Monday, September 28, 2009

An Empty Movie About Empty Bodies

Surrogates
Directed by Jonathan Mostow
One Star

“Surrogates” is such a half-assed effort on so many levels.  To grant the project the time and effort of a review is to award it more time and effort than the filmmakers did.  I would understate if I accused director Jonathan Mostow of merely recycling old ideas.  Nope, he dug this stuff straight out of the dumpster and slapped a new label on it with scotch tape and a glue stick.  He didn’t even wash off the grime from that old, brown banana peel.

Comparisons to Ridley Scott’s brilliant “Blade Runner” are imminent, but not particularly necessary.  The discussion would be one of imitation, not influence.  Mostow isn’t so much following in the footsteps of that film as he is wearing its boots and sleepwalking.

In Scott’s film, the term was replicants – robots that looked and behaved like humans, which were designed and manufactured to serve as slaves.  When the replicants began to adopt basic human survival instincts, they were equipped with a modification that set their life spans concretely at four years.  When an unusually strong willed replicant got wind of the modification, he hunted down his makers in search of either answers or vengeance.

In ‘Surrogates”, the robots in question still look and behave like humans, but this time they are operated by the thoughts of their vegetable owners, who lie hooked up to gadgets and operate their lives safely but vicariously through their surrogate machines.  The creators proudly claim that murder rates have plummeted since the inception of the surrogates, though I would imagine that destruction of property charges went through the roof.

Where the replicants were manmade machines who developed human psychological traits, the surrogates can serve only as receptacles for them.  “Blade Runner” is about machines becoming human, and “Surrogates” is about humans becoming machines.

The plot, so far as I could bring myself to care, centers around a cop named Tom Greer (Bruce Willis), one of those speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick sort of fellows who doesn’t seem to care much for his job until one of his fellow officers gets gunned down (imagine his dismay when five of them kick the futuristic bucket).  Of course, Greer conducts his job through his surrogate, a blond haired, fair-skinned likeness of him that doesn’t particularly match his persona.

Greer is investigating a string of murders from the barrel of a mysterious space-blaster-looking-thingajob that’s capable of melting both the circuits of the surrogate and the brain of its operator.  Also Greer is having marriage problems, and I just spent about as much time on that subplot as the movie did.

The weapon falls into the hands of a cult of anti-surrogate rednecks, more specifically the hands of their leader (Ving Rhames), a prophet who appropriately calls himself The Prophet and sports a human nest of dreadlocks and a pimp shirt.  The goal?  Wipe out every surrogate and surrogate user on the East Coast.  I think.

This whole thing circles back to the man who invented the surrogates, Canter (James Cromwell), whose motives don’t make any sense to anyone anywhere, including himself.  His plot has something to do with the little space blaster being amplified to a global level.  Apparently a man of such limitless intelligence couldn’t come up with a more economical solution, like the one that eventually takes place.

That might be the film’s most glaring weakness, now that I think about.  No one involved in “Surrogates”, from the writers down to the actors, have any clue what motivates these characters.  To watch the film is to see people doing stuff and to not see why.  I can think of nary a fate so boring.  The movie’s eighty-eight minute running time threatens to go on forever.

Mostow takes the necessary ingredients of a sci-fi thriller and plops them on screen, where they sit lifeless and artificial.  Technically it is a movie, yes.  It is a visceral combination of sight and sound, with heroes and villains and action and special effects contained in a conventional narrative.  But on an emotional and ideological level, in the sense that it conveys even the most remote reflection of the human condition, it is not a movie.  It is a hollow shell of celluloid, behind which hides its makers.  You know, a lot like the surrogates.

Rollan Schott
September 28, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan.


Thursday, September 24, 2009

A Disorderly Romance Remembered Out of Order

500 Days of Summer
Directed by Marc Webb
Three and One Half Stars

The day before a relationship ends, you can only think about all the things that are crap about your present situation. The day after a relationship ends, all you can think about is the good times you and your now ex-significant other had. This pattern of misremembering, exaggerating and romanticizing is how humans work through the grief of essentially losing a loved one. Some days are filled with disappointment when all you can think about are the times that brought you happiness. Other days are filled with regret when you can only think of the times that brought you pain, or in which you behaved in a way that brought pain to someone else.

