53. All the President's Men

The movie starts and ends with close-ups of a typewriter giving us the equivalent of title cards. Thematically this makes sense, but Pakula does us one better: he layers the sound of the typewriter with whips and bullets: words can be weapons.

This is a long movie (over two hours), but it is nonetheless tightly structured and scripted. Like "Zodiac", it's about process. Watch how Woodward and Bernstein go from task to task, from roadblock to roadblock, how they cajole and investigate, building upon small pieces of information to find a larger whole. This movie does the most simple yet most difficult thing a movie can do: it makes us wonder what will happen next. It does that by embodying the the suspense genre, but goes one further: we know the outcome -- Nixon resigned just a few short years before the movie was made -- but the writer and director have made us wonder how we get there.

Like "JFK", it's overflowing with the information given to the audience. We get character after character coming at us as audience, we get phone numbers, dates, names. To include a subplot, personal lives or a love interest would be ridiculous. Goldman keeps us with the task at hand, and then he's done.

And it doesn't hurt that he included some amazing dialogue on top.

As much as Goldman did a great job on the script, Pakula is great here. There's so much to admire here: His expert use of casting, with the two main character being the biggest movie stars of the time (so that we identify with them and go along on their journey), with character actors in supporting roles (Robards, Holbrooks, Balsam) and no-names in cameos; his expert sense of pacing, keeping the movie flowing from scene to scene with none wasted; his intercutting to doodles and other office detritus during phone conversations to keep the audience interested; his sense of mise-en-scene; his use of Gordon Willis' dual-focus and long lens cinematography that's
always in service of the story, often in subtle but profound ways.

Everyone loves William Goldman (as well they should), but Pakula is always underrated.

29. Sullivan's Travels

The thing I find most admirable about studio pictures of the 30's and 40's is their economy of narrative. Here we get the beginning, a patently false action scene: a train chase to end a picture, and then the lights come up in the studio office and the heads (commerce) duke it out with the director (art) -- a parallel with what the director was trying to represent with his fight, and a tip of the hat to the audience that Sturges has already made up his mind about the subject: he plans to give the audience what they want.

This is rich stuff already, and we're only in the first five minutes.

The director wants something that Robin Williams, Will Ferrell and Jim Carrey can relate to: he wants to make people think. Making them laugh is not good enough, not honorable enough for him anymore. He wants to discuss The World, he wants to make a picture about the poor, the common man, about Trouble. The problem? He's never had to work a hard day in his life, nor does he know from the poor. So: he'll LARP a hobo.

Within 10 minutes, they're off. He's tramping with an old-timey RV behind him, clad with a doctor, a photographer, a PR man. The director resents this entourage, because he desires an authentic experience. He wants no hand-holding, and gets away from the rest by hitchhiking with a boy in his derby car. Thus: a chase. The audience gets some laughs and some excitement, but there's a reason for it.

He heads off again, promising to meet them in Vegas. He has a run-in with a widow (and there's a great gag with her husband's portrait).

He meets the girl: Veronica Lake. Boy, is she beautiful. Boy, does she have great dialogue. But she also displays generosity, and his new desire in act 2 is to help her fulfill her dreams of being a working actress. His ruse is up with her eventually, and they go off again together, tramping at the train station. In this, she's doing more acting than she's probably previously done.

He gets sick on the train, so they hop out at a lunch counter. Again, generosity in the form of a counter-owner who gives them coffee and cakes for free. He is repaid when they spot the RV. They must return -- he is sick and must be bedridden. The counter-owner gets $100.

Once he's well, they're off again, this time locally. They goes to where the destitute, showering with them, eating with them, sleeping in piles with them. He trades boots with another man who's feet are freezing. All of this we're given almost as a silent film, with no word, just music. It's too long to be a montage, and it conveys everything we need to know about the poor. As such, it's what we would imagine Sullivan would want to make himself, if he could.

With this, he's done. He feels he's seen enough, but he goes down one last time to pass out money to the poor. A greedy old hobo notices and knocks him on the head, drags him off into a train car and steals his boots and money. The train takes off and the hobo is killed while trying to retrieve the cash.

Note: this above section with the old hobo is almost a small story unto itself. It remains me immediately of the Chris Tucker section of "Jackie Brown", which played as a small aside, still within the larger narrative, that could play without it. Again, the economy contained within is breathtaking -- we see an entire arc, are given a moral, and get a great image of fluttering dollar bills over a boot. Incredible.

The 3rd act begins. Now he's not longer acting -- he really is down-and-out. He commits assault and is sent to prison. Now he knows how the other half lives and, gaining that wisdom, he wants to return to his real life.

