Top Movies

A few years ago I compiled my top ten movies for a website list. These were they:

1 The Fly (1986)
2 The Breakfast Club (1985)
3 Goodfellas (1990)
4 Back to the Future (1985)
5 A Few Good Men (1992)
6 Se7en (1995)
7 Always (1989)
8 It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
9 The Paper (1994)
10 Metropolis (1927)

Interesting to note what's changed and what hasn't then. Well for me anyway; if it's no fun for you you should feel free to suffer in silence. Or post in the talkbacks...it's never been done before, why not start a revolution?

Spielberg's Always pegs higher for me now than it did then, and A Few Good Men still makes the grade, though drops a little due to The West Wing TV series being even better. (Aaron, you're a bloody genius, but the price you pay for getting better is it makes your older stuff look less great. This is why embracing mediocrity is clearly the only way to go.)

Se7en might drop out of the list, to be replaced by Fincher's OTHER great movie, Fight Club. And The Paper might fall off altogether - despite still being massively underrated.

And what gets added? Crash for sure - the Haggis film, not Cronenberg's. Despite its lazy title, it's an amazing screenplay. One of these days I'll write something about the backlash the film has faced, and why I couldn't care less about it. But not today.

The Lord of the Rings movies might go in as a single film. It would normally be against the rules, but when they're all made together - a cohesive whole in a way that Star Wars or the Godfather series could never be when they're filmed separately - the rules kinda change. (That said, I can't accept Back to the Futures 2 and 3 as one film because, despite being filmed together, they strive to be individual.)

*****

So, which from this badly-organised list fit my 'not fade away' mumblings from the other week?

The Fly, oh yes. Great finale. Blows the guy's head off, cries, fade out. That's an ending.

The Breakfast Club does it - making sense of the opening voiceover (it's Brian's detention essay), sending everyone away in a reworking of the opening introductions.

Goodfellas - spot-on. Henry Hill reduced to a common schlub in a single shot, followed by a direct crib from The Great Train Robbery (silent, black and white): Joe Pesci fires his gun into camera. The gag being that there's no definitive print of the Train Robbery flick, and because those movies used to run on a loop nobody knows for sure whether it was the closing shot or the opening (making it an interesting precursor to the James Bond gunbarrel sequence).

It works as start or finish. So it just plain WORKS.

A Few Good Men kicks everyone out of the courtroom and never follows up on the prosecutions to follow - very bold. It's a Wonderful Life gets it all done in one scene, too; for that matter, Metropolis concludes in the rubble of the climax, too.

Always, Crash, The Paper and Se7en round off - not too hard, but not too soft. A Springer-esque 'final thought', if you like. Or even if you don't. And Back to the Future hits a (previously mentioned) memorable coda.

Only the Rings movies go fade-out and coda crazy. But it's hard to be mad when, truthfully, it's actually the codas from three films all together. Or it would be, if Samwise didn't go Springer at the end of films 1 and 2.

So - what are your top films? And, more importantly, how do they end?

Question: Can a great film - not a really good one, but one that hits your top five - have a weak ending? Examples to the usual empty-posting place.