My Top Ten Favorite Movies

Of course, all of these movies I give a 10-star rating to, so I don't feel the need to list the ratings individually.

10. Where the Wild Things Are

2009

D: Spike Jonze

An insightful, funny and poignant look at the confused, and sometimes vicious, nature of childhood with amazing visuals on the monsters and their environments.

 

9. Children of Men

2006

D: Alfonso Cuaron

This movie was amazingly dark and poignant, yet hopeful.  The violence was executed in an extremely effective fashion, and the movie has some of the best single-take scenes ever.  I liked the vulnerability and humanity of the hero as well.

 

8. The Third Man

1949

D: Carol Reed

Although most people cite Citizen Kane as the best Orson Welles movie ever made, I prefer this one.  Great cinematography, some good humor and a classic villain.

7. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

2001

D: Peter Jackson

Not much I can say; this is a near-perfect fantasy film.

6. Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

1983

D: Richard Marquand

This movie does drag on sometimes with the Ewoks (I still think they’re cute), and it does make the mistake of splitting the movie into three simultaneous action scenes, but it’s still great.  Most threequels try to be this movie, attempting to end the series with the best amount of opulence and emotionality, but most of them fail miserably.  Also, I’d like to point out that I believe this movie actually has the best cinematography of the whole series.

 

5. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

1977

D: George Lucas

While some view it as rehash of Flash Gordon and other serials, but this movie’s genius was that it took all those tropes and added well-written characterization, proving that genre movies were equal to all others.  It effectively ended the 70’s era of cinema and made it for the people, and we haven’t looked back since.  

4. The Big Lebowski

1998

D: The Coen Bros.

Great characters and sharp dialogue make this my favorite funny movie of all time.

3. Equilbrium

2002

D: Kurt Wimmer

Don’t listen to what the critics and the online wannabe critics (despite my being one) say.  This movie is awesome.

2. Blade Runner

1982

D: Ridley Scott

With its dark, complex storytelling and amazing visuals, this is one of the best sci-fi movies ever made.  The ultimate cyberpunk movie. 

1. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

1980

D: Irvin Kershner

Enough has already been said about this movie’s greatness.  All I have to add is that if you somehow do not know the movie’s twist, drop what you’re doing and watch the Star Wars Trilogy.  Your ignorance is worth preserving until you actually watch these movies

One of the Most Intelligent Movies I've Ever Seen

 

Freddie as F.R.O.7

1992

D: Jon Acevski

**********

Pros: Decent animation, Some stylish moments

Cons: Insane plot, Unlikable protagonist

    
     Normally, one does not want to ghost spoilers for a sub-par story, but I urge anyone who reads this to experience this movie by watching it before reading this review in full.  This movie is an experience.  No one can be told what Freddie as F.R.O.7 is.  You have to see it for yourself.  It is a movie that defies human logic.  There are no words to describe this film.  A friend on Skype who helped introduce it to me said that the Wikipedia synopsis reads like it’s been vandalized.  I assure you, it’s an accurate description.  Apparently, the director conceived this as a story for his children, and if Lady in the Water is anything to go by, that’s not a good sign. However, while that movie seemed to have a good premise ruined by the creator’s ego, F.R.O.7 is just pure absurdity.    

     The movie begins in the present, where our hero Freddie (Ben Kingsley) is driving his anthropomorphic car through the suspiciously deserted streets of Paris.  He enters his apartment and looks at a fish pond, which triggers a flashback of his childhood in Medieval France.  He remembers how his father the king was murdered by his aunt Messina (Billie Whitelaw), who then transformed into a cobra and chased him into the ocean, where he is rescued by the Loch Ness Monster (Phyllis Logan).  This is the only scene where Freddie acts with any appropriate level of fear in the face of danger.  Now an immortal/time traveling(??) frog, he lives happily with other frogs for a while until he spontaneously grows to human size (At this point I’m wondering why this film has a title like a bad 90’s cyberpunk movie).  Here we see a recurring theme with this character: his utter lack of awareness or concern for the gravity of any situation.  He should be frightened by this change and the prospect of having to live with humans as a 6’ bipedal frog, but he seems unaffected by it.  The other frogs then produce some clothes that they had for some reason and send him on his way (Why do I feel like I’m describing a dream?).  We then return to present day Paris as Freddie answers a phone call, which sets the main plot into action.  If you’re thinking that framing the establishing flashback in this Paris scene is unnecessary, then you are clearly unprepared for the insanity that this movie has in store of you.  I was too busy emitting high-pitched laughs of disbelief to concern myself with such criticisms. 

