Top 10: 2011

Last week I asked my Facebook friends what their favorite 2011 movies were; the unanimous answer was The Muppets. That a reflection on characters many of us grew up with touched a collective nerve makes sense; 2011 was a year of looking back, both out of nostalgia and to understand what our past reveals to us about our present. Two of the Oscar front-runners are celebrations of the silent film era, and the nominees also include movies about World War I, 9/11, the civil rights movement and the Cold War. It's not unique for the Academy to nominate period pieces; what is unique is how many of these movies are preoccupied with what these moments of time tell about where we are today (with varying degrees of success). The most critically acclaimed movie of the year looks all the way back to the creation of the universe to give context to a story that takes place in the recent past and the present. As A.O. Scott put it, "A glance at the nominees for best picture at this year’s Oscars will confirm that the movies, a forward-looking medium tumbling headlong into a digital future, find themselves in a moment of retrospection." Even the films on the list with a contemporary setting, and even those which rely heavily on CGI or digital technology are build on an archetypal foundation that reaches back to 1930s noir, or the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, or the comedy of discomfort perfected by Woody Allen and Albert Brooks. The language of film is constantly evolving, but the stories are eternal.

Many of the films on my list were low-key affairs in one way or another; a few are downright gentle. Was this a trend in films in general, or am I just prematurely becoming an old fogy? I guess if you see me in line for the opening night of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, you'll have your answer. The hardest part of making a list this year was sorting out the last few slots; there were a great deal of movies that were problematic but still well worth seeing, or movies with modest ambitions that were excellent in their way. And it's very possible that if I'd had the opportunity to see Take Shelter, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Margaret, A Separation and other potentially great movies that never played in my neck of the woods, this list could be very different. Of course, it's never possible to see everything, and it's beside the point to take list-making too seriously. A friend of mine asked me a while ago what is the point of making lists; I guess there isn't one really, except as a snapshot of the things that intrigued me, made me think and moved me over the past twelve months or so. Plus, it's just too much fun to resist.


1. Drive As much as this modern-day L.A. noir owes to filmmakers like Michael Mann and Walter Hill, it's also very much the work of a director with a wholly original voice. Nicolas Winding Refn, making his English-language debut, brings to this story of a stuntman and getaway driver (Ryan Gosling) who gets in dangerously over his head trying to protect the woman he loves (Carey Mulligan) a razor-sharp awareness of what makes his genre archetypes resonate so deeply. At once an examination of the action movie's fetishism of fast cars and big guns, a sort of urban samurai story and an inversion/feminization of its stoic, toothpick-chewing road warrior, Drive is like a synth-pop tone poem punctuated with perfectly calibrated bursts of shocking violence. It's also a masterpiece of filmmaking craft, perfectly acted (Albert Brooks is terrific, and Gosling is so much more interesting now that he's stopped taking himself seriously) and wonderfully stylish in a way that fits perfectly with the story. Refn's the real deal - Drive is the ballsiest movie of the year and a hell of a lot of fun.


2. The Tree of Life A movie that is completely out of step with the time it was made. Terrence Malick's epic meditation on childhood, memory, God and our place in the universe demands to be revisited and given serious thought in an opening weekend-driven film culture that demands we move on to one next big thing after another. But it's pointless to gripe; some films just aren't for everyone, even if they're about everything. But for a movie with a narrative scope that extends from the first moments of the universe to its death, The Tree of Life is remarkably personal, even private. Though this leads to some moments that contain a meaning that perhaps only Malick fully understands, the cumulative effect is cinema's most fully realized depiction of the persistence of memory. Breathtaking in both its ambition and its moments of startling intimacy, The Tree of Life is certainly a challenging and sometimes baffling work. But if you approach it with an open mind and let it meet you where you are, it's a deeply affecting, one-of-a-kind cinematic experience.


3. Shame A close-up examination of the life of Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a sex addict whose life is a perpetual, joyless cycle thrown into chaos by a visit from his vulnerable, emotionally turbulent sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan). While director Steve McQueen's rigid, controlled style had a distancing effect for some, his unflinching and deeply empathetic study of two wounded souls was almost too painful to watch. It's a very explicit film, but never gratuitous or crass - here, sex is an externalization of one character's pain, and it's depicted with maturity and insight. It's a film where a conversation between two siblings watching cartoons - one who is incapable of connection, another with a desperate need to connect - carries a disturbing, almost violent psychological charge. Beautifully photographed against the backdrop of a New York that becomes a sort of melancholy third protagonist, Shame is a hard experience to shake, and the work of a filmmaker capable of profound compassion and grace.


4. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy A film that fits comfortably alongside '70s classics like The Conversation and The Parallax View, Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of John Le Carre's novel shares with those films an understanding of the spy story as a metaphor for truth's elusive, shifting nature. The film's condensation of Le Carre's plot is a labyrinth of mysterious motives, secret allegiances and narrative asides that, once all the pieces have fallen into place, proves to be nearly airtight in its construction. Between this and his previous film, the masterpiece Let the Right One In, Alfredson has proven to be a master of understatement; the film is a triumph of story revealed through subtle accumulating details, anchored by Gary Oldman's marvelously restrained performance as George Smiley, a British agent whose quiet personality hides a fierce intelligence. A triumph of art direction - the film is a maze of cluttered, claustrophobic interiors - filmed through a haze that is seemingly equal parts nicotine and decaying film stock, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a fiendishly fun mystery, punctuated by moments of pitch-black humor and a perverse sense of what constitutes a happy ending.


5. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo The book's Swedish title translates as Men Who Hate Women, which gets to the heart of why Stieg Larsson's book about a journalist and a hacker tracking a killer of women resonated so deeply with so many readers. The mystery plot is pure pulp, but it's redeemed by Larsson's blunt anger at the many ways women are treated like shit and the unforgettable character Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant, antisocial force of nature who isn't afraid to fight back. Director David Fincher focuses on the strongest and most cinematic elements of the source material, crafting a violent, disturbing, sexy beginning (I hope) of a franchise for adults (frankly, stating that the pretentious, thuddingly literal-minded Swedish film is better is lunacy). Fincher is smartly treats the central mystery as a Macguffin and emphasizes the relationship between Salander (the mesmerizing Rooney Mara) and sexy, feminist-friendly lefty hunk Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig, underrated here). As process-obsessed as all of Fincher's films, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is less about finding out what happened to Harriet Vanger as it is about a budding love story between an abused, alienated prodigy and the first man she could ever trust; taken this way, the ending is positively devastating. And as this is Fincher, it almost goes without saying that it's perfectly shot, edited and scored - one can derive two and a half hours of pleasure just from enjoying the way that Fincher captures the feeling of snow like no filmmaker ever has before. Bonus points for the perverse misuse of "Orinoco Flow."


