If any year is going to challenge 1993 as the best year for film in my lifetime, it’d probably be 1994. The top 50 or so movies this year are very good, with the top 65 or so actually worth watching.

80. The Next Karate Kid
79. The Specialist
78. In the Army Now
77. Princess Caraboo
76. The Client
75. Timecop
74. Airheads
73. Only You
72. Wolf
71. Speechless
70. Blue Sky
69. Priest
68. Nostradamus
67. Major League II
66. Immortal Beloved
65. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein
64. Little Odessa
63. Speed
62. Sirens
61. SFW
60. Interview With The Vampire
59. Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle
58. What Happened Was
57. Sleep With Me
56. Nell
55. It Could Happen To You
54. Dumb & Dumber
53. The Crow
52. Above The Rim
51. Spanking The Monkey
50. Vanya On 42nd Street
49. Bullets Over Broadway
48. Killing Zoe
47. When A Man Loves A Woman
46. The Paper
45. Maverick
44. True Lies
43. Forrest Gump
42. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
41. Blue Chips
40. Clean Slate
39. Star Trek: Generations
38. The River Wild
37. The Mask
36. Natural Born Killers
35. Imaginary Crimes
34. Little Women
33. Oleanna
32. Barcelona
31. Swimming With Sharks
30. Legends Of The Fall
29. Before The Rain
28. Heavenly Creatures
27. The Hudsucker Proxy
26. Crumb
25. Cabin Boy
24. Shallow Grave
23. Death And The Maiden
22. Exotica
21. Nobody’s Fool
20. The Madness Of King George
19. PCU
18. Leon, The Professional
17. Eat Drink Man Woman
16. Fist Of Legend

15. Three Colors: White – The second part of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s trilogy is a comedy starring Julie Delpy and Polish comic actor Zbigniew Zamachowski. They get divorced in Paris, leaving Zamachowski penniless. He meets a strange guy in a subway station who offers to smuggle him back to Poland in his luggage. Back home, he resumes his hairdressing career and plots his revenge against Delpy. As light and funny as Blue is depressing, it’s the slightest of the three movies.

14. Ashes Of Time – Before Crouching Tiger, The House Of Flying Daggers, or Hero, there was Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes Of Time. The influence on those later films is obvious, as Wong and his longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle apply the techniques of Chinese art movies to a kung fu epic. It’s slow, beautiful, complex in structure and in meaning. Stars Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Jacky Cheung, Leslie Cheung and the other Tony Leung. With action choreographed by Sammo Hung.

13. Ed Wood – Tim Burton’s most serious film is a bio-pic about the worst director of all-time. Johnny Depp is out standing as Wood, and Martin Landau is great as his buddy, the aged actor/junkie Bela Lugosi. It’s a disturbing film, because Wood seems to have no idea just how awful he really is. His unbound enthusiasm and belief in his own abilities is either inspiring or horribly depressing. Also stars Patricia Arquette, Sarah Jessica Parker, Bill Murray, Max Casella, Jeffrey Jones and Vincent D’Onofrio as Orson Welles.

12. Drunken Master II – Jackie Chan stars in the sequel to his classic Wong Fei-hung parody that helped invent the modern martial arts comedy genre. Generally considered the best of the 90s kung fu movies, though I prefer a Jet Li’s The Legend of Fong Sai-yuk. The main edge Chan has on Li, of course, is that he refuses to use wires or special effects in any of his stunts. Still, I prefer Li as the Buster Keaton to Jackie Chan’s Charlie Chaplin.

11. The Last Seduction – Linda Fiorentino stars as a very femme and very fatale femme fatale in John Dahl’s top notch neo-noir. After making a bunch of money in a drug deal, she leaves her husband (Bill Pullman) and steals all the money. As Pullman tries to hunt her down, she enlists clueless Hick Peter Berg to help her out. Fiorentino’s terrific as one of the most evil women of all time.

10. Hoop Dreams – In this remarkable documentary, the filmmakers followed two inner-city Chicago basketball players throughout their high school careers. William Gates got into an exclusive prep school but suffered from knee injuries and never really fulfilled his playing potential, and had a kid along the way. Arthur Agee has to play at a public school, but had a much better career. Neither one went on to do much in college, though Agee was the more successful of the two. Its a great film about poverty and sports ad the relation between the two.

9. Once Were Warriors – One of the more intense and depressing films that I actually like, this is about a family of poor Maori in New Zealand. The wife is descended from Maori warriors, the husband from the slave class. It’s about the corruption of the nobility of the warrior class by modernity through her relationship with the drunken, wife-beating, deadbeat slave-class husband. Anti-egalitarian for sure, but still very cool.

8. Reality Bites – I have no real defense for ranking this movie so high. Other than that I graduated high school in 1994. It’s a silly Gen X romantic comedy/coming of age movie, albeit one with a great cast. Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofolo, and Steve Zahn, with bit parts by John Mahoney, Renee Zellweger, Andy Dick, and David Spade. It’s not as good as Singles, it’s most similar film. Nostalgia’s a tricky thing. There is an interesting idea in that it basically became the kind of victim of commercialism and vapidity that it criticizes itself.

7. Four Weddings And A Funeral – But for Andie McDowell, this would be a truly great movie. I’ve a theory that British writers are incapable of writing credible dialogue for Americans. Exhibit A in this theory is William Holden’s part in The Bridge On The River Kwai. Exhibit B is this movie. She looks great and all, but every time she says something, you want to cringe. It’s possible (probable?) that she’s just a bad actor, but I really can’t imagine anyone making these lines sound good. The rest of the movie’s great, especially since Hugh Grant hadn’t quite reached Totally Annoying yet. Kristen Scott Thomas, Simon Callow and John Hannah steal the film from the mediocre leads.

6. Clerks – Rightly beloved by anyone who’s ever worked a customer service job, Clerks features truly terrible actors saying truly hilarious lines. Kevin Smith spent more on it than Robert Rodriguez did for El Mariachi, but you can’t tell by watching it. It’s more a collection of shorts than one cohesive film. But that doesn’t really matter. My favorites: the egg guy, the Star Wars discussion (of course), any scene in the video store, and the cat.

5. The Shawshank Redemption – The It’s A Wonderful Life of the 90s? Perhaps no movie has been played more often on television over the last decade (where would we be without TBS?). For a prison movie chock full of murder, rape and suicide, it’s surprisingly watchable. Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins are, of course, terrific. The director, Frank Darabont, appears to be the official writer-director for all Stephen King prison movies. He’s directed only three movies, two of which are Shawshank and The Green Mile.

4. Three Colors: Red – The last part of the trilogy stars Irene Jacob as a model who accidentally runs over a dog owned by Jean-Louis Trintignant, a retired judge who spends all his time eavesdropping on his neighbors’ phone conversations. Being about fraternity, this film is all about interconnectedness (the opening shot, of a phone call traveling through wires across the english channel, is a both famous and brilliant. In addition to the technological connections, there’s a little side story about a law student studying for his final exams that ultimately fits in perfectly strangely. And of course, this is the film where the characters from all three of the movies come together, mediated by technology and weather. A great conclusion to what might be the best trilogy in film history.

