Top 10 Films #5

Mad Max 2 (AKA The Road Warrior)
Directed by George Miller (1981)

I love all three of the Mad Max films. Every year or so I rewatch the trilogy, to remind myself how good they are.

Mad Max was released in 1979. It was a modestly-budgeted Australian thriller, starring Mel Gibson in the title role, and was so successful that it spawned the more expensive, more exciting, more violent sequel.

Mad Max 2 is a masterclass in action film-making. The physical stunts (this was made well before CGI started to ruin our films) are breathtaking, the acting superb, the writing and direction brilliant - you might even say visionary. Mad Max 2 is one of the most influential popular movies ever made. We still see it's influence everywhere; the style of the film has become so much part of the mainstream that we no longer even notice it.

I remember when I was twelve years old, standing and gazing longingly at the poster outside the Odeon cinema in Sunderland, gutted that I was too young to go and see the film (it was an 'X' certificate). That poster, along with the monochrome film stills they also used to put up in a  glass frame outside cinemas back then, formed their own myth inside my head. By the time I eventually got to see the film on VHS, I was already in love with it and what it had come to represent.

The plot of the film is as basic as they come: a lone wanderer in a post-apocalyptic wasteland tries to help an isolated community of survivors move their stash of valuable fuel to a safer place, whilst fighting off rampaging biker gangs. That's it. Simplicity itself. But the execution of this threadbare plot is astonishing. The look of the film is both gritty and poetic. The action scenes are beautifully choreographed, and, to my mind, are yet to be beaten. The opening monologue remains a classic in cinema history, and some of the images in the film have gone being the iconic to become engrained in our cinema-going consciousness.

I adore this film. It changed the way I look at the world. I still want to be Mad Max when I grow up.

Top 10 Films #6

Once Upon a Time in America
Directed by Sergio Leone (1984)

Once Upon a Time in America was the great Sergio Leone's final film, and for me, it was his best. It's also the greatest gangster film ever made.

The structure of the film - in it's full version, not the butchered travesty originally released in the US - consists of a series of flashbacks about a group of lifelong friends who start out as smalltime crooks in 1920s New York to become big-time gangsters, their lives eventually shattered by greed, betrayal, and violence.

The scale of the film is operatic. It's a grand epic poem, a slice of cinema that is as beautiful as it is brutal. It's tough to watch at times, and doesn't try to be moral. One rape scene in particular is very painful.

Robert De Niro invests the character of Noodles, who remains the main focus of the film throughout, with a deep sense of melancholy. At times Noodles is an unsympathetic character, but we are forced to stay with him as the story unfolds. James Woods, Treat Williams, Tuesday Weld, and Elizabeth McGovern are all outstanding in support. But the real star of the film is the cinematography, especially during those almost unearthly childhood sequences. This is a fairytale vision of New York, but it's a dark one.The scenes with the kids are enthralling - the best parts of the film. There's a heavy nostalgia, but also the suggestion that 1920s New York was a bit like the wild west. Corrupt cops, rival gangs, men with guns, run the city.

The film contains what is possibly my favourite scene in cinema. Cockeye, a young tearaway, buys a cream cake so that he can use it to pay a young neighbourhood prostitute for sex. As he sits on the stairs outside her apartment, waiting for her to come out and see him, he starts to scoop tiny bits of cream onto his finger and eat them. Soon the scoops become bigger; then, unable to help himself, he consumes the entire cake. When the girl comes out onto the landing, he stands there with only the empty wrapper. It's a wonderful scene, filled with an aching nostalgia, innocence, corruption, harshness, and beauty. For me, that single scene sums up the entire movie.

I love this film so much I had the soundtrack played at my wedding. Cockeye's Theme, by Ennio Morricone, is one of the most ravishing pieces of music I've ever heard.

Top 10 Films #7

Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Directed by Stuart Rosenberg

 



I remember the day I read about Paul Newman's death. I'd been a fan of his since I was a kid. He was cool, laconic, manly without being absurdly macho, and always had a twinkle in his eye, as if he wasn't quite taking anything seriously. That night I put on the DVD which, for me, most sums up his screen persona, a film with a character that only Paul Newman could have played.

I have a fondness for what most people call "blokey films". I love horror movies, gangster movies, sports movies, and especially prison movies. Cool Hand Luke is the best prison movie of them all.

When I was a kid the Christian symbolism on show was lost on me. I just wanted to be like Cool Hand Luke. He never submitted to the system, he always got back up when he'd been knocked down, and he could eat 50 boiled eggs as part of a ludicrous prison bet. As an adult, I find that the religious symbolism doesn't even bother me. You can take it or leave it; I choose to leave it.

At the heart of the film is Newman's portrayal of a man who suffers all kinds of psychological and physical abuse but keeps on going. He stays on his feet; he keeps digging the pointless holes in the road; he slowly wins over every other inmate he meets, including George Kennedy's towering bruiser Dragline.