And why not? This life is hard, stuck in a sweat box, manual labor all day, a terror of a boss/warden. The only relief the men get is going to a church where they put a sheet down to play movies. A cinema in the church! The conceit is too great: this little bit of release is their salvation. Again, the generosity of people is too much -- they give up the front rows and sing "Let My People Go."

The show is a simple cartoon, but it allows them to do what is missing in their lives otherwise: laugh. That's when the lightbulb comes on over Sullivan's head: movies work best as entertainment, as escape, and there's no shame in giving people pleasure.

54. Manhattan

The photo essay at the beginning, besides being beautiful, sets up (via voiceover) our character and setting: we're dealing with someone indecisive who idolizes intangible things, and he lives in and loves New York.

Now, the meat comes in the next scene. He's 42 and in a relationship with a 17 year old girl. This is played straight with little emphasis on it being illegal, and mostly focusing on him using their age difference to convince her that they should break up.

His best friend is having an affair. We met her at 15 minutes in, and she's the dissenting opinion. She slowly grows on him, and he gets with her. He crushes his teenage lover in a sofa fountain shop (an irony setting) and thus begins their short love affair.

But she's indecisive as well, as is the Yale, the man she was having an affair with. For the first time, Isaac wants to be with someone, but she doesn't want to be with him. And so, having no other options, he tries to return to the teenager, but she's off to London. And then we get a coda, a repeat of the beginning montage of beautiful New York.

It's actually more complex than my scant summary, but it is, like John Gardner said, "sophistication that lies beyond simplicity." It is a slight tale that is significant for being so contained.

Two main drawbacks about the writing: Allen's dialogue isn't ever as clever as he thinks it is, and even when it is, his punchlines never seem to fit the narrative and stick out like a stand-up comedian punching up a script. Also, the movie starts out with Isaac beginning a book. We see him quit his job impulsively to write the book, but the very idea of him finishing is absurd and it becomes a MacGuffin. Remember: gun in first act has to go off in the third act. And this one doesn't.

Two other drawbacks: Allen has thankfully learned, over time, that he shouldn't act. It's not that he's terrible (there's actually some subtle stuff going on in this movie, especially in the last scene, that I like), but he's relatively one-note and not nearly as charming as he imagines he is. The other thing is that he has Meryl Streep is his movie and hardly uses her. Inexcusable.

Besides the writing, the obvious thing to adore about this film is the cinematography. There's a lot to love here: the graceful dolly shots that allow the actors to do entire scenes in one shot, the amazing 2nd unit work that makes New York look delicious, the fact that when characters are moving apart they are always seen in close-up singles, the wide-angle deep-focus of the static shots. More specifically, look at the movement that's allowed when Isaac comes down the spiral stairs to see Tracy alone on the couch, reading under the light. She "lights up" his otherwise self-obsessed life and gives it a different meaning. Or watch Keaton and Allen in the planetarium, the lighting corresponding to their dialogue, sometimes bright when they are in sync, sometimes dim, backlit or in shadows when they are hesitating, and sometimes, courageously, completely dark.

55. Apocalypse Now

"War is hell" is an old, outdated maxim. This movie makes it plain: War is insanity.

This film is about going crazy. More to the point, it's about breaking points, the points at which those in extreme circumstances -- in this case, war -- turn the corner and become enveloped in their insanity. It's about driving off a cliff.

For those who think "high-concept" movies are inherently dumb, this is an exception to the rule. The high-concept here is: a decorated soldier is sent on an assassination mission -- to kill one of his own! Like Lorne Michael's said: "Write it good, it's Hamlet; write it bad, it's Gilligan's Island." Coppola and Milius wrote it good, and that's why it's on this list.

Luckily, they had help. The script is loosely based off of "Heart of Darkness", the classic novel. But the adaptation is loose in the very sense of the word -- Campbell's book was not about war, didn't have scenes of soldiers surfing. But somehow, like a lot of the best adaptations ("There Will Be Blood" and "The Shining" come to mind), this looseness is part of the movie's power in that the director is able to take certain characters and thematic concerns and infuse them with his own sensibilities, pacing, music choices, and mise-en-scene.

Unluckily, they had some problems. Sets were destroyed by weather, actors were constantly on drugs, other actors had to be replaced or shot around due to creative differences or medical issues, the Phillipines military was uncooperative. All this leads into one of the most remarkable aspects of the movie that you can actually glean from the narrative but that really is illuminated by Eleanor Coppola's documentary "Hearts of Darkness", which is this: the physical production of the film matched both the narrative as well as the theme. In other words, everyone went crazy making a movie about people going crazy.