3. Quiz Show – Robert Redford’s great film about the scandal around 21, the 1950s game show that gave the answers to its contestants. The cast is amazing, led by Rob Morrow from Northern Exposure playing Richard Goodwin, the Congressional investigator who went on to be a speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, John Turturro, Ralph Fiennes, Paul Scofield, Mira Sorvino, David Paymer, Hank Azaria, Griffin Dunne, Barry Levinson and Martin Scorsese. The attention to period detail is perfect and the film has a look and color that I’ve never quite seen before. The relationship between the Van Dorens, Fiennes and Scofield, is my favorite, it’s what really makes the film great, more than just a movie about a scandal. Also, Paul Scofield has one of my all-time favorite voices.

2. Chungking Express – This was actually a very tough call for me, whether to make this or Pulp Fiction the # film of the year. As great as Tarantino’s movie is, I really love Chungking Express. Ultimately I decided Pulp Fiction had to be #1, because without it, I might never have seen a Wong Kar-wai movie. It’s two separate love stories, one dark and gangsterish, the other light and fun. Brigitte Lin and Takeshi Kaneshiro star in the first, about a cop who, while obsessing about the girl who left him, spends a platonic night with a drug dealer on the run from her bosses. The second stars Tony Leung as a cop who’s obsessed with his flight attendant ex-girlfriend and Faye Wong as the crazy/cute girl who repeatedly breaks into his apartment trying to brighten it up. My pick as the most romantic film ever.

1. Pulp Fiction – If you haven’t seen Pulp Fiction, you really shouldn’t be reading this blog. I mean it, go away. Come back after you’ve watched it. On of the most direct influences on my becoming a film geek (not unusual for geeks of my generation), it made me want to go out and watch everything that influenced Tarantino. In the Goddard-free Spokane of the mid-90s, that meant film noir and Scorsese. Welles, Hitchcock and Kurosawa weren’t far behind. Influential as it is, it is first and foremost simply a great movie. As everyone who tried to copy it found out, there’s more to Tarantino than trendy pop culture references and a jumbled timeline. The references are only useful in that they reveal character, but what makes Tarantino’s characters special is the way he works with the actors. I can’t think of a single bad performance in any Tarantino film, and that is remarkable. John Travolta is not a good actor, why is he great in Pulp Fiction? Beyond the screenplay, the direction is great as well. the music is outstanding, perfectly integrated. And the cast is terrific, I’m sure I don’t need to recite them here. A serious contender for best film of the 90s.

Quite a few Unseen Movies this year, and most of them are going to stay that way:

The Secret Of Roan Inish
The Kingdom
To Live
Burnt By The Sun
Cemetary Man
Angels In The Outfield
Without Honors
Queen Margot
The Shadow
On Deadly Ground
Pret-a-Porter
Blown Away
Serial Mom
The Ref
Muriel’s Wedding
Beverly Hills Cop III
Disclosure
The Adventures Of Prisvilla, Queen Of The Desert
Il Postino
The Flintstones
Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult
Clear And Present Danger
Stargate
The Lion King
The Santa Clause
Wild Reeds
Tom & Viv
Wyatt Earp
Junior
8 Seconds
Monkey Trouble
Backbeat
Bad Girls
Crooklyn
A Million To Juan
Fear Of A Black Hat
Go Fish
Little Big League
North
Wagons East
Cobb
Strawberry And Chocolate
The Sum Of Us
Farinelli
Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey

Here is an interesting take on the Star Wars movies from Slate. Don’t forget to read the comments at the end of the article.

I watched The Legend of Zorro Monday night. It was bad. Real bad. Like the first one, only stupid. It had a couple redeeming parts, but Catherine Zeta-Jones’s breasts can only carry a movie so far. With all the movies I want to see playing right now (Jarhead, Capote, Good Night and Good Luck, The Squid And The Whale, Shopgirl), we’ve got nothing but crap at my theatre. Gonna watch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang this Monday, hopefully that’ll be better.

Got some more stuff in my survey of the post-1997 music scene. The last two White Stripes albums I like quite a bit. At this point I prefer the latest one though. But I’ve always liked albums that mix up genres. The Flaming Lips’ album The Soft BUlletin is very good, if not as immediately catchy as Yoshimi was. Slanted And Enchanted by Pavement and Stephen Malkmus’s Face The Truth I’m still working on. I took a long time to warm up to Pavement’s Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, but eventually did. We’ll see if that works with these other two. Finally, I got the latest My Morning Jacket album, Z, after the rave reviews Cameron Crowe gave them in various interviews promoting Elizabethtown (they have a song on the soundtrack). After only a couple listens, I dig it, especially the second half in which the songs grow about twice as long.

I also want to plug the website some guys I work with have set-up. Pjorno.com is fancier, funnier and much better written than this blog is.

1993 was a great year for movies. I count 77 films from that year that I’ve seen, which is significantly more than any year thus far. There’s great quality too as the top 30 or so are all very good and I’d say the top 60 or so are all worth watching. It’s also a big year for Jet Li, whose films manage to appear on this list 6 times. Numbers 29 and 26 tie for the First Annual Crying Game Award for the rankings most likely to get the wife to kick me out of the house.

77. Made In America
76. The Firm
75. National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1
74. Sliver
73. The Pelican Brief
72. Another Stakeout
71. Posse
70. Mrs. Doubtfire
69. Three Of Hearts
69. The Program
68. The Advocate
67. Wayne’s World 2
66. Manhattan Murder Mystery
65. Coneheads
64. Judgement Night
63. Indecent Proposal
62. The Man Without A Face
61. Sleepless In Seattle
60. Dave
58. The Legend Of Fong Sai-yuk II
57. Point Of No Return
56. Grumpy Old Men
55. Once Upon A Time In China III
54. Cool Runnings
53. Hot Shots Part Deux
52. The Thing Called Love
51. Robin Hood: Men In Tights
50. Cliffhanger
48. The Piano
47. CB4
46. Faraway, So Close!
45. The Last Action Hero
44. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
43. The Trial
42. Demolition Man
41. Malice
40. Rudy
39. Latcho Drom
39. Addams Family Values
38. Last Hero In China
37. Little Buddha
36. The House Of The Spirits
35. Much Ado About Nothing
34. Mad Dog And Glory
33. Ninja Scroll
32. Falling Down
31. This Boy’s Life
30. Carlito’s Way
29. Philadelphia
28. The War Room
27. The Nightmare Before Christmas
26. The Wedding Banquet
25. Kung Fu Cult Master (Lord Of the Wu Tang)
24. Short Cuts
23. Benny & Joon
22. The Remains Of The Day
21. Gettysburg
20. And The Band Played On
19. The Fugitive
18. The Age Of Innocence
17. Shadowlands
16. In The Line Of Fire

15. The Tai Chi Master – Jet Li stars in this kung fu film about two guys who get kicked out of their Temple. One of them goes off and joins the evil government. The other joins MIchelle Yeoh and a group of revolutionaries. It’s a formulaic Jet Li film, all the ones from this period are essentially the same, but it doesn’t matter. Yuen Woo Ping, the guy who’s directed just about every cool action sequence from the last decade (Kill Bill, The Matrix, etc), is the director and he blends the action and the obligatory slapstick comedy very well. Released in the US under the idiotic title “Twin Warriors” attempting to cash in on Michelle Yeoh’s fame after Crouching Tiger. She doesn’t have a large part, certainly not large enough to be in the title, but she is great when she’s on screen.

