Most of the marketing for this movie pitched it as "a professor with a problem," but it's really about his students, all English majors. You'll recognize all the usual tropes: the bad writing, the useless writing workshops, the clueless administrators, the pompous professors. It didn't do well when it was first released, but has only grown in popularity since then.
Michael Douglass is the Tripp, the prof. Frances McDormand is the woman he's having an affair with (and is married to the University Chancellor). Robert Downey Jr. is brilliant as Tripp's agent. Katie Holmes is actually good as a student renting a room from Tripp, but the movie is stolen by Tobey McGuire as that one weird student who can really write. Alan Tudyk even gets a few lines, and, more importantly, gets to live through the movie.
It's based on the novel by Michael Chabon, who wrote it about his time in the MFA program at Pitt. It rings true about the claustrophobic hothouses such programs can become, and it's shot on location—my old stomping grounds—in Pittsburgh.
Grady Tripp [in voiceover ]: So there it was. Somewhere in the night, a Manhattan book editor was prowling the streets of Pittsburgh; best-selling author at his side, dead dog in his trunk.
Don't watch it for the history, or for the reliance on coincidence in most of the plot. But if you have ever worked in the theater, or just even like to see live shows, you'll get this movie. It's the story of how "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate King's Daughter" became the tale of two star-crossed lovers that we now know. The mixture of "real life," "reel life," "stage life," and "staged life" is dizzying and delicious. It'll draw you in, as it did me. I wanted to hate this movie, and still do, but I'm always charmed by it, because it knows what it's like to work with words in a field that doesn't get much traction in contemporary culture.
The gender-bending here is brilliant, with Pre-Goop Gwynneth Paltrow as Viola de Lessups, a nobleman's daughter who cross-dresses to audition for a role in the theater, and then is cast as a boy who is romancing a girl (who at the time would be played by a boy). Joseph Fiennes is stellar as the Bard, who knows her secret.
Colin Firth is at his officious best. Tom Wilkinson is a bonebreaker who is swept away by the thrill of live theater. Geoffrey Rush is perfectly petrified as a theater owner. Even Ben Affleck plays to his strengths as a throroughly over-the-top actor. But it's Dame Judi Dench who steals this movie, as Elizabeth I. If you want to see what gender-bending is really like, watch Elizabeth in action.
William Shakespeare: Marlowe's touch was in my Titus Andronicus. And my Henry VI was a house built on his foundation.
Viola De Lesseps: You never spoke so well of him.
William Shakespeare: He was not dead before.
Riffing on Homer's Odyssey in the Depression-Era South, the Coen brothers give us an instant classic here. Ulysses (George Clooney) is trying to get home to his Penelope (Holly Hunter). But this guy is an escaped convict, chained to Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson). They travel with Tommy Johnson, who has just sold his soul to the devil down at the crossroads. They encounter, overcome, and are pursued by 1930s equivalents of many characters from the Odyssey.
In typical Coen brothers fashion, there's way too much going on here to get it all in one viewing. The dialogue is quick and witty, funny and telling. But it's the music that will make you want to watch it again. It's a mixture of styles typical of the old culture of the American South: gospel, delta blues, country, folk, swing, and bluegrass. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2002.
Pete: Well hell, it ain't square one! Ain't nobody gonna pick up three filthy, unshaved hitch-hikers, and one of them a know-it-all that can't keep his trap shut.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Pete, the personal rancor reflected in that remark I don't intend to dignify with comment. But I would like to address your general attitude of hopeless negativism. Consider the lilies of the goddamn field or... hell! Take at look at Delmar here as your paradigm of hope.
Delmar O'Donnell: Yeah, look at me.
One of the most popular graphic novels, and a pitch-perfect coming-of-age movie with great animation. Marjane Satrapi is growing up in 1970s Iran, and her political family rejoices when the Shah is overthrown in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. But the fundamentalists who now rule create a repressive regime, and Marji is a bit too outspoken for her own good. Her parents send her to school in Vienna, but life isn't any easier there. When she returns home, both she and her country have changed dramatically.
