>> We've been keeping count and
we've just about reached 100 episodes of CineFix movie list.
And so we're interrupting your regularly scheduled program for
something a little different.
For number 98, turning it over to our writer,
Billy Jackson to give you his top ten films of all time.
(Music)
I wanted to kind of step up from behind the curtain is it where for
a while now and give you all an opportunity to meet the person,
the CineFix has deciding what the top ten best whatever of all time are.
Because well, it's me and where I eventually decided I want to do that is by
going back through my own entire history with movies and kind of trace all
the most important ones that had brought me and my tastes to where they are today.
So with that being said, first, I'm turning to my earliest childhood years.
Now I don't have any specific memories of watching movies in this time of my life,
but I do have memories of the movies I know I did watch.
And most of all, I remember how some of those movies made me.
We feel.
I remember a gleeful delight with Robin Williams Batty and friend Gully.
I know I knew every song of the criminally underrated Muppets Treasure Island and
I remember lazing along down the river with Mowgli, and Baloo in Jungle Book.
But if I think back to the childhood movie about which I feel strongest,
there's nothing that really gets me quite like the Lion King did.
(Music)
That first shot, that opening image and
call to song is probably the most enduring cinema moment in all of my memory.
More than the plot or the characters or the father son Hamlet thematics of
the film, what I really think of when I think of The Lion King is just that.
And I wonder if that isn't probably where we all start with movies at a place where
sound and image combine that hits us somewhere deep in the gut, and
makes us feel.
I mean, maybe that sounds kind of elementary to some people like yeah, duh,
that's what movies do.
But over and over in my time here working on movie lists,
I kind of keep coming back in awe to this idea that these pictures and noises and
words make my brain jump and sing in these utterly surprising ways.
So that's where movies started for me.
With the feeling of the new days sunrise, the optimism of birth the hope of
new beginnings with hope movies started for me with hope.
In contrast to this hope, the other feeling I remember most
intensely from this period of my life is that of fear and dread.
I think it's easy to forget how much scarier scary things were when you
were a kid.
Now I watch a good horror film, I jump a couple times.
I get my heart rate up and then the credits roll and I brush my teeth,
I go to bed and I sleep great.
As a kid, a good scare could ruin my whole week.
All I have to do to confirm this is look back over the pile of VHS tapes in my
parent's attic and some of them are traumatic memories come rushing back.
The Chokey in Matilda, the Sky Rhino from James and the Giant Peach,
the pit from Homeward Bound.
But if I had to pick the one film from this period that has most permanently
etched itself into my nightmares, it would have to be The Brave Little Toaster.
>> I can't help it if the kid was too short to reach my dials.
>> We didn't mean it, really.
>> It's my function.
>> Don't, wait, wait.
>> He's going to blow.
>> Yeah, surprise.
(Music)
>> Don't get me wrong.
I absolutely adored The Brave Little Toaster, but I cannot express emphatically
enough how psychologically unprepared I was at age five or so for
an anthropomorphic air conditioner suicide.
There's a serious existential edge to the fear The Brave Little Toaster trades on,
and not even just here.
It's almost Freudian in a lot of ways and
I think that pattern resurfaces in my preferences later on this list,
as well as in some of the movie list I produce here at CineFix.
But whether it comes from the brave little Duster, he's just first reflected there.
There's no doubt that a preference for
existential dread is a very early feature of and my relationship with movies.
I think if I first responded to the raw, emotional potential of filmmaking,
I next remember the movies that gave me protagonists to look up to and
my first favorite heroes to pretend to be were knights with swords.
This was Arthur from The Sword in the Stone and Aragorn and
Legolas from Lord of the Rings.
It was even kind of a crowing, sword-wielding Rufio from Hook, but
I also have a thing for kung fu films and their heroes.
I can't remember the number of times I watched Iron Monkey and
Legend of the Drunken Master.
But when I was ten, kung fu movies just didn't get any better than Bruce Lee.
Maybe it was because he was my dad's favorite.
Maybe it was because I accidentally saw my first pair of movie boobs in a Bruce Lee
movie or probably just because Bruce really is that good.
So I think I've gotta take two slots for my heroes.
Sir Ulrich von Liechtenstein from A Knight's Tale and well,
Bruce Lee from Enter the Dragon.
>> William.
(Sound)
The first time I saw A Knight's Tale,
I went to the woods behind my best friend, Nathan Gretches's house where
we found an old stair railing to use as a lance and I made him pull me in
a hand cart towards a stack of logs we'd fashioned as our jousting dummy.
And I don't know what came first, Enter the Dragon or the martial arts.
But I know that from about 10 to about 20,
I took competitive Tai Kwan Do pretty seriously.
And that somewhere at that point in the back of my head was the thought of
Bruce Lee and his inhuman speed that colored how I modeled myself as a fighter.
I think in a really concrete way movies can give us images of who we want to be.
