Ryan Night’s Top 100 Movies: 90-81

Continuing my countdown of my top 100 favorite movies. You can see the previous set of ten here. Also my disclaimer is there. In short it is don’t be a hater. Anyway, here we go:

For 100-91, click here.
For 80-71, click here.
For 70-61, click here.
For 60-51, click here.
For 50-41, click here.
For 40-31, click here.
For 30-21, click here.
For 20-11, click here.
For 10-1, click here.

90. Mallrats
I mean, this is pretty out of step with the rest in this particular section of the top 100, but I liked Mallrats. What can I say? Of the Jay and Silent Bob movies, it’s my second favorite, and I liked Brody’s coat. I liked the characters, I liked the dialog. Random thought I always had about this movie, this is how I knew Ben Affleck really wanted to play Batman and was totally bummed out when everyone bagged on him for getting cast. He was in the Kevin Smith crew back in the day and you can tell he liked that crew a lot, and it was a totally comics focused crew. This movie would never get made today because malls are dying and Miramax’s legacy is totally destroyed. Oh well.

89. Body of Lies
As I mentioned when I brought up Atomic Blonde, I like spy stuff, and Body of Lies really hit the spot as far as a spy movie is concerned. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA agent stationed in the middle east. It’s directed by Ridley Scott, who I generally like as a director. Plot-wise, it’s pretty standard for a spy thriller. DiCaprio’s character is not entirely in the know and has his own ideas about how things should go down on the ground that the suits in Washington don’t understand.

88. Inside Llewyn Davis
The first of several Coen Brothers movies that are on this top 100 movies list. This one is about a folk singer who’s basically a little bit ahead of his time. He’s a folk singer before Bob Dylan took off and no one will believe that his style of music has any traction whatsoever. It’s a really interesting slice of life movie, somewhat sad, and has some really good music.

87. Sicario: Day of the Soldado
Like Body of Lies, it’s a sort of gritty look into the messy way that geopolitics plays out on the ground, far away from the news media that feeds the public bullet points or the decisions that wealthy civilians make. Notably, I didn’t care for the first Sicario much, but I really liked the second one. Basically there are two converging storylines: the US government kidnaps a Mexican drug lord’s daughter pretending to be a competing cartel in order to kick off a drug war, and meanwhile a border-town Mexican-American kid is recruited into working for a cartel.

86. Bad Times at the El Royale
Quite liked this movie. I forget who directed it, but it kind of emulates that Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez 1970s cinema-house grindhouse kind of filmmaking style with multiple characters, non-linear storytelling and chaptered vignettes. Has a really strong cast that includes Jon Hamm, Jeff Bridges and Chris Hemsworth. Very strong characters, very memorable filmmaking voice, interesting plot. Had a few flaws, like plot threads that dropped in kind of an unsatisfying way, so I guess I have some criticisms of how the structure was executed, but I greatly enjoyed the world they put together. Weirdly, it’s somewhat similar stylistically and thematically to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but I liked this movie more.

85. Interview with the Vampire
Coming in at 85 on the top 100 movies list, the adaptation of the Anne Rice novel of the same name starring Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and a young Kirsten Dunst. Random aside, I read Memnoch the Devil, the sequel to the book this movie is based on, and my main takeaway from that novel is this really weird scene where Tom Cruise’s character eats a used tampon and reviews it like a 5 star restaurant. Anyway, as for the movie, I liked it.

84. The Breakfast Club
The classic John Hughes movie about a group of kids getting beyond their high school cliques, getting to the roots of the issues that separate them and connecting with one another. I like this movie a lot. I like the idea of this movie more than I like the actual movie, but, I mean, it’s a classic for a reason. Fantastic characters, great message, well-executed. I think this clique drama affects our society much more strongly than we ever admit to ourselves or talk about.

83. American Ultra
Wow, lots of spy stuff in this lower half of the top 100 movies list. This one is about a classic underachieving American burnout teenager played by Jesse Eisenberg who turns out to be a CIA sleeper agent. He gets activated and his secret agent training kicks in, he kills a bunch of assassins and off we go. What makes this movie special to me is it’s very stylistic, it’s got a quirky sense of humor and it’s got this dark End of the ****ing World-esque ride or die romance between two fucked up people that I tend to find compelling. His girlfriend is played by Kristen Stewart.

82. The Butterfly Effect
Next on the top 100 movies list, Ashton Kutcher plays a guy in a town where everyone’s lives suck. I guess it’s basically the town they’re talking about in that Offspring song “The Kids Aren’t Alright”. You know, the one where he says, “How could one little street swallow so many lives?” Kutcher’s character is journaling one day and realizes he can go back and re-experience the events of his past. He discovers if he does this and makes different decisions, he can change the future. So he tries to fix his and his friends’ lives, but he just keeps making everything worse. It’s a thought-provoking, dark and overall pretty fucked up movie that makes you really have to face how inescapably shitty life can be.

81. Lucy
A Luc Besson movie starring Scarlett Johansson wherein Scarlett’s character gets injected with a drug that slowly unlocks the full potential of her brain. It’s an interesting action sci-fi movie that sort of ponders what powers will unlock along the path of future evolution in humans. Scarlett starts out by getting superhumanly fast at absorbing information, gets heightened intuition and her predictive intelligence shoots way up, eventually gets telekinesis and then ascends into becoming an AI that exists outside time. Some guy at an office I worked at really hated this movie. I thought it was good.

That’s it for the second installment (90-81) of my top 100 movies list.
For 100-91, click here.
For 80-71, click here.
For 70-61, click here.
For 60-51, click here.
For 50-41, click here.
For 40-31, click here.
For 30-21, click here.
For 20-11, click here.
For 10-1, click here.