6. Hugo Scorsese's latest is a walking contradiction, a valentine to the earliest days of silent cinema that utilizes hyper-modern technology to tell its story. That Scorsese embraces and revels in this contradiction is just one reason Hugo is so easy to love - in the scenes of filmmaker Georges Méliès meticulously and lovingly staging his early cinematic sleights of hand, one can trace a line directly to 3D and what it has the potential to be (but rarely is). Here, the immersive 3D effects compliment the beautifully realized world of a train station in 1920s Paris where a little boy named Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) lives in the walls, winding the station's clocks and hoping to solve a mystery left behind by his deceased father that takes the form of a wide-eyed automaton. Scorsese's typically kinetic, vital filmmaking is used for the first time in the service of a story that is meant to evoke wonder; the result is a $150-million kids' movie about the virtues of film preservation that is every bit as weird, geeky and magical as that description suggests.


7. Midnight in Paris Woody Allen's best film in 25 years is also his gentlest and most sincere. While the film is recognizably Allen's in every way - certainly nobody who knows his work should be the least bit surprised that his version of Oz is a 1920s Paris populated by the period's great artists and thinkers - there are moments in Midnight in Paris that feel like the unexpected summation of everything Allen has been expressing throughout his filmography. When Owen Wilson's writer Gil suggests that a city like Paris, teeming with life and possibility, is a beacon of hope in a dark universe, it took me aback; Allen has found Paris (or Manhattan) to be the answer to the question of where meaning can be found in life, and connecting his existential angst with his romantic view of urban life seems so obvious in retrospect and yet so profound. It's a pleasure to follow Gil on his time-travel journey and hang out with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the whole gang (I was particularly tickled by Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali), and yet Allen is also perceptive about how the idea that things used to be better is a constant illusion in every period. As with The Purple Rose of Cairo, Allen at once celebrates our fantasies and gently subverts our nostalgia; still, who can help being nostalgic when the past is brought to life with this much wit and warmth?


8. Bridesmaids Besides just being constantly hilarious from beginning to end, Bridesmaids is terrific because its humor comes from a very real and frightening place - getting older, getting poorer and watching your closest friends move on while you're still struggling to get your shit together. While the film is in the improv-heavy mold of its fellow Apatow productions, it benefits from the sturdier structure and fully realized characters that we can identify with even when they're shitting in a sink (maybe not as much then, but otherwise). It's funny because it's true, and the movie mines as many laughs from smaller moments of social awkwardness as it does from the aforementioned sink pooping and other, soon-to-be-classic setpieces like the dueling toasts and Annie's freak-out on the plane. Kristen Wiig has long been the best thing about SNL (along with Bill Hader), and she proves here to be a gifted writer as well; I wouldn't be surprised if this is the start of a large and impressive filmography.


9. War Horse Steven Spielberg's WWI epic isn't gritty and explicit in the way of Saving Private Ryan; based on the young adult novel by Michael Morpugo, it's a fable with a simple but profound anti-war message. The story of a young man (Jeremy Irvine) and his horse separated by war and trying to make their way home to each other is deeply moving and beautifully realized. The staging of the battle scenes is worthy of one of Spielberg's favorite films, Kubrick's Paths of Glory, and the early scenes of life in the English countryside have a lush palette worthy of John Ford or David Lean; this is a beautiful example of deliberately old-fashioned, classical Hollywood cinema. And it's a reminder that, when Spielberg is firing on all cylinders, there's nobody better. I can't wait to share this one with my kids when they're a bit older.


10. A Dangerous Method David Cronenberg's adaptation of Christopher Hampton's play about the rift between Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Jung (Michael Fassbender) caused by Jung's affair with his brilliant, volatile patient Sabina Spelrein (Keira Knightley) has been unfairly dismissed as a boringly conventional period piece. But while it may contain less strange creatures or unruly bodily fluids than the average Cronenberg film, it's every bit as brilliantly kinky as any he's made, perhaps more subversively so. Sabina, and Knightley's jaw-dropping performance, are as uncontrollable a monster as Jeff Goldblum's mutation in The Fly and the Mugwumps in Naked Lunch, minus the makeup effects. It's the film about the monstrous feminine and how it changed these two men, completely reshaping our understanding of human psychology in the process. It's impeccably acted, heightened by Cronenberg's mastery of the frame's ability to underline our anxieties, and diabolically funny. Bonus points to Mortensen for getting so much mileage out of Freud's cigars.

Top 10: 2001

1. Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
2. Y tu mamá también (Cuaron)
3. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Mitchell)
4. A.I. (Spielberg)
5. The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson)
6. Moulin Rouge (Luhrmann)
7. Amélie (Jeunet)
8. Spirited Away (Miyazaki)
9. Gosford Park (Altman)
10. Ghost World (Zwigoff)

Top 10: 1991

1. My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant)
2. The Silence of the Lambs (Demme)
3. Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Cameron)
4. Barton Fink (Coen)
5. JFK (Stone)
6. Cape Fear (Scorsese)
7. Naked Lunch (Cronenberg)
8. Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale, Wise)
9. The Fisher King (Gilliam)
10. Point Break (Bigelow)

Recommended Island Viewing

For his final Friday Night Seitz slideshow at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz answered the age-old question, "What movies would you want to have with you if you were shipwrecked on a desert island." Matt adds, of course, that "It is assumed that you’ll have an indestructible DVD player with a solar-recharging power source" and allows for ten feature films, one short and a single season of a TV series. Matt's challenge was taken up by others, including Jim Emerson and Damian Arlyn; their cumulative desert island library includes films by directors ranging from Martin Scorsese to Buster Keaton to the Coen brothers to Don Bluth.

My choices for desert island viewing differ from my all-time top 10 in that I think my tastes would run a bit lighter due to circumstance. While I'm generally drawn to "dark, cerebral movies" (as I believe Netflix has characterized my tastes) and that's certainly reflected in part on this list, if I was limited to the same 12 viewing options forever, I'd have a greater need for movies to lighten my spirits and help me stay connected to humanity. It's kind of like Will Smith watching Shrek every day in I Am Legend to remind him of the way the world was, except I'm a much bigger snob than Will Smith. And rewatchability is very important, of course. I thought about skipping movies that Matt, Jim or Damian had already chosen, but when you force movie geeks to limit themselves to twelve titles for the rest of their lives, I guess some overlap is inevitable.

All That Jazz - Bob Fosse's cinematic self-portrait is exhilarating in a way that very few films are. It's an incredibly entertaining examination of how an excessive dedication to one's craft gives one's life meaning even as it tears one apart. Roy Scheider was never better than as Fosse's surrogate, Joe Gideon, a chain-smoking, pill-popping, womanizing director juggling a Broadway musical, a feature film, current and past lovers, his relationship with his daughter and an impending heart attack, among other things. His hallucinatory trip through his own life and impending death is frighteningly insightful, often hilarious and punctuated with some of Fosse's best choreography, culminating in a glittery, show-stopping eulogy that can only be described as fabulous. I think it's impossible to get tired of this movie.

