The 10 best films of all time ever

 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.

Unreason

We were bored. It wasn't just the boredom of a lost afternoon it was the boredom of an interstellar traveller with only the stars for company and infinity as a reminder.

We needed something new, but we discovered that everything had been done. The world had been mapped, every depth plumbed, all the choices had been made, we had reached the end of the book and every page thereafter was blank - no adverts, no promise of things as yet unsaid. Time as it was, after a turbulent youth in the mountains, had hit the flood plain of its senescence. It lay ahead in uncertain coils. But looking back towards the sun, the river burned.

We lived then in a house by the sea set atop dark granite cliffs. Across two thousand miles of empty ocean great waves rode towards us on the wind. When they reached the land they spent their energy in frustration and pulled boulders big as houses through the sucking darkness beneath the cliffs.

When the tide went out and the ocean, restless, slept we would walk amongst the boulders in silence. Sometimes the wind and waves would leave these boulders in uneasy equilibrium, balanced so that you could move them with your hand.

Fairy dust

Strange days, empty days they were after the moon ran away. No one talks about it any more. It dropped and lodged in cliche: gone the way of the moon. Everyone had their own problems closed off from everybody else's. That's the way it seemed to me.

When I think back to that time, every thing seemed dusty. The light was always silver like the world was powdered with the scales off a moth's wings. It was as if the world had been packed away in the attic to be discovered again some misty summer day. Memories steeped in sepia, drained of everything but their age and timelessness.

That's the first memory, the second this: a staircase with a closed door at the top. Always this image of my life then, the stairs I climbed to my apartment every day I could bear to leave it and stand to return. In my memory the door never opens. It's just there at the top of a weary climb that never ends. The real stairs, the actual stairs were tacked to the outside of the house, worn smooth by time, by the gentle scuffing of footfalls of thousands of men and women just like me.

Other memories fall in around like a scattered shoe box of old photos. And, like photos, one actor is always missing: me, behind the camera. A camera records what it is pointed at with fidelity. I have no strong sense of myself at the time. Rather, the feeling I am left with is that of an emptiness, an absence. There is something missing from every frame. I flick through those photo memories now and find certain scenes appear time after time as though there was something special I wanted to capture there. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Maybe I wasn't looking at all. The other images are fleet, gone the way of the moon.

If I had a routine it was this. Each night a glass of water by my bed, each morning tanlged shadows as late morning sun shot through the water. My life didn't tick like a clock, but it felt as though each tick of the old wind up clock was marking another dusty mile along the road to... not nowhere although that's what it felt like, but here, as far now as the end of this line.

Most of the time, I read and the books piled up against the bare walls till the room, and then the flat, smelled like a second hand bookshop. I read everything and anything, scanning the charity bookstores, never spending more than a pound on any book. I read at home propped up in bed or in the pub beneath my apartment.

It was never busy in the bar which suited me fine. It meant I could take my time to relax into the shuffling silences. It was never dark in the pub either because the windows all down one wall faced south into the wasteground across the street. Warmth accumulated during the day and the shadows were stained a rich mahogany when you looked into them after the sun. The only time it got cold was a few days in autumn before the heating took up the slack from the waning sun.  It was then, in the flickering light, when the clouds rushed across the sky that it felt like the whole world was on the move and leaving me behind.

The regulars in the pub were the regulars in my life but I couldn't say there was a lot in the relationship. I'm not the gregarious kind, but I don't mind listening. Most of the time, conversations would be entirely one way. Sometimes I could even read and hold up my end of the conversation, which shows how much I was putting into things. The way I dressed meant I fit in with the rest, a kind of faded gentility style. The clothes were in the apartment when I arrived, and when I tried them on, they fit me so I wore them. My own suitcase is still there as far as I know, pushed back into the wardrobe where I couldn't see it or reach it without stepping up on a chair.

I could have lived that way forever.

But what happened? I guess if folks thought about it, they'd say I just vanished, upped and walked off the face of the earth: went the way of the moon.

Late sunday afternoon in May. The pub was half empty, or half full depending on your outlook. I couldn't decide. Best to wait until someone arrived or left and called it for one side or the other. I was half way through a novel, half way through a trilogy. You could say that things were hanging in the balance, but they'd been hanging that way for so long it didn't seem like it.

I didn't see him come in. The first thing I knew, he was standing beside the table with a pint in each hand and a paper tucked under his arm.

"Do you mind if I sit here?" he said. I shook my head in a non-commital way. He set the pints down on the table and settled himself comfortably into the chair. He say with his back to the wall watching what little action there was. I went on reading.

At the end of the chapter, I reached out for my pint and found it was almost empty. I sucked down the dregs and laid my book down, splayed open on the table. I made the briefest eye contact with the stranger across the table and as I did he nodded and his eyes flicked down. He pushed the spare pint towards me.

"On me," he said.

I thanked him. He was an old man with the look of someone who had lived and worked his whole life with other people's hopes and fears. They had worn him almost smooth. His hair was a delicate silver spray, tinged with a honey colour by the afternoon sun. His face was lined, not with laughter or with anger, but with the understanding of things. There is joy it said, and tears, but most of all a coming to terms. Each day is sufficient to itself, the seasons their own measure. He was dressed like me, which struck me strange.

