Top Five GOATED: Movies (Midlife Edition)
Image by Nick M.W.
A list that no one asked for, but I wrote it anyway.
I like to watch movies, and I like to talk about movies. Back in August, I decided to write an article about my favorite movies. I knew that I would need time to tackle such an ambitious project because I’m forty-three, and I’ve seen a lot of movies up to this point in my life, and I wasn’t going to write about all of them. I figured a “Top 5” would do, but identifying which movies I would certify as my best would take some work. There are movies that captured my heart and imagination back in my childhood. There are the edgy movies that I fell in love with as a teenager, and there are movies that have completely blown me away with their incredible scope and storytelling in the twenty years. My list of favorites has changed a bit with experience and taste, and I bet that if I ever took on such a project again in ten years that my list then would look different from this list now.
I spent a week thinking about all of these movies until I had thirty of them listed in no specific order, except for #1 because that movie has been my favorite for decades.
“Nick, why thirty movies?”
My original target number for a list was twenty-five, but I couldn’t settle on the last five movies, so I expanded the list to thirty and went from there. The margins between how much I prefer one movie over the other were slim, but I managed to slash that list of thirty movies in half, I slashed it down again before I squeezed my five favorite movies out with blood and sweat to share here with you, not that you asked for this.
Before we get into my “Top Five”, here are the twenty-five runners up in descending order:
30. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
29. Inception
28. Predator
27. Back to the Future
26. Looper
25. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
24. No Country for Old Men
23. The Dark Knight
22. Jurassic Park
21. Avengers: Infinity War
20. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
19. Mad Max: Fury Road
18. The Fifth Element
17. Aliens
16. Tropic Thunder
15. Die Hard
14. Django Unchained
13. 28 Days Later
12. The Crow
11. Drive
10. Inglorious Basterds
09. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
08. The Matrix
07. Saving Private Ryan
06. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
And now, my Top 5 GOATED movies. My all-timers. My classics.
*SPOILER ALERT*
5. Unforgiven
Clint Eastwood directed this western in which he also stars as William Munny, a reformed, widowed outlaw living out his golden years in Kansas with his two young children on a miserable patch of dirt he claims is a farm. He’s hung up his gun belt and retired his pistol when someone comes a knocking about a bounty for some bastard cowboys that cut up a whore all the way in Big Whiskey, Wyoming. Munny is broke, and the prospect of one last big bounty is hard for him to pass up, so he ropes in an old gunslinging buddy, Ned Logan (played by Morgan Freeman), to help him. Things don’t go as planned when they encounter Gene Hackman’s Little Bill.
I first saw this movie with my dad, and I thought it was boring. I liked Westerns, but my young tastes were aligned with Young Guns and Silverado. I expected more action from Unforgiven. I returned to this movie a decade later in my 20s, and I understood what the chatter back in 1992 was all about. Gene Hackman steals the show, a role that won him an Oscar, but I love the way that William Munny is driven to blood because of Ned. Ned couldn’t go through with claiming the bounty, so William completes the mission with the Schofield Kid, collects the bounty, and can ride back home to his farm and his children. But he gets word that his buddy, Ned, didn’t make it back to Kansas on account of Little Bill. Ned is Will’s boy, and Will isn’t going to let that shit slide. Will heads back to Big Whiskey to smoke Little Bill and whoever happens to be in his way before he rides home and leaves his old life behind for good.
Haters will tell me that this movies is too slow and too violent, to which a ten-year-old version of me would have agreed with you about the pacing, but it doesn’t ruin the movie so much for me as it sets up the action. As for the violence, this movie is over thirty-years-old, and the threshold for violence was different back then. It is a violent movie, but only in a few moments. It doesn’t lean on the violence as part of the spectacle. There are several reasons why I love this movie—the story, the characters, and the cinematography, but this is one of two movies in my top five that remind me of my dad.
Clint Eastwood is a brilliant director, and Unforgiven is one of his absolute best works.
4. Interstellar
The next three movies divide cinephiles. People love or hate Interstellar. Some haters will say that the ending ruins the entire movie. Others will say that the pseudo-science used to depict blackholes, gravity, and time is far-fetched. Some folks think it’s cheesy that Cooper meets his daughter at the end because she discovered the gravity code that Cooper sent her from a place on the other side of the galaxy where the future and past meet through gravity. Weird shit. I get the hate.
