The best year for movies yet is 1978. And the first time all of my top films are actually good.

13. Coming Home – I don’t generally like depressing movies, and this is a Depressing Movie. It’s redeemed by the great performances by Jon Voight, Jane Fonda and Bruce Dern.

12. Interiors – Woody Allen follows up the best romantic comedy ever with. . .his most boring movie ever. Like Coming Home, this is Depressing, but there is also some terrific acting. But if you wanted to watch a Bergman movie, you should just watch a Bergman movie. Allen would get better at serious movies. This has the same relation to, say, Crimes And Misdemeanors as Hollywood Ending has to Sleeper.

11. Game Of Death – Bruce Lee only made half of this before he died, but they released it anyway, with a different actor pretending to be Lee through much of the movie. Really, you’re better off just skipping ahead to the climax, wherein the actual Lee has to fight his way up a tower (including a tremendous scene with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to get to the bad guy.

10. The Five Deadly Venoms – A Shaw Brothers genre film, built around a fairly tedious mystery plot. Really picks up towards the end when the fighting starts.

9. Grease – A very strange film. I’ve only seen it once, unlike, apparently, everyone else. More interesting than funny. There’s some catchy songs, but I like dancing in my musicals and none of the sequences here stick in my memory.

8. Halloween – The best film of its genre, not counting Alien. But I’m not a real fan of the genre. It towers above its competition, really. Genuinely scary.

7. Dawn Of The Dead – Zombies invade a shopping mall: pure genius. The best of Romero’s Zombie Quartet and the one where his anti-capitalist metaphor works the best. Watch the long version.

6. Superman – What are Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman doing in this movie? A really great looking movie, made believable by the work of actors who should be above this sort of thing. After almost 20 years of post-Batman, post-modern superheroes, I’l admit a little nostalgia for a movie that plays the superhero thing totally straight.

5. The 36th Chamber Of Shaolin – Apparently the Shaw Brothers masterpiece, though I’ve only seen the two films on this list. A great epic martial arts film. Remember the funky logo at the beginning of Kill Bill Vol. 1? That’s the Shaw Brothers. Gordon Liu stars in this movie, and plays one role in each of the Kill Bill movies.

4. The Last Waltz – The Band’s last concert, chock full of guest appearances. My favorites are Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and, I guess just for the hell of it, Neil Diamond. The concert’s great, but it’s the way Scorsese cuts between the songs and the interviews to always keep the movie moving forward, that makes this one of the few great music documentaries.

3. The Deer Hunter – Quite the year for depressing movies. The scope and weight of this film is unmatched in Vietnam films. But it is so dark and depressing. The cast is truly amazing: DeNiro, Walken, Cazale, Savage and Streep are all outstanding. Two things keep this from being #1. First, I’ve never found what happens to Walken’s character to be realistic. Not just the going nuts and playing Russian Roulette part, but DeNiro going back and finding him and what happens then. . . .it’s just too much for me to believe in a film that seems so relentlessly realistic in every other aspect. Second is the relationship between Streep and DeNiro. I’m not sure exactly why, but it never worked for me. A great movie, the third best Vietnam movie ever, but not the best of 1978.

2. Days Of Heaven – Terrence Malik’s never failed to make a Great Movie. Of course, he’s only made three movies (the fourth is coming out this fall, oh yeah, I’m excited). This one stars Richard Gere (before he became a star, and therefore when he was good) and Brooke Adams as Depression Era wanderers who end up working on the always great Sam Shepard’s farm. Shepard falls in love with Adams and bad things start to happen in incredibly beautiful ways. One of the very best looking movies ever made.

1. Animal House – How can I put this #1 ahead of Serious Movies like The Deer Hunter and Interiors and Coming Home? Because it’s my list, dammit. And also because Animal House is a better, more innovative, more important movie than any of those others. Ask yourself honestly which you’d rather watch: John Belushi being fat, drunk and stupid, or Jon Voight as a paraplegic trying to steal Bruce Dern’s wife because Vietnam sucked? That’s what I thought. Animal House created a genre that has had way more than its share of crappy movies, but it also spawned some classics (Caddyhack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, etc). Interiors spawned, um, er, nothing. Just because it’s funny, doesn’t mean it isn’t respectable. And Animal House might be the funniest movie ever made.