Mark Webb's 500 Days of Summer, a delightful film that works as both a comedy, a romance, and even sometimes as a musical, reflects the real-like workings of a human mind when pondering what went wrong in a romance. We don't start at the beginning, we start somewhere in the middle. Then with each scene, the movie jumps around to different sections of the relationship between Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), whose romance is doomed from the start. We can tell that, and Tom can probably tell that too, but he's darned if he isn't going to set himself up for a fall. In real life, we all do that.

The romance is doomed from the start because from the second he sees her, Tom idolises the cute, slightly alternative new personal assistant that sits across the office from him. The ability to idolise and idealise a new partner is vital in romance. Tom, as we all are wont to do from time to time, overdoes it. He extrapolates from a single-word greeting one morning that Summer's weekend consisted entirely of having great sex with someone who isn't him. When Summer agrees to let Tom ever-so-slightly in, he celebrates like he's won the lottery. But Summer is always a bit aloof, and we get the sense that "it's not you, it's me" isn't just a cliche for her. She constantly expresses doubt at the existence of 'love', and proclaims that she doesn't want to be anybody's anything, let alone girlfriend.

Tom and Summer's romance lasts for (you guessed it), 500 days, and the nature of their relationship is such that both characters could wind up being deeply unlikable, annoying, or both. Fortunately these characters are in the hands of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, two actors that are building impressive bodies of work. Gordon-Levitt is a long way from home when we consider his beginnings were in the sometimes funny but often cookie-cutter sitcom "Third Rock from the Sun", but eclectic and fine performances in films like Brick, The Lookout and Mysterious Skin have earned him respect in the movie industry, if not wild mainstream success. Deschanel manages, somehow, to make Summer seem not like a heartless bitch who seems to enjoy playing games with Tom's heart.

Rich in humour and warmth, 500 Days of Summer marks the debut of Mark Webb, a former music video director. His experience in that shortened medium is evident in several lovely vignettes that work well as stand-alone small films -- an animated sequence in which Tom's heart melts, a split-screen scene that breaks our hearts, and yes, even a musical number. But beneath all the gimmicks, this is a film that actually has something to say about the nature of human relationships. By the end of the film, Tom is like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver in that we can almost hear the romantic time-bomb ticking away as the credits roll. Tom never learns. But, then again, neither do the rest of us.

Jonathan Fisher
September 24, 2009
Originally Featured in The Film Brief


Monday, September 21, 2009

To Feminism What 'Inglourious Basterds' was to Judaism

Jennifer's Body
Directed by Karyn Kusama
Two and One Half Stars

Written by a woman, directed by a woman, and starring the standard frat boy’s definition of “the” woman, Karyn Kusama’s “Jennifer’s Body” is a gleeful feminist revenge fantasy with an ear for slang and an eye for blood.  Diablo Cody’s follow-up to her Oscar winning script for “Juno” deals in flamboyant fashion with the dangers of objectifying women.  It won’t likely win any awards for subtlety.

Megan Fox stars in the title role as Jennifer, a voluptuous high school bombshell with a healthy superiority complex.  Jennifer rules over her high school in Devil’s Kettle with a swing of her hips and a seductive bat of her eyelashes that hints at a mean spirited joke only she knows the punch line to.

Her best friend is Needy (Amanda Seyfried).  Appropriately named, she’s the dime store nerd of the school in every way except that her best friend is the head cheerleader.  One night Jennifer drags Needy to a seedy bar on the outskirts of town where a nobody punk band with a “salty” lead singer is putting on a show.  When the bar burns down, the band members take Jennifer away in their van (wouldn’t you know it) and she returns to Needy’s house that night blood-soaked and spewing black bile all over the kitchen.  It takes forever to get that out from under your fingernails.  I hate that.

From here “Jennifer’s Body” settles down into the conventions of a fair slasher flick, with Jennifer picking off boys in the school one by one and eating them for sustenance.  Their deaths grow less and less tragic to the numbed residents of Devil’s Kettle.  We must be told this.  We’d never really get a sense of the community otherwise.

This is where the satire of Cody’s screenplay wears thin.  Jennifer seems to represent the objectified woman lashing out against her male objectifiers, and Needy represents the homely woman objectified be her more ideal female counterparts, but Cody’s characters are too disconnected from their society to comment on it. 

One could swear up and down that the town of Devil’s Kettle doesn’t exist at all.  We only see one street in town, and that street only once.  The school is out in the woods, and the bar Jennifer and Needy visit is farther out there still.  I’m guessing the parents are yet one stop further.

