Rustin's Favorite Movies

Rustin's Utterly Biased List of Favorite Movies

the big list | comedy | drama and thrillers | guns, swords, and loud noises | science fiction | the all time worst |

The Big List
You may never sleep again.

A Few Good Men - I find it interesting that quotes from this play/movie are taken as utterly canonical within the military. The whole "we stand on a wall" speech is quoted with fervor and reverence by a lot of men and women with reason to know. Oh, and great dialogue (by some guy named Sorkin; I hear that he does a television show these days. ;-)

Aliens I, II and III - Everybody loves II ("get away from her, you bitch!") but I think III is worth a second viewing, too. Watch it again. Forget that it's part of a series and just be there. Funny things happen when you take folks like Charles Dutton and Charles Dance and just let them work.

American Beauty - Far from the first peek into the frustrations right under the surface of affluent suburban life, but done very, very well. Annette Bening is spot on. Peter Gallagher has a delightful time as a Dale Carnegie-spouting local tycoon. And we all know by know about the visuals.
Sit back, don't think too hard, and let it wash right over you.

The Apartment - Oh, how *cute*. Shirley MacLaine, Jack Lemmon, even that guy from My Favorite Martian. Things can't go too bad. Heh.

The Big Hit - You know that weasly guy in your office? You think that he's an overacheiver until you figure out that he's just stealing proposals from another department and putting his name on them. Charming, funny, smart, greasy, and worst of all, can't understand why everybody doesn't just do it his way.
Okay, now give him a gun. Oh, yeah, you get one too and so does everybody else. Watch the world erupt.

Bell, Book, and Candle - Witchcraft never looked so good. I mean yeah, Fairuza Balk and friends tore up the screen but good in The Craft, but Kim Novak leaves you really wondering.

Blade Runner - Of course. This is a movie without a single wasted second. The plot is amazing, every actor does some of the best work of their career, the dialogue and look and sound all changed how movies looked and what we thought of the future. Nowhere has the dystopian future been so richly realized and compellingly confused.

The Blair Witch Project - Forget how they made it, forget the hype, settle down, ideally a little sleep deprived, a little hungry, out of cigarettes if you smoke, and see what happens.

Bob Roberts - A whole other kind of paranoia. For those of us who really watch politics, it's hard to laugh when it all fits together so well. It all looks so familiar. With all the current hubbub about corporate crime this is worth another watching. You won't like it. But you'll be glad you watched it.

Buckaroo Banzai - They took a hundred thousand comic books and sacrificed them to Chaos. A grateful goddess Eris favored them. In fact, tHडy çReª hjokljfdsglsf I walds "What's that watermelon doing there?" "Tay! Tay!" "Lithium will no longer be available on credit."

Brainstorm - The definitive Project Gone Mad movie. Anybody whose image of inventing is still defined by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang should be required by law to see this.

Brazil - If Kafka had been a director he would have made something much like this.

Breakfast At Tiffany's - Did somebody tell you that glamour was easy? Dimwit. It can be damn near suicidal.

Casablanca - (The French anthem scene gets me every time. Nazi bastards!)

Charade - Don't waste your time with the remake. I don't care about Charlie. Give me Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and a passel of the real deal.

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things - Troma before its time. Ketchup with your flesh?

Clerks - The reason Kevin Smith gets away with so much. When you were working at Seven-Eleven and wondering what was happening to your life, so was he. He made a brilliant movie about it. What did you do?

DarkStar - "What do we do about the bomb?" "Teach it phenomenology."

Dead Ringers - This may be the only movie that is truly gender exclusive. For guys it's creepy and kind of cool in a sick, depraved, but abstract kind of way. For women it's evidently the stuff of nightmares.
Brilliant twin gynecologists (both Jeremy Irons) turn their practice into a perfect world for themselves and their patients. Everything is taken care of. Everything is beautiful, quiet, trustworthy, and safe. Until they go quietly, elegantly, comprehensively, insane.

