100 Reasons I Love the Movies

It Might Get Loud – creating a guitar

Maybe this is more of a “yay music!” thing than a “yay movies!” thing, but whatever. It’s in a movie. Jack White assembles a guitar out of a two-by-four, a bottle, and some wire. This is the opening scene of this documentary bringing together White, Jimmy Page, and The Edge, and I was already hooked.

Shakespeare in Love – the Elizabethan theatre

It may be romanticized all out of proportion, but the portrayal of Elizabethan theatre in Shakespeare in Love had me utterly captivated, from the need for “a bit with a dog” to the theatre in the round, to the little hints of contemporary writers like Marlowe and Webster, to the giddy rehearsal and performance scenes. The soaring score and my love of Shakespeare’s words didn’t hurt either.

Speed Racer – sensory overload

I’ve never seen a film that does such an incredible job of visceral sensory overload as Speed Racer. I think I watched the entire thing with my jaw dropped, just overwhelmed by the visuals – it truly is an experiential film of the best kind. This is the opening several minutes, which establishes the real-life-cartoon aesthetic the film goes for, and ends up with the opening race. It looks fine here, but see it on Blu-ray on the biggest HD screen you can find. Wow.

Playtime – composition in depth

For Playtime, Jacques Tati make the unusual decision to shoot full-frame on 70mm film, which creates an extraordinary opportunity to compose shots deep rather than wide – and he makes the most of it, using the whole screen all the time, often with multiple things going on. It creates a sense of space and spatial relationships that’s rarely seen in film anymore, and that I love to see.

Magnolia – “chance” opening

This little opening bit of Magnolia would pretty much work just as a short film, exploring instances of chance or coincidence, which is what Magnolia is pretty much about – the seemingly coincidental interactions among people, culminating in “chance” phenomena like a rain of frogs. What are the odds?

Moulin Rouge – opening

I loved Moulin Rogue instantly when the opening came up, the flickering look of vintage cinema mixed with the haunting vocals of John Leguizamo singing “Nature Boy” followed by the stylized flythrough the Montmartre district of Paris. Though I’m a fan of the movie as a whole, the rest of it never quite lives up to this little sequence. Unfortunately, it’s not on YouTube, so I can’t show more than a screencap.

All About Eve – Thelma Ritter

Gotta admit it’s tough thinking of just one thing to highlight about All About Eve, but in a cast full of great established and up-and-coming actresses (Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, Marilyn Monroe), veteran character actress Thelma Ritter just about steals the show. She’s the only one who sees straight through Eve’s act right from the beginning, offering a typically caustic “everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end” to Eve’s life story. Ritter is a gem, and All About Eve and Rear Window are her shining moments.

Broadway Melody of 1940 – Begin the Beguine

This is quite likely my all-time favorite tap number, pairing Fred Astaire with maybe the only female tapper who could match him step for step, Eleanor Powell. It’s part of a much bigger production extravaganza of the Cole Porter song “Begin the Beguine,” but this is the best thing not only in the number, but in the whole film. I love the casual approach they both seem to be taking to it, as if they’re just out for a stroll, and the little one-ups-manship contest they carry on with their eyes as well as their feet.

Vivre sa vie – Anna Karina crying

I seem to have a thing for movies where people watch movies, and maybe that’s one reason I like Jean-Luc Godard so much – even when his characters aren’t watching movies, his iconography is inundated with cinema. In this case, Anna Karina is watching a movie – Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Ark – and is moved to tears. Seeing her moved to tears moved me to tears.

The purity of early cinema

The earliest cinema, the films made by Edison and Lumiere and others from 1895-1903 or so, are often termed “primitive cinema,” and I can understand why, as they generally consist of short documentary-type scenes, little or no narrative, no camera movement or editing even. Most of the techniques we associate with movies aren’t even in their infancy at this point. And yet, these films are fascinating and ones like this one, of serpentine dancer Loie Fuller, hold a purity and innocence that transcend their age. Lots of serpentine dances were filmed at the time; this one is my favorite (of the ones I’ve seen), thanks to Fuller’s grace and the hand-tinted colors.

The Fifth Element – big bada boom

Or, every scene in the whole movie that has Leeloo in it, which is most of the scenes. But I love this one especially, mostly because of the little giggles she gives as Corben plays along with her “big bada boom” description. I had seen other Milla Jovovich movies before I saw this one, but I’m pretty sure this is where my girlcrush hit epic heights.