Some pretty good movies I haven’t seen from this year, but I’d be surprised if any made my top 8:

Drunken Master
I Spit On Your Grave
La Cage Aux Folles
Foul Play
Heaven Can Wait
Up In Smoke
Midnight Express

I’m missing more from 1977 than 76, but I really doubt any of them would break into my top 5.

Here’s the list:

11. Saturday Night Fever – Yeah the dancing is kinda cool, but this is a truly terrible movie. Painfully bad.

10. Pete’s Dragon – The first of several kid’s movies this year. Mediocre live action, partly animated Disney movie. Mickey Rooney’s in it.

9. Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo – I loved the Herbie movies when I was a kid. This is a Herbie movie. Ignore the Lindsey Lohan version.

8. Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown – Never one of my favorite Peanuts films, but it’s alright.

7. The Rescuers – A lesser Disney cartoon, but it does star Bob Newhart. So that’s cool.

6. The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh – A much better Disney cartoon. One of the best, in fact. There’s a big gap between 6 and 7 here.

5. New York, New York – A great, underrated Scorsese movie, it’s a very dark musical with the unlikely cast of Robert DeNiro and Liza Minelli. Basically the same story as A Star Is Born, but elevated by some of Scorsese’s best looking scenes. The opening set-piece on VE day is amazing.

4. A Bridge Too Far – More than the epitome of the Caine-Hackman Theory, it’s a great war movie in it’s own right. Really the last great classical war movie. All-star cast (Caine, Hackman, Connery, Caan, Redford, Ryan O’Neal, Olivier, Anthony Hopkins, Liv Ullman, maximillian Schell, Denholm Elliott, Elliott Gould, etc) epic scope, complex action sequences, interesting story, it’s got it all.

3. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind – Possibly Spielberg’s best movie. Great performance from Richard Dreyfuss. Chock full of visually stunning sequences. Francois Truffaut co-stars as a scientist. Classic That Guy Bob Balaban plays Truffaut’s assistant. This means something.

2. Star Wars – Very tough call between 1 and 2. Ask me ten minutes from now and I might reverse them. It’s fashionable to prefer Empire, but it’s Star Wars that is the truly revolutionary film. I refuse to blame it for the crap that came after it, or the effect it had on industry strategy (the creation of the blockbuster-event film).

1. Annie Hall – The best romantic comedy of all-time. Iconic performances by Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. One of my 5 favorite movies ever. Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum have cameos. We need the eggs.

The Unseen:

That Obscure Object Of Desire
Eraserhead
Slap Shot
Smokey And TheBandit
The Kentucky Fried Movie
The Goodbye Girl
Oh, God!
Looking For Mr. Goodbar
Pumping Iron
Black Sunday
3 Women
Stroszek

Starting a new feature here on TINAB, I’m going to countdown the top movies of the year for every year for as long as I can. I’m going to start with 1976, because that’s the year I was born and it’s as good a year as any. Each year will rank the top ten or so films from that year, along with some mentions of films I haven’t seen yet. What year a film is categorized as will be determined by IMDB.

So here we go, the top films of 1976:

12. The Omen – A truly awful movie, though it was a big hit and is interesting as a cultural relic.

11. The Song Remains The Same – A mediocre Led Zeppelin concert film. The introductions of the band members before the show are pretty cool, especially the devilish Jimmy Page. Robert Plant is really bad as he manages to butcher his own songs.

10. Rocky – I’ve tried to watch it many times, but I’ve only made it all the way through once. It’s a good movie. Stallone really isn’t that bad. And the story is terrific. The problem is that it is BORING. I put it in all-caps, so you know it must be true. Not even the best sports movie of the year.

9. Network – One of those movies that you’re supposed to like, so you watch it, think it’s alright, and then can never remember anything about it. I’ve seen Network 4 times at least, yet I can remember hardly any of it.

