Top 5 Pretty Movies

McBane here. Turns out today’s list actually isn't just Raptor-baiting. No, this list is because the other day a friend of my brother’s asked me if I had seen Pan’s Labyrinth, and I responded “hell no,” with a secret inner voice asking, “why would I want to see that?”

Something about me was very disturbed by this response, and later on I sat down to think about it. This was my conclusion: what the fuck is wrong with me? Am I turning into a miserable old bastard or what? Pan’s Labyrinth is a great-looking, R-rated kiddie movie that got rave reviews. Why wouldn’t I want to see it? Am I immediately suspicious of any movie that looks visually impressive, because I’m worried it might be too pretentious or preachy? What’s the logic in that?

Here’s the thing with a pretty movie: no matter how I feel about the acting, or the characters, or the dialogue, going in I already know I will enjoy looking at it. Isn’t that kind of the main point of seeing a movie? I mean, if you just wanted to enjoy a story you could read a book. If you just wanted to see human interaction you could go to a play. If you just wanted to see moving pictures you could watch television. At their best, movies with great visuals can transcend reality and expand our imaginations; that’s kind of why they exist.

We don’t give enough credit for just being pretty anymore.

At least now I know which movies I want running on an endless loop when I get crippled and am confined to a hospital bed later in life. Here’s the list, with links to the trailers.

5) Dark City

Okay, now I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you Dark City is a better movie overall than The Matrix, but it does look shockingly better in comparison. The wise strategy to combine film noir with creepy aliens somehow creates a truly warped reality that just leaps off the screen for two hours. (That it’s never daytime also helps the continuity of the visuals and really pushes them over the top.) I mean again, I like The Matrix and all, it’s undoubtedly cooler in many ways and has more advanced special effects, but Dark City has a transcendental quality that makes you feel like you’re not just watching a film, but actually experiencing a weird sort of nightmare.

In a good way, though.

4) Sin City

All my movie pitches from now on are going to have titles with a negative modifier, followed by “City.” Death City. Toxic City. Eddie Murphy City. Unbeatable plan, right?

Anyway, watching Sin City is fascinating not just because the visuals are revolutionary, it’s because the actual experience of watching it somehow feels revolutionary as well (and not just because it’s nearly impossible to tell whether this is the either the most violently misogynstic movie you’ve ever seen, or if it’s really not very misogynstic at all – when it’s definitely one of the two). Viewing this movie is like somehow watching a comic book instead of reading it. Every frame pops off the screen, and the digital effects mean the laws of physics need not apply when something needs to look cool, which in turn means shots can look great even if they have: a) the (unexpectedly) severed heads of several notable female characters stuffed and mounted on a wall (by the way, who the fuck did the taxidermy?) or b) Elijah Wood.

And that’s pretty damn amazing.

(Note: I’m not one for censorship, and I hate to sound squeamish, but hopefully in light of this movie we can respectfully agree that we’ve reached the appropriate level of gotcha!-unexpected-dead person-head-stuffed-and-mounted-on-wall shots necessary for American cinema to survive. Perhaps we can stick pet wolf-snacking-on-living person-severed limb shots on the list as well. And ripping-off-gigantic-yellow-male-genitalia shots too. Oh, and Elijah Wood. Also, there…actually…just forget I said anything. We could be here all day.)

3) Hero

A lot of the ingenuity behind the look of Hero comes out of the different circumstances that would motivate people to create a story like this. Unlike the monolithic Hollywood of the past, our present reality allows non-Americans a budget and a voice, and we are presented stories like this, that seem almost alien to our culture.

Hero is an intriguing movie on a lot of emotional levels - love, longing, ambition, dedication – and overlaid on all of that is a kind of a trancelike meditation on what the true reality of the narrative may (or may not) be, which really informs all the visuals throughout (though of course American trailers feel obligated to portray this movie as a straight-on revenge flick).

