My cousin made us come up with a list of the 10 best films ever made as part of this year's Christmas fun. The rules: only 10 films, in strict order, with a justification. Here are my 10, in order, with a justification.
10. John Wick
Any list of top ten films has got to have a hyper kinetic chase film. Lots of films have chases, but there's an undeniable purity to films that are more or less just that - Chaser, Mad Max Fury Road, The Raid - but the combination of Keanu and the dog is a winner in the category. Like the other Keanu trilogy, the sequels are awful, but somehow what's missing from John Wick 2 and 3 makes the first film better - it has an emotional core - whereas the Matrix sequels just undermine any interest the first film had. John Wick cuts to the chase (literally) with incredible economy. He falls in love, his wife sickens, dies, he's established as a man with a past, he gets the dog, the dog is killed and the scene is set for a breathless, headlong, pursuit all within the first 30 seconds of the film (sort of). Even the way that his character - or rather the legend of the character, there not being that much character to reveal - is revealed propels the story. It's done with preposterous over-the-top style from the silly gun-fu to the elaborate subtitles and I love it.
9. Sympathy for Mr Vengeance
I love the vengeance trilogy and this is the best of the three. I'm kind of hazy on the meaning of tragedy in a formal sense, but the film is my definition of tragic with the characters trapped in a situation they can't escape or change once its set in motion.
8. Stalker
I read Roadside Picnic a long time ago and loved it. I'd heard that Stalker was based on the book and so went in expecting something completely different. It was completely different to the completely different thing I'd been expecting. The film is the most faithful faithless adaptation of a book I've ever seen. [Spoiler] Nothing happens, but the way it doesn't happen is so intense that I don't think I ever recovered. The basic story is the same in both cases - "stalkers" are professional thieves and trespassers in a forbidden zone on Earth where something happened that littered the area with magical or alien artefacts - but each takes it in a different direction before ultimately ending in the same place. Science fiction has the latitude to deal with anything in the universe and outside it and both versions deal with an event that goes beyond human understanding. My favourite species of sci-fi deals with how people deal with that. What happens when you come up against something that you don't understand and might even be incomprehensible. Stalker aligns that with a broader (or maybe narrower) religious theme, which all sounds awfully portentous and serious, but the whole thing is also a joke: the roadside picnic that gives the book its title alludes to a theory that the anomaly was caused by aliens stopping off on Earth on the way to somewhere else and littering.
7. Audition
Takashi Miike is my favourite director and Audition, as well as being the first of his films that I saw, is also my favourite with one of the best jump scares in cinema. A friend of mine took his new girlfriend to see it on a date as the cinema blurb suggested a light romantic comedy and the setup of the film does read that way. He said that half the cinema walked out. He then turned to me and said "you'll love it". He wasn't wrong**. TM's output is prolific and, frankly, all over the place, but somehow in Audition, he manages to contain the wilder, transgressive elements inside a framework that is almost conventional. Very very dark.
6. Terminator
There's a group of action films from the late 70s through to the early 90s that I grew up with and love unconditionally. Among these, there's a group of films that my friends and I watched when we were old enough to watch films we weren't old enough to watch - early teens, watching 18 rated action movies where the 18 certificate promised bad language and ultraviolence. I still have a soft spot for a lot of those films - Robocop, Predator, Aliens, Total Recall et al. - but the best of them is undoubtedly Terminator. The film is bleak and unrelenting from the very foundations upwards. The good guys - that is, the humans - win at the end of the movie, but winning means that the human race only has to endure a robot Armageddon then a nuclear holocaust (and, it turned out, a series of increasingly awful sequels). The characters themselves are left either stuck in a time loop or with an open-ended mandate to save humanity albeit without any instructions.
5. The Green Mile
I've spent a lot of time reading Stephen King and the film adaptations run from awful adaptations of awful books (Dreamcatcher) to excellent adaptations of excellent books (Misery). The Green Mile is in the latter category. I loved the book and I loved the film. Of the three near-perfect Stephen King adaptations by Frank Darabont (the other two are Shawshank Redemption and The Mist) this is my favourite. Tom Hanks proves he is the world's greatest actor when it comes to pretending his pee burns*.
4. Pulp Fiction
This was one of the first films I saw at university. A friend asked me if I wanted to go to the cinema and I said, why not? I had no idea what I was going to see. It turned out I was going to see the first showing of Pulp Fiction a film about which I had no expectations. I'd never seen anything like it before and I've not seen anything like it since. Tarantino's characters talked and talked and talked - about footrubs and quarter pounders, pot bellies and pride - and almost every line etched itself so deep in my memory that they come bubbling back up at odd times. I found myself in Paris Gare de l'Est McDonalds asking for a "Royale with Cheese" in my worst Samuel Jackson impersonation to the consternation, bewilderment and maybe even terror of the cashier. I didn't even need to say it - I'd given my order to the touchscreen five minutes before - but I had to say it.
3. Princess Bride
My hangover film. I can watch it any time, in any state and it's a joy. I must have seen it more than 50 times and it still makes me laugh, cry and cheer. It works on different levels to pull all of it off without being pretentious or corny, it all has to work perfectly. And it does. A fairy tale; a fairy tale about fairy tales; and a story within a story within a story. Everything works just so.
2. Ratatouille
I'm a sucker for animated films - particularly Pixar's - but most of them fall short of my top 10 because of the obligatory and tedious 20 minute chase in the last act of the film (Monsters Inc - the best film ever made about US energy security - doesn't make the list for this exact reason) or because it's transparently about some massively entitled silicon valley prick getting in touch with his inner child after literally minutes of therapy. Toy Story 3 and Cars 3 are both superb and the first five minutes of Up are perfect, but Ratatouille is my absolute favourite. The early scenes revealing Paris -from the sewers up - and the restaurant - from the skylight down - are magical and the single zooming shot of Anton Ego taking a mouthful of the titular ratatouille and being transported back to his childhood... ah: chef's kiss.
1. Star Wars
No need to explain this, surely? A dozen or more sequels, prequels and "stand alone" films later and nothing has come close to the original. Also, what are the chances that one of the first films I remember seeing is also the best one ever made?
* I realised at this point that both 5 and 6 lean heavily into the initials of their characters: John Coffey and John Connor are both JCs with a saviour/sacrifice thing going on. This is completely inadvertent and don't let it raise your expectations for other thematic associations at all.
** When they broke up, they both said that that date should have been a warning sign.
