Ouija (2014)

“Hey, guys! Let's make a movie based around a Ouija board! Hasbro would really love that!”

“Uh, I'm not sure that's a good idea at all...”

Then that second guy was dragged out of the board meeting for Satan's Movie Studio, and a gunshot was heard. His body was hung up on a cross in the front lobby to set an example for anyone else with similarly contrarian ideas. Hasbro executives collectively grunted their approval in deep demonic voices like the rumblings of a dragon's bowels. The first guy was promoted to God of the company that same afternoon. Production on the movie Ouija began the next day.

Director: Stiles White

Starring: Olivia Cooke, Douglas Smith

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This was produced by Michael Bay and Brad Fuller, the guys behind a production company called Platinum Dunes. If you don't know who they are, well, they produced a range of movies from merely terrible, like the Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street remakes, to absolute unholy crap like The Purge: Anarchy, The Hitcher remake and The Unborn. Christ, their line-up reads like scrolling through the past history of Cinema Freaks.

Anyway, like all great films, this began production in 2008, six years before it actually came out, and went through a shitload of script changes, director changes and basically everything else, with the promise of a super huge Pirates of the Caribbean style adventure with a huge budget. Yes, a Pirates-level budget for a fucking board game movie.

...I think it's really just time for everyone in Hollywood to go home and spend some time with their families. You know, before their families disown them for stupid shit like making blockbuster films out of board games.

Things seemed to be looking up in 2011 when the film seemed to be dead in the water due to budget issues, but only a few months later, it was unfortunately revived, like some horrible Re-Animator-esque abomination. And now we have to suffer for it. My favorite part is that, apparently, after its botched and horrific revival, they went with a significantly lower budget for the final project, as if to say, "yes, we've come to our senses and realized we can rob audiences of their money and time, for less of a budget."

The movie begins with a blonde girl named Debbie playing with a Ouija board with her friend, Laine. They're both little children at this point, which makes sense, because no one but little children will be scared by the movie.

Then we flash forward years later to when Debbie is a teenager. She never got over that Ouija thing, and she's still playing with it now, because characters in these movies are flatter than concrete outside and have no believable motivations. We see her tossing the board into a fire, which is really rude, because I'm sure her parents paid a lot to buy that piece of shit.

Hmm, that second image doesn't seem right. Let's fix that:

Ahh yes. Much better.

She wanders around for a bit and notices weird things like doors opening and closing slowly by themselves. Usually, when that happens, I call my fucking landlord and tell him the hinges are kind of loose, but I guess here it's supposed to be scary.

Also, the burner is on! Maybe you should pay more attention when you're cooking.

They should just put a pan on the stove and start cooking. Take the chance! Ghosts be damned.

Burning that Ouija board was apparently not the right move, though, as then Debbie gets hanged by a bunch of Christmas lights.

75% of people hang themselves if their parents bought them Hasbro toys as kids.

Based on the sad music and the people in black carrying flowers up to a house, I'm guessing we're supposed to be feeling sad or something.

Maybe...

It's good they put those cliches in the movie, because otherwise I wouldn't feel anything for Debbie. We knew nothing about her – she was basically just put in to be a standard open kill. They spend so much time dwelling on how sad everyone is, though, so I guess I'm just emotionally dead from watching so many of these terrible scenes over and over.

Laine is now also grown up, and she spends her time hanging out in comically anachronistic looking diners with her boyfriend, who seems to think John Hughes movie fashion is still cool. Because I guess Bay and his cohorts all have zero idea what anything in real life is like now. They probably haven't even seen the outside of their board room in years.

Like, totally hip, man. Breakfast Club.

After Debbie's death, Laine spins totally off the rails and demands that all of her friends accompany her to the creepy abandoned house of the dead girl and play the Ouija board to see if there was anything they could have done to prevent her suicide. Which is totally acceptable and sane. “Hey, could we have done anything to prevent you killing yourself? Yes? Wow, I feel better already!”

Let's get real for a second; knowing whether or not you could have stopped someone from committing suicide wouldn't help you at all. Are you insane? Who writes something like that?

I also love how they all accuse each other of moving the Ouija counter thing around just to prank one another. Like that's something these people believe their friends would apparently do a day after their friend committed suicide. Maybe in that case, you guys all need to stop hanging out, because you're all horrible people. Frankly, I think they should have asked the Ouija board if they'd still have careers after this movie. The answer would have, no doubt, disappointed them.

For some reason, they all get up and walk around the house afterward, because despite the fact that all of them have repeatedly stated they don't believe the game works, they're now superstitious. You guys really have the fortitude of a marshmallow left out in the sun, you know.

But they do all end up leaving, and go home, you know, like you do after your friend forces you to play with a Ouija board to work through her insane grief. I love how in one of the next scenes, Laine apologizes to one of the others and says she won't do it again. Yeah, you know, just a normal way of coping – playing with Ouija boards to try and defy the laws of death. You know, time heals all wounds!

All is not well, though, when everyone starts seeing this mysterious phrase “Hi Friend” all over the place. One time it's creepily in a car in the cold...

In this one, a human hand slams on the inside of the window afterward as if someone was inside the car. The girl doesn't question this at all, gets inside the car, and then nothing else happens. I guess the movie was just drunk and forgot to make that scare mean anything.

There's one time where it's written on the wall of a creepy tunnel – though I think that time was just a poor homeless guy being crazy.

The money used to make the movie could have been put to helping the homeless. But instead, the movie was made. Was it worth it?

Another time, it's written on a word processor on a computer screen:

What is wrong with you, movie? Are those things really equivalent? No better way you could've conveyed the horror of the situation? It's really just so evident nobody making this really cared.

If you can believe it, they actually go back and try the Ouija board again after seeing these things, because their sense of consequence and action is so fucked up that even jailed convicts would wonder what they were thinking. This time, the ghost just up and reveals itself to NOT be Debbie, but instead a mysterious evil entity called “DZ.” I just don't get why the ghost revealed itself that fast. Surely a better plan would have been to keep pretending to be their dead friend and lull them into a false sense of security. I'm not even a malignant entity of hell (despite what some people would tell you) and even I can see how this could have been better.

So I guess this one girl dies when she sees the Ouija board ghost in the mirror, and the ghost slams her head against the bathroom sink. It's good to know that, if you die from having your head brutally bashed against hard ceramic, your makeup won't run and all you'll get is a tiny gash on your upper forehead. How cosmetically convenient.

Yup, looks like her face was smashed against a sink...

There's also this other woman, a Spanish housekeeper for Laine's family, who of course knows everything about Ouija boards and has no other character besides that. Wow. You know, they used to cut peoples' hands off for stealing things. Can we reinstate that now, except for people who write hack work racist trash like this that doesn't help anyone? No? Damn. Why does this keep happening when I try to propose new rules?!

After that, if you can believe it, we get a long and drawn out scene where Laine and Pete, who was Debbie's boyfriend, actually sit around and search for clues about who the ghost is that's haunting them. All they have is that name, DZ, but through the convenience of lazy script writing, they find out what they need to know. Apparently, some little girl went missing years ago, and her mother was thought to have killed her, and blah, blah, blah. Whatever!

"My brain is a pile of oatmeal-y mush because of the script, but we found what we needed! Hooray! Durrr...."

This leads Laine to go find the sister of the girl who went missing. The sister is apparently now in a mental hospital because she killed her mother years ago for apparently killing the other sister. If you're confused reading that, don't be; no one cared when writing it. Just go with it.

This character is played by Lin Shaye, who was obviously also in all the Insidious movies. Goddamn, did you just have her blackmailed to keep appearing in all these dumb supernatural movies? Did you just grab her right off the set of Insidious 3 and plop her in a wheelchair for this one? You must at least really be paying her well. Shit.

What kind of awful Satanic magic did you guys use to force her to keep doing all of these films? Jesus. I can't imagine the Kafkaesque nightmare her life must be doing all these pieces of utter garbage year after year. Does she get them confused? Like, she'll be on Insidious 5: The Great Who Cares and then go 'hey, aren't we on Ouija 3: It Still Fucking Sucks?' And then they'll go, no, this is Insidious, and funnel more money into her bank account. And the cycle will continue.

The character here is, somehow, even less substantial than her character from Insidious, as she only exists to spew EVEN MORE soul-sucking exposition – this time about how the only way to stop the killings is to free the little girl ghost from the evil mother ghost. I was bored just writing that sentence, and the movie doesn't seem to care either. It's a carnival of not caring up in this shit. But hey, Hasbro got your money, so I guess they won out in a way.

So we get a very silly scene where they find this dead body under Debbie's old house, and then cut off these stitches on her mouth. I guess for some reason that's what breaks the spell – it's kind of like something out of a really cheap haunted house.

This scene would only be cool if Indiana Jones was in the background stealing a gold chalice or some shit.

After that, it seems like it's all over, but whoops, apparently not! Because the movie doesn't seem to get that we want it to go away and stop annoying us, apparently Lin Shaye's crazy old lady character was lying, and it was the little girl ghost who was evil the whole time, and NOT the mother ghost! Wow. Maybe you shouldn't listen to a murderer who lives in an insane asylum, huh? Maybe that would have been better.

Oh, and then she goes full on cartoon villain and starts cackling insanely about how her evil ghost sister will come save her. She gets dragged off by security, presumably to never be allowed to interact with the outside world again. Man, I really don't think THAT was a good plan...but whatever.

"THANK YOU FOR GETTING ME OUT OF THE MOVIE!"

So the boyfriend gets killed off unceremoniously in a pool, which is a callback to a scene earlier where he played with the pool tarp. That's really clever if the only other movie or TV you've ever seen is Blue's Clues. They also have the gall to insult our intelligence by having him show up with his back to them, as if there's any possibility he's not going to be dead and it's not going to be a stupid jump scare.

Please.

Then right when Laine is about to die, the ghost of Debbie appears very conveniently and stops things right as the movie is reaching its climax – I mean, she could have stepped in earlier, but where would the fun have been in that?

"I had to wait until now, the most dramatically convenient time, because otherwise the movie wouldn't have been good!"
"The movie already isn't good!"
"What? NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
*Fiery cataclysm of death*

So that's Ouija – what can I say, it wasn't good. The bar was set super low already – it's a corporate product put out to make money for Hasbro. The characters, writing, plot, scary moments, atmosphere and everything else are all terrible. The script is stereotypical and shallow, with zero real meaning to anything that happens. Characters act in ridiculous ways for no reason and the story isn't about anything except “this toy is cool!” Like the 2011 The Thing prequel, it really shows how much active disdain there is for horror in Hollywood – this is a joke to them, and they do not think it's worth their time to put any effort into.

Don't spend your money on this crap. Download it illegally, and then write scathing reviews online. I don't know if that will make a difference, but it's worth it if you really need to vent your annoyance with how bad this movie is, and how bad everything else the people who made it were involved with is. And hey, it's a better pastime then playing with a fucking Ouija board from Hasbro.

Images copyright of their original owners; we own none of them.

REVIEW: The Hitcher (2007)

Let’s talk about remakes for a second. They’re not inherently bad; it’s just that people these days don’t seem to like putting much effort into them, especially in the horror genre…too much of the time a remake is an excuse to just make some cheap piece of trash, with generic characters doing silly things while cursing a lot and reinforcing the reasons why being white isn’t something to be proud of. Case in point? The Hitcher.

Director: Dave Meyers

Starring: Sean Bean, Sophia Bush

IMDb

I mean this is seriously just insipid. Take the worst elements of 2000s horror and mix them with the plot of The Hitcher, only without anywhere near the level of tension or drama as that film.

…oh, were you waiting for something else? No, there is nothing else.

We start off with a truly brilliant recap of the original movie’s themes: two rich college kids meeting up and driving around while a shitty alt rock song plays in the background. It’s more like a commercial for Abercrombie and Fitch than a Hitcher movie. The girl says she has to pee, which really just caps off the re-enactment. I know; I can’t contain myself either. It’s just so much like the original that I can’t even comprehend it!

When Robert Harmon directed the original film, I bet he was just wishing he could include scenes like THESE in his movie, if only he had found the right female actress to play Jim's girlfriend! Luckily the remake was around to fix it 21 years later.

And yes, there are two main characters now. Because lord knows having just one wasn’t good enough. We need a second character so they can shout at one another and so the camera has tits to show more of the time. Brilliant filmmaking, just brilliant!

So while in the original, the car just stops and lets the Hitcher in, in this one we get an ‘exciting’ scene as they swerve around and do a figure-8 on the road without even picking him up at all. The girl, Grace, says they shouldn’t pick him up – okay then; roll the end credits. I guess that’s the end of the movie. But of course they keep going…after all, it wouldn’t be a shitty remake if we didn’t drag things out as long as possible.

They go to some gas station and buy some junk food that I’m sure won’t be good for them. The Hitcher ’07: it’s no good for your health! Jim talks to the attendant who just mostly bores the hell out of me. We’re like fifteen minutes in. Jesus; in the original, we would have already seen several thrills by now. We would have already had several key scenes. What do we get in this? Junk food at a gas station.

…that’s actually kind of a brilliant metaphor for the whole film.

Anyway, back to wasting time: Sean Bean, who is playing the Hitcher now, shows up at the gas station and asks for a ride, which Jim grants despite Grace’s reservations. In the car, they talk about how long Jim has been fucking her. A-HA! Now I know what the original was missing! Cursing and sex! What a revelation…Jim asks how long Bean has been fucking his wife, to which Bean replies that he doesn’t have one. Apparently THIS is the big ‘evil switch’ in the movie as then he breaks a cell phone and holds a knife to Grace’s face while reciting lines from the original.

It's a shame because Bean is really trying. But the script is about as articulate and intelligent as a Cro Magnon on PCP.

I guess Bean isn’t too bad or anything, but the whole scene just points out how deficient this is from the old one. We don’t need two characters for this scene, or any of the scenes for that matter. Having just Jim and the Hitcher alone was fine. Adding an extra character just makes it cluttered and messy.

They kick him out of the car, this time with more elaboration as Jim shouts for Grace to unlock the door so they can kick him out. They then wake up and it’s a bright, sunny day again, so they can stand around posing in the desert looking like a commercial again. Another crap-ass rock song is played, and the cycle of mediocrity is complete. Why are you even trying, movie? Why don’t you just give up while you’re ahead and let the world forget you exist?

Then we get a long, drawn out version of the excellent scene in the original where they see the Hitcher with that other family and then find the car afterward. In the original it was powerful because you don’t see what happened to them – here we spend way too long with the car and we see too much of what happened. One of the family members, the father, is still alive even. They drive off with him to find a hospital and this falls out of the car, which one of the kids was reading:

Heh heh heh…that’s almost funny. Almost.

They go to this stupid restaurant and have a whole scene where a waitress inexplicably thinks Grace and Jim killed the people from the car. If that was true, why exactly would they be coming in asking for help and acting hysterical? I think there’s a reason this chick is a waitress and nothing more. Personally I doubt she’ll amount to anything else, especially after she calls the cops and gets them arrested. Before that though, we get a loooooooong, sloooooooow scene of Jim trying to save the dying guy and failing, and Grace hiding in a bathroom when she should be running to help a dying man or trying to get to a phone – aren’t you guys glad this chick is one of our main characters?

She's so scared, her makeup hasn't even started to run yet.

Eh, I’m not.

So yeah, they get arrested by the idiot police, only to get broken out by Sean Bean in about two seconds. Glad they had this part in the movie at all…in the original they were at least there for a while. Here, the movie wasted like 10 minutes on that shit with the dying father in the car and just glazed over the jail part so fast that it barely mattered that they were in jail at all. And it’s just not that interesting, movie! It’s just too much of what we don’t need. I even get what this is going for…it’s trying to make the new remake different from the original classic, and does so by elongating some scenes and shortening other ones. But it just doesn’t work at all. You don’t get any tension or atmosphere from this version, just annoyance at how Bean sneaks down and has Jim in his grasp, and then leaves in two seconds once Grace comes down with a flashlight and a gun.

So let me get this straight, he went down there to threaten Jim for a few seconds and just disappear as soon as Grace finds them? This guy sure doesn't have 'efficient use of time' as a big part of his evil plot, does he? Pretty goddamn pointless in the grand scheme of things...and by that I mean ENTIRELY POINTLESS.

Yeah…pretty retarded.

So yeah, the next fifteen minutes is just stuff you remember from the original – Jim and Grace come upon some cop and take him hostage, though that goes well when Bean kills him a few moments later – glad this part was even in the movie at all, right? There are some pretty good chase scenes and then they end up in the desert somewhere. They argue a bit about whose fault it is that they’re out there, and since this is a quiet and reflective moment where the screenwriter could have actually done some good with the two characters and developed them a little, the movie literally throws a truck in front of them to stop it.

Character development?! Eww! Just throw a truck in front of them!

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie just literally not give a shit this much. Even The Hitcher II was trying compared to this right now…what kind of lazy ass do you have to be to just throw a truck in between your characters during an argument? Could you just not think of any other way to end the argument? Allow me to make a suggestion for next time: if you have a shit-ass script with no worthwhile elements to it, just have your characters ripped apart by wolverines at random next time. It’s more unique than a truck, and more painful. It might offer some minor catharsis for the audience’s pain.

And trust me, anyone with half a brain is in pain during THIS right now. Let’s just get it over with.

So they find some motel where they have shower sex and talk about how horrible everything is. I just love these movies’ conceptions of people and their sex lives. Isn’t that great? “We’re so traumatized!” “I know, let’s make out!” It’s not even like…desperate, grieving, panicked sex. It's music video sex with a bland piano ballad over it. It’s just like they’re shooting a porn video in the middle of a horror movie.

Can you picture Taylor Swift singing in the cutaway scenes yet?

Because that’s what this movie needs…oh, wait, it actually is what it needs at this point. I guess I’ll give it a pass. Everything else is so banal I might as well.

Like the next part, where the Hitcher tries to rape Grace in bed...

…because THAT was what was missing from the original! A rape scene! Brilliant! 10/10 stars! Two thumbs up! The utter worthlessness and bad taste of this scene have just driven me up the wall! A movie finally did it; drove me completely insane! Thank you, Hitcher remake, for completely destroying a great film. I think we might as well make an epitaph for The Hitcher right now.

That should do it. God, this scene though – so tasteless, so utterly missing the point. In the original he was just waiting for her in the bed and wordlessly put a hand over her mouth to kidnap her and the scene lasts maybe a minute or something, most of it taken up by the chilling suspense. Here it goes on for almost five and he says – he actually says this; damn you for making me type it at all – “I’m horny too.” What kind of a line is that? How does that add to the mysticism and mysteriousness of his character? And the whole attempted rape is just…eugh; it’s just unpleasant to watch. It pretty much singlehandedly takes the character of the Hitcher and turns him into a big nasty joke. This isn’t even the same character. This isn’t John Ryder, the force of nature – this is just some creepy bum off the streets who happened to get lucky a few times.

I also love how she hides in the bathroom afterwards with a gun, like this whole thing is some Freddy or Jason shit instead of a terse, atmospheric thriller. But then again I guess hiding in bathrooms is all she was ever good at anyway.

Oh please, this shot was just here because the director wanted her in a thong. She's wearing a skirt again in the very next scene two seconds later, so really?

So yeah, in conclusion the makers of this movie should go sodomize each other with rusty pitchforks. It might just improve their creative forces.

But, sigh, we’re not done yet, so why not just look at the part where we get the classic ‘tied between two trucks’ scene, except it’s Jim who is tied there and Grace who has to save him. Basically the whole thing looks okay at first blush, but then when you think about it, they just messed it up completely. Like when Grace has to go confront the Hitcher in the truck. Again, in the original it lasted a few moments and was mostly wordless. Here it goes on WAAAAAYYYY too long and just wears out its welcome, not to mention stupid as hell too.

The original did well to make everything ambiguous and not go into too much detail on what the Hitcher’s motives were. This one not so much. First he says he will kill Jim if Grace doesn’t get in the car. He says if she doesn't, he will take his foot off the gas and rip Jim in two. So Grace gets in the car and he then says to kill him. So what the hell? If she does THAT, then his original threat is null and void because Jim dies anyway! I guess he got an ‘F’ in Movie Villain School – I can just see his report card now. Total failure to blackmail your heroine correctly, total failure to scare anyone, even little kids…

"Yeah, I guess I don't really have any idea what I'm doing..."

And we get a bunch of nonsense about how he “wants to die,” and maybe if that simple thought was the only motive he had throughout the whole thing, it coulda worked, but it’s mostly confused and vague. So it’s just a waste like the rest of the flick.

Then we get SUPER COOL GORE, GUYS, WOW!

Yeah, great job…it’s not scary or interesting in the least. Mostly it’s just kinda ehhhh. See what this film is doing to me? I can barely even make a coherent sentence anymore!

They arrest him just like in the original and then handcuff him and take him away in an armored truck. They show him breaking his finger – which is remarkably easy for him; is his skin made out of paper mache? – to get out of the handcuffs. Honestly it’s just pointless. The original worked so well because we didn’t know how he did stuff like this; it was shrouded in secret and mystery, and made him more of the force of nature that he was. By showing these things, he becomes less mysterious and more human. It doesn’t work at all to create any kind of feeling besides a tradeoff between blandness and outright disgust at some parts.

Like this other part where he’s killed the officers and crashed the car – he gets out and walks across the field and it’s supposed to be real suspenseful, but he just looks like some skinny asshole in a vest.

Really? We're supposed to be afraid of him right now? He looks like any old common thug now. If he was still trying as hard as in the beginning, maybe, but it seems like Bean was instructed to act like he was high in these last scenes, so the impact of his acting alone isn't even that great anymore. Bravo movie...bravo...

So Grace somehow survives a fire he starts in the truck she’s in, and goes after him with a gun. She shoots him a couple times in his bulletproof vest – yeah, way to waste bullets, you idiot. He finally looks up at her and asks her “how it feels,” to which she replies that she feels nothing, and kills him. Trust me honey, the audience shares your exact sentiments about the movie they just got done watching.

Cue another vomited-up alt rock piece of shit song, and the credits roll. What the hell is even up with the shitty music anyway? It's like the director was just better at directing mainstream music vid---

...oh. So he really was a music video director. Well that explains everything! Except, you know, WHY THE HELL WOULD THEY GET A MUSIC VIDEO DIRECTOR TO DO A HORROR MOVIE? I guess the Michael Bay producing credit explains that well enough. Or just the fact that the studios care as much about quality in their movie remakes as the Westboro Baptist Church does about equality and fairness in the eyes of God. Ugh.

It's seriously a miracle of horridness - take the plot of the original, stretch out story elements that were perfectly fine in the original, subtract any and all scares and tension, and add in dullard contemporary rock more fit for a shitty MTV show than a horror film. How did this ever get past the drawing board? It's so awful I can't even comprehend it. Good God this is shit. The original is a classic and this is the stinking raw sewage that happens when modern Hollywood decides 'hey, we need to make a movie! Who cares if it's good or not? Just take some old film people barely watch anymore and make it hip and swag!' Well I think that's completely despicable. Just forget this crap ever existed. I know I'll be trying – and trying hard – over the next few days...in fact, I think I'll go watch the original. That's the perfect way to get this out of my system once and for all!

Images copyright of their original owner(s). Tombstone picture taken from http://www.jjchandler.com/tombstone/download.php

The Top 20: My Favorite Movies of All Time

Yesterday, I gave you all my personal Bottom 20 list, the worst movies out there for me. Today, I am focusing on the positive side: these are my very favorite movies. All of them are films that I can watch any time and get enjoyment from, films that I learn about the world from or about art from, and films that I hold dear to my heart. I wouldn't say all of them are necessarily the BEST out there - classics such as Casablanca, Citizen Kane and others do not feature here - these are just my favorites; the ones that have shaped me as a person. With no further ado, I present to you...the list!

20. Primal Fear

A legal thriller mixed in with some very deft twists and turns that make it one of the more unforgettable, go-for-the-throat thrillers of the 90s. Richard Gere is great and Edward Norton is just awesome in this, in one of his first roles ever. Primal Fear is a classic of mystery/thriller films.

19. The Hitcher

Just an all around winner of a movie, The Hitcher rocks some great Nevada desert settings, a killer, suspenseful plot and a great Rutger Hauer performance. It’s just a meat-and-potatoes good movie, and if you haven’t seen it, you should get on it now.

18. Rosemary’s Baby

Another essential horror film, Rosemary’s Baby is the tale of a young married woman pregnant with her first child. When she starts noticing strange things, she begins to suspect a plot against her and her baby. The reason this is so scary is because it could very well be all in her head. Maybe she is just being paranoid – for a lot of the film, it’s really not that clear. And once it is clear that there is something more going on, that fear is replaced by the even graver, more serious fear of a mother on the verge of losing her child. A true monument of fear.

17. Die Hard

This is another one that doesn’t get on the list for any one stand-out reason, but just for how good all its elements combined are. With Bruce Willis’s working-man charisma, the non-stop suspense and the well constructed action scenes that get more and more explosive as the film goes on, one Die Hard is worth ten thousand Transformers movies. Smart, fun, action packed to the core, Die Hard is a bona fide classic.

16. Halloween

John Carpenter’s 1978 classic is my personal pick for the scariest movie of all time. This film just shows us a nice suburban neighborhood in which hell breaks loose one night. Unlike the later films, this has no backstory for the killer and no real explanation for why he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s just on a rampage through this unsuspecting ‘burb and kills innocent people in horrible ways. The next time you turn this on, just imagine your own neighborhood in a similar scenario. Imagine a silent, unstoppable killer stalking your streets and picking off your friends one by one. Yeah. That’s why this movie is on the list. Essential horror.

15. LA Confidential

Just a killer crime movie. LA Confidential is actually based on a book written by the same guy who wrote Black Dahlia – which was also made into a movie, which made it onto my ‘worst movies ever’ list. Funny how this one is on my ‘best movies’ list. I guess it just goes to show you how much a good director can change things. LA Confidential is the story of three cops in the 50s and their involvement in a huge crime ring bust. I love it for how intense the pacing is and how good the characters are. Just an awesome, awesome movie.

14. Mulholland Dr.

Probably the darkest and most insane movie on this list, David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. was the first film by him that I saw. Filled to the brim with ghastly imagery, nail biting suspense, and a plot that appears to get darker and darker with every turn, Mulholland Dr., like Eyes Wide Shut, is a great horror film, even despite not being a horror film at its core. At its core, this is a deeply twisted character study and a brilliant avant garde film that captivates me every time.

13. Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick’s last film is one of his very best, and one of the most captivating experiences I have had with a movie as of late. Eyes Wide Shut is a great film for its surreal atmosphere and the creativity of its whacked out imagery. It is also a great horror film on one level and a great romance film on another: with bizarre, mysterious intrigue and lustful, achingly beautiful scenery, Kubrick crafted an unforgettable experience.

11. The Seventh Seal

I’m a newbie to Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre, but when I saw The Seventh Seal last year, it was definitely an eye opening experience. For one, the film talks about death – how much larger of a theme can you even have? – and two, it talks about it in such an all encompassing, larger than life, down to Earth way that I doubt you will ever find any other film like it. It is an epic tale of medieval crusaders who grapple with death and their very finite mortality – being in the Middle Ages, it’s not like most of these people will live very long either, so the drama is higher. The Seventh Seal is a breathtaking, life affirming experience, and you should go see it.

10. Scott Pilgrim VS the World

This will probably be the most surprising choice on this list, but I really think this is one of the most important movies of the last few years. In every generation, there are a few films and books that just define it entirely – they show what was culturally important, what people talked about, what was wrong with the generation, and more. Scott Pilgrim is like that for the last half of the 2000s and the early 2010s – you know, the “hipster generation.” With a very funny script and batshit insane directing choices, this basically tells the story of Scott Pilgrim, a Canadian guy who falls in love with a girl named Ramona and has to fight her “evil exes” in order to win her heart. With references to everything people our age (early 20s, late teens) like, from music to gaming to dating, this comes out as a very deft, subtle satire of our culture of hipsters, gamers, anime fans and everything in between. But it does so in a respectful way that allows us to look at ourselves critically without getting too spiteful or malignant. In addition to being important and intelligently written, it's also stylistically gorgeous, gut-bustingly funny and a hell of a lot of fun. One of my new favorites.

9. Taxi Driver

A portrait of a man’s life in grimy 1970s-era New York, Taxi Driver is my favorite Robert DeNiro performance as well as my favorite Scorsese movie. This is just so fascinating to me because of the character Travis Bickle, who has got to be one of my favorite movie characters ever. An unstable and mentally wired creep, the film just sort of tells the story of his life, and it appears by all accounts that he’s going downhill…until he meets Jodie Foster’s character, a 12-year old prostitute, and decides he wants to save her. Taxi Driver is a film about fate, exploring it as a coin toss. By all logical trains of thought, Travis Bickle was a man headed for a blowup, teetering on the edge of complete disaster. But instead, he saved a girl and became a hero at the drop of a dime. It’s a brilliant character study and one of my favorite movies of all time.

8. The Sandlot

I think this is probably the only movie on this list that I’ve known about since before I turned 10 years old. I loved The Sandlot back then, and I love it even more now. The mark of a good movie for me is if it can take something mundane or ordinary and turn it into a big epic, which this does. It’s just about baseball, yeah, but at the same time, it’s about a kid moving to a new place, finding friends and discovering what becomes a lifelong passion. Everything in this film is treated with a huge larger than life sense of adventure, and having great characters and a funny, fast paced script doesn’t hurt either. I love baseball, I love these characters and I love The Sandlot.

7. The Big Lebowski

Simply the funniest movie I’ve ever seen. Every second of this is packed with jokes, references to previous jokes and simply witty, wry moments. Frankly, this goes way above and beyond what the usual comedy formula is with incredibly intelligent writing and surprising complexity, at that. There is so much going on here that I notice new things every time, and the characters and acting are so good they are impeccable. I can’t decide whether John Goodman as Walter or Jeff Bridges as The Dude is funnier. Fortunately, such a choice is unnecessary: they’re both amazing. Nothing else to say about this one; just a great comedy from the masters of bizarre, off-kilter films, and one I can watch any time and enjoy wholeheartedly.

6. Thank You For Smoking

Not quite as laugh out loud funny as The Big Lebowski, but I’m putting Thank You For Smoking higher on my list because I feel it is a rarity in movies: it is completely objective. It has no slant, no bias. This movie talks about censorship and the smoking industry and how people are persuaded by advertisements and the media. It takes a very level headed, mature viewpoint and respectfully lambasts and makes fun of both sides of the argument. The script is very, very good, and the film is so clever that it actually fits in some genuine character development and drama into what is otherwise a deeply satirical, witty movie. Aaron Eckhart is just a gem in this as seemingly amoral lobbyist Nick Naylor, as is Cameron Bright as Joey Naylor, his son. On the surface this is just about smoking, but really this is more universal: it’s about arguing, morality, right and wrong and, ultimately, parenting. It makes its points almost seamlessly in the context of the film, and people who don’t pay attention at first will grossly misread what this is actually about. Frankly, I still don’t think I’m quite done discovering what this film has to offer, and I’ve seen it a bunch of times now. Thank You For Smoking is a treasure.

5. Stranger than Fiction

One of the funniest, most clever and best written romantic comedies of the last decade, Stranger than Fiction is just a great experience. I love the weird, offbeat directing (pretty similar to what Scott Pilgrim would do a few years later), I love the great characters, and I love the oddball storyline. It’s about a tax man, Harold Crick (portrayed brilliantly by Will Ferrell of all people), who begins to hear a woman narrating his life, who says offhand he’s going to die soon. On his adventure to figure out what’s happening to him, he ends up discovering there’s a lot more to life than just his boring job. This movie is basically a longer version of the old adage “live every day like it’s your last,” but for all that, it’s very well put together and the story is charming, funny and deeply likable. I also dig the complex and deeply funny deconstruction of how narrations in movies usually work. Most movies that have a narrator over top just have the characters going about their lives unaware of the narration, but in this film, by some accident of the universe, Harold Crick hears his narrator and responds to her, shouting up at the sky at her in the middle of a crowded street. It’s a great plot point. One of the smartest movies of its genre that I’ve ever seen, and one of my favorite feel-good movies ever.

4. Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola’s crowning achievement, Lost in Translation is something I think is very much akin to 1920s-era American literature: stuff like Fitzgerald, or Hemingway, or even some of Faulkner’s works, in which not a lot happens on a plot level, but the film remains fascinating and engaging through the characters and their interactions. This movie could easily have been very, very dull, but the directing is amazingly good, the disparate, cluttered Tokyo setting works like a charm, the acting is first-rate and most of all, the characters are some of the greatest ever put to film, in my opinion. I am just totally into this movie every time I turn it on, as it has the basics for any good movie done incredibly well. Above all, there is something poetic in it – the simple, random chance meeting of two lost souls in a big city they’re only visiting, and how they affect each other’s lives. It’s a beautiful and affecting picture of two people and their relationship. Humane, enlightening, uplifting.

3. Se7en

This is simply a flawless film. It has pretty much everything I like in it, from complex characters to a seedy, noir-esque setting and a story that shows a tragic Shakespearean arc of a man whose flaws end up in disaster. Everything about Se7en is tragic and poetic. Both Brad Pitt as Detective Mills and Morgan Freeman as Detective Somerset are impeccably textured, well done characters and are acted really well on top of that. They both have their own things going on, and both of them are so realistic you’d swear they were based on actual people. The film chronicles their investigation of a strange serial killer case as Somerset is about to retire and Mills is just getting started.

Se7en has this dark majesty about it, this idea that while the world is a sewer, and while a lot of terrible things may happen, it’s still worth trying to save. This movie wades through the mire of the dark by saying that you should hold to idealistic values and you should try to be the best you can be, even if the world is never going to repay you for it, even if things don’t turn out all that well in the end. The way this pieces everything together and unifies its themes by the end is just great. David Fincher’s best work and probably my favorite film of the 90s except for…

2. Pulp Fiction

This simply is. Pulp Fiction is an icon of movies simply because of how stylized and idiosyncratic it is – nobody ever saw anything like this before its debut in the 90s, and even though Tarantino wears his influences on his sleeves, taking cues from crime movies as well as boxing movies and tons of other stuff that was at least 30 years old when this came out, the way he blends everything together in Pulp Fiction is just ace.

The directing is good, but really what makes this so great is the script and the acting. Every character in this has hilarious lines and memorable quotes, and the script moves along like a fire-blazing chariot from the heavens, traipsing through seemingly nonsensical scenes and making them all count, simply by virtue of how entertaining they are. This is simply a movie that revels in the joy of storytelling, weaving together a ton of goofy, roguish characters and turning everything up to 11. It’s funny, dramatic, heart-wrenchingly tense and everything in between, and the insane thing is that the styles all blend together as one amalgam mostly known as ‘Tarantino style.’

Pulp Fiction is so good that Tarantino has spent his career up to now just trying to make something anywhere near as good, but as enjoyable as some of his work is, this was simply his magic moment – his shining star. Not putting this as one of my favorite movies of all time would just be a lie, as Pulp Fiction is iconoclastic, unforgettable and deeply, maniacally enjoyable.

And my number 1 choice is...

1. City of God

For a long time, I had a tough time pinpointing why City of God was my absolute favorite film. The first time I saw it, back in 2008, I was just blown away, and no other film had quite the effect on me that this one had. Just everything about it was spellbinding – the rough, raw directing style, the witty and down to Earth way it looks at brutal life conditions, the very well written characters, the multi-faceted story which remains constantly interesting even when it goes off in different directions every ten minutes or so…objectively, yes, this is a great film. But was it enough for it to be my favorite film of all time?

Well, all of those things factored into it. But I think the real reason goes a bit deeper. For one, this is a ‘based on a true story’ film that actually has something to say and has a reason for boasting that. And unlike a lot of films, it doesn’t get all depressive and preachy about the state of South American slums, where the entire movie is based. It simply tells the story of these kids in a slum and how they grow up in the middle of a violent gang war, and the result is something that feels much more mature and well-rounded than the majority of films ever get close to. Main character Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues)’s journey to becoming a photographer is funny, interesting and dramatic – as he points out, he is putting his life on the line to get these pictures of this gang war.

There’s just no bullshit in it; it’s got no pretensions and just shows a great real life story in a larger than life way. The way the script is paced is brilliant: the story moves through several different peoples’ lives in this crappy slum and just shows the way this drama unfolded. It takes a mundane, depressing reality and turns it into something profound in its honesty, in its brevity. There’s always something going on and the film is easy to get into even when the story jumps around from character to character so much that it seems like it’s going to come off the rails. But City of God never loses focus, and each story just adds to the colorful palette of stories.

Further, it’s just a joy of cinematic creation – there are so many memorable shots and moments in this film, and they’re put together so well that it really becomes a work of art. Being that the movie is about a young photographer, it makes sense that the mise en scene is so memorable and evocative. What else would it be? Every scene in this film just glows, and the whole thing is the most stunning film experience I’ve ever had. As a writer and storyteller myself, the way City of God tells these stories and just has so much fun doing it, even when the stories get depressing or dark, is just really admirable and worthy of respect for me. Storytelling is the bedrock of our civilization, and City of God shows exactly why it is such an important art. There is not a moment of this film where I am not completely captivated and enthralled. City of God is my favorite movie of all time.

And that's my Top 20 list, my favorite movies of all time. I look forward to seeing even more movies that will hopefully make the list in the future, and I hope you all enjoyed these lists.

All images copyright of their original owners.