If you look at page 34 it says:

20. Jumanji
20. Magnolia
19. Hoop Dreams

Jumanji and Magnolia are not tied in number of points and in fact Magnolia is closer to tying Hoop Dreams than it is Jumanji. Even if the two movies were tied, Hoop Dreams would still be #18.

edit: Or did you just throw Jumanji in there as a joke? I admit I was surprised to see it ranked there, but I've seen some other inexplicable things in this list too.

Just for the record, I didn't submit a list.

Post is by

As if I didnt feel stupid enough.

I was beginning to worry about this one. I kept an eye out for it during voting and I didn't see that many votes for it, and most of the votes I did see seemed to be in the 30-50 area. Very happy with its placement.


RSC? wait, that's me!

Listen here! it's Jumanji. Jumanji you twit. That's right Jumanji.

You woke up this morning. You got out of bed-it's Jumanji.

When you go to bed and wake up tomorrow. It's still Jumanji.

Alright? Got it? Good day and Jumanji.




It's alright old chap. it's not everyday you get to be sap for a day.

There were probably 4-5 things that I never would have expected in the top 50. I've never seen Jumanji it looks pretty fucking stupid, but I just figured it was something that a bunch of people liked when they were kids and voted it high. I never thought to look at who posted it. Oy.

It's #436 FTR with two votes.

Don't feel so bad...I believe The Goonies placed respectfully on the 80's list.

the difference being The Goonies is a really good movie and Jumanji, well...

You voted for it devil man.

but I didn't put in my top 20

classic!

#015 Reservoir Dogs (1997) 21 Votes, 4804 points
Quentin Tarantino
Running time - 99 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Crime / Drama / Thriller
Original language English

Writing Credits
Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary

Cast
Harvey Keitel ... Mr. White / Larry Dimmick
Tim Roth ... Mr. Orange / Freddy Newandyke
Michael Madsen ... Mr. Blonde / Vic Vega
Chris Penn ... Nice Guy Eddie Cabot
Steve Buscemi ... Mr. Pink

Other awards
Nominated: Cannes Film Festival Grand Jury Prize- Dramatic

BY ROGER EBERT / October 26, 1992

Now that we know Quentin Tarantino can make a movie like "Reservoir Dogs," it's time for him to move on and make a better one.

This film, the first from an obviously talented writer-director, is like an exercise in style. He sets up his characters during a funny scene in a coffee shop, and then puts them through a stickup that goes disastrously wrong. Most of the movie deals with its bloody aftermath, as they assemble in a warehouse and bleed and drool on one another.

The movie has one of the best casts you could imagine, led by the legendary old tough guy Lawrence Tierney, who has been in and out of jail both on the screen and in real life. He is incapable of uttering a syllable that sounds inauthentic. Tierney plays Joe Cabot, an experienced criminal who has assembled a team of crooks for a big diamond heist. The key to his plan is that his associates don't know one another, and therefore can't squeal if they're caught. He names them off a color chart: Mr. White, Mr. Orange, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Pink, and so on. Mr. Pink doesn't like his name. "You're lucky you ain't Mr. Yellow," Tierney rasps.

The opening scene features an endlessly circling camera, as the tough guys light cigarettes and drink coffee in one of those places where the tables are Formica and the waitresses write your order on a green-and-white Guest Check. They argue, joke and b.s. each other through thick clouds of smoke; it's like "The Sportswriters on Parole." There's a funny discussion of tipping. Then they walk out of the restaurant, and are introduced in the opening credits, as they walk menacingly toward the camera. They have great faces: The glowering Michael Madsen; the apprehensive Tim Roth; Chris Penn, ready for anything; Tierney, with a Mack truck of a mug; Harvey Keitel, whose presence in a crime movie is like an imprimatur.

The movie feels like it's going to be terrific, but Tarantino's script doesn't have much curiosity about these guys. He has an idea, and trusts the idea to drive the plot.

The idea is that the tough guys, except for Tierney and the deranged Madsen, are mostly bluffers. They are not good at handling themselves in desperate situations.

We see the bungled crime in flashbacks. Tarantino has a confident, kinetic way of shooting action - guys running down the street, gun battles, blood and screams. Then the action centers in the warehouse, where Madsen sadistically toys with a character he thinks is a cop, and the movie ends on a couple of notes of horrifying poetic justice.

One of the discoveries in the movie is Madsen, who has done a lot of acting over the years (he had a good role in "The Natural") but here emerges with the kind of really menacing screen presence only a few actors achieve; he can hold his own with the fearsome Tierney, and reminds me a little of a very mean Robert De Niro.

Tarantino himself is also interesting as an actor; he could play great crazy villains.

As for the movie, I liked what I saw, but I wanted more. I know the story behind the movie - Tarantino promoted the project from scratch, on talent and nerve - and I think it's quite an achievement for a first-timer. It was made on a low budget. But the part that needs work didn't cost money. It's the screenplay. Having created the characters and fashioned the outline, Tarantino doesn't do much with his characters except to let them talk too much, especially when they should be unconscious from shock and loss of blood.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.4/10 (129,021 votes) Top 250: #64

SOMB 499 rank - #23

Ranked highest by Worrywort, Citizen, Elcorazon and Hero (#6)

Awesome, i've had over 2/3rds of my picks make the list

disappointed Cape Fear & Suicide Kings didnt make it.....

#014 The Shawshank Redemption (1994) 24 Votes, 5138 points
Frank Darabont
Running time - 142 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Crime / Drama
Original language English / Italian

Writing Credits
Stephen King, Frank Darabont

Cast
Tim Robbins ... Andy Dufresne
Morgan Freeman ... Ellis Boyd 'Red' Redding
Bob Gunton ... Warden Norton
William Sadler ... Heywood
Clancy Brown ... Captain Hadley


Academy Awards:
Nominated Best Actor in a Leading Role (Morgan Freeman), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Music - Original Score, Best Picture, Best Sound, Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

Other awards
Nominated: Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Morgan Freeman), Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

Roger Ebert / October 17, 1999

It is a strange comment to make about a film set inside a prison, but "The Shawshank Redemption" creates a warm hold on our feelings because it makes us a member of a family. Many movies offer us vicarious experiences and quick, superficial emotions. "Shawshank" slows down and looks. It uses the narrator's calm, observant voice to include us in the story of men who have formed a community behind bars. It is deeper than most films; about continuity in a lifetime, based on friendship and hope.

Interesting that although the hero of the film is the convicted former banker Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), the action is never seen from his point of view. The film's opening scene shows him being given two life sentences for the murder of his wife and her lover, and then we move, permanently, to a point of view representing the prison population and particularly the lifer Ellis "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman). It is his voice remembering the first time he saw Andy ("looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over"), and predicting, wrongly, that he wouldn't make it in prison.

