We first meet up with Dobbs in desperation and penury, homeless and begging on the streets of Tampico. All he wants is to get his head above water, to live comfortably without having to depend on handouts from rich American vacationers. Nothin’ fancy, just freedom from poverty.

Even when he first hits on the idea of prospecting for gold, his ambitions remain modest. Howard (Walter Huston, in one of the best-deserved Academy Award winning performances of all time), another drifter with some experience as a prospector, tells him what gold does to a man, the way getting a little only makes you hungry for a whole lot more. Dobbs insists that won’t happen to a simple, reasonable man like him, that he’ll just collect his little piece and go home.

We know better, of course. Dobbs, Howard, and a third young down-and-out named Curtin (Tim Holt) set off in search of veins of gold and barely any time has passed before they all, but Dobbs in particular, begin to feel the effects of potential wealth. Once they actually start to find gold, Dobbs plummets into greed-fueled madness in record time.

Dobbs views everyone’s actions with suspicion, and the more gold the three companions find the more pronounced his paranoia becomes. Soon this regular guy is pulling guns on his friends and voting to kill strangers, all to make sure nobody comes near his supply of gold, already greater than he ever expected it would be.

And that’s what the movie’s about, the immediate, irresistible corrupting influence of a avarice. It’s the greatest exploration the snowballing effect of lust for money and what it can do to a person since von Stroheim’s Greed. (The film shares other surface similarities with that silent masterpiece, including its budget-busting location shooting.)

It’s a slight to the fabulous Walter Huston to talk only of Bogart, but man is he great. His transformation from likeable loser to nasty paranoiac to murderous madman is what performance is all about. When his greed finally forces him to kill, his lonely monologue where he tries to convince himself he’s done all the right things, regardless of what a pest like a conscience might say, is one of cinema’s all time highlights.

If your New Year’s resolution was to see some of the great movies you’ve missed out on, and you haven’t yet experienced The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, there’s no better way for you to start your year’s viewing.

BONUS NOTE: What’s the deal with Humphrey Bogart being in movies whose most famous lines are never actually said by anybody? We all know no one in Casablanca ever actually says “Play it again, Sam,” and in  The Treasure of the Sierra Madre the menacing bandit almost but not quite says “We don’t need no steenkin’ badges.” Coincidence, or secret government plot?

I’m not gonna lie to you: Raiders of the Lost Ark might be my favorite movie. It’s definitely the movie I’ve seen the most times. In fact, I’ve probably seen it more times than Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi put together. Crammed into its two hours is each and every one of the elements I look for in a movie, and once they start coming they never stop.

What makes it kick so much ass? God, where to begin. It’s got people climbing on speeding trucks; it’s got swordfights; it’s got gunplay; it’s got drinking games; it’s got boulders a-chasin’ people; it’s got creepy ghosts. It’s even got John Rhys-Davies! Could you ask for anything more? If you could, you would reveal yourself to be a greedy asshole who is impossible to satisfy.

The movie also has Karen Allen in it as Marion Ravenwood. In case your mind flashes back to Animal House, I will tell you this much: unlike in that raunch-comedy, in Raiders of the Lost Ark you do not see her buttcheeks. You can take that as a boon or a detriment depending on your tastes.

Okay, this review’s getting all over the place. That’s what happens when I try to talk about Raiders. I get so excited that I can’t think straight and I just start blurting out my favorite parts while hooting and hollering like the audience on Arsenio Hall. Before much time passes I lose the ability to engage in rational discourse and I just start shouting “OMFG, that guy wears a hat and climbs on submarines!” But let’s try to talk about the story before I completely go bonkers.

There’s this Ark of the Covenant thing, you see. Those biblical Hebrews thought it was really pretty important, so they carried it around a lot before finally putting it in a hole in the ground, which they then lost. Some thousands of years later, the Nazis (BAD GUYS) say to themselves: “Hey! We should get us an Ark of the Covenant!” So they go off looking for it, under the impression that it will make them indestructible and that Nazis trying to use the ultra-powerful instrument of the god of the Jews will not in any way backfire. Some Americans (GOOD GUYS) decide they should probably make an effort to stop Hitler from becoming invincible, so they call on archaeologist extraordinaire Indiana Jones to find the Ark before the Nazis do. And off he goes!

From that point until the end of the film, Indy has, by conservative estimate, some fifteen billion separate awesome adventures. He swings from a whip, he fires his gun with reckless abandon, and he punches people so hard that the sound of the impact is practically as loud as a sonic boom. And he does it all while looking like a True Champion. The closest I’ve ever come to falling in love with a man is with Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones.