Boogie Nights - While There Will Be Blood is my favorite P.T. Anderson movie by a hair, Quentin Tarantino was right when he characterized Boogie Nights as an "exhuberant" film (as opposed to There Will Be Blood's formalism). It's one of the movies where, every time I watch it, I can't stop debating with myself whether my favorite scene is the current one, or the one before it, or the next one. Every character is my favorite character. For it's two-and-a-half hours, Boogie Nights radiates with the joy of movies and filmmaking. No matter how crappy I'm feeling, it never fails to bring a smile to my face.

E.T. - One of the very first movies I really loved, and the first one that got me thinking about what it means to make a movie. E.T.'s stock in the collective imagination seems to have fallen a bit since I was a kid - most of the time when I mention it to people my age, they dismiss it as a movie that frightened them when they were kids. But through my childhood, it meant more to me than Star Wars or any of the other staples of my youth. Even now, I can't think too hard about certain images or moments or even John Williams' score (his best) without getting a bit misty. I'd want it on the island not for nostalgic reasons but because it remains the most clear-eyed and insightful movie about growing up. And I imagine it'd be wonderful to revisit over and over under a canopy of stars.

Fargo - The Coens' best movie is the best example of their deadpan comic genius and ability to mine laughter and genuine pathos from flawed, sometimes banal people in desperate situations. It's also filled with a fondness for their home state that pokes a lot of fun at Minnesotans' earnestness while still demonstrating real affection. Very pregnant sheriff Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is probably my favorite cinematic hero - she's true to herself, good to her husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch), unflappable while investigating a brutal double homicide and driven by an unshakeable sense of right and wrong. Her monologue to one of the kidnappers at the film's end ("There's more to live than a little money, ya know. Don't you know that?") and the coda with Marge and Norm in bed, talking about his three-cent mallard stamp, never fail to move me. Plus, it would be nice, on the island, to be reminded of snow.

Goodfellas - Scorsese's most entertaining movie. If I'm channel surfing and Goodfellas is on, even with the DVD about five feet away from the TV, it's almost impossible to stop watching. It doesn't have the kind of lightness of being that a lot of my choices have - it's a movie about very likeable assholes doing terrible things and learning nothing in the process. As such, it's one of the greatest dark comedies of all time, not to mention Scorsese - at a point in his career when he had a lot to prove - employing just about every cinematic trick at his disposal to tell this story and clearly having a blast doing it. Goodfellas is one of those movies that always reminds me what film is capable of. And seeing as I'll be on the island for a very long time, that gives me whole days to examine just the Copacabana tracking shot. Or the Billy Batts sequence. Or the "Layla" scene. Or the commercial for Morrie's Wigs...

Harold and Maude - One of those rare movies that, in the gentlest way possible, always reminds me how much of everyday life is bullshit and what really matters. Hal Ashby's laid-back stoner vibe is deceptive; it's an unpretentious movie, unafraid to be silly, but also very deep and true. Plus, a little Cat Stevens makes every day worth living.

Manhattan - This has long been my favorite Woody Allen movie, but it really came into focus when I was watching the American Masters documentary on Allen, thanks to Mariel Hemingway calling Allen a "mush." It's very true - as much as Allen's work is preoccupied with death, the non-existence of God and other sources of anxiety and existential despair, they're just as much a celebration of human relationships. Sure, they often end in heartbreak or betrayal, and Manhattan is unsparing in underlining the ways that people can be selfish and casually cruel, or how - as Allen laments in Annie Hall - love fades. But it's also a deeply romantic film, in love with the ways that people can lend each others' lives meaning, how a city is alive with millions of people living their own movies, and how a perfect, holy moment is always possible when you least expect it.

Nashville - Like Boogie Nights, a movie overflowing with potential favorite scenes and characters. It's a cynical film, but never the sort of empty, defeatist cynicism that tends to turn me off immediately; Pauline Kael put it best when she said that Altman "loves us too much to flatter us." I revisit it about once a year, and I've found that whatever is going on in my life at the time, it speaks to me right where I'm at. And you don't have to be a fan of country music to appreciate how Altman discovers poetry in the intersection of our popular culture, politics, ideals and delusions. No movie feels more like America to me than Nashville; I imagine that returning to it on the island would feel like visiting home.

The Shining - My girlfriend believes that, though I call Blue Velvet my favorite movie, my true favorite is The Shining, which I apparently talk about ten times as much. It's certainly the movie I've seen the most times and return to constantly; I've been working through its multiple mysteries, layers and ambiguities for over 20 years, and each time I revisit it, the film reveals a new shade of meaning. If someone asked me to name a perfect film, The Shining would be my answer; if I could only take one movie to the island, it would be my choice and I would happily watch it every night. Plus, I think it would be good to have a movie to watch that is almost entirely composed of interiors; over time, I would probably grow jealous of Jack Torrance and his cabin fever.

Synecdoche, New York - A movie that reminds us that, no matter how bad things get, they can always (and, eventually, will) get worse. While sometimes I need comfort food on a bad day like everyone else, a movie like Synecdoche, New York provides a different kind of therapy. It's about everything we fear and regret - failed ambitions, broken relationships, loneliness, the suspicion that everything is meaningless and, above all, death. And it confronts our darkest thoughts with eyes wide open, with wit and honesty and a stunning amount of empathy, reminding more strongly than any movie I've seen that we're all in this together. It's a movie filled with misery, and it never fails to make me feel better. No matter how dark things get on that island, I can always count on Synecdoche, New York to help me pull myself together.

The short film I would bring to the island is The Wrong Trousers. The toy train chase between Wallace and Gromit and the villainous, silent penguin left the nine-year-old me breathless with laughter, and it hasn't lost any of its charm.


Originally I was thinking I would bring a season of Lost, then decided I might not be in the mood as I'd be stuck on a frigging island. So I'll go with season one of Twin Peaks. I'll have the rest of my life to explore the mysteries of Bob, the man from another planet and all the other strange and mysterious elements that, thanks to David Lynch, seem completely effortless. And even if/when I tired of the show as a puzzle, I'd always have Agent Cooper, Sheriff Truman, Audrey Horne, the Log Lady and all the other residents of Twin Peaks to keep me company.

Top 10: 1981

1. Blow Out (De Palma)
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg)
3. An American Werewolf in London (Landis)
4. The Road Warrior (Miller)
5. Thief (Mann)
6. Modern Romance (Brooks)
7. The Evil Dead (Raimi)
8. Excalibur (Boorman)
9. Pennies From Heaven (Ross)
10. Escape From New York (Carpenter)

Top 10: 1971

Update, 1/9/12: I can't believe I forgot Two-Lane Blacktop!