There are so many iconic scenes, moments that remain seared into the imagination: the justifiably famous egg-eating bet, the erotic, yet sad and desperate car wash, the fight where Luke refuses to stay down. And, of course, there's the classic line, delivered by the brilliant Strother Martin: "What we got here is a failure to communicate".

I cried my eyes out when I watched this after Newman's death. I wept for the loss of a childhood hero, the suffering of a fictional character, and the fact that I was no longer a little kid sitting on the living room floor and held spellbound by a film that went on to take a place in my heart.

Top 10 Films #8

Apocalypse Now (1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

 

 

 

A lot has been written about the making of this film, so I won't go near that particular topic. I'll stick to the film itself. Ostensibly an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness set during the Vietnam War, this is an incredible journey into the darkness of our times. It isn't just the best film ever made about that war, it's also one of the greatest films ever made about the madness inherent in the human condition.

 



Martin Sheen is wonderful, Brando is beautifully insane, and the locations drip blood, sweat and madness. When I first saw this film it scared the shit out of me. It was like catching a glimpse of real warfare, but the battle was being fought for the soul of mankind. We are dragged along by Captain Willard on his increasingly troubling quest for the enignmatic Colonel Kurtz, and as he journeys deeper into the jungle, and into the corridors of his self, we are forced to take a good look at our own dark places.

This film gets inside you. It's impossible to watch passively; you're forced to become involved at some level. The twitchy, edgy horrors push their way under your skin. It's an exhausting experience. It's also funny (in a crazed way), violent, poetic, terrifying, and strangely celebratory.

Top 10 Favourite Films #9

Cutter's Way (1981)
Directed by Ivan Passer

Based on an equally brilliant novel by Newton Thornburg, Cutter's Way is ostensibly a mystery about three disparate people coming together to solve the murder of a young woman. Along the way, the film takes in the themes of dead ideals, the effects of the Vietnam war, friendship, moral responsibility, and modern ennui.

Jeff Bridges plays a down-at-heel, burnt-out gigilo, Richard Bone, and John Heard is his grizzled, disabled veteran buddy Alex Cutter. When Bone thinks he sees a woman's corpse being dumped into a trashcan one rainy night, Cutter takes it upon himself to solve the crime - focusing all of his rage against the world into that single mission. Deciding that someone has to pay for the crime (the one aganist the dead girl and the perceived ones against himself), he starts to hunt down local oil baron JJ Cord.

Lisa Eichhorn is unforgettable as Cutter's alcoholic, washed-up wife, and they're given great support by Anne Dusenberry as the dead girl's sister, who's moist-eyed presence encourages Cutter in his single-minded quest for vengeance as everyone else starts to think that his latest conspiracy theory is out of control.

Cutter's Way might have a familiar set-up, but it doesn't follow the rules. It wears the veneer of a crime film, but it bends and twists the genre into a different shape. One man is physically shattered, the other is broken inside. The America of the time has damaged them beyond repair, and even this last desperate lunge towards retribution can't save them. Because they're beyond saving. Everyone is. There's nothing at the end of the investigation but more questions, more mysteries, ones about which nobody cares enough to answer. One of the film's later images, of a crippled Alex Cutter riding a white horse through a garden party like some fairy tale hero, is as sad and profound and pointless as anything I've seen put on a film.

Cutter's Way is a masterpiece. But it is a neglected one. Like its characters, the film has been sidelined, pushed towards the margins, where hardly anyone notices it's existence.

Top 10 Favourite Films: #10

AFTER HOURS (1985)
Directed by Martin Scorsese

After Hours is an odd film. It plays like an existeltialist Hitchcock thriller. There's no plot, just a character going through a series of strange, inexplicable torments over the course of a night on the streets of New York City.

Griffin Dunne (an actor I've never really warmed to) is superb in the lead role, but it's the character actors who shine brightest; a parade of human oddities who push our panicked hero ever further into a special kind of darkness. Rosanna Arquette as the fucked-up object of the protagonist's lust, Terri Garr as a weird 1960s-styled neurotic, Linda Fiorentino as a mad artist who creates bagel and cream cheese paper weights, Catherine O'Hara as a vigilane ice cream vendor, and - my favourite - John Heard as a laconic barman.

Scorsese is no stranger to black comedy (I'd argue that most of his films contains elements of it), but here it's the driving force of the film. I've always called After Hours a horror film, and it certainly plays on the horror of paranoia. For me, it's one of the director's finest pieces of work. Everything he does best, he does it best here.

Top 10 Favourite Films

Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to post about my Top 10 Favourite films, in reverse order. I've been meaning to do this for ages, so what better way to ease me back into using this blog on a  regular basis?

The criteria for each choice is as follows: Each film must be a long-time favourite; it must have changed the way I look at the world; it must be a film with which I became obsessed for a while; no cheating, one film per slot.

Stay tuned for the first film...