The Best Movies for Each Letter of the Alphabet – Part 3: R to Z, Plus Some Observations and a Link

Note: For an explanation of my ground rules for this, as well as my picks for letters A to H, plus numbers, click here.  For my picks for letters I to Q, click here.

For those films I have reviewed, I have made their titles clickable to take you to them, if you are interested.  Maybe you are wondering, “Why the heck does he think so highly of that film?”  My review will shed some light on that.

The Best Movies for Each Letter of the Alphabet – Part 2: I to Q

Note: For an explanation of my ground rules for this, as well as my picks for letters A to H, plus numbers, click here.

For those films I have reviewed, I have made their titles clickable to take you to them, if you are interested.  Maybe you are wondering, “Why the heck does he think so highly of that film?”  My review will shed some light on that.

The Best Movies for Each Letter of the Alphabet – Part 1: A to H, Plus Numbers

Note: this was too long to do in a single post.  I will break this up into three pieces and then include links to each one as I go along.

From time to time I’ve seen people attempt to name what they feel are the best films that happen to start with each letter of the alphabet.  (If you have done this, let me know and I will include a link to your post when I am done.)  I find these interesting to read, but I had never tackled it myself because I have an aversion to trying to rank “the greatest ever”.  That is mostly due to the fact that I may have a different choice a month later simply because I am in a different mood.

It’s always been in the back of my mind, though, and it’s not as if this is set in stone.  I’ve done posts on the Top 10 films every year I’ve been running this site.  And I think for all of these I have later seen at least one movie that would have made my Top 10 if I had seen it before I had made those posts.

If You Could Own Any One Object from Any Movie What Would It Be?

To be clear, I am not talking about a movie prop, like the ruby red slippers Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz, or the Maltese falcon from the movie of the same name.  No, I’m talking about what if some object from a movie could really exist and you could be the one to own it.  For instance, how about a light saber from Star Wars, the laws of physics be damned.

Maybe you’re more of a Star Trek fan and would like to have a phaser or transporter.  How about the Green Destiny sword from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?  Or Excalibur?  Or the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings?  Or Aladdin’s Lamp?

Movie Pet Peeves

Note: this post is inspired by Alex Withrow’s April 5, 2013 post Top 10 Movie Pet Peeves and his April 1, 2014 post Top 10 Movie Clichés (that I’ve never experienced in real life) – both at his site And So It Begins…  Check out his site when you get a chance.  Don’t think from these two posts that all he does is poke fun at movies.  Far from it.  There are a number of types of analysis he does that you will probably find interesting.

In my comment on his first post I tossed out a bunch of other things that are laughingly ridiculous and Alex responded that it was obvious that we could make a whole other list just on Movie Sex Scene Pet Peeves.  I made a mental note to someday write out in a little more detail some of the things I included in that comment.  Don’t worry, this post is about more than just sex; there’s also discussions of nudity in it.  (Kidding…not about the nudity, but there will be more than just sexually related topics.)  And I’m not going to just jump right into the sex.  First, a little foreplay.

Throwing Away/Leaving Behind Something Very Valuable – note: there is a spoiler in this section for Titanic (1997) if you’ve somehow managed to never see this film.

Three Common Plot Points That Are Just Plain Wrong

There are any number of clichéd plot points that we’ve seen over and over in movies and TV episodes.  Maybe it’s the person who gets shot, sits up, and always rips open their shirt to show the viewer that they have a bullet-proof vest on – who does that in real life?  Maybe it’s the criminal who takes One Last Job or the cop who is One Week from Retirement – either way we know it’s not going to turn out well.  Maybe it’s the random object or person that shows up early on for no reason and then plays a critical role during the climax.

While all of these have been done to death, they are not wrong.  (Note: by “wrong” I mean factually, not morally or ethically.)  Bulletproof vests do stop some kinds of bullets.  Sometimes big cases do come up just as a cop is going to retire.  No, what I mean are plot points that have appeared tons of times, but every time they do they are flat out wrong, and it requires them to be wrong for the plot point to work.

I will count these down to the most common, most incorrect plot point.  Here they are:

Goodbye Old Friend

There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to face facts that certain things are not going to work like they used to.  Just because he had a lot of fun in a certain way in the past doesn’t mean that that fun will be able to continue.  I discovered how to have this fun more than 25 years ago.  It brought thousands of hours of enjoyment to me, and sometimes to others, too.  It was a great friend; on the spur of the moment I could take it out and be enjoying myself within minutes.  When not using it I could easily put it away for later.  It was even conveniently sized to fit perfectly in my hand.  I’m referring to my movie rental card, of course.