The Wizard of Oz – switching to color

The Wizard of Oz wasn’t the first film in 3-color Technicolor by about three years, but it was one of the first to use both B&W and color for a narrative purpose. Other films had put in a color musical sequence or a color fashion show sequence, but The Wizard of Oz underscored the brilliance of Oz by placing it in color after a drab Kansas (putting Kansas in sepia rather than pure B&W was brilliant, too). The moment when Dorothy opens the door, revealing a resplendent Munchkin city is one of the most memorable transitions ever.

Blue Valentine – “You Always Hurt the Ones You Love”

This scene is simultaneously joyful and heartbreaking – joyful because it’s a wonderfully sweet depiction of two people just falling in love and enjoying each other’s company, heartbreaking because you know the trauma that their relationship will soon be going through. It’s an utterly perfect distillation of everything about the film, as even though in context, the song and dance is lighthearted and goofy, the song he’s singing is painfully prescient.

The Empire winning in The Empire Strikes Back

When I first saw Star Wars: A New Hope, I was like, yeah, that was fun. But when I saw The Empire Strikes Back and realized that it basically ended with our rebel heroes on the run, Han Solo frozen in carbonite at the mercy of Jabba the Hutt, Luke Skywalker physically and emotionally defeated and missing a hand, C-3PO in pieces, and the Empire inexorably closing in, I was like “WHOA. This is awesome.” Not because I’m pro-Empire, of course, but because I loved that Lucas was willing not only to have his characters know defeat and despair (literally nothing goes right in this chapter, for any of our people), but to have the film end on that note.

Potemkin – The Odessa Steps

The most famous sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s most famous film is a distillation of his theories of montage, which is not editing for narrative flow, but to create dialectical meaning through rhythm, speed, collision, contrasting lines and images, etc. – an intellectual approach to editing that directly contradicts standard continuity editing. Theory or no, the Odessa step sequence remains extraordinarily powerful on a purely emotional and visceral level. See also Brian De Palma’s homage in The Untouchables (YouTube, unfortunately the clip I could find is not in English).

The Matrix – dodge this

I had at least a couple of other Matrix sections in here before deciding to go with this one, but really, how do you get better than Trinity shooting an agent at point blank range right after seeing Neo test out his own bullet-dodging skills? Trinity is awesome. Nuff said.

Band of Outsiders/The Dreamers – the Louvre

Confession: I actually saw The Dreamers before I saw Band of Outsiders, and even though I didn’t really care for the second half of Bertolucci’s film, the first part, set during the 1968 student riots in Paris (especially the one about the removal of Henri Langlois from the Cinématheque Française) had me totally captivated and probably can be credited with my eventual obsession with the New Wave. Someone has kindly put the original Louvre-in-six-minutes scene from Band of Outsiders side by side with its homage in The Dreamers.

Oklahoma! – Ado Annie

When I was a kid, I had every bit of Oklahoma! memorized – songs, dialogue, the whole bit. But my favorite parts were always the ones involving Ado Annie – I just loved her little bit of naughtiness combined with the playing-dumb exterior and the fact that her songs were the funniest. It was also my first glimpse of Gloria Grahame, who’s now one of my favorite lesser-known classical Hollywood actresses. I found out later she was massively uncomfortable in this part due to the singing, but she manages to go after it with gusto anyway.

Fantasia 2000 – “Rhapsody in Blue”

When the original Fantasia came out, it’s unlikely that Walt Disney would’ve considered an relatively recent jazz composition by a guy still writing primarily for movies and Broadway shows rather than the concert stage an appropriate piece for his classical music infused opus, but by 1999, Gershwin’s music stands as among the most innovative and enduring of the 20th century, and wedding it to art inspired by Al Hirschfeld’s cartoons is perfect. Easily my favorite segment of BOTH Fantasia films.

King Kong – the humanity of Kong

Come on, look at that face! The original King Kong doesn’t go quite as far as Jackson’s remake in terms of making it a love story between Kong and Ann Darrow, but despite the somewhat obviousness of the stop-motion effects, it’s impossible to dismiss Kong as just a savage animal. That something more that animator Willis O’Brien managed to infuse in Kong is what makes Kong such an enduring film.

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