I know they did for me and that can be really cool and inspiring and
can push us into play or a sport, or integral behavior.
But it can also be a pretty damaging, unrealistic, standard-setting thing,
especially when movies conjure up heroes who are unrealistically perfect.
I think the sting of growing up to find that I don't quite stack up to
the handsome, effortless, talented, brave, successful standards of Ulrich and
Bruce might be part of the reason you'll see my tastes start to shift away from
that kind of heroism towards more deeply flawed character pieces.
As I grew into my teenage years, my father especially took it upon himself to make
sure I received his version of a quality film education.
And God, how I resisted it.
All I wanted to do was make a nice normal trip down to the Hollywood video store on
the corner to get one of the cool new releases like Dare Devil io
Anger Management, or Kangaroo Jack.
And here, he was twisting my arm to watch some dreadfully dull old movie like
Cool Hand Luke or Goodfellas or the Sting or God forbid the Godfather.
In retrospect, I'm really glad he was just about as stubborn as I was.
But of all the brilliant movies he forced me to watch, I think the one
that's made the most lasting impression has to be Apocalypse Now.
(Sound) >> Someday, this war's going to end.
(Sound) >> The first thing I remember
about Apocalypse Now is that I gave up about 20 minutes through, which means I
watched this all-time great opening sequence and then thought rather not.
But with a couple more years of attention span under my belt,
I finally made it through.
And my God was my dad right and I think sharing his favorite
films with me has actually been a very important part of our relationship.
Sharing art is like sharing a piece of yourself.
Seeing, watch this film.
I think you'll like it.
It's kind of like saying, these noises and colors smashed up against my insides and
gimme some crazy feelings and I'd like you to feel the same ones.
Because they feel kind of important to me.
Especially as men raised in the culture and frankly a family,
we're speaking openly about our insides wasn't always the easiest thing to do.
Sharing movies was a way for my father to emotional connect with me,
even without the words necessarily talk about it.
And for that, I have to say, thanks dad.
(Music)
Taste in art is a funny, incredibly subjective thing.
It's interesting to look back at all the twists and turns mine has taken, and
see how personal it really is.
How the same movie at different times has given me completely different viewing
experiences.
My high school years would see me like many high schoolers, I'm sure forming
strong unchangeable opinions that I would later come back to completely fit.
I was trying to build an identity and
a big part of an identity is a sense of personal aesthetics and
the 15 anarchist and rebel in me loved stuff like Fight Club, and the Matrix.
Both of which I still really stand behind and American Beauty,
which I really still don't.
But the movie I saw in this period of my life that
remains the most important to me has to be No Country for Old Men which I saw in
theaters with my new best friend Matt and my father, and absolutely hated.
>> I always figured when I got older.
God would sort of come into my life somehow.
He didn't.
>> I mean, nothing happened.
There wasn't any ending and what ending there was didn't even happen on screen.
Yeah, sure, Apocalypse Now was a head trip.
But at least Colonel Kurtz got his in the end.
Of course, nowadays,
I think of them as brilliant in about a half a million different ways and
have included it on maybe too many brilliant moments lists because of that.
But at age 16, when it first came out, my God was it frustrating.
The truth is I was a different person back then when I saw it for the first time.
Not only in terms of my personality and development, but also in terms of my
familiarity with the century long ongoing conversation that is world cinema.
Cinema happens in context.
It's a language with its own literacy.
It's why history is important and
why foreign films can be as daunting as they are rewarding.
In a lot of ways,
this was one of my first encounters with a non-classical Hollywood narrative.
And it's easy to forget how narrow of a shape of mainstream films can be and
how foreign it can feel to step outside of it for the first time.
By 18, I had enrolled in engineering college with only the vaguest of
notions that I might also have an interest in film.
Inspired mostly by how much I enjoyed making ridiculous Lonely Island parodies
on (Inaudible) camera with my equally ridiculous high school friends.
But I enrolled in a film elective my very first semester to give it a look and that
first semester was filled with films I would have otherwise stuck my nose up at,
but ended up loving Citizen Cane and The Third Man and Adam.
And in just my first week as I learned that four years of engineering
school was going to be a very boring affair,
we screened our first film in that Film class.
And I marched out of it, called my parents and told them what every pair of
respectable middle class parents want to hear from their son.
That I was going to be a film major and that film was The Five Obstructions.
>> Yeah.
(Foreign) >> Okay.
>> The final instructions was to film about film making, about an oddly
competitive challenge between a mentor and a former student to remake the mentors.
In my opinion, pretty damn artsy fartsy short film.
Five times with increasingly confounding obstacles, but
the whole thing was fascinating to me.
These guys were over here dueling over this obscure short that was far more
opaque than No Country ever was.
And yet, I still got the feeling that they were really playing for keeps.
That beyond the inexplicable finger snapping riddle of the perfect human were
two people actively grappling with the big answers to the big questions.
That really appealed to me at that age.