14. Juraissic Park – The first of two Steven Spielberg films on the list this year, I bet you can guess what the other is. Somehow I managed to not see this the summer it came out. I have no idea what happened, but I didn’t see it until the following winter when it was either rereleased or played the local discount theatre. It’s an action movie, and a very good one. Frankly, I hate the kids. But all the adults are great. Oh yeah, there’s some cool special effects too.

13. So, I Married An Axe Murderer – In the wake of the huge success of Wayne’s World, Mike Myers was basically able to make any movie he wanted. He made this, it bombed and he basically disappeared for four years. It’s a very funny romantic comedy about a spoken word poet who thinks his girlfriend might be a serial killer. Nancy Travis, who’s terrific, as she was in Three Men And A Little Lady, plays the girlfriend. Amanda Plummer, Anthony LaPaglia, Brenda Fricker, Steven Wright, Phil Hartman, Charles Grodin, Debi Mazar and Alan Arkin also star.

12. A Perfect World – Clint Eastwood decided to follow up the destruction of the western genre with something even more remarkable: getting good acting out of Kevin Costner. Costner plays an escaped convict who kidnaps a little kid and takes him on the run with him. Eastwood plays the US Marshal tracking him down. It’s a coming of age story, both for the kid and the kidnapper. Costner really is very good. Really, I’m not kidding. Also stars Laura Dern and Bradley Whitford.

11. Army Of Darkness – The culmination of Sam Raini’s Evil Dead trilogy sees our hero Ash (the legendary Bruce Campbell) thrown back to 1300 AD where he must defeat the forces of evil and get back to his own time. One-armed with a shotgun, a chainsaw and a vast array of clever one-liners, he bravely joins a medieval kingdom in its fight against the undead. With Embeth Davidtz, who also stars in this year’s #1 film. And Bridget Fonda has a cameo. Hail to the king, baby.

10. In The Name Of The Father – Daniel Day-Lewis is outstanding once again as a member of the Guildfor Four, people who were wrongfully imprisoned for an IRA bombing. Pete Posthlewaite plays his father who’s imprisoned as well. Emma Thompson plays the lawyer who eventually gets them out. Directed by Jim Sheridan, who also did My Left Foot, The Boxer, The Field, In America and. . . the 50 Cent epic Get Rich Or Die Tryin’?

9. Groundhog Day – Yeah, it’s better in theory than it is when watching it, but it’s still a very good movie. It’s not especially profound, at least not as much as director Harold Ramis seems to think it is. Bill Murray plays a grumpy weatherman who’s forced to live one day over and over again until he becomes a good person. Then he gets Andie McDowell and February 3rd. Also stars Brian Doyle-Murray, Stephen Tobolowsky, Willie Garson and Chris Elliott. Pop Buddhism.

8. The Legend Of Fong Sai-yuk – My personal favorite kung fu movie stars Jet Li as a Cantonese kung fu expert who tries to win the hand of the local Manchu official’s daughter while helping the Red Lotus Society rebel against the evil Manchu Emperor. Directed by Corey Yuen, who also directed The Transporter. The slapstick and humor is alright. If you’ve never seen a Hong Kong martial arts comedy, this is a good place to start. But it’s the fight scenes, of course, that are the main attraction. There’s one that totally amazed me when I saw and made me want to watch every Jet Li movie I could get my hands on, which I proceeded to do. Released in the US under the very informative title “The Legend”.

7. Menace II Society – By far the best thing to come out of the ‘gangsta’ genre of film and music is this debut film by the Hughes Brothers (who are exactly 4 years older than me). Much more effective than John Singleton’s Boyz In the Hood because the characters actually feel like real people instead of representatives of theoretical types. Tyrin Turner stars as a drug dealer trying to decide if he cares enough to go straight and move to Atlanta with Jada Pinkett. Larenz Tate is amazing as his psychotic best friend O-Dogg. Samuel L. Jackson and Khandi Alexander also star, along with Charles S. Dutton in the only truly preachy scene in the film, one which is mercifully short. Do you care if you live or die?

6. Dazed And Confused – Richard Linklater’s film about the last day of school in a small Texas town in 1976. I was born that year, so the film doesn’t have a real nostalgia grip on me. Instead, I like it because it’s simply a great movie. It’s the kind of film Robert Altman wanted Short Cuts to be, but was too old and ‘serious’ to realize it. You get to know about a dozen distinct characters throughout the film, all of which are unique and interesting. The cast certainly helps: Mathew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Jason London, Parker Posey, Milla Jovovich, Joey Lauren Adams, and Adam Goldberg all appear, though some less often than others. I love movies that convey a real sense of time and place, and Dazed and Confused does that as well as any movie I’ve ever seen.

5. Six Degrees Of Seperation – Nobody thought Will Smith could act, you see. He was still known almost exclusively as the Fresh Prince, both the rapper and sitcom star. Then he blew everyone (well, everyone who saw it) away in this film as a street hustler who worms his way into the upper class Manhattan lives of Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing with his interesting interpretation of The Catcher In The Rye and offers to appear in Sidney Poitier’s film version of Cats. Seems Anthony Michael Hall picked him up in Boston and taught him all the inner secrets of and how to blend in with the Elites. The story is told as a series of anecdotes that Sutherland and Channing relate at parties. It’s about any number of things, depending on how you look at it, but mostly, it’s about phonies.

4. Searching For Bobby Fischer – May be the best sports movie ever, even though chess isn’t really a sport. It’s about competitiveness and obsession and art and life and everything else that makes sports great. Based on a true story, it’s the story of kid chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin and how he learns to be a champion player without losing his soul. As a counterpoint, throughout the film Josh tells the story of Bobby Fischer, the crazy chess genius. Max Pomeranc is terrific as Josh, but the adults are some pretty good actors themselves: Ben Kingsley as his traditional-style teacher, Laurence Fishburne as the chess hustler he hangs out with in the park, Joe Mantegna and Joan Allen as his parents. Tony Shaloub, Laura Linney, William H. Macy, Dan Hedaya and David Paymer also have small roles. One of only three films directed by Steven Zaillian, the guy who wrote The Falcon and the Snowman, Awakenings, A Civil Action, Gangs Of New York and this year’s #1 film.