Demolition Man - Okay, so you really want to watch a violence fest but the person next to you on the sofa will insure that you sleep on that sofa should you suggest, perhaps, Cobra. Have no fear. Demolition Man is your answer. Here s where Stallone finally gets it all out of his system, right down to a dig at Ahnuld, but along the way he brought Welsey Snipes, Sandra Bullock, and Dennis Leary. And they hired actual designers and writers too. I mean, if you've got to measure up (down?) to something truly fearsome like Bridges of Madison County then you're doomed anyway. This way you certainly go out with a bang.

Dirty Dozen - Okay, it ain't Shakefuckinspeare. Yeah? And?
You know the story. A pack of belligerent, rejected losers rise together and achieve, . . . perhaps it can even be called greatness.

Dudes - New York punks take on the Big Bad West. Bringing the Mohawk haircut back to Indian Country. Yes, it's a stoner flick, but hey. It also, oddly enough, has one of the most evocative portraits of low-rent early eighties New York I've ever seen.

Dusk Til Dawn - "Low profile. Do you understand the meaning of the words low profile?" Quentin (Reservoir Dogs)Tarentino and Robert (El Mariachi) Rodrigez each took their favorite impossible script, stuck them in a blender, and pressed Shred. If you wanted coherence you should have rented a Schwarzennegger movie.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman - Two things make this movie great. First of all, it is the cooking movie of all cooking movies. I aspire to someday get a cabin in the woods, build this kitchen beside it, and spend ten years copying every move in this film. The second is that there are no superfluous characters, no wasted moments. Rustin's first test of film excellence is how many people are on screen who could be interchangably replaced with somebody else. In this one everybody, from the boy blocking the net to the guy questioning his order is there for a reason. Ahhhhh.

Ever After - For everybody who devoured novels of castles and lords, never have they looked so rich and full on a flat screen. I want to reach in and touch the walls, run my hand along the fabrics, and share a pitcher of mead with Leonardo Da V. Shot in real castles, this is a fairy tale in a world with just enough disorder to allow a dreamer room to rise to glory.

Evil Dead II "swallow your soul! swallow your soul!" "Whoooo's laughing now?!?" Zombies, ancient manuscripts, demons, odd camera angles, Three Stooges tributes, and one guy who really doesn't want to get back together with his ex-girlfriend.

Ferris Bueller - "Sure. I'm Abe Froman, sausage king of Chicago."
Who would have thought that a teen comedy could be lyrical? Between the now-classic random bits "Bueller, Bueller, Bueller" and the hubbub and gleeful foolishness, John Hughes has shown us a life at its moment of essential definition and put a perfect summer day on film as I've never seen it before or since.

Flashpoint - Now that we've got a hundred conspiracy movies out there this one is clearly seminal. Not to mention that it's where I got my motto.
"What do you do?" "I fix things." What *sorts* of things?" "Things that need fixin'."

Gattaga - A future that we should look at again, talking about concerns that are now only a few years down the road. Wrapped in distant greys and blues, clean, severe, smoothed of any distastefulness, it's a perfect world for those who are chosen. Permanent unchangable submission for those who aren't. What happens if you try to change the game?

Ghostbusters - One of the first and still one of the best movies ever about what happens when geeks get badass. Starts off joking about academia, ends up with three goofy guys battling a god. Hey, man, you know that you love it.

Grosse Point Blank - But he seemed so normal. John Cusack has always had that dangerous edge to him. His sweet, gentle guys have been so satisfying to watch because he's got this little vibratory energy that tells you that somehow, if it all goes wrong in just the right way, he'll slice your head off and clean his knife on your shirt. So let's see what happens if he's cast as an assassin with Joan as his demented office manager and Dan Ackroyd as his mentor. All that I'll say is you really don't want to piss these folks off.

Habit - A vampire movie set in the land of the everyday. One day you're worried about the rent and your job, the next your new girlfriend is drinking your blood. This makes a killer (heh) double bill with Nadja. Add Blade for relief.

Half Baked - Trivial, foolish, and in it's own tiny way, dead on. "Have you ever looked at the sky on weed?" But be warned, the pacing in this movie could make even a stoner want to hit fast-forward.