This is a science-fiction movie, not a paper based on research. Christopher Nolan is here to entertain us and not to help us earn a PhD. Like a good chunk of his movies, Interstellar is entertaining and thought-provoking. The science is about as good as it could get for a movie about something no one has ever experienced before. It’s all theory, so miss me with that “it’s unrealistic” shit. The science works for the world in which these characters exist.
I first saw Interstellar in IMAX with my wife three months after our daughter (and first child) was born, which was right around three months after the movie premiered. Interstellar hit me in a way I wasn’t expecting it, and it had everything to do with Cooper’s relationship with his daughter, Murphy. I could relate to that feeling Cooper had. It was powerful. The movie also has incredible visuals, editing, and sound, and it has a stellar cast, led by Matthew McConaughey playing Joseph Cooper, and rounded out by Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, John Lithgow, Michael Cain, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, and a cameo from Matt Damon. Hans Zimmer adds a blistering score that raises the levels of tension as our heroes battle the extremes of deep space travel to save humanity.
3. Fight Club
Fight Club is about how one man’s mental breakdown changed the world. This movie recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, but its critique of Americans’ unhinged consumerism rings as true today as it did back in 1999.
“The things you own end up owning you.”
Tyler Durden might just be the Buddha if his message had been non-attachment via aggression and anarchy. He is “Jack’s” spiritual guide through the man’s disaffection with the way his life turned out after he did everything that he was supposed to do to be happy. He thought the career, the condo, and the goodies he filled his living space with would anchor him in content, but it ended up driving him crazy.
Some folks think Chuck Palahniuk, the author behind the novel Fight Club (from which the movie was adapted), is a hack who uses sex and violence to sell a story. Both of those things sell, so he’s smart for tapping into two things that American media consumers love to consume. David Fincher brought this novel to screen in a perfect adaptation of the source material. Fight Club has a fantastic cast; I waxed poetic about it a couple of months ago. The entire production captured a bit of the Y2K paranoia and frenzy, and that is a powerful hit of nostalgia for this old fella.
2. Pulp Fiction
To quote myself in a previous article I wrote about this movie for its recent 30th anniversary:
“I love Pulp Fiction because it is an outstanding production, I have a special fondness attached to this flick because my dad took me to see it. Great parenting! I had never heard him laugh so hard during a movie. It was magical to see him like that, so I have a special connection to Pulp Fiction in addition to this film being great.”
Again, nostalgia is a powerful drug, but let’s remove emotion from this retrospective and simply point to the outstanding production of this film. Pulp Fiction is a story about gangsters in Los Angeles, or at least Tarantino’s version of that. It felt like a retro movie when it came out, but now it feels like a relic of time. Pulp Fiction is the blueprint for edgy 90s indie movies, and a movie like it will never be made again. It has an incredible cast and helped kickstart Uma Thurman’s movie career while it took Samuel L. Jackson’s to a new Oscar-winning level, and it saved John Travolta’s career. It is an originator that inspired dozens of copycats, and yes, it’s not really about anything but a couple of days with some shady people.
1. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Episode V if you want to get technical about it, but I remember a time when this movie was known simply as “The Empire Strikes Back”. It was the middle part of the Star War Trilogy, and that’s all it was for a while. Three epic movies, anchored by the baddest flick in the galaxy.
I am a longtime Star Wars fan, which means I’m an old school fan, which means that I have a particular fondess for the Original Trilogy and that particular story about heroes of the Rebellion fighting the Empire in the Galactic Civil War. Empire Strikes Back is the quintessential Star Wars movie. If there was only one to watch, it is this one. It has the best dialogue (not a high bar for these movies), highlighted by Han and Leia going back and forth with their love/hate relationship. It was the first time iconic characters like Emperor Palpatine, Lando Calrissian, Boba Fett, and Yoda were introduced. Obi-Wan returns as a Force ghost. The score is peak John Williams. He looked at all of the other great music he had composed for other beloved movies, including Star Wars: A New Hope, and he said, “hold my beer.” Then, he hit us with the “Imperial March”.
Empire is a darker movie than A New Hope. The good guys get slapped around, but it sets up a saisfying conclusion. It was a masterpiece in 1980, and it remains the crown jewel of Star Wars movies as far as I’m concerned. It is absolute cinema!
