#43 - Apocalypse Now (1979)

I'm not a huge fan of big, epic war films. Honestly, I don't find the concept of war that exciting and I really don't know why does it fascinate so many people. Apocalypse Now is widely regarded as one of the best war films ever, so I figured if one of these films was going to get me interested, it was this one. And when it comes to action and visual effects, it is a cream of the crop film. I just have a couple of problems with everything else.

Set during the Vietnam War, you have Martin Sheen playing captain Willard, on a mission to kill the ex-colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) deep in the jungles of Cambodia, who has apparently gone insane and commands his troops into a neutral zone. What happens in between, which is most of the film, is what alomst killed the experience to me. I mean, it has a lot of memorable scenes, like the helicopters gunning down Vetnamese to Ride of the Valkyries, or the chaotic playboy show; it has lots of potential, but all of the scenes lack congruence. The whole thing is very disjointed.

       

One moment they are fighting a tiger and the next they tease a bunch of bikini-clad chicks. What?

That's my biggest complaint. The rest of the movie is very good. I really liked all the symbolism behind the film, particularly how every character embodies different aspects of war. Kurtz has very few screen time right at the end of the film but even then he is developed as Willard reads files on his target: he is a memorable representation of the madness behind war and how it comes from the dark side of human nature. And the more Willard learns about him, the more he starts to become the thing he has to hunt. Aside from Willard and Kurtz you have Robert Duvall as Lt. Kilgore, a fun loving but still twisted character I found very likeable and all the other characters in Willard's squad that are surprisingly fleshed out and further personify different aspects of war.

And the sound and visuals are great. The camera work is very impressive and most of the scenes are very well choreographed. Like I said, the scenes in the middle of the film may be disjointed but there's a lot of stuff going on from every direction. I have to give it a lot of credit for pulling all that off in a pre-CGI era, in fact, sometimes I feel like CGI sucks some of the magic out of the film (for instance, I like hand-drawn animation a lot more than computer animated films), so there's plenty here. And the sound direction is just as good: the soundtrack heightens the athmosphere and the sound effects are very realistic and fitting.

         

Look at that. You can't get more epic than this.

In the end, the characters. premise, themes and aestethics are great. I would have really liked this film if the events and the script were better organized and tied together, and the fact that I'm not very keen on war films, but what the heck. If you want to spend two and a half hours watching stuff getting blown up while having some heavy themes to go behind it, you will like it.

#42 - Donnie Darko (2001)

How can I describe Donnie Darko in one word? "Weird". This is by far one of the weirdest films I have ever seen. In general, I liked it, it's an interesting and original premise and has much to offer, but at the same time the whole thing is so weird and surrealistic it can ruin the experience for some people.

So here's a brief summary: Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a somewhat disturbed teenager that witnesses a series of visions involving a twisted humanoid rabbit named Frank that tells him the world will end in 28 days. The rest of the film involves Donnie doing research on time travel to prevent the end from happening, while he tries to carry out his "normal" life. I don't want to know what kind of drugs the creative team were on when they pitched the idea, but other than this wierd-ass plot, a lot of people can find the rest of the movie to be really good.

       

...If you can overlook the fact that a monstrous rabbit is telling the protagonist to burn stuff, that is.

I won't say Donnie is a completely relatable character: I mean, he's borderline insane, violent and has to put up with horrifying hallucinations, but I really liked other aspects of the character, from a teen angst point of view, particularly at his school. I've never been a rebellious person myself, but I do protest firmly against something I find wrong or imposed upon myself, and have gotten into heated (but polite) arguments with my teachers dozens of times. For instance, what is the purpose of learning syntax in high school aside from basic concepts (it's even more useless in Spanish, trust me). Seeing a character behave so accurately in that exact way was great.

And while the film deals with themes like science fiction or spirituality very good (I mean, the entire premise is constructed around both), the true message of the film, in my opinion, is the clarity of mind behind insanity. I know they are opposite concepts, but the idea of alienated or rejected people being able to comprehend a society or a reality better than those fully immersed in it, as if they had an outsider's point of view, is just brilliant. Aside from Donnie, you have their English teacher (Drew Barrymore) that can probably fall into the "rebellious, idealistic teacher that fights the system" cliché, but still manages to empathize with Donnie; his girlfriend-something with an abusive father...