And remember the time he’s in a big hole full of snakes? I do! I remember it clearly because it is mad crazy awesome. Thousands of snakes are crawling all about and giving everyone the jibblies and it’s great! That sequence, and in particular the image of Indy coming face to face with one pissed off cobra, instantly became an iconic movie moment, defining for a generation exactly what was meant by the term Action-Adventure.

Okay, it’s happening. All my brain will do is think about how incredible Indiana Jones is, as close to perfection as any moviegoing experience comes. I’m losing the ability to come up with words. My mind is becoming transformed into nothing but a beaming ball of delight at the thought of reliving this mindblowing adventure. So you don’t need me to keep writing stuff; just take my word for it and go watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can’t think of anything that could make a person happier.

If you don’t like Raiders of the Lost Ark, you will also totally hate:

The folks at the American Film Institute would have you believe they know best, but if I made a list of the 100 greatest movies, Easy Rider wouldn’t be anywhere near it. It defines an era and an attitude, they say. It encapsulates the disenfranchised soul-searching of an entire generation, they say. Twaddle! The truth is that this movie, as Oscar Madison might say, is garbage.

Praise it all you like, but you’ll never convince me that it’s anything more than what it appears to be on the surface—a rambling mish-mash of a low budget biker film, where everyone involved was high all the time and it shows. Despite having Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson in its cast, Easy Rider never stands out as any better than the grainy, pointless motorcycle flicks Joel and his robots would sometimes watch on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Fonda and Hopper smuggle some narcotics in from Mexico to fun their retirement, with a spiritual journey to Mardi Gras planned along the way. In the course of their travels encounter a couple of groups of people who do nothing and don’t matter before finally meeting up with a lawyer for the ACLU (Nicholson) and a couple of higher-end prostitutes (Karen Black and Toni Basil, both of whom were, against all reason, allowed to appear in movies). At no point in the proceedings do I care about these characters, not who they are, why they’re here, what they’re doing or where they’re going. Each character is a faceless blur, going aimlessly about his business and spouting marijuana-fueled paranoia in supremely drab fashion. It couldn’t be less interesting if the whole movie took place at a meeting of a town zoning commission.

The worst sequence of all is no doubt the extended collage of unpleasant sights and sounds as the characters are tripping balls in New Orleans. The players stand around acting stupid for eight or ten years, endearing themselves to me even less then they had over the course of the rest of the picture. Perhaps audiences at the time found it cool—even groovy—to see shit like this, but I think even then that could be true only of the most easily impressed viewers. From a modern perspective it plays as little more than a quaint relic, a laughable throwback to those terrible late-sixties faux-hip acid movies. We’ve realized we should ignore the rest of those films, but for some reason we keep hanging on to this one. Really, we should throw it out with the rest.

The movie’s greatest flaw, though, are the characters. They’re unlikable—Fonda is always condescending and Hopper won’t shut up with his nonsensical paranoid ramblings—but they’re so otherwise devoid of characteristics that they’re impossible to relate to. They’re utterly meaningless and featureless; each could be exchanged with another, or with anything at all, and you’d never notice the difference. Even as they start dying, you just don’t give a shit. “Oh, that guy’s dead? Whatever.” And if there’s one thing I know about movies, it’s that if you don’t have a story you’d better have compelling characters. If you don’t have a story and your audience doesn’t even care when the characters get killed, you are in serious trouble.

So yeah, it’s a complete baffling mystery to me why this movie is heralded as some kind of classic, or why it appears on this list of the 100 greatest; in fact, I could probably list 1,000 movies I’d rather watch. Sure, it’s got a good soundtrack, but I could listen to that any time without having to look at endless shots of people crossing bridges or hearing Jack Nicholson barely able to move his lines from his dope-addled brain to his mouth. It’s time we recognize this movie for what it is and kick it out of the company of true classics. It doesn’t come close to deserving to be there.

My preference in movies watched for entertainment runs to things like Die Hard, Army of Darkness, Airplane!, and Star Wars. I appreciate great dramas, but most of them require that I get in the proper mindset—that I prepare myself—and that just doesn’t happen very often. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, on the other hand, is a movie I could watch every single day.

The movie takes place on the day Joey Drayton (Katharine Houghton) brings home John Prentiss (Sidney Poitier), the man she intends to marry. The meat of the film centers around the reaction of her parents (Tracy and Hepburn, who appeared together in every movie released over a stretch of some twenty years) to this situation. John is handsome, impeccably mannered and polite, and a doctor famous in his field—not to put too fine a point on it, he’s a helluva catch for Joey. But since he’s black and it’s 1967, Mr. and Mrs. Drayton are still shocked, no matter how forward-thinking and liberal minded they’ve professed to be in the past.