I think I first got it before I even owned a VCR.  If not, I definitely had it no later than that (1989).  I don’t want to think about how much money I must have spent over the years on renting movies with it.  As you can see from the picture, this card has received a lot of use.

Times change, though.  Movie rental places, if not already closed, are on their way out. They have mostly been replaced by Netflix and Redbox.  The youngest bloggers out there have never even owned a rental card.  As for me, I haven’t used this card for probably four years.

Why am I getting nostalgic about it now?  I just bought a new wallet and that meant transferring various items over to it from the old wallet.  I tossed a few things that I didn’t use anymore, but I paused when I came to this rental card.  I stopped to realize that I’ve had it for more than half my life.  It may be in bad shape, but this card literally outlasted two different rental chains. 

It was originally for a local chain called Home Vision Video.  They were eventually bought out by a large national chain named Movie Gallery.  They transferred the records over, so my old card still worked with them.  Even after I joined Netflix I still occasionally rented movies from Movie Gallery, but once Redbox came in, at one quarter the price for new movies, that signaled the end.  I wasn’t too proud to play scavenger, picking up a bunch of used DVDs on the cheap from stores that were going out of business.  I still haven’t gotten around to watching all of them.

Anyway, I don’t think I’m going to throw this card away.  No, I’m not going to frame it and hang it on a wall, but I’ll keep it someplace where I’ll notice it now and then and be reminded of all the great times it brought me.

Chip’s Movie Rental Card

1989 – 2013

Goodbye old friend

On Silver Linings Playbook and the Continued Use of the Word “Slut” [no spoilers]

This was originally part of my Silver Linings Playbook review, but I separated it into this post both to leave my review a manageable size and to better emphasize here what I am trying to communicate.  If you are looking for my review of the film itself, you can read that here.

In Silver Linings Playbook Jennifer Lawrence’s character is referred to as a “slut” or “slutty” multiple times, even by her own character.  In fact, the film tries to say that she has a mental illness because of this behavior.  Since when did wanting and liking sex, and being honest about wanting and liking sex, become a mental illness for women?

As a man it always pisses me off in movies when some men are portrayed as molesters or rapists who simply haven’t gotten a good opportunity to attack yet.  For the same reason I don’t get why women stand for seeing members of their gender being called “sluts” in movies just because they have sex.  Even worse, some women not only don’t protest this, they perpetuate the use of the term that denigrates their own gender.  Yes, I’ve seen some men called “sluts”, but it is almost always in a joking manner, not a judgmental one.  (Actually, a phenomenon I’ve noticed in the last few years is men being called “perverts” for liking sex.  This film even does it.  It makes no more sense than calling a woman a “slut”.  That’s a discussion for another day, though.)

You might be thinking, “It’s not that she had sex that makes her a ‘slut’; it’s that she had a lot of sex.”  Well, “a lot” to one person is “not enough” to another.  Annie Hall had a funny scene dealing with this.  In fact, the truest definition I ever saw for the word “slut” is simply “someone who has sex more often than you do.”  In other words, before you hypocritically call someone else a “slut”, be aware that your behavior makes you a “slut” in the eyes of someone else.  Yes, even if you have been married forty years, have sex only with your spouse, once a month, in the bedroom, under the covers, with the lights out, someone out there thinks this is “slutty” because you are doing it for a reason other than producing children. 

If you think about it, we are all voyeurs, we movie watchers.  We sit in the dark for a couple of hours, peeking through a window into the lives of people that do not know we are watching them.  Personally, I think that’s why some viewers are made uncomfortable by sex scenes in movies – because it strongly reminds them that they are voyeurs.  I think people should take a long look in the mirror before they next try to judge someone else for their interest in sex.

Frankly, I’m sick of the term “slut” being thrown about in movies and real life.  It’s long past time for the attitude that women are not allowed to enjoy sex to be put to rest.  The world would be a lot better place if when two single people wanted to have sex with each other, they had sex with each other, instead of trying to repress it and taking their frustration out on the people around them, especially those that choose not to repress their natural feelings.

Discussion Starter – Has a Prior Role Affected How You Saw Someone in Another Movie?

I’ve had a movie category brainstormed for quite a while, but I was never happy with how I should go about presenting it.  I named it Double Features to Mess with Your Head.  I was going to pair movies that had people playing roles that were so different that seeing them back to back could, well, mess with your head.  Think Ben Kingsley in Gandhi and Sexy Beast, Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Election, or Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire and Downfall.

