10. Cop Land
Freddy is one of Stallone's most atypical roles. Looks out of shape, worn out, he's gentle, passive and doesn't really get the girl. Given those things you have to admit it was a brave role to take, but as a result we see one of his better performances and beyond that we get peak douchebag Keitel. What happens when a smothered conscience reawakens behind the blue wall of silence? Chaos, and ultimately justice.
9. L.A. Confidential
Another film handling the demystification of Hollywood, and chronicling the lives destroyed by the L.A. allure. I think the strength of this film is the casting first and foremost, and then the way the story slowly and neatly unfolds, but simultaneously snowballs eventually into one of the most chaotic shootouts in cinema history and concludes with a political falsehood just as it started.
Might be my favourite Kevin Spacey role, and I've never been much of a fan of his, but he personified his character perfectly.
8. Young Thugs: Innocent Blood (岸和田少年愚連隊 血煙り純情篇)
This is a pretty bizarre film for Miike, because it's quite normal compared to his usual stuff (though it does play out every bit as much like a manga come-to-life as most of his films) but incidentally this allows the film to flourish in the lack of shock value. A teen whose only talent is violence that starts a Yakuza-style protection racket, grows complacent with his doting girlfriend and decides to leave her for another girl who forces him to stop being violent, which of course leads to all those around town he has terrorized in the past kicking his ass and he can't retaliate because of his new commitment. This makes for hilarious and very manga-like situations, and that's the heart of this film, it's quite funny and in some ways reminiscent of what Miike would go on to do with Crows Zero.
7. Gattaca
Science fiction sans Hollywood flashiness, instead preferring to drill down directly into philosophical questions regarding eugenics and DNA-based reproductive discrimination. Essentially, the human will vs biological limitation, and which is the more powerful force. It works wonderfully as a think-piece, but also thrives in its use of silence and cinematographic symmetry. In many ways a technocratic hellscape, but also as prescient a film as any other science fiction film considering what we can now achieve with our ability to manipulate DNA and pick and chose how and what we give birth to.
6. Gummo
Harmony Korine's rebuttal to the Disney-fied children's adventure film. In the reality of a natural disaster, in the context of a lower socioeconomic area, why wouldn't a childrens' dream be riddled with racism, animal abuse, fighting, drugs, vandalism, prostitution, petty urban terrorism and heavy metal? Post-apocalyptic midwestern boredom turns hick children into the creatures the suburban children on the nicer side of the tracks have nightmares about.
5. Donnie Brasco
A young Johnny Depp in his prime teaming up with an aging Al Pacino on a detective/mob film which is at its core about the tragedy of the useful idiot. A man who is such a true believer in the organization that even when he's asked to meet his colleagues somewhere, and he knows they're going to kill him because he's been the one on the other side himself in the past, he still shows up anyway. Lefty is the self-conscious machine cog.
4. Lost Highway
I've only watched this once and I'm kinda scared to watch it again, haha. It feels like a nightmare that you can't seem to forget, nor completely remember. It's a series of bleak images imprinted on my brain that feels both horrifying and also beautiful. Features what is probably Lynch's more subversive casting choice; Gary Busey as a decent middle class suburbanite father who loves and supports his son and wife...
3. City of Industry
Potentially the ultimate double-cross revenge film, and unlike many revenge films City of Industry gets the tragedy out of the way rather quickly and leaves the director a good amount of time to relax into the revenge persona and forces the viewer to stew in such a vitriolic feeling for a long time alongside Keitel. Harvey could have very easily turned down films like this, or Bad Lieutenant, and went on to bigger and more Hollywood projects but instead he chose to slum it out with people creating real gritty art and I love him for it. He slides into this role perfectly and much like Takeshi Kitano, doesn't have to say a lot or fill the film with endless dialogue, he simply commands every scene with his presence and puts across a depth of wisdom and an endless well of violence to draw from when he needs to.
2. Starship Troopers
What happens when you take a bunch of kids that are quintessential
American teen drama stereotypes and throw them into a galactic war? The annihilation of innocence and idealism. Much like Lynch's penchant for showing us the dark undergrowth that squirms and wriggles beneath the houses with the white picket fences, Starship Troopers takes what wriggles and squirms beneath the suburban home and launches them at our planet with apocalyptic results, and then demands that the kids of suburbia, so perfect with their jawlines and bouncy hairdos, go to war in response.
In many ways yes this is just a science fiction action blockbuster that misunderstood the source material and took it in a very different direction, but at the same time it is perfect material for Verhoeven to flex his muscle as a director and give people like myself who grew up playing games like Command and Conquer, StarCraft and Warhammer 40k a film on a scale as epic as our favourite games, and just as relentlessly violent. Something the Star Wars films always seemed to fall short of.
I think one of the main things Starship Troopers nails is the feeling that war heroes, especially on a galactic scale, are utterly insignificant and expendable in the grand scheme of things.
1. Hana-bi (Fireworks)
Takeshi Kitano at his most subtle and charming. Though still as violent and stylistic as ever, there's more to the film than stylism itself. Hana-bi actually has a heart and it's quite tender, the violence unlike his previous films actually has a point that is higher than simple machismo. A slice-of-life film about the final days of a man trying to give his dying wife the best last week of her life.
I have always especially loved the way the film's plot comes to life, much like a painting, with its disjointed images and pieces that make little sense in isolation, but as the picture fills out more and more a scene of beautiful, vivid fireworks reveals itself in full colour, and then leaves an afterimage that slowly melts away like Nishi's sins in the final scene. Masterpiece.