Half Moon Street - For many of us, this is where we first heard of a shockingly bright, coolly self-contained woman named Sigourney Weaver. No thumping bass or bright explosions. Smart people in small rooms doing, eh, questionable things.

Heathers - Surreal, brittle. Compelling. See how the world of high-school cliques looks from the side of a girl on the top. Then watch it all inexorably fragment into nightmare. And all in such pretty colors.

Highlander - "I am Connor Macleod of the Clan Macleod and I cannot die." So what if one day you found out that you were immortal. What would you do? If you were gorgeous and moved like an angel, and had a thousand year old mentor to see you on your way, maybe you could be Conner Macleod.

Hudsucker Proxy - Somebody took a Capra movie, stuck it in a terrible dead-end job, shoved it into the madhouse, threw it past the girl of its dreams, and finally let it out after forty years of moldering under a file cabinet. Here it is.

The Ice Storm - What do you see in the serenity of a perfect snow-filled day?
I've never seen another movie that has left me feeling so truly a ghost, silently and omnisciently floating through the key moments in people's lives. People say that Crouching Tiger was astounding to watch. That shows that they hadn't yet seen Ice Storm.

In and Out - I ran into him at the intersexual, I mean the homosection, I mean the, oh, never mind. Just watch it. Come on, where else will you see Debbie Reynolds in a discussion about testicles?

International Space Station in Imax - Oh. My. God. You just have no idea. I've sat in a Mercury capsule, worked with a NASA payload specialist when I was still in high school, blah, blah, blahty blah. And you know what? watching this movie I damn near cried. This is it.

The Killer - Chow Yun Fat in his best John Woo movie; violence porn done right.

Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Tim Burton is back and this time he's diving deep into the Freudian as order battles emotion, steel represents earth, womanliness battles maleness, and Johnny Depp look soulfully into the camera and periodically runs for his life.

El Mariachi - Who cares if it doesn't make sense? This is conflict gone wild, all centered around a gentle-eyed soft-hearted poet with a body count to break Dirty Harry.

Married To the Mob - Funny, when I saw this I loved it but was utterly certain that it was a passing fancy. Now we're going on a decade since it came out and little bits of it keep coming back to me. Just be sure that you get an intact copy as half of the best scenes are missing from the convenience store edition.

Mephisto - Art, love and corruption in the middle of the Third Reich. Oh, I'm sure that you wouldn't be weak. Uh huh.

Midwinter's Tale - We've all seen enough snippets of Hamlet to think that we know it. We've all seen the treacley fooforah about the magic of the theeeatah. Yeah, well; let it all go and look fresh as a desperate last minute attempt to put on a serious play in a freezing church in the ass end of nowhere. They'll make it worth your while.

Mona Lisa - I suspect some days that The Crying Game was built out of rejected scenes from Mona Lisa and tarted up with it's now so famous gimmick. Watch Mona Lisa and you'll see why.

My Own Private Idaho - Sweet, quiet, and painful as hell, this is my favorite of Gus Van Sant's views of life among the rejected and malfunctioning, scrambling and skittering for scraps and trying like hell to find a point to it all. I don't think they could tell you if they succeed or not. A gloomy ride though some questionable places to an unstated destination. How does it end up so goddamn beautiful?

Ninth Configuration - Okay, so it's the nineteen-seventies, and a brilliant, decorated soldier starts talking to his shoelaces and is convinced that they talk back. Where do you put him? Another soldier, a loved and respected drill sergeant, will only rise for exactly one hundred and fourteen minutes a day and spends that time reciting nursery rhymes in Swedish. Put him in the same place. An astronaut gets an obsessive fear of handles and won't go anywhere without an open door. In he goes. Eventually you'll have dozens of them. It's only a matter of time before something unexpected happens.

The Opposite of Sex - It's prosperous suburban America and things are going just fine, by and large. But when a scheming vixen shows up on their doorstep and things begin to go amok, well, you might be surprised at the directions people travel. I love, for once, seeing a movie about smart, independant-minded people who do what smart independant-minded people really do, they make decisions of their own rather than following the script. Nice to not know the ending by twenty minutes in.