3. True Romance – The best film ever directed by someone with the last name of “Scott”? Perhaps. The script is by Quentin Tarantino (apparently he’s very happy with this film, unlike Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers). Director Tony Scott (Top Gun) captures exactly what you imagine Tarantino was going for when he wrote it. A Quentin-esque Christian Slater (he works at a comic book shop and goes to a Sonny Chiba triple feature on his birthday) meets a beautiful hooker with a heart of gold who falls in love with him. They get married right away and when he goes to get her belongings from her pimp he accidentally ends up with a suitcase full of cocaine. So, they set off for Hollywood to sell the coke and live happily ever after. It’s a movie geek’s dream of a movie. Maybe the best cast ever features Slater, Patricia Arquette, Gary Oldman, Dennis Hopper, Samuel L. Jackson, Brad Pitt, MIchael Rappaport, James Gandolfini, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Bronson Pinchot, Jack Black (in a deleted scene), Saul Rubinek, Val Kilmer and Christopher Walken.

2. Three Colors: Blue – The first part of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s trilogy loosely based on the French Flag (liberty, equality, fraternity). This one stars Juliette Binoche as a famous composer’s wife whose husband and daughter are killed in a car accident which she survives. The movie’s about how she deals with this newfound freedom. She tries a variety of things, mostly hiding from people and the world, but eventually is brought back to life by music, which she had actually been secretly writing for her husband for years. It’s the most difficult of the Three Colors films: not as fun and entertaining as White; not as clever as Red. But it’s my favorite, probably because it’s the first art movie I really worked to understand (not that I’ve come near to plumbing all it’s depths). Juliette Binoche is the best of the three star actresses too, it isn’t really close. Between this, Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf and The English Patient, she might be my pick as the best actress of the early 90s.

1. Schindler’s List – The obvious pick, but I almost didn’t rank it this high. The thing is, I think there are legitimate concerns that it trivializes the Holocaust. Not the story itself (although it does fall victim, somewhat, to Mississippi Burning Syndrome: a movie about the Holocaust in which the hero is a Nazi), but just the fact of making a movie about the Holocaust trivializes it. Especially one as terrifically well-made as this one. The argument can be made in a number of ways. First, any film about the Holocaust necessarily trivializes it. The Holocaust is the ultimate in evil. The idea of spending millions of dollars to film a story about it, then have people pay 20 bucks a piece to sit in a theatre and munch Milk Duds and popcorn while watching people get sent to gas chambers is just plain sick. Second, you can paraphrase Truffaut’s famous argument that it’s impossible to make an anti-war film because cinema inevitably makes glamourous anything it shows. This is the formulation I find most persuasive because it matches best my own reaction to the film. I saw it three times in the theatre, and while I was of course horrified by the events it depicts, the reason I kept going to see it was the technique. The terrific acting by Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and especially Ralph Fiennes. The beautiful black and white cinematography with surprising and powerful bursts of color. The tour de force action sequence that the liquidation of the ghetto turns into (the music in this sequence is phenomenal). And most memorable, for me, the sound effects. Yup, the sound. I love the opening scene, the rustle of silk as Liam Neeson ties his tie, the way the sound is so clear you can almost feel it on your own shirt when Liam Neeson sticks his swastika pin in his jacket. Schindler’s List is a film about the worst evil that humans can do, but it’s so well-made, such a great work of art, that you can’t help but enjoy it. There is something fundamentally wrong about that. But I don’t know what to do about it; I’m not sure if it’s Spielberg’s fault, my fault, or the fault of everyone who has ever watched a movie about something horrific. But since this is a list about film first and foremost, I can’t rightly punish Spielberg’s film for a failing that I, and perhaps film in general, share. So it goes at the top of the list as possibly the best film of my lifetime.

Despite the ridiculous number of films I’ve seen from this year, there’s still a bunch of movies I really need to see. Definitely the best year for movies so far. It would really surprise me if another matches it. The Unseen:

Stalingrad
Iron Monkey
Farewell, My Concubine
Tombstone
32 Short Films About Glenn Gould
Sonatine
The Visitors
Son In Law
Body Of Evidence
The Crush
Untamed Heart
Swing Kids
Naked
The Vanishing
Free Willy
Sommersby
The Joy Luck Club
Fearless
The Sandlot
Super Mario Bros.
Alive
Rising Sun
Kalifornia
A Bronx Tale
Poetic Justice
The Scent Of Green Papaya
Knight Moves
Who’s The Man?
Boxing Helena
Heaven & Earth
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

Speaking of IMDB not listing all the relevant movies, Orlando came out in 1992, but I couldn’t find it when making the list. It’s a great movie, an adaptation of a Virginia Woolf story of an Elizabethan-era boy who refuses to grow old and turns into a woman after 250 years or so. Tilda Swinton is brilliant in the lead role. I’d rank it at #9 in 1992, right between Singles and Wayne’s World.

And while I’m at it, I’d rate Sixteen Candles at #19 in 1984, in between Gremlins and Top Secret.

These changes are all added to The Big List the link to which can always be found on the sidebar.

There are also a number of Hong Kong movies I need to rank: City On Fire, The Legend Of Fong Sai-yuk, Tai Chi Master, Kung Fu Cult Master, etc.

A new high this year, as I’ve seen 60 movies from 1992. For the record, I’m using IMDB’s list of the top 100 movies of the year by total votes to come up with the titles, no way would I remember all of these. This presents two difficulties. First, there are undoubtedly movies outside the top 100 vote getters that I have seen and/or are very good. Browsing around in other sections of 1992, for example, I found Simple Men and Indochine, one of which I’ve seen and is very good, the other I haven’t but have heard good things about it. Since I’m not going to carefully comb the 6000+ movie lists looking for each and every movie released that year, these lists are going to only be approximate. So, when I say I’ve seen 60 movies from 1992, really I’ve seen at least 60 movies from 1992.

The second problem is that I’m going by the years that IMDB assigns to various films. For example, IMDB says Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf is a 1991 film, even though it wasn’t released theatrically until 1999. Or Zhang Yimou’s Hero, which was released in the US in 2004, counts as a 2002 film on IMDB. This means that my lists won’t be directly comparable to the various awards for those years, or many critics end of the year Best Of lists, all of which use their own criteria for determining when a film came out. Frankly, it’s just easier to use IMDB as the definitive authority on this matter. So, on to the list:

60. The Distinguished Gentlemen
59. Freejack
58. Death Becomes Her
57. Hero
56. Shining Through
55. Kuffs
54. Unlawful Entry
53. Passenger 57
52. The Hand That Rocks The Cradle
51. Toys
50. Housesitter
49. Single White Female
48. Patriot Games
47. Of Mice And Men
46. Jennifer 8
45. Boomerang
44. Honeymoon In Vegas
43. Candyman
42. Lethal Weapon 3
41. The Cutting Edge
40. Scent Of A Woman
39. Mr. Saturday Night
38. Shadows And Fog
37. Noises Off
36. Peter’s Friends
35. My Cousin Vinny
34. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
33. Bad Lieutenant
32. Basic Instinct
31. Encino Man
30. Buffy The Vampire Slayer
29. A League Of Their Own
28. Supercop
27. Chaplin
26. A Midnight Clear
25. Aladdin
24. Alien 3
23. Batman Returns
22. Far And Away
21. Howards End
20. White Men Can’t Jump
19. Simple Men
18. Husbands And Wives
17. The Crying Game
16. El Mariachi

15. Malcolm X – Mostly remembered nowadays for Denzel Washington’s outstanding performance in the lead role, this deserves to be ranked with the best biopics of the last couple decades. Unfairly labeled, along with Spike Lee’s earlier film Do The Right Thing (and Lee and Malcolm X himself) as being anti-white, those who do so have clearly failed to watch the film or read the source material, Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The compelling thing about Malcolm X is not the fire and brimstone “chickens come home to roost: angry guy speeches, it’s the fact that he rejected all of that after realizing how corrupt and fake it really was. And then got killed for it.

