8½ (1963)
The first film on this list was the 366th film I watched this year. I knew I couldn't close out the year without at least one Fellini film; he's considered one of the greatest directors of all time. After watching 8½, it's easy to see why. This film is a masterpiece that draws heavily from James Joyce's modernist/post-modernist style of storytelling, a meta film that Charlie Kaufman has clearly seen too many times given the similarities this film has to Adaptation (2002). A movie about making a movie that delves deep in to the director's psyche, as he tries to escape the source of his anxiety. I liked the film's meta-narrative from the beginning, with the main character Guido Anselmi essentially being a self-insert for Fellini himself, but the peak of my enjoyment was in one of his many fantasy scenes where he tries to escape from his work and his marital troubles. Guido falls in to a dream about a harem he keeps of all the women he fantasizes about, which is what you'd expect from his character given his womanising nature, but the film does a clever turnaround as all the women in his fantasy become self-aware and start to throw Guido's insecurities about these women and his work back on to him, amidst a farcical revolution against his regime of throwing women away once they're older than 25. It's a brilliant scene that shows introspection of character; Fellini is trying to tell a story that is honest, and he doesn't shy away from the things that will make us think of him a reprehensible character, rather he trying to display it and get a sad laugh out of it.
Casablanca (1942)
I knew as soon as I started watching this film that it would probably make this list. I could say the same for most of the films on this list. Casablanca is a true classical Hollywood film, with a story that hits all the right notes and character arcs that are so much richer than what you see in a lot of films nowadays. One thing I appreciated a lot about this film was the dialogue, and how it felt natural for the characters to say rather than forced so that characters would do things against their nature. As a kid, I remember The Simpsons doing a small parody bit on Casablanca, wherein I first heard the line "You'll regret it... maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life". I remember not understanding the context of the line, and thinking to myself that it must have been part of the satire, that this couldn't have been the original line, because it wasn't sappy and romantic, he wasn't trying to win her love. Now having watched the film, it's incredible to see the character of Rick get to the point where he is capable of saying that to Ilsa, knowing what he went through with her and knowing what he is going through now because of her, the difficulty with which he says it because he knows it means never seeing her again, but the knowledge that it is what he must say as he finally stops fighting the hero inside him and does something for what he believes to be the right cause.
Room (2015)
This is probably the closest thing on the list to a 'brave' pick, because it's the only one that's far too young to be considered a 'classic'. That said, as much as great films are about what they add to the zeitgeist of film as a whole, it's important to recognise the films that have had a massive personal impact upon you as a viewer along the way, and this was absolutely true for me upon my first watching of Room. I bawled my eyes out more than once watching this film; the way it uses the perspective of the child Jack to tell portions of the story really helped me understand his perspective, and it made the notion of the title that much more moving. It's not just a room to Jack, it's Room; he has no understanding of the idea that their could be more rooms than this one, it's simply Room and that's all there is. I think the reason that this so effectively hit me was because I didn't take the time to consider this fact until I had already become deeply invested in the characters, which was so easy because their performances were excellent. Jacob Tremblay is one of the most convincing child actors I have ever seen, and Brie Larson definitely deserved her Oscar win for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The two of them together create such a heartfelt and believable bond that is also imperfect and extremely relatable; I have a mum that I fight with, but also love dearly and would never trade for any other mum in the world, and that's exactly the type of relationship Room portrays excellently.
Raging Bull (1980)
This film (and indeed Taxi Driver) is a perfect example of what Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro
can do together. De Niro plays Jake LaMotta perfectly, throwing everything he has in to the role; outside of the film, it's incredible the lengths he went to in order to prepare for the role, training in boxing with the actual Jake LaMotta for months, and fighting in three actual Brooklyn boxing matches. De Niro also put on a heck of a lot of weight to play LaMotta in his older years. Scorsese is also amazing here, particularly in the fight scenes, which make use of the struggles that LaMotta is going through outside the ring to give the actual fights more impact, and choosing to film the fight from inside the ring to really focus on LaMotta and his perspective rather than the perspective of the audience.