        

Just because she's a teacher doesn't mean we have to stand her old-fashioned, narrow-minded bullshit.

Again, you have a very good film here, you just have to pay little importance to the crazy premise (and other stuff like 20 year olds playing highscoolers). The ending is very, very confusing: the guy that recommended it to me said he has watched the film like three times and still can't understand it. So you get the idea, it's not a film for everyone.

#41 - Wall Street (1987)

Piece of advice: if you are as unfamiliar as I am with terms and concepts of the stock market, make sure to have access to Google or Wikipedia if you plan on watching Wall Street. While I really liked this film I often got mixed up with some terms or didn't know what was going on.

Charlie Sheen plays Bud Fox, a rookie and ambitious stockbroker,  is given the chance to do business with the Wall Street legend Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), who takes him under his wing and skyrockets him into fortune. You can guess what happens later, turns out Gekko is a greedy douche and tries to sell a company Bud had acquired. And his dad, played by Martin Sheen, has been working there for 24 years and that means he loses his job. So Bud snaps out of it and tries to fix what he has done.

While Bud is the main character and all that and seeing him realize how much of a shmuck he's been, Douglas as Gordon Gecko steals the show, now considered a small icon. While the performance and character is great, being incredibly power hungry but still keeping that image concealed under a certain charm; his philosophy of life is what stands out. That speech about greed and how it is positive to society is by far the best moment of the film.

       

If you think as greed as ambition to improve upon yourself and shit, it's not that terrible.

The rest of the supporting cast is really good too. Daryl Hannah does an okay job playing an on/off love interest; John McGinley's (the guy that plays Cox in Scrubs) Marv, Bud's coworker, is surprisingly entertaining; and Bud's father is sort of the moral compass of the story, both caring and proud of his son while trying to keep him from becoming into a cold and greedy person.

I know the message of the story is very clear and thoroughly exploited (the moral consequences of greed), but I personally wanted to see more scenes with Martin Sheen and Michael Douglas together. The scene where the blue-collar, hard working and honest mechanic meets the insanely wealthy but ruthless corporate raider was awesome. It would be great to see those clashing ideologies being explored further, but what the heck, what we have is still great.

This is one of those films with a shitload of dialogue that I would have considered a snorefest a couple of years ago, but it has really good characters of a wide moral spectrum and offers a very interesting apporach to a concept we all consider bad, but in a certain way, "greed, for lack of a better word, is good". And by the way it's a great way to see Charlie Sheen before he ruined his life with drugs, booze, chicks, and stupid sitcoms. And he's still considered by plenty of people to be an awesome person.

       

Oh, Charlie, at what point did you become an asshole that turns down million dollar jobs over childish tantrums?

#40 - Citizen Kane (1941)

I can't believe it took me thirty nine films to sit down and watch what so many people call the best movie ever made. No particular reason, but I can finally agree with that statement... Kind of. It is a brilliant film, but I guess all the praise it got is probably because of how innovative its narrative style and themes were for its time; seventy years later I've seen it done a lot of times so it isn't such a fresh concept. But don't get the wrong end of the stick, it still holds up.

Citizen Kane follows a "rise and fall" story. The film opens with the death of the famous, rich and eccentric Charles Foster Kane, played by Orson Welles, whose last word was "Rosebud". "Wait, what? Rosebud? So many cool things to say before you kick the bucket and that's the best you can come up with?" That's probably what was on the mind of the press at that moment, so a reporter decides to solve the mystery behind it. So he starts to interview friends and relatives of Kane who tell the story of his life through flashbacks, showing one bit at a time. It's a brilliant approach to a premise that hooks you in from the very beginning.

      

Ugh. Thank god I never grew a moustache. That close-up looks terrible.