14. Bram Stoker’s Dracula – A big, colorful, overthetop, bloody, messy masterpiece of over-indulgence. One of the all-time worst Keanu Reeves performances (“It tis the man himself!”). Fantastic scenery-chewing from Tom Waits, Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Richard E. Grant and Cary Elwes. You can even see Monica Bellucci as one of the devil-women that tortures poor Keanu.

13. Strictly Ballroom – OK, I know that as a straight man, I’m supposed to hate this movie about a renegade ballroom dancer who refuses to play by ‘their’ rules. But I can’t help it, I love it and the other two Baz Luhrmann movies (Romeo and Juliet and Mulin Rouge). I like movies that, in Francois Truffaut’s phrase, express “the joy of making cinema”. That’s the only thing Luhrmann is interested in doing. One of the sweatiest movies of all-time?

12. Sneakers – Often mentioned as an overlooked movie, which raises the question of whether a movie can be overlooked if everyone thinks it’s overlooked. The problem is that while it’s extremely well made and fun to watch, nothing really blows you away about it. It’s just a perfect little movie, which is different from being a perfect movie. The great cast includes Robert Redford, Ben Kingsley, Sidney Poitier, River Phoenix, Dan Ackroyd, Mary McDonnell, David Strathairn, Donal Logue, Stephen Tobolowsky, and James Earl Jones. Written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson, who also wrote and directed Field of Dreams.

11. Red Rock West – Quentin Tarantino meets Luis Buñuel as Nicholas Cage plays a guy who just can’t get out of town. he shows up in a small Wyoming town looking for a job, gets mistaken by the sherriff for a hitman he had hired to kill his wife and soon the sherriff, the wife and the real hitman are all out to get him. Dennis Hopper, Lara Flynn Boyle and JT Walsh co-star. Ripped off by Oliver Stone for U-Turn, a much inferior film.

10. Bob Roberts – The first of two Tim Robbins films in this year’s top ten is also his directorial debut. Robbins plays a folk-singing fascist running for senator against Gore Vidal in this horrifying prescient pseudo-documentary. Giancarlo Esposito plays the liberal media reporter trying to bring him down. The large cast includes Alan Rickman, Susan Sarandon, James Spader, David Strathairn, Helen Hunt, Peter Galagher, Fred Ward, Jack Black, Fisher Stevens, Bob Balaban, Jeremy Piven and John Cusak. Much of the film is modeled after the great Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, especially Jack Black’s scene.

9. Wayne’s World – I’ll admit I haven’t seen this in years, so I don’t really know how well it aged, but I don’t imagine there’d be any problems. Might be my generation’s Animal House. I saw my first Wayne’s World skit when I first saw Saturday Night Live in a hotel room in Seattle in 1989. Fine Young Cannibals was the musical guest and I believe Wayne Gretzky was the host. Earlier that day, I’d seen my first Mariners game, featuring rookie outfielder Ken Griffey, Jr. Director Penelope Spheeris went on to direct The Beverly Hillbillies, The Little Rascals and Black Sheep.

8. Singles – Speaking of Gen X classics. . . . I actually watched this again just a couple months ago and can confirm that it’s lost nothing over time. I recently called it the best Cameron Crowe movie ever and I stand by that. While it doesn’t have any scene as great as certain scenes in Almost Famous, Say Anything or Vanilla Sky, it’s the only one without a serious flaw or two. Plus, it taught me to always say ‘Gesundheit” when someone sneezes so that Bridget Fonda will fall in love with me.

7. The Player – Might be my favorite Robert Altman movie. Tim Robbins plays a movie producer who kills a writer (Vincent D’Onofrio) he thinks is stalking him, Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovitt are the cops trying to hunt him down, Peter Gallagher’s trying to steal his job, he’s trying to sign the Coen Brothers to a long-term contract while rewriting Richard E. Grant’s script into a movie for Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts and he’s fallen in love with the dead guy’s Icelandic girlfriend (Greta Scacchi). Famous for the number of cameos as apparently everyone in Hollywood shows up at one time or another.

6. A Few Good Men – I’m a huge Aaron Sorkin fan. I think that what ABC did to Sports Night is a crime. I’ve seen every episode of The West Wing (well, except for this season’s premiere). I even liked Malice. This is a great movie, extremely well-written. But every time some says they’re going to “make an argument” my skin crawls. And they do say it. A lot. So, Mr. Sorkin, some friendly advice: people argue, they don’t make arguments. The passive voice sucks.

5. Hard-Boiled – The best pure action movie of all-time. At least for the last hour or so. Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung star as two cops trying to take down a gang of gun dealers. Chow’s the cop on the outside, Leung’s undercover, though Chow doesn’t figure that out til halfway through the movie. Both actors, two of my favorites, are outstanding. the final 45 minutes of the film is famously a single action sequence as the cops and bad guys shoot up a hospital. This is John Woo’s most effective film, both visually and in terms of the limited thematic interests Woo has (namely the similarities between good guys and bad, which he also explores in The Killer and Face/Off). IMDB says the Chinese title literally translates as “Hot-Handed God Of Cops”.

4. Glengarry Glen Ross – Perhaps the most quotable movie of all-time. Vicious dark comedy and back-biting among real estate salesmen. Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Jonathon Pryce and Alec Baldwin are pretty much the entire cast. James Foley directs David Mamet’s script. Foley had previously directed Who’s That Girl? and the video for “Papa Don’t Preach”. Favorite lines: “You see this watch? This watch cost more than your car.” “Coffee is for closers.” “Fuck you. That’s my name. You know why, mister? ‘Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove an eighty thousand dollar BMW. That’s my name.” “Who ever told you that you could work with men?. . . . You company man.”

3. Last Of The Mohicans – An unjustly forgotten classic. MIchael Mann took James Fenimore Cooper’s by all accounts extremely boring novel and turned it into a beautiful romantic action drama. If the movie came out now instead of in 1992, it’d get a lot more critical praise than it has, now that Mann’s distinguished himself with Heat and The Insider and is no longer known only as the guy who created Miami Vice. Daniel Day-Lewis is great as Nathaniel, the many-named hero of Cooper’s novels. Russell Means, Madeline Stowe and especially Wes Studi are outstanding as well. One of the best looking movies of all-time. The score’s really good as well. Apparently the only available DVD release is also the Director’s Cut, which I haven’t seen. But soon, I will.