The script is a masterfully realistic exploration of personal feelings on race—not just the feelings of Joey’s parents, but John’s family too—as well as whether a person’s stated beliefs match up with their actions and their true feelings. It’s a serious picture on a serious subject, but its greatest asset is that it never takes itself too seriously. Instead of preaching or being heavy handed, it’s simple and honest and often very funny, switching effortlessly between dramatic moments and comedic ones. Kinda like life.

And oh yeah, how’s ’bout that cast? Three of the four leads (Tracy, Poitier, Hepburn) are Academy Award winners. That’s a lot of oomph in one picture. They’re all excellent, but Spencer Tracy in particular stands out as some kind of champion. This movie was his last, and it’s perhaps the best performance he ever gave. If his stirring final speech doesn’t bring a tear to your eye and a lump to your throat, then you are broken inside and I hate you.

Oh! Also appearing is Mrs. Jefferson as Tilly, a set in her ways maid who definitely does not approve of black folks movin’ on up, be they doctors, dry cleaners or otherwise.

Here’s the biggest thing I wonder about with this movie. The picture opens with John and Joey on the way to her parents’ house. As they talk to each other, three things become evident: these two are very much in love, the Draytons have never met John, and he worries that there may be a problem when they do. What that problem might be isn’t explicitly stated at this point in the flick, and I wonder if a modern audience might not immediately recognize it.

I imagine most viewers probably would recognize it, but I hope they don’t. During a confrontation with his father, John says “You see yourself as a colored man; I see myself as a man.” I’d hate to think that in the forty years since Sidney Poitier delivered those lines we’ve moved so little as a society that such meaningless distinctions as race are still the first things that spring to mind. Fortunately, there exist movies like this one to help us notice those issues within ourselves and, hopefully, move beyond them.

I’ve reviewed It’s a Wonderful Life once before, during the Christmas season of 2004. Though that was but three short years ago, much has changed. In 2004 I was either retarded, an asshole, or both, because my assessment of this movie was completely wrong. Then I decried it as an overlong, boring, sappy piece of crap with a mushmouthed jackass in the lead role. Now I realize that this movie is wonderful and the me of three years ago should shut the fuck up.

The movie, as most of us know, tells the story of the life of George Bailey (James Stewart), from his childhood through his adult years. One at a time, the plans he’s laid for his life are altered, reversed or cancelled and he ultimately decides that his life basically sucks ass, that he should kill himself, and that everyone around him would be far, far better off had he never even been born. With the help of some angelic intervention, he learns, of course, that that simply isn’t true at all and that his life is great because he has people who love him and whatnot. It’s exceedingly maudlin and sugary-sweet, enough so to send you into a diabetic coma. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

That moronic version of me from three years ago was a real dingleberry about this kind of unashamedly schmaltzy and happy stuff. As such, he gave the movie, its actors and its characters no quarter. My review and summary of the picture is peppered with comments to the effect that George really ought to just go through with his suicide plans, because his life actually does suck no matter what some nosy seraphim has to say. Early on in the movie there’s a scene where George saves his little brother from drowning in an icy lake, losing his own hearing in the process. It’s an important moment in the character’s life, and here’s what I had to say about it in 2004: “Instead of teaching the little bastard a lesson and letting him die, George rushes in to the rescue.” Can you believe it? What a humbug!

In that earlier review I go on and on complaining about how long and boring the movie is. “For the next hundred hours or so, George dances with a gal named Mary” is one quote. Another is “No wonder this movie runs over two hours; the goddamn backstory takes eighty minutes.” What that impatient and grouchy asshole didn’t realize was that the backstory is just as much a part of the plot as the part where Clarence the angel teaches him a lesson. After all, the picture’s called It’s a Wonderful Life, not It’s a Wonderful One Particular Night When an Angel Came. The length of the backstory also serves a hugely important purpose: after all that, you’re damn invested in George Bailey. Thus, the bad stuff that’s happening to him isn’t happening to some faceless whoever. It’s happening to someone you care about. And I’ll tell you this: the movie is never boring and lame, as I once so stupidly proclaimed it. The characters are so richly drawn and well realized by their performers that you can’t help but invest yourself in them, and the mix of romance, drama and comedy makes for a story that keeps you wonderfully spellbound.