     The crisis at hand is that a mysterious force is making British landmarks disappear, including Buckingham Palace, which is depicted by the animation as an empty shell.  At this point, Brigadier G (Nigel Hawthorne), whose running gag is that he is unable to talk on the phone without tangling himself in the cord, prepares to receive a specialist from the French Secret Service.  At this point I finally figured out that the movie’s title is, in fact, a lame play on 007.  Even worse, the full title is Freddie as F.R.O.7, making it redundant and awkward in addition to being stupid.  After picking up a sexy martial arts expert named Daffers (Jenny Agutter) and a weapons expert named Scotty (John Sessions), he goes to a horse race and finds some enemy agents, who stupidly blab about the enemy’s next target after a laughably failed attempt to subdue him.  Fortunately for world security, he also wins his bet on the horse race.

      Now I must point out a major problem with this movie: Freddie is an asshole.  Upon learning that the next target is Big Ben, he informs the British chain of command that it is Windsor Castle.  Blatantly misleading his superiors so that he and his two partners could use Big Ben as a Trojan Horse and he can play hero.  On top of that he steals the batteries to his partners’ walkie-talkies and talks them out of bringing their guns on this dangerous mission.  Our hero…bucks authority and risks the safety of his allies and the world so he can stroke his ego.    In another scene, when he and Scotty are trapped in an underwater cage by the bad guys, he gives Scotty the “French kiss of life” (while taking too much pleasure in Scotty’s reluctance) and then summons Nessie to rescue them.  Then, he leaves Scotty (possibly the most likable character in the movie) wet and shivering on a rock so he can enjoy a terrible song number courtesy of Nessie and her fellow Loch Ness monsters. 

  

HAVE FUN, SCOTTY!

      Another flaw with the hero is that he has no uncertainty or vulnerability.  Although I said before that I don’t consider the lack of physical vulnerability to be a deal breaker in a movie, you usually need some type of struggle for the hero, even if it’s internal.  Freddie almost never displays any kind of doubt and never seems to understand the gravity of any situation.  I think most people, when confronted by evil aunts who murdered their parents and turned them into frogs, would feel a bit awkward, but Freddie is apparently not most people.  This problem comes to a head in the final fight scene, in which Freddie, Daffers and Scotty easily defeat a squad of bad guys who barely make even the most minimal effort to counter their incredibly slow attacks.  It is one of the most underwhelming action scenes I’ve ever seen, plus terrible music is playing the whole time.

He even stops in the middle of the fight to strike this pose.

It gets worse when Freddie continues to face the gunmen and remembers some advice from his father, who showed him a sword and told him “You don’t need to fear this.”  You know, that’s actually a good lesson.  Weapons are no more good or evil than the person holding them, and it would be irrational to fear…oh wait, Freddie then uses magical powers to turn the mooks’ guns into butterflies.  So his father meant, “You don’t need to fear people pointing guns at you because you can just use your magic to turn those guns into butterflies.”  Well…that’s a good lesson too, I guess.

      Now that I’ve described the heroes, let’s take a look at the villains.  In the movie’s main plot, Messina runs a snake-themed terrorist organization with a fatman named El Supremo (Brian Blessed), who has a freakishly triangular chin.  He’s one of the most ironically charming bad villains I’ve seen.  Then again, it’s hard not to like something voiced by Brian Blessed.  It’s implied that he and Messina are lovers of some kind, even though Messina spends most of her time as a cobra.  Since Chin the Fat has a snake fetish, you’d think she’d turn him into a snake too, but oh well. 