2. Reservoir Dogs – Quentin Tarantino’s debut film is justly praised as a step-forward in the pulp movie genre. It’s most direct ancestor is probably Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, at least in dialogue and attitude. It, of course, borrows plot elements from a whole host of films, from John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle to Ringo Lam’s City On Fire. But it’s Tarantino’s unique combination of those influences that makes this film great. Tarantino is far from the most original director out there, his genius is for synthesis instead. And dialogue. Not just the famous pop culture discussions, but every line in the film has a unique rhythm that fits just perfectly. He’s the only contemporary writer I can think of in Mamet’s class as far as that kind of words for the sake of words dialogue.

1. Unforgiven – The western to end all westerns. Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece strips the western genre down to it’s essence and examines the brutal and senseless nature of the violence at its core. It’s been argued that there is nowhere else for the genre to go after Unforgiven. We had classical westerns (Stagecoach, Red River, Silverado) and there are revisionist Westerns (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Dances With Wolves) and we had classical westerns told in a revisionist style (the spaghetti westerns). Unforgiven is the deconstruction of the western. Its a dead end. Much like Touch Of Evil signaled the end of film noir. All that we can have now are neo-classical or neo-revisionist westerns. There is no new terrain to explore, all the genre has to say has been said. I don’t know how much I buy that argument, in particular I wonder how the HBO series Deadwood fits into the sceme. It seems to accept the brutal senselessness of Unforgiven yet still demonstrates the community building necessity that permeates both classical and revisionist westerns. Regardless of it’s genre implications, it’s a great movie. One of the most depressing films that I actually like.

Despite seeing so many movies this year, there are still some with great reputations that I’ve managed to miss. And a lot of really bad ones too. The Unseen:

Indochine
The Mambo Kings
Lorenzo’s Oil
Baraka
Romper Stomper
Dead Alive
Shakes The Clown
Porco Rosso
Man Bites Dog
Damage
Belle Epoque
Poison Ivy
Radio Flyer
Hoffa
Leap Of Faith
Captain Ron
Thunderheart
Memoirs Of An Invisible Man
Newsies

Honey, I Blew Up The Kid
School Ties
Like Water For Chocolate
Cool World
Beethoven
Medicine Man
The Mighty Ducks
Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot
The Lawnmower Man
Universal Soldier
Forever Young
A River Runs Through It
Under Siege
Sister Act
The Bodyguard
Home Alone 2: Lost In New York
Un Coeur En Hiver
Enchanted April

A sizable 58 movies this year, including some of the very worst films I’ve ever seen. The top of the list is cluttered with some personal favorites; there’s not a lot of consensus great films this year, though there are quite a few good movies.

58. Highlander II: The Quickening
57. Switch
56. Life Stinks
55. Hudson Hawk
54. Toy Soldiers
53. Necessary Roughness
52. King Ralph
51. Sleeping With The Enemy
50. Dutch
49. My Girl
48. The Hard Way
47. Until The End Of The World
46. Madonna: Truth Or Dare
45. Ricochet
44. He Said, She Said
43. Backdraft
42. Oscar
41. Doc Hollywood
40. Kafka
39. Other People’s Money
38. Point Break
37. The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell Of Fear
36. The Last Boy Scout
35. Father Of The Bride
34. Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves
33. Beauty And The Beast
32. Thelma & Louise
31. Delicatessen
30. City Slickers
29. The Doors
28. New Jack City
27. The Addams Family
26. Hook
25. Cape Fear
24. Soapdish
23. Boyz N The Hood
22. Terminator 2: Judgement Day
21. Little Man Tate
20. Defending Your Life
19. Dead Again
18. Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey
17. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
16. Hot Shots!

15. Flirting – Largely unknown, this Australian film is mostly noted for starring Nicole Kidman, Thandie Newton and Noah Taylor (and Naomi Watts has a small part). It’s a smart, well-made little film set in about an interracial romance at a boarding school. I was surprised to learn that Nicole Kidman was in this after Days of Thunder and Dead Calm, in which she plays adults. I wonder if this was filmed first and just released later or what.

14. What About Bob? – It’s become overrated as time as passed, but the story of the worst doctor/patient relationship ever is still pretty good. Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss give acceptably over-the-top performances. Julie Hagerty from Airplane! and Charlie Korsmo from Hook, Dick Tracy and the Republican Party co-star. Directed by Yoda.

13. Once Upon A Time In China – The first Jet Li film to appear on any list is also one of his best. Wong Fei-hung has been the main character in a lot of Hong Kong movies (notably Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master II), but Li’s portrayal in the Once Upon movies seems closest to what I know of the actual Wong. . .with wire stunts. Directed by Tsui Hark, whose name I will never be able to pronounce correctly, despite years of trying.

12. Night On Earth – How can you not love a Jim Jarmusch movie starring Winona Ryder? That’s right, you can’t. It’s really a series of short films, set in taxi cabs in five different cities around the world. We get Ryder and Gena Rowlands in LA, Giancarlo Esposito, Rosie Perez and Armin Mueller-Stahl in New York, Roberto Benigni in Rome and unknowns (to me at least) in Paris and Helsinki. Benigni’s is the funniest, the one in Helsinki is the most touching, but each sequence is very good. A great blend of comedy and melancholy.

11. My Own Private Idaho – Shakespeare’s Henry IV, set among male prostitutes in Portland with Keanu Reeves in the Prince Hal role and River Phoenix as the narcoleptic who’s in love with him. It’s actually stranger than it sounds. Stranger still, it all works. One of the best performances of Phoenix’s career, and probably the best Gus Van Sant movie (it might be Drugstore Cowboy instead. Definitely not Good Will Hunting.)

10. The Fisher King – A combination of talk radio and Monty Python And The Holy Grail? A Terry Gilliam film which seems to be overlooked nowadays, though it was quite popular among critics at the time. Robin Williams gives a great performance as the Professor turned crazy homeless guy who gets Jeff Bridges broken-down shock jock to help him quest for the Holy Grail. I avoided watching it for a long time thinking there’d be a bunch of preaching about homelessness. There isn’t at all. It is a Terry Gilliam movie, after all.

9. The Double Life Of Veronique – It’s kind of a warm-up to his Three Colors Trilogy, but this Krzysztof Kieslowski film is as good as any of them. Irene Jacob (Red, Othello) stars in the dual role as a Parisian and a Pole who may or may not be the same person, or are two halves of one person, or just happen to look a lot alike. Like the other Kieslowski films, it’s beautiful and mysterious and worth watching again and again. It’s not nearly as difficult as my plot description makes it seem. It doesn’t appear to be on DVD; a travesty.

