Luke M. Perez

Watched: Project Hail Mary 🍿

I nearly cried at the end. What an incredible film and career defining performance by Gosling. The score, cinemetography, and editing were flawless. Easily going to be on a lists to @mwerickson’s request for top 5 films.

While working on my post about my top five films, I went to Arrow’s website to link to my recently purchased Excalibur only to discover they’ve remastered Innerspace.

Over on the excellent Micro Blog platform, Matt Erickson asked for folk’s top five movies of all time. The responses from others were quite good and I have some new films to add to my queue. I made a list of my top films something like 15 or 16 years ago. My own list was semi-inspired by either Rob Gordon’s penchant for top five lists in the film High Fidelity, or something Merlin Mann might have written on the now defunct/dormant website 43 Folders.

I had to dig up that original note,

Original List

1. Dark Knight
2. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
3. Gran Torino
4. Lost in Translation
5. Ronin

I will die on this hill but Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight is basically a remake of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Both capture a fundamental tension between two types of people, those who are so corrupt that they cannot be part of civilized society, and those who are so truly self-sufficient that they do not need it. Most of us exist in the spectrum between these two archetypes (see Aristotle’s Politics for more on this). We’re moral agents, but we’re also flawed moral agents.

Gran Torino is deeply underrated. I stopped watching the Oscars when the film was completely snubbed. It was obvious by 2008 that Eastwood’s politics were not consistent with Hollywood’s elite. But I think it was a bridge too far for Academy voters to acknowledge that of all people, Eastwood would be the one to make to make arguably the greatest film about the immigrant experience and the challenges of a community to blend in while holding on to one’s home culture. And Eastwood did that while also remaining sensitive to the experience of the “native” Americans coming to grips with a changing ethnic landscape in their communities. (Eastwood’s Kowalski implies that he’s of Polish decent; the Poles immigrated to the US when Poland didn’t exist as a country and often faced suspicion that they could be adequately assimilated into American society in the 19th and early 20th centuries.) Gran Torino is such a serious and seriously deep film.

I once spent an entire day running around Montmarte and Sacre Coeur in Paris with a buddy looking for the cafe and stairs at the beginning of Ronin. The dialogue is first class, and the action sequences are a reference by which all others should be measured. When I first watched this film, I hadn’t seen the car chases of Bullit and The French Connection. Only later would I see and appreciate the influences of those films on John Frankenheimer.

I traveled a lot in my late-teens and 20s, both on my own and during my deployments with the Air National Guard. A friend and I even did a working holiday in Australia in 2003. Lost in Translation spoke to me as I left that itinerant period of my life. It still holds up I think even if the film isn’t for everyone.

New List

I am tempted to leave several originals on the updated list but that makes this exercise too easy. So here’s a new list, considering what else I’ve seen and what else I’ve come to appreciate since my original list circa 2010–2011. An updated list is actually quite hard. I started my PhD in the fall of 2011 and by the time I finished, I had a wife and two kids. I didn’t go back to see films regularly for some time and even now, I rarely see new movies as frequently as I’d prefer.

1. Yojimbo
2. (500) Days of Summer
3. The Life Aquatic
4. Coriolanus
5. Silence

If you’re not into Shakespeare, I suspect it is because you were subjected to a lot of Romeo and Juliet in high school and Jet Li was a little out of his depth as a star crossed lover, and Leo was a bit too saturated after Titanic for re-watching. The political plays are phenomenal. Ralph Fiennes adaptation of Coriolanus, imagines ancient Rome as a military dictatorship in Eastern Europe. The language remains Shakespearean but the cinematography is contemporary. The chief advantage here is that we get to see Shakespeare on film in a way that makes sense for film, but we get to hear Shakespeare in all his gloriously dramatic wit.

All of Wes Anderson’s films are fundamentally about friendship. The Life Aquatic might be the best. Zissou’s transformation is only a part of it. Everyone is affected by the mission and partly redeemed by his coming to terms with himself and his crew. I’m a sucker for films taking place in Los Angeles. 500 Days stole my heart with the location shooting. Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt have great chemistry. They both deserve to be in more top billing films.

Honorable Mention

I just bought Excalibur on a remastered 4k Blu-ray by Arrow Films. It was the first serious film I remember watching with my dad. In fact, I had it saved in my Amazon list when he got sick and after he died on Ash Wednesday, I needed to pick it up while I could.

The first film that really stuck with me as a kid was Coming to America. I was way too young to have seen it, but I had older cousins who spoiled me. It too presents the immigrant experience and captures the feeling of the late 1980s better than just about anything from that period. It was the first film I ever wore out on VHS and needed to purchase another copy. Once Upon A Time In The West might be the greatest Western ever made. The opening sequence alone is a masterclass in filmmaking. Three Kings as well is underrated and does not get enough credit for how good it is. The moral transformation of the main characters works. And the short discussion on courage between the characters Major Archie Gates and Private Conrad Vig cuts to the heart of how the virtues actually work—you have to do the hard thing first, then you get the virtue afterward. Groundhog Day of course needs to apologia from me. It’s well regarded and deserves all the praise it gets. But I’m surprised how many folks still haven’t seen it.

Finally, Recount tells the story of the 2000 election and treats both parties sympathetically. It’s really good and worth a watch. Never Let Me Go hits hard once you realize what the big reveal is. What an incredible way to raise the ethical issues and get audiences thinking it over. My wife cried at the end, and she doesn’t even like films particularly. Frequencies is clever. It has an interesting premise to raise the idea of fate and free will. It might not hold up well in the years ahead but I liked it. And speaking of films that don’t hold up but have an interesting premise, I could not fail to mention In Time.