Other People's Money - Oddly enough the best parts of this movie are the least "fabulous". It's great to see the classic movie speech about Do what I say or We'll Sue and see him look bored, say "You'll have to do better then that; I live in court" and she just stops, thinks for a minute, and switches to plan 2.

The Player - Hollywood has never so effectively shown the sinous maneuverings behind the slick surfaces. Get Shorty played it for laughs, a hundred flicks have earnestly explained it all to you. This film just introduces you and lets it all happen.

Practical Magic - No redeeming profundities, just some of the sexiest women of our time having great fun together.

Pretty In Pink - And she is, my friends, she is. And still one of the best movies about class in America that I've ever seen.

The Princess Bride - Oh, c'mon, I know that you know the quotes. A great book becomes a great movie where all the classic fairy tale stories are happening at once but, they're all so, well, reasonable about it all. "I'd hate to kill you." I'd hate to die." Hm. Okay. Good point. And all the actors are obviously having a wonderful time that how can you not agree.

Raise The Red Lantern - Life in the perfectly choroegraphed world of a traditional Chinese villa, where the man of the house is god and his concubines scheme and manipulate and scramble to be highest in his favor. Move. Countermove. A conversational knife thrust over an elegant meal. An all too literal knife thrust when a plot goes wrong.
Claustrophobic and fascinating, elegant and lifeless, compelling and repellant. All seen through the eyes of the ferociously understated Gong Li.

Raising Arizona - You will truly never look at baby shoes the same way again. Or John Goodman, for that matter.

Romeo+Juliet - Oh, now I remember, Leonardo DeCaprio used to be an *actor*. Who would have guessed? Forget that this is Shakespeare. Just crank the stereo 'til your ears bleed, turn off the lights, and watch the world go insane. Swords never looked this good, or had such a massive caliber.

Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Two solid hours of language that dips and dangles and runs from a couple of men going nowhere in particular. After millennia of stories of the great and the heroic, and a hundred years or so of stories of the small and obscure, Tom Stoppard shows us a couple of obscure gentlemen as they scurry around the great, doing nothing much, waiting to be done to.

Scary Movie - Have you sat through all those nineties thrillers? Did you watch Scream and Silence of the Lambs? This is your reward. Find mass-market movies a waste of time? Then don't watch this. Me? I got chest pains I laughed so much.

Seconds - Have you ever wanted to start over? Leave behind the life that just didn't work out? Come to us and we'll make it *much better*.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape - Never have James Spader and Peter Gallagher slouched their way so effectively to amorality. This movie combines three of my favorite things. A sexy, neurotically angular artist. (I will forgive Laura San Giacamo as many years of sitcoms as she wants for having given us this.) Quiet, enveloping, engrossing views into a private world (with, I might add, some great audio work) and slowly, inexorably building scenes of formidible people as their world disintegrates.
Never assume. From another's view the horrible person doing terrible things could be you.

Shakespeare In Love - Yeah, I've got a soft spot for Shakespeare. And romance. And the theater. But, folks, it's amazing how human it all is in the midst of the frills and swords and the thees and thous. No other movie will ever remind you how many hours of his life William Shakespeare used up cutting notches in goose feathers. And no other movie I've seen so wonderfully captures the swirling, entrancing, casually lethal games that were going on all around him.
Nice play you've got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it.

Shallow Grave - First comes the little mistake. But we're all smart, hip young folks, we'll figure it out just fine. Okay, maybe we disagree a little. Well, yes, he is hiding above the rafters but I'm sure is will all be fine soon. Okay, a bit of a problem here but how bad can it possibly get?

Sneakers - Blows Hackers utterly out of the water and shows how easy they had it in War Games. This is the *messy* hacking movie with the mushy fantasy ending. "I want a Winnebago." "A Winnebago?!" "Burgundy interior, leather seats".

Temptation of a Monk - Man, this movie is *nasty*! Calm, civilized, elegant people at the top of the wealthiest, most sophisticated empire in the history of the ancient world who just utterly fucking rip their world to bloody screaming ribbons.