We sat in comfortable silence for a while and sipped our drinks. The bar had tilted to half empty and now the moments of quiet could be felt between the thrum of conversation. I could hear the sounds of pints being put down on tables, chairs dragging across the bare wooden boards.

"Seems like neither one of us is much for talking." observed the old man. The way he said it told me it was fine by him. The words fit into the silence either side of them. He might have been speaking to himself. I looked down at my book, but I had no urge to pick it up.

"Is it any good?" said the old man.

"I've read worse and I've read better." I said.

"Then why keep reading?" I let the question roll around in my head. It picked up answers, dropped them again.

"It's what I do," I said finally.

We sipped in silence. The sun slanted in through the window at that angle which makes each moment last forever.

"Most people these days don't have the patience for that," he said, "Their time is too precious." He paused, but what he said didn't dovetail so neatly into the silence as before. I waited. His skin was a creamy silver in the sun, like drift wood. His chin stuck out further than is usual, his forehead was high and between the two, his face was long. "It's always been that way, but now so many things compete for that same small capital of attention." I nodded agreement. "What's the book about?"

I thought.

"The same as every other," I said, "the distance between what people want and what they are given." It was the old man's turn to nod. He smiled ever so gently. As the sun slid down to the horizon, it revealed more of his face. It seemed broader, waxing to the round.

"I'm an old man," he said and for the first time, I really saw how old he might be. He wasn't frail, but his eyes had been washed clear as water by all the things he had seen. "I'm tired too, so I'll make this short." He sat forward in his chair and for the first time looked me full in the face. I held his gaze for what felt like an age.

"I came down here to find you," he said, "and I've been looking a long time. Yours was the last name on the list." He pulled out a sheet of paper that was folded over again and again. If it was what he said it was then there were a lot of names on the list. Each one scribed out in neat copperplate handwriting, There was a neat line through every one, but the last.

"Why were you looking for me?"

"A job offer of sorts."

"Doing what?"

"No more than you are doing now. Taking each story as it comes, bearing witness without judgement. That's all." It sounded like something I could do. I inclined my head so he would continue. "You would be my successor. The job's for life..." He paused, squinting into the setting sun which shone in through the door at the far end of the bar, "...life and then some."

"How old are you?" The old man looked off into some imagined distance. He seemd to be counting off for the longest time.

"I'm seven hundred and fifty years old," he said, "or thereabouts. These things don't seem so important any more. Everyone keeps count in their own way. My way, simply, was to forget. How old are you?" I thought about it for a while. The last time I really thought about it I was eighteen, the year the moon disappeared.

"Eighteen and then some," I said. "How long have you been searching?" The old man smiled the gentle smile again.

"Seven years."

"Twenty-five seems to me about the right time to find a place in life," I said. We shook hands. It was a done deal.

"You'll know what to do," the old man said. His face was half in shadow now. He stood up and tucked the newspaper back under his arm. "Be seeing you." Then he turned and he was gone.

I finished the pint off and took the empties to the bar.

"Evening Joe," I said, "I'll be off now."

"Be good," he said.

"Can't promise anything," I said, playing along, "you might even see me on the news."

It wasn't far to go. Telescopes just make small things look big. It started with a dusty staircase, silver in the starlight. By the time I reached the door at the top, the risers shone. The door was open.

I started on a high. The moon was back and brought a little wonder to the world. Each night I sat and watched, a thousand, thousand, thousand lives. The moon looks down on each one just the same. Neither recording nor judging, a simple witnessing of things unseen, unheard, of the distances between.

People disappear too

This is how the world ended, not with a bang and a flash, wiped clean by the cleansing fire of nuclear war, no plagues ravaged the land, there was no breakdown of society, no riots, no heroics and no one fought against it. The world ended quietly. It was as though everyone was tired and wanted nothing more than to sleep for a long time.

Trance

Trance is a twisty thriller in which neither the characters nor the audience know what’s going on and by the end it’s clear that neither the characters nor the audience really cares. The plot revolves around the theft of a Goya painting. Simon (James McAvoy) is the insider at a London auction house, Franck (Vincent Cassel) the criminal mastermind and Elizabeth (Rosaria Dawson) the hypnotist drafted in to help McAvoy remember where he put the painting when he forgets.

Inheritance Lost

Inheritance Lost is a book by Julian Ruck. Ruck has an unusually strong feel for language, place, history and character. His training as a lawyer really shows through in the precision of his language. Ruck has thoughtfully provided the first Chapter of each of his books at his website http://www.julianruck.co.uk/index.html and I'm going to look at the first chapter of "Inheritance Lost" and hopefully give you an idea of the depth and power of his writing.

Wise men who at their end know dark is right…

Breaking Bad, like The Wire, is damn fine TV. But, where the Wire tried to show us everything that’s wrong with modern America, by showing us everything that’s wrong with modern America, Breaking Bad goes exactly the other way.  In its protagonist, Walter White, we find the contradictions of modern America distilled down to a single man: he does all the wrong things for the right reasons. When he finds out he’s sick, he argues convincingly that he does not want to be well because being well felt to him like sickness and sickness feels like being alive.