This meditation creates a kind of juxtaposition between what we think movie images are supposed to be like and what they actually are in this movie. In America, for example, rarely do we think of violence in a movie as possessing the capacity for elegance, but luckily the Chinese know better. Just about every shot here is graceful and smooth, which is always in line with the tone of the movie, no matter what type of situation is unfolding on the screen at the time.

This may not sound like a ringing endorsement, but the movie really is astonishingly captivating; watching it is like taking some kind of drug that combines the best parts of acid and weed, in that your mind is bent while you stay mellow.

2) The Cell

This is a movie that is hard to take seriously at times, probably because it’s impossible to conceive of Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn as sincere humans anymore. What’s good for us is that Vincent D’Onfrio gives a staggeringly great performance as a man with a truly fractured mind, and he keeps your own mind off Lopez and Vaughn while they’re inside his. (The scene with the horse, which I won’t ruin for you, may honestly be the most shocking visual memory I can recall from my entire life. Eat it, Sin City. This is no small achievement.)

True creativity is rare; it’s hard to think of things no one has seen before, but this movie accomplishes just that, in spades (usually very disturbingly). If there was even more of it, I definitely would have put The Cell at number one (with a bullet), but unfortunately too much of the running time is wasted outside of people’s heads.

1) What Dreams May Come

On paper this seems like it should be a pretty fantastic flick. Essentially, the plot hook is constructed like this: dorky doctor falls in love with amazing beautiful Swiss woman (note: I did not fact-check this, the character may be Italian or Greek or something else with an accent that makes her sexy). The two get married, have two kids, life is perfect. Then: their kids die in a car accident. Later on, the good doctor himself is hit by a car and dies while stopping to help a woman who is, herself, horribly injured in a car wreck. (Note to self: start riding the subway.)

Anyway, the doc and the kids are all happy, populating their little corners of Heaven. (If it seems like they don’t hang out a whole bunch, maybe it’s because they don’t need to; this is Heaven, after all.) The wife falls into a deep depression (actually, let’s capitalize it – Depression – even more heart-wrenching to see than you’d expect, because she was a rare Very Happy Foreign Person). Eventually, after a long period of suffering, she kills herself and goes to Hell. Still madly in love, the doctor risks losing eternal bliss in Heaven to try and rescue her, which sounds difficult and stressful and compelling.

Smashingly grand idea, isn’t it? It’s so simple, why hadn’t anyone thought of it before? The problem is, it’s also obviously a very ambitious idea, and as I remember it, the movie doesn’t really deliver. The unfortunate irony is that this has nothing to do with the visuals (and, alas, probably everything to do with the casting of Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding, Jr.; my kingdom for Russell Crowe and Forrest Whitaker. Oh yeah, and it must be said that a lot of the dialogue is kind of lazy too.)

The visuals are compelling, stunning, bizarre, wonderful; it’s like a roller coaster ride through art history, from Monet to Michelangelo, from kitsch (in a good way) to Bosch. It’s not too terribly difficult to conceive of terrible visual images for Hell, but there are generally pretty high expectations to meet, and the stuff here is great – Hell is like a fuller, vaster Bosch painting, horrifying and spooky, dealing more with inner torture and anguish than anything. The images of Heaven are a revelation, since it’s exceptionally hard to do Heaven in movies. Having part of Heaven consist of a series of the wife’s oil paintings, for example (with plants actually made of paint) is a brilliant masterstroke. Other parts of Heaven may seem campy at first glance, but the visuals are treated sincerely, which is very intelligent for the movie, because who cares if it looks campy? Campy stuff can look good too, and since there’s no need for cynicism in Heaven, what does it matter if it looks campy?

When I first saw the largely wordless, very arresting three-minute trailer for this film, I think I was captivated as I’ve ever been by a trailer; the images were (and are) that good. Originally I was going to put this lower on the list (about four), but frankly I couldn’t think of a good reason why, except because it’s (probably) not as good overall as the other movies on this list.

Then I thought to myself, am I really so shallow that I would place substance over style?

Luckily, no. I have too much integrity.