Dir - Penelope Spheeris
Is it silly to put this instead of The Blues Brothers as the sole Saturday Night Live film inclusion? Call it a generational thing then. Both movies are highly quotable and contain no shortage of remarkably funny scenes, but Wayne's World is something perhaps a tad more special for the thirteen-at-the-time-year-old me. Like most comedies that warrant a placement on this list, the script from Mike Myers and Bonnie and Terry Turner here is yet another that is ceaselessly quotable, (pralines and dick ice cream anyone?). Plus truer than many films of its kind, the cameos almost steal it, particularly Alice Cooper's impassioned speech about the pronunciation of Mill-e-walk-aye and Ed O'Neill's about the world being a twisted place.
Dir - Luis Buñuel
After making history and heads spin with their first collaboration Un Chien Andalou, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali basically attempted the fuller-length version with the following L'Age d'Or. Dali for his part exited early on as he and the director could not see eye-to-eye in the writing phase, so the resulting d'Or is primarily Buñuel's vision as he does what he always does best; making fun of bourgeois society, social norms, and religion. This remains one of the earliest and most terrific surrealist comedies there is, featuring a couple that is forever thwarted in their attempts to fornicate and in their frustration, the guy punches women and performs fellatio on the toe of a statue. This is all before a giraffe gets thrown out of a window and Jesus rapes and kills a woman in an ode to Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom.
Dir - Elia Kazan
The first staring vehicle for James Dean and the only of his movies to be released before his fatal, now mythical car crash was the John Steinbeck novel adaptation East of Eden. Focusing on the second half of the book, Eden's premise is a re-telling of the Cain and Abel fairy-tale and besides being Dean's paramount work, it is likewise one of Elia Kazan's most impressive achievements. The director plays Dean like an instrument, letting the endlessly brooding, misunderstood actor improvise much of his behavior while both riling and manipulating the rest of the cast with it. Kazan also turned CinemaScope camera restrictions into full advantages, utilizing Dutch angles and the like to warp what was on screen both subtly and blatantly.
Dir - David S. Ward
Sports movies generally shoot right past my radar as I have as much interest in sports as I do politics, but 1989's Major League gets a pass for being a film I remember seeing in the theater as a kid and loving then as I do now. It is easy to long for the days when R-rated comedies were the norm, ("the days" meaning "the 80s"), and it says something indeed that a movie about easily the most boring sport in the history of the cosmos can remain such a mandatory bit of cinema. Regardless of subject matter, like most all of the best comedies, Major League boasts a pitch-perfect, (har, har), cast including Charlie Sheen, James Gammon, Dennis Haysbert, Corbin Berson, Bob Uecker, Tom Berringer, and a young Wesley Snipes, all of whom knock it out of the pa... Never mind. I will not even finish that one.
Dir - Alan J. Pakula
Exposing the Watergate Scandal for the Washington Post throughout 1972 and 1973, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's investigative reporting was permanently championed as perhaps the finest ever done. The script for their book on the affair All the President's Men was scrutinized over by both journalists, screenwriter William Goldman, Robert Redford, (who bought the book rights), and director Alan J. Pakula to optimize its authenticity. The stylistically stripped down and tensely structured final product easily stands as the most faithful representation of high tension journalism in any movie, where all of the sleepless hours of desperation, frustration, and paranoia are on full display.
Dir - Robert Woodburn
Corn's-a-Poppin's mere existence is an anomaly. Long listed on Robert Altman's biography as a co-screenwriter, hardly anyone out there ever even bothered to see if it still existed until a print beyond randomly showed up in Madison Wisconsin and has been under a restoration in Chicago ever since. Filmed in Kansas City by non-actors and clearly non-filmmakers who do not even know how to point a camera properly, this is large parts "What the fuck am I watching?", part almost-competent musical, and all delightfully impossible to tell if we are supposed to laugh AT or WITH it. It fits into no genre whatsoever. My wife described it as something our children, (then all under the age of ten), would make if given the chance to make a movie. Yet its charm is undeniable, Robert Altman's grave-spinning be dammed.
Dir - Andrei Tarkovsky
Using the real life story of the 15th century, iconic religious icon painter/monk Andrei Rublev as a loose guide, Andrei Tarkovsky examines his medieval, Russian homeland for over three-hours in arguably his most spectacular film out of the seven-ish he ever made. Tarkovsky's work is deliberately slow, (which I mind not at all), but ironically being his longest movie and broken up into nine chapters, this is the first one that I had no trouble at all NOT dozing off while watching. It is far more fun than aggravating to argue one's favorite Tarkovsky movie since they are all such marvelous experiences and in Andrei Rublev, the themes of art, religion, and suffering are back-dropped with an often brutal and frightening historical context.
Dir - James Foley
This is what happens when you take an urgently word-heavy play loaded to the brim with profanity, throw a bunch of film-acting beasts at the material, and let the cameras capture the hectically entertaining results. James Foley's adaptation of the prolific playwright David Mamet's real estate agent locker-room nightmare, dialog tour de force Glengarry Glen Ross has a script with lines so sensationally good that most actors would probably do it for free. In fact many of the players here did take a pay cut to chew the scenery while laying into these characters and what a wondrous outcome it was. Jack Lemmon perhaps never did a finer job on screen than the beaten down and desperate Shelley "The Machine" Levene, Al Pacino seems born to play the cocksure agent Ricky Roma, Kevin Spacey oozes as the young, coldly frustrated boss, and Alec Baldwin comes inches away from steeling the entire movie with his sole, celebrated speech and cameo.
Dir - Mel Brooks
In limiting myself to but one Mel Brooks joint for this list, perhaps it is my love of the horror movie that allows me to continue to come back to Young Frankenstein for inclusion. Blazing Saddles and Space Balls just as rightfully could also belong though. There is a charm to Young Frankenstein that is similar to Looney Tunes cartoons where I do not even remember seeing this for the first time. It has instead just always been in my very psyche. Brooks and star/co-writer Gene Wilder flawlessly send-up the wonderful, black and white, Universal horror movies of the 30's and 40's, (all of which I very much adore), but there are also plenty of isolated moments that children such as my own can burst into hysterics over. Of course there are also lots of naughty jabs that go right over their heads.
Dir - Dziga Vertov
Director/editor team Dziga Vertov and wife Yelizaveta Svilova formed a film movement in Russia known as the Kinoks who employed a realism-over-fiction form of cinema that aimed to portray modern Communism not only as favorably as possible, but also film itself as the truest evolution of movie making. Ignoring all of the political inclinations of Man with a Movie Camera, the amount of film-language innovation alone make this pretty much an essential history lesson. Faster paced than anything of its day, it dazzlingly cruises along with split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, double exposures, freeze frames, and backwards, fast, and slow motion cuts, growing more and more fascinating with each and every frame.
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