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10 Hollywood Classics and what really made them good
By admin | March 28, 2008
1. Raiders of the Lost Ark 
Good, bloody action combined with a sense of humor and fairly credible plot twists. This is a formula that Hollywood has forgotten makes for great entertainment. Sure, they keep throwing the poor man’s version at you (The Mummy, Live Free or Die Hard), and you keep paying for it, so that probably won’t ever change. Sitcom-jokes and CG-action satisfies your average American movie audience-member so they will likely just keep getting lamer.
Casting:
Raiders also had a charismatic leading man, who looked like a man, not a boy. They didn’t cast him because he was pretty enough to keep girls entertainined while all the guy-action was going on, and he wasn’t in the role because of his box-office clout either, the guys who made the movie cast somebody they thought would be best for the role, after Tom Selleck backed out, that is.
Pacing:
It had rapid-fire, globe-hopping, location-shifting pace that no other movie franchise has been able to duplicate, though many have tried. Spielberg is good at creating detailed, fast action sequences, where there is so much visual information being thrown at you that it feels like a news-clip.
2. Memento
Gimmicky plot:
It was an OK movie, with a premise that kept you hooked, waiting for the punchline. Gimmicky little plot ideas get made into movies because they make morons feel smart because they were able to figure it out. It’s the art of coming up with something that looks clever and different but isn’t really all that hard to figure out.
Felt gritty:
It had the kind of atmosphere that felt like a Tarantino or Scorsese movie, where you know bad shit was about to happen, edgy and harsh, which made it seem better than it really was.
3. Fight Club
Original, Edgy:
It was original in the sense of it being a bloody, violent movie that wasn’t predictable and wasn’t like anything a Hollywood writer would have come with on his own. You had Palahniuk’s homo-erotic social critique/satire acted out by 2 decent actors and directed by a genius who can make any scene feel dark and and grungy. It had the feel of being a movie unlike anything you had seen before, and was going some place that Hollywood would likely never go again.
Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden:
This is the only movie I have ever really liked him in aside, perhaps, from Kalifornia, where he played a similar character. Tyler Durden is the epitome of sociopathic cool, and Pitt thinks he is the shit, so it’s perfect casting.
4. American History X
Excellent Bullshit:
It felt like it was dealing with American racism honestly and from both sides. It was an anti-racist diatribe that felt real, like it was dealing with an immensely complicated issue that matters to everybody in a way that Hollywood had not before. It had that indie credibility that appears to dispense with Hollywood bullshit entertainment and seems to be telling you a real story about people. All of that was bullshit, but it was smart, expert bullshit and you have to give it credit for that. If you can’t tackle a hard subject honestly, tackle it so that you look like you are being honest.
Casting:
Give them credit for casting the most nebbishly sincere-seeming actor since James Stewart. Edward Norton, while not exactly convincing as a skinhead badass, did the contrition part quite well. I guess the solution to America’s racial issues involves them being raped by other skinheads.
5. The First 2 Godfather Movies
Pretend Realism:
Years before The Sopranos took you into the heart of the most public criminal organization on earth and pretended to tell you what it was really like, The Godfather did the same thing, proving that you don’t need to be realistic to get an audience to believe you are, you just have to be able to replicate what your average audience member will think is realistic. The Godfather movies were really just a set of guys’ soap operas with a little gun-play that didn’t seem like your regular Hollywood gun-play. The idea was to get the story-lines to mesh with the common American perception of the Mafia not to introduce them to the real thing.
Casting:
Young Al Pacino was the epitome of silk-suited cool. He radiated confidence and the certainty that he deserved what he had and knew exactly how to rule an empire. Robert DeNiro’s Vito Corleone was similarly perfect, depicting a man the with the unusual traits of cunning viciousness and class.
6. Alien 
Sincerity:
The sweet sweet combination of sci-fi and horror, only this time done really well, by a director who took the shit seriously. Take something fantastic, perhaps even ridiculous, and make the audience see how it would play out in real life. The oldest and most sincere kind of film-making, and the sensibility present-day Hollywood has left behind. Now movies aren’t even trying to get you to see the shit as something that could really happen, people aren’t interested in realism any more, just soap-operatic twists and video-game theatrics.
Sigourney:
Alien gave us Sigourney Weaver in panties, not your fake, surgically-enhanced current hot-starlet, but a real chick. In her underwear.
7. Sin City
Rodriguez didn’t fuck it up:
I don’t like Robert Rodriguez movies, the seem tacky and overdone to me, like they are aimed totally at inner-city high-school drop-out of the 80s. I was prepared to dislike Sin City, but I did. Violent, melodramatic, and with no real message whatsoever this movie was good because it felt serious, it was anything but half-hearted. The bloodshed was depicted seriously, the arch Hammett-style monologues weren’t tongue-in-cheek, nothing about it felt like a typical Hollywood paycheck movie.
Mickey Rourke:
I have no idea why this wasn’t his comeback role except that he looks like a freak and is, apparently, quite a dick to work with. It should have been, though. He was way better than Travolta was in Pulp Fiction.
8. Goodfellas
Joe Pesci:
The core of this movie was Joe Pesci’s performance as a sadistic thug. At the time it was shocking, and resonated with everybody. You could forget everything about the movie but you remembered two things: a) Lorraine Bracco putting that gun in her panties, and b) Joe Pesci stabbing that guy in the trunk. If you have ever met anybody like him, the kind of short guy who flips out at the slightest perceived slight, then it stays with you even longer. It was a character whose violence felt genuine, heartfelt, you kind of knew why he was that way, you know people who are almost like that, and because of that he was scary.
Scorsese:
It always seemed to me that his priority as a film-maker was to make his movies feel edgier and desperate than anything else on the screen, his characters live in a brutal world with no mercy and no joy, just like most of us. I love the fact that he flinches from nothing, and expects that of his audience.
9. The Princess Bride 
Pleasant Surprise:
If you saw it early on, before it got its “hip” Internet cult-following, as I did, you probably thought, like me, that you were going to have to sit through and entirely different kind of movie. This is the kind of movie that gets you to love it even when you are a reluctant 14 year-old boy whose mother rented it because she thought it was a different kind of movie too. It’s the last movie that I can remember being clever-funny without being dirty, meaning that unless your kids are dumbasses you can watch it with them.
Shamelessly sentimental without ever getting cute or corny
A brilliant trick which Rob Reiner has never quite managed to pull off again. Hell, the closest ever Hollywood came again was Almost Famous which while a great movie was not quite as charming as this one.
10. Snatch/Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Shallow Entertainment:
If you took Tarantino or Scorsese’s bloodiest, most overblown moment and combined it with a Chuck Jones Wile E. Coyote cartoon sensibility you have Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and Snatch. Both are somewhat overrated but still quite entertaining. There is nothing original here but there is quite a bit to make it all seem less-hackneyed, which I appreciate. They are the kind of movies where you know it’s all going to work out fine in the end for everybody, but you still stick around to see how it gets there, in other words, no suspense, but you get hooked any way.
Built Short Attention-spans:
Play a lot of video games, do you? Well here’s a movie to suit your inability to concentrate on any one thing for very long. The locale shifts every few minutes to get you into the goings on in some other part of the story.
British Exotica:
Cockney sounds impossibly exotic to your average Americans, and yet it’s a variety of English, so it doesn’t have the gibberish taste of a foreign language.
Topics: Film Commentary |