The movie makes no apologies for its overpowering sweetness, nor does it attempt to hide its feel-good motivations. Rather, it stands tall and proud and avows to the world: “Behold! I will tug your heartstrings and I will fill your brain with dripping sap. And you will love it!” And it’s true, we do love it. Under almost any other circumstances, this movie would be too sentimental, too unabashedly corny to be anything but terrible. But director Frank Capra was the master of the sentimental, the crown prince of corny. He took this mountain of schmaltz—the whole movie was inspired by the text on a greeting card, for god’s sake!—and made it not an unforgivable disaster but rather a cinematic masterpiece.

It’s movies like this that really make the Christmas season. Our good guys and our bad guys are clearly defined and the good guys just as clearly triumph. We’re given a lesson—that no man is a failure as long as he has friends—that’s impossible to disagree with. The scene with George and his sweetheart Mary (Donna Reed) both listening in to a call on the same telephone is probably the most incredible sequence of romance, love and sexual tension ever captured on film. And with Capra at the helm, Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in the lead roles and a supporting cast of all the most likeable people in the world, it all adds up to a movie that will warm your heart in all the proper ways, that’ll make you feel good and make you feel good about feeling good. I laugh and I cry each time I watch it, and while it’s playing I never want it to end.

Here’s to George Bailey, the richest man in town.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

They really knew how to make movies back in the early 1930s. A taut and effective story told without any superfluous filler and it’s all over in an hour and ten minutes. Yes, please! Plus, there’s the whole thing about how this movie is still considered essential watching more than 75 years after its release, which is generally indicative of pretty awesome quality. Frankenstein is the greatest of the classic monster movies from Universal, and none of the other tellings of the tale that have been made since has ever come close to this one. The movie takes Mary Shelley’s original novel and improves on it. Yes, folks, Frankenstein is one of that rare breed, the film that’s better than the novel on which it is based.

We all know the story. If anybody here doesn’t know the story, you can just go home right now because what in the hell is wrong with you? A scientist digs up corpses and builds himself a manmonster! Manmonster terrorizes people, mob has torches, the monster meets his demise (OR DOES HE?!) and that’s that. On the surface, that doesn’t seem too wildly impressive; that, in the words of one Lita Ford, ain’t no big thing. Why, then, has the movie lasted through the decades? What makes it rise above the pack and gets it on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest movies? I submit that the movie’s staying power is attributable largely to its portrayal of the monster. In 1931, audiences were usually sheltered from anything too unpleasant and were certainly never encouraged to see the line between good and evil as blurry. Along comes Frankenstein, with a monster who is nonetheless human, who we feel compassion and sympathy for, and the whole concept of what kind of story you could tell on screen was turned on its ear. It was a bold move and a brilliant one.

Boris Karloff’s skills as a performer allowed real humanity and emotion and thought to emerge through all the mortician’s wax and spirit gum on his face. Without ever uttering a single word, Karloff’s monster speaks volumes. He’s got an abnormal brain rattling around in his skull, a brain taken from a known criminal, so some might say his monstrous actions are inevitable, but I disagree. There is great potential for love and compassion in this so-called monster, and there’s a desire to have those same things given to him. In the scene where the monster is exposed to sunlight for the first time, we get our first inkling that maybe he isn’t a monster at all. As the window opens and the sunlight comes streaming in, the monster reaches up, trying to take hold of the light, not comprehending that it can be all around him yet he can still be unable to touch it. When the window is covered again and the light is banished, the monster holds out his hands in a pleading, questioning gesture: Where did it go? This guy isn’t a monster, he’s a child, a child who lacks the knowledge to understand the world around him and finds himself with no one willing to teach him. He’s alone, his yearning for understanding ignored by the people who can’t abide him simply for the way he was born. Is it any wonder he became a “monster?”

As pitiable as Karloff’s monster is in the scene with the light, nothing can top the scene at the lakeshore with the young girl, Maria. This quick sequence may well be the saddest thing ever put to film. The monster kills the girl, yes, but it’s not because he’s malicious; again, it’s because he doesn’t understand. It’s not like his murder of Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant, where he’s clearly acting out of rage. This little girl had been kind to him—had played with him—and he responded to these friendly gestures with obvious delight. He and the girl throw pretty flowers into a lake and watch them float on the water’s surface. When the flowers run out, the monster is unsure of how to act or what to do next. Trying to keep the game going, he picks up the pretty girl and throws her in the lake, assuming she too will float gracefully and it will all be part of the fun. When he realizes that something has gone horribly wrong, he’s not pleased with the havoc he’s created; he’s terrified. He has no idea why the flowers were fine when the girl wasn’t, he only knows that he’s made a grievous mistake and he runs away, frightened and sad. It’s an absolutely heartbreaking scene, one of the finest in all of cinema history.