1. A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick)
2. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman)
3. Harold and Maude (Ashby)
4. Macbeth (Polanski)
5. Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman)
6.The Devils (Russell)
7. Straw Dogs (Peckinpah)
8. The French Connection (Friedkin)
9. Carnal Knowledge (Nichols)
10. Two English Girls (Truffaut)

Hey kid, you want a toothpick?

While James Sallis' novel Drive provides us with a backstory for its protagonist - a stuntman by day and getaway driver by night who is known only as "the Driver" - Hossein Amini's adaptation for Nicolas Winding Refn's film version of Drive gives us few details about who the Driver is. We know as much as his boss, body shop owner Shannon (Bryan Cranston), who explains that the Driver (Ryan Gosling) showed up at his garage a few years back and asked for a job. Stoic and elusive, the Driver never puts his experiences or motivations into words - he's a character defined entirely by what he does, rather than where he's been. What he does is drive, exceptionally well; in the opening sequence, we watch him on an assignment as a getaway driver, calm and focused as he eludes police cars and helicopters with astounding timing. The sequence is shot and edited with the same expert precision, culminating in a final reveal - deftly teased from the opening shot - that recalls De Palma at his best in the devilish pleasure Refn takes from waiting until the last possible moment to let us in on the joke. My pleasure at Refn's slight-of-hand never flagged during the following ninety minutes; Drive is, without a doubt, the best time I had at the movies last year.

Taking place on the lower rungs of the film industry and the margins of L.A.'s criminal underworld, Drive takes place in the hard, glossy urban terrain of Michael Mann, populated by assorted lowlifes who speak in the terse, clipped language of Walter Hill. This is film noir passed through the great contemporary American action filmmakers and taken to its logical endpoin. It's too emotionally direct to comfortably label "postmodern," but there is the sense, as the Driver and Shannon become involved with gangsters Bernie (Albert Brooks) and Nino (Ron Perlman) - first as partner's in Shannon's plan to make the Driver a stock car racer, then as adversaries after a robbery gone wrong - of a way of life and cinema, of defining the good guys and bad guys, giving way to a murkier future. Refn, whose earlier film Bronson transformed the world of British prisons and asylums into a Theatre of the Absurd scored by the Pet Shop Boys, creates a world whose pop surfaces portray in bold strokes both the end of an era in pulp fiction and the immortality of the archetypal hero's journey.

Refn also feminizes the action film in surprising ways, from the glossy pink opening titles to the synthpop-heavy soundtrack. Drive reminds of Carol Clover's bisexual aesthetic, balancing a masculine, fetishistic reverence for machines and process with swooning romantic interludes. It's the Driver's silent affection for next-door neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benecio (Kaden Leos) that sets the film's plot into motion - when Irene's husband Standard (Oscar Issac) is released from prison and finds himself quickly in hot water, the Driver helps him in order to help his wife and son. Mulligan is luminous in the film; there's a beautiful moment, as Desire's "Under Your Spell" plays on the soundtrack, when we watch Irene and the Driver silently yearn for each other on opposite sides of the wall dividing their apartments. Drive is as effective as it is because Refn is as invested in these quiet emotional moments as he is in the violent setpieces.

At first, I thought perhaps the relationship between the Driver and Irene was vaguely defined; later, I realized that an impromptu drive through the Los Angeles River is the closest thing to intimacy that the Driver is probably capable of. This is a character who is almost entirely motivated by a sense of romantic chivalry to the woman he loves; he's also a possible sociopath who hits another woman to find out what she knows and is capable of brutal assault and even murder without ever losing his cool. Gosling - who I used to find annoyingly mannered but who has, since Blue Valentine, has found the wit to match his obvious talent - does an excellent job of wordlessly conveying the Driver's internal extremes. The film's centerpiece, in this light, is a scene set in an elevator where an ecstatic emotional climax takes a jarring left turn into a violent confrontation that is a much more disturbing form of release. We're never sure if the Driver enjoys taking out the bad guys because he's sworn to protect Irene and Benecio, or if his self-appointed role as a knight in a Chevy Impala is a pretense for him to get off on beating the shit out of people. Of course, we could similarly question the motives of almost every action hero since Odysseus.

The entire movie strikes a similar balance, its approach to cinematic violence at once exhilarating and sobering. Its violence movies come in brief, controlled bursts, reminiscent of the climax of Sanjuro, that have a greater impact for their relative restraint. While Tom Hardy's Charles Bronson relished his role as an ass-kicking maniac in that film, here the characters are reluctant to kill each other for our entertainment. Even Bernie, the film's villain, assumes that role with great reluctance - he'd rather see the Driver race and is legitimately disappointed that his criminal partners have screwed that plan up. Brooks is a brilliant choice for Bernie; thanks to his warmth and our familiarity with his screen persona, we like Bernie and want to trust him, and can believe that he'd rather not hurt anyone. So when Brooks' acerbic wit gives way to cold, merciless self-preservation, he's one of the most frightening and memorable bad guys in recent memory. A moment when Bernie whispers reassurances to his dying victim that "It's all over now, there's no more pain" lingers in the memory more strongly than movies with ten times the body count. Drive is heavy with the sense of things we can't return to, and also alive with cinema's capacity for rebirth; when Gosling finally assumes the heroic status that Refn has granted him, with College's "A Real Hero" blasting on the soundtrack, Drive achieves pop transcendence. It's one for the ages.

You'll be grown before that tree is tall.

I’ve avoided writing about the films of Terrence Malick thus far; frankly, I’m not sure I’m a good enough writer to convey what makes them special. They’re elusive in a way that is completely unique; where other directors on the same level of ambition might provide us with symbols, archetypes or formal cues to guide our interpretation of their films, Malick defies signification. In Malick’s movies, a tree represents a tree; they are visual, experiential, intentionally open to the viewer’s interpretation even as they resist classification. As with the two most recurring characters in his work – wind and water – they are at once physical and ephemeral.

Whether one likes or dislikes a Malick film, it’s undeniably challenging to put the experience of a Malick movie into words. One of the most powerful moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had was a double bill of Badlands and Days of Heaven at the Brattle; while I’m normally very chatty after a movie, I had little to say on the walk back to my hotel room that night. His movies evoke feelings and ideas that are difficult to put into words without being reductive, which makes the work of writers who find a meaningful way to engage with Malick (as Matt Zoller Seitz did with his recent video essays) quite valuable. Otherwise, discussions of Malick’s films too often split into two groups – detractors who accuse Malick of New Age-y pretentiousness and his fans of blind worship, and supporters who argue that anyone who doesn’t like Malick’s films is either being a contrarian or doesn’t “get” them; both responses betray a good deal of insecurity. I cannot claim to “get” every moment in The Tree of Life; I can only describe my own experience with the film, which is as beautiful, challenging, maddening and audacious a film as Malick has ever directed.

