#84 - Easy Rider (1969) - Dennis Hopper

When Easy Rider was released in 1969, its slogan said, “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere.” and the movie is that serious. It tells the story – if it can be called a story – of two bikers travelling across the US. They run into some Mexican farmers, pick up a hitchhiker, spend time at a hippie commune, end up in jail, make a friend in jail, find some prostitutes, and take drugs. It’s all 1960s counterculture. The plot and details are all sparse and vague, and yet dense and complicated.

The bikers, played by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, are clearly anti-establishment. And yet they’re not hippies (though sometimes they are far out, man) and they make money selling drugs to businessmen and they want to retire in Florida. But they don’t have jobs or family or friends and they go where the wind and the road takes them, sleeping in the woods when motels reject them. And they are rejected often because they are different. They’re a symbol of freedom but freedom doesn’t always go so well. It’s an interesting contradiction – it’s both pro-rebellion and nihilistic and cynical about the fruits of such rebellion.

The scenery is beautiful, the performances are wonderful, and the drug trip scene is genuinely disturbing. It’s a difficult to movie to grasp, but that makes it interesting. The contradictions it presents feel true to life where things are never black and white. And the message may be a window into how the counterculture movement viewed itself. By the late 60s the free-spirited idealism had faded to a jaded and fatalistic cynicism. Easy Rider is in the middle of this shift. Freedom only lasts so long, it says. It burns bright, but it burns out. You can stick it to The Man, but sooner or later The Man will stick it right back.

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#89 - The Sixth Sense (1999) - M. Night Shyamalan

I once watched this in a tent in a crawlspace - and a young Mischa Barton showed up with vomit dripping out of her mouth. That didn’t happen, but it was scary when it happened in the movie.

The Sixth Sense has some genuinely scary parts, but it isn’t a horror movie. It pioneered a new breed of psychological thriller. It’s a thriller at a slow pace, with its creeping, steady sense of dread, in place of the more typical in-your-face scares or over-the-top terror. This genre has persisted to this day, and it has proven difficult to market. Big scares sell tickets, and so these scary but slow-paced psychological thrillers are billed as typical horror movies, and it leads to misunderstanding and disappointment. Movies like The Others, Shyamalan’s The Village, and this year’s The Witch all suffered from this misleading marketing. They aren’t good horror movies, but they were great at what they are (yes, even The Village).

I don’t think The Sixth Sense suffered from this misleading advertising when it was released. But it was such a unique movie that marketers and movie-goers still aren’t sure what to do with the genre it spawned.

#88 - Bringing up Baby (1938) - Howard Hawks

This was hard to sit through. Almost two hours of 1930s screwball comedy requires a concerted effort in positive viewing. I think of positive viewing as making an effort while watching. Most watching is passive (though still engaged) and it’s usually obvious why things are good or bad, exciting or boring, and so on - you don’t have to think about it. But watching Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant flail around, bonking each other on the head, crashing into things, and chasing after a leopard with a case of mistaken identity, required a lot of effort to appreciate why 1930s audiences would enjoy such things. I realize screwball comedy is a genre and that it still exists and that it can be funny, and that Bringing up Baby was a pioneer. But the whole thing was so irritating. I think that was part of the point - watching rich people be annoying was novel and entertaining. But maybe our society offers more ways to be irritated than 1930s society did. We don’t watch movies to be irritated - we watch them to escape irritation.

#87 - 12 Angry Men (1957) - Sidney Lumet

12 Angry Men is a celebration of logic, reason, and rationality, as it portrays an idealized version of American criminal justice - the criminal justice system that, in recent years, has been seen as anything but logical, reasoned, and rational. As that ideal, the movie remains timely, despite being made in 1957. Over the course of their deliberations, the jurors gradually reveal their personalities and prejudices - some more overtly than others. And logic and reason gradually start to overcome those prejudices. It’s very unrealistic, but it’s the ideal that matters, and it’s an ideal worth depicting and striving towards.

The movie is excellent by itself as well. The action takes place only in the jury room and only through the power of conversation. As the details of the case are slowly revealed through careful deliberation, the movie manages to be thrilling and exciting, despite the case playing out only in the viewer’s imagination. All the characters and performances are also excellent.

For this last viewing we watched it on a hot summer’s night with a storm brewing, and our storm lined up perfectly with the movie’s. That added some pizazz.

#86 - Platoon (1986) - Oliver Stone

The message of Platoon was already heavy-handed even before Charlie Sheen’s voiceover at the end spells it out in explicit detail. War is hell - especially the Vietnam one - and we’re often fighting against the enemy inside ourselves. The explanation wasn’t needed, as the film shows image after image of the horrors of war - both the physical violence and the psychological damage that goes along with it. But even if it is heavy-handed, that message is still important, and it’s delivered here vividly and realistically - down in the muddy jungles and up close with the morally ambiguous killing and brutality - and without any style. It’s the stripped bare, grimy, uncomfortable truth of it all. Two characters represent the good and evil inside all of us - the good and evil that struggle against each other. The movie shows this struggle festering in the muck of war, overcoming some one way and some the other. It’s all horrible and very powerful.

Platoon is one of the better war movies I’ve seen, and it’s one of the few to make it onto this list.

#85 - A Night at the Opera (1935) - Sam Wood

A Night at the Opera is more 1930s screwball and slapstick comedy. This time it’s the Marx brothers and their schtick. The movie is little more than a showcase of the brothers’ musical and comedic talents, with a plot built around the jokes and gags instead of the other way around. Those talents, though, are real and there are some impressive scenes and some actually funny gags. The gags usually have little to do with what’s supposed to be going on - and what’s going on usually isn’t clear - but they’re lighthearted and absurd and everyone seems to be having a good time. But it does get to be annoying. There’s a lot of head-bonking, chasing, and practical joking - the kind of thing a goofy uncle would do: sometimes it’s fun, but sometimes you wish he would just go away. There’s also a plot involving a love story, all dealt with through opera singing that begs to be skipped over.

Overall, though, the legitimately funny parts and the sense of enjoyment make up for most of the irritation and cheesiness.