Having been several decades away from being born when the movie was initially released, I can’t say whether audiences of the time would have found Frankenstein to be scary. Certainly modern audiences are not going to be jumping in their seats the way they do at Hollywood’s current crop of horror films. Before the film proper begins, actor Edward Van Sloan comes on screen and announces that if you don’t wish to subject your nerves to undue strain you’d better leave the theater now because this picture’s gonna scare you shitless. This was doubtless done for sensational reasons rather than genuine concern that audiences may keel over and die from fright, but there may have been an element of truth to it. Audiences may truly have been scared by the murderous events of the story and the eerie cinematography (heavily influenced by German films of the time), I cannot say for sure. But I don’t think director James Whale really meant to be scary. It’s clear he identified with the monster’s outsider status—Whale was an open homosexual—and that this is what was most interesting to him about the story, a character ostracized from mainstream society simply for the way he was born, despite his capcity to be as human as the rest of us. I think the real scares in this movie come when we as audience members think: “Would I be just as quick to join that torch-wielding rabble? Or would I have the courage to learn the more complicated truths instead of taking the easy solution?” We’re scared of what the answer might be when we ask ourselves questions like that, and Frankenstein won’t let us get away with avoiding them.

Interesting trivia: Dr. Frankenstein’s (Colin Clive) first name here is given as Henry rather than the more familiar Victor. Further, the hunchbacked laboratory assistant (Dwight Frye, a brilliant character actor who also played Renfield in Universal’s Dracula)is not named Igor, but rather Fritz. Wrap your mind around that one!

And let’s not forget the most important thing about Frankenstein. Without it, there could never have been Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and we would live in a much less joyous world.

I’m kind of torn about the inclusion of Psycho on the 100 Greatest list. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, everyone considers it a classic, and I guess that makes it one; there’s no official definition of “classic” after all. That status is bestowed on a film by subjective group consensus rather than objective analysis. But the thing about Psycho is that, even though I do enjoy it, I recognize that it has a number of flaws. It’s nothing hugely grievous, but there are a lot of little things that, taken together, add up to a movie that essentially succeeds in spite of itself.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve seen it many times and still derive enjoyment from it, and if you’ve never seen it and somehow have managed to go through life without ever hearing the details of its plot, then holy cow you should see it right away. I can still distinctly remember the first time I saw the flick as a small child. I went into it not knowing a thing about the movie. I was thrown for a loop when, a third of the way through, it suddenly turns from a story about an embezzler to a ghastly murder mystery, and I was completely blown away when the full details of the mystery were revealed at the movie’s end. I never, ever saw it coming and my socks were, as they say, knocked off (which might explain why now I can never find any when I need them). So if you’ve never seen it, you definitely ought.

It’s on repeat viewings, however, that you start to see the cracks in what at first seemed to be a rock solid foundation. Little things here and there begin to jump out at you as being a lot less fascinating than you’d first believed. After the first murder, there is a lengthy scene devoted to cleaning up the mess. Just as the tension is finally really revved up in the form of a brutal slaying, the movie does a complete one-eighty, slowing to a crawl as we watch Anthony Perkins mop his bathroom. There’s an even longer scene at the end of the movie where a character I like to call “Exposition Dan” gives an interminable speech explaining the twist ending, I guess in case the audience was too ass-tarded to figure it out on their own. It’s a tedious scene, and on top of that it’s something of an insult to the intelligence of the viewer. Did Hitchcock really think nobody would be able to figure it out without this oily-haired cat talking down to us with a smarmy grin on his face?

And then there’s Bernard Herrmann’s score. Everyone knows the screechy “ree ree ree” music used during the famous shower scene; it’s practically become synonymous with death by stabbing. That aspect of the music is good, I shan’t deny it. It’s very much the exact musical equivalent of a sharp knife slicing through the air toward your flesh with intent to maim. But the rest of the score is oppressively heavy-handed. Instead of being scary, it has the effect of shouting at you “I AM SCARY MUSIC, AM I NOT?” But it’s just a lie meant to cover the fact that the music doesn’t do what it says it will-and everyone can tell it’s a lie. Sort of like when a nerdy kid tells you about his girlfriend who lives two towns over.