8. The Seven Percent Solution – A terrific cast (Alan Arkin, Laurence Oivier, Robert Duvall, Joel Grey, Nicol Williamson) stars in this Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud movie. I remember liking it quite a bit, but don’t remember enough to rank it any higher than this.

7. Bound For Glory – Hal Ashby’s biopic of Woody Guthrie,starring David Carradine, who’s very good in the role. Ashby’s a great underrated director, this isn’t his best movie, but is still pretty good. The biggest problem is that there just isn’t enough there. The film stops just as Guthrie’s career gets going.

6. Carrie – Perhaps the only good Brian DePalma movie. A dark version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, wherein adolescence = freaky demonism. Great horror movie performances from Piper Laurie and Sissy Spacek.

5. All The President’s Men – Another film that just isn’t long enough. Very slick, efficient film. Redford, Hoffman and Robards are great. Great script by William Goldman. But you only get the beginnings of the Watergate story. Maybe that’s where Woodward and Bernstein’s story ends, but it doesn’t make for a wholly satisfying film.

4. The Bad News Bears – A classic sports movie. The vicious anti-establishment humor still works. One of the great last scenes in movie history. I plan to avoid the remake at all costs. I recommend you do the same.

3. Marathon Man – The second Goldman/Hoffman pairing of the year is a near-perfect suspense thriller. It shares the lean efficiency of All the President’s Men, but manages to tell a complete story. One of Laurence Olivier’s last great performances as the Evil Nazi Dentist.

2. Taxi Driver – Please don’t take away my Film Geek Merit Badge. It’s a great movie, but the ending never really worked for me. After two hours of angry misanthropy, with a horrifically violent climax, the even more misanthropic satire of the coda is just too much. For a long time I just ignored it. Now I understand it’s supposed to be funny. I guess I’m just not demented enough to agree. DeNiro though, he’s good.

1. The Outlaw Josey Wales– Clint Eastwood’s second-best film as a director. A great revisonist Western, it makes the Western as chronicle of the development of civilization theme quite explict. But it does so with much more respect to Indians than any other Western I know of (especially Dances With Wolves). It’s the yin to Unforgiven’s yang.

Now the ones I haven’t seen:

Logan’s Run
Small Change
The Front
1900
The Shootist
Family Plot
Assault On Precinct 13
Car Wash
Midway
Silver Streak

There were two new Dylan albums released today. The soundtrack for the upcoming Scorsese documentary (on DVD Sept. 20th, on PBS the week after that). “No Direction Home” and a Starbucks CD “Live At The Gaslight 1962”. On first listen, both are worth picking up for Dylanphiles (if you aren’t one, you should be).

No Direction Home is the 7th Bootleg Series, the first 5 of which are essential for any Dylan fan. It’s 2 discs cover 1959-1966, just like the movie will. Disc 1 highlights include fantastic covers of This Land Is Your Land and Dink’s Song, very good live versions of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, When The Ship Comes In, Blowin’ In The Wind and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.

Disc 2 is mostly alternate version of songs from Highway 61 Revisted and Blonde On Blonde, some of which are substantially different than the album versions. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, She Belongs To Me, Desolation Row, Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat and Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again are the highlights. The album closes with Like A Rolling Stone from the ‘Royal Albert Hall’ concert, previously available in its entirety as Bootleg Series Volume 4. If you don’t already have it, you need to: probably my favorite live performance by anyone, ever.

The Live at the Gaslight album is actually 2 concerts spliced together. Only 3 of the songs are Dylan originals (Hard Rain, Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright, and the previously unreleased Rocks and Gravel). The last 7 are all covers of folk songs. All are interesting, but the best are John Brown (previously available only on the Dylan Unplugged album), Cocaine and Barbara Allen. definitely worth going into Starbucks to buy it.

On Air America this week, Al Franken is on vacation. Filling in for him is Rachel Maddow, the best news broadcaster I’ve seen or heard in a long time. I’ve been addicted to her daily one hour show (5 – 6 AM eastern) for months now. It’s informative and entertaining and very efficient. Should be an interesting week on AA as Maddow’s backup does her show, she does Franken’s show, and interns or something do Morning Sedition while Mark and Marc are on vacation. All these shows can either be podcast through iTunes or downloaded from http://www.airamericaplace.com. Highly recommended.