Psycho (1960)
I watched quite a few Hitchcock films this year (six, to be precise). Before this year, the only film of his that I had seen was The Birds (1963). At the end of this year, Hitchcock has become my favourite director. His films are just so watchable for me, I'm not quite sure what it is about them; they're easy stories filled with intrigue and thrills, but also incredibly deep visually speaking. I know that nowadays most people turn to Vertigo (1958) as his masterpiece, but Psycho was simply the better film for me this year. Maybe that will change as i go back and re-watch these films. Either way, Psycho makes my list this year because of the infamous shower scene, and for Anthony Perkins' performance as Norman Bates. Perkins is enthralling, first as the charmingly awkward hotel man, then more and more as it becomes clear that he is unhinged, and ultimately as he appears dressed as his own mother, ready to murder. His line, "we all go a little mad sometimes", was spine-tingling. Speaking of which, finally getting to watch the shower scene for the first time in its entirety, I see why it's so talked about. The scene makes perfect use of silence to psychologically build suspense, before dropping that unforgettable music, and the visuals that follow, expressing the cold-blooded murder without ever showing us directly, it's all so well done.
Metropolis (1927)
This one was basically guaranteed to make the list because I think it's important to recognise where film has come from. Watching this film I felt like I was watching the grandfather of all Sci-Fi; it was filled with every trope imaginable, evil scientists, a dystopian underground city, body snatchers, etc., but of course this film came before those things really were tropes of sci-fi, rather this film helped to create those tropes. There's no particular moment that really grabbed me for this film like the others, but what made this film an experience akin to the others was the music. This film uses incredibly emotive music to make up for the fact that it has no other form of sound, and cleverly inserts pieces of "La Marseillaise" and "Dies Irae" to accentuate the film's revolutionary and apocalyptic tones.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Apocalypse Now is a film that you can only really get the most out of by reading the IMDb trivia or by watching the follow-up Documentary, Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991). Seriously, there is so much that went wrong with the making of this film that it's a miracle it was made at all. It seems that at least some of these mistakes led to one of the most raw and real films I have ever seen. Films are designed to make you feel things, but it's rare for me to find a film that leaves me truly in awe of what I have watched. This film is about someone who slowly goes insane as he makes his way to assassinate someone who has gone insane, made by filmmakers who were stretched so thin that they slowly went insane. It's a portrayal of the Vietnam War that some have gone so far as to call it a recreation, and despite the fact that so much went wrong, the film gets everything right. A lot of people look to Robert Duvall's Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning") as an example of the film's greatness, or anything involving Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz, such as his monologues or his haunting final line ("The horror"). Personally though, what pulled me in to the film was the opening scene; Martin Sheen's heated mixture of anger and self-loathing was made all that more incredible when I learned that it was unscripted. People fought their demons while making this movie, and it allows the film to feel real.
Citizen Kane (1941)
This was going to be on the list whether I ended up liking the film or not; the contribution this film has had to filmmaking as an art form and storytelling method is undeniable. As it happens, I loved it regardless of the film's importance. I was captured by Kane's transition from simple beginnings to a larger than life figure, and the struggles he goes through to try and regain a connection to another human being. There's so many scenes that I could point to for their excellence, so many ways that the camera is used dynamically and surprisingly for 1941. So much of what the film does has become part of the visual language of film, but it's incredible to see so much of it used in one place. That said, if I had to consider one scene that really astonished me and cemented in my mind the reasons for this film's brilliance, it would have to be the montage of the slow destruction of Kane's first marriage. The way they start, so romantic and caring, and slowly separate emotionally as Kane is taken with his aspirations, first with concern, then anger, then simply silence, before we pull back that they now sit much further apart at the dinner table, it's really fantastic work, even today. Other bits and pieces become more significant as you realise why the film is important; the closest modern analogy I can think of is the original Halo video game: it didn't invent a lot of the techniques it uses, but it was the first of its kind to put so many techniques in to the one place.