Marji is kind of the ultimate colonized character: she's Muslim, but too liberal to fit in with the fundamentalists. She's a foreigner in Europe, where she is Orientalized by almost everyone. She's a woman in a culture that is highly patriarchal. And she's alone, so alone, so that she can stay alive.
Momo: Life is a void. When man realizes that he can no longer live, so he invents power games...
Marjane as a teenager: Bullshit! Life isn't absurd! Some people give their lives for freedom. You think my uncle died for fun? Egotistical prick.
The first time I saw this movie, I learned a bit of compassion for my father. Now, as a father of daughters who have reached a point in their lives where it is their job to disregard me, I see this movie from the other side. Maybe it's just my need to have them believe me when I tell them that my life has been strange and wonderful. Or maybe it's just my desire to pass on something to them that they can hang on to. Or maybe it's just the recognition that stories are powerful, and can carry more wieght than we ever intend them to. In any case, you need to see how strong words can be.
Will Bloom: A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.
Michael Cunningham's brilliant tripartite exploration of Virginia woolf's Mrs. Dalloway gets the star treatment with Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, John C. Reilly, and Allison Janney all at the top of their games. Bouncing between the lives of Clarissa Vaughan (Streep)—a New Yorker preparing an award party for her AIDS-stricken long-time friend and poet, Richard (Harris)—Laura Brown (Moore)—a pregnant California housewife with a young son, currently in an unhappy marriage—and Woolf herself (Kidman) as she battles with depression while struggling to finish the work, this is a century-spanning meditation on gender, mental illness, and disenfranchisement.
TBH, I like Woolf's work well enough, but I think she claimed a bit too much for herself. (Ever hear of James Joyce, Ginny? He was doing all this before you were.) However, this movie let me see how Woolf's work is passed on from generation to generation, with nuances that are ever-new, and timeless consistencies that hold firm no matter the time period.
Virginia Woolf [Narrating her letter ]: Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always, the love. Always, the hours.
Lydia: I have never been through a dating period.
Anne Napolitano: It's a disgusting process. You haven't missed a thing.
No, it's not a great movie. It might not even be a good movie. But it's fun, the music is OK, and you'll be able to nod knowingly when you recognize Chaucer and how some of his characterizations in The Canterbury Tales are inspired.
William: Oi sir, what are you doing?
Chaucer: Uh... trudging. You know, trudging?
[pause ]
Chaucer: To trudge: the slow, weary, depressing yet determined walk of a man who has nothing left in life except the impulse to simply soldier on.
William: Uhhh... were you robbed?
Chaucer: [laughs ] Funny really, yes, but at the same time a huge resounding no. It's more of an... involuntary vow of poverty... really.
Altamirano: What was your income last year?
Jesuit: Last year, 120,000 escudos.
Altamirano: And how was it distributed?
Jesuit: It is shared among them equally. This is a community.
Altamirano: Ah yes, there is a French radical group that teaches that doctrine.
Jesuit: Your Eminence, it was the doctrine of the early Christians.
Toulouse-Lautrec: I got it, I got it. Christian.
[shouts ]
Toulouse-Lautrec: The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
If you're going to watch one straight-up Shakespeare movie, make it this one. If you want adaptations, you can't go wrong with Kurosawa's Throne of Blood for Macbeth and Ran for King Lear. But for just straight Shakespeare, well-shot and well-acted, this one is it for me.
After Keanu Reaves was a burnt-out teen but before he became a movie badass and real-life good-guy meme, he was a terrible actor, wooden, jerky, and constantly underplaying everything as if he were a zombie. He had the potential to take down any movie just by delivering a line in it. Here's how good this movie is: Zombie Keanu is in it, and it's still good.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that Denzel Washington looks like a god here, or that Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson are at home with Benedick and Beatrice, or that members of the cast were also part of the Royal Shakespeare Company. They minimize the damage that Kate Beckinsale (in her first movie) and Robert Sean Leonard inflict when their Hero and Claudio are so wincingly out of their depth.
