Top ten all time favorite films

1. Terry Gilliam's Brazil - The best film ever made, without a doubt. Flawless. Epic in the most grandiose sense. Not to mention beautiful, fucking hilarious, and heart-stompingly tragic. Although majorly viewed as a dystopian comedy, it much more than that. Brazil is the ultimate remindful allusion to life; to the temporal truths of human aspirations and our unavoidable sufferings.



2. Akira Kurosawa's Dreams - A series of surreal and as the title suggests incredibly dream-like vignettes, each one capturing a particular feeling of ambiguous and indirect anxieties, nightmarish battles, and unspeakable awes.



3. David Lynch's Wild at Heart - Its hard to pick a favorite Lynch for me, and Blue Velvet or Lost Highway or Inland Empire or any of his other films could have been equally deserving here, but this one is his most competent, and probably his overall best, so its wins the spot. This adrenaline fueled classic is wildly and darkly imaginative and has perhaps the most glorious ending of any movie this side of Love Exposure. I always throw my hands in the air and yell out in delight during a certain part in the finale.



4. Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation - Something about Lost in Translation hits my sentimentality button right on the head. It is a form of catharsis for me to watch this film. The soundtrack, the cinematography, the script scenarios, the subtle humor, the almost seemingly natural acting by both Murray and Johansson, all ease my nerves and comfort my soul. An all around gorgeous film, complimented by the most gorgeous lead actress possibly ever, as Scarlett Johansson is in her aesthetic prime in this role.



5. Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas - A little slow, yet placating, and like most of Wim Wenders' other films incredibly meaningful and touching with powerful character development. The haunting image of the two in the booth with the woman's reflection being cast over Harry Dean Stanton on the window near the end is an image forever seared into my mind - one of the most fantastic shots I've ever seen outside of a Terrence Malick film.



6. Yoshifumi Kondo' Whisper of the Heart - My favorite Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli. Again with the sentimental thing for me, this is a lighthearted coming of age animated classic. Everything else Miyazaki has had his hand in is also fantastic, so a handful of his other films could have been interchangeable with this spot. As a rule of thumb with anime, always subbed, never dubbed.



7. Stardust Memories - Such a fantastic and comical film. I think that this is the third of a trilogy of sorts. This is Woody Allen's Mangum Opus in my opinion; he goes all out. Pure "saudade" and neurotic relationship stuff.



8. Bruce Robinson's Withnail & I - Hilarious, wonderful film about two unemployed actors in the late 60s and their various misadventures and eventual developments. An old friend of mine, Ryan McGuire and I were a similar pair at one point in my life: pathetic alcoholics, bumming around where we could, over dramatizing everything. Kind of makes me nostalgic for those times watching this movie.



9. David Cronenberg's Videodrome - Its actually been a while since I've seen this, and I think I was on mushrooms, but I remember it being a real trip, blowing my mind completely, and deserving a top ten spot. Cronenberg is almost always great, fucked up, sexually demented themes, car crash fetishes and all.



10. Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wraith of God - There is something staggeringly religious about this film, and I am not a religious person by any means. Maybe its Popol Vuh's score, maybe its Klaus Kinski and his Jesus-thing, whatever this movie gives me chills with whatever eerie piousness it manages to encapsulate.