Rather than continue to sit on this until I maybe someday felt comfortable with how to pair them up, I thought I would try reviving a feature I tried in 2012 – Discussion Starters.  I may still do this category in the future, but for right now I figured I would write about a couple examples where I was affected, and then ask you folks if you ever had experiences like that.  If so, maybe some of your stories will inspire me on how to best go about doing this category.

Some people end up getting typecast into the same roles in movie after movie (i.e. Meg Ryan).  When they try to go against type it usually doesn’t work.  I’m not really referring to those kinds of roles.  I am referring to single movies where someone played a character and it later impacted how you saw another character of theirs in another movie.  Here is my number one example: Louise Fletcher.

Some of you might not know who she is, while others of you might have just shouted “Nurse Ratched!”  If you are the latter, my apologies if the people sitting near you are now looking at you funny.  For those not familiar with her, she played a character of that name in the 1975 Oscar winning Best Picture One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  She won an Oscar herself for Best Actress.  In this role she plays an iron-handed nurse who constantly thwarts Jack Nicholson’s fake mental patient character.  This movie is a personal nightmare for me because it shows a man trapped somewhere he is not supposed to be and not being able to get anyone to listen to him or believe him.  Nurse Ratched is a major reason why he is trapped there. 

Fletcher did such a good job playing such an evil character that after seeing this movie I unfortunately continued to have a negative reaction to her when I saw her in other roles.  She didn’t even have to speak; I would just see her appear onscreen and I would tense up a little bit.

Sometimes it is a pairing of roles that has affected me.  The 2005 movie The Squid and the Whale was widely praised.  I watched it and the casting of two of the roles bothered me so much if prevented me from liking the movie.  The two people involved were Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin.

In 1996 they had starred together in the movie Fly Away Home.  She played his adolescent daughter.  In addition to being a sweet movie, I also liked it because it was one of the rare (nowadays anyway) films that showed an actual, positive father/daughter relationship.  Most movies and TV shows now show fathers that are at best emotionally distant or children themselves and at worst molesters or abusers.

Flash forward a few years and the two are cast together again in The Squid and the Whale, but this time as college professor and his student.  She initiates a sexual relationship with him by, among other things, telling him, “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to fuck you.”  Despite this, a later scene shows her reluctant to have sex and while Daniels’ character is not out and out physically forcing her, he is really pressuring her to have sex and she is pleading that she doesn’t want to.

Of course I know that they are not father and daughter in real life, but I liked their first pairing so much that I just couldn’t reconcile it with their roles in the later movie.  I saw an interview with Paquin where she was asked if it was difficult to do the scenes in the second film.  While not directly answering the question, she did say that she thought it had bothered Daniels more than it had her.  For what it’s worth, writer/director Noah Baumbach apparently caught flack from other people about this as well because he issued a disclaimer that he was unaware of their prior film together when he cast them in his movie.

So there are two examples from me.  Have you ever seen someone be so memorable as a character in a single film that you just couldn’t completely disregard it in other films, as I did with Louise Fletcher?  Have you ever had two people paired together in multiple films and you just couldn’t reconcile one set of roles to the other set, as I did with Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin?

The Hobbit, or A Pox on People Who Bring Babies to Theaters

This isn’t a regular movie review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  I will do that post as part of my Oscar nominees posts in January and February, since it will likely get at least a nomination for visual effects or sound.

Just to give you a quick idea of what I thought of the film: it’s a notch below The Lord of the Rings, and quite a bit sillier, but this is fitting since this is also the relationship of The Hobbit book to the LOTR books.  I did not see the movie at the higher frame rate, so I can’t give you an opinion on that.  Overall, I’d give this film a high 3 out of 5 stars.  For comparison, I would give the three Lord of the Rings movies 5, 4, and 5 stars out of 5, in that order.

No, I am doing this post in the hopes that maybe I have some latent voodoo ability that has as yet not manifested itself and by writing this I will be able to curse two sorry excuses for movie goers. 

I was sitting there in the theater just starting to watch the first trailer when all of a sudden I could hear this screaming coming from the short hallway that separates the entrance from the seats.  I turned to look and a man and woman walked in pushing a stroller.  The screams were coming from the kid in the stroller.

They didn’t just sit in the front.  No, they had to take the stroller up over the stairs, bump, bump, bump, which made the kid scream more.  Once they settled down the kid continued to scream until his mother took him out of the stroller and held him.  Soon she was texting away with one hand while bouncing the kid in the other.  The few people that were sitting by them found seats much further away.