Through these testimonies we learn that Kane used to live with his poor family until a gold mine was discovered in their properties and he is sent with a wealthy banker to be educated in New York. Through the years Kane makes a fortune out of his purchase of the New York Inquirer newspaper, gets married, divorced, remarried, and then secludes into his estate in Florida. The character is great: he has everything he could ever want but still is unhappy because of poor choices, like cheating on his first wife, forcing the second one into a singing career just to boost his ego... Up until the last ten minutes I thought to myself "well, it was pretty good". Then the true reason for Kane's unhappiness is revealed at the end of the film and my opinion suddenly changed to "genius".

That's all I can really say about Citizen Kane. The other characters are not very interesting and have very little time on the spotlight. And while the narrative is intricate and original for its time, the plot is relatively simple. At all times, the focus is on Kane, his rise and fall. And that totally works, surprisingly. It really helps with the message: Kane may be always on the spotlight and everyone talks about him, but in the end that's not what he wants. I'll stop now before I spoil the ending.

     

That huge ego of his is suddenly more tragic once you know what's behind it.

 

I can totally see why so many people call it the best film of all time, and I am glad I watched it. I wouldn't count it as a personal favorite but it still is a great fucking film and a timeless classic, and if you're a movie enthusiast you can't miss it.

#39 - The Sixth Sense (1999)

Fuck you, Adam Sandler, fuck you. I would have enjoyed this film ten times more if you hadn't spoiled the twist ending in 50 First Dates. I know it's a 13 year old movie, but I didn't know it! Surprisingly enough, though, this film can still be very enjoyable if you know what happens.

We all know what Sixth Sense is about. You have Bruce Willis as Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist who is working on Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Crowe is interested in Cole since he displays a similar behavior to an old patient of his, that had tried to murder him after he failed to help him. Turns out Cole is not insane: he can actually see ghosts. Or something.

       

You can just wrap it up in the often parodized "I see dead people" quote.

While Bruce Willis plays a very convincing and interesting character, trying to deal with his deteriotated relationship with his wife; the kid steals the film. What I really liked about Osment's performance is how believable it is. For instance, he is mocked by other kids but doesn't go through a cliche'd "I just want to fit in!" scene; and when he sees a ghost, he doesn't just cringe and call his mom: he gets scared and then retreats to calm himself. Disturbing as it may sound, this is how an 8 year old would probably react like if he went through this.

Another thing I really liked about Sixth Sense is that I can't call it a proper horror flick. The film never really gets scary: it just creeps you out the perfect amount so you can empathize with Cole. I mean, hanged, mangled corpses would scare the fuck out of me too, but you can see they just momentarily shock the kid and he then acts as naturally as the situation allows it.

       

"Yeah, they're just hanging there (get it?)".

Again, I would have really enjoyed the flick more if I hadn't been spoiled the ending. And even then, I still loved how every scene still works if you know the twist. I know M. Night Shyamalan's reputation was destroyed by films like The Village or The Last Airbender (I will forever hate you for the latter one), and how he keeps making films with silly twist endings and similar themes, but the twist here is fantastic. If only I hadn't been- fuckyouadamsandler.

Shyamalan may have a shitty filmography, but this one is still very good. And even if you know the ending (because this is 2012 and everyone knows it) you can still enjoy it.

On a totally unrelated sidenote, yes, I am posting this at 4 AM. I really got hooked on Psychonauts and forgot to watch a film today. I know this is a movie blog, but I have to promote this, because if there ever was a commercially underrated videogame, it's this one. So please, if you are into 3D platformers get your copy off Steam or something and give Tim Schafer some love. And then give yourself some love and play it.

#38 - Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Have you read my review of Dr. Strangelove already? Because it's among my favorite films of all time now. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, also among my favorite cineasts, the film poked fun at the Red Scare and America´s obsession with communism. Here we have him criticizing the Vietnam war. And it's one hell of a film, ranging from over the top parody to a more serious breed of criticism.

The film can be divided in two parts. The first one introduces us to a platoon of U.S. marines during the Vietnam war, including our main character, nicknamed "Joker" (Matthew Modine), along with "Cowboy" and the chubby "Pyle" (Vincent D'Onofrio). The platoon is trained by Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), who taunts and intimidates the marines to harden them into soldiers. Pyle, overweight and clumsy, is constantly scorned for his incompetence and eventually earns the entire platoon a collective punishment from Hartman.

