My friend Emily and I put together the following work in process — a list of the best films of the last 20,000 years.

Why the last 20,000? Well, there’s still the possibility that the lost city of Atlantis will have an extensive collection of never-before-seen movie masterpieces.

Epics

• Lawrence of Arabia
• Once Upon a Time in the West
• Reds Continue reading Best Films of the last 20,000 Years →

Pity the poor soldier, the useless toy of the State, the plaything of doctors, the grotesque romantic who yearns to love, but cannot be loved. Thirty-one years after it was filmed, mostly in single takes in 18-days of shooting, the film perplexes and captivates the viewer. It is, at its most fundamental, a film about not fitting in. There are, once again, some astounding drawn out shots of Klaus Kinski running. Extraordinary acting, a fragmented story and script, disquieting themes of class differences, disenfranchisement, medical experimentation, jealousy, and mental illness.

Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht (1979), ein Film von Werner Herzog.

I avoided Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu for years for several reasons. One, we don’t need another Count Dracula movie. Two, Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) traumatized me. Three, it had that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) look. My aversion was misplaced. Although it has its tedious moments, Klaus Kinski’s performance is a creepy one for the ages, and Herzog allows the camera and the music to tell the story. A viewing is worth it for a single scene where Nosferatu traipses pathetically away from the camera, like a rat looking for food with an ultimate destination in mind, in the courtyard before the Nieuwe Kerk, Delft, Netherlands (I think). Don’t watch this movie if you hate rats or the idea of a pathetic immortal lonely Klaus Kinski playing a rat.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)

This animated film is a follow-up to the 1995 film Ghost in the Shell by Mamoru Oshii.  Machines and people are almost identical. It is difficult to discern reality.

Likely one of the most beautifully drawn and told sci-fi/noir/anime films ever made. The version we watched was in Japanese with English sub-titles.

I first saw Ghost in the Shell and did not consider it remarkable despite its reputation as one of the great Japanese animated movies. I’ll certainly re-visit it after watching Ghost in the Shell 2.

Seven years before Francis Ford Coppola released Apocalypse Now, and 28 years before Dreamworks released The Road to El Dorado, Werner Herzog went into the Peruvian jungle with the half-deranged Klaus Kinski and made a film about Spanish conquistadors traveling down the unforgiving Amazon river in search of the mythical city of El Dorado. It is a movie about madness and power and obsession. The use of the hand-held camera, giving the film an immediate documentary feel, predates by almost 25 years the “novel” use of a hand-held camera in Breaking the Waves . “I, the wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and with her I’ll found the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen.” On a sinking man-made raft full of monkeys, even.

Werner Herzog does in 1971 what Godfrey Reggio, Philip Glass, and Ron Fricke did more popularly in 1983 with Koyaanisquatsi. A sequence of images — mirages — from the Saharan Desert, of wrecked planes, lizards, the desert itself, and a freakish vaudevillian performance at the end. Peppered with passages from the Popol Vuh, it rivited hippies, college students, and disaffected expatriates at the time it was released publicly without Herzog’s knowledge. Now it lies as a curiosity of modern documentary film-making where the viewer brings his own depth to the party.

If you can’t read, watch this DVD. Otherwise, read either Lansing’s book or Alexander’s book about this amazing adventure.

Check out this movie review of Avatar. ‘Nuff said.