8. Barton Fink – The Coen Brothers first really big critical acclaim came for this very dark comedy which won the top prize at Cannes. Fitting in that the film is a satire of the kind of people who vote to give awards at Cannes. John Turturro’s fantastic as the snobby playwright who thinks very highly of himself despite a severe case of writer’s block when he moves to Hollywood. John Goodman plays the Common Man that Turturro thinks he’s dong so much to help with his socially conscious plays. John Mahoney, Judy Davis, Michael Lerner, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito and Tony Shaloub costar. For the second straight movie in a row, the Coens made an atmospheric, picture-perfect 1930s-era film.

7. Slacker – Richard Linklater’s first film is an experiment that actually works as the film is a series of short scenes over a 24 hour period in Austin. The trick is that the camera follows one scene for awhile, then trails off to follow a passerby for awhile, then wanders off through a nearby door and so on, connecting all of the characters and, by extension, the whole town. Some of the stories are better than others, of course, but none are really bad. My favorites are the very old anarchist who catches someone robbing his house and gives him a lecture on political science, the women hanging out on their driveway who give passersby cards with clever sayings like “To withdraw in disgust is not the same as apathy” (quoted by Michael Stipe in “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?”), the first scene in which Linklater himself describes a weird dream he had to a wholly uninterested cab driver, and a JFK-conspiracy nut trying to impress a girl in a bookstore. One of my favorite films in high school.

6. Bugsy – The best Barry Levinson movie ever, probably. Great performances by Warren Beatty and Annette Benning in the lead roles. Good supporting performances from Ben Kingsley, Harvey Keitel and Elliot Gould. The very pretty images and period detail overcomes any problems one might have with the story (I’ve never quite understood why she stole all that money, or why they killed him instead of her. I know what they think the explanation is, I just don’t buy it.)

5. Silence Of The Lambs – A very good thriller, though Anthony Hopkins performance is very overrated. He’s good, but not all-time great good. Jodie Foster is really outstanding though. As is Scott Glenn. Problem is that Lecter is the really interesting villain. The actual bad guy, Ted Levine’s Buffalo Bill is too over-the-top to be taken as seriously. This makes the end kind of anti-climactic. Still, it’s about ten thousand times better than it’s sequels.

4. JFK – Yeah, a lot of it is fiction. But, if you pretend it isn’t, then this is a really great movie. Even if you ignore the subject matter entirely and just watch it for the performances and the images, it’s tremendous. This was the peak of Oliver Stone’s Oliver Stone-style. Lots of cuts, shifts from color to black and white, a cast of thousands, shifts back and forth in time, it’s all here and it all works. It’s not too much as in Natural Born Killers or out of place as in Nixon. A key film for the Kevin Bacon Game, it stars: Kevin Bacon, Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Joe Pesci, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, Laurie Metcalf, Wayne Knight, Michael Rooker, Brian Doyle-Murray, Bob Hoskins, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Asner, Dale Dye, Frank Whaley, John Larroquette, Ron Rifkin and John Candy.

3. Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse – If it is possible for a making-of documentary about a great movie to actually be better than that great movie, then this is it. Francis Ford Coppola’s wife filmed the insanity around the shooting of Apocalypse Now: the drugs, the typhoons, the heart attacks, casting changes, overweight millionaire actors who don;t bother to learn their lines, the inability of the director to come up with an ending. It’s amazing that a movie came out of this at all, let alone one of the great movies of all-time. The documentary is always fascinating. My favorite parts are when Coppola gets Martin Sheen drunk and makes him talk about his mom (who killed herself) then films his nervous breakdown, imaging Harvey Keitel in the lead role (he was originally cast in the Martin Sheen part), and Coppola’s famous quote about the film at the Cannes Film Festival, “My movie is not about Vietnam… my movie is Vietnam. There were too many of us, we had access to too much equipment, too much money, and little by little we went insane.”

2. Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf – Probably the most obscure high-ranking film on any list so far. Stars Juliette Binoche as a woman who’s going blind who hangs out with a fire-eating homeless guy (Denis Levant) on a famous bridge in Paris. The film starts with harshly realistic portrayals of homelessness and gradually becomes more and more lyrical and beautiful and romantic. I guarantee it’s not like any movie you’ve seen before. The director, Leos Carax, is a bit of a nut, as far as i know, he’s only made four movies, and I’ve only seen two of them. This wasn’t released in the US until it got Miramaxed in 1999 (under the idiotic title “Lovers On The Bridge”), we played it at the theatre I was working at at the time, which was how I saw it.

1. LA Story – Speaking of romantic movies, this is one of my all-time favorite romantic comedies, and easily the best Steve Martin movie ever. Martin plays a wacky weather man who falls in love with a tuba-playing British reporter (while dating Sarah Jessica Parker and is saved by Shakespeare and a sentient freeway traffic sign. Victoria Tennant, Martin’s wife at the time, plays the tuba player. Richard E. Grant is terrific as her ex-husband. Marilu Henner, Patrick Stewart, Rick Moranis, Woody Harrelson, Kevin Pollack, Iman, George Plimpton also appear. Steve Martin’s spent his entire career showing that you can be really smart and really silly at the same time. In LA Story, he gets it exactly right.

I’ve owned a VHS of Raise The Red Lantern for almost a decade now, I even watched parts of it once while writing a paper. It looks like a great movie, but for some reason, it remains one of The Unseen:

Raise The Red Lantern
Days Of Being Wild
Naked Lunch
The Commitments
The Rocketeer
Regarding Henry
Jungle Fever
Fried Green Tomatoes
Guilty By Suspicion
Prospero’s Books
Truly, Madly, Deeply
Mediterraneo
Curly Sue
Out For Justice
Dying Young
Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man
Billy Bathgate
Zentropa
The Prince Of Tides
Drop Dead Fred
Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead
Nothing But Trouble
Frankie & Johnny
Grand Canyon

Yesterday the great women’s basketball player Sheryl Swoopes outed herself. Today, actor George Takei does in this article. He’s an interesting guy, he seems to be equating being closeted with his growing up in an internment camp during World War II and with racial segregation.

John Kerry’s posted parts of a speech he’s making tomorrow on his website. He still hasn’t learned to communicate to actual humans, but contrast his plan to the sound bites we get from the present administration. Sigh.

Here it is:

Excerpts of remarks as prepared for delivery

The Kerry Plan: The Path Forward

This difficult road traveled demands the unvarnished truth about the road ahead.

To those who suggest we should withdraw all troops immediately – I say No. A precipitous withdrawal would invite civil and regional chaos and endanger our own security. But to those who rely on the overly simplistic phrase “we will stay as long as it takes,” who pretend this is primarily a war against Al Qaeda, and who offer halting, sporadic, diplomatic engagement, I also say – No, that will only lead us into a quagmire.

The way forward in Iraq is not to pull out precipitously or merely promise to stay “as long as it takes.” To undermine the insurgency, we must instead simultaneously pursue both a political settlement and the withdrawal of American combat forces linked to specific, responsible benchmarks. At the first benchmark, the completion of the December elections, we can start the process of reducing our forces by withdrawing 20,000 troops over the course of the holidays.