This first part is fucking fantastic. The themes of social pressure, camaraderie and manhood are perfectly executed, culminating in Pyle being in the edge of mental breakdown. I like the fact that Joker's role is downplayed to focus instead on Pyle and Hartman, because Vincent D'Onofrio's performance just keeps getting better and better as the character is tortured into insanity; and Hartman is just incredibly fun to watch. He´s the last person you would ever want to have as your boss, constantly teasing everyone over anything. You could say he is way too intimidating and ruthless to be believable and gives a more surreal or parodic tone to a film that is otherwise supposed to be serious, but even then he's by far the most memorable character of the film. Here's just a few quotes:

"Move it! Or I'm going to rip your balls off, so you cannot contaminate the rest of the world!"

"You are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit!"

"How tall are you, private?" "Five foot nine? I didn't know they stacked shit that high!"

"Were you born a fat, slimy scumbag puke piece o' shit, Pyle, or did you have to work on it?"

      

And, my personal favorite, "You're so ugly you could be a modern art masterpiece!"

In the second part we see Joker, now graduated, as a combat photographer for Stars and Stripes. He is sent along Private Rafterman to Phu Bai, where the Vietkong is attacking, and the rest of the film has Joker trying to survive the attack while interviewing the American soldiers on their views on the war.

It may not be as exciting as the first part in my opinion, but it still manages to be more insightful on the pointlessness of war; that is by far the best aspect of the second part. When Joker interviews the Privates you can see that they have either no idea of what they are fighting for, or they have their own twisted, chauvinistic motives. The private nicknamed "Animal Mother" is by far the most fucked up of them all, to the point of being completely insenstive about gunning down a teenage Vietnamese girl (to his defense she had just shot down a member of his squad, though).

      

Just look at that face. The guy is believably nuts and it really contributes to the tone of the film.

In the end, this is Kubrick pointing out how stupid war is and how clueless your average American can be about anything outside the borders of their country, and I love it for that. After seeing Dr. Strangelove I can assure you this man does political sattire better than anyone else in film history. Must watch if you're into that kind of films.

#37 - Vertigo (1958)

I can't believe I hadn't seen a Hitchcock film since Psycho. And that was over a month ago. But well, here's the second one. Glad to say it was one of the best suspense films I've ever seen.

Due to an inconvenient incident due to his acrophobia, the detective John Ferguson (James Stewart) is asked by a friend of his to tail his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), who has been acting strangely lately. The film tells how John tires to solve the mystery behind Madeleine, that keeps getting weirder and weirder, as he finds out she could be possessed by the spirit of a suicidal ancestor. Besides, John and Madeleine start developing feelings for each other.
I know the summary I just wrote is good but not that gripping. The thing is, right in the middle something really unexpected happens (which I will refer to as "[THING]" from now on) and it would ruin the entire film if I were to reveal it. And while there are more great revelations later on, sometimes the film makes a big deal out of the simple ones. But maybe that's just me being nitpicky.

      

See? Too many twists...That was terrible. Punch me.

The main protagonist not a very interesting character during the first half of the film, but after  [THING] happens he gets really obsessed about solving the mystery (and with Madeleine). I can't really keep defining the character without giving [THING] away. Madeleine, on the other hand, is always an intriguing character. The film teases her insanity constantly but you don't really know what's wrong with her until [THING]. Mysteriousness aside, she is a likeable character nonetheless.

The soundtrack is great and really helps set the tone for the film. It heightens that sense of obsession, both from the main character and that of the audience to find out what is going on. The visual effects were also very good, from the trippy intro to the now famous Vertigo zoom, used whenever our main character stares down from a high location and the film is distorted to look taller. One thing I did not like is a dream sequence that could have been executed much better. Here´s what it looks like:

      

It's supposed to be serious but come on, this is goofy and out of place.

Summing up, a great film. The mystery is the main driving force here and it is hinted perfectly, keeping you interested without giving too much away. There are some minor flaws despite the superb plot but still it was totally worth watching.