So. The Tree of Life.

I don’t think there has ever been a film that has better conveyed the process of memory. I’ve recently had several instances where old friends have, out of the blue, hit me with potent reminders of moments in my life, years ago, that I’d forgotten. While my friends may not have realized it, a simple reference to days I hadn’t stopped to think about in a long time have triggered potent emotional journeys that were probably imperceptible to anyone around me. That is, as far as I can tell, what The Tree of Life is about. On a perfectly normal day, Jack (Sean Penn as an adult, Hunter McCracken as a boy) is drawn into memories of his childhood, fantasies about the creation of the universe and imaginations or premonitions of its end, where he is reunited with everyone he’s ever known. While the the film’s thematic scope is literally universal, the scale of the story is shockingly intimate. The Tree of Life presents us with the beginning and end of everything and places its protagonist, and us, squarely at its center – our own small dramas are completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and at the same time simple things like our family and our neighborhood provide our language for experiencing the infinite.

Most of the film takes place in Jack’s memories of one summer of his childhood in small-town Texas. Malick’s characters have grown increasingly archetypal with each film – here, Jack’s father Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) and his wife (Jessica Chastain) embody the conflict between what Malick terms “nature and grace,” and Jack is caught in a classic Oedipal struggle between these two opposing forces. We’re given a few details about Mr. O’Brien - he works as an engineer, is a talented musician and often expresses envy of those who are wealthier or more successful then him – and fewer of Jack’s mother. As others have pointed out, the parents are viewed through the young Jack’s eyes, and as such are defined in broad strokes – Mr. O’Brien as the hard, authoritarian figure, and Mrs. O’Brien as the empathetic, playful and nurturing parent. Pitt does an excellent job of balancing the father’s toughness with an underlying sense that he loves his sons and believes he’s equipping them for the challenges of adulthood. Chastain, in her first major film role, is tasked with finding a way to portray the embodiment of grace and, also, a 1960s Texas housewife; she pulls off the delicate balance that implies and is completely radiant. While Malick is often criticized for his lack of interest in traditional dramatic structure and character development, the scenes of family life in the film are completely believable and filled with small, truthful details that evoke our own experience.

The much talked-about sequence depicting the creation of the world isn’t strictly necessary from a narrative perspective, and yet it’s impossible to imagine the movie without it. The sequence serves a similar purpose as the “Dawn of Man” prologue in 2001, giving us a sense of the much larger context this story takes place in before settling into a particular moment in time for the majority of the film (Kubrick chose to leap to the present, Malick to the recent past). After beginning with the news of the death of one of Jack’s brothers, the film implicitly asks what is the meaning of our lives, then gives us this sequence as a possible answer. Though Malick is a Christian, his is a creation sequence that is true to our scientific understanding of our origins, while still acknowledging the questions that science cannot answer. Douglas Trumbull, the special effects legend behind 2001 as well as Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and many others, came out of semi-retirement to work on The Tree of Life. The images do remind of the overwhelming quality of 2001’s final scenes; as we move from darkness through the formation of celestial bodies and life – first cells, then primitive organisms, always growing more and more complex – we’re reminded of our role in the greater chain of existence, no more or less significant than any other link. It’s awe-inspiring, and it also made me feel a bit lonely; if there is a God out there, he’s provided us with all the blueprints, but he’s holding out on the mission statement.

And so we have Jack and his family, and every person and family, residing at the heart of this great mystery, which gives every small moment a greater philosophical or spiritual weight. A moment where Jack commits a small trespass against an attractive older woman in his neighborhood becomes a fall from innocence worthy of Milton. When Jack participates in a naïve act of animal abuse with neighborhood kids, the moment speaks deeply to our capacity for cruelty. Whether we remember or not, we all have these moments in our childhood where some small event leads us into a larger world. Admittedly, some of these moments don’t have the clarity or emotional impact they could have – while Malick has always been elusive, The Tree of Life is the first of his films that contained moments that seemed simply vague. I don’t know why there’s a giant in the attic, I don’t know what the clown in a dunk tank is about and I can’t help but suspect these moments are more private than personal. Most importantly, I hoped for a stronger understanding of the relationship between Jack and his brothers – as it is, it took a second viewing for me to confirm which brother is the one who dies, and as his death triggers the existential questions behind the film, I wanted to connect with that loss. That said, it’s very possible that these details will become clearer upon revisiting the film, which I expect to do many times – as confounding as it may be in its individual moments, The Tree of Life has a cumulative brilliance that is nearly inarguable.

It’s been interesting to see how people seem to interpret the film’s conclusion based on what they bring to it. To many, the final scenes are about the relative insignificance of our personal experiences in a godless universe. To others, it’s a spiritual affirmation of an existence beyond this one. Or perhaps it is merely Jack imagining what may be – the shores not of eternity but of the persistence of memory. I tend towards the latter interpretation. That the film can support each interpretation speaks to its strength – like any great film, The Tree of Life has the ability to speak to you wherever you are in your own narrative. We have so few poets in American film at a time when most directors are preoccupied with prose; The Tree of Life reminds us what our cinema is capable of.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #1 - ALIEN

This month I've been using Halloween as an excuse to introduce my girlfriend to as many horror movies as possible. Jen has seen hardly any, and it's interesting because it's extremely unpredictable what will actually frighten her - we've watched The Shining, The Exorcist and The Thing without her becoming even mildly startled, but she was quite upset a few months back when I took her to the unrelenting scarefest Super 8. Last week we were watching Alien, which she'd never seen and which, I'm happy to report, worked like gangbusters on her. I mentioned to her that the alien would be my number one character on this list, and she asked me why. I thought for a while, and I feel I should be honest and give the same answer I gave her.

I could say it's because of the brilliant design of the creature by H.R. Giger, which serves as a grotesque mirror image of our repressed unease with our own sexuality. I could point to the alien's birth cycle, one of the most potent and unforgettable examples of bodily horror in film. Or I could praise Ridley Scott's handsome directorial style, the authentic performances he elicits from his cast, how he set out to make "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the world of 2001: A Space Odyssey" and, when you're watching the film, you realize that's exactly what it is and Scott succeeded beautifully. Or I could refer to Stephen King's observation that the alien is like one of Lovecraft's outer gods, a visceral representation of our most existential horror, the mystery of what is waiting for us at the farthest reaches of the universe, life and the afterlife. I could say any of those things, and there's some truth to all of them. But the bottom line is, of any monster, maniac or villain that I might meet someday in a dark alley, the alien would be the absolute worst.