Why, then, has this movie endured? For one, it’s undeniably a good story. The details of Norman Bates’ life make a ripping yarn. (And the story of the real-life psycho on whom Norman is loosely based, Ed Gein, is no less interesting and even more gruesome.) Mostly, however, I think this movie’s continued success is a testament to Anthony Perkins’ absolutely stellar turn as Norman Bates. It’s the performance of a lifetime, for sure. Virtually every line is given an odd quirk, an unexpected subtlety or a layer of nuance only an actor of remarkable capabilities could impart. Anthony Perkins is Norman Bates. He brings the character to life in every way, making him live and breathe and pop off the screen in a way very few characters have in all of cinema history. By creating a character so believable, both frightening and sympathetic simultaneously, the audience is able to connect with his story and so become wrapped up in it, leaving them more willing to overlook some of the negative aspects of the film than they might otherwise be.

What we’re left with is a film that has its share of both bad and good, so I think a rating of three out of five is fair. It’s an enjoyable picture, but also an overpraised one. Hitchcock made better movies, and there have been better films in the same genre since. There have also been many that were worse, however, and I suspect that has as much to do with Psycho’s staying power as the merits of the film itself. It’s a good movie…but I don’t know that it’s one of the 100 best.

The serious and objective part of my brain looks at AFI’s rating for Star Wars and thinks that, although the movie is undeniably great and groundbreaking and influential, the number 15 slot is probably way too high. Another part of my brain, though, thinks the hell with all that, because holy nut do I love Star Wars. That part of me is gonna win out today, and you can take that to the bank.

I’ve been a total, balls-to-the-wall Star Wars fan (of the original trilogy, that is) virtually my entire life. Any kind of sensible review, with legitimate analysis and appropriate discussion, is impossible. I can’t talk about the whole Joseph Campbell, mythological and archetypal aspects of it, or about the numerous movies, especially Akira Kurosawa films, to which it owes tremendous debts. I know about these things, having seen and heard and read gazillions of interviews and essays and commentaries about the movies. But any attempt to actually discuss them is futile; I get talking about Star Wars and pretty soon I’m just gushing about all my favorite parts of the movie. I have so much goodwill for the picture, and so many happy memories associated with it, that all I can do is present to you a list. A list of Things I Love About Star Wars.

The Droids
A pretty bold decision on the part of George Lucas was to have the beginning of the film focus entirely on relatively minor characters. Characters who are, in fact, robots! Is there anything quite so delicious as a pair of robots? I submit that there is not. The robots in question are See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo. For those of you not in the know, the former is golden, bipedal and gay; the latter is squat and has a midget inside of him. Robots are great, yes, but the greatest kind of robot of all is undeniably the “midget stuffed into a trashcan” variety. The comical misadventures of this mismatched duo bring welcome levity to the proceedings. They’re also great characters for people who’ve never seen the films and for whom a movie like Star Wars would not usually be included in the viewing library. Just when a person not hip to the ways of sci-fi might be getting bogged down in all the talk of traveling through hyperspace and Jundland Wastes and galactic empires and bullseyeing womp rats, along come the droids to allow him to say “HA HA, THAT ONE ROBOT DONE SMACKED T’OTHER UPSIDE THE HAID!”

Princess Leia
She’s hot and that’s all there is to it. She has cinnamon buns on the sides of her head, it’s true, but who doesn’t enjoy a good cinnamon bun? In the long history of fine-lookin’ damsels in distress, Princess Leia may be the finest-lookin’ of them all. Even the fact that she sometimes develops a comically unconvincing British accent for no reason, fading it in and out of her speech seemingly at a whim, cannot detract from the fact that I wish she was my girlfriend. Maybe you don’t believe me. Maybe somehow you’ve gone through your life without knowing how hot Princess Leia is and you require some proof. To that end, let me give you this little taste:

Important true fact about the cantina band: In the Star Wars universe, their style of music is called “jizz wailing.”

This One Part Where Darth Vader Waves His Hand Around
Darth Vader is the baddest of the bad, the epitome of the merciless bloodthirsty supervillain. He’s scary and evil and would just as soon blow up your planet as look at you, but he’s also supremely cool. An audience loves to be compelled by the bad guy just as much as they love to cheer for the hero, and Darth Vader’s a bad guy you can really get behind. No other character has as much power to make me want to surrender fully to the forces of evil and spend the rest of my days slaughtering the innocent; he makes being evil seem so very bad ass. What you might not know about Darth Vader, though, is that there’s this one moment in Star Wars where he shakes his hand around in the air for no readily apparent reason. It’s a gesture akin to the one you’d make if you were saying “that’s a spicy meat-a-ball!” But the thing is, Vader’s not saying that. In fact, he’s not saying anything at all, he’s just gesticulating wildly apropos of nothing. The moment comes as Vader is talking to Moff Tarkin on the Death Star. It’s just after he says “I told you she would never consciously betray the Rebellion.” Before it cuts to Tarkin saying “Terminate her immediately,” Vader finishes talking, stares at Tarkin for a second, and then raises his hand up in the air and starts shaking it here and there like a man doing a tiny, hand-intensive dance. It is awesome, I assure you.