Jennifer is supposed to be the most popular girl in school, but no one seems to pay much attention to her, or to her friend.  Even their peculiar teacher Mr. Wroblewski (J.K. Simmons) tries his best to pretend the two of them aren’t in the room.  Needy’s detached narration speaks of the residents of Devil’s Kettle as if they were from another planet.  They can’t have too much of a beef with these people.  They’re all minding their own business.

One must admit however, that the casting of Megan Fox is an obvious stroke of genius.  There isn’t an actress working today who has developed such a hollow image in the public eye.  No one knows a thing about her other than the fact that she is beautiful.  She’s an ideal choice for a high school bombshell that men pursue without regard to her motives.

Fox pulls it off for the most part, but she can’t quite bring the same life to the hyper-hipster dialog that’s always present in Diablo Cody’s writing.  Cody used this same cutesy jive in “Juno” to create a unique, identifiable, and fully realized character, but here she seems to be hiding behind it.  The characters in “Jennifer’s Body” never quite make it off the page, perhaps because there’s nowhere to go from there.

“Jennifer’s Body” is pretty shallow entertainment, and the thousands of twenty-something guys who go just to ogle Miss Fox are only going to reinforce the ideas that Cody’s screenplay is trying to satirize.  That’s the lesson of the day, I guess.  If you’re going to comment on a society, make sure they’re listening, and if you’re going to sacrifice a virgin, make sure she’s a flippin’ virgin.

Rollan Schott
September 21, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan


Wednesday, September 16, 2009

5 Remarkable Performances

"You can see now?"
Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp in "City Lights".


"Why?  Why?  Why?  Why?  Why?"
Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull".


"Will I be with you tonight in Paradise?"
Maria Falconetti as Joan in "The Passion of Joan of Arc".


"I am big.  It's the pictures that got small."
Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in "Sunset Blvd."


"Rosebud..."
Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane in "Citizen Kane".


Monday, September 14, 2009

Replacements as Doomed as We Were

 9
Directed by Shane Acker
Three Stars

The post-apocalyptic world has become so standardized by the cinema that we need no longer question how it came to fruition.  Vegetation replaces traffic on the freeways.  Architecture begins to crumble.  With the drone of our voices finally gone, the intense stillness of the earth falls on deaf ears.  Of all the possible specifics, one thing can be assumed for sure – we destroyed ourselves.  This has happened.  We are gone.  Everything else is vanity.

Such begins Shane Acker’s “9”, an exciting and provocative doomsday fable that only reveals its ambitious scope in its waning moments.  It is among the darkest animated films I’ve seen.

“9” is named after the film’s protagonist (Elija Wood), an automated ragdoll who awakens in an abandoned workshop over what we assume to be the body of his creator.  The little fellow tries to speak but alas, he has no voice (a strange oversight on his creator’s part, considering later plot developments).  He finds on the floor a peculiar insignia, tucks it away, and ventures out into a decaying city where the cloud cover never breaks. 

Once outside, he meets a second little fellow like himself, ironically named 2.  At this point the film introduces both the beginning of a string of breathtaking action sequences and a sort of A.I. tinted “Lord of the Flies” allegory that Acker promptly shelves in favor of the first option.

9 and 2 are attacked by a robotic beast with a dog’s skull as its head (Labrador sized, which to them is enormous) that makes off with 2, who is barely alive.  From here, 9 meets up with 5, 6, and 8 (John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover, and Fred Tatasciore), as well as their paranoid leader 1 (Christopher Plummer) who keeps the group of them sheltered and organized while they attempt to outlive the beast that prowls the streets.  9, certainly the most daring of the group, convinces the rest of them to set off on a rescue mission to save 2.  In so doing, they awaken the technology that may have been responsible for the end of mankind, and may also have inspired dolls’ creation.

“9” began as an Oscar nominated short film which Acker also directed.  Producers Tim Burton and Timur Bekmanbetov put forth the money to expand the project into a full length motion picture (although the longer vision still only runs a modest 79 minutes).  Acker’s original short was completely dialog free, and it’s clear that the dialog of the expanded project was added at the service of marketability.  Sure, a silent movie wouldn’t sell, but aside from a key monologue late in the picture, there isn’t a single line of dialog that isn’t disposable.  I might have greatly appreciated the courage to tell this story without such expository babble.

