MSN.com's Movies section is rolling out thumbnail appreciations of the 100 Favorite Movies determined by polling MSN staffers and contributors. Props to listmeister Noah Walden for stressing up front that he wanted deep-dyed favorites you return to again and again, not necessarily nominations for greatest films ever. (Those categories overlap, of course: my number one was Stagecoach, bumping Sunrise to second at the last minute.) Twenty titles are being announced each week; I wrote on two in the current batch, 80-61, and Kathleen Murphy's first writeup was in 100-81 (we'll each do five). Two are posted just below, and this should get you to the website: http://movies.msn.com/100-favorite-films/100-81/photo-gallery/feature/?ocid=mohfpS1L&photoidx=3
The first big laugh in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot is triggered by the title card "Chicago, 1929" coming at the end, not the beginning, of the wordless opening sequence ... a limousine filled with plug-ugly gangsters in tuxes, a police chase through night streets, the rattle of tommy guns, a coffin—the limo is a hearse—leaking bootleg booze through bullet holes. The ensuing movie focuses on two musicians (Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon) who witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, then flee town disguised as members of an all-girl band headed by one Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe). Everybody's a roleplayer, with both guys in drag pursuing Sugar in their respective fashions, and the spectacularly sexy/vulnerable blonde—the archetypal Marilyn role—taking innocent comfort in her two new girlfriends. The Forest of Arden for the variously wacky and lyrical gender play is a sunstruck resort in palmy Florida—also the destination of the gangsters our heroes are desperately avoiding. Funny stuff all, but Wilder's film becomes a masterpiece by offering something more: a dream version of a world and an era shimmering on the brink of extinction, and a hurtfully lovely index to people's need to make lies come true. —Richard T. Jameson
A feast for the eyes and imagination, John Boorman's ravishing Excalibur serves up fiery destruction and bright healing waters, brutal death and exhilarating rebirth, all transcendently scored by Wagner and Carl Orff. Steeped in primal mystery, no other film so convinces us that myth is taking form—here and now—before our very eyes. Could be we're dreaming—or high on some sacred herb—as humankind struggles out of the mud and blood of Britain's dark ages to build Camelot's shining city on a hill, then falls back into spiritual wasteland as betrayal blights King Arthur and his utopia.Boorman may have hankered to film Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, but from the beginning, in films like Zardoz and Point Blank, images and tropes from the Arthurian legends kept rising to the surface of his cinematic imagination. Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and Morgana (devilishly erotic Helen Mirren) fulfill compelling mythic patterns in Excalibur's lurid design of aspiration and adultery, but in Merlin (Nicol Williamson at his silkiest) Boorman saw himself, artist and magician, master of special effects and the kind of dramatic direction that could shape history and birth legend. But Merlin's fate is to be subsumed by his own myth/movie. Arthur may be once and future king, but his maker is overtaken by the death of magic. —Kathleen Murphy
[[In-content Ad]]