Love knows no form.

They hatch what is probably one of the most absurd evil plans I have ever seen.  They send a flying snake craft to capture British landmarks and then shrink them with a shrink way.  Then it gets really stupid.  Upon capturing these buildings, they use a magic crystal to drain their, uh…historical life force, which causes all the Britons to lapse into a deep sleep, allowing them to invade the country with an absurdly large fleet of Typhoon-class submarines (of which there are only seven in real life).  I am not just typing random things to be funny.  This actually what happens in the movie.  So the message is that British people are psychologically dependent on their historical  landmarks because they’re just that shallow.  This is a British film, and I thought America had low self-esteem.

I'm sure the ghost of Shakespeare was happy to be involved with this film.

And then there’s the villain song.  Oh dear crap, the villain song.  It’s not that good a song, and it has some classically forced rhyming, but it’s the visuals that really grab one’s attention.  It consists of Messina dancing and singing with a microphone in her coils about how she’s the Queen of Evilmania while an army of roller-skating pseudo-Nazis, black knights and freaking Klansmen dance in the background.  Oh, and even though snakes have long been associated with sensuality anyway, they gave her hips to swing.  What’s even odder, her hips aren’t even good hips, they’re like starving person hips: really jagged bony protrusions with skin on them.  At least I fixed that problem when I made my own art of her:

      There are other distracting moments in this movie as well.  One is Freddie’s car, Nicole.  Though she cannot talk, she is anthropomorphic enough to have a crush on Freddie and gets jealous when Daffers is around.  She hops over other cars and makes annoying froggy sounds while trailing hearts.  At one point, Freddie uses her to jump square on top of an elderly couple in a convertible, (because he’s an asshole).  The reason why Nicole is anthropomorphic is never explained, and she disappears without mention halfway through the movie.  There’s also a random scene where a gang of crows comments on the disappearing landmarks and then a leatherdaddy crow and his friend show up to annoy Brigadier G about it.  They also pop up in the final scene for no reason.  An evil double agent (Jonathan Pryce) informs his confederates that Freddie was going to the horse race (if they had done the smart thing and avoided the race, we might not have a movie), but other after that his arc goes nowhere.  Also, as if bestiality from the bad guys wasn’t concerning enough, they ship Freddie and Daffers (in fact, Daffers flashes Freddie the first time they meet for no apparent reason).  I was fully expecting Freddie to get turned back into a human upon defeating his aunt, but that doesn’t happen.  Not that that stops them or anything.      

I think Scotty got closer than that, actually.

     So as you might imagine, it’s a pretty bad movie, though I wouldn’t say it’s the worst animated movie of all time (I’ve seen Foodfight! and Tentacolino).  I can’t really hate it, even though it’s objectively worse that a lot of animated films I do.  In fact, it’s arguably so bad it’s good.  It’s a little disappointing that this movie sunk the studio.  It was implied that the sequel was going to take place in America, and I would have loved to see that.  I also find it funny how many respected English actors they got to be in this movie (The American version has an intro read by James Earl Jones).  In addition to ironic appeal, I genuinely like some things in this film.  The animation is decent, and it even has some stylish moments and nice details (like the presence of some well-rendered Panavia Tornadoes).  There are some moment of bad lip syncing, like when a villain laughs but her lips aren't moving or smiling.  I admit I do kind of like Messina because I’ve always loved cartoon snakes.  I also think Nessie is cute because, in case you haven’t noticed, I have a thing for fat dragons, and she’s close enough

PS: I almost can’t even believe I wrote this review.  It reads like something I just made up for laughs.

PPS: I love TVTropes’ Crowning Moment of Awesome page for this movie.
PPPS: Oh, I just found out: Grace Jones was Messina's singing voice during her song.