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Like Apocalypse Now, I was left in awe by 2001. Like Citizen Kane, 2001 is a film that's so important to filmmaking as a whole that its spot on this list was essentially guaranteed before I even started the year. While the lofty philosophy of the nature of man's entire existence juxtaposed with the life of a single man was very interesting to watch, the reason that the film astounded me so is because of the visual effects. This is before any help from computers, everything that happens in the film has to physically happen, one way or another, so every one of the space shots were both beautiful to look at and crazy to consider just what had to be done in order for them to exist. In addition to this, I particularly loved the integrity to realism in the film; sets that were built to behave as the spaceships would, with actors moving around them to simulate the look of a spaceship operating on centrifugal force, the absolute silence anytime a character is in space. While I see a lot of talk about the famous match cut between 'The Dawn of Man' and 'Jupiter Mission', the colored light vortex, or even the HAL lip-reading scene, my personal favourite moment is that which immediately follows the HAL lip-reading; there's so much tension that has built up because we as the audience know that HAL is homicidal and that he knows the astronauts are going to try to deactivate him, and more importantly we know all of this without a word about it being uttered. As we follow Poole out in to the cold of space, we know that he can and probably will die at any moment, and once the moment comes, it happens without a word, or even a sound.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
"Gentleman, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
I know I said I wouldn't put these films in a particular order, but of all the films that I watched this year, I have to call Dr. Strangelove the best. It wasn't the most moving, nor did it make the biggest contribution to filmmaking as a whole, but it was easily the most hilarious movie on this list and it was such a biting satire of Cold War politics that I love the film completely. Dr. Strangelove is literally a farce that also manages to feel annoyingly realistic; silly, but not as far a cry from reality as you would hope, and still somewhat relevant today. I loved every minute of this, so it's hard to pick the moment that stood out the most; I loved every line from Dr. Strangelove himself, and I adored the incredibly over the top General Buck Turgidson, but I think the scene that had me laughing the hardest involved the hysterically annoying process of Group Captain Lionel Mandrake trying to get a hold of the president. The world is literally at stake in this scene, but no-one around Mandrake seems to realise the urgency. Of course his only means of communication are a pay phone. Of course he doesn't have enough change to make the call. Of course the operator won't let him make a collect call to the president. And of course, in this dire moment, the dim-witted soldier that is accompanying Mandrake is apprehensive about shooting open a Coca Cola vending machine because "that's private property" and "you'll have to answer to Coca Cola", implying that even at the edge of oblivion, Coke still has power. It's just one silly little mishap after another, juxtaposed with the fact that the world could literally end at any minute, and it's exactly why I love this movie so much.
Honourable Mentions:
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966)
Seven Samurai (1954)
The Third Man (1949)
Vertigo (1958)
Tokyo Story (1953)
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
The Tree of Life (2011)
Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)
Published December 29th, 2016
The first film on this list was the 366th film I watched this year. I knew I couldn't close out the year without at least one Fellini film; he's considered one of the greatest directors of all time. After watching 8½, it's easy to see why. This film is a masterpiece that draws heavily from James Joyce's modernist/post-modernist style of storytelling, a meta film that Charlie Kaufman has clearly seen too many times given the similarities this film has to Adaptation (2002). A movie about making a movie that delves deep in to the director's psyche, as he tries to escape the source of his anxiety. I liked the film's meta-narrative from the beginning, with the main character Guido Anselmi essentially being a self-insert for Fellini himself, but the peak of my enjoyment was in one of his many fantasy scenes where he tries to escape from his work and his marital troubles. Guido falls in to a dream about a harem he keeps of all the women he fantasizes about, which is what you'd expect from his character given his womanising nature, but the film does a clever turnaround as all the women in his fantasy become self-aware and start to throw Guido's insecurities about these women and his work back on to him, amidst a farcical revolution against his regime of throwing women away once they're older than 25. It's a brilliant scene that shows introspection of character; Fellini is trying to tell a story that is honest, and he doesn't shy away from the things that will make us think of him a reprehensible character, rather he trying to display it and get a sad laugh out of it.
Casablanca (1942)
I knew as soon as I started watching this film that it would probably make this list. I could say the same for most of the films on this list. Casablanca is a true classical Hollywood film, with a story that hits all the right notes and character arcs that are so much richer than what you see in a lot of films nowadays. One thing I appreciated a lot about this film was the dialogue, and how it felt natural for the characters to say rather than forced so that characters would do things against their nature. As a kid, I remember The Simpsons doing a small parody bit on Casablanca, wherein I first heard the line "You'll regret it... maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life". I remember not understanding the context of the line, and thinking to myself that it must have been part of the satire, that this couldn't have been the original line, because it wasn't sappy and romantic, he wasn't trying to win her love. Now having watched the film, it's incredible to see the character of Rick get to the point where he is capable of saying that to Ilsa, knowing what he went through with her and knowing what he is going through now because of her, the difficulty with which he says it because he knows it means never seeing her again, but the knowledge that it is what he must say as he finally stops fighting the hero inside him and does something for what he believes to be the right cause.
