Consider this the first of many – our first guest blogger, L. Bangs (presumably not that L. Bangs, lest he has risen from the dead to blog!) of Tulsa, about his top five films of all time.  I’ve added trailers where applicable and, in cases where I can’t find a trailer or a trailer was never made, I’ve posted clips.  Remember, if you’d like to guest blog, you can always shoot me an e-mail at RBaker at Moroch dot com and we’ll get squared away.  So, without further ado, I give you L. Bangs’ Top Five Films:

5)  Andrei Rublev (1966) – Oh lord, no; not this film.  It is black and white, it is over three hours long, and it is in RUSSIAN?  Well, it is mostly in black and white, you can’t really blame Russians for making a film in Russian, and while it is over three hours, you can’t trim much without losing the whole point of the film.  I’ve read a few critics claim the last segment would be a great short film, but that’s bollocks.  On its own, that final section would play like an incredibly well-filmed cheese fest, far too optimistic to fly anywhere but Never Never Land.  Attached to the rest of the film, it is one of the greatest endings ever.  After an odd, symbolic opening (which I love, but if you had to chop something from the running time, that would be it), the film focuses on icon painter Andrei Rublev, a rock star artist in the religious establishment of the 1400s hired to decorate a cathedral.  While he travels to his commission, Mongols ruthlessly invade the land.  He witnesses the utter rank worst horror of humanity’s cruelty, and understandably, he snaps.  Angry at God for allowing such atrocities, he quits in rebellion and takes a vow of silence in protest.  This is the darkness, the hell Andrei struggles through to arrive at the final section of the movie.  Without that journey, the finale is an above-average made-for-television movie.  With it, it one of the most powerful, moving, inspirational films you’ll ever be lucky enough to see.

4)  Bringing Up Baby (1938) – Cary Grant made a career as the epitome of the ultra-suave, always-dapper, smooth gentleman, while Katharine Hepburn practically defines the fiery elegance of the educated, liberal New England upper class.  I have no clue who had the crazy notion to flip those stereotypes upside-down, but as far as bad ideas go, it was brilliant.  Here, Grant is a complete nerd, an awkward paleontologist working for a museum (yes, just like Ross from the television show Friends), while Hepburn plays a ditzy airhead, a scatterbrained dingbat who may be a bit craftier than she seems.  This is, of course, one of the worst examples of miscasting in film history, and it is hilarious.  The film is a tad slow to start rolling, but once it kicks in, there is no stopping.  The plot is entirely too crazy to summarize easily, and as involved as it is, it isn’t the point here.  The laughs are, and once the fuse is gone, they start exploding at a rapid-fire never-ending beat.  This is a screwball movie – in fact, this is the screwball movie – so naturally many of these jokes have the rich and privileged on the other end of the punchline, but these isn’t a social satire.  Every type of humor is trotted out here, from physical slapstick to awful puns all the way up to character comedy, and a straight-faced romance slithers up the middle to serve as the flexible spine to the crazy creature.  I first watched this film as a teenager staying up far past my bedtime, and despite my best efforts, I woke up the house with my laughter.  I still might marry Katharine Hepburn’s character.  What else could you possibly need to know about this movie?

3)  North By Northwest (1959) – The snobs will tell you Vertigo is the best Hitchcock movie, and the public seems to rally around Rear Window or Psycho, but this breathless adventure wins the crown from me.  If you take James Bond out of Fleming’s original novels and throw a slick, oblivious businessman in his place, this is what you get.  Hitchcock got his gloves around the best screenplay of his career (courtesy of Ernest Lehman), and he found it the perfect match to his love of manipulating plastic elements and riveted audiences around intricate set pieces and fantastic scenes of suspense.  Even his favorite dramatic themes of duplicity, cold artifice, and (not-so-)innocents endangered melt perfectly in this simmering pot.  To top it off, he gets his beloved grand finale, again on a huge, iconic setting!  This is the Cary Grant we’re used to, played to perfection (I still want to know who he is tailor was!), Eva Marie Saint is a terrific Hitchcock icy blonde, and James Mason is perfection as the cultured evil behind the espionage of the plot.  Sure, you remember that airplane scene (now, with the advent of DVD, finally seen again in vital widescreen), and that climax proves doubly worthy of the word, but watch the auction scene again, perhaps the master’s best combination of suspense, boiling emotions under glacial exteriors, and humor ever.  Those hands, that bare shoulder, and creepy Martin Landau watching it all…

2)  Citizen Kane (1941) – This is an important film, so you have to put it on this list, right?  Wrong.  Sure, I respect the unique position this movie has in cinematic history, but it is here because I love it, love it, love it.  You can obsess about the various stylistic devices that first show up here or the young genius who drove the studio mad creating it, but that’s all stuff for the classroom.  The important thing is that you can feel that energy, that heady rush from the insane drive at ninety-five while wearing a blindfold that is the dangerous dare of doing something nobody has quite done before.  This film hums; Welles knew taking chances like splintering the narrative out of chronological order with different people telling the story was a fool’s crusade, and you almost feel him nervously tapping his feet and giggling giddy at charging ahead.  The acting is about as good as you’ll ever find, the various looks of the film are enticing and engaging, and the dialogue has some of the best verbal nuggets ever spoken into a microphone.  Scarp all that, though, and still you have at the hollow core of the movie Kane, a man both attractive and repellent, a personality larger than life and repugnant in the banality that size exposes, an elusive human you never can quite pin down.  Every time I watch this film, I think for awhile I can spot where he goes off the rails, which morally ambiguous steps finally went down the wide road too far, but by the end, I’m always amazed that I fail.  He is a complex character, probably one who can never be fully understood, and that makes him both iconic and very, very human.  He makes no coherent sense and yet is one of the most believable characters in the history of cinema.  Toss all the nerd talk about deep-focus photography, historical allegories, or wipe edits, and you still have Charles Foster Kane looming above it all.  He’s reason enough for this film to be on my list.

1)  Amateur (1994) – I think describing your favorite film is like explaining why you fell for you first love; nobody else will ever exactly get it unless they fall under the same spell, succumbing to the same charms of the object of your affection.  This movie is roundly dismissed by most critics as one gigantic smirk, a jumble of smart-aleck jokes played straight.  I think most of these reviewers ran up against a unique movie, had no idea what to make of it, and like many confused people, assumed a prank was being pulled they were not privy to.  The characters speak in a quite flat deadpan.  Some of the lines are funny, most are not.  This is not an ironic device played for laughs as most assume, but a nearly neoclassical restraint used to highlight intense emotions in a subtle but devastating manner quite different from the Baroque immediacy of most of our modern movies.  They say what they mean with drained emotion because to act on those emotions would be too dangerous, too wild, but we can see the whirlwinds inside the corked bottles.  The story seems (and is) kooky, but the places it sends the characters work to examine the film’s obsessions with faith, love, identity, commerce, and tragedy.  A man wakes up on the pavement of New York City and has no idea who he is or why he is bleeding.  Eventually, he finds the help of an errant nun in a search for who he is, a search that crosses paths with ex-accountant hitmen, a former child porn star, a nefarious international organization, and more.  You haven’t seen this movie, and you’ll have to go out of your way to find it.  Even when you do, it will probably leave you bemused on first viewing.  There’s a chance though, a horrible chance, that after watching it twice, its wounded throbbing heart might work under your skin and stay near your blood for years.  You might just fall in love, exactly like this poor sucker did.