11 Awful Scenes (That Ruined Otherwise Good Films)

It’s very rare that once great scene can redeem a bad movie.  The only example I can think of is in Wizards, in which the protagonist subverts a magic duel by shooting the villain with a Luger.  That pretty much made that pretentious film worth sitting through.  However, it is common for a good movie to be ruined by one terrible scene.  It can’t really be just a boring or irritating scene, either.  It has to be ideologically offensive, something that renders the heroes unlikable when they’re not supposed to be or something that ruins any conceivable suspense.  Another surefire way to ruin a good movie is with a bad ending, since the ending is everything.  WARNING: I do get political on a couple of these things, but you know where I stand on gun control.  Also, I do touch on the abortion issue, but I mostly concern myself with how the movie treats the issue rather than my opinion.    

11. ROCK’S DEATH (AND EVERYTHING AFTERWARD)

The Boondock Saints

The majority of Boondock Saints was a fun romp that didn’t seem to take itself more seriously than it needed to.  However, once the lovable David Della Rocco died and Il Duce revealed himself to the boys as their father, the movie got way too serious.  The lovable bantering duo of heroes came off as self-righteous crazies from then on out.  This might be justified if the movie was meant to be a deconstruction of vigilantism, but apparently Troy Duffy seemed to be behind this the whole time.  The movie ends with a pretentious and absolutely unbearable closing sequence with streetside interviews.  This is also a bit of a cheat because it’s actually multiple scenes leading up to the end, but I think the movie jumped the shark close enough to the credits to mention.

10. JOHN McCLANE UP AND MURDERS SOMEONE

Live Free or Die Hard

Unlike most people, I thought Die Hard 4 was actually pretty fun.   I would include it on a list of Movies I Like That Everyone Else Hates if not for this one scene.  No, I don’t mean murder in the typical internet critic who clearly doesn’t know what the word murder means way.  I mean John McClane actually kills an unarmed man in cold blood.  McClane may be a badass, but he’s not a dark antihero.  And yet, everyone else complained about how he didn’t get to drop any F-Bombs.  Sometimes I just don’t understand other people. 

9. HOW DO YOU ACCIDENTALLY BURN DOWN A TRAIN FULL OF PEOPLE?

For Greater Glory

This movie, although arguably lackluster, could have been a solid film if not for this transparent attempt at whitewashing.  Father Reyes Vega’s intentional murder of a trainload of people was true atrocity of the Cristero War, and the movie attempts to pass it off as an honest mistake.  What literally happens is that he hastily orders an underling to burn the train after quickly asking if it’s empty.  When he hears screams coming from it, he’s like “Oops” and doesn’t do anything to stop it.  It’s so unconvincing that I smelled bullshit even without knowing of the incident.  If you’re going to tackle such a serious subject at least acknowledge the ambiguity or else risk insulting everyone.

8. ANTI-GUN NONSENSE

Road to Perdition

This would have actually been a solid period movie if not for a scene in which attempts to pass off this trope as a good thing.  When Tom Hanks’ son is confronted by Jude Law’s character, who seems intent on murdering him, he cannot bring himself to pull the trigger, and Tom Hanks has to do it himself.  When the boy says that he couldn’t do it, Hanks smiles and says, “I didn’t think so,” because, you know, killing a dangerous psychopath in self-defense is TOTALLY THE SAME THING as murdering people for the Irish mob.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging a child for unable to kill, I’m judging the movie for its peevish treatment of the event.  And then the closing narration twists the knife by having the grown up version of the boy say that he never handled another gun again.  UGH.  I know this was based on a graphic novel I haven’t read, but what do you expect from the director who gave us American Beauty?  I guess it wasn’t until Skyfall when we’d get a Sam Mendes movie without any political buffoonery. 