Room (2015)
This is probably the closest thing on the list to a 'brave' pick, because it's the only one that's far too young to be considered a 'classic'. That said, as much as great films are about what they add to the zeitgeist of film as a whole, it's important to recognise the films that have had a massive personal impact upon you as a viewer along the way, and this was absolutely true for me upon my first watching of Room. I bawled my eyes out more than once watching this film; the way it uses the perspective of the child Jack to tell portions of the story really helped me understand his perspective, and it made the notion of the title that much more moving. It's not just a room to Jack, it's Room; he has no understanding of the idea that their could be more rooms than this one, it's simply Room and that's all there is. I think the reason that this so effectively hit me was because I didn't take the time to consider this fact until I had already become deeply invested in the characters, which was so easy because their performances were excellent. Jacob Tremblay is one of the most convincing child actors I have ever seen, and Brie Larson definitely deserved her Oscar win for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The two of them together create such a heartfelt and believable bond that is also imperfect and extremely relatable; I have a mum that I fight with, but also love dearly and would never trade for any other mum in the world, and that's exactly the type of relationship Room portrays excellently.
Raging Bull (1980)
This film (and indeed Taxi Driver) is a perfect example of what Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro
can do together. De Niro plays Jake LaMotta perfectly, throwing everything he has in to the role; outside of the film, it's incredible the lengths he went to in order to prepare for the role, training in boxing with the actual Jake LaMotta for months, and fighting in three actual Brooklyn boxing matches. De Niro also put on a heck of a lot of weight to play LaMotta in his older years. Scorsese is also amazing here, particularly in the fight scenes, which make use of the struggles that LaMotta is going through outside the ring to give the actual fights more impact, and choosing to film the fight from inside the ring to really focus on LaMotta and his perspective rather than the perspective of the audience.
Psycho (1960)
I watched quite a few Hitchcock films this year (six, to be precise). Before this year, the only film of his that I had seen was The Birds (1963). At the end of this year, Hitchcock has become my favourite director. His films are just so watchable for me, I'm not quite sure what it is about them; they're easy stories filled with intrigue and thrills, but also incredibly deep visually speaking. I know that nowadays most people turn to Vertigo (1958) as his masterpiece, but Psycho was simply the better film for me this year. Maybe that will change as i go back and re-watch these films. Either way, Psycho makes my list this year because of the infamous shower scene, and for Anthony Perkins' performance as Norman Bates. Perkins is enthralling, first as the charmingly awkward hotel man, then more and more as it becomes clear that he is unhinged, and ultimately as he appears dressed as his own mother, ready to murder. His line, "we all go a little mad sometimes", was spine-tingling. Speaking of which, finally getting to watch the shower scene for the first time in its entirety, I see why it's so talked about. The scene makes perfect use of silence to psychologically build suspense, before dropping that unforgettable music, and the visuals that follow, expressing the cold-blooded murder without ever showing us directly, it's all so well done.
Metropolis (1927)
This one was basically guaranteed to make the list because I think it's important to recognise where film has come from. Watching this film I felt like I was watching the grandfather of all Sci-Fi; it was filled with every trope imaginable, evil scientists, a dystopian underground city, body snatchers, etc., but of course this film came before those things really were tropes of sci-fi, rather this film helped to create those tropes. There's no particular moment that really grabbed me for this film like the others, but what made this film an experience akin to the others was the music. This film uses incredibly emotive music to make up for the fact that it has no other form of sound, and cleverly inserts pieces of "La Marseillaise" and "Dies Irae" to accentuate the film's revolutionary and apocalyptic tones.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Apocalypse Now is a film that you can only really get the most out of by reading the IMDb trivia or by watching the follow-up Documentary, Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991). Seriously, there is so much that went wrong with the making of this film that it's a miracle it was made at all. It seems that at least some of these mistakes led to one of the most raw and real films I have ever seen. Films are designed to make you feel things, but it's rare for me to find a film that leaves me truly in awe of what I have watched. This film is about someone who slowly goes insane as he makes his way to assassinate someone who has gone insane, made by filmmakers who were stretched so thin that they slowly went insane. It's a portrayal of the Vietnam War that some have gone so far as to call it a recreation, and despite the fact that so much went wrong, the film gets everything right. A lot of people look to Robert Duvall's Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning") as an example of the film's greatness, or anything involving Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz, such as his monologues or his haunting final line ("The horror"). Personally though, what pulled me in to the film was the opening scene; Martin Sheen's heated mixture of anger and self-loathing was made all that more incredible when I learned that it was unscripted. People fought their demons while making this movie, and it allows the film to feel real.