Each of the dolls speaks only in hyper-condensed action movie clichés.  I actually caught myself quoting entire lines of dialog verbatim before the characters had even said them.  “Welcome back to the fight” the dolls tell 7 (Jennifer Connelly) when they find her at the beast’s lair.  “Back?” she asks defiantly in return, “I never left.”  Of course.

From here, spoilers abound.  Ye be warned.  I am resisting the urge to reveal the later developments in the story, but I feel I must share with you what I made of them.  See the film, as I think you should, and then return to me.

The most exciting idea that “9” presents to us in its final moments is that, when faced with oblivion, we might conceive of a being whose function was not to revitalize our own race, but to carry on in our stead.  It’s a fool’s errand, really, considering that the villainous master machine was the only remaining being with the capacity to reproduce. 

These little ragdolls were made to be the last of their kind, not the first.  They are the last breath of a species whose heart has long since stopped beating.  Were they created to put an end to an evil that has nothing left to destroy?  What would anything they do matter now that we’re gone?  What difference can they make except for themselves?  They have no hope of saving us, and no hope of replacing us.  So why were they created?  The answer, it seems, is surprisingly quaint -  Peace of mind.


Rollan Schott
September 14, 2009
Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Friday, September 11, 2009

Pixar (literally) launches itself into the stratosphere

Up
Directed by Pete Doctor
Four Stars

There is such an elegance and warmth in Disney Pixar's way of story-telling. Up, the new film from the animation powerhouse that has brought us Finding Nemo, Toy Story and about a billion other family classics in the last fifteen years, is just about the most fantastical of the lot. It tells the kind of story that the Japanese master Hayao Mayazaki has been telling his entire career, using a soaring fable to communicate a very simple, and imperative, truth -- don't be afraid to follow your dreams.

Carl Fredricksen is a young kid with a hankering for adventure. When we meet him he's a chubby-faced, doe-eyed little kid. He meets Ellie, a girl who has the same passion for adventure and is rich with anticipation for what is to come in her life. The young couple make a vow, that one day Carl will get Ellie to Paradise Falls in South America -- a vow that fades into childhood memory as the couple grow up, marry and spend their life together, with Carl making a living as a helium balloon salesman. A lovely opening montage warms the cockles of our hearts without trying too hard, and instills in us a trust and affection towards Carl (voiced as an old man by Edward Asner) that invests us in his fate for the rest of the movie.

After a long life together, Ellie passes suddenly, leaving Carl on his own. With the threat of demolition to his beloved house by a real estate developer looming large, Carl decides to do something drastic. Here's where your grown-up suspension of disbelief has to kick in. Carl tethers thousands of helium balloons to his house and lifts off. A young kid named Russell (Jordon Nagai) who needs one more badge to become a senior Wilderness Explorer Scout, finds himself on Carl's front porch when lift-off takes place, and thus finds himself along for the ride. The pair relentlessly travel the skies, looking for Paradise Falls.

It's not a spoiler to say that they do eventually reach Paradise Falls. What awaits for them there forms the primary conflict of the story. It involves Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), a famous explorerand an idol of Carl's youth, and dogs with collars that enable them to speak. Dug (Bob Petersen) is a kind dog who takes a shine to Carl and Russel, while Alpha (also Bob Petersent) is an evil minion of Muntz's. The way the dogs are written by Up's screenwriters Bob Peterson and Peter Docter are one of the many joys of the film. Far from being a heart-warming family story, Up is also hysterically funny, usually in ways that will go way over the heads of the kids in the audience.

Once more, Pixar has proven that they are in touch with how people, young and old, like to watch movies. Audiences are all for high-emotion climaxes, but they don't want to be pandered to or preached at. Up makes us emote the smart way. They build characters, make us like them. Eventually when the characters discover something about themselves, we care because we like the character, not because a big swelling of music tells us that we need to react.

There are so many wonderful visual touches in Up, from the way that light is reflected through Carl's balloons and into a little girl's room, creating a kaleidoscope of colours, to the unique but familiar slant of Carl's house. This is not a by-the-numbers children's flick. Every artistic decision has clearly been painstakingly considered, and contributes to a rich mosaic. The look and feel of a Pixar movie has been honed throughout its illustrious decades-long history, and their films seem to be getting better with age. Up is as much a visual artistic experience as it is a narrative triumph.