They Live - Come on, Rowdy Roddy Piper does Cronenburg in a commentary on Reaganomics. What more could you ask for? Oh, you want more? Then watch Videodrome. All hail the new flesh.

Twelve Angry Men - How much can happen with a bunch of hot, annoyed guys in a room? Al they need to do is reach a decision.

The Usual Suspects - Of everything made in my lifetime, this may best fit the name, film noir. A bunch of guys, not so young, not so nice, all pursuing their own shadowy agendas as they get pulled into a brutal and complex plan. Do you think that you understand it all? Maybe you need to look again.

The Wedding Singer - Sweet, sappy, sentimental. Hair bands and Boy George, DeLoreans and consumer electronics. The Eighties in Long Island where boy meets girl and Reaganism meets romanticism. With love ballads by Jon Lovitz.

The Wicker Man - It's a gentle sylvan island off the windy coast of Britain and the locals are just having their annual summer festival. Like they always have. For a few thousand years now. Sweet, sunny days. Vibrant, fecund, countryside and fields. And locals who have never forgotten to show their gratitude in the most convincing ways they can.
This movie is almost a manifesto for some pagans I've known and I can see why. Because if you really believe in the rich magic of earth and water and sky, then you know that the most holy sacraments can't be done with just a candle or two in a tidy little room.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown - Chaos, terrorists, fashion, drugs, fire, sex, music, guns, gazpacho. Gazpacho? Yep, you heard me. Learn to fear the gazpacho.

And All the Rest
Personally, just about anything with Janeane Garafalo melts me into a droopy puddle. I would give up half the contents of my hard drive to have her look at me once the way that she looks at the photographer in The Truth about Cats and Dogs. Not to mention "Say it with me. Us. Them. Us. Them." So yes, I also enjoyed Mystery Men, though seeing it free and before it came out helped. I even loved Matchmaker.

I'ld also say that a whole bunch of other non-English movies of utterly different types (Yellow Earth, Year of the Jellyfish, Ishq, God of Gamblers, Organized Crime and Triad Bureau) should be included, but many would disagree. And there's an awful lot of well done violence/testosterone stuff by now. Crimson Tide to Grosse Point Blank to Under Siege. Even the first Lethal Weapon was pretty damn good.

And last, I *love* eye candy, from Lost in Space to Fantastic Planet. And silliness like The Commitments or Gregory's Girl or just about anything else by John Hughes (except for Sixteen Candles which I found nasty, racist, and cruel). Give me well done escapism any time.

I also don't see the point is even bringing up certain movies. Yes, The Terminator is incredible to watch, but do you really need to hear that from me?.

Rustin

Comedy
the big list | comedy | drama and thrillers | guns, swords, and loud noises | science fiction | the all time worst |

The Apartment

Buckaroo Banzai

Escape From Hong Kong Island One day the perfect yuppie businessman walked into work and found himself with no job, no money, no way home, and no way out except through the very parts of life that he had so successfully not even glanced at. A Chinese version of a twenties comedy, with more than a dash of Capra fairytale. Sure, it's a trifle, but it's fun to watch and it's a side of Hong Kong life that never makes it into the glossy shoot-em-ups.

Half-Baked

The Princess Bride

Scary Movie

The Truth About Cats and Dogs

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Craftwerk: Old Time Religion on Screen
the big list | comedy | drama and thrillers | guns, swords, and loud noises | science fiction | the all time worst |

Bell, Book, and Candle

The Craft - Magic. Girls in miniskirts. Violence. Oh, sorry, I meant "majick" and "hot chicks". Yeah, it's an exploitation flick. But it's so much fun to watch. And vengence is sweet. Who cares if the plot makes no sense?

Practical Magic

The Wicker Man

Drama and Thrillers
the big list | comedy | drama and thrillers | guns, swords, and loud noises | science fiction | the all time worst |

Copland - Something about those Jersey towns just doesn't sit right with me. And this movie nails it, as a respectable little town over the river from New York has the greasy underpinnings rise up to suffocate just about everybody. And I love how very quiet so much of it is. Danger isn't always loud, you know.