I was 18, had myself a lot of big questions and
I figured that maybe these movie things could help me answer them.
(Music)
This search for movies with answers finally took me off the beaten path of
film towards what would eventually become the basis for my own tastes, but
I couldn't stomach just jumping straight into the avant garde yet.
And so I walked myself slowly towards the indie and the cult,
gravitating towards those headier offerings with a clear philosophical bent.
I reevaluated the Cohns and
fell in love with a serious man in all of its inscrutable religious questioning,
but the creator I responded to most at this age ended up being Charlie Kaufman.
At first, it was just his writing.
Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, particularly rocked my world.
But it was his directorial debut, Synecdoche,
New York that became my new all-time fave.
(Music)
>> But with ones before you, an exciting, mysterious future is now behind you.
Lived, understood, disappointing.
You realized you are not special.
You have struggled into existence and are now stepping silently out of it.
This is everyone's experience, every single one.
The specific is hardly matter.
Everyone knows everyone.
>> Synecdoche felt like my first favorite that was really properly mine.
I found it in my own searching, hadn't been handed it by anyone else.
And it was like Charlie Kaufman was talking directly to me like he was letting
me in on his own radically beautiful perspective on what life was like.
And arriving at the end of the film, I felt this really literally and explicitly.
Like I was there with Caden on the cusp of some final existential revelation on this
oceanic feeling of wholeness, but
that feeling never quit lasted more than a few hours.
And when I learn that Synecdoche,
New York was really just Kaufman's attempt at an existential horror film, a grown up,
brave little toaster meant to scare not illuminate.
It kind of ruined it for me for a little while.
It's clear to me now that these film makers didn't have the answers
I was looking for.
Charlie Kaufmann, Lars VonTrier, they're incredible artists.
But they're not exactly the picture of having it all figured out, but
what they did have were the same questions.
The same curiosity.
The same desperate search and what I was responding to where that oceanic feeling
came from was a sense of kindred experience.
Instead of showing me who I wanted to be like a Knight's Tale or Enter the Dragon,
these films helped me ping against parts of who I already was and
that kind of insight.
And honesty, it's not an answer to life's fundamental questions.
It still stands out as one of the most important abilities of any really good
personal cinema.
(Music)
And really, that's what my big takeaway from this whole list is.
That movies don't ever exist independently of their audience.
That making a top ten list is inherently subjective 100% of the time,
because we don't ever see just the movie.
We participate in the viewership experience it creates and
that experience is half made up of the film, but half made up of
who we are which changes not only from person to person, but from year to year.
By the time I had graduated from school, I had mostly grown out of
the belief that movies could give me some kind of nebulous answer.
And when I went to work for CineFix, I was lucky enough to be asked to write movie
lists and get to expose myself to tons more films on a weekly basis.
Even as I was forced to confront the impossible task of trying to rank things
that by their very nature have no real rank.
In doing so, I've made some lists I'm really proud of and
some others I'm really not.
I've tried hard to focus on praising and sharing that which resonates with
me as special instead of disparaging that, which doesn't.
And along the way, early on as I was putting together our list for
the best long takes of all time, I discovered the movie that
currently holds the crown atop my personal top, whatever list.
A movie which I'm sure comes as absolutely no surprise to any
long-time movie list Tarkovsky's The Mirror.
>> Michael.
(Noise)
>> The Mirror really truly does stir
things up in me unlike any other film I've seen before or since.
It works on me in the same way I imagine the opening image of
The Lion King worked on me at age three.
Deeply, intimately, personally as if speaking directly to my soul and
I know it isn't for everybody.
Even I'll admit that I find the first 20 minutes or so a kind of a slog and
that's the thing about cinema, and all of art really is that as much
as we would like to, and as much as it's literally my job to.
Nobody can tell you what's good or bad for anyone, but themselves.
Nobody can make you a top ten list for you, but you.
If you like pretentious Russian art films and 90s Heath Ledger rom coms,
that's great.
We've probably got a ton in common.
But if you think Marvel movies is the best thing happening in cinema right now,
that's great too.
The next question isn't, am I right?
Or should I?
It's why?
What does that tell me about me?
About how I move through the world and experience it?
Because that's ultimately what I got with movies.
Instead of answers to life's existential questions,
I got clues to a roadmap about myself.
(Music)
And finally, in my last slot on this list I got nothing partly,
because you've all spent 4 years and now 15 more minutes hearing from me.
And I want to take this as an opportunity to hear from you and
what your mirrors are, and what's in your personal top ten, and why.
But mostly, I'm leaving the spot blank.
Because I only had nine good stories for you and
I hate making uneven numbered lists.
Anyways, thank you for listening.
This has been my ten or nine, I guess favorite films of all time.
(Music)
So what do you think?
What are the films that have been most important to you?
Do you disagree with any of my picks?
I don't know how you could possibly could, that doesn't make any sense.
Let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more CineFix movie lists.
God, I've always wanted to be the one to say that.