From Andy's arrival on the prison bus to the film's end, we see only how others see him - Red, who becomes his best friend, Brooks the old librarian, the corrupt Warden Norton, guards and prisoners. Red is our surrogate. He's the one we identify with, and the redemption, when it comes, is Red's. We've been shown by Andy's example that you have to keep true to yourself, not lose hope, bide your time, set a quiet example and look for your chance. "I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really," he tells Red. "Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'."

The key to the film's structure, I think, is that it's not about its hero, but about our relationship with him - our curiosity, our pity, our admiration. If Andy had been the heroic center, bravely enduring, the film would have been conventional, and less mysterious. But we wonder about this guy. Did he really kill those two people? Why does he keep so much to himself? Why can he amble through the prison yard like a free man on a stroll, when everyone else plods or sidles?

People like excitement at the movies, and titles that provide it do well. Films about "redemption" are approached with great wariness; a lot of people are not thrilled by the prospect of a great film - it sounds like work. But there's a hunger for messages of hope, and when a film offers one, it's likely to have staying power even if it doesn't grab an immediate audience.

"The Shawshank Redemption" premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1994, and opened a few weeks later. It got good reviews but did poor business (its $18 million original gross didn't cover costs; it took in only another $10 million after winning seven Oscar nominations, including best picture).

There wasn't much going for it: It had a terrible title, it was a "prison drama" and women don't like those, it contained almost no action, it starred actors who were respected but not big stars, and it was long at 142 minutes. Clearly this was a movie that needed word-of-mouth to find an audience, and indeed business was slowly but steadily growing when it was yanked from theaters. If it had been left to find its way, it might have continued to build and run for months, but that's not what happened.

Instead, in one of the most remarkable stories in home video history, it found its real mass audience on tapes and discs, and through TV screenings. Within five years, "Shawshank" was a phenomenon, a video best seller and renter that its admirers feel they've discovered for themselves. When the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the "Shawshank" groundswell in April 1999, it was occupying first place in the Internet Movie Database worldwide vote of the 250 best films; it's usually in the top five.

Polls and rentals reflect popularity but don't explain why people value "Shawshank" so fervently. Maybe it plays more like a spiritual experience than a movie. It does have entertaining payoff moments (as when the guards from another prison, wearing their baseball uniforms, line up to have Andy do their taxes). But much of the movie involves quiet, solitude, and philosophical discussions about life. The moments of violence (as when Andy is sexually assaulted) are seen objectively, not exploited.

The movie avoids lingering on Andy's suffering; after beatings, he's seen in medium and long shot, tactfully. The camera doesn't focus on Andy's wounds or bruises, but, like his fellow prisoners, gives him his space.

The Morgan Freeman character is carrier of the film's spiritual arc. We see him at three parole hearings, after 20, 30 and 40 years. The first hearing involves storytelling trickery; the film has opened with Andy's sentencing, and then we see a parole board, and expect it's about to listen to Andy's appeal. But, no, that's when we first see Red. In his first appeal he tries to convince the board he's been rehabilitated. In the second, he just goes through the motions. In the third, he rejects the whole notion of rehabilitation, and somehow in doing so he sets his spirit free, and the board releases him.

There's an underlying problem. Behind bars, Red is king. He's the prison fixer, able to get you a pack of cigarettes, a little rock pick or a Rita Hayworth poster. On the outside, he has no status or identity. We've already seen what happened to the old librarian (James Whitmore), lonely and adrift in freedom. The last act, in which Andy helps Red accept his freedom, is deeply moving - all the more so because Andy again operates at a distance, with letters and postcards, and is seen through Red's mind.

Frank Darabont wrote and directed the film, basing it on a story by Stephen King. His film grants itself a leisure that most films are afraid to risk. The movie is as deliberate, considered and thoughtful as Freeman's narration. There's a feeling in Hollywood that audiences have short attention spans and must be assaulted with fresh novelties. I think such movies are slower to sit through than a film like "Shawshank," which absorbs us and takes away the awareness that we are watching a film.

Deliberate, too, is the dialogue. Tim Robbins makes Andy a man of few words, quietly spoken. He doesn't get real worked up. He is his own man, capable of keeping his head down for years and then indulging in a grand gesture, as when he plays an aria from Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro." (The overhead shot of the prisoners in the yard, spellbound by the music, is one of the film's epiphanies.) Because he does not volunteer himself, reach out to us or overplay his feelings, he becomes more fascinating: It is often better to wonder what a character is thinking than to know.

Roger Deakins' cinematography is tactful, not showy. Two opening shots, one from a helicopter, one of prison walls looming overhead, establish the prison. Shots follow the dialogue instead of anticipating it. Thomas Newman's music enhances rather than informs, and there is a subtle touch in the way deep bass rumblings during the early murder are reprised when a young prisoner recalls another man's description of the crime.

Darabont constructs the film to observe the story, not to punch it up or upstage it. Upstaging, in fact, is unknown in this film; the actors are content to stay within their roles, the story moves in an orderly way, and the film itself reflects the slow passage of the decades. "When they put you in that cell," Red says, "when those bars slam home, that's when you know it's for real. Old life blown away in the blink of an eye. Nothing left but all the time in the world to think about it." Watching the film again, I admired it even more than the first time I saw it. Affection for good films often grows with familiarity, as it does with music. Some have said life is a prison, we are Red, Andy is our redeemer. All good art is about something deeper than it admits.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 9.2/10 (289,007 votes) Top 250: #2

SOMB 499 rank - #13

Ranked highest by Hero (#2)

#013 Fight Club (1999) 22 Votes, 5201 points
David Fincher
Running time - 139 min
Country of origin USA / Germany
Genre Action / Drama / Thriller
Original language English / Italian

Writing Credits
Chuck Palahniuk, Jim Uhls, Kevin Andrew Walker

Cast
Edward Norton ... The Narrator
Brad Pitt ... Tyler Durden
Helena Bonham Carter ... Marla Singer
Meat Loaf ... Robert 'Bob' Paulson
Zach Grenier ... Richard Chesler


Academy Awards:
Nominated Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing

BY ROGER EBERT / October 15, 1999

"Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since "Death Wish," a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.

Sometimes, for variety, they beat up themselves. It's macho porn -- the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights. Women, who have had a lifetime of practice at dealing with little-boy posturing, will instinctively see through it; men may get off on the testosterone rush. The fact that it is very well made and has a great first act certainly clouds the issue.

