Ryan Night’s Top 100 Movies: 20-11

Home stretch for the 100 best movies of all time list. Second to last installment now. I can feel it. Almost done.

For 100-91, click here.
For 90-81, 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 10-1, click here.

20. Chinatown
Chinatown is a classic movie starring Jack Nicholson about a private eye inching closer and closer to discovering corruption during the California water crisis of the 1940s. This movie is the movie that’s emblematic of the old Dick Tracey film noir private eye whodunnits that used to be a genre-unto-themselves. Full of bizarre and shocking twists and turns, violence and subject matter you wouldn’t except to see in a movie from this time period, and an intentionally dark and unsatisfying ending, Chinatown is a pretty classic ‘film education’ kind of movie, but it’s a movie that’s unique and well made enough in its own right to still be enjoyable beyond “homework”.

19. Adaptation
My second favorite of the Charlie Kaufman films, this movie does an incredible thing. It’s a movie about itself, wherein the writer is trying to write the movie (this movie) and have it be something unique and bold without relying on third act car chases, plot twists, etc., and it ends up containing all of those things. This movie accomplishes being incredibly meta while also breaking every sacred cow of writing (at least that was popular at that time), while also being a completely solid, totally enjoyable movie on its own without needing to rely on any of those high-concept ideas. Just… what a thing. There’s nothing quite like it.

18. Trainspotting
A movie about Scottish lost youths who are trying to rectify their hopeless situation. It’s a relatable look into a cohort’s destitute lives that develops an enormous amount of empathy. It’s a fantastic story about four childhood friends and both their loyalty to one another and the way in which they hold each other back. It’s a story about the difficulty of escaping a cycle of poverty. Most of all, it’s a story about the inherently unsatisfactory nature of consumerism and materialism and the lives it promises, and the empty promises it makes about what will make us happy. This movie is very important to me and its themes are tightly woven into my worldview. Easily one of the best movies of all time.

17. Blade Runner 2049
Looks like I was wrong when I said Joker was the best movie I’d seen since Nightcrawler, because I forgot Blade Runner 2049 came out between those two. I love this movie. I like it more than the original Blade Runner. Jared Leto gives a near-perfect performance as a creepy reclusive billionaire, god-complex replicant cult-leader. Ryan Gosling gives a fantastic performance as… a stoic robot with no memory. Most of all what I liked about this movie was the love story between the AI played by Ana de Armas and Ryan Gosling, and the greater context of how she is clearly a consumer product and yet the emotions are real, just as Ryan Gosling is not human, though his humanity is real; the love angle fits really well into the concepts ostensibly about robot-rights that are central to the Blade Runner franchise. I also thought the plot’s focus on memory was intriguing and retroactively more and more interesting to me as thinking about memory has become very important to me as of late.

16. The Fifth Element
Next on the best movies of all time list is Luc Besson’s original camp sci-fi film that made him a director of note. Starring Bruce Willis and Mila Jovovich, it’s about a secret society of clerics who are awaiting what earlier generations might have referred to as the ‘second coming’, but what people in the future portrayed in the movie understand as a return of the ‘fifth element’, a genetically perfect alien interpretation of humanity that was used as the blueprint for the rest of the stupid chimps walking around on Earth. Leeloo, the Fifth Element, wakes up to basically find that humanity is self-absorbed, violent, stupid and just basically a huge fucking disappointment overall. She has to make a decision of whether to save them or let them be annihilated and ultimately decides to save them because Bruce Willis convinces her of the power of love. Which is nice. It’s a great movie, great set pieces, very inventive, cool mix of romance and sci-fi action, and fantastic use of Chris Tucker as the delightfully irritating Ruby Rod, who, somewhat ironically, is basically a retroactive parody of every influencer on YouTube.

15. A Scanner Darkly
The first thing to note about A Scanner Darkly is its use of rotoscoping, which immediately makes it stand out from a stylistic standpoint. This technique, where the filmmakers trace over the film with animation, produces a surreal quality that really enhances the story, especially when it’s about disjointed or unreliable realities, like in this movie. This rotoscoping style was also recently used in Undone on Amazon Prime. A Scanner Darkly is about Keanu Reeves who plays one of the FBI/NSA agents who sits in a room and spies on all of us, but the thing is, he’s spying on himself and he’s also being spied on… but no one knows they’re all spying on each other, because they’re all living this security clearance-enforced double life. Plot-wise, their objective is to get to the bottom of this drug ring that’s stupefying people, and Reeves is investigating Winona Ryder thinking she’s the key; little does he know, Winona Ryder is investigating Reeves, thinking he is. It turns out the drug is actually being supplied by the very government that employs both of them and is used to funnel members of the society into an unquestioning, low IQ, low class, high productivity workforce. This movie is contemplative (not just about all the stuff I just described, but also about consciousness, memory, dissatisfaction with consumerist suburban life, the unreliable nature of reality especially when altered by both illegal and legally encouraged chemicals, etc), thought-provoking, well-made. It’s a classic, for me.

