s an errant servant whom he only occasionally humors. He acts as if she’s so under his thumb that she wouldn’t protest his deal with the devil even if she discovers it.
Rosemary’s only scene with female friends is the most grounding moment in the film. In the middle of a party, mumu-clad ladies circle her, endorsing rather than denying her growing sense that something’s really wrong. Naturally, Guy explodes, calling them all “not very bright bitches,” and claiming that “your haircut is what’s the big mistake.” (When all else fails, distract a woman by disparaging her appearance.) By the time she accuses him outright of having joined a coven, he and the doctor chalk it up to “hysteria” – an all-too-familiar Sigmund F. term.