By now I'm sure you have gathered that I think Up is one of the best movies of the year. I implore you to seek it out. You will find yourself, as I did, surprisingly emotionally invested in, and amused by the fate of this old crank, his young friend, and his precarious but defiant symbol of devotion to his wife, his hovering house. Up is a complete blast.

Jonathan Fisher
September 11, 2009
Featured at The Film Brief

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Freud With a Butcher Knife

Halloween II
Directed by Rob Zombie 
One and One Half Stars

I can’t tell if Rob Zombie is taking this material way too seriously or not seriously at all. I think it’s probably too seriously, but with a cameo from “Weird Al” Yankovic, it’s hard to tell. Zombie’s “Halloween II” is a relentlessly absurd movie.

While he is a reasonably capable filmmaker, the problem I have with his work is that whatever’s going on in his mind, whatever it is he feels he needs to express, is of no conceivable worth whatsoever. He makes films of extreme brutality and depravity, of dystopian social and psychological universes, with no function or purpose. And he does it within an overtly pretentious framework.

And this movie is about Zombie. Don’t be fooled by the franchise history. He is a very autobiographical auteur. He wants us to witness his dissonant view of the world the same way Quentin Tarantino wants us to see how much he knows about movies — by making films that flaunt it. When Zombie shamelessly recruits the long-defunct it-was-just-a-dream cliché, it’s clear that he’s using it as an enabler to venture even further into this soulless reality he calls a psyche.

The plot, from what I can gather, is largely an attempt to apply an extra note to a one-note character. Michael Myers (Tyler Mane), believed to be dead by troubled teenager and cult rock enthusiast Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) and most other residents of Haddonfield, suffers from incessant hallucinations of his mother, himself as a child and a white horse. The mother and the child make sense. These hallucinations are motivating Michael to continue his killing spree and more importantly to bring the family together again by killing his sister (and then himself, I suppose).

The reveal of his sister is set up as a twist, which would mark one of the first times I’d seen a twist in a movie without a story (unless this counts — big man kills stuff).

This brings me to a modest proposition. Would anyone object to a brief moratorium on the use of the Oedipal complex as rationale for movie villains? Say, I don’t know, 15 years? It can only be original once and everything after “Psycho” has been an imitation. Now Zombie is venturing dangerously close to parody.
There’s also a side plot involving Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcom McDowell), a parasite campaigning for his latest book on the disturbed patient he couldn’t help. It seems most people attribute Myers’ victims to Loomis’ inability to reform him. The scenes offer no insight or development and only serve to break tone, which reminds me of Wes Craven’s “Last House on the Left” (1972), in which a pair of inept police officers disrupts scenes of grisly torture with slapstick humor.

By the time the film’s climax roles around, it cannot be effective. Zombie opens the film on its highest pitch and tries to hold for more than an hour and a half. By the end, it’s gone flat. Somewhere between the repetitive stabbing motions and the one-word dialogue, a pretty consistent rhythm develops, punctuated by Dr. Loomis’ righteous self-promotion and Mama Myers’ white-laced divinity. “Halloween II” is either really bad art or equally bad camp. If you think a distinction between the two is necessary, well, I won’t be seeing it again to make one.


Rollan Schott
September 10, 2009
Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Cartoons That Bleed When You Cut Them

Extract
Directed by Mike Judge
Two Stars

Mike Judge, who is most famous for his successful animated television series “Beavis and Butt-head” and “King of the Hill,” has since graduated to a handful of live action motion pictures in which real people assume the roles of the cartoons.

His previous films, “Office Space” (1999), which has become a modern cultural staple, and “Idiocracy” (2006), which saw only a limited theatrical release, were both critical successes. However, perhaps because of the subject matter of those two films, the monotony of business suit labor and a world populated only by morons, Judge’s latest film, “Extract,” seems a little stale.

Jason Bateman stars as Joel, the owner of Reynold’s Extracts, a factory that produces only concentrated food flavorings. He looks down from his office loft windows on a factory floor populated only by morons, including an aging woman behind the conveyor belt controls who blames all the factory’s problem’s on its Mexican employees, a forklift driver (T.J. Miller) who plays in a slew of thrash metal bands that all include the same members, and a sorter nicknamed Step (Clifton Collins Jr.) who takes his sorting responsibilities quite seriously.

The factory has grown rapidly and made a wealthy man out of Joel, who, with the aid of his assistant Brian (J.K. Simmons), is in the process of working out a deal to sell Reynold’s Extracts to General Mills. The negotiations are hampered, however, when an incident of negligence on the factory floor leaves Step a bit less well-off.