7. NEVER GO FULL SJW
Get Out
While creative, one line ruined it for me.  The low point is near the beginning when the villain is showing off his souvenirs from foreign countries to the protagonist.  When you’re rounding your eyes at this depiction of the “problem” of cultural appropriation, the character literally utters, “It’s such privilege to enjoy another person’s culture.”  I mean that’s actually a line a human being wrote into a movie.  Fortunately, the movie doesn’t top itself afterward.  It seemed to be a self-conscious attempt to chase away a misaimed fandom of conservatives who could have easily interpreted the movie to be about how the Left ideological enslaves minorities.

6. A NOT-SO-HAPPY HAPPY ENDING

Source Code

This movie pretty much had a perfectly bittersweet ending in the bag.  Jake Ghyllenhaal managed to save the day in the real world, make peace with his father, end a torturous “life” as mental antiterrorist weapon, and play out a fantasy in which he prevents the real-life destruction of a city and gets to kiss Michelle Monaghan.  If the movie ended at that kiss, it would have been perfect.  Instead, they make up some crap about how he gets to survive in a whole created universe, meaning that he’s possessing the body of an innocent man, and Chicago gets bombed with no clue as to who did it in an infinite number of universes.

   

5. PUBLIC RAPE IS OK IF...

Crank

This would have been a fun, original action comedy if not for this scene.  When Jason Statham meets his girlfriend on a crowded Chinatown street and needs a life-sustaining jolt of adrenaline, he bafflingly concludes that raping his girlfriend in front of everyone is the only solution.  But she eventually starts enjoying which totally makes it okay, right?  Moral Event Horizon aside, it’s pretty counterproductive.  When you’ve been given a toxin that makes your life dependent on constant adrenaline flow, you’d think risking an orgasm would be the last thing you’d want to do.

4. WHO NEEDS CONFLICT WHEN YOU CAN JUST TURN BACK TIME EVERY TIME THINGS DON’T GO YOUR WAY?

Superman/Superman II

I already complained about this cop-out in the above review, but it’s even worse in Superman II.  Superman and Lois just had an understanding where she promises to keep his secret identity intact.  This would have been a great ending which would have resulted in the characters maturing organically.  Instead of trusting her Superman kisses her memory away.  Afterwards Superman enjoys Lois’ imposed ignorance, because we’re all just toys in his game, right?  The Donner cut is worse because he turns back time again, this time negating the whole damn movie.  It’s funny how both the producers and the director thought that the mature and intelligent ending wasn’t an option, because we had to have that “endearing” dynamic between Clark and a suspicious but hapless Lois.

3. GOOD, OLD-FASHIONED HERESY
Prince of Darkness
An otherwise masterful horror film from director John Carpenter features a short scene of exposition revealing that Jesus was a space alien who tried to warn humanity about the Anti-Christ, but the Catholic Church hijacked his message for its own agenda (which I suppose included the Golden Rule).  The funny thing is, this is never acknowledged throughout the rest of the movie, and no one ever acts in accordance with its ramifications.  No crisis of faith or whatever.  The scene could have been easily cut out without losing anything.

2. DEAD CHILDREN ARE JUST HILARIOUS

Planet Terror

This would have been a fun movie if not for the one scene were Dakota irresponsibly hands her child a gun with tragically predictable results.  Just because you’re making an homage to tasteless midnight movies doesn’t mean you have to completely sink to their level.  Don’t get me started about Dakota’s Karma Houdini act throughout the movie.

1. WHAT ARE FRIENDS FOR?  WHY, SACRIFICIAL RAPE LAMBS, OF COURSE.

Death Proof

Despite the opinions of virtually everyone else, (including Tarantino himself), I believe that this would have been one of the best of his movies.  It had a clever premise, great violence and one of the most epic pro-gun moments in film history.  The problem is when Rosario Dawson’s character concocts a plan to leave one of her friends as “collateral” to a shady redneck while purposefully implying that he can have sex with her (all without her consent).  Dawson’s performance in this scene is funny, but Moral Event Horizon renders the subsequent chase scene meaningless, since I cannot really root for these people any more.  It’s ironic that the first group of girls were killed off just for being a little annoying and vapid, but the heroines who arguably deserve it more prevail.