Watched Brothers Grimm last night. I was disappointed. It’s well down. The actors are good. The story is fairly interesting. There just isn’t anything more there. It reminded me quite a bit of Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, another well-made, good-looking movie that I felt just didn’t have any reason to exist. It feels like important parts of this film are missing, which is very possible. Terry Gilliam’s set a very high standard for his films, and this is easily the worst one I’ve seen.

A couple days ago, I watched Spider-Man 2. It was good, but not as good as the first one. Just about what you’d expect I guess. I’m annoyed that they basically just recycled the conflicts of the first movie. Peter has issues with the responsibility of being a superhero, and committing to the hot girl. A scientist he likes and admires is twisted into a supervillain against his will. If they make a third one, it could potentially be the best of the three, what with a villain with a different motive (Peter’s friend chooses to become the Hobgoblin in order to get revenge), and with (hopefully) the resolution of the inane Mary Jane-Peter conflict.

Felix Herndandez finally gave up an extra-base hit. Three of them in fact. But 8 Ks and 1 walk over seven innings, with only 3 runs allowed is nothing to sneeze at.

36 IP 23 H 8 R 7 ER 2 HR 5 BB 38 K 1.75 ERA

Wednesday night, The King takes on The Big Unit at Safeco. If you watch one Mariner games this year, this should be it.

And this is hilarious.

Watched that Ghostbusters DVD tonight. Haven’t seen the movie in years, because I’ve only been able to get it panned-and-scanned. That didn’t bother me when I was a kid and didn’t know what it was, I must have watched it dozens of times on VHS (it pretty much defines the way I remember the 1980s). But now, thanks to the miracle of DVD, I’m able to watch it widescreen for the first time since seeing it in the theatre when I was eight years old.

I can’t imagine a person not liking Ghostbusters, I bet even Pat Robertson likes it. It’s pretty much a perfect movie comedy. Murray, Ackroyd and Ramis at their peak. A great supporting cast (Rick Moranis, Sigourney Weaver, Annie Potts, William Atherton). Tremendously quotable movie (the biggest ‘Memorable Quotes’ page I’ve ever seen at IMDB is in the link in the title).

The odd thing about it, seeing it now, is that there’s absolutely no cynicism in it. Not that its sappy or cheesy, because it isn’t at all. But there’s a kind of wide-eyed optimism to the film. Maybe that’s just a residue of my having watched it so much as a kid, but I really think that’s why it was such the hit that it was. These guys have done funnier movies (Stripes, Vacation) and better movies (Trading Places, The Blues Brothers, Animal House, Groundhog Day) but I don’t think they’ve ever done anything that is so appealing to so many people.

HAVANA, Cuba (Reuters) — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, popular with the poor at home, offered on Tuesday to help needy Americans with cheap supplies of gasoline.

“We want to sell gasoline and heating fuel directly to poor communities in the United States,” the populist leader told reporters at the end of a visit to Communist-run Cuba.

. . . .

Chavez said Venezuela could supply gasoline to Americans at half the price they now pay if intermediaries who “speculated … and exploited consumers” were cut out.

Venezuela supplies Cuba with generously financed oil and plans to help Caribbean nations foot their oil bills.

Chavez, in Cuba to attend the graduation of Cuban-trained doctors from 28 countries, was seen off at the airport by Cuban President Fidel Castro. Washington has accused the two leaders of being a destabilizing influence in South America.

Chavez and Castro offered to give poor Americans free health care and train doctors free of charge.

American Legion Declares War on Protestors — Media Next?

By E&P Staff

Published: August 24, 2005 4:20 PM ET
NEW YORK The American Legion, which has 2.7 million members, has declared war on antiwar protestors, and the media could be next. Speaking at its national convention in Honolulu, the group’s national commander called for an end to all “public protests” and “media events” against the war, even though they are protected by the Bill of Rights.