Structurally, it's works well. I believe that Coppola, like a lot of great filmmakers, was stealing and inspired by one of the best filmmakers ever: Terrence Malick. He made a dreamy, otherworldly movie that's structured in vignettes. But what makes them work so well is their economy: Our main character, Willard (Sheen), is given a task (think Starling in "Silence of the Lambs") and puts it into motion (act 1). In doing the job that he is given with no questions asked -- a Puritanical notion more than anything -- he meets these other soldiers and gets into a variety of scenarios (act 2), leading to the final confrontation with his object of desire (act 3). That's it in a nutshell, and the narrative is simply filled with a variety of bits to fill in the blanks.

The most famous of these, rightly so, is with Kilgore (Duvall). Willard and his boat crew meet up with Kilgore and Kilgore discovers one of the men is a professional surfer. He insists they go surfing together, raiding and clearing out a village with good waves to do so. Again, a task is set-up and completed to a satisfying pay-off, and in the meantime we get the theme illuminated in a different way and as the audience we get the pleasure of a great actor speaking iconic lines: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning", "Charlie don't surf", "You know, one day this war is going to be over".

The thing to take away from this movie -- the thing it does remarkably well that we could learn from -- is that it takes a theme ("war is insanity") and stretches it to the absolute limit. We see the aforementioned Kilgore, obviously insane, but who relishes the chaos -- he's insane but in his element. We see a raid on a peaceful village just to surf -- a crazy thing to do, but the reasons or justifications for murder don't mean much to the dead. We see a stoned character, Chef, walking through the jungle to collect mangoes and is almost killed by a tiger -- this is an insane thing to do, and the result is Chef's breaking point reached. The soldiers go crazy from seeing the prurient dances of the Playboy bunnies -- their sexual breaking point is reached.

And, of course, Kurtz' compound is the ultimate, physical manifestation of insanity, rolling all of the previous craziness into one big ball and one built-up character. Kurtz' is out of his mind, but that's because he embodies the spirit of the warrior. And war is insanity.

Battle at Kruger

I saw this for the first time last night and was enthralled. Then I noticed it had been viewed over 40 million times, and I realized that the reason this video was so popular and well-known is because it is the absolute essence of the 3-act dramatic structure, just played out with animals in the wild instead of actors or characters on the page.

To wit: everything you need to know about structuring a narrative is in this eight minute wildlife video.

56. Back to the Future

Another one from the 80's Spielberg camp, which I am warming up to as I get older. This one takes a high-concept idea -- what would it be like to go back in time and meet your parents? -- and pushes it to the limit by mixing comedy, action/adventure, science fiction and period tropes. Most highly successful/classic movies either mix several different genres together (think "Jerry Maguire") to give us something fresh and new, take a genre and embody it so thoroughly that it becomes the epitome of that genre (think "The Maltese Falcon" with film noir), or deconstruct a genre (think "The Searcher" with westerns). Zemekis is a proponent of the former stategy, to great effect.

The thing that's most remarkable about this movie is how wrong it all could have gone. If the tone wasn't just so, if it weren't so good-natured like a modern, twisted version of a Capra fable, it would have gone off the rails from the get-go. We're supposed to empathize with a whiny, skateboarding "slacker" from a barely functioning Valley family whose only friend is a corrupt, bizarre 50-something scientist and whose mother falls in love with him. It's a testament to how well the tone is controlled -- and how likeable the public finds Michael J. Fox (can't imagine Eric Stolz in the role at all) -- that the thing works at all, and that the tone changes and boundry-pushing even works.

It's also a good example of visual storytelling -- the opening tracking shot (shot in close-ups!) gives us so much: starts with a clock, gives exposition on Doc Brown, shows burnt toast from a Rube Goldberg foreshadowing the lightning and things going awry, and finally that case of plutonium.

Another visual storytelling example is the whole Doc Brown/Harold Lloyd reference. He hangs from the clock and we understand exactly what is at stake, what goes wrong and how it is fixed. And no words are used throughout the whole side of his sequence.

Sometimes less dialogue is more.