Citizen Kane (1941)
This was going to be on the list whether I ended up liking the film or not; the contribution this film has had to filmmaking as an art form and storytelling method is undeniable. As it happens, I loved it regardless of the film's importance. I was captured by Kane's transition from simple beginnings to a larger than life figure, and the struggles he goes through to try and regain a connection to another human being. There's so many scenes that I could point to for their excellence, so many ways that the camera is used dynamically and surprisingly for 1941. So much of what the film does has become part of the visual language of film, but it's incredible to see so much of it used in one place. That said, if I had to consider one scene that really astonished me and cemented in my mind the reasons for this film's brilliance, it would have to be the montage of the slow destruction of Kane's first marriage. The way they start, so romantic and caring, and slowly separate emotionally as Kane is taken with his aspirations, first with concern, then anger, then simply silence, before we pull back that they now sit much further apart at the dinner table, it's really fantastic work, even today. Other bits and pieces become more significant as you realise why the film is important; the closest modern analogy I can think of is the original Halo video game: it didn't invent a lot of the techniques it uses, but it was the first of its kind to put so many techniques in to the one place.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Like Apocalypse Now, I was left in awe by 2001. Like Citizen Kane, 2001 is a film that's so important to filmmaking as a whole that its spot on this list was essentially guaranteed before I even started the year. While the lofty philosophy of the nature of man's entire existence juxtaposed with the life of a single man was very interesting to watch, the reason that the film astounded me so is because of the visual effects. This is before any help from computers, everything that happens in the film has to physically happen, one way or another, so every one of the space shots were both beautiful to look at and crazy to consider just what had to be done in order for them to exist. In addition to this, I particularly loved the integrity to realism in the film; sets that were built to behave as the spaceships would, with actors moving around them to simulate the look of a spaceship operating on centrifugal force, the absolute silence anytime a character is in space. While I see a lot of talk about the famous match cut between 'The Dawn of Man' and 'Jupiter Mission', the colored light vortex, or even the HAL lip-reading scene, my personal favourite moment is that which immediately follows the HAL lip-reading; there's so much tension that has built up because we as the audience know that HAL is homicidal and that he knows the astronauts are going to try to deactivate him, and more importantly we know all of this without a word about it being uttered. As we follow Poole out in to the cold of space, we know that he can and probably will die at any moment, and once the moment comes, it happens without a word, or even a sound.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
"Gentleman, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
I know I said I wouldn't put these films in a particular order, but of all the films that I watched this year, I have to call Dr. Strangelove the best. It wasn't the most moving, nor did it make the biggest contribution to filmmaking as a whole, but it was easily the most hilarious movie on this list and it was such a biting satire of Cold War politics that I love the film completely. Dr. Strangelove is literally a farce that also manages to feel annoyingly realistic; silly, but not as far a cry from reality as you would hope, and still somewhat relevant today. I loved every minute of this, so it's hard to pick the moment that stood out the most; I loved every line from Dr. Strangelove himself, and I adored the incredibly over the top General Buck Turgidson, but I think the scene that had me laughing the hardest involved the hysterically annoying process of Group Captain Lionel Mandrake trying to get a hold of the president. The world is literally at stake in this scene, but no-one around Mandrake seems to realise the urgency. Of course his only means of communication are a pay phone. Of course he doesn't have enough change to make the call. Of course the operator won't let him make a collect call to the president. And of course, in this dire moment, the dim-witted soldier that is accompanying Mandrake is apprehensive about shooting open a Coca Cola vending machine because "that's private property" and "you'll have to answer to Coca Cola", implying that even at the edge of oblivion, Coke still has power. It's just one silly little mishap after another, juxtaposed with the fact that the world could literally end at any minute, and it's exactly why I love this movie so much.
Honourable Mentions:
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966)
Seven Samurai (1954)
The Third Man (1949)
Vertigo (1958)
Tokyo Story (1953)
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
The Tree of Life (2011)
Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)
Published December 29th, 2016
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