Either the kid was smart for his age or they’d had him in the stroller long past the time he should have been walking on his own because he soon showed the rest of us in the theater that he could talk.  Sure, he didn’t have the largest vocabulary, but he did make up for that lack with an overabundance of volume.

It turns out his favorite word was “Mommy”.  He said it approximately 5,000 times.  Okay, admittedly it probably wasn’t that much.  I lost count somewhere in the 3,000s.

What possesses these people who do this?  I only go to the theater a few times a year and I bet that close to half the movies I have seen in the last three years have included a young child who doesn’t know to shut up.  Yes, I understand babysitters are either hard to find or expensive, but so what?  Maybe, just maybe, becoming a parent involves making some sacrifices like, I don’t know, not going to the movies together when you can’t leave the child with someone else?

Oh well, at least when I eventually watch this movie on Blu-ray I will be able to do it in the peace and quiet of my own home.

By the way, notice how quiet that young gentleman over in the right hand column looks?  I bet you could take him to the movies and he wouldn’t cry.

Discussion Starter – Shakycam: The Most Exciting Thing to Happen to Film Since the Addition of Sound; or The Worst Thing to Happen to Film Since, Well, Ever – Part 2 (Cons)

I’ve seen more and more comments in recent years about the proliferation in movies of hand-held camera cinematography, or “shakycam” for short.  Some people despise it; many people dislike it, but tolerate it; some people like it; a few people love it; and some people, believe it or not, don’t even notice it.

I figured I would gather together the various pro and con arguments I have seen, and then go into a little detail on them.  In Part 1 of this discussion I talked about the various ways people are for it.  You can read that post here.  Now for the Con arguments.

Discussion Starter – Shakycam: The Most Exciting Thing to Happen to Film Since the Addition of Sound; or The Worst Thing to Happen to Film Since, Well, Ever – Part 1 (Pros)

I’ve seen more and more comments in recent years about the proliferation in movies of hand-held camera cinematography, or “shakycam” for short.  Some people despise it; many people dislike it, but tolerate it; some people like it; a few people love it; and some people, believe it or not, don’t even notice it.

I figured I would gather together the various pro and con arguments I have seen, and then go into a little detail on them.

Discussion Starter - Two Great Movies That I Secretly Hate (Part 2)

In my Part 1 post I wrote about hiding the fact that I sometimes have great movies that for whatever reason I simply didn’t like.  You should read it before continuing with this post.  You can find it here.  Two of these films are The Shining and Annie Hall.  In this post I will go into a little more detail on what it was about them that pushed the wrong buttons for me.

First, why are these “great” movies?  Here are my guidelines: 

1. It should be a film at least 25 years old so that a generation has gone by where it has been hailed as great. 
2. If possible, it should be both critically acclaimed AND liked by general movie goers. 
3. And it won’t be one of the trendy, easy targets like Ordinary People beating Raging Bull or other Oscar controversies.  Hating Raging Bull?  Now that would definitely qualify.

The great movies that I secretly hate are The Shining and Annie Hall.  “Hate” is a strong word for me, and I don’t use it lightly.  I can find something likable in almost every movie.  There have been only a handful of movies I would say I truly hated, but among them are these two classics.  There are several others that fall into the “dislike” category, but for now I will concentrate on the two that generated the strongest negative reaction in me.  Please be aware that there will be spoilers below for both of these films.

Discussion Starter - Do You Have Great Movies That You Secretly Dislike? (Part 1)

This is my 400^th post.  I’ve been kicking around some thoughts for several months now and I’ve decided to do something a little different.  Instead of a movie review/recommendation, I’m going to write something that I will simply term a “discussion starter”.

Many people have films that they consider guilty pleasures.  They write about them from time to time, almost as a confessional.  The thing is, these movies usually are ones that a large number of other people like, too.  They are often movies that are fun to watch, but don’t have much depth to them.  Just like most everyone else, it’s easy for me to write a recommendation for one of these films simply because I liked it.  I also have no problem sharing my liking for these films in comments on your sites.

Over the last several months, though, I’ve noticed a trend in myself.  I am far more reluctant to leave a comment that is critical of an all-time classic movie.  Sure, I will tiptoe around it some by writing things like “I felt it didn’t live up to the hype”, “for whatever reason it just wasn’t for me”, or even “I realize I am in the small minority here, but I didn’t like it.”

All of those are qualified statements weakening the message, which is this – I didn’t like, and maybe even hated, this critically acclaimed, very popular movie.  I’ve thought about why a guy confident enough to stand by all of his likes (me) is reluctant to stand behind his dislikes.  I’ve come to the conclusion that it comes down to “being taken seriously” as a “movie person”.