3. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)



The year 2001 has long since come and gone, but the movie named for it seems to exist outside of time. There was nothing like it before and there’s been nothing quite like it since, although Stanley Kubrick’s space odyssey has influenced filmmakers as dissimilar as David Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson. Ranging from the dawn of man to beyond the infinite, it’s larger than life and should be experienced that way, preferably on 70mm, as I once saw it at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. (A screening at which it seemed self-evident that the intermission coming rather late in the game is timed perfectly for the audience to slip out to the parking lot and get into the proper headspace for the grand finale.) You could fit all of its dialogue on a greeting card, and little of it means anything at all. Kubrick’s epic is all about exploding the structure of narrative film, marrying big, bold imagery to minimalist plotting – it’s about a filmmaker reaching for the stars. Kubrick’s reach may have exceeded his grasp, but he took us on a hell of a ride along the way. (SVD)

To watch 2001 is to marvel at how big Stanley Kubrick’s ideas really were. Most movies, even the best ones, are content to confine themselves to the concerns of man, but the scope of 2001 stands astride human history, observing the beginning before leaping forward to behold the beginning of the end. He did this through bravura filmmaking to be sure, but also an uncanny ability to make his ideas visual rather than spelling them out in dialogue. Long portions of 2001 play without dialogue, and when the human characters speak, they have almost nothing of consequence to say. They go about their business as momentous events play around them, and even after they learn of an important extraterrestrial presence on the moon, they pass the time by prattling on about the sandwiches they’ve been given. Of course the effects are lovely, even today -- a feat that’s all the more impressive for the fact that Kubrick and his technicians had to invent many of them for the movie. But the technical wizardry doesn’t stand alone:  rather, it's part of a directorial tour de force that was made with genuine care by one of the most gifted filmmakers ever to pick up a camera. (PC)

2. THE GODFATHER (1972)



There’s no real debate – maybe there hasn’t been for 35 years – about whether or not The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are masterpieces of Hollywood filmmaking. The only real debate is which of the two is superior. Many critics and viewers simply refuse to choose and lump the two together as a single film; it’s a decision I can fully understand and support. Most critics, though, when asked to pick just one, go for the second film, with its epic scope, its ramped-up internecine complexity, and its darker vision of violence and betrayal. When the wind is south-southwest, I agree with them; the two films are of such phenomenal merit that any given day, either one could be considered the greatest movie ever made. But if I had to carve in stone my favorite, it would be the first. It may have not had the engaging complexity of its sequel, and it left its ending far more ambiguous than the blood-soaked tragedy of Part II, but its cast was note-perfect in every single scene, anchored by the monumental presence of Marlon Brando, and its structure was untouchable, serving as a moving textbook of how to craft a great film. It built the towering edifice that its sequel would so brilliantly destroy, and it was one of those rare films that arrived in the world instantly recognizable as a thing of greatness. If Part II shocked the world by surpassing it, it’s because The Godfather was so great it seemed impossible to surpass. (LP)

I can’t recall if I ever posted this story before...but what the heck, I’m outta here soon anyway, so:  I once had a girlfriend (now sadly and tragically departed, and way, way too young) who was obsessed with both parts of The Godfather. During our years together, we watched the whole epic dozens of times, and eventually came to know every scene and line by heart (especially Luca Brasi’s stated hope for “a masculine child” on the day of Connie’s wedding, a line delivered with absolutely believable nervousness by actor Lenny Montana, reportedly due to his own absolute nervousness on the day of filming).  Very few movies stand up to so many repeat viewings...and then one night, a freshly-struck print of The Godfather screened at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, and I was astonished to discover even more sumptuous visual detail packed into the frame than I’d ever noticed before, which only heightened my awareness of the nearly unparalleled genius of the film...as well as the staggering crappiness of The Godfather: Part III. (AO)

And now, the Screengrab's pick for the Number One Film Of All Time...

1. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)



Robert Altman's take on the Western is as upside-down as Sam Peckinpah's. Where The Wild Bunch is epic and bloody, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is about being small and transient in the great landscape of the West. As big as John McCabe's dreams are, they're only in his head. All the poetry in his soul doesn't mean anything in this tiny community grasping at civilization. His final stand, his big gun battle, is as unimportant to the town of Presbyterian Church as Icarus plunging into the sea in Pieter Brueghal's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. W.H. Auden wrote of this painting in his poem "Musee des Beaux Arts":

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

In Presbyterian Church, the burning of the unfinished titular church takes precedence over McCabe's last stand. And there's always something else happening when humanity takes its last stand. Where Peckinpah mixed the myth with realism, Robert Altman always preferred the real. (HC)



You know what always gets me?  When Mr. "I don't make deals!" says of McCabe, "That man never killed anybody," he sounds as if he were describing a character defect. The movies have always been populated by guys like this, and it's sobering to realize how many times the movies they were in didn't recoil from them in dismay; on more occasions than I think I want to know, these guys were the heroes!  By the end of the movie, McCabe will have killed somebody, all right, before settling in to be covered over with snow as if he were a statue commemorating the town that he'd built. The town will go on, and the woman he loves may eventually notice that he's not around anymore, but at the moment of his death, she barely knows what planet she's on. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Leonard Pearce, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent