Some Kind of Mazzaro World

Continuing with “the list” here are numbers 80-61.

And don’t forget to check out Andrew Brenner’s list. He’s getting prolific with this stuff.

No more ado. Here we go.

NUMBER 80 – L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997)

Here’s another film like The Royal Tenenbaums that is just perfectly put together. The casting is almost a dream, and the performances are fantastic (Kim Basinger in an Academy Award winning role, plus Russell Crowe, Guy Peace AND Kevin Spacey all shine.) Director Curtis Hanson must be independently wealthy—he’s only made 4 films in the decade since L.A. Confidential. Either that or he put all he had creatively into this one. Either way, this film is alive. The sets and set decoration capture a vibe of 1950’s L.A. leaping right out of stock footage and the pages of pulp magazines and tabloids (it should come as no surprise that Hanson based a ton of what he did visually on old videos, photographs, and postcards.) But seeing those scenes come to life with actual, three-dimensional characters, and one heck of a well-imagined thrilling story, is just icing on the visual cake. To me this film is a masterpiece because the story works so well you don’t even notice everything else that went into the film technically, and yet you can really appreciate it merely for the technical aspects as well if you choose to (the DVD notably has a “music only” audio track, the only such track I’ve seen on a DVD.)

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Bored with our final semester of law school, Andrew Brenner and I decided we’d create, and post, our top 100 films of all time lists.

Our undertakings will be different, though the goal is the same–amass a list of the 100 films that mean the most to us. I won’t speak for the criteria Andrew is using to make his list, but I can speak the criteria I’ve used.

-These are the films that mean the most to me.

-These are the films I find the most impactful-both on cinema and my life.

Good Film/Movies/Cinema is a rewarding experience for me.  I get just as much entertainment from a well-written, well-made drama as I do from laughing the entire time at Will Ferrell movie. So this list isn’t necessarily full of movies I enjoy on a sheer entertainment level. A movie is just as likely to be on this list for messing with my head for weeks after seeing it, challenging the way I view the world, or being one of the best in a genre as it is just for making me smile. Not every legendary film is going to make my list because some of them just don’t mean as much to me. This whole exercise is subjective.

All this is to say, Anchorman just missed the list. Sorry.

So without further ado, here’s numbers 100-81. The rest will be revealed, 20 at a time, in four additional posts. Don’t forget to view Andrew’s list as well. I think you’ll get a glimpse of how two people with very similar tastes can sometimes view things very differently.

The list begins after the jump…

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