The Administration must immediately give Congress and the American people a detailed plan for the transfer of military and police responsibilities on a sector by sector basis to Iraqis so the majority of our combat forces can be withdrawn. No more shell games, no more false reports of progress, but specific and measurable goals.

It is true that our soldiers increasingly fight side by side with Iraqis willing to put their lives on the line for a better future. But history shows that guns alone do not end an insurgency. The real struggle in Iraq – Sunni versus Shiia – will only be settled by a political solution, and no political solution can be achieved when the antagonists can rely on the indefinite large scale presence of occupying American combat troops.

In fact, because we failed to take advantage of the momentum of our military victory, because we failed to deliver services and let Iraqis choose their leaders early on, our military presence in vast and visible numbers has become part of the problem, not the solution.

The Military Agrees:

And our generals understand this. General George Casey, our top military commander in Iraq, recently told Congress that our large military presence “feeds the notion of occupation” and “extends the amount of time that it will take for Iraqi security forces to become self-reliant.” And Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, breaking a thirty year silence, writes, ”Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency.” No wonder the Sovereignty Committee of the Iraqi Parliament is already asking for a timetable for withdrawal of our troops; without this, Iraqis believe Iraq will never be its own country.

We must move aggressively to reduce popular support for the insurgency fed by the perception of American occupation. An open-ended declaration to stay ‘as long as it takes’ lets Iraqi factions maneuver for their own political advantage by making us stay as long as they want, and it becomes an excuse for billions of American tax dollars to be sent to Iraq and siphoned off into the coffers of cronyism and corruption.

It will be hard for this Administration, but it is essential to acknowledge that the insurgency will not be defeated unless our troop levels are drawn down, starting immediately after successful elections in December. The draw down of troops should be tied not to an arbitrary timetable, but to a specific timetable for transfer of political and security responsibility to Iraqis and realignment of our troop deployment. That timetable must be real and strict. The goal should be to withdraw the bulk of American combat forces by the end of next year. If the Administration does its work correctly, that is achievable.

We Need A Political Solution:

Our strategy must achieve a political solution that deprives the Sunni-dominated insurgency of support by giving the Sunnis a stake in the future of their country. The Constitution, opposed by more than two thirds of Sunnis, has postponed and even exacerbated the fundamental crisis of Iraq. The Sunnis want a strong secular national government that fairly distributes oil revenues. Shiites want to control their own region and resources in a loosely united Islamic state. And Kurds simply want to be left alone. Until sufficient compromise is hammered out, a Sunni base can not be created that isolates the hard core Baathists and jihaadists and defuses the insurgency.

We Need a Regional Security Agreement:

The Administration must bring to the table the full weight of all of Iraq’s Sunni neighbors. They also have a large stake in a stable Iraq. Instead of just telling us that Iraq is falling apart, as the Saudi foreign minister did recently, they must do their part to put it back together. We’ve proven ourselves to be a strong ally to many nations in the region. Now it’s their turn to do their part.

The administration must immediately call a conference of Iraq’s neighbors, Britain, Turkey and other key NATO allies, and Russia. All of these countries have influence and ties to various parties in Iraq. Together, we must implement a collective strategy to bring the parties in Iraq to a sustainable political compromise. This must include obtaining mutual security guarantees among Iraqis themselves. Shiite and Kurdish leaders need to make a commitment not to perpetrate a bloodbath against Sunnis in the post-election period. In turn, Sunni leaders must end support for the insurgents, including those who are targeting Shiites. And the Kurds must explicitly commit themselves not to declare independence.

To enlist the support of Iraq’s Sunni neighbors, we should commit to a new regional security structure that strengthens the security of the countries in the region and the wider community of nations. This requires a phased process including improved security assistance programs, joint exercises, and participation by countries both outside and within the Middle East.

Improve Training:

Simultaneously, the President needs to put the training of Iraqi security forces on a six month wartime footing and ensure that the Iraqi government has the budget to deploy them. The Administration must stop using the requirement that troops be trained in-country as an excuse for refusing offers made by Egypt, Jordan, France and Germany to do more.

Win the Real War on Terror:

We will never be as safe as we should be if Iraq continues to distract us from the most important war we must win – the war on Osama Bin Laden, Al Queda, and the terrorists that are resurfacing even in Afghanistan. These are the make or break months for Iraq. The President must take a new course, and hold Iraqis accountable. If the President still refuses, Congress must insist on a change in policy. If we do take these steps, there is no reason this difficult process can not be completed in 12-15 months. There is no reason Iraq cannot be sufficiently stable, no reason the majority of our combat troops can’t soon be on their way home, and no reason we can’t take on a new role in Iraq, as an ally not an occupier, training Iraqis to defend themselves. Only then will we have provided leadership equal to our soldiers’ sacrifice – and that is what they deserve.”

Some random thoughts while watching the World Series:

Saw Sixteen Candles finally last weekend. It was good, better than Pretty In Pink, worse than The Breakfast Club. I was happy to see that there were no references to socio-economic class. Anthony Michael Hall was great, possibly his best performance. Molly Ringwold, though, not only was her acting poor, she didn’t even look particularly attractive. Nice to see was that, as the wife noted, all the kids actually look like high school kids. Just as they don’t in, say, Pretty In Pink.

I was going to post the Tom DeLay mugshot on here, but it’s just way too creepy.

Still waiting to get my prize for winning Baseball Prospectus’s HACKING MASS contest. I’ve been assured that I should be hearing something next week though, which is nice. As for the playoffs, I haven’t been following all that closely, I don’t especially like any of the teams that made it. I’ve watched much of the Series though (except the Tivo cut off an hour or two before the end of last night’s game.) I’d tell you I picked the White Sox to win it all, but you wouldn’t believe me. Oh, and if you were wondering why the White Sox aren’t the White Socks, Slate has the answer.

I’ve been trying to catch up with contemporary music after pretty much ignoring it since 1997 or so. Lately I’ve picked up some Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie, Flaming Lips, The Shins, Matt Pond PA (worst band name ever?) and the Garden State and Elizabethtown soundtracks. I like a lot of it, and of those I’d say the Matt Pond PA album is the best (it’s their latest one), and the best song is The Shins’ “New Slang”, from the Garden State Soundtrack. I have to say, though, that I’m disappointed in Modest Mouse. I don’t really see what all the hubub is about. Kids today. . . .

The Brattle Theatre in Boston may be going out of business. It’s the oldest continually running art theatre in the country, it started running repertory films in 1953. Almost a decade ago, I saw The Seven Samurai there along with Mr. Arkadin, an almost impossible to find Orson Welles film. They’re being run out of business by the increasing cost of repertory prints, decreasing attendance and competition from Landmark’s nearby Kendall Square Cinema. Though it doesn’t really show rep films anymore, Landmark draws the same audience that would go to see old movies. The Brattle’s run by the non-profit Brattle Film Foundation and has been soliciting donations for the last month or so. Here is the story in the Boston Globe about it. And here is the Brattle’s website where you can make a donation.