“The American Legion will stand against anyone and any group that would demoralize our troops, or worse, endanger their lives by encouraging terrorists to continue their cowardly attacks against freedom-loving peoples,” Thomas Cadmus, national commander, told delegates at the group’s national convention in Honolulu.

The delegates voted to use whatever means necessary to “ensure the united backing of the American people to support our troops and the global war on terrorism.”

In his speech, Cadmus declared: “It would be tragic if the freedoms our veterans fought so valiantly to protect would be used against their successors today as they battle terrorists bent on our destruction.”

He explained, “No one respects the right to protest more than one who has fought for it, but we hope that Americans will present their views in correspondence to their elected officials rather than by public media events guaranteed to be picked up and used as tools of encouragement by our enemies.” This might suggest to some, however, that American freedoms are worth dying for but not exercising.

Without mentioning any current protestor, such as Cindy Sheehan, by name, Cadmus recalled: “For many of us, the visions of Jane Fonda glibly spouting anti-American messages with the North Vietnamese and protestors denouncing our own forces four decades ago is forever etched in our memories. We must never let that happen again….

“We had hoped that the lessons learned from the Vietnam War would be clear to our fellow citizens. Public protests against the war here at home while our young men and women are in harm’s way on the other side of the globe only provide aid and comfort to our enemies.”

Resolution 3, which was passed unanimously by 4,000 delegates to the annual event, states: “The American Legion fully supports the president of the United States, the United States Congress and the men, women and leadership of our armed forces as they are engaged in the global war on terrorism and the troops who are engaged in protecting our values and way of life.”

Cadmus advised: “Let’s not repeat the mistakes of our past. I urge all Americans to rally around our armed forces and remember our fellow Americans who were viciously murdered on Sept. 11, 2001.”

(CNN) — After two days of criticism, Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson apologized for his controversial suggestion that the United States should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

“Is it right to call for assassination? No, and I apologize for that statement,” Robertson said. “I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him.”

But he compared Chavez to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Adolph Hitler and quoted German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “[That if a madman were] driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”

Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis for his involvement in a 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.

Robertson’s rationale for his statement remained unchanged.

“I said before the war in Iraq began that the wisest course would be to wage war against Saddam Hussein, not the whole nation of Iraq,” Robertson said. “When faced with the threat of a comparable dictator in our own hemisphere, would it not be wiser to wage war against one person rather than finding ourselves down the road locked in a bitter struggle with a whole nation?”

So far there has been no reaction from Venezuela to Robertson’s apology.

Earlier Wednesday, on his “The 700 Club” program, Robertson said the media had taken his remarks out of context.

“I didn’t say ‘assassination.’ I said our special forces should ‘take him out.’ And ‘take him out’ can be a number of things, including kidnapping; there are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted by the AP [Associated Press], but that happens all the time,” Robertson said on “The 700 Club.” (Watch video)

The controversy began Monday when Robertson called Chavez “a terrific danger” bent on exporting Communism and Islamic extremism across the Americas. (Full story)

“If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it,” said Robertson Monday. “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.” (Watch Robertson’s comments)

“We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,” he said. “We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”

Chavez, a close ally of Cuban President Fidel Castro, has said in the past he believes the United States is trying to kill him and vowed that Venezuela, which accounts for more than 10 percent of U.S. oil imports, would shut off the flow of oil if that happened.

Tuesday, the Venezuelan leader shrugged off Robertson’s comments during a trip to Cuba.

“I don’t know who that person is,” he said. “I don’t know him, and as far as his opinion of me goes, I couldn’t care less.”

. . . . .

His opponents, largely drawn from the country’s middle and upper classes, accuse him of undermining democratic institutions.

Chavez was re-elected under a new constitution in 2000. In 2004, he won a recall referendum with the support of 58 percent of voters.

He has become an increasingly outspoken critic of the United States, which he accuses of having been behind a 2002 coup attempt that forced him from office for two days.

The Bush administration denied involvement but refused to condemn the attempted coup.

. . . . .

Controversial statements are not new to the 75-year-old Robertson.

He has suggested in the past that a meteor could strike Florida because of unofficial “Gay Days” at Disney World and that feminism caused women to kill their children, practice witchcraft and become lesbians.