Oh yeah, plus there’s explosions and magic space wizards and Harrison Ford and action-packed aerial dogfights. But, whatever, the point is Star Wars is great and if you don’t watch it at least once a week you are a terrible person. Like, Hitler terrible.

If you don’t like Star Wars, you will also totally hate:

Look on this movie, ye mighty, and despair! This is the comedy of comedies, the absolute ne plus ultra of humor. Every other movie with laughs on the agenda—whether it’s a “comedy with a message” like this one or a straight-ahead comedy like Airplane!—wishes it could be this good. All others are mere pretenders to the throne; Dr. Strangelove will reign forever as the king of comedies.

What makes it so good is that it has just about every type of joke there is. By the nature of the story, most of the comedy is satire, but that’s not all Dr. Strangelove has to offer. There’s slapstick, there’s non-sequitur humor, there’s funny accents, there’s poop humor, and there’s a subtle (or not-so-subtle) dick joke or sexual innuendo just about every time you turn around. Strictly in terms of the comedic content, the movie has absolutely everything you could want.

The story centers on a B-52 that’s been given erroneous orders to nuke the Soviet Union by the insane General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden). While efforts are made to subdue the rogue officer and obtain the code necessary to recall the bomber, the best parts of the movie take place in the War Room of U.S. President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers). Assembled here are a crop of hysterical characters—George C. Scott as Air Force General Buck Turgidson, Peter Bull as Alexei de Sadesky, the Soviet Ambassador, and Sellers again as Dr. Strangelove, the mysterious ex-Nazi scientist now at work for the U.S. Government. Their discussions and arguments in the War Room about what to do to stop the B-52 from delivering its payload or what to do if it succeeds are the highlight of not just this movie but of cinema in general. In particular, I direct you to the largely improvised telephone conversation between President Muffley and Soviet Premier Dmitri Kissoff. That one sequence is funnier than any ten so-called comedies cranked out today and stands as evidence that Peter Sellers was perhaps the world’s single greatest comedic talents.

Not to mention his hilarious performance as the titular Dr. Strangelove. Every time Dr. Strangelove is on screen, something hilarious is going on, whether it’s the black-gloved hand with a mind of it’s own, the character’s sheer delight at the idea of slaughtering animals or his frequent lapses back into the jargon of his former loyalties (you can take the mad scientist out of Nazi Germany, but you can’t take the Nazi out of the mad scientist). Scott’s turn as General Turgidson is equally hilarious, with the audience never quite able to guess when he’s going to pause, place emphasis, wink, champ meaningfully on his gum or even fall down on the floor.

Every performance is wonderful. The set design of Ken Adam (of James Bond fame) is absolutely staggering. Stanley Kubrick’s direction is the best of his career, masterful and innovative without falling into the heavy-handed “Look at me, I’m Stanley Kubrick” trap as did some of his later films. Every aspect of the film comes together beautifully, but the standout star is the script itself. The movie’s take on Cold War paranoia, mutually assured destruction, and right-wing warmongering is the most skillfully executed satire there’s ever been. All the jokes are exquisitely constructed and perfectly delivered. (“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”) (“One of our base commanders…he ordered his planes to attack your country…well, let me finish, Dmitri.”) Despite being an extremely talky picture, the script is such that the movie never once lags or leaves you glancing at your watch; the viewer hangs on every hilarious word.

I couldn’t endorse this movie more strongly. It’s one of those rare things in the world of filmmaking, a comedy whose jokes never become stale no matter how many times you hear them and a movie tied very definitely to the period in which it was made that hasn’t become at all dated even after more than forty years. The Russians may no longer be THE ENEMY, but the issues of paranoia and simple-minded warhawks in decision making positions ring just as true today and make the movie just as valuable. Watch it today.

