CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

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My Top Twenty-Five Movies of All Time Part 3

Thursday, July 14, 2005

this entry brought to you by amon tobin, "get your snack on"

in case you missed movies #15-6, you can click here to read them.


#5 Brazil A surreal, hilarious romp through a dystopian future where everything is ruled by mounds of bureaucracy and nothing works right, one pathetic man falls in love with a woman who might be a terrorist. It's Terry Gilliam, so it's whimsical and cynical, dreamy yet cold and machinistic. Every frame of this movie is filled with dead-on, biting social commentary, yet so furiously weird and fast paced you almost don't notice it until afterwards.

#4 Fargo Ostensibly, Fargo is a movie about a man in deep debt who hires a couple of low-lifes to kidnap his wife so he can collect the ransom. But really, that plot is just a box for the characters to exist in. This movie is really about the people involved, as there are lot of non-sequitor character moments that have nothing to do with driving the plot forward. The rare Best Picture Oscar winner that wasn't trying at all to win an Oscar.

#3 Pulp Fiction When this movie came out, I had no interest in seeing it, because when I asked what it was about, my friends could only jibberingly spit out the scene where Marvin gets his head blown off and how hilarious it was that Sam Jackson had brain in his Jheri curl. This didn't exactly entice me. So my mom, whose opinion I trust, sat me down to watch it, and believe it or not, I didn't get what the hype was all about. But something made me watch it again... And again...

#2 Fight Club I hate it when this is called a "guy movie". Just because it involves men hitting one another doesn't mean it's a "guy movie"-- it's a smart person movie. It is a deep, very psychological story that is as much an embracement of manhood as it is a scathing criticism of it (that fratboys don't seem to understand this last part shouldn't be surprising). It's also hilarious, enough so, in fact, that I consider it a comedy. Certainly the most nihilistic black comedy in the history of cinema, but a comedy nonetheless.

#1 Aliens The Alien itself is the scariest Hollywood monster of all time. The H.R. Giger designed creature looks vaguely mechanical, yet disturbingly organic-- it is a very obvious phallus. Giger understood the cross between horror and blatant sexual symbolism will get under someone's skin much more so than the silly looking rubber monsters that came before it. Aliens would be the best embodiment of the series (although the original, Alien, is an utterly fantastic movie and is one of the scariest ever) because of its rollercoaster mix of action and genuine horror, but what makes it my favorite movie of all-time is the development of Ripley. It's easy to see Ripley as just a bad-ass, but bad-ass females aren't important. Gun-toting, take-no-prisoner females are a dime a dozen (in fact, to distinguish between Ripley and a run-of-the-mill tough chick, we have Vasquez, a macho, Stallone-type that nearly gets everyone killed with her shoot-first actions). What makes Ripley work is that she isn't tough. She is, however, just like all the best women in cinema, strong. She is a very strong woman who, at the movie's exhilarating climax, will not let anything get between her and saving a little girl, and that includes going into the bowels of hell. Sigourney Weaver received her first Oscar nomination for it, which is unheard of in an action movie.
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with love from CRS @ 5:26 PM 

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