Meanwhile, Joel suffers from a stagnant sex life with his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig), who activates a force field when she ties her sweatpants for the evening, and a relentless neighbor (David Koechner) who insists on dragging Joel and Suzie to every social function he attends. Joel confides in his long time friend Dean (Ben Affleck) about his sexual frustrations, and Dean in turn convinces Joel to hire a gigolo to seduce Suzie so that he might have an affair without being hampered by conscience.

Finally, a beautiful grifter named Cindy (Mila Kunis) weaves in and out of the picture with motives that are never quite clear. We think she plans to seduce Step into suing the factory over his accident and then marry into his fortune, but this doesn’t explain why she would simultaneously get a job at the factory. Is she looking to con Joel twice?

“Extract” is not as busy as I’ve made it seem. It moves in and out of its several conflicts fairly seamlessly, and does a nice job of tying them all together. But the film is intermittently funny at best.
Bateman does a nice job as the overwhelmed factory owner whose world sucker punches him from every angle and all at the same time, but he’s working out from beneath a flat script that feels a bit too much like “Office Space” rehash and can’t seem to find solid footing for its comedic tone.

As I’ve said, all of these characters are cartoons, and I grew more and more aware of the responsibility of live action movies to depict human intelligence more realistically than animated movies. When Beavis and Butthead behave inhumanly stupid, it is inherently funny because they are not humans. They are merely cartoons: reflections of humans. But if a real human behaves inhumanly stupid? That’s just, well, cartoonish.

Rollan Schott
September 9, 2009
Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

The Pantheon (2009)

Ghost on Screen's top 100 movies, as drafted by Rollie and Jon

1. The Third Man
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey
3. Citizen Kane
4. City Lights
5. Apocalypse Now
6. Goodfellas
7. Taxi Driver
8. Vertigo
9. Rear Window
10. Lord of the Rings (Trilogy)
11. It's a Wonderful Life
12. La Dolce Vita
13. Raging Bull
14. Magnolia
15. Beau Travail
16. A Fish Called Wanda
17. Sunset Blvd.
18. The Passion of Joan of Arc
19. Nosferatu
20. Do the Right Thing
21. Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
22. Schindler's List
23. Pulp Fiction
24. Psycho
25. The Godfather
26. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
27. Casablanca
28. Chinatown
29. The Bicycle Thief
30. The Seventh Seal
31. The Shawshank Redemption
32. The Shining
33. Some Like it Hot
34. Singin' in the Rain
35. Double Indemnity
36. Eyes Wide Shut
37. Annie Hall
38. The General
39. American Graffiti
40. Monty Python's Life of Brian
41. King Kong (2005)
42. It Happened One Night
43. Breathless
44. To Kill a Mockingbird
45. This is Spinal Tap
46. The Searchers
47. Notorious
48. The 'Up' Documentaries
49. Manhattan
50. A Streetcar Named Desire
51. Tokyo Story
52. Touch of Evil
53. Amadeus
54. Cabaret
55. Bonnie and Clyde
56. Once Upon a Time in America
57. All About Eve
58. Modern Times
59. Children of Men
60. American Beauty
61. The Player
62. Paths of Glory
63. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
64. Shadow of a Doubt
65. Nashville
66. Chocolat (1987)
67. The Gold Rush
68. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
69. Dark City
70. Barry Lyndon
71. On the Waterfront
72. Persona
73. Fargo
74. Synecdoche, New York
75. North by Northwest
76. The Princess Bride
77. The 'Three Colors' Trilogy
78. Pink Floyd the Wall
79. The Big Sleep
80. The Exorcist
81. The War Zone
82. There Will Be Blood
83. 12 Angry Men*
84. King Kong (1933)
85. Waiting For Guffman
86. The Philadelphia Story
87. Cache
88. United 93
89. Metropolis
90. L'Age D'Or
91. Saving Private Ryan
92. Beauty and the Beast
93. Wings of Desire
94. Lawrence of Arabia
95. The Hustler
96. Der Unterang
97. Rosemary's Baby
98. Young Frankenstein
99. Sin City
100. The Wizard of Oz

* "12 Angry Men" eluded our list until the draft was completed, at which point we became aware that it should have been placed higher.  However, we were unable to determine precisely where it should have been, so it was left at #83 with additional honors.