I went about 2800 words over the target length for my last article so I’m going to try to keep this one a bit more reigned in.  Then again I have only a third of the movies to deal with and a much shorter introduction.  Just a reminder, I have disqualified any nominees for the Best Picture Academy Award to keep my list from looking too much like everybody else’s.  That means a lot of films like Brokeback Mountain, Inglourious Basterds, Mystic River, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, that would have otherwise made my list, won’t.  Also worth noting is that unlike last week when I say 5 I mean 5 movies (no genres or studios), ranked.  Reminder: for an unranked list of “6” through “15” click here.

And now for the Top 5… (can you hear the drum roll in your head?)

5.         Oldboy (2003)

            Director: Park Chan-Wook

We first meet Oh Dae-su in 1988.  He is an overweight businessman at a police station being detained for drunk and disorderly conduct.  His friend Joo-Hwan bails him out and goes to a phone booth to call his wife and young daughter.  As Joo-Hwan makes the call, Dae-su disappears.  It turns out that Oh Dae-su has been abducted and placed in a private prison resembling a seedy hotel room.  He is fed fried dumplings every night and frequently knocked unconscious by mysterious gas so the room can be cleaned and his hair can be cut.  His only company is the television, which is how he learns that his wife has been murdered and he has been framed for the crime.  He stays locked in the room for fifteen years.  Then, in 2003, he is released without any explanation as to why he was even imprisoned in the first place.  THIS ALL HAPPENS IN THE FIRST 15 MINUTES!  Now with his wife dead and his daughter being raised by her Swedish adoptive parents in Stockholm he sets out to learn what the fuck the whole imprisonment deal was about.  But knowledge is not always a good thing.  The person who imprisoned Oh Dae-su is not done with him by a long shot.  Oldboy may be the best movie ever made about revenge.  Multiple characters set out for revenge and some achieve it but no one really walks away satisfied.  Does this movie have a happy ending?  I suppose that really depends on your perspective.  Enough seriously fucked-up things happen that most will not say so.  This is not a movie for the faint of heart, and I do not just say that in reference to the violence (which while intense is not worse than other movies you’ve probably seen before).  Seriously disturbing things happen and that is not a warning to be taken lightly.  Oldboy leaves an impression.  It is the second film of Park Chan-Wook’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” following Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and preceding Lady Vengeance, but it is the standout best of his entire ouvre.  He has made other great films worth checking out like the political murder mystery Joint Security Area, the insane asylum-set love story I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, and the non-sparkling vampire film Thirst.  It has been said of him that he crafts the visuals of his films with a jeweler’s precision and I can’t disagree.  The visuals demonstrate the technique of an artist who knows exactly what he is doing.  Oldboy may not be the feel-good movie of the decade but it is a film that stays with you.

4.         Memento (2000)

            Director: Christopher Nolan

I am a fan of hardboiled detective fiction: your Phillip Marlowe/Sam Spade types.  The story is simple enough: a man sets out to find out the truth, but the way to the truth ends up being anything but simple.  Enter Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), the protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s Memento.  His wife (Jorja Fox) was raped and murdered and he sustained a blow to the head that left him with anterograde memory loss – the inability to form new memories after his injury.  He retains all knowledge from before the injury and remains aware of his surroundings, but everything that happens to him sort of fades away.  He doesn’t let this stop him, though.  He is out to catch and kill the man who killed his wife and fucked up his brain.  The film opens with a Polaroid picture developing in reverse.  Instead of becoming clearer the image fades away.  This is the perfect visual metaphor for Leonard’s state of mind and the perfect introduction to this puzzle of a film.  After that, the film splits into two parallel narratives.  The first is in black and white and proceeds sequentially.  The second is in color and scenes are presented in reverse chronological order.  In any one of the color scenes you know what is going to happen next but you do not know what just happened, much like Leonard himself.  Detective stories tend to include a twist ending but with the structure of the movie, EVERY scene provides a twist on the scene that just preceded it.  By the end of the film the two narratives finally intersect and the whole picture becomes clear.  Leonard goes through his life not knowing if he can trust his “friend” Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), a women he meets named Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), or even his hotel clerk Burt (Mark Boone Junior).  Leonard may not even be able to trust Leonard.  His entire investigation revolves around notes he leaves for himself (some of which are even tattooed on his body).  He can never be sure that he isn’t being manipulated.  Nolan’s previous film Following and subsequent film The Prestige also made great use of nonlinear storytelling, but Memento is still the pinnacle of the technique.  Nolan would go on to remake Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Norwegian film Insomnia with Al Pacino and Robin Williams, before going on to reinvent the superhero franchise with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.  I have no clue what his forthcoming film Inception is about but Nolan is a master storyteller and his name in the credits is enough to get me in the theater.