Because while I find it fascinating to consider the underlying reasons behind what scares us, at its heart fear is a primal, non-intellectual experience. We can articulate our fears to give them form, to understand them and hopefully be stronger and braver as a result. But when we're confronted with something really terrifying, we can't save ourselves by deconstructing it and, in any case, we're too busy shitting our pants or crying. So there's a sense that the horror movie is a test run for our deepest fears - we push ourselves to confront our darkest thoughts, with the objective distance of make-believe, and to experience the worst before rewarding ourselves with that final fade to black and a return to safety. I'm not saying anything that hasn't said before, but if you had to answer the question of why we enjoy being frightened, that's the most basic and honest answer - we watch stories about characters going through horrible, unimaginable shit and thank the heavens that it isn't us.

So yeah, the alien is the scariest character because of the way the incubating facehugger spasms inside its egg before launching itself onto poor Kane's (John Hurt) face. It's for the way it tightens its tale around Kane's neck as Dallas and Ash try to remove it. It's for Kane's ungodly cries of pain as he gives involuntary birth to the chestburster, and for Lambert's (Veronica Cartwright) authentic repulsion as a jet of blood splashes her face. It's for the moment the once-small alien appears behind Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and we realize that it's made an amazing growth spurt. And that horrible moment when Dallas (Tom Skerritt) realizes he's not alone when searching the vents for the alien, and for Ripley, the lone survivor, sweaty and wide-eyed with terror, trying desperately to make her escape. And because just when she thinks she's safe, she not. And because of the way she chants "lucky, lucky, lucky" herself before confronting the alien one last time and blasting him into space, vanquishing this uncanny monster back into the dark recesses of space.

And it's for the way that the alien and Ripley keep coming back, how she has to defeat the creature over and over again, first as a kickass action hero, then as a Maria Falconetti-esque martyr, then as a campy superwoman with a mean hook shot. The alien, like so many of the characters I've written about this month, keeps coming back because we need to be reminded - to look, once again, at our worst nightmare so that we might laugh and keep them at bay. Some people don't need horror movies; they're better off for not needing to dwell on their fears. For the rest of us, small doses of fear are the vaccine that keep the sickness at bay. I had a VHS tape of Alien and Aliens that my dad had made when I was growing up. As a kid, I struggled not to close my eyes during the scariest moments, I had frequent nightmares involving the alien, and I watched that entire tape after first grade at least once a week; I eventually wore that tape out, and have bought Alien in various formats four times since then. The alien, and all the characters I've written about this month, will never stop creeping me out. And I hope they never do.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #2 - Michael Myers

John Carpenter's Halloween wasn't the first slasher movie, but it is the purest. The film that defined the slasher formula before it was a formula, Halloween perfected all the techniques and tropes - shots from the killer's POV, an isolated setting, young female victims, a climactic chase between the killer and the Final Girl, multiple false endings - that we now take for granted. As I said, other films had traveled this road before Halloween; the difference is that Carpenter, like Welles with Citizen Kane, brings these elements together with an assured, singular style and an absolute mastery of timing, lighting, spatial intelligence, music and every other trick in the book that a director can employ to maximize tension. Carpenter always seems embarrassed by Halloween, shrugging it of as a quickie exploitation film, and it's clear that other films he's made are much closer to his heart. But perhaps it is that lack of pretense that makes Halloween so wickedly effective - it's the work of a master architect plying his craft for a carnival spook house.

The film's killer, Michael Myers, shares with many of the characters on this list an impenetrability - we don't know why Michael, as a clown-suited 6-year-old, killed his teenage sister on Halloween night, or why he returns 15 years later to stalk and kill babysitters. We learn that his psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), has decided after years of careful observation and analysis that Michael's clinical diagnosis is "pure evil." And the movie proves Loomis' point - Michael is as much of an unstoppable force as the shark from Jaws. His only apparent interest is to hunt his prey as they drink, smoke and screw, and Carpenter is amazing at finding opportunities to hid Michael and the "boo!" moments in the background or margins of the frame, until we become anxious of the negative space in every shot. And the ending is a terrific punchline, as it turns out that the kids Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has been babysitting are proven right - the boogeyman is real.

I've always felt like Halloween II was a bit underrated - putting the silly decision of revealing that Laurie is Michael's sister (which Carpenter admits he wrote late one night, out of desperation, because it worked in The Empire Strikes Back) aside, it's the only sequel that comes close to the suspense of the original. After the failed experiment of Halloween III, which swapped Michael Myers for an evil Irish toymaker (and which is extremely entertaining despite its lack of any relation to Halloween), Carpenter bailed and the franchise's producers decided to replicate the formula as much as possible, and except for occasional highlights like the final scene of Halloween 4 or Jamie Lee Curtis' great performance in the late-1990s period piece Halloween H20, the results are mostly ho-hum. At best they're bland retreads of the original; at worst, they fail to understand that the incomprehensibility of Michael's actions is what makes him frightening, attempting to explain the character with pagan cults and mysterious cowboys. I do like Rob Zombie's entries, particularly the director's cut of Halloween II, which is quite visually haunting, has an unusual level of empathy for its characters and is actually a pretty insightful depiction of PTSD. In any case, at least they were different.

Jen has never seen Halloween; we're watching it tonight. I'll be interested in seeing if decades of movies that borrowed and stole from Halloween has taken away its power to frighten, or if the strength of the filmmaking trumps familiarity. For me, any way, it's become such a big piece of my cinematic experience; it just wouldn't be Halloween without Halloween.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #3 - Leatherface

I could have easily put any of the members of the cannibalistic family from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in this space. There's the hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), who sets our teeth on edge from his first scene - he's a very extreme version of the experiences we've all had where we're having a conversation with a stranger, realize something is not quite right with that person, and proceed to awkwardly extricate ourselves from the situation. There's the cook (Jim Siedow), the most seemingly normal of the family, whose admission that "I just can't take no pleasure in killing," along with the sheepish grin on his face during the climactic dinnertime scene, are deeply unsettling. And Grandpa - okay, Grandpa isn't as scary as the others, but the 100-year-old man's infantile joy as he sucks blood from a the hysterical Sally's (Marilyn Burns) finger has a powerful "Yeeechhh!" factor. Collectively, they make a potent collection of flesh-eating good ol' boys that should strike fear into the heart of any pinko homo lefty Yankee like myself.*

But of course, the scariest member of the family is Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen). From his first appearance - suddenly entering and dominating the frame, swiftly whacking poor Kirk (William Vail) and dragging him back to his makeshift butcher's shop and slamming the door shut behind him with a loud clang - Leatherface is completely terrifying. A huge, childlike brute, Leatherface kills not because he loves doing it but because his brothers make him to or because his victim has frightened him by entering his house. Leatherface, like Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill, was partly inspired by Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, but the film does not recreate the extremely disturbing facts of Gein's murders and use of his victims' remains. We get glimses of this in the bony furnishings of Leatherface's house and his wearing of other people's faces, of course. But although Leatherface's murders are very brutal, director Tobe Hooper wisely spares us the goriest details - by employing suggestion, witholding the impact of his monster's weapons as Hitchcock did with Psycho), Hooper provokes our imaginations to fill in the gory details.

Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 shifts the tone from documentary-like starkness to campy humor - I rejected this combination at first, but it gradually grew on me. The movie is hilarious for its blunt acknowledgement of slasher movies' sexual politics (it may be the source of Heathers' infamous line "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw") and Dennis Hopper's scenery-chewing performance as a revenge-seeking, chainsaw-wielding Texas ranger. The next two sequels are mostly dull; the remake and its prequel are not as bad as their reputation suggest, and I'm particularly fond of the scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning where R. Lee Ermey's character calls a family meeting to inform everyone they're cannibals now. Still, the defining image of Leatherface will always be his "chainsaw dance" at the end of the first film - spinning in circles in a state of both brutal, inarticulae anger and ecstasy until the movie cuts to black, suspending Leatherface in his own holy moment forever.

*An analogy I suggested in a discussion about the Republican presidential candidates: Mitt Romney is the cook, Rick Santorum is the hitchhiker, Rick Perry is Leatherface and Ron Paul is Grandpa. Michelle Bachmann is Baby from The Devil's Rejects. This was before the Cain surge - Farmer Vincent, maybe?

Scariest Characters in Cinema #4 - Pinhead

When I was a kid, despite being obsessed with horror, there were certain movies I was afraid to watch. I would read any reviews and articles I could find on these films but was wary of actually renting them, believing them to be more than I could handle. One of these was Hellraiser; its intimidating title and VHS art compelled me to pick it up, then replace it minutes later, countless times over the years. When, in my teens, I finally got around to seeing Hellraiser, it was as grisly as I'd imagined, but it was also smart and strangely beautiful. While Barker's work can be extreme in its content, he's also one of the most richly imaginative writers of our time. And though Hellraiser sometimes reveals its low-budget seams, it's supported by an extraordinary, mythic backstory about a puzzle box that, when solved, opens a door to world where pain and pleasure are one.

The rulers and denizens of this otherworld are the Cenobites, human figures with pierced, mutilated bodies clad in leather. The word "cenobite" means "a member of a religious order," and these Cenobites do have the solemn purposefulness of a monastery in carrying out their dark deeds; like Jack Torrance in The Shining, they've unknowingly accepted the position of eternal caretakers of hell. In the first Hellraiser, they mostly serve as background to the story of the skinless, partially resurrected Frank (Oliver Smith) and his attempts, with the help of his brother's wife Julia (Claire Higgins), to feed on enough blood to rebuild his body. Frank and Julia are Hellraiser's true monsters; the Cenobites are only interested in preserving the rules of their world, and their business is only with those who have summoned them. And Pinhead (Doug Bradley), the most recognizable character of the original film and whole series, is so peripheral to the story that he's only credited in the first movie as "Lead Cenobite."

And yet Pinhead, despite his brief screen time, lingers as strong in the memory as the film's astonishing rebirth sequence and its brilliant score by Christopher Young. Much of this has to do with Pinhead's stunning appearance, the fearful symmetry of his piercings and the contrast between his black eyes and snow-white skin. And then there's Bradley's performance - Barker directed the actor to play the lead Cenobite like "a cross between an administrator and a surgeon who's responsible for running a hospital where there are no wards, only surgical tables." He brings to the role a calm authority and perverse elegance, that, coupled with Pinhead's imposing figure, make Pinhead a precise, businesslike administrator of pain and suffering.

If this makes Pinhead sound a bit like a professional dominatrix, this is not a mistake; Hellraiser, like much of Barker's work, is heavy with sadomasochistic themes. Certainly, the movie is filled with images of body modification, bondage and dominance and submission. The fact that Pinhead is, in a peculiar way, not only visually striking but perhaps even a bit sexy makes him much more frightening. When they are summoned by the Lament Configuration, the Cenobites aim only to deliver the sensory experiences their summoners believe they want - as Pinhead clarifies in the first sequel, "It's not the hand that summons us, it's the desire." One of the great things about Barker is that he's one of the few horror writers to openly embrace the sensual aspects of horror stories - our attraction to experiencing fear in small, "safe" doses. In a sense, anyone who has ever gone to a scary movie has participated in a little light S&M.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II is my favorite film in the series for its Grand Guignol atmosphere and for being the rare horror sequel that adds a back story for its monster that is actually interesting. Unfortunately, by Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth the filmmakers were making the mistake of showing too much of the Cenobites - the unpredictability of their appearances is part of their power, and once they starting added other Cenobites with compact discs and other things sticking out of their necks, they sacrificed that power. After this, the sequels become increasingly ridiculous - one revolves around a Hellraiser MMPORG - and Pinhead treated more like a generic movie monster. Bradley smartly passed on the latest DTV sequel; luckily, we'll always have the first two movies as a tribute to Barker's wild imagination.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #5 - The Thing

The mimetic organism in John Carpenter's The Thing is easily the most mysterious character on this list. We never really see The Thing, only the people and animals it absorbs and imitates; the closest we come to a glimpse of the real Thing is in the grotesque states we see it in when its imitations are incomplete or threatened. We also never know what it's thinking - we know The Thing's goal is to assimilate all the lifeforms at the space station and (it's implied) all life on Earth, but we never know its purpose for this. In nature, mimesis is usually a defensive measure, which doesn't make sense for The Thing. While 1951's classic The Thing (From Another World) had a large, hulking alien as a stand-in for our fear of infiltration (Communist or otherwise), the amorphous alien of Carpenter's remake represents a more universal fear of the other. Of all the iconic extraterrestrials in film, The Thing is the most truly alien.

The overwhelming atmosphere of isolation and anxiety that Carpenter carefully builds is aided immensely by Rob Bottin's jaw-dropping makeup effects. The Thing was released in the heyday of latex-powered horror movies, films like An American Werewolf in London and Videodrome that relied on pre-CGI state-of-the-art makeup effects to create convincingly graphic scenes of the human body being transformed and/or mutilated. Bottin had the idea that The Thing would retain a cellular memory of organisms it had previously imitated, which would leave their traces in each stage of transformation. It's a brilliant idea that results in the be-all end-all of creature features - as Vincent Canby described it in his 1982 review in The New York Times:

It's entertaining only if one's needs are met by such sights as those of a head walking around on spiderlike legs; autopsies on dogs and humans in which the innards explode to take on other, not easily identifiable forms; hand severings, immolations, wormlike tentacles that emerge from the mouth of a severed head, or two or more burned bodies fused together to look like spareribs covered with barbecue sauce.