House of Games

This is not on the list, but it is too fucking good to pass up writing about. Here are my notes verbatim:

-- "Do you think you're exempt from experience?" -- theme at min 3/4
-- Set-up -- her client -- "What kind of help is your promise?" -- she's not living in the "real world" -- must get out into direct experience -- a gun in 1st act...
-- min 11 -- goes to The House of Games -- underworld/intrigue
-- we're taught what a tell is -- learning [the best movies teach us something]
-- min 18 -- enters the game -- a job, a task -- he gets her into it by conning her -- tit for tat
-- stakes raised -- a big bet, lots of money
-- oh shit -- he lost the hand and now SHE'S out the money -- he conned her
-- the jig is up -- she discovers its a squirt gun -- a con -- reversal [rhythm and release: the tension is lifted]
-- 30 mins -- act 2 now -- he explains the short con and debt to her client is forgiven
-- 35 -- doubt about her position in life [typical 2nd act stuff]
-- 40 -- she goes back out to find that excitement
-- she propositions him to write about him
-- the con game explained -- short con -- shown -- 43 mins. [this is the William H. Macy scene]
-- "Don't trust nobody."
-- 52/3 -- They fuck -- midpoint
-- 57 -- setpiece -- another con
-- 60ish -- a reversal -- mark is a cop -- DEAD -- she's all in now
-- 70ish -- steals a car
-- briefcase is gone
-- she'll give it to him [the money, that is]
-- he's gone -- end of act 2
-- 1:15 -- visits old professor again -- 3rd act
-- 1:22 -- discovers Billy's been in on the con -- same car
-- 1:25 -- goes to tavern -- everyone there from previous scenes -- JT Walsh is alive
-- he cons her -- by showing her the con game!
-- she comes to find him and con him -- she fails -- he recognizes it
-- 1:35 -- she kills him
-- she's got a taste for thievery now -- steals a gold lighter like the one her old friend has.

42. Raiders of the Lost Ark

Like a lot of folks, I have a knee-jerk reaction to Steven Spielberg. When I heard about his movies, I think, "Ah, whatever. Fuck that guy. He's overrated."

I think I'm just starting to get over that.

Between watching "Jaws" for the first time and now watching this movie with fresh eyes, I can see the appeal. Or maybe I'm getting older and less pretentious and I realize that a movie can be entertaining and broadly appealing and still artful.

The main thing I like about this movie is what I like about older, classical Hollywood shows: it takes interesting, idiosyncratic characters and puts them in an economically told story. They make it look easy when it is anything but, but that's Hollywood in a nutshell from what I can tell.

The movie starts out with intrigue, mystery. Where are we? Why are we in the jungle? Who is our hero? He doesn't talk much, gets a great introduction, and already we're into the story, searching for an artifact. Throughout this 10-minute set-piece, we're also LEARNING ABOUT THE CHARACTER. This is becoming more and more important as I watch these movies: they are planting things that will later pay-off. Like what? Like the bullwhip. Like the snakes. Like Indy going to ANY lengths for an artifact. Like Belloch besting Indy again.

Notice also: there's the rhythm and release. And they escalate it so that it happens almost every few seconds. Tension is built, diffused; Indy gets away, only to find it isn't that easy. He removes the idol, takes a breath, then the walls come crumbling down. He jumps across a chasm, then slips down, then grabs a branch. We know he'll always make it in the end, but we never know if he'll make it moment to moment.

In other words, the beginning of the movie is a microcosm of what will happen in the rest of the film. It's almost like the film's thesis statement: this is what I'm going to show you, and if you're paying attention, it will all be right here for you. So relax: with Spielberg, you're in the hands of a master.

The reason he's a master is because he is constantly fucking with you as an audience member. He's playing games with you at every moment, and he knows how to do it well, and he gets great joy out of it. And so do you. Nothing wrong with that.

So: we get the great 10 minute intro, and then the reveal: he's a professor! He wears glasses! He's like Clark Kent to his previous incarnation of Superman. Great. We get a long exposition in dialogue scene, but it works because we've just had our hearts racing already with the previous stuff, so we could use a breather. Plus, he's a professor. Of course he's going to teach us something!

He gets the go-ahead, and at the end of act 1, he's off to find the Ark. And he does, but not before he reconnects with his old flame, a hard-drinking woman in Nepal; not before he almost eats a poisoned date; not before he has to confront his snake issue head-on; not before he has to fight a German strong-arm; not before he shoots a swords-man; not before he hops on a submarine; not before he gets the girl again. In short, not before he becomes -- or remains -- a hero, and all the twists and turns of the rollercoaster that entails.

You know the details and I don't have to fully recap it for you, but watching it again with my pen and paper and my copious note-taking, I was struck with how well this movie was plotted and structured, how expertly we are played. There was recently released a .pdf of Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan talking about the creation of this movie, and it is a doozy. You realize how much thought, how much effort, how much work really goes into something that we think of as puffy, light and fun. But they knew exactly what they were doing, and they did it well: after all, a mere piece of "entertainment" is considered one of the best screenplays ever written, and thus is on this list.