Enemy of the State - A fun little techo-thriller. Hackman and Smith have no chemistry at all together but that dead center to it all is entirely appropriate. Not as profound as it wants to be but still unsettling. Take a drink every time they show a technique that's no longer fiction. You'll be toasted by the time the credits roll.

Training Day - Menace that builds and builds. Oh, these are some very bad people. And who do you turn to when the guys pulling you into hell are all cops? This is one of the only films that I've ever seen that genuinely scared me.

Geeks On Parade
the big list | comedy | drama and thrillers | guns, swords, and loud noises | science fiction | the all time worst |

The Island of Doctor Moreau - Oh, forgot that this was a geek picture, did you? And with all that science? Of course it's waaaay freakadelic and yeah, Marlon Brando is about the size of a hippo, but think of him as a rich old hacker gone way too deep into his loony hobbies and it all starts to make a depressing sort of sense.

Real Genius

Sneakers

Guns, Swords, and Loud Noises
the big list | comedy | drama and thrillers | guns, swords, and loud noises | science fiction | the all time worst |

Blade - I, II, III - Yeah, sure, the first is cheesy, and second cheesier. But the fight sequences have some great moments, the actors chew screen with great vim and vigor, and the third is actually kinda funny, though how they chose that guy to play Dracula I'll never know. I recommend the set of three for a movie marathon with a bunch of geeky guys, plenty of beer, and a big ol' plate of blood sausage.

Miami Vice - For once a movie worthy of its origins. Cast perfectly, shot breathtakingly, loud and quiet and unsettling. Sure, it's a fantasy, but, oh, what a ride it is.

Science Fiction
the big list | comedy | drama and thrillers | guns, swords, and loud noises | science fiction | the all time worst |

Battlestar Galactica - Yeah, the show has its ups and downs, but ignoring all that, look at the pilot as a movie, see it all by itself, and you might be surprised at just how good it is. They put a lot of themselves into this one.

Serenity - Please, I beg of you, watch the measly few episodes of Firefly first. And then watch this movie. These are folks in a hell of a bind, making choices they really wish they could avoid. Because that's what a hell of a lot of life is about, isn't it? Making the right choices, even if it hurts, buckling down, and doing the job.
Of course, sometimes the folks you're fighting are convinced that they've done just the same thing.

Silent Running - So what happens if we extrapolate emptyheaded corporate mall life to the logical dreary conclusion? Mall life in a cheap neighborhood. And the whole world is paved, pressed, painted, packaged, and pasteurized. Wouldn't it be best to go off and live in the last few bits of forest kept around for novelty value?
Don't count on it.

How Did That Ever Get Made?
the big list | comedy | drama and thrillers | guns, swords, and loud noises | science fiction | the all time worst |

Aliens IIII - Possibly the worst big budget sequel ever made. Winona whines, the crew fumbles, the plot could have been better written by any gas station attendant, and Sigourney makes it clear that they can pay her to stand in front of the camera, but nothing can force her to actually participate in such a mound of steaming dreck.

Batman III - So the second movie had some serious problems, but surely they can do better than this. I have never seen better proof that some actors just aren't meant to handle certain roles.

Judge Dredd - Someday a crew of Final Cut folks will add the few little touches to make this movie complete. All we need is for Stallone's character to actually drool, for the guns to have veins down their sides and bigger, thrusting ends, and for the fascist icons to be stripped of that last bit of sanity and stand proud in their face-crushing dominance, and then this movie will be as its makers clearly wished it to be.

Total Recall - Physical law? Logic? Acting? Line 'em up and shoot 'em down 'cause they got no place in this space burg. However, this is so appalling ("Open your mind. Open your mind.") that it achieves a certain Attack of the Killer Tomatoes flair. As movie making, let alone action-adventure, this is a landmark in bad. But how could I not forgive a movie with what everyone in the theatre immediately recognized as the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Five?

Voyager - Well, yeah, it's not even a movie. But I run this site (most days) and I'm PISSED. If the franchise is dead then take it out and shoot it. If there is any life still to be found in Roddenbery's creation then we better get Rick Berman exiled to an island before he allows something even, oh, Enterprise, they call it? And on it they do what? Never mind. Too late.