And again tomorrow.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Number twenty-five my fat, bepimpled ass! How can E.T. be at number twenty-five? Can you honestly think of twenty-four movies that are better than this? Of course not! Nobody can! E.T. is a top ten film for sure. What movie has touched more hearts and set more imaginations soaring? E.T. tops Steven Spielberg’s already impressive resume because it’s a movie that embraces you completely and draws you in, heart and mind. If you don’t cry when E.T. dies and have your hopes reborn when he comes back, only to cry all the more when he goes home with an “I’ll be right here,” then you are dead inside with a heart as black as coal and that’s all there is to it. The movie captures the spirit of both the child and the child inside, and it does it effortlessly, making it look as though getting an audience to invest emotionally in a rubber puppet is as easy as falling off a log.

We all know what the movie’s about (and I just told you that E.T. dies, is resurrected and flies back into space in a giant Christmas tree ornament, so if you didn’t know…oops!) and we all know that it’s awesome, so there’s no point in a real review. Any attempt by me to be objective would ultimately fail anyway, leaving me so overcome with love for the film that I could write no more than “OMG THIS MOVIE ROXORZ, IS HE A PIG HE SURE EATS LIKE ONE LOL!” But despite the fact that I love this movie so much it turns me into (more of) a babbling moron, AFI declares it to be only the twenty-fifth best, with movies such as 2001 and Singin’ in the Fuckin’ Rain coming in ahead of it. Therefore, there must have been something about E.T. that the folks at the American Film Institute just felt wasn’t up to snuff. In an effort to figure out just what the hell prompted this decision, let’s dig deep and look at some of the flaws this movie, great though it is, suffers from.

All Hollering, All the Time
For a person such as myself, who goes through life with a constant headache, nothing is quite as painful a dagger in the brain as the sound of children at play. And this film is just chock full of kids making as much noise as is possible. Henry Thomas as Elliott and Drew Barrymore as Gertie have voices of crystal-shattering shrillness, and they both spend approximately 98% of their screen time yelling, whether at each other, the rest of the family members, the television, barns, trees, or E.T. himself. And when they shriek at E.T., he has no qualms about stretching out his neck and shrieking right back. Perhaps the only sound more grating than the eardrum rending call of a wild Drew Barrymore is the yell of a squat spaceman. Here is a typical scene from the film:

Elliott: Hey, I found me this alien.
Gertie (yelling): AAAAAAAAAHHH!
Elliott (yelling): AAAAAAAAAAGGHHGHH!
E.T. (perplexed, yelling): AAAAAAAAGH!
Michael (yelling): Why’s everybody yelling so much? AAAAARRRGHHH!

The Drew Barrymore Factor
Yes, Drew is cute here, and largely inoffensive (apart from squealing like a piglet trod upon by John Goodman). If this were all there were to the Drew Barrymore story, we’d doubtless all think of her fondly. Alas, this is not the case. You can’t watch her performance in E.T. without being reminded of the foul brimstone reek of movies like Firestarter, 50 First Dates, Charlie’s Angels, Ever After and…well, just about every other movie she’s appeared in. It’s not fair to judge something by what came after it, but when you see Drew you can’t help but remember that she’s been in at least two Adam Sandler pictures.

Oh My God, Are They Playing Dungeons and Dragons?
Early in the film, Elliott and his friends are seen playing some manner of game that, if not Dungeons and Dragons exactly, is clearly meant to bring it to mind. I’m quite certain that if God ever decides to call someone up for another mountaintop meeting and dole out some new commandments, the first one he adds is going to be “Thou shalt not bring to mind Dungeons and Dragons.”

E.T. Home Phone
That’s no typo, folks. As E.T. prepares to tell his new earth-friend the plan he’s devised, he strikes a pose, opens his mouth and says: “E.T. home phone.” Home phone? What’s that shit? Immediately afterward, Elliott turns it around and says it as the more familiar “E.T. phone home.” But when E.T. himself first makes the remark, in what should be an iconic moment, he says it all ass backward. I can see how a movie not being able to successfully deliver its own catch phrase would knock it back a few points in the AFI list-making process.

Why No Guns N’ Roses?
The soundtrack for E.T. is alarmingly free of the music of GN’R. I realize the flick hit theaters in 1982 and Guns N’ Roses’ small debut pressing of Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide didn’t come along until 1986, but still. That is no excuse.

So yes, these are some critical flaws. But are they critical enough to bump the picture all the way down to number twenty-five on the list? This reporter thinks not. In fact, there is one line, spoken by Elliott, that is so fantastic that the movie would still be a classic even if the rest of it were no better than Heaven’s Gate. I’m sure you remember the line just as well as I do, so feel free to say it with me. In fact, stand up and shout it with me: “It was nothin’ like that, Penis-Breath!”

You’re gonna tell me twenty-four movies can top that?