3.         Almost Famous (2000)

            Director: Cameron Crowe

I dig music.  That is one of many reasons I love Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous.  I love the fact that Crowe actually LIVED this story and after making movies (Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire) for over a decade he decided it was finally time to tell it.  Crowe’s onscreen alter ego William Miller (Patrick Fugit) is a teenage rock writer who follows around the band Stillwater (Billy Crudup, Jason Lee, Mark Kozelek, and Jon Fedevich), a fictitious 1970s rock band that serves as an amalgamation of Crowe’s experiences shadowing the Eagles, Humble Pie, The Allman Brothers Band, and Led Zeppelin.  Oh, and Jimmy Fallon plays the devil.  Not literally or anything like that but his character embodies everything wrong with the music industry and he is painted to be the biggest tool humanly possible.  The movie is about the supposed “death” of rock ‘n roll, something people have been complaining about pretty much since the birth of rock ‘n roll.  The Greek chorus of the film is Crowe’s real-life mentor rock critic Lester Bangs (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman).  In his first couple scenes with William, he pretty much outlines everything that will happen: people will use him to make themselves look cooler.  They try to bring respectability to an art form that has always been righteously unrespectable.  The other thing I have to mention is Kate Hudson.  In this movie she will break your heart.  Firstly because of the tragic delusions of her character, secondly because after this movie she churned out shitty romantic comedy after shitty romantic comedy when Almost Famous showed us she could do so much better.  One of the themes of this movie is betrayal: William betraying the band’s confidence, Russell (Crudup) betraying Penny (Hudson), the band betraying William.  Lots of betrayal is what I’m saying.  But in the end, the movie has an oddly hopeful feeling and makes you feel good that people are out there creating things (an idea underscored somewhat by the AMAZING 1970s rock soundtrack).  Anyway back top an earlier point: is rock ‘n roll dead?  With the rampaging awesomeness of people like Josh Homme and Jack White, I’d venture to say not (plus a lot of the old-timers are still going).  As Neil Young said “hey hey my my, rock ‘n roll will NEVER die.”

 2.         Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001) [International Title: Amélie From Montmarte, U.S.A. title: Amélie]

            Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

J’adore ce film.  Amélie est un example de cinema magnifique.  Okay, enough of that, I’m only in my second semester of French and I’m pretty sure a lot of that was wrong… A blurb on the cover of the DVD says that Amélie is the “feel good movie of the year.”  I go further.  Feel good movie of the decade.  Even further: feel good movie of the history of cinema.  In my last article I said I wanted to live in Wes Anderson’s world.  That might be cool for a while but the world of Amélie is even better.  The movie is set in 1997 in Paris’ Montmarte area.  A young woman named Amélie Poulain (the adorable Audrey Tautou) decideds on a whim to become a do-gooder, improving the lives of the people around her in unseen ways.  Of course she completely neglects the things that might make HER happier, such as the oddball young man Nino Quincampoix (Matthieu Kassovitz, who directed the great movie La Haine).  A rich cast of supporting characters help to create this own magical color-corrected world in which you can’t help but feel everything works out for the best.  Jean-Pierre Jeunet uses innovative camera work and imaginative special effects to make Montmarte into a fairy tale place where anything can happen.  I don’t even want to summarize beyond what I already have because every second of this movie should be left for you to discover on your own.  I hate to overuse the phrase “feel good movie” but it really is insanely appropriate.  Those types of movies often find themselves passed over on “best of” lists in favor of more somber [read: depressing] fare.  But if a movie can make you feel good and give you hope and fill you with the sense that the world is full of wonder and mankind has an unending capacity to do good things even though everything in the real world seems to contradict that then I’d say it damn well does belong in the “best of” category (I wish I could say all that in French).  At the very least it is one of my personal favorite films of all time, so if you have not already seen it then do your self a favor and enjoy every magical frame this movie has to offer.

1.         WALL-E (2008)

            Director: Andrew Stanton

So unlike the previous installment in my Top “20,” I decided to prepare for the Top 5 by actually re-watching the films (which is a lot easier to do with five films as opposed to “15”).  Good thing too because Wall-E was originally set to be my number 3.  Until I watched it again and realized how naïve I was that it could be anything but number 1.  I love this movie.  I love every single frame of every single second of this movie.  There is not one damn thing I would change.  The story, the visuals, the characters, the message: all are pitch perfect.  Perhaps best of all the movie begins with an almost totally dialogue-free 40 minutes that must make Charlie Chaplain weep with joy from the afterlife.  I have a weird urge to go back and re-watch Chaplain’s Modern Times now, because Wall-E reminds me very much of ol’ Charlie’s mix of physical comedy and sentimentality often delivered without a word (though his later films were talkies).  Ben Burtt, the sound designed best known as the “voice” of R2D2, works his magic to design robot noises that give the impression of words and dialogue and even “voiced” the characters Wall-E and M-O himself.  Elissa Knight brings a playful energy as the “voice” of E.V.E., the Apple-like (computer, not the fruit) probe that captures Wall-E’s (figurative) heart.  The scenes on Earth of Wall-E romancing E.V.E. while showing off his collection of junk and cute pet cockroach (how often do you get to say that?) are sublime and would have been more than enough for a great movie, but Pixar wasn’t satisfied.  The story continues beyond the Milky Way to give us a truly horrifying (in a Disney way…) vision of the future of humanity.  The message is not a subtle one but, as mentioned in my previous entry on Pixar, it is EARNED with a strong story.  Jeff Garlin is great as Captain McCrea, who learns a thing or two about responsibility and Kathy Najimy and Pixar regular John Ratzenberger have a great subplot about two people becoming aware of their surroundings for the first time.  There really is no way to oversell this movie because it goes so far beyond what any words of mine could express.  This movie is, along with all Pixar movies and other films like Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, a sign that family entertainment does not have to be inane pandering drivel with juvenile humor and moralizing condescension.  More than that, Wall-E is a testament to everything the medium of film can do right.

            So… went long again, but not AS long so that’s got to count for something.  Feel free to flood the comments section with what you think I got wrong (please be civil) or right or with whatever you think was missing.  Big Oscar post coming next week.  I’d promise it won’t run long… but who am I kidding?  It’s the Oscars, going long is part of it.