I pride myself on being fairly in tune with my emotions.
But, every once in a while, there are periods where I don’t feel things as profoundly as I usually do. Most of the time, I label my empathetic demeanor as both a blessing and a curse; it’s impactful, the ability to truly experience every emotion a human being can experience, but bottling up too many negative ones isn’t good for anybody.
The times when my emotions prove to be buried somewhere deep, not wanting to be found, I am forced to turn to an alternate source providing those things that I can’t feel. Normally, it’s music, but since I could write perpetually until the day I die and still have more to say about the songs in my playlists, movies are the easier option to explain.
In my opinion, there are three essentials of any film in order to qualify it as “exceptional:” cinematography, soundtrack, and script. Of course, these are all subjective characteristics, but as I’ve found, any truly great picture is visually appealing, has an appropriate, emotion-inducing score, and is intelligently written.
With my newfound adoration for Letterboxd, the ultimate platform for all cinephiles, I’ve been able to dive into these details on a larger scale than ever before. Though there are extraordinary films that grace my television screen all the time, the top four displayed in the center of my profile hardly change. I’ve become defined by these movies.
#4: Memento
Despite it being one of his earliest works, I stand firm in my belief that this is one of, if not the best, films by Christopher Nolan.
Following a traumatic head injury, Leonard (Guy Pearce) suffers from amnesia that prohibits him from making new memories. His tattoos and endless Polaroid shots log the crucial information he must remember as he struggles to piece together the last night he recalls perfectly: the night his wife was murdered.
This was the movie that got both my brother and me into film. I’m not a person who can get up and go to bed immediately after the credits roll, and, in that sense, he and I are alike. We stayed up until the early hours of the next morning discussing the events of this picture. Although it doesn’t seem like the most intricate storyline, the structure is what makes Nolan such a genius filmmaker.
I promised myself not to go too in-depth explaining how it was made, since it ruins the confusion and frustration you feel throughout, but it’s the seemingly simple way the scenes are spliced together that sets Memento apart. Along with Leonard, as you watch the film, the editing places you in the plot from his perspective, as though you have his same condition. Each sequence, whether on colored film or black-and-white, introduces the viewer to questions as to what Leonard is doing, why he’s doing it, and how he got there in exactly the way he thinks.
#3: Paris, Texas
I had known for a while before first viewing this that it’s one of the highest-rated films of all time, but it wasn’t until the following days, and a second watch, that it really began to sink in why.
When Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) walks out of the desert, making a public appearance for the first time in four years, he’s disheveled, has no sense of identity, and can’t seem to speak. Walt (Dean Stockwell), his brother, comes to his aid and is determined to reunite Travis with the son that he abandoned: Hunter (Hunter Carson). As he gets acclimated to urban living and becomes acquainted with Hunter, his attention now shifts to his desire to find the wife he left behind.
This film definitely doesn’t appeal to everyone’s tastes; the main character doesn’t even talk for the first half hour, but that’s part of what makes it so incredible. It’s all about setting a tone and encompassing a certain vibe. Although there’s a restricted soundtrack, limited to Ry Cooder’s lone guitar licks, it amplifies the sense that this whole picture is a surreal snapshot of 1980s Western America. The parts that are missing that background noise don’t even register in my mind because the mural-like cinematography—with the drawn-out shots and monochromatic color scheme in certain scenes—puts me in an almost hypnotized state.
What Paris, Texas does best, personally, is make the entire world around me seem insignificant to the extent where it feels like I’m right beside the characters. No other movie has done that for me.
Unlike what films from the Disney franchise have taught my generation since childhood, this movie doesn’t have the perfect, storybook ending. Things don’t go to plan, and I was left thinking that two and a half hours were for nothing, at first. But the more I let the story marinate, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t made for the enjoyment of the audience. The plot, which does a tremendous job of being told in such a complex way for being so simple, comes to a close around what is best for each of the characters, not to please whoever’s watching; something I’ve learned to have huge respect for.
#2: It’s A Wonderful Life
I made a promise to myself a while ago, since I seem to have a distaste for the films the industry’s been releasing recently, that I would become more involved in Old Hollywood. This is one of the best films I could’ve started that journey with.
Since his childhood, George Bailey (James Stewart) has had expansive dreams. Ever since taking over his father’s banking business, he’s never been able to fulfill those dreams due to his dedication to maintaining the sanity of his hometown from greedy business mogul, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore). However, he lands the woman he always wanted, Mary (Donna Reed), and has four beautiful children. To an outsider, he’s the wealthiest man in town. When George becomes involved in a business scandal, he begins contemplating suicide. So, his guardian angel, Clarence (Henry Travers), shows him what it would be like if that desire came true.
Not only is this film one of the greatest Christmas flicks of all time, but I truly believe it redefined what romance was in 1946. We get to see George grow up from his childhood days to his early mid-life crisis, and even though that’s quite a large fluctuation of time to traverse through in two hours, it has zero pacing issues: the important scenes are elongated in the perfect spots, and the transitional clips are placed without being brought into question—something that a lot of films today have issues with.
It’s A Wonderful Life is more than just a structurally genius film, including multiple instances of paralleled events, which I’m a sucker for in cinema. It navigates controversial, negative topics and somehow manages to conclude by eliciting both tears and smiles from the audience. That, and many more aspects, are what make this film so ahead of its time.
#1: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Is this movie flawless from a technical standpoint? No. Other film nerds have expressed their disapproval of the fact that it dabbles in practically every genre, but that’s what makes it so perfect.
To escape his mind-numbing job as the manager of negative assets at Life magazine, Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) daydreams. His newfound crush on a new employee, Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig), does nothing to stop the bullying he endures from those above him. As the company is working to produce its last printed edition using the negatives from Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn), an enigmatic photographer who regularly provides the magazine with cover shots, Walter seems to have lost the final picture meant for the first page. With no source of contact between the two, Walter goes on an unexpected adventure that just might break him away from the fantasy world he so often dreams of.
There’s not a single bad thing I could ever say about this film. I may not be the greatest or most informed critic out there, but it’s simply flawless. The visuals are even more stunning than the things Walter imagines while going about his cyclical lifestyle, half of my playlist is derived from the songs incorporated in this movie, and the writing is both humanistic and poignant—a feat challenging to accomplish in an elegant way.
One of the main sources of communication in my family is movie quotes, which this film provides a lot of. With its overall lesson being told in a more edifying light, it has a few laugh-out-loud scenes, a refreshing element that sets this movie apart. Though there are some lines that my family repeats in humorous situations, there are many more chunks of dialogue that I actually attempt to live my life by. Between Walter’s dialogue as he daydreams about Benjamin Buttons and the motto of Life magazine—“To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.”—The Secret Life of Walter Mitty showcases utmost duality.
In no way am I nearly as qualified as my brother, who graduated from film school, to assess movies with any degree of professionalism. But, I am well equipped to praise anything that makes me feel things as deeply as these movies have.
