Five perfect movies:
- L.A. Confidential because of how saucy and scuzzy, burly and swank it does its bright-lit noir ensemble gray morality heroics bit. So many redemption arcs trying to happen at once, half of them crash and burn each other right off the record. Great…shoot. Everything. Rolo Tamasi.
- Run Lola Run (called Lola Rennt) because if you’re going to tell a sweetly impossible love story three times with different courses and endings, you might as well intercut the pillow talk scenes to tie the whole thing together. Bitte, Manni!
- Casablanca because I am a huge sucker for a film about people who are huge suckers, for love, for each other, yet canny idealists of incomprehensibly selfless will given half a chance. The fact poor Ingrid Bergman didn’t know during shooting who she was going to end up with seems cruel as life.
These are in no particular order. It’s not a ranking. - 12 Monkeys. Look. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but sometimes Gilliam is at his best bringing his weird, penetrating glance in impersonally, as a hired gun. It doesn’t always have to be a labor of deeply-personal love. Not when you bring the love.
- Wings Of Desire. This film is a huge, dawdlingly glorious mess, and I love its meditative take on angels: basically the ultimate innocent bystanders. What can they do but fall for us all the time? Drape an arm over a despairing shoulder and try to think wonderful thoughts.
My criteria for “perfect”?
For a movie, it’s just a thing fully-realized in all its parts, such that I wouldn’t change a thing.
Perfect pertains to purpose.
Another moviegoer is sure to bring their own purposes to these flicks.
I’m always dithering about including Withnail & I. It’s surely a glorious mess in which every part played, every sequence included goes so thoroughly into the whole that watching it the second time is a completely different experience from the first. Each time since, it’s a decrease in the distance between tragedy and comedy to the point you start to wonder: what’s the point of a perfect depiction when life’s glories are so squalid?
But then again, I’m not from London. You know.
Comments