14. The Truman Show
Next on the best movies of all time list, one of my (obviously) all-time favorites, The Truman Show. I liked this movie when it came out, and every year it feels more and more relevant. When it came out it was sort of this intriguing idea of a person whose life is totally observed and controlled. Now, with mass surveillance, it becomes more and more an allegory of someone awakening to the chatter, and a metaphor for the way most of us outside of the security clearance world think we’re living our lives freely, but really we’re on a TV show being watched, discussed and engineered by the upper classes. Finally, it brings in concepts of God as well; obviously, in the movie, Ed Harris plays a TV producer who is surrounded by overt God-like imagery, but in the modern context this raises two interesting new questions. If you’re constantly surveilled by actual people in society who have much greater power to affect the material world, much greater agency and free will than you do, and you’re reliant on them to clear a path for you or to beg them not to obstruct you, to what degree are they functionally gods? And secondly, if the concept of God is just an extension of the human concept of class, only by a matter of degree, how does that change the way we perceive God as a concept? If I can awaken to the chatter, and it is this easily understood distance from me in terms of power & thus understandable path, what kind of chatter could someone from that level of chatter awaken to, have they, and do they understand the distance? Food for thought. Anyway, good flick.

13. Idiocracy
One of my favorite movies and also one of my greatest fears. That eventually (I’m sort of adding this on top of the movie), income inequality sets human evolution on two separate paths: one toward greater intelligence, achievement and enlightenment, and one toward cattle-like reliance and degrading IQ and then, eventually, the upper class either abandons the lower class or is rebelled against and defeated, leaving the human race with a ton of technology it doesn’t understand and doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to figure out. The movie posits the what-if scenario of birth rates, where high IQ people in the first world typically have children below the replacement rate and lower IQ people in lower socioeconomic situations typically have multiple economically unsustainable children, which causes the future described above. A millennium-era man gets frozen and wakes up a thousand years in the future only to discover that he went from average intelligence to super-genius level in the future and when he talks everyone finds him “pompous and faggy”. Lots of things I like about this movie, one of them being how difficult conversation is with extreme IQ variance. Not just in terms of vocabulary, but also in terms of interests and topics.

12. The Princess Bride
Just a classic true love romance slipped inside a fantasy. There’s not really much to say about this movie, it’s just such a clean, perfectly made movie. The craft of this movie is what puts it over the top and makes it one of the best movies of all time. Not a moment of this movie is not perfect for what this movie is. And, of course, the characters are so iconic, so perfectly embody their archetypes. The swashbuckling hero, the princess, the brute, the avenger. This movie is built out of the heroic archetypes of the human subconscious and it’s perfectly put together. It’s a movie I think humans are evolutionarily designed to like in the same way we like, say, sunsets. Just what a beautifully well-done film.

11. The Royal Tenenbaums
Finishing off this section of the best movies of all time list is The Royal Tenenbaums, which I think is the Wes Anderson movie that stands out from his overall filmography. The pastel-heavy, diorama style of filmmaking is present, but before it becomes so codified and formulaic that it feels derivative and self-referential, the characters are well-developed, satisfyingly unique and play well off one another, and the conceit of the plot itself is strong. I can’t think of another Wes Anderson movie that has all of his strengths firing on all cylinders at once. I liked this movie a lot, I thought it was incredibly emotionally engaging and relatable, and all of the character relations, especially the Luke/Owen relationship and the Luke/Gwyneth Paltrow relationship, we unique and compelling. It has this New England detached old money aristocracy thing going for it, which is an interesting setting familiar from other movies like The Squid and the Whale, but subtly mocking it, thus making it relatable, rather than taking it super seriously even though almost no one belongs to that world. Great movie, I’ve watched it several times, and the use of the Elliott Smith song “Needle in the Hay” is one of the most iconic soundtrack usages I’ve seen across many, many hundreds of films.

Just one more entry into the top 100 best movies of all time list. The final 10.

For the rest of the best movies of all time, check out the rest of the list:
For 100-91, click here.
For 90-81, 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 10-1, click here.