Edward Norton stars as a depressed urban loner filled up to here with angst. He describes his world in dialogue of sardonic social satire. His life and job are driving him crazy. As a means of dealing with his pain, he seeks out 12-step meetings, where he can hug those less fortunate than himself and find catharsis in their suffering. It is not without irony that the first meeting he attends is for post-surgical victims of testicular cancer, since the whole movie is about guys afraid of losing their cojones.

These early scenes have a nice sly tone; they're narrated by the Norton character in the kind of voice Nathanael West used in Miss Lonelyhearts. He's known only as the Narrator, for reasons later made clear. The meetings are working as a sedative, and his life is marginally manageable when tragedy strikes: He begins to notice Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) at meetings. She's a "tourist" like himself--someone not addicted to anything but meetings. She spoils it for him. He knows he's a faker, but wants to believe everyone else's pain is real.

On an airplane, he has another key encounter, with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a man whose manner cuts through the fog. He seems able to see right into the Narrator's soul, and shortly after, when the Narrator's high-rise apartment turns into a fireball, he turns to Tyler for shelter. He gets more than that. He gets in on the ground floor of Fight Club, a secret society of men who meet in order to find freedom and self-realization through beating one another into pulp.

It's at about this point that the movie stops being smart and savage and witty, and turns to some of the most brutal, unremitting, nonstop violence ever filmed. Although sensible people know that if you hit someone with an ungloved hand hard enough, you're going to end up with broken bones, the guys in "Fight Club" have fists of steel, and hammer one another while the sound effects guys beat the hell out of Naugahyde sofas with Ping-Pong paddles. Later, the movie takes still another turn. A lot of recent films seem unsatisfied unless they can add final scenes that redefine the reality of everything that has gone before; call it the Keyser Soze syndrome.

What is all this about? According to Durden, it is about freeing yourself from the shackles of modern life, which imprisons and emasculates men. By being willing to give and receive pain and risk death, Fight Club members find freedom. Movies like "Crash" must play like cartoons for Durden. He's a shadowy, charismatic figure, able to inspire a legion of men in big cities to descend into the secret cellars of a Fight Club and beat one another up.

Only gradually are the final outlines of his master plan revealed. Is Tyler Durden in fact a leader of men with a useful philosophy? "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he says, sounding like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He's a bully--Werner Erhard plus S & M, a leather club operator without the decor. None of the Fight Club members grows stronger or freer because of their membership; they're reduced to pathetic cultists. Issue them black shirts and sign them up as skinheads. Whether Durden represents hidden aspects of the male psyche is a question the movie uses as a loophole--but is not able to escape through, because "Fight Club" is not about its ending but about its action.

Of course, "Fight Club" itself does not advocate Durden's philosophy. It is a warning against it, I guess; one critic I like says it makes "a telling point about the bestial nature of man and what can happen when the numbing effects of day-to-day drudgery cause people to go a little crazy." I think it's the numbing effects of movies like this that cause people go to a little crazy. Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience will like the behavior but not the argument. Certainly they'll buy tickets because they can see Pitt and Norton pounding on each other; a lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral philosophy. The images in movies like this argue for themselves, and it takes a lot of narration (or Narration) to argue against them.

Lord knows the actors work hard enough. Norton and Pitt go through almost as much physical suffering in this movie as Demi Moore endured in "G.I. Jane," and Helena Bonham Carter creates a feisty chain-smoking hellcat who is probably so angry because none of the guys thinks having sex with her is as much fun as a broken nose. When you see good actors in a project like this, you wonder if they signed up as an alternative to canyoneering.

The movie was directed by David Fincher and written by Jim Uhls, who adapted the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. In many ways, it's like Fincher's movie "The Game" (1997), with the violence cranked up for teenage boys of all ages. That film was also about a testing process in which a man drowning in capitalism (Michael Douglas) has the rug of his life pulled out from under him and has to learn to fight for survival. I admired "The Game" much more than "Fight Club" because it was really about its theme, while the message in "Fight Club" is like bleeding scraps of Socially Redeeming Content thrown to the howling mob.

Fincher is a good director (his work includes "Alien 3," one of the best-looking bad movies I have ever seen, and "Seven," the grisly and intelligent thriller). With "Fight Club" he seems to be setting himself some kind of a test--how far over the top can he go? The movie is visceral and hard-edged, with levels of irony and commentary above and below the action. If it had all continued in the vein explored in the first act, it might have become a great film. But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get. "Fight Club" is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy--the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.7/10 (219,474 votes) Top 250: #28

SOMB 499 rank - #7

Ranked highest by SuckeredYou and MitchellStirling (#3)

Fight Club was my #7, very curious to see the Top Ten now

will Fargo take it all?!?!???

Very surprised Shawshank and Reservoir Dogs didn't get Top 10...even more surprised Fight Club took over both.

my #1 and #3 are still alive

#012 Office Space (1999) 24 Votes, 5253 points One #1 vote
Mike Judge
Running time - 89 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Crime / Romance
Original language English

Writing Credits
Mike Judge

Cast
Ron Livingston ... Peter Gibbons
Jennifer Aniston ... Joanna
David Herman ... Michael Bolton
Ajay Naidu ... Samir Nagheenanajar
Gary Cole ... Bill Lumbergh
Stephen Root ... Milton Waddams


BY ROGER EBERT / February 19, 1999

Mike Judge's ``Office Space'' is a comic cry of rage against the nightmare of modern office life. It has many of the same complaints as ``Dilbert'' and the movie ``Clockwatchers'' and, for that matter, the works of Kafka and the Book of Job. It is about work that crushes the spirit. Office cubicles are cells, supervisors are the wardens, and modern management theory is skewed to employ as many managers and as few workers as possible.

As the movie opens, a cubicle slave named Peter (Ron Livingston) is being reminded by his smarmy supervisor (Gary Cole) that all reports now carry a cover sheet. ``Yes, I know,'' he says. ``I forgot. It was a silly mistake. It won't happen again.'' Before long another manager reminds him about the cover sheets. ``Yes, I know,'' he says. Then another manager. And another. Logic suggests that when more than one supervisor conveys the same trivial information, their jobs overlap, and all supervisors after the first one should be shredded.

Peter hates his job. So do all of his co-workers, although one of them, Milton (Stephen Root), has found refuge through an obsessive defense of his cubicle, his radio and his stapler. Milton's cubicle is relocated so many times that eventually it appears to have no entrance or exit; he's walled-in on every side. You may recognize him as the hero of cartoons that played on ``Saturday Night Live,'' where strangers were always arriving to use his cubicle as storage space for cardboard boxes.