Beatrice: O God, that I were a man. I would eat his heart in the market-place.
Beautiful, tender, loving, sympathetic, yet, in the end, heartbreaking. If you don't end up sobbing, you need to question your soul.
Yes, Pablo Neruda did spend time in Italy when he was exiled from Chile. I'd like to think that he did show at least one shy man the power of words to move people. The postman learns that words can move not just a single woman, but an entire country.
The audio tape that Mario makes for Neruda is maybe the most — I don't know what — all I can say is that, even now, at least 25 years after I first saw this film, I can't read those lines, let alone watch them, without crying.
Pablo Neruda: When you explain poetry, it becomes banal. Better than any explanation is the experience of feelings that poetry can reveal to a nature open enough to understand it.
I debated including this one, because it's just so bleak. But I'm placing it here to remind you that your professors exist for more than the hours they stand in front of you.
Emma Thompson is a serious, scholarly professor who is dying of cancer. This movie (based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play) is a tour-de-force for her. Her reconsideration of her life as she moves, painfully, to her death, is harrowing and exhausting. Not just for her, but for us as well.
E.M. Ashford: Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript of 1610, not for sentimental reasons I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. . .
It reads, "And death shall be no more" comma "death, thou shalt die." Nothing but a breath, a comma separates life from life everlasting. . . .
Very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored Death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause. . . .
In this way, the uncompromising way one learns something from the poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death, soul, God, past present. Not insuperable barriers. Not semi-colons. Just a comma.
Not the 2018 documentary, or the 2008 documentary, but the 2011 production by Terence Malick. It's moving,
Narrator: The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.
Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.
Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.
Theodore Faron: I can't really remember when I last had any hope, and I certainly can't remember when anyone else did either. Because really, since women stopped being able to have babies, what's left to hope for?
One of the rare cases where the movie is, in many ways, better than the book. The multiple narratives, dizzying in the book, are honed in the movie, which is helped by having great actors play multiple parts. It also has one of the most fantastic tags: "Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future."
Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, and Susan Sarandon all give star turns, over and over again.
Robert Frobisher: All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so. Moments like this, I can feel your heart beating as clearly as I feel my own, and I know that separation is an illusion. My life extends far beyond the limitations of me.
No matter how long this list gets, this movie will always be last on the list, because it means the most to me. I don't know if I can call it my "favorite movie," because it's not like that. Let's just say that I feel like this movie was written for me. It fires on all my issues, and has something important to say about the way we live, the way I live.
All those other movies above this? If you don't like them, that says more about you than it does about the movie. But this one, I feel personally invested in this one, so if you don't like it, I'll be hurt, not for me, but for the movie, and probably try to convince you that you really did like it, you just didn't know that you did. And that's really stupid.
I've told many classes that I can forgive Milton all of Samson Agonistes for a few lines in Paradise Lost, where Adam chooses to eat the same apple Eve just resisted to. In just eight lines he explains why he is willing to give up an eternity of bliss, to overthrow perfection, all for the ache in his chest:
How can I live without thee! how forego
Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn!
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart: no, no! I feel
The link of Nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
This movie is those eight lines in action. An angel gives up his eternity of watching, of witnessing, to feel something, even if it's only the crush of mortality. It's beautiful and profound, Wim Wenders' best. Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander are melancholic and merciful as angels. Solveig Dommartin has an inner glow as a fading small-time circus performer. But the movie belongs to, of all people, Peter Falk, playing himself, as a former angel who knows what Ganz is going through.
Damiel: I've stood outside the world long enough. I want to enter into the History of the World or even just hold an apple in my hand. Look. See those feathers on the water? Vanished already. See those tire marks on the asphalt and now the cigarette butt rolling along. Look how the prehistoric river has dried up and only today's rain puddles quiver. Enough of the world behind the world!