Canby means this all as a negative, but if you're a horror fan who somehow hasn't seen The Thing, doesn't that make you wish you were watching it right now? The reviews were very vicious when The Thing was released*, and the film bombed at the box office - it was released two weeks after E.T., and Carpenter has famously observed that Spielberg's film featured an alien that made people cry, whereas his alien made the audience throw up. But while The Thing's content was quite envelope-pushing for its time (it's still very strong), the negative reviews that complained it was an empty gore-fest were way off the mark. The effects are very much at the service of the story, and the strong performances of the ensemble and Carpenter's mastery of framing and timing to maximize suspense (including the most effective moment of misdirection, during the blood test scene, that I've ever seen) are crucial to the film's paranoid atmosphere. The film's cynical, ambiguous final scene suggests that The Thing is best-read as a stand-in for anxiety itself, that dreadful, amorphous monster that might be hiding in the most familiar of places. The tagline for The Thing was highly accurate - man is, indeed, the warmest place to hide.

*The critical consensus has improved a great deal over the years. I was amused, when watching At the Movies, when Roger Ebert recommended skipping the remake and watching Carpenter's film instead; he gave it a thumbs-down at the time.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #6 - Freddy Krueger

I dressed as Freddy Krueger for my preschool class' Halloween party; it remains my favorite costume. My mom, from whom I inherited my love of horror, decided scar tissue makeup would be inappropriate for a four-year-old, but she found an appropriate hat and sweater and did wonders with a ski glove, drinking straws, tape and tinfoil. My teachers and some of the other parents were concerned about my interest in Freddy; ironically, my awareness of the character, besides having caught a few scenes of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, was based largely on Robert Englund's appearance on Nickelodeon to promote A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (the highest-grossing film in the series until Freddy vs. Jason). A lot of kids my age were into Freddy, who was already as iconic to us as Frankenstein or Dracula. It's kind of amazing that at a character who began a vicious, terrifying supernatural killer in the low-budget original had, in the course of a few increasingly tongue-in-cheek movies, become an icon for an entire generation of kids.

And make no mistake - in Wes Craven's original A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy is a truly terrifying character, with one of the great backstories of any movie monster. A child murderer acquitted on a technicality (damn those movie bureaucrats and their inability to sign warrants!), Freddy is executed by a vengeful mob of local parents, only to return several years later to get his revenge by scaring their now-teenage children to death through their dreams. The character plays into our real and imagined fears - Craven has always been excellent at distilling our collective anxieties into a basic form, and Freddy is his greatest creation. As played by Englund in the original, he's a grotesque phantom, almost always concealed by shadows that show us just enough of his scarred, fearful visage. Freddy is terrifying for the surreal and creative ways he stalks his victims through the dream world, brutally illustrating that, as Night of the Hunter put it, it's a hard world for little things.

Yes, the wisecracking Freddy we see in the sequels dilutes the character's power, save for the thorny subtext of Freddy's Revenge and the just plain awesome Dream Warriors. But in his original conception, whether he's carving up a teenage girl or sucking Johnny Depp into his bed, Freddy is perverse, angry and completely monstrous. He's brought to life brilliantly by Englund, who - even in the sillier sequels - invests the character with a terribly distinctive physical presence worth of the silent horror greats. And while the series would eventually take it too far, Freddy's dark wisecracks make sense at first, as they're not meant as schtick so much as an extension of Freddy's toying with his victims. I met Englund a few weeks ago at the Rock and Shock horror convention in Worcester; he recognized my Let the Right One In shirt, exclaimed "Isn't that movie fantastic?!" and we proceded to talk about the movie and book for a few minutes. At the Nightmare on Elm Street Q&A panel, he revealed a vast knowledge of classic and obscure films, filmmakers and actors worthy of Quentin Tarantino. It was wonderful to discover that the most iconic boogeyman of my lifetime is as passionate a cinephile as I or any of us, and I think that love of film and performance shines through every moment Freddy is onscreen.

Incidentally, my daughter's preschool class' Halloween party is on Monday. She'll be going dressed as Cinderella.

Scariest Characters in Cinema #7 - Jame Gumb

In his novels featuring Hannibal Lecter, author Thomas Harris subtly makes his cannibalistic psychiatrist less repulsive, even likable at points, by contrasting him against another, more off-putting killer. In The Silence of the Lambs, this is first accomplished with Lecter's neighbor in the asylum, Multiple Miggs - while Lecter may enjoy toying with FBI trainee Clarice Starling, he objects to Miggs' semen-flinging lack of hospitality and punishes him for the offense. Starling is sent to Lecter to help find Buffalo Bill, a serial killer at large who skins his victims; we meet "Bill" as he captures Catherine Martin, a senator's daughter who Starling will spend the book and movie trying to save. We learn that Bill, like Francis Dolarhyde, believes he is in a process of transformation, in his case by creating a "woman suit" out of the skin of his victims. As he instructs Catherine, famously, to put the lotion in the basket, he's repellent for all the reasons that Lecter is attractive - the former is inarticulate, weak and misogynistic, whereas Lecter is erudite, fiercely brilliant and enamored of Starling's feminine power (also, he opts for Bach's "Goldberg Variations" as a soundtrack to murder). Like Dolarhyde and Mason Verger, Bill (real name: Jame Gumb) is in a false process of transformation, whereas Lecter, in a completely dark and twisted way, has become more human than human.

There were complaints and protests by gay and lesbian groups, when Jonathan Demme's film of The Silence of the Lambs was released, that the sack-tucking Jame Gumb represented the same hostile stereotypes about "murderous gays" as Sharon Stone's AC/DC possible killer in Basic Instinct and the self-loathing gay killer in Cruising. But it's important to note, as Lecter does, that Gumb is not truly a transsexual - as Lecter points out, true transgendered people tend to be very nonviolent. Gumb is a psychopath whose abusive upbringing (explicit in the book, implied in the film) has led him to start his woman suit project as a response to his self-loathing and violent animosity towards women. As played by Ted Levine, who is fearless in moments like the now-iconic "Goodbye Horses" scene, he's the perfect monster for Clarice, who throughout the film is struggling to transcend the male gaze, to vanquish. Thanks to Jodie Foster's brilliant performance and Demme's marvelously empathetic direction, Starling is one of the strongest and most compelling female characters in cinema. And considering the horrible abyss her hero's journey leads her to descend into, it makes a perverse sense that one of her most affirmative relationships with a man is with a cannibal who believes in her. And Lecter has far too much taste to name his dog "Precious."