Mike Judge, who gained fame through MTV's ``Beavis and Butt-Head,'' and made the droll animated film ``Beavis and Butt-Head Do America'' (1996), has taken his ``SNL'' Milton cartoons as an inspiration for this live-action comedy, which uses Orwellian satirical techniques to fight the cubicle police: No individual detail of office routine is too absurd to be believed, but together they add up to stark, staring insanity.

Peter has two friends at work: Michael Bolton (David Herman) and Samir (Ajay Naidu). No, not that Michael Bolton, Michael patiently explains. They flee the office for coffee breaks (demonstrating that Starbucks doesn't really sell coffee--it sells escape from the office).

Peter is in love with the waitress at the chain restaurant across the parking lot. Her name is Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) and she has problems with management, too. She's required to wear a minimum of 15 funny buttons on the suspenders of her uniform; the buttons are called ``flair'' in company lingo, and her manager suggests that wearing only the minimum flair suggests the wrong spirit (another waiter has ``45 flairs'' and looks like an exhibit at a trivia convention).

The movie's dialogue is smart. It doesn't just chug along making plot points. Consider, for example, Michael Bolton's plan for revenge against the company. He has a software program that would round off payments to the next-lowest penny and deposit the proceeds in their checking account. Hey, you're thinking--that's not original! A dumb movie would pretend it was.

Not ``Office Space,'' where Peter says he thinks he's heard of that before, and Michael says, ``Yeah, they did it in `Superman III.' Also, a bunch of hackers tried it in the '70s. One got arrested.'' The movie's turning point comes when Peter seeks help from an ``occupational hypnotherapist.'' He's put in a trance with long-lasting results; he cuts work, goes fishing, guts fish at his desk and tells efficiency experts he actually works only 15 minutes a week. The experts like his attitude and suggest he be promoted. Meanwhile, the Milton problem is ticking like a time bomb, especially after Milton's cubicle is relocated to a basement storage area.

``Office Space'' is like the evil twin of ``Clockwatchers.'' Both movies are about the ways corporations standardize office routines, so that workers are interchangeable and can be paid as little as possible.

``Clockwatchers'' was about the lowest rung on the employment ladder--daily temps--but ``Office Space'' suggests that regular employment is even worse, because it's a life sentence. Asked to describe his state of mind to the therapist, Peter says, ``Since I started working, every single day has been worse than the day before, so that every day you see me is the worst day of my life.'' Judge, an animator until now, treats his characters a little like cartoon creatures. That works. Nuances of behavior are not necessary, because in the cubicle world every personality trait is magnified, and the captives stagger forth like grotesques. There is a moment in the movie when the heroes take a baseball bat to a malfunctioning copier. Reader, who has not felt the same?

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.8/10 (52,270 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #27

Ranked highest by Cerebral Caustic (#1)

Ha, I fell for the Jumanji entry.

I was also one of the two who voted for it

Mine too, actually.

10) Office Space
9) Fight Club
8) Basquiat
7) Short Cuts
6) Smoke Signals
5) Smoke
4) Hard Boiled
3) Goodfellas
2) The Iron Giant
1) The Big Lebowski

I think with office space down, those are the only two left.

Two of my top 10 didn't make it.

#011 Heat (1995) 16 Votes, 5390 points, Two #1 votes
Michael Mann
Running time - 171 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Crime / Drama
Original language Spanish / English

Writing Credits
Michael Mann

Cast
Al Pacino ... Lt. Vincent Hanna
Robert De Niro ... Neil McCauley
Val Kilmer ... Chris Shiherlis
Jon Voight ... Nate
Tom Sizemore ... Michael Cheritto

BY ROGER EBERT / December 15, 1995

There is a sequence at the center of Michael Mann's "Heat" that illuminates the movie's real subject. As it begins, a Los Angeles police detective named Hanna (Al Pacino) has been tracking a high-level thief named McCauley (Robert De Niro) for days. McCauley is smart and wary and seems impossible to trap. So, one evening, tailing McCauley's car, Hanna turns on the flashers and pulls him over.

McCauley carefully shifts the loaded gun he is carrying. He waits in his car. Hanna approaches it and says, "What do you say I buy you a cup of coffee?" McCauley says that sounds like a good idea.

The two men sit across from each other at a Formica table in a diner: Middle-aged, weary, with too much experience in their lines of work, they know exactly what they represent to one other, but for this moment of truce they drink their coffee.

McCauley is a professional thief, skilled and gifted. When Hanna subtly suggests otherwise, he says, "You see me doing thrill-seeking holdups with a `Born to Lose' tattoo on my chest?" No, says the cop, he doesn't. The conversation comes to an end. The cop says, "I don't know how to do anything else." The thief says, "Neither do I." The scene concentrates the truth of "Heat," which is that these cops and robbers need each other: They occupy the same space, sealed off from the mainstream of society, defined by its own rules.

They are enemies, but in a sense they are more intimate, more involved with each other than with those who are supposed to be their friends - their women, for example.

The movie's other subject is the women. Two of the key players in "Heat" have wives, and in the course of the movie, McCauley will fall in love, which is against his policy. Hanna is working on his third marriage, with a woman named Justice (Diane Venora), who is bitter because his job obsesses him: "You live among the remains of dead people." One of McCauley's crime partners is a thief named Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), whose wife is Charlene (Ashley Judd).

McCauley's own policy is never to get involved in anything that he can't shed in 30 seconds flat. One day in a restaurant he gets into a conversation with Eady (Amy Brenneman), who asks him a lot of questions. "Lady," he says to her, "why are you so interested in what I do?" She is lonely. "I am alone," he tells her. "I am not lonely." He is in fact the loneliest man in the world, and soon finds that he needs her.

This is the age-old conflict in American action pictures, between the man with "man's work" and the female principal, the woman who wants to tame him, wants him to stay at home. "Heat," with an uncommonly literate screenplay by Mann, handles it with insight. The men in his movie are addicted to their lives. There is a scene where the thieves essentially have all the money they need. They can retire. McCauley even has a place picked out in New Zealand. But another job presents itself, and they cannot resist it: "It's the juice. It's the action." The movie intercuts these introspective scenes with big, bravura sequences of heists and shoot-outs. It opens with a complicated armored car robbery involving stolen semis and tow trucks. It continues with a meticulously conceived bank robbery.

McCauley is the mastermind. Hanna is the guy assigned to guess his next move.

The cops keep McCauley and his crew under 24-hour surveillance, and one day follow them to an isolated warehouse area, where the thieves stand in the middle of a vast space and McCauley outlines some plan to them. Later, the cops stand in the same place, trying to figure out what plan the thieves could possibly have had in mind. No target is anywhere in view. Suddenly Hanna gets it: "You know what they're looking at? They're looking at us - the LAPD. We just got made." He is right. McCauley is now on a roof looking at them through a lens, having smoked out his tail.

De Niro and Pacino, veterans of so many great films in the crime genre, have by now spent more time playing cops and thieves than most cops and thieves have. There is always talk about how actors study people to base their characters on. At this point in their careers, if Pacino and De Niro go out to study a cop or a robber, it's likely their subject will have modeled himself on their performances in old movies. There is absolute precision of effect here, the feeling of roles assumed instinctively.

What is interesting is the way Mann tests these roles with the women. The wives and girlfriends in this movie are always, in a sense, standing at the kitchen door, calling to the boys to come in from their play. Pacino's wife, played by Venora with a smart bitterness, is the most unforgiving: She is married to a man who brings corpses into bed with him in his dreams. Her daughter, rebellious and screwed up, is getting no fathering from him. Their marriage is a joke, and when he catches her with another man, she accurately says he forced her to demean herself.

The other women, played by Judd and Brenneman, are not quite so insightful. They still have some delusions, although Brenneman, who plays a graphic artist, balks as any modern woman would when this strange, secretive man expects her to leave her drawing boards and her computer and follow him to uncertainty in New Zealand.

Michael Mann's writing and direction elevate this material.

It's not just an action picture. Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they're thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They're not trapped with cliches. Of the many imprisonments possible in our world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate - to be unable to tell another person what you really feel. These characters can do that. Not that it saves them.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.1/10 (85,272 votes) Top 250: #160

SOMB 499 rank - #128

Ranked highest by Castana and Hero (#1)

short of the top ten!!!

you're all dead to me.... (except castana)

yeah i had Office Space at #13
i have 3, 9 and 10 still alive
10. Goodfellas
9. Boogie Nights
8. the Sixth Sense
7. Fight Club
6. Reservoir Dogs
5. Edward Scissorhands
4. Forrest Gump
3. Pulp Fiction
2. the Shawshank Redemption
1. Heat

is shawshank redemption actually worth watching

God, yes. By far the best movie made from a King book. Well acted. Believable.

Heat, on the other hand, is terrible.

'sway it is, mang. Me no like. I may be the only one in the country that felt that way.

yer 'Heat' is my 'Shawshank'..

4 of my top 10 still to come:

1. Miller's Crossing
3. Rushmore
4. Being John Malkovich
7. Fargo

3 more in my top 20 to still to come. the other three I haven't really figured out yet, though I feel like I should know.

Can't believe it's even in the top 20, myself. Good movie...but bloated films don't deserve this kind of praise.

Had I seen it in time, I might have put Heat at number one on my list. Amazing fucking film.

heat is in this apartment and i havent seen it before

i fucking fail so bad

pretty bad dude

Aw, shit, it's the ultra-serious cop movie that I can get behind and isn't boring like The French Connection or the movie-that-is-actually-just-a-TV-show-and-not-a-movie-at-all "NYPD Blue" or K-911 starring Jim Belushi and Mac the German Shepherd as "Jerry Lee."

whats worse is i consider pacino and de nero like my two favorite actors


gonna b low my brains out brb

today i watchec casablanca it was good lol

god The French Connection sucked

I somewhat understand (though disappointed by) this boards dislike of the French Connection. I really have no arguments to make, so I will let that dog rest.

I like the very end of the French Connection. One of the creepiest shots in a movie I've ever seen.

#010 Schindler's List (1995) 17 Votes, 5702 points, Two #1 votes
Steven Spielberg
Running time - 195 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Biography / Drama / History / War
Original language English / Hebrew / German / Polish

Writing Credits
Thomas Keneally, Steven Zaillian

Cast
Liam Neeson ... Oskar Schindler
Ben Kingsley ... Itzhak Stern
Ralph Fiennes ... Amon Goeth
Caroline Goodall ... Emilie Schindler
Jonathan Sagall ... Poldek Pfefferberg

Academy Awards
Won: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Music - Original Score, Best Picture, Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
Nominated: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Liam Neeson), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Ralph Fiennes), Best Costume Design, Best Makeup, Best Sound

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Ralph Fiennes), Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Film, Best Score, Best Screenplay - Adapted, David Lean Award for Direction. Golden Globe Best Director - Motion Picture, Best Motion Picture - Drama, Best Screenplay - Motion Picture
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Actor (Liam Neeson), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Ben Kingsley), Best Costume Design, Best Make Up Artist, Best Production Design, Best Sound. Golden Globe Best Original Score - Motion Picture, Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Liam Neeson), Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Ralph Fiennes)

Roger Ebert / June 24, 2001

Schindler's List'' is described as a film about the Holocaust, but the Holocaust supplies the field for the story, rather than the subject. The film is really two parallel character studies--one of a con man, the other of a psychopath. Oskar Schindler, who swindles the Third Reich, and Amon Goeth, who represents its pure evil, are men created by the opportunities of war.

Schindler had no success in business before or after the war, but used its cover to run factories that saved the lives of more than 1,000 Jews. (Technically, the factories were failures, too, but that was his plan: ''If this factory ever produces a shell that can actually be fired, I'll be very unhappy.'') Goeth was executed after the war, which he used as a cover for his homicidal pathology.

In telling their stories, Steven Spielberg found a way to approach the Holocaust, which is a subject too vast and tragic to be encompassed in any reasonable way by fiction. In the ruins of the saddest story of the century, he found, not a happy ending, but at least one affirming that resistance to evil is possible and can succeed. In the face of the Nazi charnel houses, it is a statement that has to be made, or we sink into despair.

The film has been an easy target for those who find Spielberg's approach too upbeat or ''commercial,'' or condemn him for converting Holocaust sources into a well-told story. But every artist must work in his medium, and the medium of film does not exist unless there is an audience between the projector and the screen. Claude Lanzmann made a more profound film about the Holocaust in ''Shoah,'' but few were willing to sit through its nine hours. Spielberg's unique ability in his serious films has been to join artistry with popularity--to say what he wants to say in a way that millions of people want to hear.

In ''Schindler's List,'' his brilliant achievement is the character of Oskar Schindler, played by Liam Neeson as a man who never, until almost the end, admits to anyone what he is really doing. Schindler leaves it to ''his'' Jews, and particularly to his accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), to understand the unsayable: that Schindler is using his factory as a con game to cheat the Nazis of the lives of his workers. Schindler leaves it to Stern, and Spielberg leaves it to us; the movie is a rare case of a man doing the opposite of what he seems to be doing, and a director letting the audience figure it out itself.

The measure of Schindler's audacity is stupendous. His first factory makes pots and pans. His second makes shell casings. Both factories are so inefficient they make hardly any contribution to the Nazi war effort. A more cautious man might have insisted that the factories produced fine pots and usable casings, to make them invaluable to the Nazis. The full measure of Schindler's obsession is that he wanted to save Jewish lives and produce unusable goods--all the while wearing a Nazi party badge on the lapel of his expensive black-market suit.

The key to his character is found in his first big scene, in a nightclub frequented by Nazi officers. We gather that his resources consist of the money in his pocket and the clothes he stands up in. He walks into the club, sends the best champagne to a table of high-ranking Nazis, and soon has the Nazis and their girlfriends sitting at his table, which swells with late arrivals. Who is this man? Why, Oskar Schindler, of course. And who is that? The Reich never figures out the answer to that question.

Schindler's strategy as a con man is to always seem in charge, to seem well-connected, to lavish powerful Nazis with gifts and bribes, and to stride, tall and imperious, through situations that would break a lesser man. He also has the con man's knack of disguising the real object of the con. The Nazis accept his bribes and assume his purpose is to enrich himself through the war. They do not object, because he enriches them, too. It never occurs to them that he is actually saving Jews. There is that ancient story about how the guards search the thief's wheelbarrow every day, unable to figure out what he is stealing. He is stealing wheelbarrows. The Jews are Schindler's wheelbarrows.

Some of the most dramatic scenes in the movie show Schindler literally snatching his workers from the maw of death. He rescues Stern from a death train. Then he redirects a trainload of his male workers from Auschwitz to his hometown in Czechoslovakia. When the women's train is misrouted to Auschwitz in error, Schindler boldly strides into the death camp and bribes the commandant to ship them back out again. His insight here is that no one would walk into Auschwitz on such a mission if he were not the real thing. His very boldness is his shield.

Stern, of course, quickly figures out that Schindler's real game is not to get rich but to save lives. Yet this is not said aloud until Schindler has Stern make a list of some 1,100 workers who will be transported to Czechoslovakia. ''The list is an absolute good,'' Stern tells him. ''The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf.''

Consider now Commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), the Nazi who has power over the Krakow ghetto and later over the camp where the Jews are moved. He stands on the balcony of his ski chalet and shoots Jews as target practice, destroying any shred of hope they may have that the Nazi policies will follow some sane pattern. If they can die arbitrarily at his whim, then both protest and adherence are meaningless, and useless.

Goeth is clearly mad. War masks his underlying nature as a serial killer. His cruelty twists back on his victims: He spares a life only long enough to give his victim hope, and then shoots him. Seeing ''Schindler's List'' again recently, I wondered if it was a weakness to make Goeth insane. Would it have been better for Spielberg to focus instead on a Nazi functionary--an ''ordinary'' man who is simply following orders? The terror of the Holocaust comes not because a monster like Goeth could murder people, but because thousands of people snatched from their everyday lives became, in the chilling phrase, Hitler's willing executioners.

I don't know. The film as Spielberg made it is haunting and powerful; perhaps it was necessary to have a one-dimensional villain in a film whose hero has so many hidden dimensions. The ordinary man who was just ''following orders'' might have disturbed the focus of the film--although he would have been in contrast with Schindler, an ordinary man who did not follow orders.

''Schindler's List'' gives us information about how parts of the Holocaust operated, but does not explain it, because it is inexplicable that men could practice genocide. Or so we want to believe. In fact, genocide is a commonplace in human history, and is happening right now in Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The United States was colonized through a policy of genocide against native peoples. Religion and race are markers that we use to hate one another, and unless we can get beyond them, we must concede we are potential executioners. The power of Spielberg's film is not that it explains evil, but that it insists that men can be good in the face of it, and that good can prevail.

The film's ending brings me to tears. At the end of the war, Schindler's Jews are in a strange land--stranded, but alive. A member of the liberating Russian forces asks them, ''Isn't a town over there?'' and they walk off toward the horizon. The next shot fades from black and white into color. At first we think it may be a continuation of the previous action, until we see that the men and women on the crest of the hill are dressed differently now. And then it strikes us, with the force of a blow: Those are Schindler's Jews. We are looking at the actual survivors and their children as they visit Oskar Schindler's grave. The movie began with a list of Jews being confined to the ghetto. It ends with a list of some who were saved. The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 8.8/10 (168,250 votes) Top 250: #6

SOMB 499 rank - #62

Ranked highest by Helmet52 and Elcorazon (#1)

#009 Miller's Crossing (1990) 21 Votes, 5716 points, One #1 votes
Joel + Ethan Coen
Running time - 115 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Crime / Drama / Thriller
Original language English / Italian / Gaelic / Yiddish

Writing Credits
Dashiell Hammett, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Cast
Gabriel Byrne ... Tom Reagan
Marcia Gay Harden ... Verna Bernbaum
John Turturro ... Bernie Bernbaum
Jon Polito ... Johnny Caspar
J.E. Freeman ... Eddie Dane
Albert Finney ... Liam 'Leo' O'Bannon

BY ROGER EBERT / October 5, 1990

The room. I keep thinking about the room. The office from which Leo pulls the strings that control the city. Leo, played by Albert Finney, is a large, strong man in late middle age, and he lacks confidence in only one area. He is not sure he can count on the love of Verna, the young dame he's fallen for. That causes him to hesitate when he knows that Verna's brother, Bernie, should be rubbed out. He doesn't want to lose Verna. And his hesitation brings the city's whole criminal framework crashing down in blood and violence.

But I think about the room. What a wonderful room. All steeped in dark shadows, with expensive antique oak furniture and leather chairs and brass fittings and vast spaces of flooring between the yellow pools of light. I would like to work in this room. A man could get something done in this room. And yet the room is a key to why "Miller's Crossing" is not quite as successful as it should be - why it seems like a movie that is constantly aware of itself, instead of a movie that gets on with business.

I do not really think that Leo would have such an office. I believe it is the kind of office that would be created by a good interior designer with contacts in England, and supplied to a rich lawyer. I am not sure a rackets boss in a big American city in 1929 would occupy such a space, even though it does set him off as a sinister presence among the shadows.

I am also not sure that the other characters in this movie would inhabit quite the same clothing, accents, haircuts and dwellings as we see them in. This doesn't look like a gangster movie, it looks like a commercial intended to look like a gangster movie. Everything is too designed. That goes for the plot and the dialogue, too. The dialogue is well-written, but it is indeed written. We admire the prose rather than the message. People make threats, and we think about how elegantly the threats are worded.

"Miller's Crossing" comes from two traditions that sometimes overlap, the gangster movie of the 1930s and the film noir of the 1940s. It finds its characters in the first and its visual style in the second, but the visuals lack a certain stylish tackiness that film noir sometimes had. They're in good taste. The plot is as simple as an old gangster movie, but it takes us a long time to figure that out, because the first half hour of the film involves the characters in complicated dialogue where they talk about a lot of people we haven't met, and refer to a lot of possibilities we don't understand. It's the kind of movie you have to figure out in hindsight.

Don't get me wrong. There is a lot here to admire. Albert Finney is especially good as Leo, the crime boss, and Jon Polito is wonderful as Johnny Caspar, his rival, who keeps talking about "business ethics." One of the most interesting characters in the movie is Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), a two-timing bookie who pleads for his life in a monologue that he somehow keeps afloat long past any plausible dramatic length.

The pleasures of the film are largely technical. It is likely to be most appreciated by movie lovers who will enjoy its resonance with films of the past. What it doesn't have is a narrative magnet to pull us through - a story line that makes us really care what happens, aside from the elegant but mechanical manipulations of the plot. The one human moment comes when Leo finds out Verna really can't be trusted. Even then, I was thinking about "Farewell, My Lovely," where a big mug named Moose finds out the same thing about a dame named Velma.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.9/10 (26,273 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #44

Ranked highest by RSC (#1)

#008 Being John Malkovich (1999) 21 Votes, 6224 points
Spike Jonze
Running time - 112 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Comedy / Drama / Fantasy
Original language English

Writing Credits
Charlie Kaufman

Cast
John Cusack ... Craig Schwartz
Cameron Diaz ... Lotte Schwartz
Orson Bean ... Dr. Lester
Catherine Keener ... Maxine Lund
John Malkovich ... John Horatio Malkovich

Academy Awards
Nominated Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Catherine Keener), Best Director, Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Other awards
Won: BAFTA Film Award Best Screenplay - Original
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Editing, Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Cameron Diaz). Golden Globe Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical, Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Cameron Diaz), Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Catherine Keener), Best Screenplay - Motion Picture

BY ROGER EBERT / October 29, 1999

What an endlessly inventive movie this is! Charlie Kaufman, the writer of "Being John Malkovich," supplies a stream of dazzling inventions, twists and wicked paradoxes. And the director, Spike Jonze, doesn't pounce on each one like fresh prey, but unveils it slyly, as if there's more where that came from. Rare is the movie where the last half hour surprises you just as much as the first, and in ways you're not expecting. The movie has ideas enough for half a dozen films, but Jonze and his cast handle them so surely that we never feel hard-pressed; we're enchanted by one development after the next.

John Cusack stars as Craig, a street puppeteer. His puppets are dark and neurotic creatures, and the public doesn't much like them. Craig's wife, Lotte, runs a pet store, and their home is overrun with animal boarders, most of them deeply disturbed. Lotte is played by Cameron Diaz, one of the best-looking women in movies, who here looks so dowdy we hardly recognize her; Diaz has fun with her talent by taking it incognito to strange places and making it work for a living.

The puppeteer can't make ends meet in "today's wintry job climate." He answers a help-wanted ad and finds himself on floor 7 1/2 of a building. This floor, and how it looks, and why it was built, would be inspiration enough for an entire film or a Monty Python sketch. It makes everything that happens on it funny in an additional way, on top of why it's funny in the first place.

The film is so rich, however, that the floor is merely the backdrop for more astonishments. Craig meets a co-worker named Maxine (Catherine Keener) and lusts for her. She asks, "Are you married?" He says, "Yeah, but enough about me." They go out for a drink. He says "I'm a puppeteer." She says, "Waiter? Check, please." Keener has this way of listening with her lips slightly parted, as if eager to interrupt by deconstructing what you just said and exposing you for the fool that you are.

Behind a filing cabinet on the 7 1/2th floor, Craig finds a small doorway. He crawls through it, and is whisked through some kind of temporal-spatial portal, ending up inside the brain of the actor John Malkovich. Here he stays for exactly 15 minutes, before falling from the sky next to the New Jersey Turnpike.

Whoa! What an experience. Maxine pressures him to turn it into a business, charging people to spend their 15 minutes inside Malkovich. The movie handles this not as a gimmick but as the opportunity for material that is somehow funny and serious, sad and satirical, weird and touching, all at once.

Malkovich himself is part of the magic. He is not playing himself here, but a version of his public image--distant, quiet, droll, as if musing about things that happened long ago and were only mildly interesting at the time. It took some courage for him to take this role, but it would have taken more courage to turn it down. It's a plum.

Why are people so eager to enter his brain? For the novelty, above all. Spend a lifetime being yourself and it would be worth money to spend 15 minutes being almost anybody else. At one point, there's a bit of a traffic jam. Lotte finds herself inside his mind while Maxine is seducing him. Lotte enjoys this experience and decides she wants to become a lesbian, or a man. Whatever it takes. This is hard to explain, but trust me.

The movie just keeps getting better. I don't want to steal the surprises and punch lines. Even a Charlie Sheen cameo is inspired. At one point Malkovich enters himself through his own portal, which is kind of like being pulled down into the black hole of your own personality, and that trip results in one of the most peculiar single scenes I've ever seen in the movies. Orchestrating all this, Cusack's character stays cool; to enter another man's mind is of course the ultimate puppeteering experience.

Every once in a long, long while a movie comes along that is like no other. A movie that creates a new world for us and uses it to produce wonderful things. "Forrest Gump" was a movie like that, and so in their different ways were "MASH," "This Is Spinal Tap," "After Hours," "Babe" and "There's Something About Mary." What do such films have in common? Nothing. That's the point. Each one stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination. Either "Being John Malkovich" gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.8/10 (83,541 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #67

Ranked highest by Worrywort (#4)

Miller's Crossing...great movie, but for some reason I wasn't expecting it to place so high.

And yay Malkovich.

Charlie Kaufman is golden
when we do the next movie poll, i'll have two of his movies in my top 20: Eternal Sunshine & Adaptation

#007 Boogie Nights (1997) 26 Votes, 6736 points
Paul Thomas Anderson
Running time - 156 min
Country of origin USA
Genre Drama
Original language English

Writing Credits
Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast
Mark Wahlberg ... Eddie Adams - 'Dirk Diggler'
Burt Reynolds ... Jack Horner
John C. Reilly ... Reed Rothchild
Julianne Moore ... Amber Waves - Maggie
Heather Graham ... Brandy 'Rollergirl'
Don Cheadle ... Buck Swope
Luis Guzmán ... Maurice TT Rodriguez
Philip Seymour Hoffman ... Scotty J.
William H. Macy ... Little Bill


Academy Awards
Nominated Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Burt Reynolds), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Julianne Moore), Best Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.

Other awards
Won: Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Burt Reynolds)
Nominated: BAFTA Film Award Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Burt Reynolds), Best Screenplay - Original. Golden Globe Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Julianne Moore)

BY ROGER EBERT / October 17, 1997

Paul Thomas Anderson's ``Boogie Nights'' is an epic of the low road, a classic Hollywood story set in the shadows instead of the spotlights but containing the same ingredients: Fame, envy, greed, talent, sex, money. The movie follows a large, colorful and curiously touching cast of characters as they live through a crucial turning point in the adult film industry.

In 1977, when the story opens, porn movies are shot on film and play in theaters, and a director can dream of making one so good that the audience members would want to stay in the theater even after they had achieved what they came for. By 1983, when the story closes, porn has shifted to video and most of the movies are basically just gynecological loops. There is hope, at the outset, that a porno movie could be ``artistic,'' and less hope at the end.

``Boogie Nights'' tells this story through the life of a kid named Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) from the San Fernando Valley, who is a dishwasher in a Hollywood nightclub when he's discovered by a Tiparillo-smoking pornographer named Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds). ``I got a feeling,'' Jack says, ``that behind those jeans is something wonderful just waiting to get out.'' He is correct, and within a few months Eddie has been renamed ``Dirk Diggler'' and is a rising star of porn films.

If this summary makes the film itself sound a little like porn, it is not. Few films have been more matter-of-fact, even disenchanted, about sexuality. Adult films are a business here, not a dalliance or a pastime, and one of the charms of ``Boogie Nights'' is the way it shows the everyday backstage humdrum life of porno filmmaking. ``You got your camera,'' Jack explains to young Eddie. ``You got your film, you got your lights, you got your synching, you got your editing, you got your lab. Before you turn around, you've spent maybe $25,000 or $30,000.'' Jack Horner is the father figure for a strange extended family of sex workers; he's a low-rent Hugh Hefner, and Burt Reynolds gives one of his best performances as a man who seems to stand outside sex and view it with the detached eye of a judge at a livestock show. Horner is never shown as having sex himself, although he lives with Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a former housewife and mother, now a porn star who makes tearful midnight calls to her ex-husband, asking to speak to her child. When Jack recruits Eddie to make a movie, Amber becomes his surrogate parent, tenderly solicitous of him as they prepare for his first sex scene.

During a break in that scene, Eddie whispers to Jack, ``Please call me Dirk Diggler from now on.'' He falls immediately into star mode, and before long is leading a conducted tour of his new house, where his wardrobe is ``arranged according to color and designer.'' His stardom is based on one remarkable attribute; ``everyone is blessed with one special thing,'' he tells himself, after his mother has screamed that he'll always be a bum and a loser.

Anderson wisely limits the nudity in the film, and until the final shot we don't see what Jack Horner calls ``Mr. Torpedo Area.'' It's more fun to approach it the way Anderson does. At a pool party at Jack's house, Dirk meets the Colonel (Robert Ridgely), who finances the films. ``May I see it?'' the silver-haired, business-suited Colonel asks. Dirk obliges, and the camera stays on the Colonel's face as he looks, and a funny, stiff little smile appears; Anderson holds the shot for several seconds, and we get the message.

The large cast of ``Boogie Nights'' is nicely balanced between human and comic qualities. We meet Rollergirl (Heather Graham), who never takes off her skates, and in an audition scene with Dirk adds a new dimension to the song ``Brand New Key.'' Little Bill (William H. Macy) is Jack's assistant director, moping about at parties while his wife (porn star Nina Hartley) gets it on with every man she can. (When he discovers his wife having sex in the driveway, surrounded by an appreciative crowd, she tells him, ``Shut up, Bill; you're embarrassing me.'') Ricky Jay, the magician, plays Jack's cameraman. ``I think every picture should have its own look,'' he states solemnly, although the films are shot in a day or two. When he complains, ``I got a couple of tough shadows to deal with,'' Jack snaps, ``There are shadows in life, baby.'' Dirk's new best friend is Reed (John C. Reilly). He gets a crush on Dirk and engages him in gym talk ("How much do you press? Let's both say at the same time. One, two...") Buck Swope (Don Cheadle) is a second-tier actor and would-be hi-fi salesman. Rodriguez (Luis Guzman) is a club manager who dreams of being in one of Jack's movies. And the gray eminence behind the industry, the man who is the Colonel's boss, is Floyd Gondolli (Philip Baker Hall), who on New Year's Eve, 1980, breaks the news that videotape holds the future of the porno industry.

The sweep and variety of the characters have brought the movie comparisons to Robert Altman's ``Nashville'' and ``The Player.'' There is also some of the same appeal as ``Pulp Fiction,'' in scenes that balance precariously between comedy and violence (a brilliant scene near the end has Dirk and friends selling cocaine to a deranged playboy while the customer's friend throws firecrackers around the room). Through all the characters and all the action, Anderson's screenplay centers on the human qualities of the players. They may live in a disreputable world, but they have the same ambitions and in a weird way similar values as mainstream Hollywood.

``Boogie Nights'' has the quality of many great films, in that it always seems alive. A movie can be very good and yet not draw us in, not involve us in the moment-to-moment sensation of seeing lives as they are lived. As a writer and director, Paul Thomas Anderson is a skilled reporter who fills his screen with understated, authentic details. (In the filming of the first sex scene, for example, the action takes place in an office set that has been built in Jack's garage. Behind the office door we see old license plates nailed to the wall, and behind one wall of the set, bicycle wheels peek out.) Anderson is in love with his camera, and a bit of a showoff in sequences inspired by the famous nightclub entrance in ``GoodFellas,'' Robert De Niro's rehearsal in the mirror in ``Raging Bull'' and a shot in ``I Am Cuba'' where the camera follows a woman into a pool.

In examining the business of catering to lust, ``Boogie Nights'' demystifies its sex (that's probably one reason it avoided the NC-17 rating). Mainstream movies use sex like porno films do, to turn us on. ``Boogie Nights'' abandons the illusion that characters are enjoying sex; in a sense, it's about manufacturing a consumer product. By the time the final shot arrives and we see what made the Colonel stare, there is no longer any shred of illusion that it is anything more than a commodity. And in Dirk Diggler's most anguished scene, as he shouts at Jack Horner, ``I'm ready to shoot my scene RIGHT NOW!'' we learn that those who live by the sword can also die by it.

Amazon.com link
IMDB link - 7.7/10 (45,133 votes)

SOMB 499 rank - #